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The Tartarian Empire: The Complete Documentary — Transcript

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0:00There is a book sitting in the internet
0:02archive right now. Anyone can read it.
0:05It costs nothing. It was published in
0:07London in 1780 and it is called Russia
0:10or a complete historical account of all
0:12the nations which composed that empire.
0:16On page 11 of the second volume, the
0:18author is describing the Tartar peoples
0:21living inside the borders of the Russian
0:22Empire. And then without any drama at
0:25all in the flat voice of a man writing a
0:28reference book, he says this. The
0:31Tartars have been in possession of all
0:33the countries above mentioned, at least
0:35the greatest part of each, ever since
0:37the Tartarian Empire was in its
0:39splendor, and all of them abound in
0:42monuments of former power. Read that
0:45again. Ever since the Tartarian Empire
0:48was in its splendor, not a region, not a
0:51horde, not a blank space on a map where
0:53the cgrapher had run out of information.
0:56An empire in its splendor. And the man
0:59writing it in 1780 expects his reader to
1:02already know what he is talking about,
1:04the way you or I would write a sentence
1:06about the Roman Empire and not stop to
1:08prove that Rome existed. He keeps going.
1:12He says the whole territory is covered
1:14in ruins, ditches and ramparts, the
1:16remains of towns that have been
1:18completely demolished, forts and castles
1:20you can still find the outline of if you
1:22walk the ground. He says the Russians
1:24have a word for all of it. Goresj,
1:27little ruined towns. He says many of
1:30them are still in reasonable condition
1:32and still make a figure even at present.
1:35And then he starts naming them a tower
1:37and a palace and a mausoleum in the
1:39ruins of Casimov. All of it built in cut
1:42stone and brick with an Arabic
1:44inscription dating Aan's burial. The
1:48remains of Madzar near the Caucasus. The
1:51visible ruins of old Astrachon.
1:54Towers, mosques, houses, and tombs at
1:56Bulgar on the Vulga where he says the
1:59oldest gravestones had already been
2:00standing for more than 11 centuries. The
2:03walls of the Kazan fortress so broad
2:06that they were still being used as
2:07ramparts in his own day. the ramparts of
2:11Cibir, which he calls the ancient
2:13capital of Tartery, still visible near
2:15Tbolsk, and the deserts of the Kirgas,
2:18which he says abound in the relics of
2:20opulent cities. That is a 1780
2:23encyclopedia telling you in plain
2:25English that there was an empire in the
2:27middle of Eurasia, that it built cities
2:30in stone, and that its ruins were lying
2:32all over Russia in such quantity that
2:34the Russians had a specific word for
2:36them. So here is my question and it is
2:40the only question this entire
2:41documentary exists to answer. How is it
2:45that you have never heard of this? Not
2:47why is it disputed, not why is it
2:50controversial, why has it been made
2:52small? Because somewhere between 1780
2:55and the classroom you sat in as a child,
2:58an empire that a London encyclopedus
3:00could describe in one clause without
3:02argument became a horde of barbarians
3:04intense and then became a ctographers's
3:07placeholder and then became nothing at
3:09all. Something happened in between. Over
3:12the next few hours, we are going to find
3:14out what I want to be straight with you
3:17before we start because this video is
3:20going to be long and I would rather you
3:22know exactly what you are getting. This
3:24is not one argument. It is three and
3:27they are not equally strong and I am
3:30going to tell you every single time we
3:32cross from one to the next.
3:34The first argument is that the Tartarian
3:37Empire was real. That it was a genuine
3:39political and military power with
3:41centralized leadership, a written
3:43record, a flag, a religion, and stone
3:46architecture, and that its history was
3:48deliberately rewritten by the states
3:50that conquered it. I believe this
3:52argument is settled. Not settled in the
3:55sense that I have a hunch. Settled in
3:57the sense that I am going to read you
3:59the primary documents and you can go
4:02pull them up yourself while the video is
4:04playing. And one of the documents I am
4:06going to read you was written by the
4:08Central Intelligence Agency classified
4:10for 42 years and then quietly released
4:14in 1999.
4:16The second argument is that Tartar
4:18peoples reached the Americas long before
4:20Columbus. This one is real, but it is
4:23weaker. The sources exist. They are
4:25serious, and they were mainstream
4:27opinion for a while in the 1800s, but
4:30they are inference, not proof. And I am
4:32going to treat them that way. The third
4:35argument is the one you probably came
4:37here for. the fires, the fairs, the
4:40buildings that do not fit their own
4:42timelines, the orphan trains, the buried
4:45ground floors, the bells, that whole
4:48body of anomalies that gets called the
4:50mud flood or the reset or old world
4:53technology.
4:54And I want to be honest with you right
4:56now before you have invested 3 hours.
4:59That third argument is speculation. Not
5:01worthless speculation, not stupid
5:04speculation. Some of it is very good,
5:06but it is speculation and anyone who
5:08tells you otherwise is selling you
5:10something. Here is why I am putting all
5:13three in one video anyway. Because the
5:16strongest thing in this entire field is
5:18not the strangest thing in this entire
5:20field. The strongest thing is a boring
5:23780 reference book and a declassified
5:26government memo. and the way this topic
5:28has been discussed online for the last
5:30several years. The strong material gets
5:33buried under the strange material and
5:35then a skeptic shows up, knocks over the
5:38strange material in 10 seconds and walks
5:40away thinking the whole thing is
5:42nonsense. He never even sees the 1780
5:46book. He never sees the CIA document. I
5:49am not doing that anymore. So, we are
5:52going to go in order of strength.
5:54documented first, contested second,
5:57speculative last, clearly labeled every
6:00time. And at the very end of this video,
6:03I am going to do something you almost
6:06never see in this genre. I am going to
6:09take the four best arguments against
6:12everything I have just told you. Argue
6:14them as hard as I can in good faith
6:17without strawmanning and then tell you
6:19honestly which parts of my own case
6:22survive and which parts do not. Some of
6:25them do not. I am going to say so out
6:28loud because if this thing is true, it
6:31can survive an honest test. And if it
6:33cannot survive an honest test, then I do
6:36not want it either. Let's begin. Before
6:39we can talk about the empire, we have to
6:41talk about the name because the name has
6:44been doing a lot of quiet work against
6:46us. The people we are discussing called
6:48themselves Tatar. One T in the middle.
6:52Tatar. That is what they called
6:54themselves in the 10th century and it is
6:57what several million of them call
6:58themselves today in Kazan, in Crimea, in
7:01Siberia, across Central Asia. The word
7:04you have heard is tartar with an extra
7:06R. And that extra R is not a spelling
7:09mistake. It is a smear. And we know
7:11exactly when it was inserted and by
7:12whom. In the 1240s, the Mongol armies
7:16came west and hit Europe like a hammer.
7:19Poland, Hungary, the Russ
7:21principalities. Europe had no framework
7:23for it. And in Latin Christendom, there
7:26was already a word that sounded almost
7:28identical to the name these armies were
7:30using for themselves. Tarderus.
7:33the Greek and Latin name for the lowest
7:35pit of the underworld, the place beneath
7:38hell. So the chronicers made the pun.
7:41King Louis the 9th of France is recorded
7:43saying that the Tartars would either
7:45send us all to Tartarus or they
7:47themselves would be sent there. And the
7:49pun stuck. It stuck so hard that for the
7:53next 700 years, every European map,
7:56every European encyclopedia,
7:59every European school book spelled a
8:01real people's name as if it meant
8:03creatures from hell. Now, here is the
8:06part that tells you the people writing
8:08these books knew exactly what they were
8:10doing. Our author from 1780, William
8:13Touque, puts a footnote at the bottom of
8:15the very first page of his chapter on
8:17the Tartar Nations.
8:19He writes that the word tartar is
8:21retained here merely from compliance
8:23with custom and that it should be tatar.
8:26He knew in 1780 he knew the r was wrong.
8:30He knew where it came from and he used
8:33it anyway because his readers expected
8:35it. That is the first thing I want you
8:37to understand about how history gets
8:39managed. It does not always require a
8:42conspiracy. Sometimes it just requires a
8:45joke that nobody bothers to stop
8:46repeating and 400 years later an entire
8:49civilization is filed under the word for
8:51hell. And Tuk tells us something else in
8:54that same passage. Something I find
8:57genuinely remarkable. He says the Tartar
9:00historians derive their people from a
9:02certain Turk or Turuk and from Tatar his
9:05grandson. He says that among these
9:07writers the most credible is Abu Alghazi
9:10Bahadur Khan. That is a real man. Abu
9:15Alghazi was the Khan of Kea. He ruled in
9:18the mid600s and he wrote a genealogical
9:21history of his own people. It survives.
9:24It was translated into European
9:26languages in the 1700s, which is exactly
9:29how Tuk got it. So when we go looking
9:32for where the Tarters said they came
9:34from, we are not guessing. We have their
9:36own historian and an English
9:38encyclopedist a century later calling
9:41him the most worthy of credit. Tuk also
9:44notes something that should stop anyone
9:46who was taught the barbarian version. He
9:49says the yakuts place the hero Tatar
9:52among their gods. You do not deify a
9:55founder unless you think you descend
9:57from something. And then he gives us the
10:00other side of it. He says the Chinese,
10:02who he notes were no less proud than the
10:04Tartars themselves, applied to all their
10:07neighbors the insulting name Tata from a
10:10verb meaning to gather in troops. And he
10:13says specifically that it was meant in a
10:15bad sense for the purpose of plunder,
10:18ravage, and rebellion. So there it is
10:21laid out in a 1780 reference book. The
10:24people called themselves after a
10:25founding ancestor they honored as a god.
10:28Their neighbors to the east called them
10:29a word meaning a mob of raiders. Their
10:32enemies to the west called them the
10:33inhabitants of hell. Guess which two
10:36versions we inherited.
10:39That is chapter 1. And we have not even
10:41gotten to the evidence yet. Stick around
10:44because next we are going to go find out
10:46where these people said they came from.
10:48And the answer starts with a name you
10:50already know. Now I want to be careful
10:53here because this is the section where
10:55this topic usually goes off the rails
10:58and I am going to try to keep it on
11:00them. What I am about to tell you is not
11:03archaeology. It is genealogy and
11:07specifically it is a people's own
11:09account of their own origins written
11:11down by their own historian. That is a
11:14real and valuable category of historical
11:17evidence.
11:18It is also not the same thing as a dig
11:21site. Both of those things are true at
11:23once. And I want you holding both of
11:25them. Here is the account. According to
11:28Abu Alghazi, the Khan of Kea, writing in
11:31the 17th century, the line runs like
11:34this. Noah had a son named Japheth.
11:37Japheth had a son, in some versions, an
11:39adopted son named Turk. And here is a
11:42detail worth sitting with for a second.
11:45The Turkish people, an entire modern
11:47nation of 85 million people, are still
11:50named after him in this tradition. Turk
11:52ruled over the enormous middle of the
11:55world. When he died, his son Tunak Khan
11:57took the throne. After Tunach came, Yzla
12:00Khan. After Yzla came Daku Khan. After
12:04Dbakui came, Caillou and after Caillou
12:07came Alonzac.
12:09Alonzac had two sons. Their names were
12:12Tatar and Mogul. And when their father
12:15died, the empire was divided between the
12:18two brothers. That is the origin story.
12:21Two brothers splitting one inheritance.
12:24The Tartars and the Mongols are not two
12:27unrelated peoples who happen to live
12:29near each other. In their own telling,
12:31they are two halves of one house. Now,
12:35do I think this is literal history in
12:37the modern forensic sense? No. It is a
12:40dynastic genealogy. And every dynastic
12:43genealogy on earth, including every
12:46European royal line is doing political
12:49work. Anchoring your bloodline to Noah
12:51is what everybody did. The Anglo-Saxon
12:55kings of England traced themselves to
12:57Odin and then once they were Christian
13:00back through Noah as well. This was
13:02standard practice.
13:04But watch what happens when you look at
13:06what it is doing. rather than whether
13:08every generation is verifiable.
13:11It is telling you that these people
13:13understood themselves as a continuous
13:15civilization stretching back into deep
13:18antiquity, not a recent phenomenon, not
13:21something that appeared out of the step
13:23in the year 1200 with Genghask Khan,
13:26something ancient that had already been
13:28rising and falling and reuniting for a
13:31very long time before Gingis was ever
13:33born. And on that specific point, our
13:361780 encyclopedist backs them up
13:39completely. Listen to how Tuk describes
13:42it. He says that in early times, the
13:44Tartars and Mongols were governed by
13:46only one sovereign who ruled over the
13:48United Nations, but that after the death
13:51of Khan ogas, the state was dismembered.
13:54And then he says that Gingis subdued the
13:56greatest number of these hordes and
13:58founded in them the Tartarian monarchy.
14:01Founded in them, not founded them. He is
14:04describing Ginis Khan arriving into an
14:06existing political landscape of
14:08fragmented pieces and putting them back
14:10together. So the story we are all taught
14:13that a nobody warlord came out of
14:15nowhere and invented the largest land
14:18empire in history from scratch is not
14:20what the 18th century thought. The 18th
14:23century thought he was a reunifier.
14:26That the house had been whole before
14:28that it had broken and that he made it
14:30whole again. Tok even records the twin
14:33brothers tradition directly. He writes
14:35that the Tartars themselves go so far as
14:37to maintain that Tadar and Mongol, the
14:40fathers of these two nations were twin
14:42brothers. And then being a careful
14:44writer, he immediately notes the problem
14:46with it. He says that nevertheless,
14:49these people each have a language
14:51absolutely different from the other. I
14:54want you to notice what he just did
14:55there because it matters for the rest of
14:57this video. He reported the tradition.
15:00Then he reported the evidence that
15:01complicates the tradition. He did not
15:04delete either one. That is what honest
15:06source work looks like and I am going to
15:09try to hold myself to that standard for
15:11the next 3 hours including in the parts
15:13where it costs me. So where does this
15:16leave us at the end of chapter 2? It
15:19leaves us with a people who had a
15:21written history of themselves, produced
15:24by their own con, which was taken
15:26seriously enough by European scholars
15:29that a London encyclopedia called its
15:31author the most credible source
15:33available. A people who understood
15:35themselves as one half of an ancient
15:37divided house and a Genghask Khan who in
15:41the 18th century understanding was not
15:43the beginning of the story. He was the
15:46middle of it. Next, we are going to look
15:49at what the map makers of Europe drew
15:51for 400 straight years, and you are
15:54going to see how a thing that big
15:55disappears.
15:57If Tartaria were a fantasy, the maps
16:00would not agree with each other. That is
16:02the test I want you to apply here, and I
16:05want you to apply it skeptically because
16:07there is a real counterargument to what
16:09I am about to show you, and I'm going to
16:11give it to you in this same chapter
16:13rather than saving it for the end. Here
16:16is what exists. The Framaro world map
16:20made in Venice around 1450. One of the
16:23most important ctographic documents in
16:26existence made by a monk on Morano and
16:29it shows Tartaria drawn with cities and
16:32architecture on it not as empty space.
16:35Abraham Ortellius 1570. Ortellius
16:38produced what is generally considered
16:40the first true modern atlas. Tartaria is
16:43there labeled given a form. Cornelis
16:46Cleles 1599
16:49there again. Guom Deil 1700. Deil was
16:54the leading scientific ctographer of his
16:56generation. The man who dragged
16:58mapmaking away from decorative guesswork
17:00toward measurement. Tartaria is on his
17:02maps. Jean Palaret 1754. Still there.
17:07That is 300 years of the most
17:09sophisticated mapmakers in Europe
17:12working in different countries in
17:14different languages in different
17:16centuries with different patrons and
17:18with steadily improving instruments and
17:21every one of them puts the same enormous
17:23polity in the same place. And then over
17:27the course of the 19th century it goes
17:29away not gradually shrinking as
17:32exploration fills it in the way you
17:34would expect. It gets partitioned,
17:37renamed and dissolved into Russian
17:38Turkystan, Siberia, Chinese Turkstan,
17:42Mongolia, and a scatter of connates. And
17:44the word itself falls out of educated
17:46usage almost entirely. Now, here is the
17:49counterargument, and I want to state it
17:52as strongly as its defenders would. A
17:55professional historian will tell you
17:57that Tartaria on these maps is what is
17:59called an exonym and a choreographic
18:01label. It is a European word applied
18:04from outside to a vast region Europeans
18:07had not surveyed covering many different
18:09peoples who did not consider themselves
18:12one nation. They will tell you that the
18:14mapmakers were copying each other which
18:16is absolutely true. Cgraphers copied
18:19constantly. They will tell you that the
18:22label shrinks over time precisely
18:24because exploration filled it in. and
18:26that the disappearance of a European
18:28catch-all term is not the same event as
18:30the disappearance of a state. That is a
18:33serious argument. It is not stupid. And
18:36for a lot of what appears on those maps,
18:38it is probably correct. But it does not
18:41explain everything. And here is the
18:43specific place it breaks. An exon does
18:46not have a flag. A region does not sign
18:50treaties. A blanket term for the unknown
18:52interior does not appear in a published
18:55naval reference. showing the inen flown
18:57on the stern of its ships. A
18:59cardographic placeholder does not
19:00receive letters from the pope and all
19:03three of those things happened. That is
19:06what we are doing in the next chapter
19:08and it is the point where this stops
19:10being about maps and starts being about
19:12a state. Nations have flags, regions do
19:16not. The symbol of Tartaria was a
19:19creature called the zealant. It is a
19:22chimera, part dragon, part griffin, part
19:25wyvern, and it is almost always drawn
19:27with a distinctive curling tail. Keep
19:30that tail in your mind because in about
19:3290 seconds, it is going to matter a
19:34great deal. Here is where the flag
19:37appears. Bulls's universal display of
19:40the naval flags of all nations in the
19:42world, published in London in 1783.
19:46That is not a fantasy document. That is
19:48a working reference for merchants and
19:50sailors who needed to identify what was
19:53coming over the horizon so they knew
19:55whether to run. A publisher does not put
19:58an invented country in a naval flag
20:00chart because the first captain who gets
20:03it wrong stops buying your charts. Carol
20:06Allard, the Dutch engraver, drew it
20:09after a 17th century voyage to Kazan. It
20:12appears in a 1709 proclamation issued at
20:15Kiev concerning maritime regulations and
20:18the placing of flags on the stern and
20:20the bow of vessels. And it turns up
20:23again in an American encyclopedia of
20:251865
20:27in the flags of all nations section at a
20:30point in time when the entity itself is
20:32essentially gone. So we have a
20:35consistent heraldic identity, black
20:37zilent curling tail appearing across
20:40roughly 200 years in Dutch, English,
20:43Russian and American sources in
20:46documents whose entire practical purpose
20:48is accurate identification. Now here is
20:51the part that made me sit up when I
20:53first saw it and I want to walk into it
20:55carefully because it is easy to
20:57overclaim.
20:59Look at the Russian Imperial Arms. In
21:02the center of the double-headed eagle on
21:04the breast shield, there is a rider on a
21:06horse driving a lance into a dragon.
21:09Officially, this is St. George and the
21:12Dragon, Christianity triumphant over
21:14evil. And I want to be completely fair
21:17because this is where I have to correct
21:19a version of this argument that I myself
21:22have made before in a shorter video. The
21:24writer and the dragon are old. Genuinely
21:28old.
21:29The image runs back through Byzantine
21:31iconography centuries before any of
21:33this. Anyone who tells you Russia
21:36invented that image to celebrate beating
21:38the Tartars is wrong. And I am not going
21:41to tell you that. What I will tell you
21:43is narrower and I think it holds.
21:47Watch when the dragon changes. Look at
21:50the depictions from the late 15th
21:52century onward and specifically after
21:541480, which is the year we are going to
21:56spend the whole next chapter on. The
21:58creature under the lance starts
22:00acquiring features it did not reliably
22:02have before. The curl in the tail, the
22:06specific chimeriic build. It starts in a
22:09lot of these images to look less like a
22:11generic serpent and more like a
22:13particular heraldic animal that belonged
22:15to a particular enemy.
22:18My favorite single example of this is a
22:20mural in the church of St. George in
22:22Naples, where the creature being run
22:24through is about as close to a textbook
22:26silent as you are going to find outside
22:29of a tartar banner. Now, is that proof?
22:32No. Heraldic dragons drift stylistically
22:35across centuries, and there is no memo
22:37that says we are now drawing the enemy's
22:40crest under the saint spear. I cannot
22:42show you that memo, but I would ask you
22:44to consider how symbols actually work in
22:47the real world, in every era, including
22:49our own. When one power defeats another,
22:52it does not usually erase the loser's
22:54emblem. It absorbs it and puts it in a
22:56subordinate position. Under the foot,
22:58under the lance, in the corner of the
23:01new arms. Rome did it. Every empire does
23:04it. It is how you say in a language
23:06everybody can read without being
23:08literate. We are the ones on the horse
23:10now.
