Rebuilding ‘Home’ in the 21st Century (w/ Ece Temelkuran)

Forced to leave her home country due to political and economic repression under the dictatorship of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkish author Ece Temelkuran sought an understanding of how a population can be led down the path to fascism. Whether it is under Narendra Modi in India, Erdogan in Turkey or Donald Trump in the United States, she found that the stages are very similar and so are the mistakes people make along the way. Temelkuran strives to provide readers with an understanding of the roots of the fascist new world order and the language necessary to change direction.

In this episode of The Chris Hedges Report, Hedges and Temelkuran discuss her newest work, “Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century,” and a previous book, “How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Fascism.” Temelkuran connects the crises of today to the neoliberalism of the late twentieth century, which made promises of prosperity but instead destroyed social infrastructure and financial security and increased state repression to subdue resultant popular struggles. Hedges calls this ‘cutthroat capitalism’, a system that divides people and pits them against each other and against their own interests. Temelkuran states, “I think people have been cheated enough with this liberal democracy promises, which were never fulfilled, so, they are perhaps taking a revenge on the entire political establishment.”

While it is tempting to believe that ousting particular political leaders, such as President Donald Trump, will solve the current crises, Temelkuran emphasizes that the crises are systemic in nature and require a long-term approach to organizing resistance.

Fundamental to that effort is breaking with a culture of fear, hatred and hostility that has been instilled by the ruling class. In this new world order, Temelkuran explains that more people are becoming ‘unhomed’ in the sense that the life they once knew no longer exists and won’t return. The antidote is a greater sense of connectedness and solidarity, of realizing that we are all vulnerable in a state that knows no boundaries in the violence, exploitation and displacement it will inflict on populations. Many people in the United States are waking up to this new phenomenon and are searching for answers. Temelkuran advises, “What neoliberalism made us believe, a dim view of humanity, we need to see that humanity and have faith in it…. Our entire economic and social system stands upon that fundamental definition of human.”

Host

Chris Hedges

Executive Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Margaret Flowers

Transcript:

Margaret Flowers

Crew:

Thomas Hedges

Please share this story and help us grow our network!

Chris Hedges: Ece Temelkuran has written two books I highly recommend: “How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Fascism,” and her newest book, “Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century.” We will discuss both.

She delineates seven global patterns, repeated and recognizable in several cases, from India to the United States. These patterns begin with a movement that divides society into two, the real people versus the corrupt elite, and with a leader who insists they alone embody the real people. The next step is the dissolution of truth and the prioritization of loyalty above decency. Then shame is dismantled. The leader breaks the long standing political and moral consensus with unprecedented relentlessness. The longer they remain in power, the boundaries of what is acceptable begin to stretch. What once felt unthinkable or despicable gradually becomes normal as the institutions that hold democracy together are quietly hollowed out, and the very definition of democracy is rewritten as being simply majority rule. Universal values, human dignity and the rule of law, are replaced with a fierce nationalism, a proud victimhood, and a rewriting of history. Cruelty and ruthlessness are deemed just, not only in the highest echelons of politics, but also trickling down to daily life. The circle of hook counts as “us” grows smaller, while millions of fellow citizens are recast as permanent suspects.

She notes that Americans, like those in other nations that have been down this path, soothe their fears by repeating the same illusionary line the institutions will hold. They do not yet dare to recognize their future country, and soon they will not be recognized as citizens unless they follow the new rules in Trump’s America. It does not matter, she writes, if Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin, or Nigel Farage disappear, the tens of millions of people fired up by their message will still be there, and will still be ready to act upon the orders of a similar figure. And unfortunately, as we experienced in Turkey in a very destructive way, even if you are determined to stay away from the world of politics, the minions will find you, even in your own personal space, armed with their own set of values and ready to hunt down anybody who doesn’t resemble themselves.

The dismantling of our democratic institutions under the six-decade onslaught of neoliberalism, perhaps better understood by its less sanitized name, “cutthroat capitalism”, is complete. The wounds are mortal. We live amid the ruins, the social inequality, and decayed institutions, including Congress, the courts, academia, and the media, ensuring the consolidation of our own fascist regime. “It is as if we are mourning not for what we have already lost,” she writes, “but for what we know we eventually will. For the first time in history, humanity is mourning in the future tense.”

