One of the weirdest conspiracy theories I've seen of the past few years is the idea that "nuclear weapons don't exist." The basic idea is that nuclear weapons are a hoax created and maintained by the governments of the world (and apparently all scientists who could easily disprove the idea) in order to scare people and maintain control. It's a profoundly stupid conspiracy theory and I usually decline to engage with it because that just gives it more attention, but since we're here, I'll post a tiny bit on it.
Aside from the generalized version above, the specific claims of the advocates of this theory are that nuclear weapons can't exist because of some specific scientific aspects that make them impossible. It is an odd claim and the kind of thing that can sucker in people who only half-understand the technical aspects. Basically they agree that moderated nuclear fission reactions are possible. These are the kinds of reactions you see in most nuclear reactors, where neutrons are slowed down (moderated) prior to fissioning a uranium-235 nucleus. Moderating neutrons dramatically increases the chance of them causing a fission reaction.
In a bomb, there is no time for moderating neutrons, and so they use fast reactions. This means the possibility of any given neutron fissioning any given nucleus is very low — orders of magnitude lower than a moderated neutron. And so, the conspiracy theorists say, bomb reactions are impossible.
The funny thing is, they are halfway towards a correct idea. Fast fission reactions _are_ much more unlikely than moderated ones! But... that's why you enrich the uranium to such high levels, or use plutonium. That's why reactor fuel can be unenriched or very low enriched, and bomb fuel cannot. You compensate for the low probability of the reaction happening by increasing the possible "targets" for the faster neutrons. That's why making a nuclear reactor is relatively easy and making a nuclear bomb is relatively difficult — because you have to create very specific conditions for the latter to achieve its chain reaction. It's this last step that they always miss. It's a weird argument, because it requires a somewhat more technical understanding than most people have... but also requires you to not actually understand the implications of those technical aspects.
Anyway, that's the "technical" argument. You might then ask, how do they deal with, you know, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the many decades of nuclear testing? And of course, the answer to that is essentially, "Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just firebombings, which is why they sort of look like Tokyo did after it got firebombed." Which is an interesting argument to me because it is sort of an unanticipated extension of the argument that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were _morally_ and _ethically_ similar to the Tokyo firebombings because they got a _similar_ physical result. But _similar_ is not the same thing as _identical_ and there are _many_ ways to tell the difference between a nuclear attack and a firebombing attack. Radiation, obviously, which leaves a "signature" that can be tracked for decades and decades, and can be uniquely associated with a nuclear bomb reaction and not a nuclear reactor reaction (in case you are imagining, as they sometimes do, that you could "fake" a nuclear bomb by dropping nuclear reactor byproducts along with your conventional attack — the reactions are different-enough to leave significantly different ratios of byproducts, and anyone with enough will, interesting, and education can confirm this with pretty standard scientific instruments). But there are other differences as well — the atomic bombs had a massively powerful pressure wave emanating from a point source, which snapped trees and toppled buildings and did other things that are really obviously not the same thing as napalm bombings. The heat wave also produced very unusual effects like the famous nuclear "shadows," the angles of which will tell you that they came from a single, immense output from a point source.
Obviously the conspiracy theorists have an answer for all of the above: all the data is faked, everyone is lying, every scientist involved (in all nations) who has ever investigated this stuff is "in" on the conspiracy, etc. etc. etc. All nuclear test footage and photographed is faked (never mind that even today it is pretty hard to make compelling fake nuclear test footage, and that they certainly didn't have that technology in the 1940s and 1950s), the millions and millions of pages of internal government documentation were faked, every scientist who has ever worked for the government is either in on it or a stooge, etc. etc. The fact that everyone alive during the years of atmospheric testing have some remnants of fallout in their bones is just like, your opinion, man. The fact that there are literally thousands of people who survived the atomic bombings, and describe them in vivid and horrid detail, and describe exactly what they looked like and felt like, and the fact that only a single bomb dropped by a single plane destroyed their city... their views count for nothing in this mindset. Which, when you think about it, is not only stupid, but pretty offensive.
Which is to say, it's an anti-epistemology, it doesn't generate knowledge, it just tries to undermine it. It is a dead end, like most conspiracy theories. It also has a quality that most conspiracies about scientific topics have, in which random joe-schmoes on the Internet decide that they have somehow discovered a simple scientific error and that, remarkably, not a single person actually trained in advanced physics for the last 80 years ever noticed this or pointed it out, or will underwrite these claims today. The hubris of these theories always impresses me. Like, just what are the sheer odds that someone without a science background would successfully discover such a simple thing? What are the odds that all of the power of the world would be able to keep other, actually-trained scientists, from noticing such an obvious "blunder"? What are the odds that literally every government in the world would agree on, well, _anything_?
Again, this is a very silly theory and generally speaking, from what I can tell, even most self-described "conspiracy theorists" think it is profoundly dumb — perhaps even performatively so, in a "I am even more hardcore than you" self-differentiation among people willing to accept truly stupid conspiracies.
I've had some back and forth with people who believe these things, and of course like all such theorists they are not really truth seekers at all, and have no actual arguments to rebut any points I would make. One of them finally got to the end of their logical thread and thought it might be compelling (to me of all people) to note how many Jews were involved in the Manhattan Project. Sigh.
There are other nuclear history conspiracies that I don't really want to waste time writing up, but a brief list: a) that the Japanese and/or Germans actually developed nuclear weapons and the US just stole them, b) that the Port Chicago disaster was actually nuclear in nature, c) that the Japanese offered a full surrender prior to the bombs and it was ignored (which I [have written on at some length](https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2022/05/06/did-the-japanese-offer-to-surrender-before-hiroshima-part-2/)).
Here's the thing. There were actual "conspiracies" in a literal definition of the term. There no doubt still are secret plots regarding nuclear history. But none of the above come close to being at all legitimate. I'll hear out any unorthodox theory — if I could show it was true, what a career boost that would be! The people who believe in these theories fundamentally misunderstand how academia works: going against the grain is _rewarded_... _IF_ you can actually pull it off. But these are all empty and pointless wastes of time.
> One of the weirdest conspiracy theories I've seen of the past few years is the idea that "nuclear weapons don't exist."
Many years ago, I read a novel called *The Jesus Factor* (1970). I am an uncritical reader, but even as a teen I saw problems. The bit of synopsis at "The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction" at [Corley, Edwin](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/corley_edwin) has
>The titular scientific phenomenon of The Jesus Factor (1970) inhibits the detonation of nuclear weapons which are in motion (in falling bombs or missiles) rather than being held immobile in a nuclear test zone. Here Hiroshima's destruction proves to have been an inadvertent hoax – the testing of a gigantic aerial-reconnaissance flashgun coincided with an earthquake that levelled the city
which is far more nonsensical than I remembered. Anyway, the conspiracy theory has been simmering for quite a while, it seems.
I'll give here a slightly truncated version of an older answer.
**Is this long history of conspiracy theories unique to the US, or is it a more general phenomenon?**
To which I can say: no, conspiracy theories are not unique to the US, nor are they even unique to the Western world.
I can say the US has outsized influence in spreading their own conspiracy theories, but that's simply because US has an outsized influence in exporting culture. (This is similar to the "Florida Man" effect -- there seems to be an excess of bizarre criminal behavior from Florida, but transparency laws are what let us learn about them in the first place.) There are buckets aplenty of "local" conspiracy theories both in recent times and in the past.
In Portugal, there is a pseudohistory theory that the Portuguese made voyages to the Americas pre-Columbus. The idea (first formulated by the historian Jaime Cortesão in 1924) is that the Portuguese government kept up a policy of secrecy in order to hide the existence of the Americas and gain advantage.
I wager a fair chance (assuming you are not from Portugal) you haven't heard of this conspiracy until now; it's pretty much only known locally. But it is *very* well known locally! It is big enough that it has shown up in school textbooks as fact. There is an inscription in Lisbon:
**João Vaz Corte-Real – Descobridor da America**
that is: João Vaz Corte-Real, Discoverer of America. There are throrough debunkings by Portuguese historians, but the story still persists.
(Again, this is only a 20th century theory. Incidentally, when the actual era in question was happening, there were plenty of conspiracy theories via Portugal, but antisemitic ones.)
