Distorted History

 It struck me recently how little we understand the past. I was reading an article titled The Great Horse Manure Crisis of 1894 and it begins as follows:

By the late 1800s, large cities all around the world were “drowning in horse manure”. In order for these cities to function, they were dependent on thousands of horses for the transport of both people and goods.

In 1900, there were over 11,000 hansom cabs on the streets of London alone. There were also several thousand horse-drawn buses, each needing 12 horses per day, making a staggering total of over 50,000 horses transporting people around the city each day.

To add to this, there were yet more horse-drawn carts and drays delivering goods around what was then the largest city in the world.

This huge number of horses created major problems. The main concern was the large amount of manure left behind on the streets. On average a horse will produce between 15 and 35 pounds of manure per day, so you can imagine the sheer scale of the problem. The manure on London’s streets also attracted huge numbers of flies which then spread typhoid fever and other diseases.

Of course, you never get a sense of that in movies set in that period, probably because the directors are not aware that there was such a problem but even if they were it would be difficult to recreate and would only distract from the plot anyway. There's a tendency to imagine that the not too distant past was not all that different from the present time and differed largely only in respect of certain technological innovations being missing. 

Even more recently, beginning in the 1940s, whole neighborhoods were doused in DDT as this video shows and this article explains. To quote from the article:

Shocking 1940s video shows how US children were sprayed with dangerous pesticide as neighbourhoods were gassed with the 'miracle cure' that could kill mosquitoes and end Polio ... DDT became prevalent in the United States from around 1943 onwards as many viewed it as a miracle cure for polio. An astonishing 1.34 billion tonnes of the chemical was sprayed across the United States in the years between 1946 and 1962. Its impact on the environment was significant, making its way into the food supply and being reported to cause neurological problems in livestock such as cows. While the effects on people are more widely debated, there are still reports of significant health issues being caused as a result of exposure to DDT. The Pesticide Action Network (PAN) of North America states: 'Studies show a range of human health effects linked to DDT and its breakdown product, DDE including, breast and other cancers, male infertility, miscarriages and low birth weight, developmental delay and nervous system and liver damage.' DDT was used well into the 1950s. After a review the U.S. government moved to ban its use in 1972.

I was a child in the 1950s and fortunately, as far as I can remember, DDT wasn't sprayed about in Brisbane Australia but it clearly was in the United States and probably other countries. The irony is that DDT can cause polio-like symptoms as explained in the book The Moth in the Iron Lung: A Biography of Polio. Without proper historical knowledge, an understanding of the rise and fall of the polio epidemic in the 20th century is impossible. The same is true of the Spanish Flu that followed in the aftermath of the Great War.

The narrative being pushed by the media and the medical mafia is that modern medicine has triumphed and continues to triumph over the onslaught of dangerous pathogens. The reality is vastly different of course and the examples of polio and the Spanish flu are a reminder of this.

Vaccines and the Spanish Flu

I watched a BitChute video today titled THE TRUTH REGARDING THE 1918 SPANISH FLU AND THE LINK TO TODAY. The hypothesis is that the Spanish Flu was really caused by a faulty meningococcal vaccine, produced by the Rockefeller Foundation and administered to US troops embarking for the Western Front. The fact that the Reuters Fact Check team were quick to jumpt on it enhances its credibility.

Figure 1

In investigating the matter further, I came across this article that suggests the hypothesis is plausible:

World War I (1914-1918) occurred at a key transition period in the history of medicine, a time when there was a gap “between knowledge and effective action,” according to a paper published last week in the journal Lancet.

Although many physicians at the start of the war still clung to the old idea that infectious diseases were caused by “bad” air and unpleasant smells (miasma), a growing number — including William Gorgas, who served as surgeon general of the U.S. Army Surgeon General during the war — had come to accept that microorganisms were really the source of such illnesses, writes Dr. G. Dennis Shanks, an infectious-disease epidemiologist at the Australian Army Malaria Institute.

Yet although Gorgas and others knew, at least rudimentarily, what caused diseases like typhoid, tetanus and tuberculosis, their understanding was of limited use, Shanks points out. Antibiotics had not yet been developed, and vaccines were mostly crudely brewed mixtures of killed bacteria. As a result, military doctors had few effective tools on hand to fight any kind of infection.

“Controlled clinical trials had yet to be devised,” says Shanks. “Treatment was by trial and error or dictated by authority.”

