Turkey takes yet another step towards dictatorship: critical academics get chased out [View all]

[DetlefK]

http://www.spiegel.de/unispiegel/studium/tuerkei-wie-erdogan-gegen-kritiker-an-universitaeten-vorgeht-a-1101485.html
This article is in german, but here's an article from 2014:
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2014/02/turkey-erdogan-government-academic-freedom.html

If a turkish professor says something critical about Erdogan, he can kiss his job goodbye.

Zeynep Sayin was a professor of communication sciences. During a lecture about art, she talked about turkish history and eventually Erdogan.
Out-of-context snippets of her speech made it far and wide on the internet, accompanied by a nation-wide smear-campaign in the newspapers. Her university fired her without ever talking to her.

In January 2016, a thousand turkish academics signed a declaration calling for a peaceful solution with the Kurds. In response, Erdogan lambasted them in a public speech as traitors and "so-called academics".
Several academics were called out in newspapers by name and smeared as "sons of bitches", "perverted lesbians" and "PKK-lovers".
Several academics were fired within days. Several others were arrested.


In the second article above, Erdogan made clear what he thinks universities are good for:
Erdogan condemned not just the students for “terrorizing” the campus, but also the academics for supporting their right to protest. He suggested these academics should quit academia and join the protesters, since an academic’s job is to “teach students valuable information, like how to use a computer. I condemn all academics who support these protests. We do not need teachers like this.”

No critical thinking allowed. Teach students how to operate a machine.



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First, Erdogan is closing down critical newspapers.

Then he moves to replace critical judges and attorney-generals with partisan hacks.

Then he sabotages the electoral process until a re-do of the national elections has to be called. (And what a coincidence: Right before the re-do a catastrophic bombing hits Ankara, uniting the country behind a strongman just as he was sinking in the polls.)

Then he paves the legal way to arrest all parliamentarians of the kurdish HDP-party.

Then he ruins everybody who dares to stand up for critical thinking.









Drip, drip, drip.
Drip, drip, drip, dictatorship.