Thursday, April 12, 2012

Sighting Report #1

Along with tracking reports on the number of citations, we will also post new Internet pages that use the fabricated quotation. 

A Google search on 12 April 2012 finds 171 new search results for the last week.  Here are two of them.
  • Sago, a conservative blog that claims to be “handcrafted opinion served fresh daily” has a post dated 8 April 2012 that criticizes President Obama: “By his remarks, he is making it clear that objective reporting is neighter necessary nor desired.  This thinking is reminiscent of Joseph Goebbels when he said, ‘If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it....’
  • My Common Sense Politics  is a blog to the left of Barack Obama. It has a long list of quotations to the bottom left of its pages.  One of those quotations is the fabricated quotation by Joseph Goebbels.
We will post interesting sighting reports as we come across them.

2 comments:

  1. Playing devil's advocate, couldn't Goebbels have said it even if he hadn't actually have coined the phrase? Even Lenin's been credited as its father (as has Hitler of course), and I would assume it predates Goebbels. In any event, I think the reason it is attached to him is that it seems to match his philosophy perfectly. It's when the nazis are being used in American political discussion that I get worked up.

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  2. It's highly unlikely that Goebbels said it. First, no one provides a source. No one. And I have read a lot of Goebbels’s material without finding it. Second, even German pages "retranslate" it from English rather than finding a source. Third, it would be a bad propagandist indeed who publicly admitted to telling lies.

    But if you can find source, do let me know!

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