Still, he adds, “medical science was progressing, and got drawn into the maelstrom of World War I. Medical laboratories … were deployed with the armies. Top research physicians joined the war as uniformed specialist consultants. … New drugs and vaccines were tried in abundance and reported with remarkable rapidity in medical journals. Some of the interventions worked and became part of the medical armamentarium; others did not and were eventually superseded.”

Another article from FIAR News gives a fair and balanced account of the hypothesis. It is well worth reading in full. To quote from it:

... the emerging evidence supports postulations that the 1918 pandemic was caused by a misguided – and very experimental – Rockefeller Institute meningitis vaccination program which was initiated at Fort Riley by the US military and spread to the world from there. This essay will attempt to briefly document the evidence that is available so far. There will, of course, be many objections to the content of this essay, not only from the ideologues and trolls but from those in high places with vital body organs requiring protection.

I've written about the Spanish Flu before in a post titled Aspirin and the Spanish Flu on October 24th 2019. In that post, I quote from John Hamer's book The Falsification of History:

The 20 to 50 million deaths during 1918 have long been attributed to a virulent new virus but the NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) has now clearly stated that common upper respiratory bacteria was responsible, not a new virus.  There was no new deadly virus but there was something new in 1918 and that was toxic aspirin, being used in totally inappropriate, dangerous dosages.  

“... just before the 1918 death spike, aspirin was recommended in regimens now known to be potentially toxic and to cause pulmonary oedema and may therefore have contributed to overall pandemic mortality and several of its mysteries. Young adult mortality may be explained by willingness to use the new, recommended therapy and the presence of youth in regimented treatment settings (military)” stated Dr. Karen Starko.  

Use of Bayer aspirin and other generic aspirin suppressed immunity, allowing the bacteria to develop into a massive bacterial infections and pneumonias.  In addition to the deaths by pneumonia, the use of Bayer aspirin (and generic versions) at toxic doses can explain the lingering mysteries of extremely rapid deterioration from health to death as well as the death of young, apparently otherwise healthy people.  Bayer's heavy advertising and government and medical recommendations fuelled use of both Bayer aspirin and generic versions.  

Based on the primary role that aspirin played in the millions of 1918 deaths versus the survival of those who avoided it in favour of natural treatments, it would suggest that 1918 was not a plague caused by a virus, but a pharmaceutical industry issue.  And given the scale of the deaths, it was without question, the greatest medical catastrophe in human history, exceeding even the ‘Great Plague’ of the Dark and Middle Ages.

The two explanations are not necessarily mutually exclusive. It's possible they both contributed to the staggering death toll. What's clear is that a flu was not the cause of the deaths and that medical mistakes most likely were the culprit.

Aspirin and the Spanish Flu

" ... the fact that he was spending day after day in bed 

being dosed with aspirin did nothing to improve his strength."

I came across this when reading Humphrey Carpenter's biography of J.R.R. Tolkien and was reminded of a connection that I'd read about concerning aspirin and the Spanish Flu that broke out at the end of the First World War. The quote above relates to Tolkien's recuperation in hospital from so-called trench fever contracted during his stint in the trenches at the Somme.

You'd be hard pressed to find too many people who could make a connection between aspirin and the Spanish Flu and that's why it stuck in my head. I came across the idea in a book by John Hamer titled OUR DISTORTED REALITY.

Here is part of what he had to say about the role of aspirin:

The 20 to 50 million deaths during 1918 have long been attributed to a virulent new virus but the NIAID (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) has now clearly stated that common upper respiratory bacteria was responsible, not a new virus.  There was no new deadly virus but there was something new in 1918 and that was toxic aspirin, being used in totally inappropriate, dangerous dosages. 

“... just before the 1918 death spike, aspirin was recommended in regimens now known to be potentially toxic and to cause pulmonary oedema and may therefore have contributed to overall pandemic mortality and several of its mysteries. Young adult mortality may be explained by willingness to use the new, recommended therapy and the presence of youth in regimented treatment settings (military)” stated Dr. Karen Starko. 

Use of Bayer aspirin and other generic aspirin suppressed immunity, allowing the bacteria to develop into a massive bacterial infections and pneumonias.  In addition to the deaths by pneumonia, the use of Bayer aspirin (and generic versions) at toxic doses can explain the lingering mysteries of extremely rapid deterioration from health to death as well as the death of young, apparently otherwise healthy people.  Bayer's heavy advertising and government and medical recommendations fuelled use of both Bayer aspirin and generic versions. 

