Stories We Want to Believe

I cannot say that I was initially suspicious of the story that accompanied this picture.  I was more interested.  I first saw a Facebook link to this story which is posted at countercurrentnews.com and wanted to know more about it.  It is both more and less than it seems.

I started following the story of the Chibok school girls at the same time as the rest of the world: a month after the kidnapping took place in mid-April.  I may have followed it more closely because I was a high school principal.  I may have followed it more closely because I was aghast at the way people with disparate interests managed to shoehorn the details into their own narratives.  I wrote in this space about the parallel callousness of Boko Haram, Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan and President Jonathan's political opponents, all of whom seemed much less concerned with the girls themselves than with the political points they could score over the story.

Throughout the months, including October when the Nigerian Army bizarrely announced that the girls would be released the next day, I have been looking at accounts in the Nigerian press.  The parents of the girls have not moved on, the women who protest daily in Lagos have not moved on, and so -- unlike the rest of the world media -- the Nigerian press has not moved on.  Boko Haram has continued with horrifying attacks on education, including suicide bombings of a teacher's college in Kontagora and a school assembly in Potiskum.

That's why any sign of successful resistance caught my attention, especially one with a photo like this, with its overtones of female empowerment, reversing the lack of power implied by the kidnapping of several hundred teenaged girls.  So, as I say, I read the story closely for more details, not because I didn't want to believe it.

My first problem was that I couldn't get more information.  The story opens with the phrase "Several Nigerian media outlets have been reporting."  But there was no hyperlink and no citation.  I wanted to see what they have been reporting, but I couldn't.  It was only later that I noticed the weird claims, beginning in the third sentence, about "talismans" that had successfully disarmed the Boko Haram gang members.

I Googled the story, but found the usual verbatim repetitions on other websites.  I was initially completely unable to find any reference to it in the Nigerian press, which was strange considering that these US and British websites supposedly got it from "reports" on "Nigerian media outlets."

Then it occurred to me to do a reverse image search on the picture.  I cannot claim to have been fully conscious that the photo was driving the story.  It was more of an intuitive move.  But things immediately got stranger.  First, I found the late December stories I had already seen, reporting the women's successful armed resistance to Boko Haram as "recent."  Then, I started finding references to this same resistance -- with the same photo -- back in mid-May, at the time of the #BringBackOurGirls campaign on Twitter.  Those stories tended to have much more on magic spells and amulets.  Some had other agendas.  I read one story which claimed that Michelle Obama had initiated (instead of participated in) the hashtag campaign.  That writer argued that the Obamas want to take away our guns and replace them with hashtags.  He implied that leaving us at the mercy of Boko Haram and the US government is much the same.

I finally found the blog of Farooq Kperogi, an assistant professor of journalism in Atlanta who wrote at length about the scandalously bad reporting on the Chibok girls, especially in the Nigerian tabloids.  You can find that article here.  Professor Kperogi identifies the source of the photo as a Times of London article on militias in Mali resisting Tuareg rebels. Yes, that is 1600 road miles (and a 36-hour drive) away.  Yes, there is an entire third country between Nigeria and Mali.  So I sympathize with Professor Kperogi about the sorry state of tabloid journalism in Nigeria.  But I also have to wonder about "news" websites like Counter Current with prominently posted disclaimers that they are "not responsible for inaccuracies" and that neither owners, management, editors or writers are responsible for errors.

But  I am not that interested in fake news or its purveyors.  I am much more interested in our propensity for accepting it, especially when it fits with what we want to believe.  It is all too easy for me to shake my head in dismay at the credulous ways of people who disagree with me, and at how they accept patently ridiculous stories as gospel.  Every one of you can point to multiple examples.  But how are we to discover our own credulity?  That may be the first step to helping other people overcome theirs.

Extrajudicial Murder

I have been reading a book called Grassroots Garveyism about the Black nationalist movement in the American South in the second and third decades of the twentieth century.  This morning I was reading about the Elaine, Arkansas massacres of October 1919.  Black sharecroppers had been cheated of their payments for the cotton crop as a matter of routine, but that year the (shorted) payments were also held up for months while the white minority "planters" spent time "calculating" what they wanted to owe.  The Black farmers met at a local church to discuss their options, including the possibilities of forming a union or filing a class action lawsuit.

In the Arkansas Delta, and throughout the Black Belt South, whites were very conscious of how few they were compared to African Americans and they routinely employed terror along with voter suppression to maintain their power. Phillips County is still 63% African American today.  In 1919 it was 74%.  Understanding the dangers, the people meeting in the church set out armed pickets.  A white deputy sheriff and a railroad detective found the meeting and engaged in a shootout with the guards.

What followed was a days-long massacre.  A "sheriff's posse", the Arkansas National Guard, and US Army regulars killed at least 200 (and possibly four times that number) Black people in the county.  The soldiers arrested another 285.  Sham trials, only minutes long, sentenced more people to death and to long prison sentences.

