Good evening. Welcome to Oxford. Welcome to the Middle East Centre. Busch Gardens. My name is Norman Your. And it is a pleasure to welcome you all to the eighth and final session of our webinar dedicated to the exploration of the dictatorship's syndrome in the Middle East and beyond. Today, the focus will be very much on the beyond. As we welcome the award winning author IGY Tim adequate up in our virtual midst.
It is by no means unknown to Oxford audience that she has addressed on various occasions in the past. Some in our audience today might even remember a particularly tough exam question when they were asked to translate an excerpt of a review of Aegeus novem between lady youthfully and cut. Women who go nuts for. Such is the curse of every great writer.
They eventually end up being the topic of an exam question and others associated in the mind of some students, at least with particularly challenging moments of their academic life. But also, I reassure you, with some very enjoyable ones. Now, E.J., it's not only a leading novelist who has all such works, such as Must Leary, The Sound of Bananas, they've each translated into English as the time of mute swans. And all my uncle shot and drop it and see the encyclopaedia of Non-existent Births.
She's also a poet. And as many of you will know, an award winning journalist who has throughout her career addressed some of Turkey's many open wounds, ranging from the status of political prisoners and hunger strikers to the country's difficult relationship with Armenia and to the, of course, the Kurdish question from that point of view. Her words are exemplary with what I call an ethics of listening. And I must say, it sounds much better in French.
It eloquent and a very rare talent to listen and to empathise with the downtrodden and those who rebelled. And then to turn their voices into the subject matter of a work. This is by no means a passive engagement. Kim and Karen has played a leading role in the anti-war movement against the invasion of Iraq and of course, in the 2013 gazy protests in Istanbul and throughout Turkey that challenged AKP to some of her work, such as her 2015 Turkey.
The insane and the melancholy have foreseen, documented and denounced Turkey's slow slide into autocracy in 2019. How to Lose a Country. The seven steps from democracy to dictatorship, however, draws lessons from the Turkish experience and analyses the rise of authoritarianism and populism throughout the world. It is a vibrant call for vigilance in the West in the age of Brexit and illiberalism. But political engagement has come at a price. And E.J. lives in exile in Zagreb.
And yet she refuses to be pessimistic and works on a new book Full of Hope, entitled Together and Choices for a Better Now, which will be published into spring next year by Fourth Estate. A few words now about the proceedings this evening for those amongst you who are not familiar with our programme. Please send in your questions via the chat function. My colleague, Eugene Rogan. We'll be monitoring them and we'll put them to the AJC. After the talk.
But this is enough for me now. And time has come to listen to E.J. and to talk entitled The Logic of Chaos. The Pattern of Dictatorship. The floor is yours. No. Oh, my God. It is. Wow. Such kind words. I cannot thank you enough. My heartfelt thinking is for this introduction. Hello, everyone. Here again, I am going to be talking about a horrible topic and a very joyful talk. And I'm going to try to make it as pleasant as I can.
I wrote this book, How to Lose a Country The Seven Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship throughout 2017 and 18. And then it was published in the beginning of 2019. Now we are coming to the end of bloody years 2020. And the context is rapidly changing. Not only because of Korona, but also because my predictions have proven themselves to be true, unfortunately for Western democracies, which weren't very optimistic.
The book tells about the seven steps, but also seven global patterns of right wing populism. One of the aspects of this book is what? I want to talk about this a little bit. When the book was published, I was calling that the phenomenon Right-Wing Populism, but now I feel like we should call it fascism after all, because since two years, several things have changed. And I feel like I don't need to use this reder, docile term.
Right-Wing Populism, whereas fascism is more convenient, more applicable in our current situation, especially when Trump is refusing to leave the White House. And when the white supremacists, not only in United States but also in Europe, are making their voices heard not from the fringes, but from the central political machine. So I would say the book tells us about the seven patterns that we see when fascism, this new type of fascism, introduces itself to the political sphere in any country.
When I wrote the book, as you said, Lauren and I drew lessons from Turkey and the book was partly a warning call for the Western countries because I was trying to tell them what had happened to us will be happening to you or actually happening to you right now. And you don't see it. And many people, you know, well learnt. Why is people intellectuals in almost every European country?
Because the book was published in almost everywhere in Europe. Many of them have fallen to the mistake of thinking that I am comparing the countries. Thankfully, I am not that naive. I don't compare countries. I know that these countries are completely different from each other. They have definitely they have different backgrounds, different sociological structure and et cetera.
