Insane Historical Theories... PART I

Day 3,381, 07:38 Published in Albania Albania by mo green



Insane Historical Theories That Make Way Too Much Sense

When it comes to history, we usually trust the historians. It's right there in the name, you know? If it's a choice between "historian" and "some random dipshit," we'll go with the former nine times out of ten. But then there's that tenth time -- the time some random dipshit comes up with a theory so compelling that we can't help but pay attention. We're not saying these folks are right -- hell, we're not even saying they're sane. We're just saying what if ...




The Sinking Of The Lusitania Might Have Been A British Plot


America's involvement in World War I began with the sinking of the British civilian cruise ship Lusitania by a German torpedo in 1915. The German government had warned Britain to suspend tourism during the hostilities, because German ships weren't going to discriminate between civilian and military vessels when they got trigger-happy. Nevertheless, the Lusitania embarked from New York to Britain on May 1, under the captain's naive impression that the Germans wouldn't really blow up a cruise ship full of innocent tourists. Over a thousand people died when Germany called that particular bluff.





As with Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and basically any tragedy ever, there are conspiracy theories that say the American government allowed the attack to go ahead because they wanted an excuse to enter the war and start whooping German ass. But when it comes to the Lusitania, that idea is a little more plausible.

For one thing, the official story at the time was that two torpedoes launched by a German submarine sank the ship, but it's since been proven that only one torpedo was launched. The cause of the well-documented second explosion remains a mystery, which is like Viagra for the kinds of people who Google jet fuel temperatures on their lunch break.





In 1982, the British government was forced to admit that the Lusitania was secretly carrying a shitload of munitions back to Britain. The Germans at the time defended their attack on the ship as a military action, but it was long denied by the British in order to bolster war sentiment against those evil, civilian-targeting Hun assholes. Once salvage crews started diving into the wreck, the Brits had to come clean, lest the workers inadvertently explode inside the ostensibly weapons-free site. This was confirmed in 2008, when salvage divers recovered a mother lode of weapons which officially never existed.

During all of this, the person in charge of ensuring the safety of British vessels, with the very British title of "First Lord of the Admiralty," was a man you might recognize: one Sir Winston Churchill. Yes, the "We will fight them on the beaches" guy. Modern Lusitania Truthers contend that Churchill set up the tragedy in order to convince the United States to enter the war. Whatever classic one-liners he quipped as a result remain lost to history.





Jack The Ripper Might Have Never Existed


Jack the Ripper's reign of terror is legendary for a number of reasons: the particularly gruesome ways he dispatched his victims, his childish, gloating, borderline illiterate letters to the press, and the fact that he's never been identified to this day. The Wikipedia page for people suspected to be the Ripper lists dozens of possible culprits, from Queen Victoria's personal physician to Alice In Wonderland author Lewis Carroll. And yet there remains a simpler and perhaps more plausible scenario: that the dude never existed at all. That is to say, the five victims of Jack the Ripper might in fact be five unrelated murders.




It turns out that the Ripper's victims don't have a whole lot in common, besides the fact that they were all killed in the same year, in the same district, and all violently. That sounds like enough to pin them on the same killer, but then you find that they were killed using different knives, and under very different circumstances.

Then there are all the taunting letters sent to the press and the police ... most of which have been dismissed as hoaxes. Of the two probably genuine letters, one of them has outright vanished due to 19th-century law enforcement incompetence, so only one, the fabled "Dear Boss letter," can be confirmed as having been written by a true killer.





And we say "killer" instead of "serial killer," because the author of this letter might only be responsible for one of the Ripper murders. Author Simon Wood, who has spent decades obsessed with the Ripper case, ultimately concluded that Jack was probably an invention of the press to sell more newspapers. But that would mean newspapermen used to be unscrupulous, which is frankly an absurd accusation.