Tartaria
Tartaria (or "Great Tartary") was a real geographic term on European maps from the 16th–19th centuries denoting the vast, poorly-mapped region of Central and Northern Asia — Siberia, Mongolia, Central Asia. In the 2010s it became the name of a conspiracy theory claiming a global "Tartarian Empire" whose advanced architecture (world's fair buildings, ornate pre-1900 structures) was destroyed and its history erased.
The conspiracy
- Claims that mud-flood catastrophes, "culture laundering," and deliberate demolition hid a technologically advanced civilization.
- Treats architectural styles (Second Empire, Beaux-Arts) as evidence of lost technology; orphan trains as evidence of population replacement.
- Explains nothing but expresses something: distrust of official history among people alienated from institutional authority.
Infrared treatment
Infrared has discussed Tartaria as a case study in how historical nihilism fills the vacuum left by the collapse of popular historical consciousness — and occasionally with ironic sympathy for its underlying intuition: that the standard narrative of Western development conceals real erasures (the commons, non-Western civilizational achievements). Haz's line: the answer to fake hidden history is real suppressed history — primitive accumulation, enclosure, colonial plunder.