Secret HistoryS


Star of David

Conspiracy of silence: How Israel is still covering up the execution without trial of 6 Polish Christians in Tel Aviv in 1948 - and other terrorist atrocities


Sputnik
Thu, 12 Jul 2018 15:45 UTC
gurion
© APCabinet Ministers of the new state of Israel are seen on May 14, 1948, at a ceremony at the Tel Aviv Art Museum, marking the creation of the new state
In 1948, just prior to the foundation of Israel, six Polish Christians were executed without trial in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem by the fledgling country's Jewish army, the Haganah. An investigative analysis on the killings - dubbed the Riftin Report - was compiled for future Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, but has never been made public until now.

Official refusal to disclose the document comes despite fervid recommendations by chief Israeli state archivist Dr. Yaacov Lozowick, and the campaigning of the investigative Akevot Institute.

According to Israeli official secrecy laws, the report should've been made accessible to the public in 1998 - however, state archivists argued it should remain classified. Dr. Lozowick sought to reverse this decision in 2014, but his recommendation was opposed by Ilana Alon, Director of the Israeli Defense Force and Defense Establishment Archives.

Democratic Resilience

Lozowick's case for declassification is available via various web resources. In it, he made clear there was "no justification" for refusing to publish the report after so many years had elapsed, and doing so demonstrated "the state has something to hide".

"If after the passage of more than half a century the state is still concealing certain files from the public, it's only because they contain particularly dark secrets - that is what the reasonable individual understands. A democratic society is obliged to allow a free discussion of its wars. The discussion is a guarantee of democratic resilience. This file perhaps contains material for such a discussion, but that is a reason to open it, not close it," he explained.
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2 + 2 = 4

Feminism's war against Motherhood

Bill Muehlenberg
Bill Muehlenberg
Sun, 12 Mar 2017 10:52 UTC
woman power march
On March 21 hard-core feminist Sarrah Le Marquand wrote a shocker of a newspaper opinion piece entitled "It should be illegal to be a stay-at-home mum". Yes you read that right. In this uber-feminist rant she said this: "Rather than wail about the supposed liberation in a woman's right to choose to shun paid employment, we should make it a legal requirement that all parents of children of school-age or older are gainfully employed."

I read it at the time, and shook my head in disbelief. Actually, it was all rather believable as this is standard feminist fare. But I let it go, hoping to later get back to it. Well it is later, so I have. You can read the piece for yourself (see link below). It is mind-boggling.
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Info

'Out of Africa' re-examined after latest discovery in China

Andrew Masterson
Cosmos Magazine
Thu, 12 Jul 2018 00:27 UTC
Homo Erectus
© Xavier ROSSI/Gamma-Rapho via Getty ImagesAn artist's impression of Homo erectus, who possibly arrived in China more than two million years ago.
The timing of hominin dispersal out of Africa needs to be re-examined, according to a team of Chinese archaeologists who present evidence that human ancestors reached China much earlier than thought.

In a paper published in the journal Nature, Zhaoyu Zhu from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and colleagues reveal more than 100 artefacts unearthed from 17 sediment layers at a location known as Shangchen on the southern Chinese Loess Plateau. The oldest of these dates to 2.12 million years ago - making it the earliest hominin find outside Africa by more than a quarter of a million years.

Until this find, the earliest evidence for hominin presence beyond Africa came from Dmanisi in Georgia, where in 2011 bones and stone tools including flakes and choppers were dated to just after 1.85 million years ago.

The next two earliest finds were both discovered in southern China, in the same broad area as the new artefacts. They comprised two teeth, tentatively identified as coming from Homo erectus, and a skull, conclusively identified as belonging to the same species. They dated from 1.7 and 1.63 million years ago, respectively.

The latest finds comprise 88 stone flakes and another 20 unmodified stones, all thought to have been used as tools. They include scrapers, points, borers and possible hammers.
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Microscope 1

Scientists have found evidence of human-Denisovan interbreeding in a second part of the ancient world

Andy Coghlan
New Scientist
Thu, 15 Mar 2018 00:00 UTC
denisova cave altai mountains
© Ruslan Olinchuk / Alamy Stock PhotoDenisova Cave in the Altai mountains, Siberia, where the only known Denisovan remains were found.
Our ancestors mated with another species of ancient hominins, the Denisovans, on at least two occasions. The discovery suggests that Denisovans were widely across Asia, and apparently co-existed happily with modern humans, to the point of having children with them in two different parts of the ancient world.

