On the very first day of 2016, news agencies reported a bizarre story out of Turkey. At a press conference, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan referred to “Hitler’s Germany” as an example of the political system he proposes for his country — “a presidential system with a unitary state.” This statement was, of course, seized by the press, with worrying headlines such as “Erdogan cites Hitler's Germany as example of effective government.”
A couple of hours later, the president’s office released an official correction. Reminding everyone that Erdogan has condemned the Holocaust and anti-Semitism as “a crime against humanity, just like Islamophobia,” the statement asserted that the president pointed to Hitler’s Germany only as a very bad example of “the presidential system.” The statement blamed the media for the confusion, claiming the “Hitler’s Germany metaphor has been distorted by media outlets and has been used in the opposite sense.”
