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Why Britney Spears’s fans are convinced she’s being held captive

Since 2008, indelible bubble gum pop star Britney Spears has been confined by a conservatorship that leaves her without control of her finances, business, or personal affairs. And since 2019, her fans have been speculating with increasing fervor that the conservatorship has left Spears, now 39, a prisoner in her own glamorous life and in need of rescue.
“She has NEVER had control over her life,” <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CCmj9u0H1u8/?utm_source=ig_embed">said a post</a> on the celebrity-focused Instagram Diet Prada that spread rapidly across the internet in the summer of 2020. “I don’t care if you personally like her or her music, NO ONE DESERVES THIS.” The post ended with a now familiar rallying cry: Free Britney.
#FreeBritney is the hashtag Spears’s fans use to follow rumors about her conservatorship — under which Spears answers to a mandated caregiver — and to advocate for its end. Together, they compare notes on anonymous reports about Spears’s living situation, pore through the posts her friends and relatives have “liked” recently, and work to decode Spears’s enigmatic social media presence. In April 2020, <a href="https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/8508234/britney-spears-protest-free-britney-los-angeles">they held a protest in Los Angeles</a> demanding Spears be released.
This February, the #FreeBritney movement rose up once again. The New York Times released a much-discussed documentary titled The Framing of Britney Spears that covered Spears’s harrowing rise and fall, and in its wake, celebrities from Sarah Jessica Parker to Bette Midler <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/britney-spears-documentary-celebrity-reaction/">issued their own calls to #FreeBritney</a>. Justin Timberlake <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CLMxYbGhTno/?utm_source=ig_embed">issued an apology for allowing the press to slut-shame her</a> after their breakup 20 years ago.
On June 23, Spears is expected to speak for herself in court, rather than through an attorney as she has in the past. The hashtag “#BritneySpeaks” has trended intermittently for the past few weeks as fans anticipate Spears’s moment, although it’s not clear whether her remarks will be made in public.
The day before her scheduled appearance, the New York Times published <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/arts/music/britney-spears-conservatorship.html">a new investigation into Spears’s conservatorship</a>, reporting that she’s been pushing for changes for much longer than was previously known.
Spears filed court papers in August 2020 asking that her father, Jamie Spears, who is currently in charge of both her personal and professional lives, be removed as her conservator. In November 2020, a judge for the Los Angeles Superior Court declined to make that happen. However, on February 11, 2021 — one week after The Framing of Britney Spears debuted — the court agreed to one of Spears’s requests: It placed the <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/britney-spears-conservatorship-judge-ruling/">financial company Bessemer Trust in an equal partnership</a> with Spears’s father.
The recent <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/arts/music/britney-spears-conservatorship.html">New York Times article</a>, however, has now revealed that Spears has been asking to explore ways of removing her father from the conservatorship since as early as 2014. In 2016, she told a court investigator that she felt the system had “too much control. … Too, too much!”
To understand the #FreeBritney movement and exactly what is at stake in the singer’s testimony, we’re going to have to delve into the nuances of California conservatorship law, Spears’s long and troubled career trajectory, and the deep protectiveness of her fans. In the end, we’ll come back to the same question that’s been driving our fascination with Britney Spears since the “… Baby One More Time” video first blazed across TRL back in 1998: Is Britney Spears the architect of her own life, image, and career? Or is she a puppet for unscrupulous people who want to use her doe-eyed prettiness to build fortunes for themselves?
Just who is in control of this woman, anyway?
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<figcaption>In 2007, Spears was pursued by paparazzi even to a child custody hearing at LA’s Family Court. Here, she waits for a sheriff’s deputy to tell her how to get into the court without being mobbed.</figcaption>
<cite>Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images</cite></figure>
When Britney Spears entered conservatorship in 2008, it was the climax to a years-long run of steadily more outrageous public behavior. Gone was the aspirational pop princess of her heyday <a href="https://www.lifeandstylemag.com/posts/britney-spears-ab-workout-151365/">who famously did 1,000 crunches a day</a> and <a href="https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2016/08/britney-spears-2001-vmas-snake-alive">writhed with a snake onstage at the VMAs</a>. In the mid-2000s, Britney Spears was going through a breakdown, one that the rising gossip blogs of the day served up to the public for avid consumption.
There was Spears’s quickie Vegas wedding in 2004, <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/britney-spears-shotgun-wedding-turns-10-remember-55-magical-hours-234192/">which lasted only 55 hours total</a>. Then there was the marriage to backup dancer Kevin Federline, also in 2004, which lasted two and a half years and was greeted by <a href="https://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/scientists-are-genuinely-losing-their-sht-arguing-over-which-is-the-most-overrated-animal/">what E! tactfully described as “mystification</a>” from Spears’s public.
The end of Spears’s marriage to Federline in 2007 at first appeared to signal a return to form, says media studies professor Moya Luckett. “She seemed to be on the verge of getting back from what people read as a misstep with the Kevin Federline marriage,” Luckett told me. “There was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YjHcFQxhqC8">an appearance on David Letterman</a> where people said, ‘Oh, she’s dressing better; she’s got herself back. We’ll now see Britney reappear as herself after she’s got rid of the dead weight of Kevin.”
Instead, Spears’s every action became the topic of breathless tabloid coverage. The paparazzi followed her around for up-skirt shots. She started yelling at them in <a href="https://people.com/celebrity/britney-spears-lapses-into-a-british-accent/">a British accent</a>. She <a href="https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/entertainment/a29681281/britney-spears-shaved-head-reason-2007/">shaved her own head</a>, allegedly telling a nearby tattoo artist that she was sick of people touching her hair, while paparazzi photographed every angle through the windows of the hair salon. <a href="http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1892685_1892691_1892788,00.html">She attacked a paparazzo’s car</a> with an umbrella. She went <a href="https://www.today.com/news/britney-spears-checks-herself-rehab-wbna17243855">in and out of rehab</a>. She sleepwalked through her performance at the 2007 VMAs so badly that Perez Hilton lectured her for <a href="http://www.mtv.com/news/2760492/an-open-letter-to-britney-spears/">being “disrespectful” to her fans</a>.
Gossip coverage of Spears became even more pantingly furious as her appearance changed. <a href="https://www.vox.com/2016/8/25/12630692/britney-spears-glory-career-history">She went brunette</a>, and then lost her hair entirely and turned to wigs. After injuring her knee, giving birth to two children, and taking a multiyear break from live performances, she’d gained weight, which the press treated as a salacious betrayal: <a href="https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/story?id=3582432&page=1">ABC News’s postmortem of those 2007 VMAs</a> quoted a celebrity publicist describing Spears as “heavy” before bracingly noting that an anonymous internet commenter had said of the starlet, “I’d hit it.”
“It was a collapse on a scale that we’d really never seen,” Luckett says. “And it was clearly abetted by the fact that gossip blogs had established themselves as very popular. With cameraphones, there was more access to this kind of information than we’d ever had before — both in terms of receiving the information and in terms of how many people could get on their phones and sell their pictures to the likes of TMZ.”
In January 2008, <a href="https://people.com/celebrity/britney-spears-hospitalized-again-for-evaluation/">Spears was twice placed under a psychiatric hold</a>. A month later, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/feb/02/musicnews.usa">her father petitioned the courts</a> for emergency “temporary conservatorship” over his daughter. The order was granted.
More than a decade later, Spears is still under conservatorship.
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<figcaption>Britney Spears at the Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood Los Angeles premiere, July 22, 2019.</figcaption>
<cite>Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagic</cite></figure>
“If you’re an adult, there is a legal presumption that you are competent to make decisions about a range of things, good, bad, or indifferent,” says Josephine Gittler, a law professor and the author of “Reforming the Guardianship and Conservatorship System: An Introduction.” “Your decisions can be good or bad, but you are entitled as an adult to make decisions about your finances and your property and your medical care. But all states have laws that recognize that some people have diminished decision-making capacity.”
