The YouTube video Loose Change, which promulgates well-trodden 9/11 conspiracy theories, has been without a rival since its 2005 inception. Even George Monbiot was engrossed for a time by the video’s “calm and authoritative voiceover” – a voiceover which, its filmmakers claim, has been heard …
Here is my review in today’s London Evening Standard of 1434, the sequel to Gavin Menzies’ 1421, a piece of pseudohistorical garbage which claimed that Chinese fleets discovered America and Australia in the 1420s. This time round, the Chinese have “ignited the Renaissance”. Sick-bags at …
In 2000, Holocaust denial took a bashing when Deborah Lipstadt defeated the psuedohistorian David Irving in an English court. Irving had accused Lipstadt of libel after her book, Denying the Holocaust, was published in Britain. He had been specified as a Holocaust denier, so decided …
It’s convenient for the Arab world to dismiss the Holocaust as a Zionist conspiracy. It’s easy, too, when accurate information about the Holocaust is so difficult to obtain in Arab societies. Robert Satloff, author of Among the Righteous: Lost Stories from the Holocaust’s Long Reach …
Hitler was wrong. The Nazi idea of a ‘pure’ Nordic race, new evidence shows, was pure fancy. Scientists at the University of Copenhagen have discovered a 2000 year-old burial site containing the remains of a man “who appears to be of arabian origin”. The evidence …
It is gratifying to see counterknowledge calmly and ruthlessly being picked to pieces. A group of Lebanese Muslims, made angry by a Facebook group which calls the Prophet Mohammed “a murderer”, have retaliated by starting their own group. It’s called “Based on the facts…There was …
Craig Brown reviews Damian Thompson’s Counterknowledge in yesterday’s Mail on Sunday: Was Princess Diana murdered by MI5? Were the Twin Towers brought down by President Bush? Were the Apollo Moon landings actually fabricated in a studio on earth? Did Jesus marry Mary Magdalen and sire …
There used to be a home front poster during World War Two that showed some idiot on the bus jabbering away about their cousin in the navy, and an arrow pointing to the consequences: a sunken ship full of drowning sailors. And they didn’t even …
Here is my review of a “history” book that appeared, in modified form, in the Sunday Telegraph magazine yesterday. Here is the unexpurgated version. The Secret History of the World by Jonathan Black, Quercus £25 by Damian Thompson The Secret History of the World is, …
No. Of course they didn’t. How can I be so sure? Because no respected historian has ever written anything to suggest that they did. Good enough? Not for some. Worryingly – amazingly – one of those who thinks Muslims did discover America before Columbus works …