GHOST STORY 2 – The Power of the Spirit

THE SUPERNATURAL HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES rendered by SIDNEY PAGET
By Sidney Paget (1860 – 1908) – File published on Camden House (Ignisart.com), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11165352

A series of posts about important people long ago whose names are either forgotten, or were never well-known in the first place. The posts may also deal with little known aspects of the lives of famous people no longer alive.

Ghost Story 1 – https://thekiddca.wordpress.com/2022/11/19/ghost-story-1-houdinis-secret-army-and-the-decline-of-democracy/

Four short profiles of four remarkable ghosts.

Sophie Scholl (1921 – 1943)

“What does my death matter if by our acts thousands are warned and alerted. Among the student body there will certainly be a revolt”. These were the last words spoken by Sophie Scholl shortly before she was beheaded. She was twenty-one when she was murdered by the Nazis. In recent years she has become more well-known in Germany but she is still relatively unknown elsewhere.

Sophie Scholl was born in 1921, the daughter of an ardent Nazi critic. She was raised in the Lutheran Church and later, in her university days, she studied theology and philosophy. As a child she was a member of the Bund Deutscher Madel (League of German Girls) and her brother Hans was a member of the Hitler Youth. As they grew older they both recognized the poison behind the Nazi ideology however and decided to do something to resist and so they gathered around them others who also wrestled with the idea of what an individual could do living under a dictatorship.

BUST OF SOPHIE SCHOLL
By Figurator – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81517435

Hans Scholl and several of his friends formed a resistance group they called The White Rose, a name taken from the novel ‘Die Weiβe Rose’ by B. Traven, a book banned in Nazi Germany. They had received the book from Josef Söhngen, an anti-Nazi bookseller who also gave the group a safe meeting place, and a place to store the pamphlets written and distributed by the group. The pamphlets detailed Hitler’s treatment of the Jews and exposed the Nazi ideology for what it was. They had no power to actively oppose the Nazi regime so in the pamphlet they outlined all the different ways in which Germans could practice passive resistance. Hitler desperately needed the adoration of the people of Germany so a campaign of passive resistance was the first step in eroding that adulation. They used their own money to print thousands of copies of the pamphlets which they distributed around the University of Munich which they attended.

HANS SCHOLL
By stadtarchiv-crailsheim.de, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58900954

Hans’ sister Sophie found a copy of the pamphlet and though Hans wanted to protect Sophie she insisted on joining The White Rose as well, which she did, and because she was female her chances of being investigated by the Nazi SS were considerably smaller. So Sophie helped to write the pamphlets, as well as copying, distributing, and mailing the pamphlets. She also managed the group’s finances. They put together six pamphlets all told and distributed them in other cities as well. To be clear, these were not naive idealistic teenagers just being rebellious. The father of Sophie and Hans was serving time in prison simply for making a remark critical of Hitler to an employee so they knew that the slightest resistance brought serious punishment. The pamphlets they circulated contained philosophical and theological support for an intellectual argument encouraging resistance based on the courses Sophie was taking on Theology and Philosophy.

On February 18, 1943, the members of The White Rose were identified and arrested by the Gestapo. Hans tried to convince authorities that Sophie wasn’t part of the White Rose but Sophie would have none of it. She stood with the others, admitting her actions. Just four days later they were tried, given no opportunity to defend themselves in court, and no recording of the proceedings was allowed. They were quickly found guilty and just a few hours later Sophie Scholl, Hans Scholl and their friend Christoph Probst were executed by guillotine.

Think for a moment how strong religious faith can be. In the book ‘The White Rose: Munich 1942-1943’ written by their sister Inge Scholl, it is pointed out that in the short time between the sentencing and the execution the guards were amazed and impressed at how calm and defiant Sophie, Hans and Christoph were up until their final moments of their very short lives.

British folk singer Reg Meuross released this song, For Sophie, in 2017:

Bantu Steven Biko (1946 – 1977)

From 1948 to the 1990’s South Africa was governed by the minority whites whose oppressive rule implemented a system of black / white separation known as Apartheid. Whites had all the power and lived in prosperity while blacks, though in the majority, lived in poverty. When blacks began to resist the enormous power imbalance the whites brutally suppressed all opposition. On March 21, 1960, for example, government forces opened fire on unarmed peaceful anti-Apartheid protesters in Sharpeville killing sixty-nine people. At least 176 secondary school students were killed (some estimates are much higher) by security forces during the student anti-Apartheid Soweto Uprising in 1976. The struggle for freedom in South Africa has been a long and bloody one.

