After World War II, the possibility of gaining control over a person's mind became one of the top pursuits for intelligence services. Amid never-ending spy games, the capacity to make someone tell the full truth during an interrogation, or to wipe out a subject's personality and impose another - perhaps, a controlled one - became quite attractive to secret services.

In 1979, former US State Department officer John Marks published a book called 'The Search for the 'Manchurian Candidate'', which focused on the CIA's mind-control experiments and is based on agency documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The term 'Manchurian Candidate' emerged from a title of a novel by Richard Condon, first published in 1959, which tells the story of a US soldier brainwashed and turned into an assassin by the Communists. Back then, the fear that America's rivals might use such techniques was not only a fictional fantasy, but a matter of very serious concern.

Centuries of shared history mean that the fate of Kiev will always remain Moscow's core interest

In August 1948, the US National Security Council issued memorandum (NSC 20/1 1948), requested by then Defense Secretary James Forrestal. The document described American objectives with respect to the Soviet Union.

A significant part of the memorandum focused on Ukraine. American analysts were convinced that the territory was an integral part of greater Russia, and it was highly unlikely that Ukrainians could exist as an independent nation. Most importantly, it noted, any support given to separatists would be met with a strong negative reaction by Russians.

Some may be perplexed by the fact that Japan, with 7,000 kilometres separating it from Ukraine, has been acting as if it was a quasi-state within the United States in its relations with Russia over the past several years. What compels a sovereign state to sign all Russophobic lists concocted by the Anglo-Saxons, and join Washington and London in every initiative targeting our country?

The West has a singular way of justifying its accusations. You did this because you have done it before. That's what they say.

But what if we look back?

Millions of lasers shot from a helicopter flying over the Amazon basin have revealed evidence of unknown settlements built by a "lost" pre-Hispanic civilization, resolving a long-standing scientific debate about whether the region could sustain a large population, a new study finds.

The findings indicate the mysterious Casarabe people — who lived in the Llanos de Mojos region of the Amazon basin between A.D. 500 and 1400 — were much more numerous than previously thought, and that they had developed an extensive civilization that was finely adapted to the unique environment they lived in, according to the study, published online Wednesday (May 25) in the journal Nature.

The study researchers used airborne lidar — "light detection and ranging," in which thousands of infrared laser pulses are bounced every second off the terrain to reveal archaeological structures beneath dense vegetation — and discovered several unknown settlements within a network of roads, causeways, reservoirs and canals that was centered on two very large Casarabe settlements, now called Cotoca and Landívar.

"In one hour of walking, you can get to another settlement," study lead author Heiko Prümers, an archaeologist at the German Archaeological Institute in Bonn, told Live Science. "That's a sign that this region was very densely populated in pre-Hispanic times." Prümers and his colleagues have studied the Casarabe ruins in the region, now part of Bolivia, for more than 20 years.

Critical Race Theory did not come ready-made out of a box. What we see and know today as CRT has, as its basis, several schools of pseudo-philosophical thought and areas of academic study - one built and twisted on another. But these influences and the progression of these ideas can, for all their wrongheadedness, be traced and seen for what they are. Today on MindMatters we delve further into the ideological roots, conceptual frameworks, contemporary movements and ultimate end game of CRT as described in James Lindsay's new book Race Marxism: The Truth about Critical Race Theory and Praxis.

Other sources:
Andrew Lobaczewski's Political Ponerology
Arthur Versluis's New Inquisitions


Running Time: 01:29:13

Download: MP3 — 123 MB

A new study by the Senckenberg Centre for Human Evolution has revealed that people in Europe used slash-and-burn methods to make land usable for agriculture during the Mesolithic period.

The team took core drill samples in the Ammer Valley in Germany and reconstructed the paleoclimate through a pollen analyses on micro and macro charcoal remains. The study, published in the "Journal of Quaternary Science" reveals that the samples date from around 10,100 and 9,800 years ago and suggests that the open and moisture-rich vegetation at the time was dominated by natural fires.

The Mesolithic began with the Holocene, a climate change that saw a warm period about 11,700 years ago which also brought about reforestation of pine, birch and hazel. The herds of ice-age steppe animals such as reindeer or mammoth were replaced by forest animals such as deer and wild boar.

The people who built Stonehenge probably ate cattle organs and shared leftovers with dogs, according to an analysis of parasites trapped in ancient faeces.

Fossilised excrement roughly 4500 years old was discovered several years ago at Durrington Walls, a Neolithic settlement in England thought to have housed the people who built Stonehenge. Previous research suggests the village held a few thousand residents who travelled to the location seasonally to erect the stone pillars.