What I am comparing is the political development that is taking place in each country and trying to compare these developments while trying to find out a pattern that is repeating itself, which in my point of view, has seven steps. And these seven steps are for those who haven't read the book yet. Is one creative moment. I'll go through the steps very shortly and I'm going to see a few sentences for each step.
Creating a movement has been the motto dates 2016 in European countries and UK as well. The word movement is very promising as opposed to the word party. Party is a static word and it has a history going back two centuries ago, whereas movement, it promises us action, a direction and a mobilisation energy. So all these right wing populist movements, then fascist movements start their political life by creating a movement.
And I would like to remind you that when Trump refused to leave the White House, his first statement after the election night, Mike Pence, his weepie, was talking about this movement again. He said that are movements that are that added up to whenever we hear the word movement. I think we all should be alert. We are going through a very interesting time globally. We know that both international and national institutions are falling apart.
They cannot hold water anymore. U.N., NATO, European Union, all are going through the age of disintegration. And on national level, the representative democracy, the mechanisms and the institutions of representative democracy are not responding to the needs of this age. And to do technological improvement, especially in communications where they cannot respond, they cannot comply with, you know, the new conditions.
That is why movement becomes a more convenient, more appealing political concept for a lot of people. And it also provides the weakness that these right wing populist movements, fascist movements, very much in need of. The second step or the second commonality is disrupting the rationale and terrorising the language. I think Britain experienced this step recently during Brexit. We have an understanding, as the people of the world is the educated people of the world, that there is a common sense.
There are common codes of a society and there are, you know, impossible to break rules, unwritten rules like basics of logic. Let's say, you know, Aristotelian logic, you cannot break it because if you break it, you become a schizophrenic. Let's say I'm just, you know, giving exaggerating the situation. But then we are now facing a global political movement that is using that is almost opposing the Aristotelian logic.
So it is only natural that those who have some sort of commonsense feel like, am I mad? Has everyone gone mad or is the entire world mad? Ironically, these three sentences that we have been using so much since last few years belonged to a Russian writer who wrote her memoirs telling about the Stalin era. I find this quite ironic. So there is this terrorising the language, disrupting durational, and it's so easy because we are operating in a communications square which is not regulated.
Social media, Internet and also the battered conventional journalism entire communication sphere is like a jungle where the powerful gets the rule. So we have to remember that once the radio became a mass communication tool, it brought us, you know, Second World War fascism, ultranationalism during the Second World War. And now, once again, the humanity is changing its way of communication. It is understanding of truth.
And then we have this new political movement, which pretty much stands upon this unstable communication spare and it energises. It is energised by that space. And the third one is remove the shame immoralities hot in the post Truth World. And this is the I think the most important thing in this book. I you know, I find it you know, in my point of view, this is the most important chapter and most important commonality, because truth in post truth.
We have been talking about this topic excessively since 2016 or even before that. But many people, as far as I can see, take it as a technical problem. If he can, you know, double cheque the facts, if he can endorse the facts. The reality. The truth. We can beat the post truth era. And if you know enough journalism is done, there will be no rain of posturing. And so on. It is not true. The attack on truth is a moral and political issue and moral.
The world moral. I underline that one. And we have a pretty long history of losing the truth. It didn't start with these Right-Wing populist movements or fascist movements. It goes back to 1970s. It goes back to the Iraq war, actually. And it goes back to No. Two war demonstrations, global demonstrations, which did not make impact on the final decision of invasion of Iraq. So what is true? What is not became really blurry.
What is right? What is wrong as well? And the fourth commonality of fourth pattern is dismantling judicial and political mechanisms. Britain as well is now experiencing this step or this pattern of fascism.
This is so it is not happening only through putting the, you know, assigning appointing loyal party members to the certain critical positions in judicial and political mechanism, but also it is happening through toying with these institutions, so much so that the entire society has this new understanding of political and judicial institutions. They start thinking that, oh, these are paper tigers. These are stupid, fearless.
Actually, we don't need them. So it happens not only through appointing loyal members of the party, but also constantly attacking these institutions to make them look super fearless at their. Designing your own citizen. This one is the fifth factor is mostly about women. It starts with women because somehow there's this understanding that if the, you know, women are easier to change and they have been always used as the window mannequins of ideological projects, any ideological project.
