Rewriting history: directorate of communications and neo-Ottoman ideological recasting of Turkey’s history

Abstract

ABSTRACT This study presents a multimodal discourse analysis of three historical videos produced by the Presidency of the Republic of Türkiye Directorate of Communications. The Directorate, chiefly operating as a partisan bureaucratic-cum-political apparatus of the ruling political party in Turkey, the Justice and Development Party, produces videos to recast the history of Turkey in line with the ruling party’s neo-Ottomanist, nationalist, militarist, and Islamist agenda. These three videos reviewed refer to the discursive building blocks of the AKP’s so-called Islamic populist worldview in recent years: the glorious Ottoman past, accumulation and glorification of military power, and a holy cause. The historical repository used in the videos reasserts the loneliness of Turkey, the utmost belief in and dedication to the nation’s leader, Turkey’s emergence as a regional power, and the primacy of the nation’s will. The article discusses the authoritarian and exclusionary implications of the misuse of history by official agencies.