from memory lane to the highway of bigotry

My last post was about a memory of mine, and speaking of memories reminded me this stupid news story of ignorance and complete bigotry:

Mina Ungan

There is a book titled "The Memoirs of a Dinosaur" written by Mina Ungan which became a bestseller in Turkey when it was first published in 1998. I remember that the book was around at the time but I don't particularly remember reading it, maybe because I really didn't read it or maybe I couldn't find anything interesting for me. But that's not the point.

The book is actually a autobiography, a book of memoirs, in which Prof. Mina Ungan defines herself as a dinasaur not only because of her old age but also her dedication to communism.

And, a teacher in a high school in Ankara advises this particular book to her students as a very good example of a memoir. However, the school administration decides that this book (which is not in the cirriculum) is not appropriate for the students. They think that this book promotes infidelity, drinking, smoking and bad moral values. So the administration asks for an investigation of the teacher.

An inspector comes.

In defense of her advice, the teacher says that this book is one of the best examples of a memoir in Turkish language because it doesn't only portray the life of the professor but also gives us insights about many important figures of her era.

It turns out that, this man whose job is supposedly to investigate the whole matter in an objective manner had already given his verdict maybe even before he had arrived to the school. And he forces the students to sign a report which blames the teacher for her inconvenient suggestions for the school.

Che

One of the students tries to defend his teacher, saying that this is not the only book she advised. The kid says that the teacher wanted to acknowledge her students about some important books they should know about, and her list also includes the works of Anton Chekhov.

"Do you mean that terrorist whose picture is all over the t-shirts," asks the inspector. And now it is the kid's duty to teach the inspector about Che and Checkov.

"Whatever," says the inspector. "None of them are from our religion and you shouldn't be reading them anyway."  To be fair, these are not his exact words but my interpretation, but you can bet they reflect his exact words.

Thanks God, there are still some parents who refuse to take the highway to the bigotry, so they file the so called inspector for misuse of his office.

You can find the entire story here, in Turkish.

the fury by Brian De Palma

In a post I wrote some time ago, I mentioned about the new Tron movie and how it made me connect to my childhood.

The same thing happened with the movie The Fury, directed by Brian De Palma. I can always trust a De Palma movie, and this one from the year 1978 did nor fail me: It is indeed a great movie.

Brian De Palma

But the thing I loved about it was more than a great movie experience. You see,  I had watched this film very long years ago, when I was not older than 10 years of age. I saw it in a movie theater, I watched it with subtitles, and even though i can't visualize it, i know that my aunt took me to the theater. Well, if it is really the case, then she must have been forced to take me because she met with her boyfriend. :)

Some time ago, my wife and I watched the movie Snake Eyes which was another treat from De Palma. After seeing it, we checked the IMDB site to check his other movies because I told my wife that I didn't remember a bad movie from this director and we could watch all of his movies. So we looked up the movies he made, and all of a sudden... BAMM...  I saw "The Fury" in the list. And I just knew that it was that great movie I had watched when I was a little kid.

It took some time to get the movie, but recently we had a chance to watch it. My wife loved it as a first timer, and I loved it too because I didn't remember most of it, and it again reminded me of my childhood.

My post involves spoilers after on, so don't read it if you think it will spoil your possible future experience.

I actually remmebered three scenes and a semi-notion about the movie. As the scenes turned out to be correct, I really loved it how it connected it with my childhood.

The first scene was the train-test scene where they put an experimental head gear to the girl to see if she can move a train with her brain waves. And of course she did. And while doing it, she saw some brutal visions. I remembered that scene. Only that, it was far less gore than I remembered. But I was only ten or even smaller at the time, and the notion "gore" was probably much different than how we see it today, so that makes sense.

The second scene was in a amusement park when the boy killed some Arabs. Even though the scene was not exactly how I remembered it, it was there already.

And in the third scene, the girl scrubbed the wall with her hand exactly as the boy scrubbed the arm-chair he was sitting on because they had a psychic connection. I exactly remembered how the boy scrubbed the arm-chair. I actually didn't remember the scene she scrubbed the wall, but I knew she did it.

And as the scenes came, I had a physcic connection with my childhood, enyoyed them all in a very different way, far from the experience the movie itself provided.

