Secret HistoryS


Better Earth

Drought drove Vikings out of Greenland, new study suggests

Greenland vikings
One of the great mysteries of late medieval history is why did the Norse, who had established successful settlements in southern Greenland in 985, abandon them in the early 15th century?

The consensus view has long been that colder temperatures, associated with the Little Ice Age, helped make the colonies unsustainable. However, new research, led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst and published recently in Science Advances, upends that old theory. It wasn't dropping temperatures that helped drive the Norse from Greenland, but drought.

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Blue Planet

Last of the giant camels and archaic humans lived together in Mongolia until desertification 27,000 years ago

camel
© Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain
A species of giant two-humped camel, Camelus knoblochi, is known to have lived for approximately a quarter of a million years in Central Asia. A new study in Frontiers in Earth Science shows that C. knoblochi's last refuge was in Mongolia until approximately 27,000 years ago. In Mongolia, the last of the species coexisted with anatomically modern humans and maybe the extinct Neanderthals or Denisovans. While the main cause of C. knoblochi's extinction seems to have been climate change, hunting by archaic humans may also have played a role.

"Here we show that the extinct camel, Camelus knoblochi, persisted in Mongolia until climatic and environmental changes nudged it into extinction about 27,000 years ago," said Dr. John W Olsen, Regents' professor emeritus at the School of Anthropology of the University of Arizona, Tucson, US.

Comment: As Pierre Lescaudron documents in his series of articles, our planet has undergone significant changes over the last twenty thousand years: The Seven Destructive Earth Passes of Comet Venus

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SOTT Logo Radio

SOTT Focus: MindMatters: Why Is Russia Like That? 400 Years of Russian Security Culture, with Gordon M. Hahn

gordon hahn
Today on MindMatters we are joined by Gordon M. Hahn, Russia analyst and author of essential books on Russia's revolution from above in the 90s, Russian jihadism, the history of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and his latest: The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance, and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin. While many have observed the ebb and flow of Russian relations with the West - from periods of Westernization and openness, to anti-Western revivals of Russian traditionalism - Hahn's is the first systematic analysis of Russia's security culture and vigilance norm in the context of relations with the West.

The West is an integral part of Russian identity, yet it has also been the source of invasion and political interference on and off for over 400 years. These threats have formed the Russian security vigilance norm: vigilance against possible military threats, fear of internal division and instability, and strong responses against foreign collusion with internal dissidents. To understand modern Russia, you have to understand its history - not just the pathological aberration of the Communist era.


Running Time: 01:48:39

Download: MP3 — 149 MB



Eye 1

The German experiment that placed foster children with pedophiles

Gérard DuBois painting child
© Illustration by Gérard DuBois“I didn’t think what was happening was good, but I thought it was normal,” one of the foster children recalled.
With the approval of the government, a renowned sexologist ran a dangerous program. How could this happen?

In 2017, a German man who goes by the name Marco came across an article in a Berlin newspaper with a photograph of a professor he recognized from childhood. The first thing he noticed was the man's lips. They were thin, almost nonexistent, a trait that Marco had always found repellent. He was surprised to read that the professor, Helmut Kentler, had been one of the most influential sexologists in Germany. The article described a new research report that had investigated what was called the "Kentler experiment." Beginning in the late sixties, Kentler had placed neglected children in foster homes run by pedophiles. The experiment was authorized and financially supported by the Berlin Senate. In a report submitted to the Senate, in 1988, Kentler had described it as a "complete success."

Marco had grown up in foster care, and his foster father had frequently taken him to Kentler's home. Now he was thirty-four, with a one-year-old daughter, and her meals and naps structured his days. After he read the article, he said, "I just pushed it aside. I didn't react emotionally. I did what I do every day: nothing, really. I sat around in front of the computer."

Butterfly

Scientists discover ancient cemetery of flying reptiles in Chile's Atacama desert

chile pterosaur fossils
© Universidad de Chile/Handout via REUTERSA palaeontologist works at the place where pterosaur fossils were found at 'Tormento' hill in the Atacama desert at Atacama region, Chile
Scientists in Chile say they have unearthed a rare cemetery with well-preserved bones of ancient flying reptiles that roamed the Andean country's Atacama desert more than 100 million years ago.

