A reader sends a link to an interview in ThoughtEconomics with Ece Temelkuran, a Turk forecasting doom if we don’t all become socialists – immediately:
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…
This was interesting in that she virtually calls for the politicization of the media. But we’ve seen how that plays out here in the States with the megaphones of the fringe-right-wing, such as Fox News and Breitbart – anything from carefully manipulated reporting to out and out lies. Temelkuran may decry the loss of those links between unions, politics, and the media as diagnostic of the imminent failure of democracies, but for me those links lead to propaganda, and I’m allergic to that favorite organ of political zealots, regardless of the stripe.
If we – and I mean everyone, not just the socialists, or the communists, or the liberals, or anyone else who wants to spit on all of their political rivals – are to solve the problems facing the world, we need a commonly agreed upon collection of facts, and that is best provided by media which embraces the neutral[1] stance in its reporting, though not necessarily in its editorial stance. Temelkuran, in this instance, reminds me of a lot of political zealots I’ve known who view the media as evil because they’re not on the side favored by the zealot in question. Their moral certitude makes me question their maturity.
Q: What are populism and nationalism?
[Ece Temelkuran]: Today, there is less time to understand the differences between nationalism, populism and authoritarianism. In Britain, democracy is literally crumbling at the hands of a strange guy with funny hair! People simply aren’t recognising the dangers that lay ahead, so there’s not enough time to get into definitions
One truth is that you cannot really know what populism is until you experience it. Populism is the act of politicising and mobilising ignorance to the point of political and moral insanity. Nationalism as we know, comes from the phenomena of nation-states – and it’s quite ironic therefore that we are now talking more and more about the failure of nation states and the failure of supranational and international institutions as well… and meanwhile neo-nationalism is on the rise. …
Q: How can we fight the growth of authoritarianism?
[Ece Temelkuran]: People sometimes look to the Middle East to see where things are going wrong, but I must say… in Turkey, perhaps our democracy was stronger – it took decades for Erdoğan to achieve what Boris Johnson did in a few weeks… maybe we had a better resistance…
I have to say though, it’s difficult to find something positive to say about the fight against authoritarianism in the middle east but I am incredibly inspired by the fight of young women in Turkey and the Middle East – fighting for democracy with their lives… they are unstoppable…
When it comes to Europe and the Western democracies; we have to take to the streets and make ourselves heard – end of story. We have to organise, mobilise and politicise… we have to use those good old-fashioned tools of politics, they’re the ones that count. We have to show-up! We have to fight, we have to get out onto the streets and change things.
Since the 1970s it’s almost become a taboo to talk of conflict – we’ve become a society geared around consensus, and co-existence – and this has domesticated politics in a dangerous way. The media have been too busy finding consensus with the Brexiteers and Trumpeteers to fight them.
This is a political struggle and there is no politeness or kindness in this. It is very clear what one has to do if one has to defend her right. It is to fight back when there is oppression.
I must admit I react poorly to rhetoric meant to inflame the passions, especially when I can start raising objections as I read. The Turkish collapse of democracy has been almost entirely precipitated by the Islamists in their calls for Turkey to be an Islamic State, and all that goes along with theocracies. What theocrats of any stripe rarely anticipate – because God is on their side! – is the moral collapse that accompanies the rule of those who believe they can do no wrong. We see this in Erdogan’s behavior, and while Trump was already morally collapsed before he was elected, it’s not difficult to see just about all of his religious supporters to now be in a similar state of moral collapse, in particular in the religious leaders who’ve refused to abandon him.
But Temelkuran tries desperately to draw a parallel to Prime Minister Johnson in Great Britain, and I must say I am unconvinced. He and his party are not, as best I can tell, in the grip of religious mania or ideological madness, a remark which might apply more properly to the defeated Labour leadership and their dreams of re-nationalizing industries. Expatriate Andrew Sullivan has pointed out, following a visit to his former homeland, that the Brits had some legitimate concerns about how their country was being run and that they didn’t like it.
It didn’t sound like religious mania. The appeal to nationalism sounds awful to those of us who have had to put up with the mendacious Make America Great Again slogan, but that word, nationalism, lacks nuance. Nationalism is not innately evil. It, in fact, serves to keep New York City from building an army and invading Philly. Oh, you think that sounds stupid? Think of Greece back when it was Athens and Sparta and all the rest, fighting with each other, think about how, as the Islamic State was taking over cities in the Middle East, each city would be used to move on to the next.
Nationalism is the name we use to explain why we don’t do that shit. Because we believe, from border to border, that we are a people sharing something important. Whether it’s a belief in freedom, or victimhood, or standing aloof from our neighbors on the Continent, nationalism is what keeps us from disintegrating into warring villages, or even feuding clans and even small families.
And, of course, when used to build a fallacious superiority complex, it can lead to war & brutality. Nationalism is, like most tools, morally neutral; the responsibility for its end result lies with the people who’ve used it for good or bad ends.
But we don’t have a good set adjectives to go with it. Turkish nationalism, American nationalism, British nationalism – these are not morally equivalent phrases. One cannot say Oh, they’re nationalists, they’re evil! So when she decries a strange guy with funny hair!, itself a red flag to the skeptical reader, for encouraging nationalism, it’s important to know and understand the particulars. Sullivan suggests the Brits aren’t motivated by xenophobia and religious mania, but concerns that their governance isn’t coming from the people they elected, but from the unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. Never mind if it’s an appropriate concern – we’re concerned about the roots, and these do not strike me as utterly irrational worries, unlike the America Christians who support Trump, or the Islamists in Turkey.
So when Temelkuran tries to lump them altogether in an interview that makes my pulse race, it’s a big blinking red light that something’s wrong. And speaking of factual concerns, the introduction to this piece struck me as rhetoric to be wary of:
Ece has seen this all before. In her incredible 2019 book 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.”
It’s a lovely summary that really evokes a sense of persecution and victimhood, isn’t it? It serves to bond together everyone who considers themselves to be like-minded.
Here’s the problem:
After that last Turkish coup attempt, it was the military who suffered. As the punishments mounted for those military members even suspected to be sympathetic to the coup, or of being a Gulenist, former Turkish military members were recalled to their units in order to make their units operational again. Sure, the progressives might have been impacted as well, but they were not the sole, or even primary, victims.
Binding disparate people together requires they have some shared, or potentially shared, experience, along with a reason they’re special. The above paragraph provides the persecutive behavior inflicted on the progressives, and how much of an impact on the country’s soul their absence has. It’s just about perfect.
But when it omits facts, I become quite suspicious. The history of politics is positively full to the brim of manipulative slogans, rants, and any other form of communication you care to name, and I prefer to not be one of the victims.
1 Long time readers might remember that I’ve treated the subject of neutral reporting before. It means being fair-minded; it doesn’t mean allowing idiots and liars onto the stage. It means calling Trump a liar every time he lies or misleads. It means ignoring people who run around with their hair on fire crying about chemtrails or the world is flat or any other completely discredited nonsense. And it’s not as easy as it sounds, but it’s really what needs to happen. Just a mention in the mainstream media can lend credence to a goofball’s viewpoint.
