Truth and lies

This is the story of how a lie can change the course of history.

In 2004 Spain was governed by Jose Maria Aznar from the People's Party (PP). Some time before the PP government had taken Spain into the Iraq War, and it was considered something extremely unpopular with most of Spaniards, because we didn't believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in the 11-S attack. On March 14th of 2004, General elections to choose the next Spanish government were schedule, and all surveys said that the PP was going to win again.

But everything changed on March 11th of 2004, when there was a terrorist attack in Madrid, in which ten explosions occurred aboard four trains of the same train line. The explosions killed 191 people and wounded 1,800. All the clues pointed to an Al-Qaeda inspired terrorist cell, but the government manipulated the reality in order to blame the Basque separatist organization ETA. They didn't want to assume that the attack could be caused for the Spanish implication in the Iraq War, so they decide to lie during the three previous days to elections, trying to cover up the Islamist implication. However, the bigger the lie, the sooner the liar is spotted. Both of the media, newspapers and TV confront the government and published the real information, and a lot of people protested in the streets all over the country requiring the outright truth.

At last, the PP lost the elections and the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) won. The predominant view among political analysts is that the Aznar administration lost the general elections because of their concealment of the truth about the authors of the attack, rather than because the bombings itself.

Nowadays, the PP still sustain ETA was involved in the attack, and all was a conspiracy to make them lose the elections. They think the more times a lie is repeated, the more believable it becomes, but I think they just look like children who don´t want to lose.


Maybe it is a boring topic, but I wanted to share this with you... Sorry!!