As I sat down to write, I was still struggling to come to terms with the detention of my colleague Ahmet Şık by Turkish police without any explanation.
When news broke of the horrendous murder of Russian Ambassador Andrey Karlov in the heart of the Turkish capital, Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu was on his way to Moscow to meet his Russian and Iranian counterparts for critical talks on Syria.
2016 has been the year when the West desperately started to question whether this was the end of the hegemonic liberal democratic order as we know it.
The TV was showing orange and blue body bags being unloaded from an ambulance.
At a time when elected chairpersons and members of Turkey’s Kurdish issue-focused Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) are locked in jail without indictments, at a time when almost all Kurdish newspapers and TV stations are shut down, at a time when anybody who spells the word “peace” is automatically named and shamed for harboring terrorists, intellectual efforts in the opposite direction might seem absurd. But as Einstein once said, “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.