THE GRAVES OF THE 69 PROTESTERS WHO WERE MURDERED AT SHARPEVILLE
By Andrew Hall – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=56177562

Though Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu are well-known, Bantu Steven Biko may not be as well-known. Born into a poor Xhosa family in South Africa, he was raised in the Anglican faith and though he was critical of organized religion he did believe in God, according to his biographer Linda Wilson, and he took great comfort from the Gospels. He excelled academically and eventually attended the University of Natal as a medical student on a scholarship. While there he co-founded an anti-Apartheid organization called SASO (South African Students’ Organization) whose ideology embraced Black Consciousness, a movement based on the ideas of Marxist political philosopher Frantz Fanon, and the Black Power movement in the United States. The organization’s goals included universal suffrage (blacks were unable to vote in South Africa), a socialist economy, and the psychological empowerment of blacks.

WEEPING. SOWETO GOSPEL CHOIR. AN ANTI-APARTHEID SONG

Biko supported the BCP (Black People’s Convention) and worked within it, focusing on improved healthcare and education for blacks, and fostering black economic self-reliance. The BCP was initiated and funded by a group of Christian churches. Biko came to be viewed by the government as a charismatic subversive for his work and he was banned from future political activities. Despite the ban he continued his activities for which he received anonymous threatening phone calls, and was detained more than once by state security forces.

In 1977 Biko travelled to Cape Town to meet Unity Movement’s leader Neville Alexander, despite the ban requiring him to remain in King Williams Town. On August 18 he was arrested for disobeying the ban and taken into police custody in Port Elizabeth where he was held naked and in shackles. He was interrogated for twenty-two hours during which time he was beaten severely. As a result of the beating he suffered three brain lesions which led to a brain haemhorrage on September 6. A police doctor examined him finding nothing wrong, but two other doctors examined him and found that blood cells had entered his spinal fluid. They said he needed to be sent to a prison hospital in Pretoria immediately. On September 11 he was loaded into the back of a Land Rover, still naked and manacled, and driven 1190 kilometres to Pretoria. He died there the next day, alone in cell 619, having suffered (according to an autopsy) intravasal blood coagulation, acute kidney failure and uremia. He was thirty.

PETER GABRIEL PERFORMING HIS SONG ‘BIKO’

There have been many others who fought to end Apartheid in South Africa – Archie Gumede, Helen Joseph, Oscar Mpetha, Allan Boesak, Ida Mntwana, Walter and Albertina Sisulu, Dorothy Nyembe and many others. These names are well-known in South Africa but not so much elsewhere.

Dietrich Bonhoefer (1906 – 1945)

The life and death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer has been an inspiration to many, including Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., as well as the anti-communist dissidents in Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Bonhoeffer was a man of great intellectual spirituality but he was also well-acquainted by choice with the realities faced by the poor. He wrote about the role of the church in the real world in his theological work The Cost of Disciplineship which is viewed as a modern classic. Bonhoeffer came from an illustrious family which included a neurologist, orchestra conductor, and a chemist who discovered the twin isomers of hydrogen. Bonhoeffer himself completed his studies for his Ph.D. in Theology at the ridiculously young age of twenty-one, graduating summa cum laude. He was a lecturer in systematic theology and a member of the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Church.

Two days after Hitler came to power in 1933 Bonhoeffer delivered a radio address warning his audience against Hitler and his policies and the broadcast was cut-off in mid-sentence. Through rigged elections the Nazification of German churches was achieved despite Bonhoeffer’s out-spoken attempts to stop the process. In 1935 he organized an underground seminary, training priests to oppose the mainstream attempts to amalgamate German Christianity with Nazi Antisemitic policies. The Nazis made opposition to the churches supporting the Nazi regime illegal and in 1937 the Gestapo closed down Bonhoeffer’s illegal seminary and arrested dozens of pastors and students.

DIETRICH BONHOEFFER
By Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1987-074-16 / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5483382

For two years Bonhoeffer continued secretly preaching against the Nazi policies moving from village to village clandestinely, and opening a second underground seminary. His brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi was one of the conspirators in the July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. Bonhoeffer was aware of the plot but was not one of the conspirators himself. He conducted trips to Denmark, Sweden, Germany and Switzerland as part of his work during which he secretly worked for the Abwehr against Nazi Germany including helping Jews escape from Germany. He also sought British support for the German Resistance movement but all requests were ignored.

