Secret HistoryS


Bizarro Earth

An OrWELLSian purge? Why H.G. Wells' 'The Shape of Things to Come' has arrived today

skull
© REUTERS/Ivan Alvarado
"It has become apparent that whole masses of human population are, as a whole, inferior in their claim upon the future, to other masses, that they cannot be given opportunities or trusted with power as the superior peoples are trusted, that their characteristic weaknesses are contagious and detrimental to the civilizing fabric, and that their range of incapacity tempts and demoralizes the strong. To give them equality is to sink to their level, to protect and cherish them is to be swamped in their fecundity. "

- H.G. Wells' in "Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical
and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought" 1901
In "The Shape of Things to Come: The Ultimate Revolution" (published in 1933), H.G. Wells writes of the future predicting, rather optimistically, that there will be another world war in just a few years, followed by epidemic and famine. In this fictional future, war continues for thirty years into the 1960s, despite the people having forgotten why they started fighting. Humanity enters a new Dark Age. In a last bid for victory, the enemy deploys a biological weapon resulting in the "wandering sickness," producing the first zombies, and by 1970 the global population has dropped to a little under one billion.

Though this is depicted as horrific, it is at the same time depicted as a necessity - a "great reset," to restore the "balance" so to speak. It is only with this reduced population size that the world can begin to build itself back together from the chaos that it was, and enter into its new phase of evolution as a biologically superior species (the inferior having been culled by war and disease), managed by a bureaucratic system under the form of a world government.

This is the sci-fi fantasy of H.G. Wells and is the central theme to everything he wrote including his works of non-fiction. The subject on ways to reduce the world population was a troubling dilemma for Wells...not the reducing part, but the thought that there would be those so foolish as to forbid it.

Pharoah

Ancient Egyptian funerary temple unveiled south of Cairo

necropolis
© AP Photo/Nariman El-MoftyA trove of ancient coffins and artifacts on display that Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass and his team unearthed in a vast necropolis, in Saqqara, south of Cairo, Egypt, Sunday, Jan. 17, 2021.
Egypt's former antiquities minister and noted archaeologist Zahi Hawass on Sunday revealed details of an ancient funerary temple in a vast necropolis south of Cairo.

Hawass told reporters at the Saqqara necropolis that archaeologists unearthed the temple of Queen Neit, wife of King Teti, the first king of the Sixth Dynasty that ruled Egypt from 2323 B.C. till 2150 B.C.

Archaeologists also found a 4-meter (13-foot) long papyrus that includes texts of the Book of the Dead, which is a collection of spells aimed at directing the dead through the underworld in ancient Egypt, he said.

Comment: Whilst the endless finds in Egypt do provide regular news for archaeology, Laura Knight-Jadczyk in her book The Secret History of the World and How to Get Out Alive provides fascinating insight that overturns much of what we've been led to believe about the ancient Egyptian civilization:
The fad for all things "Egyptian" has been with us for a very long time. Schwaller de Lubicz - the vector of many of these ideas - settled in Egypt in 1938 and for the next 15 years studied the symbolism of the temples, particularly Luxor, finding what he considered to be proof that the ancient Egyptians were the ultimate examples of Synarchy, because they were ruled by a group of elite initiates. He failed to point out that the Egyptian civilization was static and limited. What's more, it caved in on itself, and never managed to produce any significant work of benefit for humanity, as Otto Neugebauer showed conclusively in his The Exact Sciences in Antiquity, whose evidence we will quote further on in this volume.

The open-minded thinker ought to really consider the purported mysteries of Egypt in terms of the fact that they were so ignorant that they devoted a huge amount of energy to their "cult of the dead." The whole Egyptian shtick is focused around preserving dead flesh for future or otherworldly reanimation. The very fact that there are so many of these dead bodies for Egyptologists to dig up is the clearest evidence that the Egyptian beliefs were nonsense. So, in that sense, certainly, Christianity as we know it has adopted the "Egyptian religion" and its beliefs in physical resurrection.

