Was America Discovered by the Chinese 70 years Before Columbus?

A  British historian says the Chinese came ahead of Columbus.

From the DailyMail.co.uk (hat tip Lew Rockwell)

-Gavin Menzies, a British historian, claims Chiense Admiral Zheng He set up colonies and sailed round South America before Columbus

-Menzies' new book, 'Who Discovered America?' also claims the Chinese have been sailing to the New World since 40,000 BC across the Pacific Ocean

-His theories are not widely accepted by academia and he has been labeled a 'pseudo-historian'

A copy of a 600-year-old map found in a second-hand book shop is the key to proving that the Chinese, not Christopher Columbus, were the first to discover the New World, a controversial British historian claims.

The document is purportedly an 18th century copy of a 1418 map charted by Chinese Admiral Zheng He, which appears to show the New World in some detail.

This purported evidence that a Chinese sailor mapped the Western Hemisphere more than seven decades before Columbus is just one of Earth-shattering claims that author Gavin Menzies makes in his new book ‘Who Discovered America?’ - out today, just in time for the Columbus Day holiday.

‘The traditional story of Columbus discovering the New World is absolute fantasy, it’s fairy tales,’ Mr Menzies told MailOnline.

Among Menzies other claims are that the first inhabitants of the Western hemisphere didn’t come over land from the Bering Strait, but instead were Chinese sailors who first crossed the Pacific Ocean 40,000 years ago.

He also writes that DNA markers prove American Indians and other natives are the descendants of several waves of Asian settlers.

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Given the recent string of controversial territorial dispute events such as Senkaku, Kashmir, Scarborough Shoals, Spratly’s Islands (Wikipedia has a list here), will this prompt the Chinese government to make a claim on the US?

Thomas DiLorenzo: The Real Lincoln in His Own Words

At the LewRockwell.com, Austrian economist and author Thomas DiLorenzo exposes on the popular myths about former US president Abraham Lincoln

After writing two books and dozens of articles, and giving hundreds of radio and television interviews and public presentations on the subject of Lincoln and the political economy of the American "Civil War"over the past fifteen years, I have realized that the only thing the average American knows about the subject is a few slogans that we are all subjected to in elementary school. I was taught in public elementary school in Pennsylvania that Abe was so honest that he once walked six miles to return a penny to a merchant who undercharged him (and six miles back home). He was supposedly so tendered hearted that he cried after witnessing the death of a turkey. He suffered in silence his entire life after witnessing slavery as a teenager (While everyone else in the country was screaming over the issue). And of course he was "a champion of democracy, an apostle of racial equality, and a paragon of social justice," Joseph Fallon writes in his important new, must-read book, Lincoln Uncensored.

This view of Lincoln, writes Fallon, is only true "in official histories or in Hollywood movies" but not in reality. The reason for this historical disconnect is that "this myth of Lincoln, not the Constitution . . . now confers legitimacy on the political system of the United States." Despite being mostly a bundle of lies, it is nevertheless the ideological cornerstone of statism in America and has been for nearly 150 years.

The real Lincoln was a dictator and a tyrant who shredded the Constitution, fiendishly orchestrated the mass murder of hundreds of thousands of fellow citizens, and did it all for the economic benefit of the special interests who funded the Republican Party (and his own political career). But don’t take Joseph Fallon’s or Thomas DiLorenzo’s word for it. Read the words of Abe Lincoln himself. That is what Fallon allows everyone to do in his great work of scholarship, Lincoln Uncensored. No longer do Americans need to rely on politically-correct, heavily state-censored textbooks or movies made by communistic-minded Hollywood hedonists to learn about this part of their own country’s history.

Each of the twenty-three chaptes of Lincoln Uncensored explains the real Lincoln in Lincoln’s own words by quoting him directly from The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (CW), complete with specific citations for every single quotation. The following is an abbreviated sampling of what you will learn upon readingLincoln Uncensored.

LINCOLN WAS AN OBSESSIVE WHITE SUPREMACIST

"Free them [blacks] and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this . . . . We can not then make them equals." (CW, Vol. II, p. 256).

"There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people, to the idea of an indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races" (CW, Vol. II, p. 405).

"What I would most desire would be the separation of the white and black races" (CW, Vol. II, p. 521).

"I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races . . . . I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong, having the superior position. I have never said anything to the contrary." (CW, Vol. III, p. 16).

"I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races . . . . I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people . . ." (CW, Vol, III, pp. 145-146).

"I will to the very last stand by the law of this state, which forbids the marrying of white people with negroes." (CW, Vol. III, p. 146).

"Senator Douglas remarked . . that . . . this government was made for the white people and not for negroes. Why, in point of mere fact, I think so too." (CW, Vol. II, p. 281).

Until His Dying Day, Lincoln Plotted to Deport all the Black People Out of America

"I have said that the separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation . . . . Such separation . . . must be effected by colonization" [to Liberia, Central America, anywhere]. (CW, Vol. II, p. 409).