Joining me to discuss “How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Fascism” and “Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century” is Ece Temelkuran. Ece, let’s begin with how we got here and, of course, you experienced this in Turkey, were driven from Turkey under the Erdogan dictatorship and I want you to talk a little bit about neoliberalism because like a few writers, you saw that that was really the ideological engine that was used to disembowel democratic institutions.

Ece Temelkuran: Exactly. As you told, I left the country in 2016 due to the oppression. And people like me were not allowed to properly – live, write or think. So, I came to Europe and as soon as I came to Europe in 2016, it was so clear to me that what we had been through in Turkey was happening in Europe and in the United States. So, I sat down to write “How to Lose a Country” to find out the global patterns, the seven steps of what we are going through. I called it fascism. Many people would like to call it more benign names such as authoritarianism, right-wing populism, etc. But I called it fascism. And then with “How to Lose a Country,” I wanted to show the clear path, the clear connection between neoliberalism and fascism.

Very roughly, my main argument is that democracy had already lost its meaning, thanks to neoliberalism, thanks to incredible social injustice and lack of equality. And lack of equality, lack of social justice turned democracy into the theatrics of itself, a shallow theatrics, a show, so to speak. And that’s how people lost faith in democracy all over the world. And then, when these strong leaders started appearing in global politics such as Modi, Tayyip Erdogan, Trump, Putin, etc., they promised people that they are going to be their guy in Washington, in Ankara, in the capital. And I think people wanted to believe that for several reasons, and one of them being they were done with these false promises of change over and over again, especially after 1970s, perhaps more after 1980s. So, neoliberalism, if you ask me, has swallowed up democracy and, as a consequence, such leaders were produced as a side product by the system. And now we are watching the last act of what started happening in 1980s, I think.

Chris Hedges: I’ve written about this. There’s a cult-like following to figures like Trump. Trump has spent his entire life preying upon and fleecing all sorts of people in his casinos and his sham universities and now his cryptocurrency. But just talk about that desperate need to believe in the figure, I’m sure you see it with Erdogan and Modi and others, despite reality.

Ece Temelkuran: Well, part of that story is quite understandable, actually, because, especially since the 1980s when this cutthroat capitalism took off, all the leaders who came to power in United States, in Europe, in Middle East, in Turkey, they promised people that things will change. And things did not change. It deteriorated especially after 2008, I think, for all of us, it deteriorated. And as a revenge, perhaps, people now want to bring down democracy. They do it knowingly or unknowingly, but they sure understand that the new rules of the game will not be sugarcoated anymore. All these words such as rule of law, democracy, social rights, they were already losing their meaning thanks to the loss of democracy, thanks to loss of social justice. And these new guys, so to speak, these new leaders, these terrifying clowns, they are telling people in like a dog whistle, that we know that the rules are not like what they have been telling us. So, we’re going to play by the new rules and I’m going to play for you.

So, this is why there is this radical association with the leader. And they are not, in Trump’s case, in Erdogan’s case, in such leaders’ case, people are not supporting these leaders to have a more equal life, more just life, or etc. They know that there will be winners and losers, and they just want to be winners. And if you associate with the leader on a personal and political basis, then you are part of that winning team. And sometimes they ask me, like after 20 years, after such cruelty, after such ruthlessness, how come Erdogan is so popular? I think Americans should know by now, right now, that this will happen to them. It’s not because they all fall in love with Erdogan, it’s just that that association that begins with this political and personal psychological association becomes a financial and economic association.

So, what Erdogan did in Turkey, which is happening in the United States as well right now, Erdogan built a financial network and that financial network went to the capillary system, capillary veins of Turkey. So, he is actually very much connected to the last man living in the small village who is voting for him. This small guy’s life depends on Erdogan’s political victory. That’s why they support him as if they are fighting for their own lives, Erdogan’s supporters, because they are actually fighting for their own lives. That hasn’t happened in the United States yet, it’s happening. But when that small man’s life is connected to Trump’s political victory, then you will get really die-hard supporters, devotees. So, of course it’s political, but then most of it is about money and it is actually more terrifying than anything else I think.

Chris Hedges: You have a scene in “Nation of Strangers” or you’re writing about, I forget the term, these well-meaning Leftists who want to go out and explain why Erdogan is corrupt in villages and then as soon as they leave, Erdogan’s ruling party brings in a big food truck or something and distributes. But it was just a meditation on your part about the inability of those of us who oppose this rising fascism to understand the mechanism we’re dealing with and respond.

