Furtive fallacy
The furtive fallacy is an informal fallacy of emphasis in which historical outcomes are asserted to be the result of hidden (furtive) misconduct or wrongdoing by decision makers. Historian David Hackett Fischer identified it as the belief that significant facts of history are necessarily sinister, and that "history itself is a story of causes mostly insidious and results mostly invidious." It may entail a conspiracy theory, but the essence of the fallacy is a belief in secret misdeeds, whether individual or conspiratorial, lurking behind every page of history. In its extreme form, the fallacy amounts to general paranoia. Fischer identified several examples of the fallacy, with particular attention to the works of Charles A. Beard and his critic Forrest McDonald.
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