On April 5, 1943, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested and sent to Tegel Prison where he continued religious outreach with the other prisoners. A sympathetic guard smuggled his letters out of prison, and offered to help him escape but he declined fearing retribution against his family. In 1945 he was moved to Buchenwald concentration camp then onto Flossenburg concentration camp. On April 9, 1945, he was executed by hanging at dawn. He was thirty-nine years old.

BABA YETU (THE LORD’S PRAYER IN SWAHILI). THE MUSIC IS COMPOSED BY CHRISTOPHER TIN SEEN HERE CONDUCTING THE ROYAL PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA WITH THE ANGEL CITY CHORALE, THE PRIMA VOCAL ENSEMBLE, AND LUCIS – 2016

Oscar Romero (1917 – 1980)

Oscar Romero was born in Ciudad Barrios and first entered the seminary in San Miguel at the amazing age of thirteen. After graduation he went on to receive a Licentiate in Theology cum laude in 1941, and after that his doctoral degree in Theology while in Italy. On his way home he ended up in a Cuban internment camp since he had just come from Fascist Italy and World War Two was in full swing, but he eventually made it back to El Salvador.

OSCAR ROMERO, 1978
By Arzobispado de San Salvador; Congregatio de Causis Sanctorum – https://anep.or.cr/media/uploads/fotos/cyclope1_sin_cat/Romeroao4282_big.png, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60457911

He was appointed parish priest in San Miguel where he started an Alcoholics Anonymous group, promoted a series of apostolic groups, assisted in the construction of the San Miguel Cathedral and was appointed rector of the inter-diocesan seminary in San Salvador at which point he collapsed from exhaustion and was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Despite that diagnosis he continued to be active becoming Secretary of the Bishops Conference in El Salvador and director of the archdiocesan newspaper. He was then appointed Bishop of Santiago de Maria and eventually Archbishop of San Salvador.

Everything changed for him with the assassination of his close friend and Liberation Theology activist Rutilo Grande. The government ignored his demand that they investigate Grande’s murder and the press were silent on the matter. Romero began speaking out against poverty, social injustice, and the escalating assassination and torture of dissidents. The military led JRG organized a coup in 1979 setting off a wave of right-wing human rights abuses that led to the Salvadoran Civil War that lasted thirteen years. Romero formally protested in writing to US President Jimmy Carter since the US were supporting the new oppressive government. Nothing came of that.

RUTILIO GRANDE
Public Domain, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16746228

Romero met with Pope John Paul II in an attempt to get the Vatican to denounce the Salvadoran military regime’s death squads and condemn the many Catholic priests in El Salvador who were cooperating with the government. The Pope simply told him to fall in line with the cooperating priests. In a speech in February 1980 Romero talked about the priests and nuns in the minority who worked for the rights of the poor and he went to their defence when they were attacked. These priests and nuns had been threatened, attacked, tortured, expelled from the country, and in some cases murdered. In his weekly sermons broadcast every week he actually listed disappearances, tortures and murders. Listenership figures were massive.

On March 24 Romero celebrated Mass at a church-run hospital specializing in oncology and care for the terminally ill. As he finished speaking and stood away from the lectern a red car stopped in front of the small chapel, a gunman stepped over to the open door and fired at Romero. He died in the chapel of his gunshot wounds. More than 250 000 attended Romero’s funeral, the largest protest in El Salvador;s history. The ceremony was interrupted by exploding smoke bombs and gunfire from neighbouring buildings which some reporters present say came from government security forces. Between thirty and fifty people died during the confusion.

WESTMINSTER ABBEY – LEFT TO RIGHT – MOTHER ELIZABETH OF RUSSIA, REV. MARTIN LUTHER KING JR., ARCHBISHOP OSCAR ROMERO AND DIETRICH BONHOEFFER
By photographer- T.Taylor – Public sculpture, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=877301

Liberation Theology

Liberation Theology combines Christian doctrine with concern for social justice and political power for the oppressed. The poverty and social injustice experienced in Latin America in the 1960’s was among the worst in the world and it was in this environment that Liberation Theology emerged. It was codified and analysed by Gustavo Gutierrez, Leonardo Boff, Juan Luis Segundo and Jon Sobrino. The Peruvian priest Gutierrez wrote the movement’s defining book A Theology of Liberation.