Piers Mitchell at the University of Cambridge and his team analysed 19 faecal fossils, determining that some were from humans and some from dogs. When they examined the faeces under a microscope, they saw the eggs of a type of parasite called a capillariid worm, which they could identify from its lemon-like shape. This led them to conclude that the sample came from someone who had eaten raw organs of an infected bovine.

A study by the joint archaeological team of the National Museum of China, Nanjing Museum and Sihong County Museum has found evidence of rice cultivation at a Neolithic site from 8,000 years ago.

The researchers conducted a microscopic analyses of macro and micro-plant remains, food residues and the rice-field like features from the mid-Neolithic site of Hanjing in the Huai River region of China.

Charred rice grains and spikelet bases recovered by floatation confirmed that domesticated rice and wild rice co-existed, and a direct radiocarbon date of charred rice grains revealed a a date from between 8400-8000 cal. BP. The rice-field-like archaeological features suggest some initial forms of management of local hydrology at Hanjing which would have facilitated irrigation and drainage.

A newly discovered fossil tooth (shown from multiple angles) from Southeast Asia probably belonged to a Denisovan girl who lived between 164,000 and 131,000 years ago, scientists say.

A molar tooth from Southeast Asia probably belonged to a member of a cryptic group of Stone Age hominids called Denisovans, researchers say.

If so, this relatively large tooth joins only a handful of fossils from Denisovans, who are known from ancient DNA pegging them as close Neandertal relatives.

THE NICE IMPERIALISTS
In the middle of the 19th century, the British Empire ran into what what would today be termed a "public relations crisis".

Influential domestic voices were starting to criticise its industrial system and worldwide domination on ethical grounds, not least the art critic John Ruskin.

He wrote that all he had found at the heart of what was supposedly a great civilization was "insane religion, degraded art, merciless war, sullen toil, detestable pleasure, and vain or vile hope".[1]

Lack of public support for the empire at home from the wave of "Little Englander" sentiment also risked affecting the way Britain's activities were viewed abroad.

As Carroll Quigley writes, its success was partly due to "its ability to present itself to the world as the defender of the freedoms and rights of small nations and of diverse social and religious groups".[2]

It was therefore decided, by a powerful group based around Cecil Rhodes and Lord Milner, along with aristocrats such as Lord Esher, Lord Rothschild and Lord Balfour[3], to rethink the form and appearance of Britain's economic sphere of influence.

Gradually, the Crown's possessions were encouraged to become supposedly independent nations, though very much remaining under Britain's wing, and eventually, after the Second World War, The Empire was rebranded "The Commonwealth", whose current flag features at the top of this page.

In her foreword to a very useful 2019 collection of the Commonwealth's declarations, its current secretary-general, Patricia Scotland, writes[4]:

The 1949 London Declaration marks the opening of a new movement, maintaining the familiar harmony, yet developing it in ways never before attempted - the transformation of an empire into a mutually supporting family of nations and peoples. It was this brief yet visionary declaration which brought into being the Commonwealth we know today"

Today we are very familiar with the two-faced language of power, which is constantly deployed to hide unpalatable truth from the public.

Whether in the form of corporate greenwashing, warmongering "humanitarian interventions" or censorship disguised as "fact-checking", this cynical misuse of words has long since surpassed the satire of George Orwell's mendacious Ministry of Truth.

The phenomenon is global now, but Britain can look back with pride at its leading role in developing this fraudulent double-speak.

The British Empire's self-declared commitment to "the protection and advancement of the native races" [5] did not stop it from opening fire on unarmed Gandhi-supporting Indian independence protesters in Amritsar in 1919, killing 379 people, [6] or from using mass murder, torture and concentration camps to crush the anti-imperialist Mau Mau revolt in Kenya between 1948 and 1955.
The self-righteous defender of worldwide freedom acquiesced in the rise of Hitler's Germany, simultaneously denounced (in public) and tolerated (in private) Mussolini's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia and did all it could to hinder resistance to Franco's far-right coup in Spain in 1936, despite its own public's overwhelming support for the other side.

"Britain's attitude was so devious that it can hardly be untangled,"[7] writes Quigley about this period. "The motives of the government were clearly not the same as the motives of the people, and in no country has secrecy and anonymity been carried so far or been so well preserved as in Britain". [8]

Over the 70-plus years of his existence, The Commonwealth has proudly continued this official practice of manipulative and virtue-signalling language.