Thursday, August 25, 2016
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Mongolian Herders Protest Mining Operations Disruptive of Their Livelihoods
Modernity and Tradition Side by Side in Mongolia
During the week of April 18-24, Ulaanbaatar's main gathering place, the Sukhbaatar Square was the scene to a very important protest by the Mongolian herdsmen from the country’s 21 aimags (provinces). As Mongolia transforms into a mining powerhouse, livelihoods of herders are greatly disrupted by the encroachment of economic progress across the whole country of 2.7 million people. The urban capital Ulaanbaatar (pop. 850,000) is currently in the middle of a real estate boom. The rest of the population lives scattered in the other sparsely populated aimags of this very large country.
Mongolians are proud of their nomadic heritage. Animal herding is often the only way of life and it is the traditional source of income for over half the citizens of Mongolia. The livestock (camels, horses, cashmere goats, sheep and yaks) depend on grazing grounds and water, which are growing increasingly scarce due to over use by the mining operators, who essentially fence their mine areas, after being licensed by the government.
Mining operations impede access to already scarce water resources for the millions of animals, while the grasslands are shrinking. There are concerns that the water table is also being contaminated by the mining process. The environmental damage is already a major issue.
There are increasing numbers of mining companies (over 1000 foreign companies) operating in Mongolia, that mainly come from China, Russia, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and 24 other countries to exploit Mongolia’s mining resources. Mongolia is on its way to be a mining dynamo in East Asia for its ample existing mineral resources. As Mongolia’s commodities based economic development becomes highly dependent on export revenues from mining, the price for this transformation is billed to the herdsmen that will inevitable lose their way of life. It appears they must either get used to the new ways, or be forced into oblivion. While the nation must decide what it will be like in the next 50 years, herders are on the losing side.
The issue is becoming extremely serious. In order to get their voiced heard, the herders rallied this week to stage a protest in front of the Great Khural (The Parliament) to the government. In the attached pictures, it is interesting how rural life stands side by side with global brand names like Coca Cola, Luis Vuitton, and Ermenegildo Zegna.
We are in full support of economic and social progress. Progress must be a rational process. Focusing only on economic development is unsustainable, especially if it is based on a short termist perspective of growth. Progress must be considered as an enlightened self interest that does good for all stakeholders and all echelons of the society.
Demir Yener, PhD. April 24, 2011
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Monday, January 10, 2011
Variations on the theme of Prof. Hans Rosling lectures on 200 Years of progress in 200 countries in 4 minutes
Converging World Economic Development
In the linked brief BBC video, Professor Hans Rosling of Karolinska Institute in Sweden explains the last 200 years of remarkable human development and progress and demonstrates how the world economies have converged during the past 50 years.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYsojo&featu
As an international economic development professional, I appreciate this positive view of development and progress by humanity. Professor Rosling relies on statistics to prove his point very convincingly. My discussion of Prof. Rosling’s lecture and some observations follow.
Hans Rosling's lecture combines enormous quantities of public data with a sport's commentator's style to reveal the story of the world's past, present and future development. He explores stats using augmented reality animation. In this spectacular section of BBC’s 'The Joy of Stats' program, he tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers - in just four minutes. He plots life expectancy versus levels of income to measure wealth, and how in time the economies converged especially during the last 50 years.
Prof. Rosling is the chairman of Gapminder Foundation that has developed a large data bank associated with this available on www.gapminder.com . The data bank includes a substantial amount of economic data that can be used to answer some very basic questions relative to the indicators of wealth and poverty.
Some of the quick indicators of poverty reduction include information such as per capita income; poverty Index; life expectancy; access to modern technology like cell phones, computers, internet, etc; family size (associated with women's fertility), and on. Gapminder data shows striking results on economic convergence in the most important indicators of poverty such as life expectancy, women's fertility, urbanization etc.
While it is true that within countries there is increased inequality with the rich gaining a larger share of the spoils of the nations resources, for the world as a whole this is not true, there is a growing middle class in many countries. However, this takes time.
There are exceptions, such as the failed states. The failed states index include a list of countries that are usually isolated dictatorships with lots of corruption (Zimbabwe, Cuba, North Korea, Burma etc.), or others where law and order has ceased to exist.
This reminded me of a 1970s book by Alvin Toffler, entitled, "Future Shock," which was a required reading for one of the courses I took at Syracuse University graduate school of management. I understand “Future Shock” has sold over 6 million copies and has been widely translated.
“Future shock” is a term for the psychological state of individuals and entire societies, which Toffler introduced. Toffler's shortest definition of future shock is a personal perception of "too much change in too short a period of time".
Toffler argued that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a "super-industrial society". This change will overwhelm people, the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaving them disconnected and suffering from "shattering stress and disorientation" – future shocked.
Toffler stated that the majority of social problems were symptoms of the future shock. In his discussion of the components of such shock, he also popularized the term information overload.
I would like to use one of Toffler’s arguments to explain the spectacularly rapid human development that took place during the last half century: If the known human history is about 10,000 years, and an average human life expectancy during most of the human history has been, on average 40 years, then, all known human history could be expressed in 250 human life years (or life spans).
Using Rosling’s argument of the last two centuries of rapid human economic development, this translates into 6.25 human life years—six and a quarter years. Data shows that the most rapid human development has taken place during the last 50 years. This translates into 1.25 human life years, or one and a quarter human life years or life spans. This is phenomenal.
If most of the human economic development has taken place during the past 1 and a quarter human life years, this is a phenomenal development and human progress. As the human health improves, so do the life spans, and thus progress in many areas of development is taking less and less.
In this case, Hans Rosling's argument, relative to Alvin Toffler’s observations, shows that humanity is capable of coping with the future shocks brought on by economic progress. But as the velocity of this human progress increases, development assistance must also take into consideration the “future shock” effects.
Life was once short and cheap and this was only 250 years ago, then some countries took off with the industrial revolution and medical improvements. Now others are rapidly catching up to make for a more equal world. Globalization has caused this convergence.
In our line of work in development, we help accelerate this human progress by building the pillars of free market economies, its necessary institutions and required capacity to ensure this economic development to take root.
Especially since the 1990s, the world has become a smaller village with the increased liberalization, privatization and structural reforms. These increased access of many poorer countries to new technologies and investment capital. The inhuman conditions under which most highly populated countries live have begun offering more job opportunities to their citizens. This has had a large impact in reducing the mass migrations from rural areas to urban areas. This is inadequate as yet. More must be accomplished.
I think the next stage of human progress that follows will even be more rapid, and we must consider developing ways and means for our constituents to cope with the rapid development. The best one is education, and awareness. The other one is definitely entrepreneurship, access to finance and improved business environment.
Once again, globalization is the force underlying this progress.
Dr. Demir Yener
Hans Rosling is Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute, and Director of the Gapminder Foundation in Sweden. For his lecture please click on:
In the linked brief BBC video, Professor Hans Rosling of Karolinska Institute in Sweden explains the last 200 years of remarkable human development and progress and demonstrates how the world economies have converged during the past 50 years.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYsojo&featu
As an international economic development professional, I appreciate this positive view of development and progress by humanity. Professor Rosling relies on statistics to prove his point very convincingly. My discussion of Prof. Rosling’s lecture and some observations follow.
Hans Rosling's lecture combines enormous quantities of public data with a sport's commentator's style to reveal the story of the world's past, present and future development. He explores stats using augmented reality animation. In this spectacular section of BBC’s 'The Joy of Stats' program, he tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers - in just four minutes. He plots life expectancy versus levels of income to measure wealth, and how in time the economies converged especially during the last 50 years.
Prof. Rosling is the chairman of Gapminder Foundation that has developed a large data bank associated with this available on www.gapminder.com . The data bank includes a substantial amount of economic data that can be used to answer some very basic questions relative to the indicators of wealth and poverty.
Some of the quick indicators of poverty reduction include information such as per capita income; poverty Index; life expectancy; access to modern technology like cell phones, computers, internet, etc; family size (associated with women's fertility), and on. Gapminder data shows striking results on economic convergence in the most important indicators of poverty such as life expectancy, women's fertility, urbanization etc.
