Secret HistoryS


Pirates

Genocidal history lesson: Christopher Columbus' invasion of America

Irwin Ozborne
Wake Up World
Sun, 11 Oct 2015 16:28 UTC
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"In 1492, the natives discovered they were Indians, discovered they lived in America, discovered they were naked, discovered that the Sin existed, discovered they owed allegiance to a King and Kingdom from another world and a God from another sky, and that this God had invented the guilty and the dress, and had sent to be burnt alive who worships the Sun the Moon the Earth and the Rain that wets it." ~ Eduardo Galeano

A good friend of mine, a member of the Republic of Lakotah, had a meeting with her first grade son's elementary school principal. Apparently, her six-year-old was being defiant in classroom. What were these defiant actions? Well, upon his teacher explaining Columbus Day and honoring the courageous and brave sailor who discovered this land in 1492, he had a couple of questions for the teacher. He wanted to know how it was possible that Christopher Columbus discovered a land in which his ancestors had lived for over 30,000 years, he wanted to know what happened to all the people who lived here in 1491, and he wanted to know why the man responsible for invading his native land and slaughtering his ancestors was being honored.

I would love to just be a fly on the wall of that meeting with the elementary school principal.

Comment: If the information in the article above was not enough to depict the true genocidal nature of Columbus read the following articles for more on this vindictive tyrant:

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How Columbus' "discovery" set off the brutal Native American oppression that continues today

Jay Syrmopoulos
Free Thought Project
Mon, 12 Oct 2015 16:49 UTC
Columbus
© Free Thought Project
Upon arriving on the white sands of Guanahani Island, Christopher Columbus performed a ceremony to "take possession" of the land for his benefactors, the king and queen of Spain. His actions were legitimized under the international laws of Western Christendom.

Virtually all American school children are taught about Columbus's "discovery" as some type of mythical adventure. However, few are aware of the religious doctrine that underpins his taking "possession" of the newly arrived upon land, which has come to be known as the Doctrine of Discovery.

Fewer yet are aware that currently - over five hundred years later - the U.S. government still uses this doctrine to uniformly deny Native Americans' their rights.
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Boat

Christopher Columbus: A genocidal maniac and vindictive tyrant

Joshua Holland
The Raw Story
Mon, 12 Oct 2015 08:40 UTC
columbus
© Dióscoro Teófilo Puebla Tolín. Publisher : Currier and IvesFirst landing of Columbus on the shores of the New World, at San Salvador, W.I., Oct. 12th 1492.
Communities across America are beginning to embrace Indigenous People's Day. Is this an example of political correctness run amok, as conservatives tend to see it? Or, as are liberals right in arguing that it's an important acknowledgement that beneath the foundation of our vaunted Western values lie the scorched remains of millions of native Americans?

Allow me to offer a Third Way.

It's true that by modern standards, Christopher Columbus was clearly a genocidal maniac, although his brutality toward indigenous people wasn't all that exceptional in the context of early European colonialism.

But even if you don't care about that, we still shouldn't celebrate Christopher Columbus for the same reason we don't take a day off to honor André Maginot for his defensive line in France prior to World War II, or the guy who thought up New Coke for his marketing genius: Columbus was a self-aggrandizing jerk who largely stumbled into the history books despite getting a whole bunch of things wrong.

In a sense, he was like the Donald Trump of his day, a doofus with no small amount of ambition and one great skill: self-promotion. (Fact: Trump would be just as wealthy today if he'd just invested his inheritance in an index fund and sat on a beach drinking piña coladas rather than making all those "great" deals.)

Comment:


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Flashback Five scary Christopher Columbus quotes that let you celebrate the holiday the right way

Kate Halper
Raw Story
Mon, 13 Oct 2014 19:20 UTC
Columbus
© Raw Story
Happy Columbus Day! I hope you're celebrating the holiday appropriately, by breaking into someone's home and claiming that you discovered and now own it! Or you could just, you know, mourn the genocide of indigenous people by shopping. Because we all grieve in different ways.

