Fear and Loathing

T.E. Lawrence	In 1918, the regular forces of British Commanding Officer General Edmund Allenby defeated the remaining Turkish Army in Palestine. A final and conclusive strike at the Battle of Megiddo in September 1918 left the road to Damascus open. By the time Allenby arrived Colonel T.E. Lawrence and the Arabs were already installed. With Lawrence translating Allenby attempted to deliver the message to Prince Feisal that his newly-appointed Arab government would not be recognized and the city was to be handed over to the French. Both Lawrence and Feisal reacted angrily to Western duplicity. The irregular troops that had pursued the Arab Revolt against the Turks now set their sights on the British and French, and their fury was very great indeed.
Arabist

After this fateful meeting Allenby asked his commander for leave and returned to England a broken man. Allenby was promoted to Field Marshal and later served as Britain's High Commissioner in Egypt from 1919 to 1925. He outlived Lawrence by one year.

~ quotation by Steve Payne

In 1922, volunteer troops of the Empire Legion reinforced the Anglo-French garrison at Çanakkale, the narrowest point of the Dardanelles. Not only was the Greek Army in full retreat from Smyrna, but the Chanak Incident was about to kick off big time. Having just replaced Lloyd George's war-time coaliton government, incoming British Prime Minister Lord Curzon feared the War in Asia Minor was about to escalate into the Second Great War - on his watch. That was why an Empire Legion comprising British, Canadian, ANZAC, SA, Rhodesian, Indian volunteers was just the ticket. MacKenzie King's government in Canada was against intervention, and the British public had no appetite for conflict. Curzon also had one eye on the Labour Party who were threatening the Conservatives now that the Liberals had imploded. Curzon had made his own calculations. He hoped that the veterans of the Empire Legion could reprise their recent stunning victory with White Forces in Northern Russian, dismantling the new Soviet regime. It was a new kind of armed foreign policy, in which the Great Powers would fight covert wars with irregular troops. Curzon was very much aware that on the other side of Turkey, was Colonel T.E. Lawrence and Prince Feisal whose own irregular troops were fighting a new Arab Revolt, against their new masters - the British and the French governments who had simply replaced the Turkish occupation in the Middle East.

~ variant from Steve Payne: extensive use of original content has been made to celebrate the author's genius.

Bernard Montgomery	"Einsatzgruppe Egypt" [the Nazi Death Squad] was standing by in Athens and was ready to disembark for Palestine in the summer of 1942 [to extend the Holocaust into Palestine], attached to the "Afrika Korps" led by General Erwin Rommel." ~ Monty justifying the extension of the British Mandate in Palestine
Imperialist

Field Marshall Montgomery, Chief of the Imperial General Staff reacting to pressure for Britain to withdraw its forces from Palestine in response to Jewish terrorism. Montgomery said that if not for the British victory at El Alamein, Nazi Germany would have expanded the extermination of Jews beyond the borders of Europe and into British-controlled Palestine during World War Two. Montgomery presented the Irgun bombed of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem with evidence that death squads known as "Einsatzgruppe Egypt" were standing by in Athens and was ready to disembark for Palestine in the summer of 1942. This group would be attached to the "Afrika Korps" led by the famed desert commander General Erwin Rommel. The Middle East death squad, similar to those operating throughout eastern Europe during the war, was to be led by SS Obersturmbannfuehrer Walther Rauff. "The central plan for the group was the realization of the Holocaust in Palestine," said Montgomery, "But since Germany never conquered British-controlled Palestine, plans for bringing the Holocaust to what is now Israel and the Palestinian territories never came to fruition."

~ quotation by Steve Payne

Woodrow Wilson	"The man who is swimming against the stream knows the strength of it. " ~ Woodrow Wilson, Global Peace Architect
US President

Before his refusal to meet with Ho Chi Minh at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Uncle Ho requested an appointment to urge that the principle of self-determination should also apply to the population of the French Union Colony of Indochina. Wilson believed that the principles codified in the Treaty of Versailles should extend no further than Europe, seeing no parallel exclusion of African Americans from the US Constitution. A historic opportunity was missed whilst there was still time to prevent a mistake becoming a human catastrophe. The full story of Minh's Peace Conference Gambit is described at Today in Alternative History

~ quotation by Steve Payne

Mobile Phones	In 2011, the Mobile Telecommunications and Health Research Programme, said that because it can take more than a decade for cancer symptoms to become detectable only now was it possible to "say for certain" that handsets can cause the disease. MTHR had been running more than a dozen studies assessing the effects on human health, reporting as late as 2007 that "Phone safety is still an unknown". The independent group of scientists had received more than £10m from the UK Government and the mobile phone industry.
Market Collapses

Professor Lawrie Challis, the MTHR chairman, said: "We can now say with confidence that cancer can appear through excessive use of mobile phone handsets". Bluetooth technology and hands free sets are expected to be the "winners" when consumer confidence returns.

