Some folks just donÂ’t learn the lessons of history.

• "Last year, some believed that cutting back our military assistance to the South Vietnamese Government would induce negotiations for a political settlement. Instead, the opposite has happened. North Vietnam is refusing negotiations and is increasing its military pressure."-- Gerald Ford, "Special Message to the Congress Requesting Supplemental Assistance for the Republic of Vietnam and Cambodia," Jan. 28, 1975

• "I want to make it very clear that we need to threaten the Iraqi government, that we're going to take money away from their troops, not our troops who still lack body armor and armored vehicles; that we're going to send a clear message--that we are finished with their empty promises and with this president's blank check."-- Hillary Clinton, speech to the Democratic National Committee, Feb. 2, 2007

Cutting off money to an ally merely emboldens our mutual foes.

H/T Tarranto

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I'll be looking for the results of this set of genetic tests -- designed to answer an old question about the presence of Roman soldiers in China, and the continued survival of their descendants.

Residents of a remote Chinese village are hoping that DNA tests will prove one of history's most unlikely legends — that they are descended from Roman legionaries lost in antiquity.

Scientists have taken blood samples from 93 people living in and around Liqian, a settlement in north-western China on the fringes of the Gobi desert, more than 200 miles from the nearest city.

They are seeking an explanation for the unusual number of local people with western characteristics — green eyes, big noses, and even blonde hair — mixed with traditional Chinese features.

"I really think we are descended from the Romans," said Song Guorong, 48, who with his wavy hair, six-foot frame and strikingly long, hooked nose stands out from his short, round-faced office colleagues.

"There are the residents with these special features, and then there are also historical records about the existence of these people long ago," he said.

The legend has it that some soldiers of Crassus' ill-fated expedition against the Parthians may have settled in the region after serving as mercenaries, sometime around 36 BC. Personally, I wonder more about possible descendants of Alexander's army, which pushed well into India. But whatever teh answer, it will be fascinating -- even if it destroys the myths that have sprung up over the ages.

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Not gossiping about the day at work, not bitching about conditions, not even engaging in great debates about educational philosophy and policy -- a blogger/podcaster who is actually about TEACHING with his online work!

Fourth period on a midwinter Thursday, Christmas vacation a fading memory by now, and Lars Brownworth took his accustomed place in front of an American history class at the Stony Brook School here. He had been guiding these seniors through the Gilded Age lately, and for this session he planned to personify the era in the form of the oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller.

For 45 minutes, Mr. Brownworth deftly orchestrated lecture, discussion and archival photographs to evoke Rockefeller in both his rapacious capitalism and social conscience. When the bell rang, out shuffled the audience, a dozen teenagers who might or might not remember any of this material beyond the next exam. In its satisfactions and its limits, such was the life Mr. Brownworth, the son of teachers, had gladly chosen.

That night, though, Mr. Brownworth, 31, set to work in his own apartment, writing an essay about Alexius I Comnenus, the Byzantine emperor from 1081 to 1118. After revision and rehearsal, the text would become the script for the latest installment of Mr. BrownworthÂ’s podcast. And if form held, something like 140,000 listeners from Afghanistan to White Plains would hear it.

In barely 18 months, Mr. Brownworth’s podcast, “12 Byzantine Rulers” (at http://www.anders.com/lectures/lars_brownworth/12_byzantine_rulers/), has become one of the phenomena of the podcasting world. A survey of 1,200 years of rather abstruse history, starting with Diocletian in 284 and finishing with Constantine XI Palaeologus in 1453, “12 Byzantine Rulers” routinely ranks in the top five educational podcasts on iTunes, and in the top 50 of all podcasts.

Now I particularly like Brownworth's humble reaction to all the attention -- and to his fan base. He never imagined that anyone else would listen when he started this little project, which was much more for himself and his own edification than for attaining a wide-scale audience. I'm hoping that there is eventually a book in the works, and that it has the sort of wild success that his efforts deserve. But perhaps most importantly in my book, I hope his work sparks a few young people to actually consider history as an avocation, as a field of study, and as a passion in life. For as I've said more than once -- if I can turn on even one student a year to the glories of the past (or, n my government classes, to the beauty of the US Constitution), my teaching those students who just want a grade and a credit has been worth it.

Posted by: Greg at 11:06 PM | Comments (22) | Add Comment
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Over at Blogs for Bush, Mark Noonan offers this for our consideration.

For your consideration and debate:

US Civil War: first time there is a Republican President - very large, Democratic anti-war movement.

Spanish/American War: Republican President - very large, Democratic anti-war movement.

World War One: Democratic President - no anti-war movement.

World War Two: Democratic President - no anti-war movement.

Korean War: Democratic President - no anti-war movement.

Vietnam War: As soon as a Republican took over the botched war from the Democrats - very large, Democraitc anti-war movement.

Last Ten Years of the Cold War: Republican Preisdent - very large, Democratic anti-war movement.

Gulf War: Republican President - very large, Democratic anti-war movement.

Kosovo War: Democratic President - no anti-war movement.

War on Terrorism: Republican President - very large, Democratic anti-war movement.

Discuss: what are we to make of this clear pattern of Democrats opposing any war they are not in charge of?

My personal thought on the matter -- Democrats consider the votes of their fellow citizens to be more dangerous than the bullets and bombs of enemies of America who seek to defeat and destroy our country. It is therefore more important that the elected representatives of the American people be defeated, rather than the enemy in the field.

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Is “Never Again” becoming “Never Happened” even in the West?

More than a quarter of young Britons do not know if the Holocaust happened, according to a poll on Friday that sparked alarm among Jewish leaders determined the world should not forget the Nazi genocide.

"This poll reinforces the necessity to observe the motto -- Never Again", said Winston Pickett, spokesman for the umbrella group, the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

The poll, conducted by The Jewish Chronicle to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, showed that 28 percent of 18 to 29-year-olds in Britain do not know if the Holocaust happened.

But teachers were given some comfort by the poll -- just one percent of those surveyed by YouGov pollsters thought the Holocaust was a myth.

I wonder what percentage of the doubters is part of the “Asian” (read that “Muslim”) population that is a growing, radicalized segment of the British populace. After all, that community’s leaders refuse to participate in or mark any commemoration of the Holocaust.

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If you want to learn more about GOP history, or se some good commentary on current events involving the Grand Old party, Might I recommend this new site to you -- Grand Old Partisan.

It is run by Michael Zak, author of Back to Basics for the Republican Party, who also operates the site www.republicanbasics.com.

Drop by and take a look -- you'll like it.

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Ever wonder why the Jews could hold out against the Romans so long in 70 AD? After all, even after the destruction of the Temple, parts of the city held out or another month. A new excavation has shed light on how.

An immense bedrock cliff uncovered opposite Jerusalem's Temple Mount may help explain why it took the Romans so long to capture what is now known as the Jewish Quarter almost two millenia ago, an Israeli archeologist said Sunday.

The cliff, uncovered during a year-long excavation at the western edge of the Western Wall Plaza, was one of several important finds that include the remains of a colonnaded street called the Eastern Cardo, dating from the Roman-Byzantine period; a section of the Lower Aqueduct that conveyed water from Solomon's Pools to the Temple Mount; and a damaged rock-hewn and plastered Jewish mikve (ritual bath) that dates back to the Second Temple period, the Israel Antiquities Authority announced at a press conference.

The dig, which was conducted in an area that had not been excavated before due to plans for construction, also served to clarify the height of an immense bedrock cliff that separated the Upper City from the Temple Mount area. It in itself is "the most impressive" find, said Shlomit Wexler-Bedolah, the excavation director.

Wexler-Bedolah said the cliff's topography could help explain the slow Roman conquest, noting that it took the Roman army an entire month from the time they destroyed the Temple Mount on the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av until they captured the ground of today's Jewish Quarter on the 10th day of the following month.

"This could have been a natural obstacle for the Roman army," she said.

Seems to me that the people of Jerusalem made great use of the geological features of the city in their hopeless attempt to hold off the force of the greatest empire in the history of the world to that point.

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For in the earliest days of humanity, our ancestors migrated out of Africa and into the rest of the world.

Anthropologists and other scientists are slowly learning more about that event.

From a new analysis of a human skull discovered in South Africa more than 50 years ago, scientists say they have obtained the first fossil evidence establishing the relatively recent time for the dispersal of modern Homo sapiens out of Africa.

The migrants appeared to have arrived at their new homes in Asia and Europe with the distinct and unmodified heads of Africans.

An international team of researchers reported yesterday that the age of the South African skull, which they dated at about 36,000 years old, coincided with the age of the skulls of humans then living in Europe and the far eastern parts of Asia, even Australia. The skull also closely resembled skulls of those humans.

The timing, the scientists and other experts said, introduced independent evidence supporting archaeological finds and recent genetic studies showing that modern humans left sub-Saharan Africa for Eurasia between 65,000 and 25,000 years ago; probably closer to 45,000 to 35,000 years ago for Europe.

As one who teaches world history, a field that stretches back all the way to the emergence of the earliest humans, I find this fascinating, and encourage you to read the whole article.

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Are the many buffalo roaming the Great Plains really buffalo? It turns out that not many are pure bison bison, but are instead hybrids.

“The majority of public herds have some level of hybridization with cattle,” said Kyran Kunkel, a World Wildlife Federation biologist who is doing the sampling. “You can’t see any difference visually. But we don’t know what the long-term ecological or biological impacts would be.”

American bison, which teetered on the edge of extinction more than a century ago, are one of the first and perhaps greatest conservation successes, but there is an asterisk next to their species: while bison were being nursed back to viable populations, ranchers who owned them crossed them with cattle.

By the late 19th century, tens of millions of American bison had been reduced to fewer than 1,000, with two dozen or so in Yellowstone National Park, and another 250 in Wood Buffalo National Park in Canada. The balance of the animals were owned by cattle ranchers who wanted to preserve them.

“They purposely crossed bison with domestic cattle to make a better beef animal,” which they called cattelo, said James Derr, a geneticist at the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine. “Bison did better in harsh conditions and are more resistant to parasites and native viral diseases.” (Bison do not contract Texas fever, for example, which afflicts cattle.)

Over time, cattle genes have spread into many of the remaining herds of American bison. Since the late 1990s, Dr. Derr and his graduate students have traveled to public and private bison herds around the country, taking blood samples. They have concluded that the vast majority of the 300,000 or so bison in the United States are hybrids, though they look like pure bison. Fewer than 10,000 bison are genetically uncontaminated.

The research has led to the stark realization that the battle for the long-term preservation of wild bison is not over.