Based on the primary role that aspirin played in the millions of 1918 deaths versus the survival of those who avoided it in favour of natural treatments, it would suggest that 1918 was not a plague caused by a virus, but a pharmaceutical industry issue.  And given the scale of the deaths, it was without question, the greatest medical catastrophe in human history, exceeding even the ‘Great Plague’ of the Dark and Middle Ages.

Here is a New York Times article that discusses Dr. Karen Starko's findings:

A nurse took a patient's pulse in the influenza ward at Walter Reed Hospital in 1918. CreditCorbis

In 1918 Pandemic, Another Possible Killer: Aspirin

By NICHOLAS BAKALAR OCT. 12, 2009

The 1918 flu epidemic was probably the deadliest plague in human history, killing more than 50 million people worldwide. Now it appears that a small number of the deaths may have been caused not by the virus, but by a drug used to treat it: aspirin. 

Dr. Karen M. Starko, author of one of the earliest papers connecting aspirin use with Reye’s syndrome, has published an article suggesting that overdoses of the relatively new “wonder drug” could have been deadly. 

What raised Dr. Starko’s suspicions is that high doses of aspirin, amounts considered unsafe today, were commonly used to treat the illness, and the symptoms of aspirin overdose may have been difficult to distinguish from those of the flu, especially among those who died soon after they became ill. 

Some doubts were raised even at the time. At least one contemporary pathologist working for the Public Health Service thought that the amount of lung damage seen during autopsies in early deaths was too little to attribute to viral pneumonia, and that the large amounts of bloody, watery liquid in the lungs must have had some other cause. 

Dr. Starko acknowledged that she did not have autopsy reports or other documents that could prove that aspirin was the problem. “There was a lot of chaos in these places,” she said, “and I’m not sure if there are good records anywhere.” 

But of the many factors that might have influenced the outcome in any particular case, Dr. Starko wrote, aspirin overdose stands out for several reasons, including a confluence of historical events. 

In February 1917, Bayer lost its American patent on aspirin, opening a lucrative drug market to many manufacturers. Bayer fought back with copious advertising, celebrating the brand’s purity just as the epidemic was reaching its peak. 

Aspirin packages were produced containing no warnings about toxicity and few instructions about use. In the fall of 1918, facing a widespread deadly disease with no known cure, the surgeon general and the United States Navy recommended aspirin as a symptomatic treatment, and the military bought large quantities of the drug. 

The Journal of the American Medical Association suggested a dose of 1,000 milligrams every three hours, the equivalent of almost 25 standard 325-milligram aspirin tablets in 24 hours. This is about twice the daily dosage generally considered safe today. 

Dr. Starko’s paper, published in the Nov. 1 issue of Clinical Infectious Diseases, has stirred some interest, if not enthusiastic endorsement, among other experts.

“I think the paper is creative and asking good questions,” said John M. Barry, author of a book on the 1918 flu titled “The Great Influenza.” “But we don’t know how many people actually took the doses of aspirin discussed in the article.” 

The pharmacology of aspirin is complex and was not fully understood until the 1960s, but dosage is crucial. Doubling the dose given at six-hour intervals can cause a 400 percent increase in the amount of the medicine that remains in the body. Even quite low daily doses — six to nine standard aspirin pills a day for several days — can lead to dangerously high blood levels of the drug in some people. 

Peter A. Chyka, a professor of pharmacy at the University of Tennessee, said he found Dr. Starko’s theory “intriguing.” Little was known about safe dosages at the time, he said, and doctors often simply raised the amount until they saw signs of toxicity. 

“In the context of what we know today about aspirin and aspirin-like products, Starko has made an interesting effort to put this together,” Dr. Chyka said. “There are things other than flu that can complicate a disease like this.” 

Although he doubted that more than a small number of deaths could be attributed to aspirin overdose, Dr. David M. Morens, an epidemiologist with the National Institutes of Health, said the paper was valuable in that “it makes an attempt to look at environmental or host factors that may be involved.” He said, “We haven’t been able to explain all the deaths in young adults with the virus itself.” 

