From Istanbul With Love: Kaya Genç on How Turkey is Watching Trump's America

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. It's Saturday, July 11. It's been quite a week, certainly in Ankara, Turkey. Donald Trump went to NATO. NATO meeting, met Erdogan, the Turkish strongman, promised him all sorts of things, including, new F-35 fighter jets and lift the sanctions on Turkey that Trump himself, imposed. Classic Trump, I guess, in a way. And we're lucky enough today to have a man in Ankara, but a man, our man, at least for this show, in Istanbul, the great city in Turkey, straddling Asia and Europe. Kaya Genç is a very well-known Turkish novelist, commentator. He's also a contributor to an excellent anthology of essays about how America is viewed overseas. We interviewed Madeline Schwartz, the editor of it, called How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump. And, Kaya is joining us, as I said, from Istanbul. Kaya, what's the view from Istanbul, at least, on these meetings between, Donald Trump and, your strongman leader, Erdogan? Did they appear similar? Did one look stronger than the other, weaker than the other?

00:02:00 Kaya Genç: Hello, Andrew. Very good to be here, and very good to speak to you today from Istanbul. Well, before the NATO summit, there were some arrests made in Ankara, and lots of activists were rounded up one night, because they were seen as a threat to NATO security, for some reason. And those activists were LGBTQ rights defenders and labor unionists, journalists. So when it comes to NATO, there's a sense in the Turkish civil society that it is a club of the right wing. You know, you read nineteen sixties Turkish writers — like, say, Sevgi Soysal, for example — and you see this big antipathy toward NATO. So if you think that NATO represents the global world order institutions in Turkey, you're wrong. In Turkey, it represents the mighty. And so it wasn't a surprise that our president Erdogan and your president Trump got along so well. And this was such a kind of military passion show — we saw lots of jets flying in the air and revolvers being gifted among the attendees, and lots of talk about the war industry: guns and fighter jets and F-35s and S-400s, defense systems and all that. So, to be fair, Ankara has been very successful in building a in its defense industries. It built a model, where it can support, independent arms manufacturers in the country who produce drones that are you that were used in the, Ukraine-Russia war, very successfully by Ukrainians. And so these exports, these military exports have been very good for Turkish economy. But it increasingly feels that we have a kind of war economy here, very increasingly built on arms exports. So there's a sense that — I mean, the Turkish ruling politicians don't hide it. You know, Turkey is here to produce arms. That's the mission of Turkey at the moment.

00:04:55 Andrew Keen: It's been enough wars around you to supply all sorts of people. Erdogan also, apparently, gave all the NATO leaders pistols. I wonder if, when they left the summit. I wonder if he gave Donald Trump a pistol. I don't know if you quite know what to do with it.

00:05:14 Kaya Genç: Well, some leaders couldn't return to their home countries with the pistols, like Keir Starmer, because Starmer said,

00:05:23 Andrew Keen: Classic Starmer. Right? It's pathetic. Yeah.

00:05:26 Kaya Genç: Yes. And he was like, they won't allow me inside with this gun, so I have to leave it. But it's kind of a powerful message. It's very also, like, kind of Ottoman sultan style messaging. Like, you know, we represent might, and Yeah. We know how to deal with you.

00:05:48 Andrew Keen: We'll do a show maybe in the future, Kaya, on, Erdogan himself. But I'm curious as how our man in Ankara, Donald Trump, was seen. What looking up close, what did the Turkish people see in this old American character, an 80-year-old man coming to Turkey? And living it up with your old man, did he look like an old man? Was he useful? Was he fun? Was he charismatic?

00:06:23 Kaya Genç: Yes. I think Trump is a star among right-wing voters everywhere. I went to India a few years ago and with my hair very, you know, rough and stuff. And I was a bit chubbier, I guess, and someone said, oh, you look like Steve Bannon, and I love you for that — you know, we are big fans of Steve Bannon.

00:06:43 Andrew Keen: Oh my God, I hope you smacked them in the mouth. Did you shoot them with your pistol?

