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Rome isn’t Real
47 Plays1 year ago
Josh and M look at the TikTok claim that Rome isn't real, and this thing turns out to go all the way back to either the Jesuits or the Benedictines (depending on who you trust)...
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Transcript
Introduction to Roman History Conspiracy Theories
00:00:00
Speaker
Rome wasn't built in a day. Indeed, Rome wasn't built at all. In this explosive expose episode of the eggcaster's eye to the conspiracy, we look at the lies, the lamentations and the lies, by which we mean the Roman
00:00:15
Speaker
Supposedly Roman. Sorry, yes. Supposedly Roman musical instrument called a lyre. It's a clever joke, you see. Lyre sounds like lyre. Or does lyre sound like lyre? Anyway, it's very clever. So clever we derailed the syndrome entirely to explain to you just how clever we are. But yes. Rome. Does it exist? Yes. No.
00:00:37
Speaker
Anyway, grab that fiddle that Nero definitely didn't play as Rome Burnt and get ready to journey to the eternal city that doesn't exist to find out the truth about Roman history. Although, if you want to know how it all ends, then basically getting your history lessons from TikTok might not be the best idea. Yes, it is the kids who are wrong. Again. The podcast's guide to the conspiracy featuring Josh Addison and Em Denton.
Hosts' Background and Current Events
00:01:10
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. In Auckland, New Zealand, I am Josh Edison, and in Auckland, New Zealand, they are Imdentith. We're both in Auckland, New Zealand. We're both in the same space. What's going on there, Joshua? What's going on there? Well, I still don't have easy access to a car on account of the other ones getting underwaterised. Although not nearly as underwater as large parts of the country over the last week.
00:01:37
Speaker
Have you seen the photos from like the East Coast and stuff? Yeah, I was looking at photos of Eske Valley during these years. Places just buried in the sand. There are some towns and small villages that I don't think are coming back.
00:01:53
Speaker
No. Yes, so if you haven't been paying attention to local news, Cyclone Gabrielle made its presence felt over the last week. Fortunately, not so badly here in central Auckland. I didn't get flooded again, for one thing, which was a load off my mind. But yes, it's hit other parts of the country quite bad. I haven't heard a lot of sort of climate changey denialism, climate lockdown business this time round, but
00:02:21
Speaker
i don't know maybe they're just saving it up yes i think maybe they spent their load in the last tropical storm and now they've gone oh we've already done all of our verification and claiming it's obfuscation about climate change so we just have to we have to wait a while we have to it's too early it's too soon josh it's too soon to point the finger at geo engineering gotta give people space gotta give people space
00:02:47
Speaker
let the hapere fire up again. But we're not here to talk about local matters, meteorological or otherwise. We're here to talk about history, ancient history, or ancient not history, or not ancient history. Sudo history, ancient or otherwise? Something like that. So it's a regular episode of the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, which
00:03:11
Speaker
paradoxically don't seem to be the regular kind these days. Oh no, they're now irregular episodes of the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy. Now the topic we're looking at this week is the topic of Rome isn't
Existence of the Roman Empire: Fact or Fiction?
00:03:24
Speaker
real. And this was a topic that was topical back in December of last year, when we originally planned to do this episode. But long-term listeners, and by long-term listeners, anyone who's been listening since December, congratulations, you're now a long-term listener.
00:03:40
Speaker
We'll be aware that between December and now, there's been mitigating circumstances. I returned back home to look after my mother, who has lymphoma. We had problems recording due to Josh going overseas. Then there were floods. Basically, a topic that we should have covered back in December is now being covered in the middle of February, where it's less topical. But I would still say, still salient.
00:04:09
Speaker
It is. And really, one does have to ask, how did it come to this? Have dark forces been arrayed against us to try and prevent us from getting this particular episode out? I smell it in piracy. Dark forces have been arrayed against us, which is why we've sent Karl Katarnin to find out what's going on.
00:04:29
Speaker
Is that a Star Wars one? I haven't played that one. No, he was shot as a vampire. No, no, no. Calcutta was Dark Forces, Dark Forces 2, Dark Forces 3, G-Day Night 2. From Emi, that was one of those games that actually had three colons in it because it was basically a sequel to a sequel and then had its own name.
00:04:52
Speaker
Right, well, let's not talk about multiple colons here, or who knows where we could end up. I've been playing the... No, no, no, I won't get sidetracked. You can't make me. Play a sting before things get worse.
00:05:06
Speaker
Yes, so as you say, this is something that was topical at the end of last year. It was also topical at the end of the year before that, and as we'll see, was topical quite a while ago as well, but we're getting ahead of ourselves. So it started at the end of 2021. On November
Donna Dickens' Claims on Roman Fabrication
00:05:27
Speaker
the 16th, a TikToker who went by the name More Millennial,
00:05:31
Speaker
going by her Twitter account, which we'll talk about shortly. Is it Mon-lennial or Mo-lennial? I thought it was Mon, like she's a millennial, but she's a Mon. Well, maybe it's, I don't know, there wasn't an I in there, as far as I could tell. Anyway, whatever her name was, doesn't matter. Her real name apparently is Donna Dickens, and she posted a TikTok arguing that ancient Rome did not exist. The whole thing was a fabrication.
