The United States and Turkish governments, combined with UN aid, are obliterating the earliest memories of the human race. They are flooding the ancient city of Zeugma, and untold treasures underneath. A Link with those who are ancestors of perhaps half of the human race in this multicultural city, will be as if it never was. Aswan was so ill conceived it is by many accounts disrupting the entire weather patterns of the East Mediterranean. Worse, similar projects are taking a toll in China.
Government interventions generate disasters that are cunningly used to justify new ones.
Many have tried to stop the Zeugma horror. Informed Turks, unwilling to have their country bear the shame of another destroyed Byzantium library, have rallied in protests, only to be silently whisked away by police. A brief news report tells of an old man from a neighboring village who sits by Zeugma as the water rises and sings a threnody, a death song telling his imaginings of the thriving city that once had been. The dam was denounced as ridiculous from the beginning, but pushed by the US government to shore up support in Turkey for the now increasingly questioned Iraq war. People who have called for government to seize control of all archeological and ecological matters from private hands as unreliable, suddenly defend the dam with references to progress and social efficiency, like crazed capitalists from a Dickens story, or a bad Soviet novel.