CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

For U.S. Schools, A Lie That Lasts 50 Years Is No Longer a Lie

I mention schools because something bothers me the most there, but I could mention newspapers or talk shows or Wikipedia — in any of these fora, once a lie lasts long enough, even if it’s been thoroughly debunked repeatedly for decades or centuries it’s still something other than a lie. It’s still the thing you teach, with an addendum or a footnote pointing out how it conflicts with reality.

First you state that nuking Japan ended WWII; then you add that it didn’t end the war and wasn’t needed to end the war. First you state that the attack on the USS Maine started the Spanish American war; then you add that there was no attack. First you report how the Gulf of Tonkin Incident started the Vietnam War; then you add that there was no incident. And so on. You can say the War on Iraq was started with lies, but only because everyone said so very loudly at the time; if they’d only said it after some years or decades had gone by, then you couldn’t.

This is on my mind because of the Stanford Prison “Experiment.” This was hyped and hyped from 1971 through the present. But that hype required not looking too closely and not worrying that the thing could not be reproduced, that various actual experiments both before and after the Stanford performance art — including efforts to reproduce just what Stanford claimed to have been — all had very different results. In most science, if something cannot be reproduced it should not become accepted fact. But most science isn’t on television or in the movies.

If you looked closely, Stanford “experimenter” Philip Zimbardo recounted in his own book how he had trained the “prison guards” prior to the “experiment”........

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