False documentation is the process of creating documents which record fictitious events. The documents can then be used to "prove" that the fictional events happened. A common
propaganda
Propaganda is communication that is primarily used to influence or persuade an audience to further an agenda, which may not be objective and may be selectively presenting facts to encourage a particular synthesis or perception, or using loaded ...
tool, false documentation is often used by
management
Management (or managing) is the administration of an organization, whether it is a business, a nonprofit organization, or a government body. It is the art and science of managing resources of the business.
Management includes the activitie ...
groups and
totalitarian
Totalitarianism is a form of government and a political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and group opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high if not complete degree of control and reg ...
governments for four basic reasons:
# to have a basis for accusations against groups or individuals who oppose those in authority,
# to invoke hatred against certain
racial
A race is a categorization of humans based on shared physical or social qualities into groups generally viewed as distinct within a given society. The term came into common usage during the 1500s, when it was used to refer to groups of variou ...
,
ethnic
An ethnic group or an ethnicity is a grouping of people
A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established fo ...
or
religious
Religion is usually defined as a social- cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, morals, beliefs, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that generally relates humanity to supernatur ...
groups (appeal to bigotry),
# To support the actions of those in power (appeal to
patriotism
Patriotism is the feeling of love, devotion, and sense of attachment to one's country. This attachment can be a combination of many different feelings, language relating to one's own homeland, including ethnic, cultural, political or histor ...
), and
# To cover the mistakes of those in power (
deniability).
Perhaps the best illustration of false documentation is
Nazi Germany
Nazi Germany (lit. "National Socialist State"), ' (lit. "Nazi State") for short; also ' (lit. "National Socialist Germany") (officially known as the German Reich from 1933 until 1943, and the Greater German Reich from 1943 to 1945) was ...
, where the authorities falsified documents for all four reasons.
There are three basic methods for falsifying documentation. One way, of course, is to create an entirely fictional event and write it down. The other is to misrepresent an actual incident by embellishment or exaggeration so that the blame for the incident is misplaced. The third is to refuse to document an actual event, thereby exonerating the instigators for lack of proof.
The practice of false documentation rests on the fallacy, promoted by management organizations and governments, that whatever has been written down is unquestionably true. In business, it rests on a further bias: the tendency of management to believe managers rather than to collect and objectively judge evidence. As
folklorist
Folklore studies, less often known as folkloristics, and occasionally tradition studies or folk life studies in the United Kingdom, is the branch of anthropology devoted to the study of folklore. This term, along with its synonyms, gained currenc ...
Jan Harold Brunvand
Jan Harold Brunvand (born March 23, 1933) is a retired American folklorist, researcher, writer, public speaker, and professor emeritus of English at the University of Utah.
Brunvand is best known for popularizing the concept of the urban legend, ...
points out, when a story or a claim appears in print, it gains an air of authority. Many people are skeptical of spoken rumors, but few doubt the veracity of stories appearing in the news media.
A related fallacy is, of course, that whatever has ''not'' been documented must not have happened. Although absence of evidence is
evidence of absence, whether any given event happened is entirely independent of whether it was documented.
In
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair (25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalit ...
's novel ''1984'', the
Ministry of Truth has an entire department devoted to altering past editions of
newspapers
A newspaper is a periodical publication containing written information about current events and is often typed in black ink with a white or gray background.
Newspapers can cover a wide variety of fields such as politics, business, spor ...
in the belief that changing documentation will change the public's perception of history. One of the novel's greatest ironies is that the Ministry of Truth deals exclusively in lies.
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