Originally published by Paul Eisen. Republished here with additional preface and hyperlinks.
Preface to this re-published edition by Jorge Besada.
The great comedian-critic George Carlin astutely mentioned: “You don’t need a formal conspiracy when interests converge.” The “fog of war”, with its understandable hatreds, violence, rumors, exaggerations, and vengeful or noble lies, causes many people’s “interests converge” in a manner where atrocity myths easily arise. For example, during WWI rumors-exaggerations-lies created the myth that Germans were bestial “Huns” who would bayonet and chop off the hands of Belgian babies. This was such a big deal at the time that, as historian Thomas Fleming writes: “Clarence Darrow, the famously iconoclastic American lawyer…went to France later in 1915 and searched in vain for a single eyewitness who could confirm even one of the…stories.”
A more recent example is the 40-beheaded babies myth that quickly emerged during the initial months of the “October 7th” (2023) Israeli-Hamas war based primarily on the lies-exaggerations of one Israeli soldier (s ee the excellent “Atrocity Inc” documentary by Max Blumenthal, and ‘What Really Happened on October 7’ by Double Down News). Just like Soviet bureaucrats would seldom admit failure, or having gone along with lies-exaggerations, neither would Netanyahu issue an apology for spreading such a horrible lie-myth. Furthermore, much of the destruction of property and life during the early days of the war was due, not to some maniacal non-homo sapiens Hamas fighters purposely massacring people as if they were WWI German Huns, but by the ‘fog of war’ as Israeli soldiers with powerful weapons caused much destruction, including of their own via the so-called Hannibal directive to prevent the capturing of hostages. The famed Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard admitted in a conversation: “…the bulk of the damage in Gaza was caused by our soldiers…All that destruction you see was caused primarily by our soldiers…This is what I heard all across the board. By people from platoon, company, battalion, brigade, divisional commanders.” Yet in January 2025, the Israeli government passed a law which states: “Anyone who says or writes things denying the October 7 massacre[while ‘expressing sympathy’ for Hamas]…will be sentenced to five years in jail.”
The book “The First Holocaust: The Surprising Origin of the Six-Million Figure” documents how there were over 200 articles since 1850 mentioning the plight, peril, annihilation, extermination, etc. of 6 million Jews, before the allegedly real mass-gassings-Holocaust even began. Naive thinkers erroneously see this as proof that “The Jews” are malicious liars because they do not understand how harassment of Jews for centuries has created ‘fog of war’-like conditions that have understandably shaped Jewish culture to be more susceptible to creating and spreading such myths.