The decline of Turkish schools
economist.com
economist.com
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.
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...
At least, so says Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran#From_the_1800s_to_the_194...
Unsurprisingly, there were major (in the order of millions of votes) frauds.
A dictator gets over 95% of popular votes. Like in Syria, Egypt, North Korea. In 2015 elections (second in the last) Erdogan's party lost majority to form the government by itself (got 40%). After months of negotiations/bargaining political system could not produce a government and elections are done again and this time they could get the enough majority (49%).
The system in Turkey does not allow irregularities. All political parties have the right (and they do) to be represented at the voting polls. They are the very people who run the process at every polling station, from getting ID cards, finding voters in registries, counting the votes after polls are closed, etc. As you have said you can not find such fraud cases since other political parties and each one of them has to be complicit for a fraud.
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.
Europe might be importing enough conservative types to repeat this stunt in a few decades.
Not every place is Germany.
https://www.tradingview.com/chart/?symbol=USDTRY
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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 dershanes (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...
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.
Karl Popper, "The Open Society and Its Enemies", 1945
The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority
https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...
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?
When 90% of media is either in prison or controlled by the state, when judges are appointed and dismissed based on their politics, when massive protest after massive protest is brutally crushed, when investigations into irregularities at polling stations are ignored, year after year after year, it can't be said that this is simply what the people voted for. The opposition has been being illegally and brutally suppressed for a decade.
The Turks in Germany who voted voted for Erdogan in large numbers.
This is the country that gave us the expression 'deep state', so the idea that this was a strong institutional democracy that foolishly but genuinely voted itself itself into the current situation is pretty facile.
Look at the recent changes in Turkey. Yes, Erdogan got democratic approval to the changes to the constitution which now enable him to control the media and most government functions.
The education in Turkey was/is low quality. Always 50 years behind Europe. The reason why half of Turkish voters voted for Erdoğan is that Erdoğan is able to tell lies to uneducated people. The western part of Turkey is more educated and doesn't vote for Erdoğan.
And as you might know Socrates hated democracy. I really understand him now. He believed that uneducated people will vote for the popular guy on the ship, they won't vote for educated.
http://www.haritalar.web.tr/1_kasim_2015_Turkiye_Genel_tekra...
He's saying the equivalent of "the east coast didn't vote for Trump" and you're responding "that's a lie look at North Carolina and Florida".
That's not what a lie is. You just have different criteria for the statement being accurate.
Also most of the population is consantrated in western costs.
http://fotocdncube.gazetevatan.com/vatanmediafile/HaberIciRe...
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.
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.
You can watch the moment Saddam seized power on YouTube. He walks into the parliament then starts having people dragged away by the army as traitors while he smiles and smokes a cigar. Within minutes people are standing and saluting, screaming his praises over the commotion, saying they would do anything for him as a way to beg for their lives.
The descent of democracy to fascism in moments, it's one of the most chilling things I've ever watched.
You can argue the case for war was full of holes. You can criticize its execution, debathification, or the more than a decade of chaos the country has faced since, and how the US has failed to live up to its commitments there.
There are thousands of critiques you could raise where I would shrug, not bat an eye.
Iraq was just "painted" as a dictatorship though? How many political opponents does one have to summarily execute to qualify as a "real" dictatorship for you?
You give us no specifics about what the article says that is not true. I guess that's because you don't have any.
In particular, is it really your view that Erdogan is not making Turkey far more Islamic than it was? And would you oppose or support that?