00:05:57
Speaker
And fabrication by who? The Spanish Inquisition. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition to invent the entire empire of Rome. Yes, the church itself. So she sort of clarified a little bit, saying she's not saying that the city of Rome didn't exist. Obviously, it exists now since it's existed for a long time, but she's saying the Roman Empire didn't exist. There was no such thing as Romans other than citizens of that one particular city.
00:06:24
Speaker
Yeah, but not just that. She also claimed that Rome, the empire, produced zero unique material culture, zero primary documents, and no one's been able to radiocarbon date any so-called famous Roman monuments. Now those are big claims. Rome produced no unique material culture.
00:06:50
Speaker
So, thus, you would expect there to be no evidence of there being a Roman Empire outside of the city of Rome, which means that if you found, say, coins stamped with the face of the emperor and say,
00:07:05
Speaker
far-flung places like Syria that would be evident against her thesis. But no, Rome did not produce any unique material culture for us to be able to show evidence of that empire. And Rome has zero primary documents, which means that there's nothing to refer to to show the proof of this empire. There's only suspicious and probably faked secondary sources created by the Roman Catholic
00:07:35
Speaker
And why did they do that? Because they wanted to deny Europeans their own indigenous history and their own indigenous cultural origins. Yes. So that was November 2021. And in the end of last year, 2022, she switched to Twitter. So what he was quoting a second ago there, the Rome produced zero unit material culture, zero primary documents, zero radiocarbon
00:08:03
Speaker
dates is a quote from her more recent tweeting on the subject. I went and had a look, so I was sort of reading about this. And when people linked to her original TikToks saying this, they don't seem to exist anymore. But then she started up a new TikTok account also called Mominennial Returns, where she is talking about the same sort of stuff. And on Twitter, she's
00:08:26
Speaker
talking about the same sort of stuff, as well as a bunch of other stuff. She sort of talks about history things, but this is her, as she sort of put it, this is the hill she's dying on, that Rome never existed. And so what she claims about this is, as you say, she says there are no primary sources
00:08:45
Speaker
regarding Rome. She says that all the documents, all these supposedly Roman documents that we know of, are copies made by the church in the Middle Ages or in the Renaissance. She makes sort of suggestive comments about the fact that supposedly the church copied these documents and then destroyed the originals, which they didn't do with the originals of documents from other cultures, very strange. Another one she said that documents people have brought up as being original
00:09:13
Speaker
ancient Roman documents. She's claimed that's not Roman, that's Greek. And so basically anything that people will want to say, this is a Roman thing, this phenomenon or what have you, is something that originated in Rome. She'll say, basically, no, it didn't. Roman technologies or construction techniques will have you. She'll say,
00:09:34
Speaker
they were invented by earlier or other civilizations. Hadrian's Wall is one thing that's carpeted. People say, hey, if there were no Romans, who the hell... Hadrian's Wall or Hadrian's Road? Well, exactly. When people would say, if there were no Romans, if there's no Roman Empire, then who the hell built Hadrian's Wall in Scotland?
00:09:54
Speaker
And she basically said, no, I don't know. There should be a few things. At one point, she did actually say Hadrian's Wall isn't even a wall. It's just like a road, referring to the viewing of photographs. She's kind of right there in that Hadrian's Wall is not a continuous wall. Some bits of it are wall-like.
00:10:13
Speaker
Other bits of it are bits of elevated land. Other bits are stretches of land between bits of construction. Essentially, it was a tax border rather than a defensive border. It allowed the Roman authorities to control the flow of goods. So depending on what goods were flowing through particular sections, you needed more or less of a wall. So you can point to bits of Hadrian's wall and go,
00:10:43
Speaker
doesn't look like much of a wall, does it? But if you just shift the camera, say left or right, then you go, oh yeah, but that bit does, that bit really does look like a wall. Now, all of her stuff, it's all on TikTok and Twitter, which means it's all very short and condensed and she doesn't really
00:11:03
Speaker
have the space, even if she wanted to, to actually go into a lot of detail. So it is just basically what we said before. No, it isn't. No, it doesn't. This doesn't exist. There's none of this. There's none of that. No evidence. End of story. Which, as you can imagine, is not the most convincing of argumentation, and yet also at the same time,
00:11:26
Speaker
It makes things very easy for her when people try to argue with her in these formats because again she can just say no, no it isn't, no it's not. I've had a look, I've went through a couple of Twitter threads where people have talked to her and she gets hostile very quickly when people argue with
00:11:43
Speaker
or even just disagree with stuff she said. There was one thread where, you know, a guy says, well hang on, what about this? And her very first reply calls him an idiot, and she's just, you know, openly hostile immediately straight away, which seemed to be her email. I just had a quick browse through her most recent tweets, including a thread on why she hates the movie The Last Jedi,
00:12:06
Speaker
And immediately when someone said, actually, I don't think it's that bad, she was all on top of them calling them. Her main complaint was that it's both racist and sexist. Racist because obviously Finn was supposed to become a Jedi and yet Rian Johnson shoved him aside in favor of
00:12:23
Speaker
in favour of Ray, which I don't think is what they were setting up in the first word. She insists it is, and it's racist against him and somehow also sexist against Ray. I don't know. Anyway. But running that line of argumentation meant if people agree, she was like, well, then you're just a horrible racist because you disagree with this stuff, which is something
00:12:47
Speaker
We'll see her doing a little bit again in other things. And so it's a little bit hard to tell just from looking at this. That's the eternal question with all these sorts of things. Does she believe what she's saying? Is she just a troll who knows that she's wrong and is winding people up and knows that the harder she digs in her heels and the more argumentative and hostile she is?
