Secret HistoryS


Stock Up

Talking treason: How corporate America cashed in on Nazi connections

Robert Sherrill
Texas Observer
Thu, 29 Mar 2018 12:00 UTC
John Walker Lindh
© Texas ObserverJohn Walker Lindh
Let John Walker Lindh be a lesson to you: Never betray your country, or even look like you may be trying to betray your country, unless you first become a very powerful corporation, like the International Business Machines Corporation. Oh, you remember John. He's the young American who, with the sappy enthusiasm of his years (20), went abroad to study Islam and wound up carrying a rifle in the ranks of the Taliban. Was he thereby a traitor? The U.S. Constitution says that treason "shall consist only in levying war" against your country or helping your country's enemies by "giving them aid and comfort."

Aside from marching to the point of fevered exhaustion across the harshest terrain, getting little water and less food, his soldiering consisted mainly of being captured and thrown into an Afghan prison. There is absolutely no evidence he ever fired his rifle at anyone. So much for "levying war" against the United States. And if the Taliban got any "aid and comfort" from him, they must have been extremely hard up.

The elder George Bush, perhaps remembering some pretty sappy youngsters in his own family, couldn't see much evil in John and dismissed him as merely another "misguided Marin County hot-tubber."

But President George W. and his pious henchmen weren't going to pass up this opportunity. They couldn't catch Osama bin Laden. They couldn't catch Osama's chief lieutenant, Omar. But by God they'd caught John Walker Lindh and they were going to make the most of him. Attorney General John Ashcroft, nicely ignoring major portions of our history, said, "The United States is a country that cherishes religious tolerance, political democracy, and equality between men and women. By his own account, John Walker Lindh allied himself with terrorists who reject these values."
Read More...
Propaganda

Scholar unearths journal series lost for over a century: Walt Whitman's guide to 'Manly Health'

Jennifer Schuessler
The New York Times
Fri, 29 Apr 2016 23:10 UTC
Walt Whitman
© Getty ImagesWalt Whitman
In 1858, when Walt Whitman sat down to write a manifesto on healthy living, he came up with advice that might not seem out of place in an infomercial today.

"Let the main part of the diet be meat, to the exclusion of all else," Whitman wrote, sounding more than a little paleo.

As for the feet, he recommended that the comfortable shoes "now specially worn by base-ball players" - sneakers, if you will - be "introduced for general use," and he offered warnings about the dangers of inactivity that could have been issued from a 19th-century standing desk.

"To you, clerk, literary man, sedentary person, man of fortune, idler, the same advice," he declared. "Up!"

Whitman's words, part of a nearly 47,000-word journalistic series called "Manly Health and Training," were lost for more than 150 years, buried in an obscure newspaper that survived only in a handful of libraries. The series was uncovered last summer by a graduate student, who came across a fleeting reference to it in a digitized newspaper database and then tracked down the full text on microfilm.
Read More...
Book

What Aldous Huxley's Devils of Loudun can tell us about our present mania

Samuel McGee-Hall
Quillette
Fri, 02 Nov 2018 19:06 UTC
devils of loudun
There are many people for whom hate and rage pay a higher dividend of immediate satisfaction than love. Congenitally aggressive, they soon become adrenalin addicts, deliberately indulging their ugliest passions for the sake of the 'kick'...Knowing that one self-assertion always ends by evoking other and hostile self-assertions, they sedulously cultivate their truculence...Adrenalin addiction is rationalized as Righteous Indignation and finally, like the prophet Jonah, they are convinced, unshakably, that they do well to be angry.
These words first appeared in 1952, in the pages of Aldous Huxley's The Devils of Loudun. While many of Huxley's works are better known and more widely read, there may be no more relevant text, past or present, to our turbulent era than this account of a seventeenth century witch trial.

