Lying With The Truth

Machiavelli wrote that anyone who sets out to deceive will always find someone willing to be deceived. Read it again and it is not contempt for the victim. It is a statement about supply and demand.Four stories in which somebody was comprehensively fooled — and in which, if you examine the documents afterwards, it is remarkably hard to find the lie.A slave rowing a true report across the water to an enemy who acted on it exactly as he was meant to. A charter that reordered Europe for seven hundred years, undone by a man who noticed the wrong vocabulary. A telegram that lost a handful of words on its way to the printers. A dead man with a fiancée who never existed and an overdraft that did.A forgery can be exposed. A lie can be contradicted. A carefully chosen truth has no weak point to attack.An episode of Risto's History Rhymes.#Deception #Propaganda #HistoryPodcast