The Secret of Propaganda: Teaching Obedience

A classic example of modern propaganda. It dates from the 1940s and it shamelessly exploits the principle of authority. Note that there is no proof or evidence that a majority of doctors smoked Camels more than any other cigarettes. And there is no proof or evidence that, even if the claim were true, the doctors would be right. But the principle of authority works independently from data and truth and the campaign was a huge success. It is the great power of obedience.

Just a few days ago, I was a guest on a TV discussion on the usual subject* (practically, the only one being discussed nowadays).  At some moment, the discussion veered on propaganda, and the host** said something like, "but isn't it strange that Germany fell so easily for the Nazi propaganda despite the fact that it was the most cultured society in Europe at that time?" And it dawned on me:

It was not despite. It was because.

Exactly that. Propaganda and education go hand in hand: they are one the consequence of the other. In an instant, my whole career as a teacher flashed in my mind. What are we teaching to our students? Plenty of things, of course, but mostly it is about trusting the authority. Obedience, in one word. 

I experimented at times with the opposite approach, pushing my chemistry students to criticize their textbooks. Many of my students are smart fellows, some of them appreciated the idea, and sometimes they found errors that I hadn't noticed myself. But most of them found the exercise an annoying interlude in their studies. They were not stupid, either. They perfectly understood that learning how to criticize the authority gave them no useful "career points." They just wanted to go through their classes as fast as they could, hoping that the ordeal would soon be over. 

The problem is not just with chemistry. In all fields, students and teachers play a game together, as Simon Sheridan well described in a recent post. It is a game that aims at creating "the archetypal orphan," that is a person completely subjugated to a dominating figure that Sheridan identifies as "the devouring mother." You might also say "the dominating father," but it is a role that university professors assume by default. The technical details of what our students learn are obsolete or soon will be, but one thing of their training will remain for a long time: believing what they are told. Soon, the role of authority will not be fulfilled by their teachers anymore, they will be replaced by opinion leaders, politicians, and other figures. 

Look at how, in the 1940s, the tobacco industry had a huge success with a campaign aiming at convincing people that smoking Camels was a good idea because most doctors (a typical authoritative figure) smoked Camels. Look at how, nowadays, our governments used the same typical authoritative figures, doctors, to convince us to do things that might turn out to be more harmful for our health than cigarette smoking. 

Marty's Mac (see below) notes how (boldface mine)

.... it is remarkably easy to convince the educated classes of something. One only has to get the information printed in the right places. The educated can be made to believe that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, or that cigarettes and canola oil are healthy (a typical claim in the midcentury), or that the high numbers of breakthrough COVID cases in countries with 90% vaccination rates are caused by the 10% of unvaccinated people. They can be made to believe anything, really.  

So, the more educated you are, the more sensible to propaganda you are. No wonder that many of the people most affected by propaganda are well learned ones, especially people who have comfortable government jobs. Among scientists, belief in the current propaganda campaign is especially visible with climate scientists, whose beliefs depend on an authority called "climate models." (I have no statistics to cite on this point, but I know the people who work in the field) Conversely, blue-collar people engaged with real-world problems are more cautious in believing what they are told by the government, as noted by Scott Latham. 

So no surprise that the highly cultured Germans of the 1930s fell in the hands of the rabid Nazi madness (in the hands of the God Wotan, as Jung noted). And the most likely ones to fall for the Nazi ideas were among the most educated. For instance, physicians joined the Nazi party in droves (nearly 50% by 1945), a much higher fraction than for any other profession. Then, no surprise that our highly educated society fell so easily into the current propaganda trap that makes us believe that our governments are doing what they are doing only in order to protect us from a terrible danger. 

But propaganda is not necessarily a bug, it is a feature of the system. There is nothing wrong with the principle of authority, as long as you see it in terms of trust in people who know more than you. In the complex society in which we live it is impossible to question every facet of reality and, without this kind of trust, it would be impossible to keep it working. The problem with trust is that when it becomes an automated reflex it can be easily hijacked by people who use it to their own advantage. Then, trust becomes obedience and propaganda becomes the truth. (***)

If there will be some good consequences of the disaster that befell us during the past two years, it will be to understand the dangers of propaganda. And maybe to remember how right Ivan Illich was about the need of "deschooling society." 

