Book Review: "Hidden History..." by Docherty and MacGregor, on real origins of WWI--satanic perfidy

[Apollonian]

Book Review: "Hidden History..." by Docherty and MacGregor, on real origins of WWI--satanic perfidy

Fog And Mist Of History For Origin Of World Wars Decisively Lifted And Cleared
Book Review: "Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War"
(Apollonian, 11 July 15)​

"Hidden History: the Secret Origins of the First World War," by G. Docherty and J. MacGregor, Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh and London, 2013, 361 pages text, 463, index, notes, bibliography, is revolutionary and epochal, MUST reading for all patriots as it gives outstanding, even mind-boggling new historic exposition on origins of WWI and the entire modern era as it was so definitively affected by that first world war, featuring for example world gov., though limited, of League of Nations. Docherty and MacGregor deserve medals for a truly magnificent, well-written, and eye-opening work. Further, WWII is then best understood as mere second-half and resumption of the first war.

And once one realizes the satanic, psychopathic perfidy of the English bankers, especially Rothschild and the Jews, and their gentile flunkies for the bold enterprise of continued and continuous warfare and war-mongering, beginning fm before the Boer war in S. Africa in 1899, one sees everything that followed, now for over a hundred yrs, is merely the natural momentum, absolutely breath-taking and horrifying for its logic and inexorable un-folding. For WWI followed directly fm the preceding S. African Boer War, planned by the British oligarchs quarterbacked specifically by Cecil Rhodes and his lieutenant, Milner, Milner carrying-on for ruthless prosecution of WWI. WWII then was relatively simple, straight-forward follow-up of previous WWI, and "Hidden History" makes it clear.

The unifying theme for this horrific historic logic is the criminal power of central banking (see Mises.org for expo), simply legalized COUNTERFEITING, led by Jews and Rothschild, of course, then the drive for world government and empire, at first in form of League of Nations, and now as we see, United Nations (UN). Underlying this historic drive is the ever-increasing cultural irrationalism, hubris, and moralism founded upon subjectivism, thus satanism. Jews dominate because of their collectivist, bolshevik-styled unity and organization, this in the face of gentile individualism and nihilism which renders those fools most pathetic victims, slaves, and pawns of more connected and organized Jews.

Leader of this this satanic imperialism fm late 19th cent. was Jew-Rothschild -dominated England which had held sway since the Napoleonic wars when Jew banker masters, esp. Rothschild, emerged decisively and definitively. The major impediment to the English-Jews' drive for world domination was Germany and Russia, but especially Germany, according to authors, Docherty and MacGregor. Meantime, the oligarchal power in England only needed some consolidation, and this was achieved by means of the Jews' henchman who had worked for them in S. Africa, Cecil Rhodes and his coterie, consisting at first, of William Stead, a journalist, and Reginald Baliol Brett, the second "Lord Esher," established by at least 1891. Soon enough this conspiratorial coterie expanded, including now the richest and most powerful banker, Nathaniel Rothschild, and an evermore powerful, even satanistic bureaucratic mastermind, Afred Milner.

After Rhodes died at age 48 in 1902, his organization became known as Round Table, and practical leadership of this thoroughly satanic conspiratorial network was taken over by Rhodes' diabolical employee, Alfred Milner. Important thing to understand is the Boer War 1899-1902 was the first product of most careful planning and plotting by Rhodes, et al., and its momentum never stopped, but carried over to the next logical planning and plotting against Germany and Europe. And the ruthlessness of these conspirators is notorious and epic fm the horrific concentration camps where 20,000+ Boer civililians, mainly interned women and children, died of malnutrition and disease, in addition to thousands of African natives too. WWI would be no different for psychopathic ruthlessness stamped w. the maniacal single-mindedness of Milner and his Rhodes society co-conspirators.

After the Boer war, Milner consolidated control over the now enlarged British imperial southern African domain and returned to England in 1905 to continue the planning and preparation for the next war of empire. Of course to fight the immensely powerful Germans would require help of French and Russians. Even before Milner returned, the British had made a treaty of alliance w. Japan in 1902 to intimidate the Russians regarding China, the British now having tossed their previous policy of non-alignment. In 1904, making use of the diplomacy of King Edward (VII, 1901-10), the infamous "Entente Cordiale" was made w. France--it was a secret "understanding" w. France, aimed at Germany. Thus when Britain entered WWI, the excuse was defense of Belgian neutrality, not any commitment to France.

Russia remained a project for the British as there had been insurmountable problems regarding Russian designs for control of Black Sea and the straits to the Mediterannean--cause of the Crimean War of 1853-6. But so intent were the British oligarchs to gain alliance (even though kept secret) of Russians against Germany that the British now reversed their objections to Russian designs and even promised to accede to Russian possession of the straits and Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1907. And of course, like the agreements made w. the French, these dramatic new concessions to Russia were to remain secret fm the public and Parliament. Meantime, British oligarchs continued w. their military modernization programs, for example the conversion of Brit. naval vessels to oil-fuel (fm coal), committed to war, and things steadily fell into place, including especially a steady campaign in the press ("Jews-media") to demonizing Germany.

Next the British oligarchal war-mongers insured the same war designs would remain in place even in event a new government of different party took office, which change-of-gov. actually happened in 1906; the "Liberals" would now be the party destined to bring Britain into the war in 1914. In addition, the British oligarchs made agreements, again secret fm the public and Parliament, w. nation of Belgium in the case of war w. Germany, Belgium having all along pretended to neutrality, the actual pretext for Britain entering the war.

Thus necessary pieces of the plot for war against Germany by the triple entente (Russia, France, Britain--but NOT called an "alliance") were in place and only now needed a solid pretext which was presented first in late 1908 when Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina as the declining Ottoman empire receded. Serbia affected outrage, mobilized its army, and called on its ally, Russia. But Russians were still recovering fm their earlier Japanese defeat (1904-5) and declined to intervene; the British warmongers merely bided their time confident another opportunity would arise. Meantime British, French, and especially Russian agents remained evermore active in Balkans encouraging turmoil against Austria, but also Ottomans too, most active being Serbia, having firm alliance (or at least understanding) w. Russia.

The immediate next golden opportunity for war, always stoked by the Jew-dominated British oligarchs was the famous Morocco Crisis of 1911 when France, supported by Britain, attempted a take-over of the country to the prejudice of everyone else, including Germany, as usual. But Germany insisted upon diplomacy, knowing the French would have to withdraw, given the legal realities of treaty obligations (fm 1905-6, in an earlier crisis). Further, the French leader, Caillaux, was not under direct sway of British oligarchs, as he willingly acceded to negotiations w. Germans. British oligarchs now determined upon a leader of the French who would be their flunky in the effort of war upon Germany--this flunky was to be a French lawyer, Raymond Poincare', who would take office as Prime Minister and later as President.

Thus in 1912, more, predictable trouble in Balkans, stirred by the money-power and British/French/Russian oligarchs pushing the various countries esp. Serbia which threatened Austria both in aforementioned Bosnia, and also now Albania. Austrians considered they had been sorely provoked, but Germany counseled diplomacy and war among great powers was averted. But Serbians were simply not going to be satisfied until they struck a decisive blow, knowing they had solid Russian backing, Russians, as always pushed by Brits and French.

Finally, the war so much desired and worked-for by Brits, French, and Ruskies was attained and sparked by the deliberate assassination of the Austrian heir-apparent, Arch-Duke, Franz Ferdinand, by Serbia w. knowing complicity of Russians, Brit. and French allies (or, actually partners, as entente was not full alliance). And here German diplomacy fatally slipped, they imagining such outrageous aggression by Serbia would not be legitimized by the Entente partners, Brits, French, and Russians. For Germans could not prevent Austrians fm declaring war against Serbia, perfectly justified. But Germans didn't dream Brits, French, and Ruskies were behind it all fm the beginning, including the assassination. Germany slipped by presuming the other powers would permit a limited combat btwn Austria and Serbia, not realizing it was done-deal plan fm beginning that Russia would fully back Serbia, and French and Brits would back Russia.

The crucial pt. then, regarding sublime treachery of the Entente partners was that fm the very day of the Arch-Duke's assassination, 28 June 1914, the Entente prepared most actively for war while the bewildered Germans did nothing, again, presuming so fatally and falsely that Brits, French, and Ruskies were NOT behind it all. On contrary, Germans moved Heaven and earth to prevent war, much as they were capable, remaining ignorant of Entente perfidy and treachery until the end, pathetically not wanting to believe they'd been so horribly mouse-trapped and deceived by Jews and associated Entente oligarchs. Thus the eventual Treaty of Versailles blaming of Germans for the war was such outrageous, perfidious lie--which lie has prevailed to this very day for so many. One of the great merits of Docherty and MacGregor is they make this striving for keeping peace by Germany so brilliantly clear--there's no doubt possible.

For example, what Americans of today don't understand is that the Germans of Adolf Hitler's time understood PERFECTLY the general course of events that I relate here and which are now given in most excellent detail by Docherty and MacGregor. Germany was horribly ambushed, quite literally, by events and specifically by the Jews and Entente oligarchs who and which were then stupidly augmented by moronic Americans, including the leaders, especially Woodrow Wilson, the supposed highly educated former President of Princeton U., USA eventually losing 50,000+ dead in the war of gross aggression against Germany, a peaceful and most highly civilized nation, Germany and Europe devastated--and for what purpose?--nothing but world gov. at behest of satanic Jews and oligarchs. Thus after the war, the Jews of Britain took effective control of Palestine, which land belonged to the Arab people who lived there, only about 5% of the land owned by Jews, and which only needed an additional chapter of warfare (subsequent WWII barely 20 yrs later) to be made Jews' own--no one and nothing else benefitted fm WWI, the world moved closer to planetary dictatorship and genocide.

Note then, the book by Docherty and MacGregor is far more detailed than account given here, esp. for the money-power and Rhodes society direction and attn. to detail for the satanic plotting and conspiracy to bring Europe and the Near East to such bloody and destructive war for nothing, benefitting no one, in the end, but the Jews. There's an interesting side-story regarding Ireland which is additionally covered by the authors, for the oligarchs worked to cover all bases in case things didn't go right for provocation of Germany. Thus the oligarchs were prepared to start a full-out civil war in Ireland, and to blaming it on Germany.

Truly this work by Docherty and MacGregor is stupendous achievement of historical scholarship, most of all for the mind-boggling clarity for British and Entente perfidy and conspiracy, this nothing less than satanic. Hence the writing style is appropriately poignant and expressive, each of the 27 chapters w. a pt. by pt. summary of pertinent details at the end. No less excellent is the marshaling of the pertinent facts and details. No doubt is left in the readers mind for the culpability of the Jew-dominated and -led British oligarchy and the victimization of the peaceful and sincerely peace-seeking Germans entirely taken by surprise--a similar surprise, but more pleasant and enlightening awaits the readers of this work for knowledge and information.


[Note: For book review on "Hidden History's" sequel, by same authors, "Prolonging the Agony...," see http://nnnforum.com/forums/showthread.php?p=638379#post638379]

 

[Apollonian]

Re: Book Review: "Hidden History..." by Docherty and MacGregor, on real origins of WWI--satanic perf

Who Started World War I?​

By Ralph Raico
September 15, 2014

Link: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2014/09/ralph-raico/who-started-world-war-i/

The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, By Christopher Clark, HarperCollins, New York 2013, 697pp.

The question of the causes of the outbreak of the First World War—known for many years during and afterwards as the Great War—is probably the most hotly contested in the whole history of historical writing.

At the Paris Peace Conference, the victors compelled the vanquished to accede to the Versailles Treaty. Article 231 of that treaty laid sole responsibility for the war’s outbreak on Germany and its allies, thus supposedly settling the issue once and for all.

The happy Entente fantasy was brutally challenged when the triumphant Bolsheviks, with evident Schadenfreude, began publishing the Tsarist archives revealing the secret machinations of the imperialist “capitalist” powers leading to 1914. This action led the other major nations to publish selective parts of their own archives in self-defense, and the game was afoot.

Though there were holdouts, after a few years a general consensus emerged that all of the powers shared responsibility, in varying proportions according to the various historians.

In the 1960s, this consensus was temporarily broken by Fritz Fischer and his school, who reaffirmed the Versailles judgment. But that attempt collapsed when critics pointed out that Fischer and his fellow Germans focused only on German and Austrian policies, largely omitting parallel policies among the Entente powers.

And so the debate continues to this day. A meritorious and most welcome addition is The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, by the Cambridge University historian Christopher Clark.

Clark explains his title: the men who brought Europe to war were “haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world.” The origins of the Great War is, as he states, “the most complex event of modern history,” and his book is an appropriately long one, 697 pages, with notes and index.

The crisis began on June 28, 1914 with the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo, the capital of the Austrian-annexed province of Bosnia. It had its roots, however, in the small neighboring kingdom of Serbia and its strange history. As Serbia gradually won its independence from the Ottoman Turks, two competing “dynasties”—in reality, gangs of murdering thugs—came to power, first the Obrenovic then the Karadjordjevic clan (diacritical marks are omitted throughout). A peculiar mid-nineteenth-century document, drawn up and published by one Iliya Garasanin, preached the eternal martyrdom of the Serbian people at the hands of outsiders as well as the burning need to restore a mythical Serbian empire at the expense both of the Ottomans and of Austria. According to Clark, “until 1918 Garasanin’s memorandum remained the key policy blueprint for Serbia’s rulers,” and an inspiration to the whole nation. “Assassination, martyrdom, victimhood, the thirst for revenge were central themes.”

When Austria annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908 after an occupation of forty years, all of Serbia was outraged. The prime minister, Nicola Pasic, and other leaders spoke of the “inevitable” life-and-death struggle against Austria in the sacred cause of “Serbdom.” Yet the country was economically backwards, the population largely illiterate. What was required was a great-power sponsor. This they found in Russia.

The new Russian ambassador to Belgrade was Nikolai Hartwig, a fanatical pan-Slavist. A huge loan from France (for decades Russia’s close ally) was arranged, to improve and modernize the Serbian army.

Hartwig came in contact with a co-conspirator, Dragutin Dimitrijevic, known as Apis, who was chief of Serbian Military Intelligence. At the same time he headed a secret society, “Union or Death,” or the Black Hand. It infiltrated the army, the border guard, and other groups of officials. The Black Hand’s modus operandi was “systematic terrorism against the political elite of the Habsburg Empire.” Apis was the architect of the July plot. He recruited a group of Bosnian Serb teenagers steeped in the mythology of eternal Serbian martyrdom.

