
The decline of Turkish schools - imartin2k
https://www.economist.com/news/europe/21729784-out-goes-evolution-comes-islamic-piety-and-loyalty-regime-decline-turkish
======
notzorbo3
If you're ever again in a discussion with people who claim they have nothing
to hide from their government because medieval things don't happen in modern
democracies.. just point them to Turkey. Or perhaps the States under Trump.

~~~
sebazzz
Or that a democracy does not change easily to an authoritarian regime. See
also Turkey. I would not say Turkey is a democracy right now, maybe only on
paper.

~~~
notzorbo3
I have not gotten the feeling that Turkey is no longer a democracy? I have to
admit that I haven't researched it much, but I haven't heard anything in the
mainstream media about fraud during the elections or the referendum to expand
the presidents powers. The whole coup was a disaster of course, and the way
Erdogan reacted is without a doubt dictatorial in nature. But I wouldn't be
surprised if a majority of the people are actually supportive of him, much
like people are supportive of Putin in Russia.

I've always found it kinda weird that as soon as people in different countries
vote for something we don't like, we consider them no longer democratic.

BUT, like I said, I haven't researched it well enough, so I might be entirely
off the mark here. If you have any info on this, I'd love to hear it.

~~~
te_chris
Democracy is more than just casting and counting votes. It's the biggest trick
of tyrants to convince the people that so long as they can vote they're free
(see: Putin, Erdogan). Full functioning democracy requires a strong,
independent media, quality institutions, an independent judiciary, all of
which are accountable and responsive to their constituents. It also requires
eternal vigilance because these conditions are vulnerable to despotism, so you
always need to be on the lookout (see: Trump, UK tories and the repeal bill,
Poland, Hungary)

~~~
mengibar10
Very well said. However a true functioning democracy require more than these
unfortunately. At least in order to have those well functioning institutions
you need an entity that can expose groups who have hijacked them.

Countries like Turkey who have been on the losing side of power game for at
least couple of centuries, or countries like Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Greece that
were non-existent before but either their borders drawn with a ruler on the
map or too weak to stand alone are under heavy influence of foreign
agents/powers. Heck, even US is under heavy influence of interest groups to
the extent that public was sold on to the idea of Iraq's invasion. Even then
most Americans opposed the Iraq war but their voices were drowned by heavy
media bombardment.

Take Iran. Once they had their own elected government but CIA staged a coup
[1] and installed Shah. Think for once, if a country is run with democracy,
but a real one, would they throw a democratic country and install a dictator
instead? US is a very strong country in many respects and hides many large
cracks. Don't be fooled by its looks.

You need more than institutions to have a real democracy. It is not easy to
have people's voice heard.

[1] [https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/19/cia-admits-
rol...](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/19/cia-admits-
role-1953-iranian-coup)

~~~
nine_k
CIA might have installed a _different_ Shah, but the Iranian republic existed
since 1906 till 1921, and the new Shah was a son of the previous one.

At least, so says Wikipedia:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran#From_the_1800s_to_the_194...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran#From_the_1800s_to_the_1940s)

------
mannigfaltig
I'm wondering what role brain-drain plays in this catastrophe. Who wants to
live at the border of chaos? Smart and open-minded people emigrate to
Central/Northern Europe, US/Canada or Australia to live a much safer and
fulfilling life. What remains is the conservative personality type (high
dutifulness, low openness to experience, tight integration in communities),
who is much more likely to reject democratic ideals and to accept theocratic
dictatorships.

One might conclude that the only way to reliably stabilize such regions is to
massively incentivize them for the personality types that have emigrated over
the course of the past decades or centuries, even.

~~~
thriftwy
I'm not sure that either refugees or guest workers are "smart and open-minded"
variety, not the conservative one.

Europe might be importing enough conservative types to repeat this stunt in a
few decades.

~~~
ido
Turkish immigrants to the US were/are generally the elite.

Not every place is Germany.

------
Mlergh
Replace Turkey with a smaller country to the south, Islam with an earlier
religion and you'll get about the same picture that's been hapenning for a
while now

~~~
KKKKkkkk1
Are you referring to Lebanon? In my experience, making oblique references to
Judaism and the Jews often indicates that a person has opinions about them
that he or she is ashamed to admit.

~~~
Mlergh
The ambiguity was intentional, Lebanon would probably fit just as well - the
point being is that this is a world-wide trend that is exploited by any
government that can take advantage of it.

------
MichaelMoser123
However Gdp growth of Turkey remains impressive. Can it be that not all of
Turkey is fucked up? They must be doing some things right if Gdp keeps growing
like this.

