Slovakia to leave NATO is a hoax

The Slovak Spectator brings you a selection of hoaxes that appeared over the past week.

(Source: Sme )

Towers on Mars are a hoax

The NASA pictures show three huge towers on Mars, standing in line, coincidentally in the same configuration as the pyramids at Giza, Egypt, which are allegedly positioned according to the stars in the constellation Orion.

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This is one of the hoaxes that the Czech website AC24.cz spreads, also through social networks where they have hundreds of comments and shares. One of the places where they frequently appear is the group on Facebook “Stop media manipulation”.

It would take much less than buildings on Mars to attract a great deal of attention from all global media and the scientific community. The information published by AC24.cz is clearly non-sense.

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Read also: The Sme daily starts a hunt for hoaxes Read more 

Such claims are not only impossible to verify, but they also refer to the discoveries of the Mars Global Surveyor, that does exist but which NASA lost contact with in 2006 and officially closed its mission in 2007. The website published this hoax early this year and it is still being spread on Facebook.

The article links the alleged towers on Mars with the Egyptian pyramids. The alleged correlation of the position of the pyramids with the stars in Orion is a popular topic among fans of mysteries. The problem is that it does not hold up when faced with detailed measurements.

The position of the stars was different thousands of years ago than it is today. Also, at that time, Egyptians did not link the stars in the same patterns as we do. The constellations are not a natural phenomenon but rather a product of human imagination. The stars they contain are often very far from each other and only seem close when projected on a two-dimensional surface, our firmament. Even if the tips of the pyramids really did point to stars, it could still be an accidental relation, correlation.

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This article is an example of state-of-the-art pseudo-science, very frequently occurring on the internet. Articles like this are important because they help us tell which websites are conspiracy-based. Websites that write about pseudo-scientific astronomy also very often publish “alternative” news about politics.

Czech defence minister sold the army to Germans is a hoax

Czech alternative media repeatedly publish the hoax, in several variations, that there is a secret deal between the Czech defence minister and the Germans that practically allows Germany to command part of the Czech armed forces. They label it as high treason and a return to the times before 1939.

The information was published on the Parlamentni Listy website, later also by the Czech version of the Russian state website Sputnik, or the known fake news website Aeronet.cz.

Read also: Savchenko is a traitor and people have extraterrestrial blood are hoaxes Read more 

It was inspired by news about the contract that attaches the Czech 4th brigade to a German tank division, the Czech website Stream.cz explained in a video.

“It is non-sense,” the spokesperson of the Czech Defence Ministry, Petr Medek, explains in the video. The contract between the two countries is not legally binding and it is a general expression of the will to cooperate. Both military units will hold joint training missions, share experiences, and jointly test military equipment.

The Czech army is not the only one that has signed such a contract, Medek added.

Slovakia may become the first country to exit NATO after 2020 is a hoax

Slovakia could become the first country to announce its decision to leave the Alliance in 2020. There is a petition currently in circulation, collecting signatures to exit NATO, the Russian newspaper Izvestia commented on the initiative by the extremist party of Marian Kotleba, which is collecting signatures to hold a referendum about Slovakia exiting the NATO.

There really is such a petition, but there is a very long way from a petition organised by one political party to the actually leaving NATO.

The Peoples Party - Our Slovakia (ĽSNS) claims that they have already collected half of the necessary 350,000 signatures. But even if they collected all the needed signatures, it is very questionable that citizens would support the exit in a referendum.

Of all the referendums that ever took place in Slovakia, only one was officially valid - about entering the European Union. No other referendum ever met the condition that the turnout should exceed 50 percent of all the registered voters.

Izvestia did use accurate information to start, but then deformed it to fit the voice of those who are against the NATO membership.

The antipropaganda.sk website noted that Izvestia did write about Slovakia pondering to leave the EU in the past, based on the same petition by the party of Marian Kotleba.

At that time the Russian newspaper also wrote that the Freedom and Solidarity (SaS) and Sme Rodina parties were in favour of leaving the EU. The two parties are often critical towards the EU, but none of them explicitly talks about leaving the union. The extremist ĽSNS is the only parliamentary party in favour of leaving both the EU and NATO.

The Slovak Spectator brings a selection of hoaxes that were published on the internet and shared by Slovak users on social networks in cooperation with the Sme daily, which runs the project aimed at spotting hoaxes and confronting them with facts.

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