it’s almost been a year that I haven’t written anything.

I’ve been wondering whether this was due to a personal lack of involvment with international news, or if it was maybe a detachment that I had started to experience with an increasingly insane reality in which we leave. After taking the time to structure my thought, here is what I’ve noticed.

Always confused

I’ve thought about the article of Surkov and the focus on creating confusion in our minds. What if there was indeed a trend of increasing lack of sense in the media stories we were exposed to? We keep on searching for believable reasons that could justify some of the crazy things we see in the news. And those reasons exist for everything. They are archived on all sorts of online news websites that feed the most absurd and extreme convictions that people might have. Think of neo-fascist news outlets in the US, but also of the less straightforward behavior of major outlets such as the Guardian, who follow certain ideologies such as when they decided not to retract one incriminating article about Assange. Despite a complete lack of evidence, the article staid online and was viewed thousands of times, damaging Assange’s reputation at a crucial time, when he was portrayed as a lunatic.

Outplaying them all

Trump is the perfect impersonation of this unpredictable ambivalence. Be it with North Korea, China, Iran, the EU, nobody can ever really know what move he’s planned next. And this is also what makes world leaders uneasy. How can they choose the right side to be backed by Trump? There is no real good side. Instead, those aspiring to become Trump’s allies must learn how to act at the right moment, in the right way. You can feel how uneasy world leaders feel when meeting the American president. Recently, Kim Jong Un behaved like a spoiled child by re-launching some rockets close the the border with South-Korea. At the same time, he sent a letter to Trump that the latter described as very encouraging and promising a later meeting between the two men. How can such ambivalent actions take place at the same time? It doesn’t matter anymore, and we must get used to it. Logical continuations ceased to be the norm when it comes to international relations. Macron also understood this challenge and decided to polish his international image of the president of Europe by manoeuvering an impromptu meeting with the American president upon his landing in order to make sure that he could influence his agenda in an efficient manner. This type of unplanned, instant decision-making perfectly fits with the style of the American leader. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more world leaders try their luck by following the footsteps of Macron in approaching him.

Always more hypocrisy

I’ve already mentioned my reticence to condemn every Russian action as it is sometimes encouraged by the west. We live in a hyper-mediatized world where all of the critical thinking has been done for us. You don’t know anything about a specific subject yet you sense whether you like or dislike a certain world leader, a certain party or an organization. All of that because the media framed their cause in a chosen light. It takes a lot of effort to seek information taking a challenging view, let alone a neutral one. For that reason, I decided to take the messages about the Amazon fires with a grain of salt and looked for empirical evidence.

Amazon Fires in Brazil

A recent report by the New York Times indicated that the majority of the fires that had been detected were in fact voluntary set up by local farmers in order to prepare their land for the next season’s planting. This is indeed a common technique used across agricultural lands all over the world, as the soil will regenerate faster from the burn residues. Moreover, those fires are far from being a new phenomenon that hadn’t previously taken place. Why did the G7 insist so harshly on forcing Brazilian president Bolsonaro to stop them then? Probably because it’s an easy sensational story to give themselves some powerful image during the summit. While Bolsonaro is clearly a threat to his nation because of his repressive political agenda, and specifically his intent to encourage the deforestation of the country, associating the fire to the start of his presidency is misleading.

Will we ever be able to counter this vicious trend of manipulation?