Turkey: Adnan Menderes, populism, and history
Arts & Ideas
BBC
4.2 • 599 Ratings
🗓️ 17 February 2021
⏱️ 46 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Turkey and 50s Prime Minister Menderes, Erdogan today, and how history is used for political power. Matthew Sweet is joined by Jeremy Seal, Ece Temelkuran, Michael Talbot & Nilay Ozlu.
Before his execution in 1961, the Turkish prime minister Adnan Menderes saw Turkey admitted to NATO, investment in agriculture, education and health care, but also conflict with the Greek community. On 17 February 1959 he was involved in a plane crash near Gatwick on his way to a conference about Cyprus. Jeremy Seal traces his story and looks at the parallels with President Erdogan's Turkey now in a new book. He talks with journalist and author Ece Temelkuran and presenter Matthew Sweet. Plus new research on the Ottoman Empire from Michael Talbot and Nilay Ozlu.
Jeremy Seal's book A Coup in Turkey: A Tale Of Democracy, Despotism & Vengeance In A Divided Land is out now.
Ece Temelkuran is the author of How To Lose A Country: The 7 Steps From Democracy To Dictatorship; Turkey - The Insane & The Melancholy; novel The Time Of Mute Swans; and a forthcoming book, Together: 10 Choices For A Better Now.
Michael Talbot is an historian at the University of Greenwich and a BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker.
Nilay Ozlu is an architectural historian and Chevening Postdoctoral Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies.
Matthew Sweet's journey on London's 29 bus route with researchers looking at the history of the Greek Cypriot Community in London: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00014qk
Ece Temelkuran on Dictators, alongside Francesca Santoro L'hoir who acted alongside Chaplin as a child, Peter Pomerantsev and Frank Dikotter: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0009bf3
Interviews with Turkish author Elif Shafak: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00066qd; and at the Free Thinking Festival https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04nqtrt
Alev Scott and Michael Talbot on the Ottoman Empire: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0000qj7
Producer: Emma Wallace
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome back to the home of the oxymoron. Evil genius. He asked the newspaper to print his obituary early so he'd enjoy it. That's like hiding at your own funeral. Yeah, a big, great gig. I'm Russell Kane. Join me to weigh in on whether the biggest players in history are more evil or genius. Becoming that rich, I'd say that is some level of genius. It also helps that it's a long time ago, right? |
| 0:23.3 | It's like the podcast version of telling your kids the ice cream van plays music when it's |
| 0:27.5 | out of ice cream. |
| 0:28.8 | Listen to Evil Genius on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:32.1 | This is the Arts and Ideas podcast with me, Matthew Sweet, and in this program, we're going |
| 0:36.7 | to tell a story that takes |
| 0:37.9 | us from a plane crash in Woodland near Gatwick Airport to a century of political upheaval in |
| 0:43.9 | Turkey. We disembark after this message. With the BBC Sounds app, you can find some of your |
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| 1:24.7 | We sometimes think about the past as having nodal moments, the events you disrupt |
| 1:30.1 | if you were trying to jigger with the causal nexus of history, jog the arm of Lee Harvey |
| 1:35.5 | Oswald, help the young Hitler to find a market for his watercolours, that kind of thing. |
| 1:40.8 | This edition of free thinking starts with one of those, a plane crash near Gatwick |
| 1:45.8 | in February 1959 and a miraculous survival that had a decisive impact on the future of Turkey. |
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