There is no competition: the biggest hoax of all time, no matter how hard the Russians and all the other foreign and domestic lie-makers try, has already been published. Thirteen centuries ago. And I change the history of the world. Until Lorenzo Valla emerged that in 1440, putting his studies in philology and rhetoric to good use but even more by exercising the spirit of a free man, he wrote “The Discourse on the false and untruthful donation of Constantine”. The document, writes Carlo Ginzburg, had had a “very wide circulation” throughout the Middle Ages. And “he certified that the emperor Constantine, as a sign of gratitude to Pope Sylvester who had miraculously cured him of leprosy, had converted to Christianity, giving a third of the empire to the Church of Rome”. In reality, the historian continues, and the opinion shared today “that the constitutum was drawn up towards the middle of the eighth century to provide a pseudo-legal basis for the papal claims to temporal power”, but for a long time the donation “was absolutely not put in doubt “. Not even by Dante, convinced that that temporal power had laid the foundations for the corruption of the Church: “Ouch, Constantin, of how bad it was matre, / not your conversion, but that dowry / that the first rich father took from you”.
It is certain that when Valla I prove unequivocally and with harsh words the impossibility that the text was authentic (“we can speak of Constantinople as one of the patriarchal so called, it had been founded, nor had its foundation been decided
“), this proof of the false, although preceded by similar opinions such as that of the philosopher Nicolo Cusano, raises a scandal. Suffered for decades by the difficulty with which twenty-five manuscripts circulated. But it exploded when the German Ulrich von Hutten, in the wake of Luther and the theses posted on the portal of the cathedral of Wittenberg, took up the text and decided to print it. It was 1517: exactly half a millennium ago.
Yet, as he remembersLuciano Canforain his “The false story”, the donation of Constantine is not the oldest hoax. Indeed, much earlier, a letter attributed to Pausanias would be false, in which the then very powerful Spartan “regent” would have written to Xerxes, the king of the Persians just defeated: ” , if you like it too, to marry your daughter and subjugate Sparta and all of Greece to your power. I believe I will be able to carry out this plan if I agree with you. So if you like something about this proposal, send someone you trust with whom you can continue the negotiation “. An offer of treason to be taken with a grain of salt, writes Herodotus (“As long as what they say is true …”), but Pausanias pay dearly: sentenced to death, took refuge in a temple where they could not touch it. And there, without touching him, they walled him up alive. To die of hunger and thirst. For a probably fake message written by others. The letter, moreover, insists Camphor, “and in any age the falsifiable genre par excellence”. The scholar tells of “a letter from Cicero describing, with almost triumphal accents, how he had unmasked, by simple ‘internal’ analysis, a dispatch that arrived in the Senate while he was in session, and falsely attributed to Brutus, the caesaricide, then committed to organizing the republican forces in the East ”.
The Donation of Constantine is only one of the cases of “ancient buffaloes” of which the historical panorama is dotted. Answering the questions of Matteo Sacchifor Il Giornale, in fact, the historian Lorenzo Del Boca provides us with other striking examples of how these blessed fake news were anything but born yesterday: “They have existed since the dawn of time, history is full of them, only once we called them bullshit . They are often generated by the power that can use them either to fondle or to defend themselves. Let me give an example: Tito Livio describes a Muzio Scevola who puts his hand on a burning brazier without flinching… Obviously – explains Del Boca – it is meaningless, and only a way of glorifying the strength of Rome. Other times, however, the false news serves an immediate purpose. Amplifying irredentism was another example of entering the First World War. There are also fake news that are essentially based on omission. Like when Togliatti ordered the party to silence Stalin’s crimes even though Khrushchev was making them public… ”. And again: “The whole history of Soviet communism has thrived on false news. The PCI fully embraced the method and put it into practice in the case of the invasion of Hungary in 1956 and then of the invasion of Czechoslovakia. As I said before, Togliatti with Stalin I apply it to perfection… ”.
