10 "It's all the Jews' and the cyclists' fault." This slogan, coined by Joseph Goebbels, propaganda minister of the Third Reich, is still studied today in communication and political science departments as a clear example of a false dichotomy. It is said that Goebbels presented the idea to Hitler in the midst of the frenzy of anti-Semitic targeting and persecution, and that Hitler responded with what many of you might have thought, given the context: "And why the cyclists?"

]]> Not many days ago, a woman posted a very dejected image on social media of one of the many parks Manacor has available for the enjoyment of its citizens. She lamented that, due to the water shortage, the City Council, or whatever entity was responsible, had stopped watering the lawn that gave so much life to an outdoor space so frequented by families with their children, or by owners with their dogs. At that point, one of those furious commentators blurted out: "They've had to stop watering because the Moroccans go to the free fountains to get water and get it stuck." Not a word about the swimming pools, the golf courses, or the hotels.

]]> Since the Rwandan genocide, we've known that the media can play a terrifying role in conveying messages of hate against certain minorities. "Hate radio," as it came to be known, was instrumental in instigating Hutus to go out and slaughter Tutsis with machetes, as was amply demonstrated before the International Criminal Court. This happened in the 1990s, but it goes without saying that social media may have played a similar role in other, reckless events, well into the 21st century, such as in 2017.

]]> One of the most effective political and media strategies is to create a phobic climate, one that assimilates different things and phenomena and lumps them together. They made a series about the Satanist phobia that gripped us in the 1980s and 1990s (Hysteria!, on SkyShowtime), which can serve as a more or less ironic description of what always happens in these cases, now not against Satanists, but against immigrants. It's about, first of all, locating an evil and then blaming it on certain people, seen from an abstract generality. Everything we don't like can be their fault, because in the end, they're just a scapegoat, although there may be cases of crime and violence, which the phobia will multiply and magnify, contributing to turning them into a paradigm that, however, only exists in the convinced mind of someone already filled with hatred or fear.

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