No one in Turkmenistan was surprised that the image of the acting president appeared on the national currency banknotes. Saparmyrat Atayevich Niyyasov had already made the Ruhnama (Book of the Soul) compulsory school reading. If he had dared to proclaim that his book is above the Koran and to change the name of the days of the week after those of his family members, stamping his face on the Manat banknotes seemed minor.
The Won, the North Korean currency, has had Kim Il Sung’s face on it since 1947, that is, before he completed three years in power. Colonel Jadafy also did not deprive himself of stamping his face on the Dinar, the currency of Libya, just as Saddam Hussein did when he ruled in Iraq.
There are many more examples of rulers who put their faces on banknotes while still alive and ruling, but they are all lunatic and bloodthirsty despots. What has never been seen printed on a bill is the face of the leader of a liberal democracy. Donald Trump is trying to become the first in the West to issue a bill with his face while alive. He feels that the 250th anniversary of Independence is the opportunity to break the rule that prevails about the dollar: it must not have the image of a living person and must bear the legend “In good we trust.”
In the construction of his personalist cult he already suffered defeats. Due to a court ruling, he had to withdraw his name from the Kennedy Center, where he had impudently and absurdly snuck it. But while Americans are distracted by the reality show of the White House, the “patriotic fraud” of this time continues to be designed in the shadow of its occupant.
In the Argentina of the “Infamous Decade”, the rancid conservatism that held that power that implied owning the cows and crops of the Pampa Húmeda, generated a system of electoral manipulation so that an expression of the majorities would not win again, as had happened with Hipólito Yirigoyen. Convinced that the majorities should not elect the government or obstruct its actions, after the coup that overthrew the radical president in 1930, the conservatives prevented the polls from reflecting the popular will for ten years, calling the effective trap they operated “Patriotic Fraud.”
Like those Argentine conservatives, the current ultraconservative wave that governs the United States and promotes its expansion throughout the West, is perfecting the fraudulent system that prevents the return to power of the center-left and center-right. And one of the instruments to win elections are algorithms.
The owners of the algorithms are billionaires who develop Artificial Intelligence (AI), digital technology and social networks. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg among others, are the crest of the “reactionary wave” that is trying to sweep away liberal democracy in the West.
The “Patriotic Fraud” of the “techno-libertarians” is perpetrated mainly through the Internet and networks. Vladimir Putin collaborated in the first step of the ultraconservative offensive, using his squads of hackers and trolls to destroy Hillary Clinton’s election campaign and promote voting for Trump.
The control of the algorithms, making visible and hiding messages on the networks, was a substantial part of the device for the New York magnate to return to the White House, despite having in his history nothing less than an attempted coup d’état carried out against the electoral system, with the storming of the Capitol that caused seven deaths.
Weakened by their negligent war against Iran and its economic consequences in the United States, the “techno-libertarians” will use algorithms to avoid an ultraconservative debacle in the November legislative elections. They will also try to make Trump’s successor the obscure JD Vance.
The algorithms will act so that the Bolsonaro surname recovers the Planalto Palace, removing Lula from power. And in Argentina, the Silicon Valley commandos led by Peter Thiel will put their algorithms and other digital technology devices to manipulate the electoral process in favor of the ultra-conservative president Javier Milei from the Internet and networks.
As the owner of Palantir Technologies has expressed in his books, majorities should not intervene in the election of rulers nor should they obstruct the management of power controlled by mega-millionaires who produce advanced technology, such as Artificial Intelligence and massive data analysis. They do today what the conservatives of the Pampa Húmeda did in the Infamous Decade.
Silicon Valley disputes Washington for real power. Trump is the servant of today’s plutocrats. The weapon against Western governments that try to apply regulations to technology. As the emerging technologies and national security expert Adam Segal explained in a lucid essay about Trump’s return to the Oval Office, the objective is to prevent the European Union from “regulating technology, especially the Digital Markets law, the Digital Services law and the Artificial Intelligence law.”
The vice president said it in full at the AI Action Summit that took place in Paris last year. Vance denied that it is a threat to humanity, but defended it by saying that it is “a tool of American economic and military power.”
Strictly speaking, this tool is not for the power of the United States, but for the neo-reactionary elite that tries to retain power in the United States.
The first encyclical from the first North American Pope in history warns about AI, placing Leo XIV in the first line of resistance against those who are becoming the new owners of power in the West.
What Rerom Novarum entailed at the end of the 19th century entails Magnifica Humanitas today. Leo XIII confronted with the Social Doctrine of the Church the negative effects of mass production that divided the Western world between elites of property owners and masses of proletarians.
The current equivalent of large-scale production with steam engines and assembly lines are AI, massive data analysis, control of social networks and electoral manipulation through algorithms.
The techno-libertarian extreme right that advances against liberal democracy is the current Western equivalent of what the fraudulent conservatism of the “Infamous Decade” was on a national scale.
Image gallery
