Untruth and Consequences

Just a month and a half into the Great War she received news even more devastating.

At the office in Dumfries where she worked as a “clerkess,” Kate found herself with a pair of letters. The first had the signature of her older sister, about whom the last Kate knew was that she was working as a nurse in the English town of Huddersfield. The letter read: “Dear Kate, This is to say good-bye. Have not long to live. Hospital has been set on fire. Germans cruel. .  .  . My right breast has been taken away. .  .  . Good-bye. Grace.”

The first letter was explained by the other, from one of Grace’s fellow nurses, a Miss Mullard. “I was with your sister when she died,” the letter said, explaining they had been together at a field hospital set up near the front at Vilvorde, in Belgium. The Huns attacked and burned the hospital, according to Nurse Mullard, killing over a thousand wounded men, including through beheadings. As for the nurses, the ones the Germans captured were grotesquely violated before being murdered. Grace was among them: “She endured great agony,” the letter went on, detailing that counterattacking British Tommies had “caught two German soldiers .  .  . cutting off her left breast, her right one having been already cut off.”

Kate shared the letters with the press. The story caused a sensation—covered not only in local Scottish papers such as the Dumfries Standard, but in London papers including the Pall Mall Gazette, the Globe, the Westminster Gazette, the Evening Standard, and everywhere in-between. The headline in the London Star was typical: “A NURSE’S TRAGEDY: Dumfries Girl the Victim of Shocking Barbarity.”

With such widespread reporting, it didn’t take long for Grace Hume to learn of her own grisly death. She saw placards up at the newsstand advertising the big headline “Terrible Murder of Huddersfield Nurse.” She bought the local Post and, astonished by what she read, wired her father: “Reports untrue. Safe in Huddersfield.”

Kate, it turned out, had made the whole thing up.

Jump forward a century and the case of the Mutilated Nurse has a newfound relevance. For we are in a new age of hoaxes, with frequent tales of Trump-inspired atrocities that have unraveled, as did so many of the stories of atrocities committed in WWI. Understanding the propaganda of the Great War may help us understand the motives and methods of the modern propaganda in what we might call the Hate War.

The Hate War got going in earnest in the immediate aftermath of the election with a raft of reports of malicious Trumpkins taunting and attacking young Muslim women, targeting them for wearing traditional religious head-coverings.

One of the most distressing of the hijab stories was that of Yasmin Seweid, who told police she was assaulted on the New York subway by marauding Trump supporters while fellow passengers did nothing, said nothing. The perpetrators were described as three drunk white men talking about Trump. “They were surrounding me from behind and they were like, ‘Oh look, it’s an f-ing terrorist,’ ” the 18-year-old Baruch College student told a CBSNewYork reporter. They pulled at her bag, breaking the strap. She said she begged to be left alone, only to be met with a torrent of abuse: “They kept saying ‘you don’t belong here, get out of this country, go back to your country.’ ” The men grabbed at her hijab, and her fellow straphangers, she suggested, were, in their cowardice, complicit: “Everyone was looking, no one said a thing, everyone just looked away.”

The police didn’t look away. They combed through the subway’s security video looking for the men Seweid had described. They found none. Though the case was hugely publicized, no witnesses were found. Then, with the police looking to interview her again, Seweid went AWOL. When she finally turned up, “Suspicion,” the New York Daily News reported, “went through the roof.” Facing continued questioning by skeptical detectives, the young woman admitted she had been lying all along. The whole thing was a fraud. She was arraigned, charged with making a false report.

(If one thinks that a trifle harsh for a bit of youthful fibbing, it’s worth noting that Britain, in the midst of war with Germany, prosecuted and convicted Kate Hume for her lies.)

Seweid’s was hardly the only hijab hoax. There was the University of Michigan student with the story of being accosted by a smelly, drunk man with a lighter who supposedly demanded she remove her headscarf or he would set it on fire right there on her head. When she told of the attack in the days after the election, university police called in city cops and the FBI. As in New York, security video was reviewed. “During the course of the investigation, numerous inconsistencies in the statements provided by the alleged victim were identified,” the Ann Arbor police finally announced before Christmas. “Following a thorough investigation, detectives have determined the incident in question did not occur.”

