According to Ryan Beckwith (2018), United States President Donald Trump gave a recent interview to the New York Times in which he said something untrue every 75 seconds. The Washington Post found that in the first 347 days from his inauguration he made 1950 false or misleading claims. Nor were these small âfalsehoodsâ. Trump has claimed, for example, that his predecessor Barack Obama wasnât born in the United States and that he had wiretapped Trump Tower. He accused opposition Democrats of colluding with Russia and declared that millions of people voted illegally. According to Trump, thousands had celebrated the attacks of September 11 on rooftops, a spy had been planted in his campaign and rival Republican candidate Ted Cruzâs father had been involved in the assassination of President Kennedy.
One year before Trumpâs election, the morning after the Brexit referendum result had signalled the most important British policy shift for nearly half a century, UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage appeared on national television and announced that the crucial campaign promise that after Brexit ÂŁ350 million a week would be spent on the National Health Service (NHS) had been âa mistakeâ (Stone 2016a). He also denied having personally endorsed the claim, only for video footage to emerge the following day showing him having done precisely thatâstating in fact that the money to do so would exceed ÂŁ350 a week (Stone 2016b).
The shocks (to political âexpertsâ and opinion shapers at least) of the Brexit vote and of Trumpâs election have heightened concerns that misinformation and lying are undermining democratic political processes. The perceived salience during campaigning of false stories, perhaps planted with the involvement of a foreign power together with the emergence of evidence that personal data was used to target and shape stories fed to individual social network users, has added to the idea that we have entered a new era of âpost-truthâ politics. And there are, to be sure, new and very worrying developments in the generation of false âfactsâ and fallacious reasoning. Some of these are technological and relate to unprecedented and accelerating industrial capacities of corporations, states and individuals to gather and misuse data. Fabrication, fakery and dissemination have never been so easy. The potentialities for âtotalitarianâ control have never been greater. They far exceed what Orwell, or for that matter Stalin, could have dreamed of.
Other, non-technological developments are deeply concerning too. They may not be without precedent, but this does not make them less worrying. There appears to have been a shift in political norms and expectations: for example, that political leaders in a democracy should pay a price when they are found to have been lying. Expectations on the part of respective âinâ groups seem increasingly to be that when âtheirâ leader is exposed as dishonest or even corrupt, this can be dismissed, perhaps even laughed off, as, ironically, âfake newsâ. For many, it is revealed, neither evidence nor reason trump opinion or prejudice. Some political players indeed have cultivated a clownish buffoonery to pander to their audiences. Here, the generation of ignorance âfrom aboveâ is matched by the active ignoring of clear evidence âfrom belowâ. Unsurprisingly, the manufacture of ignorance around current financial, economic, social and environmental crises has built upon the strategies deployed in narrower, more-focussed sectional campaigns close to the hearts and bank accounts of the wealthy and super wealthy. It draws from and builds upon longstanding campaigns to discredit movements threatening the regulation of the pursuit of profit: tobacco; climate change; finance; workersâ health and safety; inequality. Taken together, the urgency of these current assaults, undermining knowledge and understanding, and the harms that follow, have been important motivators for the contributors to this book.
However, it is important not to see âfake newsââto use the term ironically popularised by its populariser-in-chiefâor the generation and exploitation of ignorance more broadly as new. Well before the 2008 crisis, the chronic failure of neoliberalism to deliver upon its promises had become increasingly managed by a combination of âspinâ, mass-media compliance and the capitulation of âprogressiveâ politics to neoliberalism itself (Streeck 2016). But of course the deliberate manufacture of ignorance has a much longer, and a far darker, history than the past few decades. To take just one example, towards the end of the nineteenth century, King Leopold II of the Belgians decided that he wanted an empire. Amidst a âscramble for Africaâ in which various European countries seized vast tracts of African land Leopold settled on âunclaimedâ expanses of the Congo Basin. Reaction to his endeavours among American and European contemporaries was at first overwhelmingly positive. As Adam Hochschild has noted (2006: 92):
Leopold won much praise for his patronage of Christian missionaries in his new colony; he so impressed people with his vigorous denunciation of the slave trade that he was elected honorary president of the Aborigines Protection Society, a venerable British human rights organisation. ⊠To the kingâs great satisfaction Brussels was chosen as the location ⊠for an Anti-Slavery Conference of the major powers.
What transpired was one of the worst colonial atrocities in European colonial history. A Belgian government commission concluded that the population of Leopoldâs domain, enslaved in service of the pillage of rubber and ivory was halved. As Hochschild concludes, âthis would mean that according to the estimates, during the Leopold period and its immediate aftermath, the population of the territory dropped by approximately ten million peopleâ (ibid.: 233 emphasis added).
Although there are many other examples of the generation, denial, minimisation or legitimisation of colonial genocide (see, e.g., Davis 2017; Woolford and Benvenuto 2015; Lawson 2014; Guettel 2013; Kreike 2012; Bellamy 2012; Groen 2012; Morgan 2012; Raben 2012; Shaw 2011; OâRegan 2010; Madley 2004, 2005), the case of the Congo is interesting for a number of reasons. The first reason is that even over a century ago, there were strikingly âmodernâ elements to Leopoldâs activities. Economic strains at the dark heart of this particular colonial barbarity are familiar in type to stateâcorporate harms elsewhere (see Ward 2005). Equally interesting to the modern eye however was the way that his acquisition and exploitation of the Congo were respectively realised and disguised through shrewd, duplicitous public relations. Stronger European powers had their own ambitions in Africa, and Leopold initially lacked popular support for his venture in Belgium itself (Hochschild 2006). His solution was to devise a very familiar public relations strategy that portrayed his own aspirations as purely humanitarian. This was successfully achieved, deceiving Africans, Americans and Europeans through a combination of media management, state-corporate sleight of hand, judicious funding and bribery, political lobbying and celebrity endorsement (ibid.). Leopold even had to silence a sex scandal that threatened to derail his plans. He was able to exploit discourses of Christian benevolence and African vulnerability to âArab slaversâ. As in succeeding genocides, crimes against humanity and other mass harms, the success of Leopoldâs strategy was due, in large part, to the capacity of those involved to wilfully ignore what they saw or suspected. Whilst his enslavement and the de...