When Fake News Kill: The 6 Most Stubborn (and Dangerous) Legends in History

Gary Larson's interpretation highlights the absurdity of a legend which is, nevertheless, still widely believed today. It is the basic feature of a series of legends which are wrong, stubborn, and often kill people. 

 

A few weeks ago, I was chatting with the local people of a small Tuscan town in the countryside, when it came out that I am a member of the Club of Rome. At that point, one of them asked me, "Can you tell me how much the Club had to backtrack from their wrong predictions?" I was taken aback for a moment, but then I realized that even in a small town in Tuscany people are not immune from global propaganda. That I was asked that question is simply proof of the incredible resilience of some legends, that we may also call "fake news" or "memes".

It is an incredibly fascinating subject: why are people so easily fooled by legends which not only have no basis in facts but are also plainly absurd? Yet, it is commonplace, one of the features of our world. So, let me try to put down a list of memes -- fake news -- which turned out to be extremely resilient, with a lifetime of decades or even centuries, also dangerous legends which often kill people. The list below is not complete, but I chose examples that seemed to me especially fascinating and instructive.


1. Jews Eat Christian Children. This is one of the oldest and most stubborn legends in human history. Its origins go back to the Middle Ages when untold numbers of Jews were accused and often murdered in Europe on the basis of this accusation which, it should go without saying, had no factual basis. From what we can read, it seems that when a child was found dead, maybe drowned, the people of the local village could find no better explanation than imagine that the Jews had killed him or her in a ritual sacrifice. It may well be that the remote origins of the legend go back to when the Romans accused their Carthaginian enemies to sacrifice children to their Gods. That was probably mostly propaganda, but it may have had some elements of truth: most ancient (and even modern) societies occasionally had to recur to infanticide in difficult times and it may be that the Carthaginians had ritualized it. But, here, the legend has expanded to tell of people kidnapping children from other national/ethnic/religious groups in order to kill and eat them -- a much stronger and nastier accusation. The legend is still alive with the Jews as culprits and has been applied to other groups, it was an element of the persecution against witches in Europe and, in recent times, it has been applied to Communists, North Koreans, and more.

2. "Let Them Eat Cake." A sentence said to have been pronounced by Queen Marie Antoinette  (1755-1793) of France when they told her that the people of Paris had no bread to eat. There is no record of the Queen ever having said that and the story seems to go back to a novel by Russeau which appeared in 1765 when Marie Antoinette was 9 years old. It was attributed to her only in 1843 by Alphonse Karr in Les Guêpes. So, not only the Queen never said anything like that, but she never knew -- or even imagined, that such a sentence would be attributed to her. And not even the people who sentenced her to death had heard of that story, either! Today, the story is well entrenched in the popular imagination. Searching for "Let Them Eat Cake" on Google produces more than 6 million results, even though a good fraction of them seem to be doubtful about the truthfulness of the report. Still, this old legend is remarkable for its persistence.

3. Thomas Malthus' prophecies of doom. It is commonly heard that Thomas Malthus (1766-1843) predicted a catastrophic collapse of the human population for some specific date, variously reported. In some cases, it is said that Malthus also argued for depopulation in terms of exterminating or starving entire ethnical groups. In reality, nowhere in his writings Malthus proposed specific dates for a future collapse and not only that: he never predicted a collapse! All he said was that the human population couldn't expand over a certain limit and that it would stay there, kept in check by famines, wars, and epidemics. Besides, Malthus was a man of moral principles and he never ever dreamed of recommending the extermination of anyone. The origins of the legends about Malthus are difficult to pinpoint but may go back to the 1972 book by John Maddox "The Doomsday Syndrome."  If so, it is a remarkably resilient legend that persists after almost half a century. As for the legend that Malthus recommended the extermination of the poor, it may go back to a 1983 book by Joel Mokyr, "Why Ireland Starved," where the author reported a truncated a statement from a letter by Malthus to make it appear that he recommended the extermination of the Irish. Today, many people still believe in Malthus' "wrong predictions" and may get angry if you try to explain to them how things stand.

