Urban Legends
From dKosopedia
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Urban Legends
Most of us know Snopes site's Urban Legends Reference Pages There is also About.com's section on Urban Legends and Folklore. They usually do a good job on listing urban legends and wether they are true or not, but somehow fail to expose the neocons most blatant lies.
I believe we have to start exposing those lies, so I'm starting our Dkosopedia section on Neocon Urban Legends. The other UL we can leave to Snopes and the other sites...
Links
Example of Urban Legend
Title: Hippo Eats Dwarf
Status:False
Tale: Via Museum of Hoaxes, news that a dwarf named Od was swallowed by a hippopotamus in a freak circus accident in northern Thailand.
Investigation:The tale is listed as a "1999 urban legend" by the Darwin Awards folks.
Example of Neocon Urban Legend
Title: Iraq "better" than WWII
Status:False
Source: Several e-mails have been circulating describing how WWII's post war period was as chaotic or worse than Iraq's. This particular e-mail entitled Did You Know This? managed to appear in Snopes Urban Legends pages. This assertion is not disputed by Snopes, who says These types of items are generally impossible to categorize with a single truth value because they typically contain a mixture of fact, opinion, subjective statements, inaccuracies, and literally true but often misleading claims.
Tale: Military deaths from fanatic Nazi's, and Japanese numbered in the thousands and continued for over three years after WWII victory was declared
Investigation:The tale builds on then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld declarations such as 1945 through 1947 was an especially challenging period. Germany was not immediately stable or prosperous. SS officers—called 'werewolves'—engaged in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals cooperating with them—much like today's Baathist and Fedayeen remnants
The asserion has been proved false by several scholars, including Daniel Benjamin, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In an article titled Condi's Phony History Mr. Daniel writes: It's hard to understand exactly what Rumsfeld was saying, but if he meant that the Nazi resisters killed Americans after the surrender, this would be news. According to America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq, a new study by former Ambassador James Dobbins.. the total number of post-conflict American combat casualties in Germany—and Japan, Haiti, and the two Balkan cases—was zero.