You Seen That Post-Truth They Have Now? Or Why I Don't Laugh at ‘Alternative Fact’ Jokes

The year of 2016 has been declared by some as “the worst year like, ever.” The traditionally delicate readers of the Guardian newspaper wept for weeks about Brexit. When countless refugees from Syria, Afghanistan and Sudan were risking their lives to get to Europe, remain voters (who now have their exclusive dating app) wanted the world’s consolation for having to get a visa to visit their summer house in Valencia. White liberal academics in the US have spun a good length of yarn about how much they now are suffering from “a climate of anti-intellectualism” following Donald Trump’s election, as if the true victims of Trump’s presidency will be the universities and not the projects. 2016 has not only given the literati a much coveted excuse to claim victimhood, it has also given them a catchy little word to sound smart while doing so.

The word ‘post-truth’ sounds so pretentious that the Oxford English Dictionary gave it the honour of being 2016 word of the year. Its dictionary definition reads: “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” The two key political developments that have contributed to the popularity of the term have been the Brexit referendum in the UK and Trump’s election in the US. Right from the start it is evident that the word emerges from the concerns of First World Anglophones. There is something morbidly funny about cuddled first world cosmopolitans who are acting like they have lost their birthright to sway public opinion. I can’t help but smirk when I see sentences like: “The truth has become so devalued that what was once the gold standard of political debate is a worthless currency.” There is a degree of satisfaction to knowing that they have lost their precious gold standard. That they are contemplating burning their cold hard facts in the bathtub, right before the firemen from Fahrenheit 451 barge in through the door. 

Amusement leads to indignation when I think about how blind someone has to be to believe that truth has ever been a gold standard. Where was this gold standard in 2003 when Colin Powell made his farcical Security Council presentation? This was the presentation that would justify the Invasion of Iraq by US troops. From blurry satellite pictures to made up links between al-Qaeda and Iraq, the presentation was absolutely jaw dropping. One particular slide in which Powell presented a 3D computer model of “mobile production facilities for biological agents” is unforgettable. The logic is straightforward: we couldn’t find the biological weapons that we know they have, therefore they must be manufacturing them in the back of moving trucks. How come no one brought up post-truth then? Yes, some did call it lying, but there was no contention that we had entered a dark age in which truth is altogether abandoned.

Where was this gold standard in 1980 when one of the most celebrated radical intellectuals in the US, Alexander Cockburn,  cheered for the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on the pages of the Village Voice (no less) in the vilest way: “if ever a country deserved rape it's Afghanistan.” His intellectual larvae in Brooklyn continue his legacy by calling Assad’s invasion of Aleppo a “liberation.” Although the inclination of lefty intellectuals to disregard the truth has been called out meticulously, the phenomenon of post-truth is still not associated with them. The educated, well-informed, woke-ass left never took any blame for the lies they told  but sit atop their high horse, as the rightful custodians of truth, armed with the values their glorious civilisation bestowed upon them: science, reason and justice.

The need to invent a term like “post-truth” belies an attempt to deny all the lies that were forced upon colonised people. This myth would have us believe that humanity was collectively living in the Garden of Eden until Nigel Farage and Donald Trump grabbed the forbidden fruit. It is an unacceptable genesis created by those who think they can wash their hands of their crimes by wearing a safety pin. Was the age of truth in full swing when the statues of the most savage colonial officials were erected at their ‘houses of learning’? What truths did T.E Lawrence tell Arabs to have them join the Allied war effort only to find themselves under British and French domination? We can thank enterprising Dutchman Peter Minuit who ‘bought’ the isle of Manhattan from its inhabitants in 1626, for setting the going rate for white folks’ truth: a few bales of cloth and a handful of beads. 

How is it that after all that history of lying, these erudite scholars have failed to register we have been living in an era of post-truth for quite some time now? Those learned experts who have measured skulls to argue certain people were suitable for chattel slavery thought that they held the monopoly over “appealing to emotion and personal belief.” Those men of progress and science who brought the light of civilisation to the darkest corners of the world thought they had practiced lying all over the world for so long that they would never lose their sway over the crowds back home. They were wrong. Each time some savage natives resisted their enlightened rule, they have been able to call the cavalry from home to raze them to the ground, then chronicle their victory for posterity as the unpreventable march of civilisation. But as soon as they face adversity from Trump-voting, EU-hating fellow white men who have had enough of their expertise (for entirely different reasons than ours), they get stuck between a rock and a hard place. The strategy of annihilation gets replaced with a campaign of reconciliation. Liberals line up to shake hands with police officers, Marxists rush to deny the profound racism of the white working classes. They try to gaslight our peoples into believing that our lives are not in danger from bloodthirsty bigots, that we are not besieged and surrounded by a ring of fire. 

I don’t mean to sound like a hipster here, but those of us on the periphery of the ‘developed world’ have been living in colonial post-truth way before it was cool. And not just one post-truth either; we have been navigating an echo chamber of post-truths. 

