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I didn't realize the reason until a recent Matt vlog. It was local merchants protesting being cut out as middle men by the East India Company and Crown. This nation was created by and for landowners and merchants.
Read People's History of the US, if you want the history of the whole rotten place told like it is.
Liberalism was the only option, really. The big utopian socialist guy, Fourier, wasn’t even born until the 1790s and even then liberalism was a cute niche system until 1848.
So Cenk is always saying shit like this - re-appropriating patriotic/establishment/captialist motifs to support a succdem agenda. He's wrong, etc.
But calling him "Chunk Yogurt" is racist crap copying chuds. Fuck that. Be better, OP. Just because your name is Jack Johnson doesn't give you the right to make fun of others' names.
We give loads of people silly names as a way of deriding them. Is it really racist? Chunk Yogurt is just a funny couplet of words.
It is racist/xenophobic. You meet someone named "John" do you think "hehehe like the toilet" or "Jack" - "hehe like masturbation"? You don't, because those are normal names.
Turks are a minority in the English-speaking world. Cenk was pressured to pick an American name when he tried getting into media. "Chunk Yogurt" and it's myriad versions is what gets posted on like every Cenk video, along with "fat brown libt*rd" or whatever. The impulse to go after the name is about focusing on the one thing that's other about him. Ben Dixon doesn't get called a Dick-Son on every on of his videos, does he?
Making fun of names can be good fun. But it's a bit like racial slurs/jokes - you need to be in the in-group, you need to be a friend who's known to be cool. Otherwise you look like an asshole participating in ostracism.
I mean, personally, if I'm making fun of someone I do make fun of their first and last names, "normal" or "not normal". So yes if don't like the dude, yes I would think "teehee, jack-off", or "Cuck Schumer".
“Cuck Schumer”
That's not making fun of the name though. It's not abusing him for the culture that produced the name being different. It's just a rhyme - with a sexual insult thrown in. "Chunk Yogurt" isn't funny - it's just an attack on the name.
if don’t like the dude
Right, if you don't like someone, one of the things you might do is make a joke off their name. But with Cenk, that's what people do immediately every day. It's driven by xenophobia. And it's not clever.
if he wore full-length fur coats would it be okay to call him Mink Uygur
I'm sorry but I'm not moved by anti-Turkish (or anti-Japanese for that matter) racism. Once your culture has produced a genocide you're white and fair game. No different than making fun of a German or French name.
If you just reduce it down to abstract culture then this justification works for literally anyone if you do enough of a stretch.
Kinda ignoring the historical/power context, aren't you?
idk that I agree w/ OP but saying Rwanda was the same as when the Young Turks (heh) death-marched a minority living in the imperial core as that empire collapsed is a big stretch
What follows is what the other user said and it's on him, not me, to further clarify it if folks don't like the obvious conclusions to be drawn from it.
Once your culture has produced a genocide you’re white and fair game.
I don't agree, but it is really fucked up that Cenk named his media company after a group that did one of the worst genocides in the 20th century.
a group that did one of the worst genocides in the 20th century
As far as I understand the history, that's not exactly accurate. It's more like the Jacobin Magazine - yes, the Jacobins did some atrocities (and before you say killing nobles is good - the vast, vast majority of the victims were peasants and suspected political enemies of all stripes, left and right, which is what eventually got them overthrown), but it was quite a complicated time and what we remember and praise them for isn't the atrocities, it's their ideals and the forceful pursuit thereof.
The Young Turks were liberal nationalists who were trying to reform the Ottomans for years before they sniffed political power. That's when they and their name became famous and associated with "revolutionaries" of any kind - which is the definition TYT was founded under. Certain factions of theirs eventually took power and perpetrated the Armenian/Assyrian/Greek genocides, but that was one of the things they did, it wasn't a linchpin of their program. Arguably, an unreformed Ottoman government would have done the same in their place - they had already been arming paramilitary Bashi-Bazouk forces that were known for massacring disloyal minority populations.
