Lefteast
What would the earthquake-stricken landscape look like if the AKP-connected construction industry had had to abide by building codes? Justus Links for N+1mag. Reprinted with permission. TWO MEN LIE ON THEIR SIDES on the cobblestone, looking sideways toward the car’s tires. A heavy winter boot bears down on the right cheek of one of these men. […]
Refugees, Racism, and the Turkish Ideology Villagers in the Turkish province of Konya murdered a whole family of Kurdish farmers on Friday, July 30. It was a premeditated massacre that announced itself well ahead of time to anyone willing to notice. Neighbors in the farming village of Hasanköy in central Anatolia had assaulted the Dedeoğulları family of […]
1.Has Turkey’s government taken an official position regarding the situation in Venezuela? If yes, what is the position? Turkey presents the peculiar case of a right-wing government with historically close geopolitical ties to the USA supporting President Maduro both verbally and commercially. Over the last year, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has developed an ever friendlier rapport […]
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s slim victory in the referendum to eliminate Turkey’s parliamentary system is the latest in a series of elections won by xenophobic right-wing forces in conditions of economic insecurity and social upheaval that one might naively have expected to benefit the Left. Insofar as the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) clique has […]
There is little on the global horizon these days that points toward socialism, but one thing we have more than enough of is regressive anti-capitalism: a mentality more than a political standpoint, which insists on personalizing the impersonal logic of capital, railing not at the society of commodity exchange, but at banksters, parasites, the New […]
This article by Justus Links was first published on the portal OpenDemocracy. From the distance spanned by social media, since the presidential election, I have observed friends, colleagues, and acquaintances in North America in a state of trauma. Physical illnesses are spreading and anxiety is intense. Some who are educators feel that their courses cannot […]
Published yesterday, Part I of this article explored connections among the War on Terror, political Islam and the Arab Spring, and reached these conclusions: The regional architecture put in place by the imperial system makes it very hard for a left-wing revolution to succeed. While regimes aligned with the United States have successfully suppressed their […]
The second part of this essay can be found here. The fifteenth anniversary of the September 11 terrorist attacks came and went without provoking quite the volume of critical assessments inspired by past anniversaries. No doubt it helped that there were no copycat attacks on US interests comparable to the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens […]
Note from LeftEast Editors: This text was originally in N+1 Magazine. AN HOUR OR TWO BEFORE SUNSET on a warm evening in mid-July, my friends are wondering where they can get a beer. They’re surprised that the local grocery store doesn’t carry alcohol, and that its sale on campus is illegal. But this is a fun-loving […]
Monthly Review, March 3, 2016 Turkish Islamists used to dismiss the European Union as a “Christian club.” Their claim has acquired greater plausibility now that EU leaders have appointed Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Europe’s refugee gatekeeper, bolstering his Islamist government in order to keep Muslims out of Europe. Such was the import of the agreement the […]