Aaron Astor is a cool historian I have been following for some time on Twitter.. He is an associate professor at Marywood College and an expert in 19th Century United States history..(*Plug for him here, you should follow him on Twitter as well!)
We asked him today if there were any interesting conspiracy theories from pandemics in the past as we do now..
YES! Aaron responded .. a resounding yes.
He pointed out to me,
Probably the most infamous was blaming the Jews for the Black Death in the 1340s. It’s a big reason why so many Ashkenazi Jews forced out of western Germany migrated east to Poland in that time period.
He went on to say,
If you’ve ever wondered why Eastern European Jews who immigrated to the US from the old Russian Empire spoke a dialect of German (which Yiddish is), the reason is that they lived near the Rhine River for a thousand years between ~300 and the ~1340s.
There are some who still speak Yiddish today..
Aaron said that some isolated pockets – ultra-Orthodox communities still do.. Most of it carried forth in slang and humor from grandparents.
Few understood the germ theory prior to the 1900s.. Professor Astor said, that people had some idea that plagues spread one way or another, transmitted either by humans or animals. So they looked with suspicion people who seemed less susceptible – like Jews because of cleanliness practices.
LANDS OF CONSPIRACY
Plagues bring out the best and worst of humanity..
Even in our modern pandemic, as people are aching for air and praying for lockdowns to end, we are faced with a dramatic moment.. For weeks we have been told that flattening the curve would be a sacrifice.. Now with millions unemployed, state systems overloaded, an entire economic plight of the world a hair trigger away from chaos.. we are flattening the curve.
It seems to be working!
But there are continued outbreaks in meat packing plants and nursing homes, but states are starting to see more good news than bad..
So … stop the lockdowns? Open all business?
Some stormed Michigan last week desiring that..
Up to 10,000 are expected in Harrisburg on Monday demanding the same.
The pandemic suddenly turned political.. The snooze network of your choice began to make decisions for you to autotune your script to.. Facts seemingly stopped mattering in the heat of the moment..
Conspiracy theories were raised.. Bill Gates.. Memes.. Trump Tweets.. the REAL numbers vs the projections.. We are a land of confusion.. we are a land of conspiracy..
FEAR AND PANIC IN AMERICAN MEDIA
Bill Maher had an excellent “new rule” on REAL TIME Friday night.. he decried media fear porn, such as news organizations adding emotional words into what should be factual headlines.. you can watch here:
Our news has moved away from fact and more towards emotions.. check back to the 9/11 coverage.
You had clear, true, and real news..
The emotional you had then was visceral, real.. The emotion expressed by 24/7 news these days seemingly has contrived, on purpose, and scripted.
Bill Maher is right. Just tell us 1 million are unemployed.. there is no need to add trigger words to that headline..
But news needs ratings. And ratings have turned into endless fear..
PANDEMICS CREATE CONSPIRACY THEORIES
Covid-19 has created a theory: 5G is causing the virus, or exacerbating it.
Even more 5G towers are actively being burned down in Europe–something that has not occurred yet in America.
It didn’t take long for the conspiracy theorists to join the dots. The virus was man-made, created in a laboratory in Wuhan, part of a Chinese plot to develop biological warfare systems. The masts were spreading the virus through high-frequency emissions. The virus was designed to suppress the human immune system. Or to suck oxygen out of the lungs. Ultimately it aimed to reduce the population of the West and undermine its economies. There weren’t any cases in Africa because 5G hadn’t been set up there.
In the meantime, 5G masts have been going up all over Britain to enable its adoption. Anti-5G organisations, such as Stop 5G UK, which has 27,000 members in its Facebook group, have claimed that the masts’ radiation damages people’s health and lowers their fertility (shades of the film Dr Strangelove here); and they have embraced the new conspiracy theory as further evidence of the dangers posed by the system. In a recent TV interview with London Live, the conspiracy theorist David Icke has referred to an “electro-magnetic technologically generated soup of radiation toxicity”, which he claimed damaged old people’s immune systems.
But conspiracy theories don’t just come from thin air.. There were actually scientific concerns about this new technology not too long ago.
