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[Analytical & Intelligence Comments] FYI

Released on 2013-02-13 00:00 GMT

Email-ID 1357087 Date 2010-12-14 07:14:50 From dws@westriv.com To responses@stratfor.com

[Analytical & Intelligence Comments] FYI





dws@westriv.com sent a message using the contact form at

https://www.stratfor.com/contact.





I seem to sense a rising of something that resembles fascism or pre fascism

in many places - Russia, China, Islam. Are we entering a time like the 20s

and 30s?



Darrel Smith

605-845-2507



http://www.city-journal.org/2010/20_4_weimar-city.html



Claire Berlinski

Weimar Istanbul

Dread and exhilaration in a city on the verge of political catastrophe

The City grew rapidly, dwarfing in size and population any other in the

country. The streets stimulated like cocaine; horns honked, crowds surged,

nerves jangled. To step outside was to be electrified by the harlequinade of

roaring colors, bright lights, rushing traffic. Sybaritic nightclubs thrummed

until dawn and well thereafter; strange and perverse sights were to be found

on every boulevard, in every alley, at every hour, the aesthetic of

contradiction between civilization and barbarity heightened by the ersatz

baroque of the old architecture and the shocking ugliness of the new.

Transvestites prowled, thieves pickpocketed, and in the fashionable cafÃ©s,

intellectuals smoked furiously and complained of their anomie.





The Old World had vanished, and with it its agrarian economy, its reassuring

class distinctions and social order. An alien and fragile political order had

been imposed in its place. Experimental music, art, and cinema flourished;

fascinations arose with utopianism, fortune-telling, mysticism, communism.



But there was at once a paranoid mood, a sense of impending doom. Markers of

the Cityâ€™s great imperial past evoked its former glory while proving its

decline. The art of the epoch was fueled by the fear of imminent crisis and

breakdown. Decadent American culture was hungrily emulated, passionately

deplored. Painters produced works genuinely shocking to the eye; writers

wrote novels so offensive to bourgeois sensibilities as to provoke threats of

murder. A misogynistic terror of women dominated cultural and political

debate: Had modernity destroyed their virtue?



If the City was now the undisputed capital of the regionâ€™s commerce and

industry, all remembered the horror of hyperinflation, which had obliterated

the fruit of lifetimes of hard work, and all remembered with contempt the

feuding coalition governments whose incompetent stewardship had brought the

nation to ruin. The economyâ€™s recent growth was vertiginous but precarious,

funded by overseas loans that massively increased the nationâ€™s debt.

Unemployment rose and rose. A poorly understood global economic crisis fueled

dark conspiracy theories. Daily political violence lent to life a pervasive

feeling of menace. The newspapers overflowed with right-wing propaganda.

Screaming headlines reported violent clashes in the streets. Intellectuals

were assassinated.



The constitution was new and weak, lacking legitimacy and vulnerable to

subversion. Many in the City believed that foreign powers were conspiring to

weaken and humiliate the nation. Most were cynical about democratic

experiments; all were revolted by the selfishness and corruption of their

political parties. The cravenness of the industrialists and the business

class provoked widespread disgust with capitalism itself. Many yearned for,

many openly demanded, a more authoritarian government. Europe, America, and

particularly the Jewsâ€”those sinister, infinitely powerful magiciansâ€”were

blamed for the Cityâ€™s discontents.



A shouting demagogue, having once been arrested for his extremist views, now

focused on legal methods of attaining power. He would restore the nation to

its former glory, he promised. Intellectuals thought him a ruffian and a

buffoon.



The City was proud: it was the new vanguard, the greatest metropolis in the

world! It was ashamed: look at what had been lost, how ugly it had become!

The City â€œdelighted most, terrified some, but left no one indifferent, and

it induced, by its vitality, a certain inclination to exaggerate what one

saw.â€ So Peter Gay described Weimar Berlin.



But his descriptions, as do all of these, might have been written about the

Istanbul in which I live. There is a spookiness to living in a city at the

epicenter of an impending political catastrophe, a mood of dread but also of

astonishing vitalityâ€”economic, creative, artistic. It is a distinctive mood

and, to anyone acquainted with history, a familiar mood.



There is, it seems, such a phenomenon as a Weimar City.



