Difference between revisions of "Examples of Bias in Wikipedia: Conspiracy theories"

Revision as of 21:07, September 23, 2011

This article lists examples of Bias in Wikipedia, related to conspiracy theories they just made up.

1. Wikipedia falsely claimed that 3 to 4 million Vietnamese and 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians and Laotians died in the Vietnam War^[1]. These estimates are based on official North Vietnamese Communist propaganda^[2], and they are not supported by any demographic estimates or studies. One user attempted on August 23, 2010 to include other sources, but was repeatedly censored. On the talk page, he responded: "I'm not sure what there is here to discuss. I simply cited a demographic estimate on the war casualties that the AP called the most detailed demographic study. There's absolutely no reason why it cannot be included in the article. Obviously, some don't like the estimate because they want to believe in a higher one. It's worth noting that while my source is a demographic survey; the one you have at present is a link to an assertion on a webpage, without any study backing it up. I kept that estimate intact; I simply included another. No demographic study ever conducted has estimated a death toll as high as 3, 4, or even 5 million. Right now I'm looking at photos of peace activists with signs reading "Over 600,000 Vietnamese Dead!" No house to house survey endorsed such findings, no medical journal. R.J. Rummel puts the total as 1.2 million dead-- South and North Vietnamese, and Laotians and Cambodians. Look at the Cambodian civil war: Bannister and Johnson estimated the death toll from the war to be around 275,000. Sampson, too, believed that the toll from the war was overestimated. He suggested that civilian deaths "could be numbered in tens of thousands, but not more," and also noted that military attachés estimated the size of each army to be between 100,000 and 150,000. One survey said 230,000 was "the highest mortality we could justify." No survey ever conducted has gotten anywhere near 1.5 to 2 million Cambodians and Laotians killed. The fact remains that the estimates currently cited are official figures from the Vietnamese government." Although Wikipedia's source is indeed a link to another “encyclopedia website” citing the official Communist figures; an editor responded, robotically: "These numbers are supported," while another added "maybe the Communists are telling the truth this time."^[3] A third commenter mentioned the US kill ratio and implied that all of the alleged 4 to 5 million deaths could be blamed squarely on the United States alone,^[4] despite the fact that US military actions were responsible for less than 1% of all democide in Indochina over this period,^[5][6][7] and even though the US did not start the war, but was responding to North Vietnam's aggression at the request of the legitimate governments of South Vietnam and Cambodia. Notably, Wikipedia's own casualty breakdown contradicts the number cited for Laos. Wikipedia not only regurgitates official Communist propaganda, it often backs it up with wholly arbitrary assertions from extreme left-wing propagandists and genocide deniers like Noam Chomsky (who denied the Cambodian genocide) and Gareth Porter (condemned by a Democratic Congressman for explicitly expressing support and admiration for the Khmer Rouge; author of The Myth of the Bloodbath). Conservapedia gives you the truth straight up: "The war exacted a huge human cost, including an estimated one to two million North and South Vietnamese,^[8] 100,000 to 300,000 Cambodians^[9] and 30-50,000 Laotians.^[10] The "most comprehensive demographic survey" ever conducted on casualties during the war, as endorsed by the Associated Press, estimated that nearly one million Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians were killed throughout the two decades of conflict.^[11] R.J. Rummel puts the total at 1.2 million Indochinese killed on all sides.^[12]"
2. Wikipedia minimizes the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge. It explicitly states that the Khmer Rouge killed "over 740,000 Cambodians" on its page about the Khmer Rouge^[13] and uncritically regurgitates the legitimacy of that so-called "estimate". Further, it openly declares that more people may have died in the Cambodian civil war than the subsequent genocide,^[14] even though there is no actual study cited to support the assertion. Indeed, their "estimates" are simply claims repeated by word of mouth uncritically and in the absence of evidence (though they can always find a "source" to cite in support of them); they appear to have been first promulgated by the Khmer Rouge themselves, along with their supporters in the West.^[15]
3. This is just the tip of the iceberg. Wikipedia sinks much lower in its ideological fanaticism. So low, in fact, as to be legitimately considered astonishing even by their own standards. In its article on the US bombing of Cambodia, Operation Menu, it explicitly attributes everyone who died in the entire Cambodian civil war--all deaths, soldier and civilian, on all sides--to American bombing.^[16] It states that: "Operation Menu was the codename of a covert United States Strategic Air Command (SAC) bombing campaign conducted in eastern Cambodia from 18 March 1969 until 26 May 1970, during the Vietnam War leading to the destruction of over 1,000 towns and villages, the displacement of 2,000,000, and the deaths of over 700,000 to 1,000,000 Cambodians."(!) It further adds: "[US bombing] enraged the Cambodian public and helped to create a climate that allowed the Khmer Rouge to come to power."(!!) The article even claims that the reason for the secrecy around the campaign was "[because] an aerial bombing of neutral Cambodia was a war crime."(!!!) The estimate that US bombing killed so many people, was, in fact, apparently first promulgated by the Khmer Rouge themselves.