As 5G wireless becomes more popular, more towers to emit the signals will be built to supplement existing cell towers. This is because 5G needs a different hardware to deliver such signals. However, 5G requires far more of these towers than previous generations of networks — reportedly, as near as 500 feet apart in many neighborhoods — due to having a higher frequency that decays faster in the atmosphere. The close proximity of said towers is also a cause for concern, according to Sabine El Gemayel, the producer and director of watchdog group Generation Zapped.
“I’m very concerned about 5G because 5G’s infrastructure requires cell towers to be much closer to each other, thus creating an emitting grid of 24/7 wireless radiations near our homes,” she told Salon in an email. “Radio frequencies from wireless radiations have been classified a class 2b carcinogen by the World Health Organization (WHO). It is not only a concern because it’s hazardous to our health but it is also raises concerns about privacy and cyber security with IOT (Internet of Things).”
A PAST PLAGUE AND FLU THEORIES
The Black Death was created most likely from fleas.. but theories abounded!
It was a triple conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter and Mars in the 40th degree of Aquarius, occurring on the 20th of March 1345, some said!
Not long after the Vernal Equinox of 1348 King Philip VI ordered a report on the causes of the Bubonic Plague from the University of Paris Faculty of Medicine. The response came by way of an astrological explanation. If the cause was understood, a cure might be found. The Faculty pointed to a chart for 1.00 pm 20 March 1345 there was a conjunction of Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars in the House of Aquarius. Moreover, there had been a significant Lunar Eclipse on March 18 at 9:38 pm.
THE SPANISH FLU IS THE ULTIMATE CONSPIRACY THEORY
BECAUSE IT DIDN’T COME FROM SPAIN!!
So how did the 1918 SPANISH flu get its name? … did the flu actually come from Spain?
No…
It did not.
Back to Aaron Astor. He said he was not sure where the term Spanish Flu really came from..
Most say it’s because there was no censorship in Spain. The press in 1918 didn’t understand that the smallish early wave flu outbreak in Kansas in Spring 1918 was the same flu as the big wave in Sept-Nov 1918.
He continued,
“Newspapers in late July 1918 were referring to it as the “Spanish variety” of influenza when it hit the German trenches. I think the term “Spanish flu” might actually pre-date WWI by decades – there were scattered references to the term in the 1890s.”
At this point, most researchers think that the “Spanish Flu” actually came from the United States, where the first known case was reported at Camp Funston in Fort Riley, Kansas, on March 11, 1918.. Historians believe that infected soldiers spread the disease to other military camps across the country, then brought it overseas. In March 1918, 84,000 American soldiers headed across the Atlantic and were followed by 118,000 more the following month..
The HISTORY CHANNEL has a report (now cached) stating this about the American response to the famous second wave of the pandemic:
A devastating second wave of the Spanish Flu hit American shores in the summer of 1918, as returning soldiers infected with the disease spread it to the general population—especially in densely-crowded cities. Without a vaccine or approved treatment plan, it fell to local mayors and healthy officials to improvise plans to safeguard the safety of their citizens. With pressure to appear patriotic at wartime and with a censored media downplaying the disease’s spread, many made tragic decisions.
Philadelphia’s response was too little, too late. Dr. Wilmer Krusen, director of Public Health and Charities for the city, insisted mounting fatalities were not the “Spanish flu,” but rather just the normal flu. So on September 18, the city went forward with a Liberty Loan parade attended by tens of thousands of Philadelphians, spreading the disease like wildfire. In just 10 days, over 1,000 Philadelphians were dead, with another 200,000 sick. Only then did the city close saloons and theaters. By March 1919, over 15,000 citizens of Philadelphia had lost their lives.
St. Louis, Missouri, was different: Schools and movie theaters closed and public gatherings were banned. Consequently, the peak mortality rate in St. Louis was just one-eighth of Philadelphia’s death rate during the peak of the pandemic.
Citizens in San Francisco were fined $5—a significant sum at the time—if they were caught in public without masks and charged with disturbing the peace.
On October 15, 1918, the Warren Times Mirror in Warren Pennsylvania reported a slew of interesting theories about the 1918 pandemic and other flus of the past.
A part of their warning: Don’t gaze at the stars or the FLU will get you!
Astrologers of the time reported that the flu was an epidemic attributed to heavenly bodies.. 
We have been here before..
And we will be there again…
