Ece Temelkuran: Life is all about stories. And then you are actually deciding whether your story is going to be about protecting yourself from reality, living in fear, or acting with others and giving courage to each other. This is a choice.

Alex Lovit: Life under fascism is inherently dehumanizing. My guest today says that choosing to believe in the goodness of humanity in the face of fascism is a radical act. And it might just be one of our best tools in the global fight for democracy. You’re listening to The Context. It’s a show from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation about how to get democracy to work for everyone and why that’s so hard to do.

I’m your host, Alex Lovit. My guest today is Ece Temelkuran, She’s a Turkish political thinker and writer. And she’s the author of several novels and books of nonfiction, including the bestseller, “How to Lose a Country: Seven Steps from Democracy to Fascism,” and its follow-up, “Together: Ten Choices for a Better Now.”

Ece has been called the Cassandra of global politics for identifying that a surge in worldwide authoritarianism was on the way, back when most analysts thought that could never happen. As we are recording this, Turkish President Recep Erdogan’s authoritarian grip on power is more tenuous than it’s been in quite some time. Recently, hundreds of thousands of Turkish people took to the streets to protest the arrest of Erdogan’s chief political rival. It’s a first glimmer of hope in many years for a democratic future in Turkey. I wanted to find out what has sustained Ece’s resolve during decades of authoritarian rule in her home country and what she has to say to pro-democracy Americans who are finding ourselves potentially entering a long-term battle.

Ece Temelkuran, welcome to The Context.

Ece Temelkuran: Thank you. Thank you, Alex.

Alex Lovit: So we’ve got a lot to talk about today. There’s a lot happening in Turkey right now. And I also want to talk about your ideas for democratic backsliding and resilience in the face of that. But to start, I just wanted to ask about your own story. So in 2011, you were one of the most famous journalists and commentators in your native country in Turkey. But at the end of that year, 2011-the start of 2012, you were fired from that job. Can you tell that story? Why were you fired?

Ece Temelkuran: At the time, there was a massacre on the Turkish-Iraqi border. The Turkish army accidentally killed a dozen of kids, thinking of them as terrorists, whereas they were cigarette smugglers.

So Erdogan at that moment decided to keep silent, and he wanted the media to be silent. And I wrote these two articles. One of them was “Sir, Yes, Sir,” the title. After I wrote the second one, the newspaper could not handle the situation and could not take the pressure anymore coming from the government. So they had to let me go. And there were so many people who suffered more than I did. Actually, they were imprisoned, arrested, and they lost their jobs and lives forever actually.

Alex Lovit: So you said it became an untenable situation for the newspaper. How does the President of the country, or I guess Prime Minister at that time, end up being able to control what’s printed in a newspaper?

Ece Temelkuran: It’s a tragically comedic situation actually. Of course, Erdogan doesn’t personally call people. But then he has sort of minions around him, a very close circle of people who are not necessarily in the official state apparatus but acting as consultants or aides and so on. And these people are known, and they are called the editor in chiefs of the newspapers, or head of a TV channel and so on.

But then there is always—there has been always the rumor that Erdogan watches something on TV that night and then thinks that it’s not fitting his regime. Then he calls these people, and then these people call the Editor-in-Chief, saying something like, “Don’t you think Ece is a little bit too much nowadays?” Next day you’re gone. And the thing is, it’s not only you lose your job, but you’re also stigmatized. Now nobody can hire you because you are one of those undesirables that will be a big risk to hire you as a journalist, even if you are very prominent or like popular.

Alex Lovit: You left Turkey in 2016 to live in Croatia. Now you’re living in Germany. What motivated that move?

Ece Temelkuran: It took years of living in fear. In 2011, I was fired, and then 2013 there was the Gezi Uprising. I was a little bit perhaps too much visible during the Gezi Uprising. Things got really—Turkey deteriorated politically. And the threat on people like me had been getting worse and worse. And when 2016, the Ministry coup attempt happened, when that happened, the fear of empire was officially built.