The Archduke was not targeted because he was an enemy of the Serbs. Quite the contrary. As Gavrilo Princip, the actual assassin, testified when the Austrians put him on trial, the reason was that Franz Ferdinand “would have prevented our union by carrying out certain reforms.” These included possibly raising the Slavs of the empire to the third ethnic component, along with the Germans and Magyars or at least ameliorating their political and social position.

The young assassins were outfitted with guns and bombs from the Serbian State Arsenal and passed on into Bosnia through the Black Hand network. The conspiracy proved successful, as the imperial couple died on the way to the hospital. The Serbian nation was jubilant and hailed Princip as another of its many martyrs. Others were of a different opinion. One was Winston Churchill, who wrote of Princip in his history of the Great War, “he died in prison, and a monument erected in recent years by his fellow-countrymen records his infamy, and their own.”

All the evidence points to Pasic knowing of the plot in some detail. But the message passed to the Austrians alluded only to unspecified dangers to the Archduke should he visit Bosnia. The fact is, as Clark states, Pasic and the others well understood that “only a major European conflict involving the great powers ‘would suffice to dislodge the formidable obstacles that stood in the way of Serbian ‘reunification.”’

In a major contribution the author refutes the notion, common among historians, that Austria-Hungary was on its last legs, the next “sick man of Europe,” after the Ottomans. The record shows that in the decades before 1914, it experienced something of aWirtschaftswunder, an economic miracle. In addition, in the Austrian half at least, the demands of the many national minorities were being met: “most inhabitants of the empire associated the Habsburg state with benefits of orderly government.” The nationalists seeking separation were a small minority. Ironically, most of them feared domination by either Germany or Russia, if Austria disappeared.

Following the Bosnian crisis of 1908, “the Russians launched a program of military investment so substantial that it triggered a European arms race.” The continent was turned into an armed camp.

France was as warm a supporter of Serbia as Russia. When the Serbian king visited Paris in 1911, the French president referred to him at a state dinner as the “King of all the Serbs.” King Petar replied that the Serb people “would count on France in their fight for freedom.”

The two Balkan wars of 1912-1913 intensified the Serbian danger to Austria. The terrorist network expanded dramatically, and Serbia nearly doubled in size and saw its population increase by forty per cent. For the first time Austria had to take it seriously as a military threat.

The head of the Austrian General Staff, Franz Conrad, on a number of occasions pressed for a preventive war. However, he was curbed by the emperor and the archduke. The latter had also opposed the annexation of Bosnia and Clark calls him “the most formidable obstacle to an [Austrian] war policy.” The foreign minister, Leopold von Berchtold, was a part of the heir-apparent’s pro-peace camp.

Clark develops in detail the evolution of the two combinations that faced each other in 1914, the Triple Entente and the Central Powers (what remained of the Triple Alliance, before the defection of Italy, which ultimately became a wartime ally of the Entente).

Back in the 1880s, the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck had fashioned a series of treaties with Russia and Austria designed to keep a revanchist France isolated. With Bismarck’s dismissal in 1890, the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia was allowed to lapse. Clark breaks with older views in holding that this wasn’t the result of recklessness on the part of the new kaiser, Wilhelm II, but rather the studied decision of inexperienced officials at the Foreign Ministry.

Hitherto friendless, France eagerly embraced a powerful new friend. In 1894 the Franco-Russian Alliance was formed (it was in effect in 1914). One of the treaty’s provisions stated that in the event of mobilization by any member of the Triple Alliance, France and Russia would mobilize all their forces and deploy them against Germany.

French diplomacy, directed by Theophile Delcasse, continued to be brilliant. After settling colonial differences with England, an Entente Cordiale (Cordial Understanding) was concluded between the two western powers.

Edward Grey was foreign secretary and the leader of the anti-German faction in the cabinet. Germany he viewed as an “implacable foe.” He was seconded by Eyre Crowe, a key figure in the Foreign Office, whose influential memorandum of 1907 lamented the titanic growth of German industrial power.

Delcasse joined his two allies together: England and Russia settled their own colonial differences, and combined in a treaty in 1907. The Triple Entente was complete.

The Germans, face to face with three world empires and with only Austria as an ally, complained bitterly of their Einkreisung (encirclement). Perhaps they had a point.

Clark also deviates from the mainstream in demoting the naval race as a critical factor in British antagonism. London never took Wilhelm’s grandstanding about his ocean-going navy seriously. The British always knew they could outbuild the Germans, which they did.

Russia’s disastrous defeat in the war with Japan, 1904-05, served to divert Russian expansion westwards, to the Balkans.

During the approach to war, in the western democracies public opinion was a negligible factor. The people simply did not know. When in 1906 British and French military leaders agreed that in the event of a Franco-German conflict British forces would be sent to the continent, this was not revealed to the people. “The French commitment to a coordinated Franco-Russian military strategy” was also hidden from the French public. So much for democracy.

It was the Italian attack on the Turks in Libya, encouraged by the Entente powers, that sent the dominoes falling. The small Christian nations formed the Balkan League, promoted by Russia, aimed against both the Ottomans and Austria, with Serbia in the lead. Serbian advances electrified aristocratic and bourgeois Russia but angered Austria. With the threat to Serbia, “Russia’s salient in the Balkans,” the Russians mobilized on the Austrian frontier. It was the first mobilization by a great power in the years before the war.

That crisis was defused, but the lines of French policy were stiffened. Poincare, foreign minister and premier, “reassured the Russians that they could count on French support in event of a war arising from an Austro-Serb quarrel.” Similarly, Alexandre Millerand, war minister, told the Russian military attaché that France was “ready” for any further Austrian interference with Serbian rights. Further French loans helped build strategic Russian railroads, heading west. Even the Belgian ambassador to Paris saw Poincare’s policies as “the greatest peril for peace in today’s Europe.”

As 1914 opened, the chances of avoiding war seemed dim. The peacetime strength of the Russian army was 300,000 more than the German and Austrian armies combined, not to count the French. What could Germany do in the event of a two-front war?

All the powers had contingency plans if war came. The German plan, concocted in 1905, was the Schlieffen plan, named for the chief of the Prussian General Staff. It mandated a strong thrust into France, considered the more vulnerable partner, and, after neutralizing French forces, a shuttling of the army to the east to meet the expected Russian incursion into eastern Prussia. Since everything in the plan depended on speed, it was deemed necessary to attack through Belgium.

Back in central Europe, it was clear that Austria had to do something about the murder of the imperial couple. An ultimatum to Serbia was prepared and sent on July 23, more than four weeks after the murders. The delay, partly due to Austria-Hungary’s cumbersome constitutional machinery when it came to foreign policy, partly to the Dual Monarchy’s traditional Schlamperei (slovenliness), served to cool the widespread European indignation over the assassinations.

The provisions that most irked the Serbians were points 5 and 6: that a mixed committee of Austrians and Serbians investigate the crime and that the Austrians participate in apprehending and prosecuting the suspects.

It was a farce on both sides. Austria was looking for a pretext for war. This was the sixth atrocity in four years, and amid unrelenting irredentist agitation Vienna was determined on the final solution of the Serb question.

For their part, the Serbian government knew that any investigation would lead to the critical complicity of its own officials and swing European opinion in the enemy’s direction. It was imperative that Austria be seen to be the aggressor. So after all that had happened, Clark maintains, the Serbian response “offered the Austrians amazingly little.”

Edward Grey, however, held that Austria had no reason for complaint. He bought the Serbian argument that the government was not responsible for the actions of “private individuals,” and that the ultimatum represented a violation of the rights of a sovereign state.

On July 28 Franz Josef signed the declaration of war against Serbia. Foreign Minister Sazonov refused even to listen to the Austrian ambassador’s evidence of Serbian complicity. He had denied from the start “Austria’s right to take action of any kind” (emphasis in Clark). The Tsar expressed his view that the impending war provided a good chance of partitioning Austria, and that if Germany chose to intervene, Russia would “execute the French military plans” to defeat Germany as well.

The Imperial Council issued orders for “Period Preparatory to War” all across European Russia, including against Germany. Even the Baltic Fleet was to be mobilized. At first the Tsar got cold feet, signed on only to partial mobilization, against Austria. Importuned by his ministers hungry for the war that would make Russia hegemonic in central and eastern Europe, he reversed himself again, and finally. As Clark notes, “full [Russian] mobilization must of necessity trigger a continental war.”

On August 1, the German ambassador, Portales, called on Sazonov. After asking him four times whether he would cancel general mobilization and receiving a negative reply each time, Portales presented him with Germany’s declaration of war. The German ultimatum to France was a formality. On August 3, Germany declared war on France as well.

In England, on August 1, Churchill as first lord of the admiralty mobilized the British Home Fleet. Still the cabinet was divided. When Germany presented its ultimatum to Belgium on the next day, Grey had his case complete. Though Belgian neutrality had only been guaranteed by the powers collectively and Italy refused to join in, Grey argued that England nevertheless had a binding moral commitment to Brussels. As for France, he explained that the detailed conversations between their two military leaderships over the years had created understandable French expectations that could not be ignored.

This persuaded the waverers, who were also fearful of the possible resignations of Grey and Asquith. Such a move might well bring to power the Conservatives, even more desirous of war. Seeing the writing on the wall, the few remaining anti-interventionists, led by John Morley, resigned. It was the last act of authentic English liberalism. Lord Morley, the biographer of Cobden and Gladstone, was the author of the tract On Compromise, on the need for principle in politics. On August 4, Britain declared war on Germany.

Warmongers in Paris, St. Petersburg, and London were ecstatic. Churchill beamed, “I am geared up and happy.” But Clark demolishes another myth, that of the delirious throngs. “In most places and for most people” the news of general mobilization came as “a profound shock.” Especially in the countryside, where many of the soldiers would perforce be drawn from. Peasants and peasants’ sons would furnish the cannon fodder, much of it in France and Germany, the vast bulk of it in Austria-Hungary and Russia. In tens of thousands of villages there reigned “a stunned silence,” broken only by the sound of “men, women, and children” weeping.

It was into this Witches’ Sabbath that, from 1914 on, Woodrow Wilson slowly but steadily led the unknowing American people.

 

[Apollonian]

Re: Book Review: "Hidden History..." by Docherty and MacGregor, on real origins of WWI--satanic perf

Prelude to the Great War: Russia​

Link: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2016/07/bionic-mosquito/prelude-great-war/

By Bionic Mosquito
July 18, 2016

[Russia] is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma…

- Winston Churchill, October 1939

While this quote is taken from a time 25 years after the beginning of the Great War, it is certainly applicable to the Russia of 1914 as well….

The Lost History of 1914: How the Great War Was Not Inevitable, by Jack Beatty.

Buchlau

In September 1908 at the Austrian foreign minister’s castle in Buchlau, Russian foreign minister Alexander Izvolski stepped into it; best to simply describe the aftermath, as who agreed to what is somewhat murky:

Russia would look benignly on the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina by the Dual Monarchy…. In return, Vienna would support Russia’s attempt to seek a new international agreement opening the [Turkish] Straits to its warships.

Izlovski either never agreed to this or stated he would take the proposal back to the Tsar. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth (and after an ultimatum from Austria’s ally Germany), the annexation was recognized by Russia.

Bargaining away two Slavic provinces to the Catholic monarchy was a bit too much for many Russians to accept – a betrayal of Slavdom.

Peace at Almost Any Cost

So said Vladimir Kokovtsov, Russia’s Prime Minister from 1911 – 1914.

Any system that produced leaders of his character could not be all bad.

He proposed many reforms to benefit the working class – even by this time Russia had seen significant work strikes and the like. The industrialists opposed these reforms. Eventually, a watered-down version of reforms was passed in 1912. He also supported subordinating foreign to domestic policy; Russia needed an extended period of peace in order to properly deal with pressing internal issues.

Opposite stood the minister of war, General Sukhomlinov. His beautiful and expensive wife apparently motivated him to accept bids (greased by bribes) from Vickers from machine guns that were priced 43% higher than competitive bids from Russia’s Tula Armament Works. As such, Russia entered the war with one-sixth the number of machine guns that Germany had.

As early as 1912, Sukhomlinov was pressing for mobilization of the Russian army on the Austrian frontier – apparently at the Tsar’s request. Ultimately cooler heads prevailed, and mobilization almost certain to lead to war was averted…for the time.

Rasputin

Having amazingly stopped the internal bleeding of the child Alexis, Rasputin won permanent favor in the court of Nicholas and Alexandra.

Accusations of spying on the Tsars daughters while they changed into nightgowns; raping nuns; sinning so that the quantity of sin in the world would be reduced. None of these dissuaded the royals from keeping trust with him.

A mystic, a healer, a trusted advisor to the Tsar’s family; a man whose story is far too complicated for this overview. But an overview of Russia at this time is incomplete without mentioning him.

Prohibition

Having seen the drunkenness in the villages firsthand, the Tsar moved to prohibit vodka sales in all but first class restaurants (talk about adding insult to injury for the peasants). Besides greatly upsetting the masses, this destroyed Russian finances, as the tax on liquor was one of the key sources of revenue for the government – some 28% of the state’s revenue.

Durnovo Memorandum

Pyotr Nikolayevich Durnovo (1845 in Moscow Governorate – 24 September [O.S. 11 September] 1915 in Petrograd) was an Imperial Russian lawyer and politician.

Six months before Russia entered the Great War, the Tsar (or at least his advisors) received a memorandum from Durnovo. The key points:

…warning that war would make “social revolution in its most extreme form…inevitable.”

…war would bring revolution…Russia must break with its entente partners, France and Britain. Peace could be secured, revolution skirted, only by changing sides, renewing the nonaggression pact with Germany that had lapsed in the early nineties.

He cautioned that England, being a naval power, needed Russia to fight its land war against Germany; France would focus on a defensive war. It would be this land war that would send the revolutionaries over the edge.

“The main burden of the war will undoubtedly fall on us…”

A Russian defeat would be catastrophic:

“…Russia will be flung into a hopeless anarchy, the issue of which cannot be foreseen.”

Having seen the strikes and revolutionary fervor as a result of Russia’s war with (and defeat by) Japan in 1905, Durnovo was not the only voice making this case – only the last.

In the end, fortune smiled on Durnovo; he avoided the violent fate reserved for several of his peers and successors. From the previously cited Wikipedia article:

Pyotr Durnovo died in September 1915 at his villa in Petrograd. He was the last Russian Imperial Minister of Interior to die from natural causes. His six successors were all assassinated, or murdered during the Red Terror.

Kaiser Wilhelm II

“Russia is not ready for war”…“war would be a catastrophe”…“war would bring revolution.”

