“Cheers, Tayyip”

It may take a while but pushing back is what people do when they’re sick of repression, of governments telling them not only what to do–which is bad enough when unjust rules and laws are in place–but even what to be. Still, it’s nothing short of amazing that brutal leaders, or more subtle ones taking slower steps toward dictatorship, never but never see the writing on the wall. Each and every one follows the same path to self-destruction, drawing absolutely no lesson from a history repeating itself for the millionth time.
Case in point, Turkey and its days of rioting and government reprisal. Tayyip Erdogan, the Islamist Turkish Prime Minister, he with the headscarfed wife, has not yet completely forced the independent, highly educated and self-reliant Turkish women to follow suit but is well on his way there, along with other increasing incursions into people’s lives. But despite the ugly restrictions Islamists impose wherever they make headway, Ataturk’s legacy and the principles of Kemalism are still very much alive seventy-five years after the death of the father of modern, secular Turkey. The creeping authoritarianism of Erdogan and his breed cannot change that. Last week, the legislation curbing the sale and advertising of alcohol infuriated the population. Now, for the last few days, an urban project that involved removing trees in one of the few green spaces in Istanbul gave the population an excuse to vent its accumulated rage by bringing it out by the thousands in Taksim Square, braving violent police retaliation.

When will awful governments learn that it doesn’t work that way, that if you stifle people long enough, they explode into rebellion? At first, Erdogan, chastised by the more moderate President Gul, had to accept that he was facing a potentially dangerous situation and ordered police to stop harassing demonstrators before sending them out in even more violent crackdown. In Istanbul and the other major cities to which protests have spread, some of the people marching in the streets and city squares drank beer, openly and derisively to Erdogan’s health.

Hurray for them, but this battle is far from over. The real victory will be when we can drink alcohol to the health of Islamist leaders in all these countries where they have turned a respectable religion into a retrograde and obscurantist ideology breeding extremism, hatred and violence the world over. Imagine the joy in Tehran when populations, repressed for thirty-four years, can drink alcohol to the health of the Supreme Leader as they send him and his puppets, robes and turbans and all, flying into outer space!