23:11So when I look at a Christian empire
23:13that spent three centuries fighting a
23:15specific enemy whose banner was a black
23:18curtailed dragon and I see that empire's
23:20own coat of arms feature a rider putting
23:23a lance through a black curtailed
23:25dragon. I do not think that is nothing.
23:28I think it is a claim and I think
23:30everyone at the time could read it. Now
23:33let's go find out what those two powers
23:35actually wrote about each other because
23:37we do not have to guess. They left
23:39letters. The best evidence about any
23:42people is often what their enemies said
23:44about them because an enemy has no
23:47motive to flatter you. So let's read two
23:50Englishmen writing 16th century English
23:53who had no reason on earth to make the
23:55Tartars look good. The first is John
23:58Frampton. In 1580 he published a work
24:02called a discovery of the countries of
24:04Tartery Cyia and Cath. Frampton is an
24:08interesting man. He was a West Country
24:10merchant who settled in Spain, got
24:13arrested by the Catholic Inquisition,
24:15was tortured, escaped from a prison in
24:18Kadis in 1567,
24:20and published this 13 years later. So
24:23this is a Protestant who has personally
24:26been on the receiving end of Catholic
24:28power writing about a people at the far
24:30end of the world. He describes them as
24:34arrogant. He says they think no other
24:36nation is worthy to be compared with
24:38them for wisdom or goodness and that
24:40they therefore will not willingly speak
24:42to anyone else. He says they call the
24:45pope and other Christians dogs and
24:47idoltors.
24:48Then he describes their religion and
24:51this is where it gets interesting. He
24:53says they give credit to dreams and can
24:55interpret them. He says they consult
24:57their idols before undertaking any
24:59enterprise and believe that God speaks
25:02within them. He says they predict
25:04weather and that they pay close
25:06attention to the moon and that they
25:08honor many celestial bodies. And he says
25:10they allow the use of what he calls
25:12magical sciences and the practice of
25:15divination.
25:16Now Frampton means all of that as an
25:18insult. He is a Christian describing
25:21pagans and he thinks they are damned.
25:23But strip out his disgust and look at
25:25what he is actually reporting. He is
25:28reporting a coherent religious system.
25:31dream interpretation, astronomical
25:34observation, a lunar calendar, oracular
25:37practice, and a body of specialized
25:39knowledge he does not understand well
25:41enough to name. So he calls it magic.
25:45That is not a description of nothing.
25:47That is what a literate outsider sounds
25:49like when he encounters a tradition with
25:51its own experts and its own methods, and
25:54he lacks the vocabulary for it. And here
25:57is the question I would put to you
25:59before we move on. Why is a mob of tent
26:02dwelling raiders with no institutions
26:04running an astronomical calendar and
26:06maintaining a professional class of
26:08divers? Those things require continuity.
26:12They require training records and
26:14somebody feeding the specialists. Now
26:17the second Englishman and this one is
26:19the important one. In 1590 a writer
26:23published under the name Lawrence Dos a
26:26piece called that the pope is that
26:27antichrist. It is a Protestant pymic. So
26:31its whole purpose is to show that the
26:33papacy is a tyrant. And to do that, the
26:36author runs through a list of kings who
26:38submitted to Rome. He lists Peter, King
26:41of Aragon, making his kingdom tributary
26:44to the Pope in 1202 for the sake of his
26:46soul. He lists King John of England, who
26:50having withheld church revenues for six
26:52years, is finally forced to throw
26:55himself on the mercy of Pope Innocent
26:57III and makes England and Ireland
26:59tributary to Rome, granting the annual
27:02payment for both islands. He lists
27:05Mandogus, King of Lithuania, converting
27:08and falling into the Pope's net in 1255.
27:12And in the middle of that list of
27:13humiliations, he puts this. Pope
27:16Innocent IV sent certain monks and
27:18legots to the Tartarian Emperor with his
27:20letters, exhorting them to the faith of
27:22Christ and to his obedience. And then
27:25the author adds the line that I think is
27:27the single most revealing sentence in
27:29this entire chapter. He thought that
27:31upon the sight of his holiness's
27:33letters, the Tartarian Empire would
27:35yield itself unto him. He thought the
27:39Pope sent the letter expecting the same
27:40result he got from Aragon and England
27:43and Lithuania, and he did not get it.
27:46And a Protestant writer 350 years later
27:48is using that failure as a weapon
27:50because the whole point of his list is
27:52that the Pope's power was terrifying and
27:55near universal. The Tartars are the
27:57exception that makes his point land. And
28:00this is real. Innocent IV really did
28:03send that embassy in the 1240s. The
28:06frier Giovani DeParpin really did make
28:09that journey and he came back carrying a
28:12reply. The reply from the great Khan did
28:15not accept Christ and did not accept
28:17obedience. It informed the pope that if
28:20he wanted peace, he should come in
28:22person and submit. And it asked in
28:24effect by what authority he presumed to
28:26give instructions.
28:28Now put the two things side by side. In
28:31this period, kings of Europe surrendered
28:34revenue, territory, and sovereignty at
28:37the sight of a papal letter. And the
28:39historical record is full of them doing
28:41it. and this one power in the east
28:44received the same letter and sent back a
28:46demand that the pope come to them. I
28:50would like someone to explain to me how
28:52a disorganized confederation of raiders
28:54with no centralized authority, no
28:56bureaucracy, and no state does that.
28:59Because writing a reply, having it
29:01translated, and returning it across
29:035,000 mi of Asia by a functioning
29:05courier system is not something a mob
29:07does. That is a chancery. That is a
29:10state apparatus. that is professional
29:12staff. The golden horde narrative that
29:15we get in school cannot carry the weight
29:17of its own documents. And when you go
29:20looking for where that narrative came
29:22from, you find something interesting.
29:24The phrase itself does not appear in the
29:26sources at the time. It shows up in
29:29Russian writing centuries later. It is a
29:31retrospective label applied by the
29:33successor state to the thing it
29:35replaced. Which brings us finally to the
29:38single most important text in this
29:40entire documentary. Do not go anywhere.
29:43I have already read you the opening of
29:45this passage. I read it to you before
29:47you knew anything in the cold open
29:50deliberately. Now I want to read you the
29:52whole thing in order and I want to show
29:55you what is buried inside it. The book
29:58is Russia or a complete historical
30:00account of all the nations which
30:02composed that empire. London 1780.
30:06The author is William Tuk, an English
30:09clergyman who served as chaplain to the
30:11British factory in St. Petersburg.
30:14He was later elected to the Russian
30:16Imperial Academy of Sciences. He was, in
30:20other words, a man with direct access to
30:22Russian scholarship living inside the
30:24empire he was describing, writing for a
30:27British audience.
30:29He is not a mystic. He is not a
30:31revolutionary. He is a well-connected
30:33reference writer producing a standard
30:35work. Volume two, chapter 1, Tartar
30:39Nations. He opens by placing them
30:42geographically.
30:43He runs the northern coast of the
30:45Caspian, the European side of the
30:48Caucasus, the steps from the Eural east
30:51toward Saria, the southern frontier of
30:54Siberia, the country from the Tobal
30:57paste,
30:59and the deserts toward the middle of the
31:01Lena.
31:02And then he notes that there are
31:04substantial tartar colonies distributed
31:06among the Russians, particularly around
31:08Kazan, Orinberg, and Tobulsk. Then he
31:11delivers a line that I think most people
31:13skim past, and they should not. He says
31:17that without reckoning the small groups
31:19near the Yanice, the Tartars taken in
31:22general are next to the Russians, the
31:24most numerous people of the empire.
31:27Sit with that. In 1780, the second
31:30largest population inside the Russian
31:32Empire was Tartar.
31:35Not a marginal remnant, not a vanished
31:38people, the second largest population in
31:41the largest country on Earth. Then comes
31:44the passage.
31:46The Tartars have been in possession of
31:48all the countries above mentioned, at
31:50least the greatest part of each ever
31:52since the Tartarian Empire was in its
31:54splendor, and all of them abound in
31:56monuments of former power. He then
31:59describes what those monuments are.
32:02Remains of ditches and ramparts
32:04frequently encountered which he says
32:06formerly either surrounded small towns
32:09now completely demolished or were
32:11designed for the defense of camps, forts
32:13or castles, the traces of which can
32:16often be found on the spot along with
32:19other traces of decayed importance.
32:22decayed importance. That is the phrase.
32:25He is looking at a landscape and reading
32:27fallen consequence in it. And then the
32:30detail that I think is the most quietly
32:32devastating thing in the whole book. He
32:34says, "The Russians give all these ruins
32:36a name. Goresche,
32:39there is a word in the language of the
32:42conquering state. There is a standard
32:45ordinary everyday word for the ruined
32:47towns of the people they conquered. You
32:50do not coin a common noun for a category
32:52of thing you encounter twice. You coin
32:55it because they are everywhere. Because
32:57a surveyor and a peasant and a tax
33:00official all need to be able to say it
33:02without explaining themselves. The
33:04vocabulary of the Russian language is
33:07itself evidence of scale. And then
33:10Touque starts listing and the list goes
33:12on for pages and it is all stone. At
33:15Casimoff on the Oka in the Tartar
33:17Quarter, he says there is what appears
33:20to have been the residence of a con. In
33:23the middle of the ruins, a sound
33:24elevated tower, the walls of a palace.
33:28In one of the burial grounds, a
33:30considerable mausoleum,
33:32all of it, he specifies, built of hune,
33:35stone, and brick. And from an Arabic
33:37inscription there he says, "We learn
33:40that Ahan was buried in the year 926 of
33:42the Hijra, which is 1520 in our
33:45calendar. Near the Caucasus, the very
33:48considerable remains of Madsar, which he
33:50calls a celebrated city of former times.
33:54Around Ostrachan, the ruins of old
33:56Ostrachan plainly visible near Zeritzen
34:00on the left bank of the Vulga. the
34:02rubbish and ramparts of another
34:04substantial town. Below the mouth of the
34:08Kama, what he calls many superb
34:10monuments of the ancient city of Bulgar,
34:13towers, mosques, houses, and tombs, all
34:16built of stone or brick. And then the
34:18dating, he says the oldest epitaps there
34:21have been standing more than 11
34:23centuries, and the most recent at least
34:25400 years.
34:2711 centuries from a man writing in 1780.
34:31He is telling you there are legible
34:33gravestones in that city going back to
34:35roughly the 7th century. Further on the
34:38ruins of Bilar, an ancient and very
34:41considerable Bulgar city on whose ruins,
34:44he says, the Tartars afterwards erected
34:47a smaller town at the fortress of Kazan,
34:50a monument of the ancient Tartar kingdom
34:52of that name. And listen to this
34:54specific detail. He says its lofty walls
34:57are so broad that they serve at present
34:59for ramparts and that the turrets as
35:02well as the old palace of the con are
35:04built of huneed stone. They were still
35:07using the enemy's walls. 230 years after
35:10the conquest, the fortifications were so
35:13well built that the Russian garrison was
35:15simply standing on them. Up the Kazanka
35:18River, epitaps and the strong ramparts
35:21of old Kazan. Near the Ufa cemeteries
35:24full of innumerable inscriptions and
35:26several burial vaults and near Tobulsk
35:29in western Siberia this the ramparts of
35:33Seabir which he calls the ancient
35:35capital of Tartery still visible. There
35:38is a capital it has a name. Its walls
35:41were still standing in 1780 and a
35:44British academician wrote down where
35:46they were. And the last line of the list
35:49is the one that gets me. He says he will
35:51not even attempt to mention the great
35:53number of other tombs and ruins of
35:55Siberia and especially all those in the
35:58desert of the Kirrgas which he says
36:00abounds in the relics of opulent cities.
36:03Opulent cities plural in a desert in a
36:07reference book mentioned in passing as a
36:10thing too numerous to bother
36:11enumerating.
36:13Now let's go to page 28 because Touque
36:16is not finished and the second passage
36:18is about people rather than stones. He
36:21describes the political condition of the
36:23Tartar nations under Russia. He says
36:25they are a free people permitted
36:28peaceibly to enjoy the constitution of
36:30their ancestors.
36:32He says they elect their own chiefs
36:34always from among themselves generally
36:37from their nobility. And then he
36:39specifies what that nobility consists
36:42of.
36:43Princes descended in a direct line from
36:46Genghis, from Batu, and from others of
36:48their ancient sovereigns.
36:51In 1780, there were still men in Russia
36:54who could trace their descent from
36:55Genghaskhan and Batukan, and the Russian
36:58state recognized their rank and let them
37:00govern their own people. He describes
37:03the taxation. He says that at the
37:06beginning of their subjection they paid
37:07the crown of Russia the same tribute
37:09they had previously paid to their own
37:11cons and that since then the burden has
37:14been reduced. He says the tribute is
37:16generally very moderate. He notes that
37:19some settlements perform military
37:21service instead of paying and that
37:23hordes in alliance or under protection
37:26neither serve nor pay at all. And then
37:28he gives us the passage that tells you
37:31what these people actually felt. He says
37:33they have an inexpressable veneration
37:35for the customs of their ancestors. He
37:38says the ancient oriental simplicity is
37:40perfectly preserved among them along
37:42with frugality and thrift. He says great
37:46economy shows in their manners, their
37:48houses, their food, their dress, and
37:50that even the rich do not keep a train
37:52in proportion to their fortune. And then
37:55this he says the old national pride of
37:58the tarters is maintained in all its
38:00vigor. that it is not only the great who
38:02boast of their genealogies, but even the
38:05poorest people, however lacking in
38:07education, who warm their imagination
38:09with raptures on the ancient splendor of
38:12the Tartarian Empire, and often break
38:15out into ardent longings for the
38:16reestablishment of their former power.
38:20Read that again and think about what it
38:22describes. Poor people, illiterate
38:25people. 230 years after the fall of
38:28Kazan, 300 years after the Ugra, sitting
38:31around and talking with longing about an
38:33empire. That is not folklore about a
38:36mob. Nobody's grandmother tells stories
38:39about the golden age of the raiding
38:40party. That is a memory of a state. That
38:44is what a conquered nation sounds like
38:46when the state is gone, but the identity
38:48is not. And it is exactly what you would
38:51hear in Ireland or in Poland under
38:53partition or anywhere else. a real
38:55polity has been dismantled and the
38:58people are still there. And Touque
39:00closes with the sentence that gives the
39:02whole game away. He says this is
39:05probably one chief motive why the
39:07Russian government excludes from the
39:09magistracy and from the higher ranks of
39:12the army all the settled Muslim tarters
39:15among whom he says are men of great
39:17capacity deficient neither in courage
39:20nor understanding. The Russian Empire
39:23had a policy of keeping capable tarters
39:25out of the officer corps and the courts.
39:28And an English chaplain in St.
39:29Petersburg wrote down the reason because
39:32they remembered. So let's total up what
39:35this one 1780 book freely available to
39:38anyone with an internet connection
39:40establishes.
39:41A named empire described as having had a
39:44period of splendor. A capital Seir whose
39:47ramparts were still standing. Stone and
39:50brick architecture at scale in a dozen
39:53named locations, including towers,
39:56palaces, mosques, mausoleums, and
39:59fortifications so substantial the
40:01conquerors kept using them. Inscriptions
40:04dated by the Hijra calendar and legible
40:06gravestones going back well over a
40:08thousand years. A word in the Russian
40:11language for the ruins. A surviving
40:13hereditary nobility descended from named
40:16sovereigns. a tribute system inherited
40:18intact from the previous state, a
40:21living, burning national memory in the
40:23mouths of the poorest people, and a
40:25documented Russian policy of exclusion
40:28designed to contain it. The Golden Horde
40:31version we are taught cannot survive
40:33contact with that page. It is not even
40:36close. And I want to say clearly what I
40:39am not claiming because this is where I
40:41hold myself to the standard I promised
40:43you. I am not claiming Tuk describes a
40:46technological super civilization. He
40:49does not. He describes brick, stone,
40:52ramparts, and mosques, which is exactly
40:54what you would expect from a serious
40:56medieval and early modern Eurasian state
40:59in the same league as any other one. And
41:01I am not going to pretend he wrote
41:03something he did not write. What I am
41:05claiming is narrower, and I think it is
41:07unanswerable.
41:09There was an empire. It built in stone.
41:12It had a capital, a nobility, a tax
41:14system, a flag, and a memory. A standard
41:17English reference work described all of
41:19that in 1780 as uncontroversial
41:21background. And somewhere between that
41:24book and your classroom, all of it was
41:26reduced to a horde of savages in tents.
41:29Something did that. Something took a
41:31real empire and made it small. In part
41:34two, we are going to find out exactly
41:37what and exactly when. And I'm going to
41:39show you the document where a government
41:41admits it in writing. Stick around.
41:44Empires do not usually fall in a battle.
41:47They fall in a moment where somebody
41:49stops paying. In the autumn of 1480, two
41:52armies came to opposite banks of a river
41:54called the URA about 150 mi southwest of
41:58Moscow. On one side, Ivan III, Grand
42:01Prince of Moscow. On the other, Khan
42:03Ahmed of the Great Horde. The dispute
42:06was money. Moscow had been paying
42:08tribute for roughly 240 years since Batu
42:12Khan's campaigns in the 1230s and 40s.
42:16Ivonne had stopped. Ahmed came to
42:18collect and then for weeks essentially
42:22nothing happened. They stood on opposite
42:25banks. There were skirmishes at the
42:27fords. Neither army committed. The
42:30weather toned. The river began to
42:31freeze, which should have favored the
42:33attacker because a frozen river is a
42:35road. and instead in November both
42:38armies withdrew. That is it. That is the
42:41end of the Mongol and Tartar
42:43overlordship of Russia. Russian history
42:46calls it the great stand on the URA and
42:48it is taught as the founding moment of
42:50Russian independence and it was decided
42:52by two commanders looking at each other
42:54across cold water and both deciding not
42:57to. Now, I want to be very careful here
43:00because this is a place where I have
43:02previously repeated something imprecise
43:04and I want to correct it on the record.
43:07Ivan III did not conquer Moscow in 1480.
43:11Moscow was already his. He was the Grand
43:14Prince of Moscow. What ended in 1480 was
43:17tribute and formal subordination, which
43:20is a real and enormous event, but it is
43:22not a conquest of a city, and I am not
43:25going to keep saying it that way. I also
43:28want to handle the papal alliance
43:29question honestly because I think the
43:32popular version of it is wrong and the
43:34true version is actually more
43:36interesting. The popular version says
43:38that the council of Florence which ran
43:41from 1431 to 1449 created an alliance
43:45between the Russian Orthodox Church and
43:47the papacy against the Muslim East and
43:49that this alliance armed Moscow for the
43:52Ugra. Here is what actually happened and
43:55it is close to the opposite. At Florence
43:58in 1439,
44:00a union between the eastern and western
44:02churches was in fact declared. The
44:05Metropolitan of Moscow, a Greek named
44:07Isidor signed it. He then traveled home
44:10to Moscow to announce the good news that
44:12Christendom was reunited under Rome.
44:16Moscow arrested him. Grand Prince
44:18Vicilei II had him seized, declared him
44:21a heretic, and Isidor eventually fled
44:24the country. Moscow rejected the union
44:27completely. And in 1448, Russian bishops
44:31elected their own metropolitan without
44:33any reference to Constantinople at all,
44:36which is the beginning of an independent
44:38Russian church. So the Council of
44:40Florence did not create a Moscow and
44:43Rome alliance. It caused a rupture.
44:46Moscow used the whole episode to argue
44:48that Constantinople had betrayed the
44:50faith and therefore that Moscow was now
44:53the true center of orthodoxy.
44:55Within a few decades, you get the
44:57doctrine of Moscow as the third Rome. I
45:01am telling you this because it cuts
45:02against a claim I have made in a
45:04previous video and because the real
45:06story is better. Moscow did not need
45:08Rome. Moscow declared itself the
45:11successor to Rome and it did that in the
45:13same generation that it stopped paying
45:15the con. That is what makes 1480 the
45:18hinge. In the space of about 40 years,
45:22one state stops recognizing a religious
45:24authority in the west and stops paying a
45:27political authority in the east and
45:29starts describing itself as the
45:31inheritor of both. Now why was it able
45:35to? because the other side was no longer
45:38one thing. This is the part the Horde
45:40narrative obscures rather than reveals.
45:43By 1480, the enormous western portion of
45:46the Mongol and Tartar world had been
45:48fragmenting for a century into successor
45:50connates, Kazan, Ostrachan, Crimea,
45:54Seir, the Nogai.
45:57The great horde that Ahmed led was one
45:59piece among several, and the others were
46:01not helping him. Crimea was in fact
46:03allied with Ivan. That is not the
46:05collapse of a barbarian confederation.
