Cameron has proved once again a shallow, ignorant jerk

[fpb]

First: Britain's long-term ambition to wreck the EU by bringing in Turkey will not happen. Second: to push it now, when the country is being corrupted and poisoned by the villainous, double-faced Islamist creep Erdogan and his execrable party (against which everyone I know who knows Turkey has been warning for years) is worse than stupid, it's criminal. Apologies to the shade of Prince de Talleyrand, but sometimes it is in that order!
P.S.: it has been announced that reforms will be presented to make Parliament work more. Just what we needed. (That was sarcasm, in case anyone was in doubt.)

Comments

[pathology-doc.livejournal.com]

I used to wish that the EU would stop beating around the bush and bring Turkey in; but seeing what's happening, it's probably better that it didn't*. Ataturk must be rolling in his grave - all the perfumes of Arabia won't wash out Erdogan's treachery to the great man's vision.

* I suppose it might be argued that part of the reason for the Islamisation was the pull for the disaffected who saw EU non-inclusion as part of an anti-Muslim bias, which would sort of make what's happened a self-fulfilling prophecy, but I suspect it'd take someone who's paid far more attention to European history than I can to make that hypothesis work.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

The trouble is that Torkey's history proves that Islamism can only be kept down by the permanent threat of military intervention. And this is not compatible with European values either. So a secular Turkey cannot be European because it relies on the military suppressing democracy; and a democratic Turkey cannot be European because democracy inevitably unleashes the Islamist dragon. I know several Turks and people who lived in Turkey (such as a friend of mine who made a good living out of teaching English to rich men's childredn) and they all, unanimously, from the beginning, had been warning against Erdogan and his lot, even when I was disposed to wait and see. Events proved them right. Right now, all the Turks who actually want to fit into the modern world have their morale beneath their shoes, and many are emigrating.
Even apart from that, Turkey still would not fit into Europe. The Turkish nationalism, which is an ugly caricature of the worst that prevailed in Europe before 1945, has seen to it that an absolutely irresoluble crisis (Cyprus) should stand between Turkey and Europe, and then there is the fact that Turkey, whatever its growth statistics, remains poor by comparison with almost any European country. We would be letting in a country that does not share our values, that would drain our funds, and that, since it is more populous than any EU country except Germany, would massively alter the political balance. European politicians may be stupid, but they aren't quite as stupid as that. And those among them who really believe in the European ideal (as I do) also know that the countries that want to let Turkey in - Britain and Sweden - want to do so in order to wreck Europe politically and reduce it to meaningless aggregate of nations. And I have news for you - that is not going to happen, either. Maybe we will have to find a way to expel Britain and Sweden first, but we will have a united Europe.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

All of this. Turkey doesn't have a democratic culture, period.