So right wing populism or fascism uses women. They take women as like these, you know, paper dolls. And then they put on them new clothes, new looks and new outfits, whatever, and they put on their ideological window dressing these women. But then it's also this pattern includes or this step includes cancelling out the others. The unwanted, you know, slowly defining the unwanted citizen, which I am, you know, I am as well.
So like many other people in Turkey. So bit by bit you understand that there is a certain model of citizen and you are not one of them. And I remember two thousand seven election night in Turkey. And I'm giving this example to say that these things do not happen in a very blunt way. Like, they don't happen overnight. It is just tiny words, you know, a mention of insinuation and so on. 2007 election night and I on giving his victory speech, which was embraced by media, mainstream media.
And he was saying those you said this. Those who didn't vote for us are also the colours of this country. And the next day, every almost every, you know, highlight of the newspaper, every big news piece about this victory speech was saying how embracing was Mr. Erdoğan, whereas I wrote. OK, now we are gonna cheers, you know, the dressings of the of the main meal.
We are not the main meal. So it means like, you know, we can be skipped. We can be dismissed, easily pushed away from the edge of the plate. So it's about words. It's about, you know, details and people many people feel like they would be blamed of being paranoid when they pay too much attention to these details, when they mention these details or little insinuations. I think one of the mistakes we did in Turkey was that thinking that some of us is exaggerating too much.
The danger, though, that is why maybe I, you know, more alert than anyone, you know, nothing anyone but more elect than many other people to what's happening in European countries in Britain and the United States. Anyway, let's go back to our pattern six pattern is let them laugh at the higher. I love this because it applies to Britain and the United States a lot. It does into France or Germany. Their humour is not that is not as good as these two countries.
Unfortunately. I'm sorry, Lauren. Laughing and creating producing political humour, of course, can be a tool of resistance. But unfortunately, in our times, it also becomes a too comfortable bunker or shelter. To hide away from the realities of the political developments and also we actually know that now, when I published the book, it was very fresh. But now I think many more people are aware that political humour is also taking away the tension, coming down the anxiety.
Therefore, it is a little bit delaying the political reaction. But there is another thing which is which I find very important. The political humour, especially sarcasm, becomes a tool to hit your own. Not the power, not the oppressive power, but to hit the people that you are in solidarity with or that you should be in solidarity with.
And I think that is because we feel defeated before this enormous wave of fascism and then we start doing things, stingy things, you know, picking on each other and so on. And it somehow I feel I as far as I can observe it is creating a behavioural culture amongst those people who are supposed to be in solidarity against fascism. And I think this is equally dangerous for a country that is facing danger of fascism.
And the last one, of course, build your own country. And this is, you know, we're well known to us from McCarthy era. Love or love it or leave it. And, you know, several other examples can be from the top of my head. It just McCarthy came to me. But, you know, Hitler or whatever, any kind of fascism ends up here. You are not wanted. So you go away. Either we kill you or imprison you. I'm like, that changes. But at the end of the day, this country is ours.
We, as in the supporters, the loyal, loyal members of that political movement and the others should go die or just disappear or submit. I don't think that European country, European citizens will end up here. Well, let me put it this way. I didn't think that European citizens will end up in the step. But unfortunately, I'm hearing many British people, many Americans from other European countries as well. Saying that I had to. This is not my country anymore. This is how you lose your country.
This is the feeling that, you know, that comes to you very slightly. You know, this is not this is not Britain anymore. This is not United States. It's not France. This is not Germany. And then if you can only overcome that feeling and start reacting, you know, organised in cold blooded manner, not getting too excited about it.
And then you can get back to your country. But I am pretty depressed to see that actually it is now happening to several citizens as well, because you don't lose your country by only having to go away from the country, but also the feeling of home is lost sometimes. And that is also losing your country. But I am very hopeful for the coming days. I just don't want to, you know, stop here in the most desperate sentence.
That's why I'm adding this part. And I think this new crisis of pandemic will change a lot of things. It won't be pretty. It won't be easy. But I think it will change the context that we are living in and talking about. So let's see what happens. Thank you. Learnt. And thank you, everyone. Thank you very much, A.J., for a very inspiring talk. I will continue by saying that, unfortunately, your book has proven to be prophetic.
And while normally this would have been something, too, I mean, something one could have rejoiced that as an also in this particular case, it is actually very, very sad. But I would like to use my prerogative as a as a cheque, perhaps to to start by asking you a couple of questions while questions are, I believe, coming in also from the audience.