Huxley composed this passage to shed light on the mind of a thoroughly unlikeable individual by the name and title of Father Urban Grandier, in particular. But he also offered it as a more general analysis of the mindset afflicting those who burned Grandier to death - with the approval of both the Catholic Church and the State of France - for being a sorcerer in 1634. In the context of the entire work, this passage was part of a close inspection of the susceptibility of humanity to moral panics, show-trials, and mob justice across the ages.
Read More...
Propaganda

Arthur Balfour was a white supremacist - And an anti-Semite

Yousef Munayyer
Forward
Wed, 01 Nov 2017 12:00 UTC
balfour declaration
A century ago, 67 words changed the course of history in the Middle East. In a statement that could fit into two tweets, Arthur Balfour, then the British Foreign Secretary, announced that the British government would support establishing a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.

One hundred years later, the profound legacy of what became known as the Balfour Declaration continues to define the dynamic between Israelis and Palestinians. And though Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in London this week commemorating the centennial with Theresa May, it's worth understanding why the Declaration is really nothing worth celebrating.

Though he may be most known for aiding the Zionist cause in 1917, it's crucial to remember that Arthur Balfour was a white supremacist. He made that much clear in his own words. In 1906, the British House of Commons was engaged in a debate about the native blacks in South Africa. Nearly all the members of Parliament agreed that the disenfranchisement of the blacks was evil. Not so Balfour, who - almost alone - argued against it.

Comment: As we can see by the fruits it has borne today, the creation of the state of Israel was a political move that would benefit the West and Zionism rather than some altruistic gesture for the Jewish community: Also check out SOTT radio's: The Truth Perspective: Identity Politics on Steroids: How Zionism Outdoes Them All

Read More...
Bomb

Ye olde false-flag terrorist attack: The 'unsolved' Wall Street bombing of 1920

Evan Andrews
history.com
Sun, 14 Sep 2014 21:09 UTC
wall street bombing 1920
If Lower Manhattan's Financial District was the center of American capitalism in the 1920s, then the southeast corner of Wall and Broad Streets was its most important junction. It was dominated by the headquarters of J.P. Morgan and Co., a financial leviathan that had come out of World War I as the most influential banking institution on the globe. Across the street stood the U.S. Sub-Treasury and the Assay Office. The bustling New York Stock Exchange was located just down the road.

Rain was in the forecast for September 16, 1920, but as the bells of nearby Trinity Church rang in the noonday hour, "the Corner" was its usual hive of activity. Bank clerks and stockbrokers swarmed around the building fronts, and the streets were clogged with automobiles and messenger boys. Few in the lunchtime crowd paid any notice to the battered horse-drawn wagon parked in front of the Assay Office, nor the driver that had anxiously dropped the reigns and hurried off down the street.

The final ring of the church bells was still hanging in the air at 12:01, when the 100 pounds of dynamite concealed in the wagon detonated with an ear-splitting roar. "That was the loudest noise I ever heard in my life," J.P. Morgan employee Andrew Dunn later remembered. "It was enough to knock you out by itself." The blast derailed a streetcar a block over and sent debris soaring as high as the 34th floor of the nearby Equitable building. Pieces of the wagon's ill-fated horse landed hundreds of yards away. Stockbroker Joseph P. Kennedy, father of future President John F. Kennedy, was lifted clear off his feet by the concussion, as were many others.

Comment: Fast-forward a century. We're all older and wiser. We're now so familiar with the concept of false-flag terror attacks that they're portrayed in movies.

With the benefit of hindsight, it's quite clear that the Rothschild-JP Morgan building was targeted to generate sympathy for the world's most powerful financial syndicate, thus blocking/stymieing/silencing increasing popular dissent at that syndicate's inordinate influence over the US government.

The reason this kind of 'self-inflicted wound' type of attack keeps happening is because it's so bloody obvious to a psychopathic mind that it's the logical thing to do 'when the host population get restless'...