4. In its Vietnam War article, it implies that only about a million Cambodians were killed by the Khmer Rouge.^[17]
5. Its articles on the Khmer Rouge and the Cambodian Genocide cite estimates of about 1.5 million killed, which is off by over 700,000; while its numbers for the Cambodian Civil war are between 2 and 10 times higher than any actual estimate would indicate.^[18][19]
6. Until May 21, 2010; their Khmer Rouge article absurdly implied for almost 6 months that the US armed the Khmer Rouge even after the genocide.^[20]
7. Their Khmer Rouge article stated that the Khmer Rouge "received extensive military aid from China, Britain and the United States" until July 25, 2010.^[21]
8. Their estimates of the death toll in Communist Cambodia are plainly false for this simple reason (which is mentioned on Conservapedia): Investigators have uncovered and examined the remains of 1,386,734 Cambodians found in mass graves near Khmer Rouge execution centers whose cause of death has been determined to have been primarily execution by the former Khmer Rouge regime. ^[22] Indeed, interviews with the guards who ran these execution centers, forensic analysis, and records from the former regime have allowed them to comprehensively prove that well over a million, perhaps as many as 1.3 million, of these 1.4 million victims were executed by the regime.^[23] Executions accounted for 1/2 to 1/3 of the overall death toll, which includes 500,000 deaths that represented normal mortality for Cambodia over this period. Subsequent studies sugested that the toll from executions alone could have reached 1.5 million--which would indicate 3 million deaths, and thus 2.5 million excess deaths, even if these accounted for half the sum total. The investigators attempted to define a minimum estimate based on this data and concluded that any estimate lower than 1.8 million was simply impossible. Based on these findings, however, it is believed that 2.5 to 3 million died during these years, and thus (accounting for normal mortality) that the Khmer Rouge probably killed somewhere between 2.0 and 2.5 million Cambodians. The Wikipedia article on the Khmer Rouge mentions the over 1 million victims of execution in mass graves. However, it falsely implies without ever being explicit that these Cambodians died from all causes, that many died in the civil war, and that these findings are actually consistent with the claim that Pol Pot only killed 700,000 Cambodians.^[24]
9. Wikipedia's attempts to conflate the death toll from American bombing and from Communist genocide are reminiscent of the tactics of Holocaust deniers who exaggerate the toll of Allied bombing and then assert that the deaths in the camps were the result of food shortages caused by the war against the Nazis. Here's a telling case in point: Genocide investigators have uncovered 20,000 mass graves filled with the bodies of Khmer Rouge victims, counting only mass graves located at Khmer Rouge execution centers and those filled with victims whose cause of death has been determined by the investigators' examinations to have been execution by the regime (keep in mind that executions accounted for only a fraction of the death toll). These same investigators have found only 2 mass graves filled with the victims of US bombing.^[25][26]
10. Its section on the aftermath of the Vietnam War flatly declines to mention the 70,000 South Vietnamese killed within 90 days of the Communist takeover, the massive death toll from the invasion of South Vietnam, the 200-400,000 boat who died at sea, or the 500-600,000 South Vietnamese who were slaughtered by the Communists after 1975 (not counting the boat people).^[27] It also minimizes the atrocities committed by the Khmer Rouge. It does not mention the 150,000 killed by the Pathet Lao in Laos. Wikipedia does not mention anywhere on its site the hundreds of thousands of Cambodians who were killed by the brutal dictatorship imposed on Cambodia by Communist Vietnam (after 1979), with one exception.
