Of course it does; after all, the President's been chosen by popular vote for almost two whole years now, the ruling party only had to order three elections to elect their preferred candidate and during that time the military has only once threatened to intervene if the government elected seems too religious. However could I have gotten the idea Turkeys political scene is divided between a secular military and fundamentalist religious faction rather than fully democratic?

That seems to be the case; again, perhaps I need better nomenclature. We can speak of "the Free World" to mean the democratic and economically advanced nations predominantly found in the West; that excludes both the economically advanced authoritarian Soviet governments and others like them as well as the developing world without being specific to anyone save the industrialized democratic countries.

Let me be clear: I don't hate the populations of the "Unfree World" I mostly pity them, but I think it both foolish and dangerous to invite national governments chosen on the basis of who has the biggest gun to play a role in shaping international policy.

No, you've got it backwards: Turkey manifestly does NOT have free speech, so the government airing a program that makes false and derogatory claims about entire nations can't be defended on the grounds of free speech rights that government ignores.

Perhaps it would be more difficult to maintain if "Kemalism" wasn't the governments official national policy (hence "military junta" ) or that government didn't disseminate propaganda against both Israel and Palestine (hence "terrorist sympathizing. " ) "Genocide denying" speaks for itself; as long as it's a crime to mention the Armenian Genocide in Turkey that's not hyperbole at all.



In other words, denying the Holocaust is a crime throughout the EU, punishable by 1-3 years imprisonment. I found the quote at Wikipedia, but the original source is linked.

As to genocide denial cases brought on a wholly private basis, first off it's a criminal, not civil, statute; when people are in prison for something you can't just shrug it off as the pet grievance of a few individuals. But here's a quick Wikipedia overview of some cases:

So, the Turkish military is a private citizen, and, anyway, there's only been one (upheld) conviction and only one assassination due to this law, so, yeah, clearly "freedom is on the march" in Turkey.

This appears one of those "based on a true story" scenarios where a writer can generalize from a few particular real events and extrapolate a wealth of inflammatory fiction.

Bottom line remains the same. If the international community allows repressive authoritarian regimes all the privileges of liberal democratic ones what's their incentive for change? The increasingly small fear their citizens will one day have superior firepower and organization? Because as much as popular revolution is celebrated in countries like mine, there I can't think of many revolutions against dictatorship that succeeded without the professional militarys support in the past half century. Freedom and democracy are NOT on the march throughout the world; countries that dispense with such inconveniences are growing in economic and other influence at a far greater rate than those who possess them, primarily due to the active assistance of the latter. Yes, the push for Turkeys membership in the EU despite their denial of genocide to the point of criminalizing mentions of it, despite the average voter forced to choose between putting military thugs or religious extremists while calling it "democracy" are just one example, but it's the example relevant in this thread. The problem is much bigger than that in this thread though, I concede.