Spanner wrote:What did this research consist of? Who did it? Exactly what did they look at? Exactly what were they told and by whom? In my opinion, "must have known" is a conclusion that requires a pretty heavy burden of proof. In Benson's piece, I see a bunch of speculation based on precious little hard evidence.
The story was changed extensively for 2007. The date, location and name of the ship were changed to the correct details. Unless Monson ismore of a prophet than we give him credit for, this must have been the result of research. The information was not all from the mother's letter, she only supplied the date.
In other words, we have two talks, given 38 years apart. The story in 1969 was about how Monson comforted the mother of a guy he knew who was killed in WWII. The story in 2007 was about how he got a letter 38 years earlier from the woman who had coincidentally been invited to a friend's home to listen to conference. in 2007, some incidental details not relevant to the story line were changed.
When you say "research," you really don't know what you mean. You don't know whether Monson read the whole letter in his talk. You don't know whether the letter prompted Monson to call the woman back in 1969 and so learned other details he had recalled incorrectly. You don't know who did this "research," the extent of the "research," the source consulted for the "research," or when the "research" was done. And from this vacuum of actual information, Benson concludes that Monson learned other information culled from war records that Monson intentionally and deceptively omitted from the 2007 talk. That's what I mean by a bunch of speculation based on precious little hard evidence.
in my opinion, to establish lying, you have to do better than that. You're free to disagree.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951