The community's perception management: making broken mirrors tell of one's beauty

We have said that perception management has been one of the things the Gülen movement has been most expert in from the start. For years the movement made enormous investments in how it would appear. It sought to manage how it appears and how it is perceived by carrying out activities on the scale and budget of a state's public diplomacy activities. When it heard the slightest news or word about its perception that it did not like, it showed an unbelievable informational effort to correct it. It wanted the pages of perception about itself to remain a complete tabula rasa and to fill them itself as it wished.

Interestingly, there has always been a distance between the perception it aimed to produce and the way it presented itself to its own members.

Inside, for example, everyone is made to believe in this formation as a religious community. But outward, large investments were made to carefully work in the perception that this movement is a civil society movement. The movement's members were bound to one another with the tightest organizational ties.

Members who joined the movement were sent to schools or any posts at home or abroad by appointment, without any regard whatsoever for their own preferences or their families' consent. In this sense the movement's members went, without questioning any decision, to the posts deemed fitting and appropriate for them within a strict hierarchical order.

In a sense this is truly a magnificent scene of how tremendously self-sacrificingly the movement's members are devoted to the ideal of service and how they rush without questioning to every post. Yet despite this scene, an attempt was made to give the impression that the movement was a movement of volunteers that ran on its own, not under Gülen's direct management. Meanwhile there was no counting the families complaining that their only children were being sent without their own consent to jobs abroad.

Among the movement's adherents there has also always been a difference as big as mountains between the assumptions about Judaism, non-Muslims, Alevis and even Kurds and the perceptions that were projected outward or that people tried to manage in others. That the movement is a movement of secrets entails that at every level everyone hides things from everyone. The real secret is, anyway, kept with the hocaefendi. But according to hierarchical level everyone has secrets they conceal from the one below. The double language has thus become the character of the Gülen movement, as in all secretive, esoteric, batini movements.

Throughout history too, did not the leaders of the Batinis, who held the last and great link of the chain of secrets they hid from their own members, always use this secret as the greatest instrument of political opportunism, of power and of the possibility of cooperation with others?

The Gülen movement's perception management has so far always been aimed at showing itself to others in the best way. For that reason it had upon it the condition of the ugly one who, not seeing his own state, pressures the mirror he stands before and forces it to confess that there is none more beautiful than him in the world. Getting the answer he wanted from the warped mirrors he pressured, he convinced himself of it too. In any field it reached into, when someone more beautiful or more ambitious than itself emerged, it shrank from no way of eliminating him. It set up frame-ups and tried to destroy him with its media, its police, its judiciary.

Its hocaefendis believed themselves to be the world's most moderate, smartest, deepest, greatest scholar and also the greatest representative of Islam. Just as they thought that, with their symposiums, dialogue tourism, PR work and public diplomacies, they had made the mirror of the world before them accept exactly this, someone called Erdoğan appeared and did things all over the world, both politically and in terms of representing Islam, that wrecked that hocaefendi's every nerve. If Islam and democracy, human rights, humanitarian aid and development were to be discussed, it was indigestible that the first name that came to mind in these matters was Erdoğan. It was a situation that the beauty (!) the hocaefendi had, with a thousand and one insistences and efforts and emotional relationships, made even mirrors like the Wall Street Journal, the Economist and The New York Times speak could not bear.

The Gülen movement evidently can still get those warped mirrors to say something. But while it gets them to say something, its ugliness has been spilled out in the open. There is nothing left of its own perception that it can manage. It sees that everything is falling apart. It is no longer possible to convince anyone that this movement is a movement serving Islam, humanity or any good cause.

In a way it is a sunken structure, but what it can do and is doing at the last moment is a hysterical outburst of revenge. At this moment the community has devoted all its PR and perception management skill not to correcting its own perception but to spoiling the perception of Erdoğan and the AK Parti and wearing them down. It has given up hope of correcting its own perception. It is trying to tell the world how Turkey under Erdoğan's administration keeps the press under pressure and how far Turkey is moving away from democracy.

Cases are being opened against them because of the victimizations caused by the mafia-like structure they built through their police, media and judiciary arms. None of the cases opened has anything to do with journalistic activities. Mashallah, their newspapers and televisions, benefiting from an atmosphere of freedom that no journalist in any period of Turkey's history has been able to breathe, carry out the fiercest opposition from morning to night.

That they base the matter on pressure on what they write and try to reflect it to the world this way should be left to the conscience of those who, believing the promises of "service," gave them some himmet until now. That conscience is already imposing the greatest punishment.