Paranoid people will always find something to be obsessed with and people who would manipulate the masses according to their hysteria. Think about how they were able to convince former President Süleyman Demirel and Orhan Birgit, who became the president of the Freedom to Journalists Platform, to raid the Tan newspaper, which was published by the Sertel family.
Barring a small privileged group of those who manufacture and represent these morbid ideas, no one has escaped the wrath of these paranoid people in our country: Alevis, the pious people, Kurds, non-Muslim religious minorities, pan-Turkists, Communists, Sabahattin Ali, Bediüzzaman Said Nursi, Adnan Menderes, Nazım Hikmet, Hüseyin Avni, Ali Şükrü Bey, Mehmet Akif Ersoy, Kazım Karabekir, Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, Ahmet Kaya, Musa Anter, Eşref Bitlis, Hrant Dink and the thousands of people who died in unresolved murders. Any effort to come up with an exhaustive list would certainly produce a horrible book like "Black Book of Communism."
What is this paranoia that seems to be daunting even those who appear to be our friends? "Paranoia is a disease of entertaining doubts about everything, or having concerns that evil might come from anywhere or feeling completely insecure or living with mistaken conjectures... Physicians draw attention to the following points concerning the psychopaths having paranoid nature: (1) an excessive and exaggerated self-assessment and a hypertrophy of self stemming from pride, arrogance, ostentation and similar attitudes, (2) a sense of insecurity and excessive skepticism, paving the way for concerns of being victimized or tyrannized, (3) a tendency to be daunted with mistaken conjectures resulting from erroneous or flawed reasoning, and an inclination to manufacture nonsensical and illogical evidence in support of these conjectures, and (4) a social incapability of living in harmony of security due to the perception that everyone is unreliable or insecure. Thus, physicians argue that paranoia, partial or complete, may be accompanied with all or some of these symptoms, and that even if such people live in a community, they are certainly crazy people."
Do you know who wrote these explanations? A psychiatrist or a psychologist? Let me help you as I think it will not be an easy guess. The author is Fethullah Gülen, against whom mainstream newspapers have run campaigns of black propaganda on many occasions in the past, who was imprisoned several times during the coups, who was forced to lead a life of a fugitive for many years, who was defamed in the media although he was encouraging people to work for the good of the country and the world, who was a target of plans to finish him off by some state institutions and who has been living abroad with a deep longing for his country. In short, he is the person who is on the bull's eyes of the current paranoia.
He wrote the above-mentioned quote in his editorial article published in the January 2004 issue of the Sızıntı journal at a time when he was subjected to another black propaganda campaign. You can read the rest of the article on the Internet. In this article, Gülen notes that paranoia has always served as a vital fuel used by big guns, tyrants, dictators, warlords, super powers and heads of small or big social/political movements, not only in our country but also in every corner of the world and in all periods of history, to hold onto power. "It seems to me that even if the whole society starts to experience a complete frenzy and madness, those representatives of brute force will not stop lying, deceiving people, injecting mistaken conjectures into people's minds and making everyone be like them," he says.
Yet, they do not give up. Today, the Community paranoia is everywhere once again. Certain circles inside and outside, for instance, claim the Ergenekon case is fiction thought up by the members of the Community who dominate the police and the judiciary. Despite all the evidence, confessions, arms and documents, they liken the courts trying the pro-junta to kangaroo courts and Silivri to Nazi camps. They parrot that innocent people -- not knowing what they are accused of -- are being placed behind bars and the freedom of the press is breached and "hundreds of journalists" are in jail. They even claim that the Community even targeted Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the latest MIT crisis.
For God's sake, would the court ever rule in this way? Has the Community not leaked to the ECtHR? And then what about our righteous press? Has this rule made headlines in our liberal press? Will certain circles be embarrassed to parrot the same lines? Of course not. Why would they? The paranoid people are about to make their "former victims" believe their rubbish claims, claims that failed to convince the ECtHR.
Published on Today's Zaman, 17 February 2012, Friday