00:13:08
Speaker
the more she succeeds in winding people up. Is she just an attention seeker who knows by saying provocative stuff like this she can get lots of people paying attention to her? Is she running the algorithm the way the algorithm is meant to be rung?
00:13:23
Speaker
Yes, I recently found out more about Andrew Tate than I really cared to know, but now that he's in jail, people are like, okay, let's actually talk about this dude because up until now, anything you say about him only increases his influence and following and therefore money. But one of the things I heard about him was he has these various courses telling you how to get rich, which from what I can understand is basically
Social Media Dynamics and Controversial Figures
00:13:50
Speaker
find a thing that makes you money and then do that thing. That appeared to be about the depth of it. But also when he talks about making a Twitter following, he sort of said, you know, your following on any social media should be sort of 60 to 70 percent fans and 30 to 40 percent haters. For all his faults, he's very good at running the algorithm and he knows full well that to actually get things going your way.
00:14:15
Speaker
you need almost as many people hating on you as you do people who love you. So maybe she's just really good at that. Actually on the Andrew Tate thing, there was a piece in The Guardian either last week or the week before last where a reporter went to remain here.
00:14:33
Speaker
And there was a really interesting bit in it, and as someone who lived in Bucharest for almost two years, it made me go, oh yeah, you're right. They point out that Andrew Tate presents himself as being this incredibly wealthy, incredibly rich individual, and rich by American or UK standards, so by Romanian standards, incredibly uber wealthy.
00:15:00
Speaker
And yet, he lives in one of the tattiest suburbs in Bucharest. And one of those suburbs so tatty I've never actually been to it myself. It's so well off the beaten track. And I was going, that's a little bit odd for someone who claims that he has immense, immense wealth. He appears to live in an abandoned factory.
00:15:23
Speaker
Yes, most strange, but basically a horrible, horrible human being and I'm glad he's in prison. Well, he's in, he's in Romand or whatever it is. I don't think he's actually gone to trial yet, but nevertheless. He's not here to talk about Andrew. He's not in the Romand-Romanian prison. We're not here to talk about Andrew Tate and nor should anyone else. I would put it to you. So she's not the only one to take this kind of
00:15:47
Speaker
tech, is she? No, so I was reading about her and I had had strong recollections about the work of Parallax. So Parallax was the person who popularized the Flat Earth thesis in the 19th century, because many people seem to be blissfully unaware that the Flat Earth belief, as we know it today, is a relatively modern invention.
00:16:14
Speaker
up until parallax kind of gaming the system. It doesn't seem that parallax genuinely believed the earth was flat.
00:16:32
Speaker
Rather, he had worked out that you can deny epistemic authority by just being really, really obstinate that you are right and they are wrong. So parallax would perform these elaborate experiments to show that the earth is flat. So, for example, there's one experiment where
00:16:51
Speaker
they find a frozen riverbed, they put a telescope on the riverbed and according to flat earth thesis they should be able to see some monument far away across the UK which if the earth was curved would be beyond the ability of a telescope to see
00:17:09
Speaker
And Parallax looks through the telescope and says, oh, yes, I can definitely see the monument in question. The scientist comes up, looks through and says, well, I can't see it. And Parallax all goes, well, you're just lying. I can see it. It's right there. I can see it through the telescope. My experiment proves that the Earth is flat. And he worked out that actually, if you're really, really confident, some people are going to believe you.
00:17:37
Speaker
And that's kind of what happens with a particular type of troll on social media. You can't fool all of the people all of the time.
00:17:49
Speaker
but you can convince some people, and sometimes that's all you want to do as a troll, just convince some people to believe the wrong thing. That said though, I haven't, I mean, I've sort of read articles about the final one and about the Rome isn't real thing. There's an interesting one with the Daily Beast that was more, less interested in the theory itself than how come it keeps popping up, how come it showed up in Twitter, in TikTok, and then a year later on Twitter.
00:18:19
Speaker
It ends up talking to familiar names such as Karen Douglas and Joe Yosinski to sort of talk about why these, they seem like quite clever people. I think you'd like them, should reach out. To talk about sort of why do people like to believe these things? Why do they pop up? Although in the reading that I've done, which as I say was more talking about the phenomenon than actually looking into the Roma's real conspiracy as a claim in itself.
00:18:47
Speaker
I didn't see anybody agreeing with her, like all these articles just said it, talk about how anyone who knows anything about history has disagreed and shown why it's nonsense.
00:18:59
Speaker
So I don't know. I don't know. I mean, they also didn't say that nobody believes this thing. So I don't know. But I haven't seen any evidence that suggests anyone actually takes her beliefs seriously, apart from the ones who she then deliberately, you know, who she makes
00:19:18
Speaker
point of winding up when they try to criticise her. Which is another form of trolling, where you quite deliberately antagonise people and then pretend to believe something which isn't true just to get the ire of the person who doesn't realise that you're trolling them in that way. Yeah.