11. It's article on left-wing conspiracy theorist John Pilger uncritically regurgitates his claim that the US and UK armed and aided the Khmer Rouge, without ever mentioning the "very substantial" libel damages he had to pay in England for promulgating the fantasy.^[28]
12. Its article on "Covert US Regime Change" explicitly denied that any human rights violations had ever been committed by the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua at all--until August 18,2010.^[29] On September 3, most of the changes were censored on the grounds that they were "irrelevant" "allegations".^[30] Wikipedia has endorsed the results of the rigged 1984 election, as well. Its article on the election repeats conspiracy theories from discredited genocide deniers like Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in support of the ridiculous claim.^[31]
13. In the nineties, the "Progressive South Asia Exchange Net," claiming to cite an article in Le Nouvel Observateur, asserted that U.S. policy in Afghanistan during the seventies was part of a larger strategy of aiming "to induce a Soviet military intervention" in that country by arming the mujahideen prior to the Soviet invasion.^[32] Declassified government documents have proven this allegation was a lie: Two declassified documents signed by Carter shortly before the invasion do authorize the provision "unilaterally or through third countries as appropriate support to the Afghan insurgents either in the form of cash or non-military supplies" and the "worldwide" distribution of "non-attributable propaganda" to "expose" the leftist Afghan government as "despotic and subservient to the Soviet Union" and to "publicize the efforts of the Afghan insurgents to regain their country's sovereignty," but the records also show that the provision of arms to the rebels did not begin until 1980.^[33][34] Unbelievably, Wikipedia has repeatedly and profusely endorsed this baseless assertion over and over again in every article it has on the Soviet war in Afghanistan (except its main article on Afghanistan, which a mainstream audience might read). Its article on National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski stated as a fact that he oversaw "the arming of the mujahedeen in Afghanistan to fight against the Soviet-allied Afghan government to increase the probability of Soviet invasion and later entanglement in a Vietnam-style war" as recently as May 24, 2010. Attempts to edit this claim on "Covert US Regime Change" were censored, though not removed entirely, on September 3, 2010.^[35] Things got so bad that Wikipedia's article on Brzezinski claimed that he was a "Luciferian eugenicist" and a "supervillain, faux-sorcerer" and "vampire" on June 23, 2010.^[36] In reality, Leonid Brezhnev publicly stated that the Soviet offensive was the culmination of a change in the "global correlation of forces" resulting from US defeat in the Vietnam War,^[37] an NSC working group on Afghanistan wrote several reports on the deteriorating situation in 1979--but President Carter ignored them until the Soviet intervention destroyed his illusions,^[38] Pakistan had actually been pressuring the United States for arms to aid the rebels for years but the Carter administration refused to provide them in the hope of finding a diplomatic solution,^[39] the State Department went to extraordinary lengths to deter the Soviet invasion and "would never have undertaken a program to encourage it,"^[40] Brzezinski recounted that he repeatedly advanced proposals on how to maintain Afghanistan's "independence" and deter a Soviet invasion but was frustrated by the State Department's opposition as well as its publicly aired claim that he sought to "revive" the Cold War, and Jimmy Carter's Vice-President Walter Mondale declared: "I cannot understand -- it just baffles me -- why the Soviets these last few years have behaved as they have. Maybe we have made some mistakes with them. Why did they have to build up all these arms? Why did they have to go into Afghanistan? Why can't they relax just a little bit about Eastern Europe? Why do they try every door to see if it is locked?".^[41] The interview cited to justify claims to the contrary was an utter fabrication.^[42]
14. Wikipedia's Brzezinski article contains numerous other fabrications. Here's another actual quote (from the current version): "In 1981 Brzezinski revealed that he encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot. This was part of a wider policy of forcing the Vietnamese out of Cambodia by funding anti-Vietnamese guerrilla groups that the U.S. helped create.[42] Between 1979 and 1981, the World Food Program, which was under US influence, provided nearly $12 million in food aid to Thailand. Much of this aid made its way to the Khmer Rouge.[43] In January 1980 the US started funding Pol Pot while he was in exile. The extent of this support was $85 million from 1980 to 1986.[44] Brzezinski's support of the Khmer Rouge was a continuation of the friendly relations the US had with the Khmer Rouge during the presidency of Gerald Ford. Kissinger had already asked Thailand's foreign minister in 1975 to tell the Khmer Rouge that the US would be friends with them.[45] Brzezinski himself however denied that his administration helped China fund Pol Pot in a letter he sent to the New York Times in 1998.[46]"^[43] The problem? Their source is an article titled "How Thatcher Gave Pol Pot A Hand" by the afore-mentioned John Pilger, who had to pay libel damages for asserting the truth of its thesis.