The day after the election, a University of Louisiana student told Lafayette police she had been attacked and robbed. The “18 year old middle-eastern female” said two white males jumped from a gray sedan, struck her, stole her wallet, and made off with her hijab. Police went to work. “During the course of the investigation,” read the press release soon issued by the police department, “the female complainant admitted that she fabricated the story.”

Also on November 9, there was the case at San Diego State University, where a hijab-wearing student reported that two young, Trump-talking men assaulted her in the school parking garage, taunting her, grabbing her purse, stealing her keys, and making off with her car. School police worked the case for over a month, calling in the FBI for help. The only thing they were able to nail down? “The initial report of a stolen vehicle was unfounded,” says university police lieutenant Gregory Noll, “as the victim forgot where she parked her vehicle.” The investigation has been shelved: “The victim made the decision to no longer pursue the matter,” Officer Noll says. When “the victim no longer wants to cooperate with the investigation our hands are tied.”

Why do people make up such stories? Scoring partisan points against ideological enemies is clearly job one. When she was first hyping her New York subway hoax, Seweid was quick to denounce not only her imagined attackers but the man she considered ultimately responsible: “The president-elect just promotes this stuff and is very anti-Muslim, very Islamophobic, and he’s just condoning it.” A friend of the San Diego State student was quick to blame Republicans: “I think this absolutely relates with [Trump winning],” sociology senior Aisha Sharif told the campus newspaper, the Daily Aztec. “It’s sad that it’s only—hasn’t even been 24 hours since he’s been elected and we’re already getting this type of hate.”

It’s a fine way of vilifying one’s enemies. And in their political potency, hate hoaxes function not unlike wartime atrocity propaganda. “Rumors and reports of German atrocities—many of them untrue,” encouraged the allies “to view Germans not as human beings, but as marauding brutes, thereby galvanizing ‘us versus them’ thinking,” wrote the great literary historian of the First World War, Paul Fussell.

Then again, though clothed in political garb, there may not necessarily always be a political agenda at work. Don’t discount the desperate need for attention so central to our social-media age: Hoaxers used to be eager to be in the papers or on the news; now many are eager to be “liked” on Facebook. And sometimes the most fundamental reasons can be distinctly personal. In admitting she had fabricated her tale of trauma on the 6 train, Seweid had explained to police that she was having difficulties with her parents. The New York Daily News reported that police told them “Seweid made up the story because she didn’t want to get in trouble for breaking her curfew after being out late drinking with friends”—an offense for which her father punished her by shaving her head.

Kate Hume was also having troubles at home, as the judge in the “Mutilated Nurse” case pointed out to the jury: “It is palpable that [her forgery] was done with the motive of horrifying her father and stepmother.”

There may be psychological explanations for the particular forms atrocity stories take. A widely believed WWI fiction was the tale of the “Crucified Canadian.” In its most common form the story went that a Canadian soldier captured by Germans was crucified—pinned to a tree, arms outstretched, with bayonets through his hands, feet, and side—and left in the sight of his friends across no-man’s-land to die an excruciating death. Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, suggests that the crucifixion meme resonated with soldiers for whom a sense of martyrdom was deeply felt: “The sacrificial theme, in which each soldier becomes a type of the crucified Christ, is at the heart of countless Great War poems,” Fussell writes.

Could there be something similar going on with all the hijab-grabbing tales? For young Islamic women living in the West, whether and how to cover their heads is a fraught question. Could it be that stories end up centering on the hijab not because the covering is an incitement to Muslim-hating bullies, but because it is such a difficult and self-defining issue for the young women?

It was obvious even during the First World War that many of the lurid tales of barbarous crimes were frauds. “It is now pretty generally admitted that German atrocity stories as a rule were magnified by the time they were published in the States,” wrote Edwin L. James a few months after the war was over. The New York Times correspondent (who would later be the paper’s managing editor) believed this was true of all the atrocity stories, “except those in Belgium the first three months of the war and the deportations of Lille. Those things couldn’t be exaggerated, but others unquestionably were.” James’s favorite falsehood was the widely repeated story that American prisoners were being exhibited in cages as if in a zoo. It wasn’t a concocted hoax but a rumor that, born of mistranslation, grew into an imagined atrocity. In an “official statement the German Army said something about Americans in prison cages,” James wrote in the Times in May 1919, noting that it was common practice for prisoners on all sides of the conflict to be locked up. “But somehow or other the fact that German captors put American doughboys into an ordinary prison cage came to grow to the point where the Germans were exhibiting these captured men in cages as they would monkeys. I have even read that these American-filled cages were transported about the German Empire and exhibited on stages of theatres with lectures. Such, it is the best opinion, never happened.”

