Our friends the Turks

are having another of their recurring crises of Secularism.

You see they have a proudly, militantly secular state, founded in the 1920’s by Ataturk, who strictly limited public expressions of religious faith, de-Arabized the language, etc. As a military man he naturally had a strong authoritarian outlook, which he justified on the grounds that as long as the people were largely uneducated and under the influence of the mullahs any attempt at democracy would end up putting reactionaries back in power. In this and in other matters (like the organization of the economy) he claimed to follow the French revolutionary tradition, with its strongly centralized State.

After the death of Ataturk the dictatorship gave way to an elected government, but the people kept electing parties to power which were, though as a rule not religiously authoritarian, at least softer on religion than Ataturk was. So repeatedly the Old Guard, which still dominates the military, judiciary and civil service, has intervened in the process, overthrowing governments when they see fit.

Meanwhile the public has gotten more and more fed up with the corruption and inefficiency of the secularist parties.

So: what we get is violations of human rights and democracy in the name of secularism, while on the other side the Islamists are actually now the modernizers, trying to make the country conform to Western standards of governance.

Very odd.

Personally, I sympathize with the Islamists in this situation. Banning head-scarves from public institutions and functions is just stupid. I will defend the Islamists against militant secularism unless it becomes clear that the only alternative is in fact a return to religious authoritarianism. Given a choice between authoritarianisms, I’d prefer the secular kind, because I think at least I could learn to speak its language and deal with it. The more corrupt the better, in fact; corruption gives people some wiggle-room. Crooks can be more pragmatic, better at compromise than self-righteous saints.

But in Turkey it’s the secularists who are more afflicted with self-righteousness.

Terminological update

I looked up Morgan:

Apparently the “freemen” of a Company met 4 times a year in a Great and General Court, in the place specified by the Charter (usually London or Plymouth), and elected a Governor, Deputy Governor and 18 “Assistants” who were like a Board of Directors. The Assistants met monthly, with 7 required for a quorum, and 6 of them had to attend the Great and General Court; no other quorum requirement was specified. The Assistants had the absolute right to admit new persons to “freeman” status; generally, I imagine, this happened automatically with the selling of shares.

So Winthrop’s innovations were: 1) getting the Charter to allow the Court to meet in the New World; 2) bringing the actual Charter with him; 3) assembling a quorum of Assistants here; and last but not least, 4) admitting all church-going settlers to “freeman” status.

Instant democracy. The newly-redefined “freemen” were in effect citizens, with the power to elect a sovereign (indeed virtually omnipotent) government.

Citizenship

A reconsideration of the Dred Scott case at Harvard Law School, presided over by Justice Breyer, concluded that by law in effect at the time the case should have been dismissed for lack of jurisdiction, making Taney’s inflammatory opinion totally unnecessary. You see there was no diversity of citizenship, because by Missouri law Scott was not a citizen there.

That would have simplified matters considerably. Without the ensuing aggravation of Northern opinion, the Republican party might never have triumphed, nor the South seceded – but then what? Would we still have slavery?

Speaking of citizenship, I’ve decided to go back and reread Edmund Morgan’s Puritan Dilemma. I recall something in it about how the Mass Bay Company charter originally failed to specify a meeting place for the directors, which in other such charters was generally London or some seaport; thus allowing them to meet in Boston, once the city was built and a quorum of directors was here, and then amend the charter as they saw fit. This may have been as important as the decision to bring the document with them, which Leo Collins emphasizes. Also – and this is the main thing – there was something about how some category of person with voting rights, originally meant to refer to shareholders or something similar, was reinterpreted to include the entire (churchgoing) population of the colony, making them in effect citizens of a self-governing territorial state; and I was wondering if maybe this actually created the concept of citizenship as we know it. For in England there were subjects, not citizens. The right to representation in parliament belonged to certain specific classes of person, not to the population at large. One was either heir to a patent of nobility, or a bishop of the Church, or a “knight of the shire” (which meant owning a certain amount of land), or a “burgess” in a municipal corporation (each of which had its own rules for membership)….

Quebec election

A weird result – Mario Dumont’s Action Democratique, a conservative autonomist-but-not-separatist party, outpolled the PQ, giving the Liberals a plurality but not a majority. This rarely happens in any provincial election; blowout majorities are a lot more likeley than pluralities.

Someone mentioned on dKos the other day that Canada manages to have provincial party systems that are totally independent of what happens at the federal level. I responded that this was easy in Quebec; the people there consider themselves a separate nation and speak their own language, so of course they should have their own parties.

But this is getting ridiculous. More like Tamil Nadu, with two local autonomist parties alternating in power for decades with the national parties reduced to trying to form alliances with one or the other.

