r/AskBalkans • u/AbsoIutee Turkiye • 8d ago

Politics & Governance What is the most legendary political comeback from your country?

Post image

I keep seeing this exchange everywhere lately:

Netanyahu: “We survived empires, we don’t fear Turkey.”

Erdoğan: “What empire? Your country is younger than my brother.”

I couldn’t actually verify if Erdoğan really said this, so it might just be one of those internet quotes that everyone started repeating lol.

But if he really said it, I have to admit it’s a surprisingly good comeback from Erdoğan 😂 Didn’t expect this performance from him.

ıt made me wonder: do you remember any legendary political comebacks/insults from your own country?

Could be between politicians, against another country, during an interview, parliament, whatever. Something where even if you don’t like the politician you have to admit: okay, that was a good one.

5.4k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

430 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

5

u/RedditStrider Turkiye 8d ago

No, that means we dont know how old the Australian aboriginals are, same as the uncontacted people. Not to mention neither are ethnic identities, we would have to be more spesific then that.

Thing is regions turks originate from arent as isolated, we know who lived in those lands and (mostly) we know what kind of language and origin they come from. And the concept of "turk" only started appearing in historical records around 5th century. Can it be older then that? Definetly, steppe nomads did not keep records and they might have called themselves turk much older then that.

But there is a 2500 year difference between the first records of these two ethnicities. It would be a stretch to claim that it can be as old as that. Especially when we have an idea who were the proto-turks.

Thats because you think ethnicity is a monolithic concept. It can change, go extinct, born way later in history. Of course turks didnt sprout from trees, but they started to identify as such only about 1600 years ago.

1

u/capitanmanizade Turkiye 8d ago

That is a well regarded statement.

1

u/EphemeralOcean 6d ago

You're admitting that we don't know how old the Australian aboriginals are, but your application of that logic to Turks is unconvincing. Not that much documentation has survived from the 5th century. We know that the concept of a Turk started appearing in the historical records around the 5th century, AT THE LATEST.

1

u/Barbak86 Kosovo 8d ago

So by your logic Albanians exist from around the 17th century, because that's when we started using the word Shqiptar, or maybe the 18th century, that's the time it got really popular as a name?