Carolin Emcke: "There is an exhibitionism of brutality"

BarcelonaCarolin Emcke (Germany, 1967) is a journalist and philosopher. During her career as an international reporter, she has traveled to various conflict zones. In her writings and lectures, she reflects on some of the major challenges facing today's world, such as the rise of authoritarian politics, the violence of war, and the climate crisis. Her latest book, What is true(Arcadia, Spanish edition of ENDEBATE), features two lectures focused on the search for truth in turbulent times, marked above all by the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. ARA spoke with her during her stay in Barcelona to participate in a session at the CCCB.

Wrote Against hate In 2016, he warned of the rise of fanaticism, racism, and a lack of trust in democratic systems. But the situation seems to have worsened. How do you see the world almost ten years later?

— If you write about hate, racism, and anti-democratic movements, you don't want to be right: you want to be wrong. Racism isn't something of the past or something else. The American perspective with a second Trump administration is beyond anything. Even the most cynical on the left didn't expect it. And I would also say that the concentration of absolute power in people like Elon Musk and Donald Trump was inconceivable when I wrote the book. The mechanisms, the structures, the effect on people—all of this is still valid. But, unfortunately, we're still too focused on analyzing the radical right and anti-democratic movements and don't look enough at the people who are affected.

We're seeing electoral victories in many places for xenophobic and far-right forces. How do you think we should respond?

— I agree. I think the response is shock. And this is exactly what they want. For us to be shocked, for us to be afraid. We can't pretend to be witnesses of our own lives. This isn't a movie, it's real. And I think this is what needs to change. I think the mistake was to treat democracy as if it were property. But it's something that happens. Democracy is formed in schools, in the workplace, in football clubs, wherever it is.

In his new book, he writes: "Reflecting on the truth requires doubt, skepticism, and critical questioning to assess whether one's assumptions, reasons, and motives are truly valid." Are citizens losing the capacity for critical thinking at a time when many governments generate more confusion than certainty?

— There's a machine that exists and works to distort our sense of reality, which is the only thing we have in common. And I think that's why people who don't want us to have anything in common must destroy a public sphere we can refer to, that we can trust. It's a permanent destruction of trust, one that started a long time ago. A deliberate destruction of trust in the media system. I'm not saying I like everything the media does, and we should criticize it, but it's still a profession that has criteria and standards for seeking the truth. Maybe they make mistakes, but there's still a professional attempt to maintain these standards of verification and falsification. And the fact that Mark Zuckerberg just announced that he will no longer have a filtering mechanism to check what is fact and what isn't shows that there isn't even any interest in facts, in information, in knowledge. And so I think we're all a bit lost when it comes to finding the right tools to restore trust and then restore interest in the truth.

How to combat?

— Ban TikTok. I'm serious. There's no way to fight this battle with such powerful machines, with algorithms that aren't transparent, with an inherent logic of simplification. Even if all the good journalistic platforms, all the good cultural institutions, or all the good universities join TikTok, I don't think it can be changed... It's a losing battle. These are very powerful actors, whether they're states like Russia, China, and Iran, or very powerful oligarchs. They're interested in money and manipulation.

In one of your articles, you stated that the only certainty is that human rights and democracy are the non-negotiable core of international relations. But this seems to be more challenged than ever, for example with the war in Gaza.

— Gaza is a kind of definitive sign of this, but it's happened before. JD Vance announced it publicly at the Munich security conference. Human rights and democracy have disappeared. We've seen Bolsonaro.

The big change is that they now dare to say it explicitly?

— Yes, I think there's a brazenness, a display of brutality. There are people who enjoy displaying brutality and displaying ignorance of human rights. And I think this is, indeed, the big difference. The state of shock we find ourselves in is a danger. And the other danger is thinking that it's so overwhelming, that they're so powerful, that we can't do anything. Perhaps this is the new normal, but we shouldn't get used to it.

Do we run the risk of future generations being infused with all these dehumanizing and empathy-depriving messages?

— We can think of many historical examples in which social movements managed to change an injustice that was somehow considered normal or impossible to overcome. We may have forgotten how long the civil rights movement took, how long the gay movement took, and how long it took. queer and trans. And perhaps we were naive and thought the future would only bring more freedoms, and now we see that there are fewer and fewer.