00:06:47 Kaya Genç: No, I just shaved my hair and, you know, lost some pounds. But I can see that among the most educated and also those who are, upward mobile, there's great love for Trump and people around him. And, also, in Turkey, I think the dislike for Biden was much more, you know. We I remember the Turkish media was really going after Joe Biden. But even though Trump, has supported Israel to such a degree, over the past half decades, still the Turkish media is very forgiving, forgiving. You know, Netanyahu is the bad man in Turkish press. But with Trump, he's kind of an ally, you know, because he speaks our language. He really likes Turkish, the Turkish presidential system.

00:07:47 Andrew Keen: When you say he speaks your language, you mean the language of authoritarianism rather than Turkey.

00:07:53 Kaya Genç: Yeah. He's also said some Turkish words. He said, [Turkish phrase].

00:07:58 Andrew Keen: What does that mean?

00:08:00 Kaya Genç: Just like, hello, soldier. And then he was, like, greeting the soldiers. But, you know, he's a businessman, and he, I think, really shares the kind of Turkish right-wing values. Like, he's not, like, super like, he's not, like, maybe, like, purely religious. He puts he represents the religious people, but he's a capitalist at heart. And that mixture, people like here. You know? And, but I think the most important thing is he deals with Turkey, and Turkey has this fascination with the US. You know, the Turkish politicians can be very anti-West, Western values, but that doesn't mean they don't like the US or the West. They just don't like some parts of the US. They don't like the trans movement. They don't like freedom of expression. They don't like, labor rights. You know? But they like the death penalty, maybe. They like gun ownership. You know, some parts of the West, very sympathetic for the Turkish right. And the one of the founders of Turkish Islamism, Mehmet Akif Ersoy, who also wrote the Turkish anthem. You know, he wrote this famous poem where he looks at Germany. And he says, you know, we have to level up the Germany. We have to learn how to be as industrious as the Germans and, you know, they really take their religion seriously. We have to do the same. We just should leave the decadent stuff out. You know? That's the Turkish right movement. And so Trump was there — there were no real big protests against Trump. You know, if he went to London, I'm sure he would be met with great resistance. But here, there were some attempts to protest the NATO summit, but, I mean, in Ankara, it's very difficult to protest also in Istanbul. You know? If you will go out with a banner, they'll come after you. So, I think he really got off easily here.

00:10:21 Andrew Keen: As I said, you contributed an excellent essay to this wonderful anthology, How We See It: The World Looks at Trump in the Age of — sorry. The World Looks at America in the Age of Trump. It's put together by The Dial editor, Madeline Schwartz, who was on the show a couple of weeks ago. What's your relationship, Kaya, with the United States? Have you spent much time here? Did you grow up looking at it nostalgically, sympathetically, in a hostile way?

00:10:52 Kaya Genç: Yes. I studied English literature, and I'm a English literature scholar. But the first time I went to the US was in 2016. And, just weeks into Trump's first term, And I went to New York on a book tour. I went to — yeah.

00:11:17 Andrew Keen: And your book at the time was Under the Shadow: Rage and Revolution in Modern Turkey, which was a big hit.

00:11:24 Kaya Genç: Yes. So it was, it came out just after the coup attempt in Turkey, and then Trump was elected. And I arrived in, New York, I think, in January 2017. And there were protests against Trump's Muslim ban. And so that was my first time in on US soil, and I was really heartened by those protesters who were, like, anti-Trump and defending, defending their city, their values, their culture. And, in New York, I was visiting The Nation magazine, and some radio stations and some, event venues, and everyone seemed ready to fight. And, I think people saw Trump 1.0 as a kind of temporary thing. You know? We he'll be here for a few years, and we'll just kick him out. We'll fight him off, and then American democracy will revert to its normal values. And so I think there was a sense that Trump's sense of executive presidency was seen as an exceptional thing. And as I tried to explain in this essay, in Turkey, it was seen as how American politics operates and something that we have to, imitate and something we admire because for since its establishment as a republic in the nineteen twenties Turkey has taken Europe as a model, you know, parliamentary democracy. You know, we get rid of the sultanate. We don't like one-man rule. And so now we have a parliament. And Turkey is so ethnically diverse and so many different interest groups. So let's find the voice for each of these groups in the parliament. So Turkey had a very vibrant democracy in the nineteen twenties. But soon politicians decided that this is not a very effective way of governance. You know? Maybe some were even missing the old sultan. And then, but Turkey also reforged itself as a western modern modernized country. So they decided to shift their focus from Europe to the US because they looked at the US, and they saw, a much more efficient country, and they decided to build, the second half of the twentieth century in Turkey to a kind of Americanization project. It became — it started with the Marshall Plan in the nineteen forties and the aftermath of the Second World War, and Turkey really benefited from it. And so you see lots of American investments in Turkey, highways and, Hilton hotels and burger joints. And so suddenly, the Europe the very rapidly Europeanized Turkey was very rapidly Americanized. And so when you look at the old people in Turkey, they know about history of this. So, when they look at an American politician, they maybe they feel happy that, they come to Turkey and, you know, shake our president's hand and say so many good things about him. And, you know, since the past decades, we also have a presidential system. And people like me were very much against it. We very much wanted to defend our old presidential our old parliamentary democracy, but we had a referendum and people voted for it. And now we are living the consequences of Americanization in Turkey.