Even the Huffington Post, with Renato Paone , contributes to this look backwards: “Fake news plagues the web, arouses clamor and indignation. But it is a phenomenon that has its roots in history, it is not only the result of the contemporary era. There are many documents of the past that had been given as true, resisting even for many centuries. But the hard work of historians, experts and humanists has allowed their groundlessness, their falsity to emerge. Among the most famous historical falsehoods: the Donation of Constantine, which gave rise to the temporal power of the Church, the legend of ‘Prete Gianni’, the news of Napoleon’s death in 1814 for mere economic interests, the disclosure of the “Protocols of the Elders of Sion “at the beginning of the last century and the paleontological scam of the Piltdown man”.
To bring us closer to our time, the master of fake news was the propaganda minister of the III Reich, Joseph Goebbels. The Reich spent between a quarter of a billion and a half billion dollars a year to finance the Goebbels department (while the Americans invested 26 million a year). The result was a flawless consensus machine that gave birth to fake news over and over. Like the infamous articles that fueled the campaign against “Jewish, Masonic and Bolshevik science” or those against the “Asian hordes” (the Communists) and Jews. The war also began with a hoax built at the table. Before attacking Poland (1939) the regime launched a media campaign to prepare public opinion for war, inflating the news of “Polish atrocities” which according to the regime organs would culminate with the attack on the German radio station in Gliwice.
The news was picked up by all the media, too bad it was false: the attack had been made by German SS wearing Polish uniforms. Nobody noticed and the following day Hitler announced his decision to invade Poland. All these (false) news as well as in the newspapers, circulated on the radio: in the German city of Zeesen there were eight radio transmitters capable of reaching the whole world with personalized channels for each country. The Nazi broadcasts enjoyed a fair consensus, even outside the homeland: their way of telling the war, irreverent and sarcastic, was considered not very institutional and often pleasant. A poll at the time found that 58% of listeners in England were drawn to it “because they found his version of the news so fanciful it was funny.” One of the magazines that piloted public opinion the most (in addition of course to newsreels, the regime news) was Signal, designed along the lines of the American weekly Life.
Signal was also in color and was distributed from 1940 to 1945 in 23 neutral Allied and Occupied countries (it was translated into over 20 languages). To implement and promote it, the regime had allocated a budget equivalent to 2 million dollars (it had a circulation of 2.5 million copies). The editorial team was made up of German army militants specializing in journalism, cinema and photography in charge of patrolling the front, recovering brilliant images to be circulated with Hollywood style and panache. The publisher responded directly to the Wehrmacht High Command. People bought it and read it with pleasure. Confirming that the propaganda machine was capable of making people believe whatever the regime wanted. As the President of the Reichstag, Hermann Goering , will say, at the Nuremberg Tribunal at the time of the trial that he was charged: “People can always be brought to the orders of leaders. All you have to do is tell them that they have been attacked, denouncing the pacifists for their lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in all countries ”.
But one of the fake news of Goebbels and the Nazis that has come down to the present day is that according to which the Polish army, attacked by Germany on September 1, 1939, loaded the ‘Panzer’ tanks with Polish cavalry. The falsity, apparently covered by the alleged (but unintelligent) Polish heroism, was served by the propaganda minister who made international journalists find a plain covered by a sector of Polish cavalry shot down in combat. A way to denigrate the backwardness and stupidity of the Slavic people and at the same time exalt the modernity and invincibility of the Fuhrer’s army.
The most famous fake news about Jews reported that they kidnapped babies before the Passover celebration because they needed the blood of a Christian child to mix with their matzah (unleavened bread).
