We live in times where the tales told by our politicians seem to grow ever taller, while both our memories and tempers keep getting shorter and shorter; a dangerous and potentially explosive mix. This year, in the aftermath of the 2020 elections, has been plagued by post-truth; let's look back for a moment...
Image by Mike Licht - source: Flickr
The year 2021 will be remembered as the year of the attempted coupe on January 6, which was caused by the "Big Lie": the verifiably false assertion that Trump won. Joe Biden won 306 votes in the Electoral College, while Trump received 232. In the popular vote, Biden won by more than 7 million votes. Trump also asserted in 2020 that Covid-19 was just another flu and that it would disappear in the summer. More than 20,500 deaths later (worldwide), there are still people who believe it. Right next to the Big Lie, we have the QAnon conspiracy theories that are believed by millions of people; it seems that America is losing its grasp on reality. Or at least part of America, and polarization has reached new heights as well...
This year isn't exceptional though; the spreading of post-truth has been a gradual evolution that's been going on for decades, and is taking place against a background of misleading PR, advertisements and fake-news, all induced by capitalism's drive towards profits.
Post-truth: Relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.
source: OxfordDictionaries.com
Five years ago, in 2016, the word "post-truth" gained the Oxford Dictionaries word of the year award. I believe that 2016 will eventually be written about in future history books as the year when truth died officially. The truth doesn't matter anymore and that fact was celebrated with an appropriately little-known award. In a world where truth is seen as an inconvenience at best, you don't want a big reward to celebrate its death. Some other contestants that year, the year of "Brexit" and Trump, were "alt-right", "Brexiteer" and "woke"...
The concept of post-truth has been in existence for the past decade, but Oxford Dictionaries has seen a spike in frequency this year in the context of the EU referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States. It has also become associated with a particular noun, in the phrase 'post-truth politics'.
source: OxfordDictionaries.com
To illustrate how deeply we are into the era of non-truths here's some quotes from Karl Rove, U.S. President George W. Bush's senior adviser and chief political strategist:
- "As people do better, they start voting like Republicans...unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing."
- "Once again the powers of light and good have triumphed over the media!"
- "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality-judiciously, as you will-we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
create our own reality - Karl Rove - source: FotoVision
Well, I'm sorry Karl, but may I remind you: you are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts. Who was it again that said "reality is that which doesn't go away when you stop believing in it"?
But that's part of the problem. We act according to our core beliefs and based on emotion rather than facts. And yes, in this age of the self large groups of people actually believe there is no truth, only your personal interpretation of the truth. This irrational and anti-scientific sentiment is further fueled by our natural adherence to a certain degree of confirmation-bias, and the tactics used by the mainstream media.
One of the signs that "newspeak", as invented by George Orwell in his brilliant book 1984, has firmly taken root in modern society is the way the term "fairness" has taken on a new meaning through the years in newsreporting. Here's a defenition of the "fairness doctrine" in US media:
The fairness doctrine of the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC), introduced in 1949, was a policy that required the holders of broadcast licenses both to present controversial issues of public importance and to do so in a manner that was—in the FCC's view—honest, equitable, and balanced. The FCC eliminated the policy in 1987 [...] It established two forms of regulation on broadcasters: to provide adequate coverage of public issues, and to ensure that coverage fairly represented opposing views. [...] In 1985, under FCC Chairman Mark S. Fowler, a communications attorney who had served on Ronald Reagan's presidential campaign staff in 1976 and 1980, the FCC released a report stating that the doctrine hurt the public interest and violated free speech rights guaranteed by the First Amendment.
source: Wikipedia
Image by geralt - source: Pixabay
This is all just to ensure that democracy works. Without fair, unbiased, factual representation of events, democracy can not function. Between 1949 and the early 1980s, the standard for both press and television was fact checking and to give statistically representative airtime to opposing or differing views on public affairs.
Fairness in news-reporting nowadays simply means to give equal time to both sides of any subject. To give an example, imagine a debate about whether evolution is true or not, where equal time is given to evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and creationist Ken Ham. This seems reasonable and fair: let both sides give their opinion and let the public make up their own minds.
Except it isn't fair. This debate creates the impression, the lie that there's something to debate when there simply isn't. There is no debate between scientists about the theory of evolution. If this debate was represented in a statistically representative manner, Ken Ham would have to debate thousands of scientists who all accept the reality of evolution.
Regardless of where you stand in the global warming debate, fact is that most resistance against climate change politics comes from right wing believers in free markets. Their argument is, although they don't always admit this, that measures to combat global warming constrain markets and hinder free trade and their right to more profits. Capitalism and free markets are so much part of their core beliefs, their world-view, that their confirmation-bias (as anyone's) makes them incapable of admitting to truths that go against these core beliefs.
Whatever you may think about the way it was handled, U.S. president Biden finally ended military operations in Afghanistan this year. That war had been going on for 20 years! And was based on lies. However, when Bush ordered the first attacks in 2001 most people believed those lies:
The Afghan war was enormously popular when it began on a fall Sunday eight and a half years ago. Less than a month had passed since the September 11 attacks, and President Bush could draw on deep wells of support when he ordered air strikes against Kabul, Jalalabad and the Taliban stronghold at Kandahar.
source: ABC News - June 7th, 2010
source: AZ Quotes
Constant war, bombings, destruction and loss of innocent lives in the Middle East, all based on lies. The Afghan war was shock doctrine at its finest:
This [shock therapy] centers on the exploitation of national crises to push through controversial policies while citizens are too emotionally and physically distracted by disasters or upheavals to mount an effective resistance.
source: Wikipedia
Every crisis creates an opportunity is what these people believe. And we now know that the war against Afghanistan was prepared long before the attacks of September 11th 2001, as part of a plan to lay oil- and gas-pipes through the country. All of the conflicts in this area are based on lies. How come there's still people who believe that Saddam had weapons of mass-destruction? Another lie to base another war on. I remember a story that also played against a backdrop of perpetual warfare: 1984 by George Orwell.
We've actually allowed the world to be shaped by the lies that are repeated over and over again, until people believe them. "The truth is whatever the people will believe", a quote from Roger Ailes, ex-Chairman and CEO of Fox News. Now the time has come to find our way back to the inconvenient truths that are our shared reality. And be aware that there's also a fair share of fake-news to be found in alternative media and on the internet. But at least there we have a chance to be confronted with truths and facts, whether they're convenient or not.
BOMBSHELL Documents Expose The Secret Lie That Started the Afghan War
Above is a reminder from 2018, when the war was 17 years old, about how the "war on terror", effectively the successor to the "cold war" to benefit the interests of the military industrial complex, started 20 years ago in Afghanistan. In closing I'd like to advice you that this is only my opinion on the facts as I understand them. Take everything you hear or read, including the contents of my inconvenient blog, with a large grain of salt and try to discern for yourself facts from opinion.
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