What flat-out fiction presented as history have you encountered lately?

In My Humble Opinion
1

With the advent of AI generated YouTube videos, obscure but true (or alleged, or controversial) historical accounts are getting drowned out by flat-out fabrications; the internet equivalent of presenting the movie “Inglourious Basterds” as genuine WW2 history. Some of this is based merely on the theory that the truth should never stand in the way of a good story, and others by people with ideological axes to grind (“Muslims were originally banned from the USA!” “A mulatto was elected president but was assassinated and erased from history!”).

Any particularly egregious examples you’ve encountered?

2

“Orania’s residents are not racists. They’re preserving their culture.”

3

For those not familiar, that’s a white separatist town in South Africa.

4

I don’t get a lot of outright fictions, but I do know people who always assume that racism/sexism/corporate greed/evil rich people, etc… is the root of everything bad in history, even when it’s not.

It’s the same exact lack of critical thinking and making of assumptions that fosters the outright fictional history that you speak of.

5

That the civil war was about state’s rights, that the intent of erecting statues of Confederates was not racist, etc. etc.

6

@bump and @madmonk28 's examples are more about interpretation. I was thinking of things that simply never happened.

7

Like the Bowling Green massacre?

8

No, that actually happened.

https://www.corvettemuseum.org/sinkhole/

9

Scientology

~Max

10

Tbh most of the lies that immediately come to mind are the “can’t prove a negative” kind, rather than flat out provably fiction. Like the “Haitians are eating cats and dogs” which was clearly a heinous racist lie, but not provably fiction

A couple of ones that are flat out fiction, from world of cryptozoology and pseudoscience, which will get dredged up every time someone puts out a new book or TV show on the subject…

  • The Bigfoot video. Which we know was faked, how it was faked and who faked it.
  • The story that a Tsarist Russian airplane discovered Noah’s ark from his plane on the top of Mount ararat, shortly before the Russian revolution, sending photos back to the Tsar himself only for the whole thing to be covered up by the bolsheviks when they seized power. Which doesn’t make sense on whole bunch of levels, but the most obvious of which is that before the Bolshevik seizure of power, when this allegedly took place, the Tsar was not in power having been deposed earlier in the year.
11

Oh, you’ve got to be careful with that particular fiction. It’s an antique that’s been around since 1865.

12

I’ve seen Facebook posts, presumably from bots, stating that the Knicks have turned down You Know Who’s invitation to the Oval Office. That is, in fact, demonstrably false.

13

And that fiction is so mainstream in America that calling it out is considered an interpretation.

14

Nonetheless I would prefer that this thread be primarily about alleged physical occurrences rather than intangibles like intent or meaning.

15

I suppose some aspects of Afrocentrism would apply. The belief that African civilizations were in contact with and influenced the indigenous peoples in the Americas is one such example. More recently, there was the Netflix documentary of Cleopatra that potrayed her as a Black woman as played by Jada Pinkett Smith.

16

A recent example from J.D. Vance, in an attempt to justify U.S. surrender negotiations with Iran:

Ludicrously false, given that (for example), Germany and Japan unconditionally surrendered at the end of WWII for both nations.

17

Not to even mention that those were actual declared wars, which required formal treaties to conclude.

18

Like why would a Russian plane have been flying over Williamstown, Kentucky?

19

I keep seeing “They have found the site of Atlantis!”, which seeing as Atlantis never existed iwould be impossible.

Admittedly, half the time they change that to say “They have found someplace that we think Plato might have gotten the idea of his parable from!”

20

I don’t think either of these are close to being flat out fiction. The idea of precolumbian sub-saharan African contact with the americas comes from an actual historical account. True there isnt much evidence beyond that one account, but that’s not “flat out fiction”.

Similar for Cleopatra being black. Her mother was probably African, and uniquely among the Ptolemaic dynasty she belonged to, politically she got her support from native Egyptians not the Greek populace. She probably didn’t look much like Jada Pinkett Smith, but that’s not “flat out fiction”, she may have looked more like Jada Pinkett Smith than Elizabeth Taylor.