Illuminati and Reptilians | Country

I talk about trains because in his novels Orlando, Virginia Woolf saw the train as a transcendent technological advance in the 19th century. In my lifetime, there have been countless technological changes, even if they seem so trivial compared to today: artificial intelligence that solves theorems and writes sonnets, humanoid robots, holographic avatars, killer drones, cyberattacks that can paralyze the world, billionaires who pay for travel to outer space.

In a way, it’s all captured in the colorful pages of comics I devoured until dawn as a child, my head covered by the sheets, illuminating myself with a flashlight so my mother wouldn’t notice my vicious insomnia: Planet Titan A A journey into the unknown world, A Captain Science, It’s filled with flying saucers and green Martians with jellyfish heads who have the power to enter people’s souls, turning entire towns into zombies and turning the most innocent housewives into their agents.

Fantasy about election clients

But I never thought then that the graphic drawings of comics would one day take their place in the political world and that those fantasies would become the embodiment of a way to gain power; I still find it hard to believe now that yesterday’s utopia has become today’s dystopia. Fantasy for electoral clients.

Manufacturer wins parliamentary seat False news, Los Role Player,lose Influencers Charlatans, anti-vaccine zealots. All kinds of conspirators, amateurs and professionals. They have established an ideological category that appeals to the fantasies of the ignorant and the suspicions of the ignorant, and their fans and followers on social networks become voters who have the power to elect them to public office.

Examples abound, but I’ll just give you one that seems to me to be a classic: Lilia Lemoine, an elected representative of La Libertad Avanza, the liberal party led by President Javier Milei of Argentina. She insisted seriously and firmly that the Earth is flat, and I quote her verbatim so that no one would say I’m joking: “Why do the governments of the world hide from humanity that the Earth is flat, and that there is a huge wall of ice surrounding it? For this reason, he insisted, there are no commercial flights over the Pacific. He said this seriously in front of a camera and spread it on the web. His message reached thousands of people. Let them prove the opposite.

Subsequently, for her outstanding scientific achievements, she was appointed First Secretary of the Committee for Science, Technology and Productive Innovation of the Argentine Chamber of Deputies. But not only did he confirm that the Earth was flat, he also did not believe that man had ever landed on the Moon, another conspiracy in which, like many others, secret sects were involved, trying to dominate the world and control us. Just like the evil Skeletons that Captain Science was fighting against.

When I was reading comic books, there was a booklet with a Star of David on the cover that was circulated among adults. The Protocols of the Elders of ZionThe Internet was long before you had to read paper, but this pamphlet written by an anonymous author following the extermination of Jews in concentration camps still has a conspiracy following, even though it justifies genocide. Thousands of followers. I’m just traveling down memory lane.

The deadliest virus

Is the Earth flat, a disk suspended in space? If this truth is hidden from ordinary people, it is because behind it lies a whole conspiracy of hidden world powers carried out by NASA. Must a committee of geospherists now be formed as a countervailing force?

My cartoon does not go that far. I would say they are more innocent aliens. In today’s network there are thousands of gullible followers, sects fighting for world power committed to a fierce covert war, the Illuminati and the Reptilians, but they have the ability to ally to achieve their evil purposes.

Barack Obama, for example, is nothing more than a reptile from a galaxy far, far away disguised as a human. The same is true of the Queen of England, who, according to QAnon theories, actually died many years ago, executed by a military tribunal ruling that found her guilty of Princess Diana’s death, and who lives on only as a computer-generated avatar. How envious those forgotten comic book writers of the last century would be.

But this isn’t just about cartoons. Representative Lemoine promised last year that she would introduce a law that would allow men to abdicate paternity. In other words, to deny an unwanted child. If defending the flat earth takes us back 2,000 years, then legalizing nonconsensual paternity would at least take us back to the Middle Ages.

Conspiracists form a broad ideological spectrum in which homophobes, anti-feminists, xenophobes, anti-immigrants and racists fight with a fervor that lends weight and substance to their extravagant fantasies that make the cartoons of my childhood pale in comparison.

According to conspiracy theorists themselves, a potent mixture became the most deadly virus, spreading through the ins and outs of social networks, turning the entire worldview upside down.

A protocol of the Wise Men of Zion raised to the nth power, thus being able to sow the seeds of racist hatred, division, misogyny, machismo, contempt for women and homosexuals in third-rate fantasies, who currently become votes and grant political power.

@sergioramirezm

The author is a novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, politician and lawyer, winner of the Carlos Fuentes Prize in 2014 and the Cervantes Prize in 2017. He is the founder of the Centroamérica Cuenta literary conference.