In a popular piece for The Guardian, Ece Temelkuran makes a similar point about how Turkey has been living in a state of post-truth since the election of the governing AK Party. In the article she compares the Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan to the former leader of UKIP, Nigel Farage. She believes that the populist rise of the former has happened because Turkey’s literati had concerns about being out of touch with their country and hesitated in decisively interfering in politics. She urges Western intellectuals not to make the same mistake and step up to make a resolute impact against the populist tide arising in the EU and the US. Temelkuran is wrong in several different ways. Firstly, Turkish intellectuals have never let their detachment from “the great unwashed” prevent them from taking a paternalistic attitude. The memory of the “post-modern coup” of 1997 is still very vivid in the memories of many. This was a political intervention made by the Turkish military to topple the Islamist government of the time. The core aspect of this intervention was the organisation of a political campaign to rally left-wing journalists to tarnish the reputation of an elected prime minister and his cabinet. The wave of populism we are witnessing today is in fact the backlash against a long history of elitism and religious suppression.  

Secondly, the analogy of comparing the kind of movement represented by Farage/Trump and Erdoğan is a fallacy. Yes, they both make use of populistic statements and xenophobic attacks against vulnerable ethnic minorities, but the similarity ends there. When Erdoğan refers to outside interests that are interfering with his country, he is referring to a very real and historic threat of imperialism. The kind of threat that has mobilised to organise the July 15 coup attempt and refuses to hand over it’s perpetrator. Farage talking about Brussels’ interference in the UK, however is a joke. 

Temelkuran misjudges the quality of post-truth that is being perpetuated by the AKP management. The greatest mistake the Turkish intelligentsia makes is over-emphasising the traditionalist/Islamic elements of the party ideology. If we carefully trace some of the political roots of  AKP’s ideology we can see the crucial importance of economic development and modernisation as a predominant theme in their policy and discourse. Erdoğan’s frequent boasting about the success of infrastructure projects during his administration is often attributed to primitive populism. Intellectuals are outraged that their professional and public objection to these projects are disregarded by the rabble, who are seduced by promises of faster transport and cheaper housing. One of the popular arguments against the AKP by these urban elites has always been that their voters sell their vote for basic subsistence items like coal or rice. Such accusations fail to take into consideration the fact that there are people in their own country who cannot afford food and heating. They have no shame in publicly declaring that their need to be consulted over an urban development project trumps the need of working class people to housing and infrastructure.

At a more recent interview Temelkuran has fired back against commentators like İhsan Dağı, who argue that the AKP regime has inherited their anti-democratic tendencies from Atatürk. Temelkuran responds to these criticisms by arguing that the latter respected and encouraged intellectuals. She quotes fellow snob and historian İlber Ortaylı who defended Atatürk by saying: “[w]hen we did not have bread to eat, Atatürk was raising Hittitologists.” The basis from which blue-blooded intellectuals are denying the similarities between Atatürk and Erdoğan remains timeless. When their starving countrymen are placed on a scale against a handful of Hittitologists, they choose the latter without a second thought. What is astounding is that they do so publicly without the slightest indication of shame or guilt. Their concern for their country is not about the welfare of the most vulnerable, but the maintenance of their personal prestige.  

So seamless is the transmission of authoritarianism that even the tendency to distract from state violence by pointing at gigantic infrastructural projects has been passed on in mint condition. The famous march composed to commemorate the 10th year of the Republic is familiar to every Turkish citizen. There is a line in this march which jubilantly declares: “we have covered the nation with nets of iron.” This celebration of the rail service came three years after the Zilan massacre and five years before the Dersim massacre. This is why I watch with astonishment as I observe the disciples of Atatürk turn his figure into a de-facto symbol against a feared dictatorship. The leader of a single party regime who ordered aerial bombardments over his own people is celebrated as a figurehead of democracy. But even Atatürk wasn’t the first to invent the trick of pointing at infrastructure to distract from atrocities. This is a time tested trick which -like all good things- has its origins in Europe. 

British Imperialism is notorious for its tendency to brag ad nauseam about how they built telegrams across India and railways across Africa, to justify their colonial exploitation. Monty Python’s famous “what have the Romans ever done for us” sketch is a perfect example of this pathological behaviour. The sketch is funnier when watched this way:  a bunch of white men are so triggered by what they have done to the world, that they organise a group therapy session to scream in high pitched voices about how they bequeathed us with sanitation and roads.  They beat their pink chests, about how Cecil Rhodes brought civilisation to Africa, by spreading his crotch from Cairo to Cape Town like bread over butter. We, on the other hand, have to deal with the aftershocks of the trauma they have caused. This is the root of AKP officials’ spontaneous bursts of citing infrastructural accomplishments like the third Bosphorus bridge after each major disaster that befalls the country. Each time this happens I have a flashback to Monty Python’s ruddy-cheeked white boys from Oxford and Cambridge who allegorically count the favours their empire has done for the world. Thanks to them we have not only learned what it feels like to be lied to, we have also learned how to lie to each other. Thanks to them, we can legitimately claim we knew post-truth way before it was cool.