The Civil War Hoax

[Matt McKeon]

During quarantine time I'd like to think I caught up on the classics. However I didn't. I did see "Civil War Hoax" on Amazon Prime, a "mockamentary" about people who believe the Civil War didn't actually happen. One guy thinks its aliens, another that its a coverup that the French and Indian Wars never ended, and my favorite, the war was an elaborate fiction created by guys who just needed an excuse to get out of the house and drink with their buddies, "A four year frat party," exclaims one "historian"

It goes on far longer than it is funny, like an SNL sketch that lasts an hour. And a couple of parts aren't funny at all. Its ends with a surprisingly sincere plea to abandon comforting myth for history.

 

[jgoodguy]

During quarantine time I'd like to think I caught up on the classics. However I didn't. I did see "Civil War Hoax" on Amazon Prime, a "mockamentary" about people who believe the Civil War didn't actually happen. One guy thinks its aliens, another that its a coverup that the French and Indian Wars never ended, and my favorite, the war was an elaborate fiction created by guys who just needed an excuse to get out of the house and drink with their buddies, "A four year frat party," exclaims one "historian"

It goes on far longer than it is funny, like an SNL sketch that lasts an hour. And a couple of parts aren't funny at all. Its ends with a surprisingly sincere plea to abandon comforting myth for history.

It defiantly did not happen, it was a conspiracy to sell Civil War Monuments, Books, newspapers, lectures and even I get a subsidy to run this blog from the Civil War conspiracy foundation.

 

[5fish]

Here is this...

Historical negationism,[1][2] also called denialism, is a distortion of the historical record. It is often imprecisely referred to as historical revisionism, but that term also applies to legitimate academic reinterpretations of the historical record that diverge from previously accepted views.[3]

In attempting to revise the past, illegitimate historical revisionism may use techniques inadmissible in proper historical discourse, such as presenting known forged documents as genuine, inventing ingenious but implausible reasons for distrusting genuine documents, attributing conclusions to books and sources that report the opposite, manipulating statistical series to support the given point of view, and deliberately mistranslating texts.[4]

Some countries, such as Germany, have criminalized the negationist revision of certain historical events, while others take a more cautious position for various reasons, such as protection of free speech; others mandate negationist views.

Notable examples of negationism include Holocaust denial, Armenian Genocide denial, Lost Cause of the Confederacy, Myth of the clean Wehrmacht, Japanese war crime denial[5][6] and the denial of Soviet crimes.

In literature, the consequences of historical negationism have been imaginatively depicted in some works of fiction, such as Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell. In modern times, negationism may spread via new media, such as the Internet.

Snip...

The term "negationism" (négationnisme) was first coined by the French historian Henry Rousso in his 1987 book The Vichy Syndrome which looked at the French popular memory of Vichy France and the French Resistance. Rousso argued that it was necessary to distinguish between legitimate historical revisionism in Holocaust studies and politically motivated denial of the Holocaust, which he termed negationism.[7]

Snip...

Usually, the purpose of historical negation is to achieve a national, political aim, by transferring war-guilt, demonizing an enemy, providing an illusion of victory, or preserving a friendship.[8] Sometimes the purpose of a revised history is to sell more books or to attract attention with a newspaper headline.[9] The historian James M. McPherson said that negationists would want revisionist history understood as, "a consciously-falsified or distorted interpretation of the past to serve partisan or ideological purposes in the present"

Here is a link to more on the topic... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_negationism

 

[O' Be Joyful]

inventing ingenious but implausible reasons for distrusting genuine documents

Been there, done zhat over-there in the land of popcorn,

which is not to be forgotten ...

"Look Away, Look Away...Look Away"

CSA and rebforever, and W. Virginia land.

 

[diane]

History hoaxes, once started, gain lives of their own. Dang hard to kill 'em, too, no matter how many holly stakes you have. The CW is certainly a persistent one!

