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Licenses of 21,000 Turkish teachers have been revoked
- guard-of-terra 10y ago> are mostly linked with terrorist activities All of them!?
- kaonashi 10y agoOf course not, this is a political purge. Think Chile '73.
- jayess 10y agoOr Germany February, 1933.
- artie_effim 10y agoCambodia, Rwanda, China.... Doctors are next
- TorKlingberg 10y agoI wonder how they compiled the list of political undesirables. Local informants? Targeting ethnic groups?
- pantalaimon 10y agoBig Data ;)
- tremon 10y agotwitter users?
- ihsw 10y agoThe intelligence apparatus in Turkey is all-encompassing and pervasive. A healthy combination of SIGINT, HUMINT, and homicidal madness has brought us here.
- MrZongle2 10y agoThis does not bode well for Turkey. It is unfathomable how 21,000 teachers were directly related to the coup attempt. It makes me think that the coup was Turkey's Reichstag fire moment.
- partisan 10y agoAbsolutely. From the comfort of the States, I am glad that the coup did not succeed, but only because Turkey falling into chaos would be beyond terrible. That said, the recent fallout has all the markings of opportunism and expansion of power.
- hardlianotion 10y agoNot sure I am going to be able to appreciate the difference between chaos and what seems likely to follow this.
- sickbeard 10y agoWhy was everyone screaming democracy when they never had one in the first place?
- spriggan3 10y ago> Why was everyone screaming democracy when they never had one in the first place? Political correctness. Turkey is defacto ruled by a brutal dictatorship now, the failed coup was the last chance of restoring actual democracy in Turkey. The Turkish constitution is actually good and acknowledge the danger of an Islamic theocracy. The role of the Turkish army is/was to prevent it.They failed.
- madelinecameron 10y agoI don't think they failed as much as they were never meant to succeed. There are just so many places where the military could've outright "taken out" Erdogan but didn't (such as when the "coup" had two jets right next to Erdogan's jet... but didn't shoot then completely backed off) This was completely set-up to round up popular support / not make it look suspicious when Erdogan did exactly this.
- spriggan3 10y ago> I don't think they failed as much as they were never meant to succeed Do you think it was a setup orchestrated by Erdogan ?
- lettergram 10y agoI honestly don't believe it was a coup at all, or at least it was known before hand. There's no way the presidents plane was allows to just flying in circles around the city.
- tremon 10y agoProbably the same reason why people in the USA are screaming democracy?
- dhruvrrp 10y ago21,000 teachers and 1.5k deans. This is the kind of thing that pushes the education system and thus the country back a decade. How are they gonna find replacements? How are the students gonna cope without teachers? What is Erdogan trying to do..
- rimantas 10y agoWhat's a decade when the aim is for XVI century.
- jayess 10y agoOnly a decade? More like decades. He's doing what all despots do.
- TheGuyWhoCodes 10y agoReplacement? Why not clerics? He is trying to turn the country to an Islamic state with him as the Sultan.
- jdubs 10y agoWhat ever he's trying to do will be terrific!
- zymhan 10y ago> What is Erdogan trying to do In his convoluted thinking, he's trying to stop the spread of an anti-establishment political organization that has infiltrated all levels of the Turkish military and civil service. Or, you know, they're reasonable people who are concerned about the dimming of their country's democracy.
- wheaties 10y agoEducated people ask questions. He doesn't want an educated populace.
- colejohnson66 10y agoWhile that is true, look at North Korea. Everyone is taught from birth that their Gloious Leader is, in a sense, God. However, people who've escaped have said that when they got old enough to actually think for themselves, they figured out it was a lie but couldn't do anything. http://www.craveonline.com/design/869309-north-korean-defector-living-usa-answered-internets-questions http://www.craveonline.com/design/869309-north-korean-defect... > Well, it's hard to say. Yes and no. Because if you're talking about nowadays North Koreans, it's a little bit hard for me to say that a majority of North Koreans believe propaganda. But I do think that older generations definitely believe government propaganda, because in the 1970's, economically the North Koreans were better off than South Korea, but after the 1990s famine, things have proven that it is not the best country in the world as the government or state claim, because how can you accept the propaganda when your best friend dies of starvation? So I think nowadays more and more people are critical of government propaganda, but I can't say what all North Koreans do now.
