Depressing news from Turkey

SARAJEVO - I have been in Europe in the past week, in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Heidelberg, Germany, for public talks on freedom. Organized by the brilliant group "Students for Liberty," these were events that brought together liberals and libertarians in this part of the world to discuss threats against free speech, or freedom of religion, or the freedom of markets.

Thanks to these events, I had a better chance to hear more about what I call "first world freedom problems." Examples include the limitations on free speech based on concerns with "hate speech," or controversies about the circumcision of males, or heavy taxation and regulation that infringe with private property and disrupt the rules of the market. 

I certainly am not dismissing these issues. They are all important matters that have to be discussed and fought for in order to protect individuals from "nanny states" and over-organizing bureaucracies of our day and age. But I would still really love to only have nothing worse than these issues in the part of the world where I am from. 

I mean Turkey, of course, which has rapidly moved away from "first world freedom problems," putting itself in a completely different league over the past few years. For the past week, every time I opened my Twitter account I saw yet another line of breaking news showing me that we Turks really are heading to a very concerning future.

The raid on daily Cumhuriyet, of course, was the most striking example among all that breaking news. Cumhuriyet is Turkey's oldest newspaper, a citadel of the secular-Kemalist-leftist tradition, which I am not a big fan of but which certainly has an important place in our society and which absolutely must be free. 

Fourteen Cumhuriyet journalists are now...