(*) Apologies for not writing explicitly the term for what we are discussing. I already lost a blog to censorship and I am sure that you understand anyway. 

(**) h/t Domenico Guarino

 

(***) after having published this post, I found a quote by Hannah Arendt that I think is in line with my considerations and those of Marty's Mac. 

“The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.”

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”

“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. ... Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”

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Below, I report in full the recent post by "Marty's Mac." I already cited him or her extensively in a post on religion and literacy. One of the smartest commenters I know, at present

How do you know… ?

by Marty's Mac -- Jan 10 2022

How do you know a variety of facts about the world? For instance, how do you know that matter is made up of atoms and electrons?

Presumably you learned about this in school. A teacher gave you a textbook that explained the experiments that established atomic theory. We knew already, before any electronic scanning microscope, that matter came in discrete units because the result of chemical reactions always yields perfect whole-number ratios. Subatomic particles were discovered with the cathode tube, Rutherford discovered the nucleus by shooting radiation at gold, Millikan discovered the charge of an electron with his famous oil drop experiment… the list of experiments in an introductory text goes on. An educated person who is not working in the hard sciences has, likely, already forgotten most of these. But they were in all likelihod presented to him, back in high school.

But none of these answers, even if you remember them, actually explain how you know about the atom. Unless you are in a very rarified group of chemistry and physics enthusiasts, you have not performed any of these experiments. So how do you actually know about atoms?

What happened, really, was that an authority figure gave you certain information, a significant amount of which you also read (in a text that is culturally authoritative), and you believed it. You believe stories like these because you have been raised to believe them and have not decided to radically doubt the authorities who passed this information on to you. Things like atomic theory seem to be widely believed, and people say it’s important for all sorts of technical applications, and these technologies seem to work very well. You believe about atoms, almost certainly, second-hand.

But it is not just atoms. How about the existence of Kazakhstan? It is on maps, people in the news talk about it as if it is real (and currently undergoing serious civil unrest), there are images of people in a place that is called Kazakhstan, and so on. This is also how you have any understanding of health and the body, the workings of your government, and so on. The educated mind has acquired most of its understanding through appeals to authority. The critical thinking that is so vaunted in education is mostly about judging whether or a certain authority is good (or, ultimately, approved), and in some cases whether it has internal inconsistencies that might discredit it.

I am saying this not to knock education as useless and only for the sheeple. There is not an alternative to appeals to authority. In any sufficiently complex technological or scientific society, the accumulated knowledge is too vast for an individual to replicate his ancestors’ discoveries for himself. This is already true in fairly technologically primitive societies: Which plant fibers are good for clothing and textiles, and which are useless? Which mushrooms are edible? What domesticated or semi-domesticated crops have been handed down to you? How does one hunt or make weapons for hunting? All of these are inherited knowledge or technology, and we are miles away from atomic theory. But the dependence on authority becomes much more acute for more highly technologically developed societies like our own. There is no viable alternative to an education in which appeals from authority are prominent. The only real alternative, completely erasing authority from the equation, is to drop back to some level below hunter-gatherer and hope to acquire enough knowledge over a single lifetime to manage bare subsistence.

Continuing Education

Education is, as they like to say now, a lifelong process. For the highly educated, all of whom adopt this model of trusting certain authorities for information about how the world works, and especially for those embedded in the “knowledge economy”, this kind of learning does not end (or does not largely end) with formal schooling about atoms and molecules. It continues into adult life. The teachers and textbooks are replaced by culturally authoritative figures like the newsman or public intellectuals (often academics or businessmen) and sources like The New York Times. And in the contemporary marketplace, if you don’t like these, other authorities are on offer.

The continuing education of the educated (most typically this education focuses on current affairs) has two consequences. The first is that it is remarkably easy to convince the educated classes of something. One only has to get the information printed in the right places. The educated can be made to believe that Iraq has weapons of mass destruction, or that cigarettes and canola oil are healthy (a typical claim in the midcentury), or that the high numbers of breakthrough COVID cases in countries with 90% vaccination rates are caused by the 10% of unvaccinated people. They can be made to believe anything, really. The same way the teacher explains about the electrons and the textbook backs her up, the newsman can go on Fox or print in Vox some story, and the educated and informed person will summarily believe it. Fairly recently the elites in America have suddenly noticed that this may not always work to their advantage, and Hillary Clinton coined the term “fake news” to explain her defeat (a term that was immediately taken up by Donald Trump and, like almost all of Hillary Clinton’s political moves, backfired spectacularly). However, this gullibility is not confined to conservatives (nor to liberals). It is a simple result of a large percentage of the population becoming lifelong learners.

