Narratives and scandals pay. Big time. Nigel Farage enjoyed a large salary as presenter for GB News.
Postmodernist strategies
Postmodernist strategies question the authority and power of an author.
Authors
The ability or virtue of an author to convey the objective truth is never guaranteed.
These strategies may reorder classic narrative structures of beginning, middle and end.
The author is also not the only source of creativity: a postmodernist narrative borrows elements from another story. Films within films are a good example of this. For example, Pretty Woman, which harks back to My Fair Lady. Some movies literally include film clips, thus using intertextuality, Woody Allen films like Zeilig being a good example.
History
Postmodernist strategies are not restricted to modern works in the 60s-70s onwards.
Cervantes Don Quixote is a much-cited example of the ways in which an author warns the audience that the story presented may be fallible. Cervantes found a manuscript, written by an Arab historian, on the adventures of Don Quixote. He, the author, is not the source of the story.
Don Quixote himself, his head corrupted by novels of chivalry, exposes the dangers we as readers may face in taking a narrative too seriously. Viewing these escapades of the knight errant from La Mancha from the outside is hilarious. Yet it makes a very serious point: how far can and should anyone trust the written word?
Historiographic metafiction
Postmodernism also tackles the concept of historiographic metafiction: history itself may be tainted in some way as the very act of writing it down can include some form of narrative manipulation.
Much has changed since theorists like Linda Hutcheon and Patricia Waugh penned their now famous studies of postmodernism and metafiction.
Enter the world of social media, twitter, Facebook and more to compliment other forms of media such as film, theatre, and the novel. Fictions rapidly go out of control.
Disinformation
In recent weeks, society has had a sharp wakeup call on the power of disinformation and gained insights into the workings of these narratives. False truths peddled in these texts have been deconstructed and exposed by the media. At the very least, members of the far right are now known to have fuelled acts of racial hatred based on false information. They are not heroes of the British people or patriots in doing so.
PM Starmer will crack down on these acts. At last, someone is going to solve a few of these problems. However, the government has not learned a very important lesson here. The social media narratives, which fuelled the Farage riots, are not something new. They were hard at work in the run up to the Brexit referendum. I and other authors have previously written about the Russian troll farms of Putin’s Internet Research Agency (IRA). It has long been suspected that Russian parties interfered with the Brexit referendum.
Planned narratives
Cambridge analytics revealed the mechanisms of planned narratives for political campaigns, the setups to entrap opposition candidates in compromising positions, during a series of brilliant documentaries by Channel 4 dispatches, in which Chris Wylie exposed the firm and its interactions with Facebook. Wylie hit the nail on the head at the time – ‘Cambridge Analytica coerced people’.
Brexit
The Brexit referendum has long been hailed as the ‘will of the people’. Yet how can we objectively state that the vote to leave the EU was the will of the people rather than the power of coercion?
In recent weeks, the public has received a huge wake up call as to the harmful nature of the falsehoods of narratives from Farage and co. Farage, who himself worked as an MEP in Brussels, was very selective of the information he gave out about Europe. For example, he did not write any articles or give presentations about the many controls available to EU member states to limit migration from Europe to their shores. Political commentator and EU law expert, Femi Oluwule, questioned Farage about this on LBC.
Another massive issue in the UK is the many right-wing papers, such as the Daily Mail and The Telegraph, unreliable ‘sources of truth’ for many members of our society. The role of both Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage as journalists for these publications speaks volumes. Contrast their articles on immigrants with counter opinions such as NE Bylines recent piece by Giuseppi Bignardi.
False narrative repercussions
False narratives incite physical violence. Unfortunately, that is not something new if we consider tragic events such as the murder of labour MP, Jo Cox. The harm these narratives do extends to many acts of violence in one form or another.
These narratives have long fuelled hatred against refugees who seek safety on our shores.
They empowered Brexit, which in itself has caused numerous examples of political, economic, and emotional harm to so many people. Too late for Britain to change its mind. A recent YouGov poll revealed 59% would vote to remain and while the participants did not believe Starmer had a mandate to rejoin the block in a political union, they were in favour of closer ties with Europe.
Time for a crackdown
It is time for Starmer to crack down, not only on these current falsehoods inciting violence. He must launch a full investigation into Russian interference in the referendum, dark money funding vote leave and other campaigns and the workings of right-wing groups. That dark money has, even if indirectly, succeeded in coercing not only the public at a point of time in history, but the policies of government itself.
