Saturday, April 25, 2020

Still another fabricated Goebels Quotation

A visitor to the site asks me if this quotation, allegedly by Goebbels, is genuine:
Let me control the media and I will turn any nation into a herd of pigs.
A Google search on 25 April 2020 finds 5,500 results.

It is almost certainly fabricated, and for the usual reasons.

  1. No one I checked provides a source. The sites that cite it are often dubious (e.g., RT [formerly Russia Today] is a familiar source of dubious information). The RT citation is from 2014, making it one of the earliest I can find.
  2. No reliable scholar cites it.  I checked Google Scholar and Google Books. There are a few Google Books citations, but none from a book that inspires any confidence.
  3. Although I have not read everything Goebbels wrote, I have read a lot.  I have never encountered this quotation.
  4. As I have observed before, Goebbels is unlikely to have said something like this.  A good propagandist —and he was that— is unlikely to make such a statement. 
  5. “Media” is not a word Goebbels would have used.  “Die Presse” was the contemporary term.
In short, one cannot prove a negative, but it is highly unlikely that this is something Goebbels said or wrote. As usual, if you find someone who cites this, is is excellent evidence that he or she does not check sources.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks for clearing this, when i saw that quote, i was sure that it was definitely fake. I don't think Goebbels would have given such a harsh statement towards the German people nor i believe high ranking nazi officials including Hitler would have approved of this. It seems that all these
    fraudulent quotations are being created by the same person or people because the follow the same style. "Let me control this and i will do this...", "Let me take over that and will do this..." all follow the same pattern. It is very unlikely that someone would reveal his nefarious plans against his people like this during an address to the same public/people or even in his private diary .

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