Written in the water Rodolfo Martinez's blog

Is there freedom without information is not distorted?

Through the blog Dissecting The Country (full of controversial opinions, but with incisive mind pointed in the right spot, no doubt), I found the famous early Goebbels to manipulate the masses, excellently presented and summarized. Here they are:

1. Principle of simplification and single enemy: Adopt a single idea, a single symbol. Identify the adversary on a single enemy.
2. Principle of the method of transmission: Gather several opponents in a single category or individual. Opponents have become individualized sum.
3. Top of transposition: Load on the opponent's mistakes or shortcomings, answering the attack with the attack. "If you can not deny the bad news, they invent other than distract.
4. Top of exaggeration and misrepresentation: Convert any story, however small, in serious threat.
5. Top of vulgarization. "All propaganda must be popular, adapting its level at least intelligent of individuals to whom it is aimed. The larger the mass to convince smaller must be the mental effort to perform. The receptivity of the masses is limited and little understanding; also have to forget easily.
6. Top of orchestration: "The propaganda must be limited to a small number of ideas and repeat them endlessly, again and again present them from different perspectives, but always converging on the same concept. No cracks or doubts. " From this comes the famous sentence: "If a lie is repeated enough, eventually becomes truth."
7. Top of renewal: We have to constantly deliver new information and arguments at such a rate that, when your opponent responds, the audience is already interested in something else. The responses of the opponent should never be able to counteract the rising level of charges.
8. Principle of verisimilitude: Constructing arguments from multiple sources, through the so-called balloons or fragmentary information.
9. Top of silencing: Silencing the issues which have arguments and not hide the news that favor the adversary, also counterprogram with the help of related media.
10. Top of transfusion: Generally, propaganda always operates from a pre-existing substrate, either a national or a complex mythology of hatred and traditional prejudices. These arguments take root spread in primitive attitudes.
11. Principle of unanimity: Getting to convince many people that think "as everybody," creating a false impression of unanimity.

The conclusion is that those are exactly the principles that those in power (whether political, economic or media ... if the three are not one and the same) are being applied again and again to disguise the reality at your convenience and not allow us to see what happens but what we want it to be happening (the media coverage of student protests before the Bologna Process is a perfect example of this, without going further).

Is it possible freedom in ignorance? "We live, as Chomsky says, in a system that can be defined as" brainwashing freedom "? What matters, in short, we have the ability to decide what to do with our lives if the information we use to make these decisions is manipulated, distorted and filtered previously? Is not it becomes that time the term "democracy" a bad joke?

Because, after all, which identifies a system as democratic is that there is no parliament or elections. It's as simple as the idea that power is in people; is theirs and they decide how to use it and he appoints. How can we say without being naive, that power in Western democracies is in the public?

After all, it is impossible to have power without information. And clearly we do not.

The writer writes his book to explain to himself what can not be explained.

Gabriel García Márquez