User:OPUS DIABOLI
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A HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO HISTORY REVISTED
SOCIETY without the knowledge of history is like a person void of a memory and one trusts that we do have a prodigious memory and therefore have a full grasp of history.
However, history only exists by virtue of our knowledge of it and our knowledge of history is predicated upon by what we read, but what we might have read may have been written by historians who interpreted events the way they had wanted them to be and not as events actually were – perhaps to suit the politics of the time.
Being intelligent is to have the ability to see things and understand them for what they really are and not what one wants them to be.
It bodes well nevertheless to have lodged amongst our data base de données that in 1492 three significant events took place in Spain; Isabelle and Ferdinand made their victorious entry into the city of Granada having completed the re-conquest of Spain by defeating the Moors ( Arabs ) who ruled for more than 800 years.
The marriage between Isabella of the Kingdom of Castile and the Aragon monarch’s son Ferdinand on the 19th of October 1469 was a union of the crowns which essentially led to the unification of Spain in 1479, for prior to that no such country as Spain existed. It was only a geographical landmass embracing Leon, Castile, Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia.
Christopher Columbus and his fleet of three caravels set sail from Palos on the 3rd of August to the Islas Canarias (ceded to Spain by Alfonso of Portugal in 1480) whereupon they then departed on the 6th of September on their voyage into what was seemingly the “unknown” ergo to go where no person has gone before !
Had he not fortuitously made a navigational error, hit the Bahamas and sailed south, America would not be what it is, the United States thereof today. As it was he arrived and anchored off the islands on the 12th of October, but that’s another story.
Tomas de Torquemada the Spanish inquisitor general delivered Spain from a fate worse than the present day Balkans when he expelled the Moors and some 165,000 Jews, those who remained along with the Arab and Berber people mainly in Andalucia were baptised and became the “New Christians” though some of these were Marranos, that is to say “closet” Jews who were publicly practising Christianity but privately practising Judaism.
Since commerce and maritime trade was the bailiwick of the Jews the voyage of Columbus might have gained Spain a continent but the expulsion of the business oriented Jews lost Spain an economic limb by crippling its trade and commerce.
Eventually, Spain was to decline with the gold brought back from the new world because everything Spain then needed was paid by it and not by the exchange of goods or by production, whilst the Netherlands ( Pays-Bajos ) settled by the expulsed Jews eventually prospered mainly in the pepper and spice trade and other commercial enterprises rivalling the Portuguese who replaced the Venetian and the Genovese before them.
With the establishment of die verenigde oostindische compagnie ( VOC ) in 1602 - thirteen years after the Protestant Henri IV of Navarre became the first Bourbon king of France and fourteen years after the disaster which befell the Spanish Armada that Philip II sent, a year after Mary queen of Scots was executed by Elizabeth I in 1587, to invade England but was bungled by the Duke of Parma’s failure to get his army in the Netherlands together for the crossing before a providential wind came and blew the fleet to pieces just like what the kamikaze did to the Mongol armada attacking Japan back in 1281 - the Dutch eventually drove the British East India Company from the East Indies in 1623 and the Netherlands continued to supply England and Europe with the condiments that, in the absence of such means in those days as cold storage, were of special importance to preserve meat which unless strongly seasoned was unpalatable.
The British concentrated on trade with India where Robert Clive in the service of the East India Company clashed with the French in 1745 and then drove them out in 1763 after the decisive victory over the nawab of Bengal at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 that gained him political and economic power and many military victories thereafter.
One may inform those heretofore misinformed that had not a group of baptized Jews, including one Count de Medinaceli ( who led his own force in the war against the Moors ) and Luis de Santangel, the comptroller ( cashier – bookkeeper ) of the household in Aragon, intervened and broke the impasse for Columbus - who had hitherto been rebuffed by every monarch he approached for money – by volunteering a portion of the cost of the voyage the trip across the Atlantic would not have been undertaken.
A quantum leap to 1620 when the Puritan refugees sailed from England on the ‘Mayflower’ and founded Plymouth Colony in New England, i.e. Massachusetts and Maine, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont, so named by John Smith who explored the area back in 1614. John was amongst the first settlers of Jamestown in Virginia, the first English settlement in America founded on the 13th of May, 1607.
The Puritans – a Protestant movement known in England as the Brownists because it was founded by the clergyman Robert Browne – sought to purify worship in the Church of England by excluding everything where authority could not be found in the Bible. They are commonly referred to as the Pilgrim Fathers in the U.S. of A.
Seeking refuge from religious persecution the Huguenots, ( surnom donné par les catholiques aux Calvinistes ) gave up home and fortune and left their country France forever at the time leading up to and after the revocation by Louis XIV in 1685, of the Edict of Nantes and continued to move to amongst other places America where they made important contribution to industry and Africa where they intermixed with the virile Teutonic folks who have burrowed so deeply into Africa about the time Oliver Cromwell – il fut l’un des adversaries les plus acharnes du roi Charles 1er qui fit condamner cet roi même a mort et qui soumit l’Irlande et l’Ecosse – was at his zenith, around 1652 when the Dutch East India Company founded Cape Town as a victualling station.
They were the choicest and the best of the French; the Rouxs, Du Toits, Humberts, ( descendants of Humbert II, le dernier dauphin du Viennois qui vendit le Dauphine a Philippe VI de the House of Valois en France ), Dupleixs, Villiers, Jouberts and others.
Their departure eut de graves consequences socials, economic and political and also weakened France diplomatically but their ingenuity and Calvinistic work ethics increased industrial output wherever they went. The best blood of France these Huguenots emigrants were selected seed thrown in amongst the Boer Nations of ‘Voortrekkers’ and farmers to give a touch of grace and soul to their solid Teutonic strain. The type of people who defended themselves for fifty years against the might of Imperial Spain in the Netherlands under Ferdinand Álvarez de Toledo, the Duke of Alba ( 1581 ) when Spain was the greatest power in the world.