46:08That is the succession crisis of an
46:10empire. And it looks exactly like what
46:13happened to Rome, to the caliphate, to
46:15Alexander's empire, and to everybody
46:18else. Big states do not usually get
46:20killed. They divide and then the pieces
46:24get picked off one at a time by somebody
46:26who stayed whole, which is precisely
46:29what happened next. 72 years after the
46:32Ugra, Ivon IV came to Kazan with an
46:35army. Recall him Ivan the Terrible.
46:39Though the Russian word is closer to
46:40formidable or awe inspiring than to
46:43wicked, he was the first ruler to take
46:45the title Zar, which is just Caesar with
46:48the sounds worn down. And in 1552, he
46:52brought a force of somewhere around
46:55150,000 men to the capital of the
46:57Connate of Kazan. Kazan was not a camp.
47:01I want to be extremely clear about this
47:03because it is the single fastest way to
47:05destroy the barbarian story. Kazan was a
47:09walled city on a hill above the
47:10confluence of two rivers with a Kremlin,
47:13stone and timber fortifications,
47:15mosques, madrasas, a mint, a court, a
47:19chancery and a trade economy connecting
47:21the vulga to central Asia and Persia. It
47:24was one of the significant cities of
47:26Eastern Europe. The siege lasted roughly
47:296 weeks. It ended when Ivan's engineers,
47:33some of them foreign specialists, drove
47:35mines under the walls and blew them. You
47:38do not need to mine the walls of a tent.
47:41The city fell in October. What followed
47:44was severe. The male population was
47:46largely killed. The population was
47:48expelled from the center. Tarters were
47:51forbidden to live inside the city for a
47:52long period afterward, and the great
47:54mosque was destroyed.
47:56Ivan then built a cathedral in Moscow to
47:59commemorate the victory and you have
48:00seen it your entire life. St. Basil's on
48:04Red Square. Those colored onion domes
48:07that show up in every establishing shot
48:09of Russia ever filmed. That building is
48:12a war memorial for the conquest of
48:14Kazan. I find that genuinely remarkable.
48:17The most instantly recognizable symbol
48:20of Russia in the entire world is a
48:22trophy. It was raised to mark the
48:24destruction of a tartar capital and
48:26almost nobody who photographs it knows
48:28that Astracon fell four years later in
48:321556.
48:33The connate of seir the one whose
48:36rampards Touque says were still visible
48:38near Tbulk was broken in the 1580s by
48:41Kssacs and Russian service and that
48:43campaign is the beginning of the Russian
48:46conquest of all of Siberia.
48:48So in the space of about 35 years, three
48:52of the great successor connates go down
48:55and one is left. Crimea held out for
48:58another 200 years. I think that fact
49:02alone should end the barbarian
49:03conversation permanently and I want to
49:06lay out why. The Crimean Connate was
49:09founded in the 1440s and it was not
49:11annexed by Russia until 1783.
49:14That is roughly 340 years of continuous
49:17independent existence on the doorstep of
49:20two expanding empires. For most of that
49:23time, it was a vassel or ally of the
49:26Ottomans, which is itself a diplomatic
49:28relationship, not a condition of
49:30savagery. It had a capital at
49:33Bakchisarai with a Khan's palace that is
49:36still standing today and which you can
49:38walk through. It had a ruling dynasty,
49:41the Geres, who claimed descent from
49:44Genghis. It had a court, a diplomatic
49:47service, a treasury, a legal system, and
49:51a formal succession.
49:54340 years. Nomadic marauders with no
49:57institutions do not last 340 years next
50:00to Russia, Poland, and the Ottomans.
50:03Nothing lasts 340 years by accident.
50:07And I do want to give you the hard part
50:09of the Crimean story too because I am
50:12not doing hagiography here. The Crimean
50:15Kate ran a slave raiding economy. For a
50:18long stretch of its existence, a
50:20substantial portion of its revenue came
50:22from raids into Ukraine, Poland, and
50:24Russia, taking captives and selling them
50:27at Kafa into the Ottoman market. The
50:29numbers over the centuries run into the
50:31high hundreds of thousands, possibly
50:34more. That is real. It is documented and
50:37I am not going to soften it because I
50:39told you at the start that I would
50:41rather have a version of this that
50:42survives an honest test. But notice
50:45something. A raiding economy is not the
50:48same thing as a disorganized rabble.
50:50Rome ran on conquest and enslavement. So
50:53did Athens. So did the Atlantic powers
50:56at industrial scale at the exact same
50:59time Crimea was doing it. The presence
51:02of a slave trade is not evidence of
51:04statelessness. If anything, it is
51:07evidence of the opposite because
51:09organizing raids, holding captives,
51:12maintaining a port, and running a market
51:14requires administration.
51:16The end came under Catherine the Great.
51:18Russia won the war of 1768 to 1774, and
51:22the treaty declared Crimea independent
51:24of the Ottomans, which in practice meant
51:27open to Russia. Nine years of political
51:30manipulation followed with Russia
51:32installing and removing cons. And in
51:341783, Catherine simply issued a
51:37manifesto annexing the peninsula. That
51:40is the end of the last conate descended
51:44from the empire. And I want to note the
51:47date because I do not think most people
51:49put these two things next to each other.
51:511783 is the year the American
51:54Revolutionary War ended. While the
51:57United States was signing the Treaty of
51:59Paris and becoming a country, the last
52:01independent successor state of the
52:03Tartarian Empire was being erased from
52:06the map, those of the same year. That is
52:09not a mystical coincidence, and I am not
52:11going to pretend it is. But it should
52:13recalibrate your sense of how recent
52:15this is. This is not ancient history.
52:18This is the same decade as the American
52:20founding. There were people alive in
52:231783 in Philadelphia and in Bakisarai
52:26reading the news about each other. Tuk
52:29published his book 3 years before the
52:31annexation. He was writing about a
52:33living thing. And now we come to the
52:36century where it stops being conquest
52:39and starts being deletion. Under the
52:42Romanoffs, the Tartar peoples were
52:43subjects, secondclass subjects excluded
52:46from high office as Touque told us, but
52:49subjects with their own religion, their
52:51own language, their own chiefs, their
52:53own courts, and their own memory. You
52:55can see this in a source I want to bring
52:57in here because it is a small thing, but
53:00it is a wonderful detail. In 1854, an
53:04Englishman named Thomas Milner published
53:06a book called The Baltic: Its Gates,
53:08Shores, and Cities. And in the course of
53:10discussing St. Petersburg, he makes an
53:13observation about how Russians actually
53:15feel about their own capital. He says
53:18the Russians themselves do not like the
53:20place. He says it is not their capital,
53:22not an expression of their ideas and
53:24tastes. And then he says that Moscow
53:27with its traces of Tartarian
53:29architecture is their true metropolis
53:32and a better reflection of the spirit of
53:34Thesar himself.
53:36An English travel writer in 1854 uses
53:39the phrase Tartarian architecture as a
53:42plain descriptive category that his
53:44readers will understand without
53:46explanation. And he uses it to describe
53:49what makes Moscow authentically Russian.
53:53Think about that inversion for a second.
53:56The thing that makes Moscow feel Russian
53:58to a Victorian observer is the tartar
54:00element in it. St. Petersburg is the
54:02foreign city because St. Petersburg is
54:05the European one. That is 1854.
54:09Now watch what happens in the 20th
54:11century. In 1918, the Romanoff dynasty
54:15ends. The same year, the Ottoman Empire,
54:18which many researchers, including
54:19myself, would argue inherited a good
54:22deal of the Tartar political mantle
54:24after Crimea fell, comes to the end of
54:26the First World War and is dismembered.
54:29And a few years before that, in 1911 and
54:321912, theQing dynasty in China falls.
54:35And theQing were themselves a Manchu
54:38dynasty, the last of the great step
54:40descended houses to rule a major state.
54:43Within about a decade, at the beginning
54:45of the 20th century, essentially every
54:48remaining state descended from that
54:49world is gone. And then the eraser
54:52begins in earnest. And I am going to
54:54give you four specific documented
54:56events. The first is architectural
54:59reattribution and we will do that in its
55:02own chapter because it deserves one. The
55:05second is Mongolia 1937 and 1938.
55:09During Stalin's purges, the Mongolian
55:11people's republic conducted its own
55:13terror under Cororlugan Troy Balsan.
55:16Somewhere in the region of 20 to 35,000
55:18people were killed in a country of under
55:20a million. The primary target was the
55:23Buddhist clergy. Something on the order
55:26of 700 monasteries were destroyed. Not
55:29closed, destroyed. Centuries of
55:31manuscripts, art and religious
55:33infrastructure gone in about 2 years.
55:36And among the people executed in 1938
55:39was a woman named Jennipil. She had been
55:42the consort of the Boged Khan, the last
55:44theocratic ruler of Mongolia, which made
55:47her by title the last queen. She was
55:50living quietly in the countryside. She
55:52was arrested and shot. There is a
55:55strange footnote to her story that I
55:57think about a lot. She is widely
55:59believed to be the visual model for
56:00Queen Amadala's costume design in the
56:03Star Wars prequels. Her photograph, that
56:06enormous winged headdress, went into a
56:09costume department, and hundreds of
56:11millions of people have seen a version
56:13of her without ever hearing her name or
56:16how she died.
56:18That is what eraser actually looks like
56:20in practice, not a bonfire, an image
56:24detached from a person. The third event
56:26is Crimea, May 1944.
56:30Over the course of about 3 days,
56:32beginning on the 18th of May, the Soviet
56:35state deported the entire Crimean Tatar
56:37population. Not the collaborators, not
56:40the suspects, everyone. Roughly 191,000
56:45people given between 15 and 30 minutes
56:48to collect what they could carry, loaded
56:50into freight cars and shipped to
56:51Usuzbekiststan and elsewhere in Central
56:54Asia. The stated justification was
56:57collective collaboration with the
56:58Germans. The reality is that Crimean
57:01Tatars had served in the Red Army in
57:04large numbers at the same time. Some of
57:07them were deported directly from the
57:08front after the war, having fought for
57:10the country that expelled their
57:12families. The death toll from the
57:14deportation and the first years of exile
57:16is contested and the estimates are wide,
57:19running from around 18% in some Soviet
57:21accounting up to somewhere near half in
57:23Crimean Tatar accounting. Either end of
57:26that range is a catastrophe. They were
57:29not permitted to return in any numbers
57:31until the late 1980s, 45 years. And the
57:36place names went too. Villages were
57:38renamed. The Tatar toponyms across the
57:41peninsula were replaced wholesale with
57:43Russian ones. That is not a side effect.
57:45Renaming the land is how you make a
57:47people historically invisible in the
57:49place they came from. Which brings me to
57:51the fourth event. And this is the one I
57:53promised you at the start. And it is the
57:56reason I structured this entire
57:57documentary the way I did. Do not go
58:00anywhere because the next thing I'm
58:02going to read you was written by the
58:04United States government. In June of
58:071957, the Central Intelligence Agency
58:09produced a paper titled National
58:12Cultural Development Under Communism. It
58:14was classified immediately. It stayed
58:17classified for 42 years. It was released
58:20in 1999 and it now sits in the CIA's own
58:24online reading room where you can pull
58:26it up on your phone right now for free
58:29while this video is playing. I would
58:31genuinely encourage you to do that
58:34because I want you reading it yourself
58:36and not taking my word for it. Here is
58:38the passage. The document states that on
58:41the 9th of August 1944, the central
58:45committee of the Communist Party sitting
58:47in Moscow issued a directive ordering
58:49the party's Tartar Provincial Committee
58:51to proceed to a scientific revision of
58:53the history of Tartaria to liquidate
58:56serious shortcomings and mistakes of a
58:59nationalistic character committed by
59:01individual writers and historians in
59:03dealing with Tartar history. And then
59:05the CIA analyst adds his own gloss. And
59:09this is where it stops being
59:10bureaucratic and starts being an
59:12indictment. He writes that in other
59:14words, Tartar history was to be
59:17rewritten. And then, and I want to read
59:20this exactly, he says, let us be frank,
59:22was to be falsified in order to
59:24eliminate references to great Russian
59:26aggressions and to hide the facts of the
59:29real course of tarter Russian relations.
59:32Let us be frank, was to be falsified.
59:35That is an American intelligence officer
59:37writing in an internal document he never
59:40expected you to read, stating flatly
59:42that a nation's history was ordered
59:44falsified by a party directive on a
59:46specific date. And he goes further. He
59:49says this was no isolated case. He says
59:51that in every Muslim area within the
59:54USSR, historians on orders of the
59:57Communist Party rewrote history to
59:59distort the facts so that the Russians
1:00:01appear always in a good light. And in
1:00:04the line that I think is the saddest
1:00:06sentence in this entire documentary, he
1:00:09says that histories which present the
1:00:10facts truthfully have been withdrawn and
1:00:13destroyed so that the present and future
1:00:15generations of Muslims are forever
1:00:17denied the chance of learning the true
1:00:19facts of their nation's past. Forever
1:00:22denied. Now I want to slow down here and
1:00:25do something important because this
1:00:27document is the strongest single piece
1:00:29of evidence in this entire field and I
1:00:31have watched people misuse it and
1:00:32misusing it is how you lose the argument
1:00:35to a skeptic in about 11 seconds. So let
1:00:38me tell you precisely what it does and
1:00:41does not establish.
1:00:43what it does not establish. It does not
1:00:45say anything about mud floods, world's
1:00:48fairs, free energy, buried buildings, or
1:00:51anything happening in the United States.
1:00:53It is not about that. Anyone who
1:00:56presents it as the CIA confirming the
1:00:58mud flood is going to get destroyed and
1:00:59will deserve it. What it does establish,
1:01:02and this is enormous,
1:01:04it establishes that the deliberate
1:01:06falsification of Tartar history is not a
1:01:09theory. It is a documented policy with a
1:01:12date on it, the 9th of August, 1944.
1:01:16It establishes that the policy was
1:01:18systematic and not local. Every Muslim
1:01:21area within the USSR, it establishes
1:01:24that the specific goal was to remove
1:01:26evidence of Russian aggression and to
1:01:28make the Russians look good, which means
1:01:30the direction of the distortion is
1:01:32known. We know which way the thumb was
1:01:34on the scale and it establishes that
1:01:37source material was physically
1:01:39destroyed, not just reinterpreted.
1:01:42Withdrawn and destroyed. Now, put that
1:01:45together with what we established in
1:01:47part one. Touque in 1780 describes an
1:01:51empire in its splendor, stone cities, a
1:01:54capital, a hereditary nobility, and a
1:01:57burning national memory among the
1:01:59poorest people. That is the picture
1:02:01before. The 1944 directive orders that
1:02:05picture revised and orders the revision
1:02:07done in a specific direction and orders
1:02:10the truthful books destroyed. And the
1:02:13Soviet Union then controlled the
1:02:14archives, the universities, the
1:02:17publishing houses, and the archaeology
1:02:19of that entire territory for another 47
1:02:22years.
1:02:23Then the Soviet Union collapses and the
1:02:26version of Tartar history that survives
1:02:28into the world's textbooks is the
1:02:30version that was left standing after all
1:02:32that. You do not need a secret society
1:02:34to explain the gap between Tuk's page in
1:02:37your classroom. You need a party
1:02:39directive, a date, and 47 years of
1:02:42control over the archives. And we have
1:02:45all three of those in writing from a
1:02:48hostile intelligence agency that had no
1:02:51reason to invent it.
1:02:53And now I want to ask a harder question
1:02:55and I want to ask it about us and not
1:02:58about them. Why did the CIA classify
1:03:01this? Read that memo again. There is
1:03:04nothing operationally sensitive in it.
1:03:07There are no sources or methods. There
1:03:09is no agent at risk. It is a survey of
1:03:12cultural policy in the Soviet block
1:03:15written by an analyst describing the
1:03:17destruction of the historical record of
1:03:19a Muslim people and it was locked away
1:03:22for 42 years. I think the answer is not
1:03:26sinister in the movie sense but it is
1:03:28worse in the ordinary sense. In 1957,
1:03:32the United States was in the middle of
1:03:34the Cold War and had spent the preceding
1:03:37decade constructing a relationship with
1:03:39the Soviet Union that had begun as an
1:03:41alliance. The Moscow conference of 1941
1:03:45and everything that followed had made
1:03:46the USSR a partner against Germany. And
1:03:49after 1945, the relationship curdled,
1:03:52but the record of the partnership
1:03:54remained.
1:03:55A document that says, "Our recent ally
1:03:58systematically falsified the history and
1:04:00destroyed the literature of a conquered
1:04:02Muslim people," is not a document you
1:04:05want circulating while you are trying to
1:04:06manage a complicated public narrative,
1:04:10especially when your own hands in that
1:04:12period were not clean either. So, it
1:04:14went in a drawer for four decades until
1:04:18the geopolitical reason to keep it there
1:04:20had evaporated and then it came out with
1:04:22no announcement at all. I am not going
1:04:25to tell you that is a conspiracy in the
1:04:27sense of men in a room. I am going to
1:04:30tell you something I think is more
1:04:31useful and more true. This is how
1:04:34history actually gets buried. Not
1:04:37usually by a cabal. Usually by a large
1:04:39number of ordinary institutional
1:04:41decisions, each of which is individually
1:04:44defensible and boring, which add up over
1:04:46decades to a hole in the record where a
1:04:48civilization used to be. Somebody
1:04:50classifies a memo. Somebody else does
1:04:53not renew a translation grant. A
1:04:56department closes. A collection is not
1:04:58digitized. A curriculum committee has 40
1:05:01minutes for the whole 13th century and
1:05:03gives it to the Crusades. And at the end
1:05:06of that process, you get an adult in
1:05:082026 who has never heard the name of the
1:05:10second largest population group in the
1:05:1218th century Russian Empire. The
1:05:15conspiracy version of this is actually
1:05:17more comforting than the truth because a
1:05:19conspiracy could be exposed and stopped.
1:05:22This cannot. This is just what
1:05:24institutions do to inconvenient material
1:05:26when nobody is watching. That is why I
1:05:29make these videos. Next, we are going to
1:05:32look at what happened to the buildings.
1:05:35If you conquer a people and rewrite
1:05:37their books, there is still a problem.
1:05:39The buildings are heavy. You cannot
1:05:41classify a tower. You cannot withdraw a
1:05:44fortress from circulation. It is
1:05:46standing in the middle of a city and
1:05:48everybody can see it and it does not
1:05:50match the story you are now telling. So
1:05:53what do you do? You reattribute it. You
1:05:56keep the building and you change the
1:05:58label. I want to walk through two cases
1:06:01and I want to do them honestly because
1:06:04one of them is much stronger than the
1:06:05other and I am not going to blur the
1:06:08difference.
1:06:09The first case is the Soyamika Tower in
1:06:12Kazan. It stands inside the Kazan
1:06:15Kremlin. It is a stepped brick tower
1:06:18roughly 58 m tall and it leans. It leans
1:06:21noticeably about 2 m off vertical and it
1:06:24has been stabilized in the modern era to
1:06:27stop it falling over. The official story
1:06:30is that it was built by Russian
1:06:31craftsmen under Ivan the Terrible after
1:06:34the conquest. There is a popular version
1:06:36that says it was raised in a week, which
1:06:38is obviously absurd for a 58 masonry
1:06:41tower, and I am not going to spend time
1:06:43on it. Here is why the attribution is
1:06:46genuinely questionable, and this is not
1:06:49fringe. Actual architectural historians
1:06:52disagree about this tower. The dating is
1:06:55disputed.
1:06:56proposals range across the 17th and into
1:06:59the 18th century and there is a real
1:07:01argument that its form belongs to a
1:07:03tarter architectural tradition rather
1:07:05than a Russian one. And we have a 19th
1:07:08century Englishman on the record about
1:07:10it. [snorts] Edward Tracy Turnerelli
1:07:12published a book in 1854 called Kazan,
1:07:15the ancient capital of the Tartar K. He
1:07:19describes the Soybea tower as the last
1:07:21relic of Tartar architecture in the city
1:07:24and he argues it predates the Russian
1:07:27conquest of 1552.
1:07:29That is a man standing in front of the
1:07:31building in the 1840s and50s writing for
1:07:34a British audience with no dog in a
1:07:36modern internet fight calling it tartar
1:07:39and calling it pre-conquest.
1:07:41Now here is my honest position. I do not
1:07:44think we can prove the tower is pre1522.
1:07:48The archaeology is not conclusive and
1:07:50the people who argue for the 17th
1:07:52century are not idiots. What I will say
1:07:55with confidence is that the attribution
1:07:58is genuinely contested by serious
1:08:00people. That a Victorian eyewitness who
1:08:03saw it in far better documentary
1:08:05conditions than we have said it was
1:08:07tartar and that the version taught as
1:08:09settled fact is not settled. The second
1:08:12case is Kazanski station in Moscow. And
1:08:16here I have to correct myself again
1:08:18publicly because I have previously told
1:08:21this story in a way that was wrong.