You've probably heard lots of great things about Christopher Columbus and tons of inspiring quotes from him about hard work, god, the sea etc. But those don't really capture what Columbus and the colonial expansion of which he was part were all about. So, without further ado, allow me to present these quotes that you may not have heard, from or about Christopher Columbus.

1. Conquest: the perfect chaser for expelling Muslims and Jews. You don't have to be an academic to link Spain's colonial expansion abroad with its inquisition at home. Columbus made the connection himself. Of course he saw this as a good thing, not a bad one - a killer combo, if you will.
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Magnify

Giant skeletons uncovered in Ecuador and Peru Amazon regions sent for scientific testing

Liz Leafloor
Ancient Origins
Thu, 08 Oct 2015 00:00 UTC
giant
© Wikimedia CommonsIllustration from "Mundus subterraneus" - suggesting that fossil bones were from giants
Strikingly tall skeletons uncovered in the Ecuador and Peru Amazon region are undergoing examination in Germany, according to a research team headed by British anthropologist Russell Dement. Will these remains prove that a race of tall people existed hundreds of years ago deep in the Amazonian rainforest?

According to a Cuenca news site, since 2013 the team has found half a dozen human skeletons dating to the early 1400s and the mid-1500s which measure between seven and eight feet (213 to 243 centimeters) in height.

Dement said,
"We are very early in our research and I am only able to provide a general overview of what we have found. I don't want to make claims based on speculation since our work is ongoing. Because of the size of the skeletons, this has both anthropological and medical implications," reports Cuenca Highlife.

Comment: There is a wealth of evidence suggesting that giants may have once roamed the earth:

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Bad Guys

A real history lesson: What really happened when Columbus 'discovered' America?

Arjun Walia
Collective Evolution
Fri, 18 Sep 2015 18:54 UTC
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Prior to the 'discovery' of the Americas by Europeans, scholars have estimated the pre-contact era population to be as high as 100 million people. For example, American anthropologist and ethnohistorian Henry F. Dobyns, most known for his published research on American Indians and Hispanic peoples in Latin and North America, estimated that more than one hundred and twelve million people inhabited the Americas prior to European arrival. He approximated that ten million alone inhabited an area north of the Rio Grande before European contact. In 1983, he revised that number to upwards of eighteen million. (source)(source)(source)

It's also important to note that other scholars have estimated the number to be as low as ten million, and everything in between. For example, William M. Denovan, Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, believes there were approximately fifty four million inhabitants. (source)

Comment: American Holocaust - The Unhealed Wound
Joanelle Romero began putting this film together in 1995. It was originally intended to be a 90 minute film, but due to a lack of funding, this 29 minute version released in 2001 is all that's been completed so far.

Romero traces direct connections between the Nazi holocaust and the slaughter of millions of Native Americans - at least 19 million by conservative estimates.

The powerful and hard-hitting documentary, American Holocaust, is quite possibly the only film that reveals the link between the Nazi holocaust, which claimed at least 6 million Jews, and the American Holocaust which claimed, according to conservative estimates, 19 million Indigenous People.

It is seldom noted anywhere in fact, be it in textbooks or on the internet, that Hitler studied Americas Indian policy, and used it as a model for what he termed the final solution.


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Untold story of British WWII concentration camps for Jewish refugees


Sputnik News
Thu, 08 Oct 2015 18:37 UTC
Atlit detainee camp
© Wikipedia/israluvAtlit detainee camp.
The gruesome and shameful history of British concentration camps for Jewish refugees in Palestine during the Second World War still remains largely unspoken.

When one refers to the issue of Jewish concentration camps, the dark history of the Nazi Holocaust aimed against European Jews usually comes to mind; however, it was not only fascist regimes who detained Jews in the 1930s-1940s.

Remarkably, the story of British concentration camps for Jewish refugees still remains largely untold.

"Today, when Europe is shutting its borders in the face of the huge flow of Arab refugees from Syria and Iraq, it is worth mentioning that Britain, now lecturing others on moral values, in 1939-1948 captured and detained, in its own concentration camps, thousands of Jewish refugees who escaped doom in Nazi death camps," Russian-Israeli travel blogger Alexander Lapshin wrote on his Facebook page.