Though cattle genes in affected bison herds make up less than 1 percent of the bison genome, their presence could create serious consequences like weaker disease resistance. “Hybridization makes it hard to predict and hard to manage because their immune response can be all over the place,” Dr. Derr said.

As a result, scientists are working to preserve the pure strain and restore it to the wild in viable quantities. Indeed, only about 3% of currently extant buffalo are not hybrids (that translates to roughly 10,000), and so we are still a long way from preserving this great national treasure, once hunted nearly to extinction.

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The great moai (stone statues) on Easter Island are one of the most recognizable symbols in the world. Scientists have worked diligently to restore them and to study the culture that produced them, but today there is a conflict -- what should the balance be between those two tasks. Should every moai be restored, or should the overwhelming majority be left in situ and buried or toppled, or should each and every one of them be brought back to its original state?

For local people, though, they also present a problem: what should be done about the hundreds of other stone icons scattered around the island, many of them damaged or still embedded in the ground?

Commercial and political interests, as well as some archaeologists, would like nothing better than to restore more — or perhaps eventually all — of the moai, as the statues are known. But many residents of Rapa Nui, the Polynesian name for Easter Island that is favored here, regard that possibility with a mixture of suspicion and dread.

“We don’t want to become an archaeological theme park, a Disney World of moai,” Pedro Edmunds Paoa, the mayor of Hanga Roa, the island’s largest settlement, said in an interview. “If we are going to keep on restoring moai there has to be a good reason to do so.”

The repaired and re-erected moai on display to visitors at the most popular half-dozen or so sites around Easter Island amount to fewer than 50. But estimates of the total number unearthed on the island have now climbed to more than 900 and keep growing as excavations continue, with nearly half of that total found at the hillside quarry at Rano Raraku, where the islandÂ’s original inhabitants mined and carved the statues out of compressed volcanic ash.

“Having so many is both a blessing and a curse,” said Jo Anne Van Tilburg, an American archaeologist who has worked here since 1982 and is the director of the Easter Island Statue Project. “Some are already lost, of course, but because there are so many, decisions are going to have to be made about which ones to save.”

Many of the islandÂ’s 3,800 residents argue that the moai already restored are sufficient to ensure a constant flow of tourists, the islandÂ’s main source of income. Tourism here zoomed to more than 45,000 visitors in 2005 from 6,000 in 1990 as airline flights have increased, but the influx is viewed as a mixed blessing because it has resulted in strains on public services and natural resources.

To restore even more statues, local critics argue, would only divert scarce resources from other scientific work that could reveal more about the culture that existed here for 1,000 years before the Dutch landed on Easter Sunday of 1722.

Let's put it in context -- the island is three times the size of Manhattan, and has 20,000 archeological sites. Much of the island has been declared to be off-limits to development, meaning that 80% of the land is uselesss to the 3800 inhabitants of the island.

And there is the economic question -- the restoration and maintenance of all 900 moai would cost somewhere int eh neighborhood of half a billion dollars. And given that many of the restored maoi have deteriorated due to renewed exposure to the elements, the question exists on how to best preserve these great stone faces.

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The New York Times may have deteriorated as a source for news about current events, but still does a fine job of covering news about the ancient past and developments in the field of archeology. Thus we find this excellent article on plans to preserve the mortuary complex of the Second Dynasty's King Khasekhemwy, which dates to around 2780 BC.

Now, in an ambitious effort to preserve this ruin, archaeologists, engineers and teams of artisans and laborers are shoring up the walls and gates of Shunet el-Zebib, ravaged by time and the elements and in danger of imminent collapse.

Officials of the project said in recent interviews that the work over the last two years had been slow and careful, but was at least halfway completed. More than 250,000 mud bricks, made on the scene from an ancient recipe, have been laid to build up the high walls. It has cost $1 million, and an equal amount is being raised to finish the job.

“We are not trying to restore the original structure, producing a kind of Walt Disney thing,” said David O’Connor, an Egyptologist at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. “We are preserving and stabilizing it as it is in a way that reflects its nearly 5,000-year history.”

Dr. OÂ’Connor, director of the preservation work, has conducted excavations at Abydos that have exposed the ruins of eight such enclosures. He suspects there are one or two others yet to be discovered.

British archaeologists investigating the site more than a century ago described the enclosures as fortresses, but more recent excavations, particularly at the one dedicated to Khasekhemwy, revealed the association with royal mortuary practices. Even so, owing to a dearth of inscriptions, archaeologists remain largely in the dark as to just what went on inside these centers to memorialize the king in afterlife.

We still have more questions and answers about these mortuary complexes that date back nearly 5000 to the dawn of human civilization. And to offer you some context, these structures were already over 14 centuries old during the reign of Tutankhamen, and are about two centuries older than the Great Pyramid on the plain at Giza. While preservation of Khasekhemwy's temple will be expensive, the cost of allowing it to further deteriorate is incomprehensible in terms of the heritage of humanity.

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Just to show you that Nazi Jew-hatred and Jihadi Jew-hatred have a long connection, according to British documents from the 1930s. Indeed, Hitler sought to arm the Arabs to aid in his war effort.

Historical documents in BritainÂ’s National Archives in London show that Nazi Germany attempted to ship arms to Palestinian forces in the 1930s.

A British Foreign Office report from 1939 reports of “news of a consignment of arms from Germany, sent via Turkey and addressed to Ibn Saud (king of Saudi Arabia), but really intended for the Palestine insurgents.” Britain’s chief military officer in Mandatory Palestine also noted reports “regarding import of German arms at intervals for some years now.”

British documents from the same period, and German records photographed by an American spy and sent to the British government, said that a number of Nazi agents were sent to Mandatory Palestine, in order to forge alliances with Palestinian leaders, and urge them to reject a partition of the land between the Jewish and Arab populations.

One Nazi agent, Adam Vollhardt, arrived in Palestine in July 1938, and was reported to have gained strong influence with Arab leaders, meeting with Palestinian leaders throughout 1938. Vollhardt held several meetings with leading Arab politicians and told them “that the Palestine question would be settled to the satisfaction of the Arabs within a few weeks,” adding that “it would be fatal to their (Palestinians’) cause if at this juncture they showed any signs of weakness or exhaustion.”

“Germany was interested in the settlement of the (Palestine) question on the basis of the Arabs obtaining their full demands,” Vollhardt was reported to say to Palestinian leaders, according to a report by the British War Office. Vollhardt also assured Arab leaders that “the Germans could continue to support the Palestinian Arab cause by means of propaganda.”

German documents photographed and sent to Whitehall by an American spy revealed that in 1937, German officials had calculated that “Palestine under Arab rule would… become one of the few countries where we could count on a strong sympathy for the new Germany.”

And sadly, this affinity between Arab and Nazi resulted in the abandonment of Jewish refugees by the British.

German records show that the Nazis viewed the establishment of a Jewish state with great concern. A 1937 report from German General Consulate in Palestine said: “The formation of a Jewish state… is not in Germany’s interest because a (Jewish) Palestinian state would create additional national power bases for international Jewry such as for example the Vatican State for political Catholicism or Moscow for the Communists. Therefore, there is a German interest in strengthening the Arabs as a counter weight against such possible power growth of the Jews.”

The records also show that the news of increased Nazi-Arab cooperation panicked the British government, and caused it to cancel a plan in 1938 to bring to Palestine 20,000 German Jewish refugees, half of them children, facing danger from the Nazis.

Documents show that after deciding that the move would upset Arab opinion, Britain decided to abandon the Jewish refugees to their fate.

“His Majesty’s Government asked His Majesty’s Representatives in Cairo, Baghdad and Jeddah whether so far as they could judge, feelings in Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia against the admission of, say 5,000 Jewish children for adoption… would be so strong as to lead to a refusal to send representatives to the London discussions. All three replies were strongly against the proposal, which was not proceeded with,” a Foreign Office report said.

“If war were to break out, no trouble that the Jews could occasion us, in Palestine or elsewhere, could weigh for a moment against the importance of winning Muslim opinion to our side,” Britain’s Minister for Coordination of Defence, Lord Chatfield, told the British cabinet in 1939, shortly before Britain reversed its decision to partition its mandate, promising instead all of the land to the Palestinian Arabs.

Shameful -- and part of the reason why Israel even today must fight for its survival in the face of those who would destroy it while others stand by and do nothing to stop the completion of Hitler's Final Solution.

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As I've browsed the 'net this evening, I've come across two articles proposing something other than the Nixon pardon as Gerald Ford's greatest legacy. One suggests the nomination of John Paul Stevens to the Supreme Court had the longest range effect -- an effect that I would argue is mostly negative and has done great harm tot he country.

Next week will mark the 31st anniversary of StevensÂ’ taking his oath as an associate justice of the Supreme Court. Stevens has turned out to be one of the stalwart members of the court's liberal wing.

Thirty years after Ford left office, Americans are living under legal rules created by the Supreme Court, in many cases by 5-to-4 decisions with Stevens in the majority.

Among them:

* Stevens wrote the majority opinion in Kelo v. New London, the 2005 decision that held that local and state governments could condemn and acquire private property even when it was not to be used for a public purpose.

* He helped form the five-justice majority in another 2005 case, Roper v. Simmons, which held that convicted murderers whoÂ’d been under age 18 when they committed their crime could not get the death penalty.

* He joined a 2000 decision called Stenberg v. Carhart in which the court struck down a Nebraska law banning so-called “partial-birth” abortions.

None of these decisions meet with my approval, and I believe each of them have been destructive of the proper Constitutional order. Indeed, Stevens' liberalism is proof positive that no president can ever be sure what sort of justice he will get when he makes an appointment.

The other argues that Ford's greatest legacy was that he set the stage for the election of Ronald Reagan four years after his own defeat, for any other outcome in 1976 would have likely ended Reagan's chance to be president and certainly sent the country down a very different path.

The true Ford effect was, once again, an unwitting one. By beating Reagan in the battle for his party’s nomination he saved Reagan from himself. It is very doubtful whether Reagan could have stopped Carter in 1976 — Ford as the incumbent President was the only Republican with any chance of winning — and if Reagan had lost against the Democrat peanut farmer that would have been the end of him.

What if, as he nearly did, Ford had defeated Carter? He would have faced a heavily Democratic Congress, a severe economic recession in 1979-80 and an ageing cabal in Moscow intent on sending troops into Afghanistan. He would have been ineligible for re-election in 1980 but, in these conditions, the Republican candidate would surely have been doomed at the polling stations. The odds are that the White House would have been captured by the most prominent Democrat in the land — Edward Kennedy.

The world we live in today might have been very different if that Kennedy, not Reagan, had occupied the Oval Office in the 1980s. He would not have followed policies that led to almost constant economic growth over the past 25 years nor taken on the Kremlin to the point where the Soviet Union imploded.