The whole issue of the excitement over Egyptian civilization is the belief that they had some mysterious powers because they built the pyramids and we can't. And has it never occurred to anybody that the existence of the pyramids in conjunction with the worship of an elite group of human beings, while everybody else was wearing loincloths and sweating in the hot sun, might suggest a relationship between the two? The fact is, the Egyptian civilization seems to have been the chief example of a vast chasm between the haves and the have-nots, and they managed to do it longer than anybody else.

In examining the work of Schwaller, we have one of the better examples of the subtle way the negative occult societies attack those who come to bring light, by association and co-opting. The tactic is to find a means of subtly allying their message with that of the truth so as to generate confusion in untrained minds which would tend on surface evidence to accept these actually contrary messages as similar, at least in intent. [...]

Otto Neugebauer began the ten-page section on Egypt in his later History of Ancient Mathematical Astronomy with the provocative sentence, "Egypt has no place in a work on the history of mathematical astronomy."[1]

Did you catch that? Neugebauer is telling us that the Egyptians were scientifically illiterate. He read and examined everything. All the Egyptologists who were inculcated into the belief of the superiority of Egyptian science were sending him their papyri and inscriptions from tombs and monuments. All the things that are so difficult to get hold of nowadays were sent to Neugebauer. And what did Neugebauer say?
Mathematics and astronomy played a uniformly insignificant role in all periods of Egyptian history. [...] The fact that Egyptian mathematics has preserved a relatively primitive level makes it possible to investigate a stage of development which is no longer available in so simple a form, except in the Egyptian documents.

To some extent Egyptian mathematics has had some, though rather negative, influence on later periods. Its arithmetic was widely based on the use of unit fractions, a practice which probably influenced the Hellenistic and Roman administrative offices and thus spread further into other regions of the Roman empire. [...]The influence of this practice is visible even in works of the stature of the Almagest, where final results are often expressed with unit fractions in spite of the fact that the computations themselves were carried out with sexagesimal fractions. [...] And this old tradition doubtless contributed much to restricting the sexagesimal place value notation to a purely scientific use.[...]
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Arrow Up

Debunking pseudoscience on Gobekli Tepe

Gobekli Tepe
© 0meer/ShuttestockThe remains of Gobekli Tepe in Turkey. It is one of the oldest settlements in the world.
Last September Eric Betz published an article on the Astronomy and Discover websites. These are popular websites, with a lot of readers. Now, I have no idea who Eric is. I think he's a journalist, not a scientist or archaeologist. But anyway, he wrote this bad article. I contacted the Astronomy website editors to point out its errors but got no response whatsoever. Hence this response.

Let's take a look at what Eric Betz said in his article.

Gobekli Tepe: the world's first observatory? He asks? And then he says 'Pseudoscience and genuine archaeological mystery surround humanity's oldest known temple. But was it the World's first astronomical observatory?'.

Ha, well, immediately my hackles are raised with his use of the word 'pseudoscience', and I wonder where he's going with this piece. It just sounds like sloppy journalism. Now, the problem with this word is that its often thrown around willy-nilly by people who are not scientists and who really have no idea how science really works. And they use it to claim that people with a view contrary to theirs are just talking nonsense. And I think this is how Eric is using it - simply as an attempt to undermine the position of people he disagrees with.

Now, sometimes, actual scientists will use the word in connection with studies like homeopathy or telekinesis or perpetual motion and so on. And here it has a real meaning - because these kinds of study contradict basic laws of physics. But I don't think Eric is using it in this sense. He's just using it to be offensive and to try to undermine his opponents, I think.

But who are Eric's opponents? Who is using pseudoscience, as he sees it? Whose arguments does he disagree with so strongly, and think are unsupported by any logic or evidence? Let's see.

Hearts

"Exceptional" 2,000-year-old remains of infant and pet dog uncovered in France

child burial
© Denis Gliksman/InrapAn overhead view of the burial site in what is now Clermont-Ferrand.
French archaeologists have hailed the "exceptional" discovery of the 2,000-year-old remains of a child buried with animal offerings and what appears to have been a pet dog.

