"incompatible cultures and values" are almost exactly the words these racists have always used to keep Turkey out. Britain, Spain, Greece, Cyprus and Slovakia are all compatible, but Turkey is a step too far?
The easy post would be to point out that "racists once made that argument" is basically a slightly cloaked ad hominem attack trying to accuse your opponent of racism, without doing it clearly in a way that could be denied.
But the more interesting post is to point out that if you allow racists the power to destroy an entire line of argumentation for all purposes forever by using it, you are ceding to them enormous power to control the discourse, even accidentally, by completely determining the bounds of acceptable debate.
Racism is bad, but the way we treat it as radioactive waste nowadays has itself become a danger to society. It's merely bad. It is not the One True Sin, it is not the cause of all life's problems, it is not the One Temptation in life that if resisted means we can stop worrying about our moral status, it is not something that permanently twists everything it touches into an eternerally-unredeemable black goo, even ye unto a dozen generations. It's merely a bad thing that hurts people. Giving it the power to be those other things is an error too.
So, yes, it is perfectly valid to address the question of "incompatible cultures and values". Of course, it does require one to admit that cultures have values that can differ from one another, which is, admittedly, a door that once you walk through does suddenly make a lot of the prepackaged really "nice" answers in current discourse suddenly obviously too oversimplified to be useful for any purpose, but such is reality.
In Germany Holocaust denial is illegal and you can get imprisoned for it. In Turkey it is required to deny the Armenian Genocide where the Turks killed a million or so Armenians, an act the word genocide was invented to describe. In Turkey you can get imprisoned for saying it happened. That's a fairly major incompatibility to deal with.
Art 9. – As an amendment to Article 24 of the law of July 29, 1881 on the freedom of the press, article 24 (a) is as follows written: <<Art. 24 (a). - those who have disputed the existence of one or more crimes against humanity such as they are defined by Article 6 of the statute of the international tribunal military annexed in the agreement of London of August 8, 1945 and which were a carried out either by the members of an organization declared criminal pursuant to Article 9 of the aforementioned statute, or by a person found guilty such crimes by a French or international jurisdiction shall be punished by one month to one year's imprisonment or a fine.
I, for one wouldn't be welcoming a country in EU that is now committing genocide against the Kurds for almost 3 generations.
I also wouldn't be welcoming a country that refuses to acknowledge the full independence of another EU member state (Cyprus).
If you want to play the racism/xenophobia card and pretend that these are not the big issues we have against Turkey in EU go ahead, but I can't tell you that you are not convincing anyone.
Nah, it was the German govm'ts fear of public backlash due to the fucked-up integration of Turkish immigrants. Public opinion in Germany was not Turkey-welcoming at the time.
The current situation is just Erdogan having his revenge on Europe for dropping Turkey.
This is pure nonsense. Are you kidding me ? do you have any idea what you are talking about ?
Even Iraqi Kurds trying to ban PKK because they know what's going on in that organization. Even Kurds in turkey are not happy with PKK. They want a reform , but most of them wants stay in turkey, while the "being Turkish citizen definition changed".Look at how popular HDP is in Kurdish areas in Turkey.
You have no clue what are you talking about.
for further reference , please read/listen to Henri Barkey from Woodrow Wilson which is well respected political scientist.
This comment, and others that you've posted
(e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11399333) break the HN
guidelines badly by calling names and being personally rude. We ban
accounts that do those things, so please don't do them. In particular, please edit phrases like the following out of your posts to HN:
This is pure nonsense.
Are you kidding me?
do you have any idea what you are talking about?
You have no clue what are you talking about.
wasting people times in HN
Notice how much more substantive your current comment becomes if
you take out all these rude bits? That's what we're going for here.
Hard politics isn't a great fit for HN to begin with, but if you're
going to contribute to such discussions as inevitably arise, it's
important to follow these rules—particularly when others
are being wrong and provocative.
(None of this is a comment on your politics, only on how you're
presenting them. The same applies to all HN users.)
