Land of Delusion: Deep inside the world of crackpots, conspiracy theorists, and radical ideas that are becoming dangerously mainstream
By Colin Dickey
3/5
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About this ebook
Not so long ago, conspiracy theorists were relegated to the cultural fringes. They were the oddballs in the tinfoil hats, raging to one another about who really shot JFK and whether or not an astronaut walked on the moon. In recent years, however, as everything from stolen-election claims to vaccine disinformation to QAnon has made daily headlines, conspiracists have moved, if not front and center, then awfully close.
As the American right wing retreats further into its political bunker and war rages in Ukraine, two particularly bizarre theories are gaining traction in the United States and Russia. They seem laughably far-fetched, but behind the absurdity lurk radical ideas that are becoming alarmingly commonplace. These ludicrous beliefs offer a road map of where we might be headed and also highlight the lunacy that’s already here.
In Land of Delusion, cultural historian Colin Dickey, author of the acclaimed The Unidentified and Ghostland, introduces us to Tartaria, a great empire that sprang from Russia and spread across the globe, only to be destroyed by evil schemers who erased it from the history books. We also meet the New Chronologists, who claim that history began just eight hundred years ago and that the world was originally dominated by blond, blue-eyed Slavs. Crackpot theories to be sure, but they’re fueled by troubling beliefs that are all too real: that superior societies have been overrun by “others,” that we’ve been corrupted by fake news, and that power and lost glory must be restored. The far-reaching influence of Fox News, Alex Jones, lies generated by the Kremlin are enough to tell us that not only are these beliefs potent, they might soon become dominant.
By turns entertaining and grimly serious, Land of Delusion takes us inside the warped logic of conspiracy theorists and connects the dots between crazy ideas and real-time events. Weird is one thing—weird and dangerous demands our full attention.
Editor's Note
From fringe to mainstream…
In the recesses of Reddit and other online forums, ordinary people discuss extraordinary conspiracy theories that are increasingly becoming mainstream and affecting global politics. With both urgency and understanding, Dickey gets to the heart of what makes once-radical alternate histories appealing.
Colin Dickey
Writer, speaker, and professor Colin Dickey has made a career out of collecting unusual objects and hidden histories from all over the country. He’s the author of several books, including Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places and The Unidentified: Mythical Monsters, Alien Encounters, and Our Obsession with the Unexplained. A regular contributor to The New Republic and Lapham’s Quarterly, he is also the co-editor of The Morbid Anatomy Anthology. He has a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Southern California and is a professor of English at National University, in San Diego. His next book, Under the Eye of Power: How Fear of Secret Societies Shapes American Democracy, will be published in 2023 by Viking Press.
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Reviews for Land of Delusion
25 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 1 out of 5 stars1/5Left wing conceited bigot with politically biased subject matter and no in-depth investigative research. Such basically calls every liberal or republican a colander wearing whack job.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is an excellent piece of work on an area which as yet has received little scholarly attention. Colin writes openly, easily and clearly making this the perfect introduction to the world of conspiracy theories.
I would highly recommend this to anyone interested in why people believe in conspiracy theories, how they come about and, most importantly, the harm they can cause.2 people found this helpful
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Fairly abbreviated, but it contains superb analysis of the fundamentals and functioning of conspiracy theories, using as his examples two CTs which are currently (Fall 2022) not broadly known to Americans. One is widely-held in Russia (and it explains a lot about the invasion of Ukraine) and the other may be growing in America. However, the general principles in this short publication are quite valuable.
4 people found this helpful
Book preview
Land of Delusion - Colin Dickey
The Tip of the Spear
Chicago
JAMIE LEE WON’T TELL ME when it all began. I’m calling him from a hotel in Chicago, where the TV in my room is muted and the CNN headlines are reporting that Russia has taken control of the strategic railway hub of Lyman, in Ukraine’s Donbas region. I try to ask Lee when he first learned about the Tartarian Empire, but he brushes aside the question as if it’s unimportant. What he will tell me is that in a former life he was a financial analyst on Wall Street but he now lives on a ranch in Northern California. At some point he became aware of their plan
and he had to get out. What’s the plan?
I ask, but he doesn’t say. He was doing deep research,
he says, but he can’t or won’t tell me specifics, and he doesn’t want to get into whatever it was that started it all.
How, I want to know, does one begin down a path that leads to believing that the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 was faked, and that photos of the fair are, in fact, evidence of the lost civilization of Tartaria, a utopia that not only was destroyed, but whose very existence was subsequently erased from history? How does one come to believe that a secret Russian empire once ruled the world from San Francisco to Antarctica?
I’d spent the morning at Jackson Park, on the shores of Lake Michigan on Chicago’s South Side. It was early, with barely anyone around—a few joggers, one man asleep on a park bench, another fishing in the lagoon. Across from the lagoon sprawls the Museum of Science and Industry, a massive beaux arts structure that stretches for a city block. Beautifully symmetrical, with colonnades and neoclassical statues adorning its facades, it would, in a few hours, be teeming with children on summer camp field trips. But for now, everything was quiet.
The west side of the lagoon—Bobolink Meadow—is now a rewilded marshland habitat, where native hawthorns and bur oaks caught the light morning breeze. Across from it is the Wooded Island, which boasts a Yoko Ono sculpture and a Japanese garden. At this time of morning, it was almost entirely empty. If you ignored the whizzing traffic from South Stony Island Avenue and the construction cranes in the distance, you could believe that you had somehow stumbled across the site of a lost city—abandoned and overgrown.
When people talk about the Tartarian Empire, they are talking about this place: Jackson Park. In 1893, it was the home of the World’s Columbian Exposition, the international fair held to commemorate the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in North America. The Museum of Science and Industry is the only building left standing from that time, but this was once—for a brief few months—the site of a gleaming, temporary city. The museum, then called the Palace of Fine Arts, was the northernmost of the great
buildings constructed for the fair, a series of epic structures that included the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building, one of the largest structures ever built. If it were still standing today, it would rank second in the world in volume and third in footprint.
It’s mostly all gone now. Most of the halls were built using steel frame construction, then fleshed out with wood and covered with staff, an inexpensive material mixed from plaster and jute that is easy to mold but doesn’t last. (The Palace of Fine Arts was an exception; for fire insurance reasons, it was built with brick.) Without constant maintenance, these temporary buildings quickly fell into disrepair after the exposition, and nearly all of them ended up burning in an arsonist’s fire in July of 1894. (There was no regret,
the Chicago Tribune remarked of the conflagration, rather a feeling of pleasure that the elements and not the wrecker should wipe out the spectacle of the Columbia season.
) Lost, too, was Daniel Chester French’s gleaming, sixty-five-foot Statue of the Republic, which overlooked the Court of Honor. Today a twenty-four-foot replica stands on a traffic circle in the park near the golf course, a forgotten and neglected god whose dominion now includes only a handful of cars and a few construction workers fixing potholes.
At least that’s the traditional story. There are some, including Jamie Lee, who don’t buy it at all. There is a community of thousands of believers who congregate in groups on Reddit and Discord and TikTok, exchanging ideas and documents that, they claim, reveal the real history, the one that’s been almost entirely covered up. They look at the photographs of the Court of Honor and see not temporary buildings that were never meant to last, but proof of a hidden conspiracy. They see the city of Chilago, once an outpost of the Tartarian Empire, and in photographs of