The countries that have dropped off the face of the Earth have a lesson for the West: No democracy is immune

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Ece Temelkuran is a Turkish political thinker and the author of several books, including How to Lose a Country: The Seven Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship.

When I wrote this article, I made a request of The Globe and Mail’s photo department: Please, do not accompany it with a picture of Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

For one thing, there are nicer people living in Turkey than “the leader.” But more importantly, every time his face has been plastered onto Turkey-related news or opinion pieces over the past 20 years, it has contributed to Mr. Erdogan’s efforts to equate his persona with the entire country, which, perhaps understandably, offends the people of my country.

While we’re at it, I hope photo departments everywhere kindly consider their image choices regarding other countries too, including Russia, Israel, India and Italy. Each time we in the media couple our reporting about such countries with the image of their ruthless leaders, we are committing a subtle sin: dismissing the efforts of the many people who risk their lives to keep their countries from being lost to the insane politics of such power-mongering men.

How diminishing it is, for a country to be branded with her mightiest yet certainly not loveliest face. Canadians might not be familiar with the strange sense of shame that comes from a country being reduced to this one flag of a face, but I urge you not to indulge yourself in that comfort; you may yet find yourself in our situation some day soon.

The specific sort of shame that the Turkish people have been experiencing since leaders with fascist inclinations came to power is spreading to the world. Many Indians and Italians are feeling that, and Americans had a taste of it during the Trump administration – and might again. Several European countries are about to feel this, too – the Austrians sooner than the French. This shame – which deserves a name of its own – is the shame of being represented by the worst among your people. Over time, the cringe grows deeper as your entire national identity is reduced to the leader’s persona in the collective global perception, as if all the other things that make a country no longer count.

Over time, the global community wearies of seeing the face of the leader, which turns into an overall wearying of hearing about that country altogether. The people who keep electing these leaders are deemed beyond comprehension, totally lost to insanity. Eventually, the oppressed voices of such countries become more and more invisible in the international news, as following them produces the kind of dull ache that comes with supporting a lost cause. Already brutally oppressed in their country, such voices then become inaudible in the rest of the world.

It is as if the world gives up on the entire country, and it falls from the face of the Earth.

I can tell you from experience that when you oppose a fascist regime, the only thing that weakens democratic voices as much as domestic oppression is the feeling of being let down by those who should be your allies in the international community. Worse, their abandonment makes democracy even more difficult to maintain in the rest of the world. Too many people in the West still apparently find it difficult to grasp that the world’s democracies are connected; they cling to the illusion that their countries are less crazy, and are thus immune to the same forces. But what is lost globally – our faith in democracy and politics in general, as well as our agency to refresh our faith and our determination to protect our societies – can only be earned back through international solidarity.

It has been five years since I wrote How To Lose a Country. Since then, I’ve felt like a political Cassandra, travelling around the globe telling audiences that what has happened in Turkey, India and Russia could well be coming to their country. This is not just some dark prophecy; rather, there is an all-too-simple formula for losing democracy to fascism. First, liberal democracy, which has apparently given up on its promise of equality and dignity, becomes a hollow concept, and the masses lose faith in a system through which they cannot fix their personal financial precarity. Then, people see representative democracy as a mere act performed by the privileged in rooms in which the public’s voices aren’t heard. The anger stemming from being relegated to being extras in this play causes rage, and this rage is then captured and organized by the far right. The masses, through successful and twisted propaganda, are made to believe that democracy is their enemy – even though the real problem is that they actually never really experienced true democracy in the first place.

A few years ago, my warnings may have sounded paranoid. But in the meantime, Western countries spent a lot of time hoping that this new political phenomenon – described with intentionally docile words such as “right-wing populism” or “polarization” – was just a passing fancy of the masses that could be constrained by the conventions of centrism or the right. Over the past decade, using the word “fascism” has been abhorred; too many people comforted themselves with the fact that they had not seen any military boots or Nazi-style uniforms, and so fascism wasn’t here.

Yet here we are now: The far right proudly (and literally) salutes its dark past in European countries such as Italy, while in America, white supremacy and misogyny – the wingmen of fascism – no longer feel like they have to bother hiding behind a polite lexicon.

Alarmingly, where voices for democracy, equality and dignity have failed to stand together and act as a global front, far-right movements have built international solidarity. In the new preface of How To Lose a Country, I wrote that since the beginning of recorded history, we humans have been crippled with three fundamental disabilities: We act like rock stars when it comes to showing up on time to prevent political disasters (that is to say, fashionably late), a serious punctuality problem that has often proven deadly; rather than hear the footsteps of approaching trouble, we’d rather choose to go deaf; and when we’re in trouble, we tend to believe that somebody will do something about it, and it occurs to us only later that that somebody should have been us.

Many of us, when watching our comforting history documentaries about the evils of Nazism, ask ourselves: How on Earth was it possible for an entire country to fall for such insanity? But it is now time for us to pull our heads from the comfortable sands of the past, indulge ourselves in history’s black-and-white clarity, and see what is happening to us today, in our much more colourful political reality. Only then can we have a bit more humility and understand that the responsibility falls on us to reach out to voices for democracy around the world and stop the growing political disaster that we must have the courage to call fascism.

It is time, especially in the West, to abandon arrogance and learn from the experiences of the former democracies that we’ve allowed to fall off the face of the Earth. Only their lessons, along with the yet-to-be-exhausted political energy of democratic champions from the West, can heal democracy for us all.