The type of people who cut the dykes ( digue ) to hold back the tidal surge of the North Sea and in time were to be the most formidable antagonist that ever crossed the path of Imperial Britain.
The same Dutch spirit - which defeated Catholic King James II of England and the Jacobites who together with the French under the reign of Louis XIV attempted a counterrevolution in Ireland to restore James to the throne at the Battle of the river Boyne in Eire in 1690, but was defeated by William of Orange ( Guillaume III de Nassau, Prince of Orange from the line of Dutch rulers in the duchy known as Hesse in Germany ) who then became William III , king of England which is why the Protestants in Northern Ireland call themselves Orangemen – also many years later defeated the formidable Matabele and the great Zulu nation with extraordinary ingenuity by adapting their tactics of the huntsman, the marksman and the rider.
One hundred and thirty five farmers who rode out as sharpshooters-commandos slaughtered a third of the twelve thousands spearmen at Marico River.
Vienna, a Celtic settlement became in 1278 the residence of the Hapsburg and twice, in 1529 and 1683, withstood sieges by the Ottoman Turks who many times, since their great victory (1389) at Kosovo Polje, ran over the Serbs in their advance through towards Vienna. A German baker Hornchen donné des croissants a Vienne après la victoire sur les Turcs en 1689. Marie-Antoinette d’Autriche subsequently introduced this waxing quarter crescent-shaped moon patisseries to France.
The crescent moon is the emblem of Turkey and of the Moslem world in case we haven’t noticed.
Nothing of major significance transpired on the east coast of America that we need go into now until the Boston Tea Party quand en 16ieme de decembre 1773 des colons, Boston’s wealthy smugglers, deguises en Indiens jettent from the East India tea ship Dartmouth a la mer les cargaisons de thé (342 boxes worth £10,000) demonstrating against British tax exemption on tea surplus off-loaded by the East India Company on the American market. Tea surpluses was also the leading causes of two trade wars commonly known as the first and second opium wars with China due to an acute balance of payments deficit suffered by Britain because the Chinese were exporting more commodities to the British merchants than they were importing.
Something else did happen that was one of the incidents leading up to the War of American Independence ( 1775 to 1783 ) ; the Boston Massacre on the 5th of March 1770 when British troops killed several townspeople including one Crispus Attucks first black casualty of the American Revolution, but that’s history. The very same year when a James Bruce finally arrived at the very source of the Blue Nile at Lake Tana in Abyssinia thinking that it was the true source and that he was the first European to reach the fountains of the Little Abbai.
He was wrong on both counts, as it was about 150 years before him two Portuguese priest Pedro Paez and Jerome Lobo reached the very spot on April 21 in the year 1618.
In came one Marie-Joseph-Paul-Yves-Roch-Gilbert du Motier, creator of the modern French flag, otherwise known famously as the Marquis de LaFayette who, along with Marshal Jean-Baptiste-Donatien de Vimeur Rochambeau who commanded the French troupes régulières, helped George Washington defeat the English general Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781.
The Thirteen colonies which adopted the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and became the original United States were Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina and Virginia.
The Treaty of Paris in 1763 had removed the French, Red Indian and Spanish threat east of the Mississippi and lessened the colonies’ dependence on Britain for protection which first gave rise to the struggle for independence and revolt against the mother country; and the first British surrender of General John Burgoyne’s expeditionary force from Canada at Saratoga ( 1777 ) encouraged France to declare war on Britain ( 1778, the year Captain James Cook ran into the islands of Hawaii and ten years before New South Wales was founded as a colony and the English began to ship convicts to Australia ) followed by Spain ( 1779 ) and the Netherlands ( 1780 ).
Britain was a bit stretched to say the least and lost the war which ended with le traité de Versailles signed in 1783 in which l’Angleterre reconnaît l’independence des Etats-Unis. But the loss of America had the knock-on effect of clinching Canada for Britain, thanks to the massive spin-offs from British settlers, who voted with their feet against independence, along with the flood of English-speaking Loyalists who would eventually swamped the French speaking people into a minority.
American independence did not bode well for native Americans because of the land-hungry colonists nor African-Americans, for it set back emancipation by more than a generation.
However, helping the Thirteen Colonies fight for their independence weakened France financially, and when King Louis XVI’s social charter attempted to tax the rich and ungovernable middle-classes of France fostered by François-Marie Arouet ( Voltaire ), they, along with the Legitimiste ( supporter of the Bourbons’ claim to the French throne – and that too is another story ) and the Lodges of the Freemasonary led by Louis Philippe Joseph, duc d’ Orléans, who wanted to overthrow Louis and be king himself, started the French Revolution which was not a revolution but a Reign of Terror.
The privileged nobility who opposed reform and blocked Louis XVI’s finance ministers Necker and Turgot efforts to balance the budget in order to save the French government from economic collapse also fuelled the declining situation by buying up supplies in complicity with the monopolizers and consequently drove the people to insurrection.
Just to be sure, the Orléanistes and the Assembly of Notables ordered the bakers under pain of death not to make any bread and succeeded in creating a shortage which coined the famous phrase Louise XVI’s wife the queen Marie-Antoinette was supposed to have exclaimed, “Then let them eat cake!” “Mais, ( alors ) mon dieu, s’il pouvait se resigner a manger de la croute de pate!”
She never did utter those words, the remark could well be attributed to the comtesse de Boigne, the silly cow, who writing in her old age got it mixed up with Louise XIV’s wife, but that again is another history.
By the way, one baker named François who disregarded the threats and baked all night of the 20th of October 1789 was hanged from the nearest lantern falsely accused of selling loaves of bread under the weight ordained by regulations.