What is a Weimar City? It is a city rich in history and culture, animated by

political precariousness and by a recent rupture with the past, vivified by a

shocking conflict with mass urbanization and industrialization; a city where

sudden liberalization has unleashed the social and political

imaginationâ€”but where the threat of authoritarian reaction is always in the

air.



Weimar Cities are not freaks of nature. They may be expected to arise under

certain social, political, and historical circumstances. World War I

destroyed both Imperial Germany and the Ottoman Empire. The remnants of both

entities succeeded in imposing alien new social orders on themselves, fragile

experiments in democracy. The Turkish Republic has lasted far longer than the

Weimar Republic, but the stories do not differ in the fundamentals; they have

merely been telescoped or expanded by contingent events.



With the rise to power in 2002 of the Justice and Development Party, or AKP,

the Turkish Republic has experienced a fresh convulsion. The AKP opened the

Pandoraâ€™s box of political Islam. It has presented its reforms as an

exercise in liberalization. In a sense, this is true: religion as a political

force had, since the founding of the Republic, been repressed. In another

sense, it is not true at all: this particular political force is one that, by

its nature, tends ultimately to erase liberal reforms. â€œDemocracy is like a

streetcar,â€ Recep Tayyip ErdoÇ§an, now prime minister, said infamously in

1995. â€œWhen you come to your stop, you get off.â€



Turkey is now in the throes of two revolutions. The social transformations

over which Mustafa Kemal AtatÃ¼rk presided have not yet been assimilated;

simultaneously, something newâ€”and oldâ€”has rushed up to challenge them.

The ancient order is thus disappearing doubly. Cultures, it would seem, react

in particular ways to the disappearance of ancient orders. The febrile

characteristics of Weimar Cities appear at just such timesâ€”the in-between

times. As fever is a sign of disease, so it is a sign of social dislocation.



Weimar Cities have emerged, blazed, and died throughout history. The sack of

Rome and the fall of the Empire prompted Augustine to write The City of God,

the work itself an emblematic admixture of the anxiety and creativity that

marked the epoch. Constantinople before the fall was consumed with evil

prophecies and the well-founded fear that Byzantine culture was as doomed as

it was glorious. A similar mood possessed the extravagantly genteel elite of

antebellum Charleston. Moscow and Saint Petersburg in 1917 were cities of

this sort, marked by the kinetic creative energy that accompanies the belief

that the forces of history will soon somehow sweep away the past. The

tortured intellectual blossoming of Vienna at the turn of the century was

intimately connected with a sense of helplessness about the cityâ€™s fate,

which all who lived there understood was not in their hands. The currency

crash of 2002 prompted a creative efflorescence in Buenos Aires. San

Francisco during the Summer of Love was a Weimar City, Hunter S. Thompsonâ€™s

famous Wave Speech a characteristic signature: â€œThere was madness in any

direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or

down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere.â€



All were cities marked by voluptuous excess, excitement, and fear, but the

archetype, of course, is Berlin in the twenties. â€œThere is no city in the

world so restless as Berlin,â€ recalled the diplomat Harold Nicolson:



Everything moves. The traffic lights change restlessly from red to gold and

then to green. The lighted advertisements flash with the pathetic iteration

of coastal lighthouses. The trams swing and jingle. . . . In the Tiergarten

the little lamps flicker among the little trees, and the grass is starred

with the fireflies of a thousand cigarettes. Trains dash through the entrails

of the city and thread their way among the tiaras with which it is crowned.

The jaguar at the zoo, who had thought it was really time to go to bed, rises

again and paces in its cell. For in the night air, which makes even the

spires of the GedÃ¤chtniskirche flicker with excitement, there is a throbbing

sense of expectancy. Everybody knows that every night Berlin wakes to a new

adventure. Everybody feels that it would be a pity to go to bed before the

expected, or the unexpected, happens. Everyone knows that next morning,

whatever happens, they will feel reborn.

Could there be such excitement without danger? I doubt it. Never was the

Weimar Republic viewed as legitimate by its enemies, and never has the

secular state been viewed as legitimate by its enemies here. Both societies

have been destabilized in turn by leftist subversion, right-wing militias,

assassinations, endless coup plots, the savage repression of protests and

strikes. The Nazis evoked nostalgia for a social and moral past that they

proposed to restore, and so does Turkeyâ€™s AKP government. Just look at the

map of the Ottoman Empire, say its diplomats. Turkey is returning to its

rightful place.



