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Does anyone remember Mohammed Said al-Sahaf? He was Saddam Hussein’s Information Minister during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Just hours before the capture of Baghdad, the following statement was made on live television: “The Americans are not here. They are not even close. we massacred hundreds outside the gates of Baghdad ”.
“Baghdad-Bob” became a driving force around the world. More than that. It became a term for the ridiculous denial of obvious facts.
That was then. Today, US President Donald Trump makes Mohammed Said al-Sahaf look like a prophet of truth. Earlier this week, when Trump visited California, which was hit hard by heat waves and violent fires, he commented on his vision of the climate crisis, which is already having catastrophic consequences in his country: “It’s going to be colder, you just look. “
In the big media channels It brought the news that the president of the United States in the midst of a fiery climate catastrophe clarifies his position as a denier of limited climate. Maybe not so surprising. Today, it would have been a bigger sensation if Trump had gone to California and acknowledged that the state’s average temperature has risen by 1.8 degrees since the 1970s, that this year’s historic wildfires are fueled by greenhouse gas emissions. greenhouse of the human being and that there are more and more hurricanes. hitting the shores of the United States is being loaded with increasingly hot seawater.
Instead, he scoffs: “Well“I don’t think science knows, actually,” Trump responded to a local official’s objection that science disagrees with his optimistic forecast for future climate.
“Well, I don’t think science knows, actually,” Trump responded.
Trump himself, on the other hand, knows very well what he is doing. He is about to lead the world into an old and new experience, where language loses its significant role and is instead charged with magical thoughts and emotions. The opposite pair of the old public – lies / truth, evidence-based knowledge / free fantasies, honesty / villainy – is about to be exaggerated. The rules of democracy no longer apply.
It’s scary that See and listen to talented journalists who daily try to describe and analyze this strange reality through conventional language. In the old world, Baghdad-Bob was rightly dismissed as a scoundrel for his blatant lies. In the New World, a mocking thug respectfully addresses “Mr. President” and is subjected to a factual analysis, even though he deliberately sabotages all the rules on which these analyzes are based. It’s like watching a soccer player lift the ball and play with his hands. A communicative model built on rationality, transparency, scrutiny and reason collides with a reality where these values are no longer valid.
The purpose is to undo the idea of truth in society, because if nothing can be true, everything else is also fake. The tactics seem to work. The end result, when this process of poisoning has worked, is that the language on which journalism, science and public administration are based will be seen as hopelessly out of date. Will they continue to bother the facts again?
Those who insisted on exposing their lies for ‘fanatics of objectivity’
Technology is not new. Nazi ideologues hated words like “objectivity” and “intelligence,” which were therefore placed in ironic quotation marks in the language of the Third Reich. Opposition groups called them “intelligence snobs” and those who insisted on exposing their lies were “fanatics of objectivity.”
This is also where global Trumpism wants to go. Journalists and researchers who insist on facts and evidence-based knowledge should be dismissed as whiny fanatics. The waffles and incantations of the autocrats lead first to ridicule and discouragement, but finally to indifference. Today, a leader of a great democracy can regularly replace the truth with magical thinking, without anyone being able to react further. “It’s going to get colder,” Donald Trump said of the current weather. “It’s like a miracle, it’s going to go away,” he said of the coronavirus in February.
What can disappear they are, however, completely different things. In Sweden, there is now a debate about public service, where politicians and parties that have long valued SR and SVT are now attacking the foundations of the institution. In many countries, a strong tradition of public service has been a kind of guarantor of a basic level of shared knowledge in a society, that is, on what things we agree to agree (Elvis is dead, the Holocaust has happened, the ice on the ground is melting etc).
In many countries, a strong tradition of public service has been a kind of guarantor of a basic level of shared knowledge in a society.
In America, there is no public service. Former DN US correspondent Sanna Torén Björling describes in her book “Everything We Have in Common” a country where people live parallel lives; not only do you have different opinions, you also disagree on what is true. When all opinions, even the obviously crazy ones, become equally valuable, sooner or later it will seem socially petty to persevere with things like truth and facts.
The absence of public service it is not the only reason that American democracy has become a laboratory for the collapse of truth. But it contributes. In the United States, a talk show host Tucker Carlson on Fox News while the country is on fire can claim that climate change is a liberal invention. There, climate denier David Legates may be appointed to a senior position at the NOAA weather agency, despite (or rather because) his own research in the field has consistently questioned that humans are behind climate change and has been funded by American fossil fuel giants like Koch and Exxon Mobile.
A climate skeptic as head of SMHI? A denier of science as a weather presenter at SVT? Think Thought Today. Tomorrow, maybe SVT won’t even exist.
Read more chronicles of Björn Wiman