Rather than mislead everyone, why not quote what exactly you disagree with, and offer evidence?
- "How could Isis be eliminated? In the region, everyone knows. All it would really take would be to unleash the largely Kurdish forces of the YPG (Democratic Union party) in Syria, and PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ party) guerillas in Iraq and Turkey. These are, currently, the main forces actually fighting Isis on the ground. They have proved extraordinarily militarily effective and oppose every aspect of Isis’s reactionary ideology." (http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/18/turkey-...)
- “'Kurdish people are fighting for our rights, and Turkey is trying to finish us off,' says 53-year-old Ramazon Sakci as he stands in the garden of his home, which is riddled with bullet holes.” (http://www.thenation.com/article/turkey-is-fighting-a-dirty-...)
That's a form of personal attack which is inevitably provocative of a much worse thread. Please edit such rudeness out of your posts here. Your question would have been fine, and less self-undermining, had you done so.
When faced with abusers [1], it may be mentally healthiest to briefly indulge in slightly-unpleasant words like: "Rather than mislead everyone..."
Why? Abuse stays with people during the day, and it is better to ever-so-slightly reflect it back on the abuser, than for it to come out on your employees (or friends, children, dog...)
[1] "You have no clue what are you talking about", "how much people can be stupid and naive", etc.
It is fascinating you didn't watch your link at all.
The big irony is here , how much people can be stupid and naive. My claim wasn't against Chomsky , It is quite opposite , Chomsky is completely right, But you don't know what you are talking about, Chomsky does not support PKK as he multiple times stated PKK have done seriously bad things. but at the other hand Turkish government have done so many bad things too, this is your shallow understanding about politics, which you think in every case there should be Good vs Evil. That is not the case at all . please come to the real world. you don't have clue what you are engaging to. Most of the time (almost 99% time) it is Evil vs Evil and only people got hurt is simple ordinary people.
There is a narrow line between "Erdogan is dictator (which is absolutely correct and turkey law is ridiculously weak in human rights) and PKK is good" and "Erdogan is dictator and PKK does use this opportunity to improve its position, and PKK does not give fuck about Kurds" (which is Noam Chomsky position in this video too, look at how he condemn PKK at to ordinary people, but he dos not attack PKK because he knows establishment media in west will make great deal of it to prove their point which is Chomsky fighting against it). Sadly people like you are incapable of understanding these tactics used by politicians.
if you want to check real protector of Kurd's people, look at HDP (if you do know turkey at all) and don't waste people time.PKK is not popular in east turkey, I have so many friends lives in northern Iraq north-west of iran and east of turkey and most of them (all of them Kurds which do want their rights) don't give fuck about PKK. At the other hand look at how HDP protects and fights for Kurds in right way.
Turkey, unlike most of the middle east in the news, descends from a multicultural, religiously tolerant empire (Ottoman). The culture is not far different from Greek. There is a regression to islamism with erdogan, but i don't think that's a permanent thing now. There is definitely some racism here.
> "descends from a multicultural, religiously tolerant empire (Ottoman)"
Where the terms "multicultural" and "religiously tolerant" apparently mean something quite a bit different from today (just like Athenian democracy from ours, for example).
Well, Romans, from what I can tell, had better multiculturalism than Ottomans centuries later. They did not split the society into religion-based classes. So "the West" was quite a bit more progressive centuries earlier in some ways.
No, I don't think it's racism. It's islamophobia, specifically a hostility towards the conservative trends within Islam that have become so much more dominant than they used to be. And faith based hostility absolutely goes both ways.
I know this is a taboo subject, but we should stop acting as if religion was a racial attribute. It's not. Religions are opinions, and people will have to accept that others will take those opinions into account when it comes to forming a political union.
The difficult thing is that only individuals can hold opinions but only countries can join the EU. So we are forced by the very nature of this decision to make a summary judgement that ignores individual opinions and therefore will be very unfair to some.
This is something I am personally struggling with when it comes to Turkish EU membership.