It's going to be a little bit embarrassing. But I remember a talk you gave two or three years ago in getting in and now people are going to start to believe that I am some kind of and following you. You were in that talk. You also referred to the role of the media in promoting these images of strong men like Trump, like add along like Autobahn in Hungary, and that one of the problems was that the press kept on publishing pictures of whatever you wrote about Turkey.
What was it about Turkey? You ended up with an image of a dog being published whenever something was published about Hungary you had thought about. And I was wondering if you could elaborate this a little bit for our audience today as well, because I suppose a very important point, because this still is happening. And even though I tell all the editors, like, would you please not, you know, do something else, not Mr. Erdogan. This is unfair. I think you know this idea.
OK. It's not an idea. It's an observation. It did the first time I remember observing this, I was in Denmark with Mikhail Siskin, Russian novelist, an amazing person, amazing novelist. And we were supposed to talk about, you know, our countries and the political situation. And then we are in the stage and there's this giant screen behind us. And on this side there is Putin. On my side, there's that one. And I told we are too little. We are too small in the stage now.
They are the bigger guy. So why are you reproducing the power sheen once again? Whereas this is the stage where we are challenging this polishing and Michael kind of laughing a lot. So. And whenever I write about taqiyya, I see I don't it is unfair because 20 years ago, not 20 like 30 years ago, let's say when we say Russia, the first word that would come to our mind would be Tchaikovsky, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, God, Gotting, you know, whatever.
Some some thing is nice things, you know, the good side of humanity, so to speak. And now when we say Russia, there is not only not only the first wait word is putting that comes to our mind, but there is no other word that comes to mind. You know, Russian was the. Well, Alexander, I like the Nobel prise winning Russian author, of course. But for the first word and for a long time, the only word is Putin. And this also goes for Turkey, for United States, for braciole, for Mexico.
It is unfair to the people of those countries and all the things that they have done produced. And also to the people who are resisting these, you know, political developments, we never mentioned them, it's their face. So we have to be careful because when we are opposing, sometimes we are reproducing the power relations once again without even noticing. So, yeah, you know, taxi drivers, income ratio or in United States, even in the United States, I should say that.
And in, you know, anywhere in Europe, when I say I'm from Turkey, they say, oh, Abdon. And I really want to say we are more than that. And now it is more. When I published a book, it wouldn't be so it wouldn't sound so familiar when I said this, but now I think it would. There is a certain shame. In our in these people, Americans, British or, you know, Turkish people, to be represented by the worst of your country.
And not being able to get rid of this situation, not being able to get out of this situation. Breaks your heart. And it embarrasses you. So maybe we shouldn't, you know, constantly reproduce this situation so that we can have other voices, other faces, other pictures, other images from those countries so we can. You know, start to continue to battle in the world of images as well.
So to speak. I think this is a very important point and precisely about that battle and that that's going to be my my last question before I pass on to Eugene with the questions from the audience. That's because I want to to ask an optimistic question. So could you give us a few of your while, some of your ten recipes for a better future that you are writing about right now? Not better future better now, because the United now future is too far away.
Well, the problem is I have been, you know, after writing this book and it was published in several countries, so I had to go through these several countries like a bloody Cassandra and repeat all these horrible things over and over again. And I was, you know, personally or mentally and emotionally, I thought maybe it's time to be the Mary Poppins of politics now. So I decided to write together 10 choices for a better now.
It is less of real politics, that book, but more sort of philosophical approach to the important matters of our time. And there are ten words. And the first word. And I think most important in the book is Faith. Because. We are seeing the worst of our kind constantly, we are subjected to the representation of the worst of our kind and it's like a bombardment of images. We don't see. OK, let's put it like this. How many times this week did you see the face of the guy?
The Turkish scientists, husband and wife. How many times did you see their faces and how many times did you see Boris Johnson or from. This bombardment of the worst. Actually damages our sense of humankind. One doesn't notice this until one starts hating oneself. Because you're a human as well. So you start asking this very, very wrong question. Is human evil in its essence? Maybe it's rotten. Already.
So you gradually, because of fascism, because of this global wave of new form of fascism, you start losing your faith in your own kind. And if you lose your faith in your kind, that means the rest of us is down the hill. There is no coming back from that. So one of the 10 certain words that I chose was faith. And I wanted to I wanted to tell people.
