When Greece Joined Yugoslavia : Some Counterfactual Fun

January 17, 1949.

President Beloyannis grasped the hand of his predecessor, President Tito, tightly, and smiled, as Tito’s searching, scalpel-like gaze fell on the plans for the new Capital of the Balkan Union. How different history could have been, he reflected. If Franklin Roosevelt had managed to live through 1944, President Wallace would never have begun the chain of confusion and complication which had led to the messy, delayed end to the war in Europe in the atomic bombing of Germany in 1946. America may have had some moral authority, some governing will to continue interference in European affairs, and the Democratic Army of Greece-in truth the Communists—would never have been able to wear down the British as they had done. Now, all the Americans wanted to do was to warn off the Soviets, and take care of the remains of the capitalist West as the British and French decolonised their markets into American arms.

A more determined American leader would simply have taken over the fight on the ground, and Beloyannis knew that they would have won. As it was, the northmen had put up a great struggle, under the leadership of Churchill, with Anthony Eden enjoying what was perhaps his finest hour—Beloyannis could say this in victory, having seen Eden vainly trying to hold the line personally in Greece and then Cyprus—but, really, it was now too late. The British were a dying Empire. They hadn’t been able to hold Greece because they were bankrupt.

Now, they were out of Cyprus, and out of the Balkans. Not only had enosis happened, but a new confederacy had arisen in the Balkans, uniting the Yugloslav and Greek peoples. Soon, thanks to Beloyannis’ openness to the Smyrnan diaspora, foremost of which was Ari Onassis, Beloyannis would be leading the dominant shipping power in the Suez canal too.

The Albanians held out, of course—but with Stalin aware that President Eisenhower, recalled and given the Democratic nomination in 1948 after Tom Dewey’s disastrous single term—was more than prepared to use the atomic weapon, they could hardly intrigue with Moscow. The Georgian in Moscow had been caged, which, frankly, was the best thing to happen to the communist cause in a long time. Yes, Beloyannis thought; in time, even the Albanians would come along into what was already being called eurocommunism. Who knew what could happen? He was prepared to leave the west alone, but with Italian and French communist parties registering at between a third and a half of the public support in those lands, a Mediterranean Soviet Union, or at least some accommodation not far from it, was possible.

Beloyannis had a cool attitude to the real (perhaps the really-existing) Soviets, more even than to the Turks whose lands now lay at the feet of his federation. They were basically boyars, wanting domination as they had done since Peter the Great. Beloyannis wanted independence. That started with money. A common Balkan currency had been established, and was up and running, something that pleased him very much. He believed the history of Greece to have been one in which the state had been forced into a position throughout its short history of owing foreigners money, leading to the subjection of the Hellenic people.

Well, in a Balkan Union with Greece and Serbia as the twin powerhouses, that could hardly happen. In fact, it was possible to imagine a bright future, in which three distinct global areas—East Asia, the Balkan Union, and the former German and Hapsburg lands—blazed a trail for the fraternal integration of markets whatever Stalin thought. A new Socialist Trading Organisation was to be a top priority, ringed with the rockets and science provided by Croats and Slovenes.

But first, what to do with Marshal Tito? Perhaps, as a special envoy, he could be retired to somewhere where he could do no harm, as the British had put away their former King in the Sargasso Sea. Cuba, perhaps? No, he chuckled. The Americans would never allow Cuba to go communist….

The Impeachment of President Kennedy, 1967

John F. Kennedy grimaced in pain. He had never been in the best of health, and the years since the failed attempt on his life in Dallas had not been good to him. They’d been worse for the Secret Service men on the back of his car that day, of course, but one of Oswald’s bullets had grazed his neck and he still felt difficulty in swallowing.

