Report Arianna Publishing
Of Enrica Perucchietti

Source: National interest
«War is peace, Freedom is slavery, Ignorance is strength". These are the three slogans that stand out printed on the facade of the pyramid-shaped building in white concrete where the headquarters of the Orwellian Ministry of Truth is located: it is inside it, in the Archive, who works the protagonist of 1984, Winston Smith. 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 the minds of citizens through “reality control”, that is, doublethink and nothing must escape the meshes of its all-pervasive dominion.
In the dystopian society imagined by Orwell, control is total as Winston's colleagues work to falsify history following the Party's adage, «Who controls the past […] control the future. Whoever controls the present controls the past». The lies spread by the falsifiers 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». This passage of 1984 echoes the well-known adage of Joseph Goebbels, Minister of Propaganda of the Third Reich: «If you repeat one lie one hundred, mille, a million times, becomes a reality". And above all, it is acquired and introjected as if it were Always was true.
“Reality control” and the constant falsification of the past serve to subjugate the people by keeping them imprisoned in a form of eternal present: devoid of historical memory and no longer capable of using critical consciousness, the common man is forced to collapse in the face of the cognitive dissonance that is induced by Big Brother, without even realizing the lies he is bombarded with on a daily basis. It will therefore have to align itself completely with Orthodoxy, accept and believe any lie as dogma, even if it is said that 2+2 fa 5. Anyone who did not do so would immediately be accused of thought crime. The power, that is, it empties the minds of citizens to fill them with its own contents, just as Goebbels still repeated «It is not enough to more or less peacefully submit the masses to our regime […] We want to work so that they depend on us like on a drug».
Very current issues − as I show in my latest book, Fake News. From the manipulation of public opinion to post-truth: how power controls the media and fabricates information to obtain consensus (Arianna Publishing) − in a period in which the hunt for fake news is monopolizing the public debate within a falsely democratic framework and dissonant voices are still too few.
The current diatribe over fake news has led to the promotion of a climate of hysteria that we could define as a "witch hunt 2.0". In a full regurgitation of McCarthyism, where instead of communists today those who do not align themselves with the single thought are persecuted, a campaign is underway which on the one hand exploits the violence and cyberbullying of social media and on the other, in full schizoid mode, makes use of these methods to attack, ridicule, denigrate and discredit “alternative” researchers and journalists. We started with the gradual creation of sites aimed at unmasking hoaxes and ended up adopting increasingly sophisticated methods to muzzle the web (as if hoaxes were exclusive to the internet and the mainstream media were immune to them!).
Sia i mainstream media, both politicians who today ask for measures for web censorship have disclosed over the years, and they continue to do so, countless tall tales, deliberate lies or fake news (think for example of the infamous Iraqi weapons of mass destruction which later turned out to be non-existent) therefore resorting to sophisticated forms of manipulation to direct the consensus of public opinion. Instead, the new Tribunal of the Inquisition focuses only on the contents of the internet, even pointing out uncomfortable topics as hoaxes.
According to the new inquisitors, Indeed, political and social phenomena such as Brexit, Trump's election, the victory of the NO to constitutional change in Italy, ecc. they would actually be the "unholy" fruit of the spread of online hoaxes (if not even due to the intervention of the infamous Russian hackers). To protect “propaganda”, introduce thought crime in an increasingly creeping way and censor public opinion, in the West, laws or apparatus are therefore being introduced aimed at ferreting out hoaxes and obscuring them, with risk (or perhaps we should say with deliberate intent) to censor the web and in particular alternative information.
Facebook too, Google and Twitter had to take action in order to submit to the will of the establishment. During the French presidential elections, for example, Facebook blacked out 30 thousand profiles accused of spreading fake news or spamming, causing quite a bit of controversy. Always 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.
Not even Italy escapes these draconian measures: Here the Ministry of the Interior has activated a new service available to users to report fake news, which was presented in Rome in the presence of the Minister of the Interior Marco Minniti, the police chief Franco Gabrielli and the director of the postal police service, Nunzia Ciardi. Once the reports have been received, a dedicated Cnaipic team will carefully check them through the use of specific techniques and software, in case of proven unfoundedness, will publish a denial. How will we decide which contents are true and which are false? How far will this system go??
Public opinion seems passive in the face of these measures if not even inclined to legitimize the use of force, even going so far as to agree to introduce the crime of opinion: a form of Orwellian thoughtcrime 2.0 according to which it is no longer actions that are punished but freedom of expression and even more so of thought. You will no longer be able to think "evil" (that is, critically and independently of unique thinking): one's thoughts and emotions will have to align with common thinking, global, globalized, politically correct. It will simply be forbidden to think outside the box: the minds of all of us will definitely be under control. Apparently, for a “good” cause.