Some theologians interpreted scripture to show that Jesus Christ was a political activist and not always the Prince of Peace. The theologians tied oppressive political regimes to the sin of greed and saw the words of Jesus as a call to revolutionary action. Liberation Theology attempted to build a bottoms-up movement through Christian-based communities, and Liberation theologians risked and gave their lives fighting fascist regimes. For example, the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil is also based on Liberation Theology. Many liberation theologians do the back-breaking, dangerous work to set up food programs to combat malnutrition, improve health conditions in poverty-stricken areas, organize schools to bring education to those who don’t have access to it, and so on.

LANDLESS WORKERS’ MOVEMENT
By Wilson Dias/ABr – Agencia Brasil [1], CC BY 3.0 br, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65498389

Pope Benedict XVI on the other hand was strongly opposed to Liberation Theology, calling it Marxist and therefore evil. The present Pope, Argentinian Pope Francis, was also an opponent of Liberation Theology, according to Roberto Bosca, an Argentinian historian.

GHOST STORY 1 – Houdini’s Secret Army and the Decline of Democracy

ATHENODORUS AND THE GHOST by HENRY JUSTICE FORD – By Henry Justice Ford – http://www.postershowcase.info/i1862812.html, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11733112

A series of posts about important people long ago but whose names are either forgotten, or were never well-known in the first place. The posts may also deal with little known aspects of the lives of famous people no longer alive.

I start with someone whose mind set is essential to a well-balanced successful democracy, someone we could use these days. Harry Houdini was lowered upside-down handcuffed and straitjacketed into a cramped milk can full of liquid behind a screen and emerged moments later unharmed and barely out of breath. He escaped a straitjacket while suspended upside down many metres above the Hudson River on a cold and windy day. He escaped from a coffin buried alive. He escaped from packing cases nailed shut onstage. Though handcuffed and padlocked inside jail cells, with handcuffs supplied by police departments or audience members, he escaped from all restraints in minutes. In one case he got out of his cuffs, padlocks and jail cell in a room full of other prisoners, and before he emerged from the room he had released all the prisoners from their cells as well and had them all trade places, all this in just minutes. He taught himself to be ambidextrous, he could untie knots with his toes, and he could swallow and later regurgitate a key during an escape so that before the escape a search would seem to reveal that he had no keys hidden on his person. At other times he would be searched before a dangerous escape, found to be hiding no keys, kiss his wife Bess good-bye, receive the key she secretly passed over to him during the kiss, and use it to help him escape.

However, when Houdini’s dear mother died he did something more difficult than escaping from a milk can or a jail cell. He resisted the enormous temptation to assume there was an afterlife. Instead he set out to discover, through empirical evidence and scientific methods, whether or not there was such a thing as an afterlife. After all, the world was full of people telling him that, for a fee, they could reunite him with his mother, who he was very close to, using spiritualism. If people embraced Houdini’s approach and rejected wishful thinking and rationalizations, we wouldn’t be in the political mess we are presently experiencing.

HOUDINI PERFORMING THE CHINESE WATER TORTURE CELL ROUTINE

By https://lccn.loc.gov/96518829, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=107630730

Houdini was very close to his mother and when she died he was devastated, though she died of natural causes and at an advanced age. It would have been easy and understandable if he had simply accepted the existence of an afterlife. It would have brought him great emotional joy, and for the rest of his own life he could have looked forward to his own afterlife existence in which he would meet his mother again. However, using the impressive knowledge of the art of deception which he had acquired as a stage magician, Houdini soon realized that many of the people who said that they could reconnect Houdini with his dear departed mother were in fact charlatans.

HARRY HOUDINI 1899

By McManus-Young Collection – Library of Congress, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2342684

Houdini discovered that there were many grifters in the spiritualist movement who were quite happy to trick grieving people, often people with few financial resources, getting them to pay hard-earned money to speak with imposters who they thought were their recently deceased loved ones. The fake spiritualists would take advantage of people who wanted to believe that their loved one was still around somehow, they wanted to believe that there was an afterlife waiting for them as well. Try as he might though, Houdini was never able to find evidence of an afterlife because he insisted on hard evidence and he used science and logic. Furthermore, he soon began to use his astute powers of observation to identify the frauds and bring criminal charges against many of them. Harry Houdini died a century ago but his name is still familiar and in order to carry out his ideas Houdini trained several undercover operatives whose assistance was invaluable but the names of the members of his secret army are largely forgotten. They are the ghosts who once upon a time put an end to many a predator’s operations.