Given that Cenk was a genocide-denier in his Republican youth, I do agree the naming is a bit fucked up in retrospect - I'd rename themselves if I were them. But the Young Turks weren't the equivalent of Nazis, they were way broader than that and did represent one of the most progressive movements in Turkish history.
Arguably, an unreformed Ottoman government would have done the same in their place
Definitely arguable given the famed tolerance of the empire for minority populations within its borders, though by the onset of WW1 you're probably right.
I've only ever gotten the western education (radlib at least--in the same class we learned about the CIA assassination of Mosaddegh) so part of me wonders about the reputation of the young turks (given that ataturk did the genocide)--are they hailed as liberal and progressive simply for being a secular/nationalist/liberal rebellion in the imperial core of a dying Islamic empire? Or were they actually an improvement from the politics in the empire itself?
the famed tolerance of the empire for minority populations within its borders
Except when it came to dealing with rebellious subjects - which, like I said, were met with harsh reprisals. And some Armenians/Christians were at least restive during WWI (which is what all genocide apologia focuses on). There was also the famous conscription of Christian boys etc. The Ottomans were more religiously tolerant than most European states (especially of Jews), but they still lived in an age when collective punishment was the standard mindset. But, yeah, definitely an arguable question.
(given that ataturk did the genocide)
AFAIK, he did not (except in that he was an officer for a government that was doing it). He was a mid-level officer when it started (1914), was busy fighting WWI battles during it, and only became a national figure in 1918, when it was basically concluded. He later fought the Turkish-Armenian War where more civilian massacres occurred, so those are on him. But he had little power when the bulk of it took place.
part of me wonders about the reputation of the young turks ... are they hailed as liberal and progressive simply for being a secular/nationalist/liberal rebellion in the imperial core of a dying Islamic empire?
Great question for someone Turkish! I can only offer a glimpse of the Soviet perspective, which was generally anti-Turkey (NATO country, long-time Russian enemy), pro-Ataturk (Lenin and Ataturk were allies against the Entente powers during the Russian Civil War).
My guess is that people who're actually trying to reform the country after it had been declining and losing wars non-stop for like a century would be appreciated.
That was super helpful, thanks! FWIW American-Armenians have a page dedicated to Ataturk's completion of the genocide, but yeah you'd have to talk to a Turk comrade and/or an Armenian comrade to get a more accurate picture of how the folks most impacted view his role.
If that's logic, the sky is a pancake. Brain de-worming is in order.
WTF kind of thinking is "your culture has produced a genocide"? Collective punishment based on cultural affinity?? Was the Armenian/Assyrian/Greek genocide "Turkish" or "Ottoman"? Is any culture the same thing as it was 100 years ago? Absurdity on absurdity.
Genocides are human nature. We've just rarely had the opportunity for them until the industrial revolution.
And if you're a part of Western/American culture - you're associated with genocides of your own, so you don't have much moral high-ground.
Genocides are human nature.
That second half turned a cold take into a hot take.
So does that mean it's ok for chuds in the US and Europe to attack diaspora Turks because they're Muslim and middle eastern? Was the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII justified? I dunno man, this seems like shitty logic that just perpetuates an idpol, nationalist type of thinking and ignores class and other power dynamics.
Genzedong has poisoned my brain into wanting to scream "yogurt genocide" every time i see Cenk's last name.
Left and right wing economics weren't an actual codified concept at the time, fucking hell. "The Wealth of Nations" came out in 1776 (literally the book on capitalism and America are separated by a few months. Wild fact I just learned), and of course Marx didn't drop Capital until 1867. Trying to even apply our modern understanding of right/left wing to this situation is like using completely different units of measurement and saying they're the same. He might as well have said:
"Actually, the temperature today was 40 feet"
Would be about as logical.
It was a rebellion against the established order (the monarchy) to form the first liberal democratic state (based on a slave economy). The dynamics weren't dissimilar to socialist revolutions in the following centuries, just now the established order is the liberal democracies that the monarchies transitioned into (either peacefully or through violent insurrection).
So not at all leftist as we mean today, but leftist in the sense that they were against the monarchy which I believe was the initial use of the term in France? Supporters of the status quo stood on the right and the supporters of the transition to liberal democracy stood on the left.
