Because fake news is densely masked, yet the history has been reveling time and again its actual face of destruction.
Oscar Wilde once said, “A mask tells us more than a face.”
This will be discussed in this blog to unmask before you the actual face of fake news and subsequent devastation which you may know already but let’s refresh the memory. So, dear readers, get ready and fasten your belts to take a trip down the history.
Fake news is not a new entity. It goes back to first century BC when Octavian (First emperor of ancient Rome) ran a campaign of disinformation (then known as propaganda) against his rival Mark Antony (an adopted son of Julius Caesar) portraying him a drunkard, womanizer, and mere puppet of Egyptian queen Cleopatra VII. He published forged will of Mark Antony claiming that:
“Mark Antony, upon his death, wished to be entombed in the mausoleum of the Ptolemaic pharaohs; and he is the actual son of Julius Caesar; and he want to move the seat of power from Rome to Alexandria which invoked outrage from the Roman people”.
Mark Antony ultimately killed himself in the battle of Actium fought between the fleet of Octavian and combined forces of Mark Antony and the Queen Cleopatra. However, the main reason of Mark Antony suicide was a fake news spread by Cleopatra herself that she has committed suicide. The perception (created deliberately by Octavian) about Mark Antony being a womanizer, a philanderer, and a depraved sexual addict stayed there in the history.
This series of fake news triggered a sequence of events starting with disinformation war using rhetoric, sharp and short slogans pressed on coins in a way that can be considered predecessor of today’s “twitter” culminating in the beginning of the new era for Rome and the end of Roman Empire.
After the invention of the printing press in 1439, large scale publications started appearing without any norms of business and standard. Benjamin Franklin in 18th, century wrote a fake news on Murderous “scalping” of Indians working with King George III to sway public opinion in favor of American Revolution.
In 1475, a fake news story publishes in Trent (a city on the Adige River in Trentino-Alto Adige/Sudtirol in Italy) claimed, that the Jewish community had murdered a two-and-a-half-year-old Christian infant which resulted in the arrest of all Jews in the city, tortured and burned at the stake. Such stories were (known as “Blood Libel”) aimed at accusing Jews of murdering Christian children to use their blood in religious rituals. Such fake news forced Medieval European to believe that Jews poisoned wells and had been responsible for the death of Jesus: an anti-Semitic canard used as an excuse for regular persecutions and formal expulsions of Jews from England, France, Germany, Spain, and Portugal. Pandemics have historically been breeding grounds for fake news and conspiracy theories.
“The fact was that the bubonic plague epidemic in Europe fueled a misbelief among Christians that the Jews were deliberately poisoning wells and rivers with infectious “miasma” (an unpleasant or unhealthy smell or vapors) that led to the mass persecution of Jews from Europe”.
The most famous 19th century, fake news was the slave rebellion that played havoc in USA after serving Governor of Virginia, reported that rebellion has occurred but was effectively put off which was not true. After Governor discovered the falsehood, he ordered slaves found off plantations to be punished, tortured, and made prisoners (Link-1). Though, slavery was made illegal in the United States upon the ratification of the Thirteen Amendment in December 1865, the perception of slavery attached with USA since 1776 is still persisting.
The Blacks in USA remained the worst victim of this slavery and the violent reaction the Americans showed towards the brutal death of George Floyd is nothing but the burden of the history and its backlash.
Another fake news of the 19th century was the “Great Moon Hoax” of 1835 in the form of a series of six articles published by “The Sun” describing the discoveries of life and even civilization on the Moon. The fictionalized articles successfully attracted new subscribers, and the penny paper suffered truly little backlash after admitting that the series had been a hoax (Link-2)
Such stories were intended not to mislead but to entertain readers (at the cost of a very credible person Sir John Herschel: one of the best-known astronomers of that time).
Yellow Journalism of mid 1890 aimed at capturing reader’s attention through focusing on sensation, sports, sex, and scandals just to win the circulation wars. The pioneer of yellow journalism: Josef Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst provoked the United States into Spanish-American war that triggered by USS Maine (United States Navy ship) explosion in 1898 in the Harbor of Havana, Cuba.
The American newspapers involved in yellow journalism claimed that the Spanish were responsible for the ship’s destruction just to boost circulation. The phrases “Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!” became a cry for action.
The explosion of “Maine” accelerated the events leading to the war (Link-3). Was it a falls flag operation by US or a fake news propagated by the newspapers involved in yellow journalism is still not clear, but the “widespread destruction” created through USS Main sinking has never been undone and the devastating memories are being refreshing again with a new entity “The Havana syndrome”.