While it is true that within countries there is increased inequality with the rich gaining a larger share of the spoils of the nations resources, for the world as a whole this is not true, there is a growing middle class in many countries. However, this takes time.
There are exceptions, such as the failed states. The failed states index include a list of countries that are usually isolated dictatorships with lots of corruption (Zimbabwe, Cuba, North Korea, Burma etc.), or others where law and order has ceased to exist.
This reminded me of a 1970s book by Alvin Toffler, entitled, "Future Shock," which was a required reading for one of the courses I took at Syracuse University graduate school of management. I understand “Future Shock” has sold over 6 million copies and has been widely translated.
“Future shock” is a term for the psychological state of individuals and entire societies, which Toffler introduced. Toffler's shortest definition of future shock is a personal perception of "too much change in too short a period of time".
Toffler argued that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a "super-industrial society". This change will overwhelm people, the accelerated rate of technological and social change leaving them disconnected and suffering from "shattering stress and disorientation" – future shocked.
Toffler stated that the majority of social problems were symptoms of the future shock. In his discussion of the components of such shock, he also popularized the term information overload.
I would like to use one of Toffler’s arguments to explain the spectacularly rapid human development that took place during the last half century: If the known human history is about 10,000 years, and an average human life expectancy during most of the human history has been, on average 40 years, then, all known human history could be expressed in 250 human life years (or life spans).
Using Rosling’s argument of the last two centuries of rapid human economic development, this translates into 6.25 human life years—six and a quarter years. Data shows that the most rapid human development has taken place during the last 50 years. This translates into 1.25 human life years, or one and a quarter human life years or life spans. This is phenomenal.
If most of the human economic development has taken place during the past 1 and a quarter human life years, this is a phenomenal development and human progress. As the human health improves, so do the life spans, and thus progress in many areas of development is taking less and less.
In this case, Hans Rosling's argument, relative to Alvin Toffler’s observations, shows that humanity is capable of coping with the future shocks brought on by economic progress. But as the velocity of this human progress increases, development assistance must also take into consideration the “future shock” effects.
Life was once short and cheap and this was only 250 years ago, then some countries took off with the industrial revolution and medical improvements. Now others are rapidly catching up to make for a more equal world. Globalization has caused this convergence.
In our line of work in development, we help accelerate this human progress by building the pillars of free market economies, its necessary institutions and required capacity to ensure this economic development to take root.
Especially since the 1990s, the world has become a smaller village with the increased liberalization, privatization and structural reforms. These increased access of many poorer countries to new technologies and investment capital. The inhuman conditions under which most highly populated countries live have begun offering more job opportunities to their citizens. This has had a large impact in reducing the mass migrations from rural areas to urban areas. This is inadequate as yet. More must be accomplished.
I think the next stage of human progress that follows will even be more rapid, and we must consider developing ways and means for our constituents to cope with the rapid development. The best one is education, and awareness. The other one is definitely entrepreneurship, access to finance and improved business environment.
Once again, globalization is the force underlying this progress.
Dr. Demir Yener
Hans Rosling is Professor of International Health at Karolinska Institute, and Director of the Gapminder Foundation in Sweden. For his lecture please click on:
Saturday, November 27, 2010
Fethullah Gülen And International Islam | The New Republic
The article below, written by Suzy Hansen, appeared in the December 2, 2010 edition of The New Republic. It offers a very accurate description of the Fethullah Gulen movement that is the rage these days in Turkey. It is argued that Gulenist movement of neo-Nurcu (Isik-- Light) movement from the 1960s has increasingly penetrated the state apparatus, subverted the justice and legal system, and has built a strong base in the security forces, especially the police force in Turkey. It has also penetrated into the key ministries such as education, commerce, justice, and even in the foreign ministry.
Gulenist movement owns Turkish schools in Turkey (Samanyolu--Milky Way--Schools), and in many other countries, including in the United States. I met many graduates of these schools throughout the former Soviet Union countries and Africa, who are very well educated, speak a number of foreign languages, including Turkish, in addition to their mother tongues. Student families are very happy with the quality of the education their children receive in these schools. Poor children are provided scholarships. Non of these graduates with whom I spoke felt there was any pressure to adopt ISlam as their religion. The educational system provided mentor systems where older boys and girls in upper classes would provide guidance and leadership to younger ones. This approach is known to be an effective way of teaching and educating when done properly. Gulenists finance these schools through sponsorships in Turkey at first, then use the proceeds from tuition and other incomes to sustain and upkeep the schools. Very successful business model.
In their quiet quest to penetrate all government levels in Turkey, the last bastion that the Gulenistas were unable to penetrate is the Turkish military, which, coming from the Mustafa Kemalist tradition, is the staunch opponent of religion in government. Currently much to the chagrin of the secularists, military is under heavy pressure from the government to be subordinate to the elected civilian government, unlike before. After all, the Kemalist Turkish military during the past 50 years have had 5 coups d'etat against the elected civilian governments.
Everyone in Turkey are in agreement that in a democratic society, military coups are unacceptable. However, this was expected to be achieved by strengthening and deepening democracy through evolution, and political stability in the country. The military interventions mostly took place when there was a large uncertainty into the future, and lack of stability in the political arena.
Most Turkish citizens are weary of this movement's true intentions. It is too difficult to say, but it is also believed among the secular circles that the hidden agenda of the democratically elected Justice and Development Party (a right of center, mild Islamist party) known in its Turkish acronym as AKP and its charismatic leader Recept Tayyip Erdogan has chosen to take a confrontational approach to democratizing the military. This approach has increased the suspicions about the government's hidden agenda among the secularists. At best there is a strong discontent among the secular segment of the society. The poor majority is accustomed to the populist hand outs and thus the party has secured the approval of these masses.
Lastly, the increasing drift of Turkey from the general policies of the NATO alliance as part of its emergence as a regional power in its geography has further exacerbated the suspicions in the region and in the US about the tru intentions. A new term has already been coined about the newly emerging Turkish power as the "Neo-Ottomanism". However, the architect of the new Turkish foreign policy, that falls at odds with the US policy is Mr. Ahmed Davutoglu, who seems to be using the term " Zero Problems' with all its neighbors.
While this is reminiscent of the Kemal Ataturk principle for the new Turkish Republic from 1923 on called "Peace at home, peace in the world". This seems to be against the nature of the geo politics of the region. It seems like in this tough neighobor hood no matter what Turkey does, will fall at odds with one or more neighbors at any point in time: Considering Saudi Arabia versus, Iran; Syria and Iran, vs. ISrael; Egypt vs. all other Eastern Med countries, including Greece; Azerbaijan versus Armenia, Russia vs. US, and on and on.
Gulenists are a part of this interesting transformation, and people are alarmed. Because, their cult members are in the government and in the parliament.
How could/should Turkey deal with this cult problem, is a question that needs to be settled as soon as possible. I do not think even the AKP party is immune to attacks from teh Gulenist front. PLease read on below for the assessment made by Suzy Hansen on the Gulenist movement.
Dr. Demir Yener
Fethullah Gülen And International Islam | The New Republic
Gulenist movement owns Turkish schools in Turkey (Samanyolu--Milky Way--Schools), and in many other countries, including in the United States. I met many graduates of these schools throughout the former Soviet Union countries and Africa, who are very well educated, speak a number of foreign languages, including Turkish, in addition to their mother tongues. Student families are very happy with the quality of the education their children receive in these schools. Poor children are provided scholarships. Non of these graduates with whom I spoke felt there was any pressure to adopt ISlam as their religion. The educational system provided mentor systems where older boys and girls in upper classes would provide guidance and leadership to younger ones. This approach is known to be an effective way of teaching and educating when done properly. Gulenists finance these schools through sponsorships in Turkey at first, then use the proceeds from tuition and other incomes to sustain and upkeep the schools. Very successful business model.
In their quiet quest to penetrate all government levels in Turkey, the last bastion that the Gulenistas were unable to penetrate is the Turkish military, which, coming from the Mustafa Kemalist tradition, is the staunch opponent of religion in government. Currently much to the chagrin of the secularists, military is under heavy pressure from the government to be subordinate to the elected civilian government, unlike before. After all, the Kemalist Turkish military during the past 50 years have had 5 coups d'etat against the elected civilian governments.