“What if” is an ultimately unanswerable question in history. Yet it is the real story of the Ford years.

Indeed -- that "what if" would have resulted in a world unrecognizable today -- and one that I believe would be significantly worse-off had Gerald Ford not fallen short in 1976.

I can forgive Ford his making the same mistake as so many other presidents when selecting a Supreme Court justice -- and thank God for his having run the 1976 presidential race just as he did.

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The following statement has been issued by former First Lady Betty Ford and the Ford family regarding the death of former President Gerald Ford.

“My family joins me in sharing the difficult news that Gerald Ford, our beloved husband, father, grandfather and great grandfather has passed away at 93 years of age,” Mrs. Ford said in a statement issued from her husband’s office in Rancho Mirage, also the location of the Betty Ford Center. “His life was filled with love of God, his family and his country.”

Gerald Ford, the only man to serve as President and Vice President without being elected to either office, has died at age 93. He had been in ill-health for some time.

Ford, a senior member of the GOP leadership in the House of Representatives, was selected as Vice president by President Richard Nixon following the resignation of Spiro Agnew in the wake of corruption charges. Less than a year later, Ford succeeded Nixon when the latter resigned from office in the wake of the Watergate scandal.

Ford had many accomplishments during his brief time in the White House.

Ford was the only occupant of the White House never elected either to the presidency or the vice presidency. A former Republican congressman from Grand Rapids, Mich., he always claimed that his highest ambition was to be speaker of the House of Representatives. He had declined opportunities to run for the Senate and for governor of Michigan.

He was sworn in as president Aug. 9, 1974, when Richard M. Nixon resigned as a result of the Watergate scandal.

"My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over," Ford said in his inaugural address.

"I believe that truth is the glue that holds government together, not only our government, but civilization itself. That bond, though strained, is unbroken at home and abroad."

Ford had become vice president Dec. 6, 1973, two months after Spiro T. Agnew pleaded no contest to a tax evasion charge and resigned from the nation's second-highest office. The former Maryland governor was under investigation for accepting bribes and kickbacks.

In the 2 1/2 years of his presidency, Ford ended the U.S. involvement in the war in Vietnam, helped mediate a cease-fire agreement between Israel and Egypt, signed the Helsinki human rights convention with the Soviet Union and traveled to Vladivostok in the Soviet Far East to sign an arms limitation agreement with Leonid Brezhnev, the Soviet president.

Ford also sent the Marines to free the crew of the Mayaguez, a U.S. merchant vessel that was captured by Cambodian communists.

On the domestic front, he faced some of the most difficult economic conditions since the Great Depression, with the inflation rate approaching 12 percent. Chronic energy shortages and price increases produced long lines and angry citizens at gas pumps. In the field of civil rights, the sense of optimism that had characterized the 1960s had been replaced by an increasing sense of alienation, particularly in inner cities. The new president also faced a political landscape in which Democrats held large majorities in both the House and the Senate.

But Ford is perhaps best remembered for his pardon of Richard Nixon -- an act which I believe will be remembered as one of the most selfless acts in American history, for many historians consider it to be the overriding fact that led to his loss to Jimmy Carter in the 1976 presidential election.

As Ford explained in his memoirs, his goal was the healing of the nation. Presuming, of course, that Nixon would have been indicted for crimes related to Watergate, it was likely that the trial would have occurred against the backdrop of the 1976 national elections, poisoning the political process. Appeals would have meant that the case would likely have continued to be in the national eye during the 1978 and 1980 elections as well -- if not beyond, should there be any sort of retrial -- meaning that the wrong-doing of Nixon and his associates would have been a major factor in American politics for nearly a decade. The stresses this would have caused would have inflicted even greater damage upon the nation, and therefore Ford decided to issue the pardon a month after taking office.

Indeed, history is already beginning to see the wisdom of Ford's decision. In 2001, the former president received a "Profile in Courage" award from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in recognition of his decision -- and was praised by none other than Senator Ted Kennedy, who opposed the pardon at the time.

In the days to come, there will be many words said about Gerald Ford, as the media is saturated with coverage of his life and career, as well as the funeral rites associated with a presidential death. But let me sum it all up with a few words that I believe are fitting.

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That is what it sounds like, if you consider this aspect of his new book.

We know what happens when the right of Jews to exist is denied, but Carter has forgotten. The "Historical Chronology" at the beginning of his book starts with Abraham and grows more detailed in modern times. But between 1939 and 1947 there is . . . nothing!

In the text, the history of Jewish suffering is accorded five lines, and the Holocaust is barely mentioned in passing. But as both Hanukkah and Christmas remind us, Jews are history's most persecuted people, and Israel, where we started, is our last, best refuge. Carter's bizarre book is a poisoned holiday gift for Jews and Christians, and a danger to Jews throughout the world.

You read that right -- Carter leaves the Holocaust out of the history of the Jewish People in his book, and only briefly alludes to it. I guess he has joined Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and David Duke (as well as my recently-banned Troll, KKKen Hoop) in viewing the Holocaust as a hoax. After all, how else does one explain the omission of the greatest evil of Carter's lifetime from a book in which he indicts the victims for the offense of genocide?

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And in light of the conference held by the Madman of Teheran, I think it is important to take note.

Local Muslim leaders lit candles yesterday at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to commemorate Jewish suffering under the Nazis, in a ceremony held just days after Iran had a conference denying the genocide.

American Muslims "believe we have to learn the lessons of history and commit ourselves: Never again," said Imam Mohamed Magid of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society, standing before the eternal flame flickering from a black marble base that holds dirt from Nazi concentration camps.

Around the hexagonal room, candles glimmered under the engraved names of the death camps: Chelmno. Auschwitz-Birkenau. Majdanek.

"We stand here with three survivors of the Holocaust and my great Muslim friends to condemn this outrage in Iran," said Sara J. Bloomfield, the museum's director, addressing a bank of TV cameras in the room, known as the Hall of Remembrance.

The museum, she noted, holds "millions of pieces of evidence of this crime."

This is a moving and inspiring article. I encourage you to take a look.

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And no, I don't mean Betsy Ross -- I mean the current 50-star banner that waves over our country and around the world.

I sure didn't -- until I came across this article today. The designer's name is Robert G. Heft, and the story of how he came to design the flag is sort of amusing to this teacher.

As a junior at Ohio's Lancaster High School in 1958, Heft needed a project for his American history class.

He found his calling when he came across the story of Betsy Ross, creator of the country's original flag. Armed with an idea, Heft took his family's 48-star flag and removed the blue portion of the banner.

It took him nine hours to cut out the 100 fabric stars needed to cover each side of the flag's top corner, he said. Heft went the 50-star route because of speculation that Alaska and Hawaii would become states.

Heft asked his grandmother to sew the blue section onto the flag, but she refused after realizing he'd dismantled the family's banner.

"She didn't want anything to do with it," Heft recalled.

Out of options, Heft took matters into his own hands, sewing his version of "Old Glory."

After working on the flag for 12 1/2 hours, Heft said he expected his grade to match his effort, but his teacher gave him a B-minus. Normally a quiet student, Heft said he had to confront the teacher.

"I approached him (thinking), 'Are you kidding me?' " Heft said.

After the discussion, the teacher told Heft that if he got the flag accepted nationally, he would give him an A.

Heft then sent the flag to a state representative and in 1960, his design became the country's official symbol. His teacher promptly bumped up his grade.

That sort of goes to show that a teacher never know what influence his or her words will have on a student -- and that it is important to be prepared to follow through on promises you make to students.

Heft still owns that original flag -- and speaks about his experience and patriotism to over 200 groups a year. He is working on a book about the flag and his experiences over the year.

Oh, and this July his design becomes the longest-serving flag in American history.

Not bad for a high school history project.

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How was a priceless Afghan treasure preserved through two decades of Russian occupation and Taliban oppression? That is the story in the current issue of Der Spiegel.

The treasure, from a Bactrian tomb that dates from roughly the time of Christ, was secreted away by Afghans and hidden until the American liberation of their country following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

It was a mystery of legendary proportions. When a 2,000-year-old treasure trove went missing from Afghanistan's National Museum in the 1980s, the rumors abounded: Did the Soviets take it? Was it looted and sold on the black market? Were 22,000 pieces of gold, jewel-encrusted crowns and magnificent daggers melted down and traded for weapons?

As it turns out, none of these plausible scenarios ever happened. Instead, a mysterious group of Afghans had stowed the so-called Bactrian gold underground and guarded its secret for over two decades of war and chaos. This month, some of the artifacts are on display at the Guimet Museum in Paris.

The group, the so-called "key holders," held the keys to the underground vault where the treasure was kept underneath the presidential palace grounds. They are believed to have hidden the treasure sometime after the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. They diligently kept their secret throughout the civil war of the 1990s and the period of Taliban rule all the way up through the 2001 American-led invasion.

"Over the last 20 to 25 years, during food shortages and money crises, this handful of people ... could have sold these collections instead of going hungry, but they never once sacrificed their own cultural heritage," Fredrik Hiebert, an archaeologist with the National Geographic Society, told the Associated Press.

There has to be a book in this story somewhere -- one that is filled with love of country, love of history, and a great deal of intrigue and courage.

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After all, if we are going to question the veracity of contemporary historical events, maybe we should look into events much further in the past.

I just got an e-mail from Bhuvan who tried to post a comment at the BBC. The comment, on a story about the Holocaust denial conference in Iran was apparently too controversial.

Now wait, I would like to see a conference that questions whether Prophet Muhammad existed or not. Sounds controversial? Why not? Free speech. There is more historical proof to the occurrence of the Holocaust than for the existence of Prophet Muhammad.

Indeed. So, in the spirit of 'free speech', we at The Jawa Report are organizing the first ever Was Mohammed Real? conference. Panels include:

Mohammed: Was he real or just another Zionist plot?

The Crusades: Ultra-Orthodox Muslims speak out against using the Crusades as justification for a Palestinian state.

Did Mohammed Conquer Mecca? New evidence suggests otherwise.

72 White Grapes vs. 72 Virgins: The etymology of patriarchy in Islamic societies.

'Angelic visit' or 'Pedophelic Visions': The fiction of Mohammed and his 9 year old lover Aisha.

The Illuminati: Why the Great Seal of The United States offers definitive proof that Mohammed was really a 32nd degree Mason.

You get the picture. Any other suggestions?

And might I add another topic for the conference:

Mental Illness or Demonic Possession: An Analysis of Mohammad’s Qu’ranic Visions

Other topics of discussion can be found at IMAO.