00:15:43 Andrew Keen: You speak of this Americanization, but, of course, there are many American Americas, Kaya. You don't need me to tell you that. Even after the war in the Marshall Plan age, there was the FDR, New Deal America, and increasingly more of a free market libertarian America. Of those Americas, was FDR's New Deal was this version of America? Was this the one that was embraced by Turkish politicians and society, or did people not distinguish between a new deal America and a free market America?

00:16:24 Kaya Genç: Well, the FDR America is, of course, very different from the NATO years and the anti-communist America. And so, from nineteen fifties onwards, America's, role changed in Turkey. And as you say, there are different Americas, of course. I mean, I grew up with HBO, and I grew up in New York. You know? I even though I visited New York for the first time in 2017. So and I've never been an anti-American, when I was growing up and I didn't really didn't like anti-American people in Turkey. I always believed that, the labor movement in America, the artists in America, the poets in America. There was a different America that maybe wasn't represented in the politics, maybe a little bit represented by Democrats. And so for people like us, America was also an escape, and it remains a way of escaping to reality around us, you know, because geography and the spaces and the kind of music, the jazz music. And there are so many things that really rescues one's mind when you're living here and when you're really, really frustrated by the politics, by the culture around you. America comes to your rescue, and I'm very much aware of that. But, Turkey's ties with America that has always been very militaristic. And the anti-communism in Turkey that has taken root after the nineteen fifties and that led to the, really proliferation of the Turkish right-wing movements that has always been seen, I think rightly so, by the Turkish left as an extension of Americanization. And, the role that NATO has given Turkey as a kind of defense mechanism against, the communist, Eastern Europe. And so, you know, I look at the kind of most hard right elements in Turkish history and society that's still around us. And they have a very long history with, NATO, and NATO values this anti-communism, this NATO brand of anti-communism. But at the same time, I returned to the US as I write in my piece during Biden years. And, of course, that's the wonderful America that, that I kind of grew up with in the nineteen nineties, the kind of HBO America, the kind of California America, and suddenly, America was again freedom. And, also, around the same time in 2019, there were big opposition victories in Turkey. Istanbul had a new mayor called Ekrem Imamoglu.

00:19:54 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And you have an excellent piece — new piece in The Dial where you call him the hologram or the editor there, probably, our friend, Madeline Schwartz, calls him the hologram candidate.

00:20:10 Kaya Genç: Yeah. And so when he was elected, he wasn't a hologram candidate. He was very present. He was everywhere, like, physically. You could see him in the city, in weddings, in funerals. And

00:20:24 Andrew Keen: He was a bit of a one-man army, was he?

00:20:26 Kaya Genç: Yes. Absolutely. And you have to be like that to be an Istanbul mayor. And he was very young, and he implemented this kind of socialist municipalism, ideology, which is like he was using the municipality as a kind of progressive force to fight against injustice. And so it was very popular. And all the big Turkish cities were voting for the opposition. So during the Biden years, there was great hope in Turkey that, you know, we just like, you know, we now have the good America back in power. And now maybe we'll have the opposition in power as well. And then, of course, that was very alarming for Ankara. Also, these ties with, I mean, these hopes that these politicians created. And so when Trump was reelected, and when those, mayors in opposition mayors in Turkey started to experience these difficulties, it was very, very good timing for, the Turkish right and the American right. And I think they just walked together this path of, you know, crushing the opposition.