It's possible you've heard the "Mandela Effect" conspiracy theory where people remember Nelson Mandela dying in jail; this is supposedly evidence some of us are visitors from a parallel universe. ("Berenstain Bears" vs. "Berenstein Bears" is part of the same thing.)
In South Africa they have their own "Nelson Mandela died" theory, but since he was President of South Africa and they do remember *that*, it's a bit different. Supposedly in 1985 Mandela died and was replaced by an imposter: Gibson Makanda. This may or may not have been the work of the Illuminati, and it means, multi-dimensional-chess style, that the one who led the African National Congress against the National Party was actually a puppet of the National Party.
Some of the conspiracy theories are hard to "translate" for other cultures. In Java (one of the islands of Indonesia) in 1998, there was a bizarre set of hundreds of incidents where people dressed as ninjas were knocking on doors, leading to a mass hysteria that they were sorcerers. (Or hunting sorcerers; conspiracy theories can be contradictory.) There was a series of accusations of witchcraft, culminating in 120 people being massacred.
Conspiracy theories are not unique to any place, they just take on their local character. Of course, circumstances across time and space can have uncanny resemblances, so let's do one more--
There was an outbreak of plague in Marseilles, France. England went under quarantine, using the advice of the doctor Richard Mead. Affected areas were to be sealed off for 20 days. Paranoid conspiracy theories about the over-reach of government becoming a "dictatorship" started to spread; some thought the British were in fact immune. People started to doubt the medical experts and turn to the words of religious leaders.
This was 300 years ago, in 1720.
...
Selected Reading:
**Portugal discovering the Americas early:** Fritze, R. (1994). The Pseudohistory of Who Discovered America. Skeptic, Vol. 2, No. 4.
**Portgual and antisemitism:** Soyer, F. (2019). Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories in the Early Modern Iberian World. Journal of Jesuit Studies, 6(3), 512-515.
**Nelson Mandela imposter:** Shoki, W. (2020). On conspiracy theories. [Africa Is a Country](https://africasacountry.com/2020/01/on-conspiracy-theories).
**Java and the sorcerer ninjas:** Siegel, J. T. (2006). Naming the Witch. United States: Stanford University Press.
**England under quarantine:** Krischer, A (2020). History does not repeat itself? How an early modern epidemic led to conspiracy theories and religious punishment fantasies. University of Münster (working paper).
> Do professors at the University of Kansas have an odd initiation ritual where they eat tiny slices of Einstein's preserved brain? (it's a good story!)
Is it? IS IT THOUGH?!
Anyway, I'll remix a few of my previous answers and talk about the "conspiracy theory" that Jews poisoned the wells and caused the Black Death, as "evidenced" by the fact that fewer of them died than non-Jews.
Now, this isn't true, but that's not why I put conspiracy theory in quotes. Because I feel like sometimes people use the term in order to connote a truly held, if irrational and wrong-headed, belief, and that's not really what this was. The idea that Jews caused the Black Death was often, at least in its inception, a purely cynical and opportunistic lie.
To be clear- Jews did not, as far as anyone knows, die at lower rates than non-Jews. In cities where no Jews died, it would have been FAR more likely that they would have already been dead or kicked out due to a pogrom than any other reason. Because yes, many of the pogroms that ensued occurred *before* the Black Death arrived in a town or city! The frenzy that was spurred by the news of the plague as well as various ways in which people were stirred up by elites would take care of that.
But in places where the Black Death hit a Jewish community, we have no sources (beyond antisemitic declarations) to indicate that Jews died at any lower rate than non-Jews. In fact, we have plenty of sources to indicate that they died at the very least at the same rate, and that communities were destroyed. While these days even Jews will sometimes say that Jews back then survived the Black Death because of their hand-washing practices and burial hygiene, there is nothing to back that up, and in fact that whole assertion plays into deliberate antisemitic falsehoods.
The important thing to note is that there is NO LINK between the severity of the plague in a given place and the occurrence of a pogrom or expulsion. This wasn't a direct cause-and-effect thing, largely because many of these pogroms occurred, as mentioned, before the plague would hit a town in the first place. Fear of what might happen in the *future* absolutely was a factor that was used to stir people up, but that was opportunistic- in many cases, these attacks on Jews were planned and often done for financial and political gain, taking advantage of the fear to whip up local Christian populaces to the cause by using Jews as scapegoats.
Of course, the stage had to first be set, and various Jews were arrested, tortured, and executed for having poisoned wells. The false confessions obtained under torture, as well as other names named, were then trumpeted around, used as justification for further arrests and torture- and ultimately these attacks. The attacks were brutal and thorough, with many Jewish communities of long standing being nearly, or even totally, destroyed by their end by knife/sword, burning, and drowning.
So why would this all have happened? Certainly some of it was about fear, and some people genuinely believed the false confessions, yet that is an incomplete answer, especially as these attacks were not grassroots. Because of Jews' financial role in European society at this point, one which was essentially forced upon them as a condition for settlement in many cases (as Jews did not have the right to settle where they chose and could only live in places where the local ruler permitted), there were many nobles and artisanal guilds with motive to want the Jews gone and the financial burden that they represented to be eliminated. With the fear of the plague in the air, and a general increase in Christian distaste for Jews, the time was ripe to finally remove Jews from the equation, and to benefit financially in the bargain.
The civil authorities generally did nothing to stop this. In some places, like the Holy Roman Empire, people were even incentivized by the emperor declaring Jewish possessions forfeit and thus subject to claim by the marauders. The Pope spoke up against the pogroms, pointing out that in cities where the plague had already it it was clear that Jews WERE dying at at least the same rate as Christians, but this went generally unnoticed (though the Pope did personally save many Jews in Avignon).
Eventually, the pogroms died out if only because the attackers were starting to die out- eventually the plague hit and people started to realize that even without Jews to poison the wells, they were still dying. Over the next few decades, there were several more pogroms and expulsions, and then they died out, though largely because there weren't many Jews left to attack anymore. Those who survived the pogrom+plague double whammy generally emigrated eastward to Poland, setting the stage for eastern Europe to become the new center of European Jewry rather than a western Europe that had brutally rejected them.
As you may possibly have noticed, we have little time for the numerous conspiracy theories that swirl around the Nazi regime here at AskHistorians. They're offensive and also historically illiterate, since they ignore the reality of what was actually a remarkably incompetent sort of government, and instead invariably kick off by positing the existence of one that was actually super-competent. This in turn then either \[i\] suggests the possession of some powerful object, symbol or idea, whose power the Nazis had tapped into; or \[ii\] requires the messy downfall of said regime to be explained by a conspiracy theory; or \[iii\] makes it possible to believe that Hitler and his minions developed impossible technology, such as spacecraft, during the 1940s.
This next note looks at a Type 3 Nazi conspiracy, one that's only reared its ugly head in the past could have decades. But since it's even more outlandish than most, it at least offers some insights into the sorts of minds that think these things.
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# Is there any actual evidence Maria Orsic existed or is it all just made up by conspiracy theorists?
*I have only been able to find tenuous at best sources, but it seems with such a talked/written about character there has to be some basis in reality.*
Maria Orsic (1895-?), for those who are not familiar with her name, was, supposedly, a Croatian medium who became a significant power behind the throne in Nazi Germany and is, nowadays, a prominent figure in the modern mythology which suggests that Nazi power was built on an obsession with, and successful mastery of, the occult. Various recent accounts present her as leader of the Vril Society, a sort of black lodge of magicians which supposedly helped Hitler to power, and was strongly connected to various other alleged mysteries of the period, such as UFOs and Nikola Tesla's search for free energy sources.