1:08:24Kazanski station is one of the great
1:08:26railway terminals of Moscow. It has a
1:08:29tower modeled on the Soybea Tower in
1:08:31Kazan which is a deliberate
1:08:33architectural quotation because it is
1:08:35the station from which you depart for
1:08:37Kazan. It has a clock face with zodiac
1:08:40signs instead of numerals.
1:08:42And on top of the tower, there is a
1:08:44golden finineal in the form of a zyl,
1:08:46the tartar dragon, which is also the
1:08:49heraldic symbol of the city of Kazan. I
1:08:52have previously suggested that this
1:08:54building was tartar and was reattributed
1:08:56by the Soviets. I no longer think that
1:08:59is defensible, and I want to say so
1:09:01plainly. The building was designed by
1:09:04Alexis.
1:09:06Construction began in 1913 under the
1:09:09Zsar, not the Soviets. It was
1:09:11interrupted by the First World War, the
1:09:13Revolution, and the Civil War, and it
1:09:15dragged on for decades before being
1:09:18finished. Stus's drawings exist. The
1:09:21commission exists. The design
1:09:23competition exists. This is one of the
1:09:26best documented major buildings in
1:09:28Russia. So why does an early 20th
1:09:31century railway station have zodiac
1:09:34symbols and a tartar dragon on it?
1:09:37Because that was the entire point.
1:09:39Stusev was working in a movement that
1:09:41was consciously reviving Russian and
1:09:43eastern architectural motifs. And he
1:09:46designed the Kazan station to evoke
1:09:48Kazan. The tower quotes Soybea on
1:09:51purpose. The Zilent is there because the
1:09:53Zilent is Kazan's own emblem. The zodiac
1:09:56is there because that whole design
1:09:58movement loved that kind of ornament. I
1:10:01was wrong about that building. And the
1:10:03reason I am telling you at length
1:10:05instead of quietly dropping it is this.
1:10:08When you are working in a field that the
1:10:10mainstream dismisses, every single error
1:10:13you make is used to discredit everything
1:10:15else you have said, including the parts
1:10:17that are rock solid. And I have a 1780
1:10:20encyclopedia and a declassified CIA memo
1:10:23in this video. I am not going to let a
1:10:27wrong claim about a railway station be
1:10:29the thing that gives somebody an excuse
1:10:31to ignore them. If I am wrong, I would
1:10:34rather be the one who says it. But now,
1:10:37let me show you what I do think is real
1:10:40about the reattribution question because
1:10:42there is something real here and it is
1:10:44bigger than one building. Look at what
1:10:47happened to religious architecture in
1:10:49the Soviet Union at scale. Mosques were
1:10:52closed by the thousands in the vulga
1:10:54region in central Asia in Crimea in the
1:10:57Caucasus. Some were demolished. Many
1:11:00were converted into warehouses, clubs,
1:11:02cinemas, graneries, and factories.
1:11:05Minouretes were taken down because a
1:11:07minret is visible from a distance, and a
1:11:10converted building with its minouret
1:11:12removed simply reads as a warehouse. The
1:11:15same was done to Orthodox churches on an
1:11:17even larger scale. This was not aimed at
1:11:20Tartar specifically. It was aimed at
1:11:22religion as such. But here is the
1:11:25effect. And the effect is what matters
1:11:27for our purposes. When you remove the
1:11:30identifying features of a building, take
1:11:32down the minouet, strip the
1:11:34inscriptions, plaster the interior,
1:11:36change the function, and then you also
1:11:39destroy the local histories that
1:11:40describe what it was. And then you order
1:11:43a scientific revision of the regional
1:11:46history in a specified political
1:11:48direction. What is left after two
1:11:50generations?
1:11:51A building nobody can identify. In a
1:11:54city whose old name has been changed. In
1:11:56a region whose history has been
1:11:58officially revised, whose truthful books
1:12:01were withdrawn and destroyed. That is
1:12:04not a theory. Every element of that
1:12:06sentence is documented and the last part
1:12:08of it is documented by the CIA. So when
1:12:12somebody looks at an old building in
1:12:14Kazan or Astrachan or Bakis Sarai and
1:12:17says, "I do not believe the official
1:12:19date on that," I understand completely
1:12:21why they say it. The official record for
1:12:23that entire territory went through a
1:12:26deliberate falsification process with a
1:12:28date on it. The trouble, and I'm going
1:12:31to be straight with you, is that being
1:12:32right about the falsification does not
1:12:34automatically make you right about any
1:12:36particular building. Those are two
1:12:38different claims. The first one is
1:12:40proven. The second one has to be proven
1:12:43one building at a time with documents
1:12:45and most of the time on the internet it
1:12:48is not. That is the discipline this
1:12:50field is missing and it is the
1:12:52discipline I am trying to bring to it.
1:12:55So let's take stock at the end of part
1:12:57two. We have an empire documented in
1:13:001780 as having had a period of splendor
1:13:03with stone cities and a capital. We have
1:13:06its dismemberment across three centuries
1:13:09ending in 1783 with the annexation of
1:13:11Crimea in the same year the United
1:13:14States became a country. We have the
1:13:16physical destruction of its successor
1:13:19cultures in the 20th century.
1:13:21Monasteries leveled in Mongolia. A queen
1:13:24shot in 1938. An entire people deported
1:13:27from Crimea in 3 days in 1944 and kept
1:13:31out for 45 years. And we have a
1:13:34directive dated the 9th of August 1944
1:13:37ordering the falsification of the
1:13:39history which we know about because an
1:13:41American intelligence analyst wrote it
1:13:43down and his memo was declassified in
1:13:461999.
1:13:48Everything I have told you so far is
1:13:50documented. I have not asked you to take
1:13:53a single leap. Now we are going to start
1:13:56leaping and I am going to tell you every
1:13:58time we do. Part three is about America.
1:14:02Everything I have told you until this
1:14:04moment has been documented. A 1780
1:14:07reference book, 16th century English
1:14:10texts, a Victorian travel writer, and a
1:14:12declassified intelligence memo. I have
1:14:15not asked you to take a single leap of
1:14:17faith. We are about to cross a line, and
1:14:20I am going to draw it out loud. From
1:14:23here on, the evidence gets thinner. The
1:14:25sources are real and they are serious
1:14:28and some of them were mainstream
1:14:30scholarly opinion in their day. But they
1:14:32are inference. They are people reasoning
1:14:34from what they could see toward a
1:14:36conclusion they could not test. That is
1:14:39a legitimate historical activity and it
1:14:42is how a great deal of real knowledge
1:14:44got started. It is also how a great deal
1:14:47of confident nonsense got started. So
1:14:50for the rest of this documentary, I am
1:14:53going to be telling you two things at
1:14:55once. Here is the claim and here is how
1:14:57much weight it will bear. Let's go. I am
1:15:01going to tell you about an idea that was
1:15:03proposed in the 16th century, argued
1:15:06through the 17th and 18th, taught as
1:15:08respectable opinion in the 19th, quietly
1:15:11dropped in the 20th, and which then
1:15:13turned out to be substantially correct.
1:15:16The idea is that the native peoples of
1:15:18the Americas came from northeastern Asia
1:15:21and in the language of the period the
1:15:23people of northeastern Asia were
1:15:25tarters. Here is how it develops. In
1:15:291590, a Spanish Jesuit named Jose de
1:15:32Aosta published a book about the natural
1:15:34and moral history of the Indies. Aosta
1:15:37had spent years in Peru and Mexico. And
1:15:40he sat down with a problem that was
1:15:42genuinely difficult for a 16th century
1:15:44European Christian, which was, "How did
1:15:47people and animals get to a continent
1:15:49nobody in the old world knew existed?"
1:15:53His answer was that there must be a land
1:15:55connection or a very short crossing
1:15:57somewhere in the far north, and that
1:16:00people and animals came over it
1:16:01gradually on foot over a long period of
1:16:04time. That was in 1590 and it is in
1:16:08outline correct. That is the bearing
1:16:11land bridge proposed more than three
1:16:13centuries before anyone could go and
1:16:15look. In 164, an English scholar named
1:16:19Edward Breerwood took that framework and
1:16:21made it specific. In a book on the
1:16:23diversity of languages and religions,
1:16:26Breerwood argued that the Americans
1:16:28descended from the Tartars coming across
1:16:30via the northeast of Asia. and his
1:16:33reasoning was not mystical. It was
1:16:35comparative. He looked at appearance, at
1:16:38customs, at way of life, and at the
1:16:40geography of the two coasts and
1:16:42concluded that the people on the
1:16:44American side had come from the Asian
1:16:46side. Then in the 1630s, an Augustinian
1:16:49frier in Peru named Antonio de la
1:16:52Kalancha argued the same thing from his
1:16:54own observations in South America. That
1:16:57is the 17th century position and it
1:17:00holds. It gets repeated, refined, and
1:17:03taught. By the middle of the 19th
1:17:06century, it is simply what educated
1:17:08people thought. In 1851, an American
1:17:11writer named Charles Goodrich published
1:17:13a book on the great events in the
1:17:15history of North and South America. And
1:17:17in it, he states the case directly. He
1:17:20says the most suitable origin for the
1:17:22American peoples is the northeastern
1:17:24part of Asia, naming great tartar,
1:17:26Siberia, and especially the peninsula of
1:17:28Kimchka. And he says that this was
1:17:31probably the route through which many
1:17:33Tartarian colonies passed into America
1:17:35and populated a considerable part of the
1:17:38new world. Tartarian colonies in an
1:17:41American history book in 1851 stated as
1:17:45the reasonable mainstream view. Now here
1:17:48is what I want you to take from this and
1:17:51it is not what you might expect. The
1:17:53Tartarian origin theory was not
1:17:55suppressed. It won. We now know from
1:17:59genetics, from archaeology, from
1:18:01linguistics, and from the geology of the
1:18:03Bearing Strait that the ancestral
1:18:05populations of the Americas came out of
1:18:08Siberia. The migration happened during
1:18:10the last glacial period when sea levels
1:18:12were low enough to expose the
1:18:14landbridge. The closest genetic
1:18:16relatives of Native American populations
1:18:19are in south central Siberia around the
1:18:21Alai region, which is precisely the
1:18:24heart of the territory. those old maps
1:18:27labeled Tartary.
1:18:29Aosta was right. Breerwood was right.
1:18:32Goodrich was right. Every one of them
1:18:34working with nothing but observation and
1:18:36reasoning got the direction correct.
1:18:39What changed is not the conclusion. What
1:18:42changed is the vocabulary and the time
1:18:44scale. We stopped saying Tartarian
1:18:46because we developed better categories
1:18:48and we pushed the date back from a few
1:18:50thousand years to somewhere between 15
1:18:52and 25,000.
1:18:55So when somebody tells you the idea of a
1:18:57Tartarian origin for Native Americans
1:18:59has been debunked, that is not accurate.
1:19:02The core of it is the scientific
1:19:04consensus. What has been abandoned is
1:19:06the specific framing and the timeline.
1:19:09And now I have to be equally straight
1:19:11with you about the part that has not
1:19:13held up because there is a second and
1:19:16much stronger claim in this literature
1:19:18and it is the one that gets quoted most
1:19:20in our corner of the internet and I do
1:19:23not think it survives.
1:19:25In 1834 an American writer named Josiah
1:19:28Priest published a book called American
1:19:31Antiquities and Discoveries in the West.
1:19:34It sold extremely well. It was one of
1:19:37the bestselling books in America in its
1:19:39time. Priest's argument is that before
1:19:42the Native Americans that Europeans
1:19:44encountered, there had been an earlier,
1:19:47different, more civilized population in
1:19:49North America. He points at the
1:19:52earthworks, the mounds, the great
1:19:54constructions in the Ohio and
1:19:56Mississippi valleys. And he argues that
1:19:59the peoples living there in his own day
1:20:01could not have built them and therefore
1:20:03somebody else did and then vanished or
1:20:05declined. And he proposes candidates,
1:20:08Tartars, Israelites, Phoenicians,
1:20:11Egyptians, Vikings, almost anybody in
1:20:13fact except the ancestors of the people
1:20:15who were actually living there. The
1:20:17mounds themselves are absolutely real
1:20:20and I want to spend a moment on them
1:20:22because they are astonishing and almost
1:20:25nobody outside the region knows about
1:20:27them. Cahokia in southern Illinois
1:20:30across the river from modern St. Louis
1:20:32was a city. At its peak around the year
1:20:351100, it may have held somewhere between
1:20:3710 and 20,000 people which made it
1:20:40comparable to London at the same date.
1:20:43At its center is Monk's Mound, an
1:20:45earthen platform with a base area larger
1:20:48than the Great Pyramid of Giza. Built by
1:20:50hand, basket load by basket load. There
1:20:54were plazas, a wooden solar calendar,
1:20:57satellite towns, and long distance
1:20:59trade.
1:21:00Serpent Mound in Ohio, Poverty Point in
1:21:04Louisiana, which is thousands of years
1:21:06older. The Newark Earthworks, whose
1:21:09geometry encodes an 18.6year six-year
1:21:11lunar cycle, which means the builders
1:21:13were tracking a cycle that takes almost
1:21:15two decades to complete and had to
1:21:17observe it across generations to find it
1:21:19at all. This was a civilization, cities,
1:21:23astronomy, engineering, trade networks
1:21:26running from the Rockies to the
1:21:27Atlantic. So, Priest was right that
1:21:30something remarkable was there and he
1:21:32was completely wrong about who built it.
1:21:35The mound builders were the ancestors of
1:21:37the Native American peoples. This is not
1:21:39a close call anymore. The archaeology is
1:21:42continuous. The material culture
1:21:44connects. The oral traditions connect.
1:21:46The genetics connect. There is no
1:21:49mystery population and no vanished race.
1:21:52And I want to tell you what the mound
1:21:54builder myth was actually for because
1:21:57this is the part that matters and it is
1:21:59uncomfortable.
1:22:01The idea that a superior vanished race
1:22:03built the mounds was politically useful
1:22:05in the exact decades it became popular.
1:22:08Priest published in 1834.
1:22:11The Indian Removal Act was passed in
1:22:141830. The Trail of Tears ran from 1831
1:22:18through 1838.
1:22:20If the people you are removing are the
1:22:22degenerate remnant who overran a nobler
1:22:24civilization, then removing them is not
1:22:27theft. It is almost restoration. The
1:22:29myth did work. It made a policy easier
1:22:32to carry out. Smithsonian archaeologists
1:22:35spent the later 19th century
1:22:37systematically dismantling it and it
1:22:39collapsed under the evidence.
1:22:41So here is my honest verdict on this
1:22:43chapter. The migration claim that the
1:22:47ancestral American populations came out
1:22:49of the region Europeans called tartery
1:22:51is correct. It is the scientific
1:22:54consensus and it was first argued in the
1:22:561500s by people using the word tartar.
1:23:00That is a genuine and underappreciated
1:23:02point and I stand behind it. The claim
1:23:05that a separate later more advanced
1:23:07tartarian population came to America and
1:23:10built the mounds and then disappeared. I
1:23:12do not believe. I think the evidence is
1:23:14against it and I think the idea was
1:23:16popularized in a period when it served
1:23:18an ugly purpose. Now someone is going to
1:23:21write in the comments that I am folding
1:23:24that I have been captured that I am
1:23:26afraid to follow the evidence. So let me
1:23:29be very direct about my reasoning
1:23:31because I think it is the most important
1:23:33methodological point in this entire
1:23:35video. The whole thesis of this
1:23:38documentary is that a real people had
1:23:40their achievements taken away from them
1:23:42and handed to somebody else. That is the
1:23:45crime. That is what happened to the
1:23:47Tartars. and I have shown you the
1:23:49directive that ordered it done. The
1:23:51mound builder myth is that exact same
1:23:54crime committed on this continent
1:23:56against the peoples who were here. It
1:23:58takes real achievements from real people
1:24:00and assigns them to a mysterious
1:24:02vanished race. I am not going to spend
1:24:06two hours condemning the eraser of one
1:24:08people's monuments and then turn around
1:24:10and do it to another. If the principle
1:24:12is real, it applies in both directions
1:24:15or it is not a principle. It is just a
1:24:17preference. The mounds were built by the
1:24:20ancestors of the people who were living
1:24:22beside them. They deserve the credit and
1:24:24it was taken from them and it should be
1:24:26given back. Now, there is one more
1:24:30thread in the American material that I
1:24:32have not touched and it is the one that
1:24:35most of you actually came here for and
1:24:37it does not depend on Tartaria at all.
1:24:41It depends on photographs. Part four
1:24:44begins now and everything from here
1:24:46forward is speculation. I am going to
1:24:49say it once more so nobody can accuse me
1:24:51of pretending otherwise. Speculation.
1:24:55Interesting speculation. Some of it I
1:24:58find genuinely hard to explain, but
1:25:00speculation.
1:25:02Let's go look at the buildings. Let me
1:25:04read you a list. New York 1835.
1:25:08Pittsburgh 1845. St. Louis 1849.
1:25:12Portland, Maine, 1866. Chicago 1871,
1:25:17Boston 1872, Seattle 1889, Baltimore
1:25:221904, San Francisco 1906.
1:25:26And that is the short list. Add
1:25:28Charleston, Savannah, Detroit,
1:25:31Milwaukee, Nashville, Atlanta,
1:25:33Rochester, Cincinnati, Omaha. Add the
1:25:36towns whose fires were only regionally
1:25:38famous and are now forgotten entirely.
1:25:40There is a stretch of about 70 years in
1:25:43which American cities burn down at a
1:25:45rate that if it happened today would be
1:25:48the only story on the news for a decade.
1:25:51I understand completely why this looks
1:25:53like an attack. I looked at these
1:25:55photographs for a long time before I
1:25:57ever made a video about any of this. And
1:25:59the thing that got me was not the burned
1:26:01buildings. It was the survivors. You
1:26:04look at a photograph of Chicago in 1871
1:26:07or San Francisco in 1906 and you see
1:26:10block after block reduced to nothing and
1:26:12then standing up out of it a stone
1:26:14facade, a bankfront, a church tower more
1:26:17or less intact and the eye reads it as
1:26:20bombing. It reads as something with a
1:26:22blast wave. So, I want to do this
1:26:25chapter properly because I think the
1:26:27mainstream answer here is actually
1:26:29correct and I think it is a lot more
1:26:31interesting than people give it credit
1:26:33for. Here is why American cities burned.
1:26:37They were made of wood and specifically
1:26:39they were made of a kind of wood
1:26:40construction that was invented in
1:26:42Chicago. In the 1830s, builders in
1:26:45Chicago developed what came to be called
1:26:48the balloon frame. Instead of heavy
1:26:50timber joinery, which required skilled
1:26:53carpenters and months of work, you nail
1:26:55together a cage of thin mil studs. It is
1:26:58fast, it is cheap, and it requires
1:27:01almost no skill.
1:27:03It is why the American West could be
1:27:06built as fast as it was. It is also, and
1:27:09there is no way around this, a chimney
1:27:12with rooms in it. The wall cavities run
1:27:15continuously from the foundation to the
1:27:17roof. So, a fire that gets into a wall
1:27:19on the ground floor arrives in the attic
1:27:21with a draft behind it. Now, layer
1:27:24everything else on top. Roofs of wooden
1:27:27shingles so that embers landing on one
1:27:30house start the next one. Streets and
1:27:32sidewalks made of wooden planks.
1:27:34Buildings pressed against each other
1:27:36with no gaps and no fire brakes.
1:27:38Interior lighting by open gas flame and
1:27:41before that by kerosene and candle.
1:27:44Heating and cooking by coal and wood
1:27:46stoves with stove pipes running through
1:27:48wooden walls. Industry using open
1:27:51furnaces in the middle of residential
1:27:53districts. Hay and lumber and coal
1:27:55stored everywhere because horses and
1:27:57stoves needed them. and essentially no
1:28:00fire codes because fire codes get
1:28:02written after the fire, not before. And
1:28:05the water systems could not cope. In
1:28:08city after city, the fire got to the
1:28:10waterworks or the pumping station early,
1:28:12and after that, the hydrants had nothing
1:28:14in them. Chicago in 1871 is the classic
1:28:18case. It had been a dry summer. There
1:28:20was a strong wind out of the southwest.
