Secret HistoryS


Gem

Another bloody jewel in the British Empire's crown: How India was brutalized during colonial rule


RT
Sat, 13 Apr 2019 13:22 UTC
British colonial rule India
© Global Look Press / Science MuseumMeasuring land for cultivation, Allahabad, India, 1877.
From the East India Company to the Raj, India was a British colony until the mid-20th century. And despite nostalgic imperialists extolling the virtues of the empire's rule, it left behind millions of victims.

The 1919 Amritsar massacre, the grim anniversary of which India marked on Saturday, is one of the best-known examples of the atrocities committed by the British during their two-century colonial rule of India. But, numerically, its total of 1,600 victims looks like a small blot among the millions of deaths India suffered during the empire's prolonged misrule and exploitation.

The famines

From the 18th to the 20th century, various parts of India endured over a dozen devastating famines, which killed tens of millions of people, most of the events exacerbated, if not outright caused, by the colonial administration.

The East India Company (EIC), merchants with their own army who ruled India on behalf of the British crown, were ruthlessly effective in generating exports and profits from the colonized land - ruthlessness being a key part of the efficiency. Exports of Indian produce - rice, tea, wheat, and even, illegally, opium - were a vital boost for the British economy, helping keep food prices low at home and generating income from sales to other nations, like China.

Comment: The British Empire - A Lesson In State Terrorism
The official version of the effect and legacy of the British Empire as recorded in most history books paints a picture of philanthropy writ large across the globe. The reality of the methods used by the British to establish and maintain their 'overseas holdings' however are a lesson in true terrorism.
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Light Saber

The truth of Benghazi - Chris Stevens was assassinated

JoanneM
Libyan War The Truth
Fri, 12 Apr 2019 17:26 UTC
chris stevens benghazi
Chris Stevens
We have been working with the Libyan tribes now since 2011. When Chris Stevens was killed, the tribes called us and stated that the perpetrators were in a certain hospital in Benghazi and the US could catch them if they would go to this hospital. We had no one to tell, no one was interested. The tribes later called back and told us that the perpetrators had shaved their beards and dressed in western closes, they were in cars (they described) headed to Cairo, they said the US could catch them on the road. Again, no one to call.

A few days after Chris Stevens was killed, the Libyan tribes passed to us the official security report of the then Libyan government. They had captured some of the men involved and interrogated them, they learned that Morsi, the Clinton installed leader of Egypt, was the organizer, funder and facilitator of the attack. That report was given to Dr. Jerome Corsi, who was working at World Net Daily and it was published by WND. That report was subsequently read into the Congressional Record.

Comment: More from the Moriartys on the real situation in Libya:

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Pistol

Ken Starr: Hillary Clinton triggered Vince Foster's suicide

Ronald Kessler
Daily Mail
Wed, 10 Apr 2019 13:48 UTC
H.Clinton, Vince Foster
© UnknownKen Starr admitted he left out in his FBI report that Hillary Clinton had 'triggered' President Clinton's Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster (pictured together in 1985) to commit suicide in a bid to spare her feelings.
Ken Starr purposefully left out the finding that Hillary Clinton had 'triggered' the suicide of President Clinton's Deputy White House Counsel in his final FBI report to spare her feelings, DailyMail.com can reveal.

FBI agents investigating the death of Vince Foster learned he was set off after Hillary attacked and humiliated him in front of other White House aides a week before he took his own life on July 20, 1993. But for what were then unexplained reasons, Starr elected to conceal the FBI's finding that Hillary's tirade triggered Foster's suicide when he wrote his final report on the matter.

At a reception for authors participating in the 2019 Annapolis Book Festival last weekend, I asked Starr why he omitted the damaging FBI finding.

At first, he beat around the bush, citing well-established facts indicating that Foster was already depressed before Hillary lashed into him at the White House meeting.

But when pressed, Starr admitted he 'did not want to inflict further pain' on Hillary by revealing that her humiliation of Foster a week before he took his own life pushed him over the edge.

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Cow Skull

Archaeologists identify first prehistoric figurative cave art in Balkans

University of Southampton
Phys.org
Wed, 10 Apr 2019 20:00 UTC
rock art balkans
© Aitor Ruiz-RedondoDigital tracing of Ibex featured in rock art.
An international team, led by an archaeologist from the University of Southampton and the University of Bordeaux, has revealed the first example of Palaeolithic figurative cave art found in the Balkan Peninsula.

Dr. Aitor Ruiz-Redondo worked with researchers from the universities of Cantabria (Spain), Newfoundland (Canada), Zagreb (Croatia) and the Archaeological Museum of Istria (Croatia) to study the paintings, which could be up to 34,000 years old.