The Kaiser was not concerned about Russia in 1913 – Russia could not make war for four or five years, he believed. With this in mind, Germany sent General Limon von Sanders to Turkey to command a Turkish army corps. As nearly all of Russia’s grain for trade passed through the Bosporus, this action raised concerns in St. Petersburg.

The one issue that could drive Russia to war at this time was a closing of the Straits.

Conclusion

This concern over the Straits was Tsar Nicholas’s rejoinder to the Durnovo Memorandum.

The rest of the story is well-known.

 

[Apollonian]

Re: Book Review: "Hidden History..." by Docherty and MacGregor, on real origins of WWI--satanic perf

Who's To Blame for World War One?​

Link: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2017/03/paul-gottfried/whos-blame-world-war-one/

By Paul Gottfried
March 14, 2017

This paper was delivered at the Mises Institute’s 2017 Austrian Economics Research Conference in Auburn, AL.

Having devoted considerable time over the last forty years to studying the Great War, an interest that I developed in graduate school in the mid-1960s, I am no longer surprised or disappointed by fictional accounts of this conflict. In a forthcoming anthology, I try to explain why the glaringly obvious is so often neglected in most popular histories of the War. This is seen particularly in the attempt to attach overwhelming responsibility to the losing side while making the Allied governments look better than they were. These accounts also typically feature Imperial Germany as a forerunner of the Third Reich, that is, an aggressive power that unleashed immeasurable suffering while trying to achieve world dominance.

In my book Revisions and Dissents, I examine this skewed approach not as an exception to current historical studies but as characteristic of the way they are now done: although at no other time has there been much available historical information, perhaps never before has historiography been so drenched in ideology. Historians and journalists now have at their command more data than was available to great historians of the past. But this opportunity for accurate depictions is squandered when readers are bombed with ideologically shaped stereotypes.

One can cite as examples such journalists as Victor Davis Hanson, Max Boot, and David Frum, all of whom never rise above clichés in their condemnation of the losing side in World War One. In The Atlantic in 2015 Frum offers this picture of the Herculean battle that has been periodically waged between the Wilson administration as the champions of democracy and our vile adversaries, including Imperial Germany: “Any aggressive illiberal power must fear the United States as the ultimate potential check on its aspirations. So it was with Germany in 1917. So it is with Iran today.” With an equivalent uninformed arrogance, Hanson tells us in a column (in 2012) that German governments caused “three German wars,” all since 1870. One might ask VDH whether the other side had anything to do with any of these conflicts. Another illustration of this pontificating about a subject the author knows nothing about is Fred Siegel’s comments in Weekly Standard (in 2011), that the US should not have hesitated so long in declaring war on the “anti-democratic” Germans. This action came just as the bad guys were about to pounce on us. As far as I could tell, Siegel was referring to a contingency plan that the Germans like every other European power had put together for dealing with possible enemies in a hypothetical war; the plan that Siegel hyperventilates over had been ditched several years before the War began.

More relevant to my discussion, however, are those who know something about the War but who can’t resist serving us warmed-over platitudes. Someone who fits this category is the distinguished British historian Sir Max Hastings. In his monumental study Catastrophe 1914, Hastings does not “engage in hand-wringing,” according to the WSJ, over why the War took place. He appropriately goes after the Central Powers, since he knows that “the price of German victory would have been democracy itself.”

Such praise for what the book allegedly demonstrates is, unfortunately, overblown. In his narrative Hastings keeps coming back to the thesis constructed by the anti-national German historian Fritz Fischer in the 1960s, that Germany in 1914 “directed policy toward precipitating a general European conflict.” But Hastings tries to moderate Fischer’s extravagant position on German war guilt by rephrasing it thus: “subsequent German conduct shows Berlin strikingly untroubled by such an outcome.” This statement does not explicitly accuse the Germans of starting a premeditated European-wide war, but it also does not deny that this was their intent.

For better or worse, Fischer’s evidence that Germany and Austria were alone responsible for the War has been dying the death of a thousand stabs for decades. In Der Fischer, Komplex Gunter Spraul notes the sloppiness with which Fischer cites sources, particularly those attributed to the German Kaiser and to Helmut von Moltke, the chief of the German General Staff in 1914. Spraul could have added considerably to his list of Fischer’s misrepresentations and garbled citations, but doing so would take me too far afield. And why are we supposed to believe that if the Germans and Austrians came out on top, “democracy,” meaning the Anglosphere, would have perished? If the US and Great Britain had stayed out of the continental European conflict in 1914, as Niall Ferguson soberly points out, the US would have remained the most powerful country in the world while England would have continued to be the dominant financial power in Europe, with by far the largest navy.

During the War itself, as German academic historian Hans Fenske documents, the Central Powers far more than their adversaries sought a negotiated peace. It was they who ran to accept intervention by the Pope and from a supposedly neutral American government. By contrast, it was the Allied side that proved utterly resistant to a peace without victory and territorial annexations. Equally relevant: France and the US suppressed civil liberties more than their adversaries. Enemy newspapers were sold on street corners in Berlin and Vienna throughout the hostilities, and no one was persecuted there for buying them. German Socialists in 1916 were allowed to go to Stockholm for a peace conference, but Socialists from the so-called democracies were barred from doing so.

Opponents of the War or those demanding immediate peace were allowed to speak in the legislative bodies of the Central Powers. In July 1917 a majority of the German Reichstag voted for a peace without annexations. Although the German Chancellor considered this resolution “inopportune at the time,” legislators in the US or France would have been jailed for treason for doing anything similar. In 1914 Germany and Austria permitted more, not less, academic freedom and free expression of political views than now exists in such “liberal democratic” citadels as Sweden, Canada, and the German Federal Republic. These state-of-the-art “liberal democracies” rigorously punish so-called hate speech and monitor politically correct behavior, of course in the name of “democracy.” If Germany and Austria were such political monsters in 1914, why did they alone among the belligerents seek a negotiated peace and do so several times? At the end of 1916, the Germans even grabbed at the false peace negotiations launched by the American government, overtures that the British were urged to turn down. The English and French made clear that no peace was possible until their enemy was thoroughly vanquished and Germany chopped up into confederated territories under Allied control.

I am citing Hastings’s work not because it contains an unusual number of errors but because it typifies a widely accepted interpretation of the War. Unlike such publicists as Hanson and Max Boot, Hastings understands his subject. He also commands a fluid narrative style and fills his work with a wealth of detail about the major personalities and events of the War. In short, he could have produced a far more objective work than the one that he wrote.

Too often his anti-German, anti-Austrian bias gets in the way of impartial judgment. Supposedly the German government lied when it claimed in 1914 that the English and Russians were coordinating plans to invade Pomerania. Evidence for this provisional agreement, however, has been available for more than a century, ever since the Baltic German spy, Benno von Sieberts, who was working in the Russian embassy in London, uncovered plans for this joint military action. The controversial agreement was scheduled to be signed in summer, 1914. Details about the planned British amphibious landing, which would carry Russian troops to the German coast, was transmitted to the German General Staff, three weeks before the German government issued its blank check to Austria-Hungary. These events were obviously related. Austria’s enemy Serbia was backed by Russia, whose leaders seem to have known in advance about the plan hatched by Serbian operatives to assassinate the Austrian Archduke and his wife. News of the plan for a joint operation against Germany added fuel to the already enveloping international fire.

The British Foreign Minister, Sir Edward Grey, who worked from 1905 on to build an anti-German alliance, lied three times about the agreement, once to the German ambassador Prince Lichnowsky, who knew he was lying and then to members of his cabinet, who had been kept in the dark. The plan for German encirclement helped determine the fateful decision taken by the chief of the German general staff to go for broke. The Anglo-Russian plan made clear that those efforts by the German Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg to reconcile the English government, by among other things abandoning German naval expansion, had failed utterly. The British cabinet was continuing to plot against the Germans, with continental allies.

According to Hastings: “It is hard to sustain the argument that Grey bears a large responsibility for the war because of his failure to speak frankly to the British people during the last years of peace or explicitly to warn Berlin that Britain would not remain neutral.” Apparently, none of this mattered since the Germans “would not have been impressed by the potential involvement of an army they despised.” There are at least two facts that Hastings neglects: Grey had spent eight years, unbeknownst to most of his cabinet, making reckless commitments to Germany’s and Austria’s continental adversaries. He had given, as the distinguished historian Paul Schroeder stresses, a free hand to Russian and Pan-Slavic expansionists, at the expense of the Habsburg Empire. Grey’s government had persisted in this course despite German efforts to seek an accommodation with England in the years leading up to the War. The German government, including the German Ambassador to London, who was a critic of the German decision to go to war, thought that Grey and his collaborators were untrustworthy. By August 2, 1914, the German government may have learned that Grey was a self-righteous liar.

Hastings also asserts that there “were no major massacres of civilian populations ever laid at the door of the British, French or Italians to match those repeatedly committed by the Germans, Austrians, and Turks.” But Hastings does note the apparently minor inconvenience of the British blockade of Germany, the legality of which he admits “was disputable.” “Nevertheless, the blockade seems to belong to a different moral order of conduct from the deliberate murder of civilians.” These judgments are so muddled that one hardly knows where to begin making sense of them. Although Turkish units did massacre Armenians within their borders, after Armenians took up arms against the Ottomans on the side of Russia, I’m not aware of any similar massacres committed by the Germans and certainly not by the Austrians. Hastings does mention the shooting of Belgian hostages, as a reprisal for the guerilla war waged by the Belgians against German forces, and the execution of snipers by the Austrian forces in Galicia. Yet all this pales next to Hastings’s “legally disputable” starvation blockade of Germany, which caused over 750,000 deaths through malnutrition and disease, and which was not lifted until March 1919, after the newly established German Republic signed the humiliating Treaty of Versailles. Hastings is correct that the blockade might not have been illegal under international law. The British government, which intended to use it against Germany, never signed the convention banning this measure. More German civilians died because of the British blockade in and after the First World War than in all the aerial bombing of the Second.

A mystery of the War that needs to be addressed concerns why the French were caught off guard by the German invasion. French foreign minister and from January 1913 on, the French president, Raymond Poincaré and a host of the French ambassadors had boasted, Poincaré most notably to Russian foreign ministers Alexander Izvolsky and Sergei Sazonov, about encircling the Germans. They would force the Germans to break out of their encirclement by striking the first blow, thereby putting them in the wrong and allowing Grey to bring England into the conflict on the side of France and Russia. Historian Rainer Schmidt compares the wily Poincaré trying to push Germans into firing the first shot with Bismarck as he lured Napoleon III in 1870 into war against a seasoned Prussian military. But Poincaré and his confrères, unlike Bismarck, never bothered to hide their design. The French foreign minister induced his government to build railroad lines for Russian troops that would enable them to occupy German East Prussia. He also made sure that the French defrayed the cost of modernizing the Russian military that would be deployed to invade Germany.

Not insignificantly, the French had been in possession of the German Schlieffen Plan since around 1905. They knew the details of how the Germans would conduct a two-front war, first by attacking the French in the West, and then, by turning their military power against Russia. French leaders regularly consulted with their British and Russian counterparts about how they would counteract the eventual German offensive. As late as 1913, the French had more infantry than their enemy to the East, despite the fact that the German population was approximately one-third larger.

For three weeks the German offensive against France continued to gain ground, although the movement of German troops through Belgium encountered unexpected resistance and although German units had to be diverted in order to deal with the simultaneous Russian invasion of East Prussia. It was only during the fourth week of August, on the Marne River, almost within striking distance of Paris, that the French military halted the German advance; and it did so by hurrying people into uniform and then carrying them in some cases from Paris in cabs.

This occasions the reasonable question of why the French were so unprepared for an invasion that its government helped bring about. Allow me to suggest two answers, neither of which is original. Like the British people in relation to the war party in the British cabinet, the French population was only vaguely aware that its government was rushing into provocative military alliances. The peoples who would soon be at war were not aware of how near they were to the precipice. In 1912 and 1913, for example, while the British war party became more and more entangled in anti-German intrigues, the popular press was hailing the efforts of the German government to patch up its differences with the British. One cannot, therefore, assume that the French and British populations were emotionally ready for the war when it came.

Even more significantly, as Christopher Clark underscores, French political leaders who were boasting about how they would pummel Germany, may not have believed that the Germans would actually invade. In this respect, Poincaré did not measure up to Bismarck, who did not consider war with Napoleon III’s France as necessary for his other plans, but who was ready for the fisticuffs when they started. If Bismarck’s dealing with France in 1870 was, according to Rainer Schmidt, a model for the “outline” adopted by French leadership before the Great War, the mentality of French leaders was different from that of the Iron Chancellor. The French foreign minister and his coworkers were certainly not reticent about their belligerent designs. And yet they were strangely unprepared when their neighbors launched the attack that the French and Russians had worked to provoke.

Let me close by mentioning those Anglophone historians who have influenced my own study of the First World War. Harry Elmer Barnes, Sidney Faye, and William Langer are the golden oldies whom I’ve studied over the years. And I’ve also learned much about this struggle from a zealous apologist for the Allied side Bernadotte E. Schmitt. Unlike the rabidly Germanophobic school of history whose rants I listened to as a graduate student, Schmitt and his mentor Luigi Albertini, who wrote in defense of the Italian participation in the War, provide useful information for researchers. Closer to the present and certainly of value are the works of Justus Doenecke, Paul Schroeder, Christopher Clark, Niall Ferguson, Jim Powell, and Hunt Tooley’s monograph on the staggering costs of the War. But not least of all among those I would commend as scholars on the Great War is someone who would be on this panel if he were still alive, Ralph Raico.

In two truly illuminating essays, one on the inflated reputation of Churchill as a statesman and the other on American involvement in World War One, Ralph made me keenly aware of the degree of finagling engaged in by the British government to draw the US into war. Ralph focused on the critical role played by the war party in the English cabinet between 1905 and 1914. He was among those honored few who (along with the historian Paul Schroeder) investigated the role played by British war-hawks in losing the tide of war. Grey and his circle not only failed to alert Germany as to the true extent of their continental commitments. More importantly, the English war party, including Churchill, worked to encircle the Germans with armed hostile powers who were egged on with assurances of English support.

The charge that Germany was the unprovoked aggressor should have rung hollow by 1914, given the intrigues that had gone before. Of course, no one is denying that Germany’s catastrophic blunder furnished the casus belli. But as the historian Thucydides noted thousands of years ago, a true historical study examines the genesis of events. Such an account is not limited to the immediate causes of a war nor to the pretext or excuse “(prophasis)” that is given for one when it breaks out.

