One of those unfortunate discoveries made over decades of wrestling with one fringe idea, creationism, is that when you tug on one string in the fringe, you find that it’s connected to all the other fringes, and you have to unravel the whole thing. Creationists often have bizarre ideas about Christianity and space and electromagnetism and how the Pope isn’t the true Pope and Jesus is connected to the Masons and the Rosicrucians and the Hebrews colonized Mars and Nazis possessed the Spear of Destiny and used the Holy Grail to power their flying saucers that were used to shuttle slaves to the gold mines at the center of the Hollow Earth and did you know the Nephilim built the pyramids. There is a gigantic tangle of remarkably nonsensical myths lying around, and if you’re so ignorant that you believe that scientists have engaged in a centuries-long conspiracy to hide the fact that the Earth is only a few thousand years old, then you’re primed to pick up on any bullshit you hear. If they’ve been lying about that, then sure, maybe the sun is actually only a few thousand miles away, and the Earth is also flat.
The SPLC has noticed, and has put up an article discussing the indisputable links between the alt-right and alt-history and alt-science. It starts with our contemptibly racist president — not the current one, the 19th century one, Andrew Jackson — who believed that the Mound Builders, and any other culture that built cities and monuments in the Americas, had to have been a superior and white race that was exterminated by the “savages” currently occupying the ruins. There is a long history of cultural chauvinism in the West, where the accomplishments of non-white cultures are belittled or bestowed upon super-intelligent visitors from alien worlds or visiting white tribes or angels, because gosh, the wogs couldn’t possibly have built the pyramids.
We’ve been pandering to it. If you’ve read von Daniken’s Chariots of the Gods, you’ve been soaking in racism. That’s the whole premise: that anything of any complexity or sophistication could not have been constructed by non-Europeans, and therefore, it must be interpreted as a product of alien influence. Maybe you’ve laughed at Giorgio Tsoukalos, but it’s the same thing, a set of arguments resting entirely on contempt for the intellectual capacity of brown people. We’ve seen entire television networks consumed by this pseudo-scientific conceit — anything that babbles about “hidden history” is basically garbage. But popular garbage.
Take “America Unearthed,” which aired between 2012 and 2015 on H2, a defunct History Channel network. That show’s host, a geologist named Scott Wolter, promoted theories that ancient Celts and Scots settled North America and hybridized Native Americans centuries before Columbus. The details can be found in Wolter’s contributions to Lost Worlds of Ancient America, a 2012 anthology edited by Frank Joseph, born Frank Collin, founder of the National Socialist Party of America. (In 1993, following his expulsion from the party for “impure blood”, Collin became editor of Ancient American magazine and has authored dozens of books dealing with ancient “suppressed” history.) In another episode, when a guest professes admiration for the Knights of the Golden Circle, a group of wealthy Southerners who sought to create a hemispheric slave empire, Wolter just nods. (Wolter has denied that he or his ideas are racist, and claims to be politically liberal.)
I’ve met Scott Wolter. He’s not liberal, he’s just nuts.
In the movies, we’ve got crap like The DaVinci Code and National Treasure built on ridiculously convoluted conspiracy theories about the past. Worst of all, we’ve got Indiana Jones…and I liked those movies (except the last one) and took my kids to see them. Indiana Jones is a terrible archaeologist, the very worst, and every one of those movies rests on the idea that the past accomplishments of exotic cultures rest on occultism, rather than the entirely human minds and skills of their people. And then there is the Nazi connection.
Popular media has been feeding the idea that the Nazis had secret super-science, as well as insight into the Truth™ of mystical paranormal powers and the potency of magical religious relics.
Another inevitable development in postwar conspiracy subculture was the rise of a belief in secret Nazi bases underneath Antarctica. The idea of a “hollow” or “inner” earth was a key tenet of nineteenth-century occultism, and in the postwar years it reemerged as a setting for escaped Nazi scientists working in secret technology and weapons labs.
The legend took root during the mid-1970s, nurtured by the Canadian neo-Nazi Ernst Zundel, who argued that Nazis invented flying saucers and had taken their breakthrough technology to bases deep under the South Pole.