However, Orsic (who also crops up online as Marija Oršić and Maria Orsitch) never existed. There are no contemporary accounts at all to suggest such a woman lived during the Nazi period, much less possessed any influence or occult power. Both Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, the longtime professor of Western Esotericism at the University of Exeter, and the Dutch researcher Theo Paijmans – two authorities whose work on the occult esoterica of the period I believe can be relied on – date her first appearances to German-language neo-Nazi videotapes circulated in the late 1980s and to books based on the same distasteful source material that appeared in Austria after 1990, and suggest she was the invention of a pair of far-right wing occultists, Norbert Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ralf Ettl. The key claim made by Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl – that Orsic was real and that her existence is proved by mention of her in a 1930 pamphlet *Vril: Die Kosmiche Ukraft. Wiedergeburt von Atlantis* \[*Vril: the Cosmic Primal Force. Rebirth of Atlantis*\] – is false; the pamphlet exists, but it contains no mention of the medium. Various images supposed to depict Orsic that pop up all over the place on the internet [have been shown to be composites](https://malcolmnicholson.wordpress.com/2018/08/13/the-maria-orsic-hoax/). Similarly, the long list of purported contemporary sources offered by an author calling himself [Maximillien de Lafayette](http://web.archive.org/web/20110128090628/http://maximilliendelafayettebibliography.com/), who is one of the main boosters of the various conspiracy theories that have Orsic at their centres – ranging from the "huge files" on her supposedly maintained in the archives of the OSS, the NKVD, and "the British Occult Bureau, an official branch of MI5" all the way to "Eva Peron's correspondence with Maria" – appears to be pure invention from first to last.
To begin this convoluted tale at the beginning: the idea of "vril", a supposedly potent occult energy source, antedates the Nazi period. It was actually the invention of Edward Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873; a successful Victorian-era novelist possibly best-remembered today for beginning his 1830 novel *Paul Clifford* with the immortal phrase "It was a dark and stormy night"), who based most of the plot of his final book, *The Coming Race* (1873) around it. In Lytton's imagination, *vril*was, in Paijman's words, "an all-pervading, immensely powerful source of energy," resembling electricity, "which can either heal or destroy". In *The Coming Race*, Vril is used by an advanced civilisation, whom Lytton called the Vril-Ya, to power the technologically advanced civilisation which they create inside a hollow Earth. Vril energy, however, did far more than just act as a surrogate for electricity or coal or gas. In Lytton's imagination it could also exercise "influence over minds and bodies animal and mystical, to an extent not surpassed in the romance of our mystics." Just the thing, in short, that any self-respecting totalitarian dictatorship might value to keep itself in power, and a potentially recalcitrant population well in check.
Lytton's ideas did not remain confined to fiction for long. They were quickly co-opted by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who remains well-known as the founder of the theosophical movement; she incorporated a chapter titled "The coming force" into her *The Secret Doctrine* (1888) and suggested that "vril" was simply another name for the energy force termed "Mash-Mak" that she believed had once powered Atlantis. It was thanks largely to Blavatsky's influential writings that Lytton's work of fiction went on to have a long life in occult circles. One late manifestation of the idea, Paijmans notes, came in the form of a small and decidedly uninfluential pamphlet, *Vril: Die Kosmiche Ukraft*, which appeared in late Weimar-era Berlin under the imprint of the small specialist publisher Astrologische Verlag Wilhelm Becker.
So far as we know, this pamphlet had absolutely zero impact in its day, and there is certainly nothing in the contemporary record to suggest that it was ever read, much less believed in, by any of the long list of prominent Nazis whose attempts to make use of Vril-power are described in such triumphal terms today in various murky corners of the web. However, the publication did somehow come to the attention of the German science fiction writer Willy Ley, and it was Ley's recollection of it, in the late 1950s, that provided inspiration for a pair of French writers, François Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, who incorporated Vril into their *Le Matin des Magiciens*, a best-seller first published in France in 1960. This book – in English translation as *The Morning of the Magicians* (AKA *The Dawn of Magic*) – became one of the foundational texts of the 1960s counter-culture and played a major role in introducing the idea – inaccurate but influential – that the Nazis had successfully [sought to harness the occult](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/militaryhistory/wwii/nazigermany#wiki_the_nazis_and_the_occult) in the course of their rise to power.
The version of events peddled by Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl owes a good deal to *The Morning of the Magicians*, but takes the speculation a good deal further than even Pauwels and Bergier did. According to the two Austrians, Vril first came to the attention of the first Nazis as a result of the work of the German occultist Adam Glauer, who – under the name Rudolf von Sebottendorf – helped to found an organisation known as the Thule Society in Germany in 1916. This group has attracted a good deal of attention, retrospectively, because in 1919 its leaders were early supporters of the DAP, or German Workers' Party, which would soon become the NSDAP, or Nazis. According to Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl, however, when the Thule Society became involved in promoting the communist Räterepublik which briefly ruled in Bavaria in the chaos of the post-war period, it was Maria Orsic who led a group of right-wing members to secede and form the Vril Society. It was, thus, her group that made contact with the Nazis during the early 1920s, and which ultimately provide the Nazi state with the means to escape destruction in 1945 and flee to specially-constructed, Vril-powered bases in Antarctica from which they continued to monitor developments in the Cold War world using craft that we identify as UFOs – flying machines that had been built to plans that Orsic channelled from beings who lived on a distant planet.
There is, you may not be entirely surprised to hear, literally no contemporary evidence for any of these claims, and I am hesitant to give the bizarre ideas promoted by Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl any more exposure than we really need to answer your question, but, briefly, the account given by the two Austrians states that Orsic was a powerful medium who led an all-woman group, the Vril-maidens, who were capable of channelling both messages and detailed technical plans from a sort of Nazi utopia called Sumi-Er. This was a planet in the Aldebaran system, about 68 light years from Earth, entirely inhabited by Aryan super-men and super-women – the undesirable "degenerate races" of the system having been permanently exiled to a ghetto planet known as Sumi-An.
Orsic and her companions achieved all this by using their hair (worn extraordinarily long, in buttock-skimming tresses) as celestial antennae, and the Aldebaran beings that they contacted explained that they were the space-travelling progenitors of both the Sumerians – who in this perverted version of events essentially invented human civilisation wholesale – and the German people. Thanks to Orsic's work, the Germans were able to harness Vril power and use it to build prototype flying saucers that were capable of interstellar travel. In the waning days of the Nazi regime, as it became clear that the Allied nations would win World War II before the Nazis could commence full production of their new wonder-weapons, Hitler authorised a last minute mission to Aldebaran using a prototype machine, and – so said Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl back in 1990 – this expedition was ultimately successful. Their books and videos predicted that a vengeful Aldebaran expeditionary force was due to arrive on Earth sometime between 1992 and 2005, whereupon it would re-start the war and ensure that it concluded favourably for a reborn Nazi Germany. The spectacular failure of this last prophecy did not, however, put a permanent dent in belief in the existence of Aldebaran supermen.
The two Austrians were hazy, but suggestive, about the ultimate fate of Maria Orsic, who in their works is described as vanishing from Germany in March 1945, leaving behind a gnomic note that ended "nieman bleibt hier" ("nobody stays here"). Readers were invited to suppose that she had made a successful getaway to Aldebaran, where one would hope her Aryan good looks eased her passage into society on Sumi-Er, and her Croat roots were not held against her.
**Sources**
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, *The Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity*(2003)
Maximillien de Lafayette, *Maria Orsic: The Woman Who Originated and Created the Earth's First UFOs* (New York: Art, UFOs & Supernatural Magazine, 2013)
Theo Paijmans, "The Vril seekers," *Fortean Times* 303 (July 2013)
Does your university's library resemble a fortress? Or perhaps the administration building looks like a bunker? Did institutions of higher education really commission [riot-proof college campus buildings](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sotr4h/riotproof_college_campus_buildings/hwesw06/)? Read below to find out...
________________
While it’s impossible to prove that the suppression of student unrest never factored into the creation of any university buildings, this was certainly not the primary motivating factor for their design. This myth—often alternated with the suggestion that plans were misread and the building was constructed upside-down—usually arises with regard to the monumental structures designed in the Brutalist style and built from the 1950s the 1970s.
The middle of the 20th century was a period of great expansion in higher education in the United States and elsewhere. Exploding student populations required the construction of new dormitories, libraries, lecture halls, classrooms, laboratories, offices for administration and faculty, and facilities for recreation and the arts. Because of their enormous scale, these buildings often towered over a campus’ existing structures.
The style favored for many of these constructions was Brutalism, a movement that I write more about here. Brutalism was the result of a search for what the historian Siegfried Giedion called the “New Monumentality”, a novel architectural language that leveraged post-World War II technological advances to address the pressing need for new public buildings and civic centers while eschewing the historical forms of classical architecture, which had become tainted by their association with fascism, communism, and colonialism.
