Secret HistoryS


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Mass suicide at Pilenai: Lithuanian defenders choose death over enslavement

Duke Margiris
© Public DomainDuke Margiris defending Pilėnai against Teutonic Knights 1336. Painting, 19th century.
The Crusades are best known as a series of military campaigns launched by Western European states, and sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church, aimed at reclaiming the Holy Land from the Muslims. Less well-known, perhaps, are the other wars sanctioned by the papacy, such as the Spanish Reconquista, the Albigensian Crusade and the Northern Crusades. It was during the Northern Crusades that a rather horrific episode in Lithuanian history occurred - the mass suicide at Pilenai, which is the largest known mass suicide in history.

The Northern Crusades (also known as the Baltic Crusades) were carried out between the 11th to the 15th centuries. On one side of the conflict were the Christian powers, including Denmark, Poland, Sweden, the Livonian Brothers of the Sword and the Teutonic Order. On the other side were the pagans of Northern Europe, including the Livonians, Estonians, Wends, Lithuanians and Samogitians.

Magnify

How Americans supported and inspired the Nazis

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© Ian Waldie /Getty ImagesA survivor of the Holocaust, Leon Greenman, displays the number that was tattooed on his arm at Auschwitz. The number is courtesy of IBM.

Unless We Learn Our History, We're Doomed to Repeat It


Preface: I am a patriotic American who loves my country. I was born here, and lived here my entire life.

So why do I frequently point out America's warts? Because - as the Founding Fathers and Supreme Court judges have explained - we can only make America better if we honestly examine her shortcomings. After all:
"Dissent is the highest form of patriotism."
Only when Americans can honestly look at our weaknesses can we become stronger. If we fail to do so, history will repeat ...

While Americans rightly condemn the Nazis as monstrous people, we don't know that America played both sides ... both fighting and supporting the Nazis.

Americans also aren't aware that the Nazis were - in part - inspired by anti-Semites in America.

Comment: All of this certainly begs the question: with such a strong undercurrent of Nazi-like or fascistic thinking in existence in the U.S. for so long, where exactly is all this psychopathic machinery leading towards? And what are their goals now besides making a boat-load of money? If past is prelude, what can we expect to occur in the future? And how much of the Nazi mentality has just gone 'underground'?

If any of these questions may be answered with the name of a single intelligence agency or organization, we can certainly single out the NSA or National Security Agency for this one. What the expletive do they do anyway?? By all accounts, they are several times larger than the CIA, several times more secretive, and are funded tens of Billions of dollars every year from U.S. taxpayer money. How exactly do they keep us secure, one might ask?

Perhaps the job of the NSA was never to keep the lives of Americans and its "allies" secure at all. Perhaps its raison d'etre has more to do with the absolute totalitarian control and domination of U.S. and world citizens than anything else. They do, after all, have technology and supercomputers that keep tabs on the activities of law-abiding citizens down to the minutia of when, exactly, one might be reading these words here. And that's just what we know about.

The NSA's systems of surveillance are not unlike IBM's Nazi punchcard system; only several orders of magnitude larger and more powerful. So what the hell are they going to do with it? To what end do they even see the need for such a thing?

For some more background on the NSA and an exploration of this subject, read: Project L. U. C. I. D. by Texe Marrs.

Then, to put the NSA into an even broader context, read the incomparable Wave Series by Laura Knight-Jadczyk.

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© Rick BaumerNSA's massive new data center in Utah.



Meteor

Oil workers in Siberia find woolly mammoth remains

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© Flickr/ Tyler Ingram
The unique find, made in the course of the oil workers' land reclamation work, was made about fifty kilometers from the town of Nyagan, in the Khanty-Mansi Autonomous Region in western Siberia.

Oil company workers in the area noticed a strange object sticking out of an excavator bucket in the course of their work removing the top soil near a forest in the area, which turned out to be the mammoth's tusk.

The workers stopped their excavation work and began digging with hand shovels, managing to find other remains, including the second tusk, the tibia, ribs, and fragments of the animal's teeth and jaw. The mammoth was said to have been buried approximately three meters underground.

Info

Massive underground city discovered in Turkey: Was it a shelter during various calamities?

Nevşehir
© Dachalan/FlickrA view of Nevşehir, a city near where the underground city was found.
In 2013, workers in Turkey looking to demolish low-income housing near a Byzantine-era hilltop castle stumbled upon something extraordinary: an expansive underground city that may have housed 20,000 people or more.

We think they actually found a huge Diglett sanctuary.

Located in the middle of the country near the provincial capital of in Nevşehir, the underground network has yet to be extensively explored by researchers. Archaeologists and geophysicists do have resources for their explorations in the form of a 300-year-old paper trail stretching all the way back to the Ottoman Empire.

"We found documents stating that there were close to 30 major water tunnels in this region," Nevşehir mayor Hasan Ünver told National Geographic.

In 2014, those documents led researchers to a multi-level underground village of living areas, wineries, chapels, and bezirhane-linseed presses for generating lamp oil. The research team was able to find numerous small artifacts, including stone crosses and ceramics. The artifacts reveal that the settlement was used from the Byzantine era all the way up to the Ottoman conquest, researchers said.

Comment: It seems illogical to construct such a vast underground settlement that has everything to sustain life for a long period of time, only in order to hide from the marauders. It appears that the real reason may be a very different one.

Also, nearly 135 years ago Gurdjieff discovered a similar underground city in the neighboring Armenia. Could there be a connection between two vast and complicated underground networks?


Magic Wand

8 incredible archaeological finds that probably weren't in your history textbooks

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1. The Unfinished Obelisk

For how long and complex human history is, it's no big surprise to me that it would miss a few major places and events, right? Well we'll help you fill in the gaps a bit.