The child, believed to have been around a year old, was interred at the beginning of the first century, during Roman rule, in a wooden coffin 80cm long made with nails and marked with a decorative iron tag.

The coffin was placed in a 2 metre by 1 metre grave and surrounded by around 20 objects including a number of miniature terracotta vases and glass pots thought to have contained oils and medicines, half a pig, three hams and other cuts of pork, and two headless chickens.

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Red Flag

Chinese inventions: The compass, gunpowder ... and Critical Social Justice?

taiwan
My personal area of interest lies in Formosan affairs. Perhaps better known to most as Taiwan, Formosa is the main island of the territory currently occupied by the Republic of China government-in-exile (not to be confused with the Communist-led People's Republic of China, commonly known as China). As someone born and raised in the US, it is hard to ignore the parallels between our histories. Formosan history is replete with the twists and turns of colonization, rebellion, and the ongoing battle for independence; or, now that there is some semblance of an "independent" Formosa, the battle for how it should be recognized and governed. Many volumes have been written on Formosan history, and the interested reader is encouraged to explore this history more deeply. For our purposes, it is enough to note the following: Formosa has been partially occupied by various European and Asian empires throughout its modern history, beginning with the Dutch in 1624; the vast majority of its inhabitants' ancestral lines migrated from present-day Southeast China (Amoy [Xiamen] and environs), also in the 17th century; and it has been under (Republic of) Chinese occupation since 1945.

Understanding Formosa therefore requires, among other things, a deep understanding of China and the language used to discuss all things China-related. As a frequent reader of New Discourses, I could not help but recognize that time and again, there is striking similarity between the language used and events that unfolded in China over the past few centuries, and the modern Western language of Critical Social Justice as we watch current events unfold before our eyes. I have a sneaking suspicion, which if I were an academic or a scholar might be called a working hypothesis (I am reluctant to use the word "theory," for obvious reasons), that the modern phenomenon of "Social Justice" is not in fact modern, and that it occurred in China in a very similar fashion around a hundred years ago. The eventual result of an obsession with racial and ethnic differences in late 19th — early 20th century China, perhaps unsurprisingly to readers of ND, is the seemingly monolithic Chinese Communist Party, with its near-absolute control over the lives of 1.4 billion peasant subjects. I suspect that we might learn something useful regarding our own situation by understanding the evolution from Chinese "Critical Social Justice" to Chinese Communism more clearly. Specifically, although I am not an expert by any means, I imagine that viewing our current social ills as they occurred in a different time and place may add some clarity that we miss when we are "in the mix" ourselves. In this post, I explain briefly some of the "leads," which I think might be good places to start looking.

Cow Skull

Teeth pendants speak of the elk's prominent status in the Stone Age

elk grave
© Tom BjorklundA total of 90 elk teeth were placed next to the hips and thighs of the body in grave 127, possibly attached to a garment resembling an apron. There were elk teeth pendants also on the waist. Red ochre had been sprinkled on top of the deceased.
Roughly 8,200 years ago, the island of Yuzhniy Oleniy Ostrov in Lake Onega in the Republic of Karelia, Russia, housed a large burial ground where men, women and children of varying ages were buried. Many of the graves contain an abundance of objects and red ochre, signifying the wish to ensure the comfort of the buried also after death. Pendants made of elk incisors were apparently attached to clothing and accessories, such as dresses, coats, cloaks, headdresses and belts. Although no clothing material has been preserved, the location of the elk teeth sheds light on the possible type of these outfits.

A people of grooved elk tooth pendants

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Books

New insights from original Domesday survey revealed

Domesday
© University of OxfordDomesday Book Cover.
A new interpretation of the survey behind Domesday Book — the record of conquered England compiled on the orders of William the Conqueror in 1086 — has emerged from a major new study of the survey's earliest surviving manuscript.

