Nina Weil survived the Theresienstadt and Auschwitz concentration camps.
She was tattooed with the number 71978. Pic: UN News.
On the lessons of history.
Holocaust Memorial Day. January 27th 2021
Conspiracy theories are running loose and gaining ground in just about every stratum of society, and to say it's a worrying phenomenon is more than just an understatement. But of all the crazy 'theories' out there, surely one is especially heinous; that of holocaust denial.
In the not-too distant future, the last voices of the holocaust will have left us. The last children of the camps are now in their eighties and the direct and powerful testament they provided and continue to provide will be gone. We will of course have the overwhelming body of evidence in the form of photographs, film, objet d'Histiore and the filmed and written testament of survivors, liberators and even the perpetrators – but if the last few years has taught us anything, it's surely that denialists have various techniques to defy and deny those realities and facts that don't suit their twisted narratives.
As CGI continues to develop at an astounding pace, it's not going to be long until it will be impossible to tell whether footage is real or not. I use the word 'astounding' advisedly. British computer graphics company Cubic Motion recently won a contract having developed the science to the point that their generated person on screen was indistinguishable from the real thing. Controlled from a studio in Manchester, the person on screen interacted with people during the pitch, answering questions, smiling, nodding – exactly as a real human would behave. And that was in August 2019.
They won the gig hands-down when they revealed the truth. According to the article in Digital Trends, Andy Wood of Cubic Motion said “There was an audible gasp from everyone in the room. Someone grabbed my arm because they just couldn’t believe what was happening.” Remember that the people gasping were professionals. Take a look at the opening shots of this video, and you'll see why.
This face has been generated by CM's Persona software. Note the pores on the nose, the thread-veins and the moisture in the eyes. Now imagine this not just moving and speaking seamlessly in real time, but answering questions and interacting fully with the conversation.
Would you know he wasn't real?
With technology like this in existence, every conspiracy theorist, every Trumpian pretender, every denialist will soon be able to deny filmic evidence and shout 'fake' by doing no more than lifting their index finger to point. The problem is that more and more people will listen. It's no huge leap to envisage how people such as politicians could have their reputations utterly trashed with a piece of false video.
People simply will not know who – or what – to believe.
So what then of filmic evidence? Photography is already easily discredited, and the written word has been forged for centuries. As the camps themselves approach their centenaries, they are ever more easily explained away and one must remember that the revisionists and deniers do not play by the rules of rational and reasonable people. It takes a certain kind of person to look at original photographs of dead children and wave them away as fake.
Our screens are filled with reports of anti-vax protestors and people storming the Capitol building. The web and social media is crammed with wacko theories and conspiracies. Now combine that with the fact that the technology to produce video that is indistinguishable from reality is already here, it is clear that those who seek to report the truth will be facing an increasingly impossible task.
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History demonstrates again and again that when we ignore its lessons, we are doomed to repeat them. One only had to watch the reports of children being torn screaming and crying from their mothers on the US-Mexico border to make those words come into sharp focus.