A Monday night interview between PBS’s Amanpour and Company guest host Bianna Golodryga and Turkish journalist Ece Temelkuran about the protests going on in her native country surrounding the arrest of the leader of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s main opposition took a sharp detour as Temelkuran compared Erdogan to President Donald Trump. She went so far as to claim both anti-Erdogan and anti-Trump protestors are pushing back against the same global “rise of fascism.”
Golodryga asked, “And in the last 20 years, I mean, now you have a system where 90 percent of the media is government controlled. I know you and many others have compared this to the Gezi Park Protest movement in 2013. Can you talk about the similarities here and what, if any, lessons have been learned that organizers of this movement can take with them?”
Whatever one thinks of Trump’s legal issues, it is a fact of life that the previous administration arrested him for two different cases. Trump, so far, has not arrested anyone from the Biden Administration. Nevertheless, Temelkuran declared, “Bianna, the main difference is that this time people went onto the streets knowing the risks. There was a protest ban already. So, they went onto the streets against the ban. They knew that they were going to meet with massive police violence, which happened. And the other difference is, of course, this is another world now in 2013, there was more democracy in the world and there wasn't Trump in America or several other leaders, similar leaders in Europe. So, the world was watching Turkey in a favorable way during the 2013 Gezi uprisings.”
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