Secret HistoryS


Star of David

In remembrance: Israel's Qana massacres in Lebanon

Denijal Jegić
Mondoweiss
Wed, 22 Apr 2020 19:18 UTC
qana massacre lebanon Israel
© Hassan Siklawi/UN PhotoUnited Nations peacekeepers sanitize the site where more than 100 Lebanese civilians were killed by Israeli artillery while seeking refuge at the headquarters of the Fijian battalion of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). Qana, South Lebanon on April 18, 1996.
As the Lebanese are commemorating the 1996 massacre of Qana in southern Lebanon, Israeli drones and jets continue to circle over Lebanese skies. Israel's brutal wars and illegal military occupation caused death and destruction. But Israel never left Lebanon. Today's threats and provocations follow the same narratives that were used to justify the Qana massacre.

The Qana Massacre

On April 18, 1996, Israeli forces fired artillery shells at a UN compound in Qana, a village in southern Lebanon. Around 800 had taken shelter at the compound which was clearly marked on Israeli maps. In the strikes 106 were killed, of whom half of them children, and 120 were injured including four UN workers.

Although Israel claimed it did not know that civilians had taken shelter in the UN compound, video evidence refuted this narrative. The UN believed that Israel acted deliberately. However, Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres and the State Department instead accused Hezbollah of using civilians as human shields.

Comment: Sleeping With The Enemy - The Answer To The "Why" Of War

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Nuke

Best of the Web: The U.S. government's secret history of grisly experiments

John W. Whitehead
The Rutherford Institute
Wed, 22 Apr 2020 19:29 UTC
"They were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don't recognize them for what they are until it's too late." — Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children
tuskegee experiment syphilis
I have never known any government to put the best interests of its people first, and this COVID-19 pandemic is no exception.

Now this isn't intended to be a debate over whether COVID-19 is a legitimate health crisis or a manufactured threat. Such crises can — and are — manipulated by governments in order to expand their powers. As such, it is possible for the virus to be both a genuine menace to public health and a menace to freedom.

Yet we can't afford to overlook the fact that governments the world over, including the U.S. government, have unleashed untold horrors upon the world in the name of global conquest, the acquisition of greater wealth, scientific experimentation, and technological advances, all packaged in the guise of the greater good.

While the U.S. government is currently looking into the possibility that the novel coronavirus spread from a Chinese laboratory rather than a market, the virus could just as easily have been created by the U.S. government or one of its allies.

After all, grisly experiments, barbaric behavior and inhumane conditions have become synonymous with the U.S. government, which has meted out untold horrors against humans and animals alike.
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Eagle

How the Red Army's spies found Hitler's remains


Sputnik
Sun, 19 Apr 2020 00:00 UTC
Hitler greeting people
© Sputnik
On April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler and his longtime companion Eva Braun took their own lives in a Berlin bunker, as the Red Army approached within a few hundred meters of their position. The remaining Nazi leadership attempted to destroy their bodies, but thanks to the efforts of Soviet military counterintelligence, the Fuhrer's demise was confirmed.

Sunday marks the 77th anniversary of the creation of SMERSH, the umbrella organization of counter-intelligence bodies, a portmanteau of the Russian language phrase 'SMERt Shpionam' ('Death to Spies'), formed on April 19, 1943.

It was SMERSH's job in Berlin in the chaotic first few days of May 1945 to reliably establish that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler had indeed killed himself and been cremated outside his Reich Chancellery bunker, and they accomplished their mission with flying colours, FSB Lt. Gen. (ret.) Alexander Zdanovich says.

Comment: Whether Hitler died in Berlin or escaped to South America is a popular subject of fictional novels, investigative publications and conspiracy theorists - and it overshadows the more important question of who funded the Nazis?.

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Pirates

Pirates once swashbuckled across the ancient Mediterranean

Mark Woolmer
National Geographic
Sun, 19 Apr 2020 19:15 UTC
bowl
© British Museum, London BRITISH MUSEUM/RMN-GRAND PALAISMerchant ships, such as that on the left of this sixth-century B.C. Greek bowl, were targets of pirates in antiquity. Naval warships, such as the one on the right, were periodically deployed to quash piracy.
Every child knows what a pirate looks like: a swashbuckler with an eye patch and a parrot perching on his sholder. This perception of pirates and piracy, which still deeply influences modern culture, was shaped by authors writing in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

These highly fanciful notions were inspired by the privateers and buccaneers of the "golden age" of piracy, which lasted roughly between 1650 and 1730. But pirates and piracy are much older than this era, and maritime banditry has been around for nearly as long as seafaring itself.

The origins of the modern term "piracy" can be traced back to the ancient Greek word peiráomai, meaning attempt (i.e., "attempt to steal"). Gradually this term morphed into a similar sounding term in Greek meaning "brigand," and from that to the Latin term pirata.
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Blue Planet

Ancient stone balls used by early humans may have been ideal tool to extract bone marrow

Michelle Starr
Science Alert
Fri, 17 Apr 2020 12:00 UTC
stone balls
© Assaf et al. PLOS One, 2020
Ancient archaeological sites across the Northern Hemisphere have been littered with a mystery. Where there were hominins, there too could often be found roughly rounded spheres of stone. Some have been dated back to over 2 million years ago, with marks suggesting that the balls had been deliberately shaped.

New research has discovered a plausible purpose for these strange tools: Our ancestors could have been using them to smash open bones - to get to the nutritious marrow inside.

An international team of researchers led by archaeologist Ella Assaf of Tel-Aviv University in Israel made a close examination of ten such stones found at Qesem Cave, a Lower Paleolithic site occupied by early humans between 400,000 and 200,000 years ago.

Comment: See also:

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Propaganda

Why the WHO faked a pandemic over Swine Flu in 2009 - Revealing Forbes op-ed

Joaquin Flores
Fort Russ
Thu, 16 Apr 2020 00:00 UTC
Coronavirus - hospital beds
We have found a precedent for the WHO's declaration of a 'pandemic' that was widely criticized in the recent past. In 2010, Forbes.com printed an opinion piece by opinion contributor Michael Fumento. He writes about the World Health Organization's apparently strange and unethical behaviour. The Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe had a problem with the way that the WHO falsely declared that there was a swine flu pandemic in 2009.

Comment: Yup, we remembered this too, largely because we reported at the time that it too was a fake pandemic. See here, for example: See also:

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Ice Cube

"Spectacular" artefacts found as Norway mountain pass ice-patch melts

Esther Addley
The Guardian
Thu, 16 Apr 2020 07:00 UTC
snowshoe
© Espen Finstad/secretsoftheice.comA horse snowshoe found during 2019 fieldwork at Lendbreen.
The retreat of a Norwegian mountain ice patch, which is melting because of climate change, has revealed a lost Viking-era mountain pass scattered with "spectacular" and perfectly preserved artefacts that had been dropped by the side of the road.


Comment: The Guardian's 'global warming/climate change-crisis' agenda is pretty well known, but, just for reference, while this mountain pass may be melting, elsewhere up north: All-time record snowfall buries parts of Sweden - 3.25 M (10.7 ft) - Don't tell Greta...


The pass, at Lendbreen in Norway's mountainous central region, first came to the attention of local archaeologists in 2011, after a woollen tunic was discovered that was later dated to the third or fourth century AD. The ice has retreated significantly in the years since, exposing a wealth of artefacts including knitted mittens, leather shoes and arrows still with their feathers attached.

Though carbon dating of the finds reveals the pass was in use by farmers and travellers for a thousand years, from the Nordic iron age, around AD200-300, until it fell out of use after the Black Death in the 14th century, the bulk of the finds date from the period around AD1000, during the Viking era, when trade and mobility in the region were at their zenith.

Comment: See also:

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Blue Planet

Mysterious 2,100-year-old Tagar death mask concealed ram's skull

Anna Prokhozheva
The Siberian Times
Thu, 16 Apr 2020 21:12 UTC
tagar
© Vyacheslav Porosev, Instutute of Nuclear Physics, SB RASX-ray technology of the period indicated something was unusual about the bones inside the clay head - but could not reveal more.
Modern fluoroscopy identifies sheep bones inside the Tagar culture death mask.

The discovery of the magnificent clay likeness of a young man in the Shestakovsky burial mound No 6 has long intrigued Russian archeologists.

Among cremated people this elegant mask of, perhaps, a handsome warrior immediately stood out as a remarkable find when it was first unearthed in Khakassia in 1968 by Professor Anatoly Martynov.

X-ray technology of the period indicated something was unusual about the bones inside the clay head - but could not reveal more.

Comment: See also: Scythian tomb with 3 generations of warrior women unearthed in Russia

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Info

East African herders consumed milk 5,000 years ago

Talia Ogliore
Washington University in St. Louis
Tue, 14 Apr 2020 19:06 UTC
Herd of Cows
© Fiona MarshallAnthropologists from Arts & Sciences discovered lipid traces in ancient pots that offer the first direct evidence for milk processing by ancient pastoralist societies in eastern Africa.
When you pour a bowl of cereal, you probably aren't considering how humans came to enjoy milk in the first place. But animal milk was essential to east African herders at least 5,000 years ago, according to a new study that uncovers the consumption habits in what is now Kenya and Tanzania — and sheds a light on human evolution.

Katherine M. Grillo, assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Florida and a 2012 PhD graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, teamed up with researchers, including Washington University's Fiona Marshall, the James W. and Jean L. Davis Professor in Arts & Sciences, for the study published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Julie Dunne at the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom is co-first author on the paper with Grillo.

After excavating pottery at sites throughout east Africa, team members analyzed organic lipid residues left in the pottery and were able to see evidence of milk, meat and plant processing.

"(This is) the first direct evidence we've ever had for milk or plant processing by ancient pastoralist societies in eastern Africa," Grillo said.

"The milk traces in ancient pots confirms the story that bones have been telling us about how pastoralists lived in eastern Africa 5,000 to 3,000 years ago — an area still famous for cattle herding and the historic way of life of people such as Maasai and Turkana," Marshall said.
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SOTT Logo Radio

SOTT Focus: MindMatters: Epictetus: Epic Wisdom, Roman Stoic Style

Corey Schink, Elan Martin, Harrison Koehli
Sott.net
Thu, 16 Apr 2020 00:00 UTC
epictetus
One of the major exemplars of the philosophical movement known as Stoicism almost 2000 years ago, Epictetus, a former slave, had much to say about taking the right approach to life. Through his teachings, which culminated in the dictated works of his Discourses and Enchiridion, Epictetus expounded on what virtuous living meant and what it should look like - not through theory, but through actual examples drawn from real life and the psychological attitudes one can adopt to make for a more trouble-free life and a 'tranquil' existence.

On this week's MindMatters, we take a look at the very influential teachings of Epictetus. Much like Gurdjieff (and perhaps even an inspiration to him?) we see how even centuries after his description of the 'art of living', his wisdom and insights into the human condition could not be more relevant for our own thinking and ways of living today.


Running Time: 00:53:32

Download: MP3 — 49 MB

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