I have been to Turkey on holiday several times over the past 25 years, the first being on honeymoon to a very undeveloped Bodrum, before the townspeople realised there was money to be made from the all-night drinking, Union Jack pants-wearing, tattooed, face-rivited and ridiculous haircutted brigade - and that's only the British women.
In fairness, each holiday we took was delightful, the only down side whatsoever being the fact that when you walked past a restaurant, some member of staff wanted to drag you in kicking and screaming to eat what they perceive as being required, wholesome 'good burger and 'sips (chips) and big beer' as the standard fare for the average British holidaymaker. Not for us I'm afraid.
Yes, we have only ourselves to blame on that score.
However, wherever we went, the adulation by the Turkish people for Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the former Turkish army officer, revolutionary, and the first President of Turkey, defied description. By all accounts a moderniser, hero, visionary and man of the people who dragged his country kicking and screaming into the 20th century. In the meantime there have been several coups to maintain this status quo of modernity, compared with say Iran which has successfully managed to transport itself back to the 16th century, while making those who saw the Shah as a corrupt money-grabber and suppressors of human rights and values, the Ayatollas, far more wealthy and corrupt in comparison than any way the Shah and his family ever were, and with oppression far outstripping anything the Shah even ever privately dreamt about.
Which is what makes it all the more strange regarding the carry-on by the current Islamist president Recep Tayip Erdogen. All the hard work of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and the wonderful life his people enjoyed for decades seems to be slowly eroding away. The recent failed coup, resulting in the unbelievably swift arrest of 6,000 people over the course of a mere two days, are nothing if quasi-fascist in tendency. Plainly Erdogen had his hit-list of opponents ready and waiting for any excuse to remove them from circulation. So much so, it may, at the risk of suggesting a conspiracy theory, they he might have engineered the coup himself, just to be rid of his opponents.
But this appears to have totally gone over the heads of the common people. That 6,000 people could be rounded up and transported away over a mere 48 hours.
Yes, OK, Mr Erdogen has improved the health services dramatically, something the common people see (potentially their only real contact with the state) on a daily basis, but this has been offset by, for example, creeping religion that no one really wants in the form of the removal of Darwin from the syllabus in universities, a creeping campaign against alcohol consumption, the building of increasing numbers of faceless mosques complete with call-to-prayers booming out in a language (classical Arabic) that very few - if any - Turkish people actually understand.
Dark days ahead indeed with this man as President.
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