The Third Reich was interested in a possible base at the South Pole, and a few high-level Nazis did escape to Argentina, whose national territory includes a slice of Antarctica extending to the South Pole. Zundel and his successors have infused these facts with Victorian inner-earth legends, and then marinated them over multiple viewings of the 1968 B-flick, They Saved Hitler’s Brain. Versions of the theory remain popular on neo-Nazi alt-history sites, and in recent years British tabloids like the Mirror and Daily Star have found click-bait gold in spreading them.
Yeah, “click-bait gold”. There’s a reason rat poison is sweet, too.
There were no Nazi magic powers. Germany was an industrial and scientific powerhouse in the 19th and early 20th centuries — Germany dominated physics, chemistry, and biology, and had built a substantial technological lead over the rest of the world. The Nazis didn’t create that, they exploited Germany’s hard-won advantages, and wrecked them. The Nazi regime was a major setback to our technological progress (and civilization as a whole), and I despise this propaganda that tries to pretend they were an engine of innovation rather than looters and wreckers who drove away a large part of their scientific talent and murdered good human minds.
There are no shortcuts to education and research. Our media, though, have been going down this path of promoting fables about how the world works, and it’s going to take us down the same ugly path that derailed Germany.
I’ll bet aliens wrote Beowulf.
Chartres? Vezeley? Notre Dame de Paris? ALL BUILT BY ALIENS, I TELL YOU.
I was struck by how accurate this statement still is if you insert “GOP” or “Libertarian” for “Nazi” and the USA for Germany.
I’m an historian. And the garbage I hear come out of the mouths of people I deal with, people visiting an historic site, is mindblowing. Simplified history (history dumbed-down and sanitized for public school) is bad enough. But the conspiracy theories are amazing. And all of them do two things: support the oligarchy and promote the hatred or fear of ‘the other’
For instance, the NPS is part of the UN according to the 1942 Charter (the real one, not the public one) and National Parks are used to train and support the UN international police who keep the Masons / Rosicrucians / Nephilim / Nazis / Communists / Secret order of the Oreo Cookie in power. Apparently, the turntable at Steamtown is the underground bunker for the helicopters to control Philadelphia and Buffalo. At least once a year, I hear some version of this.
#3 Why is the control of Philadelphia and Buffalo so important? (Yeah, this is the inanity that my brain focused on. What does that say about me?)
Excellent point. The University of Göttingen in Germany was the world’s greatest school of mathematics and physics, but it was reduced to mediocrity when the Nazis expelled all its Jewish professors in 1933. Einstein was also forced to leave Berlin, as “Jewish physics” was deemed un-Aryan. Posted pictures of Einstein with the words Noch ungehängt (“not yet hanged”) may have factored in his decision to leave.
#4: “#3 Why is the control of Philadelphia and Buffalo so important?”
I assume that if the genuine, uncracked Liberty Bell presently hidden in the secret crypts beneath Independence Hall falls into the hands of the UN, they will melt it down to keep The Resistance from resurrecting The Fathers of our Country by ringing it in Our Hour of Need. As to Buffalo, well, Niagara Falls! Slowly I turned … step by step … inch by inch …: the original Manchurian Candidate queen of diamonds.
Well, Philadelphia is home to the Eagles, and the Eagle is the symbol of the USA, and keeping the Eagle under control means keeping the US under control. And Buffalo? Almost 2% of US Presidents have been inaugurated there, so it has to be controlled.
That you missed the Oreo Cookie conspiracy? Seriously, if you are concerned about Philly and Buffalo, but not the Oreo Cookie Conspiracy, there really is something wrong.
I first noticed when I was a kid that any popular articles discussing archaeological finds seemed to default to “must be for ritual/occult purposes” as the explanation for objects where the use/purpose was not immediately obvious to those who found the objects. Ever since, I’ve sometimes wondered what such people in the future would make of common objects today. My Little Pony cults, perhaps?
One example that always struck me as odd are those ancient “Venus” figures with exaggerated sex organs — those tend to get “religious icon” labels stuck on them, or “ancient porn, hurr hurr hurr”. Whereas to me the purpose of such an object is obvious — it’s a sexual education visual aid. Birthing a child (unmedicated) is a highly athletic undertaking, and you’ve got to train the girls/women who haven’t done it yet on what is going to happen and how to get in shape to do it with the best odds for survival. So when I see such an object, I assume a woman made it and that she had a practical purpose for doing so, but the popular press seems to default to assuming a man made the object, so it has to be about his occult power / penis.
