Something has been on my mind for a while but I do not know how I can put it in my column without risking provoking a prosecution under article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code.
How did I start to think about it? We have thousands and thousands of “strategists” who appear on […]
We have a phrase in Turkish, felaket tellalı, which can be translated literally into English as scaremonger. For the last three months I have been acting like a felaket tellalı about the situation in Turkey. Actually not only I but a lot of other columnists and intellectuals are behaving like this as well. Are we […]
If you asked a man in the street in Turkey what racism means, you would probably receive a vague answer and some random examples rather than a conceptual definition. These examples most probably would refer to other countries, like the United States and European countries, but not Turkey at all!
For us, racism is […]
The Turkish Republic was founded by soldiers. Mustafa Kemal was a first class soldier before anything else. The Turkish military has always seen itself as the revolutionary, modernizing and progressive power of this country. To some extent this has been true. Today, however, the Turkish military is going through an existential crisis. Atatürk had always […]
I wish I had Armenian neighbors living in my block of flats. I wish I could see a Turkish colonel of ethnic Greek origin in the Turkish military talking about the relations between the Turkish and Greek militaries. I wish I could hear a Jewish judge in a Turkish courtroom reading her judgment with a […]