This Is What Autocracy Looks Like
This Is What Autocracy Looks Like
With Project 2025 looming over the U.S. elections, Turkey offers a preview of an antidemocratic future.
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Walking the streets of Istanbul, you come across absolutely gorgeous, enormous stray dogs. They are sweet and ask for little more than petting and a snack to eat. But in mid-July, the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) — President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s party — sent a bill to parliament that would order a roundup of these gentle giants and put them in shelters, where they’ll likely be euthanized.
In an op-ed for The New York Times in late July, Turkish novelist Kaya Genç wrote that he “can’t shake the sense that for the government, this is not really about the dogs. Mr. Erdogan long ago mastered the art of scapegoating.”
Over the years, Erdogan has deflected public discontent with his economic and social policies by pointing fingers at journalists and women’s rights defenders, among others. This time, he’s pulling a smoke-and-mirrors trick with street dogs to deflect from his poor showing in the March elections, which left the AKP in second place by a landslide — the worst outcome for the party since Erdogan came to power in 2002.
The dogs are the least of Turkey’s problems. Not when, for more than two decades, Erdogan has brought down an iron fist on civil liberties: political dissent and the rights of women, LGBTQ+ people, Kurds, refugees (particularly Syrians) and the press. The nonprofit Freedom House gives Turkey a measly score of 33 out of 100 in what it calls “global freedom.”
Please click over to Ms. magazine to read the rest of this article.
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Hard to believe how quickly this is all happening throughout the world. What we thought were standard norms of an evolved society just disappear.