The second consequence is that the cultural norms of society can change rapidly and over much less than a single lifetime. There have been a bevy of cultural norms that have been repealed or replaced over any adult person’s lifetime. The most obvious in the current moment is extreme fear of sickness, adoption of universal masking, and acceptance of ever-increasing government authority in the name of health. However, many other changes have occurred within a single lifetime: The widespread acceptance of gays and lesbians (currently this is happening with trans people at an even more breakneck pace), the non-acceptance of overt displays of (certain kinds of) racism, ignoring one’s dinner partner in favor of reading (once considered horribly rude with a book, now commonplace with a phone), ordering food instead of cooking, and if we go further back, the acceptance of left-handedness as a manner of writing (as late as the early sixties, this was disallowed in American schools). These are all changes that were normalized in less than the time it takes for an infant to become a legal adult. Despite this speed, they are often not noticed (many boomers lived through the acceptance of left-handedness and barely think about it), or thought of as so backwards that no one could possibly disagree (this was the case two years after the repeal of sodomy laws). A whole population can be freshly educated in the right way, whatever that right way happens to be today (and quite independent of whether it is good or bad for society), and tomorrow behave as though they grew up believing these things their whole life long.

This peculiarly modern form of changeability and indeed gullibility is not present in older, less literate societies. This is not to say illiterate or less literate societies don’t believe crazy things. Of course they do. But these crazy things are generally learned in childhood: how shamanistic magic can cure or curse, the presence of spirits all around us, the importance of smoking bodies before burial to reach the afterlife, and so on. The feudal serf may harbor a host of wacky superstitions, but they were acquired in his early education (not in a school so much as around the village) and became more or less fixed for his entire adulthood. Literacy and lifelong learning create opportunities for people to acquire new fundamental beliefs their whole life long. The gullibility of childhood can become permanent.

The sorts of rapid changes we have all experienced in the past two years in relation to COVID would not have been possible without a highly literate society. At the beginning of the pandemic, when news was first coming out of China, it was racist to be at all concerned about the virus. Then it became irresponsible and scientifically invalid to wear a mask. Then it became scientifically necessary to wear a mask (perhaps even two or three, simultaneously) and maintain social distancing. Then the science said it was okay to not practice social distancing if one attended the right kind of protests. Then it was necessary to get two vaccines, and that would end the pandemic. Then there was a booster one would get once a year, now down to every four months. At each stage, people have wholly bought into the new belief system which may have contradicted the belief system of last month or last week. Science changes, or rather the story that the cultural authority is telling changes, and so people’s fundamental beliefs can be updated more or less live. This is not because the whole population has actually properly learned something. They have just been informed of a change of plan.

Life in the age of propaganda

As I stated before, there is no solution that will keep us from having to learn by appealing to authority, because there is too much to know for any person to build up everything from scratch. Everyone has a matrix of beliefs which they have built up partially from direct experience (the minority) and partially from authorities they trust (the majority). But in an age of constant learning, it is much easier for baseless beliefs to infiltrate a belief matrix over time. When people worry about propaganda, I think this largely what they mean: That the set of new information being acquired will contain beliefs that, if one were to build them up from scratch (which most people cannot do, and no one can do with all the new information), would not hold up to scrutiny. This has been, for all of human history, an ever-present possibility in childhood, but children don’t have the mental capacity to worry about this.

This is not a place to “solve” the problem of propaganda. Such a solution (if it were possible) would be worthy of a lengthy book on epistemic philosophy or sociology. All I want to point out here is that propaganda, and easily-propagandized populations, are a result of education and cannot be fixed by simply educating people better. The very instruments for increasing knowledge in fact introduce the greatest possibility for the rapid adoption of false beliefs. If we want to live with the benefits of literacy (and we have no choice, this is the world as it is, unless we suffer a severe dark age), we must learn to live with and, if we are very lucky and work very hard to change society, mitigate the dark side of that social technology.