Ece Temelkuran: Exactly. I mean we are trying to come up with an intellectual answer to this without realizing the depth of social injustice, and I’m talking on a global level, and how that lack of social injustice makes democracy impossible actually. When people are hungry, they cannot really make a sane and proper political decision. And especially if one of the leaders, one of the candidates, is giving bread. So, we are all this time I think, especially after 2016, after Trump came to power, the issue became more global. And after that time, for the last 10 years, we’re trying to come up with an intellectualized response. And perhaps you would agree with me on this, some of the opinion makers, writers, journalists, and politicians, they are looking for a quick fix, and they are still living in the comfort of this delusion of if Trump goes, everything will be back to normal. If we can just get rid of Putin, if we can just get rid of Modi. It’s nothing like that. It is a systemic problem. And I think they find comfort in this because they think that what democracy has been before Trump, after 1980s, was enough. I think what they’re missing from that point of view is the fact that Trump is not the reason, he’s a consequence and he’s a consequence of last decades. Just like in Turkey, Erdogan is the fruit of 1980 military coup, which was you know supported by CIA and which brought the country into a conservative militarist and ultranationalist status quo. So, that status quo produced Erdogan. And what produced Trump, I think that would make break many hearts, but actually it was Reagan. What produced all these leaders all around the world was Reagan and Thatcher coming together, saying, “There’s no alternative.” And they started this ride of cutthroat neoliberalism, cutthroat capitalism. And when people thought that “There’s no alternative. We cannot change anything through voting. We cannot change anything in our lives,” it not only created this political dryness, in which we end up with these leaders, but it also created an existential problem as well. I think we lost faith in democracy. We lost faith in future in general. But most importantly, we all lost faith in democracy, which I think is a big, big, big, big problem of today. Even if we can get rid of Trump or his likes, I am not sure we will be able to come up with better leaders at the moment in the current state of democracy.

Chris Hedges: Well, you also see the bankruptcy of the opposition – Labour under Blair, the Democratic Party under Clinton – essentially transform themselves into the Republican Party light, totally embraced and propagated neoliberal policies: NAFTA, destroying institutions in the United States like the FCC, revoking Glass-Steagall that set up a firewall between investment and commercial banks, all this came under the Democrats. So, there’s a bankruptcy of alternatives.

Ece Temelkuran: I think this is why Mamdani, like Ekrem İmamoğlu, imprisoned mayor of Istanbul, these political figures are important because they are promising something truthful. When Mamdani talks about social inequality, I think the enthusiasm around the world tells us something about the current political situation and what has been lacking all this time. I think people all around the world, the citizens of the world, are done with all those false promises and then seeing, as it happened in 2008, that they are paying for the wrongdoings of the Big Capital. I think people have been cheated enough with this liberal democracy promises, which were never fulfilled. So, they are perhaps taking a revenge on the entire political establishment. Perhaps Democrats all over the world should be learning from this and then should be more courageous, more brave when they’re thinking about social equality, social justice.

Chris Hedges: Well, we know from the study of the Democratic National Committee that that’s not the case. And of course, Mamdani’s greatest enemies come from within the Democratic Party and that’s very frightening.

Ece Temelkuran: I don’t know how much people are aware, people meaning people who are doing active politics, how much of it they are aware that we are really reaching the end times for several reasons. So, this is time to be brave. There is no other option, I think. And perhaps we have to bring down certain taboos because Democrats, especially in the United States, but in Europe as well, they are still living in the cage of Cold War propaganda, I think. If we talk about social justice, they will call us communists. If we talk about social inequality, we will look like communists. And I think that propaganda has been so prominent and so influential in our politics, in global politics, that Democrats could not come out from that paralysis, I think. That’s why I’m saying it’s time to shake off the Cold War fears and then be brave and talk about the real issues. The real issue is not Trump or Erdogan. The real issue is how are we going to build a global solidarity for true democracy, for true social justice. These are the darkest times, but perhaps it’s also the time to look at something, to create this vision of the future. And we have been lacking utopias. We have been lacking this kind of talk for such a long time, I think. This is one of the reasons I wrote “How to Lose a Country,” but this is also the reason I wrote “Nation of Strangers.” We’re losing something, not only on political level, philosophical and existential level. So, it is time to liberate ourselves from the fears. I think end times, people love this word, but end times, it’s a very dark word, but it’s also a liberating thing because as you know from all the crises that you followed and I did as well. I have seen several of them. Crises have this habit of crystallizing things. They crystallize the evil, but they crystallize the good. And wars are wars, crises. They are those places where people allow themselves to be heroes. I think we just entered that time, and I am hoping that people will feel the liberation so they can act like heroes, if that makes sense.

