George Orwell’s greatest act of genius was the invention of Newspeak, the official language of Oceania, devised to meet the ideological needs of “Ingsoc,” or English Socialism. Explaining the nature of a mass trial in Turkey likewise requires the construction of a language all its own. Of late, journalists’ trials have received particular notice in the foreign press, but only because the arrest of journalists excites other journalists. In fact, early-morning raids, mass arrests, detentions without trial, and mass trials are a common feature of the Turkish landscape—for academics, students, suspected members of the so-called KCK (the urban wing of the terrorist Kurdish group PKK), lawyers of suspected members of the KCK, heads of soccer teams and their associates, members of parliament, generals, admirals, and an indeterminate number of unfortunates who just got sucked up in the vacuum.
It’s relatively fortunate to be a famous arrested journalist: at least there’s hope that someone will notice you’re in jail. The Turkish government denies that the arrested journalists were arrested for journalism—or rather, it says that only eight of them were; the others, it says, are in jail because they are terrorists. This is where a new language must be invented, because the word “terrorist” doesn’t do justice to the concept that the government has in mind. Take, for example, Interior Minister İdris Naim Şahin’s recent explanation of the concept:
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