self-serving tales and making them into official history, infantilising a nation and rendering basic human intelligence a crime against the proceso, the overall transformation of the country to so-called socialism – or a version of it, tailored by Chávez himself. The ambassador looked like a tired child who just wanted to get to the end of the story and go to sleep. I didn’t know then that in a short while grappling with fairy tales would become our daily business in Turkey, and that we would be obliged to prove that what everybody had seen with their own eyes had really happened.
‘It is alleged that the American continent was discovered by Columbus in 1492. In fact, Muslim scholars reached the American continent 314 years before Columbus, in 1178. In his memoirs, Christopher Columbus mentions the existence of a mosque on top of a hill on the coast of Cuba.’
On 15 November 2014, President Erdoğan told this tale to a gathering of Latin American Muslim leaders. The next day journalists around the world reported on the Turkish president’s bombastic contribution to history, hiding their smirks behind polite sentences that confidently implied, ‘Of course it didn’t happen like that, but you know that anyway.’
Neither Brexit nor Trump had happened yet. The Western journalists therefore didn’t know that their smirks would become prunes when rationality proved helpless against not only the nonsense of a single man, but the mesmerised eyes of millions who believed his nonsense. Had they been asked, Venezuelans or Turks could have told those journalists all about the road of despair that leads from a mosque on a Cuban hilltop to a hilltop in Ankara where nonsense becomes official history, and an entire nation succumbs to exhaustion. They could also have explained how the populist engine, intent on infantilising political language and destroying reason, begins its work by saying, ‘We know very well who Socrates is! You can’t deceive us about that evil guy any more!’ And you say, ‘Hold on. Who said anything about Socrates?!’
‘With populism on the rise all over Europe, we every so often face the challenge of standing up to populist positions in public discourse. In this workshop, participants learn to successfully stand their ground against populist arguments. By means of hands-on exercises and tangible techniques, participants learn to better assess populist arguments, to quickly identify their strengths and weaknesses, to concisely formulate their own arguments, and to confidently and constructively confront people with populist standpoints.’
I am quoting from an advertisement for the Institut für Argumentationskompetenz, a German think-tank. The title of the course they offer clients is ‘How to Use Logic Against Populists’. Evidently the helplessness of rationality and language against the warped logic of populism has already created considerable demand in the politics market, and as a consequence martial-arts techniques for defensive reasoning are now being taught. The course involves two days of workshops, and attendees are invited to bring their own, no doubt maddening, personal experiences along. Were I to attend the course with my sixteen years’ worth of Turkish experiences, I would humbly propose, at the risk of having Aristotle turn in his grave, opening this beginner’s guide to populist argumentation by presenting Aristotle’s famous syllogism ‘All humans are mortal. Socrates is a human. Therefore Socrates is mortal’:
ARISTOTLE: All humans are mortal.
POPULIST: That is a totalitarian statement.
ARISTOTLE: Do you not think that all humans are mortal?
POPULIST: Are you interrogating me? Just because we are not citizens like you, but people, we are ignorant, is that it? Maybe we are, but we know about real life.
ARISTOTLE: That is irrelevant.
POPULIST: Of course it’s irrelevant to you. For years you and your kind have ruled this place, saying the people are irrelevant.
ARISTOTLE: Please, answer my question.
POPULIST: The real people of this country think otherwise. Our response is something that cannot be found on any elite papyrus.
ARISTOTLE: (Silence)
POPULIST: Prove it. Prove to me that all humans are mortal.
ARISTOTLE: (Nervous smile)
POPULIST: See? You can’t prove it. (Confident grin, a signature trait that will be exercised constantly to annoy Aristotle.) That’s all right. What we understand from democracy is that all ideas can be represented in the public space, and they are respected equally. The gods say …
ARISTOTLE: This is not an idea, it’s a fact. And we are talking about mortal humans.
POPULIST: If it were left up to you, you’d kill everybody to prove that all humans are mortal, just like your predecessors did.
ARISTOTLE: This is not going anywhere.
POPULIST: Please finish explaining your thinking, because I have important things to say.
ARISTOTLE: (Sigh) All humans are mortal. Socrates is a human …
POPULIST: I have to interrupt you there.
ARISTOTLE: Excuse me?
POPULIST: Well, I have to. These days, thanks to our leader, it is perfectly clear who Socrates is. We know very well who Socrates is! You cannot deceive us any more about that evil guy.
ARISTOTLE: Are you joking?
POPULIST: This is no joke to us, Mr Aristotle, as it may be to you. Socrates is a fascist. My people have finally realised the truth, the real truth. The worm has turned. You cannot deceive the people any more. You were going to say, ‘Therefore Socrates is mortal,’ right? We’re fed up with your lies.
ARISTOTLE: You are rejecting the basics of logic.
POPULIST: I respect your beliefs.
ARISTOTLE: This is not a belief; this is logic.
POPULIST: I respect your logic, but you don’t respect mine. That’s the main problem in Greece today.
This is a simple example of the basic populist logic that, with variations, is employed in many countries today. However, even in this fictitious conversation there are at least five fallacies according to the general rules of rational debate, the fundamental rules of logic that we have been using for centuries in everyday life, even if we don’t know any Latin:
1. Argumentum ad hominem (rebutting the argument by attacking the character of one’s adversary rather than refuting the substance of the argument) – You and your kind have ruled …
2. Argumentum ad ignorantiam (appealing to ignorance by asserting that a proposition is true because it has not yet been disproven) – See? You can’t prove that all humans are mortal.
3. Argumentum ad populum (assuming that a proposition is true simply because many people believe it) – The real people of this country think otherwise.
4. Reductio ad absurdum (attempting to prove or disprove an argument by trying to show that it leads to an absurd conclusion) – You’d kill everybody to prove that all humans are mortal.
5. Ad-hoc reasoning (explaining why a certain thing may be by substituting an argument for why it is) – Democracy is about respecting ideas, so respect my idea.
Although the fallacies committed in the above conversation seem egregious, they did not appear childish to half of Britain when Boris Johnson and his ilk in the Conservative Party and the Leave campaign exercised them liberally during the Brexit debate. As Zoe Williams wrote in the Guardian on 16 October 2016: ‘You’d hope for consistency and coherence; in its place, the bizarre spectacle of a party claiming to have been against the single market all along, because Michael Gove once said so.’ In other words, argumentum ad ignorantiam. Michael Gove was the man who – bearing a striking resemblance to the populist driving Aristotle crazy above – declared that ‘people in this country have had enough of experts’. It was comments like this that led the other half of Britain to believe that pro-Brexit arguments