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  • 2021-05-11 (xsd:date)
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  • Did Jacques Attali Encourage Pandemic-Driven Euthanasia? (en)
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  • In May 2021, many English-language social media users encountered a quote ostensibly written by Jacques Attali, a French economist who served as a counselor to President François Mitterrand from 1981 to 1991, in which he supported the mass killings of the old and stupid via a global pandemic: This quote, which seems to suggest that a human-made pandemic would kill old people while a nefarious vaccination would kill stupid people, was not written by Attali. This quote (reproduced below) does not appear anywhere in Attali's memoir Verbatim, which reproduces various conversations between Mitterrand and other world leaders. In fact, we found no mention of a pandemic in this book. This is not the first time Attali has been accused of supporting euthanasia, and it is not the first time that a false, misleading, or misattributed quote has been offered as evidence for this accusation. CheckNews, the fact-checking arm of the French newspaper Liberation, wrote about a similar fake quote that was circulated in 2017. That fake quote supposedly came from an interview published by journalist Michel Salomon in his 1981 book l'Avenir de La Vie or The Future of Life. In that case, the viral Facebook text included a few brief sentences from Attali's interview, but the majority of the passage (including the parts about a pandemic) were fabricated. Check News wrote: The AFP also examined this quote in an article published in May 2021. The AFP noted that Attali was asked during his interview with Salomon about whether it would be possible and desirable to live 120 years. Attali gave a lengthy answer to the question and while he concluded that euthanasia may be a tool of future societies, he does not advocate for the killing of the elderly. In fact, in 1984 Attali won a defamation case against a medical journal that accused him of supporting euthanasia for the elderly. Attali told the AFP that the viral FB posts are totally made up and nowhere close to the initial text. In summation: Attali has spoken about the possibility of euthanasia becoming a tool for future societies, but he has not advocated the mass killing of elderly people. Misleading, out-of-context, and fabricated quotes related to this issue have been misattributed to Attali since the 1980s. In 2021, a modern twist was added to these misleading euthanasia quotes as social media users inserted language related to a pandemic. (en)
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