Everyone in Turkey are in agreement that in a democratic society, military coups are unacceptable. However, this was expected to be achieved by strengthening and deepening democracy through evolution, and political stability in the country. The military interventions mostly took place when there was a large uncertainty into the future, and lack of stability in the political arena.
Most Turkish citizens are weary of this movement's true intentions. It is too difficult to say, but it is also believed among the secular circles that the hidden agenda of the democratically elected Justice and Development Party (a right of center, mild Islamist party) known in its Turkish acronym as AKP and its charismatic leader Recept Tayyip Erdogan has chosen to take a confrontational approach to democratizing the military. This approach has increased the suspicions about the government's hidden agenda among the secularists. At best there is a strong discontent among the secular segment of the society. The poor majority is accustomed to the populist hand outs and thus the party has secured the approval of these masses.
Lastly, the increasing drift of Turkey from the general policies of the NATO alliance as part of its emergence as a regional power in its geography has further exacerbated the suspicions in the region and in the US about the tru intentions. A new term has already been coined about the newly emerging Turkish power as the "Neo-Ottomanism". However, the architect of the new Turkish foreign policy, that falls at odds with the US policy is Mr. Ahmed Davutoglu, who seems to be using the term " Zero Problems' with all its neighbors.
While this is reminiscent of the Kemal Ataturk principle for the new Turkish Republic from 1923 on called "Peace at home, peace in the world". This seems to be against the nature of the geo politics of the region. It seems like in this tough neighobor hood no matter what Turkey does, will fall at odds with one or more neighbors at any point in time: Considering Saudi Arabia versus, Iran; Syria and Iran, vs. ISrael; Egypt vs. all other Eastern Med countries, including Greece; Azerbaijan versus Armenia, Russia vs. US, and on and on.
Gulenists are a part of this interesting transformation, and people are alarmed. Because, their cult members are in the government and in the parliament.
How could/should Turkey deal with this cult problem, is a question that needs to be settled as soon as possible. I do not think even the AKP party is immune to attacks from teh Gulenist front. PLease read on below for the assessment made by Suzy Hansen on the Gulenist movement.
Dr. Demir Yener
Fethullah Gülen And International Islam | The New Republic
The Global Imam
What does the leader of the world’s most influential Islamic movement really want?
Suzy Hansen
November 10, 2010 | 1:40 pm
The leader of what is arguably the world’s most successful Islamic movement lives in a tiny Pennsylvania town called Saylorsburg, at the Golden Generation Worship and Retreat Center, otherwise known as “the Camp.” The Camp consists of a series of houses, a community center, a pond, and some tranquil, woodsy space for strolling. From this Poconos enclave—which resembles a resort more than the headquarters of a worldwide religious, social, and political movement—Fethullah Gülen, a 69-year-old Turkish bachelor with a white moustache, wide nose, and gentle, sad expression, leads perhaps five million followers who, in his spirit if not his name, operate schools, universities, corporations, nonprofits, and media organs around the globe.
Last spring, I visited the center and was warmly shepherded around by Bekir Aksoy, the president of the Camp. Just past a checkpoint, a portly Turkish man in a “Sopranos”-esque tracksuit was stretching, preparing for a jog. Along a road leading to the pond, we encountered a group composed mostly of Turkish men who had come from Japan to see Hocaefendi, as Gülen is respectfully called by his followers; they had been escorted onto the premises by a Columbia University student in a white Mercedes. The guest of honor for the day was a professor from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He was fishing for trout.
The three-story building where Gülen lives resembles a cozy ski lodge. The first floor features a large, sunny breakfast room with a number of long tables. Three men sat at these tables, quietly talking. One greeted me and introduced himself. He was a journalist for a once-admired, now-defunct, Turkish political magazine; the others were Turkish businessmen.
Upstairs, on the hushed second floor, about 15 young men sat on divans against the windows and on the carpeted floors, reading. One had a laptop; he looked up and smiled, as did some others, but a few scowled at me. We were clearly disturbing them. When a young man suddenly stood up and whispered something to Aksoy, I could have sworn he was complaining about my presence. Aksoy seemed to admonish him. Later, I asked, “Was that young man upset that I was there?” “Our people do not complain,” Aksoy replied. “They obey commands completely.”
Fethullah Gülen lives on the third floor of the lodge, but I hadn’t come expecting to see him. Gülen is ill, I was told, and only sees journalists when he has something specific to say. He stays abreast of the news through summaries that are provided to him each day by assistants. Sometimes, these assistants, fearful of upsetting him—Gülen is famously sensitive—try to shield him from the harshest events. Yet despite his limited contact with the world, a sense of his wisdom persists. “He knows everything,” Aksoy told me.
In a 2008 online poll devised by the British magazine Prospect and the American magazine Foreign Policy, Gülen was voted the most significant intellectual in the world. Graham Fuller, a former CIA agent and the author of several books on political Islam, says that Gülen is leading “one of the most important movements in the Muslim world today.” Yet there is much about him that is not known. One of the biggest mysteries is how much sway he holds over his followers. Some visit Pennsylvania as much as once a month; what do they want from their visits? At the end of my tour, as Aksoy was driving me back to a McDonald’s near the Camp where I had left my car, I asked him whether Gülen tells people what to do.
“He would never tell; he suggests,” Aksoy replied. “And then what do people do with that suggestion?” I asked. “Let me put it this way,” he said. “If a man with a Ph.D. and a career came to see Hocaefendi, and Hocaefendi told him it might be a good idea to build a village on the North Pole, that man with a Ph.D. would be back the next morning with a suitcase.”
Like many foreign journalists based in Istanbul, I first became acquainted with the Gülen movement through a group called the Journalists and Writers Foundation (JWF), which invites foreign journalists to seminars on political topics and generally serves as the Gülenists’ unofficial p.r. firm. At the time, new to the country, I didn’t know the JWF was a Gülen-linked group. (In fact, Gülen serves as its honorary president.)
But it wasn’t just the JWF. As I became more acquainted with Turkey, it began to seem as if everything there was somehow linked to Gülen. Not only NGOs, businesses, and schools, but also people. “This article is good,” I would say. “Yes, but you know, that writer is Gülen,” would come the reply. Sometimes, calling someone “Gülen” seemed to reflect fear or prejudice, and pinning down whether or not any given organization was tied to the Gülen movement was rarely a simple matter. As someone at the Rumi Forum in Washington—another organization where Gülen serves as honorary president—put it, “If you say you are in [the Gülen movement], if you say that at 12:20, and say you are out at 12:21, you are out.” One Turkish acquaintance joked to me, “Who knows? Every day, when I go to the bakery or get my groceries, I could be giving money to Gülen. Who knows!” “They’re everywhere” is a common refrain. At times, suspicions about the Gülenists sound like anti-Semitism—they run the media, they’re rich, they stick together, they only help their own.
If you ask Gülenists—who blanch at the words “follower” and “member,” as well as the term “Gülenist” (in Turkish, the term is Fethullahçı, referring to his first name)—they will call themselves a “faith-based, civic society movement” or a “volunteers movement” made up of people who admire the thoughts and writings of Gülen. They are an organic network of people, they say, whose goal is to do good works at Gülen’s noble behest while spreading his message of love and tolerance, as well as his vision of Islam. According to academics who have studied the movement, there are, more or less, three levels of involvement: sympathizers, who admire Gülen; friends, who, to some degree, support or work for the movement; and the cemaat, or community, the core adherents who are closest to Gülen himself.
The Gülen movement reminds people of everything from Opus Dei to Scientology to the Masons, Mormons, and Moonies. Mark Juergensmeyer, an expert on international religious movements, says that the Gülenists echo the Muhammadiyah of Indonesia, the Soka Gakkai of Japan, and various Indian guru - led or political-religious groups. I’ve seen Gülen referred to as the Turkish Billy Graham. “If you look at some of their educational work, they remind me of Quakers and missionaries who went off to Africa,” says Bill Park of King’s College, London, a scholar who has written about the group, “but if you go all the way to the other end, it is a political movement as well.”
