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Comment by gmarx | Hacker News Reader

I am fascinated by holocaust denial and the people who think the moon landing was faked. Does anyone believe both? Do the people who believe those have any other historic events that they think were made up?

Most importantly (too me) would it be possible to start one of these on purpose? If you wanted to, what would be a good candidate?

I concluded that the atomic bomb is an excellent choice. I say there never was an atomic bomb. It was propaganda to prevent the US and Soviet Union from engaging in a disastrous WWIII so soon after WWII. And it was very effective but it's time for all the suckers to wake up.

I know you've seen the films. Special effects! Hiroshima/Nagasaki? Regular fire bombing that happened to get out of control because of favorable (or unfavorable) winds! Godzilla? Well that's more difficult to explain but I'm sure if we put our heads together we could come up with something.

Who's with me?!?!?

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> I am fascinated by holocaust denial and the people who think the moon landing was faked. Does anyone believe both?

A work colleague of mine and otherwise very good friend does indeed believe that the moon landings were fake. It took some time until she started admitting that during our chats, and I have to say that I was at first baffled that she actually believed that they were fake and I've only recently stopped mocking her about that.

I also met a friend of a friend (man, late 30s, otherwise quite a great guy) who told me straight-faced that he believed that the Holocaust was not real, that the numbers were "exaggerated" or somth like that. I couldn't continue the conversation because I felt that there was nothing much that I could say, you cannot really continue that kind of conversation without calling said person an anti-Semite and it all goes downhill from there.

I'd be interested in that if it were just a critical mind examining how cognitive bias might have affected numbers and perceptions.

The fact that most of them are only that way about the holocaust argues otherwise.

Still I have to wonder- if you hate Jews why pretend the holocaust didn't happen?

I had a step-father who believed the moon landings were fake. He also thought cigarettes were healthier than chocolate and that Columbine was a false-flag operation to sway the public in favor of gun control, though.

Other notable historical conspiracy theories that have a surprising number of adherants:

- 9/11 was organized/enabled/allowed to happen by actors within the US Gov.

- Pearl Harbor was organized/enabled/allowed to happen by actors within the US Gov.

- JFK was assassinated by the CIA

- All history from CE 614 to CE 911 was fabricated by the Holy Roman Empire

I'm interested in that last one- why the focus on that time period?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_hypothesis

Nos. 1, 2, and 4 are far more plausible than conspiracy theories like flat-earth-ism, holocaust denial, and moon landing denial.

1 and 2 are much harder to prove, since they're not about whether some big thing happened as much as about who orchestrated it, which is a much more ephemeral concept. We (mostly) all accept that some ships sank in Hawaii and that the World Trade Center towers are missing as of 9/11/01. It's what happened and who made it happen that are in question.

I'd say 4 is just as easily disprovable as flat-earth-ism: There are other, contemporary societies in contact with Western Europe who were also keeping track of time... unless there was an Eurasia-wide conspiracy (in CE 1000) to fabricate those years, the dates only line up the way we count them now. There are also well-established (and recorded) astronomical events that line up well with the commonly-accepted timeline (but that would take believing that astronomical events are predictable by science).

In all, I'd say it's much more likely that NASA pretended to land on the moon than that the century we think Mohammed lived in didn't happen.

EDIT: Misread my own numbering

The first three aren't parallel in my mind. Those people aren't saying 9/11, Pearl Harbor and JFK assassination didn't occur. they just have different, mostly unfalsifiable theories about why they occurred.

If you're going to deny undeniable fact, may as well go all the way crazy. I'm in! Let's work on that Godzilla problem though, that's the real hole in our theories.

Simple. The director worked with the Japanese and American governments to create a reason why the Japanese Emperor lost that didn't delegitimize the government. Who could fault a surrender after a "superweapon" was used on you?? Genius black ops on the part of the US and Japan! Then they create various movies propping up the idea. Turn Japan into America's R&D division for electronic development so we didn't have to educate Americans and could continue to dumb down the education system and keep the rowdy Americans in check until they were needed for the next war.

Ha! Get this. It's unassailable.

Godzilla... was just an ordinary human in a rubber suit, in a movie studio sound stage where scale models of cities and landscapes had been built. In later years, as film technology improved, the more detailed films of Godzilla were created with a CGI model, with the virtual skeleton and muscle movements derived from filming a human actor in a mo-cap suit. It only looks real because the animators are so skilled, and the actor is so good at mo-cap acting. It is in no way live footage of a real animal.

That's right. Godzilla doesn't exist. He never existed. He was always a made-up movie character. I bet you could get literally thousands of people to believe that. With enough gaslighting, I bet you could even get someone whose actual home was actually stepped on and burned by Godzilla to believe that it was due to an earthquake or tsunami or tornado or nuclear reactor meltdown or something equally farfetched.

genius. I think it really adds something that we make this case strongly. Like it would make normal sane people question whether maybe Godzilla did exist for realsioes!

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