Secret HistoryS


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Flashback 6 June 1939: Ship full of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany turned away by US

Trevor Hammond
Fishwrap
Thu, 01 Jun 2017 00:00 UTC
St. Louis, a German transatlantic liner
On June 6, 1939, the St. Louis, a German transatlantic liner, was forced to sail back to Europe after more than 900 of its passengers (primarily German-Jewish refugees) were refused entry by Cuba; over 200 of these refugees would later die in the Holocaust.

The St. Louis departed Germany for Cuba on May 13. The majority of the 937 passengers were German Jews fleeing the increasing discrimination and violence against Jews under Hitler, and many planned to stay in Cuba only until they received U.S. visas. However, unbeknownst to most of the passengers, a week before the ship sailed, the Cuban government invalidated one of the types of travel documents held by the refugees.
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Chess

Myths and truths about Zbigniew Brzezinski

Paul Craig Roberts
IPE
Fri, 02 Jun 2017 00:00 UTC
Zbigniew B
© The HinduZbigniew Brzezinski
Brzezinski's death at 89 years of age has generated a load of propaganda and disinformation, all of which serves one interest group or another or the myths that people find satisfying. I am not an expert on Brzezinski, and this is not an apology for him. He was a Cold Warrior, as essentially was everyone in Washington during the Soviet era.

For 12 years Brzezinski was my colleague at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, where I occupied the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy. When I was elected to that chair, CSIS was a part of Georgetown University. However, the president of Georgetown University was one of those liberals who hated Henry Kissinger, who was also our colleague, and the university president also hated Ronald Reagan for his rhetoric, not for his deeds about which the Georgetown president was uninformed. So I also was unwelcome. Whatever I was worth to CSIS, Kissinger was worth more, and CSIS was not going to give up Henry Kissinger. Therefore the strategic research institute split from Georgetown university. Brzezinski stayed with CSIS.

Comment: That there are myths and truths of differing degrees and perspectives regarding Brzezinsky speaks to the mystery surrounding this iconic personage. Whatever the outcomes he intended, and whatever the worth of the man, he played the global chessboard as the pro he was reputed to be.

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Star of David

Land without a people? Tracing the "transfer" policy for Palestine's indigenous population dispels the lie

Neil Godfrey
Vridar
Sat, 03 Jun 2017 15:25 UTC
A Palestinian man sits in a refugee camp following the displacement in Nakba
© palestineremembered.com/FlickrA Palestinian man sits in a refugee camp following the displacement in Nakba.
Dear Reader,

This post is for anyone who loathes racism, both anti-Jewish and anti-Arab, and who feels they have not heard details of the Palestinian side of the history of the establishment of Israel in 1948. It continues a series of posts I have been doing on a book by Palestinian historian Nur Masalha titled Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of "Transfer" in Zionist Political Thought, 1882-1948. As the title indicates, the research Masalha addresses is the extent to which the Jewish Zionist movement was seriously preparing to transfer the Arabs out of Palestine prior to 1948. The significance of the research is that it indicates that the popular notion that the Palestinians virtually voluntarily left Palestine at the establishment of the state of Israel and the first war with the neighbouring Arab states is a myth.

So if you are someone who cannot tolerate any suggestion that there could possibly be two sides to the situation besetting Palestine today then don't read any further. If you are obsessed with a one-sided narrative that Israelis are saintly innocent victims and Palestinian Arabs are devilish bloodthirsty monsters, go away.

Thank you.
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Star of David

50th anniversary of Israel's infamous attack on the USS Liberty

Stephen Lendman
Global Research
Sat, 03 Jun 2017 14:06 UTC
USS Liberty attack
On June 8, during Israel's preemptive Six-Day War, an act of aggression, not self-defense against regional Arab states, the IDF did the unthinkable.

It provocatively attacked its main ally, striking the USS Liberty intelligence gathering ship, in international waters about 25.5 nautical miles northwest of Egypt's Sinai Peninsula in international waters.

