Secret HistoryS


Pirates

America's dirty laundry: The ongoing genocide of the American Indian

Irwin Ozborne
Waking Times
Wed, 08 Jun 2016 22:57 UTC
Native Americans
"The love of possessions is a disease with them [Americans]. They take tithes from the poor and weak to support the rich who rule. They claim this mother of ours, the Earth, for their own and fence their neighbors away. If America had been twice the size it is, there still would not have been enough." - Sitting Bull
Knock. Knock. Knock.

Open the door and see the armed Gestapo at your doorstep demanding you turn over the rights of your children and toddlers. They no longer belong to you as mandated by federal law.

Comment: The colonization of America was genocidal by plan: Yes, Native Americans were the victims of genocide

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Cowboy Hat

Ancient travels to the Americas or a modern forgery? Who made the Bat Creek inscription?

Natalia Klimczak
Ancient Origins
Sun, 29 May 2016 14:43 UTC
Bat Creek Inscription
© Scott WolterA reflected light image of the controversial Bat Creek Stone.
The Bat Creek stone was discovered in a small mound near Knoxville, Tennessee, USA. The archaeologists who dug it up in 1889 discovered a small stone tablet engraved with several mysterious alphabetic characters.

The stone was discovered by a team led by entomologist Cyrus Thomas from the Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology's Mound Survey. Eight years earlier, Congress assigned the Institute to complete archaeological excavations. The main goal was to explore the prehistoric mounds. After just a few years of work, archaeologists had collected over 40,000 artifacts and wrote a seven-hundred-page report of their findings, which was presented in 1894.

Thomas wondered if the tablet with the inscription was created in a pre-Columbian language. He was fascinated with the tablet and its secrets, however he didn't have enough knowledge or tools to examine the discovery properly. Now, his reports from the excavations are not considered a serious archaeological resource. Nonetheless, one of his discoveries, known as the Bat Creek stone, helped Thomas leave his mark.

Comment: Related articles:

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Yoda

Flores fossil discovery provides clues to 'hobbit' ancestors

Ian Sample
The GuradiaThe Guardian
Wed, 08 Jun 2016 12:53 UTC
Researchers find what appear to be predecessors of tiny humans whose bones were first unearthed on Indonesian island in 2004

ancient human ancestor
© Kinez RizaAn artist’s impression of the ‘hobbits’ that are thought to have roamed the island of Flores.
More than a decade ago, researchers in a limestone cave on the Indonesian island of Flores unearthed the bones of an ancient race of tiny humans. Now, in sandstone laid down by a stream 700,000 years ago, they have found what appear to be the creatures' ancestors.

The new fossils are not extensive. A partial lower jaw and six teeth, belonging to at least one adult and two children, are all researchers have. But the importance of the remains outweighs their number. They suggest that dwarf humans roamed the island - hunting pygmy elephants and fending off komodo dragons - for more than half a million years.

The first bones belonging to the miniature humans were dug from the floor of the Liang Bua cave on Flores in 2004. The 50,000-year-old fossils pointed to a now-extinct group of humans that stood only a metre tall. Named Homo floresiensis, but swiftly nicknamed the "hobbits", they made simple stone tools and had desperately small brains, one third the size of ours.

Comment: See also:

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Info

Lasers uncover hidden city near Angkor Wat in Cambodia

Suy Se
Phys Org
Sun, 12 Jun 2016 19:42 UTC
Angkor Wat
© Phys OrgNew findings by archaeologists reportedly reveal the scale of medieval cities hidden under the jungle, near the pictured Angkor Wat temple, to be significantly bigger than was previously known.
Unprecedented new details of medieval cities hidden under jungle in Cambodia near Angkor Wat have been revealed using lasers, archaeologists said Sunday, shedding new light on the civilisation behind the world's largest religious complex.

While the research has been going on for several years, the new findings uncover the sheer scale of the Khmer Empire's urban sprawl and temple complexes to be significantly bigger than was previously thought.

The research, drawing on airborne laser scanning technology known as lidar, will be unveiled in full at the Royal Geographic Society in London on Monday by Australian archaeologist Damian Evans.

"We always imagined that their great cities surrounded the monuments in antiquity," Evans told AFP.

"But now we can see them with incredible precision and detail, in some places for the very first time, but in most places where we already had a vague idea that cities must be there," he added.