After all, if all we are doing is engaging in free speech asking questions and exploring issues that will get you imprisoned (or worse) in some parts of the world…

Posted by: Greg at 11:14 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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After all, if we are going to question the veracity of contemporary historical events, maybe we should look into events much further in the past.

I just got an e-mail from Bhuvan who tried to post a comment at the BBC. The comment, on a story about the Holocaust denial conference in Iran was apparently too controversial.

Now wait, I would like to see a conference that questions whether Prophet Muhammad existed or not. Sounds controversial? Why not? Free speech. There is more historical proof to the occurrence of the Holocaust than for the existence of Prophet Muhammad.

Indeed. So, in the spirit of 'free speech', we at The Jawa Report are organizing the first ever Was Mohammed Real? conference. Panels include:

Mohammed: Was he real or just another Zionist plot?

The Crusades: Ultra-Orthodox Muslims speak out against using the Crusades as justification for a Palestinian state.

Did Mohammed Conquer Mecca? New evidence suggests otherwise.

72 White Grapes vs. 72 Virgins: The etymology of patriarchy in Islamic societies.

'Angelic visit' or 'Pedophelic Visions': The fiction of Mohammed and his 9 year old lover Aisha.

The Illuminati: Why the Great Seal of The United States offers definitive proof that Mohammed was really a 32nd degree Mason.

You get the picture. Any other suggestions?

And might I add another topic for the conference:

Mental Illness or Demonic Possession: An Analysis of MohammadÂ’s QuÂ’ranic Visions

Other topics of discussion can be found at IMAO.

After all, if all we are doing is engaging in free speech asking questions and exploring issues that will get you imprisoned (or worse) in some parts of the worldÂ…

Posted by: Greg at 11:14 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Folks still debate what it is, who built it, and why.

The island of Antikythera lies 18 miles north of Crete, where the Aegean Sea meets the Mediterranean. Currents there can make shipping treacherous -- and one ship bound for ancient Rome never made it.

The ship that sank there was a giant cargo vessel measuring nearly 500 feet long. It came to rest about 200 feet below the surface, where it stayed for more than 2,000 years until divers looking for sponges discovered the wreck a little more than a century ago.

Inside the hull were a number of bronze and marble statues. From the look of things, the ship seemed to be carrying luxury items, probably made in various Greek islands and bound for wealthy patrons in the growing Roman Empire. The statues were retrieved, along with a lot of other unimportant stuff, and stored.

Nine months later, an enterprising archaeologist cleared off a layer of organic material from one of the pieces of junk and found that it looked like a gearwheel. It had inscriptions in Greek characters and seemed to have something to do with astronomy.

That piece of "junk" went on to become the most celebrated find from the shipwreck; it is displayed at the National Archaeological Museum of Athens. Research has shown that the wheel was part of a device so sophisticated that its complexity would not be matched for a thousand years -- it was also the world's first known analog computer.

The device is so famous that an international conference organized in Athens a couple of weeks ago had only one subject: the Antikythera Mechanism.

Every discovery about the device has raised new questions. Who built the device, and for what purpose? Why did the technology behind it disappear for the next thousand years? What does the device tell us about ancient Greek culture? And does the marvelous construction, and the precise knowledge of the movement of the sun and moon and Earth that it implies, tell us how the ancients grappled with ideas about determinism and human destiny?

Just one more bit of evidence that the past is not always as cut and dried as we thin it is -- and that there is always something more to learn.

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Today is the sixty-fifth anniversary of the sneak attack on Pearl harbor by the Japanese. Today's New York Times carries a special section dealing with the recovery from the attack -- with pictures and articles censored and locked away during the war, with a special focus on the civilian shipyard workers brought to Pearl to aid in the recovery.

In the months after Dec. 7, a sleepy shipyard went into hyperdrive, pulling off unprecedented feats of engineering that The Times’s Robert Trumbull described in a series that is excerpted on today’s Op-Ed page. The Japanese had crippled the fleet but left the Navy base’s immense oil storage tanks untouched, making it possible to ramp up the shipyard for 24-hour duty. The Navy and the civilians made it up as they went along: The U.S.S. Oklahoma, flipped with its belly exposed, was righted by a fantastical arrangement of cables and winches out of “Gulliver’s Travels.”

On May 27, 1942, the carrier Yorktown, severely damaged in the Battle of the Coral Sea, pulled into port and was immediately swarmed upon by more than 1,400 workers. She sailed out again on the 30th, fit to fight in the Battle of Midway.

The local labor force was supplemented by a flood of thousands of workers, mostly bachelor men, shipped in from the states. Their lives centered around the shipyard and Civilian Housing Area III, population 12,000 at its peak and suddenly Hawaii’s third-largest city after Honolulu and Hilo. It had its own train station, bus fleet, police department, baseball fields, boxing arenas, theater, post office, stadium and football tournament, the Poi Bowl. And it had a newspaper, The Pearl Harbor Banner, filled with small-town news items (“Five Hundred Pairs of Shoes Salvaged Here,” “Fresh Vegetables Now Assured”), photos, sports scores and updates from the front.

One of those civilians was Fred Bagley, My maternal grandfather, who was recruited in Providence, Rhode Island, to help bring the Pacific Fleet back to fighting strength. This special section therefore has a special meaning to me, thirty-seven years after a heart attack took him away from me. I never got to hear the stories that I know he had to share, so I will count this as a chance to learn a little more about him and what he did during the war.

I encourage readers to take the time to read about the work of thousands of men whose efforts were so important to the war, but whose work is often overlooked as we rightly honor those who fought and died.

Posted by: Greg at 12:28 AM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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1 For those of you you have not had the privilege of visiting Pearl Harbor, there is usually a vet or two walking around, who was actually there during the attack. You have to think that it won't be long before there are none left.

My last visit, there was this wonderful old guy who just started talking to me about his memory of that day. He started out by saying he was a mechanic and was under an officer's jeep, doing some repair when the first bombs exploded. In fear, he said he remained below the jeep, however, out of the door of the hanger, he could see his mates firing up in the air with their rifles. He said that he felt ashamed that he was so cowardly, so he grabbed a pistol that was inside the jeep, ran outside and started firing at the passing planes. At this point, the tears filled his eyes and he couldn't continue. It was only then that I realized the size of the crowd that had gathered behind me to listen to this hero. There must have been 100 people standing in awe of this gentleman. I often think about him and wonder if he is still alive.

Posted by: S.A.B. at Thu Dec 7 05:13:27 2006 (2Pn2L)

2

http://www.amazon.com/Day-Deceit-Truth-About-Harbor/dp/0743201299/ref=pd_sim_b_1/104-8666164-8355140

for the real truth about Pearl Harbor, the above is essential!

Posted by: Ken Hoop at Thu Dec 7 10:46:23 2006 (DZbll)

3 What else should I have expected from you, KKKen, besides a post maligning our nation's leaders and exonorating our nation's enemies.

Posted by: Rhymes With Right at Thu Dec 7 13:02:30 2006 (a5bGD)

4

The author Stinnett , a Navy pilot "served with distinction" in World War Two."In what part of the military have you served even in a nondescript manner, to merit your "last refuging?"

Posted by: Ken Hoop at Thu Dec 7 13:17:22 2006 (7GYBH)

5 KKKen, I need not have served to reject the author's conclusion based upon my analysis of the historical record -- or to reject your compulsive hatred of America.

Posted by: Rhymes With Right at Thu Dec 7 13:53:53 2006 (a5bGD)

6

Much of your foreign policy advocacy brings discredit to what is worth preserving and advancing about America--and the world, as contrasted with the World War Two era, seems to agree, even most of that part the US purportedly liberated then.

 

Posted by: Ken Hoop at Fri Dec 8 07:58:19 2006 (7GYBH)

7 And your ideology repudiates everything good about America, KKKen -- and supports dismembering it to create racist homelands.

Posted by: Rhymes With Right at Fri Dec 8 13:30:18 2006 (xndvz)

8 respect

Posted by: Weter at Sun Aug 24 06:53:37 2008 (vX+Hk)

9 I don't know If I said it already but ...I'm so glad I found this site...Keep up the good work I read a lot of blogs on a daily basis and for the most part, people lack substance but, I just wanted to make a quick comment to say GREAT blog. Thanks, A definite great read....

Posted by: BloggerDude at Thu Oct 8 13:34:18 2009 (KICP7)

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This discovery gives us insight into the state of Egyptian medicine.

Archaeologists have discovered the mummified remains of a doctor they believe lived more than 4,000 years ago and was buried along with metal surgical tools.

The mummy was discovered in Saqqara, 12 miles south of Cairo, while archaeologists were cleaning a nearby site, Egypt's official Middle East News Agency quoted Zahi Hawass, chief of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, as saying.

Hawass said the doctor, named Qar, lived under the 6th dynasty from about 2350 B.C. to 2180 B.C., and that the upper part of the tomb was discovered in 2000 while the sarcophagus was found during more recent cleaning work.

"The lid of the wooden casket had excellent and well-preserved decorations ... and the mummy's linen wrappings and the funerary drawings are still in their original condition," Hawass said.

He said the mask covering the face of the mummy was very well preserved despite slight damage to the mouth area.

Bronze surgical instruments, earthenware containers bearing the doctor's name, a round limestone table, and 22 bronze statues of gods were also discovered, Hawass said.

I never cease to be amazed what emerges from the sands of that "antique land".

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The location has long been known, but now Vatican archaeologists have worked to uncover the apostle's burial site so that the faithful can view it.

Vatican archaeologists have unearthed a sarcophagus believed to contain the remains of the Apostle Paul that had been buried beneath Rome's second largest basilica.

The sarcophagus, which dates back to at least A.D. 390, has been the subject of an extended excavation that began in 2002 and was completed last month, the project's head said this week.

"Our objective was to bring the remains of the tomb back to light for devotional reasons, so that it could be venerated and be visible,'' said Giorgio Filippi, the Vatican archaeologist who headed the project at St. Paul Outside the Walls basilica.

The interior of the sarcophagus has not yet been explored, but Filippi didn't rule out the possibility of doing so in the future.

Two ancient churches that once stood at the site of the current basilica were successively built over the spot where tradition said the saint had been buried. The second church, built by the Roman emperor Theodosius in the fourth century, left the tomb visible, first above ground and later in a crypt.

When a fire destroyed the church in 1823, the current basilica was built and the ancient crypt was filled with earth and covered by a new altar.

Neat stuff -- and a remarkable discovery for Christians around the world.

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And I wish it told us that they were being reconstructed after their destruction by the Taliban in a grave act of historical vandalism.

The empty niches that once held Bamiyan’s colossal Buddhas now gape in the rock face — a silent cry at the terrible destruction wrought on this fabled valley and its 1,500-year-old treasures, once the largest standing Buddha statues in the world.

