The lies on the righ

Lies, damn lies, and media: Right-wing repetition

By Roberto Silva: If there is something that characterizes these times, it is that we are surrounded by lies and therefore also by liars, a situation that can be verified on social networks and also in the large communication media that are members of the establishment, which they structure a mechanism to manipulate the population through disinformation with the intention that no claims arise that call into question the privileges held by the most powerful sectors of society.

When we speak of lies we do not refer to errors, something that we can all commit as a result of ignorance, but to those who are deliberate because they seek to cause a certain effect, this liar possibly knows the truth, but chooses to hide or misrepresent it.

So widespread is the custom of throwing lies for human consumption that we have naturalized them, we are no longer surprised or astonished that false news is spread on a news channel, we accept it as if it were part of our life and it is even justified by the ideology of the issuer.

When the deceased Clarín operator, Julio Blank, acknowledged that that corporation carried out war journalism against Kirchnerism, it is known that in every war the first victim is the truth, for which he was also implicitly acknowledging that they were willing to resort to lies. to be victorious in that combat, and they did so in the most shameless way, turning their clients and consumers into accomplices of these deceptions because they were willing to accept them with the aim of defenestrating the hated enemy, "lie to me that I like it" well every Clarín reader or TN viewer could have said when consuming the disinformation that the corporation gave them.

When talking about lies, they usually resort to the Nazi Propaganda Minister, the sinister Joseph Goebbels, and his famous phrase "lie, lie that something remains" but the Nazis were not the first to implement the lie as a powerful political tool.

Many media outlets that portray themselves as champions of press freedom have adopted some of Goebbels's postulates, even when they refuse to acknowledge it, such as: “a lie repeated a thousand times becomes a truth” or "Better a lie that cannot be denied than an implausible truth."

British imperialism was the first to establish a Ministry of Information during the First World War with the intention of spreading false news about their enemies, presenting them as sadists and cruel, to that end they proceeded to invent news about events that never happened in such a way that the population would march to the front lines without resistance and be ready to kill the enemy without remorse.

Almost immediately, the president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, organized a committee on Public Information, in this case to convince a population that remained favorable to neutrality to change their ideas and show themselves favorable to the country's participation in the war and For this it was necessary to send them false news of atrocities committed by one of the parties.

More recently, the wars carried out by US imperialism in the first Gulf War were justified, alleged cruel acts of Iraqi soldiers against babies in Kuwait were invented and the invasion of Iraq after the attack on the Twin Towers was justified by the alleged possession of weapons of massive destruction by Saddam Hussein's regime, a deception that soon came to light, once Iraq was already invaded and destroyed.

Internet and social networks

Social networks have made it possible for the circulation of false news to grow exponentially, an investigation by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) conducted in 2018 shows that false news circulates much faster and reaches further than the proven facts.

The explanation that some specialists have given is that human beings tend to seek confirmation of their own beliefs rather than to determine the truth, that is why if they receive any news that is within their own line of thought, it it spreads without stopping to reflect on its veracity.

The web has the effect of encouraging the grouping of those people who think alike, favoring the confluence in what could be called tribes that live in a kind of bubble that distance them from their peers who think differently, that tribal feeling produces an effect of self-deception in the sense of believing that these ideas are predominant in a society.

It is that self-deception that they have shown in recent times that calls for demonstrations that seem massive on the networks then in the street show an undeniable insignificance, the participation of trolls with various false identities and robots allows deception in terms of quantity, but in the street each person is counted by one.

Some of these tribes have been the promoters of the wildest ideas, within a century that we believed marked by the unlimited advancement of science, groups have emerged that question significant advances in the scientific field, this is how sectors such as anti-vaccines, flat earthers and lately antiquarantine.

Canada far-right extremism and far-right terror

Precisely the antiquarantines have shown an alarming association with groups of the extreme right which have resurfaced in many countries trying to find a way out of the pandemic, with greater inequality, racism and violence.

The networks have come to play a fundamental role in certain circumstances when elections such as the Brexit plebiscite in Great Britain or the elections won by Donald Trump in the United States were held.

A very crazy case occurred in the city of Veles in Macedonia where a group of young people created in 2016 a large number of web pages with false news that benefited Donald Trump and harmed Hillary Clinton, these pages were widely disseminated by campaign managers of Trump and reached millions of Americans, in reality those young people were not interested in the result of the election but in making money, but they undoubtedly had influence in the electoral campaign.

This allows us to deduce that although networks are often presented as a place of democratic expression where all individuals can express themselves with absolute freedom and under conditions of equality, it is also an area where the powerful continue to exercise their supremacy every time they do so. they propose.

Even many of those who present themselves as influencers are still trolls who act in the service of economic power, in our country macrismo was a clear example of how the networks were used by the powerful to defame the opposition and implement hate campaigns against their adversaries.

In 2018 Amnesty International carried out an investigation into the use of trolls and robots by the macro-government government, it also showed that well-known right-wing figures such as Congressman Fernando Iglesias and journalist Eduardo Feinmann actively participated in hate and smear campaigns.

It is precisely these characters on the right who have dirtied the networks the most, unleashing verbal violence through manifestations of racism and sexism, however, the majority hide behind anonymity to unleash all their hatred.

Jauretche's zoncera "says La Prensa, says La Nación" that those newspapers were used as an irrefutable source of some event, now it has mutated into forms such as "I saw it on the internet", or "I read it on twitter", when these sources are of doubtful credibility.

