In Turkey, in the eastern province of Van, there is a man named Burhan Borak. He is a new record-holder, unlucky fellow: He has been given the longest sentence anyone has ever received for insulting the dictator, Erdogan, on social media. Borak has been sentenced to twelve years and three months. He has been punished for seven posts he wrote in 2014. That comes out to one year and nine months for each post.
What’d he say, what’d he say? News reports I have seen don’t specify. But we know that Turks have been prosecuted for asking such questions as, “Why is our government afraid of a play in a theater?”
Erdogan’s dictatorship is becoming ever more oppressive. The noose around Turks’ throats grows ever tighter. Turkey is the world’s No. 1 jailer of journalists — “ahead” of China, Iran, and the rest of them.
You may have heard a joke, circulating in Turkey: A prisoner goes to the prison library and asks for a book. “We don’t have the book,” says the librarian. “But we do have its author.”
Turkey is part of a new world order that is heavy with strongmen — including in formerly democratic lands. Erdogan’s latest inauguration took place last year, after another fraudulent election. The list of attendees was telling. You had Hungary’s Orbán, of course. And Russia’s Medvedev, standing in for Vlad. And Venezuela’s Maduro — who hailed Erdogan as a “leader of a new multi-polar world.”
In America, we don’t have an administration that really does freedom, democracy, and human rights. To most Republicans and conservatives, that sort of thing has a Reagan-Bush, “globalist” smell. You heard Trump, when he went to the Middle East in the first months of his presidency: “We are not here to lecture — we are not here to tell other people how to live, what to do, who to be, or how to worship.”
That was music to dictators’ ears. They’re the ones who tell other people how to live, what to do, whom to be, how to worship, etc. It’s their specialty.
About Turkey, specifically, Trump was very candid in 2016, when he was the Republican presidential nominee. David Sanger of the New York Times asked him about civil liberties in Turkey — and whether he, as president, would apply any pressure to the dictator.
Trump answered, “I think right now, when it comes to civil liberties, our country has a lot of problems, and I think it’s very hard for us to get involved in other countries when we don’t know what we are doing and we can’t see straight in our own country. . . . When the world looks at how bad the United States is, and then we go and talk about civil liberties, I don’t think we’re a very good messenger.”
I think we are — or could be, if we wanted to be. I think we ought to express sympathy, and a kind of solidarity, for people persecuted by tyrants. It has to do with how you view America and Americans. Who are we? What do we stand for in the world, and what do we mean to ourselves, for that matter? About this, there is a big, often painful debate.