In this mailing: Burak Bekdil: Stalin Had Gulags, Turkey Has Courts Andrew Ash: A Tale of Two Coups Stalin Had Gulags, Turkey Has Courts by Burak Bekdil  •  October 8, 2019 at 5:00 am          [Canan] Kaftancıoğlu [now under arrest for old tweets] came to prominence only after her critical role in defeating Erdoğan's Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Istanbul's municipal elections on March 31 and June 23, ending Islamist rule in Turkey's biggest city after 25 years. On September 20, a Turkish court held its first hearing of a case against two Bloomberg reporters accused of "trying to undermine Turkey's economic stability.".... "They've been indicted for accurately and objectively reporting on highly newsworthy events," said Bloomberg Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait. Thirty-six other defendants, including prominent economist Mustafa Sönmez and journalist Sedef Kabaş, are also on trial for their social media comments on Turkey's economy and banks. In May, Erdoğan said that Turkey was still committed to full membership in the European Union. He must have forgotten that, among hundreds of other hair-raising democratic deficits, he is the president of a country that has banned more than 245,000 websites and domains. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Turkey is the world's top jailer of journalists. (Images source: iStock) From 1936 to 1938, the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin brutally executed his "Great Purge," a more innocent name for the wholesale liquidation of "enemies of the state." The slaughter targeted, among others, Communist Party and government officials, journalists, academics, peasants, Jews, teachers, generals, members of the intelligentsia and many others. "Better that 10 innocent people suffer than one spy get away," said Nikolai Yezhov, chief of the NKVD (People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs). "When you chop wood, chips fly." In 1932, Stalin launched a war for the "Sovietization" of Russia. Seven decades later, Turkey's Islamist strongman and president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, launched his war to "Islamize" Ataturk's modern, secular Turkey. Continue Reading Article A Tale of Two Coups by Andrew Ash  •  October 8, 2019 at 4:00 am          The good news is that it is wholly unlikely that either of the "two coups" will succeed. The increasingly transparent nature of the opposition's underhanded tricks to reverse the outcome, will in fact, be their undoing. The president was requesting that Zelensky cooperate with the US Attorney General in investigating possible crime and corruption from 2016. It is the president's job as the Chief Executive to investigate such matters, as well as required by the Treaty with Ukraine on Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters, signed September 30, 1999. No outcome was recommended. There are also allegations that the entire attempted coup to unseat President Trump is actually an effort to head off an exposure of widespread criminality in the previous administration. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has reminded the House of Representatives that while the US Constitution does not explicitly require a vote by the entire House to launch an impeachment enquiry, neither does it support one "by a unilateral decree of the Speaker." The Democrat-controlled House has so far tabled McCarthy's resolution -- twice. And in the traditionally "wrong" Congressional committee -- Intelligence rather than Judiciary -- to boot. There are now apparently claims in the US by "multiple whistleblowers"... As [former prosecutor] Andrew McCarthy recently observed, however: "Remember your elementary math, though: Zero is still zero even when multiplied....." "Trump is the real whistleblower." — Stephen Miller, White House senior policy adviser, Fox News Sunday, September 29, 2019. The public sorely need their faith restored: that their rights as voters, along with fair play, will ultimately win out. There appears to be a curious symmetry connecting both the blocking of Brexit, and the continued attempts to bring down a free and fair American election. The same or different types of "deep state" involved on either side of the Atlantic is debatable, but the repeated attempts at a coup d'état against both the American President and the British Prime Minister have a lot in common. (Image source: iStock) There appears to be a curious symmetry connecting both the blocking of Brexit, and the continued attempts to bring down a free and fair American election. The same or different types of "deep state" involved on either side of the Atlantic is debatable, but the repeated attempts at a coup d'état against both the American President and the British Prime Minister have a lot in common, not least the desire to thwart the openly expressed wishes of the US and British electorates. 2016 was the year of the unexpected outcome -- twice. Against all the odds -- and against the wishes of the biased mainstream media -- Britain voted to leave the European Union, and in the United States, Donald J. Trump became the 45th president of the United States. Both events took the "establishment" by surprise, if not horror. Both events have been the subject of continuous attempts to overturn those results by any means possible, no matter how odious or even undemocratic. Continue Reading Article