Hoaxes

 

 

In case you haven’t heard the recent headline-making story about the Israeli bombing of a hospital in Gaza in response to the Hamas terrorist attack has turned out to be a hoax. Yes, a hoax devised by Hamas itself after one of their own rockets went astray and failed to reach Israel. Instead, it hit the hospital parking lot. The hospital is still standing, and we don’t know how many might have been killed. The initial report of 500 deaths that made headlines that prompted demonstrations all over the world was also made up by the terrorists. The death toll is now put as low as 50.

 

Incredibly, my wife and I had an argument the other night with our favorite waitress at our favorite restaurant about the Hamas attack. Over the years this young woman has become almost another daughter to us, and we often chat with her while dining. On this occasion, while waiting to take our order, she overheard us talking about the October 7 massacre of over 1400 civilians. For some reason she interjected and told us to consider that there are two sides to the question and that we should not be quick to render judgment. She pointed out that in America, we really know very little about what is going on over there, and that the Palestinian side is rarely presented in our media. When I replied that over 1400 people were brutally murdered, she told us that we have to put that in the context of years of history in that area. When I asked her if she believed that the Israeli Air Force had bombed the hospital in Gaza, and killed 500 patients, she unequivocally said yes. She could not believe the hospital story was a hoax.

 

We like this young woman so much that we just stopped there and ordered our dinner. The exchange was disturbing but we would never be angry with her or complain. She waited on us with her usual friendliness and vivacity, and we left our usual tip. I might mention that the waitress had no obvious stake in the game. She is neither Jewish nor Palestinian, and I don’t think she ever attended college. She was just deeply committed.

 

Later that night we watched on TV scenes of college students protesting against Israeli oppression and tearing down posters of hostages taken by Hamas terrorists from campus walls. To my surprise these protestors were using almost the exact same words used by our waitress. In just two weeks they, and she, and editors of major media outlets had also been led to downplay the brutal massacre, and fall for the hoax of the Israeli hospital bombing.

 

What is it about left-wingers that makes them so susceptible to hoaxes. Why, for example, did 51 former Federal government officials jointly sign an open letter during the 2020 Presidential campaign claiming that the New York Post article on Hunter Biden’s laptop computer was a product of Russian disinformation? Why do many so-called Progressives still believe that the Trump campaign “colluded” with Russia to steal the 2016 election even though the exhaustive Mueller Report found no evidence, and the Durham Report proved that the “Steele dossier” was not only a hoax, but also that it’s source could be found in the inner circles of Trump’s Democratic political opponents?

 

I suspect that when the evidence of our own two eyes does not comport with our own worldview, our political immune system goes into action to ignore it, or suppress it, or “put it into context.”  On the other hand, when stories fit our worldview, we will blindly accept them without real proof or verification, whether we be members of Congress, newspaper editors, celebrities, college students, or waitresses.  

 

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Indoctrination

                                             

 

Many years ago when I was an Assistant Professor of History at a small college in Connecticut, a colleague shared with me the results of his doctoral dissertation on Communist China. He had been with the American army during the Korean War and had become interested in China to the point of becoming fluent in official Chinese.  On returning to the United States he decided to seek an advanced degree and eventually teach at the college level.  

His dissertation examined the reading habits of various population segments in Communist China. He discovered that during the revolutionary period the ordinary Chinese read periodicals similar to those read by ordinary Americans at the time, magazines like Life, Look, and Readers Digest. The articles in these Chinese magazines often contained stories about life in America that were matter of fact, informative, and non-political. 

However, the magazines and newspapers read by members of the Communist party, a small minority of the total population, were different in both tone and content. Primarily motivated by ideology, these magazines and newspapers contained the most blatant propaganda not only about China but about life in the USA. In other words, the members of the party who ruled every aspect of life in revolutionary China received an almost daily dose of indoctrination and misinformation.

I thought about this the other day while viewing my final DVD sent by Netflix when the company cancelled its DVD service. It was Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will, her famous or infamous documentary of the 1934 Nazi party congress held that year in Nuremberg, Germany. Whatever else she was, Riefenstahl was a great filmmaker as her work on this documentary as well as on Olympia, her documentary of the 1936 Olympic games held that year in Berlin, demonstrates. For 1934 the film's camerawork and editing were way ahead of its time.