00:19:39
Speaker
I don't know. So I saw, for instance, one thing there was here, there was the document, this ancient document, which she had a TikTok and people have said, what about this Latin? This is a primary source. This isn't the reproduction. Here's an actual Roman document. And she sort of has a picture of it and zooms in and says, look, that's Greek. Like, are you guys crazy? That's Greek.
00:19:58
Speaker
And the characters do look Greek, that the O's have lines of them, so they look like homochrons, and the O's did look like lambdas, some of it looked like Greek characters, but then some of them are like, okay, yes, but if you read it, if you actually read, not just look at the characters, but read the words, it's Latin. And in particular, the first two seasons, the first two sentences, one of them talks about Caesar, and one of them says something Romanus,
00:20:24
Speaker
like, they're about as, the actual content of that thing is about as Roman as it's possible to get. But of course, she didn't reply to that. I saw another thread where somebody sort of commented, so historians who talk about the Roman-Persian War, they're just making that up, are they? And so she immediately says, oh, you know, give me a primary source.
00:20:44
Speaker
of people who actually talk about this war. Someone mentioned the document. She immediately fired back. Well, she fired back. You know, that mentions all of these people. This stuff, a dozen different kinds of people, doesn't actually mention the Romans at all. And then the guy says, what are you talking about? Oh, I see. You've just done a Google search on that document and reported that. Oh, no, no, no, no. Wait, wait. You've just looked at the Wikipedia entry for that thing, haven't you? Now, here's an actual translation of the thing by, you know, gave a proper scholarly
00:21:14
Speaker
citation, where this person talks about the land of the Romans and the Romans doing blah, blah, blah. No replies after that. But then of course, he's probably the stupidity. And we are assuming here that she's engaging in some degree of trolling the stupidity of going, well, you need to be primary sources because
00:21:34
Speaker
Even if there weren't primary sources for the existence of the Roman Empire, there are secondary sources about the Roman Empire from other cultures that wrote about the Romans. Indeed, the analogy here are the Holocaust deniers go, well, show me a primary source where Adolf Hitler actually ordered the Holocaust. Can't do it liberal. You've been owned. And people go,
00:22:00
Speaker
You know, I mean, there is no one, here's a conspiracy document that the Nazis actually wrote down. But here are a whole bunch of supporting documents that actually outline the Holocaust in all its individual pieces. Sure, there's no one document says, let's do a Holocaust together, guys. But there are lots of little documents that actually describe how the Holocaust operated.
00:22:26
Speaker
Or even the Shakespeare authorship stuff. Again, there is no actual example of Shakespeare's diaries or something where he says, today I wrote Macbeth, me, William Shakespeare, I did. The greatest play ever written, that's me, I wrote that. Yep, but there's so much other writing of people who talk about this play by the Shakespeare dude that it really does seem unsustainable to claim otherwise.
00:22:53
Speaker
unless you're a stickler for your primary sources. But there doesn't seem to be great justification for that. But I mean, so what was the birds aren't real because that was tick tock as well. Yes, this was a conspiracy theory that made the rounds on tick tock.
00:23:10
Speaker
I'm going to say 2020-ish. It may have been 2019 or 2021. And this was the claim that the CIA had wiped out the bird population using poison and replaced all birds with robots. And there were a whole bunch of social scientists going, look, people believe this really, really bizarre theory that birds aren't real. And other social scientists and scholars are going,
00:23:39
Speaker
do realize it's a joke theory. People don't actually believe the CIA replaced all the birds with robot. What they're doing is enjoying the fiction of pretending that they believe it, because it really riles up researchers like you. So that yeah, that the whole the whole
00:24:00
Speaker
algorithm-fueled social media world does put a bunch of different spins on things. So given that it's all about engagement and attention and what have you, you do have to wonder, does anybody believe this, including the one putting it forwards in the first place? Even the people who are arguing against it, I mean, how many of them actually think that she actually believes this? And how many of them just know that they themselves can get a bit of attention
00:24:27
Speaker
you know, if you have somebody with a sort of history-themed social media presence, it's like, oh, here's an issue about history that everyone's talking about. If I talk about it too, then maybe some of that will rub off on me. So you never quite know whether this is a thing that anyone involved actually believes. But Josh, the one thing we haven't mentioned is possibly her greatest claim.
00:24:55
Speaker
What would that be? So in late October, and this would appear to have been back in 2021, she appeared to suggest that the name Jesus Christ could be translated to clitoris healer. Sorry, you've lost me. I know three people called clitoris healer. That's a perfectly common name around my parts, if you know what I mean.
00:25:22
Speaker
So I wasn't to begin with, but then I thought I just had to... So I think basically it's fair to say that she says some stuff. There is stuff and she says it. And as we've suggested before, she very much uses the language of social justice
00:25:41
Speaker
to try and deflect any criticism. As she says, this is something that was organized by the church to sort of homogenize European culture. It's all about white people making themselves look better by rewriting history to make the present day sound better, which means, of course, if you argue with her, she can just turn around and say, well, you're just a massive racist then, aren't you? So a lot of people have said this is, you know, she's just a troll.