The Age of Exterminations (V): Suicide as a Weapon of Mass Destruction

Regina Lisso, 21-year-old German girl, photographed in 1945 after having killed herself by ingesting a cyanide capsule. She was unlucky enough to find herself in the crosshairs of a major propaganda effort where the Allied and the German governments collaborated to convince Germans to commit suicide. It is hard to convince people to kill themselves, but we cannot exclude that it could be tried again in some indirect forms. 

This is the 5th part (one, two, three, and four) of a series dedicated to exploring a dark area of human behavior: mass exterminations. Here, I examine perhaps the darkest part of it: when the victims can be convinced to submit to be killed or even to kill themselves by lies and propaganda.  

During the last two years of WW2, the German and the Allied governments found themselves in an unholy alliance. Both wanted the Germans to fight like cornered rats up to the very last moment but for different reasons. The Germans were trying to postpone their defeat; the Allies wanted the destruction of Germany's military and industrial base. You can find this story told in some detail in my book "Before Collapse" (1). 

A side effect of this weird bipartisan effort was the rise of perhaps the first psyop in history that tried to convince an enemy population to commit mass suicide. In 1945, the British printed and distributed in Germany a propaganda postcard written in German and supposedly issued by the Nazi government. It provided detailed instructions on how to hang oneself (postcard "H. 1321") (2). Even more weirdly, the Germans collaborated with the Allies in pushing German civilians to commit suicide. Possibly, they were possessed by a mystic intoxication about glorious death but, more likely, the German government reasoned that mass suicide was an easy way to get rid of unproductive people, mostly women and the elderly. The result was the wide distribution of cyanide capsules to the population. One of those cyanide capsules was used by Regina Lisso, a 21-year-old girl who had no reason to die but who was caught in the madness of the propaganda storm (5). Other Germans used different methods: hanging, drowning, guns, and more. 

Nevertheless, induced suicide as a weapon of mass extermination turned out to be scarcely effective. There are no reliable estimates of the total number of victims in Germany. It is mainly because of the chaos of the last months of the war, but also because everyone wanted to keep a veil of silence on the story after the war was over. From what we know, it seems that a few tens of thousands of people chose to kill themselves. Not a negligible number, but only a minor fraction of the German population, at that time over 60 million. It was small also in comparison to the number of victims of the Allied bombing, which turned out to be a much more effective way to kill large numbers of German civilians. 

The poor results of the joint Allied/German suicide psyop in 1945 do not demonstrate that much more significant effects cannot be obtained. In history, there have been cases where the casualty rate by suicide was 100%. An example is the fall of the fortress of Masada in 73 AD, where the Jewish defenders chose to kill themselves and their families rather than surrender to the Romans. A modern example is when, in 1978, more than 900 followers of the religious leader Jim Jones killed themselves in an apparent case of mass poisoning. 

In both cases, there were no survivors left to tell how exactly things went, but it is clear that, in Masada, the defenders killed each other rather than committing suicide. In the case of Jones' followers, it may well be that many of the victims, if not all of them, were gunned down rather than poisoned (3). It seems to be easier to convince people to engage in a consensual suicide pact rather than killing themselves directly. It is perhaps because they hope to have a chance to escape death at the last moment. It happened at the siege of Jotapata (Yodfat) in 67 AD when the commander of the Jewish forces (Ben-Matityahu, later known as "Flavius Josephus") escaped the suicide pact of the defenders and defected to the Romans.

So, it seems that psyops cannot easily turn suicide into a weapon of mass extermination. Even in the worst situations, rather than killing themselves, people will engage in desperate attempts at fighting back. That was the case of the Japanese kamikaze pilots, or the Native Americans in the 19th century with their cult of the ghost shirt. 

Nevertheless, there may exist creative possibilities for a "soft" elimination of large numbers of consenting people. One way could be not letting them know that they are being killed. Alternatively, they could be convinced to kill themselves in ways that they don't recognize as "suicide." Both methods require deception, but that's not a problem: deception is part and parcel of the very concept of "Propaganda."