Houdini championed critical thinking and the importance of evidence, and went about exposing people who opposed his efforts, people making a fortune from their deception, people who loved the fact that their victims viewed them as possessing great and mysterious magical power. There is convincing evidence that Houdini may have paid with his life for exposing fake spiritualists (see ‘The Secret Life of Houdini’ by William Kalush and Larry Sloman, pages 520-521). His insistence on hard evidence is essential to a democratic open society but too often these days objective reality is ignored or suppressed in the service of supporting beloved leaders yielding authoritarian power.

Erik Weis (1874 – 1926) was born in Hungary. He became enthralled with the illusions created by Robert Houdin so when he became an illusionist himself he took the name Harry Houdini. Houdini was a master magician and showman, a film actor and aviator, and a secret agent working for the United States, the latter role remaining a secret during his lifetime. But he was most famous for his elaborate and dangerous escapes. He was able to perform them because of his iron discipline, mental toughness, physical stamina and ingenuity.

ROBERT HOUDIN

By Unknown author – English Wikipedia, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1004472

As an illusionist he realized how magical some of his illusions appeared to be to those unaware of the tricks being used, and he was always careful to announce that his acts involved trickery and that there was nothing supernatural about them. A friends of his, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, was convinced that Houdini could actually perform real magic. But then Doyle believed in spiritualism likely because his son died in World War Two and he desperately wanted to believe that he could still communicate with his son. Doyle was also married to a spiritualist (who Houdini discovered was a fraud). Ironically, at one point Doyle even has his character Sherlock Holmes specifically reject the existence of a spirit world.

THE COTTINGLEY FAIRIES WHICH DOYLE WAS TAKEN IN BY.

By Elsie Wright (1901–1988) – Scan of photographs, PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18803979

Houdini observed that a good strategy for identifying charlatans was to have operatives pose as grieving widows so many of his investigators were women. His chief investigator was Rose Mackenberg who attended hundreds of seances over a period of two years, filing detailed reports on each operation. On six different occasions she was also officially ordained by charlatans (for a fee) as a spiritualistic reverend with the legal authority to perform marriages, baptize infants and bury the dead.

On one occasion Mackenberg posed as a rich grieving widow seeking spiritual enlightenment from a medium named Henry Brooks. When she arrived she was greeted by his wife who conversed with her at some length first telling her that Brooks was momentarily busy. Before Mackenberg was able to consult with Brooks himself, Brooks held a brief private conversation with his wife, apparently for her to quickly pass on any personal information she had gleaned from her conversation with Mackenberg. Mackenberg had told Brooks’ wife that she had a five year old daughter recently deceased, and that her grandmother, also deceased, was foreign and spoke Arabic. This was all a complete fiction. When Brooks finally consulted with Mackenberg he pretended to go into a trance and then told her that he had made contact with her husband and that he could also see the spirit of a young child of about five. The spirits spoke to her through Brooks, or so he said. Brooks also mentioned the presence of someone else, someone who spoke a foreign tongue that sounded to him like Arabic. He also told her that her husband thought she would make a great spiritualist herself. This led to Brooks coming out of the trance and selling Mackenberg official certification to act as a spiritual leader (she made sure he gave her a receipt for the payment), but he told her that before she could do that she had to go through a process of purification. Brooks again seemed to enter a heightened state and he proceeded to sexually abuse her, seemingly innocently, before she was able to resist. Mackenberg was also the target of similar sexual advances on the part of other mediums during her investigations.

ROSE MACKENBERG IN DISGUISE

By Helen Welshimer – Made a Frump out of Herself to Expose the Fake Mediums. Anniston Star. 14 August, 1937., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58135271

Houdini went after a particularly elusive charlatan named Pierre Keeler and after six years without success he sent one of his best operatives, his own niece, Julia Sawyer, to upstate New York where Keeler was a medium in residence. Once there, in consultation with Keeler, for a fee of three dollars ($47.79 in today’s money), Sawyer was given messages from a non-existent dead sister, and from the spirits of two relatives who were actually still alive. She then told Keeler that her wealthy Uncle Bill was waiting for her at the railway station so Keeler convinced her to let him come along and meet Uncle Bill. They arrived to find Uncle Bill, with long white beard sitting in a wheelchair accompanied by a nurse. Of course you have probably guessed what happened next. Uncle Bill dramatically threw off his beard, leaped from his wheelchair revealing his true identity (it was Houdini) shouting that he had finally got Keeler and then introduced Keeler to the New York reporter who had been posing as his nurse.

