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No saints: Anglo-Americans and their allies killed more innocents during WWII than Stalin

Marko Marjanović
Checkpoints Asia
Wed, 27 Jun 2018 00:00 UTC
4 million to Stalin's 2 million. The only reason we think of them as moral is because the Nazis were even far worse
Anglo American destruction during WWII

There was unfortunately nothing particularly moral about the allies. The German-Japanese Axis merely made them look good by comparison
According to the best available study on the subject Germany lost 5.3 million military men to World War II. Of these, 340,000 were lost in Western Europe, 150,00 in Italy, 16,000 in Africa and up to 225,000 on the seas and in the air over Germany. Additionally the Germans lost 1,230,000 dead in the final battles in Germany of 1945, of which Overmans estimates about one third or 410,000 were inflicted by the Western Allies. Taken together the Germans lost just under 1.2 million military men to the Western Allies, chiefly the Anglo-Americans.[1]

Meanwhile in the course of the war between 360,000 to 460,000 German civilians died in the Anglo-American strategic bombing campaign against German cities and towns. For every three German soldiers the Anglo-Americans also killed one German civilian (or sometimes a forced foreign laborer or an allied prisoner of war). Nor is this the complete tally of Anglo-American bombing in WWII Europe. An estimated 60,000 civilians were killed in the bombing raids over France and just as many in Italy. 20,000 more were killed in allied bombing raids in the Low Countries.

Theoretically the campaign against German cities was "strategic", but the raids over German-occupied territories were only "tactical". According to the architects of Combined Bomber Offensive, civilian deaths in Germany were a positive outcome of the raids. They would diminish German morale and aid the Allied cause. On the other hand any civilian deaths caused in German-occupied countries were only tangential to what the strikes were supposed to accomplish. In practice it did not make a whole world of difference. Altogether the Anglo-American bombs took the lives of roughly 550,000 civilians across German-run Europe.

Comment: And the blood lust of the Anglo-American regime continues unabated:

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Heart

Stunning memento of wartime romance: Archeologists discover etched canteen carved by captive Russian solider in Poland during WWI

Cheyenne MacDonald
Daily Mail
Tue, 03 Jul 2018 14:16 UTC
trench art, WWI russian solder canteen carving

Etched into a canteen found at the site of the World War I prisoner-of-war camp at Czersk is a detailed scene of a man and woman caught in a loving embrace. Experts say the carving may depict the soldier 'and his sweetheart’
Archaeologists have discovered a stunning memento of wartime romance, carved more than 100 years ago by a captive Russian soldier in Poland.

Etched into a canteen found at the site of the World War I prisoner-of-war camp in Czersk is a detailed scene of a man and woman caught in a loving embrace.

It comes in stark contrast to the gruesome first-hand accounts of life at the POW camp, where hunger, forced labor, and infectious disease were widespread.

Experts say so-called trench art like this often captured life's sentimental moments even in the midst of hardship, reflecting the 'personal stories, feelings, and fears' of soldiers during war.
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Archaeology

Massive stone head unearthed beside 8.6-foot-long sarcophagus buried in Egypt 2,000 years

Cheyenne Macdonald
The Daily Mail
Tue, 03 Jul 2018 00:53 UTC
giant sarcophagus Alexandria
© Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities/Facebook
According to the archaeologists who led the dig, the black granite sarcophagus stands at 185 centimeters tall (6 feet), 265cm long (8.6 ft), and 165 cm wide (5.4 ft). It's said to be the largest ever found in Alexandria
Egyptian archaeologists have discovered what's thought to be the largest granite sarcophagus ever found in Alexandria, measuring nearly nine feet long.

The massive stone casket was buried more than 16 feet beneath the surface alongside a huge alabaster head - likely belonging to the man who owned the tomb.

Experts say the ancient coffin has remained untouched since its burial thousands of years ago during the Ptolemaic period.