Conservatorship is designed to be the solution to the problem of a legal adult who has a brain injury or mental health condition that renders them unable to properly care for their lives. Instead, the courts assign someone else to do so for them. (Some states distinguish between conservatorship as covering financial matters and guardianship as covering personal matters, but California, where Spears lives, calls both conservatorships. Spears’s conservatorship covers both her finances and her day-to-day life.)
Proving that an adult is no longer competent to run their own life is a long and drawn-out process. Someone has to file a petition with the court, often Adult Protective Services or its equivalent. (In Spears’s case, it was her father.) The courts will send an investigator to observe the subject’s life and to see whether there’s really enough evidence to warrant a conservatorship, and the judge assigned to the case will hear testimony from experts to see if the subject’s behavior meets the criteria for that state’s statutes. In California, in cases where the stated reason for the petition is mental health concerns, as it was for Spears, a psychiatrist would have to testify that the subject has a DSM-recognized diagnosis.
Once the conservatorship is in place, the conservator assumes final control over the subject’s decisions, which is where Spears is now.
“Anything she wants to do, she has to ask permission, as if she were a child,” says Elaine Renoire, president of the National Association to Stop Guardianship Abuse. “She doesn’t have the legal right to engage in a contract. That has to be done through a conservator.”
The exact details of Spears’s conservatorship are private. But <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/arts/music/is-britney-spears-ready-to-stand-on-her-own.html">the New York Times reported in 2016</a> that her financial conservators — at the time, her father Jamie and lawyer Andrew M. Wallet — kept track of “her most mundane purchases, from a drink at Starbucks to a song on iTunes.” On Tuesday, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/arts/music/britney-spears-conservatorship.html">the New York Times reported</a> that Spears had once wanted to refinish her kitchen cabinets and was denied permission. Meanwhile, her personal conservator (her father) oversees her mental health treatment and approves her visitors.
Putting someone under conservatorship means giving someone else enormous power over them. So the potential for abuse is high. “The check on that can and should be court monitoring of the conservatorship,” says Gittler. “Routine monitoring occurs through reports that the conservator has to make to the court, which the court has a very high responsibility of reviewing in detail. Not all courts always do what they should do, and that’s been a concern that’s led to reform of guardianship.”
For their work, conservators are paid a healthy salary. According to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/arts/music/is-britney-spears-ready-to-stand-on-her-own.html">the 2016 New York Times report</a>, Jamie made an annual salary of $130,000 and took home 1.5 percent of the gross revenues from Spears’s Las Vegas residency.
Under her father’s supervision, the Britney Spears financial empire flourished. After releasing four studio albums, doing a stint as a judge on the The X Factor, and holding down two multi-year Vegas residencies since her father took over running her life in 2008, plus establishing multiple lucrative merchandise deals, <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/britney-spears-net-worth-money-spending-fortune-conservatorship#:~:text=Britney%20Spears'%20net%20worth%20is,she%20spends%20it%20-%20Business%20Insider">Spears is now worth $59 million</a>.
None of the money she has earned, or the life that it funds, is under her control.
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<figcaption>A sign from a #FreeBritney protest outside Spears’s conservatorship hearing on July 22, 2020.</figcaption>
<cite>Frazer Harrison/Getty Images</cite></figure>
Spears’s fans have been suspicious of her conservatorship for as long as it has existed. Many of them point accusingly to all the work Spears has done over the past 13 years: If she is so unstable that she can’t be in control of her own life, they say, why was she <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/26/arts/television/26britney.html">guest-starring on How I Met Your Mother</a> just two months after the emergency conservatorship was established? Doesn’t that seem to suggest the conservatorship exists less to safeguard Spears’s well-being than to maximize her income and, by extension, the income of those in control of her life?
Gittler says it’s not uncommon for people under conservatorship to be active and productive in some parts of their lives but still not be considered legally competent to make their own decisions. “A person with Down syndrome, which may be minimal or profound, may be able to do all the activities of daily living, like holding a job, having a bank account, or purchasing food and clothing for themselves,” she says. “But they might not have the capacity to do their taxes.”
Nevertheless, the secrecy surrounding the Spears conservatorship has added to the growing sense that there might be something sinister going on. “The public has the right to know that the state is taking care of the citizens that need help,” says Renoire. “Everything’s so quiet with this case that it’s very disconcerting.”
Spears’s diagnosis and treatment plan remain private, as do the details of what she is and is not allowed to do. Few would dispute that Spears’s medical status is her own business and not information the public has any right to, but fans are troubled by how heavily mediated her access to the public appears to be.
Any reporters Spears talks to have to be vetted by her conservators first, with the result that Spears has only discussed her conservatorship in public once, in her 2008 documentary Britney: For the Record. (She said it was <a href="https://people.com/celebrity/britney-spears-calls-her-life-worse-than-a-jail-sentence/">worse than being in jail</a>, because at least when you’re in jail, you know when you’ll get out.) She has <a href="https://www.instagram.com/britneyspears/?hl=en">a regularly updated Instagram</a>, but after <a href="https://www.vogue.com/article/britney-spears-instagram-video-mental-health-response">a prominent post</a> went up with an emoticon rather than Spears’s preferred emojis and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BxiP_-DgdQj/">another one recycled a clip from 2018</a>, fans began to doubt whether Spears is always in control of what appears on it. It’s rumored that <a href="https://www.tmz.com/2019/05/07/britney-spears-using-mother-lynne-mental-health-dark-period/">Spears’s access to the internet is heavily curtailed</a> and that she is only allowed a flip phone.
Spears has said publicly that she handles her Instagram herself. “For those of you who don’t think I post my own videos, I did this video yesterday,” she informed her followers in 2019, in a now-deleted post showing her modeling different dresses to Rihanna’s “Man Down.” “So, you’re wrong!” she concluded.
Fans remained unconvinced. “It sounds and looks so scripted!” said the post’s top reply.
The Free Britney movement really began to take off not long afterward, in April 2019. That’s when comedians Tess Barker and Barbara Gray, hosts of the Spears-centric podcast <a href="https://britneysinstagram.libsyn.com/">Britney’s Gram</a>, <a href="https://britneysinstagram.libsyn.com/75-freebritney">received a voicemail</a> from someone who said he used to be a paralegal at the law firm handling Spears’s conservatorship.
Earlier in the month, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/BvziBzUgQoz/?hl=en">a post on Spears’s Instagram</a> had announced that the singer had checked herself into a mental health facility for “a little ‘me time.’ :)” (Note, Spears’s fans insisted, the emoticon.) Months before that news broke, Spears had canceled her planned Vegas residency, ostensibly to spend time with her gravely ill father.
“What is going on is disturbing, to say the least,” the former paralegal said in the voicemail on Britney’s Gram. He alleged that Spears had been committed to a mental health facility against her will and that there was no timeline for her release. The trigger, he claimed, was that Spears had been seen driving with her boyfriend to pick up some fast food, even though her conservatorship forbids driving. Moreover, he said that she had begun to refuse to take her medication. Jamie Spears had decided to take drastic action and blame his own illness for it.
Barker and Gray have said they spoke to the paralegal separately and found him credible. No other outlet has ever been able to verify his claims.
Meanwhile, Spears’s camp has maintained that the conservatorship remains necessary to keep Spears’s life on track. “The conservatorship is not a jail,” <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/the-battle-of-britney-spears/2019/05/17/edcc826c-7681-11e9-bd25-c989555e7766_story.html">Spears’s manager Larry Rudolph told the Washington Post in 2019</a>. “It helps Britney make business decisions and manage her life in ways she can’t do on her own right now.” Those successful Vegas residencies, for instance, were courtesy of the conservatorship: Part of Spears’s contract demanded she remain under conservatorship for as long as she was in residency to ensure that she wasn’t a flight risk. Without the security of the conservatorship in place, the thinking went, Spears would go off the rails again, and she would surely lose the business advantages and the stable and happy life she had worked so hard to build.