15. Until June 10, 2010, Wikipedia's "Soviet War in Afghanistan" article explicitly stated that the US was the aggressor in the war and that it "induced" the Soviet military intervention.^[44]
16. Wikipedia's "CIA activities in Iraq" article claimed that Saddam Hussein had been a paid and trained CIA agent since his early twenties until June 10, 2010.^[45][46]
17. Until June 12, 2010; their "covert US regime change" article implied that the US had played a role in the 1968 coup that brought the Ba'ath Party to power in Iraq.^[47] Although the Kennedy Administration did support the 1963 coup, the US was vociferously opposed to the one five years later; it viewed it as a "radical" "counter-coup,"^[48] broke all diplomatic relations with Iraq for 16 years subsequently, and famously spent years trying repeatedly to overthrow it throughout the seventies.^[49] Wikipedia's article now concedes: "Despite claims to the contrary; official CIA records do not indicate that the CIA supported the 1968 coup in Iraq (as they do in the case of the 1963 coup in Iraq)."^[50] Perhaps this is as close to a retraction as one can expect from Wikipedia.
18. Wikipedia's article on "Covert US Regime Change" says the following: "Many of the governments targeted by the US have been democratically elected, rather than authoritarian governments or military dictatorships, and in many cases were replaced by dictatorships."^[51] No source is cited, and no credible source could have been cited. Notably, their entire subsequent article fails to give even one such example, with the possible exception of Chile. (In the case of Chile, Socialist Salvador Allende, elected with a minority of the vote, was: assassinating opponents^[52], threatening opposition media^[53], arming left-wing paramilitary groups^[54], receiving funding from the KGB^[55], and ultimately caught collaborating with Fidel Castro to arm left-wing terrorists to launch attacks on government buildings so he could declare martial law.^[56] Astonishingly, US "hostility towards the election of Socialist Salvador Allende" is portrayed by Wikipedia as US "hostility towards democracy in Chile," even though Allende, not Henry Kissinger, was formally condemned by Chile's parliament for systematically destroying democracy in Chile.^[57])
19. Wikipedia's "Henry Kissinger" article claims: "Kissinger favored the maintenance of friendly diplomatic relationships with right-wing military dictatorships in the Southern Cone and elsewhere in Latin America as well as the intervention in these countries to establish these governments.[citation needed]"^[58]
20. Until June 10, 2010, Wikipedia's article on "CIA activities in Iraq" was nothing but a series of unreadable conspiracy theories and random gibberish.^[59] It went so far as to claim that Jimmy Carter, of all people, secretly incited Saddam to attack Iran.
