James Ryan

The lesson these regimes learned from the Cold War was “don’t let Mandela out.” And the US, as hegemon, never really cared to pressure them on it.

Remember, when anyone asks some version of “but where are the leaders? who could lead a proper movement or government?” Whether it be Iran or Palestine or any other repressive or authoritarian regime, the answer is almost always, “in prison.”

Marwan Barghouti's lawyer Ben Marmarelli: there are reports that Barghouti was badly assaulted in prison, they "broke his ribs, teeth, fingers and cut part of his ear". Israeli Prison Service refused to comment or let the lawyer meet with him.

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If you're not following @boltsmag.org yet, it'll directly help fund our reporting!

Yes, because it’s global in scope. The NFL and NBA certainly aspire to this level.

True enough, though I think FIFA is really the pinnacle of this phenomenon.

The thing about the FIFA is that usually these silly prizes are attempts to distract people from your morally dubious business practices, like manufacturing dynamite. Football is the most beloved athletic competition in history. FIFA really just amounts to a parasitic spectacle of corruption.

This is sad news indeed. I didn’t know him personally, but know many in the Viewpoints community. Really thoughtful, smart writing that deserves everyone’s attention.

I’ve revised down much of my opinion on Obama era foreign policy but one thing I still think they did right was use the DoJ to go after corrupt foreign orgs. This includes sanctions busting, but most prominently the Sepp Blatter FIFA case. The US went away from that and now look what we have.

To be fair, didn’t Miller leave in June 24, and become quite critical of the admin’s policy soon thereafter?

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Israelis/Jews would also not be the first community of victims of genocide and ethnic cleansing to later visit those same crimes on another community! Plenty of Circassians in the Ottoman Empire played critical roles in the genocide of the Armenians. The Puritans were refugees and colonists!

The Struggle for Modern Turkey Sabiha Sertel was born into revolution in 1895, as an independent Turkey rose out of the dying Ottoman Empire. The nation's first professional female journalist…

If you want to read more, there’s an excellent translation of Sabiha Sertel’s memoir in English here: www.bloomsbury.com/us/struggle-...

In the end, it marked a definite break in Turkey’s political history wherein the transition to democratic politics — widely celebrated — was occasioned but a red scare that jailed, repressed, and exiled many critical pillars of the political culture cultivated during the single party era.

They believed a transition would appeal to the US hegemon and win it protection against the Soviet threat, but knew that they must inoculate it against left wing insurgency. As it happened, President Inönü’s final commitment to a two-party system came on the same day as he signed the Marshall Plan

As I argue in the dissertation and in this article I published on the Sertels’ trial, this mob violence was part of a coordinated effort by the state and closely affiliated elites to stage-manage a democratic transition. journal-prisms.de/index.php/ho...

They would ultimately be exiled from Turkey following the 1950 elections, which saw the DP sweep into power and quickly instigate a purge of leftists. Sabiha would die in exile in Azerbaijan in 1968, Zekeriya would return only briefly to Turkey before his death in Paris in 1980.

The Sertels would later be arrested on charges of insulting MPs in the newspaper that was now defunct. The would be convicted but win on appeal. They had applied for amnesty in the US — their daughter had married an American — but were denied after a former colleague, Ahmet Emin Yalman, intervened.

Tan, which had been among the most popular dailies in Turkey for a decade, never published again and the Sertels 30 year career in the Turkish press was effectively ended. A few of the mobsters were detained, but released shortly thereafter.

The Sertels were forewarned by the governor of Istanbul, so no one at Tan was hurt, but their printing presses — some of the most innovative machinery in the country — were utterly wrecked. The mob then crossed the Golden Horn and attacked the offices of Yeni Dünya and ABC Bookstore.

Three days later, a protest against Tan started at the Istanbul University Law School, and was joined by hundreds of workers at the nearby Covered Bazaar. It was cheered on by center and right wing figures alike, and by the time it reached Tan’s offices on Çağaoğlu, it had turned violent.

On December 1, they published a new journal /Görüşler/ that announced itself as both a home for left-leaning political commentary and an advocate of the new DP.

The reaction to this caused an uproar. The DP disavowed the journal and the Sertels. Turkey’s right wing press went on the attack.

The Sertels had been close associates with several members of the DP group, had supported some of them when they joined a short-lived opposition party in 1930, and had published them frequently in Tan and other outlets. They had been advocating for a democratic opening in Turkey for 20 years.

It had also moved towards allowing opposition parties to form for the first time since 1930. A group of CHP elites announced in late November they would be forming the Democrat Party. The leftist press, led by Sabiha and Zekeriya Sertel’s daily /Tan/ welcomed the news.

By December 1945 Turkey, which had been neutral throughout most of the war, had moved decisively towards the Atlantic bloc, but was under threat from Stalin for a revised straights regime and territory in Eastern Anatolia.

I dedicated a chapter of my dissertation to trying to figure out what happened on that day, and what it meant for Turkey’s democratic trajectory. I’ll thread a summary here, but you can find my dissertation here: repository.upenn.edu/server/api/c...

Today is the 80th anniversary of the Tan Olayı, an anti-communist riot in Istanbul that resulted in two newspapers and a bookstore being ransacked and effectively marked the end of the first generation of left-wing politics in the history of the republic of Turkey.

New School has been one of the most important humanities and social science universities in the world for the past 70 years. The humanities are collapsing at all of the pillars, and it won't be long until less prestigious institutions feel validated to call open season upon a number of departments.

Thinking of my New School friends whose programs have been closed (~30 of them), whose PhD programs have been indefinitely halted, and who are now receiving invitations to resign + accept severance payments — with the threat of 🪓 if not enough folks take the offer. A ✨-if-imperfect place ruined 😥

Sir, can you think of a politician that’s had this level of public popularity and yet was so loathed by party elites up and down the line as he is?