4. Mata Hari: The Spy. In 1917, Margaretha Gertruida Zelle (1876-1917), renowned dancer known with her stage name of "Mata Hari," was arrested with the accusation of having passed secret information to the Germans and of having caused the death of tens of thousands of French soldiers. She was declared guilty and shot by a firing squad on Oct 15th, 1917. Today, more than a century later, it seems clear that there was no proof whatsoever against her. She was, simply, framed and killed in a classic propaganda operation, what we call today a "psyop." Nevertheless, the stories told about started to be diffused immediately after her execution and they stuck in the popular imagination. The name of Mata Hari soon became synonymous for the concept of "female spy," and "femme fatale," an evil woman who uses her charm in order to betray her country in order to make money or simply for pure evil. A remarkably stubborn legend that starts being debunked only in recent times. 

5. The Wrong Predictions of the Club of Rome. In 1972, a group of researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology published a report commissioned by the Club of Rome titled "The Limits to Growth." The report examined several possible scenarios for the world's economic systems, concluding that if nothing was done to reduce the consumption rate of non-renewable or slowly renewable resources, the world's economy would have collapsed at some moment during the first half of the 21st century. The report was often criticized but what caused its downfall was an article published in 1986 by Ronald Bailey where the author re-proposed a criticism picked up in an older article: picking some dates from a single column of one of the many tables in the book, Bailey claimed the Club expected some important mineral resources to run out on those specific dates. Since, at Bailey's time, several of these dates were already in the past, he claimed that the Club of Rome had made "wrong predictions." But the dates that Bailey had considered had nothing to do with the scenarios of the study, which never predicted that humankind would run out of anything before the late 21st century. The story is told in detail in a post of mine on "Cassandra's Legacy: it was a classic case of propaganda, but the legend of the "wrong predictions of the Club of Rome" went viral and it is still alive and well today. It is remarkable how the origin of such a diffuse legend can be pinpointed exactly to a single article written by a single person: Mr. Bailey deserves some fame for what he could accomplish, too bad it was a lie. 

6. The Climate Change Hoax. This legend says that there is no such thing as "Anthropogenic Global Warming" (AGW). Rather, the whole story is a giant conspiracy created by scientists in order to gain money, power, and prestige, or perhaps to impose a global communist dictatorship. It goes without saying that there is zero evidence of this theory and that the motivations attributes to scientists are iffy, to say the least. The so-called "Climategate scandal," a corpus of publicly diffused private messages among climate scientists, revealed occasional cases that could be seen (maybe) as poor scientific practice, but never of collusion to sway the public. But this meme was hugely successful. It is relatively recent and its origin can be pinpointed with a certain accuracy: it was with the popular movie "The Global Warming Swindle," released in 2007. Google "ngrams" (covering up to 2008) shows that there was no mention of climate science as a scam or a hoax up to 2007. Google Trends shows how the idea that climate science is a scam or a swindle becomes a search term only after 2007. It picks up interest in the news with the "Climategate" story of 2009 and, today, the legend remains alive and well, we can see it as the thread linking the various forms of criticism against climate science (not based on data, the models overestimate warming, water vapor not considered, islands not sinking, etc.). The interesting element of this story is that it was not the work of a single person, as in the case of Ronald Bailey's memetic attack against the Club of Rome. Making a movie requires financial support and breaking into the server that kept the private messages of climatologists must have taken professional hacking work. Then, at least two movies designed to disparage climate activists were released in this period: "No Pressure" (2010) and "Combustible" (2011). Note also that the most popular anti-science climate site, "Watts Up with That" (WUWT) appeared on the Web in 2006, but it became popular only a few years later. All that suggest a concerted and financed effort to undermine climate science and science in general. Of course, this is an interpretation that cannot be proved, but it is clear that immense damage was done against climate science and science in general. The effects of this damage are still to be seen and scientists don't seem to realize that they find themselves in the same position as the French Nobles at the time of the French revolution. Heads may well start rolling in the near future, and not just in a metaphoric sense. Undermining science, one of the bases of our civilization, is destined to have profound consequences on everything.


