Secret HistoryS


Book 2

What you weren't told about WWII: Part 1

Daniel Carter
Investment Watch Blog
Fri, 18 May 2018 09:27 UTC
Soviet soldier WW2 Stalingrad
A Soviet soldier waving the Red Banner over the central plaza of Stalingrad in 1943
If news is fake now, imagine the inaccuracies of history books. How often were they distorted to make the victor look good and the loser look evil? How often do history books leave out cause-effect relationships that reveal the true nature of geopolitics? How often do they simply leave out important information on accident? The more one researches history outside of what is taught in school, the more one comes to realize that the answer to the above questions is "pretty darn often." Let's now look at some of the more interesting things that are left out of the discussion regarding World War Two.

The Soviets Defeated The Nazis

In America, it is often taught that the US stepped in to put an end to Nazi's expansion through Europe. However, it was the Soviets that sacrificed the most and stopped the Nazi's from dominating the region. In the Battle of Stalingrad, which lasted over five months, Soviet troops suffered over 1 million casualties compared to over 700,000 casualties for the Axis countries. Although the Soviets lost more troops, they handed the Germans their most significant loss up to that point in the war. That was truly the beginning of the end for the Nazis.

Comment: New WW2 documentary 'Remembrance' corrects distortions of Anglo mainstream media on the defeat of Nazism (VIDEO)

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Magnify

X-rays of 1,400-year-old hymn book reveal ancient Greek medical text

Peter Dockrill
Science Alert
Thu, 15 Mar 2018 12:00 UTC
Galen of Pergamon text x ray
© (University of Manchester/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)In the image above, the vertically oriented characters are the religious text of the 11th century, while the fainter horizontal Syriac is Galen's translation hidden underneath.
They say never judge a book by its cover - but sometimes you can't even trust the words written on the pages.

This week, scientists in California are busy investigating an archaic hymn book of religious text dating back to the 11th century. In ordinary circumstances, this weathered volume would be a priceless historical artefact in its own right. But these are not ordinary circumstances.

This time around, the religious script is a smokescreen: an ancient cover-up concealing a far older truth - one that dates back many more centuries into the past, to a man considered one of the fathers of the medical science we have today.

That man was Galen of Pergamon, a Greek physician and philosopher born under the Roman Empire during the 2nd century, who through his teachings and writings became known as one of the greatest medical minds of antiquity.

Comment: See Also:

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Vader

The Empire never sleeps

David Stockman
AntiWar.com
Wed, 16 May 2018 14:17 UTC
empire us hegemony
© C Dawes
Part 1: The Indispensable Nation Folly

Like the case of Rome before it, the Empire is bankrupting America. The true fiscal cost is upwards of $1.0 trillion per year (counting $200 billion for veterans and debt service for wars), but there is no way to pay for it.

That's because the 78-million strong Baby Boom is in the driver's seat of American politics. It plainly will not permit the $3 trillion per year retirement and health care entitlements-driven Welfare State to be curtailed.

The Trumpite/GOP has already sealed that deal by refusing to reform Social Security and Medicare and by proving to be utterly incapable of laying a glove politically on Obamacare/Medicaid. At the same time, boomers keep voting for the GOP's anti-tax allergy, thereby refusing to tax themselves to close Washington's yawning deficits.

More importantly, the generation which marched on the Pentagon in 1968 against the insanity and barbarism of LBJ's Vietnam War has long since abandoned the cause of peace. So doing, boomers have acquiesced in the final ascendancy of the Warfare State, which grew like topsy once the US became the world's sole superpower after the Soviet Union slithered off the pages of history in 1991.
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Info

Top Russian official: Churchill had Stalin killed, US bombed Russian Far East in 50s

Inessa S
Russia Insider
Thu, 17 May 2018 15:01 UTC
Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill
"We hid this from the rest of the world? - We hid a lot of things. Actually, we live in a fog of historical myth..."

What if everything you think you know about Joseph Stalin isn't true?

Similarly, what if the icon you perceive Winston Churchill to have been - is a mere illusion of history?

Anomalies in the way history is written is nothing new; the more or less objective truth is published many years later.
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Info

The dark history of Israel's independence

Brett Wilkins
Counterpunch
Fri, 11 May 2018 00:00 UTC
Nabka
© APPalestinians driven from their homes in Galilee are on the road to Lebanon, November 1948.
On May 14, 1948, Israel declared its independence. Each May 15, Palestinians solemnly commemorate Nakba Day. Nakba means catastrophe, and that's precisely what Israel's independence has been for the more than 700,000 Arabs and their five million refugee descendants forced from their homes and into exile, often by horrific violence, to make way for the Jewish state.

Land Without a People?

In the late 19th century, Zionism emerged as a movement for the reestablishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, then part of the Ottoman Empire. Although Jews ruled over kingdoms there more than 2,000 years ago, they never numbered more than around 10 percent of the population from antiquity through the early 1900s. A key premise of Zionism is what literary theorist Edward Said called the "excluded presence" of Palestine's indigenous population; a central myth of early Zionists was that Palestine was a "land without a people for a people without a land."
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Book 2

Two previously unreadable pages of Anne Frank's diary deciphered, reveal dirty jokes

Mike Corder
Kansas City Star
Tue, 15 May 2018 20:20 UTC
anne frank diary
© Peter Dejong AP PhotoTeresien da Silva, left, and Ronald Leopold of the Anne Frank Foundation show a facsimile of Anne Frank's diary with two pages taped off during a press conference at the foundation's office in Amsterdam, Netherlands, Tuesday, May 15, 2018.
Researchers using digital technology deciphered the writing on two pages of Anne Frank's diary that she had pasted over with brown masking paper, discovering four naughty jokes and a candid explanation of sex, contraception and prostitution.

