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Looted treasures: Britain's colonial legacy lives long in UK museums


RT
Tue, 05 Jun 2018 09:13 UTC
Queen Victoria
© Scherl/ Global Look Press
After Jeremy Corbyn promised to return the Elgin Marbles to Greece upon becoming PM on the basis that they were "looted" from the country, RT looks at other rare artefacts taken by colonial Britain that now reside in UK museums.

"As with anything stolen or taken from occupied or colonial possession - including artefacts looted from other countries in the past - we should be engaged in constructive talks with the Greek government about returning the sculptures," Corbyn said in an interview with a Greek newspaper.

If Corbyn were to become PM, here are some of the other artefacts that might be returned to their country of origin.
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Archaeology

Unexplained fire at Pictish fort preserved treasure trove of artefacts for archaeologists


BBC
Wed, 30 May 2018 12:00 UTC
A pin decorated with a bramble is among items discovered at the Pictish fort
© University of Aberdeen
A pin decorated with a bramble is among items discovered at the Pictish fort
A "treasure trove" of Pictish artefacts has been discovered in the remains of an ancient fort on the Moray coast.

The building near Burghhead is believed to have been destroyed by fire in the 10th century as the Vikings invaded.

It spelled the end of Pictish life in the area but the blaze preserved material that would normally have rotted away hundreds of years ago.

As well as a complex layer of oak planks in a wall, archaeologists have uncovered jewellery and animal bones.

Many of their discoveries have been made during their excavation of what was essentially the Picts' rubbish bin.

But they are helping to shed new light on the day-to-day life of the fort's inhabitants, including their diet.

Comment: It's speculation on behalf of the archaeologists to say that the invasion of the Vikings led to the burning of the Pictish fort because, as with many other sites around the world, there is good reason to think that other factors were actually responsible:

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Star of David

The European colony in Palestine created Israel

Tim Anderson
American Herald Tribune
Wed, 30 May 2018 00:00 UTC
Boat Jewish settlers
© Unknown
Jewish immigration to Land of Palestine.
Israel was created as a rather conventional European colony, to meet the demands of the European Zionist movement and to keep a western foothold in the Arab world. Built on an invented racial ideology which parallels that of the Nazi persecutors of European Jews, Israel almost managed to convince the world that it is a legitimate nation. But Palestinian resistance is putting an end to that.

There is no need to waste too much time debating the racial character of the Jewish state of Israel. There can be no doubt that it is built on 'racial' privilege and developed a thorough-going apartheid system with steady ethnic cleansing. The Adalah (2017) group within Israel, for example, has documented more than 65 laws that make Israel a racist state. The most recent authoritative report from the United Nations - by US lawyers Richard Falk and Virginia Tilley (2017) - makes it clear that Israel is indeed an 'apartheid state' and, therefore, a crime against humanity. Falk and Tilley conclude that "the situation in Israel-Palestine constitutes an unmet obligation of the organized international community to resolve a conflict partially generated by its own actions".

All 13 of Israel's Prime Ministers since 1948 came from European families. Not one came from a family which had lived in Palestine more than one generation. Yet they all claim a 'right of return' to a mythical ancestral land.

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Star of David

The disappearance of Palestine - maps must spotlight Jaffa

Tom Suarez
Mondoweiss
Sat, 02 Jun 2018 00:00 UTC
Jaffa
© Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-106225
“Joppa from the sea,” photograph by P. Bergheim, between 1860 and 1880. Library of Congress, LC-USZ62-106225.[1]
What fault have we Palestinian Arabs committed ... Release us from the Zionists greed which is increasing from day to day ... Were we liberated by the Allies from the Turkish yoke to be put under the Zionist yoke? (-telegram from the Jaffa Moslem-Christian Committee to the British government, March, 1919) [2]
A century after that plea from Jaffa, this article is a plea not to forget Jaffa on the 1947 partition map of the sequence illustrating the Palestinian loss of land from 1946 to the present. It is a cartographically cleansed dot's right-of-return.
Jaffa Palestine
© Lübeck by Lucas Brandis, 1475
In this detail from a 1475 map of Palestine, note Jaffa, just to the left of the center binding, by the ship. East is at the top, so Gaza is in the lower right (south). Woodcut, from the Rudimentum Novitiorum, published in Lübeck by Lucas Brandis, 1475.
The ancient port city of Jaffa was long a hub of Palestinian life - culturally, commercially, politically, artistically - until European invaders brutalized the city and drove its people into the sea in early 1948. Much of this gem on the Mediterranean was destroyed, and more than ninety-five percent of its population expelled by the Zionist militias in their pursuit of ethnic purity in their settler state. [3]
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Bizarro Earth