- mcbits 10y agoIt's starting to seem like they had these lists made up ahead of time and have been waiting for the right time to start cleansing the ranks.
- nickbauman 10y agoThis is exactly what's going on. As bad as the putsch is, in the end the wrong guy is in power if you value democracy and freedom of religion.
- zymhan 10y agoStarting? That was clear when they purged the first few thousand.
- derkha 10y agoEven the EU seems to think so: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-security-eu-hahn-idUSKCN0ZY0EA http://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-security-eu-hahn-id...
- mcbits 10y agoYes, "starting" may be too charitable, but the first few thousand were military, so it was at least plausible that they were tagged for actual involvement with the coup.
- AndyNemmity 10y agoThe first group were Judges actually.
- dragonwriter 10y ago> It's starting to seem like they had these lists made up ahead of time and have been waiting for the right time to start cleansing the ranks. That much is obvious. Erdogan didn't start laying blame for problems on the "parallel structure" only after the coup attempt, he's been doing it for years. The coup attempt provided the political pretext for stronger action against the group (and, potentially, others that the regime can use the pretext of going after the group to deal with at the same time) than the regime thought it could get away with before. Governments frequently use crises as pretexts for actions which they wanted to do previously but didn't find political support for, both against specific internal or external targets and in terms of general, non-specifically-targeted policy.
- jayess 10y agoHow Turkey could possibly still be in accession talks to join the EU is baffling and appalling to me.
- zymhan 10y agoThey barely were to begin with, and they are highly unlikely to continue in the current atmosphere.
- scholia 10y agoAgreed. There's no way Turkey can get into the EU, first, because it will never meet EU rules; and second, because any other EU member can veto it. In this case, Greece probably would. Quoted from https://fullfact.org/europe/turkey-likely-join-eu/ https://fullfact.org/europe/turkey-likely-join-eu/ Turkey first applied to join what was then the EEC in 1987. It was declared an eligible candidate in 1997. Negotiations were formally opened in 2005. Now, in 2016, negotiations have closed on just one out of 35 chapters—‘science and research’, which was completed in 2006, the year after it was opened. Of the remaining 34 chapters, 14 have been opened for negotiation. In 2006, the EU decided that until Turkey agrees to remove obstacles to free movement of goods (including transport restrictions) between it and Cyprus, no more chapters will be provisionally closed. Eight chapters (including areas fundamental to EU law, such as free movement of goods and right of establishment and freedom to provide services) will not even be opened.
- hardlianotion 10y agoThat, most definitely, before. Things very different now.
- imartin2k 10y agoBasically, Erdogan has given up on the EU, and to be fair, the EU has probably missed out on an opportunity to draw Turkey into its sphere while the chance existed, and while Erdogan was willing to compromise.
- Bartweiss 10y ago
- stevecalifornia 10y ago"We'd like to join the EU now."
- zymhan 10y agoTurkey's civil service is not going to be in good shape after this purge. It seems hard to run a modern society in a very precarious neighborhood with undermanned services and not risk your own citizens getting angry or outsiders using the opportunity to strike.
- frandroid 10y agoAlso difficult to run a modern society when you purge people capable of critical thought.
- vkou 10y agoSeems to work just fine for most state operations. The people really capable of critical thought will quickly learn to keep their mouths shut.
- yardie 10y agoOr they will leave. Cuba is in the shape it's in because the industrialist, knowledge workers, business owners, all left. I honestly believe the revolution started with good intentions, then began to turn more authoritarian. And finally, stacked the ranks with incompetent loyalists.
- omegaworks 10y agoBetcha they're all Kurdish.
- ebiester 10y ago...or at some point had links to the Hizmet (Gulen) movement - whether it be staying in one of their dorms, or...
- JohnStrange 10y agoThe coup was a last chance effort. Now Turkey has become a totalitarian dictatorship, there is no doubt about that. To be more precise, it already lost its status as democracy years ago when Erdogan had hundreds of prosecutors and policemen fired who dared to investigate corruption within his family. But with the latest purges you've got to wonder where they want to get the replacements from. Any sane person will probably try to leave the country rather than being clubbed to death by AKP fans. Moral of the story: NEVER trust or vote for a party that has the word "justice" in its name.