Gülen’s views are moderate and modern. He is fiercely opposed to violence and enthusiastic about science. According to Gülen, “avoiding the physical sciences due to the fear that they will lead to heresy is childish.” He is emphatically not a radical Islamist. “The lesser jihad is our active fulfillment of Islam’s commands and duties,” he has written, and “the greater jihad is proclaiming war on our ego’s destructive and negative emotions and thoughts ... which prevent us from attaining perfection.” He has exhorted women to take off their headscarves, a ritual he considers “of secondary importance,” in order to attend university in compliance with Turkey’s secular laws. His followers run nonprofit organizations that promote peace, tolerance, and interfaith dialogue, and Gülenist businessmen devote their resources to building secular schools.
It’s no surprise, then, that Gülen has many admirers in the West. “It’s a civic movement,” says Islam scholar John Esposito, one of many American academics who praise the Gülenists. “It’s an alternative elite within Turkish society, as in many Muslim societies, that can be modern, educated, and successful, but also religiously minded.” Particularly after September 11, Gülen’s movement had a lot of appeal in the United States, which was suddenly desperate for “good Muslims.” “It was 2003, two years after 9/11; we were just in the beginning of the Iraq war, and here’s this ecumenical Muslim movement that seems to be open to modernity and science and is focused on education,” said one senior U.S. government official who has had dealings with Gülenists. “It seemed almost too good to be true.”
Fethullah Gülen was born in 1941 in a village outside of the eastern city of Erzurum. He began praying when he was four years old, and learned Arabic from his father. At school, he met students of the Kurdish intellectual Said Nursi, and effectively joined Nursi’s movement, which was similar to a Sufi brotherhood. He became a state-licensed imam in 1958, and, after his military service, moved to İzmir. In 1969, he began preaching his own version of Nursi’s ideas. Soon, he acquired a following.
With the help of Turkish businessmen, Gülen began building dorms, or “lighthouses.” At the time, Turkey was urbanizing at a breakneck pace. Country kids often floundered, socially and financially, when they moved to the big cities. The “lighthouses” provided a religious community for these young people, one that offered help with academics and didn’t, say, watch porn or get carried away with leftist causes.
Within these safe havens, the Gülen movement introduced the pious to the possibilities of modern life. “My father was a teacher in a primary school. His father was a stonecutter,” says Kerim Balcı, a journalist who works for the newspaper Zaman, which is owned by Gülenists and claims to have the largest readership in Turkey. “And here I am a Ph.D. student, columnist, and academician probably earning my father’s yearly salary in a month.” Balcı’s life story—he hails from the small Black Sea city of Samsun, yet went on to receive his master’s from a university in Israel and is working toward his Ph.D. from Durham University in Britain—echoes the trajectory of many middle-aged Gülen followers from conservative families. The Turkish state had been founded on the notion that modernity meant rejection of religion—and, for a long time, it was dominated by a military and a political class that enforced this ideal, sometimes harshly. Gülen suggested there was an alternative path. “It may be possible to be both religious and a TV commentator,” Balcı says.
Gülenists also started to found schools. Students at these schools needed books and other materials, and from İzmir, the Gülen community began building publishing companies and creating audiocassettes of Gülen’s sermons. Stores that are now called “NT” started to sell these materials; today, there are 110 such stores in Turkey and other countries. By the 1980s, the statist economy had opened up and restrictions on religious groups had eased. The Anatolian middle class began to start businesses and make money. Gülen encouraged his people to go abroad and get doctorates in science. He instilled in his followers an almost Calvinist work ethic. To this day, even detractors of the movement will talk about how hard Gülenists work.
Their achievements have been remarkable. In 1983, Gülen’s followers founded a conglomerate called Kaynak Holding, which today includes some 15 companies involved in the retail, I.T., construction, and food industries. The main division, Kaynak Publishing, maintains 28 publishing labels. It produces hundreds of books per year on and by Gülen, in addition to books on subjects like Sufism and Ottoman history. Kaynak Publishing’s office, a beautiful white stone mansion and mosque that sits on a hill on the Asian side of Istanbul, also houses Akademi. According to the sociologist Joshua Hendrick, who spent eleven months researching the Gülen movement and whose dissertation is perhaps the most comprehensive independent analysis of it, Akademi constitutes the movement’s “central ideational node,” the intellectual leaders closest to Hocaefendi himself.
In 1986, Gülenists acquired Zaman. Feza Media Group, which publishes the newspaper, also operates an English edition, Today’s Zaman, a news agency, and the magazine Aksiyon. In addition, Feza is connected to Samanyolu Broadcasting, which operates several TV stations. (Here is how a spokesman for the JWF describes the relationship between Gülen, Kaynak, and Feza: “Kaynak Holding and Feza Media Group can be considered Gülen-inspired companies. None of these companies are controlled by Gülen or have any direct link with him. As with all Gülen-inspired projects, Gülen simply provides inspiration, motivation, vision, and some guiding and overarching principles.”) In 1996, according to University of Houston sociologist Helen Ebaugh, who has studied the movement, men encouraged by Gülen established Bank Asya, now Turkey’s largest Islamic bank, with billions of dollars in assets. Meanwhile, TUSKON, a Turkish businessmen’s association, boasts 50,000 companies as members. (“Most of our members admire Gülen,” says Hakan Taşçı, the group’s Washington, D.C., representative.) In 2002 came a charity called Is Anybody There?, which distributes international aid—and whose sponsors include Zaman, Bank Asya, TUSKON, and other Gülen-inspired groups. According to Ebaugh, Gülenists generally give between 5 percent and 20 percent of their income to the movement’s projects; she met one businessman who gave $3.5 million annually. Every year, something called the International Gülen Conference takes place in a different city; in November 2010, the Niagara Foundation, whose honorary president is Fethullah Gülen, with the help of an assortment of universities, will sponsor the event at the University of Chicago. These conferences are often keynoted by respected intellectuals such as Reza Aslan, the popular writer on Islam.
Even as the movement has sprouted numerous organizations and companies, the schools have remained at the center of the Gülen orbit. Starting with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Gülen dispatched his students to the former Soviet republics of Central Asia, where he rightly suspected that they might find some post-communist youths in need of religion. But it is not just Central Asia that hosts Gülen schools. They also exist in far-flung Muslim countries like Indonesia, Sudan, and Pakistan, as well as mostly non-Muslim countries like Mexico and Japan. In total, according to Ebaugh, Gülenists operate over 1,000 explicitly secular schools and universities in more than 100 countries. They emphasize science and technology, teach the Turkish language, and, by many accounts, are very good schools. Gülenist businessmen build these institutions and sponsor scholarships to them. Whenever you ask who’s funding anything, Gülenists reply “a group of Turkish businessmen,” “a Turkish businessman,” “a Turkish-American businessman,” or “our Turkish friends.”
When I recently visited Afghanistan, I was surprised to learn that Turks had been operating schools there since the ’90s, even during the Taliban era. They currently have schools not just in Kabul, but in Mazar-e-Sharif, Herat, Shebhergan, and Kandahar. Behind the lovely painted-pink school in Kabul were dorms where kids from all over the country sat outside, some of them eager to say hello in English. Every Afghan I spoke to in Kabul, from politicians to cooks, told me that “the Turkish school” was the best in the city. As we left the premises, the teachers gave my Afghan translator some books by Fethullah Gülen.
In February 2009, the Texas finals for the Turkish Language Olympiad took place in Houston. Hundreds of students were competing to land spots in the final round, which is held annually in Ankara, and attracts contestants from 115 countries. In the George R. Brown Convention Center, 2,500 spectators cheered and waved American and Turkish flags. The hosts of the competition, two Fox-affiliate TV personalities, were both decked out in “traditional Turkish” costumes. “How do you like my outfit?” Mike Barajas called out to the crowd. “He looks like a king, doesn’t he?” Melissa Wilson drawled. “We will have four students reciting poems,” Barajas said. “In Turkish. How about that.”