We have a moral duty to have faith in our kind, not because we are naive, not because of those nice videos, people doing the nice thing, you know, the right thing on that that are, you know, multiplied in social media. It's a moral duty to do this. And we owe it to the our ancestors and to our kids, to our children. So how are we going to restore our faith?
And this is the question I asked. And it is not a very Samarai usable book, I should say, because it's stories I told everything through stories, personal stories, you know, stories around the world I've seen. And so but. I want you to think, you know, everyone who is listening now, how much faith do you have? An inhuman kind. This is important to me because I am thinking now.
Although Dostoevski, for instance, hated, you know, quite many people in crime and Punishment, he had a different sense of time and human kind. For him, there was no the end of the world was not calculable. Now we can calculate it. You know, everybody has an idea when everything is going to explode. And so this changes your perception of what you're doing and the feeling of reason. Meaning everything. And then, you know, imagine all those writers from the beginning of twenty century.
They were in all of humankind, although they hated it deeply as well. But we are different now. We are losing our face of humankind to the banality of evil, but to the evil of banality. Thank you, A.J. I will. I don't know if that makes sense, but it's a long topic and I'm giving some highlights. It does definitely make sense. And I will use the opportunity to think about my faith in humanity while Eugene will be providing you with some more questions that have been coming in from audience.
Thank you, Lawrence. Thank you both. A.J., wonderful presentation that you've inspired. A lot of questions already. So I'm going to ask you to try and be brief in your answers so that as many of our audience as questions can be addressed as possible. The first is actually by Ali. Sarah that Ali, I'm going to ask you to please rephrase your question, because you've used an expression that I don't understand that if I don't, I'm afraid our audience would either.
Not sure what you mean by Shatzer. So if you could please just rephrase your question and type it up now. I'll get back to you later on. So our first question comes from an anonymous attendee. Could you please elaborate on the sixth stage you mentioned and give an example perhaps of how political sarcasm has been used? OK. Laughing is something that I love. And I think there is a deep connexion between ability to love and being human, especially as a woman.
But I think in this time and at this stage of global politics, we have to be very careful. We have to pay attention, rather how we laughed and when we laugh. And this, by the way, this idea writing about this step came to me in New York when Trump was elected. I was there right after like one one month, almost after the shock was still on. I mean, nobody was nobody. Everybody was really shocked.
And it was a big audience. And they were trying to laugh in every possible way, as if they couldn't wait for a joke to laugh about Trump. And I thought how anxious it is, how terrified they are. So they just want to actually suppress their anxiety. And by laughing at the phenomenon they want to make, they want to feel like this is not as dangerous as it seems. So laughing can be curing. Laughing can be really damaging for the oppressive power, but also it can be a shelter, an emotional shelter.
And this should be, you know, scrutinised, especially nowadays. It would be a nice exercise, so to speak. When we look at the political humour, political jokes, let's think, you know, why are we laughing now? What are we laughing at? You know, are we trying to calm ourselves down or are we are we by laughing? I'd be damaging the power of. Really? Which is, as I recall, from high school classics, where Gibbons goes in decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
That combination of corrupt emperors. And when society begins to laugh at the rulers that the fall of an empire is around the corner. Well, we have been laughing at Mr. Idealogues where it must've scheme nothing escapes. Our next question is, should make these who praises you for an elegant wakeup call and asks, could you say something more about how you see the current and potential impact on regional organisations and specifically the EU?
EU has always been an incredibly boring subject, but also very interesting as well. OK, let's do it like this. We have Putin, we have Trump and and on several other leaders, you know, belonging to the same ilk, let's say. And there is European Union whose debt is trying to supply some moral ground. And, you know, talk from the high moral ground and so on. But then, unfortunately, Syria happened. And Syrian refugees.
You know, the entire refugee crisis destroyed the last resiting of pastiche of European Union. So I don't think there is no moral high ground in the world now, which is one of the problems, global problems that we are going through, because, OK, we have leaders who do not have Shein. But also, we have no institutions that are morally intact enough to embarrass them.
So it is not only real politic disintegration we are going through in terms of European Union, but also and more importantly, in fact, it is a moral disintegration. So, yeah, I was digging digging deeper. I think it wasn't a very often. Still more to come, though, because from the OSC area that you're great, as always, to have you with us. He's shifting your orientation away from the EU to what is going on to the United States and asks, do you think the movement that Trump has generated.
The U.S. has been dealt a blow due to the election defeat he suffered, or can he come back because of the significant support he received? So is an election defeat enough to stop the chaos or does it more than that? Well, I recently wrote a piece for Guardian. It was like two days after the election and I said I said that Trump is already building a political black op team within the government administration.