Houdini also worked with Robert H. Gysel who had been a scam artist himself but who felt guilty about his past and ended up helping Houdini as a way to redeem himself, using the knowledge and skills he had used to fool others. Houdini and Gysel shared a love of scaling high buildings without equipment. A man named Clifford Eddy Jr. also assisted Houdini in exposing frauds. Houdini even recruited college students to pose as bait, including one who later became a professional magician himself.

Unfortunately, sometimes in a particular city Houdini would expose a medium as a fraud and the medium would show up a week after Houdini left town and do booming business. This was the case with the fake medium John Slater in Pittsburgh, for example. This baffled Houdini but it tells us one of two things (at least two). Perhaps people have fun suspending disbelief when it comes to entertainment (e.g. horror movies), but it’s only temporary disbelief. More ominously, it may be that far too often people are so desperate to believe in spirits, mediums and the afterlife, that they are quite capable of ignoring airtight evidence to the contrary.

People often reject what they don’t want to face up to. This tendency to go with what feels good instead of acknowledging unpleasant realities could be an ominous sign. People whose lives are getting worse year after year are too often ready to elect someone they think is competent, and is determined to make things better for them even if there is plenty of evidence out there that the person is in fact incompetent, and is determined to do everything he can to help himself and nothing to help the people who voted for him. Then when it comes to downplaying or ignoring an inconvenient pandemic, or desperately using unproven ways to fight the pandemic and in the process making things worse, lots of people may die often unnecessarily. More than a million people died in the United States during the Covid pandemic. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle couldn’t face up to the reality of his son’s premature death and the possibility that his wife was a cheat, and one can understand why. Orwell called it doublethink. I call it the decline of Western democracy, and I’m living next door to one of the more rapid descents. Orwell maintained that doublethink requires considerable mental discipline but recent events make me wonder if that’s the case.

HARRY HOUDINI CIRCA 1907 WITH HIS MOTHER AND WIFE

By http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/cph.3c12416 & https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/haventohome/haven-century.html, CALL NUMBER: McManus-Young Collection <item> [Rare Book RR], REPRODUCTION NUMBER: LC-USZ62-112416 (b&w film copy neg.), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1191993

Can the determination to embrace a false narrative explain, at least in some small part, such catastrophic phenomena as The Slave Trade and The Holocaust? There are many factors at work before major phenomena such as these can be initiated and sustained. However, if the powers that be can convince the populace (through their control of formal education, the media, and popular culture) that dark-skinned individuals are inferior to Caucasians, or that Jewish individuals are morally inferior to Christians, or that females are less intelligent or more emotional or less deserving of equal treatment than men, despite evidence to the contrary, then too many people may well believe the nonsense. Many who will benefit financially or psychologically from the lies will also go along with the propaganda even if it involves self-delusion. If you’re a poor white exploited labourer barely surviving a hard life and angry about it, you will not foment a popular insurrection if you’re focusing your anger and hatred on blacks, Jews and women. Having easy targets you can vent your anger on, and feel superior toward, that might make you feel better temporarily but it won’t lead to changes in the economic structures in place that created the social inequities that made you angry in the first place. That’s why it is in the interest of the powers that be to promote racism, antisemitism and misogyny.

A final thought. How many people have died needlessly because of the Anti-Vax Movement, (a movement by the way that started more than a century ago when vaccines were first developed)? How many millions of people died during the Cultural Revolution in China because people went with their emotions and frustrations rather than their reason? Nikita Khrushchev, leader of Russia during the Cold War, publicly championed what he called “peaceful co-existence” with the capitalist West. When Fidel Castro was the leader of socialist Cuba he is on record attempting to negotiate peacefully with the United States and it was only after he was rebuffed that he turned to the Soviet Union for support. But the powers that be in the United States always need an enemy to keep the populace distracted (remember how McCarthyism destroyed many a promising career?). That’s why the modern Skepticism Movement is so important, why critical thinking needs to be taught in school, and why we could do with another Harry Houdini and his secret army just about now.