They years had been good for the nation, he thought. He’d used the wave of sympathy after Dallas to push through a civil rights bill, and the embarrassment of the Bobby Baker scandal to get rid of Lyndon Johnson. After Dallas, no one in Texas was going to vote against him anyway. His debates with Barry Goldwater in 1964 had become legendary, and his decision to go jointly to the moon with Nikita Khruschev meant that he could avoid trouble in Vietnam and that the country could proceed upward.

All that had been very fine. Fineness wasn't helping very much today. A slight nausea from one of the many medical drugs coursing through his system was affecting his vision, and sometimes the oak panels of his desk seemed to be bending under the weight of his troubles.

Things had gone wrong. They always go wrong for second term presidents, of course. A backlash had set in in after he had federalised the national guard units of the South to carry through a voting rights act, and the constitutional amendments that he had proposed to end the poll taxes and discrimination there had stalled. George Wallace and Ronald Reagan were leading revolts in both ends of the country against what he kept reminding himself was not his rule.

And there was Lyndon. Always Lyndon; Lyndon working with Hoover behind the scenes, Lyndon and Connally strategising with Nixon, Lyndon complaining about the opening to Cuba. Sometimes, he couldn’t help but think of Lyndon everywhere. He stroked the handle of the mug containing his chowder and thought of Lyndon’s jug ears; blood pressure gave him a rush of vertigo from his comfortable leather chair as he sank into it, and he thought of Lyndon declaiming loudly, towering above him.

The trouble, however, was hard to get away from. Kennedy had survived many things in his life, but finally, the dam had broken. Mimi, and Fiddle, and Faddle, and Judy, and Jo and all the other women who had been a part of his life—who’d shared the grip of the vice that had devastated and ridden and controlled him—stared back at him from the newspapers on his desk.

They were good girls, really. he never blamed them; the ghost of kick would never let him anyway. Odd to think of her now...

He hadn’t looked at a TV screen for weeks, and the occasional sideways glimpse of a newsstand set his stomach raging. Jackie spent her time crying quietly, or speaking a soft husky French to Malraux and a thousand other people whose calls she billed Kennedy accounts for. His skin stank to him when he held his children.

Kennedy fell deeper into the chair he had sunk into. The blue sky above reminded him of dallas, and though the heat was pleasant, he shrank from it. No Oswald here. No moonshot and no crowd either, though.

The white House solarium had been built by Herbert Hoover’s wife. He’d met Hoover once or twice, and called him after becoming president. Hoover had been a source of support, knowledge, a help, much more than Eisenhower. A man who’d rebuilt his reputation and survived an obloquy Kennedy was now probably going to know. Neither Bobby nor Larry would approve, of course, but now that it looked like war was a possibility in the Middle East and an oil shock was more than possible, it would be criminal to stay president. He didn’t have the votes anyway; the republicans had the house and Reagan was the darling of the moment.


Kennedy felt that there was more to this, and had to be. His hand went involuntarily to the rosary in his breast pocket; beneath it, and the cloth of his jacket and shirt and undershirt, the leather of his scapula tag, containing a relic, stuck limpidly to his skin. But the hand didn’t stay there. Wearily, his eyes followed it to the telephone that he’d dropped above the story of ken Keating’s speech on his impeachment. Mrs Lincoln answered straight away as the sun beat down. Maybe a Southern man would be better able to do what had to be done to stop the riots and to keep civil rights on the rails.


Did his voice slur or scrape these days? He could not tell. Still, it had to be done.

‘Please ask Vice President Sanford to come to the residence’.

To Mars By Atom Bomb, 1996

Ed Grissom gazed down at the dusty surface of Mars. It seemed miraculous that he had ended up there, but since a mystical experience on the way back from the moon, Ed had not been in the best sense of the word an admirer of the derivatively rational. He was here; it was a miracle; miracles happened; this was normal. Behind him, Friendship Ten shone under the sky, which was a mixture of grey and pink. A pink sky; just what the communists had ordered.

