“Sen. Russell Long (D-La.) has told us that Lee Harvey Oswald. . . trained with Castro revolutionaries in Minsk during his Soviet stay” Jack Anderson, Washington Post, March 7, 1967
Ion Mihai Pocera defected to the West in 1978. He was head of Communist Romania’s foreign intelligence service, and was responsible for recruiting foreigners – particularly disaffected, low rank American soldiers like Lee Harvey Oswald. In Programmed to kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination, 2007, he finds that the Oswald story has very strong signs of Soviet Foreign Intelligence involvement.
Procera proposes that Oswald was likely recruited while stationed at the U-2 Atsugi base, and that Oswald’s information was instrumental in shooting down U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers, which resulted in a great PR triumph for Khrushchev. This made Oswald a hero to Soviet foreign intelligence and his visit to the Soviet Union was likely his reward (this being a common practice). They wouldn’t have wanted him to stay, his cover would be suspect and he would be more useful in the U.S., but he forced them to acquiesce – ever the loose canon – by publicly revoking his U. S. citizenship at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. While living in Russia, he received extensive espionage training, and was then sent back to the U.S. with an arranged Russian agent wife (another common practice), to function (both of them) as sleeper agents in the U.S.
Pocera doesn’t believe that the Soviet Union ordered Oswald to murder President Kennedy, but he emphasizes that Oswald was a difficult, restless agent, a true believer wanting more heroic work, who became more and more intent on getting into ‘revolutionary’ Cuba. He spun out of control, and possibly into the hands of pro-Castro Cuban agents (whom he met in Minsk?) working in the U.S. Oswald was both deluded enough to allow himself to be lured into shooting Kennedy in order to help Cuba, and gullible enough to allow himself to be set up to play the patsy role in a plot. Adult fetal alcohol syndrome?
Before November 22, Oswald mysteriously does pro-Castro advocacy, and then also mingles with anti-Castro Cubans. He visits Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico. He carries out noticeable and self-incriminating actions – shooting practices, meeting prominent Cuban exiles, hinting at planned assassination, seeking to buy a get-a-way car.
Lee Harvey Oswald was the only employee of the Texas School Book Depository not accounted for during time the shots were fired.
After the shooting, he seems to improvise an escape from the scene, as if a planned meeting doesn’t occur. He returns to his apartment for his gun – he must have thought he wouldn’t need it, but now clearly thinks that he may. He seems to head in the direction of a small airport nearby, or to a bus station to take him to Mexico (he had made that same bus trip one month before). He calmly murders Dallas police officer Tippett, who alone has threatened his movements. He brazenly re-loads his gun in front of numerous eye witnesses.
https://thinkagainonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ThinkAgain-nsq.jpg00Think Againhttps://thinkagainonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ThinkAgain-nsq.jpgThink Again2010-11-22 21:56:092010-11-22 21:56:09The Strange Case of Lee Harvey Oswald
“The other thing. . . was that this little spot, the Bahamas lowland, was a turquoise jewel that you could see all the way to the moon. . . . It was like it was illuminated, like a piece of opal. And you could see that all the way to the moon. And I kept being amazed about that”. Bill Anders, Apollo 8
Imagine being behind a rock, on The Sea of Tranquility, on the moon, for these past 3.5 billion years. Off in your horizon would be this blue-white planet with patches of brown. Over these years, you would notice these patches of brown coalesce and then separate, you would see white patches come and go, even for awhile covering the entire planet – “snow ball earth”. You wouldn’t be able to see the proteinaceous sea congeal into life, in the blue, and then come ashore and then proliferate, but you would notice increasing green. You might happen to notice, some 65 million years ago, a meteor strike the planet, clouding up the blue and white, and green, but you wouldn’t be able to know that this collision would set the stage for small mammals to evolve into primates, and eventually into self-conscious, self-cultivating beings, humans. You wouldn’t know that Kublai Khan, after conquering all of China, failed to conquer Japan. You would, however, eventually note a faint suggestion of lighted areas, particularly along blue margins, due to the intentional harnessing of energy into light by humankind, although you wouldn’t realize the profound human global proliferation.
Then, on July 20, 1969, suddenly, out of the black sky you would notice a shiny, flaming object descending towards you, with blinking lights, and gold and silver lining. It would land with a slight bounce and puff of dust, and then would extinguish its flame. A bit later, two objects would emerge, slowly descend, and move around, digging and gesturing. They would plant a flag, go back inside, and then later, with a new burst of flame, ascend and disappear.
