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Pepe Escobar: Road to Damascus, how the Syrian war was won

Pepe Escobar
Consortium News
Fri, 18 Oct 2019 00:00 UTC
SyriansFlagsRoad
© Xinhua
Syrians hailed for the reopening of the highway linking Damascus to central Syria.
What is happening in Syria, following yet another Russia-brokered deal, is a massive geopolitical game-changer. I've tried to summarize it in a single paragraph this way:
"It's a quadruple win. The U.S. performs a face saving withdrawal, which Trump can sell as avoiding a conflict with NATO ally Turkey. Turkey has the guarantee - by the Russians - that the Syrian Army will be in control of the Turkish-Syrian border. Russia prevents a war escalation and keeps the Russia-Iran-Turkey peace process alive. And Syria will eventually regain control of the entire northeast."
Syria may be the biggest defeat for the CIA since Vietnam. Yet that hardly begins to tell the whole story.

Allow me to briefly sketch in broad historical strokes how we got here.

It began with an intuition I felt last month at the tri-border point of Lebanon, Syria and Occupied Palestine; followed by a subsequent series of conversations in Beirut with first-class Lebanese, Syrian, Iranian, Russian, French and Italian analysts; all resting on my travels in Syria since the 1990s; with a mix of selected bibliography in French available at Antoine's in Beirut thrown in.
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Map

Russia and the United States: The Forgotten History of a Brotherhood

Cynthia Chung
Strategic Culture Foundation
Wed, 16 Oct 2019 13:52 UTC
battle of spotsylvania
© Pixabay
Battle of Spotsylvania Court House
"A battle lost or won is easily described, understood, and appreciated, but the moral growth of a great nation requires reflection, as well as observation, to appreciate it". - Frederick Douglass (former slave who would later become a great American statesman and diplomat)

It has always been an utmost necessity to exercise caution when reading the historical accounts of great periods that threatened to change the course of the world. As is widely recognized though not reflected upon enough, 'history is written by the victors', and if this be indeed the truth, than we must be aware of what lens we are looking through.

It is a sad reality that most Americans have forgotten that the Russians were their brothers during the American Civil War, a union that was not only based from a geopolitical stratagem but much more importantly was based on a common view of humankind; that slavery's degradation could no longer be tolerated and that industrial growth was an absolute precondition to free man. Historians today largely dismiss this as a fairy tale, they spew their vitriolic commentaries, and try to destroy the memories of great people from the past that truly did believe and fight for something noble. These historians would erase our heroes or otherwise would have us believe that they were nothing but small, bitter men that cared nothing for the world. For if we have no memory of such heroes, we have no memory of the fight that was left unfinished...

Since these revisionist historians would have this, let us not be led by such false guides into the dark forest of history, but rather let us focus on the actions and the words of the very men who shaped the world stage as proof of their mettle.
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Dig

Incredibly well preserved Roman chariot burial with skeletons of two horses unearthed in Croatia

Milly Vincent
Daily Mail
Thu, 17 Oct 2019 10:16 UTC
chariot

The horses' remains and the chariot were all buried together in what appears to have been a ritual reserved for very wealthy families
Archaeologists in Croatia have unearthed the fossilised remains of a Roman chariot buried along with two horses as part of a burial ritual.

A large burial chamber for an 'extremely wealthy family' was found in which the carriage with what appears to be two horses had been lain.

Archaeologists from the City Museum Vinkovci and Institute of Archaeology from Zagreb discovered the Roman carriage on two wheels (known in Latin as a cisium) with horses at the Jankovacka Dubrava site close to the village of Stari Jankovci, near the city of Vinkovci, in eastern Croatia.

The horses' remains and the chariot were all buried together in what appears to have been a ritual reserved for very wealthy families

Comment: See also: Also check out SOTT radio's:

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Gem

'Lavish' jewels unearthed at 6th century burial site in Lincolnshire, UK

Gemma Gadd
Boston Standard
Wed, 16 Oct 2019 09:52 UTC
Anglo-Saxon
© Sheffield University.
One of the skeletons unearthed at the Anglo-Saxon burial site in Scremby.
Skeletons and 'lavish' artefacts have been unearthed at an historic burial site in the county.

Archaeologists have been left stunned by the findings - which include 50 graves containing human remains, jewellery and weaponry.

A team from Sheffield University, which led the excavations, made the astonishing discoveries at a sixth century Anglo-Saxon burial site in a field at Scremby, between Skegness and Spilsby.

