Ashley Green-Thompson runs an organisation that supports social justice action.
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It's been a week of serious news in Mzansi and globally. If you’re a current affairs junkie or just have a healthy interest in what is happening in the world around you, the newsfeeds on your phone or TV could easily overwhelm your senses. There is just too much to process – to see or hear or read, to analyse, and then to form a view that can inform your response or course of action. What happens when there is too much information to process? We look for the sound bites, the simplified meme or summary, the voice note or 30-second TikTok video, the Facebook or X (formerly Twitter) post – maximum 100 characters.
It has opened the way for what is described as the post-truth era. ‘Post-truth’ was Oxford Dictionaries’ Word of the Year in 2016 and heralded the abandonment of truth in favour of convenience and confirmation bias, which is about being more receptive to information that affirms your own view rather than challenge it. We are in a social environment where emotional appeals and eloquently articulated personal views hold more say in shaping opinion than verifiable, independent facts. Because social media has become so ubiquitous and is tenuously regulated, fake news is peddled as the truth without much scrutiny or mechanism to check its veracity. It is little wonder that those paragons of truth and virtue, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, were able to use their massive Twitter and Facebook platforms to help sweep into power the administration of Trumpelstiltskin. He is the orange poster boy of a post-truth reality as he spreads the word on his Truth Social platform and sweetheart media outlets. I was particularly amused – and irritated at the same time - by his vice-president’s warning to Pope Leo to be careful about matters of theology. The arrogance! The cheek!
That’s the problem with a post-truth narrative. You start to believe the lies you peddle. The orange liar repeats untruths often enough that his constituency – and I believe himself – start believing that it is the truth. His little ogre buddy Netanyahu has the Zionists and Israeli apologists globally similarly in thrall as he unleashes genocide in Gaza and Lebanon.
We have our own little post-truth activists here whose pants are on fire. I watched Ernst Roets on tv say that South Africa today is an apartheid state (he missed the irony completely). He is taking advantage of MAGA madness to promote the narrative in the USA that there is a genocide of white Afrikaners in this country – repeat it often enough and they will believe it’s true. They have a new campaign to erect 3000 white crosses in Washington. The interviewer asked him about the blatant pictorial misrepresentation during that White House ambush when Trump held up a picture of the white crosses on the roadside in SA and called it a cemetery of genocide victims. Roets confirmed that the crosses in that infamous photo represented farm murder victims from the nineties. When challenged that this is not a gravesite, without flinching he said that there is no difference between the two. But it is simply not true. A gravesite commemorating a genocidal atrocity and a symbolic record of deaths over decades are two different things – both terribly sad and unacceptable, but fundamentally different. Unless you’re a disciple of the post-truth movement and will use fake news to advance your nefarious agenda.
I recently subscribed to Nco Dube’s blog, and he reflects on the burning pants brigade’s intense anger at the appointment of Roelf Meyer as SA ambassador to the USA. Here is a politician who was the chief negotiator for apartheid’s architects, the National Party, during negotiations in the nineties, and who was a key contributor to the country’s non-racial constitution. He is an Afrikaner who lives and thrives in this democracy, and so he’s a direct threat to Afriforum’s post-truth campaign that has held sway in Washington for years. Dube says: “Their entire lobby effort depends on presenting South Africa as unstable, hostile and collapsing. A credible envoy with deep political memory makes that narrative harder to sell.”
Unfortunately we too are guilty of being susceptible to post-truth manipulation by the worst politicians and monied mandarins. What is happening when we start believing that foreigners are taking over South Africa, or that white people cannot get jobs because of the discrimination of BEE and equity laws? There are many other examples where facts are conveniently replaced with opinion and information that looks like facts, but is anything but that. I hope we can all pause and think before we imbibe and internalise the falsehoods spread by those who prefer dysfunction and division.
Ashley Green-Thompson runs an organisation that supports social justice action.