The communists, as he moved his head and looked down, were filming like tourists, or rather, Sergei Mihailovich was. Much of Ed’s long career with the International Space Agency had been spent on the joint American and Soviet missions that Kennedy and Khruschev had started in 1965, but it never failed to amuse him that—that heavy, dancing joyous, Springy thing that was the Slavic soul.

He corrected himself. Dust storms had been predicted, and his visor was buzzing a little. The low hum suggested to him a level of ambient radiation that he had not expected, and which was at odds with the ice that his scraper had uncovered beneath the red dust. Mars was such an enigma, though it was fairly clear that it was one of the four or five places in the solar system that held life.

At least, unlike those who finally uncovered that truth, he wasn’t going to have to explain that he knew it after seeing a frozen shrimp from a Saturn moon thrown up by a water volcano outside the window. The banality of that announcement and the shocking implications, even though we had all expected it by 1987, still thrilled him.

Grissom sighed, unable to explain even to himself what he was experiencing. They’d practiced in Nevada and on the Tatooine sands of Tunisia, of course. The sands had even given him the idea for a space movie, though these were fairly common now that the Vietnam special effects studios were churning them out. But it had been emphasized time and again; don’t spend too much time out there. The Shelter will protect you. The Sun is warming the whole solar system. Avoid the cosmic rays on a planet with no magnetic shield. We wouldn’t want the Presidents upset.

Politicians. Grissom felt himself to be at odds with the general regard for such people. The New Romans, Americans were calling themselves now, vast majorities reading about Cicero and other lawyers and imagining a world federation. Grissom played, as he worked—he couldn’t, somehow, near the end of this trip, just enjoy Mars—with ideas.

He thought about what would have happened had Project Orion not been pursued. Space would have been some euphemism for an insane competition to kill fewer people with chemical rockets than the other side. Maybe people would even have got bored with it by now, or run out of money. Instead, huge Orion boosters had lifted parts and materiel into space from Star City in Kazakhstan with even bigger parts in their payloads for years. Success had bred success, and humanity had moved easily--too easily, Grissom sometimes thought--out into space.

To Mars by atom bomb; what a mad idea that had been. Dr Dyson, the English head of the International Space Agency, always chuckled about it, and it appealed to his ironic side, Grissom guessed. Dyson was a brilliant man, after all, he was allowed his impracticalities. He’d never have made it into a purely national effort, but when President Kennedy, having dodged those bullets at Dallas, reached out to Khruschev for détente in 1964, a new era had begun.

No more Nazis and no more fireworks; this was the big time in space shots. There was a serious surfeit of bombs, and a fear of storing them near populated areas; it seemed straightforward, really, to pick up an idea Dyson had had to throw them beneath a spacecraft plate and slip the bonds of earth.

Actually, the idea had rolled on, which is how Grissom had come to be where he was. His sample was easily collected, in this light gravity. Rising, but not too quickly from his bend—he didn’t want his slightly weary headiness to be accompanied by real blood pressure—he took one last look around and, grains of soil trickling from his glove, headed inside.

Friendship Ten was not just a spacecraft. It carried with it an unfolding geodesic dome, which, with the aid of a little insulation, was proof against all but the worst dust storm. It was feminine, inviting, warm. At the centre of it, a pogo-plane style rocket, with odd rotors extending from the top, stood like a dumpy but attractive matron; a sort of odd, strained version of Queen Victoria. Every time he saw it, Grissom thought of the Mexican art Sergei loved. Sometimes, he expected Frida Kahlo to pop up from behind it, her body madly dissonant with the surroundings and her eyebrows somehow tethered to the moons.

Inside, behind the airlock, and the shower, Winnie McNess, the third member of the team was pottering about. It was difficult to tell if she was making dinner or analyzing samples. They’d had one of Winnie’s Rhodesian Bredies, made with tomato paste and Martian water and a meat fungus Grissom didn’t want to identify the night before.