21. Wikipedia's article on "Saddam Hussein-US Relations" still endorses many of these conspiracy theories that have been removed from other Wikipedia articles. It even states, as a categorical fact, the following: "Hussein made a visit to Amman in the year 1979, before the Iran–Iraq War, where he met three senior CIA agents. He discussed with them his plans to invade Iran."^[60] The source for this claim, it turns out, is official Iranian government propaganda.^[61]
22. Wikipedia regurgitates and proudly endorses even the most absurdly extreme official Iraqi government propaganda when it claims that "up to 1.5 million Iraqis" died as a "result" of the sanctions on Iraq.^[62] It is a matter of public record that the sanctions specifically exempted food and medicine; that they applied only to weaponry; that Iraq had far more humanitarian supplies available to it under the Oil For Food program (first offered to Iraq in 1992) than it would have had over the same period based on the trends that existed before the Gulf War; and that excess deaths did not occur in the North of Iraq, where the US and UN administered the same program under the same sanctions regime, but only in those parts of Iraq were Saddam was charged with rationing the humanitarian supplies.^[63]
23. On July 28, 2010, the United States was listed as a "belligerent" fighting on the side of Iraq in Wikipedia's "Iran-Iraq War" article.^[64] On July 15, 2010, Ronald Reagan was listed under "commanders and leaders" as a commander of Iraqi forces, alongside Saddam Hussein and his thugs.^[65]
24. Wikipedia's George W. Bush article says: "Those invasions led to the toppling of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the removal of Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq as well as the deaths of many Iraqis, with surveys indicating between four hundred thousand to over one million dead, excluding the tens of thousands of civilians in Afghanistan."^[66] In reality, based on the findings of Iraqi hospitals and morgues, the Iraqi government estimates that 150,000 Iraqis died in the war, with only 1-2% of those deaths being at the hands of US troops, and the rest by the insurgency they were combating.^[67] The American army in Iraq has taken three times as many casualties as it has inflicted on Iraqi civilians in collateral damage.^[68] Although Wikipedia may insist that these numbers are there only to help unbiased viewers consider the Bush legacy, there is no mention of the fact that the US invasion of Afghanistan saved millions of Afghans from starvation,^[69][70] or that the lives of 112,000 Afghan children and 7,500 pregnant Afghan women have been saved every year since due to improved healthcare resulting from the invasion (by UNICEF figures).^[71]
25. Wikipedia’s article on “Criticism of Noam Chomsky” (the aforementioned extreme left-wing propagandist and genocide denier) is nothing but an entire page dedicated to defending him and endorsing his conspiracy theories. It is written in such a biased manner as to imply that Chomsky was correct to deny the Cambodian genocide. This pages endorses the notion that the "total population decline" due to the policies of the Khmer Rouge was "about 400,000" Cambodians and further favorably cites the following quote to demonstrate that it did not constitute genocide: “It is interesting, and perhaps suggestive, that Barnes uses the terms "genocide," "holocaust," and "mass murder" as if they were interchangeable.”^[72]
26. In 2002, Chomsky made the following factually inaccurate^[73][74][75] claim about President Clinton’s bombing of the Sudan: "That one bombing, according to the estimates made by the German Embassy in Sudan and Human Rights Watch, probably led to tens of thousands of deaths." Wikipedia has explicitly and in no uncertain terms endorsed this baseless assertion. On Wikipedia’s "Criticism of Noam Chomsky" page, the following is stated as a categorical fact: "Chomsky's claim about the German Embassy in Sudan was correct."^[76] It was most certainly not: A former German ambassador who was nowhere near Sudan at the time did make a similar off-the-record self-described “guess” sans any evidence to a magazine that refused to endorse the assertion, with HRW strongly disputing the claim, but the total number of confirmed deaths from the bombing is 1.^[77] It might be profitable to note that, according to Chomsky's own elaboration on the subject, most of those "excess deaths" would have been the consequence of US aid workers temporarily leaving the country for fear of reprisals. Since the US bombed Sudan in response to its vicious sponsorship of terrorist atrocities against American targets in Africa that murdered hundreds of people, apparently both Chomsky and Wikipedia conclude that it would be criminal for the United States to not aid states that sponsor acts of war against it.
27. Wikipedia’s "Noam Chomsky" article claims that the atrocities in Communist Cambodia under Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge were "objectively similar except for the alignment of domestic élite interests" to those perpetrated in East Timor by the armed forces of Indonesia.^[78] In fact, genocide investigators have determined that the Khmer Rouge perpetrated at least 1.1 million violent killings in three years, and estimated that the full toll from executions alone might have reached 1.5 million, a sum which represents no more than half the total death toll (but with 500,000 deaths representing normal mortality).^[79][80] A Truth Commission found that the Indonesian army had perpetrated 18,600 violent killings in East Timor over 24 years, and had caused at least 75,000 additional excess deaths from hunger and illness.^[81] Comparable? Objective? You decide.