This is an incomplete list: there is much more that could be said: Gipsies stealing children, chemtrails, abiotic oil, Russian hackers stealing the US elections, and the 9/11 attacks, a true legend factory. Not all these legends killed people, but several did, and some may kill huge numbers of people in the future -- such as the Climate Hoax one. In any case, the common element is always the search for a scapegoat, a culprit to blame for some problem that doesn't have easy solutions. It seems to be a well-ingrained mechanism working in human minds: once it kicks in, paranoia reigns and anyone, individuals, groups, entire societies, can become the target of a violent social revenge mechanism. The future will see plenty of problems, much bigger than those we are facing nowadays. How they will be interpreted and who will be taken as the target for revenge is all to be seen.

The Conspiracy of the Stonecutters: is Climate Science Denial going through a Seneca Cliff?

In a recent article on WUWT, Tim Ball describes climate science as the result of a "cabal" devised by the Club of Rome as a way to promote world socialism. He is confusing the Club of Rome with the sect of the "Stonecutters" of "The Simpsons". They really seem to be running out of serious arguments. 

Sometimes I think about how difficult it must be to be a climate science denier. I have been studying climate science for years and I can tell you that it is tough stuff and that climate scientists are smart people who have been building their competency over decades of work. Climate science deniers can have a good time telling each other their beliefs in their sites frequented only by like-minded people. But only those of them suffering from a near terminal Dunning-Kruger syndrome can think they can debate a true climate scientist on climate science. No way.

So, I can almost sympathize with climate science deniers: they face a nearly impossible task. And one good example of their plight is a recent article by Tim Ball on WUWT. Worth reading because it is, in a way, honest. Ball writes (emphasis mine):

I know from experience that after you explain to an audience what and how the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) deception was achieved the next question is inevitable. What was the motive? Unless you answer that question, people become a little more skeptical but remain, at best, undecided. They can’t and don’t want to believe that scientists would be involved in anything nefarious or even misleading. They can’t believe that so many of them were misled, which is why the 97% consensus claim was so effective.

Truly pathetic, isn't it? Put yourself in the shoes of poor Tim Ball. Imagine that you are trying to explain to a group of adult people that, say, the Tooth Fairy really exists and that she has been kidnapped by Santa Claus who keeps her hidden in a secret igloo near the North Pole. Something like that. Wouldn't that be difficult?

Ball doesn't seem to be touched by the idea that he is dealing with normal people who may well be right in their skepticism. So, he proceeds with a desperate attempt to demonstrate the undemonstrable. He says that, clearly, people are skeptical about the idea that tens of thousands of scientists are all conspiring against the American people but, hey, this is not a "conspiracy", it is a "cabal", defined as "A small group of intriguers, especially one formed for political purposes."

What is the difference between a conspiracy and a cabal? Basically, none, except in the mind of Ball who seems to think that by using the term "cabal" he has dodged the objection that a conspiracy on climate would have to be too large to be kept hidden. He doesn't seem to realize that the problem remains unchanged: how is it possible that so many scientists in the world are involved in the conspiracy...er, cabal, and nobody ever talked about it?

Never mind that, Ball tries to substantiate his idea by digging into the corpus of legends that arose in the 1970s after the publication of "The Limits to Growth", the much maligned 1972 report to the Club of Rome. At that time, the Club was accused of the worst possible things, including to be initiating a conspiracy to take over the world. None of these accusations could ever be substantiated and, clearly, if the Club had really been planning to take over the world, they haven't been very successful in almost 50 years of attempts.

But Ball is undeterred; according to him, the Club of Rome is the culprit of everything. He is confusing the Club with the "Stonecutters" of "The Simpsons". But why would the Club be pushing their cabal? Obvious: they wanted (and they still want) to promote world socialism. Again, if that was the plan, they don't seem to have been very successful. Don't you think it would be easier to convince people that the Tooth Fairy really exists?

