The New York Times published a useful update last week on the horrific scale of the purges undertaken by Turkey’s strongman president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, in the aftermath of the coup attempt against him (“Failed Turkish Coup Accelerated a Purge Years in the Making,” July 22).
Among other moves taken by Erdogan, “tens of thousands of teachers [have been] fired and every university dean, more than 1,500 in total, [has been] forced to resign.” One academic expert quoted by the Times, seeking some historic parallel to convey the scope of Erdogan’s crackdown, compared it to China’s Cultural Revolution under Mao and the purges unleashed by the Ayatollah Khomeini after the Iranian revolution.
But the Times reporters themselves chimed in that Erdogan’s repression “has raised fears of a prolonged witch hunt reminiscent of the McCarthy era in the United States in the 1950s.” Erdogan’s targets should be so lucky. As The Scrapbook’s friend who forwarded the clipping noted, “one worries that the NYT writers really think that something like that happened in the U.S. during the early 1950s.”