We have recently seen how the St. Louis County prosecutor transformed what was supposed to be a grand jury investigation of Michael Brown's murder by a police officer into a trial of Michael Brown for his own murder with the DA acting as Police Officer Wilson's attorney and nobody speaking for Michael Brown.  But we also saw how the press tried Michael Brown in the court of public opinion.  They chose pictures of him that showed him throwing up hand signs.  They aired video of him in an altercation at a convenience store that Officer Wilson could not have known about.  When you hear people make statements like "That boy was no angel," then you know that the campaign of press vilification worked.  It is as if his extrajudicial murder was somehow justified.

We also saw how the press preferred to cover fires in Ferguson to protests against the abuse of process that has allowed Officer Wilson to walk free.  I am quite certain that at least two of those fires were not set by Black residents of Ferguson or by protestors supporting them.  The fire at Michael Brown, Sr's church was clearly set by white supremacists.  One of the auto parts stores was set afire by some kind of uniformed paramilitary far from any protestors, too, as documented by a YouTube video of the fire.  But what is more important is that TV news prefers to cover night time fires and that this is the story they are telling us about the aftermath of the grand jury decision.

This morning I awoke to find that two members of the New Black Panthers were arrested for plotting to murder the DA and to blow up the Gateway Arch.  I don't know whether the charges are true.  What I do know is that Officer Wilson was exonerated for actually murdering Michael Brown.  And I also know that local authorities and their friends in the press are very good at telling white people stories about how scary these Black folks are, and why it is necessary to treat their communities as war zones.

Let's go back to 1919 for a moment.  How did  the press explain these massacres in a rural cotton county?  The headlines in the paper, after days of white mob violence read: "Negroes Plan to Kill All Whites."  That's right.  A discussion about organizing a union or a lawsuit  was transformed by the authorities and the editors into a mass murder plot!  And the actual mass murder -- of hundreds of Black people -- disappeared entirely from the news.

We Americans have short historical memories.  And the use of the word "lynching" has somehow been ruled to be hyperbole, regardless of how aptly it may describe what is going on.  But the parallels are clear.  Michael Brown was lynched by the police.  He was posthumously lynched by the prosecutor and the press.  And it may be that these charges against the New Black Panthers represent a continuation of that lynching.

¡NO a la impunidad — más que nunca!

About twenty years ago I heard Rigoberta Menchú Tum speak in person for the second time.  We had used a Scholastic Update magazine excerpt from the book I, Rigoberta Menchú for quite a few years with our social studies classes at John F. Kennedy High School.  She won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1992. Then, in 1994, I began teaching at Fannie Lou Hamer Freedom High School.  Instead of teaching five 40-minute classes a day, I got to teach two 135-minute classes (plus advisory).  So the following year, when we began a global-studies curriculum on human rights, I had my classes read the entire book instead of just a few selected pages.  She was a kind of hero for me, and she became that for many of my students reading her story.

That second speech I went to was at Synod House, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, on Amsterdam Avenue at 111th Street.  She spoke mainly about the need for an international campaign against impunity, like the impunity with which the Guatemalan government was still attacking indigenous communities and activists for labor and human rights.  I was disappointed with this approach.  To me, at that time, it was sufficiently general in scope that it blurred some important particularities.  To me, it blurred the role of the US government, which had overthrown the elected government of Guatemala in 1953, replacing it with a series of increasingly violent military dictatorships.  It blurred the role of US corporations in financing these violent dictatorships as a means of protecting profits on their plantations.  And it blurred the role of racism against Native Mayan peoples which allowed their treatment as less than human.

That was a long time ago.  I still see the need to clearly identify and denounce imperialism and racism, but I also see the need to identify and denounce all kinds of systems and ideologies that subordinate the lives of individual people to the glittering promises of their "larger" goals.  It is over six months ago that the criminal gang calling itself "Boko Haram" kidnapped hundreds of high school girls in Chibok, Nigeria.  They have since then carried out more kidnappings and killings, including the bombing of a teacher's college in Kontagora.  They have done all this with impunity, in part because the government of President Goodluck Jonathan seems only to be able to imagine these attacks in terms of his own re-election.  He first attacked the reports of the Chibok kidnapping as the work of his political opponents.  Then he attacked the demonstrators demanding the girls' return as agents of his political opponents.  He only belatedly acknowledged that the kidnappings had, in fact, taken place!  Impunity in these cases has been a result of both Boko Haram and the government treating regular people as disposable.

The police murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri this summer was committed with impunity.  The police were surprised initially that the case got traction in social media and then in mass media.  That's why they scrambled around with a series of unsustainable lies, like the story that police officer Darren Wilson had suffered a fractured orbital socket at the hands of Michael Brown.  But the unprecedented grand jury hearing, in which the district attorney submitted mounds of exculpatory evidence (including Wilson's own testimony) turned the indictment process into a trial of the victim himself, without -- of course -- any cross examination, because the DA was acting as if he were Wilson's attorney, instead of speaking for the dead.  I keep hearing this described as the rule of law.  It may be the rule of a vicious order but the only law demonstrated is that power corrupts.