Want a good one that has persisted for at least 30 years I know of - that would be the Great Poisoning. The US Army poisoned 3,000 Shastas outside Ft Jones at a big barbecue. The only 'evidence' is the self-appointed tribal historian declaring her great-grandfather told her of it. No bodies, no newspaper accounts, no letters to home of it by the soldiers, no stories of it from other tribes. Not even 3,000 Shastas to poison! But by gollies, you'd better accept the 'oral tradition' of one person or you are denying atrocities took place against local Natives. (Ought to be an 'oral tradition' in my family, too, but I guess not since they seemed to have wisely avoided the Great Poisoning.) Tell you one thing - if that did happen the local papers would have had banner headlines screaming the joyful news and there probably would have been weeks of happy celebration!

 

[jgoodguy]

I am waiting for the ban on sugar because it exploited slaves.

 

[Jim Klag]

I am waiting for the ban on sugar because it exploited slaves.

Or outlaw cotton skivvies. Or rice. Or any other product the slaves were made to work on. They already got most of the tobacco without the help of protesters. Cigars are next.

 

[O' Be Joyful]

Cigars are next.

 

[jgoodguy]

Or outlaw cotton skivvies. Or rice. Or any other product the slaves were made to work on. They already got most of the tobacco without the help of protesters. Cigars are next.

And indigo

 

[Matt McKeon]

Like Sword of Trust, where Marc Maron plays a Birmingham pawnshop owner who gets caught up in a group that claims the Confederacy won the Civil War, Civil War Hoax is a satire on what people will believe and trust and what they won't, especially in the era of conspiracy.

 

[jgoodguy]

Like Sword of Trust, where Marc Maron plays a Birmingham pawnshop owner who gets caught up in a group that claims the Confederacy won the Civil War, Civil War Hoax is a satire on what people will believe and trust and what they won't, especially in the era of conspiracy.

I ran into this trust thing in religion.
Cognitive dissonance
Endtimes are alive and well influencing the right wing evangelicals

 

[diane]

I ran into this trust thing in religion.
Cognitive dissonance
Endtimes are alive and well influencing the right wing evangelicals

That's why you need the Harmonic Convergence. Held in 1987 it was the first massive global effort to...harmonize. All the stars were aligned just right for such an event, too! Hundreds and thousands of people showed up at all sorts of sacred sites all over the world - like Mt Shasta - and meditated on peace, justice, harmony, love and positive energy to renew the earth.

Well...it was a nice thought!

 

[5fish]

I have a modern-day hoax. The Vinland Map was discovered in the 1950s. The map was a hoax but not the story it was telling...

It’s all in the ink: Vinland Map is definitely a fake, new analysis finds

“There is no reasonable doubt here. This new analysis should put the matter to rest.”...

arstechnica.com

Scholars have questioned the authenticity of a purported 15th-century map housed in Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library since it was first unveiled to the public in 1965. About the size of a placemat, the Vinland Map is an intriguing document because, in addition to Africa, Asia, and Europe, the map depicts a section of the North American coastline identified as "Vinlandia Insula" just southwest of Greenland.

Vinland Map - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The Vinland Map was claimed to be a 15th-century mappa mundi with unique information about Norse exploration of North America but is now known to be a 20th-century forgery. The map first came to light in 1957 and was acquired by Yale University. It became well known due to the publicity campaign which accompanied its revelation to the public as a "genuine" pre-Columbian map in 1965. In addition to showing Africa, Asia and Europe, the map depicts a landmass south-west of Greenland in the Atlantic labelled as Vinland (Vinlanda Insula).

 

[rittmeister]

I have a modern-day hoax. The Vinland Map was discovered in the 1950s. The map was a hoax but not the story it was telling...

It’s all in the ink: Vinland Map is definitely a fake, new analysis finds

“There is no reasonable doubt here. This new analysis should put the matter to rest.”...

arstechnica.com

Scholars have questioned the authenticity of a purported 15th-century map housed in Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library since it was first unveiled to the public in 1965. About the size of a placemat, the Vinland Map is an intriguing document because, in addition to Africa, Asia, and Europe, the map depicts a section of the North American coastline identified as "Vinlandia Insula" just southwest of Greenland.

Vinland Map - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The Vinland Map was claimed to be a 15th-century mappa mundi with unique information about Norse exploration of North America but is now known to be a 20th-century forgery. The map first came to light in 1957 and was acquired by Yale University. It became well known due to the publicity campaign which accompanied its revelation to the public as a "genuine" pre-Columbian map in 1965. In addition to showing Africa, Asia and Europe, the map depicts a landmass south-west of Greenland in the Atlantic labelled as Vinland (Vinlanda Insula).

