Invented Knowledge: False History, Fake Science and Pseudo-Religions

306 Pages·2009·1.21 MB·English

by  Ronald H. Fritze

INVENTED
KNOWLEDGE
False History, Fake Science and
Pseudo-religions
ronald h. fritze

invented knowledge

Invented
Knowledge
False History, Fake Science and
Pseudo-Religions
ronald h. fritze
reaktion books
For Jeremy Black
Gentleman, Scholar, Facilitator and Friend
Published by Reaktion Books Ltd
33Great Sutton Street
London ec1v odx, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
Copyright © Ronald H. Fritze 2009
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the
prior permission of the publishers.
Printed and bound cpiAntony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Fritze, Ronald H., 1951–
Invented knowledge: false history, fake science and
pseudo-religions
1. History –Errors, inventions, etc.
2. Common fallacies
3. Conspiracies
4. Geographical myths
5. Fraud in science
I. Title
001.9’6
isbn: 978 1 86189 430 4
Contents
Introduction 7
1 Atlantis: Mother of Pseudohistory 19
2 Who’s on First? The Pseudohistory of the Discovery
and Settlement of Ancient America 63
3 Mudpeople, Satan’s Spawn and Christian Identity:
Racist Cosmogonies and Pseudohistory, Part i 104
4 Mad Scientists, White Devils and the Nation of Islam:
Racist Cosmogonies and Pseudohistory, Part ii 135
5 Pseudohistoria Epidemica or Pseudohistorians
in Collusion 167
6 Professors Gone Wild: The Black Athena
Controversy 221
References 257
Select Bibliography 292
Acknowledgements 298
Index 299

Introduction
Man is an historical animal with a deep sense of his own past,
and if he cannot integrate the past by a history explicit and true,
he will integrate it by a history implicit and false.
geoffrey barraclough (1956)1
On 1 December 1862 Abraham Lincoln told the Congress of the
United States, ‘Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history.’2 He was
right. The United States was embroiled in its Civil War, the nation’s
greatest crisis and its deadliest war. Every day Lincoln and his con-
gressional colleagues experienced history and made history. He could
say the same thing to the entire population of this world of ours if he
could talk across the ages. We too live and make history every day.
Sadly, Lincoln could just as well have said, ‘Fellow-citizens, we cannot
escape pseudohistory.’ Pseudohistorical conspiracy theories had helped
to bring on the war he was fighting. In the Northern states a wide-
spread belief in the existence of the Slave Power Conspiracy caused
people to fear that Southern slaveholders were plotting to destroy civil
liberties and enslave poor whites. In the South many people believed
that Northern Republicans were conspiring with radical abolitionists
to foment a massive slave uprising that would end with barbaric slaves
murdering hapless whites in their beds or worse. Both of these pseudo-
historical misperceptions helped to fuel the fires of war.
The epoch of antebellum and Civil War America gave rise to a
spate of pseudohistory, a sign that unprecedented physical un-
certainty about the outcome of widespread political and military
conflict was spilling over into the intellectual climate of the age.
Americans began to reappraise the history of their tormented land,
a reappraisal ripe for wild speculation stretching back into time.
Consider the myth of the mound-builders of prehistoric America.
Accordingto this myth, a lost white race had settled North America
in ancient times and built a glorious civilization whose sole remains
were the many mounds scattered across the eastern United States.
Tragically the savage ancestors of the Red Indians (Native Ameri cans)
invaded the land of the white men and destroyed the mound-builders.
7
invented knowledge
The wilderness reclaimed the land. This mound-builder myth is
widely thought to have contributed to inspiring a new religion, the
Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints, whose members are
better known as the Mormons.3If so, it was not the first or the last
religion inspired by pseudohistory. The mound-builder myth also
provided a convenient justification for the dispossession of the
Native Americans from their lands. Other pseudohistorical myths
told of Prince Madoc’s discovery and settlement of America during
the Middle Ages and his peoples’ transformation into the fabled
Welsh Indians. Tales of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel or other
ancient Hebrews wandering the Americas were added to the mix
(see chapter Two). These are amusing stories at the least, and the
large numbers of books on those topics from that era attest to their
widespread popularity.
Things have not changed all that much from Lincoln’s time.
We cannot escape pseudohistory or pseudoscience either. The only
difference is that today there are more pseudohistorical and pseudo-
scientific ideas and more media for disseminating those ideas than
just books. The delivery system for pseudohistorians and pseudo -
scientists of all stripes now encompasses a charlatan’s playground of
film, television, radio, magazines and the internet. An especially influ -
ential example of the role of media in disseminating pseudohistorical
and pseudoscientific ideas is the late night radio show Coast to Coast
,created and hosted for many years by Art Bell, although most of
AM
the hosting is currently done by George Noory. The list of past guests
on the show’s website contains the names of a good number of people
discussed in this book.4 During the spring of 2008 Hollywood and
the film industry made its contribution to the corpus of pseudohistory.
10,000BCtold the story of some primitive mammoth-hunters being
oppressed by slave-raiders from an advanced pyramid-building civil -
iz ation at the close of the Ice Age. It was a story inspired by Graham
Hancock, Charles H. Hapgood and their fellows (see chapter Five).
Even more excitingly, Harrison Ford returned to the silver screen in
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, set in the 1950s.
Indiana Jones fights Soviet Communists for control of the mysterious
Crystal Skull, an artefact from a lost civilization that possesses awe-
some powers. In fact the crystal skull is no man-made artefact at all,
but the actual skull of an alien from another world, possibly another
dimension and, of course, those aliens taught our ancestors the funda -
mentals of civilization. The new movie is in the best traditions of the
Indiana Jones series but an article on crystal skulls in a recent issue
of Archaeology has provided convincing evidence that they are all
modern fakes or hoaxes.5 Then there is Bloodline, a documentary
8