The conspirators including the Subversives Maximilien François Marie Isidore de Robespierre and George Jacques Danton amongst them, marched on Versailles dressed as poissardes with the sans culottes and, to make the story short, brought the King and Queen and their son le Dauphin to be prisoners at the Tuileries at the bottom of the Champs Elysees near the Place de la Concorde which at the time was about to be known as Place de la Revolution.
The King at one point trying to out-manoeuvre the so-called revolutionaries put himself at the head of the Revolution, but by so doing effectively removed what crown he had left on his head. So on the night of the 17th January 1793 – the year the young officer Napolean Bonaparte first distinguished himself at the siege of Toulon - it fell to Pierre Victurnien Verniaud as President to announce these terrible words : “I declare in the name of the National Convention that the penalty it has pronounced against Louis Capet is death”.
On the morning of the 21st , the Irish priest ( confessor ) Abbe Edgeworth next to him at the scaffold uttering the memorable words “Fils de Saint Louis, montez au ciel!”, the King Louis XVI was murdered by a contraption invented by Dr Joseph Ignace Guillotin on the Place de la Revolution.
The King suffered for having been a tyrant; but had he truly been a tyrant, he would not have suffered. Had it not been for him – The Restorer of Liberty – America might not have won its independence from the British.
Insights into history now has it that a French surgeon, one Antoine Louis designed the guillotine which was then named Louison or Louisette after him and that Dr Guillotin merely instigated the use of it on humanitarian and egalitarian grounds.
In what is known as Natal a quantum leap later, the Boers - South African pioneers of Dutch descent moving north from the Cape of Good Hope to evade British rule - whose leader Piet Retief and 101 of his Voertrekkers were massacred by the Zulus, unable to use their cavalry tactics owing to the presence of their families, again met a tribal warfare situation in a square of laagered wagons not unlike that which was employed in the wild West between settlers and the Apache, Comanche and Navajo Indians with men firing while the women loaded the long-barrelled rifles.
Three thousand ‘blood-thirsty’ Zulu ‘savages’ were killed against six ‘burghers’. Thus Dingaan, the great king of the Zulu nation were finally defeated by an alliance between his brother Mpande and the Boers in 1838 and killed in 1840 by the Swazi, the year ‘penny black’ the first postage stamp was issued on the 6th of May and also the year Britain stopped shipping convicts to Australia and around the time Belgium became recognized as an independent kingdom ( 1830 ) with its neutrality guaranteed by the Great Powers ( 1839 ).
Had the British used and adopted these military characteristics forty years later also against the mighty Zulus, they would not have had to mourn the disaster of Isandhlwana, but that too is part history.
Imperial Britain, whose troops only landed in Cape Town in 1806 – the year Napoleon decisively defeated the Prussian army at the Battle of Jena two years after he was proclaimed emperor of the French - and added the Cape Colony which was first colonized by the Dutch East India Company in 1652 to the British Empire in 1814 nearly two hundred years after the Boers and the Huguenots, has always played the unpopular part of the friend and protector of the native servants and even gave lenient terms to the Kaffir savage tribes who raided and raped the Dutch farming communities.
The cheap form of virtue and philanthropic view of the rights of the native was brought to the point of friction between the old settlers and the administration of the Anglo-Celtic race, rising to bloodshed which followed the arrest of a Dutch farmer who mal-treated his slave and was hanged along with five other participants.
Such punishment was unduly severe and exceedingly injudicious. And a brave tribe like the Boers ( Dutch-Afrikanders ) can forget their victims of the field of battle, but never those of the scaffold ( echafaud ) not to mention that the making of political martyrs is the ultimate insanity of statesmanship.
Back in 1834 when came the emancipation of the slaves throughout the British Empire, all the smouldering discontents of the Boers were fanned and they loaded up one by one in their huge ox-drawn wagons to begun the “great exodus” (comparable in modern times only to the sallying forth in 1847 of the Mormons from Nauvoo, Illinois in search of the promised land of Utah) north beyond the Orange River which later became the Orange Free State.
The Boers ( namely the Kochs, Bothas, Meyers, Krugers, Schiels, Costers, Pretorius, Steyn, Schreiner, Graaff, Reitz, Herholdt, Hofmeyer, Burgers, Du Plessis, Jeppes, Groblers, Oliviers, Cronje, Wolverans, Albrechts, De Wets, etc. ) rose in December, 1880 against the Anglo-Celtic moral imperialism of telling them how relation should be between a white employer and his “half-savage and half childish” retainers in a society built on the assumption that the blacks were an inferior race which in the nineteen century was deemed ‘right’ everywhere, but from the serenity and comfortable households in Belgrave Square and Boston was deemed evil and intolerable.
To change the habits of the inflexible Huguenots and the most conservative of Teutonic races was a dangerous venture, and one which has led to a long series of complications, making up the troubled history of South Africa.
The Anglo-Celtics ruined their West Indian colonies and also started then in South Africa a disaffection the end of which we may not yet seen.
Anyhow, with their long-barrelled rifles. Their heavy six-inch Creusot guns, their Krupp guns, the hard-bitten Boer farmers’ tenacity defeated the British at Majuba hill which was followed by the complete surrender of the Gladstonian Government of William Ewart Gladstone, the Prime Minister of Great Britain who attempted unsuccessfully to carry a Home Rule Bill for Ireland (1886-1894).
From then on the Boers being the undisputed victors enjoyed the full fruits of victory after concluding armistice on March 5th, 1881 by segregating the British to the status of “Uitlanders” and taxed them heavily. Imported Hollanders ran the gold and diamond mines.
In 1882 the rights of burghership ( citoyenneté ) was after five years residence. By 1890, the year back in Europe the German emperor and king of Prussia Wilhelm II forced ‘The Iron Chancellor’ Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck to resign, the franchise was raised to fourteen years so the “Uitlanders” were still left without a vote and even though they were the majority and paid ninth-tenths of the tax, they remained along with the defeated Zulus and Sekukuni disfranchised.