So be aware it's not going to happen. Well, you know, many American commentators, academics and journalists, they are seeing this coming. They have been seeing it coming, but they didn't know how exactly would happen this pull and push about the White House. What is important is always happening somewhere behind the stage, behind somewhere, which we think could quite insignificant.
The environmental, you know, comity, this little judge there in the, you know, insignificant courthouse, all these things have been happening in the United States. And I am not an expert on American politics. And there are amazing people who have been talking about these things. But I wouldn't say exceptionalism, American exceptionalism. I wouldn't call it American arrogance, because I know how hard it is to see that those things that only happen in crazy countries happen to you.
How embarrassing it is, how it's how hard it is to swallow the fact that there has been some delay in seeing the urgency and the gravity of the situation in United States. And they are still making jokes about this. You know, Trump not leaving the White House. What they are doing wrong, in my point of view, is that they are waiting a clear cut. He's not leaving White House. He's leaving White House. It doesn't happen like that.
This entire machine of new form of fascism is working upon instability. It is immense ability to create it, to sustain instability and to make the crisis the rule. So he will be there. Biden will be the president. But constantly there will be this like a mosquito, you know? Well, that leads beautifully to our next question, which says, you know, if it were just a political matter, then an election defeat would be enough to bring about the change to stop this decline into chaos.
But rather than that, isn't this new wave of fascism rather a social movement having much deeper roots that are just exploited by populist authoritarian figures? In other words, we have a much bigger issue to contend with than simply one which democratic processes might resolve.
This is an interesting aspect to think about, although I do think that elections or current state of representative democracy will not change anything in terms of getting rid of this political disease that say, I wouldn't completely dismiss the fact that representative democracy is one of the best things that humanity could put together until this point. You know, when we look at the world out there, there's two. Those who want to change things have very, very roughly two perspectives.
Let's get get rid of all the institutions. Revolution and let's fortify the institutions. I think they will be something in between. I think they need political organisms that are now shaping through Occupy movement, through climate movement, through women's movement or Black Lives Matter.
I think they are going to occupy. The dying skeletons or the skeletons of representative democratic institutions, and they're going to be why these institutions in a certain way and they are going to reshape them. So I think that will be the answer. OK. Thank you. And Ali, Shane, thank you very much for the clarification. I think I now have the point of your question, which is really talking about the role of external powers in trying to influence political developments in other countries.
And here the question really is whether sanctions that essay by Trump or by the Biden administration would serve to consolidate votes for the AKP or help the opposition. And do officials really understand the pros and cons of such sanction, action or outside pressures from the Turkish context? There was a lot of cynicism on social media when election results in the United States were delayed. And one of the jokes was America is faster when it comes to electing other country's presidents.
So. You know, the United States and European countries, in fact, has a lot of role for Mr. Erdogan to gain such national and international power and prestige. Let me remind you that Obama endorsed him as the example leader, the good leader for the greater Middle East. So when it comes to getting rid of the sanctions. Alan? We can be more creative in that sanctions is I mean, like I haven't seen any in any time in history.
Sanctions really worked. So, you know, they they should, you know, use more creative techniques if they really want to do that kind of thing. But I also, you know, these are jokes, but very easy to misunderstand. So I have to make sure that I do think that people of the of those countries who are subjected to right wing populism and fascism should be in solidarity and should come together and can come together to change their leaders,
of course, and through elections. Obviously, I got a comment from coloured capris and you can reflect on that one. And then I'll follow with the next question. Collette writes, One of the most worrying features of these new fascism's or new despotisms, as John King calls them, is the fact that criticising the regime or the strong man's misdemeanours ends up being a form of amplification or propaganda. And the other thing is the promise of welfare that these regimes do.
This is appealing to the citizens need of stability in a changing civil as a Tory moment. So that was a comment more than a question. But is it anything that you had a reflection on? Yes, sure. You know, I have giving speeches like this in Oxford and in several other academic environment in universities. And when in when in such academic environment, people ask you, what do you how do you define Right-Wing Populism?
And there are many definitions and there have there are many books, brilliant books about this term. But how I defined it is coming from. It is my definition is coming from my personal experience as well. It is mobilising the calculated ignorance against the insecure interests of humankind. So. Right wing populism is something against the interest of humankind. So whatever they promise. And their promises always change. It's, you know, this election, that this election, it's something different.
