After George W Bush was compared by Belgian police to a chimpanzee
and Turkish President Erdogan was compared to Tony Blair, now Erdogan has been compared to a character in J.R.R. Tolkien‘s fantasy novel The Lord of the Rings: Gollum.
A Turkish doctor made on Facebook a collage of Erdogan and Gollum photos. For that, he was sacked, and put on trial for ‘insulting the president’. However, it was not so easy for the judge to find out whether comparing someone to Gollum is an insult; as he confessed he had never read Tolkien’s books, and had not seen the films based on them either.
Daily Zaman from Turkey reported on 1 December 2015:
Because no decision was reached in the fourth hearing of a case in which Aydın-based physician Dr. Bilgin Çiftçi was accused of insulting President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan after sharing a meme comparing Erdoğan‘s facial expressions to the Gollum character in the “The Lord of the Rings” movies, a court has demanded an expert examination to investigate Gollum’s character to decide whether a comparison with him is an insult.
Gollum has a split personality: Gollum, his bad side, and Sméagol, his good side.
Maybe the comparison is not an insult to Erdogan, but to Gollum.
As I have seen Erdogan’s good, ‘Sméagol’ side only rarely (in his correct criticism of European Union countries’ anti-refugees policies). While I have seen his bad sides quite some times, eg, in warmongering, mining disasters, killing refugees and sending refugees back to war in Syria.
According to Tolkien, Gollum/Sméagol showed his good side more often.
See also here.
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