The Inter-Parliamentary Union: A 'one-world government' organization you've probably never heard of (VIDEO)

Truthstream Media
Activist Post
Sat, 02 Jun 2018 00:00 UTC
Inter-Parliamentary Union
This little-known organization is older than the United Nations and The League of Nations. In fact, it appears to be the first world government group that appeared in the modern era. Aaron Dykes covers the history of their plan.

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Airplane Paper

Bringing back languages from pieces of paper

Associate Professor Nick Thieberger
Pursuit
Sun, 03 Jun 2018 19:21 UTC
The controversial ethnographer Daisy Bates recorded many Aboriginal languages in the early 20th century, which would otherwise be lost today; now her papers have been digitised
Dreamtime Story mural
© Dreamtime Story (mural in Adelaide), Michael Coughlan/Flickr
In 1904 Daisy Bates, an Irish-Australian journalist and ethnographer, sent out a questionnaire to squatters, police, and other authorities across Western Australia asking them to record examples of the local Aboriginal language.

Mrs Bates (1859-1951) was something of an eccentric - wearing full Edwardian outfits even when living in small tents in Aboriginal camps - and she remains a controversial figure. But she was one of the few Europeans of the era who lived closely with Indigenous Australians and recorded their culture.

Comment:

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Star of David

How an anti-Semitic US law helped channel Jews towards the Middle East and bring about Israel's creation

Sheldon Richman
Mondoweiss
Fri, 01 Jun 2018 13:24 UTC
Calvin Coolidge
Shlomo Sand, a remarkable scholar who studies how "peoples," including the Jewish people, have been invented through myths propagated by court historians and politicians, makes a startingly yet obvious connection in his book The Invention of the Land of Israel (2014):
In fact, it was the United States' refusal, between the anti-immigration legislation of 1924 and the year 1948, to accept the victims of European Judeophobic persecution that enabled decision makers to channel somewhat more significant numbers of Jews toward the Middle East. Absent this stern anti-immigration policy, it is doubtful whether the State of Israel could have been established. [Emphasis added.]
In the same book, Sand writes:
It is fair to say that the [British] Balfourian legislation of 1905 regarding foreigners, along with a similar law enacted two decades later in the United States that further toughened the terms of immigration (the Immigration Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act), contributed to the establishment of the State of Israel no less than the Balfour Declaration of 1917, and perhaps even more. These two anti-immigrant laws - along with Balfour's letter to Rothschild regarding the United Kingdom's willingness to view favorably "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people," ... - lay down the historical conditions under which Jews would be channeled to the Middle East. [Emphasis added.]

Comment: One wonders, what was the problem with Jewish people assimilating the cultures and national identities of their host countries in Europe, the Americas and elsewhere, as millions of people of several religions do, and many Jews still do today? What was the need for a 'nation for Jews only' in other people's land that would create the terrible conflict we see today in the Middle East - a conflict in which everyone loses?

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Info

New genetic research points to a more complex theory for South American indigenous communities

Jeff Glorfeld
Cosmos Magazine
Fri, 01 Jun 2018 00:26 UTC
Ancient Artefacts
© mj0007/Getty Images
Pre-Columbian South American artefacts: the genetic history of their makers turns out to be more complex than thought.
A new study suggests a commonly held belief - that the majority of Native North, Central and South Americans derived from one ancestry - is "unrealistically simple".