~ quotation by Steve Payne

FDR	"First of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself - nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. " ~ Franklin D. Roosevelt
US President

Whilst the fears of isolationists prevented the United States from joining World War II. A generation later, America faced the Empires of Germany and Japan alone as described by Harry Turtledove In the Presence of Mine Enemies

~ quotation by Steve Payne

Glubb Pasha	In 1941, 'the internecine struggles of the Arabs,' Glubb Pasha told Count László de Almásy and Colonel Ned Lawrence 'are more in the minds of Arab politicians than the struggle against the Jews. Azzam Pasha, the mufti and the Syrian government would sooner see the Jews get the whole of Palestine than that King Abdullah should benefit.'
The Mufti was more than keen for the Final Solution to be brought to the British mandate in Palestine. On balance, Lawrence was confident that Glubb Pasha could be expected to do the "right thing" in a forthcoming war of independence. After all, who could not be impressed by what Lawrence called "the eternal miracle of Jewry?"
~ variant by Steve Payne: extensive use of original content has been made to celebrate the genius of Susan Shwartz and Michael Ondaatje

Ulysses spacecr..	In 1994, on this day the Ulysses probe passed the Sun's south pole. The spacecraft was launched from the Space Shuttle Discovery by NASA and the European Space Agency, equipped with instruments to characterize fields, particles, and dust. Part of the InterPlanetary Network (IPN), Ulysses provided the first clues to the Sun's accelerating gamma ray bursts.
By 2030, the IPN had been renamed to the United Nations Committee for Survival of Life on Earth and increasingly desperate measures were being attempted to deal with this planet-threatening solar development.
~ entry by Steve Payne

In 1990, George Alec Effinger published his counter-history masterpiece Everything But Honour, posing the question What if Robert E. Lee fought for the Confederacy and the Civil War was over after Lincoln issued an Emancipation Proclamation? Thinking things would be better, a white supremacist working in 1938 Imperial Germany goes back in time to make Lee follow a different path.	Robert E. Lee
~ entry by Steve Payne

Annapolis	1788, the North American Union Constitutional Convention in Annapolis set the date for the country's first Governor-General's election. Victoria became the temporary capital as Britain restructured the Thirteen Colonies and Canada into self-autonomous Dominions.
~ entry by Steve Payne

In 1940, Italy invaded Egypt. A group of officers, headed by Gamal Abdul Nassar, and Anwar el-Sadat, secretly side with the Italians, ridding Egypt of Britain's presence. The “factional” account was told by counter-historian Ken Follett in his masterpiece ”The Keys to Rebecca” (1980). In a tribute to Philip K Dick's 1964 counter-factual novel Man in the High Castle, Follett presented a book within a book, 'The Sphinx Lies Heavy'.
Set in Britain in 1956, the proud nation has humiliated President Nasser by seizing back the Suez Canal after nationalisation. All because some ten years earlier Britain defended Egypt from the Italians, and chose not to punish a group of officers, headed by Gamal Abdul Nassar, and Anwar el-Sadat who secretly side with the invaders. Like Dick before him, the essence of Follett's masterpiece is the duality of his frightening visions.
~ entry by Steve Payne

God save the queen, the fascist regime They made you a moron, potential H-bomb God save the queen she ain't no human being There is no future in England's dreaming
God Save the Queen	Don't be told what you want, Don't be told what you need There's no future, no future, No future for you God save the queen We mean it man We love our queen God saves And our figurehead is not what she seems ~ Lyrics to “God Save the Queen” - Click to Watch
God Save the Queen

In 1977, an off-site Cabinet meeting by the executors of the Plot Against British Prime Minister Harold Wilson entered day two at Chequers. Interim Prime Minister Lord Louis Mountbatten and his deputy Major General Ord Wingate, DSO were in the Chair. Also present was the Home Secretary Margaret Thatcher and the Minister for Citizenship Mary Whitehouse who had just finished watching the latest installment of horror - the Sex Pistols playing "God Save the Queen". Both military leaders had a strong sense of perspective. They understood fully that the problem went back to 1951, with the Conservative victory when Churchill formed his first peacetime administration. He had little feel for what should be done. He confided to Oliver Lyttleton that "In the worst of the war I could always see how to do it. Today's problems's are elusive and intangible." Afterwards, Mountbatten and Wingate retired with brandys and cigars. Privately, Ord thought the Sex Pistols were right about one thing. In that haunting line "And our figurehead is not what she seems", there was a nugget of wisdom. After all, had not the Queen engineered Harold Wilson out of power to be replaced by Interim Prime Minister Louis Mountbatten? The lyrics are available at at Plyrics

