Tag: anger

Posted on by

Turkey’s ‘culture war’: Anger grows as string of events cancelled

Turkey’s ‘culture war’: Anger grows as string of events cancelled

Istanbul, Turkey – It is the height of spring in Turkey, and with that comes a flurry of concerts and outdoor festivals to complement the pleasant weather.

But in recent weeks, a string of events have been cancelled by cities and districts run by the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party), leading critics and analysts to accuse the government of attempting to wage a “culture war” in the run-up to next year’s general elections.

The first widely publicised cancellation occurred on May 9 when the governor of the Central Anatolian province of Eskisehir banned all outdoor events for 15 days on the grounds that “terrorist groups were preparing demonstrations”. Eskisehir is known as a lively college town with brimming nightlife and while the city municipality is run by the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), the provincial governor, like all others in Turkey, was appointed by the president.

The ban effectively cancelled a large festival which was scheduled to take place in Eskisehir between May 12-15, featuring some of the country’s most popular singers.

Meanwhile, iconic Kurdish singer Aynur Dogan’s concert on May 20 in the province of Kocaeli was cancelled on the basis that the event was “not appropriate,” while folk musician Niyazi Koyuncu’s concert in the Istanbul district of Pendik scheduled for May 25 was banned on the grounds that Koyuncu – who is known for being opposed to the government – did not share the “value judgements and views” of the municipality.

Despite enjoying a surge in popularity, singer Melek Mosso’s June 3 concert at a festival in the western city of Isparta was axed by the municipality after two youth associations released a statement alleging that Mosso “encourages immorality,” urging that her show be shut down. Another Kurdish singer, Mem Ararat, had his concert in Bursa cancelled by the provincial governorate for reasons of “public safety”.

“Cancelling concerts by Kurdish singers plays into the recent surge in nationalist, anti-Kurd and xenophobic bent of a lot of the AKP’s rhetoric and policy – an outgrowth of their partnership with the [far-right] MHP – but the general idea of taking the fight to pop music is striking in a country that generally has viewed pop music as an apolitical venue,” James Ryan, Associate Director at New York University’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies, told Al Jazeera.

“There are a lot of AKP voters who watch Eurovision, listen to [doyenne singer] Sezen Aksu, watch [the popular contest show] O Ses Turkiye, and I’m sure there were at least some AKP-aligned voters who held tickets to the concerts by Dogan, Ararat, Koyuncu and Mosso,” Ryan added.

The Directorate of Communications did not respond to a request for comment by Al Jazeera.

But Hilal Kaplan, journalist and columnist for the pro-government Sabah newspaper, said the two organisations that urged for the cancellation of Mosso’s concert in Isparta are, in fact, linked to the Felicity (Saadet) Party, which is among the six opposition parties belonging to a coalition alongside the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP).

“The Saadet Party positions itself in a more religious and more reflexive place than the AK Party. Moreover, after Melek Mosso’s concert was cancelled in Isparta, the Ministry of Culture and Tourism arranged a stage for Melek Mosso to give a concert in Istanbul. Thus by organising a concert for her in Istanbul, the government has created a much larger sphere of influence than in a small Anatolian city,” she told Al Jazeera.

“So it would be misleading to ignore these facts and claim that the events were cancelled by the government.”

Meanwhile, spring festivals take place at numerous universities throughout the country but this year live music performances at the gatherings at Middle East Technical University in the capital of Ankara and Yildiz Technical University in Istanbul were cancelled, officially because three Turkish soldiers were killed in a recent military operation targeting the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK). Both universities are led by rectors who have been appointed by President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

“It’s hard to know the exact motivation behind [all] these cancellations, which is even more disturbing, but I think it’s related to the election climate we are about to enter,” said James Hakan Dedeoglu, a publisher of the independent music magazine Bant and long an active figure in the Istanbul music scene booking and promoting concerts.