"Let us be brought to believe it is morally right , and . . . favorable to . . . our interest, to transfer the African to his native clime . . ." (CW, Vol. II, p. 409).

"The place I am thinking about having for a colony [for the deportation of all American blacks] is in Central America. It is nearer to us than Liberia." (CW, Vol. V, pp. 373, 374).

LINCOLN ONLY RHETORICALLY OPPOSED SOUTHERN SLAVERY. IN PRACTICE, HE STRENGTHENED IT

" I think no wise man has perceived, how it [slavery] could be at once eradicated, without producing a greater evil, even to the cause of human liberty himself." (CW, Vol. II, p. 130).

"I meant not to ask for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia." (CW, Vol., II, p. 260).

"I believe there is no right, and ought to be no inclination I the people of the free states to enter into the slave states and interfere with the question of slavery at all." (CW, Vol. II, p. 492).

"I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the States where it exists." (CW, Vol. III, p. 16).

"I say that we must not interfere with the institution of slavery . . . because the constitution forbids it, and the general welfare does not require us to do so." (CW, Vol. III, p. 460).

LINCOLN CHAMPIONED THE FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT

"I do not now, nor ever did, stand in favor of the unconditional repeal of the fugitive slave law." (CW, Vol., III., p. 40).

"[T]he people of the Southern states are entitled to a Congressional Fugitive Slave Law." (CW, Vol. III, p. 41).

Lincoln Advocated Secession When it Could Advance His Political Career

"Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better." (CW, Vol. 1, p. 438).

LINCOLN VIEWED FORT SUMTER AS AN IMPORTANT TAX COLLECTION POINT AND WENT TO WAR OVER IT

"I think we should hold the forts, or retake them, as the case may be, and collect the revenue." (CW, Vol. IV, p. 164).

Read the rest here

Much of what we have learned from the mainstream, like undue hero worshiping or attributing "greatness" to leaders or presidents, who presided over war/s, turn out to be mostly propaganda from statists.

The Untold Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis

Popular accounts of major historical events have mostly been inaccurate as they have either been incomplete or have been twisted to suit the biases of the author (for whatever purposes).

Historian Eric Margolis narrates of untold story of the Cuban Missile Crisis where covert horse trading between the governments of the US and the USSR led to its resolution thereby averting a nuclear holocaust.

Writes Mr. Margolis at the LewRockwell.com 

HAVANA – The black, sinister-looking Soviet SS-4 intermediate-ranged missile on display at Havana’s La Cabana fortress looks old, roughly finished, and rather primitive.

But this missile, and 41 others (including some longer-ranged SS-5’s) terrified the United States during the October 1962 missile crisis – 13 days that shook the world. Each of them could have delivered a one megaton warhead onto America’s East Coast cities, starting with Washington DC. One megaton is a city-buster.

When the Cuban missile crisis erupted 50 years ago this month, I was a student at Washington’s Georgetown University Foreign Service School. Cuba was headline news. The Cold War was at its peak.

A CIA-operation to invade Cuba and overthrow Fidel Castro’s Marxist government had spectacularly failed at the Bay of Pigs. The new, inexperienced US president, John Kennedy, got cold feet on the last minute and called off vital air cover for an invasion by Cuban exiles. Deprived of air cover, most were killed or captured. Kennedy should have either call off the amphibious operation or provided it air cover.

The Pentagon then urged a full-scale US invasion of Cuba, backed by massive naval and air power. The Kennedy administration wavered.

Soviet Chairman Nikita Khrushchev seized the moment by sneaking 42 medium-ranged missiles and smaller tactical nukes into Cuba, right under the nose of the Americans. He gambled the Soviet nuclear-armed missiles would forestall a US invasion of Cuba, which Moscow intended to use as a base to expand its influence in Latin America.

When US U-2 spy planes finally spotted the Soviet missile bases all hell broke loose.

US forces went to DEFCON 3, then DEFCON 2 – the highest readiness stage before all-out war. Six US army and Marine divisions moved to South Florida and Georgia. Nearly 600 US warplanes were poised to attack.

On 25 Oct. nuclear weapons were loaded onto US B-47 and B-52 bombers. Seventy five percent of the Strategic Air Command’s bombers were airborne or poised to attack the USSR. Curiously, the Soviets did not go to maximum readiness.

In an act of madness, Fidel Castro furiously demanded Khrushchev launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the US. Decades later, Castro admitted this was a terrible mistake. Fortunately, the Soviet leadership said "nyet!" A nuclear exchange in 1962 between the US and USSR would have killed an estimated 100 million people on each side.

As Soviet freighters steamed towards Cuba, the Kennedy White House imposed a naval and air blockade on Cuba. But it was called a "quarantine" since under international law, a blockade is an act of war. Today, in Washington’s undeclared war against Iran, the favored term is "sanctions."

Read the rest here