RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.wsj.com/articles/turkey-retreats-from-modernity-11595545661?mod=opinion_lead_pos9

This Friday marks the end of Turkey’s experiment with secular modernity. That’s when regular Islamic religious services begin at Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia. The 1,500-year-old structure had served as a museum and symbol of Turkish tolerance until President Recep Tayyip Erdogan decreed the change earlier this month.

The Hagia Sophia has a dizzying history. It originally was built in 537 as the central cathedral of what would become Greek Orthodox Christianity. Ottoman Turkish Muslims conquered the Greek-speaking Christian Byzantine Empire and converted it into a mosque in 1453. But in 1934 Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first president of modern Turkey, decreed Hagia Sophia would become a secular museum.

The symbolic meaning of the recent reconversion cannot be overestimated. Atatürk sought to substitute a secular, West-facing identity for Turkey’s traditional Islamic religious roots, which he saw as backward. A big part of that program was turning Hagia Sophia—for centuries a visual metaphor of Muslim triumphalism—into a museum. This had encouraged tourism and facilitated research by Western and Westernized scholars.

But Atatürk’s ambitious nationalism also created a Muslim monoculture. Millions of Greek Orthodox Christians and Armenian Christians had lived in Ottoman Turkey at the start of the 20th century. Genocide before and during World War I forced “population transfers” during Atatürk’s early presidency, and overt discrimination since then has reduced Turkey’s Armenian population to about 60,000. Only some 2,000 Greeks remain.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2020/07-08/the-central-european-kulturkampf/

It is my good fortune that I currently live on the Buda side of the Danube in Pasarét, a name that supposedly combines the Serbian word paša and the Hungarian rét (meadow). The nomenclature Pasarét was actually “invented” in 1847 when many names of city regions were Magyarised. The folk etymology suggests a reference to Abdurrahmán Abdi Arnaut, the last pasha of Buda, who died in the reconquest of the city by the Habsburg armies in 1686. It is (in retrospect only, of course) rather a romantic notion that the rotund Turkish pasha would have taken his summer ease here in the former royal hunting grounds, no doubt enjoying the twelve delicious varieties of Hungarian pear so rhapsodically described by the seventeenth-century Turkish traveller Evliya Çelebi. Some four hundred years later, the pasha’s meadow has become a pleasant and elegant residential district of the capital.

It has been a lovely spring here and lockdown has enabled one to enjoy Pasarét’s leafy avenues lined with what Yeats called the “great blossomer” (flowering chestnut), ash, sycamore, black poplars shedding their white pollen, sprays of white hawthorn and the acacia that produces Hungary’s wonderfully aromatic honey. The adjacent gardens of pre-First World War villas have been a riot of colour provided by wisteria, Japanese cherry, elderflower, blushing almond trees and magnolia. The birds are back and our family of red squirrels has been emboldened to resume death-defying circus runs along the telephone wires. With few exceptions May has been idyllically warm and sunny, often with a refreshing light breeze, but the streets have been surrealistically empty of humankind.

However, like Coleridge, I have been imprisoned in my lime-tree bower. Not, of course, because Hungary is the all-but-prison Left-liberals would have us believe, but due to the coronavirus lockdown. The country is beginning to emerge from the outbreak—at the time of writing (late May) there have been over 3600 cases and more than 473 deaths. The fatality rate (12.9 per cent) looks high, but there has been little testing, so it is reasonable to assume that the number of infections is actually very much higher. About 50 per cent of deaths have been persons over eighty years of age, almost all with “underlying health problems” (a medical euphemism for the assumption that many would have died rather soon in the natural course of events). Neighbouring Austria, a country with a similar population but four times the reported cases, currently has a fatality rate of only 3.9 per cent. Independent monitors have nevertheless accepted the Hungarian Health Minister’s statement that overall the country is in the bottom third sector in terms of coronavirus impact. This relatively good outcome (Poland seems to be another case in point) is insufficient to attract media attention, which has instead focused with venom on the decision passed through Parliament to allow the government emergency powers to act by decree.

https://thefederalist.com/2020/07/23/hong-kong-is-the-new-east-germany/

Accepting three million Hong Kongers should not pose a huge burden to the five core Anglosphere countries. Right now, they need all the help they can get.

In a fierce but very typically British exchange, BBC editor Andrew Marr grilled the nonchalant Chinese ambassador to Britain, revealing amateur drone videos showing chained people boarding a train flanked on both sides by black-armored troops. In a time when Department of Homeland Security agents are decried by the U.S. speaker of the House as stormtroopers for defending federal properties, videos from China show what a genuine totalitarian system looks like.

A full city full of people is staring down the threat of Chinese force. Three weeks after Beijing imposed a new draconian national security law on Hong Kong, China has established a “national security education” base in the neighboring mainland city of Shenzhen to “re-educate” Hong Kong students who are deemed insufficiently patriotic. As the London Times reported:

The centre is charged with helping pupils from Hong Kong and from Macau to ‘enhance their constitutional and national awareness through education,’ according to Xinhua, the official news agency. Du Ling, a senior party official in Shenzhen, said the base would ‘plant seeds of national identity and patriotic spirit in the hearts of more Hong Kong and Macau youth.’

Beijing also touted teen-aged party apparatchiks who were quoted saying why this facility was important because “youth years are formative,” and Hong Kong youths need “correct theoretical guidance.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/it-looks-like-the-czech-republic-might-get-a-second-amendment/

Well, sort of.

Following the Velvet Revolution, the newly formed Czech Republic passed a law legalizing the purchase of a firearm for citizens without criminal records. Although the former Czechoslovakia had a rich history of firearm production, under fascism and Communism personal ownership was largely forbidden.

Once the Czechs joined the European Union in 2004, the nation was bound to the EU’s stringent rules governing gun ownership. After the Charlie Hebdo terror attack in 2015, the first inclination of the EU was to make it even more difficult for citizens to defend themselves. The resulting European Firearms Directive placed new constraints — including an effective ban on most semi-automatic rifles — on member states, which were all expected to comply by 2019.

The only country to challenge the edict was the Czech Republic. And last year, it lost a case before the European Court of Justice. But ever since the European Firearms Directive passed, conservatives have been attempting to add the right to bear arms as one of the “fundamental human rights and freedoms.” It now looks like it may happen.

A few years ago, the amendment passed through the lower house of the Czech parliament but was stopped in the upper house. The proposed language read as so: “The right to defend one’s own life or the life of another person with a weapon is guaranteed under the conditions laid down by law.”

Since then, the center-right Civic Democratic Party has won a majority in the Czech Senate. And this week, the Czech government unexpectedly announced it would endorse the plan to add the language. The amendment now needs a 60 percent supermajority in both chambers to become — somewhat appropriately — only the second amendment to the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms.