A nation that loves to hate
Asli Tunc The presenter on a popular Turkish TV was trying to hide her feelings while reporting the crash of the Turkish Airlines plane in Amsterdam a couple of weeks ago. Allegedly the Dutch emergency crew intentionally had not come to the rescue of the pilots and wounded passengers and kept them waiting for 45 minutes in the middle of the muddy fields near Schiphol Airport. How could they do such a thing? It must have been because we were Turks, wasn’t it? “Turks have no friends but themselves” is a popular saying that most of us believe in. But lately this general belief among the Turkish society became more and more visible in news reporting. The “us vs. them” dichotomy started to lead us to a rather concerning ethnocentric view of the world. We feel more isolated on the global arena, being paranoid at times blaiming the non-Turks for every single bad incident. This feeling might be explained both with the rising nationalist sentiment and also with frustration because Turks believe they have been treated unfairly in the EU accession process. As a bottom line, Turks do not feel sympathy to any nation. In fact this was double-checked and revealed in a BBC World Service-GlobeScan Poll last month. This global poll is taken in 21 countries annually to learn the public views of each country’s of others. The results indicated that Turkey was the only country where the public views were predominantly negative. According to the results, Turkish public opinion showed great distrust in the US, Canada, all the EU countries, India, Russia, Brasil, Japan, South Africa, and you name it. Well, did it come as a surprise to you? Probably not. Ethnocentrism is defined as the tendency to look at the world primarily from the perspective of one’s […]



