The cave art was first discovered in 2010 in Romualdova Pechina ('Romuald's cave') at Istria in Croatia, when Darko Komšo, Director of the Archaeological Museum of Istria, noticed the existence of the remains of a red colour in a deep part of the cave.

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Info

Cherokee cave writings discovered in Alabama cave

Laura Geggel
Live Science
Wed, 10 Apr 2019 13:51 UTC
Cherokee Cave writings
© A. Cressler; Antiquity Publications LtdStudy researchers Beau Duke Carroll and Julie Reed examine Manitou Cave in Alabama, whose walls bear Cherokee syllabary that's has nearly 200 years old.
Nearly 200 years ago, Cherokee gathered inside a cave in Alabama and, using their newly minted alphabet, wrote ceremonial messages onto the walls and ceiling, a new study finds. The writings included accounts of Cherokee ancestors and stickball, the predecessor of lacrosse.

Some of the religious messages were written backward, possibly so that spirits in this cave - which the Cherokee might have viewed as a portal to the spirit world - could read them, the researchers said.

Modern researchers have known about these writings since explorers found the markings in Manitou Cave in 2006, but now a group of archaeologists, including those from the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes, have worked together to translate the messages.

It's rare to discover historical cave writings in a tribe's own alphabet, said the study's lead archaeologist, Jan Simek, distinguished professor of anthropology and president emeritus at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

"Here, we had Native American use of caves and Native American decoration of the walls of caves, but [in writing] that we could read," Simek told Live Science. "We could hear in their own voice what they were doing."

The messages are written in Cherokee syllabary, (a syllabary is a set of written characters that represents syllables in a spoken language), a writing system for the Cherokee language that a Cherokee man named Sequoyah invented in the early 1800s. At the time, Sequoyah lived in Willstown (now Fort Payne, Alabama), a large refugee community of Cherokees who had fled their farming and hunting homeland that straddled the Appalachian Mountains in parts of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Tennessee after Euro-Americans began taking over that region, Simek said.
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Cassiopaea

Homo luzonensis: New human species discovered in the Philippines

Michael Greshko and Maya Wei-Haas
National Geographic
Wed, 10 Apr 2019 18:15 UTC
Callao Cave
© Photograph by D. Pardo, National Geographic Your ShotResearchers digging in the Philippines's Callao Cave found teeth and bones that they say belong to a distinct species of ancient human, which they have named Homo luzonensis.
Humankind's tangled shrub of ancestry now has a new branch: Researchers in the Philippines announced today that they have discovered a species of ancient human previously unknown to science.

The small-bodied hominin, named Homo luzonensis, lived on the island of Luzon at least 50,000 to 67,000 years ago. The hominin-identified from a total of seven teeth and six small bones-hosts a patchwork of ancient and more advanced features. The landmark discovery, announced in Nature on Wednesday, makes Luzon the third Southeast Asian island in the last 15 years to bear signs of unexpectedly ancient human activity.

"For a long, long time, the Philippine islands [have] been more or less left [out]," says study coauthor and project leader Armand Mijares, an archaeologist at the University of the Philippines Diliman and a National Geographic grantee. But H. luzonensis flips the script, and it continues to challenge the outdated idea that the human line neatly progressed from less advanced to more advanced species.

Human Origins 101

Comment: The story of humanity continues to buck mainstream scientific theories and generally leaving us with more questions than answers: And check out SOTT radio's:

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Archaeology

Norway will finally return thousands of artifacts to Easter Island

Sabrina Imbler
Atlas Obscura
Mon, 08 Apr 2019 00:00 UTC
Sculptures, weapons, and human skulls will soon go back to the South Pacific.

Moai sculptures on Rapa Nui.
© LEE COURSEYMoai sculptures on Rapa Nui.
IN 1955, THE NORWEGIAN EXPLORER Thor Heyerdahl voyaged to Rapa Nui, the ancestral name of Easter Island, and collected many things: tiny carved sculptures, a stone axe, even human skulls. Though Heyerdahl promised to return the items to Rapa Nui as soon as he had analyzed them and published his findings, his death in 2002 stranded the artifacts in Oslo's Kon-Tiki Museum, over 8,800 miles away from their home.

Now, 17 years after Heyerdahl's death, the Norwegian government has finally agreed to return the objects to the indigenous Rapa Nui people, the first inhabitants of Easter Island, a Chilean island in the South Pacific. Last week, Norway's King Harald V and Queen Sonja signed an agreement with representatives from the Chilean ministry of culture, marking the beginning of what will likely be a long process of repatriation.

