Taylan (Male Feminist Arc) on Nostr: quasi I'm increasingly considering myself highly privileged (in the positive sense, ...
quasi (nprofile…4hhn)
I'm increasingly considering myself highly privileged (in the positive sense, not woke sense) for having grown up in Turkey and gone through the Turkish education system.
After the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WW1, what is today Turkey was to become a set of colonies. However, one incredibly bright and strategic general by the name of Mustafa Kemal decided that this was unacceptable. He rallied people all across Anatolia to wage a war of independence, called the Kurtuluş Savaşı aka the Liberation War. It was a huge success, and Mustafa Kemal was in a position where he could have appointed himself the dictator of a newly founded nation.
But he didn't make himself dictator. He decided that democracy was the way. That secularism, science, and modern values, erroneously referred to as "western" values, were clearly the way forward for humanity. And so the laicist and democratic Republic of Turkey was founded. In one fell swoop, Turkish society was made to adopt a new alphabet based on Latin, the Gregorian calendar, and even equal rights and suffrage for women which was not yet widespread at the time (1920s).
(Of course, there is nothing superior about the Latin alphabet or the Gregorian calendar, but this allowed for seamless integration with the modern world, since modern values came to prominence in the west.)
The Turkish education system puts immense value on these principles. Science, education, secularism, democracy, human rights...
Erdoğan has of course been shitting on these values for a while now, but I think Turkey would have become an Islamist hellhole long ago under him, if it weren't for these values being deeply instilled in the Turkish public. About half the nation is opposed to him, so there's still hope.
When I see these colonized people rejecting modern science, because they associate it with the colonizers, I feel really sad for them. And when I see people in the modern world seemingly wanting to return to the dark ages with their worship of gendered souls and unscientific "indigenous ways of knowing" I can only ask myself what the hell is wrong with them.
I'm increasingly considering myself highly privileged (in the positive sense, not woke sense) for having grown up in Turkey and gone through the Turkish education system.
After the fall of the Ottoman Empire at the end of WW1, what is today Turkey was to become a set of colonies. However, one incredibly bright and strategic general by the name of Mustafa Kemal decided that this was unacceptable. He rallied people all across Anatolia to wage a war of independence, called the Kurtuluş Savaşı aka the Liberation War. It was a huge success, and Mustafa Kemal was in a position where he could have appointed himself the dictator of a newly founded nation.
But he didn't make himself dictator. He decided that democracy was the way. That secularism, science, and modern values, erroneously referred to as "western" values, were clearly the way forward for humanity. And so the laicist and democratic Republic of Turkey was founded. In one fell swoop, Turkish society was made to adopt a new alphabet based on Latin, the Gregorian calendar, and even equal rights and suffrage for women which was not yet widespread at the time (1920s).
(Of course, there is nothing superior about the Latin alphabet or the Gregorian calendar, but this allowed for seamless integration with the modern world, since modern values came to prominence in the west.)
The Turkish education system puts immense value on these principles. Science, education, secularism, democracy, human rights...
Erdoğan has of course been shitting on these values for a while now, but I think Turkey would have become an Islamist hellhole long ago under him, if it weren't for these values being deeply instilled in the Turkish public. About half the nation is opposed to him, so there's still hope.
When I see these colonized people rejecting modern science, because they associate it with the colonizers, I feel really sad for them. And when I see people in the modern world seemingly wanting to return to the dark ages with their worship of gendered souls and unscientific "indigenous ways of knowing" I can only ask myself what the hell is wrong with them.