Rudolph added that Jamie wanted the conservatorship to end as much as anyone else. “It’s his daughter,” Rudolph said. “He wants to see her happy [in] a functional life without any intervention like this.”
In April 2019, Lynne Spears, Britney’s mother, entered the spotlight. Lynne has no legal involvement with the conservatorship, but she began <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/britney-spears-mother-likes-freebritney-comments-asking-end-daughters-1400332">“liking” posts under the #FreeBritney hashtag</a>.
In September 2019, Jamie temporarily stepped down as conservator of Spears’s person, though not her finances, <a href="https://people.com/music/britney-spears-father-jamie-steps-down-as-her-conservator/">after a physical altercation with one of Spears’s sons</a>. Jodi Montgomery, Spears’s longtime caregiver, stepped into the role on a temporary basis. In August 2020, Spears asked that Montgomery become her permanent conservator. Jamie Spears has heretofore remained in control of Spears’s financial affairs, but Spears also requested in August 2020 that he step down and be replaced by a “qualified corporate fiduciary.” The court declined to remove Jamie from either of his roles, but in February 2021 it did add Spears’s requested “qualified corporate fiduciary” to oversee her financial affairs — over protests from Jamie, who argued that this move lessened his control over his daughter’s estate.
The Free Britney movement continued to watch and wait.
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<figcaption>Spears performs in decorative manacles at the 2011 Billboard Music Awards in Las Vegas.</figcaption>
<cite>Ethan Miller/Getty Images for ABC</cite></figure>
Media scholar Isabel Molina-Guzmán suggests that the Free Britney movement caught particular fire because it came so quickly on the heels of the Me Too movement. “We’re really paying attention to women’s agency and power right now, and here’s this super-successful celebrity who can’t make decisions for herself and her kids,” Molina-Guzmán says.
And Spears’s position, she adds, seems particularly wrong for the generations of fans who grew up idolizing her. “That’s fan culture: You aspire to be your idol, or to feel like your idol understands you, right?” Molina-Guzmán says.
In her heyday, Britney Spears was just about the most aspirational figure in popular culture. She was the girl everyone was supposed to want to be. And many of Britney’s fans in particular latched onto her when she was leaving the strictures of the Mickey Mouse Club, embracing an image more provocative than Disney would ever have allowed in a way that suggested she was trying to take ownership over her body. For her to be under conservatorship — to have lost legal control over her life and her body — doesn’t fit the narrative.
“It’s not supposed to end with your dad being in control of your life!” Molina-Guzmán says. “So fans ended up looking for signs to try to justify their belief in a different ending.”
As the date for Spears’s July 2020 conservatorship hearing approached, fans began combing her social media pages for cues. Wear yellow if you need help, they instructed; wear black if you’re sad. There are so many of these messages in the comments of every Britney Spears post that Spears could hardly avoid sending a coded message through her clothing if she tried, but nevertheless, when Spears showed up on her pages dressed in yellow and black, <a href="https://theblast.com/136565/britney-spears-midriff-monday-photo-sparks-suggestions-she-isnt-">fans responded with shock and horror</a>.
Luckett adds that fans’ distress is particularly exacerbated by their belief that Britney isn’t running her own social media. “Part of the Britney narrative and part of the persona that seems to be authentic — and you always have to be careful about this,” Luckett says, “is that she seems to want to speak directly to her public because she thinks they’ll understand what she’s going through.”
Luckett points to Spears’s <a href="https://www.today.com/popculture/britney-i-do-not-care-what-people-think-wbna13329706">infamous 2006 interview with Matt Lauer</a>, for which Spears did her own makeup and during which she broke down in tears, as well as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britney:_For_the_Record">her documentary</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britney_and_Kevin:_Chaotic">her short-lived reality TV show with Kevin Federline</a>. The confessional nature of those accounts is a far cry from the suspicious “We all need to take time for a little ‘me time.’ :)” of 2019. If Spears’s fans think someone is keeping them from direct access to Britney, then they can understand themselves as being robbed of the part of Britney’s persona that made her so compelling to begin with. They start to feel outraged and protective.
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<figcaption>Spears in 1998.</figcaption>
<cite>Getty Images</cite></figure>
Ultimately, the Free Britney movement revolves around one question: Is Britney Spears in control of her own life? That’s the same question we’ve been asking about her for her entire career.
Early criticism of Spears sneered that she was a manufactured pop star, the product of a Swedish songwriting factory that had no real hand in either her music or her persona. “Seventeen-year-old actress Britney Spears couldn’t land more than a role in an off-Broadway update of The Bad Seed until she scored a contract with the Backstreet Boys’ record company,” begins <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20131211231544/http://www.rollingstone.com/music/albumreviews/baby-one-more-time-20030113">a capsule review of Spears’s debut album</a>, ...Baby One More Time, in Rolling Stone in 1998. “She was flown to Sweden’s Cheiron Studios, the Lolita-pop dollhouse where ‘N Sync, Robyn, Five, Ace of Base and the Backstreeters all record their Eurofied impersonations of teen-targeted American R&B.”
At Cheiron, Rolling Stone concluded, super-producer Max Martin and his team had collaborated to transform a perky Disney drama kid “into a growling jailbait dynamo.” Spears, in other words, was a passive blank slate, an actress with basic singing and dancing abilities who got lucky. The star audiences had fallen in love with was the product of clever producers and marketing.
When Spears came up in the late ’90s, music criticism was still overwhelmingly dominated by rockism, a system of aesthetic evaluation that prizes the so-called authenticity and grittiness of rock above all else. Spears’s slick, breezy pop was an affront to rockist sensibilities, and claiming that Spears was fake was an easy way to dismiss her.
Spears’s life, meanwhile, appeared to be entirely under her own control. Wasn’t she going out and partying every night with all of Hollywood at her feet? Wasn’t she reaping the rewards of all her producers’ hard work? And when she spiraled downward in 2007, it just proved that she should never have had that much freedom and that much control in the first place.
But over the past decade, the rise of poptimism, which celebrates the artifice and exaggeration of pop, has brought in a counter narrative. Spears, today’s critics note, was the one who came up with <a href="https://www.theringer.com/music/2020/5/14/21258289/britney-spears-oops-i-did-it-again-20-year-anniversary-retrospective">the iconic Catholic schoolgirl and cheerleader motif</a> in the “...Baby One More Time” video. She made the “Oops I Did It Again” video dance-centric rather than space-centric as her producers suggested. It was she who <a href="https://ew.com/music/2018/10/23/baby-one-more-time-britney-spears-oral-history/">ad-libbed all those</a> “<a href="https://ew.com/music/2018/10/23/baby-one-more-time-britney-spears-oral-history/">oh bay-bay bay-bays</a>,” and she who used her dancer’s intuition to help select the beats for each track.
“The public perception is that this is all created, that the record company created this — the artist, the music, the image,” <a href="https://ew.com/music/2018/10/23/baby-one-more-time-britney-spears-oral-history/">said Rolling Stone editor Ron Levy in 2018</a>. “I have to tell you, if the record company could have created more than one Britney Spears, they would have done it, and they tried!”
“Britney was the chief architect of Britney,” <a href="https://www.laineygossip.com/celebrating-20th-anniversary-of-britney-spears-oops-i-did-it-again-and-intro-for-may-15-2020/66255">wrote gossip expert Elaine Lui in May 2020</a>. “Anyone who tells you different reveals themselves to be a pop culture amateur.”
This celebration of Spears as her own auteur was part of the great poptimist revolution that reframed the way media gatekeepers had written about popular culture over the past 20 years. It’s part of a movement to stop reflexively dismissing culture created for and by teenage girls and to instead celebrate that culture as its own form of aesthetic expression.