00:21:51 Andrew Keen: Kaya, one of your compatriots, I know you know her, Ece Temelkuran, she's an old friend of mine and of the show. She was recently on the show talking about her new book, Nation of Strangers. But she's very well-known for, a book that came out a few years ago, How to Lose a Country: The Seven Steps from Democracy to Fascism [as spoken — the subtitle is "The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship"], which takes the Turkish case and globalizes it and suggests that what happened in Turkey will happen elsewhere. And, when the book came out, a lot of people thought, well, this isn't gonna happen in our country, in the UK, in the United Kingdom, or the US. But, of course, in the US, in some ways, it seems to have. Is the Turkish model did, Erdogan did he create a model, I mean, maybe not knowingly, for people like Trump? Or is Trump teaching Erdogan new autocratic tricks of how to infiltrate the state and use it to promote your own power and wealth?

00:22:53 Kaya Genç: Yes. As I tried to explain in my essay in our book, it is a kind of dialogue between, two powers. I don't think Turkey invented a model, and I don't think, Trump created something. The I think there is a kind of you know, among the leftists, there was always the international brigades and, a kind of internationalist spirits. Like, the left in Spain learns from the left in Germany. And there's kind of this is this has always been seen as part of leftist thinking. And maybe, yes, the neoliberals, you know, met, at this, place and created, invented neoliberalism. There are always, you know, stories about how neoliberalism has been created. But I think today, we see populism, right-wing populism learning from each other. It's like AI learning from, from large language models. And it makes sense. Like, if you were a right-wing populist, why wouldn't you learn from a successful right-wing populist?

00:24:10 Andrew Keen: Yeah. And that's, of course, the fascination of your look-alike, Steve Bannon, with not just Turkey, but also, Orban in Hungary. So, Bannon certainly has that internationalist quality. Maybe it's no surprise that his strategy seems to be somewhat Leninist in terms of its seizure of power.

00:24:34 Kaya Genç: Yes. And, also, we also had the same thing, I think, here with the AKP, a kind of Gramscian, war, culture war. You know? Like, you want institutions, you first go into these institutions, and slowly, you roll the culture, and you replace it with your own. And, I mean, I go to Italy a lot. And in Italy, you see, Meloni and the kind of how can we present a kind of, fascists rooted politician in a democratic outlook. You know? We are now seeing it in France with Marine Le Pen returning to the presidential race and, you know, these really cosmetic, soft brushes that make these politicians seem, much more acceptable. And, also in Britain with Nigel Farage and people around him. And so, when I see that I don't feel like or they are building on a on the Turkish model per se, but I feel that they're joining the club, the club of right-wing politicians who are accepted whatever they do, domestically. You know? It's like, if you project power to the world, if you are interested in geopolitics, if you present strength in places like NATO Summit, then whatever you do domestically maybe doesn't, matter that much anymore. And our friends in European Union, you know, they've been very silent about the things going on here.

00:26:31 Andrew Keen: Yeah. They're too worried. Starmer's too worried about taking his pistol home. It's interesting, Kaya, you bring up Gramsci. You say you go to Italy quite a lot. Of course, the quote from Gramsci that's been making the rounds recently is the one about the interregnum and the idea that we're stuck in an interregnum in history. We know that the old is dead, but we're not quite sure what's coming. But I wonder whether the world that you are becoming increasingly familiar with in Turkey and we, perhaps, in the United States, this soft Hollywood style autocracy that is the future, that we're not in an interregnum, that this is the new world.

00:27:16 Kaya Genç: Yes. It feels like that. And it feels like the kind of liberal the kind of the soft liberalism that I myself have believed in from the nineties and the early two thousands is becoming really it's just disappearing. In Turkey, we saw it, take shape in different political parties, you know, soft spoken, centrists. They don't have a following anymore. And in Turkey, we see that people like [Imamoglu] or, other opposition mayors, they really implemented these socialist policies. So what we see is if, you know, there's a resurgence of far right, that's very maybe that carries echoes of the twentieth century or the twentieth century. Perhaps, the opposite will happen too. And it did happen in Turkey, and it was very successful. And people who were skeptical, who said, oh, don't, follow socialist policies. You know? It will alienate the pious. It will alienate this group, that group. It really didn't alienate those groups. And so, I think maybe without using the word socialist, but just using those policies, they're very popular. And I read that they even use the word socialists in

00:28:45 Andrew Keen: the United States. Yeah. Yes. And AOC.

