TRIBUNE – The director of the CIA, Williams Burns, has just affirmed during a Forum on Security which was held in Aspen, in the State of Colorado in the United States, that there was no no source of intelligence indicating that Vladimir Putin was suffering from an illness, or even was in an unstable state. He even joked that he seemed to him in ” too healthy “, according to statements collected by the BBC. It’s amazing because whenever information appeared in the press, in the form of assertions, without conditional, it almost always came from these famous “American intelligence sources”. Thus the magazine Newsweek devoted last June an article presented as an exclusivity: “ Putin treated for cancer in April, US intelligence report says “. The same magazine headlined that Putin was in a coma: ” Is Putin in a coma? », « Putin will die in the next two years from a serious illness in this case citing a Ukrainian general as a reliable source. The New York Post, The Economist, Business Insider, CNN etc. are not left out.
The story of Vladimir Putin’s presumed terminal illness, accompanied by diagnoses from doctors of the same quality as those who intervened within the framework of the health dictatorship, is a great fake news which has its reason for being. To say that Vladimir Putin is in the terminal phase of cancer, to affirm that he is following such and such a therapy, that he has undergone such and such an intervention, allows us to install the idea of the suicidal madman who, faced with an inescapable destiny , wants to take everyone with him to the grave. Even, someone under the influence of powerful drugs, is no longer able to think properly, therefore surrounded by a camarilla of even more dangerous people, if that is even possible.
Fake news in new languages, it is propaganda. And propaganda is the installation of a lie in the press. The use of an English neologism suggests that there is something new under the sun. This information, which spreads like wildfire in the mass media, without which there is no rebound effect in social networks, is in no way innovative compared to state lies as known in the 1970s, except that now groups more powerful than sovereign states can carry out their own propaganda campaign.
These media, which are the first to play political commissars and shout at fake news for any independent information that is not part of the official discourse, have in common never to go back on any of their false information. Even when it is denied by those concerned. In the case of Newsweek, the White House issued a public denial, without this denial resulting in another article, if only to respond to the disavowal. Lie, there will always be something left, said Francis Bacon, taken up by Goebbels. But he was just thinking about potentially debunked lies.
In the 21st century, that doesn’t happen. Liars are never disempowered because they themselves invented the perfidy of ” fake news to disallow those who might do so in advance. Especially since the intox is passed over like a bullet. It’s rarely a home job. And it is not a hazard. On this point, the teaching on the functioning of propaganda in the dictatorships of the 20th century is very useful. The fact that the message is identical, with very little inflection, is essential to establish its plausibility. Homogeneity promotes the spread of lies, diversity contrasts it. Hence the fact that the propagandists are at the same time the political commissars in charge of the eradication of independent thinkers.
The big difference between the propaganda of the 1970s is that it obeyed vertical orders, coming from state pharmacies and the consequences were fatal for dissidents in the context of a repression that spoke its name. Without the cache-sex of self-righteousness. But people knew how to read between the lines of censorship. There was like a propaganda grammar that the reader knew how to break down. During this millennium, the propaganda obeys often private, associative agencies, which orchestrate the homogeneity of the thought, the installation of the topics and organize the enthusiastic adhesion to the lie. Where intellectuals and journalists suffered in dictatorial systems, from the humiliation of writing untruths. Today propaganda agents rejoice in this and see in the spread of lies a source of bliss and pride. What does not change is that lying deliberately for a major newspaper is still synonymous with propaganda. What has not changed either is that the archives survive long after the effects of the lie have worn off.