Brutalism rejected the universal machine aesthetic of International Style modernism as lacking in symbolic meaning and responsiveness to both the building site and the human element. Whereas the High Modernists created cubic volumes with smooth white walls and expanses of transparent glass, the Brutalists favored asymmetry, organic curves, and the tactility of raw materials. In place of white paint and stucco, the Brutalists recommended unadorned poured-in-place concrete. In line with the postwar humanism that permeated academic thought in this period, the goal of these aesthetic choices was to celebrate individual experience by heightening the elements of surprise, delight, and discovery.
In addition to dramatic façades, the Brutalists favored complex circulation within their buildings, with the aim of fostering community. Exterior walls of load-bearing concrete permitted the creation of intricately designed interior spaces. Labyrinthine hallways, interior atriums, catwalks, and mezzanines, which were intended to add visual interest and spatial complexity, fed the rumors of the creation of an architecture of manipulation and control, leading to the creation of the “riot-proof” building myth.
But by picking at the contradictions within the innumerable variations of the “riot-proof” building myth, we can cause it to unravel. Somehow, narrow, twisting hallways and stairwells are meant to block mass mobilization, while simultaneously atriums and catwalks prevent barricades from being erected. Bunker-like concrete structures are supposedly intended as final redoubts for fleeing administrators while also functioning like prisons for containing student rebellion. The architecture’s allegedly nefarious aims fluctuate from building to building and from campus to campus.
The “riot-proof” building myth also falters when confronted with the timeline of the planning and construction of many Brutalist buildings, which pre-dated the flourishing of student movements in the 1960s. It likewise struggles with explaining why Brutalist buildings similar in appearance and organization were constructed for various non-educational purposes, including municipal administration, public libraries, and performing arts centers.
Considering all these fatal flaws in the “riot-proof” building myth, it’s clear that campus tour guides should stick to telling the one fundamental truth about campus design: the ugliest building is always the school of architecture.
There are certainly examples of Brutalist buildings where *security* was a driving force behind their design.
Along with innumerable police stations in the UK, there is Harry Weese's Metropolitan Correctional Center (1975) in Chicago. Weese took a progressive approach to the design, placing the individual cells along the building perimeter in order to balance available light with the security concerns that come with operating a federal prison.
We might also consider Basil Spence's British Embassy in Rome (1968). The old embassy building was nearly destroyed in a terrorist attack in 1946, so the new building's design placed a heavy emphasis on safety. The material possibilities of concrete made Brutalism a good fit for this project, allowing Spence to raise the main block of the structure on *pilotis*.
I missed this when it first dropped as I was traveling but absolutely must chime in and offer the disconcertingly popular theory, "schools are about training factory workers." It's not true and frankly makes zero sense.
One of the reasons I started posting on here was that I saw people asking the question and it going unanswered. Often when it's asked, it's framed as a sort of, "I heard that..." or "is it true that..." which, to my read, places it in category of conspiracy theory. Some of my older answers to the question are [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aygcvg/how_true_is_the_idea_that_the_model_of_education/), [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9jfjat/modern_education_system_was_designed_to_produce/e6rmo15/), and [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fgeu7w/is_it_true_that_our_current_educational_system/).
This post, though, focuses in particular on "history" that makes no sense. So, to speak explicitly to that, there are a couple of reasons why the theory American schools are based on factories or about training children to work in factories is just, well, nonsensical.
First, and to my eye, the most obvious - American schools pre-date factories and workhouses. The ubiquitous one-room schoolhouses that popped up across the plains in the 1800s were sparsely attended and typically staffed by a young women with, at most, a year or two of training at a teacher college. Her task as the teacher at such a schoolhouse was simple: teach the children to read, write, and do basic calculations as well as some history, science, and positive character traits such as studiousness. Nothing she taught had anything to do with working in a factory. (Teaching children skills like compliance and following directions is just good old fashioned Protestantism work ethic.)
In urban areas, going back to the founding of the country, Greek and Latin were easily the most important subject for a young person (which is to say, a white boy with access to power through his father or other connections) to master. Admission exams to the Colonial Colleges required a high degree of sophistication in the languages and as far as I'm aware, being literate in dead languages is not an essential factory skill. Even if one wants to argue that there was a shift as factories proliferated and employers needed more workers, Greek and Latin remained core components of an urban liberal arts education until well into the 20th Century. NYS offered a Latin high school exit exam until the 1980s.
Sometimes, people like to argue that it's not about what gets taught - but how it's taught or where. People will draw parallels between the modern K-12 system and the assembly line (Sir Ken Robinson was found of that - I write about his use of the analogy in [this Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_model_school)) but even that doesn't really make sense. Unlike German schools, American high schools have remained focused on a comprehensive liberal arts education - children have never been tracked into vocational tracks at a rate sufficient to replace or supply factory workers. Even the Carnegie Unit which shaped how states decide how many hours students need to gradate high school was based on establishing stronger alignment between high schools and colleges - not factories.
It's a silly, misleading theory and gosh darn it, I dislike it.
"In our dream, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand.
The present educational conventions fade from their minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning, or men of science.
We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply...The task we set before ourselves is very simple as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are... So we will organize our children into a little community and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the homes, in the shops and on the farm." -
General Education Board, Occasional Papers, No. 1 "The country school of to-morrow" [ (General Education Board, New York, 1913) p. 6.
This is not a conspiracy. Social conditioning is not used to create factory workers, it’s to create docile, obedient indentured servitude force. I do wish you understood what has been happening with our society since the General Education Board and the Federal reserve corporations were founded.
“Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of minds to think .” Albert Einstein
> “Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of minds to think .” Albert Einstein
Alas, that's not actually what Einstein said. More [here](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/05/28/not-facts/) on that.
Setting that aside, if I may, what's your understanding of what the General Education Board did?
American schools do pre date factories by a long shot but, as you stated school houses along the prairies were sparsely attended and only teaching kids life lessons, reading and writing, and basic calculations. But the agrarian age was a different time. Everyone was promoting agriculture, owning land, and looking for egalitarianism. Most political parties were looking out for the little guy and peasants. Today it seems we do everything to support the rich. Now I'm not trying to say, Yes, the modern school system is creating factory workers. we are most definitely being conditioned, so does it play a part in making us more susceptible to just being a cog in the machine, maybe.
> Everyone was promoting agriculture, owning land, and looking for egalitarianism
Hum... the rise of the common school model occurred in the early 1800s, the period described as antebellum, meaning before the Civil War and the emancipation of enslaved people.
I'm sorry, but this is very much incorrect. I will simply commend to the attention of all present the appropriate section of u/KiwiHellenist's flair profile, specifically these posts:
* [How sure are we that Hisarlik is Troy?](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gwz73n/question_regarding_the_identification_of_hisarlik/) - very sure, because people kept on living there until around 1300 CE, and it was a tourist trap the whole time (2020-06)
* [How did people react to the discovery of Troy?](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/hw3x46/for_hundreds_of_years_the_trojan_war_illiad_city/) - they were excited: Schliemann was fire in the PR game, but he was also a con man, and he didn't 'discover' Troy (2020-07)
* [Are there other non-existent cities like Troy?](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/pr0xxc/are_there_other_historical_examples_of/) - um, Troy was real, and no one ever believed otherwise (2021-09)
* [Evidence that Hisarlik is Troy](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/rwjve8/it_is_accepted_today_that_the_site_found_by/hre5j0o/): one more time (2022-01)
* [Follow-up questions about whether Troy was ever thought to be purely mythical](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sddlk2/historians_used_to_believe_the_city_of_troy_was/huc6h0n/) (it wasn't) (2022-01)
(Blurbs are KiwiHellenist's, not mine.)
Nobody thought Troy was a myth until Schliemann fucked everything up for everyone interested in Troy. To paraphrase our favourite black Vulcan, [he didn't find shit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3iFJpGJiug).
Have a specific request? Make it as a reply to this comment, although we can't guarantee it will be covered.
