[SPEAKER_00]: This episode contains details that some listeners may find disturbing. [SPEAKER_00]: We spend a lot of time talking about war, about weapons, bombs, poisons, armies, the machinery of destruction. [SPEAKER_00]: And those things are terrifying, but there's a proverb.
[SPEAKER_00]: The pen is mightier than the sword, and its true, words have power, words travel, words get copied, translated, past hand-to-hand across oceans and centuries, reaching people who have never met each other and may never will. [SPEAKER_00]: Words start revolutions, topal governments, and unite strangers around a single idea, for better or for worse.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when that idea is wrong or when it's a lie carefully dressed up as truth, the damage it can do is more dangerous than any weapon. [SPEAKER_00]: Tonight we look at the five most dangerous documents in history. [SPEAKER_00]: This is a study of strange. [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome back to the show. [SPEAKER_00]: I am very excited about today's episode. [SPEAKER_00]: It's a little different format in style than our usual episodes.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have come across many provocative and mysterious documents and books that I have been thinking about for an episode of a study of strange, but they're not all quite right for the show. [SPEAKER_00]: So I had an idea instead to make a compilation a list of what I think are the most dangerous ones. [SPEAKER_00]: And to be very clear, this is not [SPEAKER_00]: a list of evil writings by evil people. [SPEAKER_00]: That is a potentially a different episode.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of these were written with malicious intent, some were not, but all of them have left a body count that is almost impossible to calculate and comprehend. [SPEAKER_00]: If you listeners, [SPEAKER_00]: have any opinions or thoughts about documents that you think should be on this list that I do not talk about today, please email me at a study of strangerchimell.com and perhaps I'll do a follow up episode or put some content out on our sub-stack.
[SPEAKER_00]: Number 5. [SPEAKER_00]: The Malias Melafakaram The 1486 book titled Translates to The Hammer of Witches [SPEAKER_00]: and like the title Alludes, it was a violently impactful work. [SPEAKER_00]: Written by Heinrich Cramer, an inquisitor, Cramer didn't think the church or authorities were doing enough to combat sorcery and witchcraft. [SPEAKER_00]: He had been trying to prosecute witchcraft cases in Austria and he kept running into a little problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: Local bishops thought that he was overzealous, legally unsound and perhaps a little unhinged. [SPEAKER_00]: so he was expelled from the diocese. [SPEAKER_00]: Presumably, he had some time on his hand, so he set down and he wrote the Malias Melefacara. [SPEAKER_00]: His work is broken into three parts, and is at its core, a procedural manual. [SPEAKER_00]: The first part focuses on the theological framework for, what is a witch?
[SPEAKER_00]: And also why, if you don't believe in witches, that is in and of itself, heresy. [SPEAKER_00]: The second part describes what witches do, and often extraordinarily uncomfortable and specific, sexually obsessive detail that tells you probably a great deal more about Kramer himself than actual witchcraft, and the third part is the section that makes it genuinely dangerous, a step-by-step guide for how to identify, try, and execute, a witch.
[SPEAKER_00]: The book was not universally accepted by leaders by courts or the Catholic Church at large with a small caveat that the Pope at the time did support the book, but the writing was very influential. [SPEAKER_00]: Before the Malias Malafakara witch trials existed, but they were inconsistent, different regions, different standards, wildly different outcomes. [SPEAKER_00]: what Kramer did essentially was franchise the process.
[SPEAKER_00]: He created a replicable system, a manual that any inquisitor in any diocese in any country could pick up and follow, and they did. [SPEAKER_00]: The Malius was one of the first books produced on the Gutenberg's printing press which had been invented just a few decades earlier. [SPEAKER_00]: It went through multiple editions before 1520 and it spread across Europe the way of virus spreads through a population.
[SPEAKER_00]: The estimates of how many people were executed for witchcraft in Europe between 1486 when this book was published and the end of the witch trial era in the early 18th century very significantly. [SPEAKER_00]: But the range most historians work with is between 40 and 60,000 people. [SPEAKER_00]: The overwhelming majority of convicted witches in some studies 95% were women.
