Statism

The Thessaloniki International Fair (TIF) is an important institution for Greece and it is high time it changed from a festival of Third World-type statism into a modern exhibition designed to highlight the most dynamic and outward-looking aspects of what the country has to offer.

The crisis of democracy in Albania these days should be seen also as part of the same serious crisis taking place in Europe and worldwide. In Albania, a still fragile democracy, the global crisis of democracy is perhaps reflected in its sorest consequences.

It is not just we Greeks who are obsessed with the legacy of totalitarianism. As the European Union commemorated the day of remembrance for the victims of all totalitarian and authoritarian regimes on Wednesday, the German magazine Stern presented Donald Trump, draped in the American flag, giving the Nazi salute.

It is not only the fact that we live in oppressive political circumstances, that freedoms are immensely curbed, and that submission is becoming the only option. Worse, we are now supposed to live under the terror of ambivalence.

The governments in Turkey have always seen engineering society as both their right and their duty. They also all share a belief that such state-directed transformation is within their ability.

'Becoming Turkish: Nationalist Reforms and Cultural Negotiations in Early Republican Turkey, 1923-1945' by Hale Yılmaz (Syracuse University Press, 328 pages, $39)

Turkey's conservative teachers' union Eğitim-Bir-Sen has suggested that courses related to Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder of Turkish Republic, should be removed from school curriculums. 

The union's statement came after the Education Ministry announced that it had concluded efforts at renovating the schedule. 

Novinite is publishing for the first time the first impressions of Thomas Tait, a former Chief Executive of the Nevada Commission on Tourism, who visited Bulgaria in the 1990s and today calls the country his "second home". 

'Mustafa Kemal Atatürk: Heir to an Empire' by Ryan Gingeras (Oxford University Press, 212 pages, $17)

'Turkey and the Politics of National Identity: Social, Economic and Cultural Transformation' edited by Shane Brennan and Marc Herzog (I.B. Tauris, 315 pages, £62)