You mean all those people in the “cradle of civilization” weren’t British?
I didn’t think about what a bad archaeologist Indiana Jones was until I saw it pointed out that a good one would have spent years studying the traps in that temple that still worked centuries later.
Marcus, #9
The thing is, to the British mind everyone is British – it’s just that some of you aren’t trying hard enough to live up to the exacting standards required of you. That’s why we spent the better part of the Nineteenth Century sailing round the world trying to help out.
The “Ancient Aliens” guy whatshisname, has become such a long standing joke, that he has now been transformed into a popular sarcasm meme.
First time I saw that show, he looked so ridiculous I simply thought he was a nod to the audience, “This is all bullshit, *wink*”
He always says two contradictory things in a single sentence, which has since migrated into sarcasm memes. “Not saying it was aliens. Aliens the only explanation (they say *wink*)”
The program voice-over would always preface their assertions with “Believers of Ancient Aliens say …”
I only watched for amusement, honestly.
#9: Of course they were British.
You see, Sumer is a corruption of the name “Somerset”, and the crowns of the mesopotamian gods are nothing more, nothing less, than a corrupted interpretion of the hats used by british ladies in the derby of Ascot (check the crowns used by Enlil or Enki!).
“There is a long history of cultural chauvinism in the West, where the accomplishments of non-white cultures are belittled or bestowed upon super-intelligent visitors from alien worlds or visiting white tribes or angels, because gosh, the wogs couldn’t possibly have built the pyramids.”
There is even a tale of Vikings making it to Minnesota before Columbus sailed the ocean blue (and then started the genocide of the Carib tribes). I learned this from an entertaining podcast by real archeologists who have to deal with this bad history all the time:
https://www.archaeologypodcastnetwork.com/archyfantasies/36
Hi Doc ,i think you mean the sun not the Daily mirror it is one of the few left wing papers over here,but i haven’t bought a copy for years so you might be right .
Talking of adolf ,he thought the Ancient Greeks were Aryans because of their Art and architecture .
I’ve also noticed most believers of pseudohistory tend to also be conspiracy theorists, new agers, and/or right leaning. Many proponents of this junk say super racist things and claim its for truth or something. I’m half indigenous Mayan through my fathers side and it pisses me off when these morons are telling people that aliens or Atlantians (The Atlantis located at white Europe of course) created civilizations in the ancient Americas, and says the natives were not smart enough to make such structures and cultures. Total assholes.
Reegarding ancient civilization:
I’ve always wondered why Europeans thought transmittion of ideas was not from the Americas to the old world, if it happened. Or both ways.
Pablo, real archeologists share your sentiment. Plus they really hate it when old white folks bury fake artifacts as a way to perpetuate their pseudo-history.
Seems to be a lot of bash the Brits going on here ,agree with a lot of it .But there are a few things the world should thank us for .
Can’t think of any at the moment..
It kills me how many right-leaning friends and brothers-in-law were obsessed with the Luftwaffe Channel before it became the Aliens Channel. And they wax all gooey and gushy over how amazing the Nazi war machine was. Just, no. It wasn’t. They were pathetic. Rommel had his way for a few months in Africa against untrained American recruits fresh out of boot camp. Nazi tanks over-ran Czechoslovakia, whose defensive perimeter they had annexed earlier by treaty. Austria was a bunch of Catholic Nazis happy to be annexed, and the Scandinavian countries weren’t far behind, they were down with getting rid of their Jews. The French traded France for the survival of Paris. The Nazis never stepped foot on British soil. They opened an idiotic second front against Russia. And in a busy two and a half years America kicked their ass from 5000 miles away, with far greater ease than we handled shoeless goatherds in Asia Minor.
What part of that history is impressive? They never once beat an army that fought back. And they managed to destroy their own society in a busy four years. Wow, Nazi strategists sure were AMAAAAAAZING! The greatest fighting machine ever assembled? Um, only if by “greatest” you mean really stupid and incompetent and good at losing.
I agree wholeheartedly the most dismaying thing about that is they the media are doing in the name of short term profits, this crap sells and there no need for difficult things like research and consistency with all ready discovered evidence and accepted history you just have to write sentences and use words to tell any story you like as long as it is viewed favorable to the audience it must flatter them.