What’s so curious about the craze for phony atrocity stories in World War I is that the entire war could itself be described as one huge, appalling atrocity. There’s something peculiar, for example, about accusing the Huns of using dum-dum bullets, Fussell points out, when you’ve “seen the damage done by quite ordinary bullets fired from high-velocity military rifles.” Why is it that, amid the incredible brutality of the war—the deaths, even executions, of civilians; the unimaginable slaughter of combatants in and between the trenches; the use of chlorine gas and mustard gas and phosgene gas; the whole grand mechanized Guignol—somehow there was still a widespread need to invent cartoonish versions of the enemy’s enormities, stories that would stand out from the daily butcher’s bill?

Something strangely similar seems to be at work in the tales of Trumpian atrocities: It’s not enough just to be outraged by the opposition’s stated positions, there’s a need to believe the enemy to be irredeemably barbarous. Goodness knows there are real, documented, unambiguous hate crimes enough: White supremacist Dylann Roof last week was rightly sentenced to death for his ghastly killing spree at a black church in Charleston, S.C. There are even clear instances of racially motivated hate crimes pegged to the election of Donald Trump: The four African Americans who live-streamed video of themselves torturing a young white man in Chicago, while shouting “F— white people” and “F— Donald Trump” is a particularly well-documented example. Aren’t we witness to behavior terrible enough without having to make it up?

But make it up they have been doing: The day after the election an African-American student at Bowling Green State University in Ohio reported that three young white men in Trump shirts had thrown rocks and hurled racist abuse at her. But when police investigated, her story kept shifting. After subpoenaing her smartphone records, detectives found that she hadn’t been anywhere near where she said the incident occurred. And as for hate, police found that she had been sending such enlightened political messages as saying of Trump supporters, “I hope they all get AIDS.” Bowling Green police charged her with falsification and obstructing official business.

Even the cases that clearly happened are often presented in ways that are less than straightforward. Take the New York Times‘s editorial page feature, “This Week in Hate,” which has been running regularly since November. The December 20 edition included this alarming item: “A man is accused of attacking a Muslim woman at a Manhattan Dunkin’ Donuts on Sunday, throwing coffee in her face and putting her in a headlock. According to police, he told the woman he ‘hated Muslims’ and was going to kill her. He has been charged with assault as a hate crime.” Unlike so many of the phony reports of hate, here we have an unambiguous incident seen by multiple witnesses. Nothing to doubt here. Then again, follow the online link to the New York Daily News story originally reporting the attack and it takes on a somewhat different quality. That article begins: “A rampaging homeless man chucked hot coffee at a Muslim woman, hit her and accused her of being a ‘terrorist.’ ” Manhattanites are all too familiar with the dangers that the homeless exhibiting signs of mental illness pose to themselves and others. Then again, the Times seems all too happy to conflate what may well be derangement with what it takes to be the political pathologies of Trump supporters.

Or consider acts of vandalism labeled as hate: It isn’t always—or even usually—clear what sort of crimes they are. Take the case of the swastikas at Wilbur Cross High School in New Haven, Connecticut. Spray-painted in red on the school gym’s bathroom wall were both the Nazi symbol and, below it, the word “Trump.” One could, of course, just assume that this is the triumphalist tag of some menacing, white-power Trump supporter (and those setting out to catalogue the supposed wave of hate do just that). But we know that some number (a large number?) of such graffiti incidents are the work of Trump antagonists. Some are clear—as when vandals spray-painted cars in front of a house in Burtonsville, Md., on November 30. The give-away was that they not only spray-painted swastikas and the word “Trump” on the cars, they also tagged the vehicles with the accusation “racist.” According to the Montgomery County police, the incident was being investigated as “related to the homeowner’s possible political affiliation.”

