Recent highly publicized scandals have made clear that there is much putrefaction going on inside the Turkish Armed Forces (TSK), which operates behind closed doors. Yet, despite this strong decay, the General Staff has exerted a great part of its energy, capabilities and resources to conduct a successful psychological warfare, thereby creating a false sense of trust in the general public toward the army. Then, it proceeded to use the confidence the general public has in the TSK -- wrapped around myths and false beliefs -- for the maintenance and sustaining of the status quo -- with which it has been highly pleased -- and for the legitimization of intervention in civilian life and politics.We have to admit that the TSK has been quite successful in doing this. For example, while it does not offer any explanation to any authority about how it trains cadets at war academies, it has expended considerable effort to manipulate the national education curriculum so that every individual student is indoctrinated as it likes. While children are unaware that they are being raised with a military mentality, starting from kindergarten, the dosage of this education was increased to the max with national security courses given directly by military officers in secondary and high schools. As if this wasn’t enough, every Turkish male is skillfully subjected to a high dose of an outdated military mindset during compulsory military service.
With its undisputable domination and control over media organizations, holders of capital and intellectual circles, which it has been able to maintain until very recently, it has disseminated the propaganda that politicians elected to public office are unreliable, dishonest and corrupt. It also managed to instill the fabricated belief that “politicians are untrustworthy” in the general public, which was prevented from realizing that it is actually disparaging itself when it humiliates those whom it elected to office. Knowing well that training, propaganda and repression can be used to create not only learned helplessness, but only learned respect, learned hatred and learned fear, the TSK has been quite good at putting this knowledge to use.
Nevertheless, if you think the military can go on with this deception forever, you are wrong. A time will come when someone will declare that the emperor has no clothes. That is exactly what the TSK has as of recently been going through. For the TSK, which is at odds with civilian control, accountability and transparency, and which, therefore, cooperates with certain groups in the media, politics and civil society in order to block any move by civilian politics to introduce oversight of the army, the time to act as the sole decider of its own actions has already ended. It is obvious that neither the sacred qualities attributed to it nor myths created about it nor even the fears instilled in the general public can protect the TSK, which has until now served as the primary prop for groups that are at war with democratization and civilianization. As public awareness of asking, inquiring and questioning everything increases, anti-democratic generals will be stranded even further.
On the one hand, they realize that they can no longer remain a closed box when everything changes and becomes more open and transparent. Therefore, they pretend to become more transparent and more inclined to be accountable. On the other hand, however, they do not want to abandon their old habits and are not eager to fully conform to the new order. Naturally, it is very difficult for the TSK to give the impression that it has renewed itself while sticking to its old and bad habits. So generals are forced to utter lies one after another and are successively committing errors.
We have a recent example of this. The General Staff opted to stick to lies instead of telling the truth about Web sites it established to disseminate propaganda about the ruling Justice and Development Party (AK Party) and democratic groups in society as disclosed by a second letter sent in by a whistleblower, an officer who helped bring many anti-democratic TSK activities to the surface.
During a press conference held on behalf of the General Staff, the Prime Ministry was accused of ordering the establishment of these Web sites. This statement -- which cannot answer the simplest question; namely, why should a government give an order to the General Staff to establish Web sites to defame itself? -- is naturally not plausible. Indeed, the truth eventually became obvious. The Prime Ministry declared that it had not given such an order to the General Staff, which disclosed that the order had been issued by the Ecevit government in 2000. Supposing that this statement was correct, the General Staff committed a great wrong by creating the false impression that the order had been given by the AK Party government. But still, even this statement was not true, as soon became clear.
According to news reports published yesterday, the search into the archives of the Prime Ministry did not reveal any such order, and the General Staff was requested to provide the number and date of the order in question. Moreover, Ahmet Şağar, the Prime Ministry undersecretary of the Ecevit government, and then-Deputy Prime Minister Mesut Yılmaz told the press that they gave no such order to the General Staff.
Given these developments, there are two obvious facts: First, the General Staff officer confirmed that it had established about 40 Web sites in order to spread propaganda about the government and certain groups in society, as claimed in the whistleblower’s letter. Second, the General Staff was caught red-handed telling lies. We have much reason to feel sorry about this situation, out of respect for our army, which has a glorious past.
I recently wrote an article titled “Pinocchios in uniform,” which produced strong reactions from Kemalist/militarist circles. Now, tell me, given all these lies and deceptions, am I not doing an injustice to Pinocchio and not to the General Staff?
