Nowadays, the news and daily reports often seem absurd. One report that is sure to raise eyebrows is that the Bertelsmann Foundation is launching a major project to combat fake news, disinformation and manipulation. Under the slogan "Forum against Fakes - Together for a strong democracy", a "citizens' council" of 120 participants, supposedly representative of all social and educational strata, will address various questions and problems on how to better protect bourgeois democracy from "fake news". For this purpose, the Bertelsmann Stiftung, in cooperation with the Federal Ministry of the Interior, the Mercator Foundation and the Michael Otto Foundation for Sustainability, has set up a website where citizens can submit their suggestions, which will be incorporated into the project's work. In September, the results of this "Citizens' Council" will then be presented to the Federal Ministry of the Interior and the public and recommendations for action will be made on how to tackle fake news and disinformation. According to Federal Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser, these recommendations for action will then become part of the federal government's strategy against fake news.

The absurdity of this project initiative lies in the fact that the aforementioned actors are among the biggest propagandists of fake news, disinformation and manipulation in Germany. The Bertelsmann Foundation, for example, holds a majority stake in the Bertelsmann Group of the same name. The Bertelsmann Group is a media monopoly that operates in over 50 countries and generates a good 20 billion in revenue every year. Bertelsmann's divisions include the RTL and Vox television channels and their European counterparts. Bertelsmann also owns the world's largest (!) publishing house, which in turn owns over 300 publishing houses around the world. Bertelsmann is also represented in the music industry by BMG, which owns the rights to promote artists such as Céline Dion, Jennifer Lopez, Ronan Keating and Britney Spears. The Essen-based Mercator Foundation is the founder of several so-called think tanks in cooperation with other large German monopolies of financial capital such as Volkswagen on topics such as migration, China policy and climate change. Unsurprisingly, behind the Otto Foundation is the eponymous German billionaire Michael Otto with his world-famous mail orderbusiness, which conducts similar activities to the aforementioned foundations.

Leaving aside the Federal Ministry of the Interior for a moment, the founders of this project against "fake news" are therefore directly concerned with research and propaganda institutes of German finance capital that are worth billions. Which use their power and their money to try to research social contradictions and conflicts from their bourgeois perspective and then develop strategies on how their interests, the interests of German imperialism, can be adequately pursued in the future, taking these contradictions and conflicts into account. This work, which runs continuously and long-term in the background, is nothing other than the transformation and indoctrination of society according to the interests of the German bourgeoisie and goes much further than the terms "fake news" or disinformation imply. Rather, it can be summarized with the excellent remarks of Marx in his work "The German Ideology": “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch.”

The connection to the Federal Ministry of the Interior, both in the support of this "anti-fake news" project of finance capital and in the subsequent implementation of the recommendations for action, only serves as an example of how certain sections of the German bourgeoisie act as cue-givers and co-determiners of the policies of the imperialist German state. How such a fight against "fake news" on the part of the bourgeoisie, its media houses and its state could look in concrete terms could already be seen with the subjects of corona and the heating protests, but also with every murder by German police officers or the current policy of censorship and lies against the national resistance struggle of the Palestinians.

The cover picture shows a screenshot of the project website against fake news: https://forum-gegen-fakes.de/de/start