00:28:48 Kaya Genç: Yeah. And not only in New York, but also in Middle America. And, I guess young people are really doing their reading or maybe they're encountering this on TikTok or I don't know where, but, there was great pushback against the fascists and the far rights in the twentieth century. And now they think it's time for the pushback. And where do they find their heroes? Maybe not in Hillary Clinton or, some, I don't know, some more centrist politician. But maybe some dead poets from the twentieth century, maybe people like Rosa Luxemburg. You know? Suddenly, those writers are becoming popular. And I, recently reviewed the book, which is coming out in English. It's called Walking. It's coming from New York Review Books. It's a beautiful book by Sevgi Soysal, a communist Turkish novelist who died age 40 from breast cancer. And she writes about Ankara, you know, the city of the NATO summit and Trump and all these leaders. And she writes about how, the city is slowly killing itself because of the profit motive, because of, Turkey's transformation. And she's trying to stay alive in this kind of slow death of the city, and it really resonated with me because I was just reading it before the NATO summit. So it's a long process. You know? This — yeah.

00:30:36 Andrew Keen: May maybe in the future, Madeline Schwartz will come out with, the second volume, How We See It: The World Looks at America in the Age of Mamdani or Bernie Sanders or AOC. We had, we had Tad Devine on the show, earlier this week. He was Bernie Sanders' campaign manager, and he talks about how the Democrats literally, and this is the title of his book, screwed Bernie. So perhaps the time is right now for the Democrats to embrace, maybe not Bernie Sanders, but AOC or Mamdani or another kind of leftist politician. So are you still, Kaya, are you still then cautiously optimistic about America perhaps being the inspiration for moderates, for progressives, for those people who believe in democracy and free speech, or might it come from somewhere else, maybe even from Ankara or Turkey?

00:31:39 Kaya Genç: Yeah. I mean, we need these big parties. Like, in Turkey, we have the Republican People's Party, Ataturk's party. In the US, you have the Democratic Party. And, you know, the right wing always wants fragmentation. You know? Why don't, socialists leave those parties and form something new so that we can, you know, fight with the centrist. But we need the socialist to really conquer these parties and to make them, closer to power. You know, we not we need those ideas in power. And in the US, I'm still optimistic. Also in Turkey, I think, you know, the Ataturk's party, is having lots of legal troubles at the moment. You know, we can talk about it maybe another day. The leader has changed after a court order and

00:32:31 Andrew Keen: And the Ataturk party, of course, is the party of what

00:32:36 Kaya Genç: The Republican People's Party.

00:32:38 Andrew Keen: An aggressive secularism in contrast with Erdogan.

00:32:43 Kaya Genç: Yes. And it's a party in transformation. You know? It has implemented Turkey's Europeanization in the twenties and thirties. It was anti-communist in the forties, and then it was very leftist in the sixties, so a very long history. But it's a big party. It's a machine to win elections. You know, you need this machine. It's always easy to vote for the Trojkist Communist Party, and then you have your, 0% votes, and then everyone is happy. But when you have these progressive ideas in big parties, then that's how you make the change. So I'm optimistic, for Italy and for the US, for Turkey. But I think that the ideas that seem marginal and radical, they have to stay. They have to retain their form, but they have to be represented in these big political, parties so that they can, you know, they can come to power because when they are implemented, from above, they're very popular. And they have to be implemented. They shouldn't stay just in the books.

00:33:58 Andrew Keen: One question, Kaya. One character we haven't brought up, and we've talked a lot about Trump and Erdogan, is Putin. And, of course, you're talking to me from Istanbul, so much closer to Russia and the war in Ukraine. Is Putin and Putinism, was it a model? Does it remain a model for Erdogan and maybe even Trump? Lots of conspiracy theories, of course, particularly back in 2016, about Trump and Putin. Most of them, I think, have been disproved. Most of them are, to put it mildly, exaggerated. But is Putin, in a sense, an extreme model for the world of Trump and Erdogan, or is he different?

