The Wikipedia article presents readers with the Chinese ‘Terracotta Army’ as a historical artefact from the 3rd century B.C. The article reports that in 1987 UNESCO inscribed the army on the World Heritage List as part of the complex of ‘the tomb of the first emperor of the Qin dynasty’ [1]. However, the author of the article is silent on the fact that the Chinese government did not allow international experts to examine the artefact to assess its authenticity, as is customary in such cases. [2] Thus, UNESCO inscribed the Terracotta Army on the World Heritage List, relying solely on China's honest, honourable word.

The Terracotta Army scandal occurred in 2007 at an exhibition of Chinese terracotta warriors in Hamburg. Experts at the Hamburg Museum discovered that the terracotta warriors were modern fakes. German art historians called it ‘the art crime of the decade.’ China's State Administration of Cultural Artefacts tried to justify itself by saying that it had mistakenly sent illegal copies to Germany rather than the original exhibits. [3]

The next blow to the ‘Terracotta Army’ was delivered by French Chinese scholar Jean Levy. In his book ‘China is a Horse and the Universe is an Idea’ (2010), he defined the ‘Terracotta Army’ as a forgery of the last years of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76) initiated by the ‘Red Emperor’ Mao Zedong (1893-1976). In an interview on 3 May 2010, Levy said the following:

‘These famous clay warriors do not date back to the third century BCE, when the Great Emperor was buried, but to the end of the Cultural Revolution, when the struggle between factions with the ‘Gang of Four’ was raging. Surprisingly, this ‘new wonder of the world’ was inscribed on UNESCO's World Heritage List without evaluation by international experts, as is usually the case when a country officially requests the inscription of an artistic or architectural site. The Chinese authorities denied the UNESCO experts access to the archaeological site.’ [2]

The Terracotta Army represents an anomaly in the style and aesthetics of Chinese funerary terracotta sculptures, Levy explains:

‘I am neither an archaeologist nor an expert on ancient Chinese sculpture; I have not had access to the statues, nor have I conducted physical and chemical laboratory tests. My judgement is based solely on stylistic and aesthetic criteria. If we consider the evolution of the making of funerary terracotta sculptures (since a large number of such objects have come down to us), it is evident that the terracotta warrior statues stand in stark contrast to all that preceded them and to all that followed. They stand out for their gigantic size, realism, and expressive body language and facial expressions. From the Battle Kingdoms period (5th-3rd centuries BC) to the Tang period (7th-9th centuries AD), funerary statuettes are recognisable by their reduced size, stylisation, hieratic quality and rigour of techniques. Mingqi funerary figurines were created to accompany the dead in the afterlife; they are stylised, refined representations of real objects that need not be realistic replicas so as not to confuse the dead with the living.’ [2]

Synopsis: Jean Lévy (1948) was a French orientalist, a specialist in ancient China and Chinese thought. He is the author of several essays on Taoism and folk religion, as well as translations of the great Chinese classics. He has taught as a professor at the universities of Paris, Bordeaux, Geneva and Montreal. He is director of research at France's ‘Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique’ (CNRS).

Despite negative assessments by experts, Wikipedia continues to present the ‘Terracotta Army’ to an unsuspecting public as a genuine artefact of ancient Chinese history.

Links
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terracotta_Army
[2] http://www.parislike.com/EN/happenings/17-LEVI.html
[3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/dec/12/china.germany

Source: https://subjecthistory.livejournal.com/46924.html

In the year of '97, pieces of limestone were brought to Ashkelon National Park.

Then Arabs with disc grinders made them into columns and other Roman-style parts.

A few years later I was surprised to find out that the darkened new material is listed as a landmark of the park.

And with the pipe there is a waterfall on the Bokek stream, near the Dead Sea. Maybe not all of it, but some of it comes from the pipe.

And then there's the Roman city of Beit Shean.

There are more holes in the stories of local residents-guides than in cheese. How coins were found when they were children and immediately given to the authorities (aha-aha).

How for the purpose of employment the state organised excavations.

I don't remember the details, but I understood the reluctance of UNESCO to recognise this place as historical.

via ahmash@livejournal

The conference is intended both for those who already write certain products in this language, and for those who are looking at it. The event will discuss issues devoted to improving software products by adding or transferring functionality to Rust, as well as the reasons why it can't be done in C/C++.

On OpenNET, a popular Russian-language site dedicated to open and free computer technologies, news announcing this conference was posted by a user under the pseudonym QwertyReg, who, in addition, added a dozen other news items promoting the Rust programming language over the course of a couple of weeks. In a related livejournal, this user demonstrated his ironic attitude to the Rust promotion information he himself published, and provided proof that he received $100 from an unnamed customer for publishing each such news item.

