|
Nick Ashdown@nickashdown.bsky.social |
411 followers 219 following 583 posts
Canadian journalist/writer in Brussels writing mostly about Turkey. New Lines Magazine, LA Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Foreign Policy, Globe & Mail, etc.
Selected clippings: nickashdown.weebly.com/selected-published-works
|
Howard Eissenstat
@heissenstat.bsky.social
[ View ] |
As someone who has written quite a bit about race in Turkish nationalism, I am always surprised by my own surprise when otherwise sophisticated Turks insist "there is no history of racism in Turkish culture." Bonkers in just about any society. Mind-boggling in the Turkish context.
0 replies 1 reposts 5 likes
|
|
Howard Eissenstat
@heissenstat.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Anti-immigrant sentiment is powerful in Turkey. Violence is not uncommon and, with economic duress hitting virtually every household, it is only going to get worse.
www.nytimes.com/2024/07/02/w...
0 replies 10 reposts 10 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
If Poland or Brazil can reverse democratic backsliding, the US can too. Many of today's brightest beacons of democracy overcame longstanding dictatorships well within living memory. It'll be a huge, long (likely unending) fight, but it can be won. Doomerism is a paralyzing poison.
0 replies 1 reposts 4 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Flashing the Greywolf salute now, while it's being brandished during mass anti-Syrian attacks in Turkey, as well as during the anniversary of the Sivas Massacre, where it was also seen, is really grim.
I wrote about Turkey's Grey Wolves here: newlinesmag.com/essays/a-pol...
0 replies 2 reposts 1 likes
|
Nate Schenkkan
@nateschenkkan.bsky.social
[ View ] |
I think it is wise and productive for people to take seriously the idea we are in a constitutional crisis in America. I don’t think it is wise or productive to assume what happens next is like what happens in semi consolidated or consolidated authoritarian systems.
4 replies 23 reposts 105 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Açık Radyo is an invaluable gem (a bit like Echo of Moscow, maybe a bit less prominent). This is extremely concerning.
bianet.org/haber/turkey...
0 replies 3 reposts 3 likes
|
Steven Seggie
@stevenhseggie.bsky.social
[ View ] |
For anyone wondering about the Turkish grey wolf fascist stuff displayed after the match last night here’s a great piece by @nickashdown.bsky.social on some modern history of the fascists newlinesmag.com/essays/a-pol...
0 replies 5 reposts 7 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
It would be amazing if we end up moving back to a post-autocracy Turkey 🤣. Great novel plotline.
0 replies 0 reposts 3 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
I have the luxury of being able to choose between Belgium or Canada, and I'm still fucking terrified for my family's future. Will Canada go far right and become a vassal state of an autocratic superpower its economy depends on? Will Belgium be governed by fascists who want to carve it up?
1 replies 0 reposts 3 likes
|
b-boy bouiebaisse
@jbouie.bsky.social
[ View ] |
SCOTUS is telling us that it has completely signed on to the project of a second Trump administration, which is establishing an elected autocracy.
48 replies 700 reposts 2858 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Another racist attack on a Syrian neighbourhood in Turkey after a Syrian reportedly abuses a (also Syrian) child. There's a high risk that one of these is eventually going to end in a massacre.
www.duvarenglish.com/local-mob-va...
0 replies 4 reposts 1 likes
|
|
Nate Schenkkan
@nateschenkkan.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Rejecting immigration is a policy of national suicide and should be treated as such
6 replies 78 reposts 427 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Guess it’ll be unavoidable…
0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
These were odds from Nate Silver and the Economist *before* the debate!
1 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
I feel like if the Democrats can’t get rid of Biden at this point (or find a suitable candidate for that matter), they’re in almost as rough shape as the Republicans.
1 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
I hope to god this is wrong but either way follow Justin for excellent reporting and analysis. He’s been covering Lebanon for a very long time now.
1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Woke up in Brussels to read what my progressive leaning Canadian friends said about the debate. About what I expected, gonna try really hard not to watch it. The whole world is so fucked…
1 replies 0 reposts 2 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Even a country like Ukraine didn’t have much of a chance until they “earned” it by EU politicians who feel guilty after visiting Bucha. While smaller Muslim majority states like Bosnia or Albania probably have a much better chance.
0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
For sure, and still are. I just think there were many other factors too. Even in a best case scenario, absorbing a country of 90 million, with weak institutions, massive human rights abuses and corruption, low level civil war raging, widespread poverty…It was always gonna be near impossible.
1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
That was definitely the cardinal sin. I also think a lot of the animosity from the EU comes from foreign policy disputes rather than rule of law and human rights abuses, but it depends on the country, institution, political party, and era.
1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Or maybe because they're (rightly) concerned with Islamophobia in the West, they think it's their duty as progressives to "support" Muslim-majority countries (by being soft on human rights abuses?). I'm speculating and generalizing based on only a few examples though!
0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
I seem to recall some stuff happening in/since 2016...The funny thing is, there are plenty of non-Turkish advocates in the EU-verse who feed these "everything is the EU's fault" narratives. They have a kind of infantilizing view of Turkey as a child-like country that "doesn't know any better."
2 replies 0 reposts 2 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Watching how they glorify the likes of Chomsky and now Assange (“Freedom fighter!!”), this must be how Turkish secularists felt when some people abroad used to praise the Gülen movement 🤣
0 replies 0 reposts 4 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
For sure, and also a lot of people left the country (or were pushed out), and others left Twitter. Was hoping people would re-congregate here. I'm basically just here to follow you and Howard and a few others now!
1 replies 0 reposts 4 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
I do sure miss the days of e.g. 2015 Turkey Twitter, when there was an actual community who knew each other in real life and interacted a lot. That mostly died post July 15. Can't recall the last time I saw a long thread of Turkey people having a discussion online.
