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597 BCE Babylonians captured Jerusalem, replacing Jehoiachin with Zedekiah as king.

37 Death of Tiberius Claudius Nero Caesar (b. 46 BCE), second Roman emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty.

1190 Crusaders started to massacre the Jews of York, England.

1244 France: After a truce (beginning on March 1) in the siege at Montségur, four Cathar defenders escaped from the citadel perched 1,207 metres (3,960 ft) high on the granite outcrop. According to legend, they used ropes to lower themselves down the almost perpendicular slopes of the mountain, carrying with them the Holy Grail. Their fate and destination are now the subject of myth and legend, as any reader of The Da Vinci Code knows.

A few hours later, between 205 and 225 Cathars marched down the southern slopes of the mountain where they were burned to death by the Albigensian Crusaders.

"On the night of March 16, these four men, accompanied by a guide, made a daring escape – again with the knowledge and collusion of the garrison.  With them, they carried some great treasure, but one that they must have done while dangling from ropes on a sheer mountainside.  It is believed that much of the wealth of the Cathars (and/or Templars in the area) had been secretly slipped out of Montsegur during the almost year-long siege.  That is, the gold and jewels and other mundane relics of wealth.  But this last daring escape and carrying off of some great treasure is a bit more interesting.           

"The Cathars, by their contemporaries, were believed to have been in possession of the Holy Grail."   Source

From Wikipedia: Catharism was a Gnostic movement that originated around the middle of the 10th century, branded by the contemporary Roman Catholic Church as heretical. It existed throughout much of Western Europe, but its home was in Languedoc, in southern France. The name Cathar most likely originated from Greek catharos, 'the pure ones'. Another suggested origin was from Latin cattus, for 'cat', which were usually associated with witches and heretics. Most likely this is just a myth initiated by the Roman Catholics. One of the first recorded uses is Eckbert von Schönau who wrote on heretics from Cologne in 1181: "Hos nostra germania catharos appellat."

The Cathars are also called Albigensians. This name originates from the end of the 12th century, and was used by the chronicler Geoffroy du Breuil of Vigeois in 1181. The name refers to the southern town of Albi (the ancient Albiga.) The designation is hardly exact, for the centre was at Toulouse and in the neighbouring districts.

Destruction of the Knights Templar, October 13,  1307 in the Book of Days

The Dundee Code (sequel to The Da Vinci Code)

1621 New World: Samoset, a Mohegan, visited the settlers of Plymouth Colony and greeted them in English, "Welcome, Englishmen! My name is Samoset". He had learned his broken English from the English fishermen that came to fish off Monhegan Island.

1660 England: The Long Parliament disbanded.

1723 A royal proclamation was issued in Britain to thank God for the end to the plague.

1747 Death of Christian Augustus of Anhalt-Zerbst (b. 1690), father of Catherine II of Russia.

1787 The First Fleet (the first fleet of British vessels that took convicts to the as yet unnamed Australia) began assembling at Mother Bank, off the Isle of Wight.

1792 Tipu, the Sultan of Mysore, the most powerful Indian ruler still resisting British imperialism, was defeated in the third war fought over his territory.

1815 William of Orange was made King of the United Netherlands and was crowned King Willem I.

1888 Emile Roger made the world's first recorded car purchase, a Benz.

1889 A major conflict among US, British, and German warships anchored off the Samoan Islands was averted, when a hurricane destroyed all but one vessel. A tripartite agreement proclaimed the islands neutral territory, a status that lasted until 1899.  

1900 British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans purchased the land around the ruins of the Bronze Age Palace at Knossos on Crete, which he excavated.

"Sir Arthur Evans who excavated the palace at Knossos named them the 'Minoans' after Minos, the legendary king of Crete. Very little was known about Minoan Crete prior to the late 19th century AD, and a great deal of the work was done by Sir Arthur Evans.  The Minoan civilization lasted about 1200 years from 2200 BC to about 1000 BC (with the last two hundred years or so in a period of great decline). They reached the height of their prosperity around the 18th -16th centuries during the Second Palace Period. The palace at Knossos appears to have been the center of Minoan government."   Source