Dr. Starko was hesitant to estimate how many deaths aspirin overdose could have caused, but suggested that military archives might be one place to look. “I’m hoping others will follow up,” she said, “by examining available treatment records.” 

Of course, it's emphasised that only a small number of deaths could have been caused by aspirin overdose but, as is admitted, nobody really knows how many. Once the possibility of aspirin being a factor in the death toll is admitted, the supposition that its effect was minimal is unscientific. One can equally assert that it had a major effect. Only more research can resolve the issue. 

Of course, this news has done little to affect the official narrative that a deadly influenza virus came out of nowhere and killed millions of people, many of them in their prime. The pharmaceutical industry thrives on the fear that another such virus may emerge at any time and sweep most of humanity away. Therefore, don't forget your annual flu shot!

Getting back to Tolkien, he did have a couple of further hospitalisations and never returned to the trenches. As his long suffering wife Edith sarcastically wrote in a letter to him:

‘I should think you ought never to feel tired again,’ Edith wrote, ‘for the amount of Bed you have had since you came back from France nearly two years ago is enormous.’

Whether he was taking aspirin during his time between hospital interludes is unknown but it is probable that he was because it was widely available. What Hamer has done in respect to the Spanish Flu is to introduce an element of doubt into the official narrative. He hasn't done this by making any wild claims but instead has used the findings of medical professionals.

Other Losses

This film is narrated by the author of the book of the same name and to quote from Wikipedia: 

In Other Losses (1989), Bacque claimed that Allied Supreme Commander Dwight Eisenhower's policies caused the death of 790,000 German captives in internment camps through disease, starvation and cold from 1944 to 1949. In similar French camps some 250,000 more are said to have perished. The International Committee of the Red Cross was refused entry to the camps, Switzerland was deprived of its status as "protecting power" and POWs were reclassified as "Disarmed Enemy Forces" in order to avoid recognition under the Geneva Convention. Bacque argued that this alleged mass murder was a direct result of the policies of the western Allies, who, with the Soviets, ruled as the Military Occupation Government over partitioned Germany from May 1945 until 1949. He laid the blame on Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, saying Germans were kept on starvation rations even though there was enough food in the world to avert the lethal shortage in Germany in 1945–1946.

It's a disturbing but absorbing film and illustrates yet again how history is written by the victors. I was somewhat aware that there was a dark side to the allied occupation of Germany because of a book I'd downloaded but not yet read.

I'm motivated to read this book now after having seen this film. I also managed to download a PDF copy of Bacque's "Other Losses" at this location and have added it to my library. Subsequently, I was able to download a Kindle version from The Internet Archive where it's available in PDF, ePub, Plain Text, DAISY and Kindle formats. Even though the software program Calibre, that I use to organise my e-library, will convert from PDF to Kindle, I've encountered problems in the past with the conversion so it's always better to have a firsthand Kindle version.

It's been a long time since I accessed The Internet Archive which is accessible without signing up but I signed up which allows me to upload content if I want to. As is described on the site:

The Internet Archive, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, the print disabled, and the general public. Our mission is to provide Universal Access to All Knowledge.

We began in 1996 by archiving the Internet itself, a medium that was just beginning to grow in use. Like newspapers, the content published on the web was ephemeral - but unlike newspapers, no one was saving it. Today we have 20+ years of web history accessible through the Wayback Machine and we work with 450+ library and other partners through our Archive-It program to identify important web pages. 

As our web archive grew, so did our commitment to providing digital versions of other published works. Today our archive contains:

• 279 billion web pages
• 11 million books and texts
• 4 million audio recordings (including 160,000 live concerts)
• 3 million videos (including 1 million Television News programs)
• 1 million images
• 100,000 software programs

Anyone with a free account can upload media to the Internet Archive. We work with thousands of partners globally to save copies of their work into special collections.

The site also goes on to mention that books published prior to 1923 are available for download, and hundreds of thousands of modern books can be borrowed through our Open Library site. I not sure why "Other Losses" is downloadable, having been written in 1989. The Open Library site is accessible using the Internet Archive credentials and to test it out I searched for Jung's "Memories, Dreams, Reflections" but to my surprise a book by Marianne Faithfull popped up called "memories, dreams and reflections". It looked interesting so I've borrowed it and have two weeks in which to read it. An encrypted copy in PDF or ePub format can be downloaded but I'll just read it online I think.