1:28:22The fire department had been fighting a
1:28:24large fire the night before and the men
1:28:26and the equipment were spent and the
1:28:28city was essentially a lumber pile with
1:28:30people in it. The fire ran for about 30
1:28:33hours and burned roughly 3 and a3 square
1:28:35miles. Now here is the fact that I think
1:28:38proves the point and it is a fact almost
1:28:41nobody knows and it changed how I think
1:28:44about all of this. On the exact same
1:28:46night as the great Chicago fire, the 8th
1:28:49of October 1871,
1:28:51a forest fire destroyed the town of
1:28:53Pestigo in northern Wisconsin. The
1:28:56Pestigo fire killed somewhere between
1:28:581,200 and 2500 people. It is the
1:29:01deadliest fire in American history by a
1:29:04wide margin. Chicago killed around 300.
1:29:08And you have never heard of Pestigo.
1:29:11That tells you two things. First, that
1:29:13the conditions that autumn were regional
1:29:15and environmental, not a Chicago
1:29:18specific act. Second, that history does
1:29:21bury things routinely and without any
1:29:23conspiracy at all. The deadliest fire in
1:29:26the country's history was forgotten
1:29:28because it happened on the same night as
1:29:30a fire in a bigger city with more
1:29:32newspapers. That is the pattern I keep
1:29:35running into in this research. The real
1:29:38explanation is usually available and
1:29:40usually strange enough on its own. So
1:29:43what about the stone building standing
1:29:45in the ash? That is exactly what you
1:29:48would expect and it is why the
1:29:50photographs mislead the eye. Masonry
1:29:52does not burn. In a fire that consumes a
1:29:55wooden city, the masonry structures are
1:29:57the things left standing, gutted with
1:30:00their floors and roofs collapsed inside
1:30:02them. That is not evidence of a
1:30:04selective weapon. It is evidence that
1:30:06stone is not wood. And what about the
1:30:09claim that these fires were hot enough
1:30:11to melt stone? Here is what actually
1:30:14happens. And it is the source of the
1:30:16confusion. Limestone and marble do not
1:30:19melt. They decompose.
1:30:22At around 800 to 900 degrees C, which a
1:30:26well-fed building fire will reach
1:30:28comfortably, calcium carbonate breaks
1:30:31down and drives off carbon dioxide, and
1:30:34the stone crumbles, spalls, and turns to
1:30:37a soft powder. Then water hits it. Then
1:30:40the wall above it comes down. The result
1:30:43looks slumped. It looks poured. It does
1:30:46not look like it burned because we all
1:30:48expect fire to leave char, and stone
1:30:50does not char. So, did every one of
1:30:53these fires happen exactly the way the
1:30:55official account says? No. And I would
1:30:58not defend that either. Insurance arson
1:31:00was rampant in this period, and
1:31:02everybody at the time knew it. City
1:31:04politics were corrupt. Fires cleared
1:31:07land in ways that benefited specific
1:31:09people, and after the fire, the
1:31:11rebuilding contracts went to somebody.
1:31:14There is genuine documented case-bycase
1:31:17skull duggery in the aftermath of
1:31:19American urban fires. And the cow and
1:31:21the lantern story was itself a newspaper
1:31:24invention that the reporter later
1:31:25admitted making up. But the pattern does
1:31:28not need an exotic explanation. Wooden
1:31:31cities, open flame, no codes, no water
1:31:35pressure, and a wind. Now, let's go to
1:31:38the fairs because that is where the
1:31:40questions get much harder to answer and
1:31:42where I think there is something
1:31:44genuinely worth sitting with. In 1893,
1:31:48on the southshore of Lake Michigan, on
1:31:50ground that had been swamped, a city
1:31:52appeared. The World's Columbian
1:31:54Exposition covered about 600 acres. It
1:31:57had lagoons, canals, and a wooded
1:32:00island. It had a court of honor
1:32:02surrounded by enormous neocclassical
1:32:04palaces with domes and colonades and
1:32:06monumental sculpture. At night, it was
1:32:09lit by electricity, which most visitors
1:32:11had never seen on a scale that had never
1:32:14been attempted. 27 million admissions
1:32:17were recorded at a time when the entire
1:32:19population of the United States was
1:32:21about 65 million and then it was gone. I
1:32:25want to be precise about the timeline
1:32:28because precision is what this argument
1:32:30actually turns on. The fair opened in
1:32:33May 1893 and closed at the end of
1:32:35October. In January 1894, a fire
1:32:38destroyed several structures on the
1:32:40Court of Honor. In July 1894, during the
1:32:43Pullman strike, a much larger fire
1:32:45burned most of what remained. The rest
1:32:48was demolished or salvaged over the
1:32:50following years. So the sequence is
1:32:53build in about 2 years, open for 6
1:32:56months, and then within roughly 9 months
1:32:58of closing, the whole thing is
1:33:00essentially gone. Now, here is the
1:33:02official explanation, and I want to give
1:33:05it accurately because the accurate
1:33:06version is more interesting than the
1:33:09version that usually gets argued
1:33:10against. The buildings were not stone.
1:33:14They were wood and steel frames sheathed
1:33:16in a material called staff. Staff is
1:33:19plaster of Paris mixed with fiber,
1:33:22usually jute or hemp, and sometimes
1:33:24cement. You cast it in molds, you screw
1:33:27the panels to the frame, and you paint
1:33:29it white. It can be molded into columns,
1:33:33capitals, cornises, statuary, anything.
1:33:37It is essentially architectural theater
1:33:40scenery built at full scale and built to
1:33:42last a few years. This is not a secret,
1:33:45and it was never a secret. It was
1:33:47described in the newspapers at the time.
1:33:50It is in the fair's own official
1:33:52publications, and there are photographs
1:33:54of workmen casting the panels.
1:33:57And here is the fact that I think
1:33:59settles the physical question, and it is
1:34:01a detail I find genuinely poignant.
1:34:05The White City was falling apart while
1:34:07it was open. Staff cracks. It absorbs
1:34:10water. Chicago winters and Chicago Lake
1:34:13Wind attacked it immediately.
1:34:16There are contemporary accounts of
1:34:17repair crews working through the fair's
1:34:19own season, patching the surfaces. By
1:34:22the time it closed, it was already
1:34:25visibly deteriorating, and the fires
1:34:27that finished it were burning a
1:34:29structure that was on its way down
1:34:31regardless. So, no, I do not believe the
1:34:34White City was an ancient stone
1:34:36metropolis that was demolished to hide
1:34:38it. I have looked at this one hard, and
1:34:40the documentary trail is thick. There
1:34:43are construction photographs from empty
1:34:45swamp forward. There is a payroll. There
1:34:48is a workforce that peaked around 40,000
1:34:50men. There are the architects and their
1:34:52frs and their drawings. There is Daniel
1:34:55Burnham running the whole thing and
1:34:57Frederick Law Olmstead laying out the
1:35:00grounds. But I am not going to pretend
1:35:03that closing the file on the physical
1:35:05question closes the file on the
1:35:07interesting question because it does
1:35:09not. And here is what I actually think
1:35:11is worth your attention. Consider what
1:35:14that fair did to the country. Before
1:35:171893, most Americans had never seen a
1:35:20coordinated monumental cityscape.
1:35:23Afterward, they had and they wanted one.
1:35:26The Colombian Exposition launched what
1:35:28became the city beautiful movement. And
1:35:30for the next 35 years, American cities
1:35:33went on a neocclassical building spree
1:35:36without any real precedent. Civic
1:35:38centers, courouses, libraries, museums,
1:35:41train stations, state capitals, post
1:35:43offices, all in the same borrowed Greco
1:35:46Roman vocabulary in towns of every size
1:35:49across the country. That is the actual
1:35:52origin of the thing that people notice
1:35:54and cannot account for. That is why a
1:35:57county seat in Iowa with 8,000 people
1:36:00has a courthouse with a dome and
1:36:02Corinthian columns on it. Not because a
1:36:05lost empire built it. Because in 1893, a
1:36:09temporary plaster city on a lake made an
1:36:12entire nation decide that this was what
1:36:14a civilized place looks like. And then
1:36:17two generations of architects and
1:36:19boosters and mayors delivered it.
1:36:22And now the questions that I think
1:36:24genuinely remain open and that I have
1:36:26not seen answered well. First, the
1:36:30permanent survivors. Not everything at
1:36:32these fairs was staff and that is a
1:36:35fact. The official summary tends to
1:36:37flatten. The Palace of Fine Arts at
1:36:40Chicago was built more substantially
1:36:42than the rest because it had to hold
1:36:44irreplaceable art on loan and the
1:36:47insurers demanded it. It survived and in
1:36:51the 1930s it was rebuilt in stone as the
1:36:54Museum of Science and Industry and it is
1:36:56standing today. The World's Congress
1:36:59Auxiliary Building became the Art
1:37:01Institute of Chicago. In St. Louis. In
1:37:041904, the Palace of Fine Arts became the
1:37:07St. Louis Art Museum, and the Great
1:37:09Flight Cage went to the zoo. In Buffalo,
1:37:12in 1901, the New York State Building
1:37:14became the Buffalo History Museum. In
1:37:17San Francisco, in 1915, the Palace of
1:37:20Fine Arts was so beloved that the city
1:37:23eventually rebuilt it permanently, and
1:37:25it is there now. So, the flat claim that
1:37:29these were all temporary is not true.
1:37:31Some were built to stay from the
1:37:33beginning, which raises the reasonable
1:37:36question of how the decision was made
1:37:38building by building about what would
1:37:40survive. And that is a question about
1:37:42money and politics that I do not think
1:37:44has ever been examined properly.
1:37:47Second, and this is the one I cannot
1:37:49shake, Nashville built a full-scale
1:37:52replica of the Parthonon for its 1897
1:37:55exposition. Full scale, not a suggestion
1:37:58of one. And it was popular enough that
1:38:01in the 1920s the city rebuilt it
1:38:04permanently in concrete. And it stands
1:38:06in Centennial Park today. And it is the
1:38:09only full-size replica of the Parthonon
1:38:11on Earth. Why did they do that? Not how.
1:38:15Why? Why does a city in Tennessee in
1:38:181897 decide that the way to announce
1:38:21itself to the world is to rebuild a
1:38:23500year BC Athenian temple at 1:1 scale?
1:38:27The official answer is that Nashville
1:38:29called itself the Athens of the South
1:38:32because of its colleges. That is true
1:38:34and it is also not an answer. It is a
1:38:37restatement of the question. What I
1:38:40actually think is going on is this and
1:38:42it is not a conspiracy. It is something
1:38:45closer to a collective psychological
1:38:47state. That whole generation was
1:38:49possessed by the conviction that they
1:38:51were the inheritors of the classical
1:38:53world and that America was Rome resumed.
1:38:57You can see it in the architecture, in
1:38:59the eagles, in the Senate, in the fosses
1:39:02on the wall behind the speaker of the
1:39:03house, in the naming of towns Rome and
1:39:06Athens and Syracuse and Udica and Sparta
1:39:08and Troy, in the Latin on the money. An
1:39:12entire civilization decided it was a
1:39:14reincarnation of another civilization
1:39:16and then built accordingly at enormous
1:39:19expense everywhere for about a century.
1:39:22That is a genuinely strange thing for a
1:39:25country to do. It is much stranger than
1:39:28a single fire. And the fact that we no
1:39:30longer find it strange that we walk past
1:39:33a federal building with Roman columns on
1:39:35it and think nothing at all tells you
1:39:38how completely they succeeded. I do not
1:39:41have a full explanation for that. I am
1:39:44not sure anybody does. But I would
1:39:46rather sit with a real unanswered
1:39:48question than reach for a fake answered
1:39:50one. Now we come to the children and I
1:39:53will tell you honestly this is the
1:39:55section that was hardest for me to make.
1:39:58Three things happened in America between
1:40:00roughly 1850 and 1930 that when you put
1:40:04them next to each other are genuinely
1:40:06disturbing.
1:40:08Hundreds of thousands of children were
1:40:09shipped by rail from eastern cities to
1:40:12the countryside and handed over to
1:40:14strangers.
1:40:16Live premature infants were exhibited to
1:40:18paying crowds at world's fairs and
1:40:20amusement parks. And the population of
1:40:23the insane asylums grew decade after
1:40:26decade until the state hospital system
1:40:29was one of the largest institutions in
1:40:31American life. I have argued in the past
1:40:34that these three things are connected
1:40:36and that they point to a population
1:40:38catastrophe in the recent past that has
1:40:40been written out of the record. I want
1:40:42to go back through them one at a time
1:40:44and tell you what I have found since,
1:40:46including where I have changed my mind
1:40:48and where I have not. Start with the
1:40:51orphan trains. They are real. They ran
1:40:54from 1854 to 1929 and they moved
1:40:58somewhere between 200,000 and 250,000
1:41:01children out of New York and other
1:41:03eastern cities into the Midwest and
1:41:05West. The program was created by a
1:41:08Protestant minister named Charles Luring
1:41:10Brace and run largely by the Children's
1:41:13Aid Society. And the mechanics were
1:41:16exactly as bad as they sound. The
1:41:19children were put on a train. At each
1:41:21stop, they were lined up on a platform
1:41:23or a stage in a hall, and local people
1:41:26came to look at them. Some were
1:41:28inspected physically. Families chose.
1:41:31Siblings were routinely separated, and
1:41:34many never found each other again. There
1:41:37was paperwork, and there were supposed
1:41:38to be follow-up visits, and in practice,
1:41:41the followup was thin to non-existent.
1:41:44Some children got families, some got
1:41:46farm labor with a bed, some got worse.
1:41:50So the horror in the imagery is not
1:41:52manufactured. It happened and it
1:41:54happened at scale within living memory
1:41:56of people's grandparents.
1:41:58Now where did the children come from?
1:42:01The standard account says urban poverty
1:42:04and I used to say that this does not add
1:42:06up that immigration does not make you
1:42:08abandon your child. I want to be more
1:42:10precise now because the honest version
1:42:12of the standard account is stronger than
1:42:14the version I was arguing against.
1:42:17New York in this period was one of the
1:42:19most lethal cities in the western world
1:42:21for adults. Chalera in 1832, 1849 and
1:42:251866.
1:42:27Typhus and typhoid endemic. Tuberculosis
1:42:30running constantly through crowded
1:42:31tenementss and tuberculosis kills adults
1:42:34of exactly parenting age. Industrial
1:42:37accidents with no safety law and no
1:42:40compensation. maternal death and
1:42:42childbirth at rates that are difficult
1:42:44to imagine now. And then the Civil War
1:42:47removes a large number of fathers in a
1:42:49four-year window. Add to that the fact
1:42:52that many of these children were not
1:42:54orphans at all. This is documented and
1:42:56it is important. A large share were what
1:42:59were called half orphans, with one
1:43:01living parent, usually a mother, who had
1:43:03no way to feed them and surrendered them
1:43:05to an institution, sometimes intending
1:43:08to reclaim them later and often being
1:43:10unable to. So the population of
1:43:13unaccompanied children in New York was
1:43:15created by disease, industrial death,
1:43:18war, and destitution in a city with no
1:43:22welfare system, no pensions, no workers
1:43:25compensation, and no public housing.
1:43:28That accounts for the children. I now
1:43:31think it accounts for them. What it does
1:43:34not account for, and what I still think
1:43:36deserves scrutiny, is the method.
1:43:38Because the disposal method was a
1:43:40choice, nothing about urban poverty
1:43:43requires you to put children on a stage
1:43:44in Kansas and let strangers pick. Other
1:43:48things could have been done, and in
1:43:49other countries, other things were done.
1:43:52The particular American solution, ship
1:43:54them west, and let the market sort it
1:43:57out, tells you something real about what
1:43:59that society thought children were for.
1:44:02Now, the incubators, and this one I have
1:44:05to correct substantially because I got
1:44:08it wrong and the truth is genuinely
1:44:10moving. The facts are as strange as I
1:44:13said. Live premature infants really were
1:44:16displayed in incubators for a paid
1:44:18admission at the Pan-American Exposition
1:44:20in Buffalo in 1901, at St. Louis in
1:44:241904, at Coney Island for 40 years, and
1:44:27elsewhere. The showman was Martin Cuni.
1:44:31Here is what I did not understand.
1:44:34American hospitals in that period would
1:44:36not pay for premature infant care. The
1:44:39prevailing medical view was that these
1:44:40babies were not viable. That
1:44:42intervention was feudal and that the
1:44:44resources should go elsewhere. Incubator
1:44:47technology existed. It had been
1:44:50developed in France and it worked and no
1:44:53hospital in the United States would fund
1:44:55it. So Cooney funded it with a sideshow.
1:44:58He took the babies that hospitals had
1:45:00given up on at no charge to the families
1:45:03ever. He hired trained nurses and wet
1:45:06nurses. He ran a strict medical
1:45:09operation behind the curtain, and he
1:45:11paid for all of it with the ticket
1:45:12revenue from people who came to look.
1:45:15Something on the order of 6,500 infants
1:45:18went through his facilities over four
1:45:20decades, and he claimed a survival rate
1:45:22around 85% at a time when the
1:45:25alternative was near certain death.
1:45:28One of the babies he saved was his own
1:45:30daughter, Hildigard, who was born
1:45:32premature and who grew up to work as a
1:45:34nurse in the exhibit. Now, was the
1:45:37ethics of it clean? No. Displaying sick
1:45:40infants for money is grotesque, and it
1:45:42was criticized as grotesque at the time.
1:45:45And the specific newspaper item from St.
1:45:47Louis in 1904 describing orphans and
1:45:50waves being cared for in the incubator
1:45:52building until adopted or placed in a
1:45:55home is real. And it does show that at
1:45:57least at some fairs, the children on
1:45:59display included children with no
1:46:01families, which is a genuinely dark
1:46:03detail. But the framing I used before
1:46:07that these babies were taken from their
1:46:09mothers and auctioned like livestock is
1:46:12not what the record shows, and I am
1:46:13withdrawing it. What the record shows is
1:46:17a man running an unlicensed neonatal
1:46:20intensive care unit inside a carnival
1:46:22because the medical establishment
1:46:24refused to fund one and saving thousands
1:46:27of children that the hospitals had
1:46:29written off. That is a stranger story
1:46:32than the one I was telling. It is also
1:46:34true. Now the asylums and here I have to
1:46:37correct a number that I have used before
1:46:40and that circulates constantly in this
1:46:42community. The claim is that at the turn
1:46:45of the 20th century, over half a million
1:46:47Americans were in insane asylums,
1:46:50amounting to more than 1% of the
1:46:52population.
1:46:54That is wrong, and I want to fix it
1:46:56precisely because a wrong number in a
1:46:58good argument is a gift to your
1:47:00opponents. The peak of the American
1:47:02asylum population was not the turn of
1:47:04the century. It was 1955 when roughly
1:47:08558,000
1:47:09people were resident in state mental
1:47:11hospitals.
1:47:13The population of the United States in
1:47:151955 was about 165 million. So that is
1:47:19around 1/3 of 1% not 1%. At the actual
1:47:23turn of the century, the number was much
1:47:25smaller, somewhere around 150,000 than
1:47:281904.
1:47:30So the specific claim is wrong on both
1:47:32the date and the fraction. And now let
1:47:35me tell you why the underlying
1:47:37observation is still worth making
1:47:39because something real is in there. In
1:47:421880, the census counted roughly 40,000
1:47:45people in institutions for the insane
1:47:47out of a population of 50 million. By
1:47:501955, it was 558,000
1:47:54out of 165 million. Run the per capita
1:47:58numbers. That is roughly 800ths of 1%
1:48:01rising to about 3,400s of 1%. The rate
1:48:05more than quadrupled in 75 years. That
1:48:08is a real and enormous change and it
1:48:11does demand an explanation. So what is
1:48:13it? Part of it is straightforward.
1:48:16Before the asylum movement, the mentally
1:48:18ill were kept at home, in poor houses,
1:48:21or in jails. Building institutions and
1:48:24then counting the people inside them
1:48:25will always look like an increase.
1:48:28Dorothia Dixs campaigned successfully
1:48:31for decades to get these people out of
1:48:33jails and into hospitals. And it worked.
1:48:36And the numbers went up because the
1:48:38counting changed. Part of it is
1:48:40urbanization. A rural extended family
1:48:43can absorb an impaired relative. A
1:48:45tenement family with both parents and a
1:48:48factory cannot. Part of it is that state
1:48:51hospitals became the default home for
1:48:53the elderly with dementia decades before
1:48:56nursing homes existed as a category. A
1:48:59significant fraction of the asylum
1:49:01population in the 20th century was old
1:49:03people with what we would now call
1:49:05Alzheimer's.
1:49:07And part of it is a cause that has
1:49:09completely vanished from memory. And
1:49:11this one genuinely startled me.