So it became the daily life for people like me. When I say people like me, I don’t mean journalists, by the way. Any kind of critique of the regime. This can be a grocery shop owner who is criticizing the regime as well. So the regime for people like me became really unbearable, so to speak, and the fear became paralyzing. I couldn’t do anymore intellectual work because my entire head was full of this question: What if they come at five o’clock? They always come at five o’clock at your door. What if they come at five o’clock and then take me?

You somehow start living like that constantly, and that shapes your thinking, your living, your soul in a way. So I couldn’t take that anymore. And I’m one of the few lucky ones who had the chance to go because, at the time, there was this confiscation of passports. One of the tricks of the regime—one of the millions of tricks of the regime is that like they were taking your passport and telling you at the passport line that your passport is lost, even [though] you’re there and the passport is there. And then you cannot get back your passport. You cannot go out of the country.

So yeah, that’s the story. I went out of the country to Zagreb where my friends were, where I had a small—very small apartment. So I started living there in order to be able to breathe, think, and write.

Alex Lovit: So no one could accuse you of abandoning the fight for democracy, and that’s something you continue to write —

Ece Temelkuran: But I—excuse me, but I actually blame myself. So that’s a deep topic, but yeah —

Alex Lovit: [Laughs]

Ece Temelkuran:—thank you for [saying that].

Alex Lovit: Well, I mean, it’s something you’ve continued to write about and think about and speak about, wherever you’ve lived. I do get the sense that it’s been difficult for you to leave Turkey. What did emigrating to another country mean for you?

Ece Temelkuran: Well, I’m writing a book about it right now; I’m trying to finish it. It’s about home, but it’s home in the 21st century, and what really [become] for all of us, not only for people like me who are, quote and unquote, called exiled, but also for everybody who is going to feel un-homed in their own country due to some fascist leader taking over the power and making everybody as if they lost a home, even though they are in their living room at that moment.

It is a difficult process, which many, many people will have to go through, I think, in the coming years. It is difficult because, as I said earlier, you constantly question yourself. Did I do enough? Did I betray my people by going outside the country? But the most difficult thing, to be honest, is to see that one day your country rises up, asking for its dignity and democracy and rule of law, and you’re not there. That is the hardest thing, not to be there to share the enthusiasm, courage, and that sense of uprising. That is the hardest thing, if you ask me.

Alex Lovit: If I have your biography right, it’s at this point when you’re living in Zagreb that you write the book, “How to Lose a Country: The Seven Steps from Democracy to Fascism.” And that’s a book in part about how you felt you lost your own country, but it’s also a broader story about the rise of fascism around the world. Do you understand that as a kind of global phenomenon? And if so, what’s pushing various countries in the same direction at the same time?

Ece Temelkuran: Certainly a global phenomenon. That is why I actually wanted to write that book because, as soon as I was in Zagreb, that’s 2016. That’s when Trump was about to come to power. Everybody was making fun of him. Also in several European countries, similar political figures were about to take over power. So sitting in Zagreb and seeing this movie that I’ve seen before on a larger screen, this time in English. The patterns, the repetition of those patterns was unbearable to watch again.

That’s why I wrote the book to say what’s happening here, we have been through that in Turkey. So this is what’s going to happen to you. Many people, many analysts perhaps are still reluctant to admit this, but this loss of democracy has been inherent in the system, very, very roughly. Neoliberalism has swallowed up democracy, and it now makes democracy look like a joke. And people are fed up with this joke because this joke has been telling them that they are equal before the law.

But then they know from their reality, from their economic reality, that this is not true. Nobody’s equal. And in fact, the inequality has reached extreme levels so much so that human dignity’s at stake. So that anger is there to be organized and mobilized by political leaders. Everywhere it’s the same thing. This is the core reason. There are other reasons, and there is a myriad of different tools to establish a fascist regime. But in fact, at the very core of it, it is democracy becoming a joke within extremely inequal living conditions.

Alex Lovit: So are you saying that it’s a tension between the political system of democracy and the economic system of neoliberal capitalism? Is that you’re seeing causing —

Ece Temelkuran: Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, I don’t know if we can any longer call it tension because, after Trump came to power, when I saw all these tech bros lining up in the White House, celebrating [laughs] very opulently their victory, I thought that, oh, now gloves are off. Now we see that democracy is no longer needed. We are now seeing who’s going to run the United States and, therefore, the entire globe, if you will.

