Friday, July 23, 2004

Napoleon, W's model for a liberating conqueror. Here in the capital of a former jewel in the French imperial crown (Quebec City), I just finished a rather dry academic biography of Napoleon by Steven Englund.  It is easy for to forget that France was once an important military power, just like us.  Rather than exploiting and/or pillaging, Napoleon tried to liberate the people in the territories that he conquered, just like George W. Bush.  And just like George W. Bush, Napoleon suffered his first defeat in a multi-ethnic Middle Eastern country: "The Turkish Empire, which nominally ruled [Egypt], was regarded as an immoral and declining power, so the French saw an opportunity to revive civilization ... "The effective goverment of Egypt at this time was in the hands of the Mamelukes, an equestrian feudal order of slave origin that had long held power over a disparate population of Moslem Arabs, Coptic Christians, and Sephardic Jews. ... "To the [French] expedition's stunned disillusionment, the land of the pharoahs turned out to be a filthy backwater of flies, mud huts, disease, howling dogs, and superstition.  Alexandria offered nothing worthy of its grand name. ... "The most controversial [decision by Bonaparte] in this campaign was his decision to execute three thousand Turkish prisoners ... [who] had surrendered on a promise of quarter ... "[The French] intention to bring 'enlightenment' and 'development' to blend 'the rights of man' with 'the law of the Koran.'  From Egypt's perspective, the Europeans dropped suddenly onto their scene as an alien, hostile force majeure. ... "What eluded Napoleon's anticipation was the degree and persistence of Moslem mistrust of the French, coupled with their comparative indifference to Western notions of reform.  ...  The preponderance of Egypt's populace sincerely believed that anything worth knowing was already explicit or clearly implicit in the Koran.  More seriously, many Napoleonic measures outraged people.  ... Decrees on behalf of women, Jews, and Coptic Christians ... went down almost as badly as the imposition of high taxes to support the French army. ... "The French hold on Egypt thus remained what it started out as: force operating behind a facade of hypocrisy... "For the mass of the populace, the French could not get out from under the burden of being seen as 'the Christian enemy,' the crusaders returned.  In that perspective, the Ottomans and even the Mamelukes were preferable because at least they were not infidels." The good news for W. is that Napoleon bounced back from that 1799 defeat and several others, managing to return to power even after exile to Elba, for example.  So if his obsession with Iraq results in the loss of the White House he might still manage to come back in 2008. [Nouvelle France and Quebec prefigure to some extent conflicts and controversies today.  The French came to live in a reasonable amount of harmony with the Indians, whom they saw as valuable economic allies in such endeavors as the fur trade.  The early French immigrants learned Indian languages and many married Algonquin women.  They expected some sort of ethnic and cultural fusion to be the end result.  The English, by contrast, came to displace the Indians.  They also did not shy from the ethnic cleansing of Nova Scotia, deporting 10,000 French-speaking Acadians between 1755 and 1762.] [Philip Greenspun Weblog] Phillip Greenspun is not the first person to notice this similarity. Various writers on the LewRockwell.com Blog have been pointing out the similarities between the neocons and Napoleon and the Jacobins for some time. 6:47:44 PM    comment () Mysterious Syrian Band Identified. That purportedly suspicious band of Syrians on a June 29 Detroit-L.A. flight that caused a wave of terror about potential terror in the blogging world has been positively identified on National Review Online. Clinton W. Taylor does some deducing and makes some phone calls and discovers that, in fact, these guys were perfectly normal passengers, the backup band for Syrian singer Nour Mehana, on their way to perform at the Sycuan Casino & Resort, near San Diego. Strangely, after explaining that these guys were perfectly innocent musicians, Taylor still concluded that there was something wrong with the fact that rather than land the plane in Las Vegas or Omaha, it was allowed to continue on to Los Angeles without interruption, as if everything were hunky-dory on board. It certainly wasn't. If this had been the real thing, and the musicians had instead been terrorists, nothing was stopping them from taking control of the plane or assembling a bomb in the restroom. Wait--what about Annie Jacobsen, whose breathless account of her nerve-wracking experience watching these musicians run amok with their standing and bathroom-going started it all? What if she had instead been a terrorist? By the same logic, nothing was stopping her from taking control of the plane either, or assembling a bomb in the restroom. In fact, even today, the skies are filled with people who, just like on that flight, are not terrorists and have no intention of taking control of a plane or assembling a bomb in it. Yet they are, as NRO points out regarding Jacobsen's sub-Shatnerian nightmare at 20,000 feet, blithely allowed to continue on to their destination without being brought down in some other city instead. I can only thank NRO for bringing that problem to our attention. [Hit & Run] As an article pointed out in the comments to this post makes clear, there was only one terrorist on that flight--her name was Annie Jacobsen. 6:40:44 PM    comment () Flight 93 hijacker: 'Shall we finish it off?'. The passengers continued with their assault, trying to break through the cockpit door. At 10:02 a.m. and 23 seconds, a hijacker said, "Pull it down! Pull it down!" "The hijackers remained at the controls but must have judged that the passengers were only seconds from overcoming them," the report concludes. [CNN] In other words, the passengers were unable to recapture the plane in time because they couldn't get through the cockpit door fast enough. So what did the Feds do with that knowledge? They insisted on making the cockpit doors even harder to get through. After all, the next time the passengers might get through the door faster, and that would never do. 5:46:43 PM    comment ()

© Copyright 2006 Ken Hagler. Last update: 2/15/2006; 2:02:33 PM.