But also the Holy Scriptures speak of fake news, starting from the beginning, the Genesis. “The prevention and identification of the mechanisms of disinformation also require a deep and careful discernment. In fact, what could be defined as ‘snake logic’, capable of disguising itself and biting everywhere, needs to be unmasked ”. Pope Francis wrote it in January 2018 in the message for the 52nd World Communications Day, to celebrate the theme “Fake news and peace journalism”. “It is about – writes Jorge Mario Bergoglio– of the strategy used by the ‘cunning snake’, of which the Book of Genesis speaks, which, at the beginning of humanity, became the author of the first ‘fake news’, which led to the tragic consequences of sin, which then materialized in the first fratricide and in countless other forms of evil against God, neighbor, society and creation ”.
“The strategy of this skilful ‘father of lies’ is precisely mimesis, a creeping and dangerous seduction that makes its way into the heart of man with false and tempting arguments. In fact, in the account of original sin, the tempter approaches the woman pretending to be her friend, to be interested in her good, and begins the discourse with a true affirmation but only in part: “It is true that God said: ‘ you must eat from any tree in the garden
What God had told Adam was not really not to eat from any tree, but only from a tree: “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”
The woman, answering, explains it to the snake, but is attracted by his provocation: “Of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden God said: You must not eat it and you must not touch it, otherwise you will die”. This answer smacks of legalism and pessimism: having given credibility to the forger, letting herself be attracted by his setting of the facts, the woman lets herself be misled. So, she first she pays attention to her reassurance of her: “You will not die at all.” Then the deconstruction of the tempter takes on a credible semblance: “God knows that the day you ate it your eyes would open and you would be like God, knowing good and evil.” Finally, she comes to discredit God’s paternal recommendation, which was aimed at good, to follow the seductive enticement of the enemy: “The woman saw that the tree was good to eat, pleasing to the eye and desirable “. This biblical episode therefore reveals an essential fact for our discourse: no disinformation and harmless; indeed, trusting what is false produces dire consequences. Even an apparently slight distortion of truth can have dangerous effects.Alessandro Zaccuri in Avvenire, in September 2017, remembers the Count of Montecristo, one of Dumas’s masterpieces. Edmond Dantes , as it is known, is back to take revenge and among the weapons he intends to use there is also that of financial distress. One of her enemies, Baron Danglars, has a wife who loves to play on the stock market, often exploiting the information that is anticipated by her lover, well introduced to the Ministry of the Interior. In order to make the woman fall into a rash investment, Dantes goes in person to a telegraph station on the outskirts of Paris, bribes the broadcast clerk and in this way spreads a completely unfounded news, that of the return from exile of the pretender to the throne of Spain, Don Carlos of Bourbon. Very modern plan, which mixes fake news and insider trading, for whose success a quite surprising element is essential: the telegraph attendant does not know the code he uses, and is able to decipher a couple of elementary information concerning the management of the service and for the rest it limits itself to mechanically reproducing the signal that is sent to it.
Albeit up to date on the technical side, the system is the same as the fires of Aeschylus, Scott and Tolkien. Dantes propagates a false news, but the person who propagates it is unaware of the content of the message and therefore behaves neither more nor less like an algorithm, indifferent to the identity and reliability of the author of a particular tweet. The denser the chain, the more it is enough to weaken a single link to make it unreliable. Baroness Danglars falls into the trap, and perhaps she could not do otherwise. Before being falsely announced, in fact, Don Carlos’s recovery had been the subject of murmurs and inferences, through the cross-reference between bruits publics (street voices) and journalistic dispatches, studied with enlightening intelligence by the historian Robert Darnton. But the false news circulated by Dantes is not only plausible. The effectiveness of him lies in the ability to adapt to the expectations of the person to whom it is intended, in this case the avid speculating noblewoman. Most of the time it is difficult, if not impossible, to know who and why they are taking the trouble to manufacture and sell fake news. We do not know them, the lords of misinformation, but they certainly know us: our fears, our prejudices, our dark desire to be deceived.
Here are some excerpts from the ebook “Fake News. Origins and horizons of a phenomenon fueled by ignorance “, written by the journalist and spin doctor Andrea Camaiora (ed. AltroMondo, 2018), CEO of the strategic communication studio The Skill
