©02 The Media Desk
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The Desk has been around some people that deny everything from the Moon Landing and the Holocaust to the fact that an American invented the light bulb or the motorized aircraft, and so on. They go into detail about the Chinese or some Moorish Scientist in Spain a thousand years ago. Shakespeare's works were written by somebody else. In fact, so was everything under the name Twain, Poe, Freud, and Hitler.
Others deny that the Earth itself could produce life. Life HAD to have come from elsewhere. For that matter, so did water.
It's like the old saying that nothing good could come from New Jersey. And just because Sinatra and Springsteen were born there proves the rule.
The Desk has been in prolonged conversation with people that are absolutely convinced that the Apollo Missions went NOWHERE. They could not have left the atmosphere because the Van Allen Radiation Belt would have killed them. The Moon is too far away. And so on. They cite as proof Hollywood movies like Capricorn 1 and Apollo 13 as well as some very shaky and actually inaccurate science that supposedly proves their case. While ignoring everything that might contradict their position. (See this guy's site for this kind of stuff- http://www.aulis.com/ )
There is at least one person in the Desk's orbit that claims the Holocaust was a vast plot to extend the Jewish Mafia's control over their life and increase the power of the Military Industrial Media Complex which is a wholly owned subsidiary thereof. Not only did the Nazis not kill five and a half million Jews, it was the Jews that started the war against a peaceful and innocent Germany to increase their bank accounts by selling arms and supplies to both sides. And the plot is still going on some sixty years later because it included a model for a United States of Europe and that is what the EU really is.
Dozens of websites promote this idea (here's one of them http://www.codoh.org/revisionist/comment/tr06pbs.html ) . And some of their tripe has made it into school textbooks, usually by fudging down the numbers of victims and called Extermination Camps 'Labor Camps'.
The Desk, who is half Jew, listens to this crap about as long as it can, then, without violence mind you, slowly begins to pick apart their argument. But in a month or so, they are back with fresh or recycled nonsense and new stupidity to explain it all.
At some point the Desk will give up.
Note. For the Record. This friend has not read Albert Speer's autobiography or anything else which could be called an authoritative work on the subject. They put all their faith in academics and apologists for the Nazis.
And we could go on with any topic you want Columbus, the Indian Rope Trick, Elvis, Civil War Gold... Pick a topic, type it into a Search Engine with the word Hoax behind it and Something will come back. (The desk almost said "something Wacky will come back" but using the word 'Wacky' to describe one of these things got Apollo Astronaut James Lovell sued for libel. Although the judge dismissed the case before it ever got to court. The anti-moon landing conspiracy proponent threatened to appeal, but got nowhere. For more info see: http://www.badastronomy.com)
The bottom line is this. IF those that wish to deny whatever it is, and propose some sort of 'vast right/left/middle wing conspiracy' to explain it would simply spend a tithe of their energy and thought processes looking into the matter instead of simply buying off on half baked theories and bad science .... moving on...
And sometimes it is Governments or the United Nations or somebody on that level that perpetuates the hoax or, in the case of the UN and its agencies, invents one where none existed before.
The Global Warming People neglect to mention that when Captain Cook took his Hawaiian Vacation there were GLACIERS on Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa (between eruptions that is) which was how many years before the appearance of the SUV?
The Dolphin Worshipers and Monkey People conveniently ignore the videos of their favorite animals in the wild killing lessor creatures, and sometimes each other, for no discernible reason. They simply cannot abide the idea that the World of Nature isn't some sort of Garden of Eden where lions and lambs would lay down together if spared the evil influence of Western White Men.
The above issues are all related.
It's actually rather simple. And can be explained quickly and simply. In two words to be exact. Well, the second word is hyphenated, oh well.
Willful Self-delusion.
Because the denier themself could not have written Richard III on a bet, that means that the person whose name is on it couldn't have done it either. Somebody else had to have written it. And then to think that that same person also wrote a bunch of romantic poetry and Julius Caesar, well, it just couldn't be.
