By Fernando Buen Abad on November 15, 2023
photo: U Chile
The “story” bathed (profitably) in blood. Placed on the “editorial desks”, the weapons of ideological warfare are surgical instruments prepared to daily disfigure on (against) reality. They sanctify themselves with the alibi of “informing” about the “war” and take pleasure, unashamedly, in bloodbaths and spectacles of corpses. They narrate in unison their identical task, pregnant with rhetorical pleasure, not hidden at all, which exhibits bloodied victims in order to raise the flags of their militaristic and exterminating morals. They fight “journalistically” to lead the paradise of media dread, prelude to any invasion, any violation of human rights, any “organized crime”. They have decades of training for a dexterous saliva in colossal expenses and deaths by the handful, the civilizing results are terrifying, but the bourgeois press is proud of its ratings, likes and followers… It is the “free expression” of the macabre storytelling.
Everyone, the oligarchic media wants more budgets and more “forces of order”, everyone wants more foreign “advisors”, more monetary applause and more military presence in the streets. That is why they have created their insatiable mass media monster that, morning, noon and night, uncontrollably exhibits unspeakable scenes of barbarism and social demoralization. Who stops them? Who regulates and orders their discourse? Who puts above this macabre business the mental health of the people, the emotional integrity of the children, the collective health of the social imaginary?
This form of “media terrorism”, wrapped in legalistic robes, oscillates its symbolic ambiguities between the urgency of effective and forceful “control” against “rebellions” and the bourgeois ideological task that camouflages, with mercenary philanthropy, its offensive of anesthetic fear. And then, everything is excess of obscenity and “news” pornography. Everything is excess, too many military, too many operatives, too many crimes on the screens, radios and newspapers of the oligarchies. And yet, inefficiency, incapacity and ineffectiveness. Crime grows and becomes a spectacle… and becomes business, advertisers bet on the rating of blood.
“Censorship!”, shout the media oligarchies every time one demands legal, cultural or political measures to democratize the media and stop their abuses. Violation of “freedom of expression” proclaim the bourgeois businessmen of the mass media, every time one demands that they fulfill their “social responsibility” and cease their pathological offensive against the sensitivity of the recipients. “Harassment”, kick the “information” hounds every time one refuses to remain a slave or hostage of their “journalistic” demagogies. The criminals of the capitalist mass culture, armed with cameras and microphones, pretend to be victims every time that social disgust and disgust turns into denunciation against their latifundia of impunity. We will not cease to insist.
Now it turns out that the victims are demanding more repression. After decades of rehearsing their macabre formula of criminal exhibitionism, the mass media have become frightening ravages that leave ideological wounds, sometimes invisible, for those who suffer them. It is impossible to be indifferent. The effects of the “necroculture” of war are really worrying, while the mass media bourgeoisie profits in a blackmailing way with fear in the background; such profit is a visible symptom of capitalist decomposition in the heads of the victims. And to top it all the system idolizes criminals disguised as businessmen and billionaires with the applause of the victims. The bloody capitalism that forces the population to live unrestrainedly with the industry of its own death, from its production, distribution and consumption. A round circus. The real bottom line of the matter is to use the so-called “media” to harden repressive policies, the policy of silencing the peoples, intimidating them and making them the first and last cause of more investments to militarize the countries. Toughen the repression against the peasant and workers’ movement. And let everyone applaud, grateful.
Those who have rarefied the territory of “information” are the cathedrals of opportunism to infiltrate horror into social struggles, to inject the poison of disorganization that has reduced the concept of informational alienation to a pure problem of individual consciousness, to erase class consciousness from the map. They overplay their “love” for class truth and for the methodology of “balance” to disguise the market egocentrism that finances the virtues of the journalistic intellect to the intellect of arms. And all to convince us that justice or equality in the world is impossible, that raw material and labor are non-negotiable, and that the important thing is that one believes what the bourgeois press says, regardless of facts, reality or truth. It is the development of the traffickers of subjectivism camouflaged with a war epistemology that hides the real thought of the bourgeoisie and camouflages it with purely subjective events and opinions. That reduce information to catalogs of abstract opinions. Furious and macabre relativism on the front pages.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English