~ quotation by Steve Payne

Changes

	"No Martians yet. Nuts." Robert put his V-shaped chin on his hands and glared at the canal. Dad had brought an atomic radio along, strapped to his wrist. It functioned on an old-fashioned principle: you held it against the bones near your ear and it vibrated singing or talking to you. Dad listened to it now. His face looked like one of those fallen Martian cities, caved in, sucked. dry, almost dead. Then he gave it to Mom to listen. Her lips dropped open. "What--" Timothy started to question, but never finished what he wished to say. For at that moment there were two titanic, marrow-jolting explosions that grew upon themselves, followed by a half dozen minor concussions.
Planet Mars

Dad listened. So did everybody. Dad's breathing echoed like fists beating against the cold wet wharf stones. In the shadow, Mom's cat eyes just watched Father for some clue to what next. Dad relaxed and blew out a breath, laughing at himself. 'The rocket, of course. I'm getting jumpy. The rocket.' ~ The Million Year Picnic (January 2008). In 2008, astronomers watched a football pitch-sized lump of rock hurtle through space at a speed of 45000 km/h. The fragment, which had been christened WD-5, was on a collision course with Mars. The impact on 30th January would subsequently be known as the Martian Armageddon. During the period December 2001-November 2005 humans from Earth had colonized the deserted planet, occasionally having contact with the few surviving Martians, but for the most part preoccupied with making Mars a second Earth. WD-5 changed all that. Captain Wilder and family had family had returned home using his private rocket that he had concealed from government service. On their million year picnic, Wilder had promised his children that they would see some Martians on the Minnesota River..

.

1948	In 1950, the acclaimed author George Orwell real name Eric Arthur Blair died in Airstrip One after a three-year battle against tuberculosis. Until the last, news had been positive and it was hoped Mr Orwell was improving. On Friday morning he had a long talk with a friend about his plans for the future. However, a few hours later he suffered a fatal haemorrhage in a London hospital.
George Orwell

Blair had been taught at Eton by Aldous Huxley, remembering him as another incompetent and hopeless teacher who couldn’t keep discipline. By coincidence, both teacher and pupil would following similiar career paths in literature and journalism. Huxley wrote Brave New World, whilst Orwell penned Nineteen Forty-Eight, an anarchistic vision of the future partly based on the indiscipline of Eton. Returning to his own dystopian vision of "Brave New World", Huxley continued: Within the next generation I believe that the world's leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience. Nineteen Forty-eight gave a full contemporary history of the world. After the Second World War, the United Kingdom descended into civil war, eventually becoming part of the new world power of Oceania. At roughly the same time, the Soviet Union expanded into mainland Europe to form Eurasia; the third world power, Eastasia—an amalgamation of east Asian countries around China and Japan—emerged some time later. There was a period of nuclear warfare during which hundreds of atomic bombs were dropped, mainly on Europe, western Russia, and North America. The civil war which ended with the Party taking over, the merging of the British Empire and the United States. During the Second World War, Orwell repeatedly expressed the idea that British democracy as it existed before 1939 would not survive the war, the only question being whether its end would come through a Fascist coup d'état from above or by a Socialist revolution from below. (Orwell greatly supported and hoped for the latter, to the extent that he joined and loyally participated in the British Home Guard throughout the war, in the expectation that it would become the nucleus of a revolutionary militia). Later during the war Orwell pointed to events that proven him right "What really matters is that 'the war and the revolution are inseparable'." Alternate Historian's note, Writing originally in 1945, Orwell originally called the novel Nineteen Forty-eight, initially believing the vision to be that close. He subsequently revised the date when rewriting on the island of Jura in 1948.

.

In 1942, senior officials of the Nazi German regiment attended a meeting in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee. The purpose of the conference was to inform senior Nazis and senior Governmental administrators of plans for the 'Final solution to the Jewish question'. Rommel's unchecked advances in North Africa meant that the Final Solution would be arriving in the British Mandate in Palestine real soon.

.

In 1917, at Aqaba in the Transjordan leader of the misnamed Arab revolt Auda Abu Tayi orders the execution by beheading of Colonel T.E. Lawrence. His duplicity had been laid bare for all brothers to see when he had carelessly left his autobiographic works, the Seven Pillars of Deceit open in his tent. Tayi had been dismayed to understand that the forthcoming Balfour Declaration would promise a Jewish Homeland in Palestine. His white brother Lawrence was no more and no less than a British Agent using Arab troops to defeat the Turk and thereafter impose his own hegemony on Arabia. President Yasser Arafat paid tribute to Tayi in 1997 on the eve of the half-centennial in East Jerusalem. Without his bold intervention, the Palestinian people would be second class citizens in a secular Jewish State.

