Becoming the Stranger

The road to fascism, as Ece Temelkuran writes in “Nation of Strangers,” was constructed over the last six decades of neoliberal assault. We have arrived at the terminus.

Becoming the Stranger - by Mr. Fish

We are becoming strangers. Strangers in our own countries. Strangers in the world. The values we cherish, the liberties we once took for granted, and the possibility of a democratic future are vanishing. The communities where we found meaning and purpose are being demolished. The iron grip of fascism is being consolidated. The decades long assault on democratic institutions in the name of neoliberalism, better understood by its less sanitized name, cutthroat capitalism, is reaping its grim harvest.

Ece Temelkuran in “Nation of Strangers: Rebuilding Home in the 21st Century” draws on her exile from Turkey, as she did in her previous book, “How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship,” to prepare us for a future we do not want but will be forced to endure.

“Nation of Strangers” is written as a series of forty letters beginning in June 2022 and ending in April 2025. Each letter is addressed “Dear Stranger,” which slowly drives home the point that we will soon become, like her, a stranger. First in our own land, then, for some of us, in exile.

She scoffs at our mania for hope, the naïve belief that our hollowed out and corrupted institutions can roll back the fascist tide.

“I don’t believe in hope,” she writes, “but in determination, having faith and doing what you can to survive when there is no hope.”

Temelkuran was a prominent Turkish novelist essayist, and journalist. She wrote a widely read column and had a show on national television. She was also the bête noire of the government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, especially after the publication of her 2016 book “Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy.”

She left Turkey after being relentlessly smeared and attacked by government-run media, her colleagues started to be imprisoned, the death threats became “too regular to ignore,” and she lost her job.

Temelkuran called her mother on November 6, 2016, from Zagreb, Croatia: “Mom, I am not coming back home.”

“It was a one-minute phone call,” she explains. “Half of it was silence. But that’s all it took for me, in the autumn of 2016, to become homeless.”

She was 43.

You can see my interview with Temelkuran here.

“The neoliberal system’s reality — extreme inequality — cancels out the fundamental promise of democracy — equality — and that is why the idea of protecting democracy means less and less to people,” she writes.

We are rendered homeless not only because of those who hold power, whether it be Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Benjamin Netanyahu, Donald Trump, or Erdoğan, but because of a bankrupt liberalism, a faux opposition enslaved to the same corporate and oligarchic masters.

“Since our political outrage is considered irrelevant by the conventional homes of realpolitik, the old political parties, we find ourselves politically homeless, too,” Temelkuran notes. “We no longer know through which political medium we can unite our voices to be heard by the rulers. Like refugees, we stay in temporary places: protest tents, makeshift occupy-movement tents or strike marquees. In the cold or under the sun, we imagine and reimagine a new political home — like an exile who knows that the old home is impossible to return to but still misses a home.”

Fascism’s lifeblood is the demonization of the other, of the stranger.

By 2050, over 1 billion people will find themselves “at threat of being displaced” due to “environmental change, conflict and civil unrest.” By 2070, between 1 and 3 billion people may find themselves “left outside the climate conditions that have served humanity well over the past 6,000 [years].”

She warns that the genocide in Gaza is a template for what will come, an exercise by the global ruling class to see how much carnage it can inflict with impunity.

Temelkuran describes Gaza as “a long bleeding, thick scar on the world map,” that is “widening to become a fatal gangrene, swallowing up the entire body of humanity.” She cautions that the “new standards of brutality will be set,” that “too many will become homeless by the end of this story, and it will not only be those whose houses are bombed. And it will all begin with the loss of one word.”

“There will be no explicit agreement needed,” she goes on, “but gradually, people will avoid that one word that is deemed ‘problematic’. It is the word genocide in Germany today; in other countries, it will be other words.”

The void left by the lost word “will soon be filled with harmless words kindly suggested by the power-approved words, such as war, even though the other side is primarily civilians. ‘Let’s not call it a genocide but ‘atrocities.’ Eventually, it will become impossible to join the public conversation without uttering only those approved words. They will operate as signal flares to show that you are not using the criminalized word. This is how fascism works. It not only silences people but also forces them to speak in a certain way.”

Temelkuran chronicles the indignities of surmounting bureaucratic obstacles to apply for residency and visa permits in “soul-sucking waiting rooms.” She wonders, along with the other strangers, if, when the permit expires, it will be renewed or if she will be forced to find another refuge. She is hardened by exile. Humor is dark. She watches as refugees from the war in Ukraine arrive in Germany, clueless about what awaits them.

“The Ukrainians do not know this yet,” Temelkuran contends. “They don’t doubt that the promise made to them by the Western world will be kept. They still believe that they’ll be welcomed in a civilized manner and taken in gracefully, dignity intact. A very dark, very broken place in me wants to laugh that repugnant laugh. You wish, baby! They never take you in without crushing you first. You will despise yourself, hate everything, give up, turn numb, and only then will everything start happening. You will be welcomed only when you surrender.”

Her experience as an exile mocks the West’s conception of itself.

“Westerners still like to think of Europe as the safe haven for the oppressed intellectuals of the Global South, but that is giving too much credit to Europa when thousands are pushed back into the sea to die,” she insists. “Putting the spotlight on ‘the exile’ to divert from ‘the refugee’ operates as a crisis management tool, if not a branding strategy for Europe’s self-image.”

The persecution by the regime that drives the stranger into exile is not, ironically, the most difficult to digest.

“What the Westerners haven’t realized yet is that many of us do not leave our homes for fear of a dictator,” she writes. “They still make the distinction in their heads between the ‘goodies’ and the ‘baddies.’ But what truly severs your ties to a country is to see so many people, ordinary people, supporting the regime even after witnessing its evil — to see so many choosing to be evil. That is when your faith in humanity shakes. That is what ostracizes us and makes us homeless even when we are at home — the sense of being under siege from inhumanity, madness and brutality.”

The final blow, Temelkuran says, the one that “actually breaks you,” does not come from “the other side.” Rather, it “comes from those whom you think of as your people, your side. When the sense of defeat takes over the side you belong to, the anger or self-disgust of being on the losing side turns to self-hatred. The hatred turns people against each other, and then — as I did once before, permanently leaving the country — you find yourself under attack, more viciously than the other side can manage. They say you are not enough. No cut is deeper than that. That is the precise moment when you become a total stranger in your home, when not the dictator but your fellow people sever your ties to your country.”

Home for “the abyss of the unhomed self” is no longer a place. It is not “a thing of the past or a destination to be arrived at in the future.” It is found in “these moments of being fully in myself, an intermittent sense of wholeness, a rare but precious feeling of normal people, and it will only be in the here and now.”

While the home we leave behind may be gone, there are “new homes in the making that yield moments of peace when you least expect them.”

That, perhaps, is a kind of hope, but one accompanied by eternal mourning and estrangement.