It’s a hopeless task, he says, complaining the Internet is like an electronic “Hyde Park Corner” where anybody can say anything, whether it is true or not. “You would need an army of secretaries to reply to all these tweets. Twitter and Facebook have made it worse, because people glom onto these things and pass it on and there it goes.”It’s good to have company in opposing dubious quotations.
If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State. [Falsely attributed to Joseph Goebbels]
Friday, December 7, 2012
Other Dubious Quotations
The 7 December 2012 Wall Street Journal has a page 1 story on a fake quotation by Thomas Jefferson that has been used by, among others, President Obama. There is a page on Monticello.org debunking several dozen falsely attributed Jefferson quotations. The article also discusses other scholars who attempt the Sisyphusian task of debunking fabricated quotations by Churchill, Lincoln, and others. The article cites Churchill expert Richard Langworth:
You really, really need to have a page on Facebook. It is so much faster to cross-check there.. But I have written on the topic of manipulative propagandistic speech, and I am glad to find this site.
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