It's going to be a long time, I guess, before any kind of settled
sense comes to the swirl of rumour and reportage, official and
unofficial truths and falsehoods, coming out of that disaster. I read
a good piece the other day (which I now can't find, unfortunately) on
the repetition and amplification of the rape gang stories, the way
they seem to have converged on old racist scripts about feral black
sexuality, unleashed and menacing.
Very little is "confirmed", but a lot of what is out there plays to
what the audience's prejudices (of one sort or another) will willingly
confirm as plausible, as sounding like a suppressed or unacknowledged
truth rather than - as it often later on turns out to have been - a
partial and embroidered one, or an unadulterated falsehood.
Since the "official version" is pretty much guaranteed to be horseshit
- given who the officials in question happen to be - I can see why
some people would prefer what looks like unvarnished popular
testimony; but the problem is, that also tends to be horseshit, albeit
for rather different reasons.
Dominic
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