1:49:13Syphilis. In the late stage of untreated
1:49:16syphilis, the infection reaches the
1:49:18brain and it produces a condition that
1:49:20was called general parasis of the
1:49:22insane. grandiosity, delusion,
1:49:25personality collapse, dementia, and
1:49:28death. And in the early 20th century,
1:49:31general parasis accounted for a very
1:49:33large share of male first admissions to
1:49:35asylums. In some institutions, in some
1:49:38years, the figure runs as high as one in
1:49:40five. There was no cure. Then in the
1:49:431940s, penicellin arrived and became
1:49:45widely available. And within about 15
1:49:48years, an entire category of madness
1:49:50simply disappeared from the wards. Think
1:49:53about what that means. There was a
1:49:55specific physical infectious cause
1:49:58behind a large fraction of the insanity
1:50:00of that era and we eliminated it and now
1:50:03nobody remembers it was ever there.
1:50:06Alcoholism pelagra which is a nasin
1:50:09deficiency that produces dementia and
1:50:11was epidemic in the American South and
1:50:13lead exposure account for more of it. So
1:50:16did people go mad in unusual numbers at
1:50:19the turn of the century? My honest
1:50:21answer, having gone through this
1:50:23properly, is that the rise is real, that
1:50:26it is largely explained by counting
1:50:28changes, urbanization, the warehousing
1:50:31of the elderly, and a set of physical
1:50:33diseases we have since defeated, and
1:50:35that the leftover unexplained portion is
1:50:38smaller than I once thought, and the
1:50:40abuse was absolutely real. People were
1:50:43committed against their will, and the
1:50:45standard for committing a woman on her
1:50:47husband's word was disgracefully low for
1:50:49a long time.
1:50:51solitary confinement, restraint, insulin
1:50:54shock, and later lobotomy, which won a
1:50:56Nobel Prize in 1949 and was performed
1:50:59tens of thousands of times in the United
1:51:01States, much of it by one man traveling
1:51:03with an ice pick. That is not a
1:51:06conspiracy theory. That is documented
1:51:09medical history, and it is worse than
1:51:11most conspiracy theories. But it was not
1:51:14a system built to silence people who
1:51:15remembered a previous civilization. It
1:51:18was a system built out of ignorance,
1:51:20overcrowding, and the ordinary
1:51:22institutional cruelty of people who had
1:51:24too many patients, no effective
1:51:26treatments, and no oversight. I would
1:51:29rather tell you the true version. The
1:51:31true version is bad enough. Now, let's
1:51:34talk about the ground. Go to almost any
1:51:36American or European city with a 19th
1:51:39century core and start looking down. You
1:51:43will find windows below the sidewalk.
1:51:45You will find doorways that open into
1:51:47dirt. You will find the tops of arches
1:51:50at ankle height. You will find whole
1:51:52floors of buildings that are underground
1:51:54and were clearly not designed to be. And
1:51:57in a lot of cities, you will find tunnel
1:52:00systems running between buildings that
1:52:02officially nobody can quite account for.
1:52:05Once you start seeing it, you cannot
1:52:07stop. And I know that from personal
1:52:09experience because it is what got me
1:52:11into this subject in the first place.
1:52:14The mud flood hypothesis says that a
1:52:16cataclysm, relatively recent, deposited
1:52:19a layer of sediment across the northern
1:52:21hemisphere, burying the lower levels of
1:52:23an earlier civilization's buildings, and
1:52:26that the survivors dug out what they
1:52:28could, and the event was written out of
1:52:29history. Here is the honest answer, and
1:52:33I want to give it fully because it is
1:52:35the strongest counterargument in this
1:52:36entire field, and because the real story
1:52:39is one of the most astonishing
1:52:41engineering feats in American history.
1:52:43and almost nobody knows it. Cities
1:52:46raised their own streets deliberately on
1:52:49purpose by hand. Chicago 1855 to about
1:52:531870. The city was built on a swamp
1:52:56barely above the level of the lake and
1:52:58it had no drainage. Sewage sat in the
1:53:01streets and Kalera killed people every
1:53:03summer. The engineering solution was to
1:53:06build a sewer system on top of the
1:53:08existing ground and then raise the
1:53:10entire city to meet it. Streets were
1:53:12lifted by 4 to 14 ft. And they did not
1:53:16knock the buildings down, they jacked
1:53:18them up. Crews put thousands of screw
1:53:21jacks under a building's foundation, and
1:53:24men turned them a fraction of a turn at
1:53:27a time on a signal, and the building
1:53:29went up while it stayed open for
1:53:31business. In 1858, they raised a masonry
1:53:35building of about 750 tons. In 1861, a
1:53:40crew raised an entire city block about
1:53:42320 ft of masonry frontage altogether
1:53:46all at once. Hotels stayed open with
1:53:49guests inside. There are contemporary
1:53:52accounts of people who did not notice.
1:53:54One of the men doing this work was a
1:53:56young engineer named George Pullman who
1:53:58used the money and the reputation to go
1:54:00into the railway car business.
1:54:03Now, what happens to a building that got
1:54:05a new sidewalk at the second floor level
1:54:08and did not get jacked? Its ground floor
1:54:11becomes a basement. Its front door
1:54:13becomes a window below the sidewalk. Its
1:54:15arched entry ends up at your knees. That
1:54:18is what you are looking at. Seattle did
1:54:21the same thing after the fire of 1889,
1:54:24regrading the ruined district and
1:54:26leaving the old street level intact
1:54:27underneath. And today, you can buy a
1:54:30ticket and walk through it. The Seattle
1:54:32Underground is a tourist attraction.
1:54:35It is the buried city and it is buried
1:54:38because they buried it and the receipts
1:54:40are in the municipal archive. Sacramento
1:54:43raised its streets in the 1860s and 70s
1:54:46after repeated flooding from the
1:54:48American River and you can walk that
1:54:50underground too. And where there was no
1:54:53deliberate regrade, ordinary processes
1:54:56do the rest. Cities accumulate. Every
1:54:59repaving adds inches. Demolition rubble
1:55:02gets spread rather than hauled. Rome's
1:55:04ancient street level is many meters down
1:55:07and nobody proposes a cataclysm for it
1:55:09because we watched it happen. So I have
1:55:12to be straight with you. For the great
1:55:14majority of the buried ground floors
1:55:16that get posted online, the answer is
1:55:18street grade raising and urban
1:55:20accumulation and the documentation is
1:55:22thorough. Do I think that closes every
1:55:25case? No. And here is where I still have
1:55:27questions. Not every buried structure is
1:55:31in a city that regraded. There are rural
1:55:33buildings and buildings in towns with no
1:55:36engineering history at all where the
1:55:38lower course is below grade in ways that
1:55:40are not obviously explained. There is a
1:55:44real and unglamorous answer available
1:55:46for a lot of those too, which is that
1:55:49soil moves, hillsides creep, and
1:55:52buildings settle. But I have seen
1:55:54individual cases where I have not found
1:55:56a satisfying answer. And I am not going
1:55:58to pretend I have. What I have stopped
1:56:01believing is the global version. A
1:56:04hemispheric sediment event within the
1:56:06last few hundred years would leave an
1:56:08unmistakable geological signature. A
1:56:10single datable layer visible in cores,
1:56:13in river banks, in lake beds, in ice,
1:56:16everywhere at once. Nothing like that
1:56:19exists in the record. and it would be
1:56:21very hard to hide from every geologist
1:56:23on Earth, including hostile ones. What I
1:56:27do still believe, and this has not
1:56:29changed, is that our sense of how much
1:56:31of the built past has been erased is far
1:56:33too low. The buildings that came down in
1:56:37American cities between 1950 and 1980 in
1:56:40the name of urban renewal amount to a
1:56:43cultural loss on the scale of a war and
1:56:45it was done by ordinary planning
1:56:47committees with federal money on the
1:56:48record in living memory. We did not need
1:56:51a flood. We had highway funding. They
1:56:54are everywhere and they all look the
1:56:56same. a low geometric fortification,
1:57:00walls sloped rather than vertical, laid
1:57:02out in a star with projecting angular
1:57:05points. You find them in Italy, the
1:57:07Netherlands, France, Spain, Russia,
1:57:11India, Japan, Africa, the Caribbean, and
1:57:15up and down the American coast.
1:57:18Thousands of them. and they share a
1:57:20design language so consistent that a
1:57:22fort in Sri Lanka and a fort in Nova
1:57:25Scotia look like they came from the same
1:57:27office. The question that gets asked is
1:57:30a good one. How does one design appear
1:57:32on every continent in an era before
1:57:34global communication?
1:57:36And there is a real answer and I think
1:57:38it is genuinely beautiful and it does
1:57:40not require a lost empire. The star fort
1:57:44is the solution to a math problem. And
1:57:46once you have the problem, the solution
1:57:48is forced. Before gunpowder artillery,
1:57:51you built tall vertical walls because
1:57:54the threat was men with ladders. And a
1:57:56tall wall beats a ladder. Then in the
1:57:5815th century, cannon got good enough to
1:58:01knock a tall vertical wall down. And
1:58:03every high wall in Europe became a
1:58:05liability overnight. So the geometry
1:58:08inverted. Low so there is less to hit.
1:58:11thick and packed with earth behind the
1:58:13masonry because earth absorbs a
1:58:16cannonball where stone shatters sloped
1:58:19so shot deflects instead of striking
1:58:21square that solves the artillery problem
1:58:24and creates a new one. A low thick wall
1:58:26can be climbed so you need to cover the
1:58:28base of your own wall with fire and a
1:58:30round tower cannot do that because a
1:58:32round tower always has a blind spot
1:58:34directly beneath it. The answer is the
1:58:37angled bastion. Push a wedge out from
1:58:39the wall and from the flanks of that
1:58:41wedge you can shoot along the face of
1:58:42the adjacent wall. Do that at every
1:58:45corner and every point covers its
1:58:46neighbor. No blind ground anywhere. Now
1:58:50why does it look like a star? Because
1:58:52that is what covering every angle looks
1:58:54like when you draw it. The star is not a
1:58:56symbol. It is the shape of the answer.
1:58:59This was worked out in Italy in the late
1:59:0114 and early 1500s which is why it was
1:59:05called the trace italen. It spread
1:59:08through Europe fast because the
1:59:10alternative was losing.
1:59:12It was systematized by Voban in France
1:59:15in the 1600s who built and rebuilt
1:59:17something on the order of 160 of them.
1:59:20And Voban's treatises were the
1:59:22engineering textbooks of Europe. And
1:59:24then European powers built colonies and
1:59:27the colonies needed defending against
1:59:29European artillery. So European military
1:59:32engineers went out and built the same
1:59:34thing everywhere they went. The design
1:59:37travels because the empires travel and
1:59:39because the physics does not change from
1:59:42one continent to another. Same problem,
1:59:45same math, same answer. That is why they
1:59:48look alike. And the sunken appearance,
1:59:51which people point at as evidence of
1:59:53burial, is intentional. You wanted the
1:59:55fort low relative to the surrounding
1:59:58ground. Many were built in a dug ditch
2:00:01with a glacius, a gentle earthn slope
2:00:04rising in front of them. so that an
2:00:06attacker coming over the slope is
2:00:08exposed and the fort itself presents
2:00:10almost nothing to shoot at. A star fort
2:00:13that looks buried is a star fort working
2:00:15as designed. So this one I think is
2:00:18closed and I think the true answer is
2:00:20more satisfying than the mystery. Human
2:00:23beings in different centuries and
2:00:25different continents facing the same
2:00:27physics arrived at the same form. That
2:00:30is not a conspiracy. That is what
2:00:32engineering is. Now, we have spent this
2:00:36entire part taking things apart. I have
2:00:39told you the fires were wooden cities,
2:00:41the fairs were plaster, the buried
2:00:43floors were jacked up on purpose, and
2:00:46the star fors are a geometry problem.
2:00:49So, let me now tell you the one in this
2:00:51whole field that I have not been able to
2:00:53take apart. The one where I have looked
2:00:55for the boring explanation and found
2:00:57that the boring explanation does not
2:00:59fully cover it. It is about sound. Part
2:01:03five. I have spent the last hour telling
2:01:06you that the boring explanation is
2:01:08usually right. Now, I want to tell you
2:01:11about the place where I went looking for
2:01:13the boring explanation, found it, and
2:01:16discovered that the boring explanation
2:01:18is far more extraordinary than the
2:01:20theory it was supposed to replace.
2:01:22Here is the claim in its popular form.
2:01:25Old world churches and cathedrals were
2:01:28built as resonance machines. The bells,
2:01:30the organs, the spires, the domes, the
2:01:33stained glass were not decoration and
2:01:35not merely worship. They were a
2:01:37technology tuned to specific frequencies
2:01:40producing effects on matter and on human
2:01:43consciousness that we have forgotten how
2:01:45to name. The mainstream response is that
2:01:48this is nonsense, that these are
2:01:50churches, that the acoustics are a
2:01:53byproduct of building big rooms out of
2:01:55stone, and that people are pattern
2:01:57matching on pretty buildings.
2:02:00Both of those are wrong and I can prove
2:02:02it and the proof is in the walls. Start
2:02:05here. If you go into certain Byzantine
2:02:08and medieval churches in Greece, in the
2:02:11Balkans, in Russia, in Scandinavia, in
2:02:14England, and you look up into the vaults
2:02:16in the upper walls, you will find holes,
2:02:19round openings set into the masonry in
2:02:22regular patterns. And behind each of
2:02:24those openings built into the fabric of
2:02:27the wall, is a ceramic pot. They are
2:02:30called acoustic vessels or resonance
2:02:33jars. And there are hundreds of
2:02:35documented examples across Europe. This
2:02:38is not a fringe claim. It is standard
2:02:40archaeology. It has been written about
2:02:42in scholarly literature for over a
2:02:45century, and you can go and look at
2:02:47them. Here is what they do. A vessel
2:02:50with a narrow neck and an enclosed
2:02:52volume of air is a Helmholtz resonator.
2:02:55It has a natural frequency determined by
2:02:57its dimensions. Blow across a bottle and
2:03:00you hear it. Now embed that in a wall,
2:03:03mouth outward in a room made of hard
2:03:05stone.
2:03:06Sound at the vessel's frequency drives
2:03:09the air in the neck and energy at that
2:03:11specific frequency gets absorbed and
2:03:14damped. In other words, these builders
2:03:17were installing frequency selective
2:03:19acoustic treatment inside the structure
2:03:21of the wall. Now, exactly what effect
2:03:24they were after is genuinely debated.
2:03:27Some researchers argue the goal was to
2:03:29reduce excessive reverberation at
2:03:32particular pitches so that chant stayed
2:03:34intelligible. Others argue the goal was
2:03:36the opposite, to enrich the sound.
2:03:39Medieval writers who mention them say
2:03:41they were placed to improve the singing.
2:03:44But the debate about the purpose does
2:03:46not touch the fact and the fact is
2:03:48enormous. Builders in the 9th, 10th,
2:03:5111th, 12th centuries were tuning rooms
2:03:55deliberately with frequency dependent
2:03:57devices hidden inside the walls
2:03:59invisible to the congregation placed
2:04:02according to a plan. That is not a
2:04:04mystical claim. That is engineering
2:04:07acoustics and it is centuries older than
2:04:09the science that explains why it works.
2:04:12Helm Holtz published his work on
2:04:14resonators in the 1800s. The pots in the
2:04:17walls are from the 1100s.
2:04:19So when somebody says these buildings
2:04:21were tuned, the correct response is not
2:04:24that is ridiculous. The correct response
2:04:26is yes. And here is the archaeology. Now
2:04:29let's keep going because it gets better.
2:04:32Consider the organ. A great pipe organ
2:04:35is the most complex machine that existed
2:04:37in the pre-industrial world. And I do
2:04:39not say that loosely. Thousands of
2:04:41pipes, wind chests, bellows, trackers,
2:04:44stops, a machine that fills a building
2:04:47the size of a cathedral, built by hand,
2:04:50without electricity, and tuned. And in
2:04:53the largest instruments, there is a rank
2:04:55of pipes called the 32 ft stop. A pipe
2:04:59that long produces a fundamental around
2:05:0116 hertz. 16 hertz is at or below the
2:05:05bottom edge of human hearing. You do not
2:05:08hear that note. You feel it. It moves
2:05:11the air in your chest cavity and it
2:05:13moves the stone floor under your feet.
2:05:16And there is a real and documented
2:05:18literature on infrasound around and
2:05:20below 20 hertz producing unease, awe,
2:05:24chills, a sense of presence, and a
2:05:26feeling that the space is inhabited.
2:05:29This has been studied experimentally,
2:05:32including in a well-known set of concert
2:05:34experiments where infrasound was
2:05:36introduced into music without the
2:05:37audience being told, and the audience
2:05:40reported significantly more intense and
2:05:42stranger experiences during the passages
2:05:45that contained it. So somebody built a
2:05:47machine at fantastic expense capable of
2:05:51generating frequencies below the
2:05:52threshold of hearing and installed it in
2:05:55a stone room designed to sustain them in
2:05:58order to produce in a gathered crowd a
2:06:00physical sensation of awe. If that is
2:06:03not a technology for acting on human
2:06:05consciousness through architecture, I do
2:06:07not know what would qualify. And now the
2:06:10bells. A cast bronze bell is not one
2:06:13note. It is a chord. A well-made bell
2:06:17produces a specific set of partials, and
2:06:19the great bell founders learn to control
2:06:21them by shaping the profile of the
2:06:23casting so that the hum note, the prime,
2:06:26the minor third, the fifth, and the
2:06:28octave stand in defined relationships.
2:06:31The tuning was refined by shaving metal
2:06:34from the inside on a lathe. That craft
2:06:37was developed to a very high level in
2:06:39Europe and then it was substantially
2:06:41lost and then it had to be rediscovered
2:06:43in the 20th century by studying old
2:06:46bells and working backward.
2:06:49That is a real instance of technological
2:06:51loss. A skill that was widespread that
2:06:54produced objects nobody could replicate
2:06:56for generations and that had to be
2:06:59reverse engineered from surviving
2:07:00artifacts. And bells were understood to
2:07:03do things beyond calling people to
2:07:05church. They were rung against storms.
2:07:08They were rung against plague. They were
2:07:10rung to mark death and to drive off what
2:07:12was believed to accompany it. That is
2:07:14not evidence that they worked in the way
2:07:16intended. But it is evidence of what the
2:07:19builders thought they were doing. And
2:07:20the builders thought they were operating
2:07:22on the world, not just signaling the
2:07:24time. Now the specific claim I have
2:07:28heard many times and which I have
2:07:30repeated is that all the bells were
2:07:32removed after the second world war. I
2:07:35went and looked into it and the truth is
2:07:38not what I said and it is much darker.
2:07:41Bells were removed on an enormous scale
2:07:43during both world wars and the reason
2:07:46was bronze. Bell metal is roughly 80%
2:07:49copper and 20% tin and copper is a
2:07:52strategic war material.
2:07:54Germany requisitioned church bells at
2:07:56scale in the first world war and again
2:07:59in the second and so did other
2:08:01belligerents.
2:08:03In Hamburg there was a collection yard
2:08:05where the confiscated bells from across
2:08:07German occupied Europe were gathered
2:08:09before being melted down. Tens of
2:08:12thousands of them stacked in a field
2:08:14waiting to be turned into shell casings
2:08:16and cartridge cases. Photographs of it
2:08:19exist. It was called the Bell Cemetery.
2:08:23After the war, a portion of the
2:08:25surviving stock was sorted and where the
2:08:27origin could be identified, returned.
2:08:30Many were never identified and were
2:08:31redistributed to churches that had lost
2:08:33theirs. And a great many were simply
2:08:36gone, nted, fired at somebody and buried
2:08:39in the ground of Europe. So the bells
2:08:41did come down, not to suppress a
2:08:43technology, to make ammunition, which
2:08:46is, if you think about it for a second,
2:08:48a far bleeer sentence than the
2:08:50conspiracy version. 600 years of the
2:08:54highest acoustic craft in Europe, cast
2:08:56by hand, tuned by ear, hanging in towers
2:08:59for 20 generations, taken down, and
2:09:02converted into artillery shells inside
2:09:04of 5 years. That happened, and it is
2:09:08documented, and hardly anyone knows it.
2:09:11So, here is where I land on the
2:09:13resonance question. Everything in the
2:09:15mainstream account is true, and the
2:09:17mainstream account is much stranger than
2:09:19its defenders led on. These buildings
2:09:22were acoustically engineered. There are
2:09:25frequency tuned devices inside their
2:09:27walls. They contain machines capable of
2:09:30producing infrasound. They were fitted
2:09:32with precisely tuned bronze instruments
2:09:35whose manufacturing knowledge was
2:09:37genuinely lost and had to be recovered.