It occurs to me that some people are drawn to conspiracy theories for the same reason many believe in God:
It is more acceptable to one or more evil lunatics (human or divine) running things than it is to confront the truth–that nobody is driving the fricking bus. Shit just happens, and both the Universe and the economy would prefer us dead.
anbheal @20:
But the Nazis had the most AMAAAAAZING tanks! Which promptly broke if you looked at them crosswise. But if they could ever keep them working they were so superior to American and Soviet tanks. Which was largely irrelevant because the Germans couldn’t keep them working. And the Allies had air superiority with dive bombers operating as anti-tank patrols that meant that the German tanks AMAAAAAAZING armor was useless since a bomb that can sink a battleship doesn’t care how well armored a tank is. But, uh, they looked cool.
The reason these conspiracy theories are so popular is that the truth is mostly boring and uninteresting when it’s not downright uncomfortable. With respect to the existence of God, for example, it’s far more comforting to believe that the creator of the universe is my best friend than it is to believe I’m on my own, which is why atheism simply can’t compete with Jesus Loves You. It’s just not as warm and cuddly.
By the same token, it’s far more enjoyable to believe that my race is the superior race as demonstrated by (fill in the blank) than it is to believe my race rose to the top purely by accident of geography (See Guns, Germs and Steel). Personally, I’d like to believe the former, just as I’d like to believe I’ve got winning lottery numbers or the 20-something clerk my office just hired wants to go out with me (I’m 59), but the evidence is otherwise, alas. But lots of people will choose enjoyable over evidence.
Inspiring phonetics by counterexample?
The “Nazi superscience” thing I find especially galling. The Nazis ended the German Renaissance. Not only did Germany never recover its pre-war scientific and cultural eminence, thanks to them it’s been pretty much wiped out of popular memory, at home and in the rest of the world. They didn’t just turn their own time into a nightmare, they managed to fuck up the past.
And Joseph Smith took this idea (making the “white race” to be Israelites) and lots of other contemporary kook ideas (including racist ideas like dark skin being a curse from God) and came up with Mormonism.
Off-the-cuff idea: Many religions/subsects of religions are the result of kook magnetism inspiring a religious leader to create a unified narrative that includes many of them into one kook gemisch “revelation”.
I have to say, I’ve never really considered the whole “Nazi superscience” genre as an artifact of racist pseudohistory. I’ve always seen it more as a way to make a nominated evil enemy more intimidating, and to create an interesting juxtaposition of anachronisms. Rather like the “steampunk” genre juxtaposes Victoriana with high technology. But I suppose if you are a fan of the whole Nazi project then you might see it rather differently.
Helen Huntingdon @ #8
This and similar things have been noted by several prominent archeologists and Biblical scholars. Minimalist archeologists like Thomas Thompson and Israel Finkelstein have noted that any discovery of a large structure in the Levant is often immediately designated a temple, a synagogue, or evidence of the David/Solomon kingdom (there is none so far) when actual evidence of the use of these structures is non-existent. Thompson asserts that most of the early archeologists in the Middle East were American or British ministers out to prove the Bible, so in true confirmation bias form, they usually did.
Klaus Schmidt, a German archeologist who has been digging at Gobekli Tepe for years, as declared it “the world’s oldest temple.” Fact is, he has no idea what it was used for.
The same is true when a paleontologist describes carvings on bone or stone or drawings on cave walls as an indication of religious sensibility. That’s a leap. The minimalist would say it’s just a carving or a drawing. Humans have done that sort of thing for a long time. Their purpose or motivation can’t be known to us, and we shouldn’t extrapolate our sensibilities and perspectives onto them. It’s like giving importance to my grandfather’s whittles on his front porch which was just a way he passed the time long before he had TV.
davidc1 @9: Shakespeare, Newton, the Industrial Revolution, Faraday, Maxwell, Dirac, and custard tarts.
Oops, @19.