We all know the story of people quietly walking into gassing chambers after being told that they would have a shower. It is an example of the strategy of deception used in Nazi Germany to eliminate that fraction of the population defined as "Lebensunwertes Leben," ''life unworthy of life.'' It included not only Jews and other ethnic minorities, but also "Aryan" German citizens affected by malformations or just considered a burden for the state. In Germany, regular medical doctors used barbiturates to kill children and gas chambers to get rid of adults. Neither the victims nor their families were told of what was being done. Officially, the victims were hospitalized to receive medical treatment; later on, families received notice that, unfortunately, their relatives had not survived the attempt to cure them. The number of ethnic Germans killed in this way is estimated as around 300,000. Much smaller than that of the Jews and other ethnic groups exterminated, but still not negligible and probably ten times larger than the number of Germans who could be convinced to commit suicide. 

In our times, we have methods to get rid of people with their consent that were not available in Nazi Germany. In terms of "substance abuse," we have a wide choice of substances that shorten one's life expectancy and that are willingly ingested by people. In some cases, they are forbidden, although obtainable illegally (heroin, cocaine, and others). Some are marketed but advertised with severe limitations (alcohol and tobacco). In other cases, they are heavily advertised and widely available (junk food). We also need to mention that some medical treatments are widely recommended as good for your health, but nobody really knows if they really are (4), and in some cases, it is discovered only later that they are very bad. Maybe you remember the case of Thalidomide, but there are many more in the history of medicine. Surely, there will be more cases in the future.

Although effective, these substances are slow and messy ways to get rid of people, and they may generate unwanted side effects. For instance, cocaine taken every day will shorten a person's life by about 10 years on average, too slow to be interesting for exterminators. It is at least unlikely that the diffusion of heavy drugs in our society is the result of an evil plan of extermination, although some agencies of the deep state may well have a role in their supply and distribution. 

At this point, the question is whether the stress on our society could accumulate to a level in which we would start doing the things that were done in Germany during the Nazi period, that is, to exterminate people singled out for some physical factor, religious belief, or ideology. And there is no doubt that our society is heavily stressed although probably not so heavily as Germany was in 1945 (not yet, at least). 

Of course, the reaction to this hypothesis normally comes with the sentence, "It can't happen here," and clearly, we are not seeing our governments distributing cyanide capsules to the population. Nor do we have evidence that doctors are willingly killing their patients. But a basic rule in history is that if something happened once, it may happen again. 

So, never underestimate what psyops can accomplish, nor how evil the people in power can be! And if they were to start reasoning like the German government did in 1945, they have a number of options that we can only hope will never be put into practice.  

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Notes

(1) All traces of the infamous "H.1321" postcard exhorting the Germans to commit suicide seem to have disappeared from the Web. Why that happened is left to the reader to wonder about. Yet, the postcard can still be found at the "wayback machine"

H.1321 (and H.1380). This card, produced in March 1945, is entitled "Instructions for suicide by hanging." Seven suggestions are listed. The text is written in a ponderous and unusual style of German that required frequent use of a dictionary. The text starts on the back of the card (all text, no image) and is printed in red, giving the impression of being typewritten.



"If you want to avoid useless suffering, pay attention to the following instructions:


1.) Choose a strong cord, about the strength of a clothes-line. A thin one cuts and hurts.

2.) Tie the knot of the bow in a way that the bow will not tighten the cord. The cord must go unhindered through the bow.

3.) Grease the bow and cord well to achieve a sleek fastening of the noose.

4.) Avoid getting strangled before jumping, or you will have to struggle longer.

5.) Secure a full jump. This guarantees a break of the neck instead of getting strangled. Climb a chair or a table and fix the noose high enough (use a hook in the ceiling or wall), so that your feet will hang free after the jump.

6.) Put the neck through the noose. Make sure that the knot and bow are behind the neck, not in front of the throat.

7.) Jump courageously. If you want to be sure, then jump as high and bold as you can to fall down near your jumping location,”

The rest of the message appears on the front of the postcard, typed vertically at the left side.


“as if you wanted to make a joyful jump from the diving board into the water. The stronger the leap, the safer the break of the neck.


Don't hesitate!

The Horst Wessel standard is calling!

Hail Hitler!"

