From Asparagas to Post-Truth: That “Unique Turkish Peculiarity”

The word “asparagas” is classified as slang in the Historical and Etymological Dictionary of Turkish by the Orientalist Andreas Tietze, and defined as “false news.” The source Tietze cites for both the slang classification and the definition is likely Hasan Eren’s Etymological Dictionary of the Turkish Language, which was the first to include the word in a dictionary. However, unlike Eren, Tietze suggests—albeit speculatively—that the word may have been derived from Greek. Eren, by contrast, simply states that the origin of “asparagas” is unknown. Yaşar Çağbayır, in his Great Turkish Dictionary, which covers Turkish vocabulary from the Orkhon Inscriptions to the present day, follows Tietze in tentatively presenting the word’s origin as Greek, but also states—incorrectly—that the English equivalent is “aspargus.” While English does have the word “asparagus,” meaning the plant, no such word as “aspargus” exists. Since Çağbayır does not cite any sources for his claim, we cannot verify its basis. Still, he offers the most detailed explanation of “asparagas” in his entry in the Turkish Language Society’s (TDK) online dictionary—not by deriving it from the non-existent English word “aspargus,” but from “asparagus,” meaning the vegetable. In this entry, he defines “asparagas” as “fabricated news, exaggerated news”; in the online Kubbealtı Dictionary, the origin is again stated to be unknown, and the meaning is given as “fabricated news, inflated news.” The most comprehensive definition appears as: “A news item in journalism that is published as if it actually happened, even though it did not; fabricated or exaggerated news.” In short, an “asparagas” is a news item that presents something that did not happen as if it did. It has no factual basis; it is fabricated.

Yet the origin of the word is surprisingly comical, almost like a joke. According to veteran journalist Doğan Uluç, who spent many years working abroad, the etymology of the word, as recounted in his 2009 book Kupa Ası: Olaylar İçinde Olaylar, stems from the Turkish phrase “para az, gerisi gaz” (“little money, the rest is hot air”). Here’s the backstory: In June 1963, Hürriyet published a photo story titled “American Girl Lives with Turkish Boyfriend in a Shanty.” It claimed that a wealthy American girl named Betty had fled to Türkiye with her Turkish lover Yaşar, after her father opposed their relationship, and that they were now living in a shack on the hills of Bebek. The photos accompanying the story showed the couple’s dwelling with graffiti reading “Azparagas” on the wall. When the photo editor asked what the word meant, the eager young reporters replied, “They’ve got little money, the rest is gas.” The story was soon revealed to be fake. Although mostly forgotten today, “asparagas” was once widely used—and how it spread beyond the editor’s desk to make its way into dictionaries remains a mystery.

Still, we cannot be entirely sure of the story’s accuracy. What we do know—from firsthand accounts—is that even the covers of Nokta, the first serious weekly news magazine in the post-1980 period, merit investigation to determine how many of them, including the photos, might be asparagas. Consider also how the 6–7 September events were triggered by false reports of Atatürk’s house in Thessaloniki being bombed, or how on June 4, 1960, Akşam ran a headline claiming that student dissidents had been turned into powder in livestock feed machines—an example of post-coup-era asparagas that deserves to be studied not just in the context of press history but also for its sociological and political implications. The history of combating asparagas is equally worthy of study. Before it fell into the hands of a notorious organization, Zaman newspaper began assigning reporters to investigate false stories. Ahmet Tezcan’s Dördüncü Kuvvet Medya, first broadcast on TV and later online, is another rare example. (Tezcan, who briefly worked in the press and later observed it from outside, likely holds a treasure trove of such material.) Ombudsman systems—originally derived from the Swedish term for “public representative”—have not been effective in the Turkish press. “Balloon news” or “inflated news,” as asparagas is sometimes called, has increasingly given way to terms like “desk journalism,” while “fake news” gained popularity with the advent of the post-truth era. Yet there has never been a comprehensive effort—philosophical, sociological, political, or otherwise—to address the reality behind the news (i.e., a report or story that depends on material or personal testimony). In Türkiye, verifying news has been largely limited to mere “fact-checking,” never extending beyond that. Moreover, both “fact-checking” and “disinformation” have, with the rise of social media, devolved into a practice of chasing down rumors—often shared without verification by prominent and influential figures.

Even so, since our main concern is post-truth and Türkiye, asparagas may serve as a useful starting point. What is most noteworthy is how the term “post-truth” entered public discourse in Türkiye without any attention to the background I’ve just outlined. This creates a need—just like with Trump or Brexit—for identifying a turning point for post-truth. Importantly, this need must be addressed not as a feature inherent to American politics, nor as an internal crisis of American foreign policy impacting its domestic politics, but as a sign of globalization. Anything beyond that would be too controversial.

