Still İ didn`t here much diskussion about the kurdish protests, most people don`t even recognize, what`s going on, even if things are happening directly in the city district, they;re living in. International press is mentioning. But only prompting the ruoghest information, hardly trying any analysis. some want to see a kind of social protest, but at least in İstanbul you can state: it seemed to be a kurdish protest, not one of other socially marginalized groups. read youself at sites of new york times, were İ`ve quoted from, for example, or if you know german at jungle world.

… A few hundred Kurdish protesters clashed with the riot police in central Istanbul on Sunday, throwing gasoline bombs and setting fire to a truck. Three people were killed after a gasoline bomb was thrown at a bus, The Associated Press reported, citing police reports.

The civil unrest has been some of Turkey’s worst since the Kurdish party took up arms against the government in 1984.

Security officials said additional troops were being sent to this city of about 100,000 people south of the region’s largest city, Diyarbakir.

Political analysts and diplomats say the violence, the worst in a decade, reflects local anger over high unemployment, poverty and the central government’s refusal to grant more autonomy to the mainly Kurdish region. …

anyway, it`s strange to see, how the story of one day is pressed in one sentence. kurdish sources are not really more interesting. To be honest, İ do not really understand the links to iraque. İt seems they are just necersary to speak about U.S.

is about the story, this artikle is telling about. it’s a little bit long for quoting, but the best text published in english yet:

Dresden
Do Germans have a right to mourn their war dead?
By Carly Berwick

Neo-Nazi demonstrators on their route
Dresden is a particularly lovely German city, even when 4,200 neo-Nazis are marching through it like orderly black ants. Since it was bombed to rubble by British and American pilots in World War II on Feb. 13, 1945, its center has been rebuilt to a digestible, weekender version of its 18th-century Baroque grandeur. The neo-Nazis marched last Saturday to observe the 61st anniversary of the bombing.

They are at the far-right extreme of a vigorous debate that’s taken hold in the past five years or so about whether Germans have a right to mourn their war dead. Moderate politicians and antifascist protesters alike are queasy at the prospect of a united Germany talking about its deprivation and suffering, exactly the sort of terms Hitler invoked in the 1930s. The debate over Dresden is, in the end, over who has the authority to assert loss, victimization, and the perceived attendant political capital.

Dresden has become a particularly charged symbol of suffering, in part because the former East Germany encouraged commemoration of the bombing, and questioning of the Western powers and reunification has brought the discussion of the Dresden fire-bombing to the entire country. But there has also been prodigious recent literary attention focused on it. The destruction of Dresden has been taken up by historians and literary humanists, including W.G. Sebald in On the Natural History of Destruction (who spreads his ruminations across many bombed cities), Jonathan Safran Foer in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, German historian Jörg Friedrich in Der Brand (The Fire), and British historian Frederick Taylor in Dresden, as well as in a new film melodrama, Dresden, which just premiered at the Berlin Film Festival.

The interests of the literary humanists and the far right in the bombings, which killed between 25,000 and 40,000 people in a refugee-swelled city of around 800,000, naturally vary. The humanists are concerned with all manner of suffering, particularly secret suffering: Talk of German anguish during World War II was taboo until recently. Encouraged by books like Der Brand, neo-Nazis proclaim that not only did Germans suffer, but that the Allies committed “mass murder,” as Goebbels was quick to proclaim in 1945.

With the far right’s heightened sense of suffering and loss come political demands. Emboldened by new rhetoric, the far right has entered state politics in Saxony, of which Dresden is the capital. The neo-Nazis who have marched in Dresden on Feb. 13 for the past several years walk with Germany’s far right National Democratic Party (or NPD). In 2004, the NPD shocked mainstream politicians by gaining 9.2 percent of the vote in Saxony. Last year, 12 NPD representatives in the state parliament walked out of a parliament meeting, angry that there was a moment of silence for Auschwitz victims and not for those of Dresden, which the party leader called a “Holocaust of bombs,” according to Der Spiegel.

On Saturday, the neo-Nazis had a focused goal: to announce that the bombing of Dresden was an aggressive war crime. Marching in Dresden, they carried blue balloons that read: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden. (They marched on Feb. 11, a Saturday, presumably because even, or especially, neo-Nazis need to work.)

Demonstrators in Dresden
They were met this year, as they were last year, by a band of 500 antifascist counter-protesters, twentysomethings with piercings and dreadlocks, blaring snippets of punk music from their loudspeaker. The antifascists, or antifa, had a double mission. They were there to taunt the neo-Nazis with their lack of fear—they wore pins and patches proclaiming “against Nazis”—but they were also there, as their flyers proclaimed, to “Destroy the Spirit of Dresden.”

“We want to offend the historical revisionist trend in Germany,” said a young Berliner waving the British flag, “that tries to make Germans the victims of the Allies. We say this was a liberation and that the bombing attacks were justified and even necessary.”

More militant antifascists like the Berliner have taken the generic “against Nazis” slogan a step further and argue against an empowered, unified German national identity at any level. On Saturday, they waved British, American, and Israeli flags and banners saying “Boycott the fascist victim myth” and “No love for the nation.”