Barajas and Wilson enthusiastically mispronounced Turkish words but did much better with the names of the young contestants, mainly because many of the Texas kids participating in the event—singing Turkish ballads, performing Black Sea folk dances—were Latino and black. As one of the young contestants, Dante Villanueva, recited a very long Turkish poem—earnestly and fluently teasing out the awkward 35-syllable words—middle-aged Turkish men in the audience wept.
There’s a decent chance that Dante Villanueva, like many of the other kids in the competition, attended a Gülen charter school. Such schools—many with fuzzy-happy names like Harmony, Magnolia, Pinnacle, and Amity—are only part of the cornucopia of cultural offerings that the movement has brought to the United States. Houston, one of the country’s major Gülen hubs, is home to the Gülen Institute; the Raindrop Turkish House, which sponsors the Olympiad; and the Institute for Interfaith Dialog. (“Many participants of the Institute’s activities are inspired by the discourse and pioneering dialogue initiatives of the Turkish Muslim scholar, writer and educator Fethullah Gülen,” is how the interfaith institute’s website explains the connection.) There are similar organizations across the country. Both Raindrop and the interfaith institute are housed in a 30,000-square-foot building called the Turquoise Center that looks like something you might see in Istanbul. Inside, photos of Madeleine Albright, Kofi Annan, and James Baker—all of whom have participated in the Gülen Institute’s luncheons and lectures—proudly hang on the walls. At the back of the building is a mosque. Last year, the building hosted a Houston mayoral debate.
Alp Aslandoğan and Ali Candir—respectively, the president of the interfaith institute and the executive director of Raindrop—took me on a tour and showed me the sketches for their new facilities. Among other things, they planned construction of a mosque, a synagogue, and a church, as well as replicas of the library from Ephesus and the Trojan horse of Troy. All it needed was a sign that said TURKEYLAND on it, and they could start charging. “Who’s paying for all this?” I asked. “A Turkish businessman,” they replied.
I asked to see a Gülen-affiliated charter school and was brought to the Harmony Science Academy, a K-12 school and one of 33 charter schools operated across Texas by a group called the Cosmos Foundation. (At both Harmony and another charter school I visited in Washington, D.C., people told me they were nervous about having their schools labeled Gülen institutions. At the same time, almost all of the Turkish men I met at these schools said they sympathized with or were followers of Gülen.) “Did you wonder why this school was founded by a bunch of Turkish men?” I asked the three mothers who’d been dispatched to give me a tour. “Totally oblivious, didn’t even think about it!” a tall, energetic woman named Colleen O’Brien immediately replied in her undulating Texas accent. In a subsequent e-mail, O’Brien would tell me that she was “aware that some of the Harmony staff believe in the teachings of Gülen,” but said she had been involved in the school for four years and had never seen any evidence of a “hidden agenda.” Indeed, each of the mothers was completely enthusiastic about Harmony. And the school was lovely. The couches in the foyer were unmistakably Turkish; I had seen ones just like them in homes in Istanbul. Everything was strikingly clean. I noticed that one of the Turkish teachers spoke rather broken English, but this hardly seemed to matter. “My kid will know better than to schedule a business lunch during Ramadan!” said O’Brien at one point. “I didn’t even know what that was until now!”
In recent months, some Gülen schools in the United States have attracted bad press in local papers, amplified by Islamophobic hysteria on blogs. But both Houston and Texas charter-school officials told me that they had not received any complaints about Gülen charter schools, and, in fact, many of the schools were high performers compared to others in the state. The public funding of charter schools prohibits religion classes, and the Houston Turks I met seemed careful to leave their beliefs at home.
On the way to the airport, Ali Candir, the Raindrop Turkish House director, tried to explain his own motivation as a Gülenist. Candir had married a Mexican Muslim when he was establishing a secondary school in Mexico City, an experience he spoke of with sincere and touching nostalgia. “Hocaefendi used to say the idea was that Turkey was once very successful, and then it became so badly considered in the world,” he said, echoing the painful feelings of lost empire that so many Turks nurture. “You had to do something. You cannot expect to sit in one place and things will change. You have to go off and try and represent your culture and values in a good way.” Candir’s statement captured a decency that characterizes many of Gülen’s followers. Why, then, are so many Turks so wary of them?
In April 2010, I went on a JWF-sponsored jaunt to Adana, a city in Turkey’s south, with a group of journalists who had, a month earlier, taken a trip to Senegal on the JWF’s dime. Our bus arrived at the offices of a local health care NGO; there, we were greeted by some 15 men in suits who proceeded to show us a film about hospitals they were sponsoring in Senegal and Congo. The film was set to melodramatic music and ended on an image of a small black child holding a red balloon with a crescent and star on it—the colors and symbol of the Turkish flag. We then visited a massive high school and a tutoring house in a poor Kurdish neighborhood; had lunch with a group of 20 businessmen who donate $12,000 per month to Senegal; stopped by the local Gülenist newspaper offices; and listened to a panel about media and Turkish society. Everywhere we went, we were given some sort of trophy or vase or sweet.
The last event on the agenda was billed as a “dinner,” but, when we arrived, I realized it was more of a convention sponsored by a TUSKON-affiliated group. About 400 people—almost all of them men—were seated at dinner tables in a ballroom. A large stage and screen had been set up at the front. I was seated at one of the only female tables, a half-empty one. Another film with maudlin music boomed to life.
Suddenly, I heard my name. The woman next to me pushed me to get up. Stunned, I stumbled to the front of the room, and found myself shaking hands with some Turkish businessman while I accepted another gift, cameras flashing. I suspected that, someday, this photo would pop up in a Gülenist brochure, with me heralded as another of the movement’s many sympathizers. I turned, exasperated, to a JWF representative. He laughed at me. “Oh, no, now you’re part of the movement too!” he joked. “It might ruin your career!”
At that moment, I viscerally understood why the Gülenists make so many people in Turkey uncomfortable. It wasn’t a question of their religious beliefs, or even their earnest, if perhaps overdone, sense of Turkish patriotism, which sends them to Texas and Senegal to promote their culture. No, it was something else: something about the way they have gone about accumulating and wielding power, while setting up what many Turks see as a parallel society.
In 2000, Fethullah Gülen was charged with running a covert operation that threatened the integrity of the Turkish state. The year before, a video had surfaced in which Gülen said: “You must move in the arteries of the system, without anyone noticing your existence, until you reach all the power centers. ... You must wait until such time as you have gotten all the state power, until you have brought to your side all the power of the constitutional institutions in Turkey. ... Until that time, any step taken would be too early, like breaking an egg without waiting the full 40 days for it to hatch.” Gülen denied the charges, and claimed the video had been tampered with. (His defense was certainly plausible, given the military’s crackdown on various religious groups in the late 1990s.)
Around that time, Gülen, who was suffering from health problems, left for America, where he has lived ever since. In 2001, he applied for a green card. After much wrangling with the Department of Homeland Security, and with the signed support of American luminaries like former ambassador to Turkey Morton Abramowitz, he got it. He was acquitted of all charges of conspiracy in Turkey in 2006.
By then, the tables had begun to turn in Turkish politics. The authoritarian heyday of the secularists and their allies in the military was over. With the rise to power of the religious Justice and Development Party (AKP)—and, in particular, its charismatic and savvy leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—the secular elites were now on the defensive. Erdoğan was not himself a Gülenist. But both he and the movement had a common enemy in the old elites. Theirs was a natural alliance. And so the Gülenists, once a target of the Turkish state, now found themselves in a position of power—or so it seemed to the many secular Turks who would, in the years to come, gradually grow more and more paranoid about them.
In 2007, Turkish police began arresting members of something called the Ergenekon organization for planning to foment chaos that would bring down the AKP government. More than 200 nationalist and secularist characters—from ex-military officers to journalists to university rectors—were arrested, and many of them are still in jail. Newspapers reported that Ergenekon had plotted to kill Armenians, Kurds, religious leaders, and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, among others. The AKP, the Gülenist media, and many liberals—who were tired of the way the secular nationalists had thwarted democracy for generations—welcomed the trials.
