This text is a transcription of the words spoken by Javier Cercas at the Intercontinental Hotel in Barcelona before the dinner for the speakers at the World in Progress Barcelona forum, organized by Grupo Prisa, EL PAÍS and Cadena SER.
Joseph Oughourlian has asked me to say a few words about the palpitating issue, about one of the burning issues of our time, in Spain and everywhere: I am referring to misinformation, hoaxes, lies. Of course, it may seem paradoxical—and perhaps it is—that he asked a novelist, that is, someone dedicated primarily to writing fiction; because, although fictions are not exactly lies, the truth is that they are quite similar to lies. The proof is that, in Latin, the verb “mentiri” means both to lie and to invent. There is in the Poetics from Horace a verse in praise of Homer that reads like this: And so he lies, so he remembers false truths; which more or less means: “And so he lies (or so he invents) mixing the false with the true.” In literature, in fiction, the result of this mixture is a truth, what we call literary truth, or verisimilitude; On the other hand, in journalism, or in history, the result of that mixture is a lie. And I wanted to talk to you about this matter today.
As you know—at least the Spaniards here present know—the Spanish government has launched an Action Plan for Democracy, or regeneration, part of which consists of some measures to combat this: misinformation, hoaxes, lies. . The response to this plan by the media—also those of the Prisa group—has been reticent, a more or less emphatic reluctance. It is natural and healthy: when power sets out to legislate about truth and lies, it is advisable to be on guard. “The truth will set you free,” says the Gospel; which means that lies make us slaves. And power, any power – including democratic power – does not necessarily want slaves, but it does want obedient people, people who say Yes and not people who say No, critical people. So the reluctance is logical. Although it is also logical that the government, partly for local – even personal – reasons, but partly also following a directive from the European Union, tries to regulate a new situation, which not only concerns the media, but also concerns us. to everyone.
Many people have the impression that more lies are told today than ever; I don’t believe that’s true—lies, and many, have been told always and everywhere, not to mention in politics. What I do believe is that today lies have a greater capacity to spread than ever, thanks to new technologies: the Internet, social networks, artificial intelligence. I also believe that this fact has disturbing consequences. The first, the most visible and the most devastating, is the discredit of the truth – at times the truth seems that it no longer matters, that it is a corny, outdated and moralistic thing – and the carcinogenic extension of what we could call the politics of cynicism… As a young man I lived for several years in the United States, and I never imagined that a character like Donald Trump could become president of that country. Never. For the rest, remember that some of the fundamental milestones of national populism – that movement that started or was consolidated throughout the West after the 2008 crisis and that in my opinion is not fascism, although it has some features of fascism and can even be considered as a postmodern mask of fascism and is in some ways more dangerous than fascism: after all, we already know what fascism was and how to defeat it, while we still do not fully know national populism and it is still alive—some fundamental milestones of that movement, as I say, were accompanied or preceded by veritable deluges of lies, often generously spread by the well-known altruism of Mr. Putin: the arrival of Donald Trump to power, without going any further, or Brexit, or simply the crisis Catalan 2017, which was the worst manifestation of national populism in our country, the most acute and the most dangerous.
But, anyway, all this is more or less known; What I wanted to emphasize today is something else.
At the outset, I must say that hoaxes, pure lies, do not worry me too much; I don’t think they are our main enemy. Look, they killed me recently. They had already killed me before, but this time they killed me very well, in details. A brilliant murder, as I say, very persuasive, perpetrated by a guy who apparently had already killed JK Rowling, Pope Benedict or Kazuo Ishiguro before. The truth is that the hoax spread at full speed and, although I don’t use social networks, I found out right away. But nothing happened, in a flash the matter had been resolved: my publisher posted a tweet denying my death and announcing that I was fine, and I myself appeared on Spanish National Radio saying the same thing that Mark Twain had said in a similar occasion: that the news of my death was frankly exaggerated. And that was it. In less than a day the lie was deactivated.
