It feels like someone's sick joke that a personality who has made lying one of his hallmarks during his public career now dares to wave the flag for a kind of censorship version 2.0 that would make it possible to ban certain news stories. According to Josep Borrell, who today holds the key position of High Representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, the EU needs to be equipped with "mechanisms to sanction malign disinformation actors". An interesting debate, if only it hadn't been contaminated at the outset: we know very well where the disinformation originates, claims Borrell, who, during his political career, has denied so many things that were obvious or has invented so many things that we should be much more hesitant about throwing ourselves head first into this swimming pool. This is the man who was Felipe González's minister at the time of the GAL death squads! The man who was fined by the securities commission for the use of inside information on sales of shares in the multinational Abengoa of which he was a board member! And so we could go on.
Because, of course, which media does Borrell think should be closed? Those who denounced that the GAL were a Spanish state operation to fight ETA? Or those who were defending the Socialist government of the day and denying the veracity of this information? Once you open this can of worms, there are few options for going to the appropriate court and making a complaint about it. It's quite a different matter, though, if what you are really seeking is to keep things hidden a little more deeply, with less need to expose them to public opinion because you want to take advantage of the opportunity provided by Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Because this is the first major war not far away from us in which the story is no longer produced through a few newspapers but in a crowded information sphere full of digital dailies and new information platforms called things like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Youtube, Whatsapp and so many others.
This digital world is already slipping out of the hands of any government, however powerful it may be, because there are not enough border posts to check all the information that is circulating. Everything suggests that the European Parliament will end up approving the report and the EU will become endowed with new mechanisms in which, under the umbrella of truth, it will be possible to act against freedoms. There is no conflict in which a backwards step is not taken in terms of freedoms and this one cannot be expected to be an exception. Fear does these things: it paralyzes protest and allows governments an expeditious and unopposed path to achieve their goals.
Informational truth gives way to propaganda. We have seen it, to name just one example, with the dodge that the United States has just pulled in Venezuela. The evil Maduro, like Hugo Chaves before him, is no longer a dictator on which all the weighty sanctions of the international community will impact, one after the other, but rather, Joe Biden's new ally, after the US president banned imports of oil, natural gas and coal from Russia. The presence of a high-level US delegation last weekend in Caracas and the tone in which Maduro explained it to his Venezuelan citizens on television make it clear that the tortilla has been flipped. In a few days the story will be different and Juan Guaidó will have gone in a matter of hours from being the West's golden boy to an annoyance on the world geopolitical map. We switch from Russia good, Venezuela bad, to Russia bad, Venezuela good. Politics.