00:26:08
Speaker
or she's just an attention junkie or she's just a grifter. There is nothing to be gained by engaging with her at all. But other people think it's more of an important issue, don't they?
00:26:19
Speaker
They do, so we get Dr. Alex Fitzpatrick, who on Twitter has the handle archaeologyfits, and they say, so yes, the Rome isn't real persons, a troll grifting off conspiracy theories couched in otherwise radical language, and technically we shouldn't be giving them energy, but I'm concerned about how this can be weaponized by others to frame all critical work as ridiculous. And that's where I think the Holocaust example comes back in.
00:26:47
Speaker
Because this room isn't real tactic of saying, well, there's no primary source. Give me actual evidence, physical evidence of this thing is precisely what Holocaust deniers had done in the past.
Comparisons to Holocaust Denial Tactics
00:27:01
Speaker
Holocaust deniers said there's no primary source.
00:27:04
Speaker
that says the Holocaust actually occurred which by which they mean there's no Nazi document which outlines exactly how the Holocaust is going to occur and they deny that there's any physical evidence of the Holocaust go oh you point towards these so-called death camps they ran but as far as I can tell it's just a normal concentration camp or prisoner of war camp that the Nazis ran there's nothing special about that shower block there definitely wasn't used to kill in
00:27:35
Speaker
anyone. And so the tactics that are used by this person are the kind of tactics that have been used in Holocaust denial in the past. And so on one level you might go, she's just a troll. Ignore the troll.
00:27:50
Speaker
But the other thing is, she's using tactics we know have been used for malign political purpose in the past. And we probably should be at least interested in why she's using these particular tactics. Is she using it to advance some kind of ideology? And if so,
00:28:14
Speaker
Is it something that we should be concerned about? So Dr Fitzpatrick was concerned specifically with her field of archaeology.
00:28:24
Speaker
She was interviewed in the Daily Beast article that I mentioned earlier, where she talks about the fact that in archaeology specifically, there's a bit of a culture war at the moment. She says there's a relatively conservative wing of archaeology, and this will be something that they can weaponize and immediately say, well, this is what that woke ideology leads to, even though it's nonsense. Her worry is that when people say obviously blatantly wrong stuff,
00:28:48
Speaker
that is ammunition for people to say, ha ha, look, this is where ideology I don't like. This is what those silly woke millennial snowflakes, if you lead them into archaeology, then they come up with that nonsense, this sort of nonsense. And so what we need is good conservative old-fashioned values in our archaeology.
00:29:05
Speaker
which I assume is a film that could certainly apply in many other areas, but that's her particular worry.
Historical Skepticism from the Renaissance to Modern Day
00:29:12
Speaker
Now, we have of course been talking about this as a recent phenomenon, something end of last year, end of the year before that, but the Rome isn't real thing, it has actually been around a little bit longer from that as I understand it.
00:29:25
Speaker
Here, so now we need to travel back in time to the Renaissance. So Josh, to put on your time traveling pants, slap on a radiation detector, and make sure you cover that cranium with tin foil, because we're going back in time.
00:29:41
Speaker
kind of feels as if there should be a song from Back to the Future playing at that point. Probably that's a copyright ping, yeah. And actually I've already had one of my channels pinged twice by this podcast recently. I really don't need to get a third ping because otherwise that channel would just...
00:29:58
Speaker
disappear. Turns out every so often we put little snippets of music from elsewhere we don't have license to and YouTube does not like that at all or at least the people who are running algorithms on YouTube to detect music do not like that at all. I think it's actually been long enough since my last strike. It wouldn't be that big of an issue but we're not going to take chances. So he's just taken his read, we have travelled back in time, there was music, it was awesome.
00:30:25
Speaker
Yeah, there was a DeLorean. We've got caps. We've got an almanac of amphitheater games, which turned out to be useless. We haven't gone back to the Roman Empire. We don't have very well-prepared time travelers, but we've traveled back in time. And we're in the Renaissance now. And in the Renaissance, it's kind of renewed interest in Roman and Latin literature, as people kind of rediscover, I'm going to put it in air quotes, the ancient masters and genius of Rome and Greece.
00:30:55
Speaker
And people were aware in the Renaissance that all of the documents that we had were largely transcriptions or copies made by monks in monasteries going over centuries and centuries and centuries.
00:31:11
Speaker
And so they were aware that errors had slowly crept into ancient manuscripts, sometimes inadvertently, and that would just be a copying mistake, which would then of course would be exacerbated by the next copying mistake after the copy became part of the main text. And sometimes, because certain monastic people would go
00:31:33
Speaker
I don't think this is written particularly well, I think there's a mistake there, and so they would correct the manuscripts. So Renaissance scholars would go around and they would find as many copies of an ancient text as possible, compare them, and try to
00:31:51
Speaker
uncorrupt the text, go back to what they thought the text looked like originally by trying to find out when the errors crept in and go well obviously this copy of the text is older than that one there's a difference here which means that difference was introduced in the more recent one so we can discard that one can we find an earlier copy of the text or a contemporary copy that looks different and try to find make the text as pristine as possible
00:32:18
Speaker
And this also led to a really interesting phenomena of some people just rejecting ancient texts because they looked wrong. So if it turns out that in the second century, you were a bad writer in Latin, then by the 14th century, an Italian in Verona might end up going, hmm,
00:32:40
Speaker
I think this text is a modern forgery because you were a piss-poor writer over a millennia ago. So there was this kind of thing going on where people were questioning text and trying to find the most pure version of text. And this led, in the 17th century, to a Jesuit by the name of Jean Hardouin,
00:33:02
Speaker
rejecting certain Latin texts because they used grammar and words he didn't think were worthy enough of the great originators of Latin. And yet I'm assuming not all of these texts were written by master playwrights or, you know, great masters.
