Manipulated

Do you ever get the feeling you are being manipulated?

It might just be me. People have always said I’m cynical and I suppose with so many people on the planet, everyone is jostling to get their own way and will do whatever it takes to get it. However, I’m sure when this time is judged by history there will be a lot to say.

The best education I had at school was in a period when I wasn’t being educated. I had been part of a guinea pig project, to make the top 5% take their O levels a year early. To this day, I’m not sure why but it is still something schools aspire to. Anyway, for me and about half of my group, it was an unmitigated disaster. Our curriculum narrowed (no music but economics) and so about half of us were labelled as failures. We were given a choice: we could carry on or drop out of the project and start again with the rest of our year group. About six of the ten opted to start again. This left the school with the problem of what to do with us. We stayed in some classes like French and still took maths and English early but they knew that economics, physics and geography weren’t going to hold all of our attentions and they didn’t want us to disrupt the others. Instead, we had classes like critical thinking, theology, understanding propoganda and colouring. I honestly can’t remember what the colouring class was but I enjoyed it. Our class of ten quickly shrunk to 4, as most chose to bunk off, take drugs and nurse the huge failure chip that had been placed on their shoulders. It was these classes that have left me with a growing sense of mistrust about what is currently happening in the world and specifically our country and politics.

We studied Nazi propoganda and looked at how people were manipulated into betraying their morals. We learnt how all this had led to press regulation. We discussed why and how good people could do
 bad things and how power can corrupt even the most virtuous people.



Today, we have an unregulated press in social media and it is flooded with manipulative images and statements and I’m shocked at things I’ve seen people, who I know are basically kind human beings, share. Everyone is quick to judge and quick to share. It’s too easy to click something without really thinking about it. It’s then not easy to change your mind.

Now, I’m going to be brave and tell you what I think about a story that is getting a lot of attention. You may not agree with me but I am prepared to be wrong.

I worry that the Shamina Begum story is manipulation.

If you are unaware (living under a rock) then this is a summary of the story (as I see it). Shamina Begum is one of three girls, who at 15 decided to travel to Syria to become a Jihadi bride in 2015. The girls were from Bethnal Green and for some reason their case got a lot of press attention, despite an estimated 500 women and girls having done the same thing.  Public opinion was against them. I think it’s complicated and can’t  even begin to understand what would make a girl from East London think that being married to a man who had the right to beat and control her would be better than the life she had. There is no doubt that these girls bought into the ideology that was being sold to them. There is no doubt that they made a choice.  All three girls married Western ISIS fighters, two of those husbands have died in battle, one of the girls was killed in an air strike and the other is reported to have wanted to escape but became too scared when another girl was beaten to death. They were living in war conditions in Raqqa. Their children have died. One girl is dead and we had lost contact with the others.

Suddenly, the least pretty, least likeable girl was found by a journalist working for The Times. She is the girl whose husband is still alive and the girl who says she has no regrets.

Whatever I think about her and her case. It’s the timing I find suspicious. At the point that this story came out people were just beginning to calm down a bit about Brexit. They were suffering from Brexigue (I can make up words too). “I can’t  even be bothered with Brexit any more. I don’t care if it doesn’t even happen.” Even Question Time became a little less angry for a week. There was a rise is Regretsiters. “I wish I’d never voted leave now.”

It’s almost as if the people who were worried about the invasion of our little island needed to be reminded why they’d voted out of the EU in the first place, even if those reasons aren’t strictly logical.  The story broke, people got very angry, the government appear to have broken international law to appease the anger and Question Time is back to normal.

It’s a controversial view but I feel manipulated.