Such a case of taxation without representation has never been known. The Zulus and the Sekukunis at least did not have to pay tax.
Almost a hundred years after the French Reign of Terror and the mythical storming of the Bastille, (which was originally built in the quarter of St Antoine to help defend the city against the English – another story altogether) a prison for aristocratic brats and powerful noblemen and men of letters, that had in its history never held more than forty-two inmates and some old aged military pensioners, the American Civil War started because of taxation.
The North favouring free soil and protectionism over-taxed the agricultural South and despite the Missouri Compromise ( 1820 ) admitting Missouri to the Union as a slave state and the Compromise of 1850, Americans was split and hostility increased, by the Kansas-Nebraska Act ( 1854 ) and the Dred Scott Decision of the Supreme Court ( 1857 ) which ruled that Congress had no right or power to prohibit slavery, and brought to a head by the election of Abraham Lincoln as president.
The Southern States of Alabama. Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, South Carolina and Virginia seceded and as we well know set themselves up as the Confederate States under Jefferson Davis.
Mieux preparés, mieux commandés les sudistes prennent d’abord l’avantage. Mais les nordiste plus nombreux l’emportent finalement – carried the day so to speak. Decisive victory at Richmond between Ulysses Simpson Grant of the North and Generalissimo Robert E. Lee – we know who won I take it.
Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the U.S. of A. wanted to hasten the freeing of the slaves ( a minor side issue of the civil war actually ) and send them back to Africa, specifically to Liberia, a settlement previously freed Afro-American slaves were founded for by the 5th president of the U.S.A. James Monroe in 1822 under the aegis of the American Colonization Society. The capital Monrovia therefore bears his name, the country was proclaimed a republic in 1847.
Congress out-voted him initially but was still debating the issue on a second reading when John Wilkes Booth assassinated Lincoln. Referred to as an out-of-work actor and a Southern fanatic he was in fact a raving left wing lunatic militant liberal who passionately believe that the emancipation of slaves wasn’t just so to “send them back to where they belong”.
In history nothing it seems could prevent legend from taking precedence over reality. The storming of the Bastille was an historic day which never existed in history on the 14th of July 1789, but the French people religiously perpetuate the memory of the myth and that is definitely another history albeit thrown out of all proportions.
The only people ‘liberated’ were four counterfeiters, the Comte de Solages – a young rake of noble birth who was interned there at the expense of his family – and an Irishman by the name of Whyte who was carried in triumph through the streets but was so terrified by the uproar and the acclamations that he begged in tears to be taken back to his cell. Or was he an Englishman?
A quantum leap forward, French men-of-war patrolled the African coast and the Royal Navy gunboats of Her Britannic Majesty plied the high seas challenging, boarding, searching and arresting ships, dhows and junks of any nationalities engaged in the trade in slaves as they have been doing since the privileges were agreed to by the Treaty of Brussels which included the right of search even of American ships granted by Abraham Lincoln when he took office as president in 1861, a right previous American presidents had so steadfastly denied.
Now, going back in time to between 1022 and 1066 when the son of Earl Godwin, Harold II succeeded to his father’s earldom and became chief adviser to Edward the Confessor, well, we know he was finally defeated by William of Normandy on October 14.
But had he not broken his promise made in 1064 to support the candidacy of William to the English throne and not been instead elected king upon Edward’s death by the nobility, history would have been slightly and somewhat different in that Hastings wouldn’t feature and would not have been necessary.
Be that as it might have been. As it was, barely a month prior to Hastings on the 25th of September Harold II had to fight, and defeated an invasion by his brother Tostig, of all people, and his namesake Harold III of Norway at Stamford Bridge.
834 years later in 1900, the Great Boer War between the Dutch Boer republics (the Orange Free State and the Transvaal) and the British Empire - out for revenge for the disastrous defeat of the first and Spioen Kop - consisting of contingents from Australia, Canada, England, India, Ireland, Malaya, New Zealand, Rhodesia, Scotland and Wales - saw the defeat of the Boers and their French, German, Irish-Americans and Russian mercenaries.
Botha, De Wets and Smuts continued guerrilla warfare for a further two years, but eventually surrendered at Vereeniging a coal-mining centre in Transvaal by the Vaal on the 31st of May 1902 and were incarcerated in internment camps along with the rest as slave labour.
All 50,000 or more of their women and children that were rounded up by the victorious British forces led by Field Marshall Lord Frederick Sleigh Roberts of Kandahar seconded by Lord Horatio Herbert Kitchener of Khartoum - who four years earlier defeated Khalifa Abdullah and his Mahdists slavers at the Battle of Omdurman in Sudan settling the score for the fall of Khartoum and the slaughter of slave-liberating General ‘Chinese’ Gordon in 1885 - were deliberately left to die in the internment camps as a result of an extermination policy of genocide by the British to ethnic cleanse and arrest the growth of the white population in South Africa.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau ( 1712 – 1778 ) the true founder of communism was wrong to believe in the natural goodness of human beings not having taken into account that prior to the translation by the religious reformer John Wycliffe and his followers around the 1360s and by William Tyndale in Antwerpen with exceptional literary quality of the Bible by around 1526 and its succeeding broad-spread diffusion, the understanding between right and wrong, the distinction of good from bad was pretty grey, and the world at large was yet to develop a conscience.
William “the heretic” was strangled, set on fire on the 6th of October 1536 (the year Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus died in Basel) following a fifteen month imprisonment in Vilvoorde prison for his effort of sharing out the exclusive and jealously guarded knowledge of Christianity with the people who were essentially pagans and he paid for the copyright with his life. However, thanks to him the Bible no longer has le droit l’auteur or authors nor is it anymore les droits exclusives of the church but rather dans le domaine public.
