bit of extra mayo on this…
During peak propaganda these things were in every town on billboards. "TURKEY" is the biggest text on it. No one was seeing "TURKEY" thinking great stuff. Erdogan played a big role in destroying Turkeys image. He's not entirely to blame, but he made it exceptionally easy to stigmatise Turkey with negative properganda.
"By then Vote Leave had shown its TV election broadcast repeatedly on different channels over four weeks, starting on 23 May. Beginning with lurid graphics representing the immigration threat of Turkey "
"The new information published by the DMCS committee shows how Facebook propaganda complemented this broadcast. While Vote Leave’s hundreds of Facebook advertisements included a wide range of issues, the largest cluster focused on immigration, Turkey and the linked £350 million claim, and widely re-used graphics and images from the broadcast in material posted to targeted subsets of users."
"In this differentiated propaganda, on the one hand immigration was presented as an example of ‘taking back control’ with the abstract theme of excessive numbers of migrants, and on the other as the threat of large numbers of new migrants arriving from undesirable places like Turkey"
"The focus on Turkey and the Balkan countries played into racist stereotypes: the otherness of people from distant, poor (and in Turkey’s case) Muslim-majority countries hardly needed labouring. It implied hostility towards Turks and Albanians in the UK, who had already experienced racism. It also implied hostility towards more than three million EU citizens by creating a threat to their residence rights and exposing them to the ‘hostile environment’ which May had created for migrant."
Truly Project Hate: the third scandal of the official Vote Leave campaign headed by Boris Johnson
Look at the Vote Leave Facebook adverts alongside their more public propaganda, and you see quite how much it promoted racist ideas.
www.opendemocracy.net
I would argue that England is maybe one of the least racially prejudiced countries in Europe and i would actually argue that the UK is the most important nation in europe and Turkeys image is mostly trash here. It was really the last 10 years of erdogans rule that did the most damage.
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