Earlier research suggested the first people to enter the Americas split into two ancestral branches, the northern and southern, and that the "southern branch" gave rise to all populations in Central and South America.

However the latest work finds that most, if not all, of the indigenous peoples of the southern continent retain, deep in their genetic history, at least some DNA from the "northern branch" -- the direct ancestors of many native communities living today in the Canadian east.

The research was carried out by a team led by scientists from Britain's Cambridge University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in the US, and is published in the journal Science.

Genome evidence suggests that the two populations may have remained separate for millennia - long enough for distinct genetic ancestries to emerge - but they came back together before or during the expansion of people into South America.
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Star of David

The oppressed become the oppressors: Post WWII Zionists used concentration camps in Palestine


Activist-news
Thu, 31 May 2018 20:02 UTC
Nakba Lydda palestine jewish prison
© Salman Abu Sitta, Palestine Land Society
Civilians captured during the fall of Lydda and Ramle around the time of July 12, 1948 and taken to labour camps. In the July heat they were thirsty and were given a drop of water carried by a child under soldiers’ guard.
Declassified documents have revealed that post World War II Jewish Zionists used ethnic cleansing in Palestine in the late 1940's. Israeli soldiers imprisoned thousands of Palestinian civilians within at least 22 Zionist-run concentration and labour camps that existed from 1948 to 1955. The documents reveal some horrific information regarding the living conditions and health concerns of men, women and children who were forced into these concentration camps. This may not come as a surprise to many historians as the facts have been documented. However, historically many people who have attempted to bring these facts to light have been condemned as anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists. The release of these documents conclusively proves this (once taboo) portion of history has in fact been covered up. [1], [2], [3].

Almost 70 years ago Israel turned its forces on the all-Palestinian towns of Lydda and Ramleh. In July 1948 Israeli troops forcefully compelled the entire population of these two towns - of almost 60,000 Palestinian civilians, Including men, women, children and the elderly - to flee their homes in the middle of the hot Mediterranean summer. When many of the native inhabitants refused to leave or couldn't, Israeli Prime Minister (at the time) David Ben-Gurion gave orders to ethnically cleanse both towns. The edicts to seize both cities were signed by Yitzhak Rabin (who later became Israel's Prime Minister).
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Георгиевская ленточка

The 'Real Butcher of the Balkans' was NATO

Max Parry
The Greanville Post
Mon, 08 Jan 2018 21:38 UTC
camp bondsteel

Bondsteel: sinister footprint of the American empire. One of America’s biggest occupation bases in the strategically important Balkans. This in addition to hundreds of bases ringing the world, and turning Italy into a virtual aircraft carrier in the Mediterranean. When it comes to America’s thirst for global hegemony excess is never enough.
More than 20 years after the Srebrenica massacre, Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladić was found guilty of war crimes by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia this past November.

Along with Mladić, the ICTY convicted the other so-called "Butcher of Bosnia", the Bosnian Serb and former Republika Sprska leader Radovan Karadžić in 2016. Meanwhile, it fully exonerated the Bosnian Muslim army commander Naser Orić of similar charges which outraged the people of Serbia. Yet, it was the same court that posthumously exonerated former Serbian President Slobodan Milošević in 2016. If you weren't aware of the latter, it's because it was not widely reported in Western media. Milošević is still generally viewed to be the central villain of the entire conflict even though the charges against him didn't hold up, but not until a decade after he died of heart failure while on trial in the Hague.

The ICTY in its ruling stated "there was no sufficient evidence presented in this case to find that Slobodan Milošević agreed with the common plan to create territories ethnically cleansed of non-Serbs." The ICTY, established in violation of the UN charter, is itself viewed to be an arm of NATO and biased against the Serbs but even it seems to have determined that any alleged war crimes and ethnic cleansing by the Bosnian Serbs was strictly a Karadžić-Mladić affair and not part of a chain of command leading to Milošević.
milosevic trial hague

Milosevic on trial. Dragged before a NATO-dominated court which the US itself has declared will not recognise if any American is ever indicted for war crimes. The very definition of unequal justice.

Comment: See also:




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