Assistant wanted, the protests in Turkey, reading on religion, millenarian fascism, Turkish daytime TV

Notebook #20

This is a regular feature wherein I write about the things I’m reading and watching. The first item is free, the rest is for paid subscribers only.

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LAST MINUTE: In about half an hour, I’m going to be joining an excellent MERIP/GW panel on the protest movement in Turkey. You can sign up here.

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Assistant wanted

I need someone to help around here at Kültürkampf. A fellow Kültürkämpfer(in). Someone who’s going to help me put this thing together week after week. This person would help come up with ideas, research, edit, fact-check, and eventually write things as well.

The main thing I’m looking for is motivation. Do you want to write about culture and politics for a living? Are you trying to get better at it but don’t know how? Do you want to write for major publications? This obviously isn’t one of them, but I can probably help you along the way.

Other things I’m looking for are:

• Native-level proficiency in either Turkish, Kurdish, or Arabic.

• Good English-language writing skills.

• A graduate education or equivalent maturity of scholarship. A degree in the humanities is a plus, one in political science/IR is generally a minus, economics is OK.

• Location in Turkey or a bordering country.

• Online skills like creating cool visuals or being able to edit sound would be a plus as well. I suck at all that.

I can’t offer payment at this point, but I might be able to in the future, as the blog grows and generates more revenue. In any case, I’d expect at least a year’s commitment.

If you’re interested, sign up for my newsletter below (if you aren’t signed up already, which ideally, you would be), then respond to any Kültürkampf email with your resume. You can also write a cover letter if you want to, but please keep it short.

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The protests spread to elite high schools

This week, the nationwide protest movement that began with the arrest of Istanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu spread to some elite high schools.

I don’t really have special insight into this, but from what I’ve been seeing and reading, it’s mostly about grievances that have been building up in these schools. The state has been prying open elite schools, especially ones where you have to take competitive tests to enter. They’ve been assigning nationalist/Islamist teachers to these institutions, while sidelining teachers who don’t conform to their political vision. They’ve at times been pretty explicit about these policies. With the spread of nationwide protests, students are now holding rallies protesting regime interference.

I think it’s fairly common across the world to see university students protest, but seeing high school students engage at this level of political action is really new. I’ve previously written on this blog how a lot of the teenagers around me now are much more political than I ever was as a kid. This is definitely an expression of that.

The question of course is this: what’s going on on the other side? Are there regime-sympathetic teenagers who are just as political, but they express their ideas more quietly, or just by studying hard and daydreaming about public service? That’s certainly what regime outlets have been saying. It’s probably true to some extent, but I’m not sure how strong things are on that side anymore. The best and brightest in our societies tend to be motivated by moral causes, and since the İmamoğlu arrest, it’s very clear who’s David here and who’s Goliath.

Here’s the writeup in BirGün.

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