Berlin in the twenties was a polyglot city, struggling to absorb immigrants:

Jews from the east, Russians fleeing the revolution. So, too, Istanbul,

swollen with mass migration from the east, large populations of Kurds, and

refugees from the many nearby conflict zones: Iraq, the Balkans, Afghanistan,

Chechnya. Berlin had only the most limited power of assimilation; ethnic

violence was always close to the surface. It was no melting pot, and neither

is Istanbul, as recent headlines here suggest: KURDISH REBELS ADMIT ISTANBUL

BUS BOMBING. STRATEGY EXPERT WARNS OF ETHNIC CLASHES. ETHNICALLY POLARIZED

SOCIETIES EASY TARGETS FOR PROVOCATEURS.



Christopher Isherwood, the great chronicler of interwar Berlin, brought to

literary life FrÃ¤ulein Schroeder, the petite bourgeoise pining for her

former comforts and nostalgic for a vanished epoch. The new city seemed to

her brutish, ill-mannered, overrun. She is a familiar fixture in Istanbul; I

have met many FrÃ¤ulein Schroeders here. How much more civilized this city

was, they tell me, before these uncultured mobs descended upon it, like ants.



If Berlin was characterized by an endless number of political tribes,

movements, and causes, from free love to vegetarianism; an endless number of

social experiments, from nudism to yoga; and an endless number of artistic

styles, from the neue Sachlichkeit to the twelve-tone row; so, too, is

Istanbul. My e-mail in-box is full of invitations to join Vipassana

meditation courses, Reiki retreats, concerts, openings of new galleries, and,

above all, ralliesâ€”rallies for the liberation of transsexuals, rallies for

the liberation of Gaza, rallies against the rape of animals (of all things).

And at all these rallies, one finds the police, flanked like centurions, with

their truncheons, shields, and gas masks at the ready.





Since Turkeyâ€™s return to civilian government following the 1980 military

coup, constraints on individual rights, economic and political activity, and

the institutions of civil society have been loosened. Under the AKP,

restrictions on broadcasting in the Kurdish language have been lifted. The

death penalty has been abolished. The National Security Council has been

given a civilian majority and its role downgraded. Military judges have been

replaced by civilian ones in the State Security Courts. International human

rights conventions have been given primacy over domestic Turkish law.



Many of these reforms may be, as critics have long charged and as I

increasingly agree, a Trojan horse, motivated by the AKPâ€™s yearning to

eradicate the militaryâ€™s power and thus the primary obstacle to the

partyâ€™s domination over every aspect of Turkish society. They have

nonetheless prompted the sense that a genie has been released from the

bottle, for good or ill.



Still, the AKP gives with one hand and takes away with the other: the

concentration of the media in the hands of government cronies has

dramatically contracted press freedom, as has the governmentâ€™s persecution

of journalists and its use of punitive taxation to bring dissenting elements

into line. Everyone here believes his phone to be tapped. When I meet critics

of the government for lunch, they remove their cell-phone batteries. They

think itâ€™s harder for the spies to hear them that way.



The sprawling Ergenekon case has resulted in wave after wave of predawn

arrests. Ergenekon is said to be a shadowy ultranationalist clique behind a

series of bombings, the assassination of journalist Hrant Dink, a shooting at

the Council of State, and a grenade attack on a left-wing newspaper. The

government claims that Ergenekon planned to assassinate the prime minister,

murder Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, shoot down Greek fighter planes, and bomb

mosques packed with worshipers as a pretext for staging a coup. Hundreds of

writers, generals, and opposition politicians have been detained on suspicion

of involvement in this nebulous conspiracy. Many have languished for years

without trial.



The accused say that Ergenekon is fictitious. â€œThis is 100 percent

political,â€ one defendantâ€™s lawyer said. â€œIt has all been cooked up by

the government and by the imperialist powers, the CIA, Mossad, and the Jewish

lobby and the European Union, to eliminate Turkish nationalism.â€ The only

belief that unites this fractured society is that the Jews are somehow to

blame. Whether Ergenekon is real or ErdoÇ§anâ€™s answer to the Reichstag

fire, I cannot say; it is surely true that many have been arrested and that

many more are terrified.