- heliumcraft 10y agoThis happened before in Iran's revolution, School Deans, and even Hospital Directors were replaced by pro-revolution islamists regardless of education or qualifications. We might see Turkey transform itself into what Iran became. After this they need a War (a la Iraq-Iran war) to keep people distracted and then the changes will be permanent.
- hx87 10y agoThe problem with that plan is that Turkey has only one equal on its borders (Iran), and cooking up a cassus belli (supporting the Rojava Kurds & the Syrian government...?) there isn't going to be easy. Everyone else is either friendly (Azerbaijan), an overmatch (Russia & NATO), or a pushover but with overmatching alliances (Armenia & Syria). I suppose they'll have to settle for a Kurdish insurgency...
- nkrisc 10y agoThere's still Syria.
- busterarm 10y agoThey have some territorial disputes with Greece and an extant DMZ in Cyprus.
- heliumcraft 10y agoThere's Syria/ISIS next door, we'll see. Some military interventions and a lot of TV fear propaganda would do the job.
- jayess 10y agoThe whole thing seemed fishy that night. I was watching Erdogan's plane circle southwest of Istanbul for an hour or so on FlightRadar24. Then suddenly it lands where just a couple of hours earlier coup-controlled tanks were patrolling the runways. Huh? The "coup" had control of fighter jets that were buzzing Istanbul and Ankara (live on TV), yet they let his plane circle, for all to see, just minutes away?
- sitkack 10y agoDo you have video of this? Interested.
- jayess 10y agoHere's the FlightRadar24 track of his jet: https://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/tk8456/#a5a3952 https://www.flightradar24.com/data/flights/tk8456/#a5a3952
- tim333 10y agoErdogan gives his version to CNN: http://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/18/europe/turkey-president-erdogan-interview-coup/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/18/europe/turkey-president-er...
- AndyNemmity 10y ago""Starting from the moment we landed, F-16s started flying above us, very close to the ground," Erdogan said." The F-16s had him locked in, and never fired. Which was odd. It all doesn't really make a ton of sense, but it's possible.
- zymhan 10y agoIt would be pretty unprecedented for the coup members to shoot down the sitting president's plane. They would almost certainly just prevent him from landing, or allow him to land and arrest him immediately.
- chinathrow 10y agoReactions like these makes you wonder if the coup attempt was staged.
- dragonwriter 10y agoPerhaps, though people are often too quick to conclude that crises are staged just because governments are prepared to quickly exploit a particular category of crises to push a pre-existing agenda with motivations only tangential to the crises, and ultimately the debate over whether the crisis was staged detracts attention from criticism of the response (especially when the crisis wasn't staged, and the claim that it was staged can be convincingly rebutted and used to discredit those questioning the response.) See, e.g., 9/11 truthers.
- Chris2048 10y agoOn the other hand, given the Saudis involvement with terrorist activities were apparently covered up, maybe the 9/11 truthers are right to by cynical?
- breitling 10y agoHow else would one react to a coup?
- lettergram 10y agoIt seems more and more (to me at least) that the coup d'état attempt could have been allowed, if not blatantly organized by the ruling elite of Turkey. There's actually a great scene in the end of the Anthony Bourdain Parts Unknown Istanbul episode where someone close to the ruling class (a business owner), makes the following comment[1]: > "Fear works. Fear gets votes." Beyond that, I can't find a clip, but it was the most real-life foreshadowing I have ever seen in my life. [1] http://www.eater.com/2015/11/8/9684640/parts-unknown-recap-istanbul-anthony-bourdain http://www.eater.com/2015/11/8/9684640/parts-unknown-recap-i...
- ianai 10y agoThat show has been amazing for its relevancy.
- lettergram 10y agoI'm not even super big on the show (my wife is), but twice now I've seen things foreshadowed on it. It was so blatantly clear Turkey was devolving into a pure dictatorship when the episode was filmed like two years ago. We've seen stuff on Reddit, but the conversation they had at the end of the episode with the business owner was just scary. He was basically just like, "yeah, we're going to take power right from under everyone's noses, and it's going to make me rich"
- ilostmykeys 10y agoObama and Hillary made a huge error in judgment by siding with a fascist. It's amazing how we haven't gotten ourselves in deep sh!t already given how badly our leaders judge situations. But maybe we have, and we just don't know it yet.