But now that our public image of Spears is able to afford her some credit for her artistic work, her personal life becomes a bigger question. Even if the rumors are wrong, and Spears does have control over her own social media accounts — well, what about the way she fills them with <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CCbi0-igE-S/">blank-eyed selfies</a> and videos of her <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/@britneyspears/video/6844989705151319301?lang=en">practicing the same pose over and over again</a> or <a href="https://www.flare.com/celebrity/britney-spears-instagram-runway-videos/">runway walking in a variety of different dresses</a>? What is going on there?
“Because the videos are a kind of art brut expressionism, empty of context, they fill viewers with questions,” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/12/magazine/britney-spears-instagram-freebritney.html">wrote Caity Weaver for the New York Times in 2019</a>. “What does she want us to feel when we watch? Is she to be viewed as an innocent girl playing dress-up? An empowered stylish woman stomping across marble floors she bought herself? A sexy human Barbie with an infinite closet? Regardless of intention, the clips are illegible, generating primarily a voyeur’s guilty, mystified confusion.”
These repetitive, vacant videos feel somehow closely related to the ubiquitous paparazzi photos of 2007: Britney grinning into the mirror as she shaves her own head, Britney with the umbrella, Britney strapped down to a gurney in an ambulance.
In 2007, we were watching someone spiral away from the constraint of her managers and image-handlers and ultimately even out of her own control. Here in 2021, we seem to be watching someone at the limits of a very narrow, very prescribed world. It’s as though all Spears can do, as though the only thing she has, is the ability to pace through the halls of her mansion and hit a mark, over and over and over again. And then, maybe, have someone else post the video online with a smartphone she’s not allowed to use herself.
The Free Britney movement takes this sense of constraint and extends it.
“Her career has been on autopilot most of her life,” <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/CCmj9u0H1u8/?utm_source=ig_embed">says that 2020 viral Diet Prada post</a>. “If you look back at her music for years, she’s been telling everyone she’s too controlled and treated as a product.” It points to the many S&M-inflected photo shoots Spears has participated in, in which <a href="https://theblast.com/129683/britney-spears-chained-up-album-art-linked-to-conservatorship-cr">she’s shown in cages and chains</a>, and to <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEZ2azbB9P8">videos of Spears singing as a child</a>, in which her voice is notably deeper and fuller than it sounds in the sexy baby coo she made famous. It argues that Spears has been forced to sing outside of her natural register, to act and dance unnaturally in ways that her team will be better able to market.
The case Diet Prada made for Britney is, in a way, a close cousin to the case the rockists made against her in the late ’90s. It argued that she is a manufactured product unable to control how the public sees her, performing as her managers have forced her to for her whole life.
For the rockists, that apparent constraint made Spears disposable and unserious. For the current #FreeBritney activists, it makes her a victim who must be rescued. But one way or another, the question of whether that constraint really exists is the question Spears has been facing for her entire public life.
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<figcaption>A #FreeBritney protester outside Spears’s conservatorship hearing on July 22, 2020, in Los Angeles.</figcaption>
<cite>Frazer Harrison/Getty Images</cite></figure>
In public, Britney Spears has remained tight-lipped on how she feels about her conservatorship. However, the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/arts/music/britney-spears-conservatorship.html">New York Times’s June 2021 report</a> revealed that she’s been fighting back against it in private for a long, long time — and some of the allegations she’s made are just as sinister as those her fans have long suspected.
According to the Times, Spears told the court in 2019 that she was forced into that mental health facility against her will on “exaggerated grounds,” and that she believed the stay was a punishment for her decision to make an objection during rehearsal.
She added that she was forced to perform while running a 104-degree fever, which she said was one of the scariest moments of her life. If that accusation is true, it certainly seems to confirm the theory that Spears’s conservatorship is designed primarily to safeguard her financial value, not her personal health.
The New York Times also reported that Spears has concerns about her father’s sobriety, and that the court refused to take those concerns seriously. Jamie entered rehab for alcoholism in 2004 at his daughter’s urging, and in 2014, she told the court through her lawyer that she believed he was drinking again.
Spears’s concerns have been backed up by other parties. In 2010, a former nanny and housekeeper for Spears threatened to sue Jamie, describing him in a legal letter as engaging in “verbal abuse, tirades, inappropriate behavior and alcoholic relapses.”
When Spears presented her concerns to the court in 2014, her lawyer noted that Jamie had taken one random alcohol test and refused to take any more, calling Spears’s request that he do so “inappropriate.”
According to the Times, the judge responded, “Absolutely inappropriate. And who is she to be demanding that of anybody?”
Because the potential for abuse in a conservatorship is so high, the standard for ethical behavior from a conservator should also be high. But the judge’s comment would seem to suggest a belief that because Spears has struggled with substance abuse issues, it is inappropriate for her to question the sobriety of the person who is supposed to look after her welfare.
In May 2019, a judge ordered a medical expert to examine Spears and her life to see if she is competent to control her own affairs. Court papers show no official petition from Spears for such an examination, but <a href="https://www.tmz.com/2019/05/13/britney-spears-free-social-media-conservatorship-jamie/">TMZ reported</a> that she made a verbal request for one, and a conservatorship lawyer told <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2019/10/24/britney-spears-why-does-she-still-need-conservator/2288009001/">USA Today</a> that if she had made such a request, appointing an expert to examine her case would have been the immediate response.
But at the next conservatorship hearing in September 2019, Spears no-showed. The lawyer appointed to advocate for her informed the judge that her absence meant she “did not object” to the conservatorship continuing. <a href="https://theblast.com/137527/britney-spears-suffers-technical-difficulties-during-virtual-cou">She also didn’t appear at a July 22, 2020, hearing</a>, ostensibly because of technical difficulties. Records of the case have now been sealed from public view.
The August 2020 court papers in which Spears asks that her father no longer act as her conservator are carefully measured. Speaking on Spears’s behalf, Spears’s lawyer Samuel D. Ingham III gestures toward the idea that Spears might eventually ask for the conservatorship to end, but as of now, she has not.
Instead, Ingham describes the conservatorship as having three phases. The first was a “triage” that rescued Spears from the events of 2007 and 2008. The second was her comeback and her Vegas residencies. And the third phase, Ingham writes, must begin as of August 2020. What that phase might look like is currently unclear, but it seems as though Spears is asking for freedom from her father. Ingham also specifically notes that Spears does not wish to perform “at this time.”
Spears has also expressed some mixed feelings about the public’s renewed fascination with her private life since the release of The Framing of Britney Spears, especially with its focus on her downward spiral in the late ’00s.
“I didn’t watch the documentary but from what I did see of it I was embarrassed by the light they put me in,” <a href="https://deadline.com/2021/03/britney-spears-says-new-york-times-documentary-cry-1234725027/">she wrote in an Instagram post in March</a>. “I cried for two weeks and well….I still cry sometimes!!!!”
“These documentaries are so hypocritical … they criticize the media and then do the same thing,” she added in a now-deleted Instagram post in May. “I’m thrilled to remind you all that although I’ve had some pretty tough times in my life ... I’ve had waaaayyyy more amazing times in my life and unfortunately my friends … I think the world is more interested in the negative.”
We may never know how much control Britney Spears has over her image, her music, or her social media. But we do know what she’s asking us for now: to let her live her life in some peace.
<hr class="p-entry-hr" />
Update, June 22, 2021: This article was originally published in July 2020. It has been updated to include Spears’s August 2020 request that her father be removed as her conservator, a judge’s November 2020 ruling against that request, the February 2021 release of The Framing of Britney Spears and addition of the Bessemer Trust to Spears’s conservatorship, and the June 2021 New York Times investigation into the conservatorship.
Correction: An earlier version of this article said that Britney Spears had twins. Spears’s two sons were born a year apart.
An earlier version of this article included a quote implying that Down syndrome is a mental illness. <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/birthdefects/downsyndrome.html">We’ve updated the reference in keeping with the CDC’s guidelines</a>.
 