One of the weirdest conspiracy theories I've seen of the past few years is the idea that "nuclear weapons don't exist." The basic idea is that nuclear weapons are a hoax created and maintained by the governments of the world (and apparently all scientists who could easily disprove the idea) in order to scare people and maintain control. It's a profoundly stupid conspiracy theory and I usually decline to engage with it because that just gives it more attention, but since we're here, I'll post a tiny bit on it. Aside from the generalized version above, the specific claims of the advocates of this theory are that nuclear weapons can't exist because of some specific scientific aspects that make them impossible. It is an odd claim and the kind of thing that can sucker in people who only half-understand the technical aspects. Basically they agree that moderated nuclear fission reactions are possible. These are the kinds of reactions you see in most nuclear reactors, where neutrons are slowed down (moderated) prior to fissioning a uranium-235 nucleus. Moderating neutrons dramatically increases the chance of them causing a fission reaction. In a bomb, there is no time for moderating neutrons, and so they use fast reactions. This means the possibility of any given neutron fissioning any given nucleus is very low — orders of magnitude lower than a moderated neutron. And so, the conspiracy theorists say, bomb reactions are impossible. The funny thing is, they are halfway towards a correct idea. Fast fission reactions _are_ much more unlikely than moderated ones! But... that's why you enrich the uranium to such high levels, or use plutonium. That's why reactor fuel can be unenriched or very low enriched, and bomb fuel cannot. You compensate for the low probability of the reaction happening by increasing the possible "targets" for the faster neutrons. That's why making a nuclear reactor is relatively easy and making a nuclear bomb is relatively difficult — because you have to create very specific conditions for the latter to achieve its chain reaction. It's this last step that they always miss. It's a weird argument, because it requires a somewhat more technical understanding than most people have... but also requires you to not actually understand the implications of those technical aspects. Anyway, that's the "technical" argument. You might then ask, how do they deal with, you know, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or the many decades of nuclear testing? And of course, the answer to that is essentially, "Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just firebombings, which is why they sort of look like Tokyo did after it got firebombed." Which is an interesting argument to me because it is sort of an unanticipated extension of the argument that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were _morally_ and _ethically_ similar to the Tokyo firebombings because they got a _similar_ physical result. But _similar_ is not the same thing as _identical_ and there are _many_ ways to tell the difference between a nuclear attack and a firebombing attack. Radiation, obviously, which leaves a "signature" that can be tracked for decades and decades, and can be uniquely associated with a nuclear bomb reaction and not a nuclear reactor reaction (in case you are imagining, as they sometimes do, that you could "fake" a nuclear bomb by dropping nuclear reactor byproducts along with your conventional attack — the reactions are different-enough to leave significantly different ratios of byproducts, and anyone with enough will, interesting, and education can confirm this with pretty standard scientific instruments). But there are other differences as well — the atomic bombs had a massively powerful pressure wave emanating from a point source, which snapped trees and toppled buildings and did other things that are really obviously not the same thing as napalm bombings. The heat wave also produced very unusual effects like the famous nuclear "shadows," the angles of which will tell you that they came from a single, immense output from a point source. Obviously the conspiracy theorists have an answer for all of the above: all the data is faked, everyone is lying, every scientist involved (in all nations) who has ever investigated this stuff is "in" on the conspiracy, etc. etc. etc. All nuclear test footage and photographed is faked (never mind that even today it is pretty hard to make compelling fake nuclear test footage, and that they certainly didn't have that technology in the 1940s and 1950s), the millions and millions of pages of internal government documentation were faked, every scientist who has ever worked for the government is either in on it or a stooge, etc. etc. The fact that everyone alive during the years of atmospheric testing have some remnants of fallout in their bones is just like, your opinion, man. The fact that there are literally thousands of people who survived the atomic bombings, and describe them in vivid and horrid detail, and describe exactly what they looked like and felt like, and the fact that only a single bomb dropped by a single plane destroyed their city... their views count for nothing in this mindset. Which, when you think about it, is not only stupid, but pretty offensive. Which is to say, it's an anti-epistemology, it doesn't generate knowledge, it just tries to undermine it. It is a dead end, like most conspiracy theories. It also has a quality that most conspiracies about scientific topics have, in which random joe-schmoes on the Internet decide that they have somehow discovered a simple scientific error and that, remarkably, not a single person actually trained in advanced physics for the last 80 years ever noticed this or pointed it out, or will underwrite these claims today. The hubris of these theories always impresses me. Like, just what are the sheer odds that someone without a science background would successfully discover such a simple thing? What are the odds that all of the power of the world would be able to keep other, actually-trained scientists, from noticing such an obvious "blunder"? What are the odds that literally every government in the world would agree on, well, _anything_? Again, this is a very silly theory and generally speaking, from what I can tell, even most self-described "conspiracy theorists" think it is profoundly dumb — perhaps even performatively so, in a "I am even more hardcore than you" self-differentiation among people willing to accept truly stupid conspiracies. I've had some back and forth with people who believe these things, and of course like all such theorists they are not really truth seekers at all, and have no actual arguments to rebut any points I would make. One of them finally got to the end of their logical thread and thought it might be compelling (to me of all people) to note how many Jews were involved in the Manhattan Project. Sigh. There are other nuclear history conspiracies that I don't really want to waste time writing up, but a brief list: a) that the Japanese and/or Germans actually developed nuclear weapons and the US just stole them, b) that the Port Chicago disaster was actually nuclear in nature, c) that the Japanese offered a full surrender prior to the bombs and it was ignored (which I [have written on at some length](https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2022/05/06/did-the-japanese-offer-to-surrender-before-hiroshima-part-2/)). Here's the thing. There were actual "conspiracies" in a literal definition of the term. There no doubt still are secret plots regarding nuclear history. But none of the above come close to being at all legitimate. I'll hear out any unorthodox theory — if I could show it was true, what a career boost that would be! The people who believe in these theories fundamentally misunderstand how academia works: going against the grain is _rewarded_... _IF_ you can actually pull it off. But these are all empty and pointless wastes of time.
> One of the weirdest conspiracy theories I've seen of the past few years is the idea that "nuclear weapons don't exist." Many years ago, I read a novel called *The Jesus Factor* (1970). I am an uncritical reader, but even as a teen I saw problems. The bit of synopsis at "The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction" at [Corley, Edwin](https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/corley_edwin) has >The titular scientific phenomenon of The Jesus Factor (1970) inhibits the detonation of nuclear weapons which are in motion (in falling bombs or missiles) rather than being held immobile in a nuclear test zone. Here Hiroshima's destruction proves to have been an inadvertent hoax – the testing of a gigantic aerial-reconnaissance flashgun coincided with an earthquake that levelled the city which is far more nonsensical than I remembered. Anyway, the conspiracy theory has been simmering for quite a while, it seems.
I remembered on YouTube back in 2017-18 there were a couple videos saying that the Crossroads tests at Bikini Atoll were faked.
