Report Arianna Publishing
Of Enrica Perucchietti

Source: cliché
Federico Dal Cortivo for Italiasociale.net interviews Enrica Perucchietti, author of the essay «Fake News. From the manipulation of public opinion to post-truth. How power controls the media and fabricates information to obtain consensus" released yesterday, 19 March, for Arianna Editrice.
D: Dr. Perucchietti, his essay comes out almost concurrently with the Interior Ministry's announcement that the new online service for reporting fake news will be launched in view of the political elections ( fake news), the citizen will only need to enter the new Postal Police website, and click on a virtual red button and «report news that in our opinion seems to be hoaxes». His first impression on how the "new public service" will work and whether it will have an impact on the upcoming political elections, from the publication of memorials against opponents to fake news one could say…
R: The discussion is very delicate. In a nutshell, however we can think that in the future it could be used as a data collection and on the other as a censorship system to muzzle the web by progressively aiming to censor inconvenient sites and alternative information. I believe that this service is part of an increasingly aggressive campaign against fake news which, however, does not have the objective of protecting public opinion, as much as social control.
Once the reports have been received, a dedicated team from Cnaipic, a specialized body of the Postal Police will carefully verify through the use of specific techniques and software e, in case of proven unfoundedness, will publish a denial. How, I wonder, it will be decided which contents are true and which are false? How far will this system go?? We don't know. However, we know that in Europe the war on fake news is becoming increasingly heated and there are still few researchers, intellectuals and journalists are opposing all this. Something similar, Indeed, it is also happening in France: in the press conference at the beginning of the year, Macron has announced a bill to combat fake news and strengthen control of content on the internet during the election period.
It can be said, therefore, that winds of censorship are blowing in Europe…
D: Minister Minniti, the head of the Police Gabrielli and Nunzia Cardi, director of the Postal Police, are now busy giving insurance to citizens, doesn't he think that we are now making great strides towards the type of state advocated by George Orwell in 1984 ?
R: I completely agree with your analysis. However quick they were to deny this comparison, the service is configured as a kind of Ministry of Censorship, echoing Orwell's Ministry of Truth, whose slogan is «WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH". In 1984 the Miniver (in neolingua) deals with information and propaganda and has the task of producing everything relating to information: promotion and diffusion of the party's precepts, publishing, radio and television programmes, literature. This body also deals with the rectification of this material, in a widespread and constant work of rewriting the sources. The Miniver, Meaning what, deals with falsifying information and propaganda to make the material disseminated compliant with the directives and ideology of Ingsoc. Big Brother, Indeed, Subdues citizens' minds through "reality control", that is, doublethink and nothing must escape the meshes of its all-pervasive dominion.
In the dystopian society imagined by Orwell, the control is total as the lies spread by the forgers are imposed by the Party and acquired spontaneously and uncritically by the masses because «if all the documents told the same tale, here the lie became a historical fact, therefore true". And above all, it is acquired and introjected as if it had always been true.
The power, that is, it empties the minds of citizens to fill them with its own contents: whoever opposes, anyone who disagrees is accused of thought crime. Something similar, but, it is happening before our eyes today, in a gradual and creeping way. And here Chomsky's theory of graduality comes into play (the boiled frog principle) and the Overton Window which I analyze extensively in the essay.
This is why I set up my book following the key themes of 1984 − but also of other essays and articles by Orwell − showing how today's social control is extraordinarily similar to the dystopian drifts imagined by the novelist 70 years ago…
D: We can see this in all of this, an attack on the provisions of the art 21 of the Italian Constitution «Everyone has the right to freely express their thoughts through speech, written and any other means of dissemination". In his opinion, the next step could also be for Italy a law on the model of the US "Patriot Act" passed after the attack on the twin towers in New York and the Pentagon, which gave full discretion to the police force, with the excuse of terrorism, to monitor citizens' lives 24 hours a day via the internet and telephone?
R: I believe that we are increasingly moving towards a transparent society in which privacy will be gradually abolished, after having convinced public opinion to abdicate their rights and citizens will have been convinced to give up their rights out of fear or convenience.
The goal, to better exercise collective control, is to make each of us a "glass man", transparent, under constant surveillance. The Government's electronic gaze would follow us in every moment of our existence, exactly like the eye of Big Brother.
D: In your new book you carefully analyze the relationship between the means of communication, power and strategies aimed at maintaining a certain status quo, you can talk about it?
R: «We are largely governed by men about whom we know nothing, but which are capable of shaping our mentality, guide our tastes, suggest what to think". This is what he wrote in 1928 in the incipit of the essay Propaganda the father of the science of Public Relations Edward Bernays, explaining that there is an invisible power that directs the opinions and habits of the masses in democratic systems. In the essay I show how this "art" of control was born and developed, how it becomes more and more sophisticated and how it uses entertainment and the mainstream media as an arm of force or a sounding board (and how these have been tainted over the decades by sensational fake news!).
With the advent of modern mass society, power has in fact had to be exercised over an indefinite number of people, often made up of individuals who are emotionally alone and have no points of reference. The art of control, therefore, it ended up becoming the science of Public Relations or, Better, a "science of manipulation" of disconcerting refinement that manages to influence behaviors and ways of being, sometimes without even having to use physical coercion.
Bernays spoke of "techniques used to frame public opinion" carried out by an "invisible government".: power today, to be more effective, in fact he prefers to remain "in the shadows", revealing itself as little as possible. A hidden power (or in any case not immediately identifiable by most) he has the ability to manipulate mass feelings and mentality almost perfectly without giving the impression of doing so; control people by entering their imagination, in their minds, in their conscience.
Already Aldous Huxley, author of another dystopia, The New World, he noted how the powerful had understood that to control the masses it was necessary to act on the "almost insatiable appetite for distractions", thus shaping their imagination. In this strategy, Obviously, the people are seen by the rulers as minors who must be accompanied, even manipulated, to give their consent. We must understand that power is not interested in "emancipating" man or making him "adult" but rather in controlling him better and better., directing his choices after penetrating his soul, in his imagination. When this is not enough, coercion comes into play.
D: Psychorate like in «1984», This will be the future that awaits all those who dare to disagree with the pre-established truths of the globalized financial oligarchic system dominated in the West? Or there are still margins of freedom?
R: The current diatribe over so-called fake news has led to the promotion of a climate of hysteria that we could define as a "witch hunt 2.0". In this case public opinion, expertly manipulated by a climate of hysteria against the elusive danger of fake news, seems to legitimize the use of force, the denigration, the climate of intolerance, even going so far as to agree to introduce the crime of opinion: a form of Orwellian thought crime according to which no longer action would be punished but freedom of expression and even before that of thought. In short, after the globalization of goods, Consciences have globalized: we have to express ourselves, we all talk and think the same way, conforming to the single thought.
Instead we should go back to asking ourselves: who should we really believe? And above all, to whom it benefits? Who benefits from everything that is happening? Perhaps to those who have an interest in shaping our conscience to obtain consensus?
The margins of freedom are proportional to our critical consciousness. To monitor our collective freedom we must get back to putting ourselves out there and above all to use our heads critically even if this means thinking against the grain of the single thought.