It was in March 2001, when the Taliban and their sponsors in Al Qaeda were at the zenith of their power in Afghanistan, that militiamen, acting on an edict to take down the “gods of the infidels,” laid explosives at the base and the shoulders of the two Buddhas and blew them to pieces. To the outraged outside world, the act encapsulated the horrors of the Islamic fundamentalist government. Even Genghis Khan, who laid waste to this valley’s towns and population in the 13th century, had left the Buddhas standing.

Five years after the Taliban were ousted from power, BamiyanÂ’s Buddhist relics are once again the focus of debate: Is it possible to restore the great Buddhas? And, if so, can the extraordinary investment that would be required be justified in a country crippled by poverty and a continued Taliban insurgency in the south and that is, after all, overwhelmingly Muslim?

The whole world should be contributing to this project -- led by the Muslim world, to make up for the great CRIME AGAINST HUMANITY that was committed in the name of their faith by the Taliban when they destroyed these great works.

Posted by: Greg at 12:32 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment
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Some big news in the world of archaeology and history – discoveries and developments galore!

1) In Israel, a fourth-century church has been discovered at Shiloh, the ancient spot that the Bible tells us was home for the Ark of the Covenant at one time.

The site, emerging from the soil in the hills of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, is richly decorated with brightly colored mosaics and inscriptions referring to Jesus Christ.

The church dates to the late 4th century, making it one of Christianity's first formal places of worship, said the team, led by Yitzhak Magen and Yevgeny Aharonovitch.

"I can't say for sure at the moment that it's the very first church, but it's certainly one of the first," Mr. Aharonovitch said yesterday as he supervised a team carrying out the final excavations before winter. He said the site contained an extremely unusual inscription that referred to itself, Shiloh, by name.

"That is very rare and shows early Christians treated this as an ancient, holy place," said Mr. Aharonovitch, 38. According to the Old Testament, the Ark of the Covenant, which contained the two tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments, was kept by the Israelites at Shiloh for several hundred years.

Discussions are underway regarding how o conserve the site – and about whether further digging might result in the discovery of the ancient site of the Jewish Tabernacle.

2) In an unprecedented discovery, the standard of the Emperor Maxentius was found with other imperial items on the Palatine Hill in Rome

Archaeologists have unearthed what they say are the only existing imperial insignia belonging to Emperor Maxentius _ precious objects that were buried to preserve them and keep them from enemies when he was defeated by his rival Constantine.

Excavation under Rome's Palatine Hill near the Colosseum turned up items including three lances and four javelins that experts said are striking for their completeness _ digs usually turn up only fragments _ and the fact that they are the only known artifacts of their kind.

Clementina Panella, the archaeologist who made the discovery, said the insignia were likely hidden by Maxentius' people in an attempt to preserve the emperor's memory after he was defeated by Constantine I in the 321 A.D. battle of the Milvian Bridge _ a turning point for the history of the Roman empire which saw Constantine become the unchallenged ruler of the West.

"Once he's lost, his objects could not continue to exist and, at the same time, could not fall in the hands of the enemy," she said Friday.

Some of the objects, which accompanied the emperor during his public appearances, are believed to be the base for the emperor's standards _ rectangular or triangular flags, officials said.

An imperial scepter with a carved flower and a globe, and a number of glass spheres, believed to be a symbolic representation of the earth, also were discovered.

The discovery was announced Wednesday by Italy's Culture Minister Francesco Rutelli during a visit to New York.

The items, inside wooden boxes and wrapped in linen and silk, were found buried at a sanctuary last year and have since been restored and analyzed. The depth of the burial allows experts to date them to the early 4th century A.D., ministry officials said.

I canÂ’t wait to see pictures.

3) Egypt is relocating 3200 families from a village near the Valley of the Kings to allow archaeological work on an ancient necropolis that lies beneath it.

ulldozers moved Saturday into an Egyptian village near the Valley of the Kings in pursuit of a long-delayed effort to allow archaeologists to begin studying a wealth of tombs in the area.

Gurna is the village closest to the Valley of the Kings, where Tutankhamen and other pharaohs were buried.

It lies on top of a vast necropolis where wealthy and powerful commoners built their painted tombs in the second millennium B.C.

The Egyptian government, with advice from architect and intellectual Hassan Fathi, tried to move them in 1948 by building the model village of New Gurna on the banks of the Nile, but most trickled back to their old homes.

On Saturday, the bulldozers picked away at four uninhabited mud- brick houses, apparently in an attempt to show that the government was serious this time.

Samir Farag, the governor of nearby Luxor, the center of the tourist trade in the area, said 120 houses had been demolished in the last week and that all but five or six people in the village had signed up for the new resettlement program, which involves 3,200 households.

Unfortunately, many of the residents do not wish to move, because of distrust of the government, the belief their new homes are too small, and the fear they will lose their ability to exploit the tourist trade.

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Yes, I know it seems like a mundane way for someone to die, but given the state of medical “science” during this stage of Egyptian history, it does not come as a surprise that an infection resulting from injuries sustained in some sort of accident could kill a person, even a healthy young man.

A CT scan of King Tutankhamun's mummy has disproved a popular theory that the Egyptian pharaoh was murdered by a blow to the head more than 3,300 years ago.

Instead the most likely explanation for the boy king's death at 19 is a thigh fracture that became infected and ultimately fatal, according to an international team of scientists.

The team presented its results this week at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America in Chicago, Illinois.

"I think it is the end of the investigation. … We can now close this file," said team leader Ashraf Selim, a radiologist at Kasr Eleini Teaching Hospital at Cairo University in Egypt.

The murder theory can pretty well be discounted by discoveries about the two bone chips found loose in Tut’s skull in a 1968 x-ray. In all likelihood, rough handling of Tut’s mummy by Egyptologist Howard Carter and his associates did that damage, along with much of the other damage to the skeleton.

But the break in the left thigh was coated with the resin, indicating that it happened shortly before the body was embalmed and that there was an associated wound through which the resin leaked. Given the probability of an infection, it should not be surprising that Tut died quickly, before there was a chance for significant healing of the injury.

But there is information about “King Tut’s Curse” in the article – it is an interesting read.

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Yes, I know it seems like a mundane way for someone to die, but given the state of medical “science” during this stage of Egyptian history, it does not come as a surprise that an infection resulting from injuries sustained in some sort of accident could kill a person, even a healthy young man.

A CT scan of King Tutankhamun's mummy has disproved a popular theory that the Egyptian pharaoh was murdered by a blow to the head more than 3,300 years ago.

Instead the most likely explanation for the boy king's death at 19 is a thigh fracture that became infected and ultimately fatal, according to an international team of scientists.

The team presented its results this week at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America in Chicago, Illinois.

"I think it is the end of the investigation. Â… We can now close this file," said team leader Ashraf Selim, a radiologist at Kasr Eleini Teaching Hospital at Cairo University in Egypt.

The murder theory can pretty well be discounted by discoveries about the two bone chips found loose in TutÂ’s skull in a 1968 x-ray. In all likelihood, rough handling of TutÂ’s mummy by Egyptologist Howard Carter and his associates did that damage, along with much of the other damage to the skeleton.

But the break in the left thigh was coated with the resin, indicating that it happened shortly before the body was embalmed and that there was an associated wound through which the resin leaked. Given the probability of an infection, it should not be surprising that Tut died quickly, before there was a chance for significant healing of the injury.

But there is information about “King Tut’s Curse” in the article – it is an interesting read.

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1 , owtshwzc, )), wgiempyr, 5534, yrxwhqjj, =-))),

Posted by: Matwuzxs at Mon May 18 05:32:07 2009 (8oH0Q)

2 , yqpreipg, ekxdl, yqmjekhk, 8[[, tpicbvoh, %-)),

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3 wildest, hfhjhtoe, fxwwyi, eiuovsga, 9702, wnudnrsy, 653,

Posted by: Bammsrpa at Wed Oct 7 08:05:56 2009 (72Lvi)

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Well, it would be easier than moving the stones in the manner traditional views suggest, with huge press-gangs manhandling blocks of stone weighing tons.

The Ancient Egyptians built their great Pyramids by pouring concrete into blocks high on the site rather than hauling up giant stones, according to a new Franco-American study.

The research, by materials scientists from national institutions, adds fuel to a theory that the pharaohsÂ’ craftsmen had enough skill and materials at hand to cast the two-tonne limestone blocks that dress the Cheops and other Pyramids.

Despite mounting support from scientists, Egyptologists have rejected the concrete claim, first made in the late 1970s by Joseph Davidovits, a French chemist.

The stones, say the historians and archeologists, were all carved from nearby quarries, heaved up huge ramps and set in place by armies of workers. Some dissenters say that levers or pulleys were used, even though the wheel had not been invented at that time.

Until recently it was hard for geologists to distinguish between natural limestone and the kind that would have been made by reconstituting liquefied lime.

But according to Professor Gilles Hug, of the French National Aerospace Research Agency (Onera), and Professor Michel Barsoum, of Drexel University in Philadelphia, the covering of the great Pyramids at Giza consists of two types of stone: one from the quarries and one man-made.

“There’s no way around it. The chemistry is well and truly different,” Professor Hug told Science et Vie magazine. Their study is being published this month in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society.

The pair used X-rays, a plasma torch and electron microscopes to compare small fragments from pyramids with stone from the Toura and Maadi quarries.

They found “traces of a rapid chemical reaction which did not allow natural crystalisation . . . The reaction would be inexplicable if the stones were quarried, but perfectly comprehensible if one accepts that they were cast like concrete.”

The pair believe that the concrete method was used only for the stones on the higher levels of the Pyramids. There are some 2.5 million stone blocks on the Cheops Pyramid. The 10-tonne granite blocks at their heart were also natural, they say. The professors agree with the “Davidovits theory” that soft limestone was quarried on the damp south side of the Giza Plateau. This was then dissolved in large, Nile-fed pools until it became a watery slurry.

Lime from fireplace ash and salt were mixed in with it. The water evaporated, leaving a moist, clay-like mixture. This wet “concrete” would have been carried to the site and packed into wooden moulds where it would set hard in a few days. Mr Davidovits and his team at the Geopolymer Institute at Saint-Quentin tested the method recently, producing a large block of concrete limestone in ten days.

New support for their case came from Guy Demortier, a materials scientist at Namur University in Belgium. Originally a sceptic, he told the French magazine that a decade of study had made him a convert: “The three majestic Pyramids of Cheops, Khephren and Mykerinos are well and truly made from concrete stones.”

