Even as Turkey pulls away, the west must help its people resist

Date:03Sep2018

Bravo to award winning novelist Mrs Elif Shafak for these lines:

Every weekend I would gather with friends and family to watch a western. John Wayne spoke fluent Turkish back then, Clint Eastwood uttered his laconic replies in an Istanbul dialect. Those cowboy towns with their bleak landscapes might just as well have been somewhere in Anatolia, they were so familiar. When the US television series Dallas first came to Turkey it created a ripple of excitement that lasted for years. There would be no one on the streets in the evenings when it was being screened. We were a nation hooked on the saga of the Ewing family. My grandmother put a curse on JR, the scheming, sneaky oil tycoon – we all hated him with a passion. But we never saw him as an “American” or a “westerner”.

What happened to Turkey since then?