Some of the biggest lies ever told came from government briefings and medicine labels, completely changing the course of human history forever.
A radio tower at night
World War II started with a lie that most people have no idea about. It began on August 31, 1939, when Polish forces attacked a radio station in Gleiwitz, near Germany’s border. But they weren’t really Polish, no, they were SS men, led by Alfred Naujocks.
They sent out a short message in Polish and fired a few shots before leaving behind a body, just to make the whole thing seem real. Germany used the incident as a reason to attack Poland the very next day, and three days after the attack, Britain and France declared war on Germany.
Fog on the water
U.S. officials claimed on August 4, 1964, that North Vietnamese forces had again attacked American ships. Radar blips, sonar noises, they were all apparent proof of the attack. President Lyndon Johnson used the attack to push Congress toward the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution.
The resolution gave America the power to use military force in the area without officially declaring war. Except, it was all a lie. The second attack never happened, there weren’t even any Vietnamese ships in the area.
A label with a catch
OxyContin. It’s a drug most of us have heard of, but in 1996, it was completely new on the market and sold with an interesting promise that, because it released slowly, it was less addictive than other opioids. No wonder Purdue Pharma pushed that idea hard.
Everyone, from doctors to patients, heard it and believed it, but it was all a lie. The company actually admitted later that, yes, the marketing wasn’t true and OxyContin was very addictive. But it was too late, millions of Americans were already hooked on it.
A missing line in the manual
In 2016, two Boeing flight technical pilots learned some important safety details about a flight-control system called MCAS. Yet these details weren’t properly shared with the FAA, so many pilots continued flying with MCAS, unaware of the dangers. Then tragedy struck.
2018’s Lion Air Flight 610 crash and 2019’s Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crash killed 346 people, both connected to a faulty MCAS. So many lives were lost, just because Boeing officials decided to hide the truth from the authorities. The company later had to pay over $2.5 billion.
Pills, politics, and silence
In the early 2000s, HIV denialism was pretty common in South Africa, and even President Thabo Mbeki had some things to say about it. He claimed that HIV didn’t cause AIDS and, worse still, that the drugs that could help it were unreliable. Those lies spread.
His government delayed wider access to these drugs, including medicine to reduce mother-to-child transmission of the disease. Later, researchers estimated that around 330,000 people died early because of Mbeki’s lies.
A story in Washington
Nayirah was a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl who, in 1990, told a U.S. congressional human rights caucus a horrifying story. Apparently, Iraqi soldiers had taken babies out of incubators and left them to die, truly awful stuff, and the claims even made it to the U.S. Senate.
President George H. W. Bush used Nayirah’s claims to justify America’s military action against Iraq. Yet it was a lie. Nayirah was actually the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the United States, and there was zero proof that anything like this had occurred, none at all.
Powder in the milk
In 2008, milk suppliers in China added the chemical melamine to watered-down milk. Why? Because it’d made the milk look like it had more protein in it and hid that it was watered down, leading to all sorts of infant formula being contaminated. It was a disaster.
At least 300,000 children became sick from the melamine, and 54,000 of them actually had to go to the hospital, with six children dying. That’s not even the worst part. Sanlu, a major infant formula brand, knew about the problem long before news broke, but it kept it secret.
A train stop in Alabama
Paint Rock, Alabama, was a normal railroad stop, right until March 1931, when it became something way worse. Victoria Price and Ruby Bates were two white women who accused nine Black teenagers of rape. These teens were later known as the Scottsboro Boys.
The thing was, the accusation was completely false, and the women knew that, they had lied to avoid being accused of vagrancy, which was a crime back then. Eight of the boys were sentenced to death, although none were executed. One of the defendants was just 13 years old.
A claim in Mississippi
Emmett Till’s case was similar, although somehow even more tragic. He was 14 in August 1955, and he went into a grocery store in Money, Mississippi, when a woman named Carolyn Bryant claimed he’d grabbed and made advances toward her. It was a lie, however.
Till was later kidnapped, beaten, shot, and left in the Tallahatchie River for his ‘crimes.’ It took decades for the truth to come out that, actually, Till had never done anything. Till’s death became an important part of kickstarting the civil rights movement.
A trimmed telegram
King Wilhelm I of Prussia had a meeting with the French ambassador at Bad Ems in July 1870, and a telegram summarised the events, completely normal stuff. But then Otto von Bismarck got involved. He edited the message before giving it to the media, making both sides sound colder.
His telegram made it seem like each side had insulted each other, even though they hadn’t, and the French were so shocked by Wilhelm’s words that they declared war on Prussia in mid-July. An entire war and around 900,000 deaths, all because of a lie.
Sources: Please see here for a complete listing of all sources that were consulted in the preparation of this article.