‘Fake news’ and ‘post-truth’ are popular neologisms – but they have actually been part of the political landscape for a very long time. We have learned to live with fake news, fake history and bogus law. We swim in an ocean of lies and dis-information, but somehow manage to survive the economic and political sharks all around us.
What is far more worrisome is the phenomenon that there are ‘real facts’ that cry out for our attention, that demand urgent action, and that our politicians and media treat as non-existent or marginal, eg exorbitant military expenses, skewed national budgets, xenophobic war-mongering, structural violence, military aggression, unilateral coercive measures, financial blockades, the homologation of the media, manifestly unjust laws, the corruption of the ‘rule of law’ through legal scams and ‘lawfare’, the penetration of public institutions by intelligence services, the ‘weaponization’ of human rights, the imprisonment of whistleblowers like Julian Assange, unjust taxation, tax havens, tax evasion, corporate bribery, economic exploitation, ecocide, extreme poverty, man-made famine, social exclusion, etc.
Now pause, take a breath and ask yourself why these facts are largely ignored or trivialized by politicians and media alike. Why are these ‘inconvenient’ facts shoved aside, as if they were only of marginal importance or as if they did not exist? Without a doubt these facts engender short-term, medium-term and long-term consequences, create or perpetuate imbalances and spread a vague, destabilizing sense of incoherence and cognitive dissonance.
‘Facts without consequences’ constitute a sui generis category of reality. These facts may be present and available in the internet and generally acknowledged – but only under the tacit condition that no genuine debate will be conducted and no concrete action will be taken thereon. It is worse than a conspiracy of silence. It is a conspiracy of irresponsibility.
There are also ‘books without consequences’, books without the urgent, imperative follow-up. Whereas some trash books like Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man are given enormous attention, hugely relevant and challenging books by Noam Chomsky, John Mearsheimer, Stephen Kinzer, William Blum, Jeffrey Sachs, Nils Melzer, President Jimmy Carter are published by notable houses, but there is no follow-up. One would have expected that after the publication of Chomsky’s ‘Manufacturing Consent’, Kinzer’s ‘Overthrow’, Sachs’ ‘The End of Poverty’, Melzer’s ‘The Trial of Julian Assange’, Carter’s ‘Our Endangered Values’, or Mearsheimer’s ‘The Great Delusion’ not only polite academic debate and scholarly conferences would follow, but genuine democratic discussion would be conducted in townhalls, in the daily press, in the internet, throughout the spectrum of the media. Politically these and other necessary books were met by silence. They had the potential to advance international law and human rights, and that is precisely why they have been victims of ‘benign neglect’.
Excerpted: ‘Facts Without Consequences’
Courtesy: Counterpunch.org