You would have witnessed a singular event, and would then know that somehow, in the silent black of the immense universe of stars, and in this triangular neighborhood of the sun, the moon, and the earth, self-organizing systems of organic complexity managed to create non-organic systems of complexity that could carry them across empty space and bring them to see for themselves the silent, vast heavens they had for so long imagined, and allow them to look back on their planet and see, in one small view, where everyone has ever lived and died, and where all of any known history has happened.
You would know that they will still live with the mystery of it all, but they will have at last come to know, for sure, that this mystery is. . . . real.
“when I first looked back at the Earth, standing on the surface of the moon, I cried. And if everybody had ever told me I was going to do that, I’d have said, “no, you’re out of your mind.” Alan Shepard, Apollo 14
“If there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it” [Yvonne Hitchens] Hitch 22, A Memoir, Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens was a middle class Brit, but received an upper class education. Perhaps this explains his ‘contradictions’. A part of him would be unable to forget that everyday people want what his upper class Oxford friends take for granted: security, freedom, prosperity, and leisure. He would know the merits of the bourgeoise.
He is a life-long Leftist, a champion of international socialism, a former Trotskyite, now a ‘conservative’ Marxist (his words), a professed agnostic. He holds Henry Kissinger guilty of war crimes, wants the Pope brought before a grand jury, considers Bill Clinton a fraud, and supports a purge of Religion from society. He is a celebrated ‘public intellectual’.
But, . . . but, contradictions: he has supported the forceful overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the Iraq War of George W. Bush, a near unpardonable sin amongst his brethren.
“I can identify the moment when I decided to come off the fence and to admit that I felt that I had been cheating on my dues”
“Ithank whatever powers there may be for the power of the United states of America. Without that reserve strength, the sheer mass of its arsenal in combination with the innovative maneuvers of its special forces, the tyrants and riffraff of the world would possess an undeserved sense of impunity.”
An engaging, entertaining wit, an erudite and humorous conversationalist with a John Lennon voice, Hitchens is an honest intellectual, following integrity. . . even when it leads to self-refutation. Christopher Lasch comes to mind. One is just never sure how much the self-refutation is realized.
Contradictions, well stated, but held, side by side, by an incisive mind are puzzling, but also informative. One is pushed to think deeper. Hitchens seems to have an awareness of the imperative of having convictions, of believing in something, and of being steadfast. He has come to admire the American soldier. He seems to realize, rare perhaps among his compatriots, how principled Leftism is utterly dependent on strongly defended civil freedoms, and that those liberties require not just legal and domestic protection, but also, in the larger world, military protection.
His friends are obsessed with the errors of colonialism, and imperialism, and inequality, but Hitchens seems able to say: compared to what?
He owns up that his leftist friends haven’t much admired his hero George Orwell, didn’t much rally (and still do not) to the defense of his friend Salman Rushdie, that even Susan Sontag had to emphasize that communism was ‘itself a variant‘ of fascism, and that the Reader’s Digest has been a more useful guide to communist reality than the Nation. . !
Alas, with his book God is not Great he has aligned himself with prominent, avowed atheists. How can someone as thoughtful and well-read as he find that religion causes tribalism instead of vice versa? Hasn’t he read The Lord of the Flies?
Stalin, The Court of the Red Tsar, Simon Sebag Montefiore, 2003
It was November 8, 1932, the fifteenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Stalin was sealing his power. The forced collectivization of farming in the Ukraine was well underway, and starvation was killing millions. The Politburo was becoming a sinister band of complicit murderers. There was dissent. In the summer there were even peasant uprisings. The Old Bolsheviks – Martemyan Ryutin among others – had been caught on wiretap: “Don’t tell me there is nobody in the whole country capable of removing him [Stalin]” In the morning, Stalin ordered Ryutin’s arrest, and then attended the Revolution Day parade in Red Square. Ryutin was executed in 1937.
Nadya Alliluyeva, Stalin’s wife of 14 years and mother of two of his children, was not happy. She was listening to the critiques of the Old Bolsheviks. Like Bukharin and others, she was disturbed by the horrors of the Ukraine. Her friends were disappearing.
The Stalin children were sent to the Zubalovo dacha for the weekend. At the evening celebratory dinner Stalin toasted the “destruction of the Enemies of the State”. Nadya didn’t raise her glass, and then left, followed by Polina Molotova, who tried to calm her. Nadya eventually went to her Kremlin room, which was across the hall from Stalin’s office and room, and down the hall from the servants. Her brother Pavel had bought her a pistol as a gift.
