Friday, May 22, 2015

The Dubious Goebbels Quotation on Academic Sites

Although there are tens of thousands of citations of the dubious quotation on the web, there are far fewer on academic sites (.edu).  Still, there are some.

Professor Chris H. Lewis at the University of Colorado teaches a course titled “America, the Environment, & the Global Economy.”  Among other things it promotes critical thinking, for which he gives twelve characteristics, one of which is “use credible sources.”   He cites the fake Goebbels translation.  He provides a source for his previous quotation from Hitler. He doesn’t source the Goebbels quotation.  He likes Colbert’s concept of “truthiness.” In a way, his citation is an example of “truthiness.”  People’s “gut feeling” is that it is something that Goebbels would say, so obvious that examining its accuracy is unnecessary.

A second is in a 2004 article by Peter McLaren and Gregory Martin at UCLA titled “The Legend of the Bush Gang: Imperialism, War, and Propaganda.”  It has the Goebbels quotation at the beginning of the article, with no source provided.   The article begins by noting that “fascism and war” have become the United States’s preferred methods to starve off economic collapse and relieve “the agonizing tension of its underlying contradictions.” Since in their view the United States is following fascist policies, it only makes sense to cite a leading fascist to support their point.

Wednesday, May 20, 2015

German Tracking Report #2

A Google search currently finds 259 hits for the German version of the dubious Goebbels quotation: “da die Wahrheit der tödliche Feind der Lüge ist, und somit wird die Wahrheit durch die Ausbreitung der größte Feind des Staates.”  This is down slightly from the last time we checked in 2012.  A search for new pages in the last month gets no results, a good sign.  

As noted in an earlier post, none of these pages cites a German source.  The quotation  has been translated from English into German.  As noted last time, there may be more pages with slightly different wording, not surprising since there are usually a variety of alternatives when translating.

Tracking Report #10

Well, Google is providing fewer hits for the phrase “truth is the greatest enemy of the State”˘  It’s down to 45,400 hits today.  I’m not sure if the absolute number of usages is declining or if Google is simply reporting fewer cases —probably the latter.

The #1 hit on a Google search is from a site that takes the quotation from one of those unreliable Internet quotation sites, but hits #2 and #3 are from our pages.  At least anyone who has doubts about the quotation will be able to easily find our discussion of it.