The incident took 34 US lives, another 171 wounded, the vessel severely damaged, lucky to stay afloat.

It was deployed to monitor belligerents' communications in response to Israeli aggression on Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Iraq - not the other way around.
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Info

15th century ovarian tumor with teeth discovered in Portugal church graveyard

Megan Gannon
Live Science
Tue, 30 May 2017 06:58 UTC
Ovarian teratoma
© Sofia N. Wasterlain et al./International Journal of PaleopathologyArchaeologists discovered this ovarian teratoma, or a tumor that had started sprouting teeth, in a burial outside the Church and Convent of Carmo in Lisbon.
Archaeologists excavating a gothic church graveyard in Lisbon, Portugal, made a discovery for the annals of medical history: an ovarian tumor that had started forming teeth.

Today, doctors know that this type of cyst, called a teratoma, is the most common tumor that occurs in the ovaries. But scientists are just starting to learn about past teratoma cases thanks to new evidence from the archaeological record.

A teratoma, which essentially translates as "monstrous swelling" from Greek, can occur when cells that should become eggs start multiplying abnormally and form mature tissues like hair, teeth and bones.

These cysts account for up to 20 percent of all ovarian tumors, and most develop in women of reproductive age, according to past studies. These masses are usually benign and go unnoticed, without causing any symptoms. But some can be cancerous, and some can grow so large that they cause severe pain, or twisting in the ovaries. The largest reported teratoma was 18 inches by 10 inches (45 by 25 centimeters), removed from a 74-year-old woman, according to one review.
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Gold Coins

Flashback The after costs of war: America is STILL paying for the Civil War

Mike Baker
Associated Press
Tue, 19 Mar 2013 09:55 UTC
American Civil War
If history is any judge, the U.S. government will be paying for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the next century as service members and their families grapple with the sacrifices of combat.

An Associated Press analysis of federal payment records found that the government is still making monthly payments to relatives of Civil War veterans — 148 years after the conflict ended.

At the 10 year anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, more than $40 billion a year are going to compensate veterans and survivors from the Spanish-American War from 1898, World War I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the two Iraq campaigns and the Afghanistan conflict. And those costs are rising rapidly.

If history is any judge, the U.S. government will be paying for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars for the next century as service members and their families grapple with the sacrifices of combat.

An Associated Press analysis of federal payment records found that the government is still making monthly payments to relatives of Civil War veterans — 148 years after the conflict ended.

At the 10 year anniversary of the start of the Iraq war, more than $40 billion a year are going to compensate veterans and survivors from the Spanish-American War from 1898, World War I and II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the two Iraq campaigns and the Afghanistan conflict. And those costs are rising rapidly.


Comment: Imagine if America also had to pay war reparations to all those countries that it has invaded. That would completely cripple the US. Germany was forced to pay after both WWI and WWII.


Comment: Let that sink in: 40 billion dollars a year and that is not even considering war reparations which should by right also be paid by the US for all the wars it has fought against other sovereign countries in order to further American imperial designs.

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Magnify

President Carter's inferiority complex? Zbigniew Brzezinski's Russia-hating obsession dominated U.S. foreign policy

John Helmer
Dances with Bears
Fri, 02 Jun 2017 00:00 UTC
A Jimmy Carter Production?
© Unknown
The widow of Cyrus Vance, the only US Secretary of State to resign in protest against his president's actions in a hundred years, called Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor and Vance's rival, "that awful man". Not a single official of the State Department under Vance during the Carter Administration of 1977 to 1981, thought differently. Most of them had monosyllabic terms for Brzezinski. Since Brzezinski died last Friday, not a single member of his own White House staff has made a public statement in his honour, memory or defence. The mute ones include Madeleine Albright, who owed to Brzezinski her career promotion as an academic, then White House staffer, then Secretary of State herself.

