Three Messages To the Conservative Electorate With More Censor and Bigotry

If Tayyip Erdogan, instead of Barack Obama, frankly addressed his people with a State of the Union speech today, he would probably pick top-three political actions that his government took this week as:

1) BIGOTLY YOURS: Firstly, Turkish Airlines (THY), with its assertive marketing campaign with a slogan like "Globally Yours", stopped serving alcohol in most of its domestic flights. Then, a possible design for the new dresses of their cabin crew was leaked. It was much more conservative (and South Asian-ish), compared to -say- 1968:

2) SHOULDERS ARE JUST SINFUL: Turkey's state TV censored the shoulder of Russell Crowe's lover by blurring it during a Saturday night movie. Female shoulder was considered as something obscene. Check out the video:

3) BEERS ARE ALSO CENSORED: It is revealed that one of my favorite poems by Edip Cansever was partly censored in an official textbook on literature for high schools. The crossed-out verses: "So many days he had wanted to drink a beer! / He put on the table the pouring of that beer."

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I was discussing these actions, especially the ones that relate to the freedom of the speech, with a group of senior columnists yesterday. Some of them link such actions to the personal backgrounds of many decision-makers with Islam-inspired orientations. 

According to this interpretation, these politicians and bureaucrats cannot just comprehend the concept of the sanctity of an artistic piece, for instance, because of a lack of education or an aesthetical sensitivity. Or simply, because their traditions are incompatible to such concepts...

I, alongside some of the aforementioned columnists, don't think that such public displays of reactionism are just natural results of the personal characters of some Islamist decision-makers as such. 

Instead, I believe that such actions are both a tour de force in the face of modernists/liberals in Turkey and a political message to appease their conservative electorates, showing them they are working on the social level, as well as sustaining their relative success in infrastructure and welfare projects.

So, I don't see any good faith here. These are probably all calculated tactical steps for a specific goal, that serve a larger-scale strategy to transform society and further entrench the already-established civilian authoritarianism in Turkey.