The remains belong to pterosaurs, scientists determined, flying creatures that lived alongside dinosaurs that had a long wingspan and fed by filtering water through long thin teeth, similar to flamingos.

The group of scientists, led by Jhonatan Alarcon, an investigator at the University of Chile, have been searching for pterosaurs for years, but this discovery surpassed their hopes.

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Bad Guys

Unsealed files expose how US abused climate change agenda to preserve its military power

wildfire deer
© Wikimedia CommonsFILE PHOTO: Documents show disingenuous American manipulation in order to maintain hegemony
Declassified files released by the US National Security Archive reveal the extent of paranoid and aggressive American backroom bullying in negotiations over the Kyoto Protocol, a historic 1990s agreement that obliged almost every country in the world to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, in an attempt to thwart the onset of global warming.

In particular, Washington sought to ensure the Pentagon was exempt from emissions targets. This desire was understandable - after all, research by Durham and Lancaster University published in 2019 revealed the US military is "one of the largest climate polluters in history, consuming more liquid fuels and emitting more CO2 than most countries." If it was a nation state, it would be the world's 47th largest greenhouse gas emitter.

Still, President Joe Biden has declared climate change to be the biggest threat to national security, although a cynic might suggest the real fear is that environmental destruction could mean that the US defense budget - $768 billion this year alone - might be scaled back slightly. That was certainly the case in the leadup to the Protocol's signing in December 1997.

Comment: It wasn't all for nothing, because it enabled the establishment to denounce and coerce countries into submitting to the deindustrialization agenda, and to further to hystercise oblivious environmentalists into being their unwitting foot soldiers. Meanwhile, those involved in actual research - not sold out scientists - rediscovered the cyclical nature of the climate and how CO2 has little to nothing to do with it: Also check out SOTT radio's: NewsReal: COP on! Heroic Global Elites Gather to Save World




MIB

Bought and paid for: How the neo-nazi Ukrainian nationalist movement was nurtured by the CIA post-WWII

Azov Regiment
Azov Regiment, battle banner, 2015.
In part 1 of this series Fact Checking the Fact Checkers, the question was posed "why does Ukraine seem to have so many Nazis nowadays?" In that paper we were led to the further question "is the United States and possibly NATO involved in the funding, training and political support of neo-Nazism in Ukraine and if so, for what purpose?" It was concluded that in order to answer such questions fully, we would have to look at the historical root of Ukrainian nationalism and its relationship with U.S. Intelligence and NATO post-WWII. It is here that we will resume.

The Historical Roots of Ukrainian Nationalism

The birth of Ukrainian Nationalism as it is celebrated today has its origins in the 20th century. However, there are a few important historical highlights that should be known beforehand.

Kievan Rus' was a federation in Eastern-Northern Europe from the late 9th to the mid-13th century and was made up of a variety of peoples including East Slavic, Baltic and Finnic, and was ruled by the Rurik dynasty.

Target

Tiananmen Square: The failure of an American-instigated 1989 color revolution

Tank and observers
© Unknown
There are few places in China that seem more burned into the consciousness of typical Westerners than Tiananmen Square, and few events more commonly mentioned than the student protests of 1989. But the stories are wrong on several levels. It was never reported in the Western media that there were two separate events that occurred in Beijing on June 4, 1989. One was a student protest that culminated in a sit-in in Tiananmen Square by several thousand university students, which had lasted for several weeks and finally terminated on June 4.

The other was a one-day worker strike that occurred (perhaps not by chance) also on June 4, when a group of workers unhappy with their lot in life, organised their own protest independently of the students, and in a different place. For reasons that will become apparent, the workers' protest is the necessary focus for understanding the events of that date, so I will begin there.