"My first encounter with the theory that prehistory was matriarchal came in 1979 in a class titled 'Minoan and Mycenaean Greece.' While on site at Knossos, our professor—an archaeologist with the American School of Classical Studies in Athens—noted that the artifactual evidence on the island of Crete pointed toward Minoan society being matriarchal."
The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory, by Cynthia Eller

The prehistoric archaeology of the Aegean

1903 Death of Judge Roy Bean (b. c. 1825), jurist, Old West pioneer.

1904 James Joyce , 22, awarded the bronze medal in a Dublin singing contest, promptly threw it into the Liffey River.

1912 Lawrence Oates (b. 1880), part of the doomed Robert Falcon Scott Antarctic expedition, sacrificed his life by going out into the snow so that the others would not have to care for him or have less food. His famous and very British last words: "I am just going outside and may be some time." It is uncertain if Oates's death occurred on March 16 or on his 32^nd birthday, March 17, as Scott himself, whose journal is our only original source for the event, was uncertain, as seen below.

Lawrence Oates was nicknamed 'Titus' by his companions, after the 17^th-Century English conspirator, Titus Oates.  

Pictured: Oates sacrifices his life for his comrades, from a Brooke Bond tea card

Last leaves from Scott's diary

Friday, March 16 or Saturday 17
"Lost track of dates, but think the last correct. Tragedy all along the line. At lunch, the day before yesterday, poor Titus Oates said he couldn't go on; he proposed we should leave him in his sleeping bag. That we could not do, and induced him to come on the afternoon march. In spite of its awful nature for him, he struggled on and we made a few miles. At night he was worse and we knew the end had come.

"Should this be found I want these facts recorded. Oates's last thoughts were of his mother, but immediately before he took pride in thinking that his regiment would be pleased with the bold way in which he met his death. We can testify to his bravery. He has borne intense suffering for weeks without complaint, and to the very last was able and willing to discuss outside subjects. He did not - and would not - give up hope to the very end. He was a brave soul. This was the end. He slept through the night before last, hoping not to wake; but he woke in the morning - yesterday. It was blowing a blizzard. He said, "I am just going outside and may be some time." He went into the blizzard, and we have not seen him since.

"We knew that poor Oates was walking to his death; but, though we tried to dissuade him, we knew it was the act of a brave man and an English gentleman. We all hope to meet with a similar spirit, and assuredly the end is not far."

Source  

More

1914 Madame Caillaux, wife of France's finance minister, shot dead the editor of Le Figaro newspaper to protect her husband against libel.

1956 St Urho's Day was first celebrated.

1967 USA: Alice Herz immolated herself to protest the Vietnam War.

1968 Vietnam War: Reports reached Saigon of the massacre of between 350 and 500 unarmed villagers – men, women, and children – at the Vietnamese village of My Lai by American soldiers under the command of Lt William L Calley.

Captain Medina led a 'victorious' attack on the village of Xom Lang, near My Lai in South Vietnam. In a one-hour killing spree Charlie Company lined up 430 old men, women and children in a ditch and proceeded to massacre whom they could.

While the top brass circled overhead in helicopters, the men of Charlie Company, First Battalion, American Division, entered the hamlet of My Lai 4, in Quang Ngai Province, and methodically and ruthlessly murdered an estimated 347 civilians over an 8-hour period.

Some were murdered by bullets fired into their houses, others herded into small groups and mowed down, and still more died when they are hurled into a ditch and sprayed with automatic rifle fire.

Naturally, the Army first tried to cover it up and naturally the US media refused to report it (despite news stories in Europe). Later they portrayed it as a aberration, one bad guy (Calley), one good guy (who stopped it). Calley was convicted, sent to his room for being a bad boy, then released after a year or so under house arrest.

Strafe the town and kill the people
Let's declare a massacre.
Lay napalm in the square,
So you'll know that Jake was there,

Drop the candy in the courtyard,
Let the kiddies gather 'round.
Crank your twenty-millimeter,
Gun the little bastards down.

Come 'round early Sunday morning,
Catch the village unaware.
Drop a bunch of cluster bomblets,
Get 'em while they kneel in prayer.

Lyrics by Bowen and Fish, The Longest Day   Source

Source: The Daily Bleed

Tip of the Iceberg: the Tiger Force atrocities – like My Lai but longer

1971 US Patent # 3,570,156 was issued for the lava lamp.

Lavarand a patent for generation of random numbers using lava lamps

1973 Queen Elizabeth II of the UK opened the new London Bridge.

1973 On the orders of Attorney-General Lionel Murphy, the Australian Commonwealth Police raided the Melbourne headquarters of ASIO, the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation.

