Ah, I wish there was some good stuff on the Web about the Hitler Diaries, which is my idea of a good textbook case of forgery -- at least for the kind of textbook I would write. The diaries had flaws that in retrospect made the discovery of their fraudulent nature inevitable -- but the feat was remarkable nonetheless: lengthy volumes of work that were convincing enough to fool a lot of people who should have been a lot more cautious.
Another favorite of mine is the Report From Iron Mountain: In the form of a government think-tank report, this fabulous satire analyzed the "possibility and desirability of peace" and found that a state of peace would be unhealthy to the American state for many reasons. The satire was aimed at the U.S. military-industrial complex from the American left-wing during the cold-war, but it has been revived by anti-government groups on the American right-wing in more recent years, some of whom take it to be evidence of an on-going conspiracy rather than just a finger pointing at the conspiracy.
For more examples of politically motivated hoaxes, check out our Guerilla Hacks page.
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Luther Blissett's warning |
A fellow with an axe to grind by the name of Solomon Volkov wrote an autobiography, only it wasn't his own autobiography, it was Dmitri Shostakovich's. And almost published recently was the account of an Italian merchant's trip to the orient in the 13th Century, as allegedly given in a recently-discovered manuscript written by the man himself.
In North Carolina, they still believe that the locals beat those dopes in Philadelphia to the punch in 1775 with the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. I suspect it's political suicide in the Jesse Helms State to suggest that the document is a fake, so schoolchildren will be learning about the pioneering Carolinans for decades to come...
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The Eremin Letter |
Sly, very sly. Luther Blissett of San Luis Obispo, California, felt that the innocent verdicts in the first Rodney King beating trial were an indication that the law did not in practice prohibit police brutality. So he wrote up charmingly formal announcements as though he were the government announcing this as policy.
Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) wrote up some fine poetry and passed it off as the 1464 work of the "gode prieste" Thomas Rowley. His life and works proved inspiring to Dante, Coleridge, Keats and others.
Here's a wicked little hack for you: Someone forged a piece of junk-email (a.k.a. spam), sent it to zillions of people, but gave the return-address of the Samsung corporation. They got thousands of messages a day from angry spamees. "We've spent millions to maintain our reputation and our brand image and we just want this to stop," said a company spokesperson.
Some wiseacre thought that Joseph Smith's story about finding a new Christian testament engraved in a supernaturally-transmitted script on metal tablets that later mysteriously disappeared was a little hokey, so he carved a bunch of gobbledygook on some slabs of metal that have since become known as the Kinderhook Plates, and asked Smith for a translation to see how he'd reply; depending on who you ask, well...
The Confessions of Pontius Pilate is one good example of a forged Christian scripture. Attributing a piece of literature to God is just one possibility for people wanting to enter the religion con game. Check out our Great God Hoax page for more on this.
Capitalist propaganda or embarassing evidence? The Eremin Letter seems to provide documentation that shows Joseph Stalin worked for the Czar's secret police as a mole into the Communist Party. And Opal Whiteley: child prodigy or literary fraud? Surprisingly many people care.
Perhaps more the work of random mutation and natural selection than of a mischief-maker, was the charming, down-home, "everything important I learned in kindergarten"-style wisdom written by Chicago Tribune columnist Mary Schmich that was chain-emailed around the net again and again but attributed to Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
If you are curious about this sort of thing, you might also be interested in Literary Hoaxes of the "A Modest Proposal" variety, or in News Hoaxes.