According to the archaeologists who led the dig, the black granite sarcophagus stands at 185 centimeters tall (6 feet), 265cm long (8.6 ft), and 165 cm wide (5.4 ft). It's said to be the largest ever found in Alexandria
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Bad Guys

The new Gilded Age: How America's wars fuel inequality at home

Stephanie Savell
Tom Dispatch
Mon, 02 Jul 2018 11:38 UTC
US military in Afghanistan
On the campaign trail in 2016, Donald Trump wasn't shy when it came to the issue of debt. As he told Norah O'Donnell of CBS This Morning at the time, "I'm the king of debt. I'm great with debt. Nobody knows debt better than me. I've made a fortune by using debt and if things don't work out I renegotiate the debt. I mean, that's a smart thing, not a stupid thing." So how perfect that he would become the president of debt, presiding (like his two predecessors) over what TomDispatch regular Stephanie Savell, co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University, calls America's "credit-card wars." Those conflicts, already almost 17 years in the making and still spreading, may, when the costs finally come due, lend a hand in the bankrupting of America and leave those who don't fit comfortably into the 1% bracket in a ditch somewhere in Trump country.
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Chess

How Snowden helped pave the way for a Trump Presidency

Rachel Marsden
Town Hall
Fri, 29 Jun 2018 11:40 UTC
snowden
© Brendan McDermid / Reuters
Five years ago this month, former CIA employee and government contractor Edward Snowden was charged with espionage after fleeing to Hong Kong with a cache of classified documents from the National Security Agency. At the time, he was either hailed as a hero or denounced as a traitor. Regardless of how you view him, history could very well end up connecting the dots between Snowden's actions and the ascendance of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States.

Many intelligence officers say that Snowden is a traitor since the information he carried with him to Hong Kong -- subsequently leaked to selected journalists and then published -- could have inadvertently provided foreign intelligence services with pieces of information that would compromise the intelligence operations of Western nations, particularly those of the "Five Eyes": the U.S., Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand. All of these agencies share data with the NSA.
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Dig

5,000 year old rock art discovered on cliff face in Siberia intrigues archaeologists


Siberian Times
Thu, 28 Jun 2018 09:12 UTC
5,000 year old rock carving
© Elena Miklashevich
One is an image of two Argali - horned mountain sheep - squaring up for battle.
But how did ancient artists create prehistoric masterpieces on sheer cliffs today only accessible by sophisticated modern climbing equipment?

When the Soviet authorities dammed the giant Yenisei River to generate hydroelectricity, they made an artificial reservoir some 388 kilometres long (roughly the distance from New York to Washington DC), never wider than 15km, and with a maximum 105-metre depth.

In doing so, ancient petroglyphs were submerged forever.

Or so scientists believed.

Now, due to markedly varying water levels in Krasnoyarsk Reservoir (or Sea), some of the submerged rock art is reappearing from the deep, while other finds are being made - thanks to observations by boat from the water - high on cliff sides.

Comment: Evidently throughout human history our world has undergone considerable and dramatic changes:

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V

Setting the record straight: George Orwell didn't spy for British Intelligence nor was he a crypto-Right-winger

Tom Secker
Medium
Tue, 26 Jun 2018 15:26 UTC
George Orwell
© Granta
George Orwell
Ever since the revelation that the radical author George Orwell had provided names of possible communists to British intelligence, liberal revisionists have claimed he was a crypto-racist and a British spy. Any honest examination of the available documents shows that not only is this untrue, Orwell was the subject of surveillance and investigation by British intelligence for over a decade.

The Independent recently ran an article asking if Orwell was 'secretly a reactionary snitch'. It recounts how in 1996 the declassification of a Foreign Office file chronicling a meeting between Orwell and an agent of the FCO in 1949 shocked many readers and admirers of Orwell's writings.
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Stock Down

6 trade wars that shook the global economy


RT
Tue, 26 Jun 2018 12:20 UTC
trade cargo
© Aly Song / Reuters
The escalating trade war between the US and China has dominated headlines, dragged markets down and aroused fears of a full-scale global trade war as several countries respond to new US tariffs with tit-for-tat measures.