Left and right wing economics are modern ideas; there is no timeless logic underlying them and their substance does not recur throughout history.
Take the Romans, for instance. They just didn't know any better! It was a different time. The idea of equality hadn't been invented yet.
The idea of equality hadn’t been invented yet.
Whiteness either, so we got a north african emperor. Just wish they'd never left England or the world would be a better place.
There couldn't have been any conceptualization of that.
Trying to even apply our modern understanding of ethnicity to this situation is like using completely different units of measurement and saying they’re the same.
So, except for the Antifa part isn't he right in a sense? Is it not reasonable to think that back then those fighting to establish liberalism over monarchy were the cutting edge of the European left?
There were legitimately socialist/anarchist/egalitarian sentiments in Europe at the time, but certainly calling the capitalists right wing at the tome of the Boston Tea Party is a bit nonsensical.
There was Thomas Paine. I wouldn't call him a socialist, anarchist or even a leveler, but based on his writings it's clear the revolution didn't go as far as he had hoped. It's funny, his pamphlet, Common Sense, served as the call to arms for the revolution. It was one of the most mass-produced documents in the colonies, but after all was said and done he was never included in the pantheon of "Founding Fathers."
Personally I think that the left v right wing paradigm shouldn't be used at all on discussing any politics before ~1800 because it just doesn't work
Whigs and Tories?
Since the early days of civilization there has always been a polarized political tension between the most powerful and the less powerful.
I mean, I get the dialectical struggle of the working and ruling classes being a constant throughout history was a central point of Marx's works, but I don't think that political the political ideologies of the day can be completely accurately described as left v right wing
That's a better way to put it.
Then again, actually descriptive terms are way better than "left" and "right" anyway.
He’s right if you define the left wing purely as anti-monarchists, which isn’t a bad definition honestly. But that’s not why he’s saying it. He’s saying it to recontextualize the founding fathers as left wingers, which is great because for some people, that’s the only way you’ll get them to understand that republicans are anti-working class reactionaries.
Sort of? Personally I see it more as "the newly minted bourgeoise that arose with the coming of capitalism didn't like that the old guard aristocracy left over from feudalism got all sorts of rights and privileges that they were locked out of. So they wanted to overthrow the old aristocracy so they (the bourgeoise) could become the new aristocracy". Both in America and France.
Yesterday he was so fucking hyped about that Trump concession he began the show by saying something like "Ana, are we gonna have anything but fun today?" and you could tell she was taken aback (which must take a lot at this point) and said "uh yeah we're going to be having a lot of not-fun today."
Then later in the show he's whinging about Pence maybe having deployed the national guard and he's like "what if someone attacked us? Who does the military get the order from?"
Just awful.
What an astounding take. Let's apply an already inadequate means of classifying ideology to an event that pre-dates its wide usage by more than a century.
And that predates its genesis by 10 years, in the Estates General. Just pure babybrained takes from him.
cenk is mostly good (and has probably done more to improve the life of your average murican than your average chapo shitposter)
but he has terminal lib brain.
I didn't realize union busting meant you were better than the average chapo.
Y'all gotta kill the boss in your heads and stop stanning these obnoxious radlib media folks.
*Bonus points for Cenk naming his media company after the group that death-marched 1 million Armenians.
that's a hypothetical and your two examples are outside the imperial core
given how media further left than TYT (haymarket, jacobin, etc.) in the imperial core already has dubious imperialist ties, i'm gonna go ahead and doubt the tyt union was a cia op rather than workers organizing for better conditions
seriously this FUD is wrecker shit, all to...defend a radlib? wtf
agreed, I'd even argue that most of them in the imperial core are fully captured thanks to the NLRA
but while not all unions, the boss unionbusting employees trying to organize in the imperial core is almost always bad, and I'm having trouble thinking of an example that justifies the almost
TYT is hard to watch because Cenk is just so damn unlikable. Anna should have taken over years ago
He was largely absent (and Ana was officially in charge of the show) when he was running for congress and apparently he's taking a few months off to write a book now.
