Insufficient Information

For somebody like me who is familiar with the history of Germany and the way how Hitler came to power it really does not feel sufficient what HBL is serving about the present development in the USA. Well, they have a correspondent there, but what this Juri von Bondsdorff is these days delivering is really not very helpful. Sometimes he is interviewing a few people – which of course helps to get an idea about the situation -, and recently he was reporting what Biden has so far managed to realize of his plans and what not and what, accordingly, his chances might be during upcoming elections. But about the reasons WHY things are as they are he writes very little. With the consequence that recently some writer of an insändare to HBL arrived at the conclusion that the Americans have obviously been hit by ”en kollektiv psykos”.

Well, there are of course in the USA masses of people who give the impression that they have indeed lost the contact to reality. But how does a normal person even in Finland establish and keep up the contact to the events in the outer world? Mostly via the media. But what can one reasonably expect from a situation where over the vast majority of the information channels come every single day cataracts of lies which all point to the same direction/conclusion? Of the information outlets in the social media I did already unsubscribe something like 30, and still I find every single day quite a bit of Republican propaganda in my inbox (often with the same propaganda story in more than one outlet; obviously the production of propaganda is unable to keep up with the number of outlets who all want to brainwash their customers). Of the TV channels, Fox News is the most popular (and regularly spreading GOP propaganda), and over all the private-owned TV- and radio channels the situation is similar. And the algorithms of Facebook and similar see to it that everybody is provided with just that information (or disinformation) which s/he has seemingly been interested in already recently – not so rarely with the result that the consumers of this begin more and more to live in a ”mental bubble”. The spreaders of all this dis/information earn quite some money by their activities (which they, thus, eagerly continue), the law seems to consider all this to be just as the ”free expression of opinions” (not minding that quite a bit of this consists of lies, insinuations, insults and similar), and the owners of the media (considering themselves – justly – as members of the moneyed class) will CERTAINLY not object if all this brings again a Trump government to power, of which one can expect that it will AGAIN shovel HUGE amounts of money into the pockets of the already-rich. To a German, it all reminds a bit VERY much of the doings of the Hugenberg papers during the German Weimar Republic and also of the helplessness of that system’s institutions how to handle all those lies and legal tricks and rules (which ended with the installation of Hitler – of whom Trump VERY much reminds), but the US correspondent of HBL is either simply unaware of it or does not think it worth reporting.

What we have occasion to observe is the willful destruction of a democratic system by Big Money, helped by a school system which is teaching national pride, prejudice and BELIEF. And once the USA are a fully fascist system we can rely that the same type of system will become very fashionable also in Europe – social media and NATO will look after that. And if we do not like that possibility, the question arises what to do to prevent it – a question which our media are obviously so far not interested in. An American Facebook friend of mine wrote that he is wishing since years (and desperately so) that the Europeans could come to the aid of US democracy. Which is of course not any very simple question, but certainly worth considering. Things which SHOULD be done to prolong the survival of democracy as a system I have been writing about in the Facebook group ”Political Psychology – Public group” since a LONG time. The problem how to get a sufficiently prominent (i.e. in a position to rouse attention), say, diplomat to say some ”truths” about Trump and the possibility to have him or somebody of his ilk in power may be more tricky, but there may be some who are sufficiently close to retirement to be safe from US retaliation, and, say, an ambassador who has aroused the severe displeasure of the US government can perhaps still hope for a position in a not too unfriendly other country. Thus, it should NOT be impossible to try and say/do something helpful (and, please mind, not only helpful for their democracy but, by that, also for our own).