 
source <a href="https://www.vox.com/culture/22280627/britney-spears-conservatorship-free-britney-explained-framing-britney-spears">https://www.vox.com/culture/22280627/britney-spears-conservatorship-free-britney-explained-framing-britney-spears</a>

vox Why Britney Spears’s fans are convinced she’s being held captive

Since 2008, indelible bubble gum pop star Britney Spears has been confined by a conservatorship that leaves her without control of her finan...

Newsweek: Turkey Is Seeking “Soft Power” In Afghanistan

<div><img class="ff-og-image-inserted" src="https://shoebat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/turkish-military-march.jpg" /></div>
An article recently published on <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/turkeys-role-afghanistan-opinion-1602088">Newsweek</a> points out that Turkey has been seeking “soft power” in Afghanistan, especially now by asserting itself as the force of security in the country to fill up the vacuum soon to be left by the US:
<blockquote readability="35.878275570583">
The relationship between Afghanistan and the Ottoman Empire and later Turkey is rooted in history, with adequate relations during the 20th century.
Following the fall of the Taliban government, Turkey, as the most prominent Muslim-majority member of <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/topic/nato" data-sys="1">NATO</a>, considered its national interests and sent its troops to Afghanistan in 2001. Ankara also sought to expand its influence in the country, taking into account various political, economic, security and cultural considerations.
Two elements of Afghanistan’s society—the Sunni religious majority and the Turkish-speaking minority (Uzbeks and Turkmen) are of importance to Turkey. Turkey has always paid attention to the Turkish-speaking minority in Afghanistan, supporting them, especially when it came to former Vice President of Afghanistan Abdul Rashid Dostum.
Establishing Afghan-Turkish schools, expanding the number of Turkish scholarships, staff training, cultural consulting, growing the presence of the Younes Amre Foundation, broadcasting Turkish shows and movies and teaching the Turkish language all play an important role in increasing Turkey’s soft power, especially in Afghanistan’s Turkish speaking regions.
</blockquote>
It really is quite obvious as to why Turkey wants in on Afghanistan. America is leaving Afghanistan and will be completely withdrawn after September 11th. Turkey wants to fill that power vacuum. Just look at what Turkey has done in Syria, Iraq,  Libya and the South Caucasus and you will see Turkey growing as a global power.
 
 
source <a href="https://shoebat.com/2021/06/22/newsweek-turkey-is-seeking-soft-power-in-afghanistan/">https://shoebat.com/2021/06/22/newsweek-turkey-is-seeking-soft-power-in-afghanistan/</a>

armageddon Newsweek: Turkey Is Seeking “Soft Power” In Afghanistan

An article recently published on Newsweek points out that Turkey has been seeking “soft power” in Afghanistan, especially now by asserting...

Major Political Party In Turkey Declares: ‘By Allah, We Will Deport All Syrian Refugees Back To Syria.’