Chris Hedges: You write, I think it’s in “Nation of Strangers,” that what we need ultimately is not a political revolution but a moral revolution. I’m paraphrasing it, those aren’t your exact words.

Ece Temelkuran: My second book, which wasn’t so spectacular, I mean it came out during pandemic, nobody knows about it, is called “Together: A Manifesto Against the Heartless World,” and I wanted to tell people that we didn’t only lose democracy, we lost many other things, especially human dignity. And this is the main problem of this century’s politics, I think. We have to put human dignity at the center again, which is the hardest thing to do.

And I counted ten more values, moral emotions that we have to come together and defend. Nation of Strangers is a little bit different because I wanted to give people the language for them to come together. Because what is lacking, I guess, in general on a global level, is that there is enough outrage, there’s enough cruelty, brutality, horrible things, there’s enough genocide, and there are enough ideas actually how to change all these things. The missing thing that would connect these two things together is the pathos, is the language. and I think people are lacking the language and I wanted to give them this language in Nation of Strangers, this language of humility, truthfulness, and if I may say that human love because in the end neoliberalism, fascism, it all comes from this fundamental emotion of fear. All these leaders are organizing and mobilizing fear. They are manufacturing hostility and hatred out of it. So, on that moral and philosophical level, we have to have an answer, the progressives, Democrats, whatever you want to call it, anti-fascists. So, on that level, we have to organize human love. How are we going to do it? That is the main problem of global politics today, I think, because in order to create that passion for people to fight for a humane life, I think we need the poetry and we need that special human language so that the global solidarity is possible against leaders like Trump, Erdogan, or many more to come, probably.

Chris Hedges: And yet the expressions of that have been ruthlessly crushed. And I’m thinking in particular about those courageous students who stood up against the genocide, the encampments were all shut down. On US universities, free speech, if you count the ability to speak out against genocide, has been banished. Faculty, not a lot of faculty, but a lot of students have been suspended, expelled. Police were brought onto campuses such as Columbia and were allowed to act quite brutally. You live in Germany. You know the draconian extent to which the Germans have gone to silence free speech. We have Trump promising to go after the radical left. He has created his own paramilitary force in the shape of Immigration and Customs Enforcement or ICE. They just shot another unarmed American citizen in Houston. So, as that consciousness has risen, and I think of course you saw this in Turkey, there has alongside it risen harsher and harsher forms of oppression.

Ece Temelkuran: You call Gaza blueprint, if I’m not wrong, and I call it experiment. And it’s an experiment to see how much the world can swallow, I think. A new world order is being established at this point, the NATO summit recently happened in Ankara was a very good example of that, a very good proof of that. And there were several others like what happened in Davos, for example. A new world order is in place. It’s being built at the moment. And Gaza, I think, was the experiment to see if this new world order can be just very freely built. And I think good part of humanity said no, but they were not listened to.

This is also why I keep saying we lost our faith in democracy, not only because of neoliberalism, but because of all the national and international institutions that were put there to defend human dignity, failed us. And that failure began when Iraq was invaded. I remember the No to War Coalition in 2003, and the entire world was on streets. We did not want war. I was one of the spokespersons in Turkey. We did not war. The world did not want war, but the war still happened. And we see this next act in Gaza. The entire world was again on streets. They wanted to stop a genocide, but no, the leaders, the institutions did not listen or could not act upon that demand. So, this is how we lose faith in democracy.

What was more disgusting than genocide, if there can be anything, was Jared Kushner’s PowerPoint presentation in Davos. He actually told us why this Gaza genocide is happening because they just want to build a resort there. And that indiscrepancy between the human demands of the global community and the psychopathic blindness of this new world order. I think the experiment was this: Can we do this? Can we just make people as psychopath as we are? So far we are not, but, it is disheartening to say the least, what’s happening. And Gaza still goes on and many people, perhaps too many people, feel relief after there was some sort of peace talk about Gaza. And I think many people took shelter there and they don’t want to talk about Gaza anymore.