It is ‘unclear’ if Stalin went home after the party, or went to his dacha, or to another dacha, with friends, or with another woman. The next morning, he was sound asleep in his room.
Nadya was found on the floor of her room, next to her bed, in a pool of blood, cold, her pistol beside her. In great fear, her servants summoned Yenukidze, Nadya’s last dancing partner the evening before, the “politician in charge of the Kremlin”. He alone witnessed the scene. Found with her was an angry letter to Stalin and a copy of the anti-Stalin “platform” statement of the Old Bolsheviks. “During those days in the country at large, the mere possession of this document warranted arrest.” Yenukidze was executed in 1937.
Stalin was awakened. Doctors arrived. “There were bruises on her face” and a “five millimeter hole over the heart“. Stalin picked up the pistol. “It was a toy”, he told Molotov, adding strangely, “It was only fired once a year.”
Stalin gave a powerful show of grief, anguish, remorse, self pity. “I’d never seen Stalin cry before,” said Molotov, “but as he stood there beside the coffin, the tears ran down his cheeks.” His daughter Svetlana has said that he wanted to resign from the Politburo, but they objected.
As Bukharin offered condolences, Stalin insisted. . . without being asked. . . that he had been at the dacha, not at the apartment. Bukharin was executed in 1938. Bukharin’s plea for clemency was still in Stalin’s desk at the time of Stalin’s death in 1953.
“He swiftly recovered the Messianic confidence in his mission: the war against the peasants and his enemies within the Party.”
Mirage, Napoleon’s Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt, Nina Burleigh, Harper Perennial, 2008
“Napoleon Bonaparte was more than just a celebrated man, he was the nearest thing to a rock star the late eighteenth century would see.”
In 1798, just before Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark on their exploration of the American West and their encounter with primordial, paleolithic humanity, Napoleon Bonaparte set off for Egypt and an encounter with primordial, ancient civilization. Ever the narcissist, Napoleon saw himself as the new Alexander the Great. He had conquered continental Europe, and now sought empire in the East to counter England, which he couldn’t oppose on the open sea. No European had been to the Middle East since the crusades. Ruthless and romantic, a dreamer both inspiring and callous to his followers, Napoleon blundered his way across Egypt and into Syria, finding an Ottoman world, magnificent ancient ruins, and the Rosetta Stone.
Like Apollo to the moon, Napoleon’s expedition not only explored, but made deliberate study of its destination. Napoleon brought scientists, 150 of the best scientists of France. They studied, travelled, catalogued, and made drawings of fantastic ancient ruins that were covered with the mysterious hieroglyphics, many of them filled with sand, used as garbage dumps by the local people. They spoke with Islamic followers about life diversity, and the origins of the world. They found, first hand, the temple of Isis on the island of Philae as the uppermost Nile reaches Nubia, now removed as the island is under the water from the Aswan dam. They discovered the colossi of Memnon statues at Thebes, which ‘moan’ as the sun rises. They found the intact Zodiac base relief ceiling at Dendara, made during the time of the Greeks, and the great temple of Hathor. They suffered the plague, and a near-blinding eye infection called ophthalmia. They created modern archeology.
“stuck dumb by the combination of silver moonlight on the desert, the black, whispering river, and the sudden, towering shadows of temples and columns”
They suffered most the self-centered whim, and reckless, impulsive leadership of Napoleon. He promptly lost his navy to the British, by surpise, in the Battle of Abukir Bay, while mooring at Alexandria. He led his army to needless defeat in the Syrian campaign. In the failed siege of Acre, he ordered euthanasia for the dying and retreating French soldiers. At Jaffa, he ordered the murder of 4000 Turkish prisoners. As news arrived of France in trouble and Italy lost, Napoleon slipped away with a small group back to France, leaving the others to fend for themselves. A shrewd publicist, he regaled his deeds in Egypt before the others could return. He eventually became Emperor.