~~~
gkya
Number-juggling. Wages grow fast, buying power sinks faster.

~~~
MichaelMoser123
Where can I read more about your claim?

~~~
gkya
It's a process we've witnessed (I'm from Turkey), so I don't know where to
point you to. But while since 2010 minimum wage went from ~800 liras to ~1400,
most of the basic needs' prices have at least doubled, and with the USD and
EUR parities of TRY tripling in the past two years, the increased amount of
liras people get has lost lots of value.

~~~
mengibar10
Back you claims with data, and don't be elitist and call Turkish institutions
crap.

~~~
candiodari
Here's one data point:

[https://www.tradingview.com/chart/?symbol=USDTRY](https://www.tradingview.com/chart/?symbol=USDTRY)

[https://www.tradingview.com/chart/?symbol=EURTRY](https://www.tradingview.com/chart/?symbol=EURTRY)

Lira has about 1/3rd of the US dollar value it had in 2009, even if it's been
going up slightly this year. In Euro it's lost about 65% of it's value in the
same time frame.

Average wages in Turkey went from 1300 Lira to close to 1600 Lira in the same
period. So Turks have lost between 30% and 50% of their spending power in the
last ~10 years.

~~~
mengibar10
Turkey's GDP has been growing with a few setbacks steadily. This year alone
the growth is 5%.

Turkey has been under a lot of stress for a very long time. Few countries
could sustain growth under such circumstances and many could not especially
after 2008 global economic crisis. On top of that on going conflicts by its
borders, huge refugee influx, terrorist attacks, Gulenist instigated social
riots (Gezi Park), and the worst is the coup attempt. I believe it is unfair
to point any data without a mention of above.

And do not forget Turkish Lira's value before Erdogan's party came into scene.
High inflation (> 50%) for decades, $1 worths over 1,000,000 Turkish Lira and
always increasing. All these obscenities were fixed all the while huge
infrastructure projects were completed.

~~~
mengibar10
And one more thing. Turkey paid back all its debt to IMF in that short period.

------
markatkinson
I just got back from a holiday in Turkey. What a beautiful country. It was
shocking to have things like Wikipedia and Imgur blocked though. Was a real
eye opener.

------
Upvoter33
it's quite sad. Turkey was pushed way ahead of where it might have otherwise
been through Ataturk and his western vision. Now, they are taking backwards
step after backwards step. It will be interesting to see what happens once
Erdogan is gone, though - will he have destroyed too much to repair it?

------
gkya
[I've written a long comment about how this happened, and it seems that it's
been too long to include in a single comment, so I'm splitting it into parts.]

[Part 1]

I'm from Turkey myself, in my initial 20s, undergrad at the faculty of letters
in Istanbul. We're that interesting generation whose parents were
kids/newborns at the first coup d'etat after the first conservative government
of Turkey (that of Menderes), teens and young adults during the left/right
clash and the coup of 12 September 1980 (that date is so much ingrained to our
memories as probably 9/11 is to American ones), 30-something parents during
the '90s' hideous bloodshed, and middle aged individuals during the first
decade of the millennium where the AKP phenomenon started happening. For us
the '90s kids, the dawn of AKP rule is a childhood memory, and also the
coalitions, 90-years-old Bulent Ecevit, the shy beginnings of an alternative
conservative party that managed to become the sole dirigent power of this
country. This past is interesting in that it let us, at least the curious
among us with educated parents, to either live firsthand or learn from
eyewitnesses the funny story that led us to where we are now as a country. The
decline of Turkish schools began since the first day, just like that of every
other institution of the republic, and nothing is or was a coincidence.