And many of the accused were, in fact, thugs who had long terrorized Kurds, Armenians, leftists, and others with their uniquely insane brand of Turkish ultra-nationalism. But some argued that among the accused were innocent targets of the AKP, which was trying to strike a final blow against the secularist elite. When policemen raided the house of Türkan Saylan—a doctor, feminist activist, and staunch secularist who at the time was dying of breast cancer—suspicions about the investigation intensified. Moreover, none of the people arrested as part of the investigation has ever actually been convicted. Turkey scholar Gareth Jenkins has argued that there is no proof that the Ergenekon organization “as described in the indictments actually exists.” Yet since Ergenekon, there have been other similar cases, mostly targeting former military officers.
There was no evidence that the Gülenists had played any role in the Ergenekon arrests, but that did not stop many Turks from being suspicious. The Gülenist media were some of the loudest champions of every odd detail propagated about the Ergenekon gang. Meanwhile, it became conventional wisdom in Turkey that there were significant numbers of Gülenists in the police force. “It is no secret that politically-motivated judicial cases such as the Ergenekon investigation are primarily driven by members of the Gülen movement, both in the police and the judicial system and in the media,” argued Jenkins.
The senior American government official who described the warm reception given to the Gülenists after September 11 says that while the movement seemed benevolent at first, “then it became clearer they had penetrated the intelligence apparatus of the Turkish National Police and that they were using it for some purpose, clearly for wiretaps and leaks to newspapers.” “There has been, or is now, a long march through the institutions,” says Bill Park of King’s College. “Even in places like the foreign ministry, it seems that Gülenists are starting to appear. What a lot of people tell me, in a way that I am starting to believe, is that they set up parallel structures within government institutions which might sometimes bypass the official structure of which they are part.”
The Gülenists deny these allegations, claim to support the Ergenekon arrests in the name of democracy, and suggest that there is nothing suspicious about the fact that followers of Gülen now work inside the state apparatus. And indeed, it often seems that both sides in Turkish politics—the old secular elite and the new religious elite—are given to paranoid thinking about their opponents.
What is undeniable, though, is that the Gülenists have not helped their case by eschewing transparency. So little is known about how the movement is structured, or whether it is structured at all. “No society would tolerate this big of an organization being this untransparent,” says Hakan Altınay, the former executive director of the Open Society Foundation (OSF) in Istanbul. “There needs to be more information about who they are, what they are doing—mission statement, board, and some kind of financial statement.” Columnist Aslı Aydıntaşbaş, who praises the Gülen-linked schools and the movement’s moderate version of Islam, nevertheless notes that “they’re not a political party, so I can’t vote them in and vote them out.” Süheyl Batum, an expert on constitutional law and the former president of Istanbul’s Bahçeşehir University, puts it this way: “I don’t think a group this influential and closed is good for democracy.”
Gülenists have a number of replies to these complaints about transparency. Some admit that the movement may need to become more transparent, but others take a harder line. When I told a group of men at the JWF that their critics wanted them to properly label themselves as part of the Gülen movement, one of them replied heatedly, “Why? I support the ideas of Gülen, and I support the ideas of Kant. Should I wear a sign that says I support the ideas of Kant?” Sometimes, they also justify their evasiveness by citing a fear of persecution. But that defense seems left over from an earlier time, when the secular elites had far more power than they do now.
In fact, a 2009 study published by the OSF and written by Binnaz Toprak, a respected sociologist, well known for her sympathy for the rights of religious people, collected hundreds of interviews with people across Anatolia, many of whom complained that those affiliated with the Gülen movement are discriminating against non-Gülenists. Businessmen feel obligated to be seen with Gülenist newspapers, and those who do not support the AKP or the Gülen community cannot win state contracts, some respondents alleged.
What do the Gülenists want? One Gülenist told me that the movement’s goal was the “betterment of humanity,” but that does not appear to be the whole story. In the beginning, it seemed that the movement was responding to a particular set of circumstances. Gülen discovered that at the center of the secular Turkish Republic was a desperate void. Much of the populace needed something besides Atatürk, or Western values, to believe in. The story of the Gülen movement is thus very much the story of Turkey’s evolution: religious Muslims using capitalist enterprise to establish a foothold in a country where they’d previously been left behind. These Turks were inspired by Gülen’s exhortation to assert themselves as full members of Turkish society. The movement’s “goal is not to establish an Islamic state,” writes Joshua Hendrick. “Such a development would be counter to its real aim, which is social power.” As one Turkish academic said to me back in 2007: “Why would they want to take over the state? They have media, schools, businesses, and the society. What do they need the state for when they have everything else?”
The Gülenists also seem motivated by a sense of nationalism and a desire to burnish Turkey’s image abroad. “What is the impact of, say, African kids learning the Turkish national anthem, of U.S. kids watching soccer games involving the top Turkish teams and being taken on trips to Istanbul?” asks Park. “Turkey doesn’t yet have the broader political, economic, and cultural footprint to follow through on this, but one can wonder whether there is a longer game being played—that the movement is putting Turkey on the map culturally and in advance of a greater Turkish economic and political presence in the longer term.”
Such nationalism may not be particularly problematic. What the Gülenists have yet to reckon with, however, is that when a relatively non-transparent movement starts asserting itself politically, it is going to make people nervous—even some inside the movement. And in recent years, Fethullah Gülen has indeed become a political force in Turkey—powerful and confident enough that he can even contradict his allies in the AKP. This summer, he spoke out against the Turkish flotilla that tried to sail into Gaza, unlike Prime Minister Erdoğan, who praised it. Erdoğan no doubt despised this challenge to his authority. Yet he needs the Gülen movement in his corner. Zaman, the TV stations, and the JWF all push the AKP political line, and they exercise a lot of influence. When an AKP-backed constitutional referendum passed two months ago—with strong support from both Gülen media outlets and Gülen himself—Erdoğan took care to acknowledge the endorsement he’d received from “friends across the ocean.” Everyone in Turkey knew who he was talking about.
Today, justifiably or not, the secularists of Turkey spend their days looking over their shoulders. I have encountered countless people who will no longer talk about Gülen on the phone. Opposition newspapers will not write critically about Gülen; what passes for conventional wisdom among some journalists at these papers will never make it into their pages. Maybe this is mere paranoia, but what I’ve seen across the faces of some secularist-liberals is something closer to fear. “It has become such a power in the government and law enforcement spheres that we in the mainstream media have become somewhat intimidated by this new mythological power they have,” says one Turkish columnist who writes for a major newspaper. “Since the Ergenekon trial, there is an unwritten rule not to criticize Gülen. We do not mess with them. There’s a feeling they can orchestrate a character assassination, and no journalist who cares about their image is willing to take this risk.”
This past summer, a former police intelligence officer named Hanefi Avcı published a book about the Gülen movement. Avcı’s children attended Gülen schools, and he himself had lived in their dorms. In the book, he alleged that the Gülen network had begun to set up a parallel state within the police and judiciary systems. The book caused a sensation. Avcı claimed he had documents to prove his case.
Then, in late September, Avcı was arrested on charges that he had connections to a fringe leftist organization called the Revolutionary Headquarters. Anything is possible, of course, and in Turkey it does seem like there’s always some crazy group waiting to claim new members. But at this point, for the first time, even some of Gülen’s sympathizers began to wonder, publicly, what the hell was going on. Some days later, from the placid Golden Generation Worship and Retreat Center in Pennsylvania, came rare public comments from Hocaefendi himself. In the course of addressing a range of subjects, he responded to Avcı’s allegations, saying, in part, “May God forgive his sins.”
Suzy Hansen is a writer living in Istanbul. This article ran in the December 2, 2010, issue of the magazine.
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More Articles On: Istanbul, Feza Media Group, Zaman, Japan, Turkey, United States, Bekir Aksoy, Bill Park, Helen Ebaugh, Hocaefendi, John Esposito, Joshua Hendrick, Kerim Balcı, Pennsylvania, Said Nursi
Thursday, June 3, 2010
FDR: The Four Freedoms Speech, Jan 6, 1941
"In the future days which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
- The first is freedom of speech and expression-everywhere in the world.
