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:

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.

 

Sighting Report #8

We're at high season in the election cycle and the quotation continues to spread: 179 new pages in the past week. Most associate Romney or Obama with Goebbels.

Another quotation site has popped up, too.  Crossquotes provides quotations “from a Christian Perspective.” It includes the quotation.  As a Christian myself I like to see people take the trouble to be accurate.

Meanwhile, a Google search for the phrase “truth is the greatest enemy of the State” provides only 166,000 hits, a significant decline.  We find, though, that Google results vary widely so we will wait to see if this represents a long-term decline.  There are still 32,000 pages that attribute the quotation to ‘Joseph M. Goebbels,” although “M” was not his middle initial.

Success Report #1: Michael C. Moynihan in “Tablet”

One of our hopes for this blog is that it will spread the knowledge that the Goebbels quotation is a forgery.  We’re beginning to have occasional successes.  Just recently Michael C. Moynihan wrote an interesting piece titled “Hitler on the Campaign Trail” that looks at the spread of Nazi comparisons in American politics.  He writes:

While fascism is a major political force almost nowhere, it is inaccurately referenced everywhere. The “Big Lie” myth is bipartisan, popular with excitable representatives of both political parties and all ideologies: Sen. Chuck Grassley, Rush Limbaugh, Joe Scarborough, and Chris Matthews have all accused their enemies of planning to lie loud and lie often—just like the Nazis. And the fear of impending American fascism, a charge made most recently by Rep. Ron Paul during the Republican National Convention in Tampa, are distressingly common. Even the recent kerfuffle over an anti-Obama cover story in Newsweek led one Huffington Post blogger to dismiss the author, Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, as a “British fascist.”

If an American politician playing fast-and-loose with the facts is indistinguishable from an editorialist for Der Stürmer, than how does one distinguish between Paul Ryan and Heinrich Himmler? If Niall Ferguson is a “British fascist,” what would one call Lord Haw-Haw, Oswald Mosley, or the bald-headed street brawlers of the British National Party? “Rather severe British fascists”?

That’s exactly the point we’re hoping to get across in this blog and it’s satisfying to see it used in ways that make the point to a broader audience.

There is one point at which Moynihan is a tad unclear.  He writes in his penultimate paragraph:

The “big lie” wasn’t a Nazi propaganda “technique.” It wasn’t “invented” or “pioneered” by either Hitler or Goebbels. Nor was it the backbone of an anti-Semitic media strategy that precipitated the Holocaust.

I initially misread the first sentence as suggesting that the Nazis were not major users of falsehood, which seemed odd in the context of the essay — I think the quotation marks around “technique” threw me off.  Mr. Moynihan dropped me a note explaining that his point was the the technique was hardly unique to the Nazis.  That makes excellent sense, and is much more consistent with the flow of the essay than my original reading.

It’s also probably worth noting that leading Nazis believed their own propaganda. Much of what the Nazis said about Jews was false, but the only credible explanation for the enormous effort Hitler put into killing Europe’s Jews is that he really did believe that they were Germany’s great enemy in the world.

A central claim of Nazi propaganda was was that “world Jewry” intended to wipe out Germany both as a nation and as a people.  This was a false claim (or else the alleged powerful forces of “World Jewry” were remarkably weak, since within ten years of total defeat West Germany was in the midst of the “economic miracle” that continues today). However, the common definition of “lie” assumes intent to deceive. A first-grader who writes on a test that “2 + 2 = 5” is wrong, but not a liar.  I don’t mean to suggest that the falsehoods in Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda were equivalent to a first-grader’s addition error — there is moral culpability in spreading false information.  One might argue, however, that although Nazi propaganda was often false, its makers did not always think that they were lying. In that sense, perhaps some Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda is less an example of the “big lie” than of the human tendency to see what one wants to see.

Sighting Report #7

With the political season raging, people continue to use the fabricated quotation against their political foes.  Supporters of the Democratic Party are using it more than the Republicans at the moment.  For an example, see a post on the Washington Monthly site.

There are 190 new pages for the past week.

Google’s Ngram Viewer Finds No Citations

Google’s Ngram Viewer allows one to search for words and phrases in the millions of books digitized by Google.  It covers the years until 2000.  It finds not a single citation of the dubious Goebbels quotation.  Proving a negative is impossible, but this is still further evidence of the unlikelihood of the quotation.

Our Article on the Alleged Goebbels Quotation

Our article titled “Plausible Quotations and Reverse Credibility in Online Vernacular Communities” was recently published issue of ETC.: A Review of General Semantics, 69 (April 2012), 216-234. Here is the abstract:

“Cyberspace includes information that lacks vetting by traditional gatekeepers such as editors and librarians. One growing type of online information is unsourced quotations attributed to well-known individuals. After summarizing the history of textual fabrication as semantic misinformation, this article traces the origin and rapid spread of a quotation misattributed to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. The quotation spread from online sources to print and even at least one peer-reviewed academic journal — all without ever being sourced. The same quotation was widely used by both the political Right and Left to support opposing ideologies. Cyberspace provides an arena for creating seemingly credible but unverified persuasive messages that confirm the existing assumptions of online communities of discourse. The essay concludes with suggestions for verifying unsourced online quotations attributed to otherwise ‘credible’ people.”

You can find the journal at larger libraries, but if you have want to read it and cannot find a copy, e-mail either of us.

Another Dubious Internet Dictionary of Quotations

A month back we noted Thinkexist, an Internet quotation site that provides no sources for its quotations.

Another such site including the Goebbels quotation is Searchquotes. It claims: “Our goal is to help you by delivering amazing quotes to bring inspiration, personal growth, love and happiness to your everyday life.”  Like Thinkexist, it provides no information on who is behind it, nor does it give sources for its quotations.  It gets about 4,000,000 visitors a month, and probably provides a lot of advertising revenue to its owner, whomever that anonymous person or persons may be.

As always, do not trust anonymous sites of quotations.  Use a good print dictionary of quotations instead.