I’ll give you uncomfortable, especially for people who attach their self-worth to the granfalloon of national pride, but uninteresting? Never. What I’ve found is that the ingenuity of real people is much more fascinating than stories endlessly recycled from racist and anti-semitic garbage.
thirdmill:
I gotta agree with vaiyt on this one. Though textbooks from grade school through high school present history as dull and flat and predestined, the reality is far different. The endless variety of genius and stupidity, brilliance and dullardy, learning and ignorance, good and bad, moral, immoral and amoral (why does immoral have to ms and amoral only one?), as well as the progress of knowledge and technology, coupled with the development of the ideas of private life and human rights, makes history far more fascinating than most fiction (even science fiction is frequently history with dialogue and spaceships added). I have studied history all my life (well, maybe not the first seven years) and studied history seriously since I was about seventeen and am endlessly fascinated.
Conspiracy theories do not add luster or interest or fascination. They steal it much the same way that creationism steals the wonders of 4.55 billion years of earth’s history. They steal it much the same way that certain religious beliefs reduce everything to a ‘goddidit so shut up and stop wondering.’
If anything, these conspiracy theories offer a boring and simplistic solution to history’s mysteries. If we posit a cabal of super-capable uber-rich and supremely knowledgeable white men (’cause it is always white men) controlling everything, then pulling at the threads of history, following the warp and woof and weave to see where they lead, is pointless. I see the same poverty in conspiracy theory that I see in biblical literalism. And the same anti-intellectual and anti-education cant. And it still has the xenophobia and superiority complex.
Perhaps you just haven’t been reading well written, well researched history books?
Helen Huntingdon @ #8 and Robro @ #30: David Macaulay’s excellent 1979 book “Motel of the Mysteries” describes a archaeological excavation in the year 4022 of a sacred temple from the vanished civilization of Usa (in fact a motel room) in which every object is assigned a ritual significance. The archaeologists infer it is a sacred site from the “do not disturb” sign on the chamber entrance. The drawing of a priest seated on the white porcelain throne with the sacred collar (the toilet seat) around his neck is priceless. The book is still available on Amazon.
Pretty much everything that needed to be said about Nazi superscience has been said already, and I agree, they fucked our country up in every way possible!
If the Nazi warmachine was powerful in any way, it was only because they took a scientifically and economically highly developed nation and twisted all it’s economy and research towards insane goals.
microraptor@23:
I found the tales about German supertanks always rather strange – my grandfather had served in a tank unit and I remember his stories about the mess of different models and the inability of the army to supply his unit with the correct spare parts and how before the Ardenne offensive a big part of their tanks were so damaged as to be useless in actual combat. Not to mention the story of how the Tiger and Königstiger tanks were used as stationary artillery when there was no chance of getting these oversized monstrosities rolling again.
Oh yeah, my grandfather was actually glad his army had not been more powerful, he only wished the idiots had capitulated earlier!
I second wubbes’s recommendation. I keep that book in the bathroom as bogside reading for guests.
I’m wondering what future generations will make of the cigarette butts my father in law put out in the wet plaster/concrete all around the house.
Giliell: Obviously part of some ceremony meant to bring fortune to the inhabitants of the newly plastered home. We have a wealth of imagery from the period showing tobacco sticks in association with representations of success and social activity, which suggests we are looking at the remains of a communal inauguration ritual.
In fairness to the Indiana Jones movies, the first and third represent the Nazi obsession with the occult as an irrelevant distraction that did nothing to improve their success in the war.
I must disgress.
The inauguration ceremony was clearly the blood sprinkled on tge below the surface level wall.
Ogvorbis, #34,
I think one key aspect of this issue is that a lot of people prefer to engage with history as drama, or propaganda, rather than as a tentative investigation of the past. While the tools of drama can be employed to bring history to life, they are not exactly conducive to historical accuracy or maintaining the degree of uncertainty that proper historical engagement requires.
I don’t actually think there is anything wrong with using the matter of history for drama and entertainment. At least not in and of itself. The problem is when this is the only engagement with history that a lot of people tend to get. From my own field of interest perhaps the most common drama-led misconception I come up against is the notion that Roman Emperors were all gluttonous, sex-mad tyrants with a cruel streak a mile wide. That sort of character makes for great drama, and always has. Roman accounts of the Imperial family (Suetonius, the Historia Augusta, to some extent Tacitus) wallowed in painting the men at the top as degenerate monsters. But this is a literature based on generations of attempts to blacken the names of murdered predecessors or present the whole Imperial system as inherently corrupt and corrupting. We unthinkingly relate back the gory gossip and slanders of the Romans because it appeals to our sense of drama. It is difficult to penetrate beyond that picture in any case, but it tickles our desire for grand guignol and larger than life historical bastards too much for most people to even try. Even I find it an appealing bit of theatre, and respond well when fantasy or science fiction cultures borrow the trappings of Imperial Rome to lend an air of degenerate tyranny and sinful sophistication.