Research published in the English Historical Review shows historians now believe Domesday was more efficient, complex, and sophisticated than previously thought. The survey's first draft, which covered England south of the River Tees, was made with astonishing speed — within 100 days.

It was then checked and reorganised in three further stages, resulting in the production of new documents, each carefully designed for specific fiscal and political purposes. The iconic Domesday Book was simply one of several outputs from the process.

Comment: For more on the revealing findings that have emerged from recent studies of the Domesday books, see: Historian reveals true story behind the 'multiple and messy' Domesday books

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Bacon

42,000 year old cave painting in Indonesia may be world's oldest known figurative artwork

cave painting pig
© AA OktavianaDated pig painting at Leang Tedongnge.
Scientists have uncovered a pig painting in an Indonesian cave that dates back more than 45,000 years, representing perhaps the world's oldest surviving animal depiction and the most ancient known figurative artwork.

The cave painting may also provide the earliest evidence for anatomically modern humans on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, supporting the view that the first populations to settle the Wallacea islands created artistic depictions of animals and narrative scenes as part of their culture.

Indonesia has been known to harbor some of the world's oldest surviving cave art, including previously discovered paintings on its largest island, Sulawesi.

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's: MindMatters: The Meaning of the World's Mythologies


Syringe

Keynes' Sleight of Hand: From Fabian Eugenicist to World Government High Priest

Under the Keynesian takeover of Bretton Woods Trans-Atlantic nations became increasingly dominated by bloated bureaucratic systems while plans for genuine development were undermined, Matthew Ehret writes.
John Maynard Keynes Eugenics
© SCF
It is as if the battle lines of civil war have been drawn up between masses of Americans who have been led to believe in either a false "bottom up" approach to economics, as defined by the Austrian School represented by Friedrich von Hayek, or in the "top-down" approach of John Maynard Keynes. The former sacrifices the general welfare of the whole nation for the sake of the parts (i.e. individual liberties), while the latter sacrifices the individual liberties of each citizen for the sake of the general welfare (or at least some oligarch's definition of what that should be).

In my last article, I introduced, in broad strokes, a history of the American System of political economy as advanced by Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, Henry Clay, Henry Carey, Lincoln, and McKinley. We reviewed how it was derailed by McKinley's 1901 murder and was only revived 30 years later with Franklin Roosevelt's 1932 presidential victory which put a stop to the 1933 Bankers Dictatorship.

Comment: See also:


Colosseum

Easter Island's 'pigment pits' call into question societal collapse theory

easter island
The actual size of the statues is not as well known
Finds of pigment pits after the deforestation of Easter Island reject the earlier presumed societal collapse.

A new study on the prehistory of Easter Island (Rapa Nui) by an international team of scientists and archaeologists from Moesgaard Museum in Denmark, Kiel University in Germany, and the University Pompeu Fabra in Spain, has discovered prehistoric pits filled with red pigment on Easter Island.

The researchers revealed that the production of reddish pigment continued as an important aspect of the cultural life of the island inhabitants, despite drastic changes to the ecosystem and environment.

An earlier hypothesis, presented by Jared Diamond in the book "Collapse" (2005), assumed that the clearance of vegetation and overpopulation, resulted in erosion, a shortage of resources and food, and finally in the collapse of the society.

Comment: As noted in Rethinking Easter Island's historic collapse there's more to the societal collapse theory:
In short, Van Tilburg believes the new work is missing some of the nuances of Diamond's original theory. Diamond never described the collapse as a one-time event, Van Tilburg explains, but rather as a series of events that ultimately resulted in destructive societal changes that were hastened by European contact.

Diamond's hypothesis is based on a mix of oral tradition, evidence of island deforestation, and the work of previous researchers, such as the Norwegian explorer and ethnologist Thor Heyerdahl. (Heyerdahl gained fame in 1947 for sailing a balsa raft, the Kon-Tiki, to test the theory that South Americans may have colonized Polynesia.)
See also: And check out SOTT radio's: MindMatters: The Meaning of the World's Mythologies