Someone's poisoned my mother!!
My mother is spreading fear and hate.
Now, my mother is in no way a hateful person. She would never knowingly spread fear and hate. But she was poisoned by a nugget of fear and hate subtly wrapped in many layers of what’s Right and tricked into passing it along.
She thought she was just forwarding an email in remembrance of those lost in the Holocaust. And that’s the Right thing to do. Right?
The motivation behind this email according to its original author is:
This week, the UK removed The Holocaust from its school curriculum because it 'offended ' the Muslim population which claims it never occurred. This is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each country is giving into it.
Kinda scary, huh? And it sounds Right. There are lots of Muslims in the UK, Right? And those wimpy Brits are always caving into this kind of stuff, Right?
But it’s not True. According to Snopes.com, this email has been circulating in some form since April 2007. The grain of Truth is that one isolated school did stop teaching about the Holocaust. So, saying “the UK removed The Holocaust from its school curriculum” is like saying “the US removed Evolution from its school curriculum” since some particular school in the rural South decided to stop teaching Darwin. It’s taking a little something True and expanding it into a general lie that just happens to sound like it might be Right. All in the name of spreading fear and hate.
(Extra Credit: Is my argument True or does it just sound Right? How many public schools in the US have actually stopped teaching evolution?)
The email is insidiously effective because of the fundamental principle behind all propaganda: it’s easy to believe what sounds Right; it’s much much harder to determine what’s True.
The email says:
It is now more than 60 years after the Second World War in Europe ended. This e-mail is being sent as a memorial chain, in memory of the, 6 million Jews, 20 million Russians, 10 million Christians and 1,900 Catholic priests who were 'murdered, raped, burned, starved, beat, experimented on and humiliated ' while the German people looked the other way!
It’s certainly Right that we should remember those 1,900 Catholic priests. It’s also True that 50,000 people were imprisoned as homosexuals, 5,000 to 15,000 of whom went to concentration camps.
It’s Right that we should be horrified about Nazi doctors experimenting on people just because they were a group branded inferior. It’s also True that the U.S. Public Health Service did the same thing as recently as 1972. They intentionally misled and withheld treatment to 399 poor black men in Alabama so that they could study the effects of syphilis.
It’s not easy for Americans to hear about the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment because it doesn’t fit what we know to be Right about America, land of the free and home of the brave. Sounds Right is easy. True is hard. But in 1997 President Clinton finally had the courage to tell the Truth:
"The United States government did something that was wrong—deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens..."
This particular email is actually very well crafted. I didn’t really question the UK school thing at first and focused on the anti-Holocaust message as intended. (It has lots of horrific photos to keep your attention.) It took me a while to see it for what it is; to unwrap the layers of Right to clearly see the message of fear and hate at the core. It’s particularly clever to disguise a message of fear about Muslims in a message condemning the Holocaust. It’s also particularly shameful to defile the memory of those victims in order to spread yet another generation of hate.
The end of the email finally delivers the punch line that the rest has set up:
How many years will it be before the attack on the World Trade Center , 'NEVER HAPPENED ' because it offends some Muslim in the U.S. ??????
It’s Right that we should remember the attack on the World Trade Center and condemn those who did it. But is it actually True that U.S. Muslims deny it that it happened? or see it as less than a criminal act of terrorism?
How do you know? Can you tell me the names of some U.S. Muslims who feel one way or the other?
Are you happy to believe this generalized message of fear and hate? To lump all Muslims together as terrorists?
To turn a bit of the author’s language back on itself: This is a frightening portent of the fear that is gripping the world and how easily each [person] is giving into it.
Don’t let yourself be taken in by blanket messages of fear and hate without questioning them.
Have the courage to look beyond what you feel sounds Right to find what is actually True.
