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THE POET AS SCIENTIST

THE POET AS SCIENTIST, THE POET AS SCIENTIST

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The Geek's Raven
[An excerpt, with thanks to Marcus Bales]

Once upon a midnight dreary,
fingers cramped and vision bleary,
System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor,
Longing for the warmth of bedsheets,
Still I sat there, doing spreadsheets:
Having reached the bottom line,
I took a floppy from the drawer.
Typing with a steady hand, I then invoked the SAVE command
But got instead a reprimand: it read "Abort, Retry, Ignore".

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Form input - by Günter Born

Friday, July 28, 2023

What if, as FDR wished, Charles de Gaulle had been totally excluded from participation in the post liberation provisional government of France?

President Franklin Roosevelt thought Charles de Gaulle was totally insane. Prime Minister Winston Churchill at times considered de Gaulle to be a traitor and signed orders to have him deported from Britain in chains. This habit persisted to the end of his life for de Gaulle. Aside from numerous nearly successful assassination attempts by his own military in France, de Gaulle is most notable in Canada for his "Vive le Quebec libre" speech from a balcony in Quebec City in 1967, when he helped inspire the FLQ crisis in Canada three years later. At the time, then Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau wanted to imprison de Gaulle, but had to be content with deporting him immediately from the country. During the FLQ crisis, now Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau declared Martial Law in Canada when his Cabinet Minister and friend Pierre Laporte was murdered by Quebec separatists, then had to content himself with having the FLQ leaders board a plane to exile in Cuba in order to have another of his Cabinet Ministers released unharmed. Some years later, with a separatist government in power in Quebec City, they returned in triumph, and their leader was made a Quebec Court Judge. When the Canadian Federal Government expressed objections, the Parti Quebecois said "sure guys, we'll make him a Quebec Senator for life, instead!" And, so it goes. The fact is, Charles de Gaulle was neither a madman nor a traitor. He was a ferocious French patriot, and a brilliant agent provocateur who simply could not be stopped or controlled. And, quite naturally, this was rather unsympathetic, to say the least, to egomaniacal control freaks like President Roosevelt, Prime Minister Churchill or Prime Minister Trudeau. So, let's say FDR gets his way, and de Gaulle is indeed left out of the process of governing France following the Normandy invasion. What happens? Well, first of all, what FDR had in mind was a government of France from Washington, with Washington bureaucrats running France on Washington's terms. It's not entirely clear at all what Washington had in mind for the future of France. Possibly something along the lines of Germany, an indefinite occupation by the U.S., Britain and the U.S.S.R. So, how would the French people respond to this, exactly? Probably not very well, at all. I think the likelihood of civil unrest is very high indeed, perhaps civil war, and likely an ultimate U.S.S.R. backed communist takeover of France. General Eisenhower, of course, simply ignored FDR's instructions and put Charles de Gaulle in charge of things in France. Eisenhower was rather good at going around other people's idiocy, that's what made him such a terrific staff officer. Also, a pretty good President himself.

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