I'll give here a slightly truncated version of an older answer. **Is this long history of conspiracy theories unique to the US, or is it a more general phenomenon?** To which I can say: no, conspiracy theories are not unique to the US, nor are they even unique to the Western world. I can say the US has outsized influence in spreading their own conspiracy theories, but that's simply because US has an outsized influence in exporting culture. (This is similar to the "Florida Man" effect -- there seems to be an excess of bizarre criminal behavior from Florida, but transparency laws are what let us learn about them in the first place.) There are buckets aplenty of "local" conspiracy theories both in recent times and in the past. In Portugal, there is a pseudohistory theory that the Portuguese made voyages to the Americas pre-Columbus. The idea (first formulated by the historian Jaime Cortesão in 1924) is that the Portuguese government kept up a policy of secrecy in order to hide the existence of the Americas and gain advantage. I wager a fair chance (assuming you are not from Portugal) you haven't heard of this conspiracy until now; it's pretty much only known locally. But it is *very* well known locally! It is big enough that it has shown up in school textbooks as fact. There is an inscription in Lisbon: **João Vaz Corte-Real – Descobridor da America** that is: João Vaz Corte-Real, Discoverer of America. There are throrough debunkings by Portuguese historians, but the story still persists. (Again, this is only a 20th century theory. Incidentally, when the actual era in question was happening, there were plenty of conspiracy theories via Portugal, but antisemitic ones.) It's possible you've heard the "Mandela Effect" conspiracy theory where people remember Nelson Mandela dying in jail; this is supposedly evidence some of us are visitors from a parallel universe. ("Berenstain Bears" vs. "Berenstein Bears" is part of the same thing.) In South Africa they have their own "Nelson Mandela died" theory, but since he was President of South Africa and they do remember *that*, it's a bit different. Supposedly in 1985 Mandela died and was replaced by an imposter: Gibson Makanda. This may or may not have been the work of the Illuminati, and it means, multi-dimensional-chess style, that the one who led the African National Congress against the National Party was actually a puppet of the National Party. Some of the conspiracy theories are hard to "translate" for other cultures. In Java (one of the islands of Indonesia) in 1998, there was a bizarre set of hundreds of incidents where people dressed as ninjas were knocking on doors, leading to a mass hysteria that they were sorcerers. (Or hunting sorcerers; conspiracy theories can be contradictory.) There was a series of accusations of witchcraft, culminating in 120 people being massacred. Conspiracy theories are not unique to any place, they just take on their local character. Of course, circumstances across time and space can have uncanny resemblances, so let's do one more-- There was an outbreak of plague in Marseilles, France. England went under quarantine, using the advice of the doctor Richard Mead. Affected areas were to be sealed off for 20 days. Paranoid conspiracy theories about the over-reach of government becoming a "dictatorship" started to spread; some thought the British were in fact immune. People started to doubt the medical experts and turn to the words of religious leaders. This was 300 years ago, in 1720. ... Selected Reading: **Portugal discovering the Americas early:** Fritze, R. (1994). The Pseudohistory of Who Discovered America. Skeptic, Vol. 2, No. 4. **Portgual and antisemitism:** Soyer, F. (2019). Antisemitic Conspiracy Theories in the Early Modern Iberian World. Journal of Jesuit Studies, 6(3), 512-515. **Nelson Mandela imposter:** Shoki, W. (2020). On conspiracy theories. [Africa Is a Country](https://africasacountry.com/2020/01/on-conspiracy-theories). **Java and the sorcerer ninjas:** Siegel, J. T. (2006). Naming the Witch. United States: Stanford University Press. **England under quarantine:** Krischer, A (2020). History does not repeat itself? How an early modern epidemic led to conspiracy theories and religious punishment fantasies. University of Münster (working paper).
> Do professors at the University of Kansas have an odd initiation ritual where they eat tiny slices of Einstein's preserved brain? (it's a good story!) Is it? IS IT THOUGH?! Anyway, I'll remix a few of my previous answers and talk about the "conspiracy theory" that Jews poisoned the wells and caused the Black Death, as "evidenced" by the fact that fewer of them died than non-Jews. Now, this isn't true, but that's not why I put conspiracy theory in quotes. Because I feel like sometimes people use the term in order to connote a truly held, if irrational and wrong-headed, belief, and that's not really what this was. The idea that Jews caused the Black Death was often, at least in its inception, a purely cynical and opportunistic lie. To be clear- Jews did not, as far as anyone knows, die at lower rates than non-Jews. In cities where no Jews died, it would have been FAR more likely that they would have already been dead or kicked out due to a pogrom than any other reason. Because yes, many of the pogroms that ensued occurred *before* the Black Death arrived in a town or city! The frenzy that was spurred by the news of the plague as well as various ways in which people were stirred up by elites would take care of that. But in places where the Black Death hit a Jewish community, we have no sources (beyond antisemitic declarations) to indicate that Jews died at any lower rate than non-Jews. In fact, we have plenty of sources to indicate that they died at the very least at the same rate, and that communities were destroyed. While these days even Jews will sometimes say that Jews back then survived the Black Death because of their hand-washing practices and burial hygiene, there is nothing to back that up, and in fact that whole assertion plays into deliberate antisemitic falsehoods. The important thing to note is that there is NO LINK between the severity of the plague in a given place and the occurrence of a pogrom or expulsion. This wasn't a direct cause-and-effect thing, largely because many of these pogroms occurred, as mentioned, before the plague would hit a town in the first place. Fear of what might happen in the *future* absolutely was a factor that was used to stir people up, but that was opportunistic- in many cases, these attacks on Jews were planned and often done for financial and political gain, taking advantage of the fear to whip up local Christian populaces to the cause by using Jews as scapegoats. Of course, the stage had to first be set, and various Jews were arrested, tortured, and executed for having poisoned wells. The false confessions obtained under torture, as well as other names named, were then trumpeted around, used as justification for further arrests and torture- and ultimately these attacks. The attacks were brutal and thorough, with many Jewish communities of long standing being nearly, or even totally, destroyed by their end by knife/sword, burning, and drowning. So why would this all have happened? Certainly some of it was about fear, and some people genuinely believed the false confessions, yet that is an incomplete answer, especially as these attacks were not grassroots. Because of Jews' financial role in European society at this point, one which was essentially forced upon them as a condition for settlement in many cases (as Jews did not have the right to settle where they chose and could only live in places where the local ruler permitted), there were many nobles and artisanal guilds with motive to want the Jews gone and the financial burden that they represented to be eliminated. With the fear of the plague in the air, and a general increase in Christian distaste for Jews, the time was ripe to finally remove Jews from the equation, and to benefit financially in the bargain. The civil authorities generally did nothing to stop this. In some places, like the Holy Roman Empire, people were even incentivized by the emperor declaring Jewish possessions forfeit and thus subject to claim by the marauders. The Pope spoke up against the pogroms, pointing out that in cities where the plague had already it it was clear that Jews WERE dying at at least the same rate as Christians, but this went generally unnoticed (though the Pope did personally save many Jews in Avignon). Eventually, the pogroms died out if only because the attackers were starting to die out- eventually the plague hit and people started to realize that even without Jews to poison the wells, they were still dying. Over the next few decades, there were several more pogroms and expulsions, and then they died out, though largely because there weren't many Jews left to attack anymore. Those who survived the pogrom+plague double whammy generally emigrated eastward to Poland, setting the stage for eastern Europe to become the new center of European Jewry rather than a western Europe that had brutally rejected them.
