I love a revolution me but this Turkey thing is weird in my humble yet accurate opinion.

First off, Turkey, being a democracy, has an election next year so if they want a regime change it’s in the bag.

According to people like Reporters Without Borders it’s one of the least censored countries in the region (as long as you don’t mention Armenia, obv.)

This is one of the reasons why there’s so much ‘please pass this on’ stuff on social media, OFTEN IN CAPS, and ironically taking cues from an idiom which developed in places where censorship, is rife: where citizens were using social media because everything else was censored and it was a dangerous and radical act. It’s impactful for sure – gives you an apparently personal link to a world event. Human rights, innit. But it can be misleading.

I mean, if you were Peruvian, living in Lima, say,  and got a FB message from the Countryside Alliance saying ‘we are in Trafalgar Square and the media elite and police are repressing us’  you might think it was a peasants’ revolt and send some compassion, if you didn’t know that the Countryside Alliance only send messages using real pigeons which the recipient than shoots and eats.

Whilst we need to be careful about ‘I went there on holiday and it seemed fine’ syndrome,  I went on holiday in Turkey and it really was fine.

Their economy is stronger than Greece’s, for example, and whilst their current leader is a bit of a twit (er…) and their handling of the park situation has been pretty terrible, there is extensive reporting of it in their largely uncensored mainstream media [see lack of censorship].

In fact what you have in Turkey – jobs, freedom of expression, etc is pretty much what people protest in order to achieve all around the world.

I’ve worked with journalists in nearby Iran, Syria, Bulgaria, Azerbaijan and Armenia and whilst this obviously doesn’t make me more correct about anything any more  than people who haven’t,  they describe much more serious problems than those I’ve worked with in Turkey. From mafia interference to state censorship to execution for speaking with Westerners, you just need to look at a map of Turkey to realise it’s doing better than most of its neighbours.

“In order for evil to flourish, all that is required is for good men to do nothing about the it because the Twitterstorm was about something else which in retrospect was not evil just fairly bad” as fellow selective revolutionary Edmund Burke once more or less said.

Here’s a Freedom House list of *really* repressive places, debatable of course, which we perhaps should be getting upset about but from whom we buy too much stuff:

http://www.freedomhouse.org/report/special-reports/worst-worst-2012-worlds-most-repressive-societies