“It seems to me it is a way for the forces in the government to show they can do whatever they want. Especially when it comes to answering the needs and requests of the conservative population. And they need to consolidate their voters, especially in this current disastrous economic downturn,” he told Al Jazeera.

Other analysts agree that the cancellations likely stem from a pre-election strategy on the part of President Erdogan, who has slipped in the polls due to Turkey’s ailing economy, with general and presidential elections set for June 2023.

“With the growth being down and inflation nearing triple digits – the highest since Erdogan came to power – and other economic indicators not looking very good, I think Erdogan is going to double down on the culture wars aspect of his brand,” Soner Cagaptay, Senior Fellow at the Washington Institute, told Al Jazeera.

The government has firmly defended its economic record and its controversial interest rate policies, arguing that lower rates will lower inflation and will boost economic growth, exports and jobs – and Erdogan said in a statement on June 6 that Turkey does not technically have a problem with inflation, but with a high cost of living.

And some argue that the cancellations are not linked to a top-down policy imposed by the ruling party.

“The decisions to cancel the concerts and festivals are definitely not the decisions of the government, they are personal decisions made by provincial or district administrators, mayors, governors and district governors,” Tulay Demir, journalist and columnist for Daily Sabah, told Al Jazeera.

“It is definitely not government policy, it is being portrayed by the opposition as if it were government policy.”

But for music publisher and promoter Dedeoglu, the wave of cancellations is deeply worrying.

“[It’s] a horrific and systematic thing the government is doing. And even if this is a temporary and stupid political act, the harm it does to society will last a long time.”

Ironically, the concert bans and ensuing outrage have probably generated a bit of the Streisand effect, in which an attempt to suppress something only brings more attention to it. Melek Mosso continues to perform for large crowds across the country, while Aynur Dogan played on May 28 to a packed house at Istanbul’s pre-eminent outdoor venue, the Cemil Topuzlu Open Air Theatre, singing Kurdish songs to thousands of fans.

“It was a dream, my heart soared from excitement and I was thunderstruck,” wrote Dogan in a heartfelt tweet featuring photos of her Istanbul performance, an indication that music can be difficult to silence when there is a dedicated audience for it.

“Every beautiful word that could be uttered lost its meaning at that moment. Your eyes and faces were more beautiful than a thousand roses and you became thousands of hearts.”

Posted on by

World events, time change and anger piling on pandemic pressures

World events, time change and anger piling on pandemic pressures






Chuck Norris

Chuck Norris


Don’t care much for the constant mid-March ritual of moving our clocks ahead one hour? According to Beth Ann Malow, a professor of neurology and pediatrics at Vanderbilt University, 63% of Americans would like to see it eliminated.

The thing is, daylight saving time represents much more than a disruption to daily routines. Given the stresses heaped upon us in our world of uncertainties, it could be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.

“Beyond simple inconvenience,” writes Malow on TheConversation.com, “Researchers are discovering that ‘springing ahead’ each March is connected with serious negative health effects.”

“In a 2020 commentary for the journal JAMA Neurology, my co-authors and I reviewed the evidence linking the annual transition to daylight saving time to increased strokes, heart attacks and teen sleep deprivation,” she says.

A separate post on TheConversation.com co-authored by Deepa Burman, co-director of the Pediatric Sleep Evaluation Center at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, and Hiren Muzumdar, director of the Pediatric Sleep Evaluation Center, notes that sleep deprivation can result in increases of workplace injuries and automobile accidents. One individual’s sleep deprivation can affect an entire family.

People are also reading…

“You may notice more frequent meltdowns, irritability and loss of attention and focus,” they say.

I wonder, could uncontrolled anger be far behind?

Now, watching a devastating war unfold on social media is also hammering away at our collective mental health. We’re all being heightened by graphic and disturbing images that fill our feeds, writes Time magazine reporter Jamie Ducharme.

“Tracking up-to-the-minute developments can come at a cost. … Footage and photos from Ukraine flooding social media and misinformation spreading rampantly (has) implications for public health,” she reports.