Ottomans were a family, like Hapsburgs or Bourbons. There was no Ottoman
people. Under Ottoman rule were though turkish speaking muslim peasants, which
were called Turks. During the 19th century, some intellectuals, under the
influence of European romantic racism and nationalism, developped the idea of
Turkish nationalism, in the same era where many christian nations parted from
the empire, and lots of bloodshed was suffered in particular by Armenians,
because they were a way more integrated part of the Empire and one of the last
groups to seek independence, and they were Christians (I'm not referring to
the Medz Yeghern here, but to the Hamidian massacres). In this atmoshpere of
ethnoreligious clash and of the disintegration of a long-standing empire that
followed many other long-standing empires since Darius the Great, the ideals
and the ideas of Turkish nationalism were initally born. Intellectuals were
seeking the origins of the Turkish-speaking anatolians in Central Asia, fooled
by linguistic relations (today it seems to me that there's little doubt that
the Turkification of the Asia minor was through language and culture
replacement provoked by elite dominance by Persianised Turkish military
powers, not unlike how the same region was Hellenised under Alexander the
Great and how southern Europe was Latinised under Roman rule and later with
the influence of the Catholic church), and a plethora false narratives of war
glory, mass migrations, racial/ethnic supremity etc. started being produced by
the Ottoman-Turkish intelligentsia. When WWI was happening, the Turkish
nationalists (Ittihat Terakki Firkasi) was in control of the recent
constitutional monarchy, and under their control the biggest bloodsheds
happened in Turkey; deportation and massacres of Christian ethnoreligious
groups, mass poverty and lots of war casualties because of the short-sighted
government following unrealistic, inhumane and bloody agendas (the event of
Sarikamis is a really popularly known one, where 90 thousand Ottoman troops
died of cold in the extreme conditions of very-high-altitude province Kars,
without encountering a single enemy soldier). At the end of the war, the
constituent peoples of the empire were tortured both by themselves, the empire
itself, and the belligerent European forces; and the empire was dead. As the
European belligerent states were in the process of sharing the Ottoman
territories, nationalism was becoming more fierce among the Turkish-speaking
muslims of Asia minor.

In this atmosphere were born many organisations for Turkish or Muslim
indipendence. Kuva-yi Milliye (National Forces) was one of them, it comprised
many disorganised bands of amateur warriours, not much unlike the Italian
partigiani. In the last decade and a half, Mustafa Kemal (later Ataturk) was
rising as a successful general in a decadent army of a moribond empire. After
1919, he left Istanbul to Samsun in disguies on a ship called Bandirma, quit
his role in the Ottoman army, and with his many friends started to organise an
independence movement in Anatolia. He managed to unify, organise and
regularise Kuva-yi Milliye, and to form an army that then fought its way
through 1919-1922 to successfully establish a Turkish republic in Thrace and
Asia Minor in 1923, with the Lozanne Treaty in 24 August and the declaration
of the Republic in 29 October. After this point came the long rule of Ataturk
as the de facto BDFL of the nascent country, where the wartime elite executed
many reforms to realise their ideal Turkey. They made their Turkey, now they
had to make the Turks. The state encircled at that time Muslims of diverse
ethnic backgrounds, split mainly in Sunnites and Alawites, and also in
Turkish-speakers and Kurdish-speakers; and the surprisingly populous remnants
of the Christian population of the territory (given the catastrophe they
faced). Ataturk's government implemented a series of rather oppressive and
authoritatisn reforms, based on his seven principles (see Kemalism), to
modernise and westernise the country and its peoples, and to assimilate the
citizens into the figure of modern Turk: a turkish speaking, secular and
laicist, patriotic, hard-working individual, for whom religious and ethnic
ideals are bad memories of the past, or better yet forgotten altogether. And
thus came the dismissal of the Ottoman dynasty, the removal of the Sultanate,
the dismissal of the Caliphate, the language reform, the clothing reform,
secularist and laicist reforms, mass programmes of assimilation, and a
reformist, unquestionable dictating government of recent war veterans. Nearly
all of these reforms were unwelcome by different constituent ethnolinguistic
and ethnoreligious groups of the new republic, and bloodshed came. The
Westernisation was imposed by the founding fathers, either by authoritarian
laws or by force. It's really interesting that it's the same government who
both executed Sheik Said and incarcerated Nazim Hikmet Ran. Turkey was
Ataturk's little baby to be raised as a hard-working modern man, but it was
never becoming what he wanted when left on his own, so he didn't. This period
did a lot of good to Turkey, but also lots of bad.