The Denisovans were unknown until 2010, when researchers described a fragment of a girl's finger bone found in Denisova cave in Siberia. Soon afterwards, researchers sequenced its genome from the surviving DNA. The DNA did not belong to any known hominins, such as Neanderthals, so it had to be something new.

What's more, around 5 per cent of the DNA of some Australasians - particularly people from Papua New Guinea - is Denisovan. Humans evidently mated with Denisovans 50,000 or more years ago.

But this posed a puzzle: why were the present-day descendants of Denisovans so far from the Denisovans' Siberian home? The simplest explanation was that Denisovans lived throughout much of Asia, including South East Asia, not just Siberia.

Sharon Browning of the University of Washington in Seattle and her colleagues have now found evidence of a second instance of human-Denisovan interbreeding - on the Asian mainland.

Comment: See also:

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Pirates

As Deraa, Syria, is liberated, remember: This is where the jihadi revolution began

Thierry Meyssan
Voltaire Network
Tue, 10 Jul 2018 16:23 UTC
Deraa, Syria
© Alaa Al-Faqir / Reuters
The Western powers present the battle of Deraa as a symbol of the failure of the combat they were supporting. This is absolutely exact, but not in the way they mean. Let's return to the events which triggered the hostilities.

From 4 February 2011, a mysterious Facebook account called « Syrian Revolution 2011 » (in English in the original text) called for a demonstration every Friday against the Syrian Arab Republic. Using exclusively Sunni symbols, while pretending to speak in the name of all Syrians, it set the rhythm for events for several years.

According to Al-Jazeera, on 16 February, 15 adolescents (and then 8 of their friends) were arrested in Deraa for having tagged slogans hostile to President el-Assad. They were allegedly tortured, and the local representative for state Security allegedly insulted their parents. To this day, although it has been confirmed that the minors were held in custody for several hours by the police, the torture and the insults have never been proved. The videos and the interviews broadcast by the Anglo-Saxon Press are terrible, but they correspond neither to the original Qatari reports nor to what was verified on site.

John McCain is an elected US Senator, and is also president of one of the branches of the National Endowment for Democracy, one of the secret services of the « Five Eyes » (USA-UK-Australia-Canada-New Zealand) [1]. On 22 February, he was in Lebanon, where he tasked the transport of weapons in Syria to the Haririst deputy Okab Sakr. He also journeyed to Ersal in order to establish a future rear base for the jihadists.
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Dig

Varlam Shalamov: 45 things I learned in the Gulag

Varlam Shalamov
The Paris Review
Tue, 12 Jun 2018 16:14 UTC
Varlam Shalamov
For fifteen years the writer Varlam Shalamov was imprisoned in the Gulag for participating in "counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities." He endured six of those years enslaved in the gold mines of Kolyma, one of the coldest and most hostile places on earth. While he was awaiting sentencing, one of his short stories was published in a journal called Literary Contemporary. He was released in 1951, and from 1954 to 1973 he worked on Kolyma Stories, a masterpiece of Soviet dissident writing that has been newly translated into English and published by New York Review Books Classics this week. Shalamov claimed not to have learned anything in Kolyma, except how to wheel a loaded barrow. But one of his fragmentary writings, dated 1961, tells us more.

1. The extreme fragility of human culture, civilization. A man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labor, cold, hunger, and beatings.

2. The main means for depraving the soul is the cold. Presumably in Central Asian camps people held out longer, for it was warmer there.

3. I realized that friendship, comradeship, would never arise in really difficult, life-threatening conditions. Friendship arises in difficult but bearable conditions (in the hospital, but not at the pit face).

4. I realized that the feeling a man preserves longest is anger. There is only enough flesh on a hungry man for anger: everything else leaves him indifferent.

5. I realized that Stalin's "victories" were due to his killing the innocent - an organization a tenth the size would have swept Stalin away in two days.
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Arrow Down

Report reveals Anne Frank's family tried escaping to US but was thwarted by 'bureaucracy'

Edward Helmore
The Guardian
Sun, 08 Jul 2018 18:08 UTC
Anne Frank Otto
© Dave Caulkin/APOtto Frank in 1971 holding the Golden Pan award, given for the sale of one million copies of The Diary of Anne Frank in London, Great Britain.

New research says the family twice tried to obtain US immigration visas but were thwarted by red tape

The family of the diarist Anne Frank twice tried to obtain US immigration visas but were thwarted by red tape, according to a new report published 76 years after they were forced into hiding in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam.