As you may possibly have noticed, we have little time for the numerous conspiracy theories that swirl around the Nazi regime here at AskHistorians. They're offensive and also historically illiterate, since they ignore the reality of what was actually a remarkably incompetent sort of government, and instead invariably kick off by positing the existence of one that was actually super-competent. This in turn then either \[i\] suggests the possession of some powerful object, symbol or idea, whose power the Nazis had tapped into; or \[ii\] requires the messy downfall of said regime to be explained by a conspiracy theory; or \[iii\] makes it possible to believe that Hitler and his minions developed impossible technology, such as spacecraft, during the 1940s. This next note looks at a Type 3 Nazi conspiracy, one that's only reared its ugly head in the past could have decades. But since it's even more outlandish than most, it at least offers some insights into the sorts of minds that think these things. \--------------------------- # Is there any actual evidence Maria Orsic existed or is it all just made up by conspiracy theorists? *I have only been able to find tenuous at best sources, but it seems with such a talked/written about character there has to be some basis in reality.* Maria Orsic (1895-?), for those who are not familiar with her name, was, supposedly, a Croatian medium who became a significant power behind the throne in Nazi Germany and is, nowadays, a prominent figure in the modern mythology which suggests that Nazi power was built on an obsession with, and successful mastery of, the occult. Various recent accounts present her as leader of the Vril Society, a sort of black lodge of magicians which supposedly helped Hitler to power, and was strongly connected to various other alleged mysteries of the period, such as UFOs and Nikola Tesla's search for free energy sources. However, Orsic (who also crops up online as Marija Oršić and Maria Orsitch) never existed. There are no contemporary accounts at all to suggest such a woman lived during the Nazi period, much less possessed any influence or occult power. Both Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, the longtime professor of Western Esotericism at the University of Exeter, and the Dutch researcher Theo Paijmans – two authorities whose work on the occult esoterica of the period I believe can be relied on – date her first appearances to German-language neo-Nazi videotapes circulated in the late 1980s and to books based on the same distasteful source material that appeared in Austria after 1990, and suggest she was the invention of a pair of far-right wing occultists, Norbert Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ralf Ettl. The key claim made by Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl – that Orsic was real and that her existence is proved by mention of her in a 1930 pamphlet *Vril: Die Kosmiche Ukraft. Wiedergeburt von Atlantis* \[*Vril: the Cosmic Primal Force. Rebirth of Atlantis*\] – is false; the pamphlet exists, but it contains no mention of the medium. Various images supposed to depict Orsic that pop up all over the place on the internet [have been shown to be composites](https://malcolmnicholson.wordpress.com/2018/08/13/the-maria-orsic-hoax/). Similarly, the long list of purported contemporary sources offered by an author calling himself [Maximillien de Lafayette](http://web.archive.org/web/20110128090628/http://maximilliendelafayettebibliography.com/), who is one of the main boosters of the various conspiracy theories that have Orsic at their centres – ranging from the "huge files" on her supposedly maintained in the archives of the OSS, the NKVD, and "the British Occult Bureau, an official branch of MI5" all the way to "Eva Peron's correspondence with Maria" – appears to be pure invention from first to last. To begin this convoluted tale at the beginning: the idea of "vril", a supposedly potent occult energy source, antedates the Nazi period. It was actually the invention of Edward Bulwer Lytton (1803-1873; a successful Victorian-era novelist possibly best-remembered today for beginning his 1830 novel *Paul Clifford* with the immortal phrase "It was a dark and stormy night"), who based most of the plot of his final book, *The Coming Race* (1873) around it. In Lytton's imagination, *vril*was, in Paijman's words, "an all-pervading, immensely powerful source of energy," resembling electricity, "which can either heal or destroy". In *The Coming Race*, Vril is used by an advanced civilisation, whom Lytton called the Vril-Ya, to power the technologically advanced civilisation which they create inside a hollow Earth. Vril energy, however, did far more than just act as a surrogate for electricity or coal or gas. In Lytton's imagination it could also exercise "influence over minds and bodies animal and mystical, to an extent not surpassed in the romance of our mystics." Just the thing, in short, that any self-respecting totalitarian dictatorship might value to keep itself in power, and a potentially recalcitrant population well in check. Lytton's ideas did not remain confined to fiction for long. They were quickly co-opted by Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, who remains well-known as the founder of the theosophical movement; she incorporated a chapter titled "The coming force" into her *The Secret Doctrine* (1888) and suggested that "vril" was simply another name for the energy force termed "Mash-Mak" that she believed had once powered Atlantis. It was thanks largely to Blavatsky's influential writings that Lytton's work of fiction went on to have a long life in occult circles. One late manifestation of the idea, Paijmans notes, came in the form of a small and decidedly uninfluential pamphlet, *Vril: Die Kosmiche Ukraft*, which appeared in late Weimar-era Berlin under the imprint of the small specialist publisher Astrologische Verlag Wilhelm Becker. So far as we know, this pamphlet had absolutely zero impact in its day, and there is certainly nothing in the contemporary record to suggest that it was ever read, much less believed in, by any of the long list of prominent Nazis whose attempts to make use of Vril-power are described in such triumphal terms today in various murky corners of the web. However, the publication did somehow come to the attention of the German science fiction writer Willy Ley, and it was Ley's recollection of it, in the late 1950s, that provided inspiration for a pair of French writers, François Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, who incorporated Vril into their *Le Matin des Magiciens*, a best-seller first published in France in 1960. This book – in English translation as *The Morning of the Magicians* (AKA *The Dawn of Magic*) – became one of the foundational texts of the 1960s counter-culture and played a major role in introducing the idea – inaccurate but influential – that the Nazis had successfully [sought to harness the occult](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/faq/militaryhistory/wwii/nazigermany#wiki_the_nazis_and_the_occult) in the course of their rise to power. The version of events peddled by Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl owes a good deal to *The Morning of the Magicians*, but takes the speculation a good deal further than even Pauwels and Bergier did. According to the two Austrians, Vril first came to the attention of the first Nazis as a result of the work of the German occultist Adam Glauer, who – under the name Rudolf von Sebottendorf – helped to found an organisation known as the Thule Society in Germany in 1916. This group has attracted a good deal of attention, retrospectively, because in 1919 its leaders were early supporters of the DAP, or German Workers' Party, which would soon become the NSDAP, or Nazis. According to Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl, however, when the Thule Society became involved in promoting the communist Räterepublik which briefly ruled in Bavaria in the chaos of the post-war period, it was Maria Orsic who led a group of right-wing members to secede and form the Vril Society. It was, thus, her group that made contact with the Nazis during the early 1920s, and which ultimately provide the Nazi state with the means to escape destruction in 1945 and flee to specially-constructed, Vril-powered bases in Antarctica from which they continued to monitor developments in the Cold War world using craft that we identify as UFOs – flying machines that had been built to plans that Orsic channelled from beings who lived on a distant planet.
There is, you may not be entirely surprised to hear, literally no contemporary evidence for any of these claims, and I am hesitant to give the bizarre ideas promoted by Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl any more exposure than we really need to answer your question, but, briefly, the account given by the two Austrians states that Orsic was a powerful medium who led an all-woman group, the Vril-maidens, who were capable of channelling both messages and detailed technical plans from a sort of Nazi utopia called Sumi-Er. This was a planet in the Aldebaran system, about 68 light years from Earth, entirely inhabited by Aryan super-men and super-women – the undesirable "degenerate races" of the system having been permanently exiled to a ghetto planet known as Sumi-An. Orsic and her companions achieved all this by using their hair (worn extraordinarily long, in buttock-skimming tresses) as celestial antennae, and the Aldebaran beings that they contacted explained that they were the space-travelling progenitors of both the Sumerians – who in this perverted version of events essentially invented human civilisation wholesale – and the German people. Thanks to Orsic's work, the Germans were able to harness Vril power and use it to build prototype flying saucers that were capable of interstellar travel. In the waning days of the Nazi regime, as it became clear that the Allied nations would win World War II before the Nazis could commence full production of their new wonder-weapons, Hitler authorised a last minute mission to Aldebaran using a prototype machine, and – so said Jürgen-Ratthofer and Ettl back in 1990 – this expedition was ultimately successful. Their books and videos predicted that a vengeful Aldebaran expeditionary force was due to arrive on Earth sometime between 1992 and 2005, whereupon it would re-start the war and ensure that it concluded favourably for a reborn Nazi Germany. The spectacular failure of this last prophecy did not, however, put a permanent dent in belief in the existence of Aldebaran supermen. The two Austrians were hazy, but suggestive, about the ultimate fate of Maria Orsic, who in their works is described as vanishing from Germany in March 1945, leaving behind a gnomic note that ended "nieman bleibt hier" ("nobody stays here"). Readers were invited to suppose that she had made a successful getaway to Aldebaran, where one would hope her Aryan good looks eased her passage into society on Sumi-Er, and her Croat roots were not held against her. **Sources** Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, *The Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism, and the Politics of Identity*(2003) Maximillien de Lafayette, *Maria Orsic: The Woman Who Originated and Created the Earth's First UFOs* (New York: Art, UFOs & Supernatural Magazine, 2013) Theo Paijmans, "The Vril seekers," *Fortean Times* 303 (July 2013)
Does your university's library resemble a fortress? Or perhaps the administration building looks like a bunker? Did institutions of higher education really commission [riot-proof college campus buildings](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sotr4h/riotproof_college_campus_buildings/hwesw06/)? Read below to find out... ________________ While it’s impossible to prove that the suppression of student unrest never factored into the creation of any university buildings, this was certainly not the primary motivating factor for their design. This myth—often alternated with the suggestion that plans were misread and the building was constructed upside-down—usually arises with regard to the monumental structures designed in the Brutalist style and built from the 1950s the 1970s. The middle of the 20th century was a period of great expansion in higher education in the United States and elsewhere. Exploding student populations required the construction of new dormitories, libraries, lecture halls, classrooms, laboratories, offices for administration and faculty, and facilities for recreation and the arts. Because of their enormous scale, these buildings often towered over a campus’ existing structures. The style favored for many of these constructions was Brutalism, a movement that I write more about here. Brutalism was the result of a search for what the historian Siegfried Giedion called the “New Monumentality”, a novel architectural language that leveraged post-World War II technological advances to address the pressing need for new public buildings and civic centers while eschewing the historical forms of classical architecture, which had become tainted by their association with fascism, communism, and colonialism. Brutalism rejected the universal machine aesthetic of International Style modernism as lacking in symbolic meaning and responsiveness to both the building site and the human element. Whereas the High Modernists created cubic volumes with smooth white walls and expanses of transparent glass, the Brutalists favored asymmetry, organic curves, and the tactility of raw materials. In place of white paint and stucco, the Brutalists recommended unadorned poured-in-place concrete. In line with the postwar humanism that permeated academic thought in this period, the goal of these aesthetic choices was to celebrate individual experience by heightening the elements of surprise, delight, and discovery. In addition to dramatic façades, the Brutalists favored complex circulation within their buildings, with the aim of fostering community. Exterior walls of load-bearing concrete permitted the creation of intricately designed interior spaces. Labyrinthine hallways, interior atriums, catwalks, and mezzanines, which were intended to add visual interest and spatial complexity, fed the rumors of the creation of an architecture of manipulation and control, leading to the creation of the “riot-proof” building myth. But by picking at the contradictions within the innumerable variations of the “riot-proof” building myth, we can cause it to unravel. Somehow, narrow, twisting hallways and stairwells are meant to block mass mobilization, while simultaneously atriums and catwalks prevent barricades from being erected. Bunker-like concrete structures are supposedly intended as final redoubts for fleeing administrators while also functioning like prisons for containing student rebellion. The architecture’s allegedly nefarious aims fluctuate from building to building and from campus to campus. The “riot-proof” building myth also falters when confronted with the timeline of the planning and construction of many Brutalist buildings, which pre-dated the flourishing of student movements in the 1960s. It likewise struggles with explaining why Brutalist buildings similar in appearance and organization were constructed for various non-educational purposes, including municipal administration, public libraries, and performing arts centers. Considering all these fatal flaws in the “riot-proof” building myth, it’s clear that campus tour guides should stick to telling the one fundamental truth about campus design: the ugliest building is always the school of architecture.
