They say that you shouldn’t pronounce the name of the beast, of the devil, because you run the risk of invoking the inhuman over which we have no control — even if it’s a small, still human, rascally creature with sulfur tantrums. I’ll try not to name him.
Today I woke up to the image of a poster with the following phrase: Get your brown kids out of my daycare. It can’t be real, I thought, still between waking up and drinking a cup of coffee. Although, after the recent statement about the need for us to have three Salazars — the holy Trinity of salvation, according to the imp — perhaps it was true.
Perhaps that phrase was, in fact, written and disseminated throughout the country. I researched and confirmed that it was a fake image. But what is a fake image? There are no fake images. It’s not even possible desver — the word doesn’t even exist. «This is a false image»: reminiscent of a poor, literal Magritte, turning around in the tomb with his pipe.
An image is an image, and that one was seen by thousands, perhaps millions, of Portuguese people who didn’t bother to check it. It was no coincidence that, in the first decades of the 20th century, propaganda became an effective way found by dictatorial regimes to support political positions and guide public opinion. The undeniable strength of the image.
A picture is a picture and, as the proverb says, it is worth a thousand words. Now, in the era of iconoclasm, the production of images has reached breakneck speed — a maddening machine in which we are, at the same time, producers and a product of this assembly line — and we are a hair’s breadth away from separating what is real information from fictional information.
The poster about “the brown kids” is a montage of another poster, equally chilling, which read: This is not Bangladesh. The poster that actually existed on the streets was, in fact, as racist and xenophobic as this image — this poster — that only circulated on the internet. And it seems that, being on the internet, it doesn’t hurt. We scroll past the screen like someone praying a digital rosary, waiting perhaps for the next miracle, perhaps the next offense. And perhaps the scariest thing is not the lie, but our apathy towards it. The ease with which we accept the grotesque. Saying “it’s just on the internet” could well be the new “I was just following orders”. The same avoidance of responsibility, the same illusion of innocence.