It is said in America – the real America – that you can fool everyone sometimes, and some all the time, but not all of them simultaneously. In any case, the credulity of human beings should not be underestimated. Once, a prestigious BBC investigative program (Panorama) innocently made a report about the large spaghetti harvest that had occurred in the Swiss province of Ticino, in which people were seen picking handfuls of spaghetti from trees and bushes, and its switchboard collapsed with thousands of calls asking how to grow one's own pasta in the garden.
The British believed in 1980 that Big Ben had become digital (today it would be imaginable, but then it seemed like science fiction), and every year from 1698 there were crowds queuing at the Tower of London attending a supposed official invitation to the “washing the lions” ceremony, when there were no lions, much less bathing them; In the 1960s, people realized that with a few simple instructions they could turn their black and white television into a color one; and in 1976 an astronomer who had a radio show persuaded his audience that, due to a strange alignment of Jupiter and Pluto, the Earth would experience an alteration in gravitational forces that would allow it to float in the air.
After the invention of the phonograph in 1877, the New York Graphic took the opportunity to make its readers believe that, for that matter, Thomas Edison had developed a machine that turned garbage into meat and water into wine; The supposed eruption of Mount Edgecumbe, in Alaska, once caused panic, when in reality it was the grace of an individual who chartered a helicopter to deposit seventy old tires in the crater of the volcano, douse them with gasoline and set them on fire; and we already know that it doesn't take much for some to believe they have seen a flying saucer (English billionaire Richard Branson and a friend caused a sensation by landing in the Surrey countryside in a UFO-like balloon).
There have always been jokes, but things are more serious when the one doing the teasing is a government official. As is now the case of the Paraguayan Arnaldo Chamorro, chief of staff in the Ministry of Agriculture, forced to resign after signing an agreement with representatives of the United States of Kailasa, contemplating the establishment of diplomatic relations and his entry into the United Nations and other organizations. international organizations in exchange for their support in irrigation projects.
The problem is that the United States of Kailasa does not exist, it is a fictitious country created by the imagination of the Indian guru Nithyananda Parmasivam, whose whereabouts are unknown and for which there is a search and arrest warrant for several crimes, including sexual abuse. . The fictitious nation, yes, has its own currency (the dollar, of course), passport, flag and central bank, a Bollywood actress as prime minister, one hundred million inhabitants of the Hindu diaspora and is located on an island off the coast of Ecuador.
Poor Chamorro completely believed the film that the supposed representatives of Kailasa sold him, to the point of signing a memorandum of understanding with them and presenting it to his minister. But he was not the only innocent one. Also in Paraguay, the municipal authorities of María Antonia and Karpai, and before that of Newark (New Jersey), and local leaders from the United States and Canada fell into the trap. With a tough face, diplomats from the supposed nation have even managed to participate in meetings of a UN commission in Geneva.
But we should not focus too much on Chamorro, who has also had the dignity to resign. The Russian comedy duo Vovan and Lexus (Vladímir Kuznetsov and Alexei Stolyarov) have managed to deceive and make fools of numerous Western politicians, including Boris Johnson and Justin Trudeau, by posing (with the help of artificial intelligence to change their voice and appearance). aspect) by those who were not – including the environmental activist Greta Thurnberg – and thus record conversations with them on sensitive topics and try to extract comments favorable to the policies of the Kremlin and Vladimir Putin. Lately they have been appearing as representatives of the Ukrainian Government (including Zelensky himself), and in this way they have spoken with a former American ambassador in Moscow. Former British Defense Minister Ben Wallace initially took the bait when they passed his call in a car, but he reacted in time, smelled a singe and hung up on them before revealing military secrets.
Chamorro has been much more naive, he entered with a rag and believed that the United States of Kailasa existed. Long live innocence!
