İ got a letter. a real one, paper, ink and some fotos, prints, not bits and bytes. İt`s strange, iyt`s out, it` nice. İ met R. some weeks ago in “little wing cafe”, an hippie-ethno-style location just opposite to “babylon”. totally not my style, but i like the talkative athmosphere, as long there is no open stage live music. So İ spent one evening with R. He told me something, which was really interesting. The famous revolutionary Antifa M from the perspective of a members parent. Funny, they kind of organized themselfe in order to protect and support their kids. in a way am “antifa M perants association”.
So we had an interesting evening, talking about me, my reasons to leave germany, homophobia and body and our relationship to society and much more. So thank you R. for writing me it was a nice evening for you , too.

Here is a pic of the hip restaurant and cafe area asmalı mescit mahale in tünel. its a place for showing and spending money in a kind of “alternative” athmossphere. Since a few month, private security is selecting, who is allowed to enter the street and who has to stay outside. So begglers and tinerci, those who are using clue as drug, are refused.

İf you look the same in daytime, you can guess, it wasn`t always like this. about five years ago it was an area considered to be dangerous and those who are coming now wouldn`t enter at all. Then the artists came and foreigners like me, attracted by the contradiction of old pera bourgois architucture and the rundown setting.

Still there are some cafes in this area, which keep an alternative flair, but rents are growing fast and nobody, who was living there five years ago can afford now.

something i found on metroblog:istanbul. One more time kurdlar - the grey-woolve turkish natonalits attacked people, who want to speak about the crimes connected to the foundation of “Turkey”. This time they attackad a on “Ottoman Armenians during the Decline of Empire: Questions of Scholarly Responsibility and Democracy” in bilgi universitesi. Read here.

before:

after:

The method to poisen cockroaches is working quite good. see hamam böceği and böcekler II. But know İ found a new method. İ could use a robot to lead them out of my kitchen to the neigbours. İ found this here. And İ tried google automatic translation for this - the result is better than İ expected.

surfing the berlin political blogsphere i found an review an the book “Die Morgenthau Legende” by Bernd Greiner. To give a short english excerpt: Morgenthau is one of the most hated political actuers especially in germany. Most people know him from Goeppels antisemitic propaganda, who said, he wanted to make germany to an potatoes field in order to take revange on germany. In fact, Morgenthaus post-war policy was based on the four D`s in order to prevent germany to attack other countries again: demilitarisation, denazifikation, decartelization and the installation of democracy.
But what is mostly unknown, is the early engagement of Morgenthau in order to stop germanies war and the shoa. he was one of the most important interceder at first for the american embargo on germany, then to let enter jewish refugees into amerika and for the dicission to join the alliance to fight germany.
And how is all of this connected to the massacre on about one million arminians? Morgenthau`s father was the US-embassador in the osman empire at that time. He got reports on what happened to the armenians and tried to organize international intervention on this, but wasn`t successfull at all, because no western power had an interest on it. Morgenthau was influenced by this experience, when he pushed american policy to intervene in Europe, and he did before Pearl Harbour.
So far about Morgenthau. Now a want to say something about to compare the masscre on arminians and the shoa. Mostly it`s said, one shouldn`t compare the shoa to anything, because the shoa is singular. I do not want to question that, for sure it`s not comparable in the grade of organisation, the involvement of masses and the number of victims. But I want to diskuss, wether it`s possible to draw parallels first on the images of jewish and arminian, for example the image of not be able to live settled, on the role of antisemitism and antiarminianism for the construction of german and turkish identity and last, not least how the germans and turkish are dealing with this crime in nower times. Some statement I haerd was about, arminians would use, would invent the massacre in order to get compensations. That sounds quite a bit like what I know as secondary antisemitism from germany.
When I ask all this stuff, it`s not rethorical. I`m really unsure. I would really appriciate discussion and hints for further information. Did anyone read Dan Diner on this issue?

there is a wedding festival next to my house. it`s the second day now. two days of arabesk music, maybe 100 people dancing, no alcohol, and just some rice. İ do not really understand the party. just one our ago it ended. the couple went to its room, the man is more or less beaten by other man while going in. İ don`t know, whether its still done here, but traditionally the linen is shown to public with blood, to proof, that the women was virgin.
Of course all this stuff is not so much strict any more. There is this idea of modernity in this city, this idea of sexual freedom, which means to be promiscuitive in a period of adulescence. But this is on the one hand for those, who can afford time and education, on the other its not really questioning family structueres. But there are also those, who are encouraged and brake with these structures.
İ don`t think, all this stuff is a matter of islamic cultural background. İt`s just, in Europe there were some people, espacially women, who tried to leave this stuff one or two generations before. More than here. So this is still here more difficult than there.