As we approached the tail end of the leap year a new buzz phrase suddenly hit the pop charts. Like that dreaded virus, be it of the biological or computer variety, it spread across the globe like wildfire. I was somewhat bemused! So what exactly is new? Fake news has abounded for years, nay, centuries. A large part of propaganda is fake news, and propaganda has existed since time immemorial, and disseminated with great tenacity.

But what made me laugh, sardonically of course, was the inevitability, just as night follows day, of the pot succumbing to the irresistible temptation of calling the kettle black. As two sides dig in to the trenches of a new cold war that is heating up very rapidly and ever so dangerously, propaganda is stepping up gear as it spews out ever increasing and darker doses of misinformation.

Facts are thus devoured and reprocessed to feed a war machine that in turn feeds on fake news, fabrications and false flags. And as we all know, lies have a habit of snowballing and replicating exponentially as each one requires another two or three to cover it up.

The term ‘fake news’ has thus introduced nothing new but is simply part of Orwellian newspeak, of political language, which old George himself, who was a journalist and writer, defined as nothing but “designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give the appearance of solidity to pure wind”. So for example the fabrication of weapons of mass destruction eventually morphed into weapons of mass deception, yet not before having been used to justify both an economic and a military war in Iraq that together claimed hundreds of thousands of lives, immense suffering and staggering profits for the arms and reconstruction industries, sending a nation spiralling downwards into chaos.

In 1846 Abraham Lincoln had taken President James Polk to task in no small way to challenge his narrative about the justification for invading Mexico and eventually annexing half of it, which Lincoln saw as just militarism and empire building. Even then fake news had surfaced with claims that the Mexicans were the first to attack.

William Churchill had cynically yet so accurately stated famously that history is written by the victor. Considering that he was a grand victor himself, we heard it from the horse’s mouth, as if he were trying to send a message to posterity to be ever vigilant for the truth, and not to take the standard narrative for granted, be it a current one, or one that crystallises into a historical record.

Lawyers are trained to challenge the narrative forged on the other side of every court room, and judges likewise trained to hear both sides and sift through each argument taken to its conclusion, in order to reach the truth, in humble service to Themis, the blind folded embodiment of Justice, and to the fundamental principle of due process of law. Audi alteram partem, hear the other side, is her guide, as she weighs the arguments, armed with the scales in her left hand prior to striking with her sword in the right.

Democracy is being hijacked under our very noses by a plutocracy orchestrated by some very rich and powerful entities

Addressing the couriers of our news, as President John Kennedy called them in his famous speech to the media, which is still relevant today, he called upon it to be no different, and to challenge and question every narrative in the spirit of due process of information. And so it should be with the rest of us, whose opinions are formed and shaped daily by current events and the reporting thereof.

Yet one cannot help but feel the enormous frustration of sensing that so many people act like flocks of sheep, as they are herded together and steered from one direction to another by indomitable sheep dogs. Suddenly, listening to the other side gets you branded a commie, a radical, an agent provocateur, a basket of deplorables, or just a weirdo. Try challenging the official narrative and you get labelled a conspiracy wacko. That term too is a very devious part of newspeak, used to surreptitiously discredit anyone seeking the truth, be he an investigator in journalism, in academia, in historical research, or in the police and justice system.

As language evolves, words often take on new meanings. The word conspiracy is actually a very important and fundamental legal term that refers to the act of two or more persons coming together to break the law. That is all it means, pure and simple. So, for example, if two or more politicians or nations agree to breach international law by carrying out illegal economic sanctions, or in using force illegally against another sovereign nation, that is a real conspiracy, an actual breach of law. We are constantly surrounded by a multiplicity of actual illegal conspiracies, yet the term has now lost its true significance, drowned in its new connotations, because as Orwell so masterfully understood, a lie may be made to sound truthful and a crime may sound like nothing but a bunch of fictitious mental gymnastics in the head of a nutcase who dares to challenge the official narrative.

The pursuit of truth and justice is stumbling into a dark and nebulous forest which we are being made to believe is filled with goblins and ghosts, and that if we veer from the official path (for path, read narrative) in that forest, we do so at great risk to ourselves, our careers, our financial security, reputation and credibility.

Take Galileo, Darwin, Velikovski and Wegener, for example, the proponents of heliocentrism, evolution, chaos theory and continental drift. These are all established scientific narratives today, yet each one was vilified and ridiculed in his own day. The truth is that every time we fail to listen to the other side, to check our sources, to question and challenge the official narrative, to look for irrefutable evidence, and to discount the statements of those who have a conflict of interest in what they do and say, and an interest to maintain the status quo, we are adding new nails to the coffin of democracy, truth and lasting security.

Democracy is thus being hijacked under our very noses by a plutocracy orchestrated by some very rich and powerful entities, who seek to persuade and assuage us the people,  the ultimate benefactors, but also sentinels of democracy, that we are all to bow our heads sheepishly to the official narrative and pay allegiance to the status quo, which is engineering financial mechanisms, crops, economic sanctions, wars and ultimately even engineering information, for public consumption and acceptance, in order to mould the collective consciousness and retain their grip on power.

We must never forget that every war has started with a great lie, and so often followed in the wake of economic sanctions as a form of soft war. We must remain ever vigilant, and doggedly challenge any narrative that tries to demonise the other side, to engineer information and to ultimately justify military escalation and action, lest we be duped once again into a conflict that could only bring hardship and suffering to all sides, to the sole benefit of the plutocrats who finance and arm both sides of every struggle and control a region’s resources.

If we are to secure peace and justice in our times and make real progress in the information age, we must not only wake up, and see through the veil of misinformation and fake news from wherever it may spring. We must also take a firm stand against fictitious threats, the military resolution of conflicts, and the preparation thereto by military build-ups, propaganda and economic warfare.

Rodolfo Ragonesi is a lawyer and researcher in international affairs.

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