It is very obvious now, democracy, human rights, rule of law, this, let’s say, icing on the cake is no longer needed. The system somehow took off its lovely liberal mask, and now we are facing the brutal fact that our democracies are ruined by big capital [their] interests, whereas we as citizens have been deceived into thinking that we are equal partners in this game. We are not. And to be honest, this is the reason, I think, for many people to support people like Erdogan, Trump, and so on and so forth.

But in the end, yes, it was inequality, it was social injustice that paved the way for Erdogan to power.

Alex Lovit: So you’re saying that part of the appeal of populist politicians like Erdogan or Trump is they’re promising a solution to these problems of inequality. In your view, do they provide any actual solutions? Like what are they offering to folks that are concerned about inequality, that feel frozen out of the system?

Ece Temelkuran: We should think of this as they are bad guys, but people think that they are our bad guys. It’s not that people do not know Erdogan or Trump or Orban or, I don’t know, Meloni, they are the bad guys. They know it. So I mean, like telling them that they are the bad guys is so funny because they already know it. It’s just that they don’t see a way out of this system, a way out of this misery of theirs without a bad guy. It’s just that they know this is their bad guy because the association of the masses with the leader is complete. It’s our guy; it’s us now.

The solution they’re offering makes sense actually. It’s not that I accept it or I surrender to it, but it makes sense because they say this is an unjust system, and now it’s going to be this unjust system will be benefiting you if you support me. But if you want to benefit from this injustice, if you want to survive in this injustice, you have to support the guy because that guy, that leader is your reason to survive.

So many people, like many journalists, especially for the last ten years, ask me how Erdogan is still so popular. This is why he’s popular because now everybody who is benefiting from this regime knows that their survival is very much connected to Erdogan’s political survival. They’re not supporting them because they love him; they’re just supporting to keep the money coming. For instance, in the recent elections already proved that there was election fraud. All the ballot boxes are attacked by those Erdogan supporters who think that if Erdogan is gone, they’ll be gone as well.

Alex Lovit: After you wrote “How to Lose a Country,” you wrote sort of a sequel titled, “Together: Ten Choices for a Better Now.” What motivated you to write that follow-up?

Ece Temelkuran: Well, my publisher [laughs]. They asked me because “How to Lose a –” was a successful book. They wanted me to write something like probably like how not to lose a country or how to get your country back, seven steps backwards in the opposite direction. The thing is, after you live under such an oppressive regime, you learn that you cannot only use political tools to get rid of the regime. You kind of understand that political mechanisms are not enough to get rid of the regime and to mend the damages that that regime created in a society.

So I thought about fascism, how it operates today in the 21st century. And when I started thinking about it, I felt fascism today, more than anything else, is the loss of faith in humankind because, as I said, as you live long enough under such an oppressive regime, you know what happens to people. And it’s not loss of hope. It’s not loss of determination. It’s not loss of opposition or people do not yield to fear. People just start losing faith in themselves and in the others.

This is the biggest and the deepest damage that oppressive regimes create in the human psyche. And that damage becomes the reason that people do not do anything after a while. They cannot do anything after a while against the regime. So I started thinking about this hope, especially the hope, because after I wrote “How to Lose a Country,” people kept asking me—after I gave speeches, they asked me like the same question over and over again: Where is hope?

And I told them at some point like there is no hope. There’s us, and that’s it. And I think many other countries now are beginning to realize that there might not be hope, or hope is too fragile a word for our cruel times, so to speak. The moral value that keeps people going is that hope. You understand that it’s faith. Faith is composed of several things—self-esteem, trust in each other, and determination to do the good work against all odds.

I think hope is a passive word, whereas faith is the word that keeps you alive when everything is horrible. And once you lose faith, actually faith as in humankind, in yourself, in your fellow citizens, that is when you actually give up, and that is when actually they win. If you want to get back your country, if you want to get back your democracy, people need to take heart. And that heart cannot be activated with words such as democracy or rule of law. Fascism creates a deeper damage in humankind. And that damage should be addressed if we want to mobilize people towards a more equal and just system.

