By Yinka Odumakin
ECE Temelkuran is a writer who commands attention for her investigative journalism and principled stand against the authoritarian slide in Turkey.Her latest work is How to Lose a Country: Seven Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship. It is a yeowoman’s attempt to understand and to see through the way in which populist leaders exploit the political and social systems that they emerge from to create authoritarian states in which democracy, free and fair elections, freedom of speech, human rights and the security of vulnerable groups who are “you” and not part of “we” are all eroded for the sake of maintaining their leaders’ continued position at the top.
There are a number of books that have been written in a post-Trump/Brexit panic that address the current threat to democracy of the political space now.
What makes Temelkuran’s perspective important in the political discussion is her authority in the rise of the AKP and the slide of Turkish democracy into the sorry state it is in today. She lays bare for the hows and the whys that sit behind a now global trend of populism. The daily struggle for survival may not allow many people in many countries around the world, including our country, to pay attention to this.
Personal anecdotes
She humanises some of these discussions with personal anecdotes about how emotionally-draining and career-damaging it can be trying to push back against the shameless figures.
The book channels the Turkish experience and draws bigger-picture lessons from it. It focuses on England, America and Turkey. Though Orban, Putin and the A.F.D get their mentions, Italy and Venezuela barely get a look in. Japan, Brazil and India – all with their varied authoritarian issues – are not included, which feels like an oversight and could have given her a broader range of examples to draw from. I doubt if she is even aware of Nigeria but the issues she raised have tremendous global applications.
One of the things that make writing and thinking about populism a tasking activity is that it rises through a combination of shamelessness, design and incompetence; quite hard to lock down to a set of ideologies, goals or tactics.
Populists’ actions can seem quite random and contradictory. Even the fascist movements of the 20th century, had to pay lip service to an ideology, however, twisted they were, as Temelkuran pointed out so brilliantly.
You can’t put down the book once you start reading because it is so breezy and pins a lot of what seems slippery and slithery about the rhetoric and strategy of populists under the microscope.
It also describes in clear language what they are doing, how they are making changes and how these moves can be used to subvert a democratic process. A great example of this that rattled my brain is her exploration around the language of “real people”, typified by the people we refer to as Buharideens in our own setting.
About this type of people, the author says that “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” (p.10).
Her ability to capture the nuances of this global political insanity in stories that are natural penicillins for diseases of the human soul led her to identify seven steps a populist leader takes to transform himself “from a ridiculous figure to a seriously terrifying autocrat, while corrupting his country’s society to its bones.”
I will come to the seven steps shortly. There is no perceptive person that will not be able to see what she calls the emergence of a new “we” even in our own environment. It is a “we” that does not include “you”, the worried reader of this.
Ece captures her first encounter with some activists of the Justice and Development Party, AKP, in 2002 and their leader said to her in a language we were so familiar with around here in 2014/15: “We are more than a party. We will change everything in this corrupt system.”
She said the others nodded approvingly as their composed spokesman fired off phrases like “dysfunctional system”,”new representatives of the people, not tainted by politics”,”a new Turkey with dignity” and all that.
This is why when it all unfolded she was unlike those who, each summer, are surprised by the heatwave, and only then recall the climate-change news they read the previous winter. She saw and noted the “new” phenomenon building.
Societies under corrosive populism are littered with characters who in the first step are part of “create a movement”.
They are people who mouth “changing the status quo” but all they want to do is to build a world in which they are among the lucky few who survive under the leadership of a strongman.
The next step is “Disrupt Rationale/Terrorise Language.” The Venezuelan Ambassador to Turkey said: “…And that was when Chavez gathered his loyal friends under a fig tree on top of a hill. They all swore to the Bible. That’s how and why the revolution started.” That was in 2007 when Hugo Chavez’s name was already in the hall of fame of “The Great Populists”. He was criminalising every critical voice as coming from “an enemy of the real people” in a manner reminiscent of “wailing wailers” and “corruption fighting back”. President Edorgan took this to higher heights.
Populism usually thrives on argumentum ad hominem (rebutting the argument by attacking the character of the opponent), argumentum ad ignorantiam (appealing to ignorance), argumentum ad populum (assuming a proposition is true because many believe it), reductio ad absurdum (to prove or disprove on the ground that it leads to an absurd conclusion), and ad-hoc reasoning (exposing why a certain thing may be by substituting an argument for why it is).
Greatest weapons of dictatorship
The third step she identified is “To remove the shame”. One of the greatest weapons of dictatorship in Turkey is to suppress the truth and so it is in populist regimes around the world.
The fourth notorious step is to “Dismantle judicial and political mechanisms”. You may not have to read Turkey on this once you recall the raids on judges homes, all leading to an intimidated judiciary in the course of political manipulation.
The fifth step is to “Design your own citizen”. This is the process of a strongman creating robotic citizens who are ready to believe all absurdities from the leader. A former senator told me how he stormed out of a University Staff Club in 2015 when a professor argued passionately like an idiot that one naira will exchange for a dollar under President Buhari.
The sixth one is: “Let them laugh at the horror”. Here again we leave Edorgan and Turkey. Let’s just look on our social media and see how our maladjusted citizens laugh at all kinds of horror that should make normal humans to weep.
The last of the seven steps is to “Build your own country”. Here, you have a country that operates by its own rules. You shut borders against protocols you freely entered into with impunity.
The disastrous thing about having unreal people in your country is that you don’t have to pay any attention to them. Supporters of the EU in England hold vast rallies, send in petitions signed by millions. In the EU elections, parties supporting ‘remain’ gain a higher results in aggregate than those backing ‘leave’ and it doesn’t matter at all. You get Boris Johnson as prime minister. The “real people” have already spoken.
Excellent work on this terrible idea
Temelkuran’s book did excellent work on this terrible idea. The division of people into the real and the unreal is easily supplemented by two simple but highly effective and flexible takes:
1) The “real people” have been victimised. This victimhood can be real, imagined or some blend of both.
2) The “real people” need to be respected. Therefore, the leader must be respected as their representative.
Hillary Clinton broke both these rules while running against Trump by saying that “America is already great” and calling Trump supporters “deplorables”.
Unforgiveable. Trump on the other hand was able to crank out obscenities like machine gun fire and it didn’t matter because the victimised people he disrespected weren’t “real” enough – not to his followers anyway.
Temelkuran argues that the the body politic and the media are ill-equipped to deal with this division of people manufactured by the populists and that it paralyses opposition parties and the media. She gives the example of Turkey, how people in the press, business and politics had to prove their AKP credentials or become liable to having their opinions ignored or ridiculed. Thus, if you wanted to have a voice in public life, you have to prove yourself to be in touch with these “real people”.
Temekulen watched her country disappear and she has documented it. Is there still time for the rest of us?
Disclaimer
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