In the 1930s European Jews were not welcomed anymore in Nazi-controlled Germany. The Jewish community was stigmatized, and anti-Semitism was on the rise. In the face of increasing repression many Jews fled Germany. Needless to say, the nationwide Kristallnacht ("Night of Crystal") in Germany in November 1938 facilitated a sharp increase in Jewish emigration.

But where could they go? It was a time when Palestine was seen by many as the only light at the end of the tunnel.
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Info

12,000 year old hunter-gatherer population discovered in Scotland

Jennifer Viegas
Discovery News
Wed, 07 Oct 2015 18:12 UTC
Karen Wicks
© Steven Mithen and Karen Wicks, University of ReadingArchaeologist Karen Wicks is pictured with the pigs that found stone tools belonging to hunter-gatherers who lived 12,000 years ago on the Isle of Islay, Scotland.

Pigs foraging along a Scottish coastline have unwittingly uprooted the earliest evidence for a remote population of hunter-gatherers.

The uprooted items, stone tools that have been dated to around 12,000 years ago, are described in the latest issue of British Archaeology. The tools were discovered on the east coast of the Isle of Islay, Scotland, and include sharp points -- likely used for hunting big game -- scrapers and more.

Archaeologists Steven Mithen and Karen Wicks of the University of Reading explained to Discovery News that a gamekeeper had previously released the pigs at a local port on Islay to reduce the bracken there. While feasting away, the pigs managed to dig up the ancient tools.

"Previously, the earliest evidence (for humans at Islay) dated to 9,000 years ago, after the end of the Ice Age," Mithen said. "The new discovery puts people on Islay before the Ice Age had come to an end at 12,000 years ago."

Mithen and Wicks were already working on a project in Scotland when they were informed of the pigs' finds. They investigated the site, Rubha Port an t-Seilich, as well as nearby areas, and found layers of many other artifacts dating to different time periods. These included remains of animal bones, antlers, spatula-like objects, crystal quartz tools, and what was once a very well used fireplace.
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Fire

The Great Chicago Fire of 1871

Lenny Flank
Daily Kos
Tue, 12 May 2015 00:00 UTC
map great chicago fire
© Photo by Chicago History Museum/Getty ImagesMap (published by the R.P. Studley Company) of the area of Chicago burned during the Great Chicago Fire, Chicago, Illinois, early 1870s.
In 1871, the most famous fire in American history swept across Chicago and destroyed much of the city. According to legend, the Great Chicago Fire was started when a cow owned by an Irish immigrant named Mrs O'Leary kicked over a lantern in the barn. But from the ashes, Chicago was rebuilt, and the city's rebirth changed the face of every major American urban center.
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Info

Newly identified human ancestor handy with tools, walked like a person, scientists say


ABC News, Australia
Wed, 07 Oct 2015 01:02 UTC
Human Hand
© Peter Schmid/Will Harcourt-SmithThe hand and foot of the newly-discovered hominin species Homo naledi.
Homo naledi, the ancient human ancestor whose fossils have been retrieved from a South African cave, may have been handy with tools and walked much like a person, according to scientists who examined its well-preserved foot and hand bones.

Its foot and hand anatomy shared many characteristics with our species but possessed some primitive traits useful for tree climbing, the researchers said on Tuesday.

Scientists last month announced the discovery of this previously unknown species in the human linage, in a cave northwest of Johannesburg.

The new research offers fresh insight into a creature that is providing valuable clues about human evolution.

Paleoanthropologist Tracy Kivell from Britain's University of Kent said it boasted a hand "specialised for fine, powerful manipulation".

Its wrist bones and thumb showed features shared with modern people and Neanderthals, and indicated powerful grasping and the ability to employ stone tools.

Its strongly curved fingers, rather than the straight ones of people and Neanderthals, suggested it also regularly used its hands for climbing.Its foot was largely like ours, particularly in the ankle joint anatomy, the presence of a non-grasping big toe and the proportions of the region from the ankle to toes.

Dartmouth College anthropologist Jeremy DeSilva said it was well-adapted for long distance walking and perhaps running.

"The legs are long, the knees are like ours, the feet are human-like," he said.

"Homo naledi walked a lot like us."
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