[dropcap style=”font-size:100px; color:#992211;”]A[/dropcap]re you disturbed by “fake news” as promulgated by “fake news sites”? I see.
But before I can start to offer commiseration, it is crucial we define the terms of the issue.
Are you referring to fake news such as: Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Or perhaps a regionally-related sister story: Qaddafi was on the verge of committing mass murder; therefore, a massive NATO humanitarian bombing campaign was imperative to prevent the carnage?
It continues, the precepts becoming more subtle and ponderous as they go along, yet with no more resilience to considered scrutiny. The crises in the greater Middle East are very complex: Those people have been killing each other for hundreds of years. Western imperialism and Zionist aggression are only nominally to blame for the proliferation of civil strife and sectarian violence in the region.
Let’s change regions, there are plenty of fake news assuptions to go around. A peoples’ uprising in Ukraine ended the corruption and tyranny of a despotic regime. US foreign policy, in general, is based on the principle of spreading democracy across the globe.
Conversely: Putin has awakened the Russian bear and she is licking her chops as she gazes hungrily upon Europe. Putin and his geek squad of neo-Cossack hackers (as claimed by Hillaryites, not proffering a shred of evidence) tilted the election towards Trump.
Do you desire to expose fake news sites? Then turn your scrutiny towards the entirety of the corporate media hologram. Furthermore, your capitalism-colonised mind is a fake news site itself, thus you yourself are a fake news outlet; your utterances are fake news. Apropos: Trump will make America great again.
Or… third parties engendered the election of the tangerine-tinted huckster-in-chief elect. Poor innocent Hillary was a victim of sexism. Racism elected Trump (when the fact is, the key swing states that enabled his victory voted for Obama twice). Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are positioned to lead a progressive resurgence within the Democratic Party.
Equally implausible, yet the core hallucination enabling all of the above: it is possible to vote away an oligarch-constructed dictatorship of money by working within the system created to maintain its power.
The crux of the matter is, the struggle to silence fake news begins within.
Image by Dan Booth. Not to be reproduced without express prior permission.
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City.
Yet a bio amounts to dharma for dimwits: It defines a human being in the same manner and degree of veracity as a restaurant menu describes the various slabs of meat offered … commodified things that were once living beings.