Grissom wondered about the ethics of shitting on Mars. The toilets were chemical, and recycled waste brilliantly, but there was residue, if dried. On the Soyuz Spirit of ’76 that was orbiting above, it would have gone straight out the back just before the next atomic blast was thrown out, but down here, especially since the old lady had to return upstairs, it went onto Mars. Hello planet, we are human. Have a sample. Terrible.

More importantly, there was clearly water down there, and from what Grissom had seen from above, Mars had enough caves that it could be liquid at some point. It wasn’t that his excrement was especially alive with bacteria and microbes and the things their shared food had cleared out of their gut, but, well, life was tenacious.

Were they seeding Mars, bio-colonising the inhabitants, tiny as they might be, without even a thought? Ed Grissom, Conquistador and colon-izer. He shuddered. Even the Egyptians myth of a world born of bodily fluid was, well, more life affirming.

From somewhere, Blue Moon was playing. Ah, strange fortune. One day, he would see that again. He smiled. ‘Hi, Winnie, what’s up m’frien?’ He drawled. Winnie didn’t answer. She seemed frozen to the spot. That was unlike her.

The look on her face, though…Grissom wouldn’t forget it. He recalled the thoughts that went through his mind. Radiation? Space sickness? Had the confines sent her stir crazy?

Then he turned around. It was the corner of his eye that acted first, then the head at an angle, then the torso, then a pirouette on the leg. Mindlessly. In front of him. Barely as high as the table. Everything strange around it, and it looking so normal. A big, three foot tall, spindle legged white-brown big headed black eyed it. Like finding a mouse in a kitchen. When he mouthed the name of his saviour, he could hear himself speaking as Winnie gasped in place of a scream; but everything else had frozen.

How banal thoughts are at these moments. Grissom would always recall his. That thing...did it want...a lift?

Kennedy-Reagan 68


America is still recovering from the smashing, shaking, dark energies of the election of 1968. What a hell of a year. I’ve taken lot of drugs in my life—none since I found Jesus somewhere down the back of a girl’s eyes in a mussed up bed in Chicago---but none of those have had the effect on Hunter J.Mailer, Esq, as that year.

I wasn’t a Kennedy man from the beginning, and I had been taken by Reagan’s sunny charm since he fixed the California budget in 1966. I have to admit that. I liked the lower taxes. But I hated Hubert Humphrey, the doughfaced bouncing gull, and frankly, I would have shot Nixon myself, full to the eyeballs of dope if he’d’ve won. A national choice between those two would have been a national enema with an elephant gun, as far as I’m concerned. I’ve fired those. Nasty.

So what was it that brought us to this path? I guess, looking back, the year was down to one guy; Rockefeller. Had Rocky not entered the race on the Republican side, the party of darkness would have fallen for Nixon. He’d been traipsing up and down the land hawking his wares in a lying competition with Lyndon Johnson since 1962, and I think that he had the market cornered on the ‘electable, dark horse candidate’ stakes. Or at least, he thought he had. George Romney he could have undermined, since Romney was basically too innocent for a smear merchant, but Romney and Rockefeller both running meant that your average son-of-the-desert rube was spoilt for choice. Those two getting in early and staying in stymied Dick like spinach in the teeth on a guaranteed sex date. When the Republicans got to their fortress in Miami to the first of the year’s two brokered conventions, the ground was set for Reagan to come through, and God knows he had the backing.



Reagan had had the sense to get to Strom Thurmond before Nixon did, and to promise him all the crazy federalism and missile-in-space programmes he wanted. With Senator Pecker running interference for him in between interns—literally, I tell you, I know, a guy in an alley told me—Sunny Ron could ally the South to the Goldwaterites and the Moabites and the Lebanites and the rest of the Republican tribes. People forget that Israel wasn’t the leading Jewish Kingdom, Judah was; why? Because Israel won.