In my journey toward historical truth, Ralph played a critical role that I wish to acknowledge today. It is entirely fitting that our session be dedicated to this contentious, anti-establishment historian, who was for all of us on this panel a close friend. We are bestowing this honor on him despite the obvious fact that Ralph would not have wanted us to honor his achievement. One can almost hear him snarling somewhere in Heaven: “Hey, what the hell are those guys doing down there? Have they lost their minds? Just leave me alone to finish my cigarette!” But of course, we can’t observe this hypothetical command. Ralph was and is a looming presence in our lives.

 

[Apollonian]

Re: Book Review: "Hidden History..." by Docherty and MacGregor, on real origins of WWI--satanic perf

A Day of Betrayal of the Framers​

Link: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2017/04/jrn-k-baltzersen/a-day-of-betrayal/

By Jørn K. Baltzersen
April 6, 2017

It is April 6, 1917 – a day of great betrayal. The House of Representatives of the United States votes to declare war with 373 to 50 votes. Two days ago the federal Senate approved the declaration with 82 to 6 votes, with 8 Senators absent/abstaining. The same day President Wilson signs the declaration of war against Imperial Germany, a declaration he asked for in a speech before a joint session of Congress just four days ago.

Those United States are just about to intervene in the Great European War on a quest to make the world safe for democracy. The fall of the Russian Emperor was celebrated in the federal capital on the Potomac just the previous month, although the Russian monarchy is to be formally abolished several months later. Those United States are to declare war on Austria-Hungary exactly eight months and a day later. The day that truly will live in infamy – December 7, 1917.

Gone are the framers’ strong fear of and opposition to democracy. The nation is now to go on a crusade to make the world safe for democracy. Gone are the framers’ warnings against foreign entanglements. The nation is now to intervene in an armed conflict of the old world, a European conflict of the type the framers decried.

The Fall of the Romanovs

Given that Tsar Nicholas II had been forced to abdicate only three weeks earlier, in effect deposed, the crusade against the old European order could come full-fledged into the open. The conception that Russia was a backward country has been debunked by the great, late Austrian scholar Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn – in his Leftism Revisited. Bolshevik propaganda against the monarchy is slow to die. As Matthew Dal Santo notes, Western chroniclers so often delight in character assassinations as if they themselves were part of a 1917 Russian bread riot. Nicholas Henshall in his book The Myth of Absolutism from 1992 tells us of the growing dissatisfaction with the theory that the Russian monarchy was an Asian despotism with none of the European characteristics of limits on power.

At the outbreak of the war, there was the Western Emperor and the Eastern Emperor (the German Emperor was a novelty on the side from the recent German unification of 1871). The latter was the Tsar of Russia.

The Fall of the Habsburgs

The former was the Habsburg Emperor, Francis Joseph, who was going on his 66th year on the throne in July of 1914 – and on that fateful day, July 28, when war was declared on the Kingdom of Serbia. Few in the vast Habsburg lands could remember any other Emperor. Bionic Mosquito draws to our attention the claim of historian Jack Beatty that the Emperor’s long life was a cause of the massacre of millions that the war was.

While the Habsburg Kaiser certainly was the one finally responsible for going to war, as he was the Emperor and the one who signed the declaration of war at Bad Ischl, he was not the one most eager in pushing for war. The German Chancellor and the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister both played a game. Kaiser Wilhelm wanted to cool down the Austrians. His Chancellor delayed and filtered his message. Count Leopold Berchtold, the Foreign Minister, lied to Francis Joseph about Serbia already having opened fire at the border.

We often hear that the Habsburg Empire was just waiting to collapse. Alan Sked in his book The Decline and Fall of the Habsburg Empire, 1815–1918 disagrees and makes the case that the Habsburg Empire was well cohesive until 1917. Pieter M. Judson also believes there was no doom to failure, as William Anthony Hay takes note of. Also, John Deak of the University of Notre Dame gave a talk a few years ago, making the case that the Austro-Hungarian army made war on its own peoples, and that this was in large part what destroyed the loyalty of the empire’s peoples. Apparently, the theory that the Habsburg Empire was not doomed to fail is not particularly controversial amongst Habsburg historians, whereas more general military historians typically believe that the empire was doomed no matter what.

German Guilt

Then there is the issue of the claimed German guilt, a myth that is pretty persistent, as Paul Gottfried remarks (Prof. Gottfried was also interviewed a couple of times on the Tom Woods Show in 2014, the centennial year of the outbreak).

Historian J.H.J. Andriessen points out in his book World War I in Photographs (my notes are from a Norwegian translation) that the Royal Navy was bullying the German merchant fleet. The Royal Navy could supremely rule the waves, but for any challenger, a navy buildup is blamed on an inferiority complex towards grandmother (Queen Victoria), uncle (King Edward VII), and cousin (King George V).

We are generally appalled by the German unrestricted warfare and the sinking of the Lusitania, which basically was a cargo warship with no escort – but with a “human shield” of civilians. On the other hand, we tend to pay little attention to the blockade against Germany, severely harming civilians, a blockade that, as the late Ralph Raico noted, Churchill was instrumental in establishing.

The Cause of a New War

Keynes predicted a new war would come after twenty years. Keynes’ theories are wrong on a few other essentials, but in this prediction he was pretty accurate. The two world wars have been labelled a European civil war with a twenty-year truce. In a sense this is correct, but it is also confusing, given the very significant differences between the Wilhelmine and the Hitlerite regimes.

The mainstream belief is that it was the Versailles Treaty and its harsh terms that gave us Corporal Hitler at the helm and World War II. Churchill in his six-volume work The Second World War points at a second factor, namely the vacuum created by removing the Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns from their thrones.

While he is probably largely right in claiming this vacuum was also a significant factor, Churchill himself was not exactly innocent in bringing about the situation, with his role as First Lord of the Admiralty, the equivalent of Secretary of the Navy, but he puts the blame on “American and modernizing pressure.”

The “war to make the world safe for democracy” was not purely an endeavor of Woodrow Wilson and the Americans. The quest had European driving forces as well. David Lloyd George, who had succeeded Henry Asquith as Prime Minister in late 1916, gave a speech to the American Club in London six days after Congress had decided to go to war, clearly stating how he viewed the war as an ideological war.

Transformation of Our Civilization

In the mainstream, we hear that the only real problem beyond the mass killing and the war itself was the interwar period and its problems leading up to Nazism, Fascism, and World War II. That problem has been solved. So, no worries?

Not so fast!

World War I transformed civilization and society and gave us problems we still are stuck with today. The transformation was profound. Much revisionist work had been done, and, as Hunt Tooley tells us, much work remains. The world has moved from a norm of monarchy to a norm of democracy, a process which Hans-Hermann Hoppe describes in his book Democracy – The God That Failed as civilizational decline. William S. Lind describes the fall of the large European monarchies as the poisons that were the French Revolution were let unchecked upon our civilization.

But it is hardly just a question of monarchies removed or not. War first and foremost destroys. As mentioned, making war on the peoples of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy destroyed the empire’s cohesion and fabric.

We went from traditional society to modernism. We went from small to bigger and bigger government, as the bureaucracy and regulations of wartime translated into the same in peacetime. And this goes to show that Randolph Bourne was right when he told us that war is the health of the State.

Mass participation in war translated into mass participation in government. And we eventually got equal, universal suffrage and mass democracy. Belief in the divine got a hard blow, as Christians were fighting each other at an unprecedented scale. Monarchic, aristocratic, and religious checks on the power of the masses were all but gone when the war had completed its destruction.

The United Kingdom had gotten its House of Lords already in 1911 reduced to a debating club, in the words of Bertrand de Jouvenel. However, governance was still largely by the aristocratic class. The war gave aristocratic participation at the battlefields, reducing their numbers greatly through massacre, such that it was depleted as governing class. In came new overlords.

American Guilt

But all this was started by the Europeans, and those United States entered late in the conflict. So why does American intervention matter at all?

First of all, the first American troops landed in France a whole 16 months before the Armistice in November 1918. That is a whole lot of time in an industrial scale war. And according to Hunt Tooley, momentous American decisions were crucial to the further development of the war. It is highly probable that American entry prolonged the war, for which a small committee in Christiania (today’s Oslo), Norway just a few years later apparently thought President Wilson was worthy of a peace prize.

Perhaps even more important, however, is the status of those United States before April 1917. We are told they were neutral, so it doesn’t matter. But the United States were never really neutral. It was a faux neutrality. The Allied Powers “knew” the United States would not let the Central Powers win. That certainly would influence the Allied Powers’ willingness to negotiate an early peace.

Entering the war also had severe domestic consequences for the United States. Big government got a boost. The oppositional speech was silenced. The American idea of limited government was betrayed.


Certainly, the American decision to enter World War One gave us a world to the worse for America, Europe, and the world at large.

 

[Apollonian]

Re: Book Review: "Hidden History..." by Docherty and MacGregor, on real origins of WWI--satanic perf

Let's stop kidding ourselves. The U.S. role in World War I had disastrous consequences.​

Link: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opin...cracy-world-war-james-bovard-column/99959474/

This week is the 100th anniversary of President Woodrow Wilson’s speech to Congress seeking a declaration of war against Germany. Many people celebrate this centenary of America’s emergence as a world power. But, when the Trump administration is bombing or rattling sabers at half a dozen nations while many Democrats clamor to fight Russia, it is worth reviewing World War One’s high hopes and dire results.

Wilson was narrowly re-elected in 1916 based on a campaign slogan, "He kept us out of war." But Wilson had massively violated neutrality by providing armaments and money to the Allied powers that had been fighting Germany since 1914. In his war speech to Congress, Wilson hailed the U.S. government as "one of the champions of the rights of mankind" and proclaimed that "the world must be made safe for democracy."

American soldiers fought bravely and helped turn the tide on the Western Front in late 1918. But the cost was far higher than Americans anticipated. More than a hundred thousand American soldiers died in the third bloodiest war in U.S. history. Another half million Americans perished from the Spanish flu epidemic spurred and spread by the war.

In his speech to Congress, Wilson declared, "We have no quarrel with the German people" and feel "sympathy and friendship" towards them. But his administration speedily commenced demonizing the "Huns." One Army recruiting poster portrayed German troops as an ape ravaging a half-naked damsel beneath an appeal to "Destroy this mad brute."

Wilson acted as if the congressional declaration of war against Germany was also a declaration of war against the Constitution. Harvard professor Irving Babbitt commented in 1924: "Wilson, in the pursuit of his scheme for world service, was led to make light of the constitutional checks on his authority and to reach out almost automatically for unlimited power." Wilson even urged Congress to set up detention camps to quarantine "alien enemies."

Wilson unleashed ruthless censorship of any criticism. Anyone who spoke publicly against military conscription was likely to get slammed with federal espionage or sedition charges. Possessing a pamphlet entitled Long Live the Constitution of the United States earned six months in jail for a Pennsylvania malcontent. Censorship was buttressed by fanatic propaganda campaigns led by the Committee on Public Information, a federal agency whose shameless motto was "faith in democracy... faith in fact."

The war enabled the American equivalent of the Taliban to triumph on the home front. Prohibition advocates "indignantly insisted that... any kind of opposition to prohibition was sinister and subversively pro-German," noted William Ross, author of World War 1 and the American Constitution. Even before the 18th Amendment (which banned alcohol consumption) was ratified, Wilson banned beer sales as a wartime measure. Prohibition was a public health disaster; the rate of alcoholism tripled during the 1920s. To punish lawbreakers, the federal government added poisons to industrial alcohol that was often converted into drinkable hooch; ten thousand people were killed as a result. Professor Deborah Blum, the author of The Poisoner's Handbook, noted that "an official sense of higher purpose kept the poisoning program in place."

The war provided the pretext for unprecedented federal domination of the economy. Washington promised that "food will win the war" and farmers vastly increased their plantings. Price supports and government credits for foreign buyers sent crop prices and land prices skyrocketing. However, when the credits ended in 1920, prices and land values plunged, spurring massive bankruptcies across rural America. This spurred perennial political discontent that helped lead to a federal takeover of agriculture by the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s.

World War One was ended by the Treaty of Versailles, which redrew European borders willy-nilly and imposed ruinous reparations on Germany. One of Wilson’s top aides at the peace talks, Henry White, lamented: "We had such high hopes of this adventure; we believed God called us and now we are doing hell’s dirtiest work." Wilson had proclaimed 14 points to guide peace talks; instead, there were 14 separate small wars in Europe towards the end of his term — after peace had been proclaimed. Millions of Irish Americans were outraged that, despite Wilson’s bleatings about democracy, Britain brutally repressed Ireland during and after the war. The League of Nations, which Wilson championed in vain, was so smarmily worded that it could have obliged the U.S. to send troops to help Britain crush the burgeoning Irish independence movement.

The chaos and economic depression sowed by the war and the Treaty of Versailles helped open the door to some of the worst dictators in modern times, including Germany’s Adolf Hitler, Italy’s Benito Mussolini, and Vladimir Lenin — whom Wilson intensely disliked because "he felt the Bolshevik leader had stolen his ideas for world peace," as historian Thomas Fleming noted in his 2003 masterpiece, The Illusion of Victory: America in World War 1.

Despite winning the war, Wilson’s Democratic Party was crushed at the polls in both 1918 and 1920. H.L. Mencken wrote on the eve of the 1920 election that Americans were sickened of Wilsonian "idealism that is oblique, confusing, dishonest, and ferocious."

Have today’s policymakers learned anything from the debacle a century ago? Wilson continues to be invoked by politicians who believe America can achieve great things by warring abroad. The bellicosity of both Republican and Democratic leaders is a reminder that Wilson also failed to make democracy safe for the world.

 

[Apollonian]

Re: Book Review: "Hidden History..." by Docherty and MacGregor, on real origins of WWI--satanic perf

America Should Have Skipped the War, Not Just the Ceremony​

Link: http://ronpaulinstitute.org/archive...d-have-skipped-the-war-not-just-the-ceremony/

Written by David Stockman
Tuesday November 13, 2018

This weekend the Donald took some heavy duty flack from liberals, Dems, the MSM and harrumphing patriots for canceling his appearance at a wreath laying ceremony at the famous WWI battle site at Belleau, France owing to inclement weather. For instance, former Secretary of State, John Kerry got himself worked into high dudgeon:
Mr. Kerry criticized the president’s decision on Twitter, saying that the weather “shouldn’t have stopped an American President”.

“President @realDonaldTrump a no-show because of raindrops?” he wrote. “Those veterans the president didn’t bother to honor fought in the rain, in the mud, in the snow – & many died in trenches for the cause of freedom.”
We truly wonder whether Mr. Kerry gets the monumental irony. In his youth he was a courageous leader of the anti-Vietnam War movement based on the insanity of America’s role in a needless war in Southeast Asia of which he was a veteran.