But there were more moderate protesters on hand as well. Ordinary Dresdeners lit candles and proclaimed, “This city has had enough of Nazis.” And the mainstream political parties, including the Social Democratic Party (or SPD; it corresponds roughly to the Democrats) and Christian Democratic Union (or CDU; the Republicans), came together to put on a mini-democracy festival, in the form of a cookout, games, and music. They set themselves up at the foot of the Augustus Bridge, which sat on the return route of the neo-Nazi demonstration. The SPD offered karaoke and the CDU a democracy quiz. A huge pink banner on the stage read “Kein Sex mit Nazis”—No Sex with Nazis. An SPD volunteer explained that the mainstream parties became particularly concerned after the strong far-right showing in the 2004 local elections; they marched last year, but this year they wanted to bring local Dresdeners together more comfortably for some wine and anti-Nazi sloganeering.

The marketing decision to sit in one place and play games rather than march portentously worked in everyone’s favor. The mainstream parties, galvanized by the volubility of the far right and far left, were taking a stand, even if only in snow-battered tents filled with flyers and quizzes.

“We want to show that the Dresden people are for democracy and not dictatorship,” said a volunteer for the CDU, which was participating in the “Democracy Milestone” for the first year. “Every year the 13th of February we are thinking of the attack on Dresden. It is typical that the right and left demonstrate. We are for the normal people.”

While the neo-Nazis grab tightly to the idea of their (or their parents’) suffering during the war, the antifascists worry that, in fact, many Germans can identify with the trauma of the war. It is understandable to remember the terror of being bombed and to mourn relatives who died, but to transform that identification into a fervent national identity and political platform based on exclusion brings to mind the problems of the Weimar era—and points to the problems with any political agenda dependent on the idea of loss. When a sense of group suffering wends its way into political arena, it can lead to a special kind of frustrated identity politics. The lesson of Dresden today is that, like collective guilt, the concept of collective suffering twists personal experience into utilitarian political aims: Demagoguery depends on it.

As the antifascists waited on the Augustus Bridge in late afternoon, hoping to challenge the neo-Nazis, police vans blocked the small antifa group from going further. Members of the far left Linkspartei/PDS left the “Kein Sex “cookout, as did the SPD and Green Party volunteers, to join the antifascists in solidarity. In the end, the Leftists, stubbornly waiting in the swirling snow for three hours, had blocked the neo-Nazis from crossing on their intended route. In the distance, down river, the black figures marched back the way they had come.

Carly Berwick writes about art and culture for Bloomberg.com, New York, Travel and Leisure, and ARTnews. She is currently a McCloy Fellow for the American Council on Germany.

İ don`t know, how many times İ had this book in my hands and İ decided not to buy it. İt was in a small second hand bookshop in galatasaray. The same where İ got the first edition of Feuchtwangers “Jud Süss”. Second hand books usally cost about 1 EUR, but Dan Diners “Das Jahrhundert verstehen” was 15 EUR.
He`s doing the impossible: writing about the 20th century universally. Talking about sovjet revolution and shoah, first worldwar and 1989 changements. And about, as he calls the armenian catastrophe.
İ haven`t read much yet. İ just know, that Dan Diner has interstings views what`s going on know in middle east and that he is insisting to compare the shoah to the stalinist gulag system, comparing in difference, like he say`s.
So İ start to read, reading critically, as İ do not really understand, why he is playing with this pattern, used by revisionists.
Now İ bought this book, also because İ would like some answers to the questions İ asked here.
So, dear readers, if you are able to give me some hint`s, how to read Dan Diner, You`re welcome.

i wanted to ignore this campaign “Du bist Deutschland” about 99% of german blogs were writing about. but many discussions i had, make me talking about new german nationalism. İ had to hear one sentence quite often: >İ respect the way, germans are facing their history and are talking about.< İn fact, when İ see the way, turkish society is ignoring the crimes commited when setting up the turkish nation, i have to state, the german way is different. But - despite the fact, taht the dimension of the shoah was too huge to ignore - the goal of speaking and ignoring seem to be quite the same. it`s to preserve national identity. just speaking is a little bit more self-confident.
And germans are speaking a lot. and they are speaking about the fact, that they are speaking. They claim to be experts for collective crimes and so they go to war to prevent others of doing, what they did. and they are proud of dealing with their history, so get proud of their history and their crime.
Now about the campaign. German can be proud of people, forced by germans to emmigrate. they are even proud of people they have killed. “Du bist Albert Einstein”. the shoah is not a reason to overcome german identity, it`s getting part of identity. it`s not enough, that those, who comitted mass-murder collectivly are bond together by their crimes, they also claim a shared history with their victims.

So, all İ can say about that is: Germany, shut up!

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.

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?

İ have a strange personal connection to this issue. Most likely the occupants of the house, i`m living in, where affected by the progroms against rum people in 1955. Or they where forced to leave in the 1660`ies, when all turkish citizens, which had also greek citizenship, where expatriatad.
İn the artikle “jungle in ische” i wrote, there is no diskussion about that, but slowly some are talking - and attacked by turkish “grey wolves” nationalits. İ found a link to the fotos of the attacked exhibition in an artikle of istanbul:metroblog.