<div class="wp-caption aligncenter" readability="32"><a href="https://shoebat.com/2021/06/22/major-political-party-in-turkey-declares-by-allah-we-will-deport-all-syrian-refugees-back-to-syria/syrian-refugees-deported-from-turkey/" rel="attachment wp-att-144044"><img alt="" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-144044" class="size-large wp-image-144044" height="659" loading="lazy" sizes="(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" src="https://shoebat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/syrian-refugees-deported-from-turkey-1024x659.jpg" srcset="https://shoebat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/syrian-refugees-deported-from-turkey-1024x659.jpg 1024w, https://shoebat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/syrian-refugees-deported-from-turkey-300x193.jpg 300w, https://shoebat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/syrian-refugees-deported-from-turkey-768x494.jpg 768w, https://shoebat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/syrian-refugees-deported-from-turkey.jpg 1178w" width="1024" /></a>
Kemal Kilicdaroglu wants to deport all Syrian refugees
</div>
Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of Turkey’s main opposition party, the Republican Peoples’ Party (CHP), declared that if he won he would, by Allah, deport all Syrian refugees back to Syria, as we read in report from <a href="https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20210622-we-will-return-syrians-in-turkey-back-home-turkish-main-opposition/">Middle East Monitor</a>:
<blockquote readability="35">
Turkey’s main opposition leader on Tuesday said if his party comes to power, they would return Syrians now living in Turkey back to their home country, Anadolu Agency reported.
“With the permission of Allah, and the appreciation of the nation, when we come to power, one of the first things we will do will be to send brotherly Syrians (living in Turkey) back to Syria,” Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the head of Republican Peoples’ Party (CHP), told his party’s parliamentary group.
Kilicdaroglu said that the European Union would finance this return, without citing any evidence.
In fact, under a 2016 deal with Turkey on immigration, the EU provided funds to support Syrian refugees living in Turkey – now numbering about 4 million, more than any country in the world. An update to the 2016 deal is widely expected.
Kilicdaroglu also said when they come to power, they would provide peace in neighboring Syria.
“We will provide peace throughout the Middle East … this is my promise,” he added.
</blockquote>
CHP politicians talk no differently than populist politicians in Western Europe. In 2018, the Republican People’s Party (CHP) presidential candidate, Muharrem İnce, <a href="https://www.yenisafak.com/en/columns/ergunyildirim/the-main-opposition-chps-estrangement-toward-syrians-2045463">announced</a> in an inflammatory way that he will deport and block from entering Syrian refugees:
<blockquote readability="10">
“There are 4 million Syrians in Turkey; on Eid, 72,000 of them go to Syria for the holidays and then come back. So the conditions are suitable. Why do you come back to my country? Once you go, I will close the gates and you will be left there. Is this a soup kitchen?”
</blockquote>
The just recently elected mayor of Bolu, Tanju Ozcan, ordered the departments of the Bolu municipality to cease giving relief to refugees. In Ozcan’s letter to the government departments, he <a href="https://thenewturkey.org/turkeys-chp-is-reminiscent-of-the-far-right-in-europe">said</a> that the aid had surpassed its limit (regardless of the fact that there are only 1500 Syrian refugees living in Dolu) and that the people of Dolu “have cared for them for seven years, giving them our children’s livelihood. After this, I won’t give a single penny to Syrian refugees from the Bolu Municipality budget.”
In 2008, the CHP deputy of Izmir, Canan Arıtman, <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20150402125957/http://www.todayszaman.com/national_chp-deputy-aritman-unapologetic-as-gul-denies-armenian-roots_161910.html">attacked</a> Abdullah Gul for expressing sympathy towards the Armenian Genocide and linked Gul to a signing campaign to recognize the Armenian Genocide and even called his mother an Armenian:
<blockquote readability="9">
“The false scientists signing it should apologize to Turkey … We see that the president supports this campaign. Abdullah Gül should be the president of the entire Turkish nation, not just of those sharing his ethnicity. Investigate the ethnic origin of the president’s mother and you will see.”
</blockquote>
She then mockingly said of Gul:
<blockquote readability="7">
“How come the president — who never remembers democracy and freedoms in Workers’ Day celebrations when women on the ground are being kicked by the police — supports those who say we committed genocide and who apologizes for that?”
</blockquote>
The CHP party goes back to the days when the Turks, led by Kemal Ataturk, were fighting the British and Greeks for independence, after the First World War. During this time, in order to maintain harmony between his followers, Ataturk and his colleagues created the Müdafaa-ı Hukuk grubu (the “group for Defence of the Law”). In January of 1923, Ataturk transformed this group into the Halk Fırkası (People’s Party), and in 1924 this was changed to the Republican People’s Party, or the CHP of today. To deny the relation between the CHP’s current racism with its past racism would be like denying that the Democrat Party’s support for abortion is rooted in its history of supporting eugenics. The Young Turks, the Masonic society who would be at the very foundation of the CHP, believed in ethnically cleansing, through mass deportation and killing, the Ottoman Empire, with the idea of forming a Turkish national identity.
The Young Turks directed and superintended the deportation of hundreds of thousands of Greek Orthodox Christians. When the Ottomans loss their territories in the Balkans, many Muslim refugees from the Balkans migrated to the Ottoman controlled regions. To make room for these refugees, the Young Turks forced thousands of Christians to Greece. The properties and homes of these Christians were then given to the Ottoman Muslim refugees. These “population exchanges” were done not only with the authorization of the Ottoman government, but with the approval of Balkan governments as well. This was, in the words of Eugene Rogan, “ethnic cleansing with an international seal of approval.” This policy escalated. From being an exchange of populations under the agreement of governments, it became the mass deportation of hundreds of thousands of ethnic Greeks, occurring before and during the First World War. This was a racial policy.
Greek villagers living in Anatolia — far away from any Balkan lands — were also forced to leave their properties. They were rounded up by gendarmes and if they resisted they were shot. A similar thing happened to the Arabs of Syria. According to Muhammad Ali al-Ajluni, a soldier and eyewitness, Turkish soldiers refused to mix with Arab comrades in the mosque and in the mess hall, and even made racist remarks referring to the Arabs as “blacks”. The Ottoman Empire in fact used Arabs as slaves to build streets in Constantinople. During World War One Germany and the Ottoman Empire made an agreement to use Arab soldiers (who fought for the British and the French only to be captured by the Germans) as soldiers. The Germans used them as soldiers, the Turks used them as slaves. In March of 1916, the German lieutenant, Fritz Grobba, led a battalion of one thousand French Arabs from Wunsdorf into Istanbul. Ironically, the Ottoman war minister, Enver Pasha, did not trust the Arab soldiers and made them slaves to work building streets.  
While he was in Tarsus on the Cilician coast, al-Ajluni watched as trainloads of Syrians were being deported. “We saw the pain and sorrow etched in the expression of each and every one of them,” he recounted. As he saw these Syrians trapped within the trains, he also saw the mass of Armenians being deported to the opposite direction by guards “into whose hearts mercy never found its way.” (See Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans) The genocide of the Armenians, the extermination of the Assyrians, the mass deportations of Greeks and Syrians — all of these were done under a policy that aimed at the formation of a nation state. The treatment of non-Turks was hand in glove with the ideology of the CHP. The second president of the Turkish Republic and a CHP member, İsmet İnönü, said: “Only the Turkish nation has the right to demand ethnic and racial rights in this country. Any other element does not have such a right.”
This CHP’s very ideological roots consist of social Darwinism, racism and eugenics. In 1939, the CHP held a conference one of the topics of which was “Öjenik” (Eugenics). The presentation on eugenics was given by one Mazhar Osman Uzman, who <a href="http://psi421.cankaya.edu.tr/uploads/files/Atabay%2C%20Eugenics%20modernity%20and%20the%20rationalization%20of%20morality%20in%20early%20republican%20Turkey%20%28McGill%20Thesis%29.pdf">said</a> that every country has a population policy because they understand that larger and stronger nations conquer smaller and weaker nations, a reference to Social Darwinist ideology.
Turkish nationalism’s ideology is rooted in the work of Ziya Gokalp. Gokalp <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19448953.2016.1141580">believed</a> that blacks were inferior in intelligence and because of this the white man could not make enough money off of him:
<blockquote readability="9">
“as the black and red races were inferior in terms of intelligence and skill, the white master could not make enough fortune. In order to be a good worker in today’s standard of agriculture and industry, it is necessary to have a high level of civilization.”
</blockquote>
Gokalp held that the Turks of Central Asia were the original founders of Mediterranean civilization, but because of wars had to retreat eastward deep into Asia. He said that the “ancient Turks were among the earliest founders of that Mediterranean civilization” and it was only “after attacks that they were forced to move to Far East only temporarily”.
In the first half of the 20th century there were in Turkey what was known as  “Turkish Ojaks” or cultural clubs where Turkish nationalism was promoted. The institution of the Turkish Ojaks went back to the year 1912 and was founded “to reinforce the ethnic conscience among the Turks; to elevate their social and intellectual level; to purify their language; to increasing their economic prosperity”. One of the ideologues of Turkish nationalism, Rechid Safvet, believed that the Altai region (a land of the Turkic people in Russia) was the original home of the White race:
<blockquote readability="10">
“The Turks had always and profoundly the consciousness and the pride of their origins, their ascendances, so much that there was almost no leader among them that has stood with honour to trace back their ancestors to Altai, the birthplace of the white race itself.”
</blockquote>
The Republic of Turkey, established in 1923, was founded as a country of Darwinist and Enlightenment ideology. The Young Turks, influenced by the ideas of Herbert Spencer — the one who coined the term “survival of the fittest” — were, like the philosophers of the Enlightenment, anti-clerical and put a fanatical emphasis on science. Turkish intellectuals were strong believers in the ideology of positivism which held society as something mechanical, and thus something that can be engineered and altered through science and technology. Since they believed that society could be engineered, these Turkish ideologues were firm believers in Social Darwinism or Eugenics, which is the idea that human society can be manipulated so as to be transformed into something else. Positivism was the philosophical root of Darwinism.
