MICHAEL G. BERGEN

Empires Lost is a collection of memories spanning half a century by an old man in a seniors’ home on the great St Lawrence River in Canada. Looking back on his own experiences and studies of history, he concludes that people were now living in a safer world than their ancestors. Once more, peace and prosperity had returned to Europe, and the British Empire and life initially flourished in the second half of the 20th century. But in the wake of World War II, the victors had divided the world into Eastern and Western Blocs: communism versus capitalism.

The old man had been a child in Montreal during the Korean War. He had been a Canadian sailor at sea during the Cuban Crisis and the assassination of President Kennedy. Not twenty years after WW2, the world seemed to be on the brink of WW3! During the Vietnam War, the old man had been a passionate university student protesting Canada’s subtle but tangible support for the US East Asian efforts. Since then, he had been a world traveller, business executive and business owner in Europe and Africa. Yet no matter where he went, he observed that terrorism seemed to follow him: the separatists of Quebec, the IRA in England, the Red Army Faction in Germany, the PLO in Paris and the ANC and PAC in South Africa. Was this a new war we were fighting?