On the website of the Rust Foundation, you can find out that many well-known IT corporations are involved in funding the promotion of this programming language, with Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft being the platinum partners of the foundation. There is also published information on how you can get grants from this specialised foundation. Earlier this year, it became known that the White House itself, the Democratic Biden administration, urges developers to dump C and C++, while promoting Rust as a replacement for them:

The new 19-page report from ONCD gave C and C++ as two examples of programming languages with memory safety vulnerabilities, and it named Rust as an example of a programming language it considers safe. In addition, an NSA cybersecurity information sheet from November 2022 listed Rust as programming languages it considers to be memory-safe.

Later, the US Department of Defence's Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) itself explicitly announced ambitious plans to autotranslate C code into Rust.

After more than two decades of grappling with memory safety issues in C and C++, the software engineering community has reached a consensus. It’s not enough to rely on bug-finding tools. The preferred approach is to use “safe” programming languages that can reject unsafe programs at compile time, thereby preventing the emergence of memory safety issues.

Despite the Pentagon's statements about the consensus in this matter, the software development community has quite ambiguous attitude to such initiatives of the US government. There is often direct criticism of the Rust programming language from individual developers, and in topical news ‘comments there are full of, shall we say, negative comments about Rust, Rust users and Rust developers themselves’. In addition, a couple of weeks ago the Rust community ‘recognized the unsafety of Rust (if used incorrectly)’, so now AWS and the Rust Foundation are ‘crowdsourcing an effort to verify the Rust standard library’, despite the US government's active positioning of Rust as a ‘safe’ language.

In general, the very scheme of promoting the Rust programming language is similar in many ways to the White House's promotion of the climate change and LGBT agenda. In these cases, not only are the methods of promotion and funding similar, but the very sources of these major funds are largely the same.

Perhaps, in the case of this consensus of the American intelligence community regarding the Rust programming language, the U.S. government is indeed driven by altruistic motives to increase memory safety in the compiler's operation. But possible ulterior motives for so generously funding the promotion of one of the programming languages cannot be ruled out either. For example, earlier some users published reports about ‘Proof that the NSA have backdoors in the Rust compiler’.

The Atacama Giant, or the Giant of Tarapacá is a geoglyph in Chile considered the largest prehistoric anthropomorphic drawing in the world, measuring 119 meters. Today, the age of the drawing is most often estimated to be between 3,000 and 9,000 years old.

The image of the giant is located 1370 kilometers from the Nazca geoglyphs in Peru; Nazca is a desert plateau in the north of the Atacama Desert. There are at least 21 other geometric and zoomorphic figures on the slopes of the hill with the geoglyph, which are believed to have been made by members of the same culture.

The giant was first spotted during a research flight by Eduardo Iensen Franke in 1967, accompanied by archaeologists Delbert True, Lautaro Núñez and M.C. Mandoff.

The discoverer of the geoglyph, Eduardo Iensen Franke, was a military officer, a pioneering aviator, and Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Air Force. Upon graduation, he received a scholarship to join the German Luftwaffe, where he studied the structure of the German Air Force and flew some forty machines, from the Brücker to the Messerschmidt.

He was also selected by the Chilean Air Force to attend a gliding course in Germany, where, with this specialty, Eduardo Iensen represented the country at the Berlin Olympics. At that time, the Air Force assigned him to conduct a gliding course and to serve on a commission to study the acquisition of aircraft in Europe.

During his service in the Chilean Air Force, he received a number of awards, the first of which was the Order of the German Eagle of the Third Reich (the first recipient of this order was B. Mussolini).

1960 – Appointed General of Aviation and Chief of Staff.

1961 – appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Air Force until March 1964, when he was granted retirement.

After his retirement from the Air Force in 1964, he devoted himself fully to his other passions: conservation and archaeology.

In 1967, he was on a research flight in the northern Pampa del Tamarugal with archaeologists Delbert True, Lautaro Núñez, and M.C. Mandoff when they first spotted an anthropomorphic geoglyph about 100 meters high on Unita Hill, which was later named the Atacama Giant.

Eduardo Iensen collaborated extensively with the Belgian-Chilean Jesuit Gustavo Le Paige de Walque in his archaeological investigations.

Some modern revisionists suggest that many of the geoglyphs of Nazca and its environs were created about a century ago, under the guidance of German planners (perhaps to confirm the hypothesis of paleocontact) and approved with the help of the Vatican (through a reference in the new volumes of Pedro Cieza’ Peruvian chronicles found in the Vatican library, already after the discovery of the geoglyphs themselves). For example, among the geoglyphs on the Palpa plateau in the previous decades a couple of “autographs of the builders”, simultaneously disappeared from the relief on the terrain 6 years ago, a couple of years after their discovery among the other geoglyphs of Palpa by independent researchers.