Rocky coming in and then coming out against the war, with Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy already calling for it to be over by March had an odd effect on the Democrat side too. It made Lyndon Johnson mad as hell, and made him absolutely determined to get Hubie elected. Hubie, the joyborne cornball, thought this would be done by slavish loyalty, and when Johnson stitched up a bombing halt in Vietnam he thought that meant he should, like his Boss said, stand in Macys and kiss Lyndon’s backside. That was the day before the Nixon team, spooked by the Humphrey bounce, released the information about all that money Lyndon had got from the Greek Colonels. Sirhan didn’t have to miss, then, though he did; it was fairly obvious Humphrey wasn’t going to win on a first ballot in Chicago.

It was also clear that 68 would be the year of the independent Leader, not the follower, not the experienced man. McCarthy was too close to his kids, too poetic, too intense, even if JFK had named an entire administration after a throwaway line of Kahlil Gibran’s. When Daley swung behind Kennedy after California, it was obvious to me that 68 was going to be a year with a Democrat candidate, albeit one running round with a target strapped to both his faces, head and torso, spending squillions with an Irish twinkle once again.

The Conventions were amazing. To his great credit, sneaky little bastard that he was, Robert Francis Kennedy, saw how appealing Reagan was that year. Many of his hangers on didn’t. What Kennedy, the survivor of the Missiles of October had, though, was something Reagan didn’t; credibility as a liberal hawk.

Bob had a record. He’d ordered troops to act for his brother’s administration and enforce the end of segregation in the South and he’d wiretapped Martin Luther King. This mattered in a year when sixty per cent of the Chicago police department self-identified themselves to posters as racists. Kennedy had what some debased fascist age would easily have called a compassionate conservative appeal.



Reagan had his strengths. I liked Ron. Occasionally, late at night, when my mind was snaking out into star trek reruns and the psychotic fare of a hotel TV, the vast plates of lobster I’d ordered on expenses and emptied on auto would arise and look through me and show me the deep secrets of his soul. Salty and light and meaningless with claws hidden somewhere, like Rothko painting a smile. He appealed to some.

I heard him once, playing to a western audience sick of punks and soap-dodgers and kids who just didn’t want to go to Vietnam or General Motors and rioters, and I reflected that, in many of the states west or south of the rockies, the only way that sharia law would ever arise is as a species of liberal reform. Ronald Reagan had the fairground charm of a ride you know, drunk and high and full of some greasy fat sugary thing that makes you feel like a greasy fat sugary thing with wings is bad for you and enticing. Bobby saw that.

I can’t forget the debates of 68. Kennedy and Reagan traveled round the country, Bobby trying to slip his moral stilettos into the pilsbury doughnut boy in a Glenn Ford body, Reagan trying to aim for the knees. The most interesting thing I think about debates that will probably be talked and written about until the end of the Republic is just how classic they were. I mean that in the Greek sense; the debates of 68 laid out, unusually, two utterly different philosophies at their best, and you wanted to do what Roosevelt did to gold speeches—cut them down the middle and stitch them together.

The two of them replaced the lobsters as the ubiquity in my preformed manufactured hotel rooms, especially when I booked one for a week on the publishers card, as I did from time to time, and laid myself out with some Benzedrine, heroin and a couple of boxes of green things I’d been given in Hanoi that had the same effect on my mind as a Beret of the same colour and a half years training had on a Marine’s forearm.

I remember the debate in September particularly well. The debate where the bombs were being discussed, and where the bomb went off. You know what happened as well as I, you saw the pictures—who hasn’t? Bob Kennedy was a red rag to every nut in America. I recall the funeral, the way Teddy was reeling, unable to take the nomination the Democratic National Committee and Lyndon promptly delivered to Hubert; the way Reagan went comatose, and Rockefeller stepped in to run with Romney.




