So what happened when a concept like post-truth—deeply embedded in American political culture—suddenly entered Türkiye’s political discourse without any serious intellectual groundwork being laid regarding big narratives like politics, truth, facts, reality, or systemic deceit? The existing academic literature on post-truth and Türkiye spans a wide range—from Gezi Park and the 15 July coup attempt, to neo-Ottomanism, conspiracy theories in politics, pandemic-era lies, and post-truth elements in the 2023 presidential election campaigns. Many of these works are academic articles that, while written for publication in scholarly journals, are analytically shallow. They attempt to explain post-truth (if it exists in Türkiye at all) primarily through the lens of government politics, without citing clear examples such as the conflicting claims made by Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu and Ümit Özdağ about a signed protocol, or the unfounded reports that Qatari students would be admitted to medical schools in Türkiye without exams. Only one study stands out, whether intentionally or not, by aligning with the political-truth-factuality triangle we’re attempting to build here through Arendt’s framework.

In a piece published on opendemocracy.net on 31 January 2017, Julian de Medeiros begins with the claim that the globally recognized phenomenon of post-truth can be better understood through the example of Türkiye. At first glance, the article seems to address the crises faced by deliberative democracy, yet Medeiros does not endorse agonistic democracy either. In his view, neither liberalism nor a Schmittian agonism offers a solution in the post-truth age. Instead, the answer lies in learning to see truth differently—and he believes Türkiye shows exactly how.

Türkiye becomes a model here in the context of post-truth’s globalization. Medeiros frames it as follows: “The recent explosion of public interest in post-truth politics in the US, the UK, and Europe both surprised me and confirmed my suspicions—particularly in revealing that what was long viewed as a peculiar Turkish eccentricity is in fact part of a global rejection of supposedly rational and deliberative politics.” The key term here is (whatever it may mean) that “peculiar Turkish eccentricity.” But before unpacking it, Medeiros lists the causes of post-truth.

According to Medeiros, several factors have led to the rise of post-truth. Even in the healthiest democracy, striking a balance between liberty and equality is difficult: equality can undermine freedom, and freedom can eliminate equality. Put simply, the tension between the elite (the free) and the masses (the equal) has always been a serious issue; equality can lead to populism, while freedom can open the door to totalitarianism. Another cause, he argues, is the inherent and unresolved contestation of truth that democracy carries within itself—a suggestion that, implicitly, if a truth claim exists at all, it should not be open to democratic negotiation.

We thus find other roots of post-truth predating Trump and Brexit: one is the “Third Way,” a synthesis of liberal and social democratic politics developed from the 1980s to the 2010s, which blended center-right and center-left (though Medeiros never mentions Tony Blair by name). Another example is Bill Clinton’s “triangulation strategy” of the 1990s—an attempt to merge the best aspects of both Democrats and Republicans into a third, superior negotiation style. Medeiros claims that it was not “Trump’s bizarre antics” but strategies like the Third Way and triangulation that created the conditions for post-truth. That is why, he insists, simply reverting to a pre-post-truth state is insufficient. The so-called “peculiar Turkish eccentricity” already proves this point.

So how can this “peculiar Turkish eccentricity” be instructive? Medeiros is quite clear: “For Turks and those who follow Turkish politics, the term post-truth is nothing more than another flashy term in a nomenclature used to describe a lesson learned long ago: In any hegemonic system, the truth of any issue is entirely subordinate to the overarching whims of the strongman political project. Truth derived from the depths of one’s own rhetorical intrigue constitutes post-truth precisely because it contains the premise of its own justification. In other words, post-truth cannot be challenged by seeking a pure, pre-post-truth impartiality. Doing so will only reinforce the trap of post-truth politics.”

This paragraph is striking for several reasons. First, we now see how that (whatever it is) “peculiar Turkish eccentricity” is defined: it is post-truth itself. Moreover, the specific form of hegemony unique to Türkiye is realized not merely through force but by “capturing democratic institutions in a hegemonic manner” and then comfortably cloaking itself as a legitimate populist democracy. Therefore, institutional grounding alone is insufficient—because even those institutions are deeply post-truth. (Strangely, while the “triangulation strategies” of Clinton or Blair may eventually lead to post-truth, they are not framed as hegemonic; they are seen merely as political preferences. In contrast, Türkiye’s so-called “peculiar Turkish eccentricity” is portrayed as something inevitable.) This framing is striking because it effectively marginalizes Türkiye in the broader discussion of post-truth’s globalization.

Second, it claims that political analysis must avoid illusions such as “neutrality.” Not only liberals, but even “strongmen and their supporters,” who believe they hold the truth, are in fact uncomfortable with post-truth. Yet post-truth has no truth, and neither does the time before or after it. This is why “post-truth cannot be challenged by seeking a pure, pre-post-truth impartiality.” This makes the redefinition of “truth” necessary and thus also striking.