00:33:21
Speaker
So yeah, but essentially he has an idea in his head of what Latin is like, what Latin should be like. And so when he sees something that doesn't fit with his idea, he rejects it as a fake, which is a phenomenon that kind of persists to this day, but we've talked about that many times in the past. But he goes slightly further with this because he starts questioning Roman history as a consequence. So he goes, look,
00:33:48
Speaker
Here are these weird documents that describe these momentous events supposedly that occurred in Roman history, and he's going, you know, if these events were so important, why didn't someone strike a coin about it? So he's going, look, Romans liked striking coins to commemorate events, you know, you win a war, you strike a coin, you annex a province, you strike a coin, the emperor stubs his toe, you strike a coin.
00:34:15
Speaker
So there are all of these momentous events in these documents and there are no coins and there are no statues. If you look there's no physical evidence that these events that have been written down in these documents actually occurred. He's going well that
00:34:32
Speaker
that's just more evidence that these documents are forgeries. And then he discovers that some of the early church fathers who are writing in Latin, they've got views which are now considered to be heretical. And this particular Jesuit priest is going, I think Christians have always had consistent thoughts since day one, ipso facto, heretical ideas could never have been mainstream in my church.
00:35:01
Speaker
So I think someone's rewritten history to put these heresies in to impugn the church. And so he comes to the realisation that the only people with the skill, the want and the desire to do this are the Benedictines. When they're not present making eggs, I assume.
00:35:23
Speaker
I think the eggs Benedict might be slightly more recent. Although that being said, I actually have no idea. I don't even know why we call it an eggs Benedict. Why do we call it an eggs Benedict? It neither looks like a Benedict nor like a Benedictine.
00:35:40
Speaker
I don't know, we've said the word Benedict too many times in a row now and it's just, I've lost all meaning. Yeah, so yeah, he takes it, the Benedictines who I should note have been the traditional enemies of the Jesuit order since basically the time that the Jesuits came into existence. They forged these texts about Roman history and the early Church Fathers
00:36:05
Speaker
in the 13th century and then they spent a lot of time modifying other texts to add in references to their forged text to genuine materials so they could introduce heresies into the historical record and impugn the church and they did this working for a mysterious figure called Severus Arcontius
00:36:30
Speaker
who was probably Emperor Frederick II of the Holy Roman Empire who had died about a century earlier and there had been a scandal during his lifetime that people thought he may have been an atheist. But of course he didn't exist because the Holy Roman Empire didn't exist.
00:36:47
Speaker
Oh no, so the Holy Roman Empire did exist because we're doubting the Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire is kind of the empire from Constantine onwards. And we're doubting the history of ancient Rome. Now, Hardouin doesn't think that ancient Rome didn't exist. He accepts that Rome did exist. He just thinks that a lot of the history of ancient Rome is in fact the species conjuration of Benedictine monks.
00:37:16
Speaker
Right. He said some other stuff though, didn't he? Didn't he think that Jesus spoke Latin? Yeah, and that's because he wanted to make the claim that the Vulgate translation of the Bible, which was made in the fourth century, isn't actually a translation at all, because the apostles wrote it down in Latin originally.
00:37:37
Speaker
right 400 years after jesus or was jesus all that history has been faked ah right so okay all the history of the translation is fake ipso facto if there is a bible and the vulgate exists in latin it must have been written in latin originally which means that jesus and the disciples spoke and read latin and that's where you get the text from
00:38:03
Speaker
Right, unless it turns out that also Jesus didn't exist. I mean, we're going to have to move forward in time to get to that particular claim. So Haduwin was not taken seriously in his lifetime. Basically, other Jesuits were going
00:38:20
Speaker
Yeah, this is a bit ridiculous. Also, he was questioned mightily about his views, because Haruin, before he took this turn into doubting the history of ancient Rome, was actually a well-respected historian and commentator on early church councils. And so he was asked, how do you reconcile your view that these councils never occurred and the commentaries you've written on what came out of them?
00:38:49
Speaker
And he said God only knows. So he was basically going, well, you know, my professional job requires me to write commentaries on these things, even though personally, I don't think they ever happened. But yeah, he was basically ignored in his lifetime and his books basically just became ephemera. No one paid any attention to them.
00:39:09
Speaker
until the 19th century, when Edward Johnson, who was a really, really big fan of Hardewin's ideas, went really, really hard with it and didn't just say that Roman history as we understand it didn't occur, but furthermore, the character of Jesus
00:39:30
Speaker
was a myth and never existed.