- The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way-everywhere in the world.
- The third is freedom from want, which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world.
- The fourth is freedom from fear, which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor-anywhere in the world.”
--Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Annual Message to Congress, January 6, 1941
FDR's speech to the US Congress on January 6th, 1941, is as valid today as it was 70 years ago, and was given as the United States was about to enter a major war perpetrated by undemocratic forces.
Democracy is an expensive, time consuming process. It must be understood and taught at all educational levels as a continuing process to all citizens of the free world.
In the year 2010, humanity in various parts of the world must still endure the lack of democratic freedoms that FDR spoke about seven decades ago, and all US citizens enjoy as a given. It is however, a privilege, to have democratic right that are protected under the constitution. This fragile system of governance must be nurtured and protected. It requires many checks and balances to cross check the actions of all those who govern the people.
Laws may be in place in all countries. Often times however, their enforcement is lacking. True democracy taken for granted in a few countries is unavailable in most countries. We may blame it on the lack of education, abject poverty, corruption and greed and graft on the part of governing parties. These political powers have no respect to human rights to begin with.
What we must deeply ingrain in the conscience of all individuals is that all societies need the following four fundamental values in order to achieve the ideal, full democracy:
1- Transparency: A general quality that is implemented by a set of policies, practices and procedures that allow citizens to have access, use, information, clear understanding, and audible information and process held by centers of authority (society or organizations). Feedback mechanisms -- checks and balances--are necessary to fulfill the goal of transparency.
2- Accountability: The state of being accountable; liability to be called on to render an account; the obligation to bear the consequences for failure to perform as expected; accountableness.
3- Responsibility: Stands for the state, quality, or fact of being responsible. The obligation to carry forward an assigned task to a successful conclusion. With responsibility goes authority to direct and take the necessary action to ensure success.
4- Fair and equitable treatment: The human rights and the property of all must be protected in a fair and equitable manner. These rights are inalienable and they must be respected for all concerned parties regardless of their race, creed, nationality, gender, and political beliefs.
If these four fundamental values of democratic governance can be achieved, then we are approaching those freedoms that FDR so passionately defended in his speech. For this ideal, millions of US citizens went to fight a war that was legitimate to establish democracy everywhere.
FDR speech inspired great American illustrator Norman Rockwell to paint the now famous Four Freedoms series. Rockwell was too old to serve in the military for the war effort at that time. Instead, he sought to help his country by illustrating FDR's speech.
He made these great paintings in a matter of six months during 1942. He published his paintings through his old friends at The Saturday Evening Post in 1943.
On this memorial day, May 31, 2010, I salute all of the brave Americans who made the ultimate sacrifice while serving their country in the War efforts as soldiers, seamen, airmen, marines, police, and fire fighters that allow us to enjoy these democratic freedoms on our land today.
Freedom of Speech Freedom to Worship Freedom from Want Freedom from Fear
Franklin Delano Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms" Speech
On January 6, 1941, United States President Franklin Delano Roosevelt presented his annual State of the Union Address to Congress. Presented when the United States was on the brink of entering into World War II, Roosevelt’s speech has become known as the “Four Freedoms” speech for the President’s enunciation of the “four essential human freedoms:” freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom of want, and freedom from fear.
Full Text of The Four Freedoms Speech
Mr. President, Mr. Speaker, Members of the Seventy-seventh Congress:
I address you, the Members of the Seventy-seventh Congress, at a moment unprecedented in the history of the Union. I use the word "unprecedented," because at no previous time has American security been as seriously threatened from without as it is today.
Since the permanent formation of our Government under the Constitution, in 1789, most of the periods of crisis in our history have related to our domestic affairs. Fortunately, only one of these--the four-year War Between the States--ever threatened our national unity. Today, thank God, one hundred and thirty million Americans, in forty-eight States, have forgotten points of the compass in our national unity.
It is true that prior to 1914 the United States often had been disturbed by events in other Continents. We had even engaged in two wars with European nations and in a number of undeclared wars in the West Indies, in the Mediterranean and in the Pacific for the maintenance of American rights and for the principles of peaceful commerce. But in no case had a serious threat been raised against our national safety or our continued independence.
What I seek to convey is the historic truth that the United States as a nation has at all times maintained clear, definite opposition, to any attempt to lock us in behind an ancient Chinese wall while the procession of civilization went past. Today, thinking of our children and of their children, we oppose enforced isolation for ourselves or for any other part of the Americas.
That determination of ours, extending over all these years, was proved, for example, during the quarter century of wars following the French Revolution.
While the Napoleonic struggles did threaten interests of the United States because of the French foothold in the West Indies and in Louisiana, and while we engaged in the War of 1812 to vindicate our right to peaceful trade, it is nevertheless clear that neither France nor Great Britain, nor any other nation, was aiming at domination of the whole world.
In like fashion from 1815 to 1914-- ninety-nine years-- no single war in Europe or in Asia constituted a real threat against our future or against the future of any other American nation.
Except in the Maximilian interlude in Mexico, no foreign power sought to establish itself in this Hemisphere; and the strength of the British fleet in the Atlantic has been a friendly strength. It is still a friendly strength.
Even when the World War broke out in 1914, it seemed to contain only small threat of danger to our own American future. But, as time went on, the American people began to visualize what the downfall of democratic nations might mean to our own democracy.
We need not overemphasize imperfections in the Peace of Versailles. We need not harp on failure of the democracies to deal with problems of world reconstruction. We should remember that the Peace of 1919 was far less unjust than the kind of "pacification" which began even before Munich, and which is being carried on under the new order of tyranny that seeks to spread over every continent today. The American people have unalterably set their faces against that tyranny.
Every realist knows that the democratic way of life is at this moment being' directly assailed in every part of the world--assailed either by arms, or by secret spreading of poisonous propaganda by those who seek to destroy unity and promote discord in nations that are still at peace.
During sixteen long months this assault has blotted out the whole pattern of democratic life in an appalling number of independent nations, great and small. The assailants are still on the march, threatening other nations, great and small.
Therefore, as your President, performing my constitutional duty to "give to the Congress information of the state of the Union," I find it, unhappily, necessary to report that the future and the safety of our country and of our democracy are overwhelmingly involved in events far beyond our borders.
Armed defense of democratic existence is now being gallantly waged in four continents. If that defense fails, all the population and all the resources of Europe, Asia, Africa and Australasia will be dominated by the conquerors. Let us remember that the total of those populations and their resources in those four continents greatly exceeds the sum total of the population and the resources of the whole of the Western Hemisphere-many times over.
In times like these it is immature--and incidentally, untrue--for anybody to brag that an unprepared America, single-handed, and with one hand tied behind its back, can hold off the whole world.
No realistic American can expect from a dictator's peace international generosity, or return of true independence, or world disarmament, or freedom of expression, or freedom of religion -or even good business.
Such a peace would bring no security for us or for our neighbors. "Those, who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
As a nation, we may take pride in the fact that we are softhearted; but we cannot afford to be soft-headed.
We must always be wary of those who with sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal preach the "ism" of appeasement.
We must especially beware of that small group of selfish men who would clip the wings of the American eagle in order to feather their own nests.
I have recently pointed out how quickly the tempo of modern warfare could bring into our very midst the physical attack which we must eventually expect if the dictator nations win this war.
There is much loose talk of our immunity from immediate and direct invasion from across the seas. Obviously, as long as the British Navy retains its power, no such danger exists. Even if there were no British Navy, it is not probable that any enemy would be stupid enough to attack us by landing troops in the United States from across thousands of miles of ocean, until it had acquired strategic bases from which to operate.
But we learn much from the lessons of the past years in Europe-particularly the lesson of Norway, whose essential seaports were captured by treachery and surprise built up over a series of years.
The first phase of the invasion of this Hemisphere would not be the landing of regular troops. The necessary strategic points would be occupied by secret agents and their dupes- and great numbers of them are already here, and in Latin America.
As long as the aggressor nations maintain the offensive, they-not we--will choose the time and the place and the method of their attack.
That is why the future of all the American Republics is today in serious danger.