When the networks and the alternative media play a clearly democratic role denouncing the role of the imperial powers, as has happened with the leaks of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning and Glenn Greenwald, governments have tried to silence them and establish some exemplary punishment.

Julián Assange responsible for the Wikileaks leak, which revealed the abuses and criminal acts of the United States government throughout the world, had to spend 7 years locked up in the Ecuadorian embassy in Great Britain until since April 2019 he has been detained in London, a trial is currently underway to determine whether he will be extradited to the United States, as a result of so much confinement, his health is very deteriorated.

Chelsea Manning, the US Army intelligence analyst responsible for the Wikileaks leak, spent 7 years in prison, was sentenced to 35 years in prison, but was pardoned by Barack Obama.

While Edward Snowden, a technology consultant from the United States, showed with his leak how the National Security Agency (SNA) spies on citizens at home and abroad, violating people's privacy, he currently lives in exile in Russia

The prestigious journalist Glenn Greenwald who collaborated with Snowden had to suffer the arrest of her husband as a pressure, since he lives part of the year in Brazil, he was in charge of exposing the pressure of Judge Moro to prosecutors to accuse Lula without evidence Bolsonaro threatened to arrest him several times.

The media corporations 

The media, far from being in charge of providing clarity in the face of so much circulating lies, are also a constant source of false information, one of the consequences has been that a growing number of citizens mistrust what appears in the media and that the profession of journalist is among the most discredited, with a growing suspicion that there are very few media that can show a minimum of objectivity when reporting.

One of the consequences of the low credibility in the media is what has allowed the most absurd conspiracy theories to emerge that defy all the scientific knowledge that Humanity has acquired over the centuries, instead of advancing sometimes it seems that we are going backwards when We see people who believe that the Earth is flat going back to the times of Columbus.

Except for honorable exceptions, the media are the spokesmen of the ruling classes, that is why they have become accomplices of this system of deception with which they have tried to manipulate citizens, Clarín and La Nación in Argentina are already part of that oligarchic class that tries to keep the people away from decisions, while trying to locate in the government, often with non-democratic mechanisms, docile politicians who take care of their economic interests.

The growth of the discredit of the media has made it possible for some of its candidates, such as Mauricio Macri and María Eugenia Vidal, who had the unconditional, although not disinterested, support of the mainstream media have lost the 2019 elections in a resounding way.

In the United States, the emergence of that grotesque Fox News network, a furiously right-wing news channel and therefore a defender of Donald Trump's satrapies, has been a clear demonstration of the decline of the media, proceeding to a degree of massive manipulation to the extreme that a 2011 survey shows that Fox News viewers are far less informed than those who do not consume news channels.

The same would happen in Argentina if a survey were made among the viewers of the right-wing channels such as A24 and TN, it would show that they are less well informed than people who do not watch any news channel.

In recent days, many of the lies invented by the mainstream media prior to the 2015 electoral campaign have been unveiled, one of them was the operation "Aníbal es la morsa", where the candidate for governor of the province of Buenos Aires was accused , Aníbal Fernández, if he was responsible for a triple crime related to drugs, some scenes of that monumental deception were recorded in Elisa Carrió's apartment for the show of lies that is Jorge Lanata's program.

Another of the deceptions was that of the railway tragedy of the Once Station that ended the lives of 51 people, it was falsely argued that it occurred due to the lack of maintenance of the trains, but now it is known that the driver deactivated the mechanism that could have prevented the tragedy, the Macrista judge Bonadío prosecuted the five experts who said that the brakes worked, those experts were dismissed two years later.

One could also add the lie of the journalist from Clarín, Daniel Santoro, currently prosecuted for being an accomplice of the false lawyer D'Alessio and the macrista prosecutor Stornelli for extortion, who invented that Máximo Kirchner and Nilda Garré had an account in the United States, the The denial from that country took three years to arrive, but Santoro never apologized for the false news and the attempted defamation.

Damage capacity

This is how the 2015 elections were reached, where Cambiemos won in the Nation, the Province and the city of Buenos Aires with a portion of the population believing that a candidate for governor was a murderer and a trafficker, who the former president had ordered to be assassinated. to Prosecutor Nisman, that the Once tragedy was the product of government corruption, that Cristina Fernández had an account in the Seychelles, while her son and one of her ministers had accounts in the United States.

None of this was true, but it helped the media, particularly the Clarín group, influence the outcome of the elections, allowing for the first time the right wing to come to government through suffrage, of course manipulated by the media corporations. .

Although the media were defeated in 2019, there is still a significant portion of the population that is kidnapped by them and they respond to their slogans that lead to destabilize any popular government.

We see people maddened by these media marching against the health care measures required by the pandemic that is punishing the entire planet, we see them with arguments typical of science fiction novels, some holding the wildest conspiracy theories, many of the which arise from the power plants of the ultra-right groups.

The economic power of the Clarín monopoly increased considerably in the four years of Macri's government, which granted him everything he demanded, in addition to paying him a sidereal advertising guideline, that is why his capacity to damage is still enormous, although he cannot enter all the elections as is your intention.

We are already seeing ten months after the government of Alberto Fernández those corporations that make up the economic elite conspiring to destabilize or at least obtain a change of course, for that they need to break that electoral and government alliance that was the Frente de Todos. they are concentrating their efforts, inventing fights between the president and the vice president, to point out the next day that the vice manages the president.

Popular mobilization, which the pandemic has stopped for now, and laws that curtail the power of corporations are the only antidotes that can stop the antidemocratic actions of these agents of destabilization.

Published in www.elforjista.com.ar