An opinion piece by President Emiel van der Huijsen and Deputy Prime Minister Hasan Çakar. It does not necessarily reflect the views of the Courant van Lazia or its editors.
Lux, Veritas et Ordo
A joint statement by President Van der Huijsen and Deputy Prime Minister Çakar against fake news. The views are the authors' own.
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An opinion piece by President Emiel van der Huijsen and Deputy Prime Minister Hasan Çakar. It does not necessarily reflect the views of the Courant van Lazia or its editors.
Lazia, 17 April 2020 — For some time now a particular kind of fake news has attached itself to us and our supposed activities. Defamation of that sort is easy enough to ignore, and ignore it we shall; but to stand by while the kleptocratic pornocracy that styles itself the “Grand Unified Micronational” drags our names through the dirt and seeks to turn us into diplomatic pariahs would be foolish. Where ridicule can be expected and tolerated, outright libel cannot.
The libel is at its most prominent in the tabloid rag known as the “Occitanian Sun”, whose pages have carried such inventions as the claim that Hasan Çakar is an antisemite, and the suggestion that we ought to be tried in a GUM-sponsored show court for crimes we did not commit and in a language we do not understand — rather as one might expect Benjamin Netanyahu to be tried in a Hezbollah court, in Farsi.
Sadly, these sentiments have been parroted by assorted micronational figures, the Ashukov president Edward Jacobs — described by the Batyr Times as a “notorious troll” — among them. One wonders whether such conduct explains the dispiriting modern tendency to assume that the GUM’s opponents must be acting in bad faith: that, rather than believing what they say they believe, they are driven, deep down, by a wish to be wicked. How likely is it, really, that criticism of the GUM springs from “anti-GUM extremism” rather than from an ordinary desire to see micronational entities develop and flourish? A moment’s reflection suggests: not very.
Perhaps one day there will be a device that physically stays the user’s hand before they retweet such rubbish, and cries: “Come on — really? Listen to yourself!” Until then, before we set out to convince others of what we believe, it might be worth pausing a moment to decide whether we truly believe it ourselves. Otherwise, it may really be the Occitanian Sun wot won it.
Edited for the relaunch of the Courant van Lazia.