"Anyone who reads the passages that have now been discovered will be unable to suppress a smile," said Frank van Vree, director of the Netherlands Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. "The 'dirty' jokes are classics among growing children. They make it clear that Anne, with all her gifts, was above all also an ordinary girl."

Anne, age 13 at the time, wrote the two pages on Sept. 28, 1942, less than three months after she, her family and another Jewish family went into hiding from the Nazis in a secret annex behind a canal-side house in Amsterdam.

Later on, possibly fearing prying eyes or no longer liking what she had written, she covered them over with brown paper with an adhesive backing like a postage stamp, and their content remained a tantalizing mystery for decades.

It turns out the pages contained four jokes about sex that Anne herself described as "dirty" and an explanation of women's sexual development, sex, contraception and prostitution.

"They bring us even closer to the girl and the writer Anne Frank," Ronald Leopold, executive director of the Anne Frank House museum, said Tuesday.
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Archaeology

New look at ancient Persian epic poem could rewrite history

Mark Oliver
Ancient Origins
Tue, 08 May 2018 17:33 UTC
persia painting Kushnameh
© Hanyang University MuseumThis 14th-century Persian painting portrays a scene from the Kushnameh in what scholars believe could be the betrothal of prince Abtin (kneeling) and Silla princess Frarang (sitting).
More than a thousand years before the first European explorer reached Korea's shores, the Persian Empire was writing love stories about Korean princesses.

It's a little-known story that could change the way we see our history. Recently, historians took a second look an old Persian epic written around 500 AD and realized that, at the center of the tale, was the unusual story of a Persian prince marrying a Korean princess.

It's an incredible discovery. Up until recently, we weren't sure that the Persians of that time even knew Korea existed. This new revelation shows Persia didn't just make contact with Korea - these countries were intimately connected. And it might just call for a total rewrite of history.
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Archaeology

2,000yo remains of carbonized horse discovered by tomb raiders amongst ruins of Pompeii

Alicia McDermott
Ancient Origins
Sun, 13 May 2018 19:31 UTC
horse fossil pompeii
© Antonio Ferrara and Riccardo SianoThe remains of the horse were uncovered by looters.
Donkeys, pigs, and dogs have all been found amongst the ruins of Pompeii, but the remains of a carbonized horse are the first example archaeologists have come across of that animal. While the discovery is great, the way it was found is unsettling.

The Local.it reports the horse was found in a stable, complete with a trough, beside a large Roman villa. Unfortunately, archaeologists were not the first to make the discovery - tomb raiders are responsible for unearthing the horse. Nonetheless, Massimo Osanna, the director of the Pompeii site, calls the horse an "extraordinary" find.

Authorities found the looters had dug a 60 meter (196.85 ft.) long network of tunnels under the villa, to search for frescoes and other precious artifacts. Laser scanners show the tunnels measure just 60 cm (23.62 inches) wide, according to Independent.ie. Steps have been taken to find the looters and archaeologists have begun excavating the area properly to try to avoid further destruction .
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Bad Guys

Flashback As if torture wasn't cruel enough: Human experimentation was a core feature of CIA's program

Lisa Hajjar
The Nation
Tue, 16 Dec 2014 00:00 UTC
CIA torture human experiments
Human experimentation was a core feature of the CIA's torture program. The experimental nature of the interrogation and detention techniques is clearly evident in the Senate Intelligence Committee's executive summary of its investigative report, despite redactions (insisted upon by the CIA) to obfuscate the locations of these laboratories of cruel science and the identities of perpetrators.

At the helm of this human experimentation project were two psychologists hired by the CIA, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. They designed interrogation and detention protocols that they and others applied to people imprisoned in the agency's secret "black sites."

Human experimentation was a core feature of the CIA's torture program. The experimental nature of the interrogation and detention techniques is clearly evident in the Senate Intelligence Committee's executive summary of its investigative report, despite redactions (insisted upon by the CIA) to obfuscate the locations of these laboratories of cruel science and the identities of perpetrators.

At the helm of this human experimentation project were two psychologists hired by the CIA, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. They designed interrogation and detention protocols that they and others applied to people imprisoned in the agency's secret "black sites."

Comment: See also:

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2 + 2 = 4

Manufacturing "McCarthyism": M. Stanton Evans and the truth about Joe McCarthy

Mark Sunwall
Lew Rockwell
Tue, 15 May 2018 12:01 UTC
The best book since the Bible, kinda...
Senator Joseph McCarthy
Alright, there are some serious competitors for that title, even if we limit ourselves to books on the cold war era. Notably, Witness by Whittaker Chambers is a more literary, though less learned, revelation. Yet beyond the hyperbole (courtesy of Miss Coulter) there lies a kernel of truth, or at least an application of the marginal utility theorem. Unless you have, Blacklisted by History: The untold story of Joe McCarthy is the most important book that you have not yet read on American politics.

Indeed, it bears some faint likeness to the Bible, in that it centers around a resurrection, albeit in this case the resurrected reputation of a man who has been damned repeatedly by the Pharisaic court of American establishment history. Like a Biblical epic, this damnation of Joe McCarthy transcends the fate of any particular man, however laden with interesting vices or admirable virtues. Rather, this verdict has shaped the moral and legal precedents which have become the rotting core of modern America's extra-constitutional political framework. McCarthy and so-called "McCarthyism" (a term which is taken as synonymous with "witch-hunting") have become the bywords and shibboleths of partisan conflict within our body politic, entailing the suppression of ideological meaning and accountability.
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