This is the Cato Daily podcast for Tuesday, June 9th, 2020. I'm Caleb Brown. When the Cato Institute's

Mustafa Akiol watches protests unfold in the United States, he's reminded of a similar time in Turkey.

The protests there were simply known as Gezi Park, and they didn't exactly work out as protesters would have hoped.

He believes there are clear lessons for American protesters. We spoke this week.

What is going on in Minneapolis, in Louisville, in cities across the United States in response to

violence perpetrated by police largely against either unarmed people or people

where police did not have a justifiable cause of action.

This is nominally the reason why people are out there protesting.

You saw something similar in Turkey seven years ago. You were there for it. So describe to me,

what was Gezi Park? Well, the Gezi Park protests, as they're called in Turkey, was probably the

biggest social protest movement in the history of Turkey, modern-day Turkey.

And it was again a reaction to a police action, some excess, some wrongdoing of the police.

And it just triggered, and that triggered it and just turned into a nationwide protest against the government, the system, if you will.

So there are some similarities that I see there.

Of course, there are some differences too.

I mean, the killing of George Floyd was an unimaginable brutality.

I mean, it was really, really evil.

What triggered the Gezi Park protest

was something less tragic. I mean, it was police gassing a group of peaceful environmentalist

protesters in the park. And I think in the United States, there is 400 years of slavery and

discrimination against African-Americans, so there's a deeper history there.

In Turkey, you could argue that the Gezi Park protests were against a government whose

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