Secret HistoryS


USA

Sorry, not everyone felt that way: Racism, rationalization and the potential of white allyship

Antislaverysign
© unknown
I remember when I was a kid how my maternal grandmother would defend Richard Nixon for the crimes of Watergate. As she put it, "He didn't do anything that every other president didn't also do."

It's an easily manifested suspicion I suppose - not altogether incorrect - given the commonality of misconduct in high places. And surely it's the kind of thing we'll be hearing a lot more of in years to come, after the presidency of the human cynicism factory known as Donald Trump comes to an end.

Still, and however prevalent personal duplicity may be, even at six I understood that the "everyone does it" defense wasn't exactly compelling. Not because I was a particularly developed moral philosopher, but because it never seemed to work when I would try it on my mom, in those instances where a friend and I would be playing ball and break something on the porch of a neighbor's apartment.

Whenever I tried the old "but Billy was playing too" defense, it would be met with the same reply. As I recall it involved something about a bridge, followed by a query as to whether, were young William to leap from it, I would follow him in the manner of a damned fool.

This tendency to excuse one's own misdeeds - or the misdeeds of others you admire - by way of the "everyone does it" defense is nowhere more maddening than when applied to our nation's founders, or early American presidents and prominent citizens.

Comment: History can be a teacher and a touchstone, should it be properly and accurately acknowledged. Instead we write and rewrite it to serve a bias, then remember it as validation.


Archaeology

Fascinating discoveries suggest Isle of May was a healing centre for hundreds of years (PHOTOS)

isle of may
It lies on the edge of the Firth of Forth like a lump of the Hebrides tossed over Scotland to land in the waters off the east coast.

And today the Isle of May is chiefly home to sea birds, seals and the odd intrepid visitor attracted by its rugged beauty and isolation.

But now new evidence has emerged casting the island as a centre of medicine and healing for the people of early medieval Scotland, who were drawn to its shores seeking wisdom from the monks who called it home and also the hope of divine intervention - either in this life or the next.

Comment: The finds are fascinating and, while the interpretations of the archaeologists may or may not be completely accurate, it does seem to be quite a significant place, and It demonstrates how little we really know about life in the past:


Star of David

Flashback Israeli newspaper: We mustn't forget that some of the greatest murderers in modern times were Jewish, particularly those in Stalin's Russia

Image
Genrikh Yagoda
In 1934, according to published statistics, 38.5 percent of those holding the most senior posts in the Soviet security apparatuses were of Jewish origin. They too, of course, were gradually eliminated in the next purges. In a fascinating lecture at a Tel Aviv University convention this week, Dr. Halfin described the waves of soviet terror as a "carnival of mass murder," "fantasy of purges", and "essianism of evil." Turns out that Jews too, when they become captivated by messianic ideology, can become great murderers, among the greatest known by modern history.

Here's a particularly forlorn historical date: Almost 90 years ago, between the 19th and 20th of December 1917, in the midst of the Bolshevik revolution and civil war, Lenin signed a decree calling for the establishment of The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, also known as Cheka.

Within a short period of time, Cheka became the largest and cruelest state security organization. Its organizational structure was changed every few years, as were its names: From Cheka to GPU, later to NKVD, and later to KGB.

We cannot know with certainty the number of deaths Cheka was responsible for in its various manifestations, but the number is surely at least 20 million, including victims of the forced collectivization, the hunger, large purges, expulsions, banishments, executions, and mass death at Gulags.

Red Flag

Former Red Guard member recounts the horrors of China's Cultural Revolution

In the face of silence from the Communist party, a former Red Guard has written a blog about the bloody summer of '66
Chinese cultural revolution
© Universal History Archive/UIG via Getty ImagesChinese red guards during the Cultural Revolution.
Thousands of teenage hands rocketed skywards as the Great Helmsman stepped down from the rostrum in Tiananmen Square to greet the shock troops of his revolution. It was the summer of 1966 and Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution - a catastrophic political convulsion that would catapult China into a decade of heartbreak, humiliation and deadly violence - was under way.

"When we saw Mao Zedong wave his hand, we all went berserk," recalled Yu Xiangzhen, then a 13-year-old schoolgirl whose bright red armband marked her out as one of millions of loyal Red Guards. "We shouted and screamed until we had no voices left."

Fifty years after the start of the Cultural Revolution, in May 1966, Yu, who is now 64, has been blogging her memories of the period in a bid to prevent history repeating itself.

China's communist rulers have remained silent over the anniversary of the devastating political mobilisation, which scholars estimate claimed somewhere between one and two million lives.

But since the start of this year, Yu has been trying to use her blog to tear down the wall of official silence surrounding the events of that bloody summer.

Comment: "If our descendants do not know the truth they will make the same mistakes again..."

History in a nutshell.

Her cautionary words were timely because a similar leftist ideology is now giving rise to mass hysteria which bodes ill for Western civilization.


Archaeology

New light on the Phaistos Disc: The goddess of love who glows and grows dim

Phaistos disc
Phaistos disc
"Side Α of the disk speaks of the pregnant goddess who glows and side B contains a sentence in two lines in Minoan alliteration which refers to the goddess who grows dim; The fading of Astarte/Aphrodite/Aphaia. With your help, I should like us one day in the future to translate these lines on the goddess of love and learn more".

