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How Vladimir Lenin Became a Mushroom
- wimagguc 9y agoI learned about this video from HN last year or so. The relevant discussion is here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11952927 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11952927 ...and the Youtube links still work too! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2cs8QLnxlU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2cs8QLnxlU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExXDxpBFFR0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ExXDxpBFFR0
- kenning 9y agoThere's something special about documentaries -- you can convince the audience of practically anything if you're a good enough director. My favorite case is the Errol Morris documentary Mr. Death. It follows the story of a man who went from an electric chair technician to a holocaust denier. Morris attempted to direct the movie from the subject's perspective so that the audience could understand how you could slowly become a holocaust denier. When he showed the movie to a Harvard film class, half the class believed that Morris himself was a holocaust denier, and the other half of the class believed the subject's (holocaust denying) side of the story, specifically that the Auschwitz gas chambers never actually had poison gas in them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Death:_The_Rise_and_Fall_of_Fred_A._Leuchter,_Jr.#Background https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Death:_The_Rise_and_Fall_o...
- hansjorg 9y agoAnother good one is Dark Side of the Moon where amongst others Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld and Alexander Haig explain how the Apollo 11 moon landing was faked. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Side_of_the_Moon_(film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Side_of_the_Moon_(film)
- flukus 9y agoI must confess to falling for that one briefly (In my defense, I was half asleep at the time), they start off using very cagey language so it seems like what you'd expect in a real interview but by the end theiry're blatant enough to be unbelievable. A more recent one was a Mermaid mockumentary, even though they are honest about being completely fictional in the credits there are still people that believe they were real documentaries sadly.
- dailyvijeos 9y agoAdvertising/PR manufactures beliefs, values, preferences and consent every day. Most people these days forgot or were not aware of how they were brainwashed by content or by other people into internalizing what they believe.
- kenning 9y agoDocumentaries are just on another level, in my opinion, because they take on the style of what you've learned in school. People expect advertisements to be fake, which is why they have to be so postmodern now.
- telesilla 9y agoPeter Jackson also managed to fool many television watchers with Forgotten Silver: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgotten_Silver#Reception https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgotten_Silver#Reception
- Joeboy 9y agoThe BBC's spaghetti harvest documentary from April 1 1957: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVo_wkxH9dU
- Sag0Sag0 9y agoOne reason for such a large crop is the virtual disappearance of the spaghetti weevil. Classic.
- emmelaich 9y agoAnother one, from the Australian 60 minutes. http://skepdic.com/carlos.html http://skepdic.com/carlos.html "'Carlos' was the name of a 2,000-year-old spirit allegedly channeled by José Alvarez when he toured Australia in 1988." The hoaxing presenter (Richard Carleton) did not even tell his co-hosts and they were pretty mad at him.
- Joeboy 9y agoIn a similar vein, BBC's Ghostwatch: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostwatch#Controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostwatch#Controversy
- Shivetya 9y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti-tree_hoax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti-tree_hoax https://youtu.be/tVo_wkxH9dU https://youtu.be/tVo_wkxH9dU that hoax is my favorite because the BBC did it. I will let each enjoy the the story and video
- peterbotond 9y agoFascinating
- TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago> There's something special about documentaries -- you can convince the audience of practically anything if you're a good enough director. The reception of Adam Curtis films speaks to this.
- mirimir 9y agoI don't know. I mean, if Lenin did use psychedelic mushrooms, maybe it did boost his charisma, creativity, etc. But the title? It's just silly.
- gk1 9y agoRead the story. The hoax is that Lenin literally became a mushroom.
- mirimir 9y agoI did read the story. Here's the punchline: > Correlating the existence and use of hallucinogenic mushrooms in both Russia and Mexico, Kuryokhin posited that drugs had ultimately inspired the successful propaganda of the Russian revolution. In fact, Lenin had consumed so many mushrooms that their fungal “consciousness” had completely consumed him in return. By the end, Kuryokhin put it plainly, saying, “I have absolutely irrefutable proof that the October Revolution was carried out by people who had been consuming certain mushrooms for many years. And these mushrooms, in the process of being consumed by these people, had displaced their personalities. These people were turning into mushrooms. In other words, I simply want to say that Lenin was a mushroom.” He also made references to mushrooms being made out of radio waves, as if he didn’t already sound crackpot enough. So no, "Lenin was a mushroom" was just a figure of speech. Edit: The hoax was that he used psychedelic mushrooms, and that they "inspired the successful propaganda of the Russian revolution".
- iamthirsty 9y agoHis body has been on display for almost a century. Some conspiracy theories make no sense but some will believe whatever they're told.
- dailyvijeos 9y agoCommunal reinforcement of delusions is vital for crazy people whom have few friends. Without their flat earther or Christianity conventions, they have nothing.
- igivanov 9y agoThere were no storms. I lived in the USSR at the time and once even went to a show where Kuryokhin performed. Thankfully his performance wasn't the whole show (it was Viacheslav Polunin why I went there) because it was extremely lame IMHO, though it appears he wasn't so bad at pulling people's leg. The mushroom thing was just a silly joke and a not very popular one at that.
- mirimir 9y agoYeah, that was my impression.
- romwell 9y agoIt might have not been very popular, but plenty of people are aware of it to this day (which is what the article says anyway ). I personally think it was brilliant, but I have a knack for absurdities. More info (in Russian): https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9B%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BD_%E2%80%94_%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B1 https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9B%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BD... A less formal article: http://lurkmore.to/%D0%9B%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BD_%E2%80%94_%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%B1 http://lurkmore.to/%D0%9B%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D0%BD_%E2%80%94_...!
