Word: hoax
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...last week The Daily Princetonian carried the In & Out Club's first contribution to the university. It was a photograph; professing to be a composite picture of Princeton's 2,100 students-the typical Princeton undergraduate, 1940-style. Next day the composite was found to be a hoax-a retouched photo of swashbuckling Cinemactor Errol Flynn, minus mustache and with a crew haircut. Said the unabashed In & Out Club: "What's wrong with the picture...
Three undergraduate editors had concocted the hoax. They said on the editorial page: "Today's front page . . is the best argument we can give against war. ... In black on white . . . you can see just what war will mean...
...hoax, as the French charged, a fake accident staged and executed by Hitler's own henchmen to bring the Führer close to martyrdom and thus rally waning popular support for the regime? Was it another Reichstag fire? What about the mysterious and providential changes in plan? What about the fact that not a single big-shot Nazi remained in the beer hall even though the Führer's prompt departure was unforeseen? Despite these startling coincidences, this theory was hardly more credible than the German charge that Winston Churchill sank the Athenia...
...London the Berlin Chancellery's charge that British agents launched the armistice hoax was called "fantastic" at the British Foreign Office, where an official spokesman cracked: "The allegations should be dealt with in the special jokes department." Nevertheless, it was a pretty compliment, and an eminently justifiable one, to the potent British espionage-propaganda system which, by the tearful post-war testimony of Generals Ludendorff and Hindenburg, did more to undermine German resistance in 1918 than all the Allies' guns...
...microphone for all Rumania to hear: "Attention! Calinescu has been assassinated. The action was carried out by Iron Guards." It so happened that the Premier's wife, who was staying at their country place, was listening to this broadcast, which she at first took to be a hoax. She set out for Bucharest with her 16-year-old son. On arrival, she was told that her husband was dead with five bullets through his body and one through an eye.* At the sight of his body she fainted, the boy suffered nervous collapse...