Some Truths about Falsehoods

Fernando Buen Abad

Behind every invention produced in the entrails of the dominant ideology, are the most perverse mercantile interests in the history of mankind.

Against the brand new professed thoughts in some academic marsupials, we must repeat that the fake news, and its “post-truth”, has nothing “new” in the old art of deceiving people with premeditation, malice aforethought and advantage. And it must be repeated a thousand times, lest some already cherish and get used to the idea of receiving prizes for “scientific findings”, equivalent to changing the name of the same ideological executioner who lives in the entrails of capitalism. Even if the smart ones publish books, papers or articles that are highly praised among themselves.

At no time has the dominant ideology (false consciousness) been more intent on hiding the class struggle; on making invisible the oppressor’s theft of the product of labor and natural wealth. Hiding, at all costs, the thousands of traps, crimes and tortures that have been devised so that the workers, will never notice the ambush in which we live, generation after generation.

And, all of this, seasoned with reams of “ethical” and “moral” values (judges, churches, preceptors and gurus) to defend the “private property” of the masters and their “supreme right” to keep, under their boots, the necks and brains of the oppressed. This with all the technology imaginable in their hands, with all kinds of mass narrative models, from the confessional to football. The true story of a system of exploitation hidden under false pretences.

In the history of the bourgeois press, it is clear that the system of fallacies has developed in detail, accompanying the accumulation of capital and the dispossession of those who count on nothing more than their labor power to feed their offspring. In that press, one can see the falsification of reality behind the stories that, to make themselves credible, were disguised as “learned”, “technical”, “professorial”… and were capable of weaving a wide network of containment that, in addition to lying, enabled the proliferation of fallacies immunized against the rigors of verification. In other words, they manufactured the disease of “media faith” above the facts. They suppressed the rigor of the evidence to impose the fanaticism of slander with “prestige”. Marx experienced this very closely in his time.

This cataract of lies that we see unfolding today as part of the dominant ideological landscape is a model of distortion that has been twisted and perfected (too) by groups of intellectuals, academics and scientists who are servile to the model of deception that the bourgeoisie needs on a daily basis in order to survive. In the retreats of these “notables”, vocabularies and typologies are forbidden as they might trace in detail the effects of their deceptions, which are dying out, to advise on the production of “novelties” capable of ratifying, deepening or widening “successful” deceptions. Nothing new. In the top ten of bourgeois fallacies we have, for example:

• The United States won World War II.
• There are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
• The “End of History” and the paradise of the “market economy”.
• The front page of the Spanish newspaper El País about the death of Hugo Chavez.
• The girl Frida-Sofia invented by Televisa, from Mexico.
• The whole affair against Julián Assange.
• The Pope’s support for Donald Trump.
• Cuban doctors are spies, according to the Argentine oligarchic press.
• The economy collapses because of COVID-19.

Behind every invention produced in the entrails of the dominant ideology, are the most perverse mercantile interests in the history of mankind. That too has broken its own boundaries and become perfected. The level of lies also demands that its liars be perfected and that is why they are trained in the production and distribution of fallacies. Some, mercenaries of falsehood, are willing to go even further and are able to fix any scene or text to flatter their masters and make themselves feel like “phony” opinion leaders. They yearn to lead the agenda of lies and make it a succulent business. Just like the Clarín group, BBC, CNN, Televisa, TV Azteca… and the whole mafia of the media condor plan, which operates in Latin America and the whole world. Where there are military bases there are media bases. Eight of them own 90% of the world’s mass media.

They turned the lies into daily artillery against the people’s intelligence and against the emancipatory struggles. And that is why this is not a problem of “communication” as some hitmen from the academy would have us believe. This is a problem of economy and national security. It is a war of information (or disfiguration of reality), which has terrible roots and consequences for which we are paying excessively high prices. We must not face this war with the weapons of criticism alone. We need to deploy a map of actions that allows us, while disarming the “minefield” with “fake news”, case by case; to dismantle the production factories, their production logic and their distribution systems. To systematically display their economic base. And that requires theoretical and methodological organization. It requires humanist political training willing to prevent and dedicate against the predominance of capital over human beings.

Let us not allow the reductionism of the “experts”, who seek to anesthetize us with contemplative semiotic theories or bureaucratic statistics, which is the only language of bureaucrats and reformists.

The struggle against the lies against information, and against all fallacy, is part of the struggle for the emancipation of the oppressed class in the face of the economic and ideological outrages of the oppressor class. It is urgent to prevent the distortion of reality, produced daily with the ideological warfare weapons of capital, but it can only be prevented with the weapons of emancipated and emancipatory science in the hands of the people. And there is no time to lose. The next fallacies are already in the mass media oven and will be served early during breakfast. What do we do? The truth is always revolutionary.

Source: Granma, translation Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau