they were always real and in power...lmao
if we don't learn from history we are doomed to repeat it. --someone said that, shrug, though I don't necessarily believe or disbelieve it.
People need their enemies that act upon them--from gods to telegraph wires. shrug again
https://www.history.com/news/how-infecti...n-theories
Pandemics have long bred prejudice and mistrust, and fueled longstanding biases, as traumatized communities have looked to blame others as unclean or malicious spreaders of disease.
Throughout medieval Europe the plague became an excuse to scapegoat and massacre Jewish people. Medieval Christian mobs attacked Jewish ghettos with virtually every wave of the disease, claiming that Jewish citizens poisoned wells and conspired with demons to spread the disease. In one pogrom, 2,000 Jews were burned alive in the city of Strasbourg on February 14, 1349.
Meanwhile, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, cholera sweeping across Europe became the subject of wild class-based conspiracy theories, as poor and marginalized people accused the ruling elite of ruthlessly working to cull their ranks by spreading the disease and deliberately poisoning them.
From Russia to Italy to the United Kingdom, scores of riots followed, with members of the police, government and medical establishments murdered, and hospitals and town halls destroyed.
In the absence of certainty, pandemics have often inspired people to grasp at answers based on whatever they immediately observe around them. With the Russian flu of 1889, bizarre theories evolved quickly into widely disseminated rumors.
One newspaper, The New York Herald, speculated that the flu could travel on telegraph wires, after a large number of telegraph operators seemed to contract the disease. Others hypothesized that the flu may have arrived on letters from Europe, since mail carriers had begun to fall ill. In Detroit, when bank tellers began to get sick, some jumped to the conclusion that they'd caught it from handling paper money. Other rumored culprits included dust, postage stamps and library books.
During the Middle Ages, it was believed that sneezing not only spread Black Death but caused a person to expel their soul. Hence, “God Bless You!”
Here's a simple summary: Uncertainty is a mindfuk--for everyone. Folks generally find something certain to latch onto--even if it's only in their own minds....then they find likeminded folks to hang with....next they want to convince others of differing minds that they alone are correct
It's just human lol