If you followed me up to here, I guess that, like me, you don't know whether you should laugh or get angry. Surely, it is such a pathetic story that one is tempted to laugh. But, then, if you think of the kind of disaster we are facing (and the Hurricane Harvey is only one of them), you see that people are suffering and dying because of climate change. And you may well get angry at people like Tim Ball are arguing that nothing should be done because they attribute everything to an obscure cabal devised by a group of white-haired people who collected in a smoke-filled room nearly 50 years ago in order to promote socialism.

Hopefully, a Seneca Cliff in the public opinion on climate will take care of this group of conspiracy theorists.

The most recent (March 2017) Gallup poll results on climate change. This can be seen as a "Seneca Cliff" in reverse. A hard core of unbelievers maintain their position, but the overall opinion is clearly tilting in the direction of thinking that climate change is real and it is a serious problem. 


For a detailed rebuttal of Tim Ball's post, see "The Hot Whopper"

Mini Ice Age in 2030: the new anti-science meme?

Image from Gallup


The past decade has seen some truly clever media tricks being used against climate science. The most successful one was the so-called "Climategate" scandal of 2009. You can see its effects on the Gallup poll, above.

Climategate was a very successful "meme", a term created by Richard Dawkins in analogy with "gene" - a meme is a reproductive unit in the mediaspace. It works like a virus, and, as a virus, it tends to lose its potency when the system develops ways to fight it. So, the climategate meme lost potency in a few years after its introduction and the Gallup curve started going up again.

2012 saw the birth of a new and powerful anti-science meme: the "climate change has stopped" one, created by David Rose with an article in the Daily mail. The effect was less pronounced than that of the Climategate meme, nevertheless the idea of the "pause" went viral and it is probably the origin of the drop/stasis in the Gallup curve from 2013 to 2014.

But also the "pause" meme has lost potency; with 2015 on track to become the hottest year ever recorded, it becomes more and more difficult to maintain that climate change has stopped. So, with the Paris conference on climate approaching, it is probably the right time for a new anti-science meme appearing in the media.

Not surprisingly, the media is all abuzz with the idea of a"mini ice age" that should occur at some moment in the 2030s. Look at the results of a "Google Trends" search. Remarkable, indeed!

This avalanche of Internet hits was triggered by a presentation by Prof. Valentina Zharkova of Northumberland University at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in early July. Even without going into the details (but, if you are interested in a critique of Zharkova's ideas, look at this link) it is clear that we are discussing about something that might happen in two decades from now on the basis of an untested model, not even published in a refereed journal. And that should stop us from doing something against global warming, that's happening right now? Come on......

The question is, rather, whether the "mini ice age" idea will be a good anti-science meme; maybe affecting the results of the Paris conference, in December. Of course, we have to wait and see, but it seems unlikely. The mini ice age meme is weak. Compare it with the "climate change has stopped" meme. One of its powerful features was that David Rose had positioned it as a conspiracy, with scientists in the role of the bad guys trying to hide the truth from the public. And a meme that involves bad guys works almost every time. Then, how many times have you been questioned by someone absolutely sure that climate change had stopped? To answer, you had to explain to him/her (most commonly him) that no, it had not stopped, that it had only slowed down, that the heat had gone into the oceans, etc. It never really worked.

But the "mini ice age" meme has no bad guys to blame, and that makes it weak from the start. And then, picture yourself facing someone who states "they say that in 15 years from now there will be a new ice age". It should be enough to look at him (maybe her) with an appropriately skeptical expression and say, "are you sure?"

It looks like climate denialists are going to have a hard time. And that's exactly what they deserve!

Peak Oil: does the CIA know?

Years ago, at an international conference on peak oil, I met Michael Ruppert, who later became known for his investigations of the 9/11 attacks. He told me that in the audience, that day, there were a few CIA agents whom he personally knew.

I had no way to check Ruppert's statement, but, on the whole, it made sense to me. The CIA, after all, is an "intelligence" agency and their main purpose is to collect data. So, the fact that some CIA people were attending a meeting on peak oil didn't mean that they thought we were dangerous subversives. They were simply doing their job: collecting data about peak oil; a dangerous economic and political problem (or maybe both things..... Who knows?)