00:34:41 Kaya Genç: He maybe he was a decade ago, but not anymore. He's, I mean, Turkey has a historical, antipathy towards Russia. You know, we have the Crimean War, and Turkey has, historically been against Russia. You know, the kind of — not just the NATO anti-communism, but also during the nineteenth century. And so there is not much love for the Russian system, and there are so many Turkic people in former Soviet states. And Turkish right has always fought for their independence. And so the kind of Russian czar — we say czar, but you say czar. And so we don't have any sympathy for that. And, you know, you look at the Turkish trade. Turkey does most of its trade with Europe, Germany, Ukraine, US. You know? Actually, Russia is, turning into a footnote. And I think this latest NATO summit, we, today learned that the Turkish, the Turkish government is returning the S-400 defense systems to a third, country so that it's getting rid of those, defense systems so that it can get the F-35s from, the US. So Turkey has really turned its back, toward the US and against Russia, particularly in the past few months. So, and also in Istanbul, you see lots of Ukrainians, Ukrainian refugees, lots of people working in tech, lots of young people. And there is not much love for Putin or his autocracy here. I don't see it in the Turkish newspapers. And he's never presented as a kind of model in the same way that Trump and his way of, his way of ruling the White House is a model for Turkey.

00:37:04 Andrew Keen: You mentioned Netanyahu. In the United States, of course, Gaza is increasingly becoming a divisive issue. What's the view less of Gaza, but what's the view from Istanbul, Turkey, on American involvement, the American relationship with Israel?

00:37:26 Kaya Genç: Well, it's accepted as a fact. People are realists here, and I don't think anyone expects something different from the US. You know, Kamala Harris was proposing something slightly different, but even that didn't get good press here. I you know, for The Dial, we were looking at how the, presidential race in the US was, was covered in countries like Turkey. And I was surprised at how little criticism for Trump was in the Turkish media, and, actually, people didn't like the Democrats. They were afraid that, that they could come back into power. And so with Israel, you know, the longer Netanyahu stays in power, the longer we feel right that, you know, there's an extremist in power in Israel, and there are no kind of moderates in Israel. And so let's be anti-Israel. You know? It's easier to do that. And, you know, I wrote a piece some years back for Jewish Quarterly about antisemitism in Turkey, and it is, you know, it's just poison. It's a very poisonous ideology, and it's a very powerful part of the Turkish right. And so it's alarming that, you know, the more outrageous things Netanyahu says, the more antisemitic groups are empowered. So, it's I mean, if you're concerned about antisemitism in Turkey, you're concerned about Netanyahu, because he really, empowers these groups. And yes. So he's actually kind of the bad person, the first number one here in Turkey, and that won't change. And, you know, that makes antisemitic people happy. And so it's, hopefully, things will change in Israel, and there'll be some moderation also for us.

00:39:50 Andrew Keen: For everyone. Then very briefly, Kaya, you're not a geostrategic, expert, I know, but, your focus is more on film literature. What about Iran? How is American involvement in Iran, which seems at best blustering, slightly absurd? How is it viewed? It's your neighborhood, so you have a closer view of it than we do in the United States.

00:40:21 Kaya Genç: Yeah. I mean, the Iran's involvement in the Syrian civil war and its support for the regime, you know, it so Turkey doesn't really have that kind of sympathy. Also, like, just like for Russia and Putin for also for historical reasons, you know, also for religious reasons. Not much love for Iran. But

00:40:44 Andrew Keen: Do you mean for the Sunni because Iran is Shia and, Sunni, and Turkey is

