"There's nothing that can be done," he kept saying.
He made it clear that in Turkey, his native country from which he fled for being someone who poked holes in the current, severely repressive regime of president Recep Tayyiv Erdogan, the government has nearly all bases covered with respect to the display of information about it. Resist, and torture may be waiting for you. Most certainly, there will be prison.
The Erdogan regime has routinely harassed journalists who dared to publish something against the government line. One of them was Mahir Zeynalov, who in 2014 literally had to leave by his back door to keep the agents from seizing him. He spoke of his situation at Marquette University last Thursday.
In hiding, he couldn't meet with any of his friends because all knew they, too, would be questioned and harassed by police. In fact, 40 of his friends are now in prison. "It was basically solitary confinement," Zeynalov said. He managed to get to the States, and has a six-year sentence hanging over his head for "political criticism" upon his return.
He couldn't return to his home for fear of arrest, either. Spied upon in their texting and e-mails, Zeynalov and his wife invented a language with which they could communicate (How, exactly, they did this he didn't explain.). His wife tried to join him in America and managed to gain a visa. The plane was forced to land in Germany, Zeynalov said, and she was taken off and sent back to Turkey. "She was called an agent of ISIS," he said. But she made it here in 2017.
International intrigue in Turkish repression isn't that rare. So pervasive is the Erdogan government's reach in these matters that it succeeded in getting an event cancelled at Columbia University, Zeynalov said.
It tried to do the same thing to Marquette last Thursday, said Zeynalov. Obviously, it was unsuccessful. But to know that it had the absolute chutzpah to try such a stunt (except who can blame them--it worked the first time) is, to say the least, chilling and invasive.
It also implies that the Erdogan government has enough in common with 45's gang of thugs that, at the very least, its attempt would not meet with condemnation. No, I haven't read a thing about this, either.
Erdogan is riding the same wave of nationalist populism that got 45 to sneak into the presidency's back door via the Electoral College. Zeynalov, now the Chief Editor of an internet site called Globe Post Media, broke it down for us, which made it all the more chilling. In order for populism to work, he said, you need:
- An enemy--someone to hate;
- A charismatic leader who calls out the elite establishment;
- Assistance from mainstream media (one tries to squash it, the other manipulates it with his tweets and bully pulpit);
- An economy where most people are working and unemployment is low;
- Low interest rates;
- Economic anxiety, meaning future fatalism about the coming effects of automation;
- Cultural insecurity--persuading the people that they are being humiliated by foreign forces; and
- The victim/blame card, where the leadership never has to take responsibility for any of the country's problems.
Go back and substitute 45 for Erdogan. You get the picture. And really, the only thing that separates us from Turkey is the continued independence of journalists, tweeting notwithstanding. On top of his media repression, Erdogan is extremely persuasive--"People continue to think the fix is on against them," Zeynalov said--and 45 has his base in a state of constant, nonsensical reinforcement--but here, there are still publications, websites and television networks that won't let him get away with it.
More to the point, the Supreme Court hasn't reversed the effects of the Sullivan v. New York Times case in 1964, which establishes an extremely high bar for enforcement of libel suits brought by political candidates and politically-elected or appointed officials. Much in line with the spirit of the constitutional phraseology of Article 1, which allows members of Congress to say just about anything they wish on the floor of their respective chambers without fear of legal vengeance--"for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place"--the Court said that actual malice must take place for any attack on a politician in order for it even to be considered at trial: that the publisher must know beforehand that not only was the information false, but damagingly false.
It hasn't, yet. But Clarence Thomas has called for a review of that concept. 45 has wondered out loud more than once that media (which is to say, media that publishes something he doesn't like, a staple with tyrants) should be liable to lawsuits for attacking him. And six members of Georgia's state legislature have introduced a bill in which the state's government would establish an ethics board for journalists, thus screening those who report on their activities.
Beyond that, Devin Nunes (R-CA), 45's former cat's paw on the House Intelligence Committee (another wonderful by-product of the 2018 mid-terms; we've heard little from him since except what's to follow here), announced recently that he would go after the Sacramento Bee for misrepresenting what the Bee called a "cocaine-fueled party with sex workers" on a yacht owned by a winery he partly owns in California. He claimed that he had to spend big bucks on defending himself against the charge during the past campaign, which, by the way, he won. He didn't ask the Bee, which never accused him of being on that yacht at that time or for being any part of it, for a retraction or correction, which is required in the state of California as a necessary part of the libel process. Nonetheless, he wants to recover damages.
In the end, no harm, no foul, because Sullivan. Nunes is still in Congress, so this is pretty much dead on arrival in court (except if he has money, which he does, he can make the Bee spend a lot of its own money, thus partly accomplishing his goal). In Turkey, though, such a story about anyone connected with Erdogan most likely would never see the light of day.
Things that diminish little by little, place by place, incident by incident, are difficult to detect on the daily radar, especially in a country as large as ours. But it's becoming clear that, to keep our nation from becoming an echo chamber like Turkey, the free press is, and must be, the bulwark that stands in the way of that utter disaster of token democracy and anaconda-like control. As noted above, everything is in place for us to become a land of coercively uninformed bobbleheads, something for which 45 lusts in his corrupted soul. Nancy Pelosi was right in her "60 Minutes" interview: We have enough resistance to survive one term of him, but probably not for another.
We are closer to Turkey's cruel fate than we'd like to realize. We don't want American journalists, fleeing prosecution just for doing their jobs, to admit to another country's listeners that there isn't anything anybody can do about it anymore. The free press is, really, all we have left.
But that means, too, that the Julian Assanges of the world must be given sufficient latitude to do their snooping against governments including our own, exposing uncomfortable, brand new things or those long since buried, based on truth and the facts regardless of motivation. Freedom of expression, like the rest of them listed under the Bill of Rights, cuts both ways.
More on that later.
Be well. I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
In the end, no harm, no foul, because Sullivan. Nunes is still in Congress, so this is pretty much dead on arrival in court (except if he has money, which he does, he can make the Bee spend a lot of its own money, thus partly accomplishing his goal). In Turkey, though, such a story about anyone connected with Erdogan most likely would never see the light of day.
Things that diminish little by little, place by place, incident by incident, are difficult to detect on the daily radar, especially in a country as large as ours. But it's becoming clear that, to keep our nation from becoming an echo chamber like Turkey, the free press is, and must be, the bulwark that stands in the way of that utter disaster of token democracy and anaconda-like control. As noted above, everything is in place for us to become a land of coercively uninformed bobbleheads, something for which 45 lusts in his corrupted soul. Nancy Pelosi was right in her "60 Minutes" interview: We have enough resistance to survive one term of him, but probably not for another.
We are closer to Turkey's cruel fate than we'd like to realize. We don't want American journalists, fleeing prosecution just for doing their jobs, to admit to another country's listeners that there isn't anything anybody can do about it anymore. The free press is, really, all we have left.
But that means, too, that the Julian Assanges of the world must be given sufficient latitude to do their snooping against governments including our own, exposing uncomfortable, brand new things or those long since buried, based on truth and the facts regardless of motivation. Freedom of expression, like the rest of them listed under the Bill of Rights, cuts both ways.
More on that later.
Be well. I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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