But, as I told in Together, we have to have faith. It’s a human moral stance to have faith in humans. And I choose to believe in people against this system because I think this is where we are going. We will have to defend the basic human morale, not only politics, democracy, democratic institutions, but basic human morals, actually, moral value, which is more terrifying than anything.

Chris Hedges: Although, the more the more repressive a regime gets, I mean I’ve lived in several of them, that act of dignity, asserting one’s dignity, that act of compassion for the other is seen in the eyes of the state as subversion.

Ece Temelkuran: I’ve seen in Turkey, and I’m still seeing so many people, despite the fact that they are under this enormous suppression, not only politically through political violence, but also economic suppression, people are still resisting, which is incredible, which is ultimately admirable. So yeah, talking about human dignity is becoming a crime now, but this I hope will also crystallize the courage of those people who are there to defend human dignity.

Chris Hedges: Let me ask you about elections. You write about it. I think it’s maybe in your first book. We are now on the cusp of midterms. The Trump administration is energetically attempting to subvert those elections through a series of measures, including appointing election deniers over Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen when he ran against Biden. He just fired the bipartisan election commission. He’s blocking mail-in ballots. He wants voter lists. And I remember you writing about when the elections were stolen in Turkey. Talk about those parallels when you see what’s happening here and what happened in Turkey.

Ece Temelkuran: One of the things that Americans did not understand in 2016, hopefully they understand it now, this is a long game. So, being angry, being emotional, being outraged and so on, those things do not count. It’s an endurance game. So, instead of anger, a country has to organize active attention if this country wants to get rid of such a leader. And America is still in a good place because Trump still could not institutionalize his regime, unlike Erdogan. He did not have the time to raise a generation in his vision like Erdogan did. So, for America this might be the one of the last chances to change its destiny probably.

And one of the common mistakes when a country experiences such a regime, in the first years, is to be distracted by the spectacle of evil and ruthlessness. Whenever Trump does something like absurd, I mean there are so many mistakes that I cannot come up with right now. And I always think that he’s doing this absurd thing, and everybody loves to talk about it, most probably, he’s doing something else about the institutions behind the closed doors. Like he’s changing something critical about the institutions or the laws. But people, because of social media, love to talk about the other absurd thing. I mean, like he said something to somebody, that kind of reality show part of the story.

I think the most important thing that United States should be careful about is the change in judicial institutions. That is critical. And I hope Americans understand that this is not a passing by political fancy, what Trump is about. Trump is there because he is ruthless and shameless enough to bring the new world order through the power of the United States on a global scale. So unfortunately, when Americans are voting, they’re voting for all of us. I hope they are aware of their responsibility.

Chris Hedges: Right, although I think it’s pretty clear that even if the Democrats were to regain control of the Congress, the Senate and the House, in the midterms, Trump would work hard not to even validate it. I worry about the midterms. I remember from your book that seizure of the electoral process in Turkey, it in many ways just shut down certainly within the system any hope of any exit and I wonder if we are reaching that same point.

Ece Temelkuran: Hopefully not. It took Trump to do in one or two years what Erdogan could do in twenty years. And unfortunately, this wasn’t due to the extraordinary talents of Trump. This was only because Turkish society was more politically organized than Erdogan, the opposition, both in party politics and outside party politics, made it impossible for Erdogan to do the things that Trump did in only one year. But then you’re right, your political opponent, in this case Trump or Erdogan, they don’t get tired of this kind of very cheap antagonism. And they do all the cheap tricks whereas one of the most important problems of the other side, Leftists, Democrats, whatever you call it, we get emotionally tired of this, of course. Not only that, but also you lose faith in the electoral system because you know that you cannot get out of this through elections, so you start giving up. But then in Turkey, after a while, exactly the opposite happened. Elections became part of street politics, so to speak, part of militancy, political militancy, to go there and to wait at the ballot boxes so that there is no poll rigging, etc. And so many citizens, unprecedented high number, have become witnesses for ballot boxes and so on. I hope Americans can see this election like that, not only for voting, but also protecting the ballot boxes, protecting the electoral process. Also, it would invigorate them, I think. It would invigorate the party politics in a different manner, and Democrats probably would feel less comfortable when they are making false promises.