Herbert Spencer found in Positivism the philosophical explanation for the idea of human evolution. The philosophy goes back to the Frenchman Auguste Comte, the inventor of the term Positivism, who believed that humanity had gone through three stages of intellectual evolution: religious, metaphysical and positive. In the first stage man tried to explain things with religion; in the second, with philosophy or metaphysics; and in the third, man began to observe things through the lens of science.
Comte believed that in the “positive” stage, society will be ruled under a technocracy, or under a regime of scientists who would know what is best for the people. This should remind us of Eisenhower’s warning about the “danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” By the age of 14, <a href="http://www.thegreatdebate.org.uk/Comte1.html">Comte</a>, in contempt towards his monarchist parents, embraced the republicanism of the French revolt against the Church and had “naturally ceased believing in God” and had already “gone through all the essential stages of the revolutionary spirit.” While he rejected monarchy he became an apostle for the idea of a regime of the religion of science and technology. It was this hatred for religion, combined with an emphasis on science, that was lodged within the movement of the Young Turks, or the political movement that overthrew the rule of the Sultan and established the Republic of Turkey. In the <a href="file:///Users/davidloving/Downloads/Politics_of_the_body_and_eugenic_discour.pdf">words</a> of Alemdaroglu:
<blockquote readability="15">
“Reformers, both before and after the founding of the Republic, shared many positivist attitudes such as anti-clericalism, scientism, biological materialism, authoritarianism, social Darwinism, intellectual elitism and a deep distrust of the masses (Zurcher, 2001: 54).”
</blockquote>
The aspects that made up Kemal Ataturk’s new country were populism, republicanism, nationalism and the fixation on a national identity and the nation-state. These aspects were codified under one label: Kemalism, the ideology of the CHP. The Kemalists saw the Western world and as they envied its success, they also observed its emphasis on science and social-Darwinism, and believed that if Turkey was going to be successful they needed to make a society that put science and technology above religion. With the hope of Turkish advancement, Turkish intellectuals began resorting to race science to prove that the Turk was equal to the White man of Western Europe. One physician, Şevket Aziz Kansu, who had ties to Kemal Ataturk, went so far as to compare Turkish and European skulls to show that they both have similar brachycephalic structure.
Gokalp held that the Turks of Central Asia were the original founders of Mediterranean civilization, but because of wars had to retreat eastward deep into Asia. He said that the “ancient Turks were among the earliest founders of that Mediterranean civilization” and it was only “after attacks that they were forced to move to Far East only temporarily”.
In the first half of the 20th century there were in Turkey what was known as  “Turkish Ojaks” or cultural clubs where Turkish nationalism was promoted. The institution of the Turkish Ojaks went back to the year 1912 and was founded “to reinforce the ethnic conscience among the Turks; to elevate their social and intellectual level; to purify their language; to increasing their economic prosperity”. One of the ideologues of Turkish nationalism, Rechid Safvet, believed that the Altai region (a land of the Turkic people in Russia) was the original home of the White race:
<blockquote readability="10">
“The Turks had always and profoundly the consciousness and the pride of their origins, their ascendances, so much that there was almost no leader among them that has stood with honour to trace back their ancestors to Altai, the birthplace of the white race itself.”
</blockquote>
The Republic of Turkey, established in 1923, was founded as a country of Darwinist and Enlightenment ideology. The Young Turks, influenced by the ideas of Herbert Spencer — the one who coined the term “survival of the fittest” — were, like the philosophers of the Enlightenment, anti-clerical and put a fanatical emphasis on science. Turkish intellectuals were strong believers in the ideology of positivism which held society as something mechanical, and thus something that can be engineered and altered through science and technology. Since they believed that society could be engineered, these Turkish ideologues were firm believers in Social Darwinism or Eugenics, which is the idea that human society can be manipulated so as to be transformed into something else. Positivism was the philosophical root of Darwinism.
Herbert Spencer found in Positivism the philosophical explanation for the idea of human evolution. The philosophy goes back to the Frenchman Auguste Comte, the inventor of the term Positivism, who believed that humanity had gone through three stages of intellectual evolution: religious, metaphysical and positive. In the first stage man tried to explain things with religion; in the second, with philosophy or metaphysics; and in the third, man began to observe things through the lens of science.
Comte believed that in the “positive” stage, society will be ruled under a technocracy, or under a regime of scientists who would know what is best for the people. This should remind us of Eisenhower’s warning about the “danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” By the age of 14, <a href="http://www.thegreatdebate.org.uk/Comte1.html">Comte</a>, in contempt towards his monarchist parents, embraced the republicanism of the French revolt against the Church and had “naturally ceased believing in God” and had already “gone through all the essential stages of the revolutionary spirit.” While he rejected monarchy he became an apostle for the idea of a regime of the religion of science and technology. It was this hatred for religion, combined with an emphasis on science, that was lodged within the movement of the Young Turks, or the political movement that overthrew the rule of the Sultan and established the Republic of Turkey. In the <a href="file:///Users/davidloving/Downloads/Politics_of_the_body_and_eugenic_discour.pdf">words</a> of Alemdaroglu:
<blockquote readability="15">
“Reformers, both before and after the founding of the Republic, shared many positivist attitudes such as anti-clericalism, scientism, biological materialism, authoritarianism, social Darwinism, intellectual elitism and a deep distrust of the masses (Zurcher, 2001: 54).”
</blockquote>
The aspects that made up Kemal Ataturk’s new country were populism, republicanism, nationalism and the fixation on a national identity and the nation-state. These aspects were codified under one label: Kemalism, the ideology of the CHP. The Kemalists saw the Western world and as they envied its success, they also observed its emphasis on science and social-Darwinism, and believed that if Turkey was going to be successful they needed to make a society that put science and technology above religion. With the hope of Turkish advancement, Turkish intellectuals began resorting to race science to prove that the Turk was equal to the White man of Western Europe. One physician, Şevket Aziz Kansu, who had ties to Kemal Ataturk, went so far as to compare Turkish and European skulls to show that they both have similar brachycephalic structure.
The Kemalists lobbied for a more masculinist society in which athleticism and being physically strong would be revered. There was Selim Sırrı, an educator who was influential in Republican policy on the physical fitness of the society. According to Sirri, a physically fit society was paralleled with a well trained army. The Kemalists worked to create a culture of athleticism in which being physically fit was either a matter of pride or shame. The parliament passed the Body Discipline Law in 1938 to “regulate games, gymnastics and sports that improve the physical and moral capabilities of the citizens in accordance with the national and reformist principles”. Article 3 of the law made it mandatory that youth partake in physical fitness during their free time.
The major conduit for social Darwinism within the Republic of Turkey was the Committee of Union and Progress (later known as the Union and Progress Party), the secret society of the Young Turks the successors of which would later form the CHP. Abdullah Cevdet, a founding member of the Union and Progress Party, taught that the socio-economic status of a person would effect the genetic traits of his or her offspring. For example, Cevdet said that the children of subjugated women would perpetuate the inferior traits of their mothers. The Turkish government under the Kemalists of the CHP, instilled in its education system a belief in the Turkish master race, and the idea that mothers needed to birth children of superior genetic qualities. In a 1934 biology textbooks for secondary students, it teaches this doctrine:
<blockquote readability="15">
“The Turkish race, to which we are proud to belong, has a distinguished place amongst the best, strongest, most intelligent and most competent races in the world. Our duty is to preserve the essential qualities and virtues of the Turkish race and to confirm that we deserve to be members of this race. For that reason, one of our primary national duties is to adhere to the principle of leading physically and spiritually worthwhile lives by protecting ourselves from the perils of ill health, and by applying the knowledge of biology to our lives. The future of our Turkey will depend on the breeding of high valued Turkish progeny in the families that today’s youth will form in the future.” (Biyoloji ve I˙nsan Hayatı II, 1934: 321)
</blockquote>
It is this racialist fixation that the CHP still holds today. It is not surprising that in a CHP meeting in Antwerp there was found Filip DeWinter, a neo-Nazi and the head of the Flemish separatist Vlaams Belang party, which recently became the second largest party of Belgium.
The nationalists of Turkey are with with the nationalists of Flanders; those who continue the legacy of the Young Turks, who did ethnic cleansing for a homogenous Turkish empire, are with DeWinters who declared: “Yes, Vlaams Blok will put our own people first and yes, Vlaams Blok will have a Flemish Flanders and YES, the Vlaams Blok will have a white Europe!”.
[embedded content]
The parties of ethnic cleansing are here collaborating. What makes this even more interesting is the fact that it was Filip DeWinter who organized the 2007 Counterjihad Brussels Summit in the EU Parliament building, the very conference that would establish the Counterjihad movement of Robert Spencer, Pamela Geller, Baron Bodissey and a plethora of other nefarious figures, into an international network of internet agitators. The Counterjihad movement, <a href="https://shoebat.com/2017/07/02/how-the-anti-islam-movement-was-created-by-the-cia-and-very-powerful-eugenist-elites-to-advance-nazism-eugenics-paganism-and-genocidal-ideology/">as we have shown substantially</a>, is really a conduit by which to spread nationalism, racialism and eugenics. It would not be surprising that the racialists and technocrats of the West want the CHP to take power so as to spark nationalism in Turkey (the <a href="https://shoebat.com/2017/09/09/the-world-is-heading-towards-armageddon-as-the-major-military-powers-of-the-earth-prepare-for-war-great-britain-germany-turkey-hungary-and-the-major-military-powers-of-the-earth-are-all-preparing/">CIA was working with Turkish Nazi Alparslan Türkeş</a> for this very goal). Regardless, we should not be optimistic about the CHP.   
 