Every year on November 11 since Wapenstilstand or Armistice day 1918, Remembrance Day to the British and Veterans Day to the American and Canadians, the end of hostilities is commemorated of a war which started when Austria declared it on July 28 in 1914 against Serbia 200 years after the War of the Spanish Succession ended with the Treaties of Utrecht when Britain gained Gibraltar.
President Woodrow Wilson had reluctantly entered into this first world war on April 6, 1917 which was to cost 120,000 American lives along with 8,700,000 European lives cruelly culled mainly in the battlegrounds of Somme and Flanders.
The war ended with the Treaty of Versailles which failed to fulfil Wilson’s liberal hopes but nevertheless went onto set up the League of Nations (the forerunner of the present day UN) which the U.S. Senate then refused to ratify.
Julies Galus Caesar, who in 46 BC introduced the solar calendar root of the present day Gregorian calendar which was corrected by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582 and subsequently adopted in Britain and the American colonies in 1752, only crossed the Rubicon when he was over fifty years old and after many military successes, including the conquest of what is now Belgium and France, then Celtic Belgæ and Celtic Gaul in 58 – 50 BC, to take Rome which he subsequently transformed from an oligarchy into a monarchy establishing himself as not quite the absolute dictator as history has shown.
1,912 years after the crossing of the Rubicon and forty years after the issuing of the Monroe Doctrine which opposed further European control and influence in the western hemisphere, and two years before General Robert Edward Lee surrendered to Ulysses Simpson Grant at the Appomattox Court House, la Légion étrangère of the Third Company of the 1st Battalion ( out of two ) under the command of Captain Danjou, which was tasked to escort a convoy carrying bullion to the French troops in the interior of Mexico, came under cavalry attack outside the hamlet of Camerone near a stream noted for its excellent crayfish.
Two thousand Mexicans armed with Remington and Winchester rifles under the command of Colonel Milan caught Danjou and the legionnaires halted and was about to have their casse-croute at 7.00 a.m., and to make a long firefight which ensued and lasted till 6.00 p.m. short, des legionnaires, all sixty-two of them, se defendirent heroiquement contre a disproportionately superior force and ended up with three surviving legionnaires miraculously spared by Colonel Milan who was so impressed he called a halt to the ultimate massacre on what has become known as Camerone Day, le 30 avril, 1863, the year General George Gordon Meade won the crucial battle of the American Civil War in Gettysburg on the third of July, three weeks and a year after John Hanning Speke discovered the source of the Nile.
Cette date est devenue celle de la fête de la Legión étrangère.
Going back about the time of the Tercera Cruzada ( 1189 ) to recapture the port of Acre, the scene of fierce fighting between Saladin and Richard I “Coeur de Lion” the son of Henry II the king of England who had his turbulent priest Thomas Becket knocked off in Canterbury, the Aztecs settled in Mexico coming after the Toltecs ( 10th c. ) and the Mayas ( 4th – 8th c. ) before them.
A member of the Nahuatlan people the Aztec civilization revived and flourished until the arrival six years after Vasco Núñez de Balboa – perhaps the first European to see the Pacific Ocean - of Hernán Cortés in 1519 who then conquered the kingdom and overthrew their emperor Montezuma II and established the country as a province of Spain in 1521.
Well nigh on to three hundred years later Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the Mexican revolutionary priest initiated in 1810 the revolt against Spanish rule but was captured and shot. The revolt was taken up by Agnostic de Iturbide in 1821 - the year Napoleon died on the island of St Helena - who proclaimed Mexico his empire in 1822 but was then forced into exile in 1823, the year the Monroe Doctrine was proclaimed, when Antnio Lopez de Santa Anna turned it into a republic during the time when Belgium was a part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Iturbide was shot upon his return in 1824, the year Simón Bolivar liberated Peru and Upper Peru on the other side of the equator from Spanish rule.
At the zenith of the Mayan civilization in Mexico ( 5th c. ) the Huns, a member of a nomadic Asian people who were also at their apex under Attila, had Byzantine and what is present day Germany, Poland, Russia and as far west as Orléans in Gaul within their sphere of thraldom.
They gave the Visigoth and Ostrogoth, predecessors of the Teutonic Knights, a cruel taste of what was to come - well after the establishment of the Crusader States in Judea, just before the recapture in 1244 of Jerusalem by the Saracens and within a decade of the seventh crusade - when the Golden Horde of Mongols once again descended upon Eastern Europe and founded an empire in Russia until Ivan Vasillevich III, ‘the Great’ not ‘the Terrible’ saw them off in 1480.
Having conquered and subjugated the Russians the Golden Horde of the Mongols smashed into the Christendom of Poland and Hungary in the fashion comparable to today’s hell’s angels on horseback. Batu was poised to strike the Celtic settlement of Vienna in 1241 when news of the death of his uncle Ogodei, the most able of Genghis Khan’s four principal sons, reached him and miraculously stayed his hand.
Back to the future and the attempted impeachment of President Richard Milhous Nixon by political chicanery, meretricious media machination and skulduggery which ended ultimately with the first ever resignation of the office of the presidency by a besieged and bewildered president.
Maureen Elizabeth Kane Owen Biner Dean before her marriage to John Dean shared a flat in Washington D.C. with her friend Heidi Rikan whom she previously lived with in Lake Tahoe. While Maureen worked a $10,000-a-year job as assistant to the director of National Commission on Marijuana and Drug Abuse, Heidi who called herself Cathy ran a call girl agency in Columbia Plaza just across the street from the Democratic National Committee (DNC) Headquarters in the Watergate Office Building on 2600 Virginia Avenue, N.W. Washington D.C.
A young Washington attorney named Philip Mackin Bailey who was a close friend of Maureen and Heidi using his contacts at the DNC operated a branch of Cathy Dieter’s call girl set-up from the almost always empty office of the Democratic State Governors Organization right smack inside the DNC offices and even from the office of Spencer Oliver the executive director of the Association of State Democratic Chairmen also in the DNC headquarters at Watergate.