Chris Hedges: Well, in Nation of Strangers, you talk about people pouring onto the streets. I think you use the word carnival, is that right? But that’s exactly right. I mean, my energy, my therapy was going to the encampments at Columbia or Princeton. I live in Princeton. I spent a lot of time in the Occupy in Zuccotti Park, but it was completely rejuvenating, especially for those of us such as yourself who’ve been calling this out for a really long time.

I want to talk about, I thought one of the points in Nation of Strangers that particularly struck me was, and you differentiate between refugees and exiles, exiles being sort of the sanitized version, maybe even the romanticized version, of the people forced out of their country as opposed to refugees. But you’re all treated the same when you’re standing for visa lines and you’re trying to get an extension. And I found one of the poignant parts of that book was how the rest of the world may look at you, the stranger, as outside the social milieu, but your point is, no, you have to recognize that we’re you, that you’re headed for exactly the same place. You too are going to be ‘unhomed’. I think is the word you use.

Ece Temelkuran: Yeah, ‘unhomed’ is a very old English word I resurrected. It’s an 18th century word. Interestingly, ironically, after I published a book in Britain, in a few days Minneapolis started happening. and I thought, here you go, Nation of Strangers. People are made to feel homeless, unhomed, in their own country. For Americans, for white Americans at least, I think, middle class white Americans, this was the first time that they saw that a government can target you as an enemy, even though you are protecting the basic human values. But they felt unhomed, and then, of course, some of them were really strangers, like foreigners or immigrants, whatever. But Nation of Strangers was formed there on a microscale, I think. People stood up for all the others, all the immigrants, and they said that this country will home all of us. That was the utopia that I was thinking about, imagining, which happened only one week later after the book was published. That was interesting.

Yes, I do think that the central problem of our century is the word ‘home’. We are losing home on many different levels. Some of us are really immigrants, refugees, we lose our homes due to wars, fascism. But also we’re losing home because of leaders like Trump. Because you look at your country, you see all these screaming devotees, minions of Trump, let’s say, and then you feel like “Is this my country anymore? Am I at home in this country anymore?” We lose home due to climate crisis. We lose home because of this moral decay that we are going through, you know, seeing PowerPoint presentations about a country that is under occupation and is witnessing a common experience, a genocide. So, all these things make us feel homeless in this world, in these times, in this new world order. So, we are all strangers. So, can we connect through that? That is the point of the book. And I think what I wanted to do is that, “Yes, I’m in exile. Many people are. There are so many refugees. There are so many immigrants. And they are perhaps the ones who carry the very necessary wisdom for our age, because we are the people we who lost everything and we had to rebuild our homes from nothing. And this is what the world will have to do very soon, for many different reasons. So, can we build our relations from here? And also, can we produce politics out of this fact, out of this affinity, out of this shared predicament?

Chris Hedges: You have a line in there. It’s like, I’m gonna butcher it, “Home is not where you’re from, but it’s who remembers you,” is that right? Something like that?

Ece Temelkuran: No, it’s “Home is not what you remember but where you are remembered.”

Chris Hedges: Yes, where you are remembered. Explain that idea.

Ece Temelkuran: We always think that home is a memory. When we miss home, actually we don’t miss a place, we miss a time. And that is why I think going back home is impossible. And when somebody promises you, like Trump, for instance, to make your home great again or something, that is absolute absurdity. Anyways, but many people think that home is about what you remember, all these things that you remember, whereas once you leave your country and once you end up in another country where nobody knows you, where nobody remembers you, you kind of suspect your own existence. It’s that very terrifying clean slate that you embark upon. So, I think this is something I found out through experience, unfortunately, home is where you are remembered, not where you remember people.

Chris Hedges: Let’s talk about the media. You and I both come out of the media. You write in your book about the confrontation you had, and you write about the whole notion of objectivity or which is, as you write, just neutrality. But the media’s been complicit in essentially bringing us to where we are. And I just wondered if you could comment on that.