Edward Johnson and Historical Forgery Theories
00:39:33
Speaker
Yeah, so he wrote a book called The Rise of Christendom in 1890, or so a book called The Pauline Epistles restated and explained in 1894, and in both of these books he basically said that the Middle Ages
00:39:48
Speaker
just didn't happen, that this period of 700 years, it had just been kind of made up. And as we'll get onto in a second, that's a claim we've seen before. Oh yeah, yeah. Once we get to Russia, it's a claim we've seen, we've talked about back in episode 113, back in 2018.
00:40:08
Speaker
But yes, so once again, he blamed everything on those damn Benedictines. And so this was a Benedictine conspiracy. He read as far as to say that the Benedictines had forged most of English history as well, just this history forging machine.
00:40:27
Speaker
Yeah, and in fact, even more so than they had forged the history of Europe. So Johnson goes, look, 700 years of history, so from late antiquity through the Middle Ages to the beginning of the Renaissance, didn't exist. But he also claims that in the case of England, the Benedictines forged 1,500 years of history. That basically all history up until the 16th century
00:40:56
Speaker
hadn't occurred the way that people believed it had. So then this brings us into the early 20th century, where a Swiss writer called Robert Beldalf, who was a contemporary of Edwin Johnson. He took it even further. He not only had the Middle Ages never existed, but now he is actually saying that ancient Rome and ancient Greece
00:41:21
Speaker
were also fakes. And this is because he starts comparing Greek and Roman myths with myths from other parts of the Mediterranean. And he's going, isn't it weird that you get the same myth being retold from one culture to another? So when you get a story about Zeus, you find a similar story about Jupiter.
00:41:47
Speaker
when you find a story about Bacchus, you find a story about Dionysus. You go, look, we keep on finding the same myths time and time again. The only way that could happen
00:42:02
Speaker
if it's the same myth, but someone has not had the imagination and has attributed it to multiple cultures. So you're going to look, these myths can't be shared across cultures, they belong to one culture, which means that all of the copies are not real cultures at all.
00:42:21
Speaker
Yes. Whereas, of course, we know that Rome was in the habit of whenever it would go into a co-conquering area, rather than saying, all your pagan gods are wrong and bad, you must stop worshipping them and worship our gods. They were a little more sophisticated and would say, no, no, no, you're worshipping the right gods.
00:42:39
Speaker
You're just calling them the wrong names. We'll just fix the names there. The Romans actually went slightly further than that. They kind of went, look, as long as you pay tax to Rome, we don't really care which god. Well, in some cases, yeah. We're going to incorporate those gods into our pantheon. I mean, they're probably related anyway, right? And this is actually taken to be
00:43:03
Speaker
one of the arguments is the way the Catholic Church is a natural continuation of the Roman Empire. Rome basically just absorbs all cultures whenever possible and the Catholic Church has done very similar things in certain parts of the world and other parts of the world not so much. Will they go on?
00:43:22
Speaker
your gods you do realize that actually they're just saints and they and they're actually worshiping our god your gods actually worship our god they're actually not gods at all they're just saints who are part of the communion of the catholic community and actually they would have prayed towards jesus and god the father god the holies
00:43:44
Speaker
So, you know, actually, you are really Catholic when you think about it. You're Catholic just like us. So, yeah, if you can send some money to Rome, that would be great. But yes, I can see. I assume it happens to everyone when you sort of when you're a kid and you learn about Greek myths and Roman myths and learn fairly quickly that they're actually they're all kind of the same. They just they had different names for each other's gods. And then you get really confused every time popular culture takes on
00:44:14
Speaker
Hercules and says he's the son of Zeus. And then you're like, well, hang on, but I thought he was, yeah. I remember reading a Greek book about Hercules that actually was a book about Heracles, called him Heracles the whole way through. And I read it as Hercules for about half of the book until I actually looked at it and said, oh, they are actually calling him a different name, and that's the Greek one.
00:44:41
Speaker
But then, yes, any time Disney or Marvel or anyone has a crack at it, it's always the Greek gods, except for when it's Hercules and he gets the Roman name. Yeah, because no one likes to say Heracles for some reason. Is it just because of the old movies, the old Arnold Schwarzenegger ones and those Italian ones where they said Hercules and that's just the name that's stuck in popular culture? I don't know.
00:45:06
Speaker
only a sociologist or an anthropologist would know. Well, I don't have any of them too handy, so let's go to Russia. Yes, so we'll skip over this quite quickly because we've kind of talked about the big figure in this, but in the early 20th century, Nikolai Alexandrit Morovitsov, I practiced pronouncing this this morning and I just completely found it, Nikolai,
00:45:32
Speaker
Alexandrovich Morozov proposed that if two events that seem similar are recorded to have happened at different times in different places, then they must actually be the same event merely incorrectly transposed into different historical time periods under a false chronology.
Fomenko's Chronology Theory and Roman History Denial
00:45:52
Speaker
And so from this he infers that we know nothing between 1000 after the common era and Western ancient history happening between 1000 after the common era and 1500 after the common era. Sorry, I should have said those we know nothing before 1000 ACE and really not much between 1000 ACE and 1500 ACE. Yes, which sounds a lot like
00:46:22
Speaker
the new chronology of a fellow by the name of Fomenko and if that sounds familiar it's because you've been listening to this podcast for quite a while now because back in 2018 we covered Fomenko's new chronology which is all of this stuff.