Yet the only war of the 20th century more senseless than Vietnam was the so-called Great War, and most especially America’s intervention in an old world tragedy for no good reason whatsoever. That is to say, the Marine heroes of the bloody battle of Belleau Wood did not die "in the trenches for the cause of freedom."

To the contrary, they died there owing to the fanatical megalomania of President Woodrow Wilson. The latter maneuvered America into the Great War in April 1917 when it was nearly over, and for the purpose of giving himself a grand seat at the peace conference afterward to reshape the world in accordance with his messianic vision.

That was a horrible reason in itself for the 116,000 deaths of American servicemen during the less than 12 months that they were actually engaged in battle at the tail end of the war. The real tragedy of their sacrifice and the real crime of Wilson’s pointless intervention was that it snatched victory for the allies, who didn’t deserve it, from the jaws of stalemate among the militarily exhausted, financially bankrupt and politically demoralized combatants on both sides of the conflict.

In a word, save for Wilson’s intervention the war would have been over in 1917. In consequence, there would have been a peace of the exhausted, not the vindictive, destructive peace of the "victors" at Versailles, which paved the way for Lenin and Stalin in Russia and Hitler and the totalitarian mobilizations that fostered World War II and the Cold War beyond.

That is to say, the 100-year anniversary of the Armistice of November 11, 1918 is not about just another historical date passing a big round number. Instead, it is a reminder that the Great War and the Carthaginian Peace which followed was the incubator for almost all the ills of the next 100 years – and not just the Stalinist nightmare in Russia, Nazi Germany and the holocaust or the long gray night of Cold War during which the Nuclear Sword Of Damocles hung precariously over the planet.

It also gave rise to the Big Government interventionist state in America; turned the Federal Reserve from a decentralized "bankers’ bank" into an all-powerful fiscal arm of Washington and eventually the monetary central planner for the nation; and most insidiously of all, generated the baleful notion of America as the Indispensable Nation and the follies of Empire which have flowed therefrom.

Needless to say, amidst all it harrumphing about the Donald’s "no show" at Belleau Wood, Imperial Washington is showing it true colors. It is so steeped in the culture, rationalizations and prerogatives of Empire that it fails to appreciate the profundity of the Donald’s surely less than noble reasons – fear, apparently, that the Orange Comb-Over might get waterlogged – for eschewing the one hour car trip to the Aisne Marne American Cemetery.

Far, far better that America had eschewed the war entirely 100 years ago, and that no American had ever been sent into the meat-grinder at Belleau Wood. Obviously, their snuffed-out lives would have turned out for the better, but so would have America’s and the entire world’s.

Accordingly, during the next three days we are presenting a series on the wrong path taken 100 years ago during 1917-1919 by the very worst President ever to occupy the Oval Office.

Indeed, even as he prepared on Armistice Day for his triumphal trip to the Paris Peace Conference a month later the messianic Wilson might better have contemplated the meaning of what ace fighter pilot, Eddie Rickenbacker, saw as high piloted his fighter plane just 500 feet over the fog-shrouded battlefield slightly before 11 AM on November 11, 1918. In his diary he noted:
And then it was 11:00 A.M., the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. I was the only audience for the greatest show ever presented. On both sides of no-man’s-land, the trenches erupted. Brown-uniformed men poured out of the American trenches, gray-green uniforms out of the German. From my observer’s seat overhead, I watched them throw their helmets in the air, discard their guns, wave their hands. Then all up and down the front, the two groups of men began edging toward each other across no-man’s-land. Seconds before they had been willing to shoot each other; now they came forward. Hesitantly at first, then more quickly, each group approached the other.

Suddenly gray uniforms mixed with brown. I could see them hugging each other, dancing, jumping. Americans were passing out cigarettes and chocolate. I flew up to the French sector. There it was even more incredible. After four years of slaughter and hatred, they were not only hugging each other but kissing each other on both cheeks as well.

Star shells, rockets and flares began to go up, and I turned my ship toward the field. The war was over.
Except it wasn’t and not for a century. Yet back then the soldiers on both sides knew the war was pointless and that there was no victory to be had – just an end to the insane brutality of the whole enterprise. Better that they had all gone home after the politicians on both sides finally threw in the towel.

But it was not to be because the vainglorious Thomas Woodrow Wilson foolishly believed that he had been called by God to remake the world for the betterment of mankind. So doing, he sacrificed American blood and treasure so that the vengeful French and the Empire-minded Brits could impose a punitive, draconian peace on the gray-green German uniforms which Rickenbacker saw that morning ready to go home and to forgive and forget.

Instead, Wilson and the Allies eventually sent them home humiliated and destitute, signatories to the German "War Guilt" clause in the treaty of Versailles and the punitive burden of war reparations which accompanied it; and, more importantly, as the future politically combustible tinder from which the scourge of Hitler and Nazism soon arose – and then nearly a century of wars thereafter.

Rather than harrumphing at the Donald, it would be far the more becoming if Imperial Washington took the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Armistice to reflect upon its own derelict and bloody hands.

Woodrow Wilson And The Rise Of The Indispensable Nation Folly, Part 1

The Indispensable Nation meme originates not in the universal condition of mankind and the nation-states into which it has been partitioned. Instead, it stems from an erroneous take on the one-time, flukish and historically aberrant circumstances of the 20th century that gave raise to giant totalitarian states in Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia, and the resulting mass murder and oppressions which resulted there from.

What we mean is that Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany were not coded into the DNA of humanity; they were not an incipient horror always waiting to happen the moment more righteous nations let down their guard.

To the contrary, they were effectively born and bred in April 1917 when the US entered what was then called the Great War. And though it did so for absolutely no reason of homeland security or any principle consistent with the legitimate foreign policy of the American Republic, it’s entry tilted the outcome to the social chaos and Carthaginian peace from which Stalin and Hitler sprang.

So you can put the blame for the monumental evil of 20th century totalitarianism squarely on Thomas Woodrow Wilson. This megalomaniacal madman, who was the very worst President in American history, took America into war for the worst possible reason: Namely, a vainglorious desire to have a big seat at the postwar peace table in order to remake the world as God had inspired him to redeem it.

The truth, however, was that the European war posed not an iota of threat to the safety and security of the citizens of Lincoln NE, or Worcester MA or Sacramento CA. In that respect, Wilson’s putative defense of “freedom of the seas” and the rights of neutrals was an empty shibboleth; his call to make the world safe for democracy, a preposterous pipe dream.

Indeed, the shattered world extant after the bloodiest war in human history was a world about which Wilson was blatantly ignorant. And remaking it was a task for which he was temperamentally unsuited – even as his infamous 14 points were a chimera so abstractly devoid of substance as to constitute mental play dough.

The monumentally ugly reason for America’s entry into the Great War, in fact, was revealed – if inadvertently – by his alter-ego and sycophant, Colonel House. As the latter put it: Intervention in Europe’s war positioned Wilson to play,

“The noblest part that has ever come to the son of man”.

America thus plunged into Europe’s carnage, and forevermore shed its century-long Republican tradition of anti-militarism and nonintervention in the quarrels of the Old World. From Wilson’s historically erroneous turn – there arose at length the Indispensable Nation folly, which we shall catalogue in depth below.

For now, suffice it to say that there was absolutely nothing noble that came of Wilson’s intervention.

It led to a peace of vengeful victors, triumphant nationalists and avaricious imperialists – when the war would have otherwise ended in a bedraggled peace of mutually exhausted bankrupts and discredited war parties on both sides.

By so altering the course of history, Wilson’s war bankrupted Europe and midwifed 20th century totalitarianism in Russia and Germany.

These developments, in turn, eventually led to the Great Depression, the Welfare State and Keynesian economics, World War II, the holocaust, the Cold War, the permanent Warfare State and its military-industrial-surveillance complex.

They also spawned Nixon’s 1971 destruction of sound money, Reagan’s failure to tame Big Government and Greenspan’s destructive cult of monetary central planning.

So, too, flowed the Bush dynasty’s wars of intervention and occupation, and from them a fatal blow to the failed states in the lands of Islam foolishly created by the imperialist map-makers at Versailles. The legacy: endless waves of blowback and terrorism now afflicting the world.

The rise of the murderous Nazi and Stalinist totalitarian regimes during the 1930s and the resulting conflagration of World War II is held to be, correctly, the defining event of the 20th century. But that truism only begs the real question.

To wit, were these nightmarish scourges always latent just below the surface of global civilization – waiting to erupt whenever good people and nations fell asleep at the switch, as per the standard critique of the British pacifism and US isolationism that flourished during the late 1930s?

Or were they the equivalent of the 1000 year flood? That is, a development so unlikely, aberrant and unrepeatable as to merely define a horrid but one-off chapter of history, not the ordinary and probable unfolding of affairs among the nations.

We contend that the answer depends upon whether your start with April 2, 1917, when America discarded its historic republican policy of nonintervention and joined the bloody fray on the old continent’s Western Front, or December 7, 1941, when Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor allegedly awoke America from its isolationist slumber and called it to global leadership of the so-called American Century.

Needless to say, the Deep State’s ideology of the Indispensable Nation and its projects of Empire are rooted in the Pearl Harbor narrative. That is, the claim that global affairs go to hell in a hand basket when virtuous nations let down their guard or acquiesce to even modest acts of regional aggression.

The now faded verities of republican nonintervention, by contrast, properly finger Woodrow Wilson’s perfidious declaration of War on Germany as the event that changed the ordinary course of history, and paved the way for the once in a 1000 years aberration of Hitler and Stalin which ultimately ensued.

Not surprisingly, the official historical narratives of the Empire glorify America’s rising to duty in World War II and after, but merely describe the events of 1917-1919 as some sort of preliminary coming of age.

As a consequence, the rich, history-defining essence of what happened during those eventful years has been lost in the fog of battles, the miserable casualty statistics of war, the tales of prolonged diplomatic wrangling at Versailles and the blame-game for the failed Senate ratification of Wilson’s League of Nations thereafter.

In this connection, the defeat of the League of Nations is treated as a colossal error in the mainstream narrative. It is held to constitute a crucial default by the Indispensable Nation that hurried the rise of the totalitarian nightmares, and only compounded America’s task of righting the world in the 1940s and after.

In fact, however, the defeat of Wilson’s treaty was the last gasp of republicanism – an echo of the stand that had kept America true to its interests and noninterventionist traditions as the calamity of the Great War unfolded.

In effect, Henry Cabot Lodge and his so-called Midwestern isolationists (actually the original America Firsters) were trying to turn the clock back to April 1, 1917.

That was the day before Wilson summoned the Congress to war based on his own megalomania and the high-handed maneuvers of his State Department. After William Jennings Bryan’s principled antiwar resignation in June 1915, the latter had been operating in complete cahoots with the Morgan interests (which had risked billions financing England and France) and had essentially maneuvered the messianic Wilson into war.

Consequently, the powerful truths of what actually preceded the 1919 defeat of the League have been lost to standard history. In what follows, we mean to revive these crucial developments and inflection points because they clearly do demonstrate that the 1000 year flood of 20th century totalitarianism originated in the foolish decisions of Wilson and a few others, not the DNA of mankind nor a death urge of the nations.

Needless to say, that is not a matter of academic history; it makes all the difference in the world of here and now because virtually every maneuver of Imperial Washington, such as it current demented attacks on Iran, are predicated on the Hitler and Stalin syndrome. That is, the hoary belief that there is always another one of these monsters lurking in the ordinary political, economic and cultural conflicts of the nations.

To the contrary, of course, if the world actually needs no Indispensable Nation the whole predicate for Empire is invalidated. The raison d’etre of the Imperial City and all its hegemonic projects of "leadership", meddling, intervention, and occupation, in fact, belong in the dustbin of history.

Needless to say, that is also why Imperial Washington was so aghast at Donald Trump’s election. By whatever cockamamie route of thinly informed reasoning he got there – he did seem to comprehend that the national security of America and the policing of a global Empire are not the same thing at all.

So herewith is a capsulized dissection of the 1000 year flood – explaining why Stalin and Hitler should have never happened. Accordingly, the hot, cold and permanent wars that followed thereafter condemn the case for Empire, not make it; and they show that Trump’s America First is a far more appropriate lodestone for national security policy than Imperial Washington’s specious claim that America is the Indispensable Nation.

As indicated above, the Great War had been destined to end in 1917 by mutual exhaustion, bankruptcy and withdrawal from the utterly stalemated trenches of the Western Front. In the end, upwards of 4.0 million combatants had been killed and 8.3 million wounded over four years for movement along blood-drenched front-lines that could be measured in mere miles and yards.

Still, had America stayed on its side of the great Atlantic moat, the ultimate outcomes everywhere would have been far different. Foremostly, the infant democracy that came to power in February 1917 in Russia would not have been so easily smothered in its crib.

There surely would have been no disastrous summer offensive by the Kerensky government to rollback Germany on the eastern front where the czarist armies had earlier been humiliated and dismembered.

In turn, an early end to the war in Russia would also have precluded the subsequent armed insurrection in Petrograd in November 1917, which enabled the flukish seizure of power by Lenin and his small band of fanatical Bolsheviks.

That is, the 20th century would not have been saddled with what inexorably morphed into the Stalinist nightmare. Nor would a garrisoned Soviet state have poisoned the peace of nations for 74 years thereafter, while causing the nuclear sword of Damocles to hang precariously over the planet.

The same is even more true regarding the rise of Hitler, as we examine next time.

Reprinted with permission from David Stockman's Contra Corner.

 

[Apollonian]

Re: Book Review: "Hidden History..." by Docherty and MacGregor, on real origins of WWI--satanic perf

U.S. Soldiers Died for Nothing in WW I​

by Jacob G. Hornberger
November 12, 2018

Link: https://www.fff.org/2018/11/12/u-s-soldiers-died-for-nothing-in-ww-i/

Let’s be blunt: the 117,466 U.S. soldiers who died in World War I died for nothing. No one can deny that. In fact, that might well be the reason why interventionists changed the name from Armistice Day to Veterans Day. They wanted Americans to stop thinking about the fact that all those American soldiers in World War I died for nothing.

After the war was over, the American people knew that those soldiers had died for nothing. That’s why they were overwhelmingly opposed to the U.S. entering World War II. They had had enough of foreign interventionism. After losing 117,466 soldiers for nothing in a foreign war in Europe, the last thing they wanted was to go through the entire experience again.

