Lynching by the hand of the state

Adem Yavuz Arslan, Bugün

Telling grandiose lies and reiterating them often is one of the best-known tactics of black propaganda.

If you reiterate a lie very often, people will believe it sooner or later. I started my column with these two sentences because we have been facing black propaganda by the government since Nov. 14, 2013. This propaganda campaign grows more violent as details of the corruption investigation continue to emerge. A series of lies made up by a small group of pro-government experts in Ankara first make their way into some newspapers; later they are spread on Twitter by the government's teams [of social media trolls]; and then they're included in the prime minister's speeches. The community [the Hizmet movement] is being lynched, and the state is using its power to do it. The same tactic has been used in the claims of mass wiretapping. According to news reports from Yeni Şafak and Star, some 7,000 people were wiretapped in an investigation into the Tawhid-Salam organization. The news reports also pointed out the perpetrators: the community! The prosecutors involved in the investigation have denied the claims, but the black propaganda campaign has been going on for two days.

Published on Today's Zaman, 26 February 2014, Wednesday