Pulp History

Roger Avary made his name as co-writer, alongside Quentin Tarantino, of the cult film Pulp Fiction. Now he has resurfaced as the apostle of a fictional belief system that, in the hierarchy of conspiracy theories, ranks alongside Flat Earthism.

Appearing a few weeks ago on Joe Rogan's podcast—one of the most listened-to shows in the world—the American screenwriter claimed that virtually everything we think we know about history before the year 1600 is false. According to Avary, nearly a thousand years of history were fabricated by the Vatican and the Romanov dynasty to erase all traces of a lost Eurasian civilization known as "Great Tartaria."

Avary's embrace of this theory comes just months after NBA player Tyler Herro drew attention for making similar claims. Neither appears to have arrived at these conclusions independently. Both are drawing on the ideas of Russian mathematician Anatoly Fomenko, creator of the so-called "New Chronology," a movement that emerged in the Soviet Union in the 1980s and rejects much of what historians consider established fact.

The movement's claims are staggering and include such falsehoods as: Christopher Columbus never existed; The Trojan War and the Crusades were actually the same historical event; Ancient history extends back only a few centuries; Plato was a Renaissance thinker; and, Jesus Christ was, in reality, a Byzantine emperor.

At the heart of these declarations lies a distinctly modern suspicion: that historians and archaeologists are not merely trying to understand the past but are actively helping to falsify it. The past ceases to be an object of investigation and becomes a blank canvas onto which almost anything can be projected.

In that world, history turns into a giant shadow play where hidden forces manipulate reality, evidence cannot be trusted, and experts are assumed to be part of the deception. It is a worldview that sits comfortably alongside other conspiracy theories Avary has endorsed, including claims about Satanic elites and sinister vaccine plots.

The logic is familiar. Like Holocaust denial, the New Chronology dismisses converging evidence, casts doubt on every source, and invokes an all-powerful conspiracy to explain away inconvenient facts. Any document can be questioned. Any consensus can be rejected. Any contradiction becomes proof of the cover-up.

The result is that the past becomes whatever its believers want it to be.

Then again, rewriting stories is Roger Avary's profession.