| The Art of Deception |  |  |  |
| Written by The Pilgrim |
| October 2011 |
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Sometimes deception can be innocent. This occurred to me when I read about a BBC radio bulletin from 1926. It was a carefully rehearsed spoof news broadcast, which claimed that Britain was in the grip of a Bolshevik revolution. Nevertheless, many people thought it was a genuine news report. A similar situation arose in the USA in 1938, when a radio dramatisation of the novel The War of the Worlds by the British author H G Wells took the form of a simulated news bulletin. The result was widespread panic, followed by a mixture of relief and anger when people realised it was all a spoof. H G Wells had a flair for deception. He discovered that many people would believe a story to be true if it were written in a matter-of-fact way. Perhaps his most mischievous example of this was the short story The Sea Raiders. Take a moment to read it; it isn’t very long. In case marine biology is not your strong point, a cephalopod is any creature of a class which includes octopi and squid, and a cachalot is a sperm whale. If you find this impressive, remember that it is entirely innocent. Wells did not have some grand plan for brainwashing people into believing in non-existent sea monsters. Unfortunately many people nowadays do have grand plans, and we need to be on our guard. The 1995 film Toy Story was an innocent frolic, and introduced millions of people to the wonders of computer animation. However computer animation is a powerful weapon in the war of ideas. Surprising as it may seem, the murder of British student Meredith Kercher was reported as far afield as Taiwan, where one television company went so far as to make a short animated film about it. Take a look. The animation begins at around the twenty second mark. Did you spot the mistakes? The first scene shows Amanda Knox enjoying a drink with Raffaele Sollecito and Rudy Guede in the apartment she shared with Meredith Kercher. If we overlook the facts that Knox and Sollecito deny having been in the apartment on the evening of the murder and that Sollecito denies ever having known Rudy Guede, then the fact remains that they are shown sitting on a three-seater sofa, whereas the apartment had only a two-seater sofa. Try watching it a second time, but first take a look at this detailed plan of the apartment. The next scene is in Meredith’s bedroom, and shows an alleged altercation leading to the murder. The room is shown incorrectly, and that’s putting it mildly. For example, the door is shown in the centre of the wall, and adjacent to a wardrobe. The door was actually in the corner of the room, and the wardrobe was in the opposite corner. The third scene is in the bedroom of Filomena Romanelli, which is also shown incorrectly. The fourth scene shows Sollecito and Guede breaking the window of Filomena’s bedroom from the outside, and this is so inaccurate as to make me wonder if the people who made the film did any research whatever. The house in question (number 7 Via della Pergola) is set into a steep hillside, and the window is a long way above ground level. Also, the doors to the left hand side and the bay window to the right hand side are imaginary. I have no doubt however that a lot of Taiwanese people who saw this film when it was first broadcast believed that it depicted what actually happened on that fateful night. I am not suggesting that the people who made this film deliberately intended to misrepresent what happened, but that is not really the point. The point is that computer animation can be used to misrepresent actual events, and that can easily be misused for propaganda purposes. Suppose for example that this animated film had shown Guede as a white man instead of a black man. On a positive note, computer animation is not the hardest skill to master, and the software can be purchased easily at no great cost. Maybe it is time that people in the nationalist community began to look into the possibilities afforded by computer animation. In the right hands it can be used to educate and inspire, rather than to deceive. |
We are surrounded by deception. It can take various forms. Dishonesty is one form, another is concealing facts. When the murder of British citizens by immigrants is reported only in local or maybe regional newspapers, then that is a form of deception. It is only when such murders are reported nationally that the British people begin to realise the grim truth.