Ece Temelkuran: Absolutely. And that’s another kind of homelessness. Right now, American journalists are experiencing it because our homes are taken away from us. All those journalists in Washington Post, for instance, they were left homeless overnight, and so many of us all, in Turkey and all over the world, actually. The thing is I’m one of the early birds. I mean like I write all these books too early. I write columns too early, that is a problem. No, it sounds like I’m bragging. On the contrary, it makes my life really difficult. I first wrote about Erdogan and that is this is going to be a big and different kind of problem, it was 2002. And everybody, not everybody, but too many people were in love with him anyways. And I remember that complicity does not only come because people are evil and they want to have perks for being close to power. There is that as well. But there is also this being mesmerized by power, being inclined to be mesmerized by power. And this, the power of wanting to believe in something, that is so dangerous and that is more nuanced, it’s more subtle. You cannot just put your finger on it and call it complicity. And that was very present in Erdogan. And I think the United States is very lucky in that sense. You have an obvious one. Erdogan was not like that. Erdogan, I mean, even Obama was in love with him until very late. It was too late when it became embarrassing to support him on the global and national level. He was already too powerful.

So yeah, complicity in journalism started before Erdogan, obviously. It started, I think, in 1980s when we were made to mistake neutrality for objectivity. We were made to forget that journalism, in its essence, by nature, in opposition to power, should be opposing power, questioning power at least. But the propaganda of neoliberal understanding of truth was so profound, was so powerful that it made us forget that we were supposed to be the voice of the voiceless, if there is such a thing, or we were supposed to be standing with the poor, with the weak, with the oppressed.

Chris Hedges: Well, it’s those people who would not have a voice without us.

Ece Temelkuran: Exactly. And I remember it very well. I’m fifty-two years old now. I started journalism when I was nineteen or even eighteen, full time. And I remember how they split up, you know, first economy and correspondence were one thing. And then they became two groups, business correspondence and economy. No, not economy, Labor correspondent. And labor correspondent was seen as this, of course you are mesmerized by the discourse of the communists. And I saw it happening, by time this business journalism became more important and they were more respected within the newspaper and so on. It was as if a small scale of change, what was happening in the outside world was happening in the newspaper.

Chris Hedges: I just want to say the exact same thing happened in American newspapers as well. With very few papers, even I think the New York Times may still have a labor correspondent, but it’s the behemoth of the business section, which missed the 2008 crash because they were all interviewing people like Jamie Diamond. But you’re right, the same thing happened within American journalism.

Ece Temelkuran: And it became a taboo to talk about these things. And it was made by an invisible hand almost. It was very visible, of course, it was politics and so on. But those were different times. And I remember how the news reporters who were writing about workers’ unions were treated as if they were communists.

Chris Hedges: I want to go back to the point you talked about being close to power because you also make the point in your book, I think it’s Nation of Strangers, that there was a naivete, we’re talking even about the intellectual class, that they couldn’t read Erdogan and they couldn’t read what was happening around them. And you actually write about conversations you had, and I think that’s also been true about what’s happening here.

Ece Temelkuran: I think I would now call it arrogance. Looking back at Turkey in hindsight, but then for today in the United States and in Europe, I can very easily call it arrogance. And it’s a very hidden, subtle arrogance. They still think that, intellectual class, cultural elite, opinion makers, party politicians and so on, they still think that they matter. We don’t matter. We have to accept this, and this fact should liberate us from all the etiquette that we feel like we are limited by. The arrogance is causing a lot of problems, and it’s more important than complicity, perhaps.

We still think that our presence matters, our word matters. We still think that people will listen to us. No, unfortunately, this is not the case. One very small example when I was launching my book, Nation of Stranger, in France, a far-right businessman bought a very important publishing house, Grasse. And then all the writers of this publishing house resigned or left the publishing house in protest. And I told my French friends and colleagues and writers, why do you think that your absence matter? Your presence even do not matter. I mean like you don’t understand this new world now. So, this is why I’m talking about, maybe it’s a strong word, but militancy. I’m talking about liberation of fears. I’m talking about humility. I’m talking about truthfulness and the courage to assess our reality, not only our own reality as people of culture and politics and letters, but also the reality of the world. We are there where we have not much to lose.

I think we have two options now. Either some of us will do that probably, we’ll take shelter in the bunkers of the rich and powerful, and others, like artists, cultural people, writers and so on and politicians, and the others will realize that they have no choice but to stand with people and realize that we are truly equals and we have nothing else but each other, which I think is more than enough.