The concrete theorists also point out differences in density of the pyramid stones, which have a higher mass near the bottom and bubbles near the top, like old-style cement blocks.

Opponents of the theory dispute the scientific evidence. They also say that the diverse shapes of the stones show that moulds were not used. They add that a huge amount of limestone chalk and burnt wood would have been needed to make the concrete, while the Egyptians had the manpower to hoist all the natural stone they wanted.

The concrete theorists say that they will be unable to prove their theory conclusively until the Egyptian authorities give them access to substantial samples.

It will be interesting to see more on this.

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In the Middle Ages, it was common for older works to be "erased" from the valuable, durable vellum upon which they were written so that it could be recycled. Modern technology now allows us to recover the original text of these "palimpsest" manuscripts -- and one recent discovery gives us new insights into Athenian history and democracy.

The Archimedes Palimpsest, sold at auction at ChristieÂ’s for $2 million in 1998, is best known for containing some of the oldest copies of work by the great Greek mathematician who gives the manuscript its name. But there is more to the palimpsest than ArchimedesÂ’ work, including 10 pages of Hyperides, offering tantalizing and fresh insights into the critical battle of Salamis in 480 B.C., in which the Greeks defeated the Persians, and the battle of Chaeronea in 338 B.C., which spelled the beginning of the end of Greek democracy.

The palimpsest is believed to have been created by Byzantine monks in the 13th century, probably in Constantinople. As was the practice then, the durable and valuable vellum pages of several older texts were washed and scraped, to remove their writing, and then used for a medieval prayer book. The pages of the older books became the sheaths of a newer one, thus a palimpsest (which is pronounced PAL-imp-sest and is Greek for “rubbed again”).

After the ChristieÂ’s sale the manuscript was left at the museum by the private collector for conservation and study. This year imagers at Stanford University used powerful X-ray fluorescence imaging to read its final pages, which are being interpreted, transcribed and translated by a group of scholars in the United States and Europe.

The new Hyperides revelations include two previously unknown speeches, effectively increasing this renowned oratorÂ’s body of work by 20 percent, said Judson Herrman, a 36-year-old professor of classics at Allegheny College in Meadville, Pa. He is one of a handful of classicists who have written doctoral dissertations on Hyperides.

Hyperides lived from 390 or 389 B.C. until 322 B.C. and was an orator who made speeches at public meetings of the citizen assembly. A contemporary of Aristotle and Demosthenes, he wrote speeches for himself and for others and spoke at important political trials. In 322 B.C. Hyperides was executed by the Macedonians for participating in a failed rebellion.

“It’s a spotlight shining on an important moment in history,” said Mr. Herrman, currently a fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research Triangle Park, N.C. Until the new leaves were found in the palimpsest, most scholars believed only fragments of Hyperides survived beyond the Classical period. The mystery of Archimedes’ treatise on combinatorics, the Stomachion, was solved in 2003 by deciphering the palimpsest. Now W. Robert Connor, the president of the Teagle Foundation, which provides education and financial resources for education, called the discovery of new Hyperides text a “tour de force of the first order.”

A combination of high-tech imagery and old-fashioned deciphering, sometimes letter by letter, was used to resurrect the older text, revealing a slice of Athenian history in the days after its devastating defeat by Philip II, king of Macedonia and the father of Alexander the Great, Mr. Connor said. “The number of times you get a new text is very small,” Mr. Connor, a former professor of classics at Princeton said. “It’s like hearing an old violin played at a superb level.”

It makes you wonder how many other important discoveries are waiting in libraries around the world, hidden behind beautiful but historically insignificant prayer books, Bibles, and other texts.

For more on the Archimedes Palimpsest, click here.

Posted by: Greg at 11:17 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 605 words, total size 4 kb.

This past summer, I wrote about the discovery of the USS Legarto. Now, though, an even more legendary American submarine has been found -- the ">USS Wahoo.

The discovery of her last resting place has been confirmed by the United States Navy.

ommander, U.S. Pacific Fleet declared Oct. 31 that the sunken submarine recently discovered by divers in the Western Pacific is, indeed, the World War II submarine USS Wahoo (SS 23 .

"After reviewing the records and information, we are certain USS Wahoo has been located," said Adm. Gary Roughead, the U.S. Pacific Fleet commander. “We are grateful for the support of the USS Bowfin Submarine Museum and Park, and appreciate greatly the underwater video footage of the submarine provided by our Russian navy colleagues, which allowed us to make this determination. This brings closure to the families of the men of Wahoo - one of the greatest fighting submarines in the history of the U.S. Navy."

In July, the Russian dive team “Iskra” photographed wreckage lying in about 213 feet (65 meters) of water in the La Perouse (Soya) Strait between the Japanese island of Hokkaido and the Russian island of Sakhalin. The divers were working with The Wahoo Project Group, an international team of experts coordinated by Bryan MacKinnon, a relative of Wahoo’s famed skipper, Cmdr. Dudley W. “Mush” Morton.

“I am very pleased to be part of an effort where old adversaries have joined together as friends to find the Wahoo,” said MacKinnon.

Wahoo was lost with all hands on her seventh patrol in October, 1943. She and her skipper, Cdr. Dudley W. "Mush" Morton, had compiled a phenomenal record of success during the sub's time in service. Morton's success as a captain was such that he was still a legend among navy men when I was a boy growing up on navy bases, more than a quarter century after the last patrol.

The following is a list of the brave men of the USS Wahoo, lost when she was sunk on October 11, 1943.

Anders, F. MM3
Andrews, J. S. EM1
Bailey, R. E. SC3
Bair, A. I. TM3
Berg, J. C. MM3
Browning, C. E. MOMM2
Brown, D. R. LTJG
Bruce, C. L. MOMM1
Buckley, J. P. RM1
Burgan, W. W. LT
Campbell, J. S. ENS
Carr, W. J. CGMA
Carter, J. E. RM2
Davison, W. E. MOMM1
Deaton, L. N. TM1
Erdey, J. S. EM3
Fielder, E. F. LTJG
Finkelstein, O. TM3
Galli, W. O. TM3
Garmon, C. E. MOMM2
Garrett, G. C., Jr. MOMM2
Gerlacher, W. L. S2
Goss, R. P. MOMM1
Greene, H. M. LT
Hand, W. R. EM2
Hartman, L. M. MM3
Hayes, D. M. EM2
Henderson, R. N. LT
Holmes, W. H. EM1
House, V. A. S1
Howe, H. J. EM2
Jacobs, O. MOMM1
Jasa, R. L. MM3
Jayson, J. O. CK3
Johnson, K. B. TM1
Keeter, D. C. CMOMMA
Kemp, W. W. GM1
Kessock, P. F1
Krebs, P. H. S1
Kirk, E. T. S1
Lape, A. D. F1
Lindemann, C. A. S1
Logue, R. B. FC1
Lynch, W. L. F1
MacAlman, S. E. PHM1
MacGowen, T. J. MOMM1
Magyar, A. J. MM3
Manalisay, J. C. ST3
Mandjiak, P. A. MM3
Massa, E. E. S1
Maulding, E. C. SM3
Maulding, G. E. TM3
McGill, T. J. CMOMMA
McGilton, H. E. TM3
McSpadden, D. J. TM1
Mills, M. L. RT1
Misch, G. A. LTJG
Morton, D. W. CDR
Neel, P. TM2
O'Brien, F. L. EM1
O'Neal, R. L. EM3
Ostrander, E. E. MM3
Phillips, P. D. SC1
Rennels, J. L. SC2
Renno, H. S1
Seal, E. H. Jr. TM2
Simonetti, A. R. SM2
Skjonsby, V. L. LCDR
Smith, D. O. BM1
Stevens, G. V. MOMM2
Terrell, W. C. QM3
Thomas, W. S1
Tyler, R. O. TM3
Vidick, J. EM2
Wach, L. J. COX
Waldron, W. E. RM3
Ware, N. C. CEM
White, W. T. Y2
Whipp, K. L. MM2
Witting, R. L. MM3

It seems that this unofficial alternate verse to the Navy Hymn is appropriate.

Lord God, our power evermore,
Who arm doth reach the ocean floor,
Dive with our men beneath the sea;
Traverse the depths protectively.
O hear us when we pray, and keep
them safe from peril in the deep.

May God grant the men of USS Wahoo eternal and peaceful rest -- and may our country never forget their sacrifice.

Posted by: Greg at 03:34 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 736 words, total size 5 kb.

It is generally accepted history that the Spaniards and other Europeans brought diseases with them that killed off the indigenous people of the Americas. There is certainly some truth to that in some areas of the New World -- but it may not be the case in Mexico, which is usually cited as Exhibit A for the "foreign diseases" argument.

Here's what history tells us about the Spanish conquest of Mexico: Armed with modern weapons and Old World diseases, several hundred Spanish soldiers toppled the Aztec empire in 1521. And by the end of the century, the invaders' guns, steel and germs had wiped out 90 percent of the natives.

It's a key piece of the "Black Legend," the tales of atrocities committed by the Spanish Inquisition and colonizers of the New World.

But it may be just that — legend, according to Rodolfo Acuña-Soto, a Harvard-trained epidemiologist.

He argues that an unknown indigenous hemorrhagic fever may have killed the bulk of Mexico's native population, which plummeted from an estimated 22 million in 1519, when the Spaniards arrived, to 2 million in 1600.

And he warns that the fever — which the Aztecs called cocoliztli in their Nahuatl language — may still be lurking in remote rural areas of Mexico.

Not everyone buys the theory. But Acuña-Soto, who spent 12 years poring over colonial archives, census data, graveyard records and autopsy reports, is convinced that many historians are wrong about what killed the Aztecs.

"The problem with history is that it's very ideological," he said. "In this case, it was a beautiful way of accusing the Spaniards of unimaginable cruelties and of decimating the population of Mexico."

Spanish colonizers were far from blameless, he quickly points out. By subjecting the Indians to slave-like conditions and malnutrition, they made them more vulnerable to the disease, he said.

"Of course, there's a terrible story of cruelty and disease that killed a huge amount of indigenous people," he said. "But we don't know what this disease was."

Acuña-Soto, who has published his findings in several international scholarly journals, is a research professor at Mexico's National Autonomous University.

Notice, this doesn't absolve teh Spanish of charges of great cruelty. But it does raise the possibility that something else was at work -- and that the agent of infection is still around. I ca't wait to se what further research shows.

Posted by: Greg at 04:41 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 422 words, total size 3 kb.

This could change our whole picture of the emergence of human civilization.

The remains of what has been described as a huge lost city may force historians and archaeologists to radically reconsider their view of ancient human history.

