Trump and Putin, Putin and Trump. The weird couple is making the entire world talk. The issues: NATO and Europe, the Middle East, but also China and Asia. Their speeches sound like a spartition of the world ‘Risico’ – style.
Donald Trump has just sworn as 45th President of the USA. The protests worldwide have been numerous, but it can only be his deeds to be judged in the future. And, as for every President, the examination will be severe and strict.
“Brexit was a great thing, and I will make an agreement with the United Kingdom,” President Trump has declared. Then he continued: “The EU is only a means to achieve Germany’s goals”. And added “NATO is an anachronism.”
The aim is to destabilize Europe, politically, economically and militarily. The European Union alone accounts for 16.5% of the global imports and exports. It is the main economic power, unites twenty-seven Countries, and is governed in a unique manner in the world. Too much for both Trump and Putin.
The intention is to divide us and push us to negotiate individually, in the hope of stimulating a “Brexit” following another. A disunited Europe made of weak statelets would become a land of conquest for Moscow as much as for the Washington in Trump’s sauce. If all this were confirmed, it would demonstrate an unscrupulous and winning strategy by Trump and Putin to control the Western world. But they don’t realize that this will lead to an alliance between Europe and China even more formidable for the USA and Russia.
This is at least what emerges from Trump’s statements to two major European newspapers, the German Bild and the British Sunday Times. In both cases, it is clearly evident the closeness with Russia’s positions: “We must start trusting Vladimir Putin”. This is although many are the evidences that the Russian leader is little progressive, from the fact that he has circumvented the Russian legislation in order to remain at the pinnacle of power for 20 years, up to the decriminalization in these days of domestic violence to just administrative offense, because considered “part of the Russian culture.”
The first arrows of President Trump are for NATO to be dismantled because obsolete and troublesome to Putin. He also hasn’t spared any criticisms and barbs against Angela Merkel, accused of a “catastrophic mistake” in her migration policies. All thanks to the weapons that led him to victory in the US: endorsing some of the hoaxes and false rumors that have runned for a long time against the German Chancellor.
We are facing targeted attacks by far-right websites against Chancellor Merkel, which spread a misinformation that assumes even greater value in view of the elections to be held in Germany in 2017. The scheme used is similar to that already seen in the spread of the hoaxes against Hillary Clinton during the election campaign. Fact-checking experts showed that more than two thirds of Trump’s statements in the past year are false, but his credibility is nevertheless not affected.
Among the sites that help Trump in misinforming on Europe and Germany is Anonymousnews.ru, where issues are published dear to the propaganda of the Russian government, blocked in May by Facebook. These are only the first days of the axis between Trump and Putin, but unfortunately the winning strategy is to distort reality thanks to the gaming system today called the post-truth. The formula describes the dangerous trend of Western democracies not to believe to the facts in the political debate, but to the lies spoken confidently.
The Oxford Dictionary has chosen “post-truth” as its word of the year. People are more influenced by emotion than by reality. In his book The post-truth era, Ralph Keyes defines lie as “a false statement, made in full knowledge of facts in order to deceive.”
Unfortunately the world is changing, and is forgetting the results of the last populisms in the early 1900s. Today, according to the World Economic Forum, only 25% of the people born in the 1980s consider it “fundamental” to live in a democratic system. But young people also seem unable to develop a critical sense, blindly believing to the plethora of false rumors that circulate on the web. The results are Brexit, Trump, the Italian referendum.
What are the tools at our disposal, then, to face the increasingly evident infiltrations of dishonesty and falsity in the public debate? If the general amnesia of the horrors of the past authoritarian regimes is frightening, the real problem is that politics is perceived as an activity for reward-hunters, who are merely interested in maintaining the status quo and are distant from the real population.
But it is precisely the political arena the space where things can be changed, even through bottom-up action, where indignation has a real power and where information and reality must not be “post” but rather carefully verified.