So what should be done? The lesson to be learned from Türkiye lies in the answer to this question. In Türkiye, although the space for “truth” is claimed by the personal representatives of hegemony, it remains essentially vacant. Therefore, instead of scrambling to possess the “power to speak truth” (with no actual scientific or intellectual foundation), as the famous motto of public intellectuals suggests, one must abandon that pursuit. Should we then resign ourselves to the kind of “resignation” attributed to the first generation of the Frankfurt School—who were critiqued for being noble in theory but absent in practice? Should we act like Adorno during the 1968 protests, when students stormed his classroom demanding he lead their revolution, and he defended himself with his briefcase, saying: “But my theories are not Molotov cocktails”? (Incidentally, in his later essay “Resignation,” Adorno interpreted calls for academics to sign petitions—like those we occasionally see from Turkish scholars—as “obvious remnants of the Kantian categorical imperative.” He viewed such acts as the ego sacrificing itself to share in the collective fate, which produces a new sense of security—but only at the cost of autonomous thought. For Adorno, submitting thought to action is unacceptable: “He who refuses to surrender his thinking has not resigned.” To understand what “thinking” means here, we can look to the opening section of Arendt’s The Life of the Mind. According to Arendt, “thinking” involves stepping away from the visible world, while the will to act is nothing more than an illusion.)

Medeiros, in truth, does not call for “thinking” per se—but he does issue a call to thinking in the name of action. However, this call first requires abandoning a certain liberal naiveté: “The current mode of liberalism is, at its core, a dangerous naivety that places all its hope in our democratic institutions as the guarantors of a progressive truth.” Here is where the benefit of that “peculiar Turkish eccentricity” becomes apparent in our global post-truth era. Turks—especially oppositional Turks and more specifically Turkish academics—struggle against strongman politics or post-truth itself by grounding their claims in “truth” and “science.” (Incidentally, this is not without doubt. A large segment in Türkiye still associates “science” with positivism. Yet there is some truth in the saying: “Science is light.” And light means enlightenment and the path to truth.)

Thus, Medeiros proposes a general “what is to be done?” motto for the global post-truth era: “For academics to challenge the acceptable levels of danger in the post-truth arena, academia must be understood not primarily as a ‘scientific’ identity rooted in so-called pure empiricism, but rather as an intellectual responsibility.” What is particularly notable here is the phrase “pure empiricism.” Medeiros essentially equates pure empiricism with factual reality. In his view, just as the domain of “truth” is empty, chasing factual reality risks perpetuating the conditions of post-truth. Therefore, public intellectuals should stop speaking as if they are “experts” in everything and conducting “fact-checking”; instead, they should engage in “thought-checking.” He writes: “Resist the idea of understanding our work as fact-checking rather than thought-checking.” He even goes so far as to say: “Shame on the people who ask their academics for a stronger dose of truth.”

So what has happened to “truth”? Instead of tethering it to factual reality or reverting to pre-post-truth modes of knowing, Medeiros jokingly suggests an alternative inspired by Muhammad Ali: that humor can be a form of truth-telling. He writes: “It might be better to recall how legendary boxer Muhammad Ali would joke with reporters, saying that his sense of humor was always about telling the truth. After all, is the idea of pure, unadulterated truth not just the world’s funniest joke?”

Even more striking are the essay’s closing lines, where that “peculiar Turkish eccentricity” is emphasized again: “Accepting that the true antidote to post-truth politics may be not taking an empirically grounded truth claim too seriously is something we might learn from our Turkish colleagues, who long ago abandoned the idea of a discourse grounded in fact or reason.” So what are these Turkish colleagues—those who “long ago abandoned” truth and reason—actually doing? Are they acting like Muhammad Ali, joking that joking is truth-telling? Or, perhaps, is it not just the strongman political actors but also the intellectuals opposing them who are themselves deeply embedded in post-truth politics? It’s ambiguous, of course—but the final lesson is left not to the “peculiar Turkish eccentricity,” but to Medeiros himself: “If such awareness is accompanied by humility, it might provide a foundation from which we can build a more resilient—and hopefully wiser—democracy in the face of the post-truth experience.” Truly, it’s like a joke. To claim that Turkish intellectuals are disconnected from reality, and therefore reality itself is empty; and to conclude from this that all intellectuals, not just Turks, should stop bothering with reality altogether—and begin constructing from that emptiness—is the very definition of a joke. Everything is a lie; let’s build the truth by looking at the lie!

Yet there is also a serious side to all this. Didn’t Medeiros write that, for Turks and those who follow Turkish politics, “the term post-truth is nothing more than another flashy term in a nomenclature used to describe a lesson learned long ago”? Then what if the buzzwords constantly uttered by public intellectuals fixated on American foreign policy—like “strongman,” “regime,” “authoritarianism,” “totalitarianism,” even “nation,” “ballot box,” and “election”—are themselves nothing more than items in another flashy nomenclature?

If there is such a thing as post-truth politics in Türkiye, this is perhaps where it ought to be sought. Attempting to discredit one’s political opponent by rhetorically bracketing “truth” or factual reality outside the scope of their discourse produces a void—different from what Medeiros describes, but a void nonetheless. Yet that void does not remain empty; it can lead to tragedy, but more often, to farce. And didn’t asparagas itself first emerge almost as a joke? Countless examples could be cited, but let us settle for a recent one: weren’t the claims that missile tests conducted at a facility in Sinop frightened tourists and scared off fish just another product of that void?