In this conversation, Pankaj Mishra and Ece Temelkuran discussed her childhood in Turkey and her experience, as a young journalist, of how people around her normalized and even became complicit in the authoritarianism of the Recep Tayyip Erdogan regime. Mishra highlighted complicity as a bigger problem than straightforward evil, while Temelkuran shared how moral clarity has suffered as ending up on the winning side becomes more important than being on the right side of history. Intellectuals around the world, as a result, are unheeded and "unhomed," with no institutions to protect them. Mishra and Temelkuran concluded that the societies around them are in denial for two reasons: one, that they're unable to accept that fascism can occur even in free-market economies; and two, that recognizing today's political patterns as fascism will require them to sacrifice their comforts and act with a sense of urgency. Everywhere, people are in survival mode, numbing themselves to the currents around them.
The GGD Conversations series is a collaboration between the Georgetown Global Dialogues and Equator.