00:40:51 Kaya Genç: Sunni? Yes. I mean, history plays a big role in present day politics here and, you know, the Ottoman history and the all those historical wars and everything. But, of course, the thing that Turks hate the most is foreign interventions. And so when the US was waging its war, you know, everything else, lost importance. And so, I mean, if you look at pro-government media, of course, it's anti-US, and it's pro-Iran. Yes. We can say that it's pro-Iran. But it's also about Venezuela when America does its operations in Venezuela. The pro-government media is vehemently against it, and there's always the fear and also the kind of the maybe the fear that, you know, America will come for us. You know? There's always a fear, but then something is stopping that. What is stopping it's Erdogan's relationship with Trump. They're good friends, and so America will never attack Turkey. So it's kind of it sounds like, like a fairy tale, but, I mean, that's what politics has seen, in Turkey these days. And, also, we have some, Iranian refugees, and we have some lots of Iranian communities in Turkey, even from before the war. And we did some reporting on that for Index on Censorship, the British magazine, lots of Iranian dissidents. So we have lots of Iranian dissidents, Russian dissidents based in Istanbul because, Istanbul is a good hub for these dissidents. And, you know, Turkey, is not kicking those people out. You know? Turkey is actually protecting these people. And so I think Turkey is enjoying this kind of, kind of

00:43:10 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Maybe on

00:43:11 Kaya Genç: the call.

00:43:12 Andrew Keen: Turkey or Istanbul is the new Paris or the New York. Finally, you've written some powerful pieces on, Turkish filmmakers standing up to Erdogan's autocracy. You wrote an interesting piece in The Guardian, another about another, filmmaker, one called Ceylan, for, this was an essay in foreign policy. We had, we had, Kaya, a, one of America's great film critics on the show, David Thomson, on a couple of weeks ago, who's written a book suggesting that Trumpism is the outcome of American love affair with Hollywood and the screen and the violence of movies like The Godfather. What's your take? I mean, you've said that you've been a lover of America since the nineties, HBO. I assume you also love American movies. Do you think that Hollywood and its glamorization of violence, movies like The Godfather, do you think that, in a way, has contributed to the emergence of these strongmen, particularly Trump, but maybe even Erdogan and the other strongmen leaders in Europe that movie directors have glamorized violence and strongmen over the years?

00:44:40 Kaya Genç: Yes. That was a great interview, and I love David Thomson. And he's one of my heroes, and I think his diagnosis is on the mark, especially about The Godfather. And there's this kind of cult of the powerful helping each other, helping the family, and, you know, moral relativism, and kind of the male models who presented in that film. And I still remember, like, the closing of the door and, leaving the woman outside, all those very, animalistic, scenes. And it feels just like, yes. That's how life works. You know? The film, Hollywood gives you that sense. And I see lots of Turkish right-wing columnists using, Corleone as kind of their Twitter banners. You know? Like, that scene and, like, he's really the hero. He's like, he's the boss. And even, you know, the aspiration to become that kind of boss who delivers and also with The Sopranos, we were talking about HBO and kind of yes. You know, he's a pig sometimes, but he delivers the food. And, that is like, this is reality. This is the truth. And cinema gives us the truth. And that kind of illusion that David Thomson talks about is I think it's, it's very on the mark. And as you say, I wrote about Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and he writes about the cynical terms, the cynicism that people live in this country to survive. And, you know, some people are critical of this, you know, because they think that it's kind of legitimizing this cynicism. You know? Because also these powerful three-hour-long films you watch and you say, yes, this is how life works. You only survive by cynicism. You know, if you're an idealist, this is what happens. And this is actually how people behave. And, like, cinema is the only way to show that. And so, but then you what's the alternative? Do we have to hate cinema now? Do we have to say, yes. You know, cinema is legitimizing this, and so we shouldn't watch it. But I think, I think when you look at kind of more experimental cinema that is problematizing, the objectivity of cinema, objectivity of camera, objectivity of narration, then we have something maybe more critical. But still, you know, what filmmakers? What films? You know? It's very difficult to dislike them. But I think David Thomson is also right. And I'm so glad that he came back to say his piece, in interviews like yours, and everyone is talking about The Godfather and American politics now. It's incredible.

00:48:08 Andrew Keen: Well, Kaya, again, a wonderful conversation. Your contribution, again, an excellent contribution to a wonderful anthology of essays about how the world is looking at America in the age of Trump — How We See It. Kaya, lovely to talk to you. Keep well in Istanbul, and, we will catch up again. It's always nice to have friends overseas. Thank you so much.

00:48:31 Kaya Genç: Thank you. Thank you for the invitation. Always good to be here.