New on my website: a Primer on the Creation of an Artificial post-Colonial Nation-state
Excerpt from Paris 1919, by Margaret MacMillan (Toronto, Random House, 2002); this excerpt from the 30/10/02 issue of The National Post. �Gertrude Bell, an historian and archaeologist, was the first British spy and the only woman to play a key role in the conference. Thin, intense and chain-smoking, she loved the silence and solitude of the desert. She foresaw a disaster in the Middle East but felt powerless to stop it.� The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 tried to pick up the pieces after the First World War, disposing of many parts of the world with a varying effectiveness vividly described by Margaret MacMillan in her new book, Paris 1919. The Conference was the closest thing there has ever been to a world government. Halfway through the war, in 1916, Britain and France made a somewhat fanciful agreement on how they would divide up the huge Ottoman Empire, not really expecting to get the chance to do so. At the time, they were by no means sure they would win the war. Then in 1918, the Ottoman Turks did lose their empire, and the Allies were faced with a. reality they had not seriously considered. Macmillan shows how several modern countries were born from their improvisations. Before the Peace Conference, for example, there had never been such a state as Iraq. continued at: http://www.members.shaw.ca/mschindler/D/Iraq_Paris.htm -- Marc A. Schindler Spruce Grove, Alberta, Canada -- Gateway to the Boreal Parkland �The first duty of a university is to teach wisdom, not a trade; character, not technicalities. We want a lot of engineers in the modern world, but we don�t want a world of engineers.� � Sir Winston Churchill (1950) Note: This communication represents the informal personal views of the author solely; its contents do not necessarily reflect those of the author�s employer, nor those of any organization with which the author may be associated. ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// /// ZION LIST CHARTER: Please read it at /// /// http://www.zionsbest.com/charter.html /// ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// ${list_promo}