In this period were formed the initial modern institutions of education in
Turkey. The Istanbul University existed in some form since the 4th century AD,
and the Levantines and the Christians had their lycees, but the Turks mostly
had the religious medreses at their disposal for study. Under Ataturk a new
education system was installed, copying the Western system (I guess a mix of
the German and the French systems), and modifying it to produce the first
"seed" generation according to Kemalist ideals, securing the continuity of the
new Turkish republic and its fundamental philosophy. And surprisingly this
worked, though, the copycat nature and the focus on quantity over quality
still remains to date in many institutions of the country along with its
education system.

~~~
gkya
[Part 2]

On 10 November 1938 Ataturk died (Many Turks still who were born on November
10 either don't celebrate their birthday or celebrate a couple days prior to
or after that day). Until '50s Ismet Inonu was going to rule the country, as
the head of the founder party CHP, and the president, as one of the top men of
Ataturk, always under his shadow. Under him the Kemalist nationalism, which
was denominational rather than ethnic, began to become more and more ethnic.
With the imminent WWII, an era of Realpolitik started to defend the still-
young-and-forming quasi-republic, and during this episode four very important
events happened: Koy Enstituleri (Village institutes), Varlik Vergisi (Wealth
tax), the admission of Turkey to Nato, and the immigration to Turkey of some
German academics. Koy Enstituleri was a project to bootstrap the largely
uneducated anatolian peasants as modern citizens. They endured 5 years, and
until their removal by the same Inonu who lead their establishment, they
produced a generation of rather cultured individuals out of analphabetic
peasants. Varlik vergisi was a tax introduced in 1942 and collected as a
percentage of wealth from the Christian and Jewish bourgoisie of the republic,
which was intended to raise the funds required to defend the country in the
WWII (in which she never really participated), and to covertly remove the said
bougoisie to give way to a Turkish one (recall the ethnic nationalism of Inonu
in opposition to the denominational one of Ataturk, the latter one was more
favourable to the ethno-religious "minorities" of Turkey). This tax caused
lots and lots of Christians to leave the country, and left the country prive
of its biggest class of educated elite. It was collected as about %100-250 of
the wealth of the Christians, and %5 from the Muslims. The rest of the
Christian population that survived this event left the country after various
pogroms and ever-growing ethnoreligious tension during the '50s through '80s.
Today the Christian and Jewish population of Turkey is in the hundred-
thousands range, and while the active oppression is very weak compared to the
recent past, they are still practically second class citizens. The admission
of Turkey to Nato happened in the final moments of the WWII, where Turkey
declared was on Germany, and per Nato's rules that any state who officially
fought Germany would be a part of Nato, Turkey became so, although no battles
happened. And lastly, the German professors who fleed Germany for Turkey
raised a generation of sophisticated academics especially in the Istanbul
University. Most of these returned to Germany shortly after the end of
Hitler's regime, but their legacy and their contribution to the nascent
Turkish higher education was of vital importance.

1950 is the year of the first really free elections in Turkey, and the right-
leaning, conservative party of Menderes won it. His anti-secular and anti-
laicist stance brought the coup-d'etat of '61; which executed him, installed a
very liberal constitution, and set the path to the formation of the first real
Turkish intelligentsia during the '60s, and also to the clash of different
wings of this inteligentsia, mainly right/nationalist/religious and
left/secular/laicist/communist. This tension quickly escalated and gave way to
civil war, especially during the '70s, and epoch of continuous and omnipresent
idealistic violence that was finished with the infamous coup-d'etat of 12
September 1980. As the juntas head, the Gernral Commander of the army Kenan
Evren read their manifesto on the state TV, a new epoch was on the brink of
coming to stay. Under the juntas violent regime, in 1982, the still-present
constitution of Turkey, named after that year, was becoming effective after
popular vote where it received the approval of the %92 of the Turkish voters.
Hundreds of thousands were arrested and tortured, and thousands killed by this
regime, and they sterilised every institution of the republic, apolitised
nearly everyone, and initiated a regime of fear and uncertainty under the
disguise of democracy, always at the gunpoint of the Turkish Armed Forces
(TSK), ready to take over should the founding ideals be under threat.
Widespread cencorship of all media and centralisation of all kinds of
education came, and universities, seen as the root of the evil of the
politicised youth, became sterile, high-school like institutions, deprived of
any kind of intellectual liberty. It's this episode during which the statues
and pictures of Ataturk started to appear everywhere, and nationalism and
statism became incredibly prominent everywhere. The schools deteriorated
quickly, producing apolitical, unquestioning, anti-intellectual individuals.
Free thought was strangled. State entered in each mind.

In mid '80s came the government of Turgut Ozal, a right-wing libertarian
politician, under whose lead Turkey became less and less a strictly social-
democrat state. And also religious organisations were conceded some liberties,
after being completely prohibited for decades, since the Kemalist reforms.
Many of these were born, including the Gulenist organisation.

During the '90s Turkey was going through a weird political situation where the
government was swinging between prominent right and left wing parties,
occasional coalitions (most of which were big failures, thus the Turkish
aversion to coalition governments), while a covert bloody war was going on in
South eastern regions, fighting PKK, and oppressing Kurds. The oppression on
Kurds started right after the Sheik Said event, continued until the
coup-d'etat of 1980, only to worsen due to the new agenda the new Consitution
and the new mindset installed by the junta, and peaked in 1990s in outright
was and nearly a program of ethnical cleansing. The same decade saw the
governments of Necmettin Erbakan, a fundamentalist islamist, Tansu Ciller, the
only female prime minister of Turkey, a nationalist conservative, and Bulent
Ecevit, a left wing politician. Widespread identity crisis was beginning.
Especially the continuous failure in joining EU and the general humiliation of
living the schizophrenic life of a Turk in the middle of a passage from a
mostly agricultural people to a Western, civilised one; and the ever-
continuing fascism of the junta constitution was being felt and suffered by
everyone.