Alex Lovit: You’re talking there about the importance of faith and maintaining faith in humanity. And I did pick that up as one of the major themes of that book “Together.” Another major theme that I picked up is the necessity of seeing reality as it is —

Ece Temelkuran: Mm-hmm.

Alex Lovit:—confronting the reality of what is happening in a country. But I’m wondering if you can speak to that a little bit, including for American listeners right now who might be struggling a little bit to confront the reality of what’s happening to our country.

Ece Temelkuran: That’s one of the chapters in “Together.” And well, it’s not only criticism of the oppressive regimes. I think we have to go towards criticism of neoliberalism as well because the fundamental definition of humankind for neoliberalism is this: We are self-centered, selfish, egotistical bastards. We survive on the demise of others. We leave the weak behind. If you want to be a winner, you should leave behind the losers, and so on, which is very, I think, integral and central to American way of life, if we can say that, or capitalism.

That particular definition is a threat and is a very serious attack to humanity. And finally enough, fascism has the same definition of humankind. So one has to go against that. If one goes against that, the question of reality becomes central because neoliberalism has been telling us that if we are the winner, we don’t have to suffer the consequences of ugly reality. It tells us that we can protect ourselves from reality, depending on our purchasing power. We can go into secluded gated communities and live a better life.

So reality in capitalism is seen as something dirty, something that we have to protect ourselves from. However, reality, even when it’s really, really ugly, really difficult or challenging, it also has the magical ability to offer you something about humankind. And that is the ability to resist. And when you are not in the reality, when you’re outside of it trying to protect yourself, trying to keep your optimum distance from reality and so on, you cannot see that magical thing in reality that will remind you that you are human.

Reality is not that terrifying when you are in it. And when you deprive yourself from reality, you actually deprive yourself from beautiful things that would refresh your faith in humankind.

Alex Lovit: So does the same thing apply to fascism? Are people who confront the reality of what’s happening and are trying to resist the encroaching fascism in various countries around the world, are they also then engaged with other people, building faith in humanity? I feel there’s a tension here between kind of the confronting reality and building faith in humanity.

Ece Temelkuran: Well, it’s very connected, although there is a tension, yes, and that fascism is not a funny thing. It’s really, really terrifying. There are so many ways that they can wreck your life. It is terrifying. I would not say otherwise. And courage is not not being afraid. It terrifies me as well. But then the other cure for that fear is to be with other people. The isolation, the fear that comes with isolation is much worse than anything else.

I think when it comes to fascism, facing reality is sometimes really facing police violence, as we are seeing in Turkey right now, brutal police violence or arrests or detention, years-long imprisonment. But then it is also true that when you’re in solidarity with other people, your reality is reshaped. Life is all about stories, and then you are actually deciding whether your story is going to be about protecting yourself from reality, living in fear, or acting with others and giving courage to each other.

This is a choice. The one thing I learned is everybody is paying the price that they can afford. If you can pay the price of isolating yourself, living in fear, pay it. But then, if you ask me, the other price is easier to pay, which is like being in solidarity and being in the reality.

Alex Lovit: Just now, you said fascism isn’t funny. And I wanted to talk about one of the chapters in “How to Lose a Country.” You write that “the resistance in Turkey wasted time reacting to rightwing populism with humor and sarcasm, trying to laugh away our fears. And it took our political culture down a cul-de-sac, bringing about a new type of fatalism, one that always has a smiley at the end.” Can you describe how laughter can be counterproductive? I think we’re in a moment in the U.S. when a lot of people are making fun of Trump.

Ece Temelkuran: Well, actually, I think you were in that phase in 2016. Now this is a different phase [laughs]. In 2016—I think it was 2016—I was in Lincoln Center, giving 3,000 women—when World Women’s Forum was happening, I gave a speech about this. Don’t laugh at him. Don’t laugh at him or, at least, try to understand how you laugh and when you laugh because sometimes, yes, humor is a good way to bring down a fascist regime, or disturb it at least. But also, sometimes we are doing it to console ourselves, to calm ourselves because we think that as long as we laugh, nothing would happen to us.