Despite the disloyalty of those closest to him, and the detestation for Bzezinski of those further away, he was, and remained, Carter's favourite. Between 1977 and 1981, Brzezinski's time with Carter, according to the White House logs, amounted to more than 20% of the president's working time. That's 12 minutes of every hour — no other official came close. On Friday, shortly after Brzezinski's death was announced by his family, Carter issued a statement extolling him as "a superb public servant...inquisitive, innovative, and a natural choice as my national security advisor ...brilliant, dedicated, and loyal. I will miss him."
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Book 2

'Beren and Lúthien': JRR Tolkien book released a century after he wrote it


RT
Fri, 02 Jun 2017 00:45 UTC
Lord of the Rings
© Reuters
A new book by famed Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit author J.R.R Tolkien was released Thursday - a century after the literary genius first penned the story.

Beren and Lúthien brings readers back to the mythical realm of Middle Earth, a land occupied by humans, elves, dwarves, wizards (both good and evil) and, of course, bloodthirsty orcs.
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Info

Ancient history - The deja vu dodo


Malaga Bay
Thu, 01 Jun 2017 22:34 UTC
Parthian Empire
© Malaga Bay
Foreword

The good news for the Academic Acolytes is that their gainful employment is guaranteed in the short term because new discoveries must be careful shaped and retro-fitted onto the existing Etruscan Ecclesiastical Empire embroidery they call history.

The bad news for the Academic Acolytes is that the warp and weft of their underlying historical fabric is flimsy, frayed and failing.
The terms warp and weft refers to the threads that make up a loomed or woven fabric. Warp threads are the threads that run along the length of the yardage and parallel to the selvedge. Weft threads are the threads that run from selvage to selvage (side to side).

Embroidery Basics: Warp and Weft - Cheryl Fall
Therefore, in the longer term, the Academic Acolytes are doomed to extinction [just like the Dodo] because their narratives [and frantic arm waving] simply don't fly.

The Challenge

If you've got some time [and brain cells] to kill over a wet weekend then try getting your head around how the Etruscan Ecclesiastical Empire [and their Academic Acolytes] went about distorting and duplicating elements of Iranian history.

The central challenge is to unscramble the historical narrative that's been mangled and mutilated to accommodate the Western narratives of the Roman Empire and Ancient Greece.

There are four mainstream narratives that cover the same ground.

Are any of them vaguely truthful?
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Gold Seal

JFK's Russian Conspiracy: How a 'secret back-channel' may have saved the world

Tim Naftali
Slate
Wed, 31 May 2017 12:38 UTC
JFKennedy
© Unknown
On a day in early December, one of Moscow's agents in the United States, working undercover as a journalist for Izvestia, reported a private meeting with the president-elect's "closest adviser." The adviser, who met privately with the Russian spy, was frank and hopeful about a significant improvement in relations from the previous administration. He "stressed that was not merely expressing his personal opinion but the position of the future president." The two men met alone, and there was no American record made of the encounter.

This is not a report about Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, whose activities during the transition are now being investigated. Nor it is about Jared Kushner, who, the Washington Post reported on Friday, approached Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak last December to propose a secret communications channel. The meeting described above took place in 1960, and the "close adviser" was the incoming president's brother, Robert F. Kennedy. It is not unusual for the Russians to want to establish contacts with an incoming presidential administration, especially when there is tension between the two countries. It is also not unusual for an American administration to use back channels to probe the intentions of adversarial powers. But December 1960 was not December 2016. The RFK meeting likely came at the request of the Russians, not the Americans. It was not held in secret—it was noted on RFK's telephone log. And Robert Kennedy, despite general encouraging words, made no promises, suggested no follow-up, and was in no way working against the outgoing Eisenhower administration. The Russians were smart in focusing attention on the president-elect's brother. He would eventually be involved in historic back channel activity, but well after the inauguration. And all these years later, such communications have been revealed as a canny and patriotic initiative by the Kennedy administration.
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