Κουλός Γκεμπελισμός και η Ομάδα της αλήθειας
There are moments when political irony stops being amusing and becomes revolting. Greece, a country that once gave the world the concept of democracy, is now watching a private propaganda machine operate under the absurdly Orwellian name “Squad of Truth.” (Ομάδα της αλήθειας). A name so shamelessly self-congratulatory that it could only belong to something rotten at its core.
Let’s not sugarcoat it. The “Squad of Truth” (Ομάδα της αλήθειας) is not about truth. It’s about distortion, manipulation, and obedience. It’s about crafting narratives that glorify one man and his government Kyriakos Mitsotakis and his party, New Democracy΄, while shredding anyone who dares to question them. The squad is not composed of journalists, analysts, or thinkers. It’s a digital militia of wordsmiths-for-hire, churning out filth, spinning scandals into misunderstandings, and turning criticism into treason.
And the best part? They do it all while proudly wrapping themselves in the flag of freedom of speech.
Freedom of speech! What a magnificent shield to hide behind while spitting venom. When others demand transparency, the “Squad” cries censorship. When journalists expose corruption, they call it “fake news.” When citizens protest, they are branded “agents of chaos.” Every time they are accused of slander, manipulation, or hate speech, they howl about their right to speak freely, as if the right to express an opinion also grants them the right to poison public discourse and vomit hatred onto anyone who disagrees.
Let’s be clear, freedom of speech is not freedom from accountability. It is not a weapon for the powerful to silence dissent. It is a shield for the weak, the marginalized, the people who dare to speak truth to power. When a well-funded propaganda company uses it to justify defamation, racism, and digital terrorism, we are not witnessing democracy, we are watching its dismemberment.
The “Squad of Truth” (Ομάδα της αλήθειας) operates mostly online, where shadows thrive and decency dies quickly. An army of anonymous trolls, armed with memes and venom, floods social media platforms with coordinated attacks. Anyone who criticizes the government becomes an enemy of the nation. Artists, academics, journalists, and ordinary citizens, none are safe from their digital claws. Their mission is simple: to drown out every voice that does not echo the government’s line, to reduce public dialogue to a war of insults and fear.
And they are paid handsomely for it.
Here comes the second grotesque layer of this tragedy: this private company is funded, directly or indirectly, by a political party swimming in debt. New Democracy, the self-proclaimed champion of fiscal responsibility, owes Greek banks over half a billion euros. Half a billion. And yet, while small businesses are crushed under taxes and citizens struggle with inflation, the party finds the means to finance a propaganda apparatus to polish its image and demonize its critics.
It’s not just immoral, it’s parasitic.
Imagine the absurdity: a political party that has failed to pay its debts for years still finds money to pay digital mercenaries. A private company that feeds on public contracts, party donations, and hidden sponsorships now masquerades as a defender of truth. The banks, of course, look the other way. No threats, no auctions, no repossessions. Ordinary Greeks lose their homes for a fraction of that debt, but the ruling party’s golden boys are untouchable.
The “Squad of Truth” (Ομάδα της αλήθειας) is more than a propaganda agency. It’s a symptom of a deeper disease, the normalization of corruption through narrative control. Their work is to make scandal seem trivial, to make injustice seem inevitable, to make people believe that there is no alternative. When the prime minister’s name surfaces in a surveillance scandal, they twist the story until the victim becomes the suspect. When public funds vanish into the pockets of friends and contractors, they call it “strategic investment.” When journalists are targeted, they say “the opposition is exaggerating.”
It is Goebbels rebranded for the digital age. Not with brown uniforms and torchlit parades, but with hashtags, influencers, and algorithmic manipulation. A modern ministry of propaganda without the ministry, outsourced, privatized, and comfortably detached from legal and moral responsibility.
And the tragedy is that it works.
The average citizen scrolling through social media, tired of politics and drowned in daily struggle, cannot always distinguish between truth and fabrication. The constant repetition of lies makes them believable. The endless mudslinging against opposition figures makes them appear suspicious. The constant praise of the government creates an illusion of stability and competence. That’s the real goal, not to convince the people that everything is true, but to make them doubt that anything is.
In such an environment, cynicism flourishes. People stop caring. They stop believing that honesty matters. They accept corruption as part of the landscape. “They’re all the same,” they say and that sentence, the death rattle of democracy, is the propaganda machine’s greatest victory.
The “Squad of Truth” thrives on that exhaustion. It doesn’t need to inspire faith; it only needs to destroy trust. When truth becomes just another opinion, when outrage is dismissed as hysteria, when lies become normalized, then power has achieved total control.
But here’s what they underestimate: the Greek people’s capacity for irony. You can fool them for a while, but you cannot make them blind forever. Greeks have lived through dictatorships, through juntas, through censorship and fear. They know propaganda when they smell it, even when it wears a modern suit and speaks the language of marketing.
The “Squad of Truth” (Ομάδα της αλήθειας) might dominate the digital battlefield today, but its victory is temporary. Every lie leaves a residue. Every manipulated story creates a scar. The more they scream about “truth,” the more obvious their deceit becomes.
And one day, when the tide turns and it always turns in this country their excuses will sound pathetic. “We were just doing our job.” “We believed what we said.” “We were defending democracy.” No. They were defending power. They were selling the soul of democracy to the highest bidder, hiding behind slogans and hashtags.
The truth, the real truth, needs no squad. It doesn’t require paid trolls or political sponsorships. It stands on its own, often silent, sometimes slow, but always invincible in the long run.
So let the “Squad of Truth” (Ομάδα της αλήθειας) keep barking about freedom of speech. Let them wave their digital torches and chant their slogans. Because in the end, history has never remembered the propagandists kindly. And when the dust settles, they’ll discover that their greatest enemy was not the opposition, nor the journalists they smeared, but the very truth they thought they could bury.
And the truth, as Greece has proven time and again, always digs its way back to the surface.
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