How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship
Written by Ece Temelkuran
Narrated by Ece Temelkuran
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
‘It couldn’t happen here’
Ece Temelkuran heard reasonable people in Britain say it the night of the Brexit vote.
She heard reasonable people in America say it the night Trump’s election was soundtracked by chants of ‘Build that wall.’
She heard reasonable people in Turkey say it as Erdoğan rigged elections, rebuilt the economy around cronyism, and labelled his opposition as terrorists.
How to Lose a Country is an impassioned plea, a warning to the world that populism and nationalism don’t march fully-formed into government; they creep. Award winning author and journalist Ece Temelkuran identifies the early-warning signs of this phenomenon, sprouting up across the world, in order to define a global pattern, and arm the reader with the tools to root it out.
Proposing alternative, global answers to the pressing – and too often paralysing – political questions of our time, Temelkuran explores the insidious idea of ‘real people’, the infantilisation of language and debate, the way laughter can prove a false friend, and the dangers of underestimating one’s opponent. She weaves memoir, history and clear-sighted argument into an urgent and eloquent defence of democracy.
No longer can the reasonable comfort themselves with ‘it couldn’t happen here.’ It is happening. And soon it may be too late.
Ece Temelkuran
Ece Temelkuran is an award-winning Turkish novelist and political commentator, whose journalism has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times,, Frankfurter Allgemeine and Der Spiegel. She won the Edinburgh International Book Festival First Book award for her novel Women Who Blow on Knots, and the Ambassador of New Europe Award for her book Turkey: The Insane and the Melancholy. She is the author of the internationally acclaimed How to Lose a Country.
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Reviews for How to Lose a Country
9 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/54.5 stars. This was an excellent analysis of how even (or maybe especially) countries that think “it* could never happen here; it only happens in other countries” can move swiftly towards it happening to them. However, as the book neared its conclusion I was hoping there would be more solid actions to take to stop or at least oppose the steady slide that a country might make towards fascism and it doesn’t really explicitly provide those action steps for resistance so, that was a little unsatisfying.
* “it” being fascism, dictatorship, broken democracy, failed state, etc.