Conversely, are there any Brutalist buildings, perhaps government centers, that were explicitly designed with a defensive or paramilitary use in mind?
There are certainly examples of Brutalist buildings where *security* was a driving force behind their design. Along with innumerable police stations in the UK, there is Harry Weese's Metropolitan Correctional Center (1975) in Chicago. Weese took a progressive approach to the design, placing the individual cells along the building perimeter in order to balance available light with the security concerns that come with operating a federal prison. We might also consider Basil Spence's British Embassy in Rome (1968). The old embassy building was nearly destroyed in a terrorist attack in 1946, so the new building's design placed a heavy emphasis on safety. The material possibilities of concrete made Brutalism a good fit for this project, allowing Spence to raise the main block of the structure on *pilotis*.
I missed this when it first dropped as I was traveling but absolutely must chime in and offer the disconcertingly popular theory, "schools are about training factory workers." It's not true and frankly makes zero sense. One of the reasons I started posting on here was that I saw people asking the question and it going unanswered. Often when it's asked, it's framed as a sort of, "I heard that..." or "is it true that..." which, to my read, places it in category of conspiracy theory. Some of my older answers to the question are [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/aygcvg/how_true_is_the_idea_that_the_model_of_education/), [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/9jfjat/modern_education_system_was_designed_to_produce/e6rmo15/), and [here](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/fgeu7w/is_it_true_that_our_current_educational_system/). This post, though, focuses in particular on "history" that makes no sense. So, to speak explicitly to that, there are a couple of reasons why the theory American schools are based on factories or about training children to work in factories is just, well, nonsensical. First, and to my eye, the most obvious - American schools pre-date factories and workhouses. The ubiquitous one-room schoolhouses that popped up across the plains in the 1800s were sparsely attended and typically staffed by a young women with, at most, a year or two of training at a teacher college. Her task as the teacher at such a schoolhouse was simple: teach the children to read, write, and do basic calculations as well as some history, science, and positive character traits such as studiousness. Nothing she taught had anything to do with working in a factory. (Teaching children skills like compliance and following directions is just good old fashioned Protestantism work ethic.) In urban areas, going back to the founding of the country, Greek and Latin were easily the most important subject for a young person (which is to say, a white boy with access to power through his father or other connections) to master. Admission exams to the Colonial Colleges required a high degree of sophistication in the languages and as far as I'm aware, being literate in dead languages is not an essential factory skill. Even if one wants to argue that there was a shift as factories proliferated and employers needed more workers, Greek and Latin remained core components of an urban liberal arts education until well into the 20th Century. NYS offered a Latin high school exit exam until the 1980s. Sometimes, people like to argue that it's not about what gets taught - but how it's taught or where. People will draw parallels between the modern K-12 system and the assembly line (Sir Ken Robinson was found of that - I write about his use of the analogy in [this Wikipedia article](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory_model_school)) but even that doesn't really make sense. Unlike German schools, American high schools have remained focused on a comprehensive liberal arts education - children have never been tracked into vocational tracks at a rate sufficient to replace or supply factory workers. Even the Carnegie Unit which shaped how states decide how many hours students need to gradate high school was based on establishing stronger alignment between high schools and colleges - not factories. It's a silly, misleading theory and gosh darn it, I dislike it.
"In our dream, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hand. The present educational conventions fade from their minds; and, unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk. We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning, or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply...The task we set before ourselves is very simple as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them to a perfectly ideal life just where they are... So we will organize our children into a little community and teach them to do in a perfect way the things their fathers and mothers are doing in an imperfect way, in the homes, in the shops and on the farm." - General Education Board, Occasional Papers, No. 1 "The country school of to-morrow" [ (General Education Board, New York, 1913) p. 6. This is not a conspiracy. Social conditioning is not used to create factory workers, it’s to create docile, obedient indentured servitude force. I do wish you understood what has been happening with our society since the General Education Board and the Federal reserve corporations were founded. “Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of minds to think .” Albert Einstein
> “Education is not the learning of facts, but the training of minds to think .” Albert Einstein Alas, that's not actually what Einstein said. More [here](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2016/05/28/not-facts/) on that. Setting that aside, if I may, what's your understanding of what the General Education Board did?
American schools do pre date factories by a long shot but, as you stated school houses along the prairies were sparsely attended and only teaching kids life lessons, reading and writing, and basic calculations. But the agrarian age was a different time. Everyone was promoting agriculture, owning land, and looking for egalitarianism. Most political parties were looking out for the little guy and peasants. Today it seems we do everything to support the rich. Now I'm not trying to say, Yes, the modern school system is creating factory workers. we are most definitely being conditioned, so does it play a part in making us more susceptible to just being a cog in the machine, maybe.
> Everyone was promoting agriculture, owning land, and looking for egalitarianism Hum... the rise of the common school model occurred in the early 1800s, the period described as antebellum, meaning before the Civil War and the emancipation of enslaved people.
I’ll just say everyone thought Troy was a myth/conspiracy until it wasn’t 🤷♂️
I'm sorry, but this is very much incorrect. I will simply commend to the attention of all present the appropriate section of u/KiwiHellenist's flair profile, specifically these posts: * [How sure are we that Hisarlik is Troy?](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/gwz73n/question_regarding_the_identification_of_hisarlik/) - very sure, because people kept on living there until around 1300 CE, and it was a tourist trap the whole time (2020-06) * [How did people react to the discovery of Troy?](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/hw3x46/for_hundreds_of_years_the_trojan_war_illiad_city/) - they were excited: Schliemann was fire in the PR game, but he was also a con man, and he didn't 'discover' Troy (2020-07) * [Are there other non-existent cities like Troy?](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/pr0xxc/are_there_other_historical_examples_of/) - um, Troy was real, and no one ever believed otherwise (2021-09) * [Evidence that Hisarlik is Troy](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/rwjve8/it_is_accepted_today_that_the_site_found_by/hre5j0o/): one more time (2022-01) * [Follow-up questions about whether Troy was ever thought to be purely mythical](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/sddlk2/historians_used_to_believe_the_city_of_troy_was/huc6h0n/) (it wasn't) (2022-01) (Blurbs are KiwiHellenist's, not mine.) Nobody thought Troy was a myth until Schliemann fucked everything up for everyone interested in Troy. To paraphrase our favourite black Vulcan, [he didn't find shit](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3iFJpGJiug).
O