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Sadly, there is no shortage of manipulated victim testimonies either, often used to start or perpetuate a war. - Nayirah testimony leading up to the 1st Iraq w

by DenisM 12y ago

Sadly, there is no shortage of manipulated victim testimonies either, often used to start or perpetuate a war. - Nayirah testimony leading up to the 1st Iraq war [1] - Numerous refugees testimonies leading up to the 2nd Iraq war (WMD, torture reports, etc) - Torrent of testimonies from Ukraine in recent months, e.g. [2] - I heard there is plenty of made-up material coming from Palestine You can see how giving much credence to a single-sourced report is not just un-epistemological, but also plain dangerous in that it can easily make bad situation worse. It's a very interesting question - how do we judge credibility of such reports? Clearly you can't take them at face value, but there must be things we can do. Obviously the best is a number of investigations by multiple independent people on site, but that's not always possible. One thing that comes to mind is interviewing all of the refugees and collating their accounts, as it could give a lot of data - people make errors, but if they all make the same errors it can point to manipulated accounts. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_%28testimony%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_%28testimony%29 [2] http://news.yahoo.com/russian-tv-sparks-outrage-ukraine-child-crucifixion-claim-114839196.html http://news.yahoo.com/russian-tv-sparks-outrage-ukraine-chil...

mc32 12y ago
I think if you can verify that people are indeed taking perilous journeys dragging along families and whatever possessions they can (usually the clothes on their backs and some money), it's a good indicator of bad things happening. In Kampuchea, it wasn't a few dozen people. There were lots of 'boat people' in vietnam, hong kong, who escaped from the Kh R. That in no way can be interpreted as being "ambiguous". People don't travel through jungle, losing members along the way, for propaganda. Like I said, these weren't a few dozen people. It was thousands. People who ignored this can only be described as ideologues. It's kind of the same way some people in the West didn't want to believe gulags existed.

by DenisM 12y ago

mc32 12y ago

I think if you can verify that people are indeed taking perilous journeys dragging along families and whatever possessions they can (usually the clothes on their backs and some money), it's a good indicator of bad things happening. In Kampuchea, it wasn't a few dozen people. There were lots of 'boat people' in vietnam, hong kong, who escaped from the Kh R. That in no way can be interpreted as being "ambiguous". People don't travel through jungle, losing members along the way, for propaganda. Like I said, these weren't a few dozen people. It was thousands. People who ignored this can only be described as ideologues. It's kind of the same way some people in the West didn't want to believe gulags existed.