Of 34000 land troops who sailed to Egypt with Napoleon, 21,500 returned alive. Among the survivors were 3,000 sick and maimed. Out of the expedition’s 16,000 sailors, only 1,866 – barely one in nine- are known to have returned to France.
https://thinkagainonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ThinkAgain-nsq.jpg00Think Againhttps://thinkagainonline.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ThinkAgain-nsq.jpgThink Again2010-11-04 19:54:282010-11-04 19:54:28Napoleon in Egypt
The Strange Case of Lee Harvey Oswald
/in All, Books, Politics“Sen. Russell Long (D-La.) has told us that Lee Harvey Oswald. . . trained with Castro revolutionaries in Minsk during his Soviet stay” Jack Anderson, Washington Post, March 7, 1967
Ion Mihai Pocera defected to the West in 1978. He was head of Communist Romania’s foreign intelligence service, and was responsible for recruiting foreigners – particularly disaffected, low rank American soldiers like Lee Harvey Oswald. In Programmed to kill: Lee Harvey Oswald, the Soviet KGB, and the Kennedy Assassination, 2007, he finds that the Oswald story has very strong signs of Soviet Foreign Intelligence involvement.
Procera proposes that Oswald was likely recruited while stationed at the U-2 Atsugi base, and that Oswald’s information was instrumental in shooting down U2 pilot Francis Gary Powers, which resulted in a great PR triumph for Khrushchev. This made Oswald a hero to Soviet foreign intelligence and his visit to the Soviet Union was likely his reward (this being a common practice). They wouldn’t have wanted him to stay, his cover would be suspect and he would be more useful in the U.S., but he forced them to acquiesce – ever the loose canon – by publicly revoking his U. S. citizenship at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. While living in Russia, he received extensive espionage training, and was then sent back to the U.S. with an arranged Russian agent wife (another common practice), to function (both of them) as sleeper agents in the U.S.
Pocera doesn’t believe that the Soviet Union ordered Oswald to murder President Kennedy, but he emphasizes that Oswald was a difficult, restless agent, a true believer wanting more heroic work, who became more and more intent on getting into ‘revolutionary’ Cuba. He spun out of control, and possibly into the hands of pro-Castro Cuban agents (whom he met in Minsk?) working in the U.S. Oswald was both deluded enough to allow himself to be lured into shooting Kennedy in order to help Cuba, and gullible enough to allow himself to be set up to play the patsy role in a plot. Adult fetal alcohol syndrome?
Before November 22, Oswald mysteriously does pro-Castro advocacy, and then also mingles with anti-Castro Cubans. He visits Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico. He carries out noticeable and self-incriminating actions – shooting practices, meeting prominent Cuban exiles, hinting at planned assassination, seeking to buy a get-a-way car.
Lee Harvey Oswald was the only employee of the Texas School Book Depository not accounted for during time the shots were fired.
After the shooting, he seems to improvise an escape from the scene, as if a planned meeting doesn’t occur. He returns to his apartment for his gun – he must have thought he wouldn’t need it, but now clearly thinks that he may. He seems to head in the direction of a small airport nearby, or to a bus station to take him to Mexico (he had made that same bus trip one month before). He calmly murders Dallas police officer Tippett, who alone has threatened his movements. He brazenly re-loads his gun in front of numerous eye witnesses.
Earthrise
/in All, Ideas“The other thing. . . was that this little spot, the Bahamas lowland, was a turquoise jewel that you could see all the way to the moon. . . . It was like it was illuminated, like a piece of opal. And you could see that all the way to the moon. And I kept being amazed about that”. Bill Anders, Apollo 8
Imagine being behind a rock, on The Sea of Tranquility, on the moon, for these past 3.5 billion years. Off in your horizon would be this blue-white planet with patches of brown. Over these years, you would notice these patches of brown coalesce and then separate, you would see white patches come and go, even for awhile covering the entire planet – “snow ball earth”. You wouldn’t be able to see the proteinaceous sea congeal into life, in the blue, and then come ashore and then proliferate, but you would notice increasing green. You might happen to notice, some 65 million years ago, a meteor strike the planet, clouding up the blue and white, and green, but you wouldn’t be able to know that this collision would set the stage for small mammals to evolve into primates, and eventually into self-conscious, self-cultivating beings, humans. You wouldn’t know that Kublai Khan, after conquering all of China, failed to conquer Japan. You would, however, eventually note a faint suggestion of lighted areas, particularly along blue margins, due to the intentional harnessing of energy into light by humankind, although you wouldn’t realize the profound human global proliferation.
Then, on July 20, 1969, suddenly, out of the black sky you would notice a shiny, flaming object descending towards you, with blinking lights, and gold and silver lining. It would land with a slight bounce and puff of dust, and then would extinguish its flame. A bit later, two objects would emerge, slowly descend, and move around, digging and gesturing. They would plant a flag, go back inside, and then later, with a new burst of flame, ascend and disappear.
