Bringing it on yourself

For the Night of Broken Glass there was a thorough psychosocial preparation supported from the communication platforms at the Nazi regime’s disposal. Radio, cinema, popular theater performances and graphic design, skillfully handled by Joseph Goebbels, maximized anti-Semite prejudices while reinforcing the traditional values of the German people, and modulated the feeling of frustration stemming from the defeat in the Great War.

How did German Nazis do that? How had the National Socialist metanarrative managed to fool the German people in such a way that it brought them to the edge of barbarity and reduced any critical approach to almost nothing?

Answering these questions, and generating applications of their own, was the great mission of the Mass Communications Research (MCR), which began to be carried out in the United States from the 1940s with government funding allotted to public and private universities. The MCR is methodologically grounded in the application of a mechanistic stimulus-response model, and it overvalues the role of the media with respect to other anthropological and socioeconomic variables. However, it allows imperialist power centers to accumulate and codify for decades —in addition to analyzing, modeling and mathematically simulate— the procedures for the induction of certain behaviors in groups or communities through the use of artificial intelligence and the reduction of communicative distances by means of the social networks.

It’s no coincidence that the belligerent discourse of Donald Trump against the new socialist ‘axis of evil’, that is: Cuba Venezuela and Nicaragua, is imbued with a psychosocial hostility against the national values of their peoples. In the case of Cuba, for example, one look at the social networks shows us a difference between Cubans ‘from the island’, who live ‘subjugated by the communist tyranny of Castro’ and the ‘Cubans of the free world’. The ones in the island, according to this matrix, are cowardly because we don’t rise against the regime. We are lazy and conformist because we intend to live off the remittances our family and friends send us from the ‘free world’. We are culturally inferior because we remain isolated.

According to that supremacist matrix, migrants in transit to the United States begin to be criminalized or associated with all kinds of excesses. Doctors collaborating in Latin America are accused of being either slave labor or destabilizing agents. They stigmatize enterprising people who, because of the often absurd limitations imposed by our government, go to other countries to try to buy what they need to do their work. The anti-values listed by the Western tradition: heartlessness, lack of respect for life, professional incompetence, are commonly and vulgarly deployed for the purpose of demonizing Cubans, from among the tapestry of similar occurrences which are a simply signs of modern times.

Both traditional media and the social networks are useful in this demonizing of the ‘Cubans in the island’ or the ‘Cubans coming from the island’, as a mechanism to, first, degrade to a symbolic scale the nation’s values through the mistakes and excesses (real or made up) of its citizens —mistakes and excesses any citizen of any country may partake in—, and prospectively justify the economic siege implemented by the Helms-Burton Act, and maybe even a direct aggression. This is not a problem of the communication platforms themselves —as some run-down local might suggest—, but rather a combination of the imperialist hegemonic intention and the blunders, absurdities and abuses, in quite a few cases, committed by the island’s ideologues and decision-makers.

That’s how, for example, the legal and administrative abandonment in which the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Relations leaves our legal or illegal migrants facilitates the purpose of that demonizing process. When the Ecuadorian police, in the midst of protests against Lenín Moreno, arrest a Cuban national at the airport in Quito under suspicion that he may be monitoring the activities of that country’s President, and the Cuban consulate takes several days to go and represent him and show concern for its citizen, it is nourishing with its idleness the idea that Cuba has destabilizing agents planted throughout Latin America. This also happens when our government speaks against any injustice or cruelty against migrants in transit anywhere in the world, and at the same time overlooks their own, who are right now being abused and subjected to violence in American detention centers, or are surviving in precarious conditions in any Latin American country; or when the all-powerful head of a medical mission blackmails and represses any instance of criticism or any of his workers’ demands for rights, resorting to ideo-political rhetoric to mask their own inefficiency, so that the worker has to either do what he’s told or be sent back to Cuba. This phenomenon is more frequent than would be ethically acceptable, and it fuels the myth of the slavery of our doctors.

And what won’t be done by a person who, for whatever reason, leaves in search of a dream and is driven to the edge of a nightmare? And why did they decide to go abroad in search of that dream? Was it just a material ambition? Or were there also spiritual aspirations associated to the material ones? And what is the responsibility of our State under the Rule of Socialist Law in that decision to migrate? And when will it finally implement that responsibility?

The bias and the semantic reductionism typical of the traditional media and the social networks —which is based on an adaptation of the way in which we neuro-psychologically turn signals into stimuli, thought and language— becomes a weapon for the destruction of the values of a nation, a human community or any given entity, from the imperialist power centers, with the regrettable complicity, in our case, of the very victims and their representatives. It’s as if the Jews, by intensifying usury and proselytism, had enabled the intentions of Hitler and Goebbels.

(Translated from the original)