00:46:39
Speaker
So using statistics to make claims about similarity and then using those claims about similarities then say large chunks of history never occurred. Now I should say I cribbed most of this from a rather great article I found online which is
00:47:00
Speaker
Spencer McDaniel's article over it, Tales of Time's Forgotten, which is just a really nice... What's the exit?
00:47:12
Speaker
Exegesis? Yeah, I never quite know how to pronounce it, but yes. A really nice exegesis of this particular precursor to the Rome isn't real stuff. So he quite deliberately goes, look, there are people on TikTok who say that Rome isn't real. People are kind of making fun of, oh, young people today, aren't they stupid?
00:47:32
Speaker
We should hold on because actually people have been claiming Rome isn't real or at least aspects of Roman history aren't real for a very long time. This is part of a tradition of denying primary sources and thus denying the history of the ancient world.
00:47:51
Speaker
And there you have it. And that provides an interesting segue into what's going to be happening in this week's bonus episode, because there's a bit of Holocaust revisionism, I guess, distortion that's been going on, which we're going to be talking about and other things as well, because that's what we do in our bonus episodes. We love our patrons so much. We tell them all sorts of interesting things. We talk about
00:48:16
Speaker
something that happened at the Super Bowl that wasn't Rihanna's pregnancy reveal. We're going to talk about a dead Chilean poet, might talk about Brexit, and then we're going to talk about someone called Jorge. Or at least a team of people associated with Jorge.
00:48:34
Speaker
And who knows what else besides, quite frankly, could be literally anything. So that's it for this episode, but if you want to hear our bonus episode, you can just become a patron by going to patreon.com and searching for the podcast's guide to the conspiracy. And then sign yourself up, you get all sorts of things. You might say your name, you can talk to us on Discord. It's literally a magical, magical time for everyone.
00:48:58
Speaker
But if you don't want to be one of our patrons, then that's fine also. You just listen to our episodes and be our audience. That's really all we need. That's all we ever really needed. But the patron money is nice. Yeah. Yeah. We're never going to be big on TikTok, I think, because we're not on TikTok. I'm not on TikTok, no. I'm not on TikTok either. A real desire to be. I don't know. TikTok, I...
00:49:19
Speaker
Like, when Twitter started imploding, I immediately started casting around like a mad person to try and find what the next big replacement was going to be. So I did something with the Mastodon account I signed up for a while ago and never actually used. I signed up for Hive, and then Hive exploded from all of the people trying to sign up to it because Twitter was dying. I think it's back up again, but I still don't think anyone's on it. Then I signed up for post.
00:49:49
Speaker
which was taking things easy and having sort of a controlled beta program to stop itself from exploding. But nobody really seems to have joined either of those. People are mostly still just on TikTok, yourself excluded.
00:50:03
Speaker
Did you hear about Elon Musk and the Super Bowl? Oh God, yes, yeah. So for listeners who want to know just how pathetic an individual Elon Musk turns out to be, Joe Biden made a tweet during the Super Bowl that got millions upon millions of impressions. Elon Musk made a tweet during the Super Bowl that got
00:50:26
Speaker
a tiny amount of impressions. Elon Musk then went to Twitter HQ and said, why am I not getting the views that Joe Biden is getting? People pointed out to him that actually people are a bit tired of Elon Musk. If you look at Google Trends, Elon Musk's popularity just keeps going down. He fired the engineers who actually pointed out the actual data to him.
00:50:49
Speaker
And so Twitter then changed the algorithm to make sure that Elon Musk's posts went big, not because people wanted to see the post, but because Elon Musk demanded his posts be popular. I believe those were two separate incidents, the firing of the person and then the post Super Bowl. I'm sure there was a firing that went on and that one as well. Well, who knows? Yes.
00:51:12
Speaker
But yeah, and then he has, he's since, I believe, he had sort of a almost sheepish tweet where he posted a meme of, essentially acknowledging that everyone was being force fed his views and made some comment about whether we'll be tweaking the quote unquote algorithm, possibly because he realized just how pathetic it made him look. But anyway,
00:51:36
Speaker
this is not the the podcasters guide to dunking on Elon Musk although maybe it should be I'd heard yeah yeah maybe it should be we i mean we we actually probably could become quite popular online if we spent our entire time dunking on Elon Musk and Andrew Tate uh but it's a man who's easy to hate it's because his name rhymes uh
00:52:00
Speaker
But we're not either of those things because it's the end of the episode. We're out of time. We couldn't do that stuff even if we wanted to. I mean, we could. Well, I mean, yes, we could record a podcast as long as we weren't really. We're free agents. We're capable of anything. But we're not going to because this is the regular time to end a podcast and we're slaves to convention. At least I am.
00:52:23
Speaker
I'm slave to the rhythm. Well, that as well. So if you're a patron, stick around for interesting stuff. If you're not a patron, thank you for listening. And if you're not listening to this podcast, then you have no idea I've just mentioned you. Precisely. So there's really nothing to say, but goodbye. Lassitude. The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy is Josh Addison and me, Dr. M.R. Exdenteth. You can contact us at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com
00:52:52
Speaker
and please do consider supporting the podcast via our Patreon. And remember, remember, oh December, what a night.