Over the years, I have occasionally wondered about what the Central Intelligence Agency may know about peak oil. They surely have lots of data on crude oil, including data that for us - common citizens - are not available. In principle, they could do a much better job than the ragtag group of geologists and physicists forming the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO). The same is true for climate change; another dangerous worldwide problem. And they don't just have knowledge, they have power. So, could they be acting in some way on these problems?

Alas, every time I asked myself this question, I came to the conclusion that - no - there is no such a thing as a hidden force understanding and acting on the global problems of oil depletion and climate change. No matter what mysterious powers we attribute to the CIA - or to any other of the many shady government agencies charged with "intelligence" collection - my impression is that we deal with an oxymoron. There is no trace of intelligence in their actions - at least in the sense of tackling global serious and long term problems.

My impression is that the problem is that we simply don't know how to manage very large organizations, and that all large organizations tend to flounder in a mess of bureaucracy, individual interests, compartimentalization, power games, infighting and more. In the case of the CIA, these problems are compounded by the fact that everything is shrouded in secrecy. Recently, I stumbled on an article which describes the CIA mode of operation; seemingly from first hand experience. I have no way to check whether the person who uses the nickname of "Shellback" is reliable. However, on the whole, his interpretation fits well with my recent experience with the European Parliament, another huge, bureaucratic, and fragmented organization which seems to be unable to process information in any rational way. And that spells big trouble when we deal with global problems such as peak oil and climate change.


Below, you can find Shellback's article from "The Russian Insider" - Let me repeat that I have no way to tell how reliable Shellback's statements are and the fact that I am reproducing this article doesn't mean that I agree with what Shellback says. I am just passing it to readers as as something that may be interesting to understand how large organizations function. 



__________________________________________________________________

From "The Russian Insider"

The Severe, and Maybe Fatal, Handicaps of US Intelligence

Compartmentalisation
Obsession with personalities
Over-impressed by collection techniques
Often re-written to conform to expectations

Shellback

 

During my career in a NATO country’s military establishment I had interactions with the Central Intelligence Agency often and some of the other US agencies occasionally. The characteristics of the CIA, as I saw them, are the subject of this essay. I think they are applicable across most of the forest of US intelligence structures.

The CIA is a very large organisation and the result, bureaucratically speaking, of all these bodies and money is that it is very fragmented. Time and time again our guys would be talking to their guys about some country. Their political section would give us their views of who was in, who was out, power struggles and so on. We would then ask a question about how the economy fitted into this. A pause, well you’ll have to talk to our economy guy, and from the back of the room, blinking in the unaccustomed light, their economy guy would mutter something and then return into his dark burrow. Clearly, the political guys were the stars and economic guys were not: almost an afterthought. But in most countries the economy is the most important driver of politics most of the time; in some countries, it is almost the whole story. How can you possibly separate the two? I will confess, by the way, that we sometimes provoked this response for our amusement.

The politics people were completely obsessed with personalities. I will never forget the leader of their delegation in one of our meetings proudly handing out a piece of paper with the people around the Boss divided into several groups, each with a neat name: his Tribe, Security organisations, the previous Boss's relicts I think they were. Imagine what that had cost the American taxpayer, the hours of discussion as to whether the Minister of Whatever was more of a Tribe than a Relict. I asked the CIA guy what was the point? What had we learned? How did this help us understand or predict? Of course it was all rubbish, the truth was that the Boss had put together a team; it was what that team did that was important, not from where he’d plucked its members. In another case we were all invited to make predictions about the future of a country. The CIA’s entry was a point series – if this guy becomes Boss, then this; if that guy gets in, then that; if somebody else, then something else. As it turned out, the new Boss wasn’t even one of the people on their list. But note their assumption that everything depended on who the new Boss would be. This obsession with personalities seems to be a built-in characteristic of American thinking for some reason and you see it in the political leadership, the media and intelligence all the time. Milosevic is the problem, Saddam Hussein is the problem, Ahmadinejad, Qaddafi, Assad, bin Laden, Putin. If we can only get this guy out, all will be well. No it won’t, all the objective local conditions that carried him to the top will elevate somebody similar. It’s not a person, it’s a whole country. But the Americans never learn, they force the Bad Guy out and they get either total chaos or a new Bad Guy who turns out to be rather like the old Bad Guy.