As for the Wilbur Cross High School gym, we’ll likely never know whether the graffiti was the work of some Trump-emboldened white supremacist or a student angry at the Republican’s victory and eager to express his contempt for the candidate by painting “Trump” together with a swastika. The New Haven Police Department has no leads: The high school’s “video surveillance system wasn’t working,” says Officer David Hartman. “There wasn’t anything to go on.” Absent proof to the contrary, the New Haven swastikas will continue to be listed as acts of hate, though there’s of course a difference between graffiti that means “Trump won, hurray for Nazism” and the very same tag meant, instead, to condemn Trump as some sort of Nazi.

There are other crudely drawn swastikas that have nothing to do with Trump and everything to do with traditional antisemitism, such as the mad proliferation of Nazi graffiti at Nassau Community College on Long Island this fall. Though it began in October, there were suggestions it was the work of Trump’s white-power minions—that is, until police arrested, in flagrante, student Jasskirat Saini, who seems to have had a gripe against Jews.

Many of the cases of menacing graffiti have turned out not to be what was first assumed. Williams College discovered one of its buildings had been defaced with “AMKKK KILL” in blood-red paint the weekend after the election. To his credit Williams president Adam Falk was cautious: “This vandalism is disturbing and intolerable, no matter what motivated it.” But then he couldn’t help but invoke the potential menace of Trump: “In the current post-election climate, we have a heightened awareness for any actions or expressions that may be bias incidents.” The vandals were soon identified: two Williams students who explained theirs was a commentary on “racism in our society.”

Or how about the Elon University classroom whiteboard that was found, after the election, with the words “Bye Bye Latinos, Hasta La Vista.” A vicious expression of Trump-inspired hate? After much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, it turns out, no, it was actually “satirical commentary” penned by a Hispanic student.

Encounter enough of these hoaxes, and one starts to feel like Edward G. Robinson’s character in Double Indemnity, Barton Keyes, the insurance investigator with a finely tuned instinct for fraud. “Every month hundreds of claims come to this desk. Some of them are phonies. And I know which ones,” he tells a hapless scammer. “How do I know? Because my little man tells me .  .  . the little man in here,” Keyes says, gesturing to his gut. “Every time one of these phonies comes along it ties knots in my stomach—I can’t eat.”

My Keyesian “little man” went into action the week before the election when the Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church in Greenville, Miss., burned down. Not only was the historically black church torched, it was tagged—the side of the building was spray-painted “Vote Trump.” It was assumed the perpetrator was engaged in racial intimidation. “I see this as an attack on the black church and the black community,” said Mayor Errick Simmons. The FBI and the ATF were called in to help solve this obvious hate crime.

A month and a half later an arrest was finally made—an African-American member of the church.

Our little Keyesian men are helpful in winkling out hoaxes, and we should all cultivate them. But those hard-earned habits of skepticism point to what may be the greatest damage done by atrocity propaganda, whether a century ago or now. Fed enough preposterous whoppers, we become unwilling to credit even those stories that are true. It happened in Britain after WWI, where “propaganda became a dirty word. The falsehoods that had been put out, and the lies that had been believed, greatly discredited its use,” writes Taylor Downing in his book on spycraft and psychological warfare during the Great War, Secret Warriors. People had learned to dismiss hysterical tales of atrocities. Which is all well and good, except: “When genuine atrocities, such as the Nazis’ gassing and burning of millions of innocent civilians in the extermination camps, were revealed, many therefore dismissed them as alarmist prop-aganda.” The grim irony, Downing writes, is that having been all too willing to believe lies, people then “disregarded what was dreadful but true.”

Arthur Koestler wrote, in January 1944, a distraught article for the New York Times Magazine “On Disbelieving Atrocities” that despaired of convincing people of Hitler’s crimes: In a “public opinion survey nine out of ten average American citizens, when asked whether they believed that the Nazis commit atrocities, answered that it was all propaganda lies, and that they didn’t believe a word of it.” It may be satisfying to paint one’s enemies as brutes and monsters, but the cost of telling lies may well be that one loses the ability, when it matters most, to tell terrible truths.

Eric Felten is managing editor of The Weekly Standard.