.

In 1649, the traitor Oliver Cromwell was tried for treason and other 'high crimes' as the authority of Stuart rule was re-established following the English Civil War.

.

Changes	In 2009, following his inaugural address Barack Obama made reference to youth icon Tupac Shakur. Changes had predicted 'we're never going to see a Black Presidency', failing to anticipate a Rice vs. Obama campaign race.
Tupac Shakur

.

Stephen R. Donaldson	In 1968, Stephen Reeder Donaldson languished in Vietnam. By inclination a conscientious objector, he had been compelled to serve in the armed forces. Much later, and after dropping out of his Ph.D. program and moving to New Jersey in order to write fiction, Donaldson made his publishing debut with the first 'Covenant' trilogy in 1977. That enabled him to move to a healthier climate. He now lives in New Mexico. Donaldson's two year compulsory military duty would be the deep undercurrent of his escapist fantasy writing. In 'The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, the Unbeliever', the protagonist was a leper struggled with disempowerment in a Land he did not really believe in.
Unbeliever

This is the Land,' Lena said joyfully, as if the outspread earth had a power to thrill her. 'It reaches far beyond seeing to the North. Is it possible that you do not know this?'. 'I don't know anything, ' he groaned into the open fall. ~'Kevin's Watch'.

.

In 1994, prosecutors of the traitor Aldrich Ames were confronted with a nightmarishly difficult decision. It had been safetly assumed that since Ames had betrayed the US to foreign powers, little damage could be caused through revelations in the media. Not so, said he producing the Ames dossier.

.

In 1981, the Iranian Hostage Crisis ended as Ronald Reagan’s successor was sworn into office. True to their word at last, the Iranians released the embassy personnel they had been holding for over a year once Edward Kennedy was sworn in as President of the United States. To thumb his nose at the Iranians, Kennedy lent Ronald Reagan Air Force One to fly overseas and retrieve the hostages.

.

In 1981, the Iranian Hostage Crisis ended as the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s successor was sworn into office. Having negotiated the release of the students in Tehran in 1980, Reagan and Bush had conspired with the terrorists to release the students only after the inauguration. They send Jackson to Germany to meet the students, a duplicious act of false humility to reinforce his weakened authority. And the President of Iran today is the very channel through which Reagan and Bush acted.

.

In 1953, on this day President Douglas MacArthur was inaugurated in Washington DC. In his address he drew parallels with the career of Paul Von Beneckendorff und von Hindenburg, German Command in Chief also recalled from retirement twice, once to lead the military, once for the Presidency, both in late middle age and at a time of national crisis. Unlike the 'Wooden Titan' Hindenburg, Brass Hat was back to get a result. In theory he was promoted from retired Six-Star General to Commander in Chief. In practice he was given the keys to the hydrogen bomb. Also Bacteriological weapons that Unit 731 gave Brass Hat in 1945 to secure the amnesty of the Japanese scientists against trial for the extermination of 200,000 Chinese citizens during World War II. Quite a cocktail when combined with a determination to make war with the China to re-unite Korea and re-instate Chiang Kai-shek.

.

In 1971, the British Government reacted somewhat irritably to the European Space Agencies who described Apollo 13 mission mechanical failures as a self-inflicted wound. The British really would have to do something about this quality control problem for next time. Mind you, they had won the race to the Moon, so there.

.

	Through the mirror of my mind, time after time I see reflections of you and me Reflections of the way life used to be, reflections of the love you took from me Oh I'm all alone now, no love to sheild me, trapped in a world that's a distorted reality Happiness you took from me and left me alone with only memories Through the mirror of my mind through these tears that I've cried reflects the hurt I can't control Cause although you're gone I keep holding on to the happy time Ooh, when you were mine ~ Poem Fragment discovered by builders at 2648 W. Grand Boulevard Detroit, Michigan 48208

History students of Afrocentric sixties have speculated that the poem fragment was written by Diana Ernestine Ross, a member of the little known Supremes who disbanded in late 1963. Ross sang lead on all but one of the group's early singles. These singles were not successes, and Ross worked as Motown CEO Berry Gordy, Jr.'s secretary for additional income. It is generally believed that Gordy was also the father of Ross's first child. The poetry fragment was discovered when the studio was demolished in the early 1990s to make way for a shopping mall, with both Gordy and Ross dissappearing into obscurity.

.