It has long been the responsibility of traditional media outlets for editors to decide which content is too graphic to show, or to label disturbing images with warnings. As pointed out by Roxane Cohen Silver, a professor of psychological science at the University of California, Irvine, today anyone “can take pictures and videos and immediately distribute that (on social media) without warning, potentially without thinking about it.”

Jason Steinhauer, founder of the History Communication Institute, says, “Russia has been waging a social media and misinformation war for the past 10 to 12 years.” This has only gotten worse since its invasion of Ukraine.

We should not be surprised at all that studies now suggest that news coverage of the pandemic has contributed to our mental distress. “Adding yet another difficult topic to the mix can worsen those feelings,” Cohen Silver says.

Yet the war is hardly the only attack on our senses. At a time when we are most vulnerable, the Federal Trade Commission reports that predatory fraudsters bilked consumers of an estimated $5.8 billion last year. According to the agency, it represents a 70% increase over 2020. “Almost 2.8 million people filed a fraud complaint, an annual record” and “the highest number on record dating back to 2001,” reports the FTC. “Imposter scams were most prevalent, but investment scams cost the typical victim the most money.”

“Those figures also don’t include reports of identity theft and other categories,” the report points out. “More than 1.4 million Americans also reported being a victim of identity theft in 2021; another 1.5 million filed complaints related to ‘other’ categories (including credit reporting companies failing to investigate disputed information, or debt collectors falsely representing the amount or status of debt).”

The mounting stresses placed upon us are now posing a threat to not just our mental and financial health but our physical well-being.

According to a working paper from researchers at the Naval Postgraduate School and the University of Pennsylvania, “In 2020, the risk of outdoor street crimes initially rose by more than 40% and was consistently between 10-15% higher than it had been in 2019 through the remainder of the year.” Researchers also believe that the finding “points to the potential for other crimes to surge the way homicides have as cities reopen and people return to the streets,” says the report.

Adds Megan McArdle commenting on the report in an op-ed for the Washington Post, “community trust in the police might have plummeted, possibly making people more likely to settle scores on their own. Or police might have reacted to public anger by pulling back from active policing, creating more opportunities for crime.”

Hans Steiner is a professor emeritus of Stanford’s Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences who has logged decades of work studying anger and aggression. In an interview posted on the Stanford University website, he says he believes that “the coronavirus pandemic, with its extreme disruption of normal daily life and uncertainty for the future, compounded by several other crises (economic distress, racial tension, social inequities, political and ideological conflicts) puts us all to the test: we find ourselves immersed in a pool of negative emotions: fear, sadness, contempt, and yes, anger. What do we do with this forceful emotion?”

“Anger signals that we are being threatened, injured, deprived, robbed of rewards and expectancies,” Steiner says. It should be “one of our adaptive tools to deal with the most difficult circumstances. Sometimes it becomes an obstacle to our struggles, especially when it derails into aggression and even violence.”

Anger problems are now spilling over into record accounts of hate crimes. It seems that today’s circumstances, with anger management and rule of law seemingly at an all-time low, have caused many individuals to become ticking time bombs. Reports CBS News, “the total number of hate crimes nationwide has increased every year but one since 2014, according to FBI data, which includes statistics through 2020.”

Steiner says that “maladaptive anger and aggression has the following characteristics: 1. It arises without any trigger, seemingly out of the blue; 2. it is disproportionate to its trigger in its frequency, intensity, duration and strength; 3. it does not subside after the offending person has apologized; 4. it occurs in a social context which does not sanction anger and aggression.”

Who among us has not seen or maybe even experienced some, maybe all, of these behavior characteristics?

“In such conflicts we need to remind ourselves that diatribes, lies and accusations will not move us forward; compassion, empathy and the reminder that we are all in this horrible situation together (needs to) inspire us,” Steiner advises.

Write to Chuck Norris at info@creators.com with questions about health and fitness.