Under the nickname “Clout” Maureen ‘Mo’ Biner then a girl friend of John Dean moonlighted for the call-girl agency “to make out-of-town people happy at night” almost all of which came from the Governors’ office at the DNC headquarters on the sixth floor of the Watergate Office Building.
Being infatuated and besotted with Maureen Biner and left somewhat in the dark by his very good friend Heidi Rikan who had introduced him to Maureen in the first place John Dean did what any jealously suspicious future husband would do.
With the authority he could invoke and the resources he could call upon as chief White House legal counsel to the president he ordered through brilliant surreptitious cunning the fabled Watergate break-in and masterminded the subsequent ‘cover up’.
Seventy two years before Augustine who was sent by Pope Gregory on a mission from Rome to reintroduce Christianity landed in Kent in 597 to become in 601 the first archbishop of Canterbury and about the time when the Mayan civilization was in full swing, the Indian monk Bodhidharma, a Mahayana Buddhist of the bodhisattva ilk – which is to say one who has attained enlightenment but postponed Nirvana in order to help others attain it – went off to China in 525 and thereupon founded Zen by synergizing Buddhism with Taoism, a Chinese religion founded around 6th c. B.C. by Lao-tzu. Whilst in Assyria – a kingdom in the region of Mesopotamia between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers – the cruel Tiglath-pileser III ascended the throne and turned his warlike race into a nation of imperialists who conquered, terrorized and deported people en masse.
The kingdom of Israel under their king Menahem was no match against the Aramaean and Chaldean tribesmen from Babylonia. Anyhow, to shorten the time frame Cyrus, the founder of the Persian empire and respecter of diverse religions was to allow the Jews to return to Jerusalem in 537.
The defeat of the combined armed forces of Serbs, Albanians, Bosnians, Montenegrins and Bulgarians in the Battle of Kosovo Polje by the Turks in 1389 and their subjugation thereafter by the Ottoman Empire sowed the seeds of discord with long term ramification vociferously manifested itself 600 years later with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism, conveniently opening the floodgate of Radical Islam once more.
The greatest geographical secret years after the European discovery and settlement of the Americas, so named by a German cartographer after the Italian navigator Amerigo Vespucci who made two trips to the new world for Spain in 1499 and Portugal in 1501 whose discoveries became known all over Europe, still remained in 1850 the unsolved mystery of the sources of the Nile, a river without which Egypt - a country that was part of the empire of the Ottoman Turks for nearly three centuries after taking control of it from the Arabs who 900 years earlier had invaded and ruined - would perish.
John Hanning Speke and Richard Francis Burton, rejecting the route Herodotus in 460 B.C. followed upstream from Egypt to only as far as the first cataract at Assuan - the most southerly outpost of the Roman Empire - on June 16 1857 – the year of the Dred Scott Decision, a U. S. supreme court’s verdict which fuelled the North South controversy - struck westward from the island of Zanzibar in the young Sultan Majid’s corvette and march into the dark interior of a continent on an expedition to go where no white persons had gone before to discover the source of the White Nile, and to arrest the slave trade no Arab to this day considered any more evil than the buying and selling of horses, starting off the great trend of Central African exploration.
David Livingstone, who devoted his life to the destruction of the slave trade in Africa, crossing from west to east discovered Victoria Falls seven years before Speke finally found the source of the White Nile at Ripon Falls just north of the Equator running off Lake Victoria on the 28 July 1862, slightly over a year before Lincoln gave his Gettysburg Address on the 19 November eulogizing that “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth”.
Because Samuel Baker who ascended the Nile from Cairo to Khartoum and onto a lake he named Albert in honour of Queen Victoria’s husband who had then recently died in 1861 and which he too claimed it to be the “sources of the Nile”, the Royal Geographical Society in order to settle the question once and for all sent Livingstone, who also believed that he would come upon the true source, back to Africa.
The first world war was precipitated by the dual monarchy Austro-Hungarian’s, of the Hapsburg Empire, annexation of the Ottoman provinces of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908 and virtually started by the foreign minister count Leopold von Berchtold on July 28, 1914 shortly after the assassination of the heir to the throne, one Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip at Sarajevo on June 28, 1914.
Because Serbia’s independence, which was recognized in 1828 after it revolted against the Ottoman Empire in 1804, was guaranteed by the Congress of Berlin in 1878, Russia mobilized in its support, whereupon Germany declared war on Russia and - since she had a Triple Entente with Britain and France in opposition to the Triple Alliance of Austria, Germany and Italy - on France for good measure.
German field marshal Alfred Schlieffen had devised in 1905 a cunning plan for a massive flanking movement to defeat France through les Pays-Bas if need be and in applying such a plan Germany invaded Belgium as well.
Since Belgium neutrality was guaranteed by the Great Powers in 1839 after it revolted against the Netherlands and was recognized as an independent kingdom in 1830, Britain and Japan in turn had to declare war on Germany the following month, joined by amongst others Italy almost a year later and the U. S. A. thereafter.
Austria declared war on Russia, followed by Turkey and then Bulgaria leading to a war between the Allies and the Central Powers which finally ended - with a social democratic revolution in Germany and the establishment of the Weimar Republic under its first president Friedrich Ebert whereupon the Kaiser Wilhelm II fled to Holland - by another Treaty of Versailles and the Treaty of St. Germain in 1919 and ultimately the Treaty of Lausanne on 1923 whereupon Turkey surrendered her claims to non-Turkish regions of the Ottoman Empire and the demilitarisation of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles which separate Europe from Asia.
Homme politique haïtien Toussaint Louverture milita en faveur de la France qui avait aboli lésclavage en 1794 et nommé general, il assura la défense de lîle contre les Anglaise et les Espagne. Quand il tenta de proclamer une république noire, Napoleón Bonaparte envoya Leclerc reconquerir lîle. Il fut arete –1802 – et emprisonné en France where he died in 1803.