While US President Donald Trump claimed recently on Twitter that trade wars are "good" and "easy to win" - history paints a very different picture. Here's a look at six past trade wars and the havoc they caused to the global economy.

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Archaeology

Hundreds of skulls reveal scale, skill, and the history of human sacrifice in Aztec capital

Lizzie Wade
Science Mag
Thu, 21 Jun 2018 12:00 UTC
A codex written after the conquest by a Spanish priest depicts Tenochtitlan's enormous skull rack, or tzompantli. 1587 AZTEC MANUSCRIPT, THE CODEX TOVAR
© WIKIMEDIA COMMONS
A codex written after the conquest by a Spanish priest depicts Tenochtitlan's enormous skull rack, or tzompantli.
1587 AZTEC MANUSCRIPT, THE CODEX TOVAR
The priest quickly sliced into the captive's torso and removed his still-beating heart. That sacrifice, one among thousands performed in the sacred city of Tenochtitlan, would feed the gods and ensure the continued existence of the world.

Death, however, was just the start of the victim's role in the sacrificial ritual, key to the spiritual world of the Mexica people in the 14th to the 16th centuries.

Priests carried the body to another ritual space, where they laid it face-up. Armed with years of practice, detailed anatomical knowledge, and obsidian blades sharper than today's surgical steel, they made an incision in the thin space between two vertebrae in the neck, expertly decapitating the body. Using their sharp blades, the priests deftly cut away the skin and muscles of the face, reducing it to a skull. Then, they carved large holes in both sides of the skull and slipped it onto a thick wooden post that held other skulls prepared in precisely the same way. The skulls were bound for Tenochtitlan's tzompantli, an enormous rack of skulls built in front of the Templo Mayor-a pyramid with two temples on top. One was dedicated to the war god, Huitzilopochtli, and the other to the rain god, Tlaloc.

Comment: So even though it's thought that human sacrifice was a ritual with a long history, it seems to have reached its peak at a particular period and the evidence would suggest that their fear of the end of the world was probably well founded. In many other parts of the world there was a documented shift in climate causing famine and plague, along with increased fireball activity in the skies:

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Hammer

Enemy of the state: The gruesome assassination of Leon Trotsky

Erin Blakemore
Russia Today
Sat, 23 Jun 2018 17:31 UTC
Trotsky
© Wikimedia Commons (Trotsky) / iStock (Background)
In August 1940, a Russian expatriate worked in his well-sheltered garden in Mexico City. He surrounded himself with chickens, rabbits, and peaceful trees. But the man was no vacationing grandpa - he was one of the most famous political exiles in the world, and his home in Coyoacan was surrounded by armed guards and fortress-like walls.

Leon Trotsky had been a political liability in Russia for years before his hasty expulsion. Though he had helped lead the Communist Party to power in Russia during the Bolshevik revolution in 1917, Trotsky quickly became persona non grata to Joseph Stalin. Trotsky's opposition to Stalin's bloated bureaucracy and his publicly-stated belief that Stalinism wasn't taking Communism far enough toward permanent world revolution cost him everything.

When Vladimir Lenin died in 1924, it was thought that Trotsky, who had endured a long
Ramon Mercader

Ramón Mercader
marriage of political convenience with Lenin, might come to power. But Stalin helped drum up and took advantage of anti-Trotsky sentiment to seize Soviet control instead. Stalin acted swiftly against the former hero, and he swept Trotsky out of his political positions, the Communist Party, and eventually the USSR itself.

As Trotsky looked for a new state to call home, Stalin scrubbed him from photographs and published texts, but Trotsky was more concerned about preserving his actual life. Though he managed to find political asylum in Mexico, he survived multiple assassination attempts over the years and a raid on his compound.

However, on August 20, 1940, Trotsky's luck ran out. A man who called himself Jacques Mornard had become friends with Trotsky and his armed guards. They exchanged sympathetic political views and chatted about trivial matters, but Mornard was actually Ramón Mercader, a Soviet agent.
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