But then, as it is now in the United States, it becomes part of the cynicism, I think, like in a defeatist cynicism. And that is dangerous because then you contribute to the normalization of oppression by laughing at it. The thing is, we also believe that if you laugh at them, they would be offended, they would be embarrassed, and so on. Unfortunately, in this case, it doesn’t operate like that. Sometimes when you mock them, and this was very, very widespread, both in the United States and in the United Kingdom, this teasing, that kind of humor, that mocking humor, really strikes back.

And that mocking adds to this long myth of victimhood, you know, we are the left behind, we are the ones who are not heard, and so on and so on. There is this manufactured victimhood in their discourse. And when you mock them, it adds to their outrage, and they think, yeah, you see, these oppressive elite are making fun of us. So I think there are several different types of laughter, which I talked about in “How to Lose a Country.” And we have to know how we laugh and when we laugh, and we have to be very careful about it because laughter is a political tool, sometimes political weapon, but it has to be handled carefully, I think.

Alex Lovit: When can it be useful? I mean, you’re a funny person. You’ve made me laugh already in this conversation.

Ece Temelkuran: Thank you very much [laughs].

Alex Lovit: [Laughs] So when is humor a useful tool?

Ece Temelkuran: I think humor is useful when there is political action that supports it. Otherwise, it’s empty. It’s an empty thing. Well, let me give you a recent example. A few days ago in Turkey, the most important, most famous protester became Pikachu [laughs]. Pikachu—like somebody put on this Pikachu costume, and there was a footage, Pikachu running away with the protesters from the police. And it was a funny site, of course, and it became a global phenomenon, Pikachu.

And now there’s a new figure—[true], [Leches], angry Pikachu looking at [Che] with a cap, Che cap, chu [laughs]. That is good laughter because now, you are encouraging the protesters. You’re encouraging the people. You are keeping their spirits up. And this happened while hundreds of people were under arrest, young people, 18 years old, sometimes 18. They were arrested and tortured under police custody. There was nothing to laugh [at] at that point.

But this Pikachu [laughs] running with the protesters, and then next day striking back again, that is something that gives courage to people. That kind of humor is to say we are not defeated. I think it comes to defeat. If the humor says we are not defeated, we can do this together, we are in it together, that’s good humor.

Alex Lovit: Yeah, and I saw that video of Pikachu. It is quite funny. Well, let’s talk about what’s happening in Turkey right now. Erdogan has been in power for more than 20 years now, as Prime Minister and now as President. Is there a story here of how the resistance has had to maintain their faith over more than two decades? And is there a way in which these current protests are built upon that long-term work?

Ece Temelkuran: There is long-term work, of course. No political movement happens spontaneously. There has been a widespread, romantic idea during occupy movements and so on, and but it’s no, no, there’s always political work behind it. There’re always organizations behind it. But then sometimes, being defeatist progressives, we are being unfair to ourselves because 2013 after Gezi uprisings, people thought that like it’s gone. But then I think that defeat there is not the final say of history, let’s say. People do not forget.

I think we should have faith in humanity in that sense as well. People remember. When it’s important, when it’s about dignity, when it’s about freedom, people do remember, and they keep that memory alive. And when the time comes, like after almost a generation, they strike back as it happens in Turkey right now.

Alex Lovit: So it sounds like you think that there’s risk for these protesters right now, that the police violence is a very real risk that these folks are facing head-on. It also sounds like you think there’s opportunity. There’s a possibility of change right now. What is your advice for people in Turkey right now navigating that risk and opportunity?

Ece Temelkuran: I have zero advice because I’m not there, and I find it morally and politically wrong to advise people, and they have all the brains and physical endurance and all the emotional endurance one can have. So there’s nothing to advise there. But then what I see when looking at those protests can be helpful to the other countries as well, especially the United States in this case, to be honest. In “Together,” I wrote about this theoretically, and now it’s happening, and that makes me really happy.

I thought there are two avenues of opposition when it comes to fascism in these times. One is the occupy kind of street politics, and the other one is the conventional progressive parties or liberal parties such as democrats in the United States. The problem is these two political energies, let’s say, do not come together, and there are reasons for that. These occupy political movements and street politics do not want to associate themselves with the, quote-unquote, corrupt conventional opposition parties.

