Everything was great.
Until Erdogan felt a threat to his power in 2014, when an obscure Kurdish political party threatened to secure a tiny presence in Turkey’s parliament that could have slighted his power over the country.
From that point on, Erdogan began a massive PR campaign against the country’s Kurdish minority that included repeated attacks on their politicians and the jailings of Kurdish journalists.
On television, ‘news’ commentators opined night after night about the alleged threat this new group posed to the country’s stability. Turkey’s increasingly pro-government media became dominated by hype and grandiose fearmongering. Everything was a threat. Minor issues were something for all to fear. The sense of reality in Turkey shifted off its axis without anyone really noticing.
This is how a plethora of dictatorships start out: Democratically elected politicians feel a real or imagined threat to their ego or power, and move to eliminate ‘opponents’ by politicizing the courts, the security services and the media landscape.
There’s even a book, The Dictator’s Handbook, that describes the well-trodden, step-by-step path that successful authoritarians have taken to achieve their goals.
Invariably, there is a particular event that solidifies a despot’s rule. Often, it’s a security breach or an outside threat that the new authoritarian leadership claims ‘threatens national security.’ In Russia, the Second Chechen War of 1999 served as a pretext to shut down all opposition to Vladimir Putin. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban used unfounded fears of mass immigration in 2015 (immigrants wanted to go to Germany and Sweden, not stay in Hungary) as a tool to curb opposition and silence the country’s independent media. In Turkey, Erdogan’s response to a failed coup in 2016 saw thousands of independent judges, lawyers and police officers fired from their posts or jailed on fabricated charges.
In these and many other countries, the picture is the same: The party in power and its media vassals use nationalist tropes and language that other anyone not aligning with the autocrat’s narrative. From that point on, most other issues – the environment, minority rights, taking care of those most at risk – are shelved in favor of a singular focus on the new, mostly-fabricated ‘threat.’
At a time of national distress, the independent media go mute, not wanting to be labeled ‘co-conspirators.’
Decades of political stability in western countries have fooled many of us into thinking that democracy is the default means of governance for large portions of our world. It is not.
Our relative prosperity has tricked us into believing that our ability – our opportunity – to elect a school board, a county sheriff, or mayor doesn’t really matter. But it does.
Democracy is not a right for anybody; it is something constantly in flux and under threat and must be earned and peacefully fought for. And once it goes, it’s incredibly hard to revive.
To be sure, democracies fail all over the world. But a failure of American democracy would be like something like no one alive today has experienced before, and not just be calamitous for Americans, but for billions of people around the world.
All it takes is for regular people to wring our hands, shake our heads and do nothing.
Stephen Starr is an independent Irish reporter and co-founder of the Dayton-based Journalism Lab.
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