A year later about the time Napoleon was proclaimed emperor of the French crowning himself in the presence of Barnaba Chiaramonti – the pope Pius VII – Jean-Jacques Dessalines who avait pris part à l’insurrection de 1791 and fought alongside Toussaint Louverture s’étant also proclamé empereur d’Haïti sous le nom de Jacques 1er in 1804.
Because the Huns under Attila invaded and controlled most of what is now Germany and in 451 advanced as far as Orléans in Gaul but was decisively defeated that same year by the Roman general Aetius Flavius allied with the Visigoths army under Theodoric at the Battle of Châlons, the Ostrogoths and Visigoths in turn shortly thereafter overran the Roman Empire and then eventually made Toledo, which was first conquered by the Romans in 192 B.C., capital of Visigothic Spain from 534 to 712 when the Moors took over and ran it until its reconquest in 1085 by Castile.
Henri de Lorraine duc de Guise, who planned the murder of Charles IX ‘s chief adviser Huguenot leader Gaspard II de Coligny, conspired with the queen of France Catherine de’ Medici to persuade her twenty-two year old son the king to consent to the Massacre of St Bartholomew which began the murder of Huguenots by Catholics in Paris, Orléans and other towns on the 24th of August 1572 when thousands of Protestants died and those who survived scattered further abroad than even the Jews.
Pope Gregory XIII, whose Gregorian calendar ten years later superseded the Julian calendar, was beside himself with joy at the news of the massacre. In his efforts to reconvert to Catholicism countries which had become Protestant he conspired in with Anthony Babington and Mary queen of Scots in an unsuccessful plot to depose Elizabeth I so as to restore Roman Catholicism in England.
Ten years after Philip II’s vain attempt to conquer England the first Bourbon king of France Henri IV de Navarre triumphed in the struggle for freedom of worship and ended the Wars of Religion in 1598 whereupon he promulgated the Edict of Nantes granting freedom of worship to French Protestants ( l’Eglise reformée ) which was attacked by pope Clement VIII because it was absurd for it gave equality of citizenship to everyone regardless of their religion.
Trade and industry under the king’s chief administrator Maximilien de Béthune the duc de Sully prospered restoring the country’s finances and agricultural output leading to the building of roads and canals. Henri was assassinated in 1610, Sully was out of a job and the king’s wife Marie de’ Medici became regent for her son Louis XIII and France was once again torn by civil strife, until Armand-Jean du Plessis de Richelieu was appointed secretary of state, cardinal and finally chief minister to the king in 1624. He subsequently in 1635 founded the French Academy.
The Africa section of the Greek astronomer and geographer (who determined the value of ) Claudius Ptolemy’s Map of the World in A.D.150 was perhaps still the only geographical reference available when the hunter and explorer Samuel Baker and his Hungarian wife Florence made their journey up the Nile in June 1862 primarily on a missionary enterprise and also driven by Baker’s personal decision to solve the problem of the Nile.
Having finally assembled his expedition in Khartoum he set off - in search of the two explorer, John Hanning Speke, who was on a new expedition which Burton was not invited to take part, and a replacement Captain James Augustus Grant who had been missing for over a year - with three sailing boats, provisions for four months, ninety-six men, donkeys, horses and camels in December 1862 sailing south through the desert on a five hundred miles course that led into the vast sea of floating vegetation known as the Sudd sixty miles beyond the town of Malakal.
The precursor of the second world war was the refusal of the isolationist and leading member of Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald’s coalition cabinet Stanley Baldwin to support the French government’s plan to march into Germany when Paul von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg’s former chief of staff Erich Ludendorff who became a Nazi forcefully along with others persuaded him to appoint Adolf Hitler chancellor on the 30th of January, 1933 and by so doing effectively ended the democratic republic constitution drawn up and adopted in the cultural town of Weimar – the home of Goethe of the poetic drama Faust where an ambitious scholar sells his soul to the devil in exchange of knowledge, power and pleasure in his life, Schiller of the drama Wilhelm Tell the legendary 14th century hero of the Swiss struggle for independence, Herder “Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man” and Wieland “Oberon” - under which hitherto Germany was Governed since 1919.
Britain remained passive, and France unable to take on Germany alone was left to rely on the fortifications built after the first world war by André Maginot along her eastern front as an impregnable line of defence, when Germany annexed Austria and even signed the Munich Agreement in 1938 allowing Hitler to liberate the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia where Germans were ill-treated.
Germany then seized the whole of Czechoslovakia and Italy under Benito Mussolini having conquered Ethiopia, seized Albania and the two aggressors signed up a military alliance in May 1939. Using a dispute over the free city of Danzig – Treaty of Versailles 1919 - as an excuse Germany invaded Poland four months later on the 1ST of September, 1939 and immediately caused Britain and France to declare war two days later whilst all this time the United States of America remained in splendid isolation with nothing to do except to impose an oil embargo on Japan along with Britain and the Netherlands after it occupied French Indochina in July 1941.
Upon HMS Prince of Wales (which was later sunk by Japanese high-level and torpedo bombers between 11.15 am and 1.30 pm on December 10 1941 in the South China Sea) in the mid-Atlantic Ocean Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met on August 14 1941 and jointly declared the eight principles of the Atlantic Charter which would ultimately lead to Britain decolonising territories after the war so that Americans could move in to do business as well.
Still remaining neutral the U.S. undertook to supply under a lend-lease arrangement weapons and equipment to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Britain and countries fighting the Axis alliance of Bulgaria, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Japan and Rumania which amounted to the tune of a staggering $50,000,000,000 by 1945.
The insistence of the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek, Winston Churchill and the US secretary of state Cordell Hull that Japan withdraw not only from Indochina but the whole of China which was clearly unacceptable led to the Admiral Ishiro Yamamoto pre-emptive strike on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor and precipitated America’s entry into the war in 1941.