Marine scientists say archaeological remains discovered 36 metres (120 feet) underwater in the Gulf of Cambay off the western coast of India could be over 9,000 years old.

The vast city - which is five miles long and two miles wide - is believed to predate the oldest known remains in the subcontinent by more than 5,000 years.

The site was discovered by chance last year by oceanographers from India's National Institute of Ocean Technology conducting a survey of pollution.

Using sidescan sonar - which sends a beam of sound waves down to the bottom of the ocean they identified huge geometrical structures at a depth of 120ft.

Debris recovered from the site - including construction material, pottery, sections of walls, beads, sculpture and human bones and teeth has been carbon dated and found to be nearly 9,500 years old.

Read the whole article -- it is fascinating.

Posted by: Greg at 12:52 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 196 words, total size 1 kb.

I've got a Holocaust-deying troll who has been infesting my site for some time. He is an immoral, intellectually-deficient pseud-Christian hate-monger. But under no circumstance should he be considered a criminal for his holding and expression of a repugnant view that is contrary to the overwhelming weight of historical evidence.

A situation taking place in Europe now illustrates the folly of laws banning the publication of what the government decides is the only correct interpretation of historical evidence.

Turkey's painful progress towards European Union membership has been plunged into crisis by a dispute with the French over the massacre of Armenians during and after the 1914-18 war.

A Socialist-backed proposal, which could pass the National Assembly on Thursday, would make it illegal in France to deny that the killings amounted to genocide by Turkey.

The legislation, which has gained support from Right-wing assembly members, would see anyone denying that a genocide took place jailed for up to five years.

Armenians claim that as many as 1.5 million of their ancestors were killed between 1915 and 1923 in an organised campaign to eradicate them from eastern Turkey.

The Turkish government fiercely denies a genocide, saying that hundreds of thousands of Turks and Armenians died in a civil war.

Under Turkish law, it is illegal to accuse the state of genocide. Scores of Turkish writers and intellectuals who have debated the massacres publicly have faced prosecution under article 301 of the penal code, outlawing insults to "Turkishness".

The Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, reacted with indignation to the French proposal, asking: "What would you do if the Turkish prime minister came to France and denied that the genocide had taken place? Arrest him?"

And therein lies the problem. Such an official, while clearly wrong about the history of his own nation, would not be a criminal in any moral sense -- merely deluded. After all, the documentary evidence is too strong -- including pictures of soldiers standing next to piles of severed heads of Armenian men, women and children.

But neither is the scholar who dares to present that evidence to document the grave evil that took place betwen 1915 and 1923 a criminal, for all of Turkey's attempt to punish those who dare to speak the truth about the murder of millions of Christian Armenians by Muslim Turks acting (for at least part of that time) on behalf of the religious government of the Muslim Ottoman Empire.

The study of history is not a crime. Stating one's conclusions should not be, either.

Posted by: Greg at 10:44 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 438 words, total size 3 kb.

Proof that past mistakes can be corrected.

Just before 6 p.m. on a recent evening, students began to fill a lecture hall at Vanderbilt University. Some pressed cellphones to their ears, others sipped cups of coffee. Flip-flops scuffed the carpet as the students shed book bags and opened laptops

A typical class, perhaps — until the teacher with the shock of white hair rose from the table at the front of the hall, greeted the students and asked a question: “How many of you have experienced a hate crime against yourself? Let’s see the hands.”

So began the lecture by the Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., 78, who returned to teach at Vanderbilt this fall, 46 years after the university expelled him for his role in lunch-counter sit-ins that made Nashville a springboard for a generation of civil rights activists.

The expulsion of Mr. Lawson, a Methodist divinity student who was one of the nationÂ’s leading scholars of civil disobedience and Gandhian nonviolence, was quickly dubbed the Lawson affair, and tarnished VanderbiltÂ’s reputation for years. University officials apologized to Mr. Lawson long ago, honoring him and inviting him back for periodic lectures. Even Harvie Branscomb, the chancellor who presided over Mr. LawsonÂ’s ouster, apologized before his death.

But the invitation to return as a visiting professor is a new chapter in relations between Vanderbilt and its famous former student.

“It isn’t often that an institution gets the chance to correct for a previous error,” said Lucius Outlaw, Vanderbilt’s associate provost for undergraduate education, who first proposed that Mr. Lawson be asked here for the year.

This is a course I would love to be able to take. It isn't often that you get to hear from the participants in historical events.

Posted by: Greg at 10:33 PM | Comments (24) | Add Comment
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Given that we have lately been infested with a Holocaust denying cockroach, I think that the passing of the last survivor of the Chelmno concentration camp, Shimon Srebnik is an appropriate time to present the testimony of an eyewitness to the industrialized slaughter of Jews by the Nazis.

"When we got to Chelmno the older people said, 'What a beautiful place,' 'We'll be happy here,' 'It's green, birds are singing,' 'A real health resort.'

I remained in the 'house kommando.' I was in a barrack with Waler Bonmeister. We sorted people's gold and possessions, things people left behind, suitcases. There was a big tent where Jews sorted things.

How did I know my mother arrived in Chelmno?

There were many handbags, a mountain of handbags. Once, I found a handbag with my mother's pictures and all her documents. I told Bonmeister: 'Look, this is my mother's.'

'Yes, she's in heaven,' he said.

'It's my mother's.' I was naive.

He said, 'Yes, but she's in heaven.'

I didn't know what he meant by 'heaven'."

- from the testimony of Shimon Srebnik in the Yad Vashem archives.

In a rural green forest area in central Poland, in the town of Chelmno, 47 miles west of Lodz, the Germans built their first extermination camp for mass murder by gas. Between December 1941 and January 1945, more than 300,000 Jews and 5,000 gypsies from Lodz and the vicinity were murdered in Chelmno. Only three people survived.

The last survivor of the Chelmno Extermination Camp, Shimon Srebnik, 76, of Ness Ziona, died last month at Tel Hashomer hospital after a long battle with cancer. Srebnik, who lost both his parents in the Holocaust, was a boy of 13 when he was deported to Chelmno from the nearby Lodz Ghetto, and was forced to bury the dead at the Nazi extermination camp.

Upon arrival in Chelmno, Srebnik was sent to join a small group of slave laborers at the rural extermination camp, whose pastoral settings deluded the people in the doomed transports into a false sense of hope, having come from the filth-ridden and disease-infested ghettos.

Like the rest of the prisoners, Srebnik had his legs immediately shackled - the length of the chain between them was about 40 centimeters - in order to prevent any possibility of escape from the secluded camp, which was manned by armed Germans.

The prisoners at the death camp were forced to wear their chains 24 hours a day. For the first two or three months, Srebnik put up tents and prepared the crematorium where his own mother would be gassed to death. Once the transports of Jews from Lodz began arriving regularly for extermination, Srebnik was assigned the job of extracting the gold from the teeth of the victims.
He was also involved in general sorting operations, before being assigned to bury the dead.

It was when he was sorting through the victims' personal possessions that he came across pictures belonging to his mother and realized that she too had been murdered in Chelmno.

WHEN THE victims arrived in Chelmno, they were gathered in the camp courtyard, and told they were being sent to a work camp and needed to wash up.

Groups of 50 were then escorted to the basement of the camp building, where they were told to remove their valuables and undress; men, women and children together.

During their walk to death, the victims were continuously reassured by signs reading "to the washroom" or "to the doctor" when in fact they were walking down a ramp into a parked gas van.

After the van was completely filled, the driver locked both the doors and turned on the motor. About 10 minutes later, the gas fumes had suffocated everybody inside.

In his vivid, bone-chilling testimony, Srebnik details how the prisoners were killed at the camp.

"There were three gas vans. The exhaust gas from the engine entered the van through a gridiron on the floor. Each van held 80 people. There was a bigger van that held 100 people. The distance from Chelmno to the forest was four kilometers. During the ride, gas entered the van.

When the doors opened, you could see that all the dead were injured.
Everyone wanted to survive, wanted to live, so they scratched each other. It was terrible. When the van reached the furnace, two people entered. The furnace was already lit.

What a fire! There was a railway gridiron in the furnace. They put a layer of wood on top of it and lit it and then a layer of people, and a layer of wood. This happened every two days. They pulled out gold teeth along with the flesh. I sat and removed the gold from the flesh.

It smelled awful. I collected the victim's teeth. It wasn't only my mother, I handled thousands of mothers. My heart ached for them and for my mother. But there were thousands like her...

Did I think about my mother? She was already in heaven. Nothing could be done."

As related on the Yad Vashem website, in January 1945, as the end of the war approached and the Soviet troops drew near, the Nazis began evacuating Chelmno, which they had begun to destroy four months earlier.

The Germans decided to liquidate the camp, and opened fire on the last 48 Jewish prisoners, shooting them in the back of the neck.

Srebnik was seriously wounded by Nazi gunfire during the liquidation, but, along with two others camp inmates, managed to escape during a last-minute fight that the dying and emaciated prisoners put up against their captors.

Srebnik was able to find refuge with a Polish farmer in the town who cut off his shackles and took care of the feverish boy. The following day, the Germans offered a large cash reward for turning Srebnik in.

But the Poles, who already feared the approaching Russians more than the Germans, did not betray him, and so he was able to reach the approaching Russian forces. After the war he immediately immigrated to Israel, meeting his future wife on a way station in Italy.

THREE AND a half decades later, in 1978, Srebnik received his shackles back from the Polish farmer who saved him when he went to the site of the extermination camp with Claude Lanzmann for the filming of the Holocaust documentary Shoah. After some hesitation, he would later donate the leg irons to Yad Vashem, where they are currently on display.

"It was not easy for him to part from the shackles," said Yehudit Inbar, director of the Museums Division at Yad Vashem who took down Srebnik's testimony several years ago.

Srebnik, who had earlier testified at the Eichmann trial, also assisted the Polish archeologist who excavated the Chelmno site over the last two decades.
Noting that the shackles are among the museum's most-visited exhibits, Inbar added: "He was a very special man, with a very special story."

Srebnik is survived by his wife, two daughters, five grand-children, and a great-grandchild.

Never Again.

And never forget, no matter how loudly the genocide deniers and Nazi-wannabes claim it never happened.

Posted by: Greg at 09:17 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 1195 words, total size 7 kb.

Given that we have lately been infested with a Holocaust denying cockroach, I think that the passing of the last survivor of the Chelmno concentration camp, Shimon Srebnik is an appropriate time to present the testimony of an eyewitness to the industrialized slaughter of Jews by the Nazis.

"When we got to Chelmno the older people said, 'What a beautiful place,' 'We'll be happy here,' 'It's green, birds are singing,' 'A real health resort.'