2:09:39and the builders understood themselves
2:09:41to be doing something to the people
2:09:43inside and to the world outside. What I
2:09:46do not have evidence for, and I want to
2:09:48be clean about this, is the further
2:09:50claim. I cannot show you that these
2:09:52frequencies healed anybody. I cannot
2:09:54show you that a spire collects
2:09:56atmospheric electricity. I cannot show
2:09:59you a mechanism by which a stained glass
2:10:01window does anything other than what a
2:10:03window does. Those claims are made
2:10:05confidently online and I have not seen
2:10:07the measurements and I have looked. So
2:10:10my position is this. The old world
2:10:12buildings really were built to do
2:10:14something to you that is proven. What
2:10:16exactly and how far it went is open. And
2:10:20on that open question I want to
2:10:22introduce a man who took it further than
2:10:24anyone. Constantine Male is a German
2:10:27professor of electrical engineering. In
2:10:302004, he published a book in German. And
2:10:32in 2014, it appeared in English called
2:10:36Broadcasting of the Gods.
2:10:38And before I tell you what is in it, I
2:10:41have to tell you something that I think
2:10:42most people who cite this book have not
2:10:44noticed. And it changes everything about
2:10:47how you should read it. Male labels his
2:10:49own book historical science fiction on
2:10:52the cover, on the title page, in the
2:10:55preface. He explains why in the preface,
2:10:59and I find his reasoning honest and
2:11:01rather charming. He says the subject
2:11:04would really only be satisfied by an
2:11:06adventure novel, but that the technical
2:11:08content demands a non-fiction treatment,
2:11:11and the historical content demands a
2:11:13history book, and so he has written
2:11:15something that is all three at once. He
2:11:18says openly that he is an engineer and
2:11:20not a professional historian, and that
2:11:23his critics may take comfort in that. He
2:11:25says his aim is that the imagination
2:11:27should find recognition and entry into
2:11:30the textbooks and that he cannot affect
2:11:32that judgment himself.
2:11:34That is a man being straight with his
2:11:36reader. And I think the people who
2:11:38present this book as suppressed proof
2:11:39are doing him a disservice because what
2:11:42he actually wrote is more interesting
2:11:44than that. He wrote a thought experiment
2:11:46and he did it with real numbers. Here is
2:11:49the structure. The narrator is
2:11:51Lactantius, the real historical scholar
2:11:54who tutored the young Constantine, later
2:11:57Constantine the Great, at the imperial
2:11:59palace in Nicamedia around the year 304.
2:12:03Lactantius is teaching the boy lesson by
2:12:05lesson the secret technical knowledge
2:12:07behind the sanctuaries of the gods. And
2:12:10the thesis is this. The great temples of
2:12:13the ancient world were not primarily
2:12:15places of worship. They were transmitter
2:12:17and receiver stations. The voice of the
2:12:19god that issued from the sanctuary was a
2:12:21broadcast. The oracle was a receiver.
2:12:25And the priesthood was the operating
2:12:27staff of a communication network. The
2:12:30mechanism he proposes is a cavity
2:12:32resonator. A closed conductive room of
2:12:35the right dimensions supports standing
2:12:37electromagnetic waves at frequencies set
2:12:40by its size. In the same way that an
2:12:42organ pipe of a given length supports a
2:12:44particular note, modern engineers use
2:12:47exactly this principle in waveguides and
2:12:50cavity resonators for microwaves.
2:12:53Male's argument is that the ancient
2:12:55builders were using it at much lower
2:12:57frequencies in the short wave range and
2:13:00that at those wavelengths the required
2:13:02dimensions are tens of meters which is
2:13:04why the buildings had to be so large.
2:13:07And then he does the thing that makes
2:13:09the book worth reading, which is that he
2:13:11takes measurements off actual temple
2:13:13plans and computes what frequency each
2:13:16one would correspond to. He works
2:13:18through the successive temples of Hera
2:13:20on the island of Seamos. He treats the
2:13:23cella of the third temple of Hera at 49
2:13:2612 m as tuned to about 3.03 03 megahertz
2:13:31and he calls it probably the most
2:13:33powerful shortwave transmitter of its
2:13:35time around 540 BC and then he takes the
2:13:38fourth temple the one polycrates began
2:13:41at 55 m and computes 2.7 megahertz and
2:13:45argues that this frequency was
2:13:47unfavorable and notes the historical
2:13:49fact that this enormous temple with its
2:13:52155 columns was never finished. That is
2:13:56his method throughout. The temple of
2:13:59Zeus at Agriento as an experimental
2:14:02transmitter.
2:14:03The ziggurats of Babylon as transmitter
2:14:06towers. Carnac in Britany as a longwave
2:14:09installation.
2:14:11The Pantheon in Rome, that perfect
2:14:13concrete dome with the open oculus as a
2:14:16broadband transmitter for all the gods
2:14:18at once, which is what the word pantheon
2:14:20literally means. and he reads the office
2:14:23of Pontifix Maximus, the chief priest of
2:14:25Rome, as the administrator of the
2:14:27network, the man who allocated the
2:14:30channels, the pyramids he treats
2:14:32differently, as power rather than
2:14:34communication. His argument there is
2:14:37that the structure functions
2:14:38electrostatically,
2:14:40that the conductive cap and the ball
2:14:42electrode at the apex accumulate charge,
2:14:45that the interior must be filled with
2:14:47dialectric material for the discharge to
2:14:49occur at the top rather than inside, and
2:14:52that this is what the shafts and voids
2:14:54are for, and that when the charge was
2:14:56sufficient and a discharge occurred, the
2:14:59flash was visible across the whole
2:15:01country, and the pharaoh who commanded
2:15:02it was demonstrating to every subject
2:15:04who was mass master of the forces of
2:15:06nature. Now, what do I actually think of
2:15:10this? I want to give you both halves
2:15:13honestly. What is wrong with it, or at
2:15:16least unsupported?
2:15:18The physics does not work as stated, and
2:15:20I say that as someone who wishes it did.
2:15:23A stone temple is not a conductive
2:15:25cavity. Limestone and marble are
2:15:28dialectrics, not conductors. And a
2:15:30resonant cavity needs conductive walls
2:15:33to confine the field. An open colonade
2:15:36is not a closed cavity in any case. It
2:15:39is a structure with enormous gaps. There
2:15:41is no power source identified that could
2:15:44drive such a transmitter. There is no
2:15:46evidence of the receiving apparatus at
2:15:48the other end. In male's broader
2:15:51theoretical framework, the scalar wave
2:15:54and potential vortex work that he
2:15:56references is not accepted by mainstream
2:15:58physics and it is fair to say it has not
2:16:01survived independent replication.
2:16:04[clears throat] Also, and this matters,
2:16:06the dimensions of ancient temples are
2:16:08known to follow proportional systems
2:16:10based on the column diameter and
2:16:11traditional ratios, which is a well
2:16:14doumented design method that fully
2:16:16accounts for why the numbers come out
2:16:18where they do. If you compute
2:16:20frequencies from any set of dimensions,
2:16:22you will always get frequencies. The
2:16:25numbers landing in the shortwave band is
2:16:27a consequence of the buildings being
2:16:29tens of meters long and buildings of
2:16:32that era are tens of meters long for
2:16:34structural and lurggical reasons. Now
2:16:37the other half, what is genuinely
2:16:39valuable in it? Male is asking a
2:16:43question that historians of the ancient
2:16:45world mostly do not ask and the question
2:16:48is legitimate.
2:16:50Why are these buildings this size? The
2:16:53standard answer is prestige and worship.
2:16:56And that is probably right. But notice
2:16:59that it is an answer of the same type as
2:17:01Nashville is the Athens of the South. It
2:17:03restates the observation in respectable
2:17:06language. Male looked at a temple and
2:17:08asked, "What would this be if it were
2:17:11equipment?" And that is the reflex of an
2:17:13engineer. And it is a genuinely useful
2:17:15reflex to bring to material that has
2:17:17only ever been examined by classicists
2:17:19and theologians. And here is the part
2:17:22that I think is his strongest
2:17:23contribution and it is not the physics
2:17:26at all. He points out that when an
2:17:28ancient author writes that a message was
2:17:30sent and the answer arrived immediately,
2:17:33we translate that as a metaphor or as an
2:17:36exaggeration because we assume they
2:17:39could not [clears throat] have meant it.
2:17:41And he notes correctly that the
2:17:43translators assumptions determine the
2:17:46translation. A scholar trained in Latin
2:17:48and Greek with no technical background
2:17:51will render an ambiguous passage in the
2:17:53non-technical direction every time
2:17:55because that is the only direction he
2:17:57can see. That is a real epistemological
2:18:00point and it applies far beyond this
2:18:03subject. We read the past through the
2:18:05vocabulary we brought with us. So my
2:18:08verdict on male as physics I do not
2:18:11think it holds and I am not going to
2:18:13tell you otherwise. As a way of looking,
2:18:16I think it is worth your time. He built
2:18:18the most rigorous version of the ancient
2:18:21technology idea that anyone has built.
2:18:23He did it with numbers rather than
2:18:25vibes. He published his reasoning so it
2:18:28can be checked. And he told you on the
2:18:30cover of his own book that it was
2:18:32fiction. Compare that to the way this
2:18:34material usually gets presented on the
2:18:36internet with no author, no method, no
2:18:39numbers, and total certainty. The
2:18:41engineer who calls his work fiction is
2:18:44being more honest than the anonymous
2:18:46account that calls its work proof. And
2:18:49that brings us to the man both of them
2:18:51are really talking about. Every
2:18:54conversation about lost technology
2:18:56eventually arrives at Nicola Tesla. And
2:18:58I want to do him properly because I
2:19:00think Tesla is misused by my own side of
2:19:03this argument in a way that actually
2:19:05diminishes him. Let's start with what he
2:19:08really did because it is enough.
2:19:10Tesla developed the polyphase
2:19:12alternating current system that the
2:19:14entire electrified world runs on. Every
2:19:18power line you have ever driven under is
2:19:20his. He built the induction motor. He
2:19:23did foundational work on rotating
2:19:26magnetic fields, on radio frequency
2:19:28transmission, on wireless remote
2:19:30control, which he demonstrated with a
2:19:33radiocrolled boat in Madison Square
2:19:35Garden in 1898 to an audience that
2:19:38partly assumed it was a trick or
2:19:40telepathy. He built resonant
2:19:42transformers that produced the enormous
2:19:44discharges everybody has seen. That is
2:19:48one of the great engineering careers in
2:19:50human history and none of it is
2:19:52disputed. Now, the tower. In 1899 and
2:19:571900, Tesla worked at a laboratory in
2:19:59Colorado Springs where he built a very
2:20:02large resonant transformer and conducted
2:20:05experiments on transmitting power
2:20:07without wires. He reported lighting
2:20:10lamps at a distance. He reported
2:20:12artificial lightning over a 100 ft long.
2:20:15He reported detecting signals he thought
2:20:17might be extraterrestrial, which were
2:20:20probably from Jupiter's radio emissions.
2:20:22And either way, it was a genuine
2:20:24observation of a real phenomenon he had
2:20:27no framework for. Then he came back east
2:20:30and persuaded JP Morgan to fund a
2:20:32facility at Shoreham on Long Island.
2:20:35Warden Cliff, a tower about 187 ft tall
2:20:39with a large domed electrode on top and
2:20:42a shaft driven deep into the ground
2:20:43beneath it. His stated plan publicly was
2:20:47a system of world telegraphy, global
2:20:50wireless communication. His private
2:20:52plan, which he later described openly,
2:20:55was that the same installation would
2:20:57transmit electrical power itself to
2:20:59anywhere on Earth to be drawn off by
2:21:01anyone with a receiver. It was never
2:21:04completed. Morgan stopped funding it.
2:21:07Tesla lost the property in 1917, and the
2:21:10tower was demolished for scrap. Now, why
2:21:13did the funding stop? This is where the
2:21:15popular story and the documented story
2:21:18diverge, and the documented story is sad
2:21:21rather than sinister. The usual version
2:21:24is that Morgan realized he could not put
2:21:26a meter on it and killed it to protect
2:21:28his interests.
2:21:30There is something to that. Tesla
2:21:32himself said something close to it, and
2:21:34Morgan was exactly the kind of man who
2:21:36thought in those terms. But here is the
2:21:39fuller picture. In December 1901, while
2:21:42Warden Cliff was still being built,
2:21:45Maronei transmitted a signal across the
2:21:47Atlantic with equipment that was vastly
2:21:49simpler and vastly cheaper. Whatever the
2:21:52priority disputes about who invented
2:21:54what, and Tesla's patent claims were
2:21:56later vindicated, the commercial
2:21:58question was settled in that moment.
2:22:00Morgan had funded a communication
2:22:02system, and somebody else had just
2:22:04delivered communication for a fraction
2:22:05of the cost. Tesla then went back to
2:22:08Morgan and asked for more money and in
2:22:10doing so revealed that the project was
2:22:12actually much bigger and more expensive
2:22:14than what he had pitched because it was
2:22:16really about power transmission. Morgan
2:22:19declined. There were also the financial
2:22:22conditions of 1901 and 1907 and Morgan
2:22:26had other problems and underneath all of
2:22:29it there is a physics problem that I
2:22:30have to be honest about because it is
2:22:32the one thing the Tesla story usually
2:22:34omits. Wireless power transmission is
2:22:37real. It is in your phone charger. It
2:22:40works at short range by near field
2:22:43coupling. What has never been
2:22:44demonstrated by Tesla or by anyone since
2:22:48is efficient power transmission at
2:22:50global distances. Energy spreads out.
2:22:53That is what energy does. Tesla believed
2:22:56he had a method that avoided the
2:22:58spreading using the Earth itself and its
2:23:00upper atmosphere as a resonant system.
2:23:03And he was extremely confident about it.
2:23:06He never demonstrated it. Not at
2:23:08Colorado Springs, not at Warden Clive,
2:23:10not anywhere, and not in the notebooks.
2:23:13So, did they suppress Tesla? My honest
2:23:16answer after going through this
2:23:18carefully is that they did not have to.
2:23:20And I think what actually happened to
2:23:22him is worse than suppression and more
2:23:24instructive. Tesla was not silenced. He
2:23:28was ignored and then he was out competed
2:23:30and then he ran out of money and then he
2:23:32got old. He gave interviews to
2:23:35newspapers until the end of his life in
2:23:37which he described increasingly grand
2:23:39devices and the papers printed them as
2:23:43human interest curiosities about the
2:23:45eccentric old inventor at the hotel. He
2:23:48died in 1943 in a room at the New Yorker
2:23:52in debt feeding pigeons.
2:23:55And here is the detail that everybody
2:23:57uses to prove this suppression and which
2:23:59I think actually proves the opposite.
2:24:02After his death, the federal government
2:24:04did seize his papers. That is true. The
2:24:08Office of Alien Property took them and
2:24:10the FBI was involved.
2:24:13But then they had them examined by an
2:24:14electrical engineer named John Trump at
2:24:17MIT who was a serious man and as it
2:24:20happens, the uncle of a president. And
2:24:23Trump's report concluded that the
2:24:25material was primarily speculative and
2:24:28philosophical and that it did not
2:24:30contain a workable new principle or a
2:24:33device that could be developed. Most of
2:24:36the papers were eventually released to
2:24:37his family and are in the Tesla Museum
2:24:39in Bgrade.
2:24:41Now you can believe the report was a
2:24:43cover. I understand the impulse, but
2:24:46consider the alternative, which is that
2:24:48a brilliant man in his last decades kept
2:24:50describing machines he could no longer
2:24:52build. and the government checked, found
2:24:54nothing usable and let it go. That is
2:24:57the version I believe and I think it
2:24:59should make you angrier than the
2:25:00conspiracy version, not less angry
2:25:03because the loss was real. It just was
2:25:06not stolen from us. We threw it away
2:25:08slowly through indifference by declining
2:25:11to fund the one man who was thinking
2:25:13further ahead than anyone else because a
2:25:15cheaper product got to market first and
2:25:18because his backer preferred a quarterly
2:25:20return. That is how societies actually
2:25:23lose things. Not to a cabal, to a
2:25:26spreadsheet. And that in one sentence is
2:25:29the thesis of this entire documentary.
2:25:33Now we come to the last part. And this
2:25:35is the part I promised you at the
2:25:36beginning. And it is the part that most
2:25:38videos in this genre never do. I am
2:25:41going to argue against myself. For the
2:25:44last several hours, I have been making a
2:25:47case. Now, I am going to try to take it
2:25:49apart. I want to explain why because I
2:25:53know some of you are going to hate this
2:25:54section. If a thing is true, attacking
2:25:58it makes it stronger. Every real
2:26:00historical claim in the world has
2:26:02survived people trying to knock it down,
2:26:04and that is the only reason we trust any
2:26:07of them. A claim that has never been
2:26:09tested is not a strong claim. It is an
2:26:12untested one, and there is no way to
2:26:14tell the difference from the inside. So
2:26:17I am going to give you the four best
2:26:19arguments against what I have said. Not
2:26:22the lazy ones, not the ones where
2:26:24somebody calls us crazy and leaves. The
2:26:26four arguments that a serious historian
2:26:29who had actually read the material would
2:26:31make. I am going to argue them as hard
2:26:34as I can. And I am going to argue them
2:26:36in good faith, which means I am not
2:26:38going to build them weak so I can knock
2:26:40them over. And then I am going to tell
2:26:43you which parts of my case survive and
2:26:46which parts do not. Some of them do not.
2:26:50This is the strongest objection and it
2:26:52deserves to go first. The argument runs
2:26:55like this. Tartaria is what is called an
2:26:58exonym. It is a name applied from the
2:27:01outside. No ruler ever sat on a throne
2:27:04and called himself emperor of Tartaria.
2:27:07No embassy ever presented credentials
2:27:09from the Tartarian state. There is no
2:27:12Tartarian treasury, no Tartarian legal
2:27:15code, no Tartarian capital that the
2:27:17Tartarians themselves called the capital
2:27:20of Tartaria.
2:27:21What existed were specific polities with
2:27:24specific names, the Golden Horde, the
2:27:27Connate of Kazan, the Connate of Crimea,
2:27:30the Connate of Cibir, the Nogi Horde,
2:27:33the Timurid State, the Chagatai realm.
2:27:36These were real. They had rulers, coins,
2:27:39chanceries, and borders, and they
2:27:42frequently fought each other. Tartaria
2:27:44was the word Europeans used for the
2:27:46enormous area those polities occupied,
2:27:50plus everything beyond it they had not
2:27:52surveyed. And when a European cgrapher
2:27:55wrote Tartaria Magna across the middle
2:27:57of Asia, he was doing something closer
2:28:00to what a modern map does when it writes
2:28:02the Middle East. That is a real label
2:28:04for a real region and it is not the name
2:28:07of a state. And the objection continues,
2:28:11the disappearance is explained by the
2:28:13same logic. Tartaria vanishes for maps
2:28:16in the 19th century not because a state
2:28:18was destroyed and covered up, but
2:28:20because exploration, surveying, and
2:28:23better ethnography replaced a vague
2:28:25blanket term with precise ones. That is
2:28:28not eraser. That is the map getting
2:28:31better. Now, here is my honest response,
2:28:34and I have to concede a great deal of
2:28:36it. I concede the central point. There
2:28:39was no single unified Tartarian Empire
2:28:41with one throne and one flag governing
2:28:44that entire land mass at any one moment
2:28:46in the way that the popular version
2:28:48implies. When people share a map with
2:28:51Tartaria written across half of Asia and
2:28:53say, "Look, an empire the size of a
2:28:56continent," they are misreading a
2:28:58regional label as a political one. That
2:29:00is a real error. and I have made it
2:29:02myself. Here is what I do not concede.
2:29:06First, the objection proves too much.
2:29:09Apply the same standard to anything
2:29:11else. Nobody in the fifth century said,
2:29:13"I am a Byzantine." That word was
2:29:16invented by a German scholar in 1557, a
2:29:19century after the empire fell. The
2:29:22people we call Byzantines called
2:29:23themselves Romans. Nobody in Mesopotamia
2:29:27in 2000 BC said, "I live in the Middle
2:29:29East." Every large historical category
2:29:32is an outsers's construction imposed
2:29:35after the fact and we do not therefore
2:29:37say the thing did not exist.
2:29:40Second, and more importantly, the
2:29:42objection does not explain the flag. A
2:29:45region does not have an inen in a naval
2:29:48identification chart. BS published that
2:29:51in London in 783 so that captains could
2:29:55tell who was approaching. Nobody prints
2:29:57an inen for the Middle East. You print
2:29:59an inen for something that flies one.
2:30:02Third, it does not explain the pope's
2:30:04letter. Innocent IV did not address an
2:30:07embassy to a geographical region. He
2:30:09addressed it to a ruler. That ruler
2:30:11received it and that ruler wrote back.
2:30:13Regions do not conduct correspondence.
2:30:16Fourth, it does not account for Tuk's
2:30:19grammar. Read that sentence again with
2:30:21this objection in mind. Ever since the
2:30:24Tartarian Empire was in its splendor.
