![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Times They Are A'Changing
Saturday, December 11th, 2010 08:08 pmYesterday there were two campus meetings that interested me not so much because I thought I'd learn something, but simply that they were happening at all. The first was a seminar on hate crimes, hosted by the GBLT society (or is it GLBT and I'm getting mixed up with the sandwich?). The second was a screening of "The Other Loch Ness Monster", a documentary about Aleister Crowley shown by the Spiritualist Society. I didn't go to either because I needed to get home, clean the house then meet the missus, but I was mightily pleased all the same. The point is that a few years ago, neither of these events would have happened. The GLBT society only started this year, partly as a response to a homophobic attack on campus. As far as I know, it is the first of its kind in any Turkish university. As for Uncle Al, this is a country where a lot of people are still worried about the threat of yoga. (There again, that is also true of America, I hear.)
Turkey seems to be pulling in both directions at the moment. On the one hand, the religious conservatives and fundamentalists seem more powerful than ever as the current government seems to be winning its battle against the Republican Old Guard. On the other hand, Turkish society is getting more diverse, and more open about its diversity. In the past, of the two most respected Turkish "art music" (sanat müziği) performers, one was gay and the other a transsexual, but a GLBT club in a university would have been unthinkable. Forget occult societies on campus, police were even raiding music shops and seizing heavy metal merchandise because they thought it was Satanist.
Of course there are some on the left who will never be happy with anything on principle. (I recently gave up on an interesting article about Che Guevara and Paulo Freire after it called NATO's prevention of Serbian atrocities "human rights imperialism".)So I suppose some will dismiss this kind of development as just more Western cultural imperialism, where "we" impose "our" values on "their" cultures. (I'm not sure why I put the quotation marks in the last sentence; it just seems to be the done thing.) There again, the abolition of slavery involved the North imposing its values on the South. If a little more tolerance of differences in sexuality or spiritual beliefs is a feature of Western culture, then, as the Pet Shop Boys so elegantly put it, "Go West."
Turkey seems to be pulling in both directions at the moment. On the one hand, the religious conservatives and fundamentalists seem more powerful than ever as the current government seems to be winning its battle against the Republican Old Guard. On the other hand, Turkish society is getting more diverse, and more open about its diversity. In the past, of the two most respected Turkish "art music" (sanat müziği) performers, one was gay and the other a transsexual, but a GLBT club in a university would have been unthinkable. Forget occult societies on campus, police were even raiding music shops and seizing heavy metal merchandise because they thought it was Satanist.
Of course there are some on the left who will never be happy with anything on principle. (I recently gave up on an interesting article about Che Guevara and Paulo Freire after it called NATO's prevention of Serbian atrocities "human rights imperialism".)So I suppose some will dismiss this kind of development as just more Western cultural imperialism, where "we" impose "our" values on "their" cultures. (I'm not sure why I put the quotation marks in the last sentence; it just seems to be the done thing.) There again, the abolition of slavery involved the North imposing its values on the South. If a little more tolerance of differences in sexuality or spiritual beliefs is a feature of Western culture, then, as the Pet Shop Boys so elegantly put it, "Go West."