I remained in the 'house kommando.' I was in a barrack with Waler Bonmeister. We sorted people's gold and possessions, things people left behind, suitcases. There was a big tent where Jews sorted things.

How did I know my mother arrived in Chelmno?

There were many handbags, a mountain of handbags. Once, I found a handbag with my mother's pictures and all her documents. I told Bonmeister: 'Look, this is my mother's.'

'Yes, she's in heaven,' he said.

'It's my mother's.' I was naive.

He said, 'Yes, but she's in heaven.'

I didn't know what he meant by 'heaven'."

- from the testimony of Shimon Srebnik in the Yad Vashem archives.

In a rural green forest area in central Poland, in the town of Chelmno, 47 miles west of Lodz, the Germans built their first extermination camp for mass murder by gas. Between December 1941 and January 1945, more than 300,000 Jews and 5,000 gypsies from Lodz and the vicinity were murdered in Chelmno. Only three people survived.

The last survivor of the Chelmno Extermination Camp, Shimon Srebnik, 76, of Ness Ziona, died last month at Tel Hashomer hospital after a long battle with cancer. Srebnik, who lost both his parents in the Holocaust, was a boy of 13 when he was deported to Chelmno from the nearby Lodz Ghetto, and was forced to bury the dead at the Nazi extermination camp.

Upon arrival in Chelmno, Srebnik was sent to join a small group of slave laborers at the rural extermination camp, whose pastoral settings deluded the people in the doomed transports into a false sense of hope, having come from the filth-ridden and disease-infested ghettos.

Like the rest of the prisoners, Srebnik had his legs immediately shackled - the length of the chain between them was about 40 centimeters - in order to prevent any possibility of escape from the secluded camp, which was manned by armed Germans.

The prisoners at the death camp were forced to wear their chains 24 hours a day. For the first two or three months, Srebnik put up tents and prepared the crematorium where his own mother would be gassed to death. Once the transports of Jews from Lodz began arriving regularly for extermination, Srebnik was assigned the job of extracting the gold from the teeth of the victims.
He was also involved in general sorting operations, before being assigned to bury the dead.

It was when he was sorting through the victims' personal possessions that he came across pictures belonging to his mother and realized that she too had been murdered in Chelmno.

WHEN THE victims arrived in Chelmno, they were gathered in the camp courtyard, and told they were being sent to a work camp and needed to wash up.

Groups of 50 were then escorted to the basement of the camp building, where they were told to remove their valuables and undress; men, women and children together.

During their walk to death, the victims were continuously reassured by signs reading "to the washroom" or "to the doctor" when in fact they were walking down a ramp into a parked gas van.

After the van was completely filled, the driver locked both the doors and turned on the motor. About 10 minutes later, the gas fumes had suffocated everybody inside.

In his vivid, bone-chilling testimony, Srebnik details how the prisoners were killed at the camp.

"There were three gas vans. The exhaust gas from the engine entered the van through a gridiron on the floor. Each van held 80 people. There was a bigger van that held 100 people. The distance from Chelmno to the forest was four kilometers. During the ride, gas entered the van.

When the doors opened, you could see that all the dead were injured.
Everyone wanted to survive, wanted to live, so they scratched each other. It was terrible. When the van reached the furnace, two people entered. The furnace was already lit.

What a fire! There was a railway gridiron in the furnace. They put a layer of wood on top of it and lit it and then a layer of people, and a layer of wood. This happened every two days. They pulled out gold teeth along with the flesh. I sat and removed the gold from the flesh.

It smelled awful. I collected the victim's teeth. It wasn't only my mother, I handled thousands of mothers. My heart ached for them and for my mother. But there were thousands like her...

Did I think about my mother? She was already in heaven. Nothing could be done."

As related on the Yad Vashem website, in January 1945, as the end of the war approached and the Soviet troops drew near, the Nazis began evacuating Chelmno, which they had begun to destroy four months earlier.

The Germans decided to liquidate the camp, and opened fire on the last 48 Jewish prisoners, shooting them in the back of the neck.

Srebnik was seriously wounded by Nazi gunfire during the liquidation, but, along with two others camp inmates, managed to escape during a last-minute fight that the dying and emaciated prisoners put up against their captors.

Srebnik was able to find refuge with a Polish farmer in the town who cut off his shackles and took care of the feverish boy. The following day, the Germans offered a large cash reward for turning Srebnik in.

But the Poles, who already feared the approaching Russians more than the Germans, did not betray him, and so he was able to reach the approaching Russian forces. After the war he immediately immigrated to Israel, meeting his future wife on a way station in Italy.

THREE AND a half decades later, in 1978, Srebnik received his shackles back from the Polish farmer who saved him when he went to the site of the extermination camp with Claude Lanzmann for the filming of the Holocaust documentary Shoah. After some hesitation, he would later donate the leg irons to Yad Vashem, where they are currently on display.

"It was not easy for him to part from the shackles," said Yehudit Inbar, director of the Museums Division at Yad Vashem who took down Srebnik's testimony several years ago.

Srebnik, who had earlier testified at the Eichmann trial, also assisted the Polish archeologist who excavated the Chelmno site over the last two decades.
Noting that the shackles are among the museum's most-visited exhibits, Inbar added: "He was a very special man, with a very special story."

Srebnik is survived by his wife, two daughters, five grand-children, and a great-grandchild.

Never Again.

And never forget, no matter how loudly the genocide deniers and Nazi-wannabes claim it never happened.

Posted by: Greg at 09:17 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 1204 words, total size 7 kb.

Earlier this week, while discussing ancient Athens and the differnce between slavery in the ancient world and slavery in America (and there were substantive differences), one of the young men in my World History class asked me about the origins of slavery in the United States. I answered as best I could, being put on the spot with no possibility of checking my facts or refreshing my memory, but I've now come to find that some of what I said may not have been entirely accurate, both because of my own faulty memory and new scholarly research on the "twenty and odd" Africans who set foot on American soil at Jamestown in 1619.

I'll be posting this article from the Washington Post in my classroom as a resource for my students.

JAMESTOWN -- They were known as the "20 and odd," the first African slaves to set foot in North America at the English colony settled in 1607.

For nearly 400 years, historians believed they were transported to Virginia from the West Indies on a Dutch warship. Little else was known of the Africans, who left no trace.

Now, new scholarship and transatlantic detective work have solved the puzzle of who they were and where their forced journey across the Atlantic Ocean began.

The slaves were herded onto a Portuguese slave ship in Angola, in Southwest Africa. The ship was seized by British pirates on the high seas -- not brought to Virginia after a period of time in the Caribbean. The slaves represented one ethnic group, not many, as historians first believed.

The discovery has tapped a rich vein of history that will go on public view next month at the Jamestown Settlement. The museum and living history program will commemorate the 400th anniversary of Jamestown's founding by revamping the exhibits and artifacts -- as well as the story of the settlement itself.

Although historians have thoroughly documented the direct slave trade from Africa starting in the 1700s, far less was known of the first blacks who arrived in Virginia and other colonies a century earlier. A story of memory and cultural connections between Africa and the early New World is being unearthed in a state whose plantation economy set the course for the Civil War.

"We went entirely back to the drawing board," said Tom Davidson, senior curator of the Jamestown-Yorktown Foundation. "The problem has always been that all of the things that make for a human story [of the Africans] were missing. . . . Now we can talk about the Africans with the same richness we talk about the English and the Powhatans."

Too often, people think of history as old, dead, and stagnant. The reality is that there is always more artifacts to be recovered and more old records to be discovered, and as a result there are new insights into the past that help us understand who we are as a people and how we came to be that way. I'm thankful for this article, and for the work of those at Jamestown who have provided a little insight inot the development of one of the less proud aspects of American history.

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Posted by: Greg at 11:25 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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Cool!

And that isn't a reference to the permafrost where the mummy was found.

The spectacular find of the frozen remains of a Scythian warrior in Mongolia by an international team of archeologists could shed new light on ancient life. Some of those findings will be the subject of a major exhibition in Berlin next year.

Scientists in Berlin this week gave their first major press conference about the spectacular discovery of a frozen mummy in Mongolia's Altai mountains. The frozen corpse, embedded in permafrost, is considered one of the greatest archeological finds since climbers came across the mummified remains of Ötzi, the ice man, in an alpine glacier. The corpse of the Scythian warrior could help provide clues about how people lived 2,500 years ago and about what illnesses they suffered.

"The mummy is unbelievably valuable to science," Hermann Parzinger, president of the German Archeological Institute (DAI), said on Thursday in Berlin. He described the mummy recently discovered in Mongolia as a "one of a kind find" that could increase our knowledge about the nutrition and health of early man.

The mummy, which is believed to be about 2,500 years old was a 30-to-40 year-old man with blond hair, and was found in very good condition, Patzinger said. It's too delicate for exhibition, but new techniques developed following other recent discoveries of frozen mummies will enable scientists to study the remains in detail. The newly discovered Altai mummy has been compared to the discovery of Ötzi in southern Tyrol in 1991 and a tattooed Siberian ice princess in 1993.

Wikipedia has a good article on Scythia and the Scythians, if you want more information on these fierce warriors.

Posted by: Greg at 12:24 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Does this picture not break your heart?

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A fire gutted a 19th century cathedral in the heart of Russia's second city on Friday, destroying its famous azure domes which attract thousands of tourists every year.

As flames leapt from the main dome of the Troitsky (Trinity) Cathedral -- one of the largest wooden domes in Europe -- passers-by helped to rescue priceless artefacts from its renowned art and religious icon collection.

"The fire services don't have long enough ladders to reach the top of the dome. They have been aiming their water guns at the middle section," Reuters photographer Alexander Demyanchuk said by telephone from outside the cathedral.

The cathedral had been covered by wooden scaffolding during reconstruction work when the fire started.

"The main dome has been destroyed but we could not stop the fire because it was so high and now other domes are in flames," a spokesman for Russia's emergencies ministry told Interfax news agency.

Emergency services said there had been no casualties.

The Troitsky Cathedral, built overlooking one of central St Petersburg's canals, is big enough to hold 3,000 worshippers and also housed the military uniforms of Russian 19th century tsars.

No word yet on the extent of the damage, or the loss of any of the important historical and religious items in the building.

UPDATE: It appears that most of the items of historical and religious significance have been saved.

The cause of the fire was not immediately known, but acting St. Petersburg emergency department chief Leonid Belyayev said the blaze apparently started on scaffolding on the outside of the church, which was undergoing restoration.

He said the most valuable icons and other items had been saved, and that structural damage beneath the roof area was minor.

The damage will be repaired.

The above picture sums up my feelings as well. My heart breaks for the people of St. Petersburg.

Posted by: Greg at 11:59 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
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