Anyway, getting off topic, but it's interesting where Internet investigations can lead. Returning to the theme of history being written by the victors, I must say that I'd heard nothing about any of this unlike a year or so ago. I'd basically thought that, during the closing stages of the war and in its aftermath, the Allies were basically well-behaved in the areas that it took oversaw. I'd formed the impression that the things were definitely worse in the Russian-occupied areas.

Like most people my age, I've endured a lifetime of Hollywood propaganda about the evil Nazis, the psychopathic Adolf Hitler and the horrors of the Holocaust. Now I'm realising that the history of the second world war that I'd once accepted is largely fictional.

The Secret History of Britain

A friend put me onto Stephen Oppenheimer who has an alternative take on the history of British migration and settlement, namely that "everything you know about British and Irish ancestry is wrong. Our ancestors were Basques, not Celts. The Celts were not wiped out by the Anglo-Saxons, in fact neither had much impact on the genetic stock of these islands". Controversial stuff indeed. Wikipedia introduces him as follows:

Stephen Oppenheimer (born 1947) is a British paediatrician, geneticist, and writer. He is a graduate of Green Templeton College, Oxford and an honorary fellow of the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. In addition to his work in medicine and tropical diseases, he has published popular works in the fields of genetics and human prehistory. This latter work has been the subject of a number of television and film projects.

Of interest are the books he has written:

• Eden in the East
• The Real Eve (documentary and US book title) / Out of Eden (UK book title)
• Origins of the British

I've downloaded from this site, a six page PDF file that summarises his views about the origins of the British and have placed it in my e-library. His books are not available in the local library; however, they are available on Amazon. If what he says is true, then it's another example of the falsification of history in which fictions turn into facts. Here is a quote from the PDF file:

Many archaeologists still hold this view of a grand iron-age Celtic culture in the centre of the continent, which shrank to a western rump after Roman times. It is also the basis of a strong sense of ethnic identity that millions of members of the so-called Celtic diaspora hold. But there is absolutely no evidence, linguistic, archaeological or genetic, that identifies the Hallstatt or La Tène regions or cultures as Celtic homelands. The notion derives from a mistake made by the historian Herodotus 2,500 years ago when, in a passing remark about the "Keltoi," he placed them at the source of the Danube, which he thought was near the Pyrenees. Everything else about his description located the Keltoi in the region of Iberia. 

The late 19th-century French historian Marie Henri d'Arbois de Jubainville decided that Herodotus had meant to place the Celtic homeland in southern Germany. His idea has remained in the books ever since, despite a mountain of other evidence that Celts derived from southwestern Europe. For the idea of the south German "Empire of the Celts" to survive as the orthodoxy for so long has required determined misreading of texts by Caesar, Strabo, Livy and others. And the well-recorded Celtic invasions of Italy across the French Alps from the west in the 1st millennium BC have been systematically reinterpreted as coming from Germany, across the Austrian Alps. 

De Jubainville's Celtic myth has been deconstructed in two recent sceptical publications: The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention by Simon James (1999), and The Celts: Origins, Myths and Inventions by John Collis (2003). Nevertheless, the story lingers on in standard texts and notably in The Celts, a Channel 4 documentary broadcast in February. "Celt" is now a term that sceptics consider so corrupted in the archaeological and popular literature that it is worthless. 

I'll keep an eye out for any of his books and they certainly of interest to seekers of truth in history. Here is a YouTube video, divided into two parts, in which Stephen Oppenheimer is talking about the British migration:

Understanding our Past

This is an excellent video in which Graham Hancock expatiates on a number of different topics. I've only come to learn about him recently. The notes to the YouTube video describe him as follows:

Graham Hancock (born 2 August 1950) is a British writer and journalist. Hancock specialises in unconventional theories involving ancient civilisations, stone monuments or megaliths, altered states of consciousness, ancient myths and astronomical/astrological data from the past. One of the main themes running through many of his books is a posited global connection with a "mother culture" from which he believes all ancient historical civilisations sprang.

One crucial point he makes is the importance of thinking for yourself. Don't accept what so-called authorities say about something. Years ago, he began to question the accepted narrative about ancient civilisations and has spent his subsequent years trying to find out the truth about the pyramids, the sphinx and other Egyptian structures. Mainstream historians, in his opinion, misrepresent the ancient past just as they misrepresent the recent past.

Here is the video: