- 5 months ago
From political deceptions to corporate cover-ups, history is riddled with lies that shaped our world. Join us as we explore the most consequential falsehoods ever told, from wartime propaganda to financial schemes that devastated millions. These aren't just fibs—they're calculated deceptions that changed nations, sparked conflicts, and eroded public trust.
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00:00So the lawyers took over.
00:01The lawyers intervened and then they purged documents
00:03every time there was reference to a word less hazardous or safer.
00:08Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at lies, takebacks, and broken promises
00:13that changed the course of human history.
00:15By 1974, the Nixon White House was a bunker
00:19where the president and what was left of his loyal staff were holed up
00:22and holding out against wave after wave of bad news.
00:27Number 10, WMD.
00:29They simply got people to believe that there was a real threat out there
00:34when in fact there wasn't one.
00:36You get told things every day that don't happen.
00:39It doesn't seem to bother people.
00:41Post-9-11 America was primed for fear.
00:43The Bush administration poured gasoline on it.
00:46After invading Afghanistan, W set his sights on Iraq,
00:50implying that Saddam had ties to 9-11.
00:52Worse, the Iraqi dictator was supposedly sitting on a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction.
00:57President Bush told cabinet members that if Saddam Hussein was to become a target,
01:03they needed to dig up evidence that he was cooperating with al-Qaeda.
01:07Enter Colin Powell, the administration's most trusted face,
01:10sent to the UN to sell the war.
01:13He sat before the world, holding up a vial he said could contain anthrax.
01:17Powell echoed now discredited claims from U.S. intelligence
01:21about secret bio-labs and mobile weapons programs.
01:24When U.S. troops stormed in, they found nothing but the wreckage of a cooked-up war.
01:29The lie killed hundreds of thousands, destroyed America's credibility for decades,
01:34and haunted Powell until his death.
01:36He had walked into my office musing, and he said words to the effect of,
01:41I wonder how we'll all feel if we put half a million troops into Iraq
01:47and march from one corner of the country to the other and find nothing.
01:52Number 9, Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme.
01:54You feel that the legitimacy of the trading business
01:58offered protection to what your father was doing?
02:02Absolutely, absolutely.
02:04That he was using you and your brother?
02:06Absolutely.
02:07Charles Ponzi made headlines in 1920 by promising absurd profits on postage stamps.
02:13He told investors that they could rake in 50% returns in 45 days
02:17by flipping international postal coupons.
02:20It was a scam.
02:21He paid early investors with new money, not actual returns.
02:25It was a scheme that would define financial scams for the next century.
02:29If Ponzi was a financial demon, then Bernie Madoff was the devil.
02:33For decades, he posed as Wall Street's safest bet.
02:36Days passed, weeks passed, months passed, and we never saw anything happen.
02:44Madoff just continued to report good numbers.
02:47Celebrities, charities, and retirees lined up to hand him their savings.
02:52Behind the curtain, it was an empty house of cards.
02:55There were no trades, no profits, just a $64 billion illusion.
03:00When the 2008 crash hit, it all came crashing down.
03:03It's gross negligence. It's incompetence.
03:06But at the heart of his story is a criminal mastermind who kept spinning to the end.
03:12Number 8. LBJ and Vietnam
03:14We're here to emphasize that the United States will maintain its interest and its presence in your country.
03:23There is no question whatsoever of our abandoning that interest.
03:28In 1964, Lyndon B. Johnson made a grave promise.
03:32We are not about to send American boys 9,000 or 10,000 miles away from home.
03:37Less than a year later, he did exactly that.
03:40The Gulf of Tonkin incident, an alleged unprovoked attack by North Vietnam, was used to justify escalation.
03:46But one of the two reported attacks never happened.
03:50They lied about going, about why they went, and as the world would come to learn, their chances once they got there.
03:56Now Johnson knew the stakes.
03:58To keep South Vietnam from falling, he might have to commit hundreds of thousands of American boys to a full-scale land war in Asia.
04:07He was face-to-face with a decision he had been dreading.
04:10The Pentagon Papers, leaked years later, confirmed it.
04:14Escalation was planned well in advance of Tonkin.
04:17Worse, Johnson and others knew the war was unwinnable.
04:20Over 58,000 Americans died, millions of Vietnamese lives were lost, and America's trust was forever shattered.
04:27What makes you think if we put in the numbers you're suggesting that Ho Chi Minh won't match us man for man?
04:33This means greater bodies of men, Mr. President, which will allow us to cream them.
04:37Number 7. Stalin.
04:38There is no famine.
04:40Stalin condemns the Ukrainian party's urgent appeals to reduce quotas and send aid.
04:46He accuses them of placing local interests above the success of the five-year plan.
04:51The war for bread is the war for socialism, he says.
04:55Left-wing or right-wing, there is one consistent truth about autocrats.
04:59Lies are their greatest weapon.
05:01In the early 1930s, Joseph Stalin engineered a famine across Ukraine.
05:05He seized grain and sealed borders as millions starved.
05:09When foreign journalists started asking questions, the Soviet line was simple.
05:13There is no famine.
05:14Their suffering meant nothing to Stalin.
05:17He looked for scapegoats.
05:18Anyone who said otherwise was silenced or expelled.
05:21Just a few years later came the Great Purge.
05:24Stalin blamed every failure and civil unrest on enemies of the people.
05:28That lie justified show trials, mass executions, and gulags filled with innocence.
05:34Millions died, slain by hunger and bullets alike.
05:37All of it was cloaked in official denials and false narratives.
05:41To this day, Kremlin-aligned voices still push a lot of more denial online.
05:45Tell Kremlin-aligned voices, Stalin, what is happening.
05:49Tell him they have taken away our lives, our wood, our lives.
05:56Number 6.
05:57The tobacco industry on cigarettes.
06:00The issue here isn't, why should people smoke?
06:02It's, why should people smoke Lucky Strike?
06:04Imagine if Don Draper ran an ad campaign for the devil, and you'll come close to big tobacco.
06:09They sold glamour, freedom, and rugged masculinity, while knowing full well their product caused cancer.
06:16Even after the 1964 Surgeon General's report linked smoking to disease, tobacco executives doubled down.
06:22For decades, they swore nicotine wasn't addictive.
06:25They called filters safer.
06:27They buried internal research, bought off scientists, and ran ads with doctors holding Lucky Strikes.
06:33There's no better way to launch a product than to be able to go on the airwaves.
06:37Nothing tastes as mild and rich as a camel, except another camel.
06:41Better taste.
06:42Lucky tastes better.
06:44Say, this is a good cigarette.
06:46It wasn't until 1998, with the Master Settlement Agreement, that the truth fully came out.
06:51Decades of calculated deception were exposed in damning internal memos.
06:56Smoking killed millions.
06:58This was evident since the 1950s.
07:00The industry's real product wasn't cigarettes, it was the lies they peddled to keep the world smoking.
07:06We don't sell Tic Tacs, for Christ's sake.
07:08We sell cigarettes.
07:10And they're cool, and available, and addictive.
07:14The job is almost done for us.
07:16Number five, Watergate.
07:18They planted spies, stole documents, and on and on.
07:21Now, don't tell me you think this is all the work of little Don Socrates.
07:25The break-in was sloppy, but the cover-up was worse.
07:29In June 1972, five men were caught bugging the Democratic National Committee's office at the Watergate complex.
07:35As it turned out, the burglars were directly tied to President Nixon's re-election campaign.
07:40The White House denied everything in public.
07:43Behind the scenes, Nixon and his inner circle were busy on a crime spree.
07:46The president had no choice, and one tape clearly showed that Richard Nixon ordered a cover-up of the Watergate investigation.
07:54Don't go any further into this case, period.
07:56They paid hush money, obstructed justice, and weaponized federal agencies against their enemies.
08:02It worked for a while, until the revelation of tapes.
08:05Subpoenaed recordings revealed Nixon knew about the cover-up from the start.
08:09The truth unraveled his presidency.
08:11Faced with certain impeachment, Nixon resigned in disgrace.
08:15Trust in government never fully recovered.
08:17It's clear in the conversation that this is being done for political purposes,
08:20basically to save the skin of the White House, and the president says he approves it.
08:25Number four, the donation of Constantine.
08:28Did you know that the biggest power move in Catholic history was backdated?
08:32During the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church claimed Emperor Constantine had granted it control over Rome and the Western Roman Empire.
08:39The proof was a 4th century document called the Donation of Constantine.
08:44It gave the Pope supreme political and spiritual authority.
08:47There was just one problem.
08:49It was fake.
08:50Created in the 8th century, the document was used for centuries to justify papal supremacy.
08:55Rome's influence over kings and emperors rested on a forgery.
08:59It wasn't until the 15th century that Renaissance scholar Lorenzo Valla exposed the fraud.
09:05But by then, the damage was done.
09:07Wars were fought, crowns were bestowed, and power was centralized, all thanks to a fake scroll.
09:14Number three, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
09:17It surfaced in 1903 in Tsarist Russia, a pamphlet proving that a secret Jewish cabal was bent on global domination.
09:25Equal parts plagiarism and pure fiction, its lurid conspiracies spread like wildfire across Europe and America.
09:32When the Nazis needed a scapegoat, they turned to the Protocols.
09:36They reprinted it by the millions, ran it in newsreels, and taught it in classrooms.
09:41Goebbels called it essential reading, and Hitler echoed its themes in Mein Kampf.
09:45It was a lie that helped grease the machinery of the Holocaust.
09:48A century later, the Protocols still circulate online.
09:52They're pushed in fringe forums, rebranded as memes, and amplified by state-sponsored troll farms.
09:59Today, it muddies the waters of anti-Israel sentiment with anti-Semitism to divide loyalties and complicate geopolitics.
10:06Do you have that book, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, sold out?
10:10He sold out the Protocols.
10:11Yeah.
10:12It's a hot seller.
10:13Number two, the Commentarii di Bello Gallico.
10:16Don't they know that my ambition is their ambition, the ambition of Rome?
10:20I will go to Britain, and Caesar shall have his legions all the same.
10:27Julius Caesar didn't just conquer Gaul, he used the war to ghostwrite his own legend.
10:32In Commentarii di Bello Gallico, his official war memoirs, Caesar painted himself as a heroic general defending Rome from barbaric hordes.
10:40He claims to have killed over a million Gauls and taken another million as slaves.
10:45In truth, these claims were wild exaggerations.
10:48Modern historians estimate those numbers were inflated several times over.
10:52Roman losses, too, were far greater than Caesar let on.
10:56The barbarians he crushed included thousands of women and children.
11:00But his propaganda worked.
11:01The memoir made Caesar a superstar back home.
11:04It paved his path to dictatorship, giving history its earliest and most successful example of a wartime spin.
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11:29Number one, the Munich Agreement.
11:34There was little to be decided.
11:36As Chamberlain had said and as this agreement said, it had already been decided in principle to give the Sudetenland to Germany.
11:44Sometimes those who believe blatant lies deserve some of the blame.
11:47In 1938, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain returned from Germany victorious.
11:52He gleefully waved a piece of paper before the British public promising, peace for our time.
11:57It was the Munich Agreement, a deal with Adolf Hitler allowing Nazi Germany to annex the Sudetenland.
12:03Chamberlain believed it would satisfy Hitler's ambitions.
12:06He was wrong.
12:07I had another talk with the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler.
12:14And here is the paper which bears his name upon it as well as mine.
12:23Within six months, Hitler broke the agreement, seizing the rest of Czechoslovakia.
12:28Within a year, he invaded Poland, igniting World War II.
12:31The Munich Agreement was just appeasement dressed up as diplomacy.
12:34Chamberlain wasn't completely naive.
12:37He gambled that Hitler could be managed.
12:39Instead, the lie that peace had been secured gave a genocidal regime time to grow stronger.
12:57Did we lie to you about history's worst falsehoods?
13:00Let us know in the comments below.
13:01After all, there are two terrible dilemmas in Europe.
13:05Economic chaos and war.
13:08And anything that can keep us out of either of those should be tried.
13:12The Complete afincraft
13:25No one is a perfecting nightmare.
13:27We don't wish him until we got to save the day.
13:30Have a great day.
13:31Use the craving for the man to make an example.
13:33Have a great day.
13:34Use the craving for theےems in Europe.
13:35Use the craving for the complimentings too.
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