[SPEAKER_00]: many were elderly, many were targeted just because they own property that somebody else wanted, or because they had made an enemy of the wrong person. [SPEAKER_00]: Many inquisitors, Heinrich Kramer himself, were uncomfortably focused on the sexuality and sexual behavior of these women, and now there was a procedure to find them and execute them. [SPEAKER_00]: While many in that era might not have believed everything in this book, or some of them may not have ever even read it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it influenced how society worked, how culture worked, it also influenced other books as an example, demonology which came out, I believe, 80 to 100 years later, written by King James, built on some of these ideas about how to find and execute witches. [SPEAKER_00]: Cramer's writing was dangerous because it told people in power what they already wanted to hear, and it gave them the tools to act on it with legal cover.
[SPEAKER_00]: Heinrich Cramer's dangerous obsession with witches and his writing has rippled down through centuries, causing untold chaos and death.
[SPEAKER_00]: 4. [SPEAKER_00]: The Cigarette Papers [SPEAKER_00]: In the early 1990s, Parallel Eagle Merrill Williams was working at a law firm in Louisville, Kentucky, a firm that represented Brown and Williams, one of the largest tobacco companies in the United States, and his job was to review documents to prepare for defense cases, routine stuff, theoretically, and somewhere in those files, Merrill Williams found information.
[SPEAKER_00]: Brown and Williams internal research documents went all the way back to the 1950s. [SPEAKER_00]: In these files and were memos between scientists, letters between executives, meeting notes, and what they collectively show is at Brown and Williams' new.
[SPEAKER_00]: They knew nicotine was addictive, they knew their product cause cancer, they knew it decades before the public did, decades before lawsuits, decades before the congressional hearings where all the CEOs sat in a row and told the United States government under oath that they did not believe nicotine was addictive.
[SPEAKER_00]: They knew they had always no. [SPEAKER_00]: Williams risking his job his credibility and so much more smuggled these documents out a few at a time over the course of two years. [SPEAKER_00]: He gave copies to a Kentucky state legislator, reporter, and eventually they reached Professor Stanton Glance at UC San Francisco who was able to publish them. [SPEAKER_00]: Of course, the industry's legal machinery came down on Williams like a collapsing building.
[SPEAKER_00]: In junctions, lawsuits, attempts to suppress this information, but it was too late. [SPEAKER_00]: the documents became the foundation for the largest civil litigation settlement in American history. [SPEAKER_00]: The 1998 tobacco master settlement agreement in which the major tobacco companies agreed to pay over $200 billion that's with the B to 46 states. [SPEAKER_00]: And it fundamentally changed how they could market their products.
[SPEAKER_00]: The cigarette papers themselves did not directly cause death and destruction, like some of the other works that we will talk about today, but because of the data within and how dangerous tobacco products were and how that was hidden, I think it's worthy to include these documents in this list today. [SPEAKER_00]: In Quick Footnote, Jeffrey Wygens, [SPEAKER_00]: was another whistleblower right around the same time who had information about Brown and William Sin as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: They turned his story into a movie and I believe a book as well. [SPEAKER_00]: The movie is called the insider directed by Michael Mann starring Russell Crowe and it is worth checking out if you haven't seen it. [SPEAKER_00]: Number three, general order number 11. [SPEAKER_00]: This one, I'll wager you, probably haven't heard about, and that honestly, is why I wanted to include it on this list, in August of 1863.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Civil War is in its third year, in the border state of Missouri, which never formally seceded, but is deeply, violently divided. [SPEAKER_00]: A Confederate guerrilla leader named William Control led a raid on Lawrence, Kansas. [SPEAKER_00]: 150 [SPEAKER_00]: It's a massacre. [SPEAKER_00]: and the Union Command and Missouri led by Brigadier General Thomas Ewing Jr. was under enormous pressure to respond.
[SPEAKER_00]: So on August 25th, Ewing issued general order number 11, the order, which is on a one-page document, commands that every single civilian resident of four Missouri counties, Jackson cast baits in the northern portion of Vernon, must leave their homes [SPEAKER_00]: not just Confederate sympathizers, not just people who demonstrated ties to these guerrillas, everyone.
[SPEAKER_00]: The entire civilian population of a region roughly the size of a small state ordered [SPEAKER_00]: Their homes, those that weren't looted first, were burnt, their crops, destroyed, their livestock, taken. [SPEAKER_00]: The area became known for years afterward as the burnt district. [SPEAKER_00]: It took generations to recover in some parts arguably never did. [SPEAKER_00]: Now, Ewing's order was legal.
[SPEAKER_00]: It went through the proper channels, and had the right signatures in the right places. [SPEAKER_00]: President Lincoln approved the order himself, though he did voice some concerns. [SPEAKER_00]: It looked, in other words, like any other order, but what it actually was. [SPEAKER_00]: is one of the largest forced displacement operations conducted by the United States government against its own civilian population in the country's history.
[SPEAKER_00]: Artist George Caleb Bingham, who was in Kansas City at the time of this route, it is well known that men were shot down in a very active obeying the order, and their wagons and effects seized by their murderers. [SPEAKER_00]: dense columns of smoke arising in every direction marked the conflagrations of dwellings, many of the evidences of which are yet to be seen in the remains of seared and blackened chimneys.
[SPEAKER_00]: Standing as melancholy monuments of a ruthless military despotism, which spared neither age, sex character nor condition. [SPEAKER_00]: There was neither aide nor protection afforded to the vanished inhabitants by the heartless authority which expelled them from their rightful possessions. [SPEAKER_00]: This order was a direct precursor in philosophy, in method, and in precedent to later force displacement policies that we rightly regard as atrocities today.
[SPEAKER_00]: The idea that entire civilian populations can be collectively punished for the actions of combatants among them, and that a document with the right letterhead can make it legal, is not an idea that has stayed in 1863. [SPEAKER_00]: We don't talk about general order number 11, much in the standard telling of the Civil War, so I'd argue that this deserves to be better known.
[SPEAKER_00]: People should know about this, because understanding how it happened and how few people in positions of authority objected to it tells you something very important about the relationship between official documents. [SPEAKER_00]: and official violence, and unfortunately, I think repeats itself in human history.
[SPEAKER_00]: Number two, the protocols of the elders of Zion, first published in 1903 in Russia, [SPEAKER_00]: I can not believe I am talking about the protocols of the elders of Zion on my podcast because this has become part of pop culture now. [SPEAKER_00]: It is the the foundation of many conspiracy theories and it is disgusting documentaries and of course not so healthy YouTube videos forums and much more and oh man it is not fun to read comments. [SPEAKER_00]: on this subject online.
[SPEAKER_00]: The gap between what most people know about this work and what it actually is where it came from, how it was made, how it spread, while that gap is like the grand canyon. [SPEAKER_00]: The protocols of the elders of Zion purports to be the minutes of a secret meeting of Jewish leaders in which they outline a global conspiracy to control governments, control economies, control media, and eventually the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is presented as a found document, elite document, a whistleblower document, if you will, but it is a fabrication. [SPEAKER_00]: a complete deliberate, provable fake, not only that a large portion of it is plagiarized from 1864's political satire dialogue and hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu by Maurice Jolli, which had nothing to do with the Jewish people at all. [SPEAKER_00]: The original satire targeted Napoleon III.
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone took that, replaced the characters, reframed it as a conspiracy document, and handed it to a Russian mystic named Sergei Nelus, who published it in 1903 as an appendix to a religious text. [SPEAKER_00]: It was almost certainly produced by the Russian secret police. [SPEAKER_00]: Within a decade, it had been translated into dozens of languages.