The bloodiest of all crusades were not any of the military expeditions undertaken between the 11th century and the 13th century either to capture Jerusalem, against Saladin, secure Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Nazareth or to recapture Jerusalem from the Saracens but that which Pope Innocent III proclaimed in 1209 against fellow Christians – the Albigensians – in Languedoc appointing the Norman knight Simon de Montfort, who fought brilliantly in the Fourth Crusade to carry out a massacre without parallel in European history with his mercenary army of “gallant Christian gentlemen”, when the King of France refused.
The Pope’s blood lusty crusaders slaughtered all the Cathars who were then the true Christians from Montpellier to Béziers, Narbonne to Carcassonne, Rennes-le-Château, Limoux, Couiza, Quillan to Toulouse in their jihad against their so-called heretics till none was left.
The Egyptian stronghold of Gondoroko near the present day town of Juba in February 1863 was nothing more than a miserable collection of huts and an Austrian Catholic Mission when Speke and Grant marched into it nearly two and a half years after leaving Zanzibar to be told of outbreak of the American Civil War and the death of the Prince Consort in England by the sportsman Samuel Baker and his wife who they never expected were first there to come out to meet them having themselves been in Gondoroko for only a fortnight. Baker very graciously hid his disappointment when Speke and Grant told him that they had already reached the source of the Nile.
Baker’s flotilla had accomplished the 1,000-mile voyage from Khartoum to Gondoroko in forty days, a hazardous undertaking given that since every official from the Governor-General, Musa Pasha, downwards was involved in the profitable slave trade and wanted no interlopers to upset their savage and brutal economic equilibrium or to report on their activities to the outside world and therefore was determined to thwart their missionary zeal, even to do away with them.
However, a request from the Royal Geographical Society to find Speke and Grant had added an urgent reason for Baker and his wife continuing into the interior with their armed escort.
Following the Moorish invasion of Spain in 711 and just before the establishment of Cordova as the centre of the Umayyad caliphate, the Saracen invaded Europe and having stretched their forces as far as Neustria without first consolidating their purchase and leaving themselves without logistic back-up were routed and repulsed by Charlemagne’s grandfather Charles Martel at the Battle of Poitiers or Tours (where the two armies met each other where the rivers Clain and Vienne join between Tours and Poitiers) in 732. The result of this battle stopped the northward advance of Islam and halted the invasion of Europe by Muslims, and preserved Christianity as the controlling faith, during a period in which Islam was overrunning the remains of the old Roman and Persian Empires.
The United States lost the battles but won the war in Vietnam in 1975 and not many Americans know that, let alone understood the brilliant strategic withdrawal which led to an ultimate victory - through a policy of containment - and the world to this day is still not one whit the wiser.
By changing the mission’s profile and abandoning all the latest and best military hardware to build up communist Vietnam to become the fourth largest modern army in the world, the State Department actually fulfilled once and for all the United States' raison d'être in Indochina in the first place by creating Vietnam as a buffer and put a check on the ominous domino impact of China's destabilising influence.
Ethnic cleansing of potential fifth-column Vietnamese of Chinese descent soon followed suit throughout Vietnam which culminated with the displacement and relocation of tens of thousands Chinese boat people who came to be happily rooted throughout the world, principally in France and the U. S.
For both the Americans and the North Vietnamese it was a necessary partnership forged through bitter experience, hardship and the realization that they have been fighting at cross purposes caught in a cynical and vicious conflict of ideologies between the oligarchies of China and the Soviet Union and wastefully fought on the unwitting battlefield of Vietnam.
Though he spoke reassuringly against the slave trade to the Europeans and especially the French, Muhammad ( Mehemet ) Ali was the greatest slave-dealer in history who was always reminding his commanders “that the end of all effort” the bottom line so to speak in today’s lingo, “is to procure Negroes.” It is therefore ironic that the greatest pugilist in history should have changed his name to that namesake in protest against mere apartheid.
Like most of the survivors after the decisive defeat of the Turkish army at the Battle of Abukir by Napoleon Bonaprte on July 25, 1799, Muhammad Ali a mere volunteer was pulled out of the water by the British only to be, eight years later as Pasha of Egypt, victorious over the British in Alexandria taking thousands of prisoners to Cairo where they were auctioned off as slaves having had them carry the heads of their dead comrades which were erected on poles in Esbekiah Square.
Had Napoleon Bonaparte in 1798 at the age of 29 not embarked upon his Egyptian campaign to liberate that lost province of the Ottoman Empire from the hated foreign tyrants and oppressors, the Mamelukes; and had Horatio Nelson on August of that year not annihilated the French fleet commanded by Admiral François-Paul Brueys in the Battle of the Nile - which was fought nowhere near the Nile - whereupon the French Army became marooned conquerors imprisoned in its own conquest, the chronological history of ancient Egypt (Kemet) would not have been rediscovered, by one Jean-François Champollion.
Napoleon Bonaparte, his generals - Jean-Baptiste Kléber amongst them - and savants like Dominique Vivant Denon, Déodat Gratet de Dolomieu, Edme-François Jomard, Claude-Louis Bethollet, Geoffroy Sainte-Hilaire, François Auguste Parseval Grandmaison, Nicholas Conté, Louis Costaz, Gaspard Monge, Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier plus others from the National Institute which was established in Paris in 1795 had set out on a civilizing mission and accordingly set up the Egyptian Institute of Arts and Science at Cairo, a city founded in 969 by the Victorious ( al-Qahira ) descendants of the prophet Mohammed’s daughter Fatima, on August 22, 1798 appointing the brilliant mathematician Fourier as its Perpetual Secretary.
TO BE CONTINUED ……
“The future is not what it used to be, and time can no longer tell” Malcolmus Awsumicus