Early 20th century witnessed the single-most traumatic event: “The holocaust” for the Jewish people. In second half of the 19th century, notions such as Jews are spreading cultural “Marxism” and propagating “Communism” started emerging. Jews and Freemason were accused of establishing an “absolute control over the world” which in their opinion, will be unrestrained by the law and will be enforced through controlling the world’s banking system, the News media, and the entertainment industry. The most famous and influential part of this propaganda was deliberate release of a document “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, first published in Russia in1903 and later translated into multiple languages and disseminated internationally in the early part of the 20th century. According to editors of Encyclopedia Britannica “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” was a fraudulent document that served as a pretext and rationale for antisemitism mainly in the early 20th century. The document purported to be a report of a series of 24-27 meetings held at Basel, Switzerland in 1897 at the time of the first Zionist congress where Jews and Freemasons were said to have made plans to disrupt Christian civilization and erect a world state under their joint rule. Liberalism and Socialism were to be the means of subverting Christendom; If subversion failed, all the capitals of the Europe were to be sabotaged. Historian believed that this document was published to divert the attention of the emerging revolutionary movement away from Russian ruling classes and towards the Jews. Even though the document was plagiarized form of a satirical novel from 1864, the Nazis used it as a central piece of propaganda.
The publication of the document created the biggest and perhaps the malicious deception which resulted in tyrannical world view about Jews and created further hatred for them. It is believed that such anti-Semitic canards were mainly responsible for the worldview of Hitler encompassing hatred for what he believed were the world’s twin evils: Communism and Judaism which he wanted to eradicate both from Germany and the rest of the Europe: the “Holocaust” was the method of choice adopted for that ethnic cleansing.
Began with systematic persecution and segregation of Jews aimed in part at encouraging emigration from Germany to other countries, it went through spontaneous murders and planned massacres to “The Final Solution” the term refers to planned genocide, destruction, and annihilation of Jewish communities (Link-4). Even today, such theories persist because of the perception created during Medieval Europe and early 19th century.
The question is why only the “Jewism” as an ethnic religious group have been the major victim of “fake news”? Why anti-Semitic canards were created and spread that largely formed the “Hitler world view”? (Persisted even today in fragments in Europe and what the world witnessed in “Christchurch” was nothing but the continuation of that “view” apparently now turned against Muslims after partly eliminating Jews from Europe. What would be the result can be anybody guess nevertheless; the biggest lesson of the history is that no one learns any lesson from it.
Why hatred for Jews reached to the extent that holocaust became an option? What was the fear? Was the racial purity at stake? or the motive was attaining sufficient “lebensraum” by eliminating the Jews from Europe for the would-be overpopulated Germany, or the need to conquer Russia and Eastern Europe’s fertile black earth breadbasket for nurturing the German race?
In my view, it was the God gifted ability of the Jews to dominate, control and rule the world. Someone read their mind and got scared but to stop and/or control them, wrong choices were made to the extent of holocaust. This humiliation perhaps forced not only the Jews but the Communist as well (the twin evils that Hitler wanted to eliminate from the world) to accept it as challenge, of what has been happening with them since 14th, century and achieved what the Europe was afraid of at that time. Though, Jews learned through hard way but, is it a coincidence that both communist and the Jews have successfully converted the Perception created since medieval time into todays near Reality? Look around and think if “fake news, anti-Semitic canard, and holocaust” were blessing in disguise? May be, but certainly not for any other or for everyone.
Another popular hoax of the 20th century comprised one of the most notorious anti-German atrocity propaganda stories widely circulated during World War 1. The propaganda described “German Corpse Factory” (Link-5) as a special installation in which German battlefield corpses were rendered down for fat used to manufacture nitroglycerine, candles, lubricants, and even boot dubbin (Link-6)
John Charteris: the British former Chief of Army Intelligence allegedly stated in a speech made after the war that he had invented the story for propaganda purposes, aiming at getting the “Chinese” to join the war against Germany but “Chinese” refused to join the war precisely because of these atrocities.
English-language publication “North China Daily News” presented these allegations as true, citing the references of The “Times” and The “Daily Mail” where these stories initially started appearing. Although, the propaganda later turned out to be based on forgeries, the perception remained there as such after the war, and in the second World War, Joseph Goebbels used the story in order to deny the ongoing massacre of Jews saying it is a “British propaganda as usual”.
Dear readers, don’t be sad. Much more is still left that can describe how various countries have been and are still being affected by the devastation masked by fake news. So, this is not the end and not there any seems to be because:
We all wear masks, and the time comes when we cannot remove them without removing some of our own skin.” André Berthiaume: Canadian writer
Further readings:
Link-1. Slave Conspiracies in Colonial Virginia. History.org. Retrieved June 29, 2017.
Link-2. Borel, Brooke (January 4, 2017). “Fact-Checking Won’t Save US from Fake News”. FiveThirtyEight. Retrieved March 8, 2017).
Link-3. Milestone, U.S. Diplomacy and Yellow Journalism, 1895–1898. Office of the Historian. Retrieved February 19, 2017.
Link-4. www. https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/introduction-to-the- holocaust.
Link-5. Fussell, Paul, 2000. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford University Press US. pp. 116–117. ISBN .
Link-6. Neander, Joachim, The German Corpse Factory. The Master Hoax of British Propaganda in the First World War, Saarland University Press, 2013, pp.79-85.)
