The unidentifiable ugliness of Pandora’s Box that’s been opened.
There’s a devastating wind blowing from the east, hot air rising up in the west, cold water coming from the north and we’re in the middle. Unprepared and unprotected because we just don’t like to give up our pride and work together. There’s darkness escaping from within our own stubbornness, an open box of Pandora spreading a devil’s virus of anger and anti-intellectualism. The truth is something for academics, not for the people and certainly not for the ones they elect to rule.
The Oxford Dictionaries honoured the expression “post-truth” to the international word of the year, it must have something to do with the context of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Post-truth: goodbye truth and facts. Welcome to hollow frames, idiosyncratic interpretations of the obvious.
Journalistic fact-checkers exposed lies and half-truths but were then portrayed as offenders against those who were exposed. And because they do their work, they are seen as old-fashioned politically-correct people who don’t understand that the world is changed and that facts are not the solution for feelings. Facts don’t matter if they are bad compared to what politicians want. The values that are embraced by populist politicians can be different depending on what their voters want to hear. They can preach a different kind of “truth’s”too different groups in society.
There are absolute facts, at the same time different truths coexist. There are different worlds, in which everyone is holding on to their own private part of the truth. One of the most beautiful examples is the free movement of persons within the European Union and the admission on labour markets by workers from the other Member States. For years gouvernments contradicted that this would lead to problems. Any citizen could predict that this new freedom would lead to locals being pushed out of the labour market because of unfair competition and even exploitation, as it was in the interest of big companies to have a cheap workforce. No gouvernment did anything about it. They didn’t control or guard workers rights: it led to persistent problems, foreigners doing the same job for less pay and under very different circumstances. The displeasure about this was a driving force behind the Brexit, but the EU commission is still in denial. Facts are just not convenient sometimes. The only strange things is that people actually believe that borders can be closed from just one side, just because some populist politician says so.
The unidentifiable beauty in this all is that facts are always right, no matter how hard people try to hide them. The fact that, since the European Union was grounded, we had decades of peace and wealth can’t be denied. It’s the gouvernments that fucked it up by adjusting the rules and laws so the ones already in a favourite position gained power and wealth and the ones doing the dirty work were denied any chance of a piece of that successful pie. Now with new generations, which don’t have a clue what it means to live with war or without any social security or healthcare, the result of decades of bad education, flexible jobs that aren’t a base to start a real life, now, they’ve had enough of it. Some get motivated by the words and actions of people like Corbyn, Roemer, Sanders or Mortágua, but lot’s are so easily convinced by the hollow promises, the great feeling of having a mutual enemy coming from outside their own borders, the expressions of nationalism and plain racism by populist politicians like Wilders, Le Pen, Trump and May.
So now there’s talk about a European Army, we can’t rely on the Americans Special Forces to kill all dictators or the CIA intervening in democratic countries that won’t give up their resources for free, to defend our borders against the storms from the east. Against who do we need to defend ourselves? Against the nuclear weapons in the hands of a lunatic on the other side of the ocean, or against the extreme Muslim terrorists, supported by American and European weapon manufacturers, that lost hope to change anything within their own borders, so they seek for victims elsewhere? Against the upcoming dictators within the Eastern European countries that are even a member of the European Union? I’m not a specialist on war and weapons but is there any country in Europe that still has a fully functioning army? I know the Dutch don’t. So suddenly that same Europe that squeezed out all that was left usable out of more than half of their population now want those same people from that same new generations to defend the institution they hate so much? Fact is that a part of Europe is rich, awful rich and a big part is poor, unacceptably poor. Now, who do you think will be put up front, whenever there might be a threat, to fight for our freedom? Who will have to endure the pain of nationalists waving Nazi-flags in Germany, France, Belgium, Italy and The Netherlands, just because the law gives them freedom of protest?
It didn’t all start with Brexit, that’s just the result of the election of Trump is. It’s not jealousy if someone that can’t feed her children is marching in a Pegida protest if at the same time some politician get’s a four year allowance, when he or she is not elected or decides to quit, of 8 times more than an unemployed truck driver who is forced into social security after 30 years of hard work. That’s anger, understandable anger, streamed into a dangerous revolutionary nationalism by populist politicians who just shout what these people want to hear, without any solution in mind. It’s a journalist’s job to report and tell the facts, the truth. National TV broadcasters, financed by tax-payers money have an obligation to educate their viewers, tell them about the facts and maybe, well most importantly show what happened all these years ago, when the same boots were marching.