Read More...
Eagle

NATO's Humble Nazi-Inspired Beginnings: How The West Implemented Hitler's Goals

Robert S. Rodvik
Voltaire Network
Thu, 21 Jun 2012 00:00 UTC
Duke and Duchess of Windsor and Hitler
Welcome to Munich: the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, during a controversial visit to Germany, are greeted by Hitler in the city in 1937.
Who gave NATO the right to rule the world? This author elucidates how the Western elite, many of whom were Hitler supporters, rescued a vast number of Nazi hierarchy and placed them in positions to continue the many decades long fight against Russia. The One Percent of the time and the One Percent of today have sent millions to their deaths in formulating and enacting Winston Churchill's 1918 pledge to "strangle at its birth" the Bolshevik menace. Total control of the so-called mainstream media has furthered that odious task.
Many writers have documented how British and American elites bankrolled Hitler's rise to power and not until he turned his forces westward did they begin to mount defensive actions against the Third Reich. In Britain, elite members of The Right Club, often with government collusion, secretly supported Hitler's actions against the Jews and against communists and socialists. The Duke of Wellington was a noted anti-semite and a member of the Right Club. Edward the VIII, known as "the Traitor King" was close friends with Adolf Hitler and was forced to give up his throne, not because of Wallis Simpson, but because it was discovered that he was passing British war operations documents to the Nazis. The aristocracy, after all, have never submitted to sharing the wealth with the lesser classes and Adolf was equally amenable to those ends, the destruction of the untermenschen being foremost in Plan A of his conquest strategy for Europe and Russia.
Read More...
Magnify

Evidence of oldest use of olives dating back 4,000 years found in Croatia and Italy


Croatia Week
Mon, 22 Oct 2018 12:00 UTC
old olive tree
Evidence of the oldest olive groves in Croatia discovered
Archaeologists from Zadar have come across a variety of finds dating back to the Middle Bronze Age in the sea between the Isle of Ricul in the Pasman Channel and the coastal resort of Turanj, including numerous 3,500-years-old olive pits, which speak to the oldest olive groves along Croatia's Adriatic.


Comment: Comets and the Bronze Age Collapse


In northern Dalmatia, little was known about the Middle Bronze Age until archaeologists began underwater explorations several years ago.

Well-preserved organic material trapped in thick marine growth layers has provided them with data they can very rarely obtain on land, enriching the knowledge about Pre-Liburnian communities living there about three millennia ago.

The University of Zadar Department of Archaeology is conducting systematic researches in the area thanks to the financial support of the Ministry of Culture, among others.

Comment: It's not clear how olive pits constitute an olive grove, but, the claim for world's oldest use of olives continues as Smithsonian magazine reports:
4,000-Year-Old Jar Contains Italy's Oldest Olive Oil
olive oil oldest traces
© Archaeological Museum of Siracusa
Not only is olive oil at the heart of almost every dish that comes from the Mediterranean, the oil is used by cultures in the region as body wash, perfume, medicine and lamp fluid. In the Roman era, the commodity was so important that olive oil was collected as part of provincial taxes.

But just when did Italians begin squishing olives to extract the oil sometimes known as "liquid gold?" A new study of pottery fragments recovered from an archaeological site in Castelluccio, a village in the Apennine Mountains of central Italy, shows that oil was being produced in the region about 4,000 years ago. That pushes the timeline of the production of olive oil in Italy 700 years earlier than previously believed, reports Anne Ewbank at Atlas Obscura.

The story of the discovery of the Bronze Age oil itself goes back two decades. That's when archaeologists first uncovered the fragments of a jar in the Castelluccio site. According to a press release, conservators from the Archaeological Museum of Siracusa pieced together some 400 fragments found at the site to rebuild a 3-and-a-half foot-tall, egg-shaped jar with rope-like flourishes. They also restored two basins separated by an internal septum, as well as a large terracotta cooking plate.

"The shape of this storage container and the nearby septum was like nothing else...found at the site in Castelluccio," says historian Davide Tanasi of the University of South Florida, lead author of the study, published in the journal Analytical Methods. "It had the signature of Sicilian tableware dated to the end of the 3rd and beginning of the 2nd millennium BCE (Early Bronze Age). We wanted to learn how it was used, so we conducted chemical analysis on organic residues found inside."

Using gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, the team discovered residue of oleic and linoleic acid, telltale signatures of olive oil. Nuclear magnetic resonance testing then helped them determine the age of the oil. "The results obtained with the three samples from Castelluccio become the first chemical evidence of the oldest olive oil in Italian prehistory," says Tanasi.