The report, issued by the Anne Frank House and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, details the challenges faced by Jewish families looking to escape the anti-semitic Nazi grip on Europe and negotiate anti-refugee sentiment then building in the United States.

Gertjan Broek, a researcher at the Anne Frank House, and Rebecca Erbelding from the USHMM wrote in their report that Otto Frank, Anne's father, began seeking ways to escape to the US as early as 1938. At the time, the US had no specific refugee policy, but enforced quotas based on national origin.

Comment: It's likely no coincidence that this story is coming out now, given the fierce immigration debate currently dominating the headlines. Whether the comparison of Anne Frank's situation to the current one is fair, we'll leave up to the reader.

See also:

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Dig

Is 8,000 year old Tappe Sialk in central Iran the world's oldest civilisation?

Arghavan Shamsara
Press TV
Wed, 04 Jul 2018 17:22 UTC
Tappe Sialk
The file photo shows a view of the Tappe Sialk prehistoric site in central Iranian city of Kashan.
With a history of nearly over 8,000 years, Tappe Sialk prehistoric site in Iran's central city of Kashan in Esfahan Province is believed to be the probable birthplace of the world's oldest civilization, oldest fixed settlement, oldest architecture, oldest ziggurat, oldest pottery kilns and oldest metal furnaces.

Following climate changes at the end of the seventh millennium BC, which led to formation of grasslands, the cave dwellers of the Iranian Plateau started living in plains, among which Tappe Sialk site is probably the oldest location discovered so far.

The entire Sialk civilization is thought to have originated from the pristine large water sources nearby which still exist.

A large number of farm animal bones discovered at the site suggest that the dwellers of Sialk were meat eaters of domesticated animals.

Artifacts excavated from the site, including some very fine painted potteries, are currently on display at the Louvre, he British Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Museum of Iran and some others are at private collections.

The ancient site comprises two hills, nearly 600 meters apart, in the northern and southern sides. The northern mound is 25 meters high and the southern one is six meters high.

Comment: While Tappe Sialk may indeed hold treasures that have not yet been discovered elsewhere, its title of the world's oldest civilisation is questionable since there is evidence for other equally accomplished communities all around the world:

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Dig

2,000 year old mummy dressed in silk and jewels emerges from Siberian reservoir


The Siberian Times
Sun, 22 Jul 2018 12:00 UTC
siberian silk mummy
© Marina KilunovskayaThe ancient woman was buried wearing a silk skirt with a funeral meal
Archeologists hail extraordinary find of suspected 'Hun woman' with a jet gemstone buckle on her beaded belt.

After a fall in the water level, the well-preserved mummy was found this week on the shore of a giant reservoir on the Yenisei River upstream of the vast Sayano-Shushenskaya dam, which powers the largest power plant in Russia and ninth biggest hydroelectric plant in the world.

The ancient woman was buried wearing a silk skirt with a funeral meal - and she took a pouch of pine nuts with her to the afterlife.

In her birch bark make-up box, she had a Chinese mirror.

Near her remains - accidentally mummified - was a Hun-style vase.

Comment: Siberia is certainly turning out some interesting finds of late:

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Bomb

The eves of destruction: 250 videos of declassified US atomic tests hit the internet


RT
Fri, 06 Jul 2018 17:36 UTC
Nuclear explosion
© US Defense Department/ReutersThe Bomb
More than 250 videos of previously classified US nuclear bomb tests have been uploaded to YouTube this week, providing a fascinating but terrifying glimpse into the United States' nuclear program.

Digitized and uploaded by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, the videos document secret atomic bomb tests between 1945 and 1962. The organization says that it hopes that the videos will help dissuade humanity from further use of nuclear weapons in the future.

"I think that if we capture the history of this and show what the force of these weapons are and how much devastation they can wreak, then maybe people will be reluctant to use them," a physicist working for the lab said after a similar batch of videos was released last year.

The videos feature dozens of tests from once-classified chapters in US nuclear history, including Operation Dominic, which consisted of 31 nuclear tests in 1962, and Operation Teapot, during which 14 bombs were dropped in Nevada in 1955. A similar series of tests, known as Operation Sunbeam, was conducted at the Nevada National Security Site in 1962.

The [following four] visually stunning but harrowing videos vary in length, although most of them are approximately one minute long and begin at the moment of detonation.


Comment: Deto'nation': The history we wish we never had...

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