The problem is that well-researched and informative documentaries never get the kind of money, publicity or prestige that dramatic re-tellings and historically dubious entertainment do. Glurge like Spartacus: Blood and Sand or HBO’s Rome get everywhere and make lots of money, Mary Beard’s Meet the Romans and Richard Miles’s Archaeology – A Secret History get repeated late at night on BBC4 if they’re lucky. Even in the realm of publicly-funded documentaries by respected academics there tends to be a preference among broadcasters for sensationalist bastards like David Starkey and his brand of pompous monarchistic jingoism. At least over here.
Speaking of dear Saint Mary, her latest pamphlet on how Western societies have defined the relationship between women and power is well worth a read:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Women-Power-Professor-Mary-Beard/dp/1788160606/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1515098692&sr=8-1&keywords=mary+beard+women+and+power
thirdmill:
Ogvorbis said most of what I would reply here. I would counter that real history is not at all uninteresting (a value judgment anyway and not an objective determination either way), but it’s almost all uncomfortable, in that it stubbornly resists a tidy narrative arc that we meaning-makers crave. That’s what pseudo-history and conspiracy theories provide. As someone else said, they’re actually boring, in that they’re plotted, but badly and obviously.
robro:
Agreed, of course, that the motivation can’t be known with any certainty. But it’s not out of bounds for an expert to speculate, and indeed that’s part of what we value their expertise for: informed possibilities, as long as they don’t over-commit to the absolute truth of an idea that can’t ultimately be tested. In the case of paleolithic cave art in Southern and Eastern Europe, the context of the sites is meaningful also. Many assemblages of cave paintings were made in the same caves, over millennia, people returning to the same site, in many cases deep within a cave past narrow passages far underground where few individuals would ever have ventured. So while we can’t say anything for certain (and, in my view, applying the term “religion” unproblematically even to many historical ancient practices is assuming too much), it’s hard to believe that some orientation to the numinous or sublime or “spiritual” or what have you did not motivate our ancestors to create those charged images. (BTW, this Spring I will be visiting a few paleolithic cave art sites in Spain and I’m just a little excited.)
When I said that the truth tends to be boring, I was referring to the population in general, and not the higher-than-average-intelligence people who read this blog. I’m talking about the type of people prone to believe conspiracy theories in the first place. And for them, it is boring. They’d far rather hear how UFO aliens built the Mexican pyramids.
Science can’t explain how kooks are magnetic.
Except: quantum.
Though if kooks are magnetic, surely there must be some way to reverse the polarity and repel them, rather than attracting them?
@25 Don’t understand your comment ,i think you are making fun of a simple country lad.
@20 First of all you don’t have to be a rabid rightit wingnut to be interested in the Nazi war machine .
All the faults with supply and stuff like that is because they ended up fightingt a long war instead of a short war .
The bit about Rommel makes no mention of how he chased the British all the way to Egypt twice .
The German Panther tank is regarded as the best medium tank of the war ,once they had sorted a few problems out .
As for the rest ,Denmark helped the small amount of Jews living there to escape to Sweden .
The Nazis wanted the Czech arms factories ,if they had been prepared to allow The Red army to help them if the Germans invaded that might have stopped adolf from rattling his sabre and the guy who did Prime minister impressions (Neville Chamberlain) from sticking his tory nose in.
The faults with the Luftwaffe Aircraft were mainly political ,for example ,Milch disliked a certain aircraft maker so he tried his best to have one of his aircraft taken out of service .
And they didn’t have nice shiny 4 engined aircraft like the B17 ,and green ,brown ,black aircraft like the Avro Lancaster because their airforce was meant to support the Army ,not meant to be bombing London night after night .
Think i have covered.everything.
I will finish with a funny .I make models ,and German aircraft are not supplied with swastikas from a lot of makers .
So i went on the interweb to ask google where i could get some swastika markings ,i found myself on a far right model making forum .All dixie and swastika flags ,they were going on about the lack of swastikas markings in model kits as a Jewish plot .