The ancient cemetery was first discovered when a metal detectorist scanning the farmland uncovered Anglo-Saxon objects including iron shield bosses, copper guilded brooches and spear heads. Ploughing had damaged some of the graves before their existence was known - but many survived intact.

Comment: It'll be interesting to see what the DNA results show because a recent study reports that Britain's Anglo-Saxon period was not the result of a takeover by a foreign overclass, as previously thought, but was instead a society that was the result of interaction and assimilation of a number of nearby countries. As detailed in: Time to axe the Anglo-Saxons? Rethinking the 'migration period',
Judged by the norms of Romano-British archaeology, the post-Roman period looks like a catastrophe from which it took centuries to recover, and whose study is made frustratingly difficult because of this so-called 'cliff edge', after which we lack dateable mass-produced pottery and coinage.

[...]

It looked to her as if most of Britain's population, descended from earlier inhabitants, continued to farm the same landscapes in much the same ways as their ancestors had done over preceding centuries. Additionally, assimilation of immigrants among existing communities is suggested by studies of isotopes in dental enamel from burials of the period. Incomers are only identifiable by these means: they are otherwise invisible - having been buried in the same orientation, with the same rites, and with the same kinds of grave goods as their neighbours, among whom they are intermingled.

[...]

There is little evidence of landscape restructuring or of Romano-British communities being reduced to servile status by a new Germanic elite. Instead, most households lived in the same kind of houses as their neighbours, used the same kind of goods, and farmed the same patterns of fields in the same sorts of ways.

[...] brooches that look Germanic may have been imported initially, but became increasingly popular and were then reproduced by local craftsmen, evolving over the 6th and 7th centuries into better designed and more complicated insular forms that were worn across England: an index of regional taste and fashion, not of immigrant ethnicity.

[...]
Increasingly, linguists are characterising English as a contact language - emerging from the interaction of different languages - rather than the imposed language of a dominant class.
See also: And check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Who was Jesus? Examining the evidence that Christ may in fact have been Caesar!

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Info

Ancient Assyrian tablets seem to reference a massive solar storm

Ryan F. Mandelbaum
Gizmodo Australia
Thu, 17 Oct 2019 04:27 UTC
Aurora over Canada
© Keith E. Doucet, Wikimedia Commons
The aurora in Alberta, Canada.
Scientists report that they may have found the earliest written record of a solar storm in ancient Assyrian tablets.

Recent analyses have found evidence of an extreme solar storm that left energetic particles in tree rings and ice cores across the world sometime around 660 BCE.

With this in mind, a research team in Japan and the United Kingdom wondered if they'd be able to find evidence of this storm in ancient astrological records — and they may have found something in Assyrian tablets.

Back in the 19th century, archaeologists uncovered thousands of tablets dating back to the Assyrian empire in Mesopotamia, which documented treaties, stories, including the now-famous epic of Gilgamesh, and astrological reports. These reports included observations of the planets, phenomena like comets and meteorites, and of course, predictions of omens.

The researchers (today's researchers) scanned through a collection of these astrological reports in search of auroral-type events, which they define as "reddish luminous phenomena in the sky" and are caused by the Sun's particles interacting with the atmosphere. Many of the reports weren't dated, but the researchers could at least produce date ranges based on the astrologer who wrote the report.

They found three reports that seemed to mention auroral phenomena: one reporting a "red glow," another a "red cloud," and a third reporting that "red cover[ed] the sky," according to the paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
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Microscope 2

Just two plague strains wiped out 30%-60% of Europe

Jennifer Ouellette
ArsTechnica
Mon, 14 Oct 2019 11:32 UTC
Mass grave
© Archeodunum SAS, Gourvennec Michaël
Mass grave dating to the Black Death period, identified in the '16 rue des Trente Six Ponts' archaeological site in Toulouse, France.
The Black Death ravaged medieval Western Europe, wiping out roughly one-third of the population. Now researchers have traced the genetic history of the bacterium believed to be behind the plague in a recent paper published in Nature Communications. They found that one strain seemed to be the ancestor of all the strains that came after it, indicating that the pandemic spread from a single entry point into Europe from the East — specifically, a Russian town called Laishevo.


Comment: Black Death traced back to Russia's Volga region via ancient DNA


Technically, we're talking about the second plague pandemic. The first, known as the Justinian Plague, broke out about 541 CE and quickly spread across Asia, North Africa, the Middle East, and Europe. (The Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian I, for whom the pandemic is named, actually survived the disease.) There continued to be outbreaks of the plague over the next 300 years, although the disease gradually became less virulent and died out. Or so it seemed.