The "disappearance" of 43 teacher's college students from Ayotzinapa, Mexico was committed with impunity.  Acting on orders from the local mayor, police opened fire on a bus carrying a football team, thinking it was the student teachers, killing three people.  They also fired on the students' bus, killing six and capturing the rest.  The police then turned their captives over to assassins from a narco cartel.

I can write about the Israeli murders of thousands of Gazans, about Massey Energy's murders of dozens of miners, about Russian troops masquerading as "rebels" shooting down a passenger airplane.  I can write about gang rapes by University of Virginia frat boys, or by gang members styling themselves an "Islamic State."  But I have come to believe that disregard for individual humans, along with the ability to act without fear of consequence is -- itself -- a particular kind of crime that we have to identify and denounce.

Efrain Ríos-Montt was "president" of Guatemala in 1982 and 1983.  What he presided over was mass murder, torture, rape and genocide.  He was eventually charged with these crimes, but won a seat in the Guatemalan Congress in 2007, giving him congressional immunity from prosecution.  In May 2013 he was convicted in Guatemalan court of genocide and crimes against humanity and sentenced to seventy years.  In May 2014 that conviction was vacated by the Constitutional Court of Guatemala.  It is a reminder to me that impunity is not just a crime of the vicious sociopaths who commit the murders, rapes and tortures.  Impunity is a crime of the politicians and judges and police who collude to allow these people to walk away as if they had done nothing.  Impunity is a crime of the press that chooses not to report on these murders, rapes and tortures.  And if we know and do nothing, it is a crime of those of us who remain silent.

No Bad Deed Goes Unrewarded

Remember the debate a decade ago about privatizing Social Security?  During the Bush Administration there were REPEATED pushes to transform Social Security into an individual account system in which every working American could decide for themselves how to invest the money that was withheld from their check.  Wall Street was positively drooling over the massive influx of capital for them to take fees on.  One University of Chicago economist estimated the windfall to the brokerage houses at over $900 BILLION.   And that leaves aside their tendency to scam their own customers by advising them to buy securities that the houses themselves are dumping.

More important in some senses was the fact that lots of regular people were looking enviously at the stock market.  The Dow rose from about 10,900 when George Bush was sworn in to 14,600 in the fall of 2007.  Everyday working people wondered why only the rich were benefiting from this boom.  They wanted some, too.  As Rockefeller says to the Hell Hound in my short story "Who Could Have Foreseen It?":  "I sometimes think that the most painful thing in the world is watching other people make money that you think should be yours.”  One of the characteristic features of a market bubble is investing by people who have no experience in the market.  It is a sign that a crash is imminent.  And, of course, the arrival of these credulous newcomers is also an invitation to theft.  But even crafty traders fall victim to enthusiasms.  They convince themselves that there is no downside.  As Fritz exclaims in that same story, "The demand has no ceiling!  The price will never go down.”

Now the Social Security privatization debate had another feature, which was the drumbeat of calamity, the constant repetition of the warning that the system was "broken" (there's that phrase again) and that there would be no money left in ten years.  How interesting that we have stopped hearing all these dire predictions!  But a bigger reason why we stopped hearing about private accounts was what happened in the stock market AFTER October 2007.

As most people still remember, the market lost TWO-THIRDS of its value in 18 months.  Suddenly those private accounts looked a lot less enticing.  Many people who had tied up their supplementary retirement accounts in stocks lost those accounts completely. 

I often wonder, though, how long it will be before everybody forgets about the risks.  Working people may not have their jobs back.  Their income may have fallen.  But the Dow has gained 256% since it bottomed out five years ago.  People have short memories and I am certain that soon everybody will conclude -- again -- that we have entered a period of "permanent prosperity."

We do get occasional reminders of the costs of normalizing risky financial behavior.  The Chicago Tribune has been running a series about how the Chicago school system was induced to fund itself with a shady scheme that is now costing the children and parents $100,000,000.  That is not a typo. ONE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS.

The CEO of Chicago schools ten years ago was our current US Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, a person with NOT ONE MINUTE of teaching experience.  He brought in David Vitale as his Chief Administrative Officer.  Vitale's own teaching experience consisted of chairing the Chicago Board of Trade and running Bank One Corporation's Commercial Banking, Real Estate, Private Banking, Investment Management and Corporate Investments.  (Sarcasm. Poe's Law.)

It was Vitale who came up with the convoluted scheme which I will not detail.  Check out the Tribune's pieces http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/watchdog/cpsbonds/ct-chicago-public-schools-bond-deals-met-20141107-story.html#page=1  Suffice it to say that Vitale was rewarded by being named President of the Chicago Board of Education.  And Arne Duncan is still Secretary of Education.  This, too, is part of the culture of impunity.