There is clearly something about the moment when an authoritarian society

begins to liberalize that makes it unusually fragile. Fragile because

democratic political concepts are new and alien; fragile because

inexperienced democracies are prone to misadventures; and fragile because, in

the case of both Weimar Germany and modern Turkey, there were serious and

perhaps fatal flaws in the very way that the democratic experiment was

conceived, flaws embodied in both nationsâ€™ weak, disputed constitutions.

Simultaneously, these cultures were and are magnificently expressive and

creative precisely because the process of liberalization and democratization

unleashes vibrant energies, hitherto suppressed. Powerful emotions inspire

powerful art. To live in these political circumstances is to experience

emotions beyond the normal range, to perceive life in more dramatic terms.



The loosening of formal censorship has given rise to a tulip craze in the

Istanbul art world. New galleries open daily. The prices reported at auctions

are spectacular; the value of the art-auction market here has quadrupled in

the past eight years. â€œIt makes so much sense that Turkey should be the

next big thing,â€ says Kerimcan GÃ¼leryÃ¼z, art director of Istanbulâ€™s

avant-garde Galeri x-ist. â€œItâ€™s not an accident. We have the key to the

issues the world is going to be struggling with for the next 25 years.

Weâ€™re the remains of an empire, the residue of this humongous problem the

world is going to have to come to grips with. Itâ€™s East versus West at its

fundamental core.â€



There is something, too, about the richness of Turkish and German culture and

history that allows both to become exceptionally dynamic under the right

conditions. There is, after all, a tradition on which to build. And there is

something about both nationsâ€™ histories and collective political

temperaments that makes them vulnerable to extreme nationalism,

authoritarianism, and anti-Semitism, particularly when an ambient dread of

â€œirresponsible elementsâ€ and â€œdecadent forcesâ€ takes hold.

Psychoanalysts might look to family structures in both cultures, particularly

the domineering role of fathers. But these theories are not easy to prove.



It is all too easy to draw analogies between any society under an

authoritarian threat and interwar Germany. But the parallels here go beyond

the standard hyperbole. They are eerieâ€”even down to the obsession with the

imagined iniquity of the treaties that marked the end of World War I: for

Germans, the Treaty of Versailles; for Turks, the Treaty of SÃ¨vres, which

dismembered the Ottoman Empire and assigned the spoils to the Allies. In

Istanbul, it is as if that humiliating treaty had been signed but yesterday.



There is another important parallel: the memory of hyperinflation. Such a

trauma, it appears, persists in imagination long after the real risk is gone,

leaving democracies shaky in its wake. Weimarâ€™s hyperinflation took place

between 1921 and 1923, a full ten years before Hitlerâ€™s rise to power. It

ended completely with the introduction of the rentenmark in 1923. Yet

Hitlerâ€™s skillful exploitation of the memory of that event was an important

part of the formula that allowed him to rise to power. It was hyperinflation

and the inability of Turkeyâ€™s feuding, self-interested political parties to

restore economic order that brought the AKP to powerâ€”not Islam, as is

commonly believed. Overwhelmingly, voters chose the AKP because they believed

it to be the party best able to stabilize the economy. In a sense, the voters

were right: able at last to dominate the parliament, the AKP brought

inflation under control, continuing an economic recovery program launched by

their predecessors in 2001. It is essential to grasp the significance of the

memory of economic bedlam when trying to understand whatâ€™s happening now in

Turkey.



But as in Weimar, the governmentâ€™s displays of official prowess

ineffectively mask the real chaos on the streets, the fear that society is

turning and turning in the widening gyre. AKP governance is marked by show

and vanity. In my neighborhood is a proudly renovated Ottoman fountain, very

pretty to look at and adorned with a sign: RENOVATED BY THE AKP MUNICIPALITY.

It does not convey water. Typical AKP. That the city is not only on a

political fault line but on a literal one adds to the mood; when the

earthquake comesâ€”and it willâ€”much of Istanbul will collapse because the

AKP has done little to crack down on corrupt, lax, and dangerous construction

practices. The government has produced slick, doorstop-size

earthquake-preparation plans, but these have little to do with any

preparations actually made.



I do not wish to make too much of this parallel. Turkey is not headed

inexorably toward Weimarâ€™s fate. Nothing in history is inevitable. Nor am I

suggesting that the creative culture of contemporary Istanbul is as brilliant

and historically significant as that of Weimar. Feverish and fecund, yes;

marked by genius, only rarely. Nor, certainly, am I saying that ErdoÇ§an is a

new Hitler. He is increasingly a disturbing figure, but thatâ€”no, thatâ€™s

much too far. The point I am making is that one may now feel in Istanbul a

particular mood, a curious admixture of dread and thrill, and that this mood

is familiar and that this mood is no accident.