So, despite being a problem, hoaxes, I insist, are not the main problem: they can almost always be dismantled easily. The main problem is not pure lies: it is half-truths, lies mixed with truths, lies that harbor a grain of truth and that therefore have the flavor of the truth. Those are the worst lies, the really dangerous lies. And journalists, whether they know it or not, face them daily. As for me, who is not a journalist, I only became fully aware of the problem a few years ago, while writing a book titled The impostor, a non-fiction novel that is about a real character whom Mario Vargas Llosa called the biggest imposter in history; with reason: for me he is the Leo Messi, the Lamine Yamal of imposture. This is a man, now deceased, who for years posed as a former deportee in the Nazi concentration camps, who presided over the main association of Spanish deportees in the Nazi camps and who enjoyed fabulous success with his lies: he spoke in in schools, universities and in the media, he even spoke on behalf of the Spanish deportees in the Spanish Parliament, and everywhere he also presented himself as an anti-Franco fighter, as a hero of the civil war, etc.; This man became, in short, a true civil hero, a rock-star of historical memory, as I call it in the book…
Well, at a certain point, while I was writing about him, I realized that an important part of his exorbitant success was due to the fact that all his lies were mixed with truths, because behind his big lies there were always small truths. For example: he said that he had been confined in a Nazi camp during World War II (the Flossembürg camp, in Bavaria), and it was not true; but it was true that during the war he had been in Nazi Germany, it was just not true that he had been there as an anti-fascist militant—just as the almost 9,000 Spaniards held in Nazi camps were, almost all of them former Republican combatants in the war. civilian—but had been there as a volunteer worker: as you know, during World War II Franco sent several contingents of volunteer workers to Germany to contribute to the Nazi war effort. And no, it was not true that this man—Enric Marco, his name was—had been a prisoner in a Nazi camp; But it was true that he had known, for a very brief period of time, a Nazi prison, only that he had not been locked up there for opposing Nazism, but because of a simple and reckless defeatist comment… It was always like this: there were always truths that gave the flavor of truth to his lies.
Marco claimed that, during the Franco dictatorship, he had lived clandestinely in Spain because of his opposition to the regime; and it was true that for years he had lived clandestinely or semi-clandestinely, but it was not true that his opposition to the Franco regime was to blame, which had been null: in reality, he had lived clandestinely for having committed petty thefts, because He had been a petty thief, a common criminal on the run from justice. I insist: Marco, the master liar, almost never told pure lies; On the contrary: there was hardly a single one of his lies that did not contain some fragment of truth. And those lies are the big problem.
Before I said that in our time lies have greater power to spread than ever; That means, I add now, that journalism is more necessary than ever, only that practicing it is perhaps more difficult than ever, among other reasons because it is no longer enough to tell the truth: in addition, we must dismantle the lies, especially those lies mixed with truths, which are the most poisonous. The big problem is that, in short: that the truth is more expensive, more complex, more difficult to explain and often more unpopular than lies; and that the lie is cheaper, simpler, easier to explain and almost always more unpopular than the lie: it is more popular to say that one was a deportee in the Nazi camps than to say that he was a volunteer worker in Nazi Germany; It is nicer to say that one was an anti-Franco fighter than to say that he was a simple thief. Perhaps telling the truth is more difficult today than ever, but it is as necessary as ever.
I’m done now. I do not want to do it, however, without saying something that I care very much about saying, that I have already said in other places and that for that reason – and because I am too old to keep quiet about what I think – I feel obliged to repeat here. I have been writing for EL PAÍS for almost thirty years – I am not an employee, I am a simple collaborator who, on top of that, has barely set foot in the editorial office a couple of times. You all know that this is the most influential and most read newspaper not only in Spain, but in our language; but perhaps not everyone knows – I think of the foreign guests – that EL PAÍS is inseparable from Spanish democracy. It always was: EL PAÍS was born with democracy, the year after Franco’s death; EL PAÍS earned its titles of democratic nobility on the night of February 23, when a group of military coup plotters kidnapped the Spanish Parliament and this newspaper was the first to take to the streets, at ten at night, three and a half hours later. of the beginning of the coup, when the government and all the deputies were still held by the coup plotters, and it did so with a full-page headline that those of us who lived through that moment will not forget: “THE COUNTRY, with the Constitution”; and EL PAÍS has continued to be a bastion of Spanish democracy to this day. It has been, above all, because of the daily work of its journalists; but not only for that. My friend the Mexican writer Juan Villoro, who knows Spain very well, once told me: “The political-intellectual debate, in Spain, passes through the pages of EL PAÍS.” I think you are not wrong. During the last year or year and a half in Spain we have experienced considerable political tension, with very tough debates, with extreme political polarization, and EL PAÍS has been the only national newspaper – this is not an opinion: it is a fact – that not only It has tolerated in its pages the defense of ideas contrary to its own editorial line, but – I attest to this – it has encouraged them. That ability to accommodate opposing points of view—sometimes radically opposed—is for me one of the greatest virtues of a newspaper, and perhaps the most obvious demonstration of its strength. I ask EL PAÍS journalists not to interpret these words as praise or flattery; They are exactly the opposite: a demand, a challenge. What I have just described is, with all the ups and downs and nuances you want, what has happened in this newspaper during the last fifty years; It is also what should continue to happen for at least the next fifty. Democracy is not only defended by battling daily for the truth; It is also defended with debate and controversy of ideas, which is another way of fighting for the truth.