A third characteristic was illustrated by a presentation from the Defense Intelligence Agency. The author proudly presented a chart of combat missions by a certain country’s air force. The air force was said to be decaying with poorly maintained aircraft and untrained pilots. And yet his data showed numerous sorties in mountains in bad weather and no crashes. The obvious deduction was that the air force was in much better shape than we thought it was. But the author was so impressed with the data itself that this escaped him. And an impressive collection effort it would have been too, one that few intelligence structures could have carried out: that little chart had cost a great deal of money and involved some impressive and expensive technology. But I suspect that they are so often impressed by the collection technology that they forget why they are collecting it.

I mentioned these characteristics to a neighbour who had also had a lot of dealings with US intelligence and security structures. She agreed with my three and added a fourth: you never meet the same people twice. Indeed, I don’t recall ever meeting the same person twice either (and at her level and the nature of what she was doing – common security issues – the constant changing of the team would have had a much greater consequence). I don’t know how many people work in the US intelligence and security megalopolis but it surely is in the hundreds of thousands if not a million or two. A lot of turnover, cross-postings, promotions and so on. So maybe it’s not surprising that the teams do change quite a bit from year to year. Which raises the question, of course, of how much time on the job the average analyst has.

Another fact, emphasised in the book on the Dulles brothers, is that, from the beginning, the CIA combined intelligence with operations. The British warned them against doing this because the operational requirements will come to shape the intelligence and you’ll start confirming what you want to believe. No wonder the CIA has been surprised so many times.

(Speaking of Allan Dulles, I hope the level of knowledge in the CIA is higher today than his. When asked why he was supporting the Pakistan Army he replied that we need the only real fighters in the area to be on our side and we couldn’t do it without the Gurkhas. But the Gurkhas aren’t Pakistani, no, but they are Muslims. Well, they’re not Muslims either; Dulles is reported to have then changed the subject.)

I passed this to a former colleague who has had much more experience with the CIA than I and he added yet another problem: It’s known in the military as SOPO – senior officer present’s opinion. He told me that in numerous private conversations CIA analysts had complained to him that their assessments were frequently sent back to them to be re-written to fit the conclusions the higher-ups had already come to. And that, of course, is fatal because it creates a closed loop in which you only hear what you already believe and worse, think it’s confirmed by the intelligence. I am always amused how much people are impressed by that phrase “confirmed by the intelligence”. If they only knew.

The purpose of intelligence is to minimise surprise and you can’t expect to do that if you compartmentalise things, obsess about personalities, get carried away by the collection mechanics, change your personnel all the time and confirm what you want to believe.

I’m not going to say, by the way, that my group got it all right: in this business 50% is a pretty good score and too many analyses fall back on the “maybe this, maybe that, time will tell” school of waffle. But we did try to look at the whole picture, regarded individuals as important but embedded in a context, didn’t have a lot of collection technology and therefore went more for what is now pompously called OSINT (open source intelligence) and didn’t do operations at all. And, thanks to one former boss who was still setting the style in my time, we were encouraged to stick our necks out. But we – and all other intelligence organisations – do suffer to some degree from SOPO.

Even without the bosses demanding the “correct” answer, getting it right is very difficult – imagine trying to solve a jigsaw puzzle when you don’t know how big it is, what the actual picture is and have a random selection of pieces some of which may be from another puzzle altogether. I used to amuse myself by asking old intelligence guys when in peacetime in the Twentieth Century had the intelligence guys got it right and convinced the politicians (not much point in the first if you can’t do the second). Personally, I can only think of Richard Sorge. Intelligence is much easier in wartime, by the way, because then you have a very good idea of what the picture is and how big the puzzle is.

Which, come to think of it, seems to be another defect of American intelligence – if you convinced that Russia is a permanent enemy, then everything it does will be interpreted either as an openly hostile act or hostile in some cunning, sneaky, back-handed, barely detectable way.

So, in my experience, the US intelligence structure has made a difficult job almost impossible with these self-imposed handicaps.