How It Starts
Can Dündar was the editor of Cumhuriyet when the Turkish government decided editors needed to go. They locked him up on espionage charges, he got out somehow, fled to Germany, and now he’s writing about what’s actually happening back home. It’s the kind of warning you read and then have to sit with because it’s too much to process quickly.
The detail that sticks is the knocking. Eighteen Cumhuriyet employees, same day, doors knocked on like they were running a coordinated raid. This was years into Erdogan’s grip, after the coup attempt that everyone recognized as the moment everything got worse. The response was systematic in a way that should have alarmed more people. Parliament neutralized. A purge disguised as a legal process. Seventy thousand people charged, thirty-two thousand actually locked up, sixty thousand government workers fired, a hundred and fifty news outlets just shut down. Numbers that are almost too clean to be real, but they’re real.
What Dündar keeps returning to is the atmosphere. The fear doesn’t come from being arrested—it comes from living in a place where speaking up is impossible and everyone knows it. The silence is the point.
He writes about the incremental part, how dissent dies in stages. First they take the Kurds, and most people stay quiet because they’re not Kurdish. Then the left. Then there’s nobody left because you’ve been picking them off the whole time, and now everyone’s either gone or terrified. It’s the poem people half-remember, the one about how these things work.
Someone actually said it to him straight. A German, Edzard Reuter, whose father ran Berlin after the war. Looked at Turkey and said it reminds him of the beginning of Nazi Germany. No metaphor. No hedging.
The thing I keep thinking about is how normal it becomes. You watch it happen in real time and part of you believes it’s necessary or temporary or not as bad as the headlines make it. Until the day you realize the whole architecture is in place and you can’t dismantle it anymore because most people have already stopped trying.