Because of its obvious propaganda purpose and in light of the tragic consequences of the Nazi regime, it is difficult to watch Triumph of the Will in its entirety. So, I just skipped around from scene to scene, and then fast forwarded to the end to see Hitler’s farewell address to the over 100,000 faithful assembled in seemingly interminable rows. Today, it is difficult to understand how the not very imposing figure of Adolph Hitler could have become an object of such mass adulation. 

One thing struck me about Hitler’s speech. He looked back over the previous ten years and noted that the Nazi party had started with only seven members, and made a point of emphasizing that now that it had achieved power, it was still only a small minority in Germany. It was, in effect, an exclusive club made up of only the most devoted believers in the cause, the ones who, like the Communists in China, had been completely indoctrinated. 

In fact, leaders of Totalitarian regimes like Nazi Germany, Communist China, and Soviet Russia, before they could censor or eliminate opposing views among the masses, had to censor themselves. They had to become true believers and deceive themselves before they could lie to everyone else. It is well-known that these regimes regularly conducted purges of their own members to eliminate those who seemed to be backsliders or weaklings. Only true believers could be capable of the atrocities committed by these regimes.

It seems to me that the members of Hamas who conducted the bloody slaughter in Israel recently must be true believers. What else can explain their brutality, and their exultation in brutality? Sadly, it seems to me that some college students and professors in America who persist in blaming the victims of this brutality have so indoctrinated themselves that they cannot even believe their own eyes. 

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Columbus Day 2023

 

As Columbus Day morphs into Indigenous Peoples Day in parts of the USA, it is ironic that many of the people calling for the removal of statues of Columbus, or for his elimination from our school history books are people that now call themselves Hispanics.*

 

Who do these people think were on the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria back in 1492? Other than Columbus, they were all from what is now called Spain. Columbus, the leader of the expedition, came from Genoa which is now part of Italy. The Spanish crew, especially the Pinzon brothers who captained the Nina and the Pinta, disliked and distrusted Columbus despite his obvious seamanship and great experience on the high seas. 

 

Once they landed on an island off what Columbus  thought was Asia, he had an extremely difficult time controlling the cruelty and rapacity of his crew in their dealing with the natives they found there. 

 

The indigenous islanders themselves were not much better. Modern feminists might be surprised to discover that native men freely shared their women with the new arrivals. After all, what was a woman for, except work, sex, and childbearing? Indeed, indigenous people from other islands often took women captive to breed them so they could feed on their infants.

 

Anyway, in subsequent voyages thousands of Hispanics, the ancestors of today’s protestors, came to the New World and increased the level of cruelty and brutality. It is true that Columbus, participated in this ill-treatment, especially after he found that the settlers he had left behind on his first voyage had all died in suspicious circumstances. Eventually, Columbus lost control over the situation and on one trip was even arrested by the Spanish governor and sent back to Spain in chains.

 

Despite the efforts of Queen Isabella who insisted that the natives of the islands were her subjects, and therefore could not be slaves, the practice of slavery and colonial brutality grew worse. The story was told long ago  by Bartolomeo del las Casas, an early settler who became a priest, gave up his own slaves, and worked for the rest of his life to protect the natives from the ravages of the colonizers. 

 

The efforts of Las Casas were mirrored a couple of centuries later when Junipero Serra, another Franciscan friar, built a mission system in California in the eighteenth century to protect the  natives from the brutality and rapacity of Hispanic colonizers. Only after the Mexican government shut down the missions in the nineteenth century were the natives thrown to the wolves. For his efforts, the Catholic church has canonized Fr. Serra, but protestors now vandalize and tear down commemorative memorials. 

 

The ancestors of these Hispanic colonizers can still be seen today as they brandish AK 47s, and brutally herd thousands of immigrants from Central American through Mexico to the American border. 

 

Although I am dismayed by the hypocrisy of modern Hispanic protestors, I do not want to single Hispanics out as particularly evil. Slavery has been practiced all over the world by all kinds of people. Before African slaves could be sent to the New World, they had to be captured and chained by black tribal leaders and Moslem slave traders. Only then could European slave traders transport them to the Americas. Even indigenous American Indian tribes owned black slaves. 

 

Where did this evil come from? In the Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers wrote that all men were created equal, but they did not believe that all men wound up equal. They meant that all humans had the same nature. We are all human despite our gender, or the color of our skin. 