And the opposition parties find the street politics and this political energy of occupy kind of movements too unruly, too irregular, too heterogeneous to accommodate. So I think in the world there is a political homelessness problem. There is political energy coming from the moral and political outrage of people, but that energy could not find itself a political home. The conventional political parties could not manage until now to be home to this political energy that is rising and growing everywhere.

So what we’re seeing in Turkey right now is that this is the first time, I think, in the world that this conventional party is trying to come together with the street movement. It is incredibly difficult. It takes a lot of calibration. It takes a lot of negotiation, exhausting transformation for both parties and so on, and very ad hoc and quite hasty whatever. But then what’s happening right now for the first time is that a conventional political party is accommodating or trying to accommodate the outrage coming from the streets from the people.

And this outrage, this protest is so incredibly heterogeneous. It accommodates so many contradicting, conflicting political views, political stances, and so on. This is like a shipwreck turning into a reef because conventional political parties are like shipwrecks. They are dead, under the water. But then when street politics come into it, it looks like the fish are shoaling and schooling around the shipwreck, and it’s giving life to the shipwreck, this metal structure.

This is what’s happening in Turkey, and I think the entire world should take lessons from that. What happened in Turkey, it can write the protocol of how to take back your democracy from a fascist regime.

Alex Lovit: And is that the same challenge or the same hope that you have in the United States that the street politics and the [unorganized] political party will be able to work together?

Ece Temelkuran: You know, people are praising me sometimes [laughs] because I foresaw what’s going to come and so on. But then I tell them like the speed, my friends, the speed. I didn’t foresee that. Nobody could, I think, predict that the speed of things in the United States. That is so particular to the United States because the country is run by a Presidential system that makes everything happen at a different speed.

And also, the United States is not a very political country. Citizens are not political as we are in Turkey. We live and breathe politics. In the United States, it’s almost a cute statement to say that, oh, I don’t know politics. I don’t understand. I don’t—I hate politics, and so on. People do not know yet that this is a very, very political statement, and the wrong kind [laughs] of political statement.

Anyway, so there are particularities that are specific to the U.S., and one of them—and I am saying it really with deep concern—there are too many guns in that country, which is something we don’t know from Europe, or even Turkey. These are terrifying parts. However, I also remember the future [laughs], let’s say. It’s very popular to hate America in the world, as we all know, because of the foreign policies of a certain decade.

However, we have to remember that the biggest workers’ movements came from the United States. And the most important anti-capitalist discourse came from the United States. So I think the United States will be a very, very interesting place to follow, and I do think that they should follow us as well. Western democracy can learn from the experiences of the Global South.

What’s happening in the United States happened to our countries in Latin America, in Global South, so many years ago. We learned to deal with this. We learned how to resist against this. We learned how to protest. We learned what to do, how to take stands, and how to protect ourselves.

People of the United States should, I think, look at Global South experiences, one of them being Turkey. And those experiences will tell them that they shouldn’t paralyze with fear. They should pull themselves together, remember that they’re strong. They’re not powerful perhaps, not as powerful as tech bros or Trump, but they’re strong. And reality is not that terrifying when you’re in it. And you have to have faith in people. And dignity is a joyous thing. It’s not fun maybe as Americans would say, but it’s a joyous thing.

Alex Lovit: Well, Ece Temelkuran, thank you for your wit, your wisdom, and your work, and thank you for joining me here on The Context.

Ece Temelkuran: Thank you, Alex, and good luck to all of us.

Alex Lovit: [Laughs] Indeed. The Context is a production of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation. Our producers are George Drake, Jr., and Emily Vaughn. Melinda Gilmore is our Director of Communications. The rest of our team includes Jamaal Bell, Tayo Clyburn, Jasmine Olaore, and Darla Minnich. We’ll be back in two weeks with another conversation about democracy.

In the meantime, visit our website, Kettering.org, to learn more about the Foundation or to sign up for our newsletter. If you have comments for the show, you can reach us at TheContext@Kettering.org. If you like the show, leave us a rating or a review wherever you get your podcasts, or just tell a friend about us. I’m Alex Lovit. I’m a Senior Program Officer and historian here at Kettering. Thanks for listening.

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