That bomb deranged this country. It boosted George Wallace and Happy Chandler way above what they could have got, and cut the ground straight out from Humphrey. Even when Rocky announced immediate vietnamisation of the war, without saying what that meant—one final, vast bombing of Cambodia—and started fronting his foreign policy with his flunky Kissinger, we couldn’t stop Rocky. Couldn’t stop the inflation, disillusion and shady spooks who followed in his wake. Couldn’t stop Rockefeller-Romney from winning in 68.

Then they messed up. Funny that; on their own primary rules, the ones Rocky pushed through in '68, but Bobby and Daley kept the Democrats from embracing.

’72 was almost a foregone conclusion. Reagan returned, signed up Maryland’s liberal civil-rights governor, Agnew, beat Muskie, and, well, the rest—the Article V convention that proposed altering the constitution and then went nowhere, the accelerated détente, the opening with China in 76, the ‘premiership’ of Kissinger, the damascene conversion and the opening with Brezhnev, the occupation of the Middle East—all of that’s for another time.

I’m tired of all this. Still, at least it’s nice up here with my guns in Wyoming, smelling faintly the cities burning on all the cheap oil. I’m told to enjoy it. The liberals all tell me there’s an ice age coming, though I guess that will all be a matter for George Bush or Gary Hart next year….

A Napoleon On The Moon, 1919

“Une desolation magnifique”. I don’t think anyone alive in this amazing year of 1919 could forget the words of Jean-Jacques Napoleon as he looked out upon the moon. I myself heard and saw it on the visualiseur, our great Franco-escossais achievement in the City-State of Londres. It made me think how lucky we were that the founder of the Imperial family hadn’t made the wrong decision in 1812, and at how history could have been so different.

France, of course, was then merely the greatest of the European Empires. The first Napoleon had stabilized and improved upon the Revolution, and yet stood surrounded by the forces of Russian, Austrian and English reaction. One wrong move could have derailed everything; one refusal to note the danger Prussia, that long forgotten tribe of misplaced Viking slavs, one lucky break for England, one slip-up in the face of the Turks or the Russians and all could have been lost.

The problems faced by Napoleon the Great were of course intense. We can be grateful that, somehow, in 1812, he overcame the contempt that is natural to the military mind—how much more so the genius—and found Generals whom he could trust.

The Corsican had built a France united as never before by language, by semaphore signals and by science, and had grasped the vital heartland of Europe, the rhine and the Saar valley. He had vast agricultural resources at his disposal, and the genius of those scientists who had survived the excesses of the revolution.

So, when the Emperor chose a cold peace, and ended that remarkable and fissile division that had prevailed since the peace of Westphalia in the Germanies by incorporating the European lands into the Empire, Europe breathed a sigh of relief. The Emperor seems somehow to have tapped into some current of history in those years; certainly, encouraging the Protestants of the North of Ireland to accept the Empire and to be a base for the invasion of the Scottish and Irish north was incredible.

When the forces of France smashed into Southern England, having gained the neutrality of President Clinton in America, the English had to capitulate. They’d been oppressing their own poor for ages of course, anyway; presumably, that is why the division of England into the Duchies or Yorkshire, Norfolk, London, and the Pays de Galles works so well.

With France so strong, and determined not to be lured into Russia, the Tsar could do little. With the acquisition of the Australias, Southern India, and Madagascar, he could do nothing but desperately develop Alaska and California. It remained for President Calhoun and the Nipon Emperor later in the century, of course, to disabuse the Tsar of his lands, and his intrigues with the remains of the American Empires that did not fall to the United States.

Of course, he couldn’t have run it all himself. To merely replicate the sun-kings must have been a fear; to surpass them an intention of the sort more suited to the lofty disdain of taller men, which we now call a ‘Wellington complex’. Yet Napoleon the first didn’t. What of course not even he could have predicted was the way he stumbled across the two inventions that saved the Empire; the galvanic communicator and La Usine Babbage.