The United States was founded on the principle of non-interventionism in the forever wars in Europe and Asia. That non-interventionist philosophy was captured in the speech entitled “In Search of Monsters to Destroy” that John Quincy Adams delivered to Congress on the Fourth of July, 1821.

There are lots of monsters in the world, Adams pointed out. Always have been. Always will be. Tyrants. Wars. Revolutions. Civil wars. Starvation.

But America’s job was not to send military forces to Europe or Asia or other faraway lands to slay those monsters. Instead, America would serve as a haven for anyone who was able and willing to flee the monsters. That’s what America’s policy of open immigration for more than 100 years was all about. It told people: “We will not send troops, bombs, or bullets to save you but if you can get out, there is one place where you can come without fear of being forcibly deported back to your monster.”

The turning point came in 1898 with the Spanish-American War, when U.S. proponents of foreign interventionism were claiming that America could never be a great nation without acquiring colonies, like the other empires around the world. That’s how the United States ended up owning or controlling former colonies of the Spanish Empire, like the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and Cuba. That’s how the United States ended up with Gitmo, which would ultimately be converted into a U.S. torture and prison center.

The 1898 intervention was followed by President Wilson’s fateful decision to intervene into World War I, a brutal and vicious European war that ended up killing some 40 million people. There was absolutely no reason for Wilson to embroil the United States in the war. The conflict was none of the U.S. government’s business.

But Wilson was an academic idealist. He was certain that given America’s “greatness,” it could force those Europeans to stop their incessant wars, once and for all. Wilson was convinced that if the U.S. entered the conflict, it could ensure that this would be the final war in history. In his mind, this was the war that would end all wars into the future. Wilson was also convinced that his intervention would also finally make the entire world safe for democracy.

Ironically, in other to wage his war Wilson had to resort to conscription. When one has to force men to fight in a war, that’s a pretty good sign that that is not a good war. Moreover, forcing men to serve the state, especially by killing and dying in a foreign war, obviously destroyed the freedom of those who were conscripted. What could be worse than dying for “freedom” when you’ve been forced to die for “freedom.”

That wasn’t all that Wilson did to destroy freedom in America. His goons also began arresting, prosecuting, and jailing people who dared to criticize his foreign adventure. And then they began persecuting German Americans, even making sure that the German language could no longer be taught in public (i.e., government) schools and, more important, making sure that red-blooded, patriotic Americans referred to sauerkraut as “freedom cabbage” rather than as sauerkraut. He also enacted a tyrannical law called the Espionage Act, which, believe it or not, is still used by U.S. officials today as an instrument of tyranny.

If the U.S. had not intervened in World War I, it is a virtual certainty that there would have been a negotiated settlement between the warring parties. U.S. interventionism instead brought about the total defeat of Germany, which Wilson was convinced would mean that the world would be made safe for democracy and that this would be the war to end all wars forever.

The result of Germany’s total defeat? The vengeful Treaty of Versailles, which later provided Hitler with his rationale for his rise to power. So much for making the world safe for democracy. So much for making this the war to end all wars. Wilson’s intervention into WW I was a critical factor in the rise of the Nazi regime and then World War II.

Can you see why Americans were so overwhelmingly opposed to entering World War II? President Franklin Roosevelt understood the depth and fervor behind that opposition. That’s why in his 1940 presidential campaign, he did precisely what Wilson had done in his 1916 presidential campaign. A few days before the election, he assured voters, “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”

But FDR was lying, intentionally, just like Wilson had done. In fact, FDR was secretly doing everything he could to embroil the United States in the conflict. But FDR knew that he could never secure a congressional declaration of war, which the Constitution required. (This was when U.S. presidents were still complying with the Constitution’s declaration-of-war requirement.)

So, FDR began provoking the Germans into attacking U.S. vessels, so that he could then go to Congress and get his declaration of war on as “self-defense” basis. When the Germans refused to take FDR’s bait, he turned to the Pacific in the hopes of using it as a “back door” to getting into the European war. That’s what the oil embargo on the Japanese was all about, along with the humiliating demands that FDR placed on Japanese officials.

FDR’s plan worked perfectly. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese, attempting to break out of the oil-embargo noose that FDR was tightening around their neck, attacked U.S. naval forces that were conveniently positioned at Pearl Harbor. FDR got what he had been striving for — U.S. entry into World War II.

How can the lies and machinations that led the United States into World War I and World War II be reconciled with democratic principles? That can’t be.

World War II, in turn, brought about the conversion of the federal government into a national security state, a type of governmental structure that is inherent to totalitarian regimes. It also brought the Cold War against America’s World War II partner and ally, the Soviet Union, and the anti-Russia mentality that is a core element U.S. foreign policy today. It also brought coups, regime-change operations, assassinations, torture, partnerships with brutal dictatorship, a foreign and domestic military empire, an ever-voracious military-industrial-congressional complex, out-of-control federal spending and debt, denial of due process of law and trial by jury, mass secret surveillance, invasions, occupations, and forever war, not to mention the destruction of liberty and privacy in America.

It all goes back to the meaningless deaths of 117,466 U.S. soldiers in World War I. That is Woodrow Wilson’s legacy. That is the legacy of foreign interventionism. That is what happens when a nation founded on the concept of a limited-government republic and a non-interventionist foreign policy abandons its founding principles.

 

[Apollonian]

Re: Book Review: "Hidden History..." by Docherty and MacGregor, on real origins of WWI--satanic perf

 

[Apollonian]

Re: Book Review: "Hidden History..." by Docherty and MacGregor, on real origins of WWI--satanic perf

 

[Apollonian]

Re: Book Review: "Hidden History..." by Docherty and MacGregor, on real origins of WWI--satanic perf

 

[Apollonian]

Re: Book Review: "Hidden History..." by Docherty and MacGregor, on real origins of WWI--satanic perf

Sleepwalk to Suicide​

Hubris no greater than America’s led Europe to World War I.

By Paul Gottfried • January 21, 2014

Link: https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/sleepwalk-to-suicide/

Perhaps no war has been treated more tendentiously—and in recent decades more inappropriately—than World War I. Since the 1960s, a fixed view of that conflict has developed in academic and journalistic circles that places the blame almost entirely on one side. The German government, led by an evil, authoritarian emperor and his bellicose general staff, unleashed a struggle that cost more than 30 million lives and wrought untold destruction on the European continent.

According to the scholar Fritz Fischer—who became the German Left’s darling, despite his background as a loyal Nazi—the war was planned and initiated by a Germany bent on world domination. What other belligerents did to get the ball rolling in 1914, Fischer suggests in his 1961 book Germany’s Bid for World Power, was inconsequential. The rest of Europe was pulled into a struggle that Germany had planned for decades, a conflagration its antidemocratic ruling class and ultranationalist public happily initiated.

Defenses of the Fischer thesis and other versions of the outbreak of the Great War stressing exclusive German or Austro-German responsibility have been driven by moral and ideological considerations. Unfortunately, there are facts that historians until recently tried studiously to avoid. As critics of Fischer’s position were already showing in the early ’60s, his singling out of his own country, already burdened with Nazi crimes, for starting an earlier Euro- pean war was based on questionable investigative methods.

Fischer and his followers ignored what other European countries did to provoke the Great War, unfairly blackened the reputation of German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg—who tried earnestly to iron out differences between England and his country for at least three years before the war started—and misquoted key German actors in the conflict, such as the Kaiser and the chief of the German general staff.

In recent decades those who write non-prescribed histories dealing with the outbreak of the First World War typically ignore Fischer and like-minded interpreters. Niall Ferguson in The Pity of War, Konrad Canis in his massive three-volume German work on the failures of German diplomacy leading to the “abyss” in 1914, Christopher Clark in The Sleepwalkers, and Sean McMeekin in The Russian Origins of World War One have all produced estimable studies about the Great War that are clearly incompatible with Fischer’s stress on exclusive German guilt.

All the Great Powers behaved rashly, and to their credit the most scrupulous historians do not spare any of the actors on the Allied side. The avoidable disaster of 1914 teaches us, according to Christopher Clark, how the Great Powers “sleep-walked” their way into a war from which European civilization never recovered. Russia in its drive to dismantle Turkey and control the Dardanelles; Britain in its efforts to reduce a rival’s power even at the risk of encircling the German Empire with hostile alliances; Serbia in its attempts to split apart the Habsburg Empire; and France in its desperate desire to punish the Germans for defeat in the Franco-Prussian War all helped stir the pot.

Canis has shown in staggering detail how German foreign policy after the fall of Bismarck floundered for decades. The German Naval Program designed to achieve a 3:5 ratio in relation to the British navy, which was then the world’s largest, was an irritant to British political leaders. It allowed firebrands like Winston Churchill—who became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911—to exaggerate German hatred for England, which in fact was never particularly great, as Canis documents by looking at the German press.

The German government naively thought it could create a large enough navy to force the British to make an alliance with its fellow Northern European power. The royal families of the two countries were closely related, and the Kaiser believed his British cousins would never go to war with him—indeed, they would seek his friendship— if they couldn’t blockade his coastline.

The Kaiser was wrong. Although Bethmann-Hollweg managed to halt the German naval buildup by 1912, the British government still plowed on and plunged their country into further entangling alliances with Russia against the Germans. The British managed to bottle up the Germans even before the war began and then imposed what was probably an illegal starvation blockade until 1919.

Niall Ferguson argues convincingly that if Britain and the U.S. never entered the war—and even if the Central Powers prevailed after a long, bloody conflict—Britain would have remained Europe’s premier power, blessed with an enormous navy, an extensive empire, and an economic lead over other European countries. No matter the outcome of the war, the U.S. would eventually have become the greatest world power on the basis of its industrial and agricultural wealth.

As it was, American intervention on the Allied (read British) side was always a matter of time. The U.S. government, as historians Thomas Fleming and Walter Karp have demonstrated, was never really neutral. Any crisis that put the Central Powers in a bad light was played up by America’s fervently Anglophile political class. The sinking of the Lusitania by a German submarine in 1915 was not a belligerent act directed against the U.S.: the ship was loaded with arms and other contrabands that were earmarked for the British. The German government had warned Americans and other neutrals not to board the ship because it was a fair war target—as indeed it was.

Already in 1914 the American ambassador to London and a close friend of President Wilson, Walter Hines Page, had announced to British leaders that he would do all he could to bring the U.S. into the war on England’s side as soon as an appropriate pretext could be arranged. No similar assurance was given by Page’s counterpart in Berlin in talking with German leaders.

But Woodrow Wilson and his party were not the major backers of getting the U.S. involved in the bloodbath. Wilson delayed in the face of Republican hysteria about not moving fast enough to stand with England for “democracy.” Today’s neoconservatives are not the first to talk up the “Anglosphere.” One-time Republican celebrities like Theodore Roosevelt, Elihu Root, and Henry Cabot Lodge were demanding in 1914 that we get into a European war we would have done well to stay out of. The GOP’s horrid habits go back a very long way.

President George W. Bush exceeded in his calls for America to liberate the rest of the world any expression of chauvinism from a major European leader on the eve of World War I. But tactless behavior has not produced the consequences for us that it did for the “sleep-walking” subjects of Christopher Clark’s history. We are lucky about where our country is located and how much wealthier and stronger we are relative to other states. What did Bismarck say about God looking after fools, drunkards and the United States of America?

 

[Apollonian]

Re: Book Review: "Hidden History..." by Docherty and MacGregor, on real origins of WWI--satanic perf

American History for Truthdiggers: A Savage 'War to End All Wars,' and a Failed Peace ​

Link: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/a...age-war-to-end-all-wars-and-its-failed-peace/

“Over There” (1917), with its patriotic lyrics and rousing melody, was a rallying cry for Americans in World War I.

Editor’s note: The past is prologue. The stories we tell about ourselves and our forebears inform the sort of country we think we are and help determine public policy. As our current president promises to “make America great again,” this moment is an appropriate time to reconsider our past, look back at various eras of United States history and re-evaluate America’s origins. When, exactly, were we “great”?

Below is the 22nd installment of the “American History for Truthdiggers” series, a pull-no-punches appraisal of our shared, if flawed, past. The author of the series, Danny Sjursen, an active-duty major in the U.S. Army, served military tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and taught the nation’s checkered, often inspiring past when he was an assistant professor of history at West Point. His war experiences, his scholarship, his skill as a writer and his patriotism illuminate these Truthdig posts.

Part 22 of “American History for Truthdiggers.”

See: Part 1; Part 2; Part 3; Part 4; Part 5; Part 6; Part 7; Part 8; Part 9; Part 10; Part 11; Part 12; Part 13; Part 14; Part 15; Part 16; Part 17; Part 18; Part 19; Part 20; Part 21.

* * *

“Over there, over there, / Send the word, send the word over there. / That the Yanks are coming, / the Yanks are coming … / We’ll be over, we’re coming over, / And we won’t come back till it’s over, over there.” —An excerpt from George M. Cohan’s song “Over There”

America wasn’t supposed to get in the war. When the country finally did, it was to be a war “to end all wars,” to “make the world safe for democracy,” one in which, for once, the Allies would seek “peace without victory.” How powerful was the romantic and idealistic rhetoric of Woodrow Wilson, America’s historian and political scientist turned president. None of that came to pass, of course. No, just less than three years after the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914, the working classes of the United States would join those of Europe in a grinding, gruesome, attritional fight to the finish. In the end, some 116,000 Americans would die alongside about 9 million soldiers from the other belligerent nations.

Today, the American people are quite comfortable with the mythical sense of their role in the second of the two world wars. The Nazis had to be stopped at all cost; the Japanese had deceitfully attacked our fleet; and—in the end—America saved the day. The U.S. thus became, as a popular T-shirt proclaims, “back-to-back” world war champs. Still, most of the citizenry knows little about the First World War, which was once called the Great War. The issues involved and the reasons for fighting seem altogether murky, messy even. So, as a simple patriotic heuristic, Americans tend to frame the First World War as a prelude to the second. Not simply in the sense that one led in some way to the next, but that the German enemy was equally evil in each—that the kaiser in 1917 was only slightly less militaristic than Adolf Hitler in 1941. Germany’s race for world domination, we vaguely conclude, really began in the second decade of the 20th century and wasn’t fully thwarted until 1945. None of that is strictly true: The kaiser’s government was far more complex than that of Nazi Germany, for example, and a German sense of guilt over the war was more collective in 1914 than 1939—but the legend of the war and America’s role in it can more easily be simplified by use of this mental shorthand.