Chris Hedges: There’s a passage in a novel by Joseph Roth, a very obscure German novel I read, and Roth is a character in the novel. Roth, like you, called out the Nazis. He knew exactly what was coming, back in the 20’s, and was a pariah, not only a great journalist but a great novelist. But he, at one point, says, “I feel like a mouse squeaking against an avalanche but squeak I must.”

Ece Temelkuran: Exactly. I’m laughing and I think Europeans and Americans should learn this kind of laughter very soon, not the laughter that comforts us against the danger, but the laughter that brings us together and makes us more powerful. This is a dark laughter, but dark laughter we must.

Chris Hedges: Well, you write about it in the book and I’ve been in war, so I totally get the black humor. However, I think you are trying to get a visa, I can’t remember the story, but you call up a friend who’s also in a precarious situation and the friend says, “So, when are you gonna commit suicide?” as a joke, if I have that story right. But that’s exactly what we need.

Ece Temelkuran: Yeah. No, it is like that, yeah. You know, many times when I talked about Turkey, especially in 2016, I remember I was in Lincoln Center talking to 3,000 women and telling them, and at the time, many Americans thought that especially in New York, he wouldn’t last a year. And I told them, “No, he will last a year and then he will come back again.” And then I laughed. And now I think, after ten years, Americans are more familiar with this kind of laughter than they were then, which is good.

One thing, Nation of Strangers has been published in I don’t know how many languages now, and I was touring Europe for the last six months. A new phenomenon, which is interesting to me, in every European city, in every audience, there was an American with a trembling voice and teary eyes. They all told me the same thing. I’m an exile in Europe. And I thought, “This is McCarthy era. This is, I don’t know, Hemingway all over again. Expatriates, American exiles. American exiles. This is a new phenomenon.” And I’m thinking, I write books early and so on, but Nation of Strangers, I think, hits the spot. Now we are all becoming homeless in one way or another. And for the first time, maybe, America is closer to the rest of the world than it has ever been.

Chris Hedges: You write, which I love, I remember Margaret Atwood once saying that she doesn’t share Western culture’s mania for hope, but you also write that you don’t like the word hope, you like the word – is it defiance?

Ece Temelkuran: Faith. Faith because I think that was the main topic of “Together: A Manifesto Against the Heartless World.” Many people think that it’s hope. We have to have hope, be hopeful and so on. By time, after especially after writing “How to Lose a Country” and going around the world for two times and talking to audiences that asks for hope. I notice that they’re not asking for hope. Actually, they’re asking for a reason to believe. They’re asking for a meaning so that they can work for it and with it. What neoliberalism did is not only creating incredible social injustice and ugly clownish leaders, but also I think it stole our faith in humanity, in our own agency as humans, political agency and otherwise. Because neoliberalism tells us, just like fascism, by the way, that humans are selfish, self-centered, horrible beings. And this is how our faith in our humanness, in the human future has been, I think, stolen from us because we fell for that definition for some reason. Our entire economic and social system stands upon that fundamental definition of human. Selfish, self-centered bastard. So, in order to change that, we don’t need hope. We need faith. Faith in humans. And like any faith, it is not for the object of the faith, but for yourself, because once you start believing in humans, in humanity, in the future of humans, then you start believing in yourself. And this is the starting point of our political struggle, I think. How do we refresh our faith in humanity?

You see, when you go to the encampments, you feel a certain joy. That is the joy of dignity. It’s a very, very specific joy. And why do you go there? It’s like, okay, you go there once, you feel the joy, it’s lovely. Why do you go there more? It’s like a pilgrimage. You want to refresh your faith in humans because you want to see the humans like you, and you don’t want to forget that we are here and we are many, and so on.

These acts, all those people who spoke up for Gaza, all those people who still speak up for many injustices and so on, these people are refreshing our faith in humans, in humanity, in ourselves. And if we can have faith in ourselves, then it’s not only voting for the right leader, but it can truly change the very fabric, very essence of politics all around the world. And I think this is why Mamdani, Ekrem İmamoğlu in Istanbul and several other local leaders, they are becoming the carriers of this faith so that we think, okay, we are beautiful, we are good, we’re not evil, and we are selfless, beautiful creatures. I think we need to see that more and believe in that more.

Chris Hedges: Great. Thank you, Ece. and I want to thank Thomas and Max, who produced the show. You can find me at ChrisHedges.substack.com.

You can also make a donation to our PayPal or subscribe to our Patreon.

Please share this story and help us grow our network!