The agreement specifies that the artifacts must be returned to a "well-equipped museum," according to the ministry's press release. Heyerdahl's son, Thor Heyerdahl Jr., also attended the signing and told Smithsonian that the human remains would be prioritized in the repatriation process. The Kon-Tiki museum will retain most of its other artifacts, including the original Kon-Tiki raft as well as maps and exploratory materials the explorer used to navigate in his overseas expeditions.
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Muffin

5,000-year-old barley grain discovered in Finland changes understanding of livelihoods

University of Helsinki
Phys.org
Tue, 09 Apr 2019 10:20 UTC
barley grain 5,000
© Santeri Vanhanen, CC-BY 4.0 licenceResearchers determined the age of millennia-old barley grains using radiocarbon dating.
On the basis of prior research, the identity of the Pitted Ware Culture from the Stone Age has been characterized as hard-core sealers, or possibly even related to Inuits of the Baltic Sea. Now, researchers have discovered barley and wheat grains in areas previously inhabited by this culture, leading to the conclusion that the Pitted Ware Culture adopted agriculture on a small scale.

A study carried out in cooperation with parties representing the discipline of archaeology and the Department of Chemistry at the University of Helsinki, as well as Swedish operators in the field of archaeology (The Archaeologists, a governmental consultant agency, and Arkeologikonsult, a business), found grains of barley and wheat in Pitted Ware settlements on Finland's Aland Islands and in the region of modern Stockholm.

The age of the grains was ascertained using radiocarbon dating. Based on the results, the grains originated in the period of the Pitted Ware culture, thus being approximately 4,300-5,300 years old. In addition to the cereal grains, the plant remnants found in the sites included hazelnut shells, apple seeds, tuberous roots of lesser celandine and rose hips.

Comment: One wonders if there were any particular driving forces that caused these communities to begin experimenting with agriculture. It's notable that, concurrent with the findings above, a recent study found evidence of plague in Sweden's early farmers:
Nearly 5000 years ago, a 20-year-old woman was buried in a tomb in Sweden, one of Europe's early farmers dead in her prime. Now, researchers have discovered what killed her-Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague. The sample is one of the oldest ever found [...] This newly discovered strain of plague could have caused the collapse of large Stone Age settlements across Europe in what might be the world's first pandemic

[...]

They found Y. pestis sequences in the teeth of the 20-year-old woman, who was buried in the Frälsegården grave in western Sweden, and in the teeth of another person buried in the same grave, they report today in Cell. Both were farmers from Scandinavia's Funnel Beaker culture, and neither had any trace of Yamnaya ancestry-meaning a form of plague was present in Europe before the steppe migrants arrived. That the bacterium was preserved in their teeth means it was circulating in their blood and very likely killed them, Rasmussen says.
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Archaeology

Iroquois artifacts uncovered in downtown Montreal date back to 14th century


White Wolf Pack
Mon, 01 Apr 2019 00:00 UTC
Clay artifact
Archaeologists in Montreal have uncovered Iroquois artifacts that date mostly to around 1375.

Thousands of artifacts - mostly pottery - have been found during an excavation at Peel and Sherbrooke Streets, where digging has been underway since 2016.

Archaeologist Roland Tremblay called it a "major discovery."

"We find their cooking vessels, essentially. But we also find their pipes because they were made out of ceramics," he told CTV Montreal.

The researchers also found a tooth from a beluga whale. It's not known what the tooth was used for, although it's believed it came from relatives down the St. Lawrence River toward Quebec City. This is not the first time Indigenous treasures have been found at the site. The site was excavated once before after pottery was found in 1859.
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Bad Guys

US ex-war planner reveals reasons NATO broke promise to Gorbachev not to expand east


Sputnik
Thu, 04 Apr 2019 18:22 UTC
Gorbachev bush
© RIA Novosti
NATO began expanding into Eastern Europe in the late 1990s, despite assurances to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that the bloc would not expand beyond the former borders of East Germany following Germany's unification. Since then, the alliance has integrated every member of the ex-Warsaw Pact, and six former Soviet and Yugoslav republics.

NATO is a 'zombie' alliance whose reason for being perished along with the demise of the Soviet bloc but been repeatedly "reanimated" using a variety of tricks, US senior former military tactician and veteran Col. (ret.) Dr. Douglas Macgregor has suggested.

In an article for The National Interest magazine, Macgregor pointed out that, despite promises by US President George H.W. Bush, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, French President Francois Mitterrand and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl that the alliance would not move "one inch eastward" beyond unified Germany, the alliance went back on its word.

Comment: It's also likely that any promises made by NATO were intended to be broken: Also check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: NATO's Secret Armies in Europe - Interview with Daniele Ganser

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