The power of lies
Andrew Bolt
16mar05
Why would 500,000 Italians march in support of a propagandist? Because people prefer nice lies to the harsh truth.
THE students were stumped, as students I speak to often are.
How could I accuse so many good people of telling nasty lies?
Didn't I know "everyone" shared the fashionable beliefs of these good folk - whether about the "stolen generations", man-made global warming or the wicked war in Iraq?
"Why would these people lie?" protested one boy.
Forgive me, but I didn't want to seem even meaner by telling these teenage idealists their "everyone" prefers nice fibs to nasty truths, particularly now.
So, yes, I wimped it.
Bad me. After all, it being a fine school, I could have tried to impress these students by quoting philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer: "There is no opinion, however absurd, which men will not readily embrace as soon as they can be convinced it is generally adopted."
I could have said Seneca taught that man preferred belief to reason. Or I could have cut the cute quotes and just told the wild truth about Giuliana Sgrena.
In fact, gather around children, and I'll do it now . . .
Sgrena is a 58-year-old Italian journalist as passionate as you are, in all the good causes you love. She co-founded Italy's "peace" movement, and, like you, was against the war in Iraq.
She even works for the communist newspaper Il Manifesto, and was sent to Iraq to report on the crimes she was sure the United States was committing. So how good is she, guys?
Dutch war correspondent Harald Doornbos was on the plane with her and recalls her insisting, "The Americans are the biggest enemies of mankind".
When he warned her of Iraq's notorious kidnap gangs, she snorted: "Oh no. That won't happen. We are siding with the oppressed Iraqi people. No Iraqi would kidnap us." True story.
Luckily, when Sgrena got to Iraq, she met - or said she met - Iraqis who told her all she wanted to hear.
You can read some of her "reports" on the Il Manifesto website - claims that the US used napalm in Iraq, and some corpses were so charred "that some thought of nuclear bombs". There are also gothic tales of US soldiers raping women and torturing children, and Sgrena even finds a woman who sighs: "All Saddam taught us was how to work hard."
Il Manifesto actually printed this stuff and "everyone" may well have believed it - after all, why would these people lie?
But the strain of producing such tosh finally broke Sgrena on February 4, when she badgered refugees from Fallujah for more horror stories about US atrocities.
Who knows what these Iraqis made of her lust for war porn, given they had seen US troops in fact root out a terrorist nest from their city, and then protect them as they voted for democracy in January's marvellous election.
Whatever, as Sgrena complained last week, "the refugees . . . would not listen to me. I had in front of me the accurate confirmation of the analysis of what the Iraqi society had become as a result of the war and they would throw their truth in my face". Fancy - Iraqis telling her, her, she didn't get it. Naughty natives.
But minutes later Sgrena was saved. Her car was rammed and she was abducted. For two weeks no one heard from her, until her captors released a video of her begging Italy to pull its 3000 troops from Iraq.
"The situation here is intolerable; the children are dying, people are dying of hunger in the streets, women are raped," she wailed dramatically, as if dictating one of her "reports". "The troops must be withdrawn. My life depends on it."
Why would these people lie? The video electrified Italy. Whipped up by Il Manifesto, up to 500,000 people marched in the streets, demanding Sgrena be freed and Italy's troops withdrawn. Even Britain's BBC helped by publishing a hagiography: "Giuliana Sgrena: voice of weakest."
The Italian Government did what we imagine Italians do and panicked, sending over a secret agent, Nicola Calipari, to negotiate Sgrena's release, bought with, Italian papers report, a $7.5 million ransom.
Presto. On March 5 Sgrena was handed over to Calipari, who raced her towards Baghdad airport - without warning the US military.
Tragically, a US patrol, spooked by a car speeding towards them like a suicide bomb, signalled it to stop and then fired when it didn't - killing Calipari and wounding Sgrena.
The Americans claimed it was what it seemed - a mistake. But Sgrena was having none of that.
She claimed her car was in fact driving slowly when US "tanks started to strike against us . . . without any light or signal" of warning, and "fired between 300 and 400 bullets" - so many that "I found handfuls of bullets on the back seat".
It was no accident, either: "Everyone knows that the Americans do not like negotiations to free hostages, and because of this I don't see why I should exclude the possibility of me having been the target."
In fact, her captors had warned her "the Americans don't want you to go back".
Naturally, "everyone" believed Sgrena. Why would these people lie? Il Manifesto claimed the US had "assassinated her liberator", Calipari. Leftist politicians demanded Italy get out of Iraq. The Government insisted on explanations from the US. Hundreds of thousands of mourners turned out for Calipari's state funeral. There were more rallies against the war and the US.
But a few questions began to be asked. Why would the US want a crazy Italian propagandist dead? Why, if it wanted to kill her, did it fail? Why did her car show not 300 bullet holes, but just two? Why had Sgrena admitted her car was actually going so fast that the driver was "almost losing control", and that the Americans indeed "shone a flashlight at the car" before firing?
And how genuine had been her terror on that video, or her danger in captivity, given she now said her kidnappers were not killers, and "I was never treated badly" - indeed, "one in particular showed much attention to my desires"?
Sgrena even boasted of teaching the kidnappers tactics: "I insisted on the fact that they could not ask the Italian Government to withdraw the troops. Their political go-between could not be the government but the Italian people, who were and are against the war."
Do you see, children, how "everyone" can quite easily come to believe in lies told by "good" people? How facts barely matter?
Actually, for Iraqis one fact in this farce will matter.
On the day of Sgrena's release, Iraqi TV broadcast the interrogation by police of several local and foreign terrorists who had been hired to slaughter nine Iraqi policemen for $250 a head.
Officer: Were you doing these killings for jihad?
Criminal: Yes, sir.
Officer: For jihad or for money?
Criminal: For both, sir.
Officer: How could jihad be paid for!
But we know now how this jihad can be paid for, don't we? With the ransom paid by a feckless country for the release of a reckless "journalist" who will say any evil thing in her "good" cause.
Isn't it a shame, guys, that your "everyone" isn't a little wiser to such things?
bolta@heraldsun.com.au
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