 
source <a href="https://shoebat.com/2021/06/22/major-political-party-in-turkey-declares-by-allah-we-will-deport-all-syrian-refugees-back-to-syria/">https://shoebat.com/2021/06/22/major-political-party-in-turkey-declares-by-allah-we-will-deport-all-syrian-refugees-back-to-syria/</a>

armageddon Major Political Party In Turkey Declares: ‘By Allah, We Will Deport All Syrian Refugees Back To Syria.’

Kemal Kilicdaroglu wants to deport all Syrian refugees Kemal Kilicdaroglu, the leader of Turkey’s main opposition party, the Republican P...

The Biden Administration Is Now Defending Donald Trump

<a href="https://shoebat.com/2021/06/22/the-biden-administration-is-now-defending-donald-trump/biden-trump/" rel="attachment wp-att-144040"><img alt="" class="aligncenter wp-image-144040 jetpack-lazy-image" data-lazy-sizes="(max-width: 761px) 100vw, 761px" data-lazy-srcset="https://shoebat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/biden-trump-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://shoebat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/biden-trump-300x169.jpg 300w, https://shoebat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/biden-trump-768x432.jpg 768w, https://shoebat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/biden-trump.jpg 1078w" height="428" loading="lazy" src="https://shoebat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/biden-trump-1024x576.jpg?is-pending-load=1" srcset="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7" width="761" /></a>
<img alt="" class="aligncenter wp-image-144040" height="428" loading="lazy" sizes="(max-width: 761px) 100vw, 761px" src="https://shoebat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/biden-trump-1024x576.jpg" srcset="https://shoebat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/biden-trump-1024x576.jpg 1024w, https://shoebat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/biden-trump-300x169.jpg 300w, https://shoebat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/biden-trump-768x432.jpg 768w, https://shoebat.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/biden-trump.jpg 1078w" width="761" />
Trump is getting defense from the most unlikely entity: the Biden administration, as we read in <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/bidens-justice-dept-may-defend-trump-capitol-riot-lawsuits-2021-06-22/">Reuters</a>:
<blockquote readability="33">
 Former U.S. President Donald Trump may have an unlikely ally to defend him against lawsuits alleging he incited the U.S. Capitol insurrection: President Joe Biden’s Justice Department.
The Biden administration paved the way for that possibility, say constitutional scholars and lawyers in the cases, by arguing in an unrelated defamation case against Trump that presidents enjoy sweeping immunity for their comments while in office – and the right to a defense by government lawyers. Biden’s Justice Department used that rationale in a surprise decision this month to continue defending Trump in a case filed by E. Jean Carroll, who contends Trump raped her 25 years ago and then lied about it while in office, defaming her.
That decision reaffirms the position the department took under the Trump administration. And it has profound implications for several ongoing lawsuits, including one filed by two U.S. Capitol Police officers seeking to hold Trump liable for injuries they suffered defending the building in the Jan. 6 attack.
Attorney Philip Andonian said he fears the Justice Department, under the same legal rationale, will also defend Trump in a case Andonian is pursuing on behalf of U.S. Representative Eric Swalwell, a California Democrat. Swalwell alleges Trump incited the deadly Jan. 6 riot in an effort to stop Congress from performing its duty to certify Biden as the election winner. Andonian called the logic behind the department’s decision to defend Trump against Carroll’s defamation suit “alarming.”
The Justice Department appears to put no limits on immunity for speech by a sitting president on any matter considered “of public concern,” Andonian said.
</blockquote>
 
 
source <a href="https://shoebat.com/2021/06/22/the-biden-administration-is-now-defending-donald-trump/">https://shoebat.com/2021/06/22/the-biden-administration-is-now-defending-donald-trump/</a>

armageddon The Biden Administration Is Now Defending Donald Trump

Trump is getting defense from the most unlikely entity: the Biden administration, as we read in Reuters : Former U.S. President Donald ...

Swedish Firm Says Covid Test Database Breached

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<div class="ins_instory_dv_cont"><img alt="Swedish Firm Says Covid Test Database Breached" src="https://c.ndtvimg.com/2020-12/9t7ugcnc_coronavirus-generic_625x300_20_December_20.jpg" title="Swedish Firm Says Covid Test Database Breached" /></div>
The Swedish firm's database contained patient data, including COVID-19 test results (Representational)
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Stockholm:
A Swedish information technology firm said on Tuesday a database containing patient data, including COVID-19 test results, had been breached but it was unclear if any contents had leaked.
InfoSolutions said in a statement that it had identified a breach last week but it had since "identified and solved what made the intrusion possible.
"It cannot be ruled out that personal data has been read, but InfoSolutions considers the risk to be very low," it said, adding that no information had been lost or altered.
The firm provides digital journals, including test results, for 15 of Sweden's 21 regions on behalf of the Public Health Agency, which has twice shut the database in recent months and reported suspected breaches to the police.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
 
 
source <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/swedish-firm-says-covid-test-database-breached-2470220">https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/swedish-firm-says-covid-test-database-breached-2470220</a>

news world Swedish Firm Says Covid Test Database Breached

The Swedish firm's database contained patient data, including COVID-19 test results (Representational) Stockholm: A Swedish informa...

Google To Soon Face Lawsuit Over Play Store From US States: Sources

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Google already faces a federal lawsuit brought by the Justice Department last year (File).
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Washington:
A group of state attorneys general may file a lawsuit against Alphabet Inc's Google as early as next week, accusing the search and advertising giant of violating antitrust law in running its mobile app store, according to three sources familiar with the matter.
The anticipated lawsuit follows complaints from app developers about Google's management of its Play Store for Android devices, according to one source. The lawsuit has been in the works since last year and has already been delayed, but seems close again, the sources said.
The investigation by the state attorneys general is being led by Utah, Tennessee, North Carolina and New York. It is unclear how many states will participate.
Two sources said the case is likely to be filed in federal court in Northern California, where related cases are being heard. These include a lawsuit that video game maker Epic Games Inc filed against Google last year, accusing it of having anti-competitive app store rules. It is expected to go to trial in 2022.
There also are two proposed class-action lawsuits over the Play Store before the same judge. If the states want to participate in depositions and other pre-trial activities, they would have to file fairly soon, one source said.
Apple Inc and Epic are awaiting the verdict in a similar California lawsuit after a trial that ended last month.
A Google spokesperson defended their app store as open.
"Android is the only major operating system that allows people to download apps from multiple app stores. In fact, most Android devices ship with two or more app stores preinstalled. They can also install additional app stores or apps directly from their browser if they choose," the spokesperson said.
Google was originally seen as more open in how it ran its app store than Apple but has tightened rules recently and increased enforcement of those rules.
The lawsuit is expected to focus on Google's requirement that some apps use the company's payment tools to sell subscriptions and content and pay Google as much as 30% of sales, according to two sources.
App makers like music streaming service Spotify Technology SA and dating services giant Match Group, which owns the Tinder app, have long accused both Google, as well as Apple, of being anti-competitive in demanding mandatory revenue sharing.
This latest lawsuit is being planned at a time of unusually vigorous debate over whether federal antitrust enforcement is too lax. Many people, including Senator Amy Klobuchar who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee's antitrust panel, have pressed for tougher enforcement.
Google already faces a federal lawsuit brought by the Justice Department last year and related antitrust cases brought by two separate groups of attorneys general. One is led by Texas and focused on advertising while the other targets Google's alleged efforts to extend its dominance in search to newer markets, like voice assistants.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
 
 
source <a href="https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/google-to-soon-face-lawsuit-over-play-store-from-us-states-sources-2470217">https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/google-to-soon-face-lawsuit-over-play-store-from-us-states-sources-2470217</a>

news world Google To Soon Face Lawsuit Over Play Store From US States: Sources

Google already faces a federal lawsuit brought by the Justice Department last year (File). Washington: A group of state attorneys gener...