“
I am one of the early birds…”
Ece Temelkuran told me, “
I saw democracy collapse in Turkey and tried to warn the United States, European Countries and Britain about this. I’ve been telling people that what you think is normal, or a passing phase, is part of a bigger phenomenon that affects us all. Somehow though, European democracies feel they’re exceptional – and too mature to be affected by neofascist currents.”
Ece has seen this all before. In her incredible 2019 book https://www.harpercollins.co.uk/9780008294014/how-to-lose-a-country-the-7-steps-from-democracy-to-dictatorship/, she notes, “
We have learned over time that coups in Turkey end the same way regardless of who initiated them. It’s like the rueful quote from the former England footballer turned TV pundit Gary Lineker, that football is a simple game played for 120 minutes, and at the end the Germans win on penalties. In Turkey, coups are played out over forty-eight-hour curfews, and the leftists are locked up at the end. Then afterwards, of course, another generation of progressives is rooted out, leaving the country’s soul even more barren than it was before.”
Ece Temelkuran is an award-winning Turkish novelist and political commentator, whose journalism has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, New Statesman, Frankfurter Allgemeine and Der Spiegel. She has been twice recognised as Turkey’s most-read political columnist, and twice rated as one of the ten most influential people in social media (
with three million twitter followers). In this exclusive interview, we discuss the dangers of populism, authoritarianism and fascism, and why we need to act
now.
Q: Why are nationalism and populism creeping back into our world?
[Ece Temelkuran]: The
Second World War taught us a specific aesthetic of
fascism. We always imagine that Nazi uniform, and the kind of futuristic authoritarian settings we see on Netflix and HBO. In our culture, we see the
uniform and the
militaristic as the representations of authoritarianism and fascism.
Today, right-wing populism, authoritarianism and
neo-fascism are coming from different places. Reality TV stars, strange men, and people who otherwise would be considered national jokes. Many of today’s right-wing populist leaders are political figures that nobody really took seriously from the beginning. Nobody expected that neo-fascism could take hold with swagger, in such a laid-back manner.
To understand
why these phenomena are creeping back into our world, you have to look for the roots.
Neoliberalism has- since the 1970s- imposed this idea that the free-market economy is the best (
and most ethical) system humanity can come up with to organise itself. Neoliberalism changed the definition of what human fundamental morals are, and what justice means – and it’s created a new kind of
being. It tends to be the
extreme examples of neoliberal being that disgusts, appalls and surprises us – but those are also the people who have become the leaders of our world.
The neoliberalist model has been put forward as a solution to which there is
no alternative; we’ve crippled the political spectrum, cut the left away, and shifted everything to the right. Politics has become a competition, who can be
further right – and who can further deliver numbing of the mind through consumerism – after all… people are only
allowed to be free when they consume, and thus we are political objects, not political subjects…
Politics has become entertainment – and people feel like their opinions do not matter any more… this became clear after the
Iraq invasion when millions of people took to the streets of Europe, and saw that their call for peace meant nothing. Now? people carry this sense of being a political
object as a badge of honour – they want strong powerful men to be in charge… they want bold action like the suspension of parliament…. There is an incredible willingness to be
shepherded and that’s only because we’ve lost faith in democracy, in politics and
ourselves as political subjects.
The de-politicisation of media has also emboldened all of this – the obsession with objectivity has become a substitute for
neutrality. The vast majority of the world’s mainstream media have become obsessed with being neutral, and have done so at the cost of forgetting their main job – holding power to account, asking questions to power, and giving a voice to the voiceless. In many ways, the media have become their own class – an elite of sorts… that has cut ties with unions and politics…