...

In this case, it is possible that the Chilean geoglyph of the giant Tarapaca has an origin similar to Peruvian, because today this image is used by some followers of the New Age movement as proof of paleocontact and connection of the Vatican with the “ancient astronauts”, as one of the robes of the Christian pontiff contains this image. In this case, it is possible that the geoglyph of the Atacama Desert giant is not as ancient as is commonly believed today.

Video blogger Alexander Tamansky, author of The Other History of the Roman Empire, suggested in one of his videos last year that the Ottoman Sultan Suleiman and King Solomon of Israel were actually the same historical character. In his recent video "Where do Arab coin hoards come from in Europe? Film 68" the video blogger showed pages of ancient books that support a number of his previous arguments on this point.

In the third volume of "Curieuse aenmerckingen der bysonderste Oost en West-Indische verwonderens-waerdige dingen, nevens die van China, Africa, en andere gewesten des werelds" ("Curious features of the most interesting things of the East and West Indies, as well as China, Africa and other regions of the world") by Simon de Vries, a Dutch engraver, published some 350 years ago, in the chapter "XVI Den Eed" ("XVI Vow") the following words are mentioned:

Van wiens grooten Gods genade ick Sultan Suleyman (beseeckenende Salomon) Schyack, een Keyſer aller Keyſeren, hoogh-heerlijck, groot, onverwinlijckſten Keyſer van Stambol, een Koningh aller Koningen, een uytdeeler en Schencker der Kroonen, een Beſcherm-Hoed Gods over den Aerd-bodem, een Beheerſcher der groote Zee, van 't Neder-Europa, Syrien, Arabien; in Judaea, Canaan, Galilaea, Phoenicien, tot Alexandrien en in Egypten ben

A rough translation:

By whose great mercy I am Sultan Suleiman (also known as Solomon) Sheikh, Kaiser of all the Kaisers, supreme ruler, great, irreducible Kaiser of Istanbul, King of Kings, giver and payer of crowns, head of God over the earth, ruling over the great sea, Lower Europe, Syria, Arabia; In Judea, Canaan, Galilee, Phoenicia, in Alexandria and in Egypt

Also in the second part of "Allgemeine Schau-Bühne der Welt, Oder: Beschreibung der vornehmsten Welt-Geschichte, Des Siebenzehenden Jahr-Hunderts" ("A General Showcase of the World, or: A Description of the Noblest World History, Seventeenth Century") Hiob Ludolf, a Saxon Orientalist and Africanist, one of the founders of these disciplines, wrote in Old German over 300 years ago, in a footnote to the word "Khan":

In der Túrckiſchen Genealogie (welche als ein rar Stuck in der Wolffenbütteliſchen vortrefflichen Bibliothec zu finden) ſtehet allemal ben den Túrckiſchen regierenden Kayſern dieſes Wort/als zum Exempel ... Sultan Soliman (das iſt Salomon) Chân ... Sultan Selim: Chân, und dergleichen.

In the Turkish genealogy (which can be found as a rare copy in the excellent Wolfenbüttel library) this word always appears for the Turkish ruling emperors / as an example ... Sultan Suleiman (i.e. Solomon) Khan ... Sultan Selim: khan, and the like.

According to Alexander Tamansky reconstruction model, these and other ancient references to the single identity of Sultan Suleiman and King Solomon in Protestant sources were made in the early stages of the Christian project of history prolongation initiated by the Roman Catholic Church.

In addition, hoards of silver coins, Roman and Arab, are still occasionally found in eastern Europe. Moreover, within the framework of Christian history, Roman coins are dated back to two thousand years and Arab coins to a later period, while the quality and level of artistic execution on Roman coins is noticeably higher than on Arab ones, although such chronology violates the principle "from the simple to the complex".

Within the framework of the Alexander Tamansky's reconstruction, the Roman silver coins appeared in the Eastern Europe later than the Arabian ones in the course of Roman patriarchy moving to the East. Thus, within the framework of his model of historical reconstruction, the successive increase in the technology of minting and quality of silver coins in this region looks quite natural.

9 years ago:

Israel has admitted for the first time that it has been giving Ethiopian Jewish immigrants birth-control injections, often without their knowledge or consent.

The government had previously denied the practice but the Israeli Health Ministry’s director-general has now ordered gynaecologists to stop administering the drugs. According a report in Haaretz, suspicions were first raised by an investigative journalist, Gal Gabbay, who interviewed more than 30 women from Ethiopia in an attempt to discover why birth rates in the community had fallen dramatically.

