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The history of different countries is full of founding acts of their societies and they are openly recognized as part of their evolution, encouraging citizens to pay attention to their cultural heritage, symbols and iconography. Thus, France, in its lazy celebration of the 2024 Olympic Games, included a series of scenic pictures where the French Revolution was promoted; even showing the infamous queen. Putin’s Russia adopts the symbol of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in a conceptual and temporal continuity that breaks the left-right logic because the current Russian government is of conservative affiliation. In the case of Chile, the anniversary of independence calls for citizens to be part of the revolutionary process that gave sovereign power and established the Republic in violent action through armed conflict, from which all Chileans ‘ sense of pride, especially the true nationalist leader. right.
Other violent events, such as the coup d’état in 1973, meant a reversal in reactionary action in the sense of destroying the dialectical progress of history and the postulates of liberal democracy. It is presented by the right and farthest elite as facts that helped to imagine the success of today’s Chile, the success of a few families who own the sea, the land or the destiny to millions of workers.
It is obvious that the cynicism of those who see in acts of violence the meaning of their humanitarian principles and the material fulfillment of their desires; and in others, acts of terror against the essence of democracy or coexistence. Cultural and media hegemony translates into the ability to specify when violence is direct, and when it is abhorrent, and that people believe it to the point of becoming a dominant thought.[1]
The same people who characterize the Coup d’état as a conservative revolution or a capitalist revolution created, through the corporate media and the use of power, the necessary political/economic manipulation that brought a- to bring in thousands of immigrants to reduce the cost involved. labor What they are now taking advantage of as an electoral argument after the migrants sated the social services – which are already fragile for the Chileans -, or their membership in criminal groups that destroy the streets of the country. In a systematic communication effort, they managed to create in the public psyche the idea that the Social Revolution had been a criminal act, a return to barbarism that was intolerable for the defenders of democracy and Western civilization. .
Success in manipulating public opinion tells us about the power of the media to create a real world through assumptions or lies over and over again. The logical question is: How can a society be democratic where the means of public expression are in the hands of a few who determine political forms: what is acceptable and what cannot be tolerated?
This October 18, when 5 years have passed since the Social revolution, is a date to remember that the action and movement of the people as a whole is the way for the poor to have their rights to prove it, to challenge the abuse of power and to try to change it. which is considered and known to be unfair.
In the portals of municipal and regional elections, electoral milestones are part of the control mechanism where alternatives are always included in the narrow legitimacy of what is tolerated for de facto power. It seems that the crisis of representation that has afflicted Chile and the rest of the liberal democracies of the world requires a strong dose of explosions so that the elites wake up, so that they realize that there is a finite capacity for suffering among the people, that injustice has a permissible limit and – beyond these limits – that the stability of the system they created and the peaceful life of the privileged people are in danger. They created a society where few live in the first world and the majority live under the shadow of poverty, vulnerability or debt.
It would not be unfortunate to think that the crisis of representation itself saved the system, because the mass of citizens, who had no faith in any leadership, preferred the sentimentality of symbolism to the combination of progressive political thought. and the moral force of a general social movement.
Ignacio Figueroa F.
Center for Media Studies
[1] A CEP study where 50% of those consulted reject the Social Revolution.