[SPEAKER_00]: Within two decades, it was being cited by Henry Ford and his personal newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, which distributed to hundreds of thousands of American readers. [SPEAKER_00]: And within three decades, it was required reading and German schools. [SPEAKER_00]: You can do your own math there to figure out when in history that was.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, not everyone believed this document right away, thank goodness, as early as the 1920s as it was spreading west, the London Times definitively exposed it as a plagiarized forgery, a Swiss court ruled it defamatory and false, and has been debunked conclusively more times than almost any document in history. [SPEAKER_00]: But it's on this list, because as easy as it is to conclude that it is a fake, it hasn't mattered.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the thing about this that I find genuinely, I don't even know if frightening is the right term, but it's destabilizing. [SPEAKER_00]: The protocols have spread. [SPEAKER_00]: almost because they've been proven false because believers reframe each debunking as further evidence of a conspiracy, of a cover-up. [SPEAKER_00]: Hitler cited this in mind comp. [SPEAKER_00]: It was used as ideological justification for programs across Eastern Europe in the 20th century.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was used to incite violence and displacement and eventually the systematic murder of millions of people. [SPEAKER_00]: And it still influences violence today. [SPEAKER_00]: Number 1. [SPEAKER_00]: The Tuskegee Study Letters [SPEAKER_00]: Most people probably know this story by now, but for decades it was a secret. [SPEAKER_00]: There was a government program that ran for 40 years that enrolled hundreds of human beings without their genuine and informed consent.
[SPEAKER_00]: Withheld from those human beings was a treatment that could have saved their lives. [SPEAKER_00]: because the people running the program decided that watching what happened without intervention was more scientifically valuable. [SPEAKER_00]: This program generated an enormous paper trail, mimos, reports, funding requests, academic papers published in peer-reviewed journals, annual reviews, approvals, letters, you guys get it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The letters and documents, of course, are in reference to the Tuskegee syphilis study, which began in 1932 in Naken County, Alabama, and enrolled 399 black men who had syphilis and 211 without as a control group. [SPEAKER_00]: The men were told that they were being treated for bad blood, a local term for a range of ailments. [SPEAKER_00]: They were not told that they had syphilis. [SPEAKER_00]: They were not told that they were in a study.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were given placebo's and occasionally aspirin and told to come back. [SPEAKER_00]: When Penicillin became the standard treatment for syphilis in 1947, you might expect this study to conclude, but no, it continued. [SPEAKER_00]: When men in the study were drafted during World War II, and identified by military doctors as having syphilis, which would have triggered standard treatment.
[SPEAKER_00]: The study's administrators contacted the draft board and had those men exempted from treatment protocols so they could remain in the study. [SPEAKER_00]: Again, unknowingly, the study ran until 1972, when a whistleblower leaked the story to journalist [SPEAKER_00]: The Associated Press ran it on July 25, 1972. [SPEAKER_00]: The study was shut down within days. [SPEAKER_00]: By then, 28 men had died directly from syphilis, 100 had died from related complications.
[SPEAKER_00]: 40 of their wives had been infected, 19 of their children had been born with congenital syphilis. [SPEAKER_00]: The documents that authorized all of this, [SPEAKER_00]: were written by doctors and administrators and government officials who went home at night and presumably lived ordinary lives. [SPEAKER_00]: Every other entry on this list, caused its damage at some kind of distance.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was influence for sure that reverberated through history, but the Tuskegee documents they're different to me because they were renewed every year for 40 years. [SPEAKER_00]: And the consequences did not end. [SPEAKER_00]: When this program was shut down in 1972, the justified documented historically grounded mistrust of medical institutions among African Americans that the Tuskegee study created is still felt today.
[SPEAKER_00]: A study that ended 50 years ago, and it's still right now affecting who goes to the doctor, who doesn't, and how much they trust what a doctor actually tells them. [SPEAKER_00]: Languages the most powerful tool humans have ever developed, and power as it turns out doesn't need a sword, it just needs a pen. [SPEAKER_00]: Thank you for listening to a study of strange. [SPEAKER_00]: I hope you enjoyed today's episode for those that don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm now releasing a video version of this podcast on YouTube. [SPEAKER_00]: Hi, hi for those that can see me what's going on. [SPEAKER_00]: You get to see me and some images that may pop up. [SPEAKER_00]: It's really simple, but you know, podcasts, they all have to have some sort of video component now. [SPEAKER_00]: So we're doing that. [SPEAKER_00]: Follow us on Instagram and things of that nature. [SPEAKER_00]: Otherwise, subscribe to nend next week.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much.