Edited by: Jelena Vesić and Vladimir Jerić Vlidi
Contributors: Jonas Staal, Geert Lovink, Hazal Özvarış, Nükhet Sirman and Feyza Akınerdem, Ahmet Ersoy, Raja Shehadeh (interview with Meltem Ahıska and Saygun Gökarıksel), Jelena Vesić, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Vilém Flusser
Red Thread journal, a slow and infrequent publishing platform, presents its new issue investigating the topic of the contemporary right-wing use of media. The texts compiled here address how right wing propaganda and fabrication of truth have overgrown through excessive control in conventional media, diverse impact strategies in social media, appropriation of cultural channels and codes. They concentrate on the ways in which the Covid-19 crisis has been instrumentalized by right-wing regimes to reshape media narratives and suppress dissent. They focus on the erosion of public institutions and the transformation of media into a tool of propaganda and control. Issue 5 emphasizes the urgency of building solidarity and resisting authoritarian cultural politics.
Excerpt from the editorial text:
“It took a global crisis to show us how little of the social state is left – how, alongside science and education, the former public health systems are systematically destroyed. Witnessing all the privatizations and cutoffs for decades we already knew that from before, but the extent of annihilation of the social services becomes brutally visible and unforgivably telling about where we stand now.
★★★
In a world where populist dictatorships came to power through electoral politics, the feeling of uneasiness and anxiety turns into a sense that the world is dislocated, that things no longer mean what they used to mean, that any concepts can now be used to refer to anything and everything. It creates the shared sense that today, to quote from one of the texts from the issue, ‘you can just say anything, create realities’.”