That is why this Annual Message to the Congress is unique in our history.
That is why every member of the Executive Branch of the Government and every member of the Congress faces great responsibility and great accountability.
The need of the moment is that our actions and our policy should be devoted primarily-almost exclusively--to meeting this foreign peril. For all our domestic problems are now a part of the great emergency.
Just as our national policy in internal affairs has been based upon a decent respect for the rights and the dignity of all our fellow men within our gates, so our national policy in foreign affairs has been based on a decent respect for the rights and dignity of all nations, large and small. And the justice of morality must and will win in the end.
Our national policy is this:
First, by an impressive expression of the public will and without regard to partisanship, we are committed to all-inclusive national defense.
Second, by an impressive expression of the public will and without regard to partisanship, we are committed to full support of all those resolute peoples, everywhere, who are resisting aggression and are thereby keeping war away from our Hemisphere. By this support, we express our determination that the democratic cause shall prevail; and we strengthen the defense and the security of our own nation.
Third, by an impressive expression of the public will and without regard to partisanship, we are committed to the proposition that principles of morality and considerations for our own security will never permit us to acquiesce in a peace dictated by aggressors and sponsored by appeasers. We know that enduring peace cannot be bought at the cost of other people's freedom.
In the recent national election there was no substantial difference between the two great parties in respect to that national policy. No issue was fought out on this line before the American electorate. Today it is abundantly evident that American citizens everywhere are demanding and supporting speedy and complete action in recognition of obvious danger.
Therefore, the immediate need is a swift and driving increase in our armament production.
Leaders of industry and labor have responded to our summons. Goals of speed have been set. In some cases these goals are being reached ahead of time; in some cases we are on schedule; in other cases there are slight but not serious delays; and in some cases--and I am sorry to say very important cases--we are all concerned by the slowness of the accomplishment of our plans.
The Army and Navy, however, have made substantial progress during the past year. Actual experience is improving and speeding up our methods of production with every passing day. And today's best is not good enough for tomorrow.
I am not satisfied with the progress thus far made. The men in charge of the program represent the best in training, in ability, and in patriotism. They are not satisfied with the progress thus far made. None of us will be satisfied until the job is done.
No matter whether the original goal was set too high or too low, our objective is quicker and better results. To give you two illustrations:
We are behind schedule in turning out finished airplanes; we are working day and night to solve the innumerable problems and to catch up.
We are ahead of schedule in building warships but we are working to get even further ahead of that schedule.
To change a whole nation from a basis of peacetime production of implements of peace to a basis of wartime production of implements of war is no small task. And the greatest difficulty comes at the beginning of the program, when new tools, new plant facilities, new assembly lines, and new ship ways must first be constructed before the actual materiel begins to flow steadily and speedily from them.
The Congress, of course, must rightly keep itself informed at all times of the progress of the program. However, there is certain information, as the Congress itself will readily recognize, which, in the interests of our own security and those of the nations that we are supporting, must of needs be kept in confidence.
New circumstances are constantly begetting new needs for our safety. I shall ask this Congress for greatly increased new appropriations and authorizations to carry on what we have begun.
I also ask this Congress for authority and for funds sufficient to manufacture additional munitions and war supplies of many kinds, to be turned over to those nations which are now in actual war with aggressor nations.
Our most useful and immediate role is to act as an arsenal for them as well as for ourselves. They do not need man power, but they do need billions of dollars worth of the weapons of defense.
The time is near when they will not be able to pay for them all in ready cash. We cannot, and we will not, tell them that they must surrender, merely because of present inability to pay for the weapons which we know they must have.
I do not recommend that we make them a loan of dollars with which to pay for these weapons--a loan to be repaid in dollars.
I recommend that we make it possible for those nations to continue to obtain war materials in the United States, fitting their orders into our own program. Nearly all their materiel would, if the time ever came, be useful for our own defense.
Taking counsel of expert military and naval authorities, considering what is best for our own security, we are free to decide how much should be kept here and how much should be sent abroad to our friends who by their determined and heroic resistance are giving us time in which to make ready our own defense.
For what we send abroad, we shall be repaid within a reasonable time following the close of hostilities, in similar materials, or, at our option, in other goods of many kinds, which they can produce and which we need.
Let us say to the democracies: "We Americans are vitally concerned in your defense of freedom. We are putting forth our energies, our resources and our organizing powers to give you the strength to regain and maintain a free world. We shall send you, in ever-increasing numbers, ships, planes, tanks, guns. This is our purpose and our pledge."
In fulfillment of this purpose we will not be intimidated by the threats of dictators that they will regard as a breach of international law or as an act of war our aid to the democracies which dare to resist their aggression. Such aid is not an act of war, even if a dictator should unilaterally proclaim it so to be.
When the dictators, if the dictators, are ready to make war upon us, they will not wait for an act of war on our part. They did not wait for Norway or Belgium or the Netherlands to commit an act of war.
Their only interest is in a new one-way international law, which lacks mutuality in its observance, and, therefore, becomes an instrument of oppression.
The happiness of future generations of Americans may well depend upon how effective and how immediate we can make our aid felt. No one can tell the exact character of the emergency situations that we may be called upon to meet. The Nation's hands must not be tied when the Nation's life is in danger.
We must all prepare to make the sacrifices that the emergency-almost as serious as war itself--demands. Whatever stands in the way of speed and efficiency in defense preparations must give way to the national need.
A free nation has the right to expect full cooperation from all groups. A free nation has the right to look to the leaders of business, of labor, and of agriculture to take the lead in stimulating effort, not among other groups but within their own groups.
The best way of dealing with the few slackers or trouble makers in our midst is, first, to shame them by patriotic example, and, if that fails, to use the sovereignty of Government to save Government.
As men do not live by bread alone, they do not fight by armaments alone. Those who man our defenses, and those behind them who build our defenses, must have the stamina and the courage which come from unshakable belief in the manner of life which they are defending. The mighty action that we are calling for cannot be based on a disregard of all things worth fighting for.
The Nation takes great satisfaction and much strength from the things which have been done to make its people conscious of their individual stake in the preservation of democratic life in America. Those things have toughened the fibre of our people, have renewed their faith and strengthened their devotion to the institutions we make ready to protect.
Certainly this is no time for any of us to stop thinking about the social and economic problems which are the root cause of the social revolution which is today a supreme factor in the world.
For there is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy. The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are:
Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.
Jobs for those who can work.
Security for those who need it.
The ending of special privilege for the few.
The preservation of civil liberties for all.
The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.
These are the simple, basic things that must never be lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of our modern world. The inner and abiding strength of our economic and political systems is dependent upon the degree to which they fulfill these expectations.
Many subjects connected with our social economy call for immediate improvement.
As examples:
We should bring more citizens under the coverage of old-age pensions and unemployment insurance.
We should widen the opportunities for adequate medical care.
We should plan a better system by which persons deserving or needing gainful employment may obtain it.
I have called for personal sacrifice. I am assured of the willingness of almost all Americans to respond to that call.
A part of the sacrifice means the payment of more money in taxes. In my Budget Message I shall recommend that a greater portion of this great defense program be paid for from taxation than we are paying today. No person should try, or be allowed, to get rich out of this program; and the principle of tax payments in accordance with ability to pay should be constantly before our eyes to guide our legislation.
If the Congress maintains these principles, the voters, putting patriotism ahead of pocketbooks, will give you their applause.
In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
The first is freedom of speech and expression--everywhere in the world.
The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way--everywhere in the world.
The third is freedom from want--which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants-everywhere in the world.
The fourth is freedom from fear--which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor--anywhere in the world.
That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.
To that new order we oppose the greater conception--the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.
Since the beginning of our American history, we have been engaged in change -- in a perpetual peaceful revolution -- a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly adjusting itself to changing conditions--without the concentration camp or the quick-lime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.
This nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of its millions of free men and women; and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose. To that high concept there can be no end save victory.
References:
The Wolfsonian-Florida International University (The Wolfsonian-FIU)
http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=old&doc=70#
http://www.best-norman-rockwell-art.com/four-freedoms.html
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