You would have witnessed a singular event, and would then know that somehow, in the silent black of the immense universe of stars, and in this triangular neighborhood of the sun, the moon, and the earth, self-organizing systems of organic complexity managed to create non-organic systems of complexity that could carry them across empty space and bring them to see for themselves the silent, vast heavens they had for so long imagined, and allow them to look back on their planet and see, in one small view, where everyone has ever lived and died, and where all of any known history has happened.
You would know that they will still live with the mystery of it all, but they will have at last come to know, for sure, that this mystery is. . . . real.
“when I first looked back at the Earth, standing on the surface of the moon, I cried. And if everybody had ever told me I was going to do that, I’d have said, “no, you’re out of your mind.” Alan Shepard, Apollo 14
Contradiction Hitchens
/in All, Ideas, Politics“If there is going to be an upper class in this country, then Christopher is going to be in it” [Yvonne Hitchens] Hitch 22, A Memoir, Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens was a middle class Brit, but received an upper class education. Perhaps this explains his ‘contradictions’. A part of him would be unable to forget that everyday people want what his upper class Oxford friends take for granted: security, freedom, prosperity, and leisure. He would know the merits of the bourgeoise.
He is a life-long Leftist, a champion of international socialism, a former Trotskyite, now a ‘conservative’ Marxist (his words), a professed agnostic. He holds Henry Kissinger guilty of war crimes, wants the Pope brought before a grand jury, considers Bill Clinton a fraud, and supports a purge of Religion from society. He is a celebrated ‘public intellectual’.
But, . . . but, contradictions: he has supported the forceful overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and the Iraq War of George W. Bush, a near unpardonable sin amongst his brethren.
“I can identify the moment when I decided to come off the fence and to admit that I felt that I had been cheating on my dues”
“I thank whatever powers there may be for the power of the United states of America. Without that reserve strength, the sheer mass of its arsenal in combination with the innovative maneuvers of its special forces, the tyrants and riffraff of the world would possess an undeserved sense of impunity.”
An engaging, entertaining wit, an erudite and humorous conversationalist with a John Lennon voice, Hitchens is an honest intellectual, following integrity. . . even when it leads to self-refutation. Christopher Lasch comes to mind. One is just never sure how much the self-refutation is realized.
Contradictions, well stated, but held, side by side, by an incisive mind are puzzling, but also informative. One is pushed to think deeper. Hitchens seems to have an awareness of the imperative of having convictions, of believing in something, and of being steadfast. He has come to admire the American soldier. He seems to realize, rare perhaps among his compatriots, how principled Leftism is utterly dependent on strongly defended civil freedoms, and that those liberties require not just legal and domestic protection, but also, in the larger world, military protection.
His friends are obsessed with the errors of colonialism, and imperialism, and inequality, but Hitchens seems able to say: compared to what?
He owns up that his leftist friends haven’t much admired his hero George Orwell, didn’t much rally (and still do not) to the defense of his friend Salman Rushdie, that even Susan Sontag had to emphasize that communism was ‘itself a variant‘ of fascism, and that the Reader’s Digest has been a more useful guide to communist reality than the Nation. . !
Alas, with his book God is not Great he has aligned himself with prominent, avowed atheists. How can someone as thoughtful and well-read as he find that religion causes tribalism instead of vice versa? Hasn’t he read The Lord of the Flies?
Stalin’s Wife commits Suicide
/in All, PoliticsStalin, The Court of the Red Tsar, Simon Sebag Montefiore, 2003
It was November 8, 1932, the fifteenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Stalin was sealing his power. The forced collectivization of farming in the Ukraine was well underway, and starvation was killing millions. The Politburo was becoming a sinister band of complicit murderers. There was dissent. In the summer there were even peasant uprisings. The Old Bolsheviks – Martemyan Ryutin among others – had been caught on wiretap: “Don’t tell me there is nobody in the whole country capable of removing him [Stalin]” In the morning, Stalin ordered Ryutin’s arrest, and then attended the Revolution Day parade in Red Square. Ryutin was executed in 1937.
Nadya Alliluyeva, Stalin’s wife of 14 years and mother of two of his children, was not happy. She was listening to the critiques of the Old Bolsheviks. Like Bukharin and others, she was disturbed by the horrors of the Ukraine. Her friends were disappearing.
