
Turkey's block on Wikipedia violates rights, court rules - thewarpaint
https://in.reuters.com/article/turkey-wikipedia/turkish-court-rules-wikipedia-block-is-a-rights-violation-idINKBN1YU0PF
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duxup
From the outside this seems strange in light of the current autocratic nature
of the government in Turkey where we hear stories of wholesale purges from
civil service jobs, universities and etc.

~~~
rolleiflex
Turkey is a weird place. (Context: Turkish person living in the US). It is
autocratic in a very specific way — it elects its autocrats. As in, Erdogan
legitimately wins his elections, and he is as popular as the votes indicate,
which is around 51% - an unfortunate fact for those of us at the remaining
49%.

For comparison, it’s not like Russia at all - Erdogan is very vulnerable to
just getting elected out and while he does have more leeway in doing what he
wants, he ultimately has to do what the population wants him to do or risk
losing the next election.

For the things that Turkish population puts less immediate value on is the
places where he gets the most leeway, and rule of law in the western sense was
until recently one of them. As of now though, he is bleeding out votes because
of various issues, like this one, which I would speculate as the everyday
person in Turkey sort of discovering _habeas corpus_ is actually kind of
important.

I’ve always thought it’s a cultural remnant of the sultans.

~~~
nif2ee
> Erdogan legitimately wins his elections

It's very easy to win elections when you kill, imprison and lay off _hundreds
of thousands_ of your "enemies" and have total control on the press and the
judicial system. Westerners nowadays forget that fear is a very, very
effective political tool. In fact it's the most effective political tool by
far. In Turkey, thousands of people were imprisoned based on just DNS queries
that are being logged by intelligence services. Fucking DNS queries! even if
your application/website connected to a "terrorist affiliated" server once via
some ad or anything you get arrested. Turkey has, and now shamelessly
supporting the most dangerous Islamic groups on Earth. How coincidental that
after the alleged pathetic coup attempt, within days, around 100,000 people
were arrested, how can you arrest a fucking hundred thousand people if these
people aren't on lists a priori?. If hundreds of thousands plotted a fucking
coup, how on earth could it fail? How can it even be a coup when hundreds of
thousands plot it?. This is like Kirov assassination v2.0. It's not even a
secret that Erdogan moving extremely dangerous ISIS members in civilian planes
from Syria to Libya to destabilize Egypt. The US used an Iraq base and even
asked the Russians to clear the way on the Syrian field for the planes that
were going to kill Al Baghdadi in northern Syria despite having a big base in
southern Turkey that can do the mission in minutes. It isn't hard to get that
even the US army and CIA don't trust Erdogan having his men spying on the base
and warning AL Baghdadi within seconds

Every day, every fucking day, you open the news and see Erdogan "threatening"
somebody, some country, some group, not just in Turkey but everywhere. Since
he has been doing this for more than a decade now and nobody stood up to him.
He's been seen now as the Caliph by islamists and extremists all over the
world. It's the romantic reflection in the islamic legacy of the strong muslim
ruler humiliating the infidels. The holy grail for every extremist!

~~~
mrtksn
See, these people are on a list because they were fast-tracked into the
positions they got due to their affiliation with the people who organised the
coup, back when the coup organisers and Erdogan were BFFs.

It probably sounds like tin foil hat conspiracy theorists to people unfamiliar
with the life in Turkey but in Turkey, there are religious cults that are good
for networking and social support. Essentially, they will pay for your
education and get you to the top places but expect you to report to them and
take orders from them when it comes to. Like the Chinese Govt using its
citizens employed in tech companies to steal secrets etc.

This particular one was active since 30-40 years now and was able to scale its
operations to enormous size, having people everywhere. The founder was the
original podcaster and Youtuber, spreading its message through VHS tapes etc.
later creating a business model based on subscription(literally, subscribing
to their newspaper multiple times) and expanding into a business network where
you get business but you also pay in some of your profits. So these guys were
on the radar of the secularist for a long time and are routinely purged from a
critical position up until Erdogan teamed up with them. At some point, they
got into a fight and Erdogan won and Erdogan had a list of their names of
those he directly enabled, the rest were deducted from there. Imperfect but
very well educated guess of the cult members, let's say. Probably not too much
off since he had at least 3 years before the coup to polish his list of
Gulenits.

After the coup, Erdogan gained unchecked power and this is scary stuff. He is
trying to be influential leader over the whole region but I am not sure that
he is smart enough to do that.

BTW, Erdogan dropped the Islamist rhetoric after the coup. He is now on the
nationalistic side of the things, having the support of the nationalist
secularist. All those imprisonments of the Gulenists were a wet dream of any
secular nationalist. The rhetoric about foreign powers trying to destroy
Turkey, evil west etc. is also not stranger to the secular nationalist.

