By Ana Hurtado on August 7, 2024
As always the world’s media, were part of the lies and falsehoods, to weave a fictitious reality about the Venezuelan elections.
It has been more than a week since the presidential elections were held in Venezuela. If it were a comic movie I would believe it, or even a tragicomedy. But sometimes I find it hard to believe that this reality is really happening.
There is a real brazenness on the part of capitalism, its henchmen and its tools. And the masses are being held hostage to consume and assimilate. I really know it is real because several days have passed, otherwise, I might even have thought that I have dreamed it. Because of the garbage I see in the social networks. A dream in which the masses are deceived to their face and do not even have the capacity to stop to think, to analyze. They have been robbed of their ability to think. And nobody does anything.
Venezuela; the country that has the most elections, with a multiparty system with a high representation of an annexationist ultra-right, accused of dictatorship.
Whatever the Chavista government of Venezuela does since the people raised up to regain it sovereignty, it will be criticized and demonized.
Since the Revolution of the people took over the sovereignty of the country, Venezuela has been one of the first enemies of US imperialism. Because it has oil. Because from that moment on they were not going to be able to ravage it as they are accustomed to do with the raw materials of third world countries without caring about truncating the lives that are left along the way; nor the histories.
Already at a very early stage back in 2002, they tried to carry out a coup d’etat against Chavez which was a failure. The world’s media, including the Spanish ones, were part of it, just as in these past days they have been part of the lies and falsehoods. But the attempts of the world monster do not cease, and now, with the Internet as a weapon, they charge harder than ever. They have nothing to lose but much to gain.
If there are no elections, they call it a dictatorship; but if there are elections, they already take care of saying before the celebration that there was fraud. They choose a servile and annexationist candidate from the United States and they make an informative campaign so that the opinion of the uninformed masses is with him, without knowing who he is, what he wants, or what he stands for. Only that he is a savior. And people, who enter the networks and the Internet to look at anything else, end up seeing a manipulated and highly intentional packaged news that Maduro is very bad and the other in turn, very good.
The idea is to generate an ascending matrix of opinion against any social process that goes against the interests of the empire. And in this case, Venezuela, with the world’s largest oil reserves. And copper, iron and gold. A very important motivating fact.
They wanted us to believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, that Bashar Al Asad used chemical weapons, that Lula da Silva was corrupt, that Evo once manipulated elections. And it was proven internationally later that it was all a lie after the damage was done.
Now it is Maduro’s turn. And they will continue to lie as long as any fact poses a threat to the privileges of the world’s economic and political elite.
I see the new “experts” who supposedly know everything. The networks are full of people, in my case, observing my native country, Spain, who seem to know the Venezuelan electoral system better than Spain’s. These are the ones coming out of the wood work that do not know the slightest thing about politics, who have no ideology, who do not care if their neighbor makes ends meet with his salary or if he is going to be evicted. They prefer to think that Venezuela is a dictatorship because they have seen it on Tik Tok and Instagram.
We live in a universe of invisible censorship of which we are not aware.
The other day in a talk with comrades from the Cuban Ministry of Communications, one of them asked me if it was easy to access books and Marxist Leninist knowledge in Spain. And I shared a reflection, that both in the case of access to knowledge, as well as in the case of generating matrices of opinion on purpose, comes as a ring to the finger.
There is a new form of censorship and control of information that we do not see, because it is invisible. Something similar, but increased, to what is called in journalism “agenda setting”. The media imposes on us what is of informative interest and what is not. They choose what they show us so that the individual is not able to consider that there are other worlds and other existing realities. Other thoughts. Another way of approaching current situations using critical thinking.
That is why in the face of such a media dictatorship, of information, of the mass media, the revolutionary thinker has no way out. He has to address the realities and represent a real opposition to the matrix of opinion of the prevailing thought. To teach people to think from every little piece of writing, to every conversation we have in the street, to every tweet or short phrase we post on social networks.
We live in a world ruled by calculated ignorance created at the empire’s own will. And it is our role to fight it, showing the truth.
When men and women are stripped of their ability to discern, when their capacity for analysis and reasoning is taken away, they lose their identity and their essence. They begin to form part of an alienated mass that is very useful for the powerful to move, manipulate and transform.
The battle of information is now. And as Martí said, if the war is a war of thought, we are going to win it with thought.
Let there be no doubt in anyone’s mind. We are in it and we do not know surrender.
Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English