2:30:27That is not the syntax of a region. You
2:30:30do not say ever since the Middle East
2:30:32was in its splendor. He is using a
2:30:34temporal clause that requires a polity
2:30:37with a rise and a decline. And he was a
2:30:40member of the Russian Imperial Academy
2:30:42of Sciences writing a reference work,
2:30:45not a poet reaching for an image. So
2:30:48where does that leave me? I think the
2:30:50accurate formulation, the one I am going
2:30:52to use for now on is this. There was no
2:30:56single continuous Tarian state. There
2:30:59was a Tartar imperial world. A family of
2:31:02related successor states descended from
2:31:05a common political inheritance, sharing
2:31:07a dynastic lineage that traced to
2:31:09Genghis and beyond him to their own
2:31:11ancient genealogy, sharing legal and
2:31:14administrative traditions, sharing
2:31:16heraldry, frequently at war with each
2:31:19other and yet recognizably one
2:31:21civilization.
2:31:23That is exactly what we mean when we say
2:31:25the Islamic world or Christendom or the
2:31:28Henistic world. Nobody demands a single
2:31:31throne before those terms are allowed.
2:31:33And on those terms, the empire is real.
2:31:36It is just not shaped like the popular
2:31:38version says it is shaped. That
2:31:41objection cost me something and I am
2:31:43paying it. This one is sharper and it is
2:31:46aimed at my method rather than my facts.
2:31:49The argument goes like this. Everything
2:31:52you proved is about Tatars. Real Tatars.
2:31:56a real Turk Muslim people who exist
2:31:59today, who have a language and a
2:32:01literature and a national movement,
2:32:04whose history was genuinely suppressed
2:32:06by the Soviet state, and whose
2:32:08descendants are alive right now in Kazan
2:32:11and in Crimea and in exile. And
2:32:14everything you find interesting is about
2:32:16something else entirely, a lost
2:32:18technological super civilization that
2:32:21built the Lincoln Memorial and was
2:32:23buried in mud. You prove the first thing
2:32:26with excellent documents. Then you use
2:32:28the emotional force of having proved it
2:32:30to make the second thing feel supported.
2:32:33But the CIA memo says nothing about
2:32:35American buildings. Took says nothing
2:32:37about free energy. You have proved A and
2:32:41are quietly asking for credit on B. And
2:32:44worse, the objection continues. In doing
2:32:47so, you are using a living people as set
2:32:50dressing for an internet mystery. The
2:32:53Crimean Tatars have an actual historical
2:32:55grievance, an actual deportation, an
2:32:58actual 45-year exile and an actual
2:33:02ongoing political situation.
2:33:04Folding them into a story about mud
2:33:07floods and world's affairs does not
2:33:09honor them. It buries them a second time
2:33:12under someone else's aesthetic. That
2:33:14last part stings, and I want to sit with
2:33:16it rather than deflect it. Here is my
2:33:19response on the logic. The objection is
2:33:23correct and I have tried to answer it
2:33:25structurally rather than rhetorically.
2:33:28That is the entire reason this
2:33:30documentary is built the way it is with
2:33:32the documented material first, the
2:33:35contested material second, the
2:33:37speculation last, and an announcement
2:33:39every time we cross a line. I did not
2:33:42put the CIA memo next to the mud flood.
2:33:46I put 90 minutes between them and I told
2:33:48you exactly what the memo does and does
2:33:50not establish. If I had wanted to run
2:33:53the switch, I would have edited it the
2:33:55other way and I would have opened with
2:33:57the strange photographs which is what
2:33:59gets clicks. On the moral part, I think
2:34:02the objection is half right and I want
2:34:04to take the half seriously. It is
2:34:06half-right because there absolutely is a
2:34:09version of this genre that treats Tatars
2:34:11as scenery where the actual people are
2:34:14irrelevant and what matters is the
2:34:16aesthetic of the Lost Empire and the
2:34:18human beings involved are just texture.
2:34:21I have seen it. I have probably done it.
2:34:24Where I think it is wrong is in assuming
2:34:27that interest cannot lead anywhere good.
2:34:30I did not come to this subject as a
2:34:32scholar of Central Asia. I came to it
2:34:35because I saw a strange building and
2:34:37started pulling a thread. And that
2:34:39thread led me to a 1780 encyclopedia and
2:34:43then to a declassified memo about a
2:34:45directive dated the 9th of August 1944
2:34:49and then to the deportation of 191,000
2:34:52people in 3 days in May of that same
2:34:54year. I did not know any of that before.
2:34:58I know it now and so do you and so will
2:35:00everyone who watches this. The unserious
2:35:04interest was the door. What matters is
2:35:06whether you walk through it and then do
2:35:08the work or whether you stand in the
2:35:11doorway forever posting the same six
2:35:13photographs.
2:35:15I am trying to walk through it. This
2:35:17section is what walking through it looks
2:35:19like. This objection is the most
2:35:22physical and the hardest to answer for
2:35:24the strong version of the theory. If
2:35:27there was an advanced civilization
2:35:29recently with technology beyond ours,
2:35:31then where is it? Not the buildings, the
2:35:34rest of it. Because a technological
2:35:36civilization is not a set of pretty
2:35:39facades. It is an entire material
2:35:41ecology. And that ecology leaves debris
2:35:44that is essentially impossible to
2:35:46remove. Where are the factories that
2:35:48made the components? Where are the mines
2:35:50and the tailings?
2:35:52Where is the metallurgy, the alloys that
2:35:54we cannot reproduce, sitting in museum
2:35:57collections waiting to be tested by
2:35:59anyone with an electron microscope,
2:36:01which is now thousands of laboratories
2:36:03and dozens of countries with no shared
2:36:05interest in a cover story.
2:36:07Where are the failures? Every real
2:36:10technology produces vastly more broken
2:36:12and discarded units than working ones.
2:36:15We know the Romans made glass because we
2:36:17find millions of shards. We know about
2:36:20bronze because we find slag heaps and
2:36:22failed castings and scrap hordes. A
2:36:25civilization with wireless power would
2:36:27have left behind ruined, half-melted,
2:36:30obviously anomalous hardware in enormous
2:36:32quantity in the ground everywhere, and
2:36:35farmers and construction crews and metal
2:36:37detectorrists would be turning it up
2:36:39constantly.
2:36:41Where is the language? Where is the
2:36:43documentation, the manuals, the
2:36:45training, the disputes, the patents, the
2:36:48arguments between engineers?
2:36:51Technologies generate paper the way
2:36:53fires generate smoke. And where is the
2:36:56labor record? Something built the
2:36:58buildings. If it was not the workforce
2:37:01named in the payrolls and photographed
2:37:03on the scaffolds and buried in the local
2:37:05cemeteries, then who and what did they
2:37:07eat? And where did they live? And where
2:37:10are they buried? And there is a final
2:37:12version of this that I find nearly
2:37:14unanswerable. The scale of the required
2:37:17silence. To maintain this, you need not
2:37:20only every historian, but every
2:37:21geologist, every archaeologist, every
2:37:24metallurgist, every archivist, every
2:37:26surveyor, and every construction worker
2:37:28in every country, including countries
2:37:31that spent the entire 20th century
2:37:33looking for ways to embarrass each
2:37:35other. The Soviet Union would have
2:37:37published American evidence instantly.
2:37:39So would the Americans in reverse.
2:37:42Enemies do not keep each other's
2:37:43secrets. I want to be honest with you. I
2:37:47do not have an answer to this objection
2:37:49for the strong version of the theory. I
2:37:51have looked for one and I do not have
2:37:53it. The best answer I can construct and
2:37:56I will give it to you at full strength
2:37:58is that we are not talking about a mass
2:38:00production civilization.
2:38:02that if it were a small elite
2:38:04technology, a few hundred installations
2:38:07rather than a consumer economy, it would
2:38:09leave far less debris than an industrial
2:38:11society would. And that materials get
2:38:14recycled. That bronze and copper and
2:38:17lead were valuable and were melted down
2:38:20continuously across all of history,
2:38:22which is exactly why so little ancient
2:38:24metal survives relative to what was
2:38:26made. That is a real answer as far as it
2:38:29goes. It does not go far enough. It does
2:38:32not explain the absence of the failures
2:38:34and it does not explain the silence of
2:38:36the mutually hostile archives. So on
2:38:39this one I have to tell you plainly I do
2:38:42not believe in the technological super
2:38:44civilization version. I have looked at
2:38:46the material question honestly and the
2:38:48material is not there. What I believe is
2:38:51that we systematically underestimate
2:38:53what pre-industrial people accomplished
2:38:55with hand tools, organization, and time,
2:38:59and that our disbelief that they could
2:39:00have built these things says more about
2:39:02us than about them. That is a real
2:39:05conclusion, and it cost me something to
2:39:07reach it. I am not going to hide it in
2:39:09the middle so it goes unnoticed. I am
2:39:12putting it here in plain language at the
2:39:14front of the last hour of a documentary
2:39:16about Tartaria.
2:39:18The last objection is the one about how
2:39:20we know things and it is the one I think
2:39:23about most.
2:39:25The argument is that this entire field
2:39:27runs on visual inference from
2:39:28photographs and that visual inference
2:39:30from photographs is close to worthless
2:39:32as evidence. You look at a picture of a
2:39:36stone building in a field of ash and you
2:39:38see a bombing. You look at scaffolding
2:39:41around a structure and you see
2:39:43excavation rather than construction. You
2:39:46look at a window below a sidewalk and
2:39:48you see a flood. You look at a fort in a
2:39:51ditch and you see burial. In every one
2:39:54of those cases, the image is genuinely
2:39:57ambiguous and your brain resolves the
2:39:59ambiguity toward the more dramatic
2:40:01reading. And then you experience that
2:40:03resolution as perception rather than as
2:40:06interpretation. It feels like seeing. It
2:40:09is not. It is inferring and you are not
2:40:12aware you are doing it. And there is a
2:40:15second problem stacked on top. The
2:40:17images that circulate are not a random
2:40:20sample. They are the ones that got
2:40:22shared because they look strange. Every
2:40:24photograph in which the answer is
2:40:26obvious and boring gets filtered out
2:40:29before it reaches you. So the evidence
2:40:31base is selected by an algorithm for
2:40:34maximum strangeness.
2:40:37And a third problem almost none of it
2:40:39comes with provenence. Where was this
2:40:42taken? When? By whom? What is the
2:40:45caption on the back? What did the
2:40:47newspaper the following week say? Most
2:40:50of what circulates has been cropped,
2:40:52reposted, retitled, and stripped of its
2:40:55context. And the context is where the
2:40:57answer usually was. I think this
2:41:00objection is essentially correct. And I
2:41:03want to tell you how I know. I have made
2:41:06these errors, not hypothetically. In
2:41:09this documentary, I have corrected
2:41:11myself on Kazanski station, on the
2:41:13Council of Florence, on the conquest of
2:41:16Moscow in 1480, on the asylum
2:41:19statistics, on the incubator babies, and
2:41:22on the mound builders.
2:41:24Six corrections in public, in a video
2:41:28where I am supposed to be the one who is
2:41:30right. Every single one of those errors
2:41:33had the same shape. I had an image or a
2:41:36claim. It fit the pattern I was already
2:41:38holding and I did not go and check the
2:41:40primary source until later. That is what
2:41:43the objection describes and I am the
2:41:46evidence for it. So what do I do about
2:41:48it? Not stop looking. The answer to bad
2:41:52method is better method, not silence.
2:41:55Here is the standard I'm going to hold
2:41:57myself to from now on and I would ask
2:42:00you to hold me to it in the comments.
2:42:03One, provenence before interpretation.
2:42:06Where is this from? Who made it? And
2:42:09when? If I cannot answer those three
2:42:11questions, I do not use it. Two, find
2:42:14the boring explanation first and find it
2:42:17in its strongest form from the people
2:42:20who actually believe it. If it survives
2:42:22the boring explanation, then it is
2:42:24interesting. If I never went looking for
2:42:27the boring explanation, I have not
2:42:29earned the interesting one. Three,
2:42:32separate the observation from the
2:42:34inference out loud every time. That
2:42:36building has a window below the sidewalk
2:42:38is an observation. That building was
2:42:41buried by a flood is an inference. Those
2:42:44are different sentences and I will say
2:42:46them as different sentences. Four, say
2:42:49the number and say where it came from. A
2:42:51statistic without a source is a rumor
2:42:53with a decimal point.
2:42:56Five. When I am wrong, say so in the
2:42:59same format and at the same length as
2:43:01the original claim, not a pinned
2:43:03comment, not a correction in the
2:43:05description out loud in the video. That
2:43:09last one is the expensive one, and it is
2:43:12the one I think this whole community
2:43:13most needs. So, let's do the accounting
2:43:17honestly in order out loud. What is
2:43:20proven? There was a tartar imperial
2:43:23world, a family of successor states with
2:43:25a shared dynastic inheritance, real
2:43:28capitals, stone architecture, a
2:43:31hereditary nobility, a tax system, a
2:43:34heraldic identity, diplomatic relations,
2:43:37and a literate historical tradition of
2:43:39its own. William Touque described it in
2:43:431780 as uncontroversial background, and
2:43:46the internet archive has the book. Its
2:43:49ruins covered such a vast area that the
2:43:52Russian language contains an ordinary
2:43:54word for them. Its people were in 1780
2:43:58the second largest population in the
2:44:00Russian Empire and they retained a
2:44:02burning memory of their own former
2:44:04statehood down to the poorest and least
2:44:06educated among them. And the Russian
2:44:08government had a policy of exclusion
2:44:10because of it. That world was dismantled
2:44:13over three centuries, ending with Crimea
2:44:15in 1783, the year the United States
2:44:18became a country. And then in the 20th
2:44:21century, its history was deliberately
2:44:23falsified by order of a party directive
2:44:26dated the 9th of August 1944.
2:44:29The truthful books were withdrawn and
2:44:31destroyed. And we know this because a
2:44:33CIA analyst wrote it down and the memo
2:44:36was classified for 42 years. And you can
2:44:39read it right now for free. All of that
2:44:43is proven. None of it requires you to
2:44:45believe anything unusual. And
2:44:48essentially, nobody watching this was
2:44:50taught any of it. What is probable but
2:44:53not proven. That specific buildings
2:44:56across the former Tartar territories
2:44:58carry attributions that cannot be
2:45:00trusted given that the entire regional
2:45:03historical apparatus went through a
2:45:05documented falsification process. The
2:45:08Soybea Tower is the clearest case with a
2:45:10Victorian eyewitness on record against
2:45:12the official dating and living scholarly
2:45:14disagreement about it. That the scale of
2:45:17what has been lost in buildings, in
2:45:20books, in craft knowledge, and in bells
2:45:23is dramatically larger than most people
2:45:25assume. The Bell Cemetery at Hamburg is
2:45:28real. Urban renewal is real. 600 years
2:45:32of acoustic craft went into artillery
2:45:34shells.
2:45:36what is possible and unproven that
2:45:39oldworld buildings were engineered to
2:45:41act on human beings through sound in
2:45:43ways more sophisticated than we credit.
2:45:46I lean toward yes on this one because
2:45:48the acoustic vessels in the walls are
2:45:50real archaeology and the 32 ft organ
2:45:53pipe is real engineering and both of
2:45:56those are already stranger than the
2:45:58skeptical position admits. what I no
2:46:01longer believe, a global mud flood. The
2:46:04geology does not support it and it would
2:46:06be undisguisable.
2:46:08That the world's fairs were the
2:46:10demolition of a pre-existing stone
2:46:12civilization.
2:46:14The construction record is too thick and
2:46:16staff is too well documented. That a
2:46:19technological super civilization existed
2:46:22recently and was hidden. The material is
2:46:25not there and the required silence is
2:46:27not achievable across hostile archives.
2:46:30that a separate advanced Tartarian
2:46:32people built the American mounds. The
2:46:35mound builders were the ancestors of the
2:46:37peoples who lived beside them and that
2:46:39credit was taken from them for a
2:46:41political purpose and it should go back.
2:46:44That is the ledger. Some of it I gained
2:46:46doing this and some of it I lost and I
2:46:48would rather show you the whole thing
2:46:50than only the parts that flatter me. I
2:46:53want to end on the thing that actually
2:46:55matters and it is not any single
2:46:57building. He who controls the past
2:47:00controls the future. That line gets
2:47:02quoted constantly in this corner of the
2:47:04internet, usually with a picture of a
2:47:07cathedral behind it. And I think most
2:47:09people who quote it have not thought
2:47:10about the second half of the original,
2:47:12which is that he who controls the
2:47:14present controls the past.
2:47:17That is the harder claim and it is the
2:47:19true one. The past is not a fixed object
2:47:21we are prevented from seeing. It is
2:47:24continuously reconstructed by whoever is
2:47:26in a position to do the reconstructing
2:47:29right now using the archives, the
2:47:31curricula, the funding, and the
2:47:34attention that exists right now. We have
2:47:36watched that happen in this video at
2:47:39close range with a date on it. On the
2:47:429th of August 1944, a committee in
2:47:44Moscow sat down and ordered a scientific
2:47:47revision of the history of a people and
2:47:49the truthful books were withdrawn and
2:47:50destroyed. And 82 years later, I am
2:47:54sitting here reading you an American
2:47:55intelligence memo about it because that
2:47:58is what is left. That is not a metaphor.
2:48:01That is minutes of a meeting. And I want
2:48:04you to notice how ordinary it was. There
2:48:07was no ritual. There was no hooded
2:48:08cabal. There was an agenda item and some
2:48:11paperwork and some historians who wanted
2:48:13to keep their jobs and a filing cabinet.
2:48:17That is what the destruction of a
2:48:18civilization's memory actually looks
2:48:20like from the inside. It looks like
2:48:23administration.
2:48:24Which is why I am not frightened of the
2:48:26men in the robes. I am frightened of the
2:48:29committee. So what do we do? I have
2:48:32three things and then I will let you go.
2:48:36The first one is read the primary
2:48:38sources, not the videos, not mine
2:48:40either. I have put every link in the
2:48:43description below and almost all of it
2:48:46is free because these books are hundreds
2:48:48of years old and out of copyright and
2:48:50sitting on the internet archive right
2:48:52now waiting for someone to open them.
2:48:54Tuka is right there. Frampton is right
2:48:57there. The CIA memo is on the AY's own
2:49:01website. You do not need permission and
2:49:04you do not need a degree. You need an
2:49:06afternoon. And when you read them, you
2:49:09are going to find things I missed. Took
2:49:12second volume has hundreds of pages I
2:49:14did not touch in this video. There are
2:49:16chapters in there on peoples most of us
2:49:18have never heard the names of. Somebody
2:49:21watching this is going to go read the
2:49:22section on the bashers or the no guy or
2:49:25the kirgas and find something I walk
2:49:27straight past and I hope you do and I
2:49:30hope you tell me. The second one is look
2:49:33at your own town. That is genuinely how
2:49:36I got here. Not from a book, from
2:49:38walking around the place I live and
2:49:40noticing that the buildings did not
2:49:41match the story. Go find the oldest
2:49:44building in your town. Find its
2:49:46cornerstone.
2:49:47Go to your county historical society,
2:49:50which is almost certainly staffed by
2:49:52volunteers who are desperate for
2:49:53somebody under 60 to walk through the
2:49:56door and ask a question.
2:49:58Look at the Sandborn fire insurance maps
2:50:00which are digitized for most American
2:50:02towns and which show you your street as
2:50:04it stood 140 years ago building by
2:50:07building in color for free. You will
2:50:10find something. Everybody does. And
2:50:12whatever you find will be real with
2:50:14provenence which is worth more than a
2:50:16thousand reposted photographs. The third
2:50:19one is the hardest and it is the one I
2:50:22actually care about. Be willing to be
2:50:25wrong out loud. I corrected myself six
2:50:28times in this video. It was
2:50:30uncomfortable and some of you are going
2:50:32to use it against me and I would do it
2:50:34again because the alternative is to
2:50:36become exactly the thing I object to. A
2:50:39person who has decided what happened and
2:50:41then manages the evidence to protect the
2:50:44conclusion. That is what the committee
2:50:46in Moscow did on the 9th of August 1944.
2:50:50They had a conclusion and they revised
2:50:52the record to fit it. If we do the same
2:50:55thing with better intentions, we are
2:50:57still doing the same thing. So question
2:51:00the narrative, including this one,
2:51:02including mine, especially mine, because
2:51:05if we are right, it will hold. And if it
2:51:08does not hold, then we did not want it
2:51:10anyway. Thank you for spending this long
2:51:12with me. I know it was a lot. There are
2:51:15chapters in the description if you want
2:51:17to come back to any of it. And every
2:51:19source I used is linked down there in
2:51:21order. Let me know in the comments what
2:51:24I got wrong and what I should look at
2:51:26next. Stay safe everyone. God bless.

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