Because the denier, if they were a chimpanzee, without a mortgage to pay and a kid that needs new shoes lived in a jungle, they'd spend all day eating bananas and sunning themselves on a rock, that the chimps that live there wouldn't attack another band of chimps for love or money. Even with PBS cameras looking on.
The denier wouldn't gun down an entire village of French Peasants (Oradour-sur-Glane, June 10, 1944), so the Nazis didn't do it either.
They were not on the Apollo spacecraft, they didn't see the pictures as they came in from Mars, they didn't get to attend the launch of the CHALLENGER so it simply did not happen.
It is useless to argue, debate, or discuss these things with them because they are right. Regardless of evidence or logical reasoning.
It can be infuriating talking with them. You can go mad when they dismiss scientific papers, photographs, historical film footage, and even physical evidence with a wave of their hand and words like 'you fell for that hoax' even when what they have fallen for is an even bigger hoax.
The willful self-delusion can be made to serve everything from a scientific fallacy to a political agenda. Up to and including a national movement.
For instance. Watch a 'slavery reparations' activist's face go through contortions when you tell them that some freed blacks in the south who had their own farms also had slaves to work them. Most operations were small, and only had a couple of slaves, usually a housekeeper/cook and a hand or two to work the fields and care for such animals as they had. But they did exist. Then ask the activist: Should their black descendants also get reparations money too?
Sometimes it is more fun to put an 'gradual evolutionist' through some terrible changes by pointing out that life began on earth as soon as it was cool enough that liquid water could form on its surface. This is supported by the fossil record of ancient plant colonies now petrified in parts of Australia. The formations are nearly as old as the planet itself. It did not take 'Billions and Billions' of years, it was almost overnight, in geologic time of course.
Then you can work out on the 'Shakespeare/Twain/Byron' didn't write those stories by pointing out that Somebody had to write them. And if it really was his mistress/homosexual lover/secretary/all the above, or whoever, they were most assuredly written by the same person, and THEY, whoever They were, was a certified genius. Concede the point: OK, so it wasn't the Bard of Avon, somebody sure could write. Then see what they do.
The Desk's personal favorite is the Holocaust of course. It sat and let the gentleman talk about how all the documents were forged, the Nazi propaganda films made after the fact, the concentration camps reverse engineered, and so on. The entire war was a set up to discredit Hitler and make money for the Jewish/Western Industrialists and turn Europe into their economic colony for the next fifty years. Then he went into how Stalin wasn't all that bad, and pointed to the current mess in the Middle East as proof that the Decadent West was bound to fail.
He talked on and on, going all the way around twice, dragging the Masons into it, and saying something about secret documents uncovered in the Papal Library.
The Desk sat and listened. Fascinated. It wished it could tell a story like that.
This was genius at work.
Not since JRR Tolkien had somebody gone to such lengths to create a world where everything was explained away so completely down to the smallest detail.
Of course a great deal of this was blaming Jews, and America, and Britain, and everybody but Nazi Germany and Adolph Hitler, who was evidently an innocent stooge to all this, for the war.
Then the Desk started asking some questions. Trying to see exactly how deep this fantasy ran.
Was FDR behind it? No? Then who was pulling his strings? Did Joseph Kennedy and men like that really have that much international pull? What about the French who tried to play both sides of it with their collaborationist government?
But then as his argument started to circle around on itself the Desk gave up. Denying the obvious is a powerful intoxicant.
If you want to deny the existence of life elsewhere in the universe, go for it. If you want to doubt the reality of ghosts, mental powers, guardian angels, werewolves, witches, and that Elvis is still alive, more power to you.
But
But...
Don't subject the Desk to your opinions unless you are willing to give hearing to the Desk's side of the matter with the same open mind you expect from it.
And after we discuss all these things, the Desk will be taking up a collection for the Flat Earth Society's scholarship fund.
selah
Hoaxbusters at the Department of Energy. http://hoaxbusters.ciac.org
http://www.truthorfiction.com.
Space Hoax Debunking Site. http://www.badastronomy.com
For more see the Desk's Urban Legend Page
http://themediadesk.com