According to Daniel Dawson of Olive Oil Times, storage jars dating back to the 12th and 11th century BCE in southern Italy's Cosenza and Lecce previously held the record for holding the oldest traces of olive oil in Italy.

While the ancient oil is a big deal for Italy, it's only half as old as the world's earliest extra virgin. In 2014, archaeologists in Israel unearthed shards of pottery a mile from the city of Nazareth, which contained traces of 8,000-year-old olive oil, the oldest ever discovered.

While olive oil from the Bronze Age is long gone and would be rancid even if it did survive, it's still possible to taste some olives from the far distant past. An olive tree in Bethlehem is believed to be 4,000 to 5,000 years old while the Olive Tree of Vouves in Crete, as well as several nearby trees, are believed to be 2,000 to 3,000 years old.
See also:

Read More...
Dig

300,000-year-old stone tools found in Saudi Arabia, when the area was a lush savannah

Kiona N. Smith
ArsTechnica
Mon, 29 Oct 2018 20:47 UTC
300,000 tool saudi arabia
Stone tools unearthed in Saudi Arabia's inhospitable Nefud Desert indicate that members of our genus Homo had ventured beyond the familiar borders of Africa and the Levant sometime between 300,000 and 500,000 years ago. And according to climate data captured in the bones of animals found at the site, the environment they moved into may not have been that different from the one they left behind in East Africa. That may help anthropologists better understand the role of environment-and the ability to adapt to challenging new landscapes-in shaping human evolution and global expansion.

The things they left behind

Archaeologist Patrick Roberts of the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History and his colleagues recently discovered a handful of stone tools in a sandy layer of soil beneath the dry traces of a shallow Pleistocene lake at Ti's al Ghadah, in the Nefud Desert of northern Saudi Arabia. The soil layer dated to between 300,000 and 500,000 years ago, and it also contained fossilized remains of grazing animals, water birds, and predators like hyena and jaguar. Many of the bones seem to bear the marks of butchering by tool-wielding hominins.

Archaeologists had found other fossils at the site with possible cut marks, but, without stone tools, it's difficult to determine if a notch in a fossil rib was put there by a human hand and not another predator or natural process. The tools-six sharp brown chert flakes and a scraper-make a much clearer case. Roberts and his colleagues say they're the oldest radiometrically dated hominin artifacts in the Arabian Peninsula, edging out the previous contender by 100,000 years.

Comment: Evidently our climate is always changing and the human story is not as clear as was once thought:

Read More...
Archaeology

Mysterious tunnel and funeral chamber found beneath Pyramid of the Moon near Mexico City


RT
Tue, 30 Oct 2018 13:20 UTC
Pyramid of the Moon Mexico City
© INAH / Mauricio Marat
Archaeologists have discovered a mysterious tunnel and funeral chamber beneath the Pyramid of the Moon near Mexico City which was believed to represent a passageway to the ancient underworld.

The 15-meter-wide (50 ft) chamber, located around 8 meters (26 ft) under the surface is believed to have been used for sacred funerary rituals. An additional tunnel leading to the Plaza of the Moon was also discovered, opening at the southern end.

"These large offering (ritual) complexes are the sacred core of the city of Teotihuacán," archaeologist Verónica Ortega from the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) in Mexico said in a press release.

Comment: More on the discoveries at Teotihuacan:

Read More...
Ice Cream Bar

Chocolate was a treat 1,500 years earlier than thought

Gemma Tarlach
Discover Magazine
Mon, 29 Oct 2018 20:32 UTC
Chocolate
© Oswaldo Rivas / Reuters
It's time to rewrite the history of chocolate. Using both archaeological and genomic data, researchers have revealed that consumption of the now globally-loved ingredient started much earlier than thought - and has a different birthplace than many assumed.

Chocolate is a product of the cultivated cacao tree (Theobroma cacao), and evidence of both cacao domestication and chocolate use have been centered around Central America and Mexico. Found at sites and documented in numerous texts, chocolate - usually consumed as a drink or gruel - played a key role in several regional cultures going back about 3,900 years.

Additional archaeological material suggests it spread to the American Southwest by about 1,000 years ago.
Read More...