People Power in Istanbul

I'm watching with great interest and concern the current developments in Istanbul and elsewhere throughout the Republic of Turkey. 

I have long distrusted the government of Turkey's prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP). Most of that comes from my general wariness of politicians who exploit conservative, religious populism, and not from any personal knowledge of Turkey. 

But following the increasingly alarming news being reported in the better press outlets available in the U.S., I have become more and more troubled. It has seemed to me that much as rich American ideologues pull the strings manipulating both the seemingly similar strains of right-wing, religious populism in the Republican Party, so it is seeming that Erdogan and the corporate interests and investors backing him are using pious conservatives and traditional to advance a political and economic  far removed from the interests of the masses providing the AKP with its votes.

That said, it is extremely heartening to see the multitudes mobilizing to resist Erdogan and the AKP, and I wish them well. (I also wish we saw their like in the U.S.!)

But don't listen to my views. Turn to the reports flowing from Turkey, from the people challenging the autocracy of the AKP ... flowing, it must be said, through social media; the AKP controlled and intimidated formal media of Turkey have been all but ignoring what is happening under their very noses, while the mainstream press of the west is only beginning to pay attention.

On that note, I recommend recent postings by a dear friend who brings intimate personal knowledge of Turkey combined with considerable wisdom and scholarship, in her own blog, Reflections and Meditations on the Path.