President
Trump has long signaled his desire to reverse President Barack Obama’s
normalization of relations with Cuba, so it’s no surprise that his
administration has begun to do just that by withdrawing most employees
from the United States Embassy in Havana.
But
a part of the justification for the move — the reports that embassy
employees were victimized by a “sonic attack” that caused a range of
physical symptoms — fits a troubling pattern. It’s just the latest
example of the way Mr. Trump has attempted to harness vague, unspecified
threats to inspire fear and advance his political agenda.
The Associated Press first reported on Aug. 10
that State Department employees had been targeted by these attacks.
According to the spokeswoman Heather Nauert, they caused “a variety of
physical symptoms.” It was also reported at this time that the State
Department had already retaliated for these attacks by expelling two
Cuban diplomats from the United States on May 23.
Since
then, much of the news coverage of the incident has turned to a
discussion of technical questions about sonic weaponry. A few articles
quote experts who are skeptical, to put it mildly, but a majority of the coverage has accepted and even reiterated the State Department’s explanation wholesale.
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The
truth is, the sort of sonic weaponry that might cause the concussions
and persistent memory loss that the State Department claimed to have
found in its diplomats doesn’t exist, as far as experts in this field
know. “Nothing about this story makes any sense to us,” said a marketing
director of a firm that manufactures acoustic devices, quoted in Wired.
To imagine that such weapons have not only been covertly developed but
also were then somehow hidden near the embassy is even more fanciful,
for a variety of logistical and technical reasons. The fact-checking
site Snopes.com provided a review of scientific data on sound and sonic
weapons, concluding that it was false to claim that such weapons could be responsible
for what happened to the United States diplomats in Cuba. Yet, this has
not stopped the reverberation of sonic-weapon rumors. The press has
continued to amplify the story, and the Trump administration has carried
on with its narrative, even issuing a Cuba Travel Warning based on the “specific attacks” that it says targeted embassy employees.
The
State Department’s explanation — that sound was used to make people
sick — is perfectly tailored to frighten us. It plays on the
well-established way humans tend to associate sound and illness with
hidden, unknowable threats. Mr. Trump as both candidate and president
has routinely exploited fears of vaguely defined hidden menaces as a
justification for policy and politics.
None
of this is to say that no attacks occurred — there may have been
chemical exposure, for example. However, not only is the cause unknown
(if there is one), but also no evidence of a deliberate attack has been
offered.
Sound,
despite being a physical material, is often described as intangible,
simply because we do not see it. We distrust sound for its invisibility
(consider the misery of hearing noisy neighbors but being unsure of what
they’re actually doing; consider the meaning of the term “hearsay”),
just as we may be drawn to it for its mystery. Even though sound is
measurable, we tend to experience it as spectral, as something beyond
our rational understanding. It is thus the perfect stand-in for a Cold
War-style cunning enemy, who is surely out there, doing something, even
though we can never seem to pin him down.
Mr.
Trump exploits people’s preconceptions about sound in a manner similar
to his exploitation of illness, to signify a hidden,
never-quite-graspable threat to the nation. Like the unspecified (and
perhaps unverifiable) sonic cause of these health attacks, the reported
illnesses are vague and unspecific. Mr. Trump has often turned to
illness politics — portraying his opponents as weak, sick and neurotic.
He
didn’t invent this political tactic. But he has enthusiastically
embraced the approach. Mr. Trump and his campaign encouraged speculation
that Hillary Clinton was hiding a secret, degenerative illness
(Parkinson’s, traumatic brain injury and epilepsy all circulated as
possibilities), which if revealed would make most Americans realize she
was not qualified to be president. Of course, these insinuations were
most powerful precisely when nothing had been revealed and when
speculation could thus fill in the blanks. Media coverage of these
charges tended to focus on historical examples of sick presidents or
presidential candidates, rather than on how Mr. Trump was deliberately
playing upon fears of sickness — that is, engaging in illness politics.
In this case, Mr. Trump didn’t invent the story of the attack (it’s
relatively clear that something happened at the embassy) but he
has latched onto its vague description to raise alarm in a way that’s
broad and unsettling enough to provide support for any actions he wants
to take in response.
This
pattern of suggesting that the United States is under threat from vague
and indeterminate dangers — secret illnesses, mysterious sounds —
creates a political atmosphere almost miasmic in its effects. There are
many facts we do not yet know about the Cuba incident. However, the
pattern so far fits Mr. Trump all too well: Raise the volume on a
fanciful scary story and tie it to an already desired policy shift in a
way that appears to justify that shift. We shouldn’t fall for it.
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