What does it feel like to live in a Weimar City? Consider the mad optimism of

my neighbors, who have just opened a luxurious wine boutique down the street

from my apartment. Who invests that kind of money in renovating and stocking

a massive cellar, in importing champagne, port, and sherry, in the middle of

an Islamic revolution? The number of licenses granted for the sale of alcohol

has sharply contracted, even though Turkeyâ€™s population is growing. Alcohol

bans are spreading throughout the city. Yet when I walk past this gleaming

boutique and take in the elegant stone floors, the sleek, varnished hardwoods

and marble, the tasting tables and tasting kits and the in-house sommelier

and the 1,200 bottles of wine glowing in their illuminated cabinets, it seems

absurd to ask whether Turkey has been lost to the West. I am reassured until

I turn the corner, and thenâ€”not so fast! There goes the caravan of bearded

ninjas screaming down the street in their jihadimobiles, yelling slogans

about the liberation of Palestine. I keep walking down the block and am

whipsawed with this confusion a dozen times before I reach the traffic light.



The conflict between the ancient, the modern, and the reaction is in evidence

everywhere here, especially in the small, weird details. Pneumatic

drillsâ€”the sound of economic growthâ€”play a constant counterpoint to the

shouts of street hawkers and the call of the muezzin. The barracks of the

imperial military have been purchased by investors and refashioned as the W

Hotel, its dÃ©corâ€”aquamarine lighting, an efflorescence of strange chrome

spearsâ€”a campy hybrid of neo-Ottoman and neoâ€“Stanley Kubrick: think

Sultan Mehmed V: A Space Odyssey. The rooms come complete with â€œintimacy

kitsâ€ containing condoms. Perhaps you should use them, too, because the

government takes a dim view of foreign sperm. Women who leave the country for

artificial insemination are to be prosecuted.



Istanbulâ€™s thrilling skyline, a glittering ribbon of palaces, mosques, and

minarets, forms the backdrop to the sinister glamour of its rooftop nightclub

scene, where the cityâ€™s privileged youths pass their summer nights spending

their fathersâ€™ money. I have rarely in the West seen promiscuity such as

that which characterizes Istanbulâ€™s elite, secular class. Come the

Revolution, they will surely be shot. Yet the women complain to me, in tears,

that they cannot understand why the men they bed never call the next day. The

poor things, I think. They are so new to this.



North of the Golden Horn, on the European side of the city, it is almost

impossible to walk down the crowded streets without passing a film crew.

Turkish filmmakers are wan and drawn, earnest, deeply preoccupied with

Turkeyâ€™s rapid social transformation. Film departments at universities

throughout the city are packed. The Turkish film sector expanded by 10

percent last year. Not all the movies are good, but they are unified by the

experimental drive characteristic of a Weimar City.





Esen Kunt, a research assistant at the Plato Film School, tells me that she

wants to make documentary films about Islam, religion, gender, and the

transformation of intimacy in Turkey. She puts a book by Turkish sociologist

NilÃ¼fer GÃ¶le on the table, explaining that GÃ¶leâ€™s work has profoundly

influenced her. â€œIf we try to analyze the current approaches in Turkish

cinema, we can see that cinema is the camera obscura of Turkish political and

cultural transformation, through the lens of gender identity and hegemonic

masculinity. Turkish cinema symbolizes cultural memory and cultural

resistance history. Especially in the last decade, Turkish directors have

tried to criticize the struggle between modernization and convention,

customs, gender identity, the hegemonic masculinity of the ideology. Art,

especially cinema, gives you a huge opportunity to understand the cultural

dichotomies and hybrid narratives of Turkish cultural history.â€ Kuntâ€™s

remarksâ€”yes, thatâ€™s really her name, and yes, she really said thatâ€”go

some way toward explaining why Turkish films have yet to become box-office

successes overseas.



