For the last several days now, Turkey has been teaching the world about democracy. Their Prime Minister is a religious conservative who shares an ideology remarkably similar to that of American “conservatives”. http://guardianlv.com/2013/06/turkish-people-and-a-lesson-for-the-world/ “Among the protestors are former Erdogan supporters. As he became more powerful, and took more authority, they say they are sorry they voted for him. A united Turkey frightens the government. In the United States, our government has no fear of the people. They keep us divided. They, not the people, call us liberals and conservatives, and tell us we live in red or blue states. It is government that has failed the people, and their intent is to keep us angry at each other and divided. The United States of America does not exist any longer. We may be called the Divided States of America. The people of Turkey do not care about religion, or even politics. They care about their quality of life. The crowd in Taksim Square is a cross section of the nation. The people of Turkey are teaching the people of the world a valuable lesson. We, the people, remain stronger, and have more value than our government.” - The Guardian Express Beware American conservatives; the spirit of those brave Turkish freedom fighters may be arriving at American shores someday in the near future should you succeed in bringing a Republican/conservative government back into Washington. Government exists to serve the people and when it no longer fulfills that obligation, it is time for it to go. The world owes a debt of gratitude to the freedom fighters in Turkey. They remind us that freedom is not free.
The question is when is it beneficial to call them freedom fighters or terrorists? Syrian "rebels" are called freedom fighters by the West. Iraq "rebels" are called terrorists by the West. Syrian "rebels" destabilizing the government, will help the US in long term in installation of its own oil companies. Iraq "rebels" distabilizing the government will hurt the US in long term as it has gained control of the oil and now needs to retain it with the catchy "liberty for all" slogans. Turkey meanwhile, their "rebels" are painted as freedom fighters for now, since Erdogan has been a big buddy of Washington, of course if the politics change against him...his buddies in White House will fade away too, and once "freedom fighters" will now be "terrorists".
There is a difference between terrorism and rioters. Terrorists attack innocent unarmed civilians. Rioters are protesters, usually unarmed, who confront well-armed and well trained police forces in the streets. And that is what we are seeing in Turkey.
Correction: And that is what we are being shown currently in Turkey. Behind the scenes, is just as important.
Turkey is a country that acts as the perfect medium between europe and the middle east...and yes they are doing a fantastic job at it....but still cant see your justification to the reference to democracy though.
What did Martin Luther King teach Americans about democracy? What did Mahatma Gandhi teach the world about democracy? Sometimes civil disobedience is necessary to enact and protect democracies.
What did Snowden teach us about democracy? Sometimes civil disobedience is necessary to enact and protect democracies. Freedom is worth more than...honor, courage, and commitments.
Snowden taught us absolutely nothing about anything, much less democracy. Everything Snowden has publically revealed was previously known or at least could be reasonably inferred and expected. What Snowden has not publically revealed, but probably privately revealed to less open and less transparent governments like China and Russia, are the details of US foreign electronic surveillance.
Terrorists commit acts of war against civilians and civilian infrastructure. The purpose of this is extortion: to frighten a population into adopting a position, attitude, politics, etc., that they would never adopt of their own free will--so that they will put pressure on their government to do whatever the terrorists are extorting them to do. Freedom fighters generally fight against their government and its agents. They're not usually trained soldiers with a disciplined chain of command, so they typically cause far more "collateral damage" than an army would (any army except the USA with its mindless drones piloted by cowards in a bunker 50 miles away for whom it's nothing but a really exciting videogame), and they aren't above targeting other civilians who happen not to agree with their cause. This doesn't really set them very far away from the terrorists. The IRA were freedom fighters when they killed British policemen: members of the occupying country's (para-)military force. But they became terrorists when they bombed schools, churches, and Protestant residential neighborhoods. When American military personnel bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki with weapons of such great destructive power that the overwhelming majority of casualties were guaranteed to be civilians, including children, the elderly, hospital patients, and humanitarian workers such as surgeons and teachers, they were executing a classic terrorist scenario. It was "known" that the Japanese people regarded surrender as an unpardonable act of dishonor, so they would continue fighting until the last five-year-old girl was torn to pieces by a volley of bullets while charging a battalion of U.S. marines with her dead daddy's samurai sword. The Americans didn't really want this to happen (not out of sympathy for the little girl but because we didn't want to be placed in the same category as Hitler when the war was over), but more importantly (to us) we didn't want to take the hundreds of thousands of casualties we would have suffered as we slowly marched through one island after another, destroying all human life. So rather than take that strategy to end the war, we extorted Japanese civilians to lobby their government to surrender, since their enemy had proven himself to have absolutely no sense of honor, according to the Japanese code. (You're supposed to look your enemy in the eye when you kill him, not hide half a mile up in the air while you drop bombs on his children.) That, dear friends, is terrorism. So now every half-assed band of idiots believes they should try it, since it worked for us. (And yes, I know that the Japanese were not exactly rigorous about their own code of honor, considering what they did to the Chinese during that war.) When somebody asks you a question, you're supposed to answer it in your own words. If we wanted to take the time to read an online article, we'd be on that website instead of this one. Yes. But the reason we call it civil disobedience is that it is not criminal disobedience. Nobody is supposed to suffer a serious injury and no infrastructure is supposed to be damaged. All you're supposed to do is inconvenience a lot of people and reduce your country's GDP by a fraction of a percent.
So what are you saying? If the civilly disobedient cannot guarantee nonviolence they should not be civilly disobedient? There was violence in the American Civil Rights Movement led by Martin Luther King. There was violence in the Indian independence revolution led by Gandhi. Both leaders were victims of violence, but neither King nor Gandhi advocated violence or engage in violence. The government and government sympathizers were the ones who initiated the violence. In fact they were advocates for peace. It is magical thinking to think that the civil protestors can guarantee nonviolence. And just because protestors cannot guarantee non violence, it doesn't follow that they should not protest and not express their opinions.
