Finished reading: How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship by Ece Temelkuran 📚
How to Lose a Country is an impassioned plea, a warning to the world that populism and nationalism don’t march fully-formed into government; they creep. There’s a lot about post-Brexit England that I recognised in the book that should concern us all.
As one of the panellists, I smiled bitterly as I thought about how all these brilliant journalists were yet to suffer the despair of realising that their tactics were akin to playing chess against a pigeon, as someone once described debating evolution with a creationist: the pigeon will just knock over all the pieces and shit on the board, then depart, proudly claiming victory and leaving the mess behind for you to clean up.