More on the “Bong Hits” case

(Follow-up to this.)

In oral argument Alito came out sounding relatively sympathetic to the student, and Kennedy more sympathetic to the school. One remark by Kennedy got to me. It has been accepted that a school can punish “disruptive” student speech. Kennedy took that to include “disruptive of the school’s message.” I think to justify abridgement of free speech, “disruptive” should mean, well, disruptive. Physically, tangibly, preventing teachers or other students from being heard. Jumping up and down and yelling during class. That sort of thing. If merely expressing a contrary opinion in an orderly manner is “disruptive,” there is no end to what can be prohibited.

The school has a right to convey a message but not to prevent students from disagreeing. They are targets of the message, not agents of the school in disseminating it.

New MA Senate President

It seems to be official: Robert Travaglini has resigned in order to take up lobbying, and Therese Murray of Plymouth, hitherto chair of Ways and Means, has been elected to succeed him.

She is the first woman to head either house of the Great and General Court.

Perhaps of more immediate impact, she opposed Travaglini’s move to let the “Defense of Marriage” nonsense get certified at the last Constitutional Convention, which raises the possibility that she will manage to prevent it from getting the necessary second reading.

I wish I could do statistics.

I’ve been trying to make some sense of the demography of that list of Iraq war fatalities. As I suspected two of the two most blue-collar cities in the state were well represented, but so were a number of low-blue-collar areas. A statistician could plug all the numbers into some kind of program and maybe be able to say something, but I can not.

My first impression holds though: no war dead from college towns.

Elections in Finland

The Kokoomus (Coalition, the conservative party) seems to have nailed exactly 50 seats in the Eduskunta (parliament), just one seat short of the Centre Party and well ahead of the Social Democrats, who with a mere 45 are being tagged as the big losers of the day.

The outcome will probably be a coalition of the two now-leading parties, who (unusually for Finland) have an absolute majority of 101 between them. They’ll probably include the Swedes of course, and maybe another small party; possibly even go for a grand coalition with the SDP.

For many years after the Second World War – on into the 80’s I think – there was a pattern in which the SDP, the Center (formerly Agrarians) and the Left (a communist-front alliance) each had about a quarter of the seats every time and Kokoomus was in fourth place with about an eighth. With the end of the cold war the dynamic shifted, the Left dropped into fourth and Kokoomus took its place in the Big Three. But the numerical shares remained the same, only with those two parties swapping theirs.

There was something called the Finnish People’s Party too, but it merged with the Agrarians probably about the time it changed its name to Centre.

Also in the olden days actual governments rarely lasted very long; coalitions were inherently unstable because the Left and Kokoomus were both largely unacceptable as partners, requiring the SDP and Agrarians/Centre to depend on a lot of small grouplets. With the cold war over there are few real differences between the parties, it is easier to build coalitions across the whole spectrum, and so it is normal now for a PM and Cabinet to serve for a whole parliamentary term or longer.

UPDATE: I just ran into this thorough analysis of the situation.

The cost of war

Today’s Metro has a listing of MA soldiers killed in Iraq since the start of the war.

48 out of 3200: maybe a bit below the state’s proportion of the US population but not outrageously so. Of the 48, three are from Boston: again, not outrageously below average. Indeed raise that to 4, I just noticed one listed as “Dorchester.”

However I didn’t see one name on the list from: Cambridge, Watertown, Somerville, Arlington, Newton, Brookline, Waltham, Wellesley, Medford; one from Malden.

There’s a Pittsfield, a Springfield or two… a couple of New Bedford/Fall Rivers, a Lynn – it would be interesting to plot them out on a map, run them through that Demographic Guide to the Commonwealth I’m pretty sure I know where to find. And that story the Globe ran a few weeks ago on 11 old industrial cities that have emphatically not shared in the state’s economic growth.

Today’s conundrum for conservatives

Reported in today’s NYT:

A school principal in Alaska suspended a student for carrying a banner, at the procession of the Olympic torch through town, saying “Bong Hits 4 Jesus.” So of course the Bush administration is in favor of the school district’s action, and the ACLU is against.

So what else is new? Well, some of the conservative “religious freedom” groups realized that any power given to school administrators to censor student expression could be used to censor religious expression as well, so they have come down on the side of the student.

One factor in the arguments is that a provision in the No Child Left Behind law apparently jeopardizes federal funding for schools that do not convey a consistent message opposing drug use. More broadly, the principal and her defenders argue that a school has a right to control student speech in the interest of the school’s educational mission. This has the religious folks very worried.

And just yesterday there was a story in which a law meant to ensure equal treatment for religious student groups has turned out to require equal treatment for the Gay/Straight Alliances too.

I love it.