The machine had been conceived in England. The greed of that late Empire was intense; it took the brilliance of looms given their ordinated programmes by card, and made money from their looted textiles with them; it took chemistry and worked out new ways of killing Indians with them. When Babbage, building on the work of La Belle Lovelace—ah, that woman, how those impotent Englishmen before our liberation would have ignored her!—proposed his machine, they laughed at him.

It took Napoleon to see its possibilities. He was an old man by then, but a man who had had a great deal of time to think, and to contemplate the future. What a mind it was, that went forward to the galvanic communicator—the ‘telegraph’ as Les Americains put it. They should be allowed the word, I have always thought; it makes their surrenders quicker, and communicates the news of their periodic liberations by the forces of France much more effectively.

When Napoleon the great died in 1840, we were lucky that his nephew was available to refound the Imperial family. France would never again be a republic, but from Ireland to the Elbe, and from Sweden to Egypt, it was clear that the heartland of liberty was free. It fell to Louis, of course, to end slavery, and to lead the final assault on Cuba, which the Americans had set up as the heart of their golden circle. But what was there to do? Build railroads? A man like Louis-Napoleon, of that blood would not have been so contained.

So, of course, France was launched upon the great experiment, not to make money but to discover some source which would deliver energy and progress. That we should find it in the black oil and strange, diminishing rocks of L’Afrique was, I suppose, a serendipity.

We were always more scientific, our thoughts always grander than the English; our resources were greater than the Prussians, and our energies backed by forces and power greater than any available to the Americans. So it was no surprise that, after the opening to the Ottomans launched upon once Louis-Napoleon had won over the westernizing elements in the Russian court with the peace of 1850, we borrowed and enhanced their rocket technology.

They’d been firing great cannon since 1453 of course; once, for the benefit of a sultan in the seventeenth century, a man even sat upon a cage above what could only be described as a grand explosive. I suppose that when Louis-Napoleon sat within the great Pyramid, as all the Emperors have done in a homage to Napoleon the Great, his mind must have turned to Levantine things.

Levantine things….what amazing events those two, odd Saxon words convey. The re-establishment of Palestine, of Jordan, Lebanon and Israel, the creation of an Arab confederation modeled on the Confederation of the Rhine. I suppose that one is forced to take sides these days on the viability of the Arab National home set up around Mecca after the attempted holocaust of those people, but I for one would simply say that I like Arabs. Muslims were a successor state to the Byzantine empire and the fact that Arabs are stateless in a world of Moors, Berbers, Turks, and Persians and the various Jewish states is neither here nor there. We cannot abjure them. I despise the pathological sickness of contrarabisme. Quite why a few Americans, dictated, to, I suppose, by the national religion of the Mormon-Islam lobby, want to bomb everyone for the Arabs I don’t know.

Still, those rockets and cannon, when linked to the calculations of our Babbagettes, proved invaluable. And, of course to our remarkable Marie. How gifted we French are with our women!.

Who could have predicted we would have risen to world domination and the permanent end to any challenge to our power with the addition of Curium explosives to the rockets, and the development of Curium power to our homes? When, briefly, the radiative galvanic effects of Curium on the commicateur were noted, of course, we were led to the ‘radiophone’. What people live in Greater France!

So now, we stand, here in the year 1919, in a world of some seven rulers, an humanity under the Family Napoleon united in liberty, satisfait. The Union Francaise, exemplified by the Senate and Tribunes in the City of Paris whose initials grace our standards, beneath the giant N, subsists in glory.

Another, if hitherto minor, Napoleon, is upon the moon, erecting the copy of the Declaration de les Droits de l’homme on the site where, I am confident, a New Paris will one day stand. My mind turns to the possibilities of the impossible future. It is all that I can do to reflect on just how limited the futures of the peoples of the world would have been had Napoleon the Great never trusted his Generals, and never held back on his instinctive desire to penetrate quickly into the lands of the Tsar. 1812; the year no one remembers. The year our Printemps did not end. The year we did not begin to dream of carving our canals on Mars….

NSTVP