Info

Maya 'melting pot' discovered in Guatemala

Mayan Site
© Takeshi Inomata/University of ArizonaThis is a round structure uncovered at Ceibal, from about 500 B.C.
Archaeologists working in Guatemala have unearthed new information about the Maya civilization's transition from a mobile, hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a sedentary way of life.

Led by University of Arizona archaeologists Takeshi Inomata and Daniela Triadan, the team's excavations of the ancient Maya lowlands site of Ceibal suggest that as the society transitioned from a heavy reliance on foraging to farming, mobile communities and settled groups co-existed and may have come together to collaborate on construction projects and participate in public ceremonies.

The findings, to be published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, challenge two common assumptions: that mobile and sedentary groups maintained separate communities, and that public buildings were constructed only after a society had fully put down roots.

"There has been the theory that sedentary and mobile groups co-existed in various parts of the world, but most people thought the sedentary and mobile communities were separate, even though they were in relatively close areas," said Inomata, a UA professor of anthropology and lead author of the PNAS study. "Our study presents the first relatively concrete evidence that mobile and sedentary people came together to build a ceremonial center."

Phoenix

Did a volcanic cataclysm 40,000 years ago trigger the final demise of the Neanderthals?

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© B.A. Black et al. and the journal GeologyFigure 4 in B.A. Black et al.: This image shows annually averaged temperature anomalies in excess of 3°C for the first year after the Campanian Ignimbrite (CI) eruption compared with spatial distribution of hominin sites with radiocarbon ages close to that of the eruption.
The Campanian Ignimbrite (CI) eruption in Italy 40,000 years ago was one of the largest volcanic cataclysms in Europe and injected a significant amount of sulfur-dioxide (SO2) into the stratosphere. Scientists have long debated whether this eruption contributed to the final extinction of the Neanderthals. This new study by Benjamin A. Black and colleagues tests this hypothesis with a sophisticated climate model.

Black and colleagues write that the CI eruption approximately coincided with the final decline of Neanderthals as well as with dramatic territorial and cultural advances among anatomically modern humans. Because of this, the roles of climate, hominin competition, and volcanic sulfur cooling and acid deposition have been vigorously debated as causes of Neanderthal extinction.

Binoculars

DNA analysis reveals the origins of modern Europeans

Ancient migrations to Europe
© Wolfgang HaakMap depicting the two major hypotheses of the spread of Indo-European languages (white arrows) and geographic distribution of the archaeological cultures described in the text.
Europe is famously tesselated, with different cultural and language groups clustering in different regions. But how did they all get there? And how are they related?

One way of answering these questions comes from digging up relics of the past. Europe has a rich archaeological record, ranging from periods well before the famous metal ages (i.e. copper, bronze and iron) to the recent adventures of the Romans, Vandals, Huns and Vikings.

Distinctive types of pottery and cultural practices associated with burials and settlements have been used to group the ancient populations into individual "archaeological cultures". However, it hasn't been clear whether there is a genetic basis for these group boundaries or whether they're just cultural.

Another line of evidence to illuminate how various groups are related comes from their languages. There is the well known Indo-European language tree - ranging from Hindi to Russian to Spanish. But it's also quite unclear how the languages spread to their present regions.

Info

Argentine archaeologists find secret Nazi lair in jungle

Rio Parana
© AlamyView of the Rio Parana from Teyu Cuare park in San Ignacio, Misiones, Argentina.
A team of Argentine archaeologists investigating a series of ruins in the jungle, close to the border with Paraguay, believe they have discovered a secret Nazi lair.

The cluster of stone structures, now covered by thick vines and accessible only when using a machete to cut through the undergrowth, contain stashes of German coins from the late 1930s, fragments of "Made in Germany" porcelain, and Nazi symbols on the walls.

"We can find no other explanation as to why anyone would build these structures, at such great effort and expense, in a site which at that time was totally inaccessible, away from the local community, with material which is not typical of the regional architecture," said Daniel Schavelzon, leader of the team.

Mr Schavelzon, from the University of Buenos Aires, spent months exploring the site in the Teyu Cuare provincial park, in the Misiones region of northern Argentina. Local legend told that a house in the forest belonged to Martin Bormann - Hitler's right-hand-man, who took his own life in May 1945 - but Mr Schavelzon said there was no evidence to support what he called "an urban myth".

Fireball

Black Death was 'triggered by asteroid impact and could reoccur today', scientist claims

The Black Death may have been triggered by asteroid impact
© GettyThe Black Death may have been triggered by asteroid impact
The devastating Black Death which killed hundreds of millions of people in the 14th century may have been triggered by an asteroid impact, scientists have sensationally claimed.

The shocking revelation threatens to debunk one of the biggest chunks of British history and turn the world of science and academia on its head.

And experts warn another collision with Earth could happen "at any moment" sparking an outbreak of disease capable of wiping out entire populations.

History has for centuries claimed the Black Death which led to the gruesome deaths of up to 200 million people in Europe was carried by rats and fleas.

Its victims were covered in huge weeping boils, swollen lymph glands, gangrene and rotting limbs and eventually succumbed to a slow an painful death.

It struck again every 30 or so years until the famous medieval bubonic plague in 1664 which finally came to an end after the Great Fire of London in 1666.

Comment: See also:

New Light on the Black Death: The Cosmic Connection

Black Death found to be Ebola-like virus

New Light on the Black Death: The Viral and Cosmic Connection

Natural allopathic treatment modalities for Ebola

For more on the history on ancient civilizations, the nature of cyclical cosmic catastrophes and much more, read:

The Secret History of the World and its sequels, Comets and the Horns of Moses and Earth Changes and the Human-Cosmic Connection.