The semi-notion I mentioned above turned out to be wrong. I thought the boy and the girl were siblings. Well, I am not sure if I made that up later, or misunderstood the movie back then - which is very likely, Or maybe it was translated wrong. Because you see, if it is not my imagination playing tricks on me (which I admit that it is very likely), I somehow remember people whispering "Oh, they are siblings." in the movie theater. And there is actually a scene where it says they're like twins, but not actually blood-related, so it could also be a case of wrong translation. 

And it was a good thing that I didn't remember anything else about the movie so I didn't know how things were going to resolve.

OK, thank you for putting up with my silly childhood memoirs. And if you want to see what it is about, this is the post I wrote about the new Tron movie.

do we need x-men to avoid another world war?

The movie 13 Days starring Kevin Costner was about the Cuban Crisis that took place in 1962, when. Americans found out that Soviets were about to plant nuclear missiles in Cuba. And of course, USA had no intention to allow such a risk so close to their mainland.

But it was somehow a minor detail in the movie that, USA had already planted nuclear weapons in Turkey, which is pretty much the very same thing Soviets were trying to do in Cuba. Yet, Turkey was merely mentioned in the movie as if the whole thing was something with no importance at all. Wait a minute, the whole thing had indeed no importance at all. You put nuclear weapons or you take them back depending on the on going political situation. What's Turkey got to do with such gravely political matters?

Anyway, it was a realistic drama about the Cuban political crisis. And when I say realistic, I don't of course mean that the movie was loyal to all the facts about the situation. No, such a thing is rather impossible because I don't think there is a way to know all the facts about it. However, it was realistic in the sense that the event and the characters who took place in it were portrayed in their natural phyiscal features.  I mean, there weren't any flying men around, for example.

But it is too much to expect historical and political accuracy from a movie. After all, a movie is a way to tell a story, and there are zillion ways to tell the very same story. Think about it, it would have been a completely differet movie if it had been made by the Soviets. Of course, there weren't any Soviets in the year 2000 : )
 
The way I see it, when it comes to historical and political accuracy, the movie 13 Days is not any different than any other movie with the same plot even if there are super heores in it. Oh well, there is a movie about the Cuban Missile Crisis with super heroes in it: X-Men First Class. In this movie, the entire crisis turns out to be a conspiracy designed by a super villain, and X-Men save the day, even before they were oficially called X-Men.

Turkey is again mentioned in this latter movie, but she is still just a pawn in the league of big players.

So OK, it was either the common-sense of the politicians or the X-Men, a nuclear war was avoided that time. My question is, will the world be able to avoid such a crisis one more time, or are we just heading full speed to another World War. While I sincerely wish that we can avoid it one more time, I am rather pessimistic about it.

I recently read a book called "Huzur" (Peace, in English) from Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, a great Turkish novelist. The book was first published in 1942, and it is a shame on my part that it took so long for me to discover such a great writer. Any way, very interestingly, the characters in his book had some very interesting thoughts about the upcoming war - which was WWII for them, of course.

So in a friendly chat about the upcoming war, one of the characters says that: "A war can be avoided if it is a political one. But there is no way to avoid it if the world is shifting to another state." When you think about it, the Cuban Crisis was indeed a political one with no intention to shift the world's political state. However, today, the world is changing and there is a war coming with the clear intent to re-shape the world. 


I have a very little hope that a catastrophe will be avoided, simply because another character in the same novel says that "And now we expect that, those people who caused this crisis will suddenly change their minds and come to reason." Of course, he wrote that in a marvelous way, very hard for me to translate literally.

war clouds over Syria

I don't think it is any news to anybody that USA used Islam as a tool to achieve her goals. The notorious Al-Qaeda is nothing but a by product of the US policy against the Soviet invasion in Afghanistan - only if you can call the supporting troops of an allied country back then as an invaison army.

I don't suggest that USA has a secret agenda spesifically about Islam. It is only that, Islam happens to be the major motor for the societies in the region, that's why they used it and that's why they're still trying to use it. It it were Hinduism which was dominant in the region, today we could be talking about radical Hinduism.

After seeing how things can get out of control and the sufferings can reach to your own homeland even if it somehow seems far enough to feel secure, you may think that USA has learnt her lesson and abondened the policy of messing with the nature of societies. Nope, you would be wrong if you assumed that. However, USA did indeed learnt her lesson and now she has another tool to play with.

