dual personalities

It’s Friday already! I have done nothing noteworthy this week unless you count work (which I don’t). Desperate to find something to watch last night but too tired to bother looking for long, I settled on Netflix’s Misha and the Wolves, a documentary about a Belgian woman who became famous back in the late 1990s-early 2000s with a false Holocaust narrative. (Apparently, her story became a worldwide sensation. I had never heard of her).

Misha claimed to be Jewish and that her parents had been taken off to a German prison camp during WWII. She was hidden by a Catholic family who didn’t treat her well. In an effort to find her parents, she, a mere child of seven, set off into the woods, where eventually a pack of wolves adopted her. Unlikely, you say? From the start, the story seemed preposterous and it surprised me that anyone would believe it. None of the so-called evidence added up. Nevertheless, she wrote a book, became a celebrity, a movie was made and scandals ensued. It turned out that she was Catholic, not Jewish, and that her father, a member of the resistance, got arrested and betrayed his compatriots under torture. Her parents died at Auschwitz, but her father was remembered as a traitor. The child Misha escaped into a fantasy world and eventually cashed in on her fantasies. The whole sordid affair happened because some people, Misha included, got greedy and others just wanted to believe. A holocaust historian who appeared in the documentary had this to say:  

The danger of believing everything (we are told) puts history, as a historical reality of genuine survivors, at risk. I think that we would like to believe that Misha Defonseca believed that she was a survivor of the Holocaust. I think that we would like to believe that we were not so naïve, that we believed it because she believed it, and we would even like to believe that this narrative has a redemptive purpose, because it made right the wrong of her childhood. I think it’s nonsense. There is no redemptive purpose, we were so naïve, (and) it was all a fabrication.

That about sums it up, but it got me thinking about how easy it is to dupe the public these days, especially with all the new-fangled technology. Sometimes people we see in ads aren’t people at all. They’re computer generated.

That’s all well and fine, you say. It’s only an ad. But what about the news? See this, for examples of how easy it is to manipulate the viewer. People constantly demand that we follow ‘science’ and ‘stick to the facts’ but it’s getting increasingly difficult for us to tell what those are.

Well, I guess we’ll just have to blunder on and do our best, but beware — if the truth is out there, it’s hiding.

*Mark Twain (if I can trust my source)