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The Marconi Officer: Book One Island Made

R.J. Berney

The tale unfolds amidst tumultuous events, the drama, trauma and terror of the twentieth ‎century. Avalanches of political, social and territorial change combine to spawn a plethora of ‎war: foremost the contraction and demise of the Ottoman Empire with ancient nations ‎reborn and the rise of The Young Turks who divide between democracy and dictatorship - the ‎latter to seize power and destroy the social democratic reform of the Ottoman Empire ‎initiated in 1908 by the restitution of the long abrogated 1876 constitution which granted ‎equal social and political rights to all Ottoman subjects regardless of race and religion ‎through the election of their own representatives to the parliament. With the demise and ‎sabotage of the parliament numerous Ottoman subject peoples rebelled which in turn caused ‎the Balkan Wars, and further leading to two World Wars.‎

Genocidal slaughter and terror with pillage and plunder of private property on an ‎unprecedented scale ensues under the Young Turk dictatorship: the foundation of the ‎Kemalist regime ruling class in the republic to come. Rabid nationalism rears its ugly head ‎across Europe, the Mediterranean, the Caucasus, wider Asia and the Middle East, spawning ‎virulent Fascism thus spurring the Holocaust. Totalitarian ideology and corrupted Marxism ‎strive for world dominion, sciences advance as brilliant minds uncover and explain the ‎subconscious: a concertina of catastrophe and enlightenment, instrumental in determining ‎and steering the fate and fortune of swathes of human kind, not least the central characters ‎in the Marconi Officer.‎

 

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ABOUT R.J. BERNEY


Born in 1950 in Thetford, Norfolk (birth place of Thomas Paine). My ‎mother, a medical doctor, was an Australian. Sent from my first home - ‎a rural paradise - to boarding schools I sought solace in Art, English ‎Literature, History and writing short stories. Many of my school friends ‎were Jewish. After attaining an MA in Philosophy and Political Science I ‎worked with horses, also as an under shepherd I looked after a large ‎flock of sheep, and farming in my own right followed. For a later post ‎graduate course my dissertation was Ethnic and Religious Minorities in ‎Greece: A Focus on Macedonians and the Prespa Region. The travel bug ‎took me from Western to Eastern Europe into the Balkans ,Anatolia the ‎Levant, Asia Minor onward to Israel and Palestine: in the autumn of ‎‎1988 I went to Gaza and met the leaders of Hamas. I wrote reports and ‎articles for Eastern Europe Newsletter and the Turkish Daily News, ‎besides having interviews with the BBC World Service. Latterly I ‎worked for twenty years as an English teacher at schools and a ‎university in Izmir (ancient Smyrna). The seeds of The Marconi Officer ‎came to fruition over four decades.‎