28. Wikipedia's article on the Korean War claims, without offering any citation in support, that up to 1.2 million South Koreans had been killed by the state prior to or during the invasion from North Korea.^[82] In reality, “the war was preceded by a major insurgency in the South and serious clashes along the thirty-eighth parallel,” and 100,000 died in “political disturbances, guerrilla warfare, and border clashes.”^[83]
29. In Wikipedia’s article on the Indonesian mass killings of suspected leftists and Communists in the mid-sixties, in which up to one million (but probably only about a quarter of a million^[84]) people were killed, Wikipedia claims the following: “The massacres were described by Time as 'The West's Best News in Asia'.[57] A headline in US News and World Report read: 'Indonesia: Hope... where there was once none'.[58] New York Times columnist James Reston celebrated 'A gleam of light in Asia'.[59]”^[85] Time Magazine never referred to the slaughter as “The West’s Best News in Asia,” it vociferously condemned the “boiling bloodbath” and said that the prospects of regional peace and of Indonesian neutrality in the Cold War were “the West’s best news for years in Asia.”^[86] A New York Times op-ed listed strategic changes in Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Japan, the Philippines and China under the headline: “Washington: A Gleam of Light in Asia.”^[87]
30. In the same article, conspiracy theories about the US role in the killings are also hysterically strewn about, with even less credibility: “The US also provided "arms" of both US and non-US origin, requested specifically to "arm Moslem and nationalist youths in Central Java for use against the PKI [Communists]."^[88] The sources Wikipedia cites in this instance, as was the case above, actually say the exact opposite of what Wikipedia says they say, which can be explained by the fact that Noam Chomsky invented this talking point,^[89] and this is his famed method of propaganda and deceit. Indonesia did request "communications equipment and small arms to arm Moslem and nationalist youths in Central Java for use against the PKI," but the US stonewalled the request. Embassy staff reported Indonesia’s request and sought "more explicit guidance as to how this matter is to be handled here." The State Department replied: "There was to be no implication of providing anything more than medical supplies already authorized, but the US officials could ask questions to clarify any Indonesia requests for additional aid."^[90]
31. Wikipedia (like Chomsky) cites inaccurate quotes from media outlets like those mentioned above on Indonesia to imply that a right-wing bias exists in the American media. Hence, while it happily cites the New York Times when it (allegedly) celebrates the mass killing of Communists in Indonesia; Wikipedia never mentions that in 1978 the New York Times published an editorial by a devoted Communist and Maoist explicitly denying the Cambodian genocide.^[91]
32. The only article on Wikipedia that gets the death toll from the Khmer Rouge correct is Wikipedia's Pol Pot biography, which states 1.7 to 2.5 million were killed. This really does accurately state both the minimum and maximum plausible estimates. Even so, it feels sociopathically compelled to lie for Pol Pot (the greatest mass murderer in history). For example, it writes that "only 80,000 to 100,000 of these were directly killed."^[92] This claim is not just jaw-droppingly stupid; anyone who knows a thing or two about Cambodia might well laugh out loud reading it. As mentioned above, genocide investigators have proven that at least ten times this number were violently executed.
33. Wonderful news: For now, Wikipedia has eliminated its claim on "Operation Menu" that the US bombing killed more people than the Khmer Rouge! Their estimate for the bombing is now 50-200,000. Hey, you have to start somewhere.
34. In Wikipedia's page on the ABC's docudrama The Path to 9/11, the page contains a section titles "Controversy and criticisms," which contains 19 sub-sections to support it, while the section titled "Controversy: support for The Path to 9/11" only contains four, despite the fact that the controversy was sparked by pro-Clinton liberals that failed to see the fact that the two-part miniseries criticized both Bush and Clinton administrations leading up to 9/11 and that writer Cyrus Nowrasteh stated that many of their consultants on it stated that the docudrama went easy on Clinton. It also fails to note John Ziegler's documentary on the censoring of the docudrama Blocking the Path to 9/11 [1], which contains interviews with many people on the topic, and points out how the MSM liberals and Clintons have smeared it so much that it has destroyed it from ever being shown on TV or being sold on DVD in the near-future. [2]

References