1 replies 0 reposts 5 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Ok I don't like Unherd lol but I do enjoy Ralph!
1 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
The For You feed really shows me everything I actually want to see - accounts that I interact with, topics I'm interested in. When you follow 5000+ accounts with an eruption of several posts/second the only way it's useable is with a good algorithm (and lists) to separate the wheat from the chaff.
1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
And obviously very little foreign news here unless it relates to US foreign policy. I want e.g. Turkey, Ukraine, Europe, security and defence stuff, longform journalism, and it's slim pickings. It's just American progressive politics, which I also enjoy, but give me some variety!
1 replies 0 reposts 2 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
The only thing I follow on this site is my Turkey list. I like that there are multiple algorithms to choose from, but they all show me super boring posts. For all its awfulness, I find Twitter's algorithm excellent (but you have to like things voraciously so it knows what you want to be shown).
1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
|
|
Nate Schenkkan
@nateschenkkan.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Not covered much even in US or European media, but Canada is going through a multiyear crisis on foreign interference that has implications for the future of democracy there and abroad Recent parliamentary report on it is sober and sobering: www.nsicop-cpsnr.ca/reports/rp-2...
2 replies 59 reposts 124 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
John Oliver on Project 2025 and a second Trump term.
youtu.be/gYwqpx6lp_s?...
0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Ooo that was a good one…
0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
|
|
Howard Eissenstat
@heissenstat.bsky.social
[ View ] |
One of my biggest beefs with the literature on settler colonialism is that, on the whole, it is treated as if it is utterly distinct from other sorts of nationalist projects (as opposed to a variant trend within the general category of nationalism) and limited to discussions of Western projects.
1 replies 1 reposts 6 likes
|
|
Nate Schenkkan
@nateschenkkan.bsky.social
[ View ] |
A campaign of systematic erasure of indigenous identity
1 replies 3 reposts 8 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Man I would kill for that confidence lol. Even after over a decade of covering Turkey, whenever people ask me for comment or a presentation, my first impulse is always “I’m not qualified to talk about that.”
1 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
The Yanis Varoufakis obituary is laugh out loud funny. Who praises themselves in an obituary for someone else!? Epic levels of narcissism. “I’m so sorry that my friend and hero died. Anywho, did you know that he thought that I was in fact the real hero? Hmm, did you know that??? Do you agree???”
0 replies 1 reposts 2 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
(The Turkish humanities are dominated by the hard left, something Chomsky actually noticed and praised, and he has criticized Erdoğan quite a bit to be fair, but if Erdoğan weren’t “Western-backed” I promise you he would have had a different take).
1 replies 0 reposts 5 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
Really want to rant to my thousands of Marxist Turkish followers that Chomsky was a genocide denier and dictator apologist but I’d get ratioed so hard and would be fuming for days, so I’ll just rant here into the empty abyss instead…
2 replies 0 reposts 4 likes
|
|
Nate Schenkkan
@nateschenkkan.bsky.social
[ View ] |
A big part of Chomsky’s political appeal IMO was that he was an inveterate critic who never expended serious effort on a program that would have forced him to engage with the actually existing world and how it could change
2 replies 1 reposts 8 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
I think about this several times a month.
0 replies 0 reposts 3 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
In case anyone was wondering if Jacobin could embarrass itself any more. New Statesman has also gone really downhill.
0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
“Incremental improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances are the best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek." - Tony Judt, who always had a healthy scepticism (to put it lightly!) towards any kind of radical revolutionary change (which almost always ends badly).
0 replies 1 reposts 0 likes
|
|
Nate Schenkkan
@nateschenkkan.bsky.social
[ View ] |
This piece by Aaron Stein and Nick Danforth on US-Turkey relations makes a good counterpoint to Asli Aydintaşbaş’s on the same subject in Foreign affairs this week warontherocks.com/2024/06/comi...
1 replies 4 reposts 2 likes
|
|
Nate Schenkkan
@nateschenkkan.bsky.social
[ View ] |
There’s a new piece in Foreign Affairs by my friend Asli Aydintaşbaş arguing for Turkey and the U.S. to reconcile. This is a thing I’ve worked on, and I disagree with the piece, so response to follow in this thread.
www.foreignaffairs.com/united-state...
1 replies 2 reposts 3 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
I love that it lets you choose from alternative translations for each word, which is clearly informed not just by a dictionary but context-specific AI.
0 replies 0 reposts 0 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
DeepL is like, shockingly good at translations. Very convenient for my work, and terrible for my Turkish!
1 replies 0 reposts 3 likes
|
|
Howard Eissenstat
@heissenstat.bsky.social
[ View ] |
The Turkish government is not (yet) indulging in the overturning municipal elections en masse, as it did in 2019. Nonetheless, an ugly turn.
anfenglish.com/news/turkish...
0 replies 2 reposts 2 likes
|
|
Howard Eissenstat
@heissenstat.bsky.social
[ View ] |
The Turkish Studies community on this site is fairly limited and not particularly active. Sinem, however, is one of the best scholars of contemporary Turkey out there. And she's here. Worth a follow!
1 replies 2 reposts 7 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
If she's elite now (don't all working class people dream of joining the middle class? Why attack them for it?), it's due to raw talent - she wrote White Teeth (which I'm reading now and is *fantastic*) when she was 21!
0 replies 0 reposts 1 likes
|
|
Nick Ashdown
@nickashdown.bsky.social
[ View ] |
The racist, classist attacks on her ("she's a rich, white liberal") were absurd. She grew up the daughter of a poor Jamaican immigrant and working class white father, and went to state schools back when they were higher quality. She's a socialist, not a liberal (as if liberal is any kind of insult).
1 replies 0 reposts 1 likes