~~~
gkya
[Part 3]

A TV series in Italy titled _Piovra_ depicts the one-man war of a police
officer on the italian Mafia. In the second season of this movie appears
Laudeo, with his cultural organisation _Itala_ , with secret political and
business agenda. This is what the Gulenist organisation is. They generated
capital from participating individuals as a religious non-profit under
Fethullat Gulen, and used that capital to form a widespread network of
educational institutions, exploiting ultimately the centralised exam system of
Turkey for university qualifications via private preparatory courses, and
managed to raise hundreds of thousands of supporters and place them in most
important statal institutions, and until recently, they continually expanded
their influence on Turkish politicans and politics. With the openly right-wing
and popular government of AKP from 2002, they gained more and more power,
siding with that party, which included many individuals member of both
organisations.

The last coalition of Turkey had to deal with the 2000 crisis, with the very
popular scene where the then president Ahmet Necdet Sezer threw a book of
constitution at the then prime minister Ecevit. AKP was quickly formed during
the last months before the elections, attracting many important and popular
figures from many right wing backgrounds, and in 2002, they managed to become
the sole governing party. I vividly recall how embarassing it was to be an AKP
supporter those days, nobody openly admitted to supporting them. They were so
unpopular and covertly popular at the same time. The EU agenda of Turkey
failed, the laicist and free-thought agenda failed, the secular Turkish
assimilation project failed, and the Turkish identity was really in crisis.
Education, under this new government, became a tool to produce AKP voters and
a source of cash mainly for the Gulenist organisation through their _dershane_
s (supplementary courses for preparing lycee students to the centralised
university admission exams). Frequent modifications to the education
institutions, misuse and frequent modifications of relevant laws, agenda-
bearing curricula, economical failure, insufficient funding, all fed a fast
demise of all the Turkish schools in all levels. Furthermore, both the
Gulenists and AKP supporters were penetrating the important positions of all
schools and of all the education system in general, turning each of them into
a political tool. The facilities was laid for such exploitation by the '80
coup, and the '82 constitution, which left no liberties to the universities,
and centralised all their management. Meanwhile, AKP managed (and still
manages) to maintain and enlarge its supporting base with it's faceless
Realpolitik, adapting to every change, and exploiting every soft spot of the
conservative majority of the country. The little support for competing right-
wing parties melted away because they couldn't make it to the parliament, as a
%10 election treshold is in effect, again thanks to the '80 coup. The
Wikipedia page on the topic has this relevant and interesting quote [1]:

> Turkey, 2002. All five parties that passed the 10% threshold in the 1999
> elections, as well as two other major parties, failed to pass the threshold
> in 2002, rocking Turkish politics to its foundations. Notably DYP got 9.55%,
> MHP got 8.34%, GP got 7.25%, DEHAP got 6.23%, ANAP got 5.13%, SP got 2.48%
> and DSP got 1.22%, all falling below the threshold. In total, 46.33% of the
> votes, i.e. 14,545,438 votes were unrepresented in the parliament.

During the '00s and especially the first years of the second decade of the
21st century, the face of Turkey's already decadent academy was changing,
Gulenists, AKP supporters, conservatives, fundamentalists alike were invading
the academic institutions. Free thought and academic research was being
opressed, cencored; and brain drain was continuously increasing. Then came the
Gulenist coup attempt, and a widespread purge of the Gulenists, which affected
academia and schools in general too. The lycee system was dependent on the
dershane, which were being purged, the students were being forced into
religious lycees or vocational ones, the curricula was becoming diluted, all
the focus was on the numbers of students graduating, all the bright minds were
subject to oppression. All this was already happening since years before the
coup attempt, but with it, the government now had (and has) the means to
openly attach whomever he wants. The Turkish education system is becoming a
chore that one has to endure, and people want to send their kids to do even
the highschool abroad. Nearly everyone with the means and without a zealous
brain is either has left already, is trying to leave, or considering leaving.
Turkey, in its path to becoming an authoritarian regime with an agenda for the
individuals mind, is becoming more hostile every day to intellectualism and
culture.