Angkor Wat, a UNESCO World Heritage site seen as among the most important in southeast Asia, is considered one of the ancient wonders of the world.

It was constructed from the early to mid 1100s by King Suryavarman II at the height of the Khmer Empire's political and military power and was among the largest pre-industrial cities in the world.

But scholars had long believed there was far more to the empire than just the Angkor complex.
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Book 2

Shlomo Sand's "The Invention of the Jewish People"

Raymond Deane
The Electronic Intifada
Thu, 22 Oct 2009 11:09 UTC
shlomo sand
© ali Tibbon/Graphic Shlomo Sand
In 1967 the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish published his poem "A Soldier Dreaming of White Lilies," only to be accused of "collaboration with the Zionist enemy" for his sympathetic depiction of an Israeli soldier's remorse of conscience. Forty years later that soldier has identified himself as the historian Shlomo Sand. He has translated his remorse into a book that has become a bestseller in Israel and France, where the award of the Prix Aujourd'hui has made the author something of a TV star.

Indeed, few recent books have aroused more interest and been more frequently reviewed in the US and Europe prior to the appearance of an English version. Translator Yael Lotan has chosen to follow the example of her French predecessors by telescoping the interrogative Hebrew title (When and How Was the Jewish People Invented?), which here becomes The Invention of the Jewish People, thus misleadingly and (deliberately?) provocatively implying that such inventiveness was unique to the Jews. However, Sand clarifies that worldwide in the 19th century "[t]he national project was ... a fully conscious one ... It was a simultaneous process of imagination, invention, and actual self-creation" (45).

Sand traces how Zionist ideology drove the project of Jewish nationalism by turning Judaism "into something hermetic, like the German Volk ..." (255). He argues that history and biology were enlisted "to bind together the frangible secular Jewish identity." Together, these engendered an "ethnonationalist historiography" which was typified by the mid-19th century German Jewish historian Heinricht Graetz and his friend Moses Hess, who "needed a good deal of racial theory to dream up the Jewish people" (256).

Comment: See also:

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Bad Guys

Secret deals that transformed the world's economy


Sputnik
Sun, 05 Jun 2016 15:16 UTC
Federal reserve building
© Wikipedia/Dan SmithThe Federal Reserve
History has seen a number of secretive agreements which had major impact on the global economy, from hiding investments to taking gold reserves. Some of the stories are real, and some are rather legends.

Here are some examples of how global financial decisions have been made behind closed doors.

IMF Helping Ukraine

Recently, Ukrainian politician and former Prime Minister Yulia Timoshenko accused President Petro Poroshenko of reaching a secretive deal with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). According to the agreement, Kiev would abandon a moratorium on the sale of land and increase electricity and gas tariffs, Timoshenko said. Ukraine would also abandon preferential pensions for school teachers and healthcare workers, she added.

"This document is secret. The government and the president signed a secret agreement behind the back of the Ukrainian people," Timoshenko said.

However, soon afterwards the Finance Ministry rebuffed the allegations, saying that the final text of an agreement with the IMF is not yet ready. According to the ministry, the final document will be published within a month.

Meanwhile, Kiev has been part of an IMF program of financial aid. The plan has resulted in a twofold increase in tariffs on gas, hot water and heating.

The program presumes $17.5 billion of aid to Kiev. In March 2015, the first tranche of $5 billion was unveiled. Kiev received the second tranche of $1.7 billion in August 2013. However, the third tranche of financial aid was delayed due to political turmoil in Ukraine. But after Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk resigned the IMF reaffirmed its readiness to work with Kiev.
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Info

Ancient oracle to Apollo discovered in Athens

Chuck Bednar
redOrbit
Wed, 08 Jun 2016 19:32 UTC
Marble-omphalos
© Jutta StroszeckMarble-omphalos.
Archaeologists working on behalf of the German Archaeological Institute at Athens have found an ancient well, believed to be at least 1,800 years old, which could be the first oracle devoted to the Greek god Apollo ever discovered in that country's capital and largest city.

According to Haaretz and Ancient Origins, the well is the first ancient oracular edifice to Apollo, the Greek god of music, art, poetry, archery and the sun (among other things), and the well itself likely would have been used for hydromancy, a divination technique that involved water.

The oracle well was located in the Kerameikos region of Athens, which was in the central part of the capital just northwest of the Acropolis. It was discovered in the Temple of Artemis Soteira, in a region that still receives water from the Eridanos River, said Dr. Jutta Stroszeck, a cultural and art history expert who led the expedition on behalf of the Institute.

