U.S. and Russia... and Turkey...

Che Guevara praised America as the head of the snake... with a vicious bite... American liberals praised America as the world's leading democracy...
...and billionaires wanted to Make America Great Again...
But,
The world expected a new global vision from the U.S.  and instead got a partnership with Putin's Russia... Russian oligarchs and apparatchiks hooked up with U.S. white nationalists and racists and billionaires and the outcome became the world that we are living in...
Russia has a history of czarist despotism which evolved into Stalinist dictatorship and later into Putin's oligarchic vandalism... The "liberal western democracies,"  are democracies based on money... the more money individuals possess the more rights they have... money decides rights and equality... and who will lead the country...

Putin's Russia
Alexei Navalny, Russia's most prominent opposition figure, has questioned reports that he suffered an acute allergic reaction after being taken ill in jail...

 "I have never had an allergy. Not to food or pollen or anything else," Navalny wrote in a blog post.

The 43-year-old was taken to hospital with a swollen face, eye problems and rashes on his body. He was in jail for calling for unauthorised protests. His doctor suggested he might have been exposed to "some toxic agent".          Navalny has since been discharged from hospital and has returned to jail.

Putin's Russia is an oligarchic despotism... the opposition has no rights... and the oligarchs have both the money and the rights... This is yet another variety of "bourgeois democracy..." That is democracy based on money...
In the U.S. the 1% has more rights than the rest of the people... and they are bold enough to declare that even if they kill a person on 5th avenue in New York... they will still go free...
Putin's Russia and Trump's America are starting to resemble each other more closely... and other leaders with despotic tendencies are imitating them...

Erdogan's Turkey has a long history of despotic actions... 
Brazil, Philippines and Saudi Arabia are others... examples of despotic friends of the ruling 1%... be they in the U.S.  or in Russia...

...an image of Erdogan's Turkey...

Elif Shafak: Turkish author living in exile in England...
I love her writings... like I like the writings of Orhan Pamuk (Nobel laurate...) Like Shafak, Pamuk lives in exile too... in Europe...

Shafak insists..." Much has been said about the anti-liberal nature of authoritarian populism, but little about anti-intellectualism and anti-feminism..."


Shafak continues...

One day two months ago I woke up to thousands of abusive messages on Turkish social media, many of them generated by bots and trolls. Sentences had been plucked from one of my novels, The Gaze, and were being circulated by people demanding fiction writers be put on trial for "obscenity". My new novel, 10 Minutes38 Seconds inThis Strange World, was also targeted. Both books explore difficult subjects - sexual harassment, gender violence and child abuse - and I was far from the only writer targeted in this way. Soon the hysteria turned into a kind of digital lynching of Turkish authors who had even slightly touched on similar issues in their novels and short stories.

Erdogan's Turkey bans books and persecutes authors... even fiction is not safe... They put authors on trial because of their fiction... like they did to Shafak and Pamuk...
Erdogan;s Turkey... bans books...

I received a distressed call from my Turkish publisher the same week, informing me that civilian police officers had come to the office demanding to see a number of books. Not only my fiction but titles by Duygu Asena, a leading feminist who died in 2006. The books were taken to the prosecutor's office to be investigated.

Erdogan's Turkey and his university rector... The people are romanticised as pure and innocent.

 The deputy rector of a newly established university in Turkey, Bülent Ari, claimed on TV: "I'd rather trust ignorant people who have not attended university or better yet, not even attended primary school ... because their minds are pure." Saying he was unhappy to see literacy rates going up, he claimed that people who had higher education and were more cultured also had blurred minds and couldn't think straight. "If Erdogan leaves it will be a catastrophe," he added. Afterwards, he was promoted by the government to the Council of Higher Education.

Shafak narrates... that,

There is a clear animosity towards intellectuals under President Erdogan's AKP government. More than 7,300 academics have been dismissed via emergency state decrees. Around 700 scholars have been criminally charged for signing a peace petition. They have lost their jobs and been blacklisted. Some have been arrested, others have had travel bans imposed on them or had their passports confiscated. Mehmet Fatih Tras, a university assistant who had signed the peace petition and was then fired, killed himself. Professor Sebnem Korur Fincanci, chair of the Human Rights Foundation, and Ayse Gül Altinay, a professor of gender and women's studies, were both given two-year prison sentences. Professor Füsun Üstel, one of Turkey's leading academics on nationalism and identity, is in prison.

Like intellectuals, feminists are accused of being 'pawns of the west' and 'rootless cosmopolitans'... 

It is equally hard for female journalists. Nurcan Baysal had police knocking on her door in the middle of the night. Baysal is one of the most important voices writing about the traumas of Yazidi and Kurdish women, and she was put on trial for her articles. Ayla Albayrak from the Wall Street Journal was charged with "terrorist propaganda" after penning an article about what was transpiring in the Kurdish-majority south-east. She was sentenced in absentia. Article 19 called the decision "an unprecedented verdict for a reporter of a foreign media outlet".

In the U.S. advisers to the current regime have also targeted intellectuals equating to "cosmopolitan" rootless globalists... and Putin's Russia has a long history of anti-intellectual  crusades...

Turkey's trajectory shows that wherever there is a rise of nationalism and authoritarianism, patriarchy and homophobia are also in the ascendant... and that is exactly the same in Russia and the U.S. and all over the "liberal democracies..."

Nationalists are burning poster of Shafak... in Turkey...
White nationalists demonstrated and killed people in the U.S.
... and Russian chauvinist and oligarchic regime is prosecuting Navalny and other opposition leaders-intellectuals...

Violence is part of the "white nationalists" in the U.S. 
Violence is part of the Putin's oligarchs... and violence is the desired policy in Erdogan's Turkey...

Shafak continues...

In 2006, after I wrote The Bastard of Istanbul - a novel about a Turkish and Armenian-American family - I was put on trial for "insulting Turkishness". The words of several of my Armenian fictional characters were used as "evidence" by the prosecutors. As a result, my Turkish lawyer had to defend not only me but also my characters. I wish I could say that Turkey has made progress in human rights and freedom of speech since then, but I am afraid it has been the opposite.

No country is immune to the rise of populist nationalism... 

As liberal democratic values continue to be endangered, we storytellers are now facing unexpected challenges. Doris Lessing once said that literature was analysis after the event. But there might be times when literature has to become analysis during the event. Paradoxically, at a time when truth is under attack, writers might need to defend fiction more loudly. In the age of anger, tribalism and apathy, we need stories of connectivity, humanism and empathy. In the face of binary oppositions, we need to promote a more nuanced way of thinking. Wherever there is a decline in democracy we will see an increase in censorship and intolerance. Today, more than ever before, literature has to be not only about stories but also about silences and the silenced. It has to become a sanctuary for the disempowered and the marginalised across the world.