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Many Turks are passionate about democracy and civic rights – and amid Erdoğan’s rhetoric, they should not be overlooked

Growing up in Turkey, 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”.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2PADbRV