The Workers' Revolt

A group of workers gathered, and barricaded several streets in Muxidi, an area in Beijing five or six kilometers from Tiananmen Square, the barricades attended by several hundred mostly adult workers, with an undetermined few young people. However, there was a third quite large group present that to my knowledge has never been clearly identified, though it is obvious from the photos they were not workers and certainly not young students.(1) Thugs or anarchists might be an appropriate adjective, but the facts seem to support the conclusion (and my own personal judgment) that they were mercenaries.(2)

Family

The world's oldest pants are a 3,000-year-old marvel of engineering

3000 year old pants woven trousers
© Wagner et al. 2022Strong in some places and flexible in others, the pants were designed for horseback riding.
With the help of an expert weaver, archaeologists have unraveled the design secrets behind the world's oldest pants. The 3,000-year-old wool trousers belonged to a man buried between 1000 and 1200 BCE in Western China. To make them, ancient weavers combined four different techniques to create a garment specially engineered for fighting on horseback, with flexibility in some places and sturdiness in others.

The softer side of materials science

Most of us don't think much about pants these days, except to lament having to put them on in the morning. But trousers were actually a technological breakthrough. Mounted herders and warriors needed their leg coverings to be flexible enough to let the wearer swing a leg across a horse without ripping the fabric or feeling constricted. At the same time, they needed some added reinforcement at crucial areas like the knees. It became, to some extent, a materials-science problem. Where do you want something elastic, and where do you want something strong? And how do you make fabric that will accomplish both?

Pistol

SOTT Focus: 'Gods of War': How The US Weaponized Ukraine Against Russia

Army guys
© UnknownUS Maj. John Alan Gavrilov (right) trains commanders of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion as part of a November 2017 foreign delegation
Since the US-engineered 2013-14 coup in Ukraine, American forces have taught Ukrainians, including neo-Nazi units, how to fight in urban and other civilian areas. Weaponizing Ukraine is part of Washington's quest for what the Pentagon calls "full spectrum dominance."

"[I]f you can learn all modalities of war, then you can be the god of war," so said a Ukrainian artillery commander in 2016 while receiving training from the US Army.

The unnamed commander was quoted by Lt. Claire Vanderberg, a mortar platoon leader training soldiers as part of the Pentagon's Joint Multinational Training Group-Ukraine. The training has taken place at the absurdly named International Peacekeeping and Security Center, which sits close to the border with Poland near the Ukrainian town of Yavoriv. Western media reported Russia's recent cruise missile attack on the base, but chose not to mention what has taken place inside.

The relationship described above is a snapshot of a decades-long US-NATO effort to not only pull Ukraine from Russia's orbit, but to actively weaponize the country against Moscow.

Comment: The weaponization of Ukraine was designed to do more than mine the country in anticipation of Russian forces intervening.

The question is, why did Russia intervene? Does it just not like seeing Ukraine go the way it has gone? Or is its claim that Ukraine - in its current form - represents a fundamental threat to Russian statehood a valid one?

600,000+ armed Ukrainians trained to NATO standards and backed up by NATO supply lines and led by fanatical Nazis were not going to just sit tight in western Ukraine and wait for the Russians to come.

At the very least, they were poised to retake the Donbass and Crimea by force before Russia pre-emptively nixed their immediate plan. But the longer-term plan was for them to keep going, on into Russia, all the way to Moscow ideally, bringing about regime change and/or the break-up of the Russian Federation.

Ukraine was way more than a de facto NATO member; it was a bridgehead for the NATO invasion of Russia. With nuclear war out of the question due to mutually-assured destruction, proxy 'hybrid' warfare is the only means available to the Western Empire. So the question for Russia becomes, at what point to we intercede here to prevent Russia from being 'given the Syria treatment'?

As Joe Quinn explained in a recent NewsReal, the British and Americans in 2019 and 2020 built two naval bases, either side of Crimea, and supplied them with warships forally under the 'Ukrainian flag'. Such moves were not mere gestures...

Russia's invasion of Ukraine was not a 'war of choice'. It was a genuinely pre-emptive war, with just cause.