In reality, Europe blundered into war because of a mix of absurd factors that undergirded the entire nation-state and imperial system of the day: jingoistic nationalism, the race for Asian and African empires, a destabilizing series of opposing alliances, and the foolish notion that war would rejuvenate European manhood and, of course, be swift, decisive and brief. Instead, technological advances outran military tactics and the two sides—Germany, Austria and Turkey on the one hand and Britain, France and Russia on the other—settled in for an incomparably brutal war of stagnation and filth. Unable to win decisively on either front, both sides dug in their men, artillery and machine guns and fought bloody battles for the possession of mere meters of earth. It was to be the war that ultimately “finished” Europe, destroying the long-term power of the continent and ultimately shifting leadership westward to the United States. Not that any of this was clear at the time.

Europe lost an entire generation, killed, maimed or forever psychologically broken by the war. Many Europeans lost faith in the snake oil of nationalism and turned away from the standard frameworks of monarchy or liberal democracy. Some found solace in socialism, whereas others doubled down on ultranationalism in the form of fascist leaders. Despite 9 million battle deaths—a number unfathomable when the war began—WWI solved little and sowed the seeds for the European cataclysm of 1939-45. It is an uncomfortable truth, especially for the United States, a nation that tends to see itself as being at the center of the world; the U.S. played mostly a late, and bit, part in the drama across the Atlantic. However, the populace believed its own propaganda, crafted a myth of American triumphalism and learned all the wrong lessons from the war. Instead of being a “war to end all wars,” the Great War turned out to be just the beginning of American interventionism—the pivot toward the creation of today’s fiscal-military hegemonic state. And it didn’t have to be that way.

Getting In: Wilson Takes Us to War

A 1916 campaign button for the re-election of Woodrow Wilson. Within weeks of his second inauguration, the president, declaring “[t]he world must be made safe for democracy,” would successfully ask Congress to approve U.S. entry into World War I.

Most Americans were horrified by the brutality of trench warfare in Europe and thanked God for the Atlantic Ocean. A majority in the U.S., due to cultural and linguistic ties to Britain, favored the Allies. Still, another segment of the population, German-Americans and the viscerally anti-British Irish-Americans, tended to favor Austria and Germany. So, while President Wilson advised the people and his government to be “neutral in fact as well as in name … impartial in thought as well as action,” genuine neutrality was always a long shot. One of the problems was Wilson, himself, who began to see the war as an opportunity for the United States to lead “a new world order.” If he could do so as a peaceful arbiter, so be it; if it required America’s entry into the fields of fire, well, perhaps that couldn’t be avoided.

Only William Jennings Bryan, Wilson’s first secretary of state and a three-time Democratic presidential nominee, could be considered a truly neutral voice in the Cabinet. “There will be no war as long I am Secretary of State,” the legendary firebrand thundered upon joining the administration. He felt obliged to resign barely a year later, and the U.S. slid toward war. Of course the U.S. had never been strictly neutral. Close economic ties with the Allies ensured that. Rather than embargo both sides or demand that Britain open its starvation blockade of Germany to U.S. trading vessels, Wilson’s government exported hundreds of millions of dollars in goods annually to the Allied nations and funded some of their debts. In just the first eight months of the war, U.S. bankers extended $80 million in credits to the Allies, and then, after Wilson lifted all bans on loans, U.S. financial interests would float $10 million per day to Britain alone! By the end of the war, the Allies owed $10 billion in war debts to the U.S., the equivalent of some $165 billion in today’s dollars. Indeed, the U.S. economy had by 1917 come to rely on Allied war orders. How would Wall Street recover these debts if not through Allied victory? And how could the bogged-down Allies defeat Germany without the promise of American troop reinforcements?

Furthermore, Wilson acquiesced to Britain’s blockade of Germany. He told Bryan it would be “a waste of time” to argue with Britain about the blockade, but this made the U.S., in fact if not in name, a partner of the Allies. German officials, with some sound logic, protested that the U.S., if truly neutral, would condemn a British blockade that starved European children. Wilson remained silent.

“Without Warning!,” a 1917 cartoon in the Evening World Daily Magazine, depicts a sword rising from the sea to destroy a U.S. merchant vessel. Above the waves can be seen part of a German helmet. Such cartoons proliferated after the sinking of the luxury liner Lusitania in 1915.

His voice was quite clear, however, on the subject of German submarine warfare against Allied (namely American) shipping. Though the German navy had been built up in the decades before the war, its battleships and cruisers were still no match for the combined Anglo-French fleets. Therefore, in order to stymie the blockade and attrit the Allied supply lines, the Germans turned to submarine or “U-boat” warfare. Indeed, at certain points during the war, the German U-boats nearly brought the Allies to their logistical knees. It was only American distribution that kept Britain, in particular, afloat. The German government spent much of the conflict at war with itself over whether or not to sink American merchant ships supplying the Allies. One can, after all, understand the German predicament: Allied naval power was isolating the Central Powers and the Americans were economically allied with Britain and France!

When, however, a German sub sank the British luxury liner Lusitania in May 1915, killing more than 120 U.S. citizens, there was a great outcry from Americans. Former President Theodore Roosevelt, always a reliable war hawk, called the attack “murder on the high seas!” He was still a popular figure, after all, so his demand for war in response to German “piracy” was a serious matter. It turned out the Lusitania, traveling from the United States to Britain, was carrying 1,248 cases of three-inch shells and 4,927 boxes of rifle cartridges. The British had put the American passengers at risk as much as the Germans did. In response, in one last plea for “real neutrality,” Secretary Bryan called for calm and stated, “A ship carrying contraband, should not rely on passengers to protect her from attack—it would be like putting women and children in front of an army.” When Wilson failed to sufficiently curtail warlike rhetoric, Bryan tendered his resignation. With him may have gone any real chance at U.S. neutrality.

The British, to be fair, had also contravened America’s “neutral rights” throughout the war. They upheld the blockade, denied the U.S. the ability to easily trade with Germany, and even went so far, in July 1916, as to blacklist 80 U.S. companies that allegedly (and legally) traded with the Central Powers. Furthermore, key immigrant communities in the U.S. were appalled by Britain’s forceful put-down of Ireland’s 1916 Easter Rebellion for independence and the subsequent execution of rebel leaders. Wilson, weak protestations aside, gave in to London at every turn.

Initially, Germany promised no further surprise attacks on passenger vessels and American merchant ships, but as the war ground on, German Chancellor Theobald Bethmann-Hollweg faced a decision between submission, on one hand, and utilizing the U-boats to their fullest, on the other. Fatefully, it turned out, the German military forced Hollweg’s hand and Berlin declared “unrestricted submarine warfare” in early 1917. This was not the only affront to American prestige. In late February 1917, the British leaked a German message—the famous Zimmerman telegram—seeming to offer an alliance with Mexico and the potential for the Mexicans to “reconquer its former territories in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona.” Despite the truth that Washington had, indeed (probably) illegally conquered the region and turned northern Mexico into the Southwest United States in the 1840s, Americans were in no mood for subtleties, and anti-German sentiment exploded across the country. It was to be war.

Still, this outcome was never inevitable. Germany sought not to conquer the world, but to win—or at least honorably extract itself from—a stagnant and costly European war. Nor should the reader give in to the (mostly false) notion that Germany was an authoritarian, brutal Nazi-like dictatorship, while the Allies were liberal democrats. Austria was a dual monarchy, but Germany had a mixed government with a royal kaiser but also a parliament and one of the most progressive social welfare systems in the world. Besides, Russia—a key country in the Triple Alliance—was perhaps the most backward, largely feudal, monarchy on the planet. Furthermore, as the famed progressive Sen. Robert La Follette of Wisconsin reminded Americans as he cast a vote against Wilson’s April 2, 1917, call for war, Britain and France possessed their own global empires. In that sense, the U.S. merely sided with one set of flawed empires over another. La Follette exclaimed on April 4th that “[Wilson] says this is a war for democracy. … But the president has not suggested that we make our support conditional to [Britain] granting home rule to Ireland, Egypt, or India.” The man had a point.

Nevertheless, Wilson’s request for a war declaration passed the Congress and mobilization began. The president stood before the legislature and claimed the U.S. “shall fight for the things we have always carried nearest to our hearts—for democracy … for the rights and liberties of small nations. … We have no selfish ends to serve.” Wilson was only formalizing a millenarian message he had been spreading for years. In 1916, in a speech one historian has called “at once breathtaking in the audacity of its vision of a new world order” and “curiously detached from the bitter realities of Europe’s battlefields,” Wilson declared that America could no longer refuse to play “the great part in the world which is providentially cut out for her. … We have got to serve the world.” And so it was, whether in the interest of “serving the world,” or backing its preferred empires and trading partners, the U.S. would enter its first war on the European continent. It would not be the last.

Over There: America at War

The United States may have been an economic powerhouse holding most of the financial cards in the deck, but its military was woefully unprepared for war on the scale of what was being waged in Europe by 1917. Though some limited preparations began with the 1916 National Defense Act—which gradually raised the size of the regular Army to 223,000 men—the U.S. military remained tiny (only the 17th largest worldwide) compared with those of the belligerent nations. After all, the combined German and French fatalities at a single battle—Verdun in 1916—exceeded the total dead of the U.S. Civil War, still the bloodiest conflict in American history.

Meanwhile, the Germans nearly won the war before the U.S. could meaningfully intervene. After the 1917 Russian Revolution turned communist, the new Russian leader, Vladimir Lenin, made a humiliating peace with Berlin. The Germans now shipped dozens of divisions westward and attempted one last knockout blow against the British and French on the Western Front. And, since President Wilson and the leading U.S. Army general, John J. Pershing, insisted that American soldiers fight under an independent command, it took many extra months to raise, equip and train an expeditionary force. It took more than a year before the U.S. could muster even minimal weight at the front. Nonetheless, the British and French lines (just barely) held in early 1918, and the infusion of 850,000 fresh, if untested, American troops helped make possible an Allied summer counteroffensive that eventually broke the German front lines.

It was all over by Nov. 11, 1918 (once called Armistice Day, now celebrated as Veterans Day in the U.S.), when the Germans agreed to an armistice in lieu of eventual surrender. Still, when peace came, the German army largely remained on French soil. There was no invasion of Germany, no grand occupation of the capital. The end was nothing like that of the next world war. To many German soldiers and their nationalist proponents at home, it seemed that the army had been sold out by weak civilian officials—especially the socialists (and Jews) in the government. This belief, along with the later insistence by the Allies on a harsh retributive treaty at Versailles, sowed the seeds for the rise of fascism, ultranationalism and Hitler in 1930s Germany.

When all was said and done, the U.S. had suffered just 116,000 of the 9 million battle deaths of the war. Despite collective American memories of Uncle Sam going to the rescue, an honest reflection requires admission that it was Britain and France—which together had suffered roughly 2 million dead—that won the war for the Allies. The U.S. was a latecomer to the affair, and while its troops helped overrun the German lines, Berlin was cooked as soon as its spring offensive failed in 1918. The United States had hardly saved the day. It was a mere associate to Allied victory. Such humility, though, tends not to suit Americans’ collective memory.

Over Here: War at Home and the Death of Civil Liberties

An ad encouraging Americans to buy war bonds to help defeat the “Hun,” a pejorative term for Germans.

The war that Wilson claimed was being waged to make the world “safe for democracy” forever changed and restricted American civil liberties. It strengthened a fiscal-military federal state that shifted to a war footing. Every single facet of Americans’ lives was now touched by the hand of federal power. First off, the war required a mass military mobilization. The era is often remembered for its intense public patriotism, but, when only 73,000 men initially volunteered for the military, the government brought back conscription for the first time since the Civil War and drafted nearly 5 million men from 18 to 45 years old. Some noted progressives got carried away with the idea of federal power and regulation. “Long live social control!” one reformer enthusiastically wrote. Another wing of anti-war progressives wasn’t so sure. The longtime skeptic Randolph Bourne—who noted with distaste that “[w]ar is the health of the state”—worried that most progressives were allying themselves with “the least democratic forces in American life.” He concluded, “It is as if the war and they had been waiting for each other.” And, throughout history, so often they have been.

The government first sought to control the economy and ensure that American business was placed on a war footing. The War Industries Board (WIB) regulated the production of key war materials through a combination of force and negotiation with the “captains of industry.” Though the WIB quickly transitioned the U.S. to a war economy, one the organization’s own leaders, Grosvenor Clarkson, described the potential dark side of such a system: “It was an industrial dictatorship without parallel—a dictatorship by force of necessity and common consent which … encompassed the Nation and united it into a coordinated and mobile whole.” Additionally, Wilson’s government needed to get control of the country’s proliferating labor unions to ensure a smooth economic war machine. His National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) attempted to mediate disputes between capitol and labor. It never really worked. Strikes continued and even grew throughout the war years, and the NLRB—with the backing of police, militia and federal troops—worked overtime to quash workers’ demands. The result was a sense of national need over individual freedom. George Perkins, a top aide to financier J.P. Morgan, caught the mood when he exalted that “[t]he great European war … is striking down individualism and building up collectivism.” It would do so in industry, and also in culture and politics.

Though waves of patriotism and anti-German anger swept the nation, many Americans—especially the ethnic Irish and Germans and a broad swath of Midwesterners—remained skeptical of the war. Furthermore, this was an era of strong socialist (anti-war) power in American politics. The Socialist Party candidate for president in 1912, the former union leader Eugene Debs, had, after all, won nearly a million popular votes. As surprising as this sounds at present, 1,200 socialists held political office in the United States in 1917, and socialist newspapers had a daily readership of some 3 million citizens. For all his external rhetoric about peace, liberty and democracy, President Wilson wasn’t taking any chances at home. He and his congressional supporters delivered a propaganda machine and civil liberty curtailments unparalleled in the annals of American warfare. Indeed, Wilson was obsessed with sedition and disloyalty, warning, “Woe be to the man or group that seeks to stand in our way. …” And he and his Congress were willing to back up such threats with action.

A campaign button for Eugene Debs, the Socialist Party candidate for president in 1920. Though he ran from federal prison he received over 900,000 votes.

In 1917-18, Congress passed the Espionage and Sedition Acts. In a sweeping violation of Americans’ constitutional rights, for example, the Sedition Act declared illegal “uttering, printing, writing, or publishing any disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive language about the United States government or the military.” Apparently, this applied to any criticism of the draft. Thus, when Eugene Debs spoke critically, and peaceably, about the war outside a conscription office, he was arrested and later sentenced to 10 years in federal prison. Standing before the judge at his sentencing, Debs made no apologies, asked for no leniency and uttered some of the most beautiful words in American history: “Your honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. … I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

Debs was not alone. Some 900 people were imprisoned under the Espionage Act—which is still on the books—and 2,000 more were arrested for sedition, mainly union leaders and radical labor men such as members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or “Wobblies.” Appeals to the Supreme Court failed; all branches of government, it seemed, were complicit in the curtailment of standard civil liberties. Interestingly, the now aged Espionage Act was used extensively by the Obama administration to charge journalists, as well as Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden. What’s more, over 330,000 Americans were classified as draft evaders during World War I, and thousands of them, mostly conscientious objectors, were forced to work in wartime prison camps, such as the one at Fort Douglas, Utah, for the duration. Finally, even the mail was restricted, with the postmaster general refusing to deliver any socialist or anti-war publications and materials.