~~~
plumednom
You forgot the most important part: Gulen was Tayipp's closest friend, ally,
and advisor .. until he wasn't. Gulen was a _huge_ part of Gulen gaining
power, and he used that network to his advantage. Go back to whatever it was
called, Operation Sledgehammer.

I was here during the fake coup, watching the f16s, watching Tayipp descend
from his private jet like he was jesus, his arms stretched out, telling his
people to come defend him, hoardes of nationalists swarming the tarmac to his
defense.

The whole time it seemed like bullshit. My friend's father, who is 80 and has
experienced 5 or 6 coups, went fishing 5am saturday morning. When his children
told him not to, he said, "I've been through this 5 times now, and I call
bullshit. This isn't a coup, this is a theatrical rendition of 1984, and Gulen
is Emmanuel Goldstein.

Interesting anecdote: I met a Gulenist in Ukraine last month. I'm a US citizen
living in Türkiye, working for an American firm, and was in Kiev meeting some
contract programmers. One programmer, a Tatar from Russia, One found out I was
living in Istanbul and approached me really excitedly. He wanted to tell me
about the great Turkish organization which funded his education.

I stopped him right there and told him that an in-law of mine was hurt in the
fake coup and he would do well to end this line of conversation, but he
persisted. When I suggested Gulen was a terrorist, he rather .. aggressively
told me "No Erdogan is the Terrorist" and got in my face. I politely told him
"Both can be true, have a nice night".

The next day I had him removed from our account due to his actions, but in
reality, due to his association with a terrorist group, and let my account
manager know what was going on. He's no longer with that consulting company
either.

~~~
diminish
unfortunately you wrote too much anecdotal gossip. gulenist islamist circles
based in usa - were hinting that night and few months earlier and preparing
and praising a military fascist islamist coup. it was a coup attempt by
fethullah (imam of the universe) followers fearing a final purge from the
military posts they occupied by faking the admission process and cheating in
all the exams. Noone in turkey disputes that. The coup was supported by cold
war remnants in washington and fake liberal circles in turkey. Period.
Gulenists were purged, and politicians will lose power by elections and life
will go on as usual. turkish people were so much disgusted by the gulenists
that it's a gift that they got purged. now the rest is politics as usual.

------
mirimir
> “One of the sad issues is this: We expressed on every platform since the
> first day that the process of blocking access to the whole of Wikipedia was
> unlawful,” Gonenc Gurkaynak, a lawyer representing Wikimedia, wrote on
> Twitter.

Huh? So does this imply that blocking access to specific Wikipedia articles
_would_ be lawful?

That would not be such a reassuring concession by someone representing
Wikimedia.

~~~
tehlike
Funny you should say that, because a lot of US companies eventually implement
filters that follow local censorship.

~~~
mirimir
Yeah, they do.

I hate it. It's one reason for using VPNs.

But the global takedowns, that really sucks.

------
nurettin
I truly resent and despise the infantile attempts at self-preservation through
censorship. I hope this years-long embarrassment resolves itself.

~~~
nurettin
Aaaand the article is gone from frontpage (and second page, and third page,
and fourth page.)

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lolc
Good! It is hard to watch all the damage being dealt to institutions in Turkey
with these "terrorist" laws. So I'm always happy to note remnants of a
functioning civil society. It means that when the antidemocratic AKP is voted
out, the country doesn't start from zero.

------
modeless
Edit: Sorry, I misread a quote from the article.

~~~
caymanjim
Nothing in the article implies that the page will be blocked at all.

------
shmerl
Erdogan will probably try to fix it by setting up more agreeable judges or by
changing the constitution itself, like Putin is planning to do.

~~~
duxup
>like Putin is planning to do

My understanding is the Russian courts have for a LONG time been weak and
simply deferred to Putin and Co. The Russian courts don't even come up as a
question when most Russian news is discussed.

~~~
shmerl
Russian courts are simply rubberstamping whatever they are told to do indeed.
They are just an empty facade. In this since Turkey is in a better situation,
so far.

But Erdogan is gradually trying to take all that way. He already changed the
system from parliamentary to a presidential one. Why would you expect him to
stop there? He'll try to get to the courts too.

