Public opinion and personal opinion
So who were the Vandals, and what on earth did they do to be introduced into modern history in such an abject and mocking way?
Public opinion, a term crystallized in Walter Lippmann's book of the same name (1922), is the collective manifestation of published opinion. Max MacCombs, in the study that gave rise to Agenda Setting, revealed how the media set the agenda for political events, exerting a strong influence on significant segments of society, the so-called "outside world and the images in our minds" referred to by Lippmann.
Of the giant, the one who woke up terribly late, stretched, and went out into the street, it is often said, after he dozed off again, that he was a monster without focus, without a defined agenda, who must have inhaled too much tear gas and gone completely crazy.
None of that; what the giant received was an overdose of appointments, but, being lazy, it waited to react to them all at once. Everything that was written on the posters ended up in newspaper headlines.
However, amidst this civic rave, there were those who held opinions different from those of the media, people who saw that there were other villains: the media itself, the police who kill poor and black people, the government officials who were spared in the demonstrations, the banks, the stores, the capitalist system...
These people didn't want to take a nice picture holding a sign to post on Facebook; they wanted to confront them. The media and their cronies called them vandals and wanted them out of the demonstrations.
The problem is that now it's just them left, the vandals. There's no mistaking them anymore.
These are definitely the ones who have their own opinions, opinions that differ from those published in the mainstream media.
Masked, they are determined to expose the savagery of the civilized world; to this end, they attack banks, public buildings, the police, and the symbols of rampant capitalism.
They're coming out looking bad. The mainstream media and public opinion—that segment of society that forms its opinion based on the opinions of newspaper owners—are condemning these protesters.
The noun "vandal" is used to describe them, to disqualify them. However, "vandal" is the word that best describes them.
They say that a vandal is a rebel without a cause, a troublemaker, a rioter. After all, who were the Vandals and what on earth did they do to be introduced in such an abject and mocking way into modern history, why did they arrive in the media age like this?
Why does the media hate them? Were they the ones who burned down the Library of Alexandria, destroying the memory of the world's knowledge? Were they the ones who decimated the natives of South America? Were they perhaps the ones who set fire to Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple of Solomon?
Were they more furious and insane than the warlike Huns under Attila's command? Did they plunder more than the Spaniards did the Inca empire? Were the Vandals on the African continent, enslaving their fellow men and plundering their riches? Were they perhaps the ones who flayed the backs of black people in Latin America, whipping them night and day until exhaustion led them to death?
No, son of man, quite the contrary.
The Vandals defied imperial power in a brazen, cynical, fearless, insolent, and disorderly manner. The Vandals saved the world from apathy and servitude.
The Vandals slapped kings and spat on emperors. They urinated on luxurious staircases and set fire to alcoves adorned with canopies and silks.
The Vandals entered the imperialist cities without knocking, they arrived breaking down, and they paid the scoundrels back in kind.
Vandalism should be a doctrine, and its followers, heroes of their time. Transforming vandalism into something unthinkable, insane, weak, and morbid is an attempt at distortion and reinterpretation. It is a semantic and historical fraud.
In 455 the Vandals invaded Rome and overthrew the tyrannical and bloodthirsty power of that empire. For two consecutive weeks, they attacked the city, setting fires and terrorizing the imperial terrorists.
The works of art, those Roman fetishes that were the fruits of the looting and pillaging of Jerusalem, Greece, and other places, those appropriations from other peoples dominated by the terror of the Romans, turned to ashes.
That is why today, those who loot banks, storm palaces, and break windows are called Vandals.
They are called that in order to disqualify them as rowdy or unruly people without cause or shame; but they end up qualifying them, because they always attack the same targets, they have a declared enemy.
And they have absolutely no shame against those in power.