- nradov 9y agoIt's depressing to see how gullible some supposedly intelligent and educated people can be. Perhaps colleges need to add a new question on their admission applications: "Was the Holocaust a real event where the Nazis actually murdered over 6M innocent people? Yes/No.” And then anyone who answers No can be sent back for remedial history class.
- mulmen 9y agoOr you know, they could take the opportunity to educate those students?
- nradov 9y agoSomeone who failed to learn such a basic historical fact in high school isn't ready for college. It's akin to being illiterate or unable to do basic arithmetic.
- goialoq 9y agoWhy would a fact mentioned in high school be considered automatically more reliable than a documentary? Both are secondary or tertiary sources. To be ready for college, it's more important to have critical thinking skills, to understand that not everything you heard in high school is true.
- nerdponx 9y agohttps://www.xkcd.com/1053/ https://www.xkcd.com/1053/
- JackNichelson 9y agoRepost. Also off topic.
- jwilk 9y agoFrom the HN guidelines: Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.
- duncan_bayne 9y agoThat's exactly the sort of complaint I'd expect to hear from a mushroom apologist. Are you some sort of fungus yourself?
- mlvljr 9y agoFinally, this one!
- rdtsc 9y agoI really don't remember this one. Granted I was young then but Lenin being a mushroom is something I would have remembered. It was a time when commercial advertisements, tabloids, rumors like that were starting to become popular and people who haven't dealt to seen those things before were really fooled into believing them. They were used to government propaganda and were inoculated and skeptical against that alright. Lenin being a mushroom, or the story about scientists who drilled the deepest borehole and hit hell and a creature with red eyes popped out of there. Or aliens landing. Or anyone remember https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoly_Kashpirovsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoly_Kashpirovsky? people were glued to their TV waiting for their diseases to be cured. There was also other more insidious propaganda from years before manufactured by KGB. It had a department devoted to planting fake stories in western media to undermine credibility of Western countries. One evil one they created was that AIDS was created by the American scientists to kill black people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION
- jwilk 9y ago> Because a mammal cannot be a plant. But mushrooms aren't plants.
- vadimberman 9y agoFunny, because that was exactly the response to that functionary.
- emmelaich 9y agoContrary to the claim in the article, I suspect people are much more gullible coming through a social upheaval such as that in 1990's USSR. "Yurchak says that it wasn’t that the viewing audience was any more or less gullible than they are today, it’s just that people, everywhere in the world, have a tendency to believe what the TV says"
- avodonosov 9y ago"storm" is a huge exaggeration of course. The joke is fairly strained; they are even laughing in the end of the video. I don't think many people seriously believed it. BTW, another similarly popular joke is that Putin is a crab. https://google.com/search?&q=putin+crab https://google.com/search?&q=putin+crab In early 90-ies freedom of speech, I was impressed by a newspaper which was proving that apes evolved from human (and lower animals evolved from apes). Arguments were taken from school biology textbook (gills in human embryos, fossils, etc).
- EugeneOZ 9y agoIt was not “theory”, nothing about conspiracy. It was joke and everybody (kids and adults) were understanding it’s a joke. Article is full of lies.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- cormullion 9y agoI wonder whether the idea had its origins here: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Mushroom_and_the_Cross https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sacred_Mushroom_and_the_...
- 205guy 9y agoI find the interpretation of the event to be interesting. The atlas obscura link here and the Wikipedia link in the other HN thread both make it sound like the intention was to be a hoax, to make people believe something false. But most of the Russian observers of the actual event that are commenting here say it hardly "fooled" anyone, it was just funny. I wonder if the show was meant more as satire or parody, as in "let me make fun of the stuff they used to feed us on TV, now that access to media is more open." So it would've been a very self-aware performance, aimed at an audience that was attuned enouh to pick up on the humor. The cognitive dissonance of the mushroom Lenin was a parody of the years of cognitive dissonance from the official propaganda on tv. I'm not sure where the hoax interpretation comes from. The atlas obscura article seems mostly sourced from Wikipedia, or vice versa, it's hard to tell. Calling it a hoax may be more of a western misinterpretation, one that reveals a bias in believing the Russian public was unsophisticated and easily fooled. Also sometims truth is stranger than fiction. Nature's prior art is a mushroom that takes over ants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiocordyceps_unilateralis The following article explains how the game The Last of Us expands this concept until human victims turn into mushrooms: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/but-not-simpler/the-fungus-that-reduced-humanity-to-the-last-of-us/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/but-not-simpler/the-fun...
- baybal2 9y agoThis keeps popping on HN now and then. >So it would've been a very self-aware performance, aimed at an audience that was attuned enouh to pick up on the humor. Except they didn't. Up until today, there are people - equivalent of American lizardmen believers going around preaching around that the story was true. >Calling it a hoax may be more of a western misinterpretation, one that reveals a bias in believing the Russian public was unsophisticated and easily fooled. And the Western commentators were 100% correct in that. There was and still is a class of public in Russia that will believe anything coming from a "reputably looking official in a suite." This was the extend of Soviet three letter services brainwashing powers. They learned a lot from herr Goebbels. Now look, these former three letter services servicemen are doing the exact thing in US. Russian propaganda in US does not target any much normally politically active population, no they target the kind of people believing in bizarre stuff, and with a remarkable success. The still raging, so called, "pizzagate" is a proof.