With these words, linguist Dr Gareth Owens, a specialist in Minoan script, concluded his interesting talk entitled "The Voice of the Phaistos Disk" given on Wednesday at the National Hellenic Research Foundation (NHRF), in collaboration with the Technological Educational Institute (TEI) of Crete.

Comment: It seems all the secrets of the Phaistos disc have still yet to be revealed. The Minoan's were just one of the civilisations that suddenly disappeared during the collapse of the Bronze age, could this disc be related to the happenings at the time? Or perhaps it's a tablet devoted to a ritual practise?

For more on the deciphering of the disc: Mysterious 4,000 year-old Phaistos Disk finally decoded after a century

See Also:


Fire

The destructive radical feminist legacy of Kate Millett

A conversation with the feminist icon's sister.
Sexual Politics
Feminist icon Kate Millett passed away recently in Paris at the age of 82. Her 1970 book Sexual Politics, called "the Bible of Women's Liberation" by the New York Times, had a seismic effect on feminist thought and launched Millett as what the Times called "a defining architect of second-wave feminism." In a cover story that same year, TIME magazine crowned her "the Mao Tse-tung of Women's Liberation." Fellow feminist Andrea Dworkin said that Millett woke up a sleeping world.

Kate's sister Mallory, a CFO for several corporations, resides in New York City with her husband of over twenty years. In a riveting article from a few years back bluntly titled, "Marxist Feminism's Ruined Lives," Mallory revealed what she saw of the subversive undercurrent of her sister's passionate radicalism.

Asked for her thoughts on Kate's legacy, Mallory shared her very personal responses, which follow.

Comment:


2 + 2 = 4

How radical feminism ruined lives

The horror I witnessed inside the women's "liberation" movement.
feminist march
"When women go wrong men go right after them."
-- Mae West


"Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy; its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery." Winston Churchill wrote this over a century ago.

During my junior year in high school, the nuns asked about our plans for after we graduated. When I said I was going to attend State University, I noticed their disappointment. I asked my favorite nun, "Why?" She answered, "That means you'll leave four years later a communist and an atheist!"

Comment: Why feminism wants to break up the family


Archaeology

Hidden Egyptian paintings depict never seen before animals and unexplained drownings

New analysis of a tomb painting has revealed an image of two men carrying a pig.
New analysis of a tomb painting has revealed an image of two men carrying a pig.
Thanks to modern imaging equipment, archaeologists now have a wide range of new tools to help them uncover the secrets of the past. New undiscovered empty areas have been uncovered in the Pyramids of Giza thanks to devices which can 'see' the cosmic rays bouncing off of the insides of the pyramids, while unmanned aerial vehicles have led to the discovery of dozens of new unexplored and unknown ancient structures. Just this week, new research into image enhancement software has led to a breakthrough in ancient Egyptology. Researchers using a radical new imaging software called DStretch have discovered depictions of both bats and pigs in art found at an ancient Egyptian cemetery, some of the only known examples of these animals in all of ancient Egyptian archaeology.

Comment: Considering the amount of imagery the Egyptian's created, it is curious that particular scenes have never been found, until now. See Also:


Sun

Maurice Pappworth: The doctor who exposed the UK's horrible and useless medical experiments on patients

hospitals of the 1950s and 60s
© Heritage Images/GettyIn hospitals of the 1950s and 60s, doctors had enormous power. Maurice Pappworth wanted to stop them abusing it
In the 1960s, British medics took sometimes fatal liberties with unsuspecting patients in the name of science. Maurice Pappworth wasn't having any of it

Maurice Pappworth was a "pestilential nuisance", according to his obituary. It was meant as a compliment. A whistle-blower before the modern meaning of the term was invented, he exposed how many of his fellow doctors in the 1960s, often at British teaching hospitals, were treating their patients with as much respect as lab rats, and sometimes killing them in the process.

In his explosive 1967 book, Human Guinea Pigs, he revealed how unsuspecting patients were being "subject to mental and physical distress which is in no way necessitated by, and has no connection with, the treatment of their disease". They were being sacrificed to science by "wolves in white coats", said one reviewer of his book. And not just in hospitals: in prisons, orphanages and psychiatric centres, too.

The book created headlines around the world, and Pappworth pulled no punches, likening the situation to the foul work of doctors in Nazi concentration camps. With the war so recent, this comparison inevitably whipped up outrage among his peers.

Comment: The scope of Nazi-style experiments documented from places around the world, and even in the most 'democratic' of nations, is shocking:


Evil Rays

Historian: A 'red scare' is launched by the elites every 20 to 30 years

red menace
Edward Herman was a professor of finance at the Wharton School of Business. He was also a well-known writer and historian, who co-wrote a number of books with "the World's top public intellectual", Noam Chomsky.

Herman says that fatcats launch a Red Scare every 20 to 30 years in order to roll back any gains in wealth and rights gained by the public, and to browbeat everyone into allowing policies which redistribute power back to the fatcats: