Videoage International March-April 2020

8 Book Review March/April 2020 V I D E O A G E O ne would think that the concept of “fake news” was created by U.S. president Donald J. Trump (according to The Washington Post , Trump has made 15,413 false or misleading claims over 1,055 days), but according to Errico Buonanno, author of the Italian- language book Sarà Vero , fake news actually began with the ancient Greeks. The author is a 41-year old Italian journalist and TV writer, and the book title translates as Is it True — without the question mark — which doesn’t really make sense in English. In Italian, however, it’s correct because, as it is explained in the introduction, the title is meant to illustrate how some readers will erroneously say, “ Sarà Vero? ” (with the question mark), and begin believing whatever it is that they heard, thereby demonstratinghoweasy it is to create false reports. At 418 pages, the paperback book — published by Utet Libri in Milan and priced at 18 euro — is rather bulky. It is this reviewer’s opinion that it would be very difficult to translate the book into English as the author used a combination of archaic, tedious, and confusing language to make his various points. Plus, even though Buonanno lists a very large number of fakes, he often doesn’t explain how those fakes were discovered. In order to arrive at the “fakes” used by Dick Cheney and his ilk to justify an Iraqi invasion (i.e., the weapon of mass destruction, which merits only a brief mention in the book), Buonanno starts in France in the year 1080 because, as he points out and subsequently demonstrates, “The European Middle Ages were the cradle of the fake.” He later explains that out of the 130 comedies attributed to Plautus (who allegedly wrote them circa 130 BC), 109 were fakes. To further drive home this point of howancient themanufacturing of fakes is, he even ventures into the Christian belief of the Trinity of God, explaining how “the Bible never made a mention of it.” He also takes issue with the Jewish religion, noting that in 1450 the Zohar , an ancient fake, “was considered on par with the Talmud ,” a Jewish book of history and laws. Buonanno doesn’t explain what the Zohar is, but it’s a group of books that deal with the mystical aspects of the Torah (the Jewish Bible). He then moves on to the Knights Templar, alleging that a fake report attributed its creation to the Freemasons even though the concept is not clearly explained. This section of the book is further clouded by the introduction of the clash between the Jacobites (the war of British Succession, 1688-1746) and the Orangists (Dutch liberal monarchists), and the idea that the “Declaration of Independence in the U.S. [was] signed by well-known Freemasons.” Buonanno also reports on how the “Mystical Order Rosae Crucis” (aka the Rosicrucian Order) were the heirs to the Knights Templar and how members opposed the “modern economy founded on usury [...] and the occult power of the banks.” But, he concludes, “[stories about] Templars and Rosicrucians were lies developed in an epoch in search of a definition.” He then turns his attention to the various “conspiracy theories” that were first attributed to the Jesuits (according to him, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were also promoters of various conspiracy theories), and later to international “demo-plutocratic” and “Judaic-Freemansonic” followers. It was because of conspiracies, he wrote, that Napoleon Bonaparte even thought to move against England and Russia, that Japan’s Tanaka Giichi went against Russia and China, that Italy’s Benito Mussolini decided to invade Abyssinia (Ethiopia and Eritrea), that Adolf Hitler moved against Germany’s neighbors, and that gave Saddam Hussein the idea to rise against Kuwait. And conspiracies justified Cheney’s Gulf War (actually Buonanno calls it “Bush’s War,” which this reviewer attributes to his possibly poor knowledge of U.S. politics.) He then cites the Chinese general Sun Tzu (544 BC), who said that, “All warfare is based on deception,” which indicates that all fakes have the imprimatur of a government in search of an excuse. Buonanno also reports the various pieces of fake news created by the Soviet Union to use against the U.S., including the amateurish threatening letters sent to black U.S. athletes during the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics that were supposedly from the Ku Klux Klan. The letters were clearly fake. They were riddled with errors. According to Buonanno fake news has been so pervasive throughout history that a study should be undertaken to see if the news was always vicious. He wonders if there are any examples of fake news that were meant to do good, either directly or indirectly. As an example he cites the letters from the Presbyter Johannes , fake reports that instigated various wars from the year 1100 that, Buonanno wrote, “gave the excuse for the Crusaders, but also gave the impetus for the discovery of the new continent.” Before the Cold War, Buonanno reports that conspiracies were attributed to Jesuits, Jews, Freemasons, the Illuminati, and/or the Templars. After the Spanish Inquisition, but before Hitler, Napoleon, in 1806, found it useful to ferment a Jewish conspiracy theory by organizing a meeting with French Jewish leaders, and called the gathering, the “Grand Sanhedrin,” or Jewish high court, to reinforce the belief that the Jews wanted to take over the French government. Tomake the various conspiraciesmore dramatic, Buonanno said that the collected conspiracies of Jesuits, Jews, and Freemasons were invariably grouped together by the makers of fakes as one and the same, who said that all of them were guided by the dictums of Niccoló Machiavelli. In 1884, Pope Leone XIII even called Freemasonry “Satan’s Synagogue.” Fakes were used in Paris in 1894 to execute Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish lieutenant colonel in the French artillery corps. In 1902, the Okhrana, a covert Russian agency, fabricated The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (an anti-Semitic text describing a Jewish plan for global domination) that were used by the Nazis, and considered real even by Egypt’s president Gamal Nasser (1918-1970), and various politicians throughout the world up until today. Buonanno leaves many definitions to the readers’ imaginations, including the Zohar , the Grand Sanhedrin, the Jacobites, and the Orangists. In addition, he uses the typical Italian journalistic tradition of omitting first names — possibly expecting that readers know who they are — so, he simply writes: Jefferson (for Thomas), Dreyfus (for Alfred), and Nasser (for Gamal), among others. “Lies,” in Buonanno’s opinion, “have magnetic virtues that like mosaics can expand.” He later explains that in Pinocchio (a book written in Italy by Carlo Collodi in 1883), there are “lies with short legs [meaning ones that can’t travel far], and lies with long noses that are clearly visible. Therefore, if people fall for them, it is because the lies are useful to them.” Buonanno sprinkles similar sentiments through- out the rest of the book: “Reality is often most of all the projection of our beliefs.” Plus, “Only what we want to believe is true.” “We have to understand that just believing in something gives it existence,” he says. He cites French philosopher François-Marie Arouet, known by his pen name Voltaire, who wrote that the “existence of witches ended when people stopped burning them at the stake.” He continues: “There are two ways to make history: Creating a future or fabricating the past” and that “Every era creates a past that it deserves” and that “Propaganda is the first and most effective political tool.” Finally, he says, “The Internet emphasizes what people want to believe, not what is true.” In the final analysis, Buonanno’s book is interesting and somewhat informative, but definitely not a page-turner. ( DS ) Fake News is Not a Trump Creation, It’s Existed Since Biblical Times