The Oxford Dictionaries honoured the expression “post-truth” to the international word of the year, it must have something to do with the context of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Post-truth: goodbye truth and facts. Welcome to hollow frames, idiosyncratic interpretations of the obvious.
Journalistic fact-checkers exposed lies and half-truths but were then portrayed as offenders against those who were exposed. And because they do their work, they are seen as old-fashioned politically-correct people who don’t understand that the world is changed and that facts are not the solution for feelings. Facts don’t matter if they are bad compared to what politicians want. The values that are embraced by populist politicians can be different depending on what their voters want to hear. They can preach a different kind of “truth’s”too different groups in society.
There are absolute facts, at the same time different truths coexist. There are different worlds, in which everyone is holding on to their own private part of the truth. One of the most beautiful examples is the free movement of persons within the European Union and the admission on labour markets by workers from the other Member States. For years gouvernments contradicted that this would lead to problems. Any citizen could predict that this new freedom would lead to locals being pushed out of the labour market because of unfair competition and even exploitation, as it was in the interest of big companies to have a cheap workforce. No gouvernment did anything about it. They didn’t control or guard workers rights: it led to persistent problems, foreigners doing the same job for less pay and under very different circumstances. The displeasure about this was a driving force behind the Brexit, but the EU commission is still in denial. Facts are just not convenient sometimes. The only strange things is that people actually believe that borders can be closed from just one side, just because some populist politician says so.
The unidentifiable beauty in this all is that facts are always right, no matter how hard people try to hide them. The fact that, since the European Union was grounded, we had decades of peace and wealth can’t be denied. It’s the gouvernments that fucked it up by adjusting the rules and laws so the ones already in a favourite position gained power and wealth and the ones doing the dirty work were denied any chance of a piece of that successful pie. Now with new generations, which don’t have a clue what it means to live with war or without any social security or healthcare, the result of decades of bad education, flexible jobs that aren’t a base to start a real life, now, they’ve had enough of it. Some get motivated by the words and actions of people like Corbyn, Roemer, Sanders or Mortágua, but lot’s are so easily convinced by the hollow promises, the great feeling of having a mutual enemy coming from outside their own borders, the expressions of nationalism and plain racism by populist politicians like Wilders, Le Pen, Trump and May.
So now there’s talk about a European Army, we can’t rely on the Americans Special Forces to kill all dictators or the CIA intervening in democratic countries that won’t give up their resources for free, to defend our borders against the storms from the east. Against who do we need to defend ourselves? Against the nuclear weapons in the hands of a lunatic on the other side of the ocean, or against the extreme Muslim terrorists, supported by American and European weapon manufacturers, that lost hope to change anything within their own borders, so they seek for victims elsewhere? Against the upcoming dictators within the Eastern European countries that are even a member of the European Union? I’m not a specialist on war and weapons but is there any country in Europe that still has a fully functioning army? I know the Dutch don’t. So suddenly that same Europe that squeezed out all that was left usable out of more than half of their population now want those same people from that same new generations to defend the institution they hate so much? Fact is that a part of Europe is rich, awful rich and a big part is poor, unacceptably poor. Now, who do you think will be put up front, whenever there might be a threat, to fight for our freedom? Who will have to endure the pain of nationalists waving Nazi-flags in Germany, France, Belgium, Italy and The Netherlands, just because the law gives them freedom of protest?
It didn’t all start with Brexit, that’s just the result of the election of Trump is. It’s not jealousy if someone that can’t feed her children is marching in a Pegida protest if at the same time some politician get’s a four year allowance, when he or she is not elected or decides to quit, of 8 times more than an unemployed truck driver who is forced into social security after 30 years of hard work. That’s anger, understandable anger, streamed into a dangerous revolutionary nationalism by populist politicians who just shout what these people want to hear, without any solution in mind. It’s a journalist’s job to report and tell the facts, the truth. National TV broadcasters, financed by tax-payers money have an obligation to educate their viewers, tell them about the facts and maybe, well most importantly show what happened all these years ago, when the same boots were marching.
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