Whatever they promise. Actually, behind it is the only thing behind those promises is the ruthless desire for limitless power. And this is actually what maybe differs in today's fascism, because in, you know, during Nazi Germany, Hitler's fascist fascism or Mussolini's fascism. It was horrible. It was, you know, ridiculous. But still, they had the ideal. They had the ideal for humans. They wanted to create this ubermensch. You know, today's fascism. No ideals, no ideas and nothing to talk about.
Except for very concrete, some false promises about very concrete, real political issues. So there is no ideology, which is so interesting to me because. Yeah. Let me stop you there, because there's so many questions piling in. It's always worry. I'm kind of oh, on the contrary. It's just you're provoking a lot more from our audience. And I've got a couple of comments from Latin America I'd like to share with you.
William California writes, I feel immensely privileged to hear Adjaye, whose book Seven Steps has become a Bible for those who, like me, are fighting to save our frail democracy in faraway Salvador. What happened from Alejandro Regg, who writes Very interesting perspective. Thank you very much. I am Venezuelan. And you're familiar with the Venezuelan case.
Of course, you know that over there we lived a very similar process since nineteen ninety nine, with many, if not all the steps you talk about. However, for the liberal media around the world, it took nearly 12 years to give credit to the voices of civil society and democratic resistance, even those coming from traditional figures on the left. So two questions. One. Do you think your emphases on right wing populism is necessary or could it not be just populism in the left and right?
And to how does your perspective differ from the point of view of an Wookey who speaks about left to right transversal global trend from initially hegemonic democracies to clearcut authoritarianism? It's a lot to unpack and if you want me to repeat any of it but start. And yeah, I think I will pick a day in my case because it's always.
Yeah, it is always very telling to talk about Venezuela as well as Mexico, because recently I gave a talk for a Mexican audience and we were talking about this Left-Wing populism. And I told the same thing when I'm asked this question in the United States or, you know, Britain or, you know, in European countries. So what do you think about leftwing populism? I don't answer it because the context is different.
But if I ask the question in Mexico, in Venezuela, I can answer because I know that that question is not therefore rhetorical, you know, Jumble Wombo. So I wrote a book about when I saw LA. It's in Turkish. I was there when Chavez came to power. I was in bodyguards and talking to grassroots movements. And I think many people would agree with me that there is Chavez and there is the grassroots movement that brought Chavez to power.
And let me tell you a funny story. I was there, I saw how it happened. It wasn't Chavez. It was the people who did the change. And they hoped something completely different. I saw it with my own eyes. I wrote the book and then a few years later, I was giving a talk. And I think this is in how to lose a country as well. I was giving a talk with the ambassador of Venezuela in Ankara and suddenly.
The guy was telling a completely different story. Chavez, as it is a, you know, hero, changed everything. Like Jesus Christ, he promised to his country. He was telling a tale, a fairy tale. So I said, oh, God. Venezuelans, obviously, they lost it. They lost the country. They lost everything. It's Mexico as well. Mexico has such a leader like Chavez. Maybe even worse than Chavez. He says that he's a leftist, but even Subcomandante Marcos hates him.
So it can be a leftist if Subcomandante hates you. He's the moral high ground of all. And so being popular and being a populist are two different things. Neither Chavez nor the Mexican leader are leftist figures. In my point of view, they're just authoritarian leaders. But when this question asked to equalise the current danger of fascism with tiny bubbling hopes of socialism. I am intimidated. Otherwise, we all know that neither Chavez nor I constantly.
I cannot pronounce the name so I can memorise it. The Mexican leader and then a leftist. They are just a sample test is suffering from grandiosity syndrome. People got married. Garcia Marquez interviewed Chávez when he came to power and he said something like, oh, classic Latin American throat. OK, J.J., thank you so much for doing that.
We have to stop here. But I want to say that really an important aspect of your contribution tonight was to show that the many issues that we have been discussing over the last eight weeks as part of our exploration of the dictatorship's syndrome is that they are absolutely not reduced to the region that some called the Middle East, but that they are really global problems. So it is a real call for vigilance for everyone, but also here in Europe.
This was the last of our eight talks in this series. So time has come now to say goodbye. But we will be online again next term for a series of talks about the 10th anniversary of the Arab Spring. But until then, I wish you all happy holidays and I hope to meet again in a few weeks time. Goodbye. Thank you, everyone. My.