- mtgx 10y agoWithout making this too political, this is exactly why good judgement is so much more important than "experience" alone. Hillary is proving herself once again incapable of making good decisions in such tough situations, and who knows to what future catastrophes her bad decisions will lead, if she becomes president. At least Obama is threatening to throw Turkey out of NATO, but knowing Obama's ABC policy (Always-Be-Compromising), it's just an empty threat, and Erdogan likely knows it.
- hx87 10y agoYes, how dare they not support a coup against a democratically elected government!
- tremon 10y ago"democratically elected" seems to be the only democratic part of Erdogan's reign.
- ihsw 10y agoThis is not democracy. The people had little choice in deciding their fate, now they have no choice. Erdogan is here to stay -- he will either eventually pass away of old age (see: Zimbabwe's eternal president, Mugabe) or be assassinated.
- JohnStrange 10y agoAdolf Hitler was also democratically elected. Just sayin' ...
- mikeash 10y agoWhat else should they have done? Siding with a military coup against a nominally democratic government would look terrible, and when the coup lost they'd look like complete idiots. Remaining neutral wouldn't have been much better.
- mtgx 10y agoThis after Erdogan has already purged 2,700 judges and 8,000 police officers: http://www.reuters.com/article/turkey-security-judges-idINKCN0ZW0OZ?irpc=932 http://www.reuters.com/article/turkey-security-judges-idINKC... http://www.politico.eu/article/turkey-dismisses-8000-police-after-failed-coup-judges-military-personnel-recep-tayyip-erdogan/ http://www.politico.eu/article/turkey-dismisses-8000-police-... This looks very much like a real-world version of Supreme Chancellor Palpatine's "Execute order 66": http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Order_66 http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Order_66 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09n0qd_n4c0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09n0qd_n4c0
- Kenji 10y agoWhat a shame. Erdogan is cementing his position and thus totalitarianism and islamofascism. Driving out the intellectuals and freethinkers is a significant step. Every month he and people like him are in office will take Turkey years to recover from. If this isn't stopped now, and it seems like it isn't, I doubt I will see a free Turkey in my lifetime.
- trhway 10y agoReichstag fire. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_fire
- tremon 10y agoAt least now all those ISIS combatants have a new place to call home :/
- tim333 10y agoThey were pretty at home in Turkey in prior times. It may have got tricker for them now they've bombed Turkey a bit.
- nurettin 10y agoI am mostly a-political, 3000 years later none of this will matter. A few billion years later andromeda "collides" with milky way. So let people play. That being said, how does a successful military coup increase a country's democracy in any conceivable way? How is this a "last ditch effort for democracy" as so many people here seem to be thinking? And why is the answer always "oh it was a fake"? How does it work in the first place? Do you think people will suddenly stop voting for their favorite party and ideology (opposing the ruling secular elite) after 14 years?
- tim333 10y ago>how does a successful military coup increase a country's democracy in any conceivable way? A conceivable way is they overthrow a dictator and hold elections. In practice through research finds "though democracies are occasionally established in the wake of coups, more often new authoritarian regimes emerge, along with higher levels of state-sanctioned violence." http://rap.sagepub.com/content/3/1/2053168016630837 http://rap.sagepub.com/content/3/1/2053168016630837 I don't think a coup would have been a good idea in this case - Erdogan was elected and fairly popular so the argument for a coup would be weak. One reason to think it may not have been a real coup attempt.
- nurettin 10y agoAs long as rich is getting richer and poor is getting better services, which has been consistently the case for the past decade, majority doesn't care about who rules what and what their agenda is. People just want the status quo. People do think extraditions and finger pointings are increasing to insane levels, but as long as status quo is kept and lost services are replaced, they will keep on voting for their beloved somewhat-islamic somewhat-secular government.
- ihsw 10y agoThis submission was at the top on the front page -- what happened?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tim333 10y agoHN has a policy for the mods to move stories down that are more politics than tech/startups.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]