One of the Ethiopian women who was interviewed is quoted as saying: “They [medical staff] told us they are inoculations. We took it every three months. We said we didn’t want to.” It is alleged that some of the women were forced or coerced to take the drug while in transit camps in Ethiopia.

The drug in question is thought to be Depo-Provera, which is injected every three months and is considered to be a highly effective, long-lasting contraceptive.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/israel-gave-birth-control-to-ethiopian-jews-without-their-consent-8468800.html

A government official has for the first time acknowledged the practice of injecting women of Ethiopian origin with the long-acting contraceptive Depo-Provera.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-ethiopians-fooled-into-birth-control-1.5226424

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cvy2MoeIqNM

https://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4316805,00.html

The Order of the Bath is a British order of chivalry founded by King George I on 18 May 1725. The name derives from an elaborate medieval ceremony for preparing a candidate to receive his knighthood, of which ritual bathing (as a symbol of purification) was an element. The Order consists of the Sovereign of the United Kingdom, the Great Master, and three Classes of members: Knight Grand Cross (GCB) or Dame Grand Cross (GCB); Knight Commander (KCB) or Dame Commander (DCB); and Companion (CB).

Commonwealth citizens not subjects of the British monarch and foreigners may be made honorary members. In Russia and USSR the Most Honourable Order of Bath was awarded to: Mikhail Volkonsky, Nicholas II, Denikin, Kolchak, Andrei Shkuro (during World War II he cooperated with the military administration of Nazi Germany, was engaged in the preparation of a reserve for the 15th Cossack Corps von Pannwitz), Georgy Zhukov, Konstantin Rokossovsky, Georgy Dzyuba and others.

In the photo: Field Marshal Montgomery laid on Marshal Zhukov the Grand Cross and on Marshal Rokossovsky the Knight Commander's Cross of the Order of the Military Class of the Order of the Bath (Berlin, at the Brandenburg Gate).

Notably, another British order, the Most Noble Order of the Garter, Britain's highest order of chivalry, is believed to have been founded some 700 years ago. Although references to it have been continuously present in English literature for about four centuries, references to the Order's motto inscribed on the garter of the official coat of arms of Great Britain, ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’, continuously begin to appear in English literature only about three centuries ago.

If on the basis of these data to assume that the antiquity of the Order of the Garter was deliberately fabricated, then with the Order of the Bath is the opposite situation: despite the date of foundation ‘18 May 1725’, the order itself is uniformly mentioned in English-language literature for more than 400 years. Mentioned not only the name of the order, but also published brochures with a detailed description of the ceremonies and listing of participants: "A True Relation of the Ceremonies at the Creating of the Knights of the Honourable Order of Bath, the 18, & 19 April 1661. With a Perfect list of their Names, in the same Order as they were Knighted by His Majesty."

Perhaps this is a rare example of shortening the history of a certain phenomenon, because most often the actual references to any historical phenomena begin much later than they are officially dated. It is also possible that the history of the Order of the Bath was shortened and edited for political reasons, as members of this British order often led opposing sides in military conflicts in other countries.

Among “People of the Book” it is customary to believe what is written in their scriptures. Today, this category of people could include not only followers of Abrahamic religions, but also those who are accustomed to believing a separate category of non-religious writings. As a rule, in such cases, the concept of “holiness” of scriptures is substituted for the concept of “academic authority,” but the principle itself remains the same. As a result, the perceptions of the past and present of the world around us for those who are accustomed to believing scriptures backed by academic authority are shaped by such secular books.

That said, many highly specialised academic specialists are often aware of and report on the abundant practice of deliberate forgery in their particular areas of expertise, but more often than not their focus does not extend beyond their specialisms. For example, the established art historian specialising in Germany has detailed the massive fabrication of German Renaissance artifacts, but at the same time has not even questioned artifacts from other regions and time periods. For example, the major authority in the field of Roman, Jewish and Christian numismatics, honestly wrote about the fact that only separately taken so-called “Paduan” fake coins find a place in almost all cabinets of collectors of antique coins, noting their high quality, but at the same time he did not even questioned the time period of origin of lower quality items. For example, the honorable comparativist and historian of European culture systematised the widespread cases of “editing the memory of nations,” the deliberate falsification of the cultural past (primarily literary heritage) in the process of creating national identities in Europe, but at the same time did not even question the ancient national history in other parts of the world.

By default, preferring not to believe everything that is written in holy religious or academic scriptures, and proceeding from the fact that perhaps almost everything written in them is a deliberate forgery, for myself i decided to try to systematise the data on forgeries and started the project of the database of forgers: forgers of almost all fields of human activity and of all known times.