Comment: See also: Also check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Who was Jesus? Examining the evidence that Christ may in fact have been Caesar!

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Archaeology

Egypt says archaeologists uncovered 20 ancient coffins: "Most important discovery in years"


PhysOrg
Tue, 15 Oct 2019 18:24 UTC
new eyptian coffins
© Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities via AP
Recently discovered ancient colored coffins with inscriptions and paintings, in the southern city of Luxor, Egypt, Tuesday, Oct. 15, 2019.
Egypt's Antiquities Ministry says archaeologists have uncovered at least 20 ancient wooden coffins in the southern city of Luxor.

A brief statement from the ministry says Tuesday says archaeologists found the coffins in the Asasif Necropolis. The necropolis, located in the ancient town of West Thebes, includes tombs dating back to the Middle, New Kingdom and the Late Periods (1994 B.C. to 332 B.C.).
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Info

Second gate found in Hacilar Great Mound, Turkey


Hurriyet Daily News
Mon, 14 Oct 2019 02:24 UTC
Hacilar Great Mound
© Arkeolojik Haber
An excavation team working at Hacılar Great Mound are jovial after finding a second monumental gate in the province of Burdur, unveiling a discovery that a local kingdom ruled the region in southwestern Turkey for some time.

The Great Mound is located in the village of Hacılar, where Hacılar ceramics were discovered by the British archaeologist James Mellaart in the late 1950s. Excavations have been carried out in the field for eight years, and the city's second monumental gate was discovered this year.

The second monumental gate is located 200 meters from the first one in the settlement, which stood resistant to foreign threats with a chain of rooms called Casemate and was surrounded by an advanced defense system.

The presence of the second monumental gate, as well as the other findings obtained during the excavations, strengthened the idea of the existence of a local kingdom of the Hacılar Great Mound.

Speaking to the state-run Anadolu Agency, the head of the excavations, Istanbul University Archaeology Department's Professor Gülsün Umurtak, said that they reached the 350-meter defense system at the center of the mound.
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Star of David

The myth that the U.N. created Israel

Jerry R. Hammond
Foreign Policy Journal
Tue, 26 Oct 2010 00:00 UTC
United Nations
© Unknown
The popular belief that Israel was established by the United Nations is rooted in falsehood and prejudice against the rights of the Palestinians.

There is a widely accepted belief that United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 "created" Israel, based upon an understanding that this resolution partitioned Palestine or otherwise conferred legal authority or legitimacy to the declaration of the existence of the state of Israel. However, despite its popularity, this belief has no basis in fact, as a review of the resolution's history and examination of legal principles demonstrates incontrovertibly.

Great Britain had occupied Palestine during the First World War, and in July 1922, the League of Nations issued its mandate for Palestine, which recognized the British government as the occupying power and effectively conferred to it the color of legal authority to temporarily administrate the territory.[1] On April 2, 1947, seeking to extract itself from the conflict that had arisen in Palestine between Jews and Arabs as a result of the Zionist movement to establish in Palestine a "national home for the Jewish people",[2] the United Kingdom submitted a letter to the U.N. requesting the Secretary General "to place the question of Palestine on the Agenda of the General Assembly at its next regular Annual Session", and requesting the Assembly "to make recommendations, under Article 10 of the Charter, concerning the future government of Palestine."[3] To that end, on May 15, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 106, which established the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) to investigate "the question of Palestine", to "prepare a report to the General Assembly" based upon its findings, and to "submit such proposals as it may consider appropriate for the solution of the problem of Palestine".[4]
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Dig

Pictish stone with carved beasts, 'unlike anything found before'?


BBC
Mon, 14 Oct 2019 21:10 UTC
Pict stone
© John Borland/NOSAS
Pictured from left the stone's carved beasts, an illustration of the beasts carvings and a side of stone later used as a grave marker
A 1,200-year-old standing stone discovered in the Highlands has carvings never before seen on a Pictish stone, archaeologists have said.

The stone was found lying in the ground and covered by vegetation at an early Christian church site near Dingwall.

Archaeologists have now revealed the side of the stone that was down in the earth and hidden from view was decorated with "two massive beasts".

Just over a metre of the original two metre-tall (6ft) stone survives.

Comment: See also: Also check out SOTT radio's:

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