Obama in Ankara

Front pages of Turkey's major daily newspapers, Nov. 6, 2008

I picked up copies of a few Turkish newspapers the day after the presidential election, including a couple high circulation tabloids, the papers of record for left- and right-wing Turks, and one of Turkey’s two major English dailies. I’m still not so great at reading beyond the headlines, but one thing is clear: Turkish photo editors dig the Arringatore look. Closeups of each front page with headline translations after the jump.

Here comes the nanny Net

Today’s FCC ruling slamming Comcast for throttling BitTorrent traffic over their network is an indicator that more extensive government regulation lies ahead for that wild, anarchic thing we used to call the Internet. But college students across the United States may be logging onto a series of terrible dystopian future-tubes far sooner than everyone else, thanks to the 1,158-page Higher Education Act, which Congress approved yesterday and President Bush will soon sign into law.

Among the slew of new regulations in the bill is a provision originally inserted by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that requires all universities to develop “plans to effectively combat the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted material,” including technological tools like network monitoring and packet shaping, and to “offer alternatives to illegal downloading” like the industry approved, DRM infected services from Napster and Ruckus.

That’s right — universities have now been deputized as copyright cops, and the alternative services (which happen to pay big licensing fees to the record industry) have just received a subsidy by fiat. Public choice pressures, anyone?

The law is ambiguous on actually requiring colleges to implement any sort of network surveillance or traffic management tools, although as Will Patry notes, “there is likely to be an effort in the next Congress to mandate these technologies.” That means that although campus networks might not yet be monitored, students should expect more of the fun creative solutions designed by schools like the Missouri University of Science and Technology, which requires students to take an inane “copyright quiz” before allowing limited access to peer-to-peer network connections. Or the slew of schools that now give students a crash course in copyright law at freshman orientation — a complicated subject usually covered in, um, law school.

Shoot me now. In fact, I think I’d actually prefer school snooping to some of the awful anti-piracy programs designed by the academy. After all, our lovable federal government is already listening, so what’s another set of prying eyes?

Copyright is a deeply flawed system, but individuals ought to reasonably respect it, as they do with any other law. What deserves no respect, however, are efforts by media lobbyists to strongarm schools into doing their dirty work with the power of the state.

Critical massacre

Real Clear Politics points to a peculiar contrarian op-ed by Gregory Clark in Monday’s Japan Times, arguing that despite the iconic images and powerful press surrounding the 1989 student protests in Beijing, there is “overwhelming evidence that there was no Tiananmen Square massacre.” An excerpt from his revised history:

“True, much that happened elsewhere in Beijing that night was ugly. The regime had allowed prodemocracy student demonstrators to occupy its historic Tiananmen Square for almost three weeks, despite the harm and inconvenience caused. Twice, senior members of Deng Xiaoping’s regime had tried unsuccessfully to negotiate compromises with the students. Unarmed troops sent in to clear the square had been turned back by angry crowds of Beijing civilians.

“When armed troops were finally sent in, they too met hostile crowds, but they kept advancing. Dozens of buses and troop-carrying vehicles were torched by the crowds, some with their crews trapped inside. In the panicky fighting afterward, hundreds, maybe even thousands, of civilians and students were killed. But that was a riot, not a deliberate massacre. And it did not happen in Tiananmen Square. So why all the reports of a ‘massacre’?”

He goes on to contend that the most popular and widely printed account of the events in Tiananmen square, this article allegedly written by a Chinese student and reprinted in The New York Times, “was very likely the work of U.S. and British black information authorities ever keen to plant anti-Beijing stories in unsuspecting media,” and that Nick Kristof’s later account of the incident was more accurate but “buried on an inside page” by his editors. Has the free world been hoodwinked about Tiananmen by China-haters for two decades?

Doubtful. It’s not too much of a stretch to accept that the Tiananmen massacres were messier than popularly portrayed — not in terms of lives lost, but in terms of responsibility for them. After all, rarely is a popular struggle a clear-cut conflict between virtuous freedom fighters and evil opressors, especially when it becomes violent, as Tiananmen did once the PLA began to move in. But it’s also hard to fault the media for a modicum of inaccuracy or exaggeration — did the Party really think that cutting off the cameras just as the bloodshed began would prevent the rest of the world from imagining the worst? The fault for any “massacre myths” ought to fall far more heavily on a censorious Chinese government rather than the scattered reporters who relied only on their own observations of a massive, confusing, and dangerous incident, later pieced together into coherent copy and rushed to publication.

Ultimately, I think Kristof tells an objective story in his account of Tiananmen:

“This reporter saw troops fire on and kill people on the Avenue of Eternal Peace on the northern part of the square as well as some who were on a segment of the square just north of the avenue, near the Tiananmen Gate. But there is no firm indication that troops fired on the students occupying the monument in the middle of the square.”

Fair enough. But save for the historians, why should anyone care about the specific spot where student protesters were slaughtered?  In the wake of the incident, the Chinese government itself confirmed 241 casualties, and even the U.S. diplomatic documents that Clark curiously uses to try to discredit conventional accounts of the killings note that “reports of deaths from the military assault on Tiananmen range from 180 to 500.” Spin that as you please, but there’s no escaping the fact that hundreds of protestors gunned down anywhere is nothing less than a massacre. There is no lower bound beneath which indiscriminate and brutal slaughter are acceptable. History is a complicated thing that has its blemishes, but allowing them to discredit the overall story only makes the best account of the incident an enemy of the good ones.