Occupy Turkey

"Save The Trees"

I was surprised by the way the demonstrations in Turkey are being described by some well informed journalists here in the U.S.eh?

One might think, at first blush if they were as uninformed about the protests in Turkey as I was, that it was some vague "Islamic thing", whatever that might be.

But it is a thing about natural rights common to us all, yes, the common good of our planet, which is more of a big thing to them than we give them credit for (What Kind of Intelligence Is Prescience? - 2).

Interestingly, the youth of Turkey are trying to occupy Oil-Qaeda in some important ways that do not come to mind at first when Westerners consider Islamic youth.

That is probably because of the propagandasphere here in one of the strongholds of Oil-Qaeda.

The protests in Turkey have to do with green ideology:

Nominally, the protests were sparked by a government plan to replace Istanbul's leafy Taksim Gezi Park with a touristy shopping mall—what the country's leading historian, Edhem Eldem, sardonically derides as a "Las Vegas of Ottoman splendor." Trees are especially precious in Istanbul, where only 1.5 percent of land is green space (compared to 17 percent in New York).

(Mother Jones, emphasis added). But like the jackboot response to the Occupy movement in the U.S.eh? the wannabe Ottoman Empire Turks came down hard on the youth, which gave those youth more things to protest about:

But the protests quickly became symbolic of much broader concerns about Erdogan's autocratic and socially conservative style of government.

Istanbul's secularists chafe at the way he has rammed through development projects in this cosmopolitan cultural crossroads with little regard for the European and non-Muslim aspects of its history; a 19th-century Russian Orthodox Church may be destroyed as part of an overhaul of a port. What's more, Erdogan has placed new restrictions on the sale of alcohol and availability of birth control. And he has jailed political opponents and members of the media.
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Since Friday, there have been demonstrations in 67 of Turkey's 80 provinces, according to Turkey's semi-official Andalou News Agency.

At least 1700 people have been arrested.

(ibid, emphasis added). "Why does this sound so Homeland Security ish?" you may be wondering, and that is a good question with a big brother answer:

Is Erdogan just another Islamist dictator? Not according to Washington, which holds up Turkey as a shining model for democracy in the Islamic world. Since coming to power in 2002, Erdogan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) has twice returned to office with large pluralities of the vote. In recent years, Erdogan has kept up the pace of democratic reforms in Turkey by enshrining individual rights in its laws and placing the military under civilian control. "Yet even as the AKP was winning elections at home and plaudits from abroad," writes Foreign Policy's Steven Cook, "an authoritarian turn was underway…"

In 2007, the party seized upon a plot in which elements of Turkey's so-called deep state—military officers, intelligence operatives, and criminal underworld—sought to overthrow the government and used it to silence its critics. Since then, Turkey has become a country where journalists are routinely jailed on questionable grounds, the machinery of the state has been used against private business concerns because their owners disagree with the government, and freedom of expression in all its forms is under pressure.

How bad is the crackdown on the press? Pretty bad. At the same time CNN International was broadcasting live from Taksim Square on Friday, CNN Turk, the network's Turkish-language affiliate, was showing a cooking show and a documentary about penguins.

(ibid, emphasis added). This sounds familiar because we have been going through it forever here in the original homeland of Oil-Qaeda since MOMCOM decided to "manage our oil" that somehow got misplaced under the soils of the people of the Middle East:

Long before politicians mewled helplessly about the power of “Big Oil”, carbon-based fuels were shaping our very political, legal, intellectual, and physical structures.
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For instance, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a pivotal moment in America’s strategic outlook. America, a global hegemon whose empire was weakening, seized the second largest oil deposits in the world as a way of preventing its economic and political decline.
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The last declining global hegemon, Great Britain, also engaged in a brutal and highly controversial British occupation of Iraq, in the 1920s, pressed aggressively by the well-known British conservative, Winston Churchill.
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It was the Royal Navy which was the impetus for the development of the oil industry in Britain. The problem was supply and the security of that supply. Initially, the British government purchased shares in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, subsequently, British Petroleum.
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Then, to prevent further disruptions, Britain enmeshed itself ever more deeply in the Middle East, working to install new shahs in Iran and carve Iraq out of the collapsing Ottoman Empire.

Churchill fired the starting gun, but all of the Western powers joined the race to control Middle Eastern oil.

(The Universal Smedley - 2). We just had to come to their aid and bring some clear-thinking democracy to them:

The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims, while incidentally capturing their markets; to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples, while blundering accidentally into their oil wells.

(The Peak Of The Oil Wars - 7, see also He Whose Name Cannot Be Spoken). And so it has gone on since about the turning of the 18th into the 19th Century.

One could say "it is so yesterday and so boring" except for the fact that Russia is supplying Syria with missiles (Time) as the U.S. begins to supply Jordan with missiles (CNN).

Recent stories inform us that the current U.S. president was unaware of IRS, Bengazi, and DOJ activity, so we may be aligning to repeat what RFK papers recently released inform us was "the most dangerous moment in human history".

It too was caused in part by JFK's presidential unawareness (The Most Dangerous Moment in Recorded History, Humanity Imperiled).

Stay focused.