Board index ‹ Government and Politics

[Superpositionist]

The Turkish political situation is, of course, different from ours in many respects, but one thing that struck me while I was there is that it's never a good thing when leaders use hatred and fear of immigrants and minorities as a way to gain power. It's very hard to improve racial tensions, and it's very easy to make them worse. Government, at its most basic, is about millions of very different people coming together to create something greater than themselves. Our leaders should be our best examples of understanding and working with people of different perspectives, not people who promote division and hatred.

[Roger Podger]

Politics and power always promote divisions and hatred and always will, as it is the easiest path to control. People are inherently tribal as well, and often seek like groups. This is a fundamental part of humanity and is both a defensive mechanism and a survival instinct. We are still very much tied into the lizard brain inside our head and that will never go away. This is why we need to allow people to break themselves up rather then force them together as that has never worked in the past without a huge body count and will not work in the future. It is part of our Original Sin, the knowledge of our differences.

[Superpositionist]

I couldn't disagree more. You're right that humans have a problem with tribalism, but that doesn't stop at racial boundaries. People can create "us" vs "them" conflict in any situation. Just look at sports teams--how easy is it to conclude that our team's player was just "playing hard" and the other team's player was "fouling on purpose to try to injure our best player"? The truth is, it's just hard for people to get along. Everyone thinks differently than you do. Everyone. The easiest thing might be to never leave your house, so no one will ever challenge your beliefs or be an obstacle to what you want to accomplish. Other people are scary, and the more different they are from us, the scarier they are. But the solution is not to avoid interaction! All that does is increase the sense that other people are incomprehensible and unpredictable, making it easy to excuse hurting or marginalizing them. It's not easy to understand or get along with other people, but that's what life in a world with other people in it means. The wider our experiences with people who are different than we are, the better we will be at understanding and working together.

[Roger Podger]

Just because you allow people to live in their comfort zones does not mean that such interactions will not happen. The key is having that interaction be done peacefully and not enforced, which is often the state. The sharing of ideas and interaction is important, but it must be done organically and not enforced. For example, if Iraq were divided into 3 areas after the Iraq War, ISIS would have had a much tougher time forming and the amount of religious violence would have been curtailed as it would have been harder for terrorists to act inside the different regions. There would have been some chaos at the start, but I doubt the Kurds would have lost Mosul if they had actual control over it, and a Kurdistan would have done much to help Turkey out with the Kurdish Separatist Movement. The only way you get peace if you do not allow self-segregation is by force and with a huge bodycount, as in Russia, Yugoslavia and China, for example. The forced integration of Armenia and Azerbaijan under Stalin is a perfect example of this and the conflicts is caused are still felt today. Croatia and Serbia is another such case and the list goes on and on. Let people live as they wish and, just as in history, this communication will happen naturally.

[Superpositionist]

Ah, I see what you mean. You're talking about state boundaries that don't fall on ethnic identity lines, often because a colonizer or conqueror has set national boundaries for other reasons. And yeah, that's caused problems all over the world. Not sure how you fix that, but I get what you're saying. I was talking on much more personal lines.

[Roger Podger]

It was always a way of control and it being used now in America. Turkish politics have always been a mess since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey just lost, in many ways, as their gambit to support ISIS so that they could get their Turkish-Qatar pipeline has failed and Russia closed that door. That is why Etrogran has to stage these fake coup attempts, blaming it on Dr. Gulen, who lives in PA and who I have spoken with on a few occasions. Great guy. He, to get this pipeline through, had to sidle up to the Salafist and Wahhabist Muslim movements and support them, putting generals in place loyal to those causes. Thus he had to remove them when he realized that the US was not going to back their play and that Russia had the upper hand. Now he is walking everything back down, including his aggression against the YPG and their Kurdish backers. That is why he is grabbing on to every thread he can, including hate, because he has to reverse everything he has done in the last 8 years as Russia now has Casus Belli to invade Turkey and NATO will not come to their defense. That is why Turkey's leader is acting the way he is and why he is saying what he says.