This is very related to the tech/IT industry, which suffers in Turkey from
brain drain, as most of the IT laureates, knowing they can work abroad and
live a happier life in a freer and saner society, leave. Apart from some
leading companies like Turkcell, most IT enterprise has to make do with sub-
par tech staff. And the fact that we're rolling into a whirlpool of an
economic crisis does not help: $1 is ~₺3.5, €1 is ~₺4, and buying power of an
average Turkish citizen is rapidly decreasing. Heavy taxation, corruption, and
failing industries are trying to be hidden behind Mussolinian construction
projects, and faux statistics. We'll see...

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_threshold#Notable_fai...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_threshold#Notable_failures_to_reach_the_threshold)

~~~
woodandsteel
Thank you for the posts. They are very informative.

------
geff82
Turkey in total is in decline. It is the classic way of the dictatorship:
after some initial successes in the economy, the leader wants to get more and
more power, surpresses more and more diversity, tries to bring under control
the thoughts of people and finally destroys the country by his power. I wish
the Turkish good luck with their deliberate choice to give their sucker at the
top everything he wants. They knew what they vote for and they absolutely
deserve the results.

~~~
notzorbo3
> It is the classic way of the dictatorship

Let's not kid ourselves though. The people voted time and again for Erdogan
and his policies. It's a democracy that brought this upon itself. Putting the
blame on a single individual and labeling them a dictator just muddies the
water.

~~~
jon_richards
>Less well known is the paradox of tolerance: Unlimited tolerance must lead to
the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those
who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society
against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed,
and tolerance with them. — In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance,
that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as
long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by
public opinion, suppression would certainly be unwise. But we should claim the
right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out
that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but
begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to
rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments
by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name
of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.

Karl Popper, "The Open Society and Its Enemies", 1945

~~~
TheAdamAndChe
Suppressing ideas perceived to be intolerant by those in power is intolerant
itself, though. Who is to decide what is and is not intolerant?

A good example of this is immigration reform in the US. Many people consider
deporting illegal immigrants to be intolerant despite the fact that they would
just be enforcing existing US law. Should everyone who wants mass illegal
immigrant deportation be suppressed and attacked in the name of tolerance?

~~~
pgorczak
That's why he calls it a paradox. IIRC Popper mentions it in the context of
the also relevant democratic paradox (a democracy abolishing itself by
democratic process).

------
transverse
Article flagged due to pay wall.

------
mengibar10
It baffles me the amount of misinformation given to the public in the West. A
deliberate attempt to mislead and misguide people to further an agenda of
violence, coup, and war.

Haven't we learned anything from Iraq War? If a country is not submitting your
requests and taking care of their own business is enough to be painted as
dictatorship.

One truth in an articles is mixed with 10 other lies. There are so many one
finds oneself overwhelmed.

~~~
maxxxxx
Not sure what you are trying to say. Can you be more specific?

~~~
mengibar10
One example. The mentioned Imam Hatip schools were a headway for religious
education after a very heavy secularization of the country. It was just an
alternative to ultra secular education system so people could send their
children to have them get some religious education. They were never meant to
train preachers only. Their graduates have become anything but preachers
mostly. In my family there are physicians, lawyers, engineers who attended
that school (Alas, I did not).

In the article it is presented as if these schools are training ultra
religious people even "Jihadist" in the sense Western conception has these
day. That is the biggest lie and misdirection.

These schools are actually anti-thesis of such movements like people who join
ISIS. The fundamental reason is that they teach religion, and if one knows
Islam as it should be one can not join such groups.

For example, The coup attempt executed by Gulenist (a pseudo-religious modern
looking power hungry group) have been against these schools. Because these
schools were teaching Islam as opposed to a version filled with superstitions,
like believing the Gulen himself (the leader of the group) is Mahdi to put the
world in order. During the coup attempt they have killed over 250 ordinary
citizens. They shot to crowds from helicopter gunships. Due to their so called
religious understanding those killed were killed for a greater good anyway or
deserved such death. Do you see any resemblance to ISIS? They are more
dangerous than ISIS though, at least those thugs show their true color unlike
Gulenists.

Where there's lack of proper education and understanding of religion there
will always be someone to abuse it. Painting these schools as if training
jihadists is nothing but disservice to the public.