 

In the eighteenth century there was a great debate among intellectuals about human nature. A few novel thinkers rejected the time-honored idea that all humans are imperfect; that we could be capable of great things but that there was a flaw in our nature that could lead us to do wrong or evil. Christian theologians called it original sin and believed we had all inherited it from our first parents.

 

The new thinking of the so-called Enlightenment rejected the notion of original sin and claimed that we are all created perfect or good. The evil in the world could then be traced somehow to corrupt social norms or traditions. The cure for evils like slavery would then lie not in perfecting human weakness, but in reforming society and ridding it of its various ills. 

 

Along with this new theory came a new myth, the myth of the “Noble Savage,” that believed that the indigenous peoples of the New World lived in a state of nature where all was happiness, peace, and serenity. Only when Europeans brought their civilization to America with all its social ills, including religion, was the paradise of the noble savage corrupted and destroyed in the same way that the serpent corrupted Adam and Eve in the biblical story.

 

The myth of the noble savage was not based on any real historical evidence. The proponents of the idea despised and ridiculed the primitive peasants of their own countries but praised the primitive indigenous people of the New World whom they had never seen.

 

Nevertheless, the myth of the noble savage has become pervasive in our own time. So, instead of a human being, capable of good and evil like the rest of us, Columbus has become an evil agent of white supremacy, the man who destroyed the pristine paradise of the New World.

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*Note: I do not understand why I, a descendant of immigrants from Italy, am considered "white" and inherently a "white supremacist," while the descendants of immigrants from Spain are not considered "white" and therefore free of any taint of white supremacy.

Feast of St. Francis

Today is the feast fay of St. Francis, or S. Francesco in Italian. Actually, Francesco was not his real name but a nick-name meaning "little Frenchman". His father was a merchant from the Italian city of Assisi but his mother was a French woman from Provence.

For the past three years I have been transcribing and posting passages from the extraordinary travel books of Edward Hutton, an Englishman who early in his life fell in love with Italy and its people. Coincidentally, I just brought the series to an end with a series of posts from "Assisi and Umbria Revisited,' a 1953 remake of his 1907 "Cities of Umbria." 

Hutton began his Umbrian journey at Assisi, and ended it at  Gubbio, a small town visited by Francis. As usual, Hutton related the history of the town, and described its various churches and artworks. He also quoted at length the familiar story of the taming of a ferocious wolf by St. Francis. But below is a less familiar story as well as a tribute to S. Francesco that brings his book to an end.

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Just before I crossed the watershed I came on the hill-top to a mass of building with tower and bell-turret which proved to be the Badia di Vallengegno, but of old was the monastery of San Verecondo, where it is said S. Francis was employed as a scullion after he had been thrown into a ditch full of snow by brigands on his first wandering to Gubbio. He was thus employed, according to Thomas of Celano, for several days, “wearing nothing but a wretched shirt and desired to be filled at least with broth. But when, meeting with no pity there, he could not even get any old clothing, he left the place (not moved by anger but by need) and came to the city of Gubbio, where he got him a small tunic from a former friend of his. But afterwards,” says Thomas, “when the fame of the man of God was spreading everywhere, and his name was noised abroad among the people, the prior of the aforesaid monastery, remembering and realizing how the man of God had been treated, came to him and humbly begged forgiveness for himself, and his monks.” …

 

It is said of S. Francis that death, which is to all men terrible, and hateful, he praised, calling her by name: “Death, my sister, welcome be thou”; and that one of those best-loved brothers saw his soul pass to heaven in the manner of a star, “like to the moon in quantity, and to the sun in clearness”. And however we may think of him, whether he is to us the most beloved saint in all the calendar, or whether he is merely a delightful figure, a little ailing, a little mad from the Middle Age, he went honourably upon the stones, as Voragine reminds us. “He gadryd the wormes out of the ways, by cause they should not be trodden with the feet of them that passed by.” He called the beasts his brethren; and in all that age of passion and war, of immense ambition and brutal hate, he loved us as Christ has done, and was content if he might be an imitation of Him. “He beheld the Sonne, the Mone, and the Starres, and summoned them to the Love of their Maker.”

As we pass up and down the Umbrian ways, it is his figure which goes ever before us.

 

                               Que pacis crescit oliva

                   Regnat amor, concors, gratia, vera fides.*

 

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*           Where the olive tree of peace grows

           Love, concord, grace, and true faith reign.

 

 

Edward Hutton: Assisi and Umbria Revisited, London, 1953. Pp. 221,233-234.