Enter moderate Islam


Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Companions did a marvelous job of representing themselves as the saviours of the real democracy in Turkey. It was nothing but a marvelous PR campaign and I see examples every single day which proves my belief that neither Tayyip Erdogan nor incumbent AK Party is capable of understanding what real democracy is. It is quite evident that the only more freedom they want is more freedom for Islam to the extent that it changes the entire fabric of the nation and the republic.

Let me digress a little, to give you one little example and tell you what is going on in Turkey nowadays. Right at this moment I am writing these lines, there is twitter campaign to ban a site, namely ekşi sozluk which is a wiki with tens of thousands of users, because they insulted Islam, Allah and the prophet Mohammed. It is interesting to see that the prominent names who iniated this rage against the wiki are from Taraf daily, a newspaper which self-claims to be the champion of democracy in Turkey. And suddenly, we started to see tweets coming from these very democrats demoning the entire site and want it to be banned. And when it comes to insulting Islam, who can dare to stand the opposite?

Now back to main subject I was planning to write about.

With AK Party coming to power, we started to hear more and more western leaders praising the value of moderate Islam and the role of Turkey to lead the region as a model for perfect moderate Islamic country. But wait a minute! Is Turkey a moderate Islamic country? Last time I checked, she was still a secular country, but everyone seemed to ignore the warnigs about the true nature of the republic and kept mentioning Turkey as a role model for a moderate political Islam. And those people who tried to say that this was the exact concept the entire Turkish Republic had been built against, are labeled as anti-democratic racist ultra-nationalist Kemalists, and some of the most stubborn names of this notion are in jail now, leaving the entire political arena to so called democracy champions who are so eager to ban a web site because they claim that it insulted the believers.

Note that I still don't know what is written in that site which caused such a  harsh reaction, and as a matter of fact I don't even care. What I know is, my faith is stronger than some people who insulted it - only if there is really an insult, and I don't need anyone asking to ban it to protect my faith. 

I wish it was all about a twitter rage against a web site. But I am afraid things are much worse than that.

Now, please let me remind you that our Recep Tayyip Erdogan fought so hard against the obvious will of his county to allow US troops enter Iraq through Turkish lands, right before the occupation. I still think that not allowing the troops was one of the most dignified actions in the history of Turkish Republic, especially after it turned out that every excuse for the war was a lie. Well, that was a time when RTE had just seized the power so his efforts to pass the bill failed because almost everybody was against it, but after 9 years in power, I am pretty sure he can pass any bill he wishes to pass today.

And what is the most important, most dangerous agenda in Turkey today? Syria, of course. All of a sudden, Prime Minister Erdogan and his co. realized how an awful dictator the leader of Syria is. And since Turkey is a moderate Islamic country with the perfect democratic records, RTE keeps talking about intervening Syria if the current regime doens't stop the violence against her citizens. And as Hillary Clinton once said:

Turkey should strengthen its democracy at home, and promote peace and stability in its region so that it could realize its full potential.

Right. And, Spokesperson for the United States Department of State, Mark Toner said that Turkey had become an increasingly vocal opponent to what was going on in Syria and an increasingly powerful voice among the international community in calling for Bashar al-Assad to end the violence and to allow for a democratic transition to take place.

Turkey is about the engage a war against Syria for a very wrong cause - as if there is such a thing as right cause for a war. But you see, today we all know that all the Arab springs are false alarms and there is no hope for a real democracy in any of the countries which uprised against their dictator leaders. It is completely another matter if they were right to uprise or not, but it is quite evident today that the result has nothing to do with the initial intentions of a better living - yet again, if there were any. But what really bothers me is all that praising Turkey receives for all those war-mongerings as if all this stage play really intends to bring democracy and human rights to Syria. Nope, it will simply bring misery just like all other wars in the entire human history brought.

Note: I think I should also note that I don't see all of the events going on as an American conspiracy theory. First of all, USA or any other western power doesn't have the power to create something which is already not there. I fully understand that the lack of true democracy and the increasing tendency to become a more religion-driven country is the problem of Turkey herself and this is what we have to deal with ourselves. However, you can't deny the power of western powers which are the absolute masters at manipulating nations with every every tool they realize that they an toy around. Secondly, looking at things more globally, I think USA pretty much shares the same role with Turkey: just a pawn. I don't belive in the conspiracy theories of a room full of evil men who actually rules the world, but there doesn't reeally need to be. In every phase of time, policies are always determined by people who has the power, and today, the power is money, and there are sources which have more money than any country can possibly have.