Spanish lies

By Ignacio Ramonet, Le Monde diplomatique, April 2004

THE 11 March bombings in Spain are a consequence of the Iraq war and the confrontation between al-Qaida and the United States and its allies. They are a terrible reminder that a year after the offensive against Baghdad the world seems a more unstable, violent and dangerous place. Contrary to the promises of President George Bush, the preventive war in Iraq has not reduced the intensity of Islamic terrorism. Far from it. The waves are spreading, intensified by the disastrous conduct of the occupation of Iraq, and they have reached shores hitherto untouched: Bali, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Turkey and now the European Union. This time the bombers attacked students and workers, many of them in fact immigrants, on suburban commuter trains in Madrid.

Beyond whatever significance these acts might have on the international political chessboard, it might be useful to draw a few lessons, political and other, from the major changes in the Spanish political scene.

For the first time the actions of a terrorist group have created a unique confluence of tragic events: the bombings; a major press campaign compounded by lies told by the Spanish government; and a major electoral event, the national parliamentary elections. Rarely in the life of a demo cratic state have we seen a mutual interaction of three such powerful temporalities: the time of the event itself, media time and the time of politics.

Such a violent conjunction was bound to cause major upheavals. We know the power of the media in our opinion-led democracies. After the bombings in Madrid and their electoral effect, should we now begin talking about emotion-led democracies (1)? Because it seems beyond doubt that the emotional reaction to the tragedy at Atocha station weighed heavily on people when they cast their votes three days later. It has now been shown that José Maria Aznar's Popular party, which all commentators backed as the likely winners before the bombings, attempted to turn this wave of emotion to its advantage by manipulating information, concealing evidence suggesting that Islamists were to blame and insisting on blaming its preferred enemy, the Basque organisation ETA.

Since the country was in a state of shock, electoral campaigning was suspended and replaced by a full-scale information war. Intent on deceiving public opinion, the Popular party mobilised a force of government information channels (especially the state TV channels) and complicit influential media, such as the news papers El Mundo and La Razin and the Cope radio station.

In the face of this official disinformation, the scepticism of many Spaniards was reflected in the reporting of newspapers such as El Païs and El Periodico and radio stations such as SER. Ordin ary people transmitted their doubts via email, internet chatrooms and cell phones; there were millions of text messages. Within a few hours—the decisive communications battle was on the afternoon of Saturday 13 March—an effective anti-lie and counter-information network was established, mobilising hundreds of thousands of people whose votes assured the victory of the Socialist Workers' party (PSOE) and its candidate for prime minister, José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero.

One of the morals of this tale is that people are extremely sensitive to attempts at manipulating the media. In Spain and elsewhere people do not like to be misled. Many people agree that the media tendency to deceive is one of the great problems of our time.

The Popular party had gone too far in exploiting its control of information, both in spreading lies to justify its commitment to the war in Iraq and in concealing its responsibility for the ecological catastrophe of the sinking of the oil tanker Prestige. Presumably it thought that, with the media hypnosis created by the bombings, one more lie would pass unnoticed. But when Spaniards rose in protest, the government fell.

As for the disappointment about Aznar, whom some in France, even on the eve of 11 March, had seen as a model for the right—his fall recalls the wise advice that the ancient Romans gave their political leaders when they proved too arrogant: “Next to the Capitol is the Tarpeian rock” (2).

(1) See Paul Virillo, Ville panique, Galilée, Paris, 2004. In particular the chapter “La démocratie d’émotion”.

(2) The Capitoline Hill was the religious centre of ancient Rome where victors were honoured with triumphs. The Tarpeian rock was a cliff over which murderers and traitors were thrown.