"Water, and in particular drinking water, was sacred," Dr. Stroszeck told Haaretz. "In Greek religion, it was protected by nymphs, who could become very mischievous when their water was treated badly." People would present miniature, liquid-filled vessels and other offerings in order to appease them in such instances
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Info

Enormous platform structure found in Petra, Jordan

Kristin Romey
National Geographic
Wed, 08 Jun 2016 18:51 UTC
Monument in Petra
© Photograph by I. LaBianca (Left) and Photograph by I. LaBianca; graphics by J. Blanzy (Right) An overhead image of the monument photographed from a drone, and a detail overlay of the surface features in which the image is rotated 90 degrees clockwise.
An enormous monument has been hiding in plain sight at the World Heritage site of Petra, according to a study recently published in the Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research.

Archaeologists Sarah Parcak, a National Geographic fellow, and Christopher Tuttle, executive director of the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, used high-resolution satellite imagery followed by aerial drone photography and ground surveys to locate and document the structure.

They report that the monument is roughly as long as an Olympic-size swimming pool and twice as wide. It sits only about half a mile (800 meters) south of the center of the ancient city.
The enormous platform has no known parallels to any other structure in Petra.
The caravan city of Petra, in what is today southern Jordan, served as the capital of the Arab tribe known as the Nabataeans from its likely founding in the mid-second century B.C. The site was essentially abandoned at the end of the Byzantine period in the seventh century A.D.

Hundreds of thousands of tourists visit its iconic buildings, hewn from the local red sandstone, each year.

The entire Petra Archaeological Park covers about 102 square miles (264 square kilometers), but the city's center encompasses an area of only 2.3 square miles (6 square kilometers).

As evidenced by the latest discovery, while the hinterlands north and south of Petra's ancient city center have been well surveyed since explorer Johann Burckhardt arrived in 1812, new discoveries continue to be made around its urban core.
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Pirates

49 years ago Israel carried out a false flag attack that killed 34 Americans, U.S. government covered it up

Jay Syrmopoulos
Free Thought Project
Wed, 08 Jun 2016 00:00 UTC
USS Liberty
On June 8, 1967, 34 American servicemen were slaughtered and 173 more wounded after Israeli forces repeatedly attacked the USS Liberty in international waters. The Liberty was not a battleship and was entirely unable to defend itself as the hours-long assault took place.

For decades, the US government threatened the survivors with jail if they spoke about it and kept the truth from the public.

Although Israel apologized for the devastating attacks and maintained that a simple misidentification caused the strikes, startlingly new evidence has surfaced that refutes Israeli claims that this attack was done in error and that the Israelis were unaware they were attacking an American Navy vessel.

The USS Liberty incident was an attack on a U.S. Navy intelligence ship in international waters about 12.5 nautical miles from the coast of the Sinai Peninsula, north of El Arish, by Israeli fighter planes and torpedo boats.

It occurred during the Six-Day War, a conflict between Israel and the Arab states of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. The Israeli attack killed 34 U.S. servicemen and wounded at least 173. The attack was the second deadliest against a U.S. Naval vessel since the end of World War II and marked the single greatest loss of life by the U.S. Intelligence Community.
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Books

Overlord versus Bagration: A tale of two WWII battles

Nikolai Gorshkov
Sputnik
Mon, 06 Jun 2016 23:55 UTC
Soviet and Polish Armia soldiers in Vilnius, July 1944
© WikipediaSoviet and Polish Armia soldiers in Vilnius, July 1944.
Ceremonies in Normandy mark the 72 anniversary of D-Day that opened the Second Front in the war against Nazi Germany. It was a culmination of East-West cooperation, with the Soviet Union launching its own massive offensive to help the Allied effort. But it's largely forgotten in the West.

In the small hours of June 6, 1944 General Eisenhower and his staff gathered at their Portsmouth HQ, battered by driving rain and gale force winds that threatened to derail the cross-Channel attack on Hitler's Fortress Europe, which took years to agree and months to prepare. The window of opportunity for the start of Operation Overlord seemed to have closed. Then, as if by a miracle, the downpour suddenly stopped. Eisenhower thought for a few moments and then spoke quietly: "O.K., let's go."

His words heralded the opening of the Second Front against Nazi Germany, a momentous event in East-West relations.
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