The Stalin children were sent to the Zubalovo dacha for the weekend. At the evening celebratory dinner Stalin toasted the “destruction of the Enemies of the State”. Nadya didn’t raise her glass, and then left, followed by Polina Molotova, who tried to calm her. Nadya eventually went to her Kremlin room, which was across the hall from Stalin’s office and room, and down the hall from the servants. Her brother Pavel had bought her a pistol as a gift.
It is ‘unclear’ if Stalin went home after the party, or went to his dacha, or to another dacha, with friends, or with another woman. The next morning, he was sound asleep in his room.
Nadya was found on the floor of her room, next to her bed, in a pool of blood, cold, her pistol beside her. In great fear, her servants summoned Yenukidze, Nadya’s last dancing partner the evening before, the “politician in charge of the Kremlin”. He alone witnessed the scene. Found with her was an angry letter to Stalin and a copy of the anti-Stalin “platform” statement of the Old Bolsheviks. “During those days in the country at large, the mere possession of this document warranted arrest.” Yenukidze was executed in 1937.
Stalin was awakened. Doctors arrived. “There were bruises on her face” and a “five millimeter hole over the heart“. Stalin picked up the pistol. “It was a toy”, he told Molotov, adding strangely, “It was only fired once a year.”
Stalin gave a powerful show of grief, anguish, remorse, self pity. “I’d never seen Stalin cry before,” said Molotov, “but as he stood there beside the coffin, the tears ran down his cheeks.” His daughter Svetlana has said that he wanted to resign from the Politburo, but they objected.
As Bukharin offered condolences, Stalin insisted. . . without being asked. . . that he had been at the dacha, not at the apartment. Bukharin was executed in 1938. Bukharin’s plea for clemency was still in Stalin’s desk at the time of Stalin’s death in 1953.
“He swiftly recovered the Messianic confidence in his mission: the war against the peasants and his enemies within the Party.”
Napoleon in Egypt
/in All, BooksMirage, Napoleon’s Scientists and the Unveiling of Egypt, Nina Burleigh, Harper Perennial, 2008
“Napoleon Bonaparte was more than just a celebrated man, he was the nearest thing to a rock star the late eighteenth century would see.”
In 1798, just before Thomas Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark on their exploration of the American West and their encounter with primordial, paleolithic humanity, Napoleon Bonaparte set off for Egypt and an encounter with primordial, ancient civilization. Ever the narcissist, Napoleon saw himself as the new Alexander the Great. He had conquered continental Europe, and now sought empire in the East to counter England, which he couldn’t oppose on the open sea. No European had been to the Middle East since the crusades. Ruthless and romantic, a dreamer both inspiring and callous to his followers, Napoleon blundered his way across Egypt and into Syria, finding an Ottoman world, magnificent ancient ruins, and the Rosetta Stone.
Like Apollo to the moon, Napoleon’s expedition not only explored, but made deliberate study of its destination. Napoleon brought scientists, 150 of the best scientists of France. They studied, travelled, catalogued, and made drawings of fantastic ancient ruins that were covered with the mysterious hieroglyphics, many of them filled with sand, used as garbage dumps by the local people. They spoke with Islamic followers about life diversity, and the origins of the world. They found, first hand, the temple of Isis on the island of Philae as the uppermost Nile reaches Nubia, now removed as the island is under the water from the Aswan dam. They discovered the colossi of Memnon statues at Thebes, which ‘moan’ as the sun rises. They found the intact Zodiac base relief ceiling at Dendara, made during the time of the Greeks, and the great temple of Hathor. They suffered the plague, and a near-blinding eye infection called ophthalmia. They created modern archeology.
“stuck dumb by the combination of silver moonlight on the desert, the black, whispering river, and the sudden, towering shadows of temples and columns”
They suffered most the self-centered whim, and reckless, impulsive leadership of Napoleon. He promptly lost his navy to the British, by surpise, in the Battle of Abukir Bay, while mooring at Alexandria. He led his army to needless defeat in the Syrian campaign. In the failed siege of Acre, he ordered euthanasia for the dying and retreating French soldiers. At Jaffa, he ordered the murder of 4000 Turkish prisoners. As news arrived of France in trouble and Italy lost, Napoleon slipped away with a small group back to France, leaving the others to fend for themselves. A shrewd publicist, he regaled his deeds in Egypt before the others could return. He eventually became Emperor.
Of 34000 land troops who sailed to Egypt with Napoleon, 21,500 returned alive. Among the survivors were 3,000 sick and maimed. Out of the expedition’s 16,000 sailors, only 1,866 – barely one in nine- are known to have returned to France.