‘Official truth’

Herbie Gomez

“The art of propaganda consists precisely in being able to awaken the imagination of the public through an appeal to their feelings, in finding the appropriate psychological form that will arrest the attention and appeal to the hearts of the national masses.” -Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

I’M keeping all the innocent people who lost their lives in Resorts World last week and their families in my thoughts.

Marawi is also in my thoughts. May the innocent who survived find comfort in these trying times, and may this crisis end the soonest possible so people from that place could re-build.

Our soldiers there are also in my thoughts. May they muster more courage in the face of great danger, and may their bombs and bullets hit the right targets so that our hard-earned taxes are not wasted, and so that they don’t unknowingly kill more of their own. May they emerge as the victors, and may they reunite with their loved ones soon.

President Duterte is in my thoughts, too. May genuine love for country (not lipservice), respect for the co-equal branches of government, other institutions and the law, humanity and reason prevail so that the remaining five years of his presidency won’t be characterized by Caesarism, megalomania, unreason, impulsive pronouncements and Fentanyl-influenced decision-making.

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There has been a surge in the number of false news being posted and shared in cyberspace since President Duterte’s May 23 declaration of martial law in Mindanao. The last time fake news mushroomed like this was during the period when Malacanang had its hands full because of the Senate and Lower House inquiries into the “war on drugs,” the extrajudicial killings, the so-called Davao Death Squad, Edgar Matobato’s and retired SPO3 Arthur Lascanas’s testimonies. Include in that period the allegations of Sen. Leila de Lima’s links to the illegal drug trade that resulted in her arrest, her affair with her former driver-bodyguard Ronnie Dayan, and the dubitable “sex scandal” video they supposedly made. Stories about that supposed video now appear to be fiction because no one has really claimed with a straight face to have seen it except Duterte and a handful of the senator’s accusers. If such a sex video exists, it is unthinkable how copies of that (not blurry photos or vidcaps) can escape the hands of the video “pirates” and peddlers, and the political operators in the Internet. Something like that would sell like hotcakes in the black market.

But we live in crazy and dangerous times when many people tend to swallow populist assertions hook, line and sinker, when half-truths and lies are decreed as “official truth,” and when challenging ideas being propagated by government and its policies, no matter how absurd, is taboo.

Hitler had this in mind: “Propaganda must not investigate the truth objectively and, in so far as it is favorable to the other side, present it according to the theoretical rules of justice; yet it must present only that aspect of the truth which is favorable to its own side… The receptive powers of the masses are very restricted, and their understanding is feeble. On the other hand, they quickly forget. Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward… Every change that is made in the subject of a propagandist message must always emphasize the same conclusion. The leading slogan must of course be illustrated in many ways and from several angles, but in the end one must always return to the assertion of the same formula.”

Perhaps one of the greatest misfortunes of this generation–not just in the Philippines–is its failure to critically think and discern. Former US President Barack Obama stated it so clearly when he addressed the 2016 graduates of Rutgers University: “If you were listening to today’s politcal debate, you might wonder where this strain of anti-intellectualism came from… In politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue. It’s not cool not to know what you’re talking about… (When) our leaders express their disdain for facts, when they’re not held accountable for repeating falsehoods and just making stuff up while actual experts are dismissed as elitists, then we’ve got a problem… The rejection of facts, the rejection of reason… that is the path to decline.”

Last week, I started to screengrab, label as “fake,” and post some of these false news on my Facebook wall. An acquaintance “pleaded guilty” and claimed she was having difficulties in telling which is fake and which is real. She says she merely posts what she likes, not knowing if it’s fake or not. Now, that’s a problem. When the “truth” to us is dependent on what we like, when it becomes “official” just because those in power say so, then we lose touch of reality and become gullible. Truth is not dependent on our emotions. Neither does truth care if we like it or not. Pastilan.