"Attorney-General Lionel Murphy eventually led a Commonwealth police raid on ASIO's St Kilda Road, Melbourne, headquarters when he believed vital security information was being withheld from him. ASIO then decided to spy on Murphy, its boss, suspecting he could be linked to the KGB. In this venture, ASIO was assisted by British intelligence. McKnight relates the recollections of journalist George Negus, then Murphy's press secretary:

"'Lionel had asked for the files of the six most dangerous or subversive people in Australia", recalled Negus. When they arrived, Murphy found they were of several CPA unionists and people such as CPA leader and peace movement activist Mavis Robertson.

"'Lionel looked at them and laughed, and said to the bloke `I know these people. They are not subversives, they're old fashioned Marxists whom you needn't worry about. We know what they are. Can you get me some real subversives? Some Russians who are in the woodwork out there?' An hour later at the airport, Murphy, brimming with good humour at the incident, rang [Prime Minister] Whitlam and asked him if he would like to know the names of the "six most dangerous people in the country". When he told Whitlam they both laughed – and they seldom laughed together.'"   Source: Australia's Spies and Their Secrets

Lionel Murphy clip

1984 William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut, Lebanon, was kidnapped by Islamic fundamentalists and later died in captivity.

1985 Associated Press newsman Terry Anderson was taken hostage in Beirut (released on December 4, 1991).

"And the story gets murkier: immediately after the battle the United States Defense Intelligence Agency investigated and produced a classified report, which it circulated within the intelligence community on a need-to-know basis. That study asserted that it was Iranian gas that killed the Kurds, not Iraqi gas.

"The agency did find that each side used gas against the other in the battle around Halabja. The condition of the dead Kurds' bodies, however, indicated they had been killed with a blood agent -- that is, a cyanide-based gas -- which Iran was known to use. The Iraqis, who are thought to have used mustard gas in the battle, are not known to have possessed blood agents at the time.

"These facts have long been in the public domain but, extraordinarily, as often as the Halabja affair is cited, they are rarely mentioned."
Source

From Wikipedia: A preliminary Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) study at the time concluded, apparently by determining the chemicals used by looking at images of the victims, that it was in fact Iran that was responsible for the attack, an assessment which was used subsequently by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) for much of the early 1990's. The CIA's senior political analyst for the Iran-Iraq war, Stephen C. Pelletiere, co-authored an unclassified analysis of the war [1] which contained a brief summary of the DIA study's key points. In a January 31, 2003 New York Times [2] opinion piece, Pelletiere summarized the DIA's findings and noted that because of the DIA's conclusion there was not sufficient evidence to definitively determine whether Iraq or Iran was responsible. Pelletiere also felt that the administration of George W. Bush was not being forthright when squarely placing blame on Iraq, since it contradicted the conclusion of the DIA study. However the DIA's final position on the attack was in fact much less certain than this preliminary report suggests, with its final conclusions, in June 2003, asserting just that there was insufficient evidence, but concluding that "Iraq ..used chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians in 1988" [3]. The CIA altered its position radically in the late 1990s and cited Halabja frequently in its evidence of WMD before the 2003 invasion ...

Books by Stephen Pelletiere in Cafe Diem!, our store
America's Oil Wars    The Iran Iraq War: Chaos in a Vacuum

Iraq and the International Oil System: Why America Went to War in the Gulf

See also: Highway of Death: America's 'turkey shoot' war crime

1988 Iran-Contra Affair: Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and Vice Admiral John Poindexter were indicted on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States.

Poindexter, from big fraud to Big Brother

Poindexter was convicted of conspiracy, lying to Congress, defrauding the government, and destroying evidence, so George W Bush wanted him for a big job. On February 13, 2002, the media learned that Poindexter had been appointed (by George W Bush) the Director of The Pentagon's Information Awareness Office, a secretive intelligence bureau whose mission is to gather and centralise as much information as possible about everyone, intending to unify all private databases about US citizens into one central database run by the government (including information about travel, credit card purchases, medical history, and so on).

Tomorrow: St Patrick's Day

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