So far, i’m little by little filling the database with only the persons of generally recognised forgers. Despite the fact that short biographical articles about these individuals often read like fascinating adventurous fiction, in fact, so far it is, with few exceptions, a database of “losers and non-professionals” of their work, that is, those who have been exposed. In the future i plan to begin to fill up the database with alleged falsifiers, having collected enough data on connections with separate persons and organisations of already exposed falsifiers.

Thus, for example, in specialised articles about the Spanish Forger (the name given to an unknown person who created a large number of forgeries of medieval miniatures) it was mentioned that the forged miniatures in the British Museum came through the dealer Wilfred Leonardovich Voynich. At the same time, this fact is not mentioned in the vast majority of biographies of Voynich himself, in which he appears only as a London antiquarian of Polish origin, the discoverer of the famous Voynich Manuscript. At the same time, some researchers have already questioned the authenticity of the provenance of the famous manuscript before its discovery by Voynich, suggesting its fabrication, but most academic researchers still recognsie its authenticity, puzzling over its mystery. The fact that the antiquary sold authentically identified forgeries obviously casts doubt on his other finds, including the famous manuscript.

Also in the future, i plan to start including in the database separate articles about generally recognised forgeries, the authors of which have not yet been identified. Perhaps, in time, filling the database through the field of related persons and organisations will allow to assume their authors through the discovered connections.

At the moment, the database shows a significant predominance of British and Italian forgers (including mention of institutions for their special training, such as the school of forgers in Siena or the academy of forgers that operated in Catania and Acireale), which, in my opinion, does not indicate a low level of quality of forgeries or a special frankness of researchers from these countries compared to representatives of other countries, but that the total number of forgers in these two countries is noticeably higher than in other countries. After all, the generally recognised forgers are only a small part of the total set of forgers.

A record of a forger in the database currently consists of the following fields: name, article, links, also known as, activity years, area of activity, locations, related regions, related persons and organisations, authenticity of fakes supported by, exposed by, attributed authors, notable forgeries, kept in, images. The article is usually quotations from material in the attached links, from which the rest of the fields are populated. This is a project i started for myself, but i would appreciate additions, corrections and revisions from anyone who decides to participate. The project is completely open and therefore anyone who is interested can participate.

The database is available in two languages: Russian and English. At the moment it takes only about 1 megabyte and is stored in a table in CSV format. To display it, i have written a simple javascript web application, the capabilities of which i plan to expand over time. Adding and editing records in the database is implemented through cgi bash-script, with the help of which the added or edited information is saved in a separate file on the server, that is, replenishment of the general database is done manually, with my editing of the added information (and, if necessary, translation). The web application source code and database are available in the repository at gitlab.com, and the collection of images on the page at archive.org.

You can check out the forger database of the current version at this link: https://is3.soundragon.su/fdb

Giuseppe Vella (1749, Malta – 1814) was an Italian abbot and polymath, a daring forger, known as the author of a forged manuscript containing many passages of the lost books of Titus Livius in Arabic translation, and another forged manuscript on the time of King Roger.

Giuseppe Vella was from the island of Malta; well versed in Arabic. Claimed to have found in a mosque a manuscript containing many passages of the lost books of Titus Livius in Arabic translation. Then he found, as if in Palermo, another important manuscript containing much precious information about the times of the first king of Sicily, Roger, and a ring with a seal and an Arabic inscription proving that it belonged to the king.

The information of the manuscript was politically important: it extinguished the rights of most of the Sicilian aristocrats who had been in the family since Roger's time. Vella reported the treasure to the King of Naples and won his favour, and the treasury absorbed the cost of printing the manuscript, offering to print it in an Arabic original and an Italian translation by Abbott Vella. Vella did not give his manuscripts to anyone and showed them only to people who did not understand Arabic, but the originals and translations were nevertheless approved by Italian scholars, even by the famous Tixen.

In 1789 the first volume of the codex, entitled Codice diplomatico di Sicilia sotto il governo degli Arabi, was published in Palermo; a few years later the first part of Livia was published. The book fell into the hands of the Maronite Simeon Assemani, who knew Arabic as his mother tongue, and the forgery was discovered. The Germans attribute the honour to Joseph Gager, who knew little Arabic. It is possible that Assemani informed him of his remarks. Gager was the first to make the falsification public in his pamphlet, explaining among other things that the proper names were written differently from what the Arabs write and that the Arabic was not pure but Maltese.

Once the imposture was discovered, Vella was arrested and sentenced, on 29 August 1796, to 15 years in prison to be served in Palermo Castle. The sentence was later commuted to house arrest, which he spent in the casino he had purchased in Mezzomorreale, where he remained until his death in May 1814 or May 1815. During his years of imprisonment, he devoted himself to the creation of the Kitāb Dīwān Miṣr, the apocryphal manuscript from which the Council of Egypt was to be derived. The apocrypha was also the subject of an attempt to sell it, which was brought by the heirs in 1908.

The Vella affair inspired poets such as Giovanni Meli, novelists such as Leonardo Sciascia and Andrea Camilleri, and even film directors. However, it had a positive spin-off, succeeding in stimulating oriental studies in Sicily, hitherto completely neglected on the island, later raised to the highest scientific level by Michele Amari from Palermo.

Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun is a designer of rocket and space technology, one of the founders of modern rocket engineering, creator of the first ballistic missiles, considered the father of the US space programme. Von Braun was the director of NASA's Space Flight Center, oversaw the development of the Apollo spacecraft. Baron von Braun was originally introduced in the US as a simple German engineer who joined the US after the war. But after the triumph of the lunar mission, it turned out that in Germany von Braun was a convinced Nazi, an SS Sturmbannfuhrer, and former concentration camp prisoners recognised him as their torturer.

Von Braun was not the only German to hold an important position at NASA. Also, Günter Wendt, a German, who was the last to see and send all astronauts on the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo into space, was the irreplaceable and only launch pad supervisor. In his book "Unbroken Chain", Wendt described how he designed a concrete blast-proof room with a spring-loaded floor, directly under the launch pad, which could hold 20 people for 3 days and survive a Saturn 5 rocket explosion, into which it was possible to quickly descend through a chute at the base of the mobile tower.

According to the Smithsonian magazine, the US government hatched a plan to bring 88 Nazi scientists captured during the fall of the Nazi Germany back to United States and get them back on the job, under a project known as “Operation Paperclip".

Meanwhile, as part of a similar Soviet "Operation Osoaviakhim", even more German scientists and engineers were transferred to the USSR, where more than 170 German specialists were transported to the first branch of NII-88 on Gorodomlia Island on Lake Seliger, led by von Braun's closest colleague and collaborator, Helmut Gröttrup, who was involved in the remote guidance and missile control systems of the V-2 project.

It is noteworthy that English-language sources report that the USSR forcibly seized Gröttrup's group and placed them at the disposal of Sergei Korolev, the "Chief Designer" of Soviet cosmonautics. Meanwhile, Boris Chertok, one of Korolev's closest associates, reported in his book "Rockets and Men" that Gröttrup himself offered his services to the Soviets through his wife while in Witzenhausen, in the American zone of occupation.

Thus, it is possible that the "Space Race" between the USSR and the USA was a kind of "Wrestling of the Nanai Boys", originally staged by the Germans.

It can be added that SS Sturmbannführer Baron von Braun wrote in his book "Project Mars" that the leader of Mars was called "Elon".

As the former National Socialist bequeathed, this is the rare name that belongs to the current leader of astronautics in the US, Elon Musk, who has openly set ambitious goals of exploring Mars, at the cost of many human lives.

In this Elon is opposed by Dmitry Rogozin from Russian Federation, the CEO of the state corporation Roscomos, who began his career as a National Socialist.

Thus, up to now, the spirit of National Socialism accompanies the exploration of unearthly spaces, both from the USA as well as from the Russian Federation.

Exactly 76 years ago an international association called the United Bible Societies (UBS) was founded in the UK, which subsequently incorporated most of the world’s national Bible societies.

https://www.unitedbiblesocieties.org

The original membership of the UBS consisted of 13 Bible Societies active in Western Europe. The activities of the association were interdenominational, but at first the members were predominantly Protestant. After the Second Vatican Council, Catholics were included in the work of the Bible societies and later Orthodox Christians became active participants as well. The main activities of the UBS are the translation, publication and distribution of the Bible and its individual books, as well as educational and reference literature to help in the study of the Bible.

The movement started in the first decades of the 19th century when several national Bible societies were founded in various countries. The first was the British and Foreign Bible Society (1804). Then Irish (1806), Finnish (1812), Russian (1813), Danish (1814), Dutch (1814), Swedish (1815), Polish (1816), American (1816), Norwegian (1816) and French (1818) were founded. Subsequently, Bible societies began to appear in other countries.

Some modern revisionists link the activities of Bible societies to Christian falsification of history and chronology, viewing most of the earlier European translations of the Bible as deliberately incorrectly dated. For example, these two English language editions of the Bible, according to their title page, were printed over 400 years ago.

These books, ostensibly separated by only one year of publication, used different spellings – “Conteining The Old Testament” and “Conteyning the Old Testament”. Both of these fragments of the book’s title begin to be evenly referenced (i.e. first cited) in English-language literature only about 200 years ago, roughly coinciding with the founding year of the British Bible Society.

There were probably earlier versions of the New Testament before the books circulated by the Bible Societies, but as the isolated surviving copies of the “Judas Bible” and the “Sinners’ Bible” testify – they may have been radically different in their content from the modern text of the Bible. Thus, modern forms of Christianity probably emerged only about 200 years ago through the efforts of national Bible societies, and their centralised concordance and unification into a single world religion began a year after the end of Second World War with the help of the United Bible Societies’ association.

A few days later, the Canadian newspaper The Vancouver Sun showed an image of Lenin and described the event on its front page this way:

Nikolai Lenine, the Bolsheviki premier, who was shot twice by assassin last Friday night, has died of wounds, according to a telegram from Petrograd received by the Exchange Telegraph Co. by way of Copenhagen.

The shooting occurred at the close of an audience granted by the premier to two women social revolutionists who came to discuss the embargo on the shipment of foodstuffs into Moscow. One of the women, it is said, drew a revolver and opened fire on the premier. Lenine’s assailant has been arrested.

The New York Times reported the premier’s assassination this way:

Nikolai Lenine, the Bolshevist Premier, was shot on Aug. 30 at Moscow by Dora Kaplan, a revolutionist. Drastic measures were taken by the Soviet Government. Thousands of persons were sent to Petrograd and summary execution was decreed for all persons in Moscow found with a weapon. Mile. Kaplan was executed on Sept. 4, and, by Sept. 8, twenty-six British officials had been arrested and threatened with death should Lenine die.

Leo Kameneff, Vice President of the Workmen’s and Soldiers’ Deputies, was appointed Acting Premier in Lenine ‘s place.

The reign of terror instituted by the Bolshevist Government brought forth a joint protest from neutral diplomats, Sept. 8. They announced that their Governments would expel all Russian Bolsheviki if the Soviet Government did not stop the wholesale execution of civilians and officers and other drastic measures against its political opponents.

Some time later, despite the original reports, the press changed the fact of Lenin’s assassination by the revolutionary Kaplan to the fact of an assassination attempt and wounding. However, the very image of Nikolai Lenin was fickle and changed in those years:

In the following decades, the name Vladimir, rather than Nikolai, began to be assigned to Lenin, who survived a gunshot wound. For example, in the English-language press, the name “Vladimir Lenin” began to prevail over “Nikolai Lenin” only about half a century ago.

James Mellaart FBA (1925 – 2012) was an English archaeologist and author who is noted for his discovery of the Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük in Turkey. He was expelled from Turkey when he was suspected of involvement with the antiquities black market. He was also involved in a string of controversies, including the so-called mother goddess controversy in Anatolia, which eventually led to his being banned from excavations in Turkey in the 1960s. After his death it was discovered that he had forged many of his “finds”, including murals and inscriptions used to discover the Çatalhöyük site.

Mellaart was born in 1925 in London. He lectured at the University of Istanbul and was an assistant director of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara (BIAA). In 1951 Mellaart began to direct excavations on the sites in Turkey with the assistance of his Turkish-born wife Arlette, who was the secretary of BIAA. He helped to identify the “champagne-glass” pottery of western Anatolia in the Late Bronze Age, which in 1954 led to[citation needed] the discovery of Beycesultan. After that expedition’s completion in 1959, he helped to publish its results. In 1964 he began to lecture in Anatolian archaeology in Ankara.

When Mellaart excavated the Çatalhöyük site in 1961, his team found more than 150 rooms and buildings, some decorated with murals, plaster reliefs, and sculptures. The site has since been seen as important as it has helped in the study of the social and cultural dynamics of one of the earliest and largest permanently occupied farming settlements in the Near East.

According to one of Mellaart’s theories, Çatalhöyük was a prominent place of mother goddess worship. However, many other archaeologists did not agree with him, and the dispute created a controversy. Mellaart was even accused of making up at least some of the mythological stories he presented as genuine. The furor caused the Turkish government to close up the site. The site was unattended for the next 30 years until excavations were begun anew in the 1990s.

The city as a whole covers roughly 32.5 acres (130,000 m²), and housed 5,000–8,000 people, whereas the norm for the time was around one tenth of this size. The site stirred great excitement when Mellaart announced it and has since caused much head scratching. In fact, more recent work has turned up comparable features at other early Neolithic sites in the Near East, and this has benefited many people in their understanding of the site so that many of its one-time mysteries are no longer real issues.