At the other end of the silliness scale i clicked on a christian model making site ,i kid you not .Their tag line was making models to a higher purpose .
thirdmill:
I was not trying to be elitist. My sister-in-law, who has Down’s syndrome, reads history books. And enjoys them.
I think the biggest obstacles to most people enjoying histor are:
1. We are taught, early on, that reading is a chore. Some of us are lucky and avoid that — maybe due to family, maybe due to other influences.
2. History books, before one gets to college (and even some of the ones in college) are written to be as bland and non-controversial as possible. Which means that, to most Americans, when I say “history book”, they harken back to the shitty books of junior high.
3. Lack of time. I’m comfortable. I don’t work two or three jobs. I have the time to pursue whatever threads I choose to follow. Many Americans are not so lucky.
Having higher-than-average intelligence may be part of it. But the anti-education culture of the US (and I can only speak to the US), the crappy history books of school days, and lack of time are, I think, a much bigger part of it.
@ 19 davidc1
Marmite?
Ogvorbis:
One antidote to that is James W. Loewen’s book Lies My Teacher Told Me. He has first hand experience with trying to get actual grim reality in a history book:
http://historynewsnetwork.org/blog/153970
@chris:
I remember that book from my junior high days; I seem to recall liking it a lot.
Although it was A People’s History of the United States that I really latched on to. I read Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky around the same time.
@anbheal #20
Oh, thank you USA for single handedly defeating the Nazis! Clearly this is why you are now the Leaders of the Free World™
:-p
@davidc1 #49
I was under the impression that swastika decals were supplied but broken up into seperate pieces. Do they not even do this anymore?
CJO @ #45
“Informed possibilities” perhaps, but speculation based on the researcher’s cultural context is problematic. The context of a site may be important, but that’s itself an interpretation. A cave that was visited repeatedly over hundreds or thousands of years may have held some special place in those people’s hearts, but we can’t know that. We’re only inferring it and we should remain very clear about that before we assert a spirituality to it or purpose to their behavior. Perhaps they just liked spelunking and finger painting.
Anyway, enjoy your trip to Spain.
The “Unbeatable Nazi War Machine” meme is similar to the “Nazi Superscience” thing, really — it’s greatly exaggerated, what successes they did have were thanks to the discoveries and developments of people who came before them, and they thoroughly squandered these advantages in a few short years. Hitler didn’t invent mechanised warfare, and Erwin Rommel didn’t learn command at a Nazi military academy.
And just like German culture and science never recovered their pre-war eminence, neither has German military skill. Not that I’m particularly torn up about the latter.
Interesting cherry picking. I expect more from the SPLC. While I see strong connections between distrust of expertise and the embrace of “secrets” in all of these right-leaning things, I also see secrets trumping expertise on the left. Anti-vaxxers or the anti-GMO crowd know better than scientists, after all. And “your vaginal floor rocks” is no longer just a compliment on the left. Left-leaning kooks seem to be the ones who think homeopathy is medicine and Deepak Chopra is intelligent. I could go on, but I’m a liberal and this stuff disgusts me not only because of the way people behave but because the right wing associates these idiots with me and my beliefs.
@55 Some kit makers do that ,some supply whole decals .But Revell of Germany don’t supply any ,same goes for Airfix from Britain.
What surprised me when i returned to the hobby in 2011 was how many manufacturers there are from The Czech Republic and Russia and Ukraine ,countries that suffered the most under the Nazis making models of the tanks and aircraft of their former enemy.
mordred @36:
From what I can tell, the idea of the Nazi supertanks stems from armchair historians and wargamers looking at the theoretical maximum performance of German tanks under optimum conditions, then ignoring all the issues that the real tanks actually had: lack of fuel, mechanical failures, flawed metallurgy that resulted in armor plating that shattered when hit by enemy fire, poorly trained crews, lack of moral, a lack of standardized parts that meant it wasn’t possible to take parts from one machine and use them in another machine that was allegedly the same model, the use of slave labor for construction which incentivized the workers to sabotage things as often as they could…
@51 ,Yes Marmite ,spread thinly on hot buttered toast yum yum .
davidc1 @59:
I’ve also seen models of Imperial Japanese warships and warplanes that were produced in China.
Content note: Completely off-topic.
