Horror Stories

In American literature, a listing of some famous "horror stories" about social injustice would include such novels as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, and Richard Wright's Native Son.

Literary critics might refer to fictional "horror stories" as didactic literature: writings designed basically to teach or to instruct. Although there's much disagreement among critics over different kinds (e.g., "proletarian literature," "problem plays," "allegory," "exemplum," "satire"), there is a large body of narrative stories in all languages, which is intended to teach us about threats (evil-doers, villains, and bogeymen) and how to behave in response to them. In contrast to the fragments of rumors (which only intensify the bad), these crafted "horror stories" usually present positive role models of response behavior: we learn to be heroes, or how not to be victims.

In truthfulness and accuracy, there can be great differences. The horrors of some real events, such as the bombing of Pearl Harbor or the tortures at Dachau, can be told in great detail with great fidelity to truth. Propaganda writers who used these events as part of a revenge theme in WW2 propaganda simply had to re-tell and re-emphasize true stories to stimulate audiences. Other episodes, based on real events, may have been fabricated or manipulated by government officials seeking a crisis to rally public opinion in their favor; for example, the Tonkin Bay "attack" on the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam war. Or, as some say, the exaggeration by the Bush Administration of imminent danger in 2003 of Iraq using WMD -- weapons of mass destruction.

"The first casualty of war is truth," observed Senator William Borah in 1917, and historian Philip Knightley's book The First Casualty (1975) has well documented the chronic manipulation of war stories by all governments involved in the wars of the past century. Nations have always tried to unite their own people by depicting the savagery and barbarity of their enemies.

Some horrible atrocity stories and rumors commonly used in war propaganda (such as babies being chopped up, and the "bucket of eyeballs") date back to the Crusades without ever being substantiated. Righteous anger, outrage, and disgust are often triggered by stories about the other profaning sacred objects. In May, 2005, for example, outraged Muslims rioted in Afghanistan upon hearing that American soldiers has desecrated Islam's holy book, by flushing a copy of the Koran down a toilet at the Guantanamo Bay prison; whether these reports or rumors were true or not, they had been preceded by a constant repetition of the horror stories and atrocity pictures from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

The sophistication of the narratives and the overtness of the propaganda varies. Some of the WW2 John Wayne movies, for example, seem very blunt and heavy-handed propaganda today when seen on the late, late show. Didactic writing can sometimes be very obvious and explicitly labeled: traditional animal fables and medieval morality plays, for example, usually end with a specific "moral to the story." Sophisticated novels often imply their message, rather than make any explicit statement, allowing their readers to complete the connections.