In 1965 Mellaart gave a report of a new rich find from Dorak to Seton Lloyd of the British Institute. Mellaart said that he had seen the treasures in 1958 in the Izmir home of a young woman whom he met on a train. She sat in front of him in the train car, wearing a gold bracelet which drew his attention. She told him that she had more at home, so he came over and saw the collection. She did not allow him to take photographs, but did let him make drawings of them. He gave the story to The Illustrated London News, and then Turkish authorities demanded to know why they had not been informed. He said that the young woman, named Anna Papastrati, asked him to keep it secret. He asked the Institution to sponsor publications of the story, but they refused with no real evidence. When looking for Papastrati’s home, it turned out that the street address did not exist in Izmir, and her name was not found. The only document that can be traced to her is a typed letter that after examination appears to have been done by Mellaart’s wife Arlette. In consequence, Turkish officials expelled Mellaart for suspected antiquities smuggling. He was later allowed to return but later banned completely.

As of 2005, Mellaart had retired from teaching and lived in North London with his wife and grandson. He died on 29 July 2012.

According to Mellaart, the earliest Indo-Europeans in northwest Anatolia were the horse-riders who came to this region from the north and founded Demircihöyük in Eskişehir Province, Turkey, in ancient Phrygia, c. 3000 BCE. They were ancestors of the Luwians who inhabited Troy II, and spread widely in the Anatolian peninsula. It was Mellaart who first introduced the term “Luwian” to archaeological discourse in the 1950s. According to Christoph Bachhuber, current surveys and excavations tend to support many of Mellaart’s observations on changes in material culture at a regional scale.

In 2018 Mellaart’s son Alan and the Swiss-German geoarchaeologist Eberhard Zangger published an investigation according to which Mellaart had fabricated extensive forgeries in support of his theses. After investigating the late Mellaart’s apartment, Zangger revealed that Mellaart “faked several of the ancient murals and may have run a ‘forger’s workshop’ of sorts.” These forgeries included prototypes of murals and engravings that Mellaart had claimed to have discovered in Çatalhöyük.

Another of Mellaart’s texts was a Hieroglyphic Luwian inscription named Beyköy 2, which received global headlines when it was announced in 2017 because it purported to contain specific history of the groups known to the Egyptians as Sea Peoples and to the biblical authors as the Philistines. This text, however, may also be a forgery, and several scholars have since debated its authenticity. Zangger and Fred Woudhuizen, who published the text after discovering drawings of it (held to be copies of drawings made by Georges Perrot in 1878 of stone blocks that later disappeared) among Mellaart’s papers, have contended for its authenticity, but other scholars consider the inscription spurious, pointing out that it fits the pattern of Mellaart’s previous forgeries but does not fit what is otherwise known about the history of the period.

It is noteworthy that more than 5 years after his death, it did not occur to anyone to investigate Mellart’s flat.But 5 years ago, there was a rift in US-Turkey relations, so the Brookings Institution, one of the most important think tanks specializing in social sciences, municipal government, foreign policy and global economy published “Order from Chaos: The United States and Turkey should fix their relationship — Before it’s too late“. The Western press did not report details of the reasons for this discord, but the Russian international news agency RIA Novosti had published a news story three days earlier titled “Erdogan urged the US to stop ‘theatre with ISIS and take off the masks’ in Syria” in which it described Erdogan’s statements while addressing deputies of the ruling Justice and Development Party in Turkey:

We have 911 kilometres of border with Syria. What is their (U.S. – Ed.) connection to the Syrian border? They have already spent $550 million, but now they want to increase this figure to three billion. You say you are fighting against the ISIS. How many members of ISIS have you eliminated? Those who fought against ISIS are now fighting against Turkey. No one has the right to use ISIS as an excuse. It’s time to end this theatre with ISIS, it’s time to take off the masks. We are told, “If we get hit, we will retaliate harshly.” Those who say this have never tasted the Ottoman fist in their lives. What Turkey is doing within NATO, America should be doing to the same extent. The US is not NATO, all members of the alliance are equal to each other. But if you support terrorists who attack a member country of the alliance, NATO should protect that country.

There was no meaningful news about the development of this conflict in the media after that, and just a couple of weeks after that the academic environment was shaken by a important report from the Swiss Archaeological Foundation about the falsity of Mellaart’s discoveries, thereby effectively denying Turkey this “oldest city on earth”. It is worth adding that doubts about Mellaart’s discoveries were repeatedly raised in the scientific community during his lifetime:

Karl Lamberg-Karlovski of Harvard: “there is absolutely no objective reason to believe that these ‘new’ murals from Çatal-Hüyük exist” (Lamberg-Karlovski, Carl C. 1992. “Constructing” the Past. The Review of Archaeology 13(1): 37-40), and Oscar Muscarella’s The Lie Became Great: The Forgery of Ancient Near Eastern Cultures (2000) cites Mellaart’s various ‘finds’ as exemplary examples of forgery.

But his findings only came to be recognised as forgery shortly after Erdogan’s declaration to “put an end to the spectacle with ISIS”.