 

[5fish]

Here is the painting in the story...




Image of Discovery of the Piltdown Man in 1911 by Cooke, Arthur Claude (1867-1951)

 

[Union8448]

I always considered this to be an appropriate joke. It made fun of all the elaborate theories of human evolution that were based on very flimsy evidence. The evidence that could be observed is that when people of different types mix together, love and reproduction conquers all. Mixing is the engine of evolution when accept the observable.

 

[5fish]

You know a hoax here and a hoax there everywhere is a hoax...

10 of the Most Audacious Scientific & Archeological Hoaxes - or Are They?

10 of the Most Audacious Scientific & Archeological Hoaxes - or Are They?

spyscape.com

 

[5fish]

I found this about George Mendel his work has been in question since the 1930s... I do not know exactly what the issue the stats guys have with it... called the Mendel Paradox...

http://blog.thegrandlocus.com/2016/04/did-mendel-fake-his-results

The charges against Mendel were laid by Ronald Fisher, the father of statistics. It is intriguing that he started to doubt the results of Mendel in the first place, because he greatly contributed to the modern evolutionary synthesis, i.e. the use of Mendelian genetics to explain Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Why doubt the honesty of someone you believe to be right?

At the age of 21, Fisher came across the unpublished work of Raphael Weldon who happened to have serious doubts about Mendel’s theory. Before his death 5 years earlier, Weldon had started most of the statistical work to disprove Mendel, the analyses were ready for Fisher to pick up and give a nice show on something he still knew little about. This was published in 1911, but nobody paid attention at the time.

 

[5fish]

Here is more on the topic...

Did Gregor Mendel Fabricate His Gene Data?

Questions about bias and skewed experiments have circulated for more than 100 years regarding Mendel's famous research on pea genes.

www.discovermagazine.com

However, there has been an ongoing historical debate as to whether Mendel’s original experiments on this matter were either fraudulent or biased in some way. His overall conclusions are well accepted in the scientific community, but his initial data itself may not be entirely accurate. New research in the past several years revived this topic, which has been the subject of multiple books over the past century.

This notion that Mendel fabricated his data goes back to the year 1900, when biologist W. F. R. Weldon first read Mendel’s seminal paper with some skepticism. Working with famous mathematician Karl Pearson, Weldon demonstrated that it was extremely unlikely for Mendel to get his results the way he did.

It wasn’t until geneticist Ronald Fisher came onto the scene in 1936 that allegations spread more widely about Mendel’s work being fraudulent. Fisher suggested that Mendel’s work was likely fixed in some way, but he posited that rather than Mendel himself being the culprit, some unknown assistant may have fabricated the results to appease Mendel. However, Fisher lacked any evidence for the claim that this assistant altered results.

“To Fisher’s credit, he was up front about having no independent evidence for it, and as far as I know, none has emerged since,” says Radick.

The controversy then continued on for decades after that, with some scholars claiming to have demonstrated Mendel was innocent, and others claiming to have proven Mendel was a scientific fraud. A 2008 book entitled Ending the Mendel-Fisher Controversy even aimed to settle once and for all the debate as a whole. However, this book did not end the discussion, given that many papers published in the years since have offered new insights and perspectives to the matter.

 

[rittmeister]

I found this about George Mendel his work has been in question since the 1930s... I do not know exactly what the issue the stats guys have with it... called the Mendel Paradox...

http://blog.thegrandlocus.com/2016/04/did-mendel-fake-his-results

The charges against Mendel were laid by Ronald Fisher, the father of statistics. It is intriguing that he started to doubt the results of Mendel in the first place, because he greatly contributed to the modern evolutionary synthesis, i.e. the use of Mendelian genetics to explain Darwin’s theory of natural selection. Why doubt the honesty of someone you believe to be right?

At the age of 21, Fisher came across the unpublished work of Raphael Weldon who happened to have serious doubts about Mendel’s theory. Before his death 5 years earlier, Weldon had started most of the statistical work to disprove Mendel, the analyses were ready for Fisher to pick up and give a nice show on something he still knew little about. This was published in 1911, but nobody paid attention at the time.

gregor not george mendel