On September 2, 2015, the body of a Syrian refugee child named Aylan was found on a beach in Turkey in a far-reaching photo.
If you look up the news of this photo on the Internet, especially on the Chinese Internet, you will find that a considerable number of people are coming up with various “evidence” trying to prove that it was posed.
What makes this photo so emotional is that it depicts a real phenomenon in which Syrian children are losing their lives as a result of their flight. This phenomenon is real. You can see this objective fact by standing on this beach late at night, but whether this photo is 100% matched with this fact, there is indeed a lot of room for questioning, such as this It is possible that the child was from Iraq, for example the photographer might have photographed him in a different position. But do these really matter? Perhaps for historians, it is indeed important, but for ordinary people, it may not be so important, at least at this moment there are more important things than questioning.
What is fact, what is real? The truth does not mean that the details of everything are the exact facts. This is like the childhood stories of the children in the mouths of parents, which are somewhat icing on the cake, but this does not deny that these stories are true.
Conversely, a story composed of facts is not necessarily a true story. During the war in Syria, you must find areas where you can eat, sleep, and eat, but if a journalist based in Syria goes to these areas to report on the lives of the people during the war in Syria, it must not be a real report.
In order to be able to spread human stories, some exaggerated elements will always be mixed in more or less. Even if the first party is only an objective statement, it cannot prevent others from making secondary creations in the process of spreading. In the end, the public opinion market will Spontaneously choosing a version that balances authenticity and contagion becomes the story we are familiar with today.
For those who want to sway people’s emotions and tamper with people’s memories, facts are a powerful weapon against all stories. The public cannot seek the real facts by themselves. As long as a few people have the right to investigate the facts, they have the right to provide the only legitimate narrative. They wipe out all the stories they don’t want to see with facts, leaving the world with only the official narratives constructed by the facts they control. In this narrative, there is neither the emotion of the people nor the memory of the people, but a will so powerful that it overwhelms everyone.
This narrative has been used in the past in the refugee crisis in Europe, in the Hong Kong movement, in the US election, and in the Shanghai epidemic. The power of it is that those who are in it will find themselves unable to wrestle with this narrative machine, because what it describes is indeed the truth, the weakness of the story we believe, the weakness of our being as ordinary individuals defect. We cannot allow ourselves, the group we unite, to be objective, fair, and truthful forever, because we are humans, not machines, and those who try to deny us only need to be objective once and be Once fair and realistic, we believe that we can completely deny all the efforts we have achieved.
We live in a chaotic world where Fake News and True Story coexist, and True News and Fake Story coexist. Meng Jiangnu may not have cried the Great Wall, and Moses may not have been able to split the Red Sea. But maybe all the True Story we believe is not the result of fact, but because there are thousands of people in pain, hoping that the Great Wall will collapse, and hope to reach the promised land, so Meng Jiangnu was born, and Moses was born. They may not be facts, but they are far more powerful than facts.
This article is reprinted from: https://blog.joway.io/posts/true-story/
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