Other products of the film renaissance would have made Nazi propagandists

proud. Valley of the Wolves: Iraq, a smash hit in 2006, was aptly described

by the Wall Street Journal as a cross between American Psycho and The

Protocols of the Elders of Zion; it features, among other obscenities, a

Jewish doctor who harvests human organs from Iraqi prisoners of war to sell

to Israelis. Turkeyâ€™s vice prime minister, BÃ¼lent ArÄ±nÃ§, described the

movie as â€œabsolutely magnificent.â€ The filmmakers are now making a sequel

called Valley of the Wolves: Palestine.



If it cannot be said that Istanbulâ€™s artistic culture achieves the level of

brilliance displayed in Weimar Berlin, there is brilliance here nonetheless,

of the tortured kind that one finds especially in Weimar Cities. Ä°nci

Evinerâ€™s 2009 masterwork, Harem, is a video installation based on

nineteenth-century engravings by Antoine Ignace Melling. In Evinerâ€™s mind,

the harem is clearly no Occidental fantasy of sensual delight. The women are

engaged in pointless, ritualized activitiesâ€”some laboring to no obvious

end; some involved in vague but obviously twisted and ungratifying sexual

acts. In the allusion to the original German engravings, one senses

Evinerâ€™s reproach: You Europeans might think a harem is colorful and

oh-so-Oriental, but let me tell you, itâ€™s not so exotic when youâ€™re

forced back into it.



The paintings of Taner Ceylan have recently sold for stratospheric prices at

auction. I opened the website of his online gallery in front of my cleaning

lady, a sweet, traditional Turkish woman from a small town in Middle of

Nowhere, Anatolia. To see her face when the photos loaded was to understand

the tensions of modern Istanbul. I assume that her native village is not one

where much tribute is given to â€œastonishing technical masterpieces of

hyper-realismâ€ that pay homage to â€œthe artistic avant-garde and the

leather S&M circuitâ€ while simultaneously â€œcalling upon the pastoral

tradition of man depicted in the context of natureâ€™s majesty to underscore

the aesthetic idealization of two men in the throes of lovemaking.â€



And daily life? The Assk CafÃ© on the shores of the Bosporus features a

Northern Californiaâ€“Mediterranean fusion menu; the name of the cafÃ© means

â€œlove,â€ or more properly, â€œlooovvve,â€ and it is the creation of Petek

Mermillon, a typical Turkish utopian who went to California to study film but

ended up studying Whole Foods. Love is not much in the air, however, when you

leave the cafÃ©. In recent news from the daily Turkish blotter, police are

searching for protesters who booed the prime minister following the World

Basketball Championship finale in Istanbul. The malefactors have apparently

been identified in security footage from the arena.



No, not that much love in the air. The PKK, an ultranationalist Kurdish

organization, spent the summer setting off bombs. Enraged Turkish

nationalists went on a counter-rampage, destroying shops and buildings,

clashing with security forces, burning official vehicles, and attacking

police stations in the hope of finding Kurds to lynch. Whoâ€™s stirring up

this unrest? Depends on whom you ask. The AKPâ€™s backers say itâ€™s the

hydra-headed so-called Deep Stateâ€”Ergenekonâ€™s progenitorsâ€”which, they

believe, is trying to provoke a civil war to get rid of the AKP. The AKPâ€™s

opponents naturally blame the AKP, which, they claim, is trying to provoke a

civil war to get rid of them. CIVIL WAR REHEARSAL, a local newspaper is

calling it. But since 1984, the war against the PKK has claimed 40,000 lives:

if this is the rehearsal, Iâ€™d hate to see the performance.



All very Weimar. All very Istanbul.



The historian Eric Hobsbawm recalled his return from the dying Weimar

Republic thus:



â€œ â€˜Imagine yourselves,â€™ I told my fellow Old Philologians, â€˜as a

newspaper correspondent based in Manhattan and transferred by your editor to

Omaha, Nebraska. Thatâ€™s how I felt when I came to England after almost two

years in the unbelievably exciting, sophisticated, intellectually and

politically explosive Berlin of the Weimar Republic. The place was a terrible

letdown.â€™ â€



I am often asked why I stay in Istanbul. Often, I ask myself. But in the end,

isnâ€™t it obvious? After this, anyplace else would bore me senseless. What

curious student of history could resist the chance to see something like this

with her own eyes? Who wouldnâ€™t want to know what will happen next?



Claire Berlinski, a contributing editor of City Journal, is an American

journalist who lives in Istanbul. She is the author of There Is No

Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters











Source: http://www.stratfor.com/