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(2) From Ugo Bardi's book "Before Collapse"

By September 1943, after the surrender of Italy, it must have been clear to everybody on both sides that the Allies had won the war, it was only a question of time for them to finish the job. So, what could have prevented the German government from following the example of Italy and surrender, maybe ousting Hitler as the Italian government had done with Mussolini? We do not know whether some members of the German leadership considered this strategy but it seems clear that the Allies did not encourage them. One month after Italy surrendered, in October 1943, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, signed a document known as the “Moscow Declaration.” Among other things, it stated that:

"At the time of granting of any armistice to any government which may be set up in Germany, those German officers and men and members of the Nazi party who have been responsible for or have taken a consenting part in the above atrocities, massacres and executions will be sent back to the countries in which their abominable deeds were done … and judged on the spot by the peoples whom they have outraged. … most assuredly the three Allied powers will pursue them to the uttermost ends of the earth and will deliver them to their accusors in order that justice may be done. … <else> they will be punished by joint decision of the government of the Allies."

What was the purpose of broadcasting this document that threatened the extermination of the German leadership, knowing that it would have been read by the Germans, too? The Allies seemed to want to make sure that the German leaders understood that there was no space to negotiate an armistice. The only way out left to the German military was to take the situation in their own hands to get rid of the leaders that the Allied had vowed to punish. That was probably the reason for the assassination attempt carried out against Adolf Hitler on June 20th, 1944. It failed, and we will never know if it would have shortened the war.

Perhaps as a reaction to the events in Germany, on September 21, 1944 the Allies publicly diffused a plan for post-war Germany that had been approved at the Quebec Conference by the British and American governments. The plan, known as the “Morgenthau Plan,” was proposed by Henry Morgenthau Jr. secretary of the Treasury of the United States. Among other things, it called for the complete destruction of Germany’s industrial infrastructure and the transformation of Germany into a purely agricultural society at a nearly Medieval technology level. If carried out as stated, the plan would have killed millions of Germans since the German agriculture, alone, would have been unable to sustain the German population of the time.

Unlike the Moscow declaration that aimed at punishing German leaders, the Morgenthau plan called for the punishment of the whole German population. Again, the proponents could not have been unaware that their plan was visible to the Germans and that the German government would have used it as a propaganda tool. President Roosevelt's son-in-law Lt. Colonel John Boettiger stated that the Morgenthau Plan was "worth thirty divisions to the Germans."⁠ The general upheaval against the plan among the US leadership led President Roosevelt to disavow it. But it may have been one of the reasons that led the Germans to fight to the bitter end.

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(3) The story of the "mass suicide" in Jonestown is far from being clear. There were no survivors so the interpretation of what actually happened is mainly based on a tape with the last speech of Jim Jones, where we hear him exhorting his adepts to kill themselves. This is one of the many cases in which a mass killing event is explained on the basis of the near-miraculous survival of a tape where the evil guy of the story accuses himself of being the perpetrator. Another suspicious detail is that we know that the victims of cyanide poisoning normally die gasping for air, face-up, with their mouths open in a characteristic "grin" that you can see in the pictures of Regina Lisso. Instead, in Jonestown, nearly everyone died face down, and in none of the very few photos we have where we can see the face of the dead, we can detect the typical features of people dying of cyanide poisoning. Very few autopsies were performed, and it is likely that we'll never know exactly how these people actually died, but the hypothesis that they were gunned down, rather than convinced to commit suicide, cannot be excluded.

(4) The complexity of modern medicine is so high that even medical doctors may be at loss to understand what they are recommending. For instance, a large number of Americans are taking statins or other cholesterol-lowering drugs, and their use of statins is aggressively promoted. But is there evidence that statins significantly increase people's life expectancy? None at all, and statins have non-negligible side effects. So, why are people taking statins? Because their doctors told them so. And who told that to the doctors? At best, they read some scientific papers in a hurry and got the impression that statins are good. Or maybe they were convinced by the advertising of statin producers. Possibly, they know that statins are ineffective, but they won't take the risk of not prescribing them. In short, people take statins because everyone takes them.

(5) A commenter raised the question of whether Regina Lisso was really dead, since she looks relaxed, even beautiful in death. It is correct to doubt anything that comes from a government, and that picture was taken by a photographer working for the US army. But the setting, the posture, and all the details in the photo look just right. There are not so many photos of the bodies of people who killed themselves using cyanide in Germany, but in most cases, we see them lying face up, their mouths open, sometimes just a little, very much in the same posture as Regina Lisso. It also makes sense that it is a real photograph because the idea that a young and beautiful girl had killed herself to escape her "liberators," the US army, had no propaganda value for the Allies. 

 

Regina Lisso committed suicide together with her mother and her father, and the three of them are shown in several photographs easily found on the Web.