Ogvorbis @ 34: “(why does immoral have to ms and amoral only one?)”
The extra ‘m’ stands for “morality. Someone who is behaving in an immoral manner knows what the moral rules are, and is breaking them in a deliberate fashion. Someone who is behaving in an amoral fashion denies the existence of morality altogether, and therefore the word doesn’t have the “m” for “morality” in it.
(Instant etymology as created by me right now, inspired either by divine revelation or entirely too much time having difficulty sleeping during these hot nights).
My favorite rebuttal of Von Daniken-like tripe: Look, if you want to think that all of your ancestors were as dumb as rocks, that’s fine—but I deeply resent your saying that all of my ancestors were also as dumb as rocks!
Funnily enough, I read it back when it was published (I have to confess to buying it, sadly) and it was my first, very large, gigantic step into understanding and recognising racism when I see it. At least in writing, there are 2 simple rules.
1. Any writer who says that the women of any group, regardless of colour of skin, don’t suffer as much as “our” women do during childbirth andor that the group generally doesn’t grieve over the death of infants and children the way “civilised people” do is a racist. (I note here that classism has exactly the same effects on warped thinking, whether it’s about poor people generally or identifiable populations in particular. Read half a dozen Brit crime writers of the 1920s to 30s and see what you think.)
2. Ancient peoples, along with those funny coloured people, clearly could not possibly have been as clever as “us” – though they very likely had “access” to spiritual stuff in ways that are impossible to understand, the dear innocent things. I think this is actually related to failure to understand evolution in any way other than a Victorian/Edwardian notion of all society “improving” all the time.
ogvorbis, Meg Thornton – etymology.
The prefix a- indicates not or opposite in these cases. Theist, a-theist. Moral, a-moral. (Obviously not the same as a-round, a-way, a-long, a-far, a-top which are a different set. The ‘a’ for this meaning becomes ‘ab’ in front of a word beginning with a vowel, about, above.)
The prefix in- can mean not or opposite also. Indistinct, incontinent. However, when the base word begins with b, p, or m, the ‘in’ becomes ‘im’. Impossible, impatient, immoral, immovable, immeasurable. (It’s well to remember that in and im also have a couple of other meanings, but the same rule applies.)
Meg Thornton #63
You had me going…
mostlymarvelous #65
yeah…
that, too
I’ve been thinking about this in the context of ancient monuments.
Consider how many different ancient societies there have been, with all the geographic and temporal range of human history. In a few cases, a society would choose to exert all its economic and technological resources on the most massive monuments they could possibly create. These monuments would then stand out from the usual products of human history, looking like a nearly impossible achievement to naive outsiders.
Presumably, many other societies spent their resources on things that aren’t very visible in the long term, such as the Nazi war against everyone, or the the American – Soviet space race. I was born in 1982, and I already find it hard to believe that moon flights were possible with 20th century technology.
Looks like your thesis in the headline is amply demonstrated by the next post!
Monty Python did a special book and record at about the time von Däniken was popular. It had this great put-down in it.
Q. How did the primitive Ancient Egyptians manage to build the Pyramids?
A. Whips.
Fucking kook magnets, how do they work?
iMoral is an Apple trademark?
The vikings did get to North America long before Columbus. Their farthest-flung colonies failed pretty quickly, but the nearer ones — in Greenland — lasted a few centuries. It seems they traveled a fair bit in the eastern parts of Canada, though exactly how much is hard to nail down. It’s not hard to think there might have been some hanky-panky. It didn’t take long for babies to be born to Hudson’s Bay Company and RCMP men, after all.
In the Arctic, people of European ancestry could visit but couldn’t really conquer the Inuit until the 1950s or so because of a lack of appropriate technology — whereas the Inuit had been living there for more than a thousand years, after displacing the Dorset culture and the Vikings.
I would like to point out that Zundel was NOT a Canadian citizen. He applied for citizenship twice and was turned down twice. He did live in Canada for many years, but was not taken onboard, to put it mildly, and ended up leaving the country. He later tried to return to Canada and was refused reentry. He was returned to Germany, where he died last year.
There is something delicious about tales where our understanding of the universe is wrong in some radical way. Knowing science for real can make those fantasies even more exciting. That’s why I like to GM Call of Cthulhu with home brew adventures.