Wilson also needed a government propaganda machine to drum up support for the war, especially among apathetic Midwesterners, socialists and so-called hyphenated Americans. He found his answer in the Committee for Public Information (CPI), which, led by the journalist George Creel, employed social scientists and greatly exaggerated German atrocities to motivate the public. The CPI employed 75,000 speakers and disseminated over 75 million pamphlets during the war years. One social scientist bragged that wartime propaganda was designed to create a “herd psychology,” and philosopher John Dewey referred to the methods as “conscription of thought.” Fact, it seemed, was secondary to results, and the preferred outcome was a united, anti-German public ready to fight and die both in the trenches abroad and for “patriotism” at home.

Not all Americans were willing to acquiesce to this state of affairs, and some wrote critically of the wartime climate in the United States. One Harvard instructor complained, “With the entry into the war our government was practically turned into a dictatorship.” Furthermore, the journalist Mark Sullivan maintained that “[e]very person had been deprived of freedom of his tongue, not one could utter dissent. … The prohibition of individual liberty in the interest of the state could hardly be more complete.” The effect fell worst on German-Americans and Southern blacks.

John Meints, a German-American who farmed in Minnesota, is shown after being tarred and feathered in 1918. The vigilantes who brutalized him were celebrated in the press, and no one was ever prosecuted.

The problematic results of all this were altogether predictable. Hypernationalist Americans, treated to lies and exaggerations about their German enemies, began to take matters into their own hands and to police “loyalty” at home. Across the country, 250,000 citizens officially joined the American Protective League (APL) while many more joined informal militias. APL members opened mail and bugged phones to spy on suspected “traitors.” These excesses also infected the culture and language in a number of ludicrous ways. German-sounding words were Americanized or renamed. Hamburger became Salisbury steak, sauerkraut was changed to “liberty cabbage” and the German measles was rechristened the “liberty measles.” (One is reminded of french fries being renamed “freedom fries” when France refused to back the United States’ 2003 invasion of Iraq.)

Such farce aside, the actions of the APL and unofficial militias quickly got out of hand and often turned violent. Americans suspected of disloyalty were taken to public squares and forced to kiss the flag or buy liberty bonds. Others were brutally tarred and feathered or painted yellow. One German-American, Robert Prager, was hanged by a mob in Illinois. In response to the incident the supposedly liberal Washington Post reported, “In spite of the excesses such as lynching, it is a healthful and wholesome awakening in the interior of the country.”

African-Americans also, predictably, suffered during the war, both in terms of humiliation and physical attacks. The famed civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois predicted at the start of the war that “f we want real peace, we must extend the democratic ideal to the yellow, brown, and black peoples.” That proved to be a bridge too far. In the Army, blacks served in segregated units and, ironically, found wartime France much more hospitable and egalitarian than the American South. Many never returned home. Those who did so returned to a country beset with race riots. Dozens of blacks and others were killed in riots in Chicago, East St. Louis and 25 other cities. At the same time, a new manifestation of the Ku Klux Klan—now concerned with not only blacks but immigrants, Jews and Catholics—grew in numbers. This expansive version of the Klan operated publicly and even controlled many political offices during the period. Lynching exploded across the South: 30 black men in 1917, 60 in 1918, 76 in 1919—including 10 war veterans, some still wearing their uniforms. It seemed that the American South could not bear the sight of “uppity” blacks returning home as “men” wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army.

The war’s end also broke the back of the then-powerful American Socialist Party. After the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the U.S. government helped foment a veritable “Red Scare,” an illogical fear of all speech and action on the American left. One observer noted, “Not within the memory of living Americans, nor scarcely within the entire history of the nation, has such a fear swept of the public mind. …” During the scare, which reached a peak in 1920, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer created the General Intelligence Division, led by a young and zealous J. Edgar Hoover (later the longtime head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation). In the federal counterattack that followed, 4,000 supposed “radicals” were arrested, and hundreds were stripped of their citizenry and shipped to the Soviet Union. It was the death knell not only of American socialism but also of the more liberal and skeptical brand of progressivism. Randolph Bourne would see the future clearly in the midst of the war. “It becomes more and more evident that, whatever the outcome of the war, all the opposing countries will be forced to adopt German organization, German collectivism, and [to indeed shatter] most of the old threads of their old easy individualism,” he wrote, continuing on to say that “[Americans] have taken the occasion to … repudiate that modest collectivism which was raising its head here in the shape of the progressive movement.” Bourne was right: Progressivism—for now—was dead. It, along with 116,000 American men and a handful of American women, was killed by the war.

Men like Eugene Debs and Randolph Bourne, along with other skeptics, were ahead of their time. They realized a universal truth that applied then as well as now. Things are lost in war—freedom, liberties, individualism. Some are never recovered. That, along with battlefield triumphs, must define the American experience in the Great War.

The Seeds of the Next War: Wilson, Versailles and the Road to WWII

The manner in which the First World War ended helped sow the seeds for a second world war. Though Wilson personally brought his sense of America’s special destiny to the peace conference at Versailles, France, and despite his wide popularity among the masses of Europe, he was unable to craft the treaty and postwar world he desired. Indeed, his idealistic, and perhaps naive, sense of American duty and interventionism, which has ever since been labeled “Wilsonianism,” has never really left the scene in America. The realpolitik-minded Allied leaders of Britain, France and Italy were in no mood for lectures on democracy and human rights from Mr. Wilson. Given his personal popularity, and America’s latent power, they appeased him to some extent, but that was all.

Even though he stayed in Europe for six full months, Wilson’s preferred peace would not come to pass. Despite the romantic liberty-rhetoric of his so-called Fourteen Points, the president was forced to accede to the Allies on key elements that would poison the well of peace. Germany, in the “war guilt” clauses of the treaty, was held solely responsible for the outbreak of war. Berlin was also saddled with a crippling war debt and forced to compensate the victorious Allies with territory and enormous sums of cash for decades to come. Adolf Hitler would play on Germans’ (sometimes legitimate) grievances regarding these matters to rise to power decades later. So much for “peace without victory.”

On issues of colonialism, too, Britain and France were never willing to play ball. They sought perpetuation and even expansion of their empires (at the expense of Germany, of course) in Asia and Africa. So died Wilson’s promises of a war for the “rights of small nations.” Britain and France carved up the old Ottoman Empire and redrew lines in the Middle East that to this day contribute to disorder and civil war. When the Allies rejected Japan’s proposal for a “racial equality” clause in the treaty, the ministers of that nation—a member of the Allied war against the Central Powers—nearly walked out. Eventually they did leave, with lasting resentments that would come back to haunt the U.S. and the other Allies in the Pacific.

Many representatives from colonial nations had placed an enormous amount of trust in Wilson. Never trusting the tainted imperial governments of Britain and France, these unofficial peace delegates hoped that Wilson’s Fourteen Points would save them. A young French-educated Vietnamese man named Ho Chi Minh was unable to even gain entrance to the proceedings. He would not forget, and 40 years later emerged as an anti-colonial guerrilla leader. Furthermore, when it became clear that the European colonies would not receive postwar home rule, riots and protests erupted in India, Egypt and China. Observing this, and commenting on the failures of the Treaty of Versailles, a young library assistant named Mao Zedong—later the leader of China’s communist revolution—protested, “I think it is really shameless!”

Russia, because it was communist, was excluded from the conference. In fact, in an episode lost to U.S. (but not Russian) history, 20,000 U.S. troops joined many more other Allied soldiers in an occupation of parts of Russia, backing the non-communist “White” Russian armies in their failed attempt to overthrow “Red” power. The Soviet government and its successor state, the Russian Federation, now led by Vladimir Putin, would never forgive the West for this perceived transgression.

Still, President Wilson hoped that the new League of Nations—the deeply flawed precursor to the United Nations—would achieve what the basic contours of the treaty could not. Wilson took these matters personally and embarked on a nationwide tour of American cities to sell the treaty and league to a citizenry (and Congress) increasingly skeptical of international involvement. Wilson asked the people, “Dare we reject it [the treaty] and break the heart of the world?” But Americans did reject it, as would their representatives in the Senate, where it lost by seven votes. The U.S. would sign a separate peace treaty with Germany and declined to join the now-weakened League of Nations. By this time Wilson, having suffered strokes—including a final one that paralyzed half his body—was nearly an invalid. His advisers and wife would keep his medical condition a secret from the American public, remarkably, nearly to the end of his second term.

Perhaps a more equitable, or Wilsonian, peace treaty would have assuaged German shame and avoided the rise of Hitler. Beyond that, one must wonder whether a swift, limited German victory—along the lines of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71)—might also have avoided the catastrophe of Hitler and the Second World War. And then there is the matter of America’s “retreat” from Europe after declining to join the League of Nations. Could U.S. involvement and leadership have avoided the rise of fascism and outbreak of conflict in Eastern Europe and the Pacific? In truth, these questions—counterfactuals really—are unanswerable. Still, they are important to consider. What is certain is that Allied imperialism survived for 40 to 50 years, leading to outbreaks of left-leaning guerrilla wars in the 1950s and ’60s; European nationalism remained a major factor, contributing to the rise of its most extreme form, fascism; and American “Wilsonianism” emerged from the war as a still powerful force in U.S. foreign policy, guiding a full century’s worth of (ongoing) American worldwide military interventionism.

* * *

Historians continue to argue whether the Great War was the culmination or the death knell of progressivism. In a sense it was both. Indeed, the use of an activist, empowered federal government to rally the populace and control the people that World War I personified was always the dream of one strand of progressives. Yet, in the end, we must conclude that war—and its domestic excesses—destroyed the foundation of the progressive movement. The citizenry had tired, temporarily at least, of big government and federal interventions at home and abroad. The progressive push for a stronger, European-style social democracy withered just as swiftly as the Treaty of Versailles itself. In the election of 1920, the Republican Warren G. Harding swept to victory on a platform of a return to “normalcy,” and two straight conservative, business-friendly Republican administrations followed. As the progressive warrior Jane Addams had warned when the U.S. entered the war, “This will set back progress for a generation.” How right she was.

Those three presidents—Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover—would, it must be said, keep the U.S. out of any major international war, but they would also crash the economy and dismantle the social safety net, paving the way for the Great Depression. And though the policy of “isolationism,” which actually personified the views of George Washington and more than 150 years of American tradition, briefly flourished between the wars, it would eventually become a pejorative term. When war again brewed in Europe, partly because of the way the Allies mishandled their “victory” and negotiation of the “peace,” most Americans and their leaders were able to fall back on their comfortable myth of the U.S. having “saved the day” in 1917-18. Forgotten were the last war’s horrors, the domestic excesses of the warfare state, and the once prevalent (if vanquished) anti-war movement that had flourished not 30 years in the past.

Americans believe their own lies—the lies they are told and those they themselves craft. And the U.S. has failed to see through its falsehoods about the Great War even though a century has passed since it ended. Its sense of messianic destiny and unparalleled accumulation of military power is such that—as the world celebrates (or mourns) the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I—the U.S. alone still views that conflict in heroic terms. Americans, at least the 1 percent willing to volunteer to go to a war and the numerous policymakers ready to send them off, still stand ready, as the song said, to go “over there.” Only now everywhere is over there and American hubris appears to know no bounds. And, one could argue, it all began with the fictions we told ourselves about America’s experience in World War I—and more’s the pity.

 

[Apollonian]

Re: Book Review: "Hidden History..." by Docherty and MacGregor, on real origins of WWI--satanic perf

The Madness of Saint Woodrow: Or, What If the United States Had Stayed out of the Great War?​

by Walter A. McDougall|31 Comments

Link: https://www.lawliberty.org/liberty-...nited-states-had-stayed-out-of-the-great-war/

April 2, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson declares to Congress that America would “make the world itself at last free.”

On April 2, 1917, Woodrow Wilson rose before a joint session of Congress to make the case for a declaration of war on Germany. Summoning his considerable eloquence, Wilson intoned: “the right is more precious than peace,” “make the world safe for democracy,” “a universal dominion of right by a concert of free peoples,” “America is privileged to spend her blood,” and, in a conscious echo of Martin Luther, “God helping her, she can do no other.”

But the sentence that really proclaimed a global crusade was this:

Neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable where the peace of the world is involved and the freedom of its peoples, and the menace to that peace and freedom lies in the existence of autocratic governments backed by organized force which is controlled wholly by their will, not by the will of their people.

The Truman Doctrine would be moderate by comparison.

During the Senate’s cursory two-day debate, William J. Stone (D-Mo.), chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, warned that to enter this war would be “the greatest national blunder in history.” George W. Norris (R-Neb.) rejected Wilson’s rhetoric as moral gloss obscuring financial interests, declaring: “We are putting the dollar sign on the American flag.”

The noted Independent from Wisconsin, Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette, rebutted the President’s arguments in a tearful address to his colleagues that lasted four hours. If, as Wilson said, Germany was waging a war against all of humanity, how come the United States was the only neutral nation to object? If, as Wilson said, this was a war to make the world safe for democracy, how come the British refused it to the peoples of Ireland, India, Egypt? If, as Wilson said, the United States meant to wage war on a militaristic government and not on the German people, how come more Germans supported their Kaiser than Americans had voted for Wilson in 1916?

Nevertheless, the Congress, which had bowed to the White House on issues of war and peace ever since 1812, did so again. To be sure, the Senate voted 82 to 6 in favor of war on April 4, and the House, two days later, approved the war resolution 373 to 50, but British Ambassador Cecil Spring-Rice cabled back to London his judgment that the Americans had gone to war “with the greatest reluctance.”[1]

Historians today conventionally speak of a “short 20th century” extending from 1914 to 1991—bracketing, in other words, the unspeakably violent and ideological era that saw two world wars and the Cold War. Historians invariably trace the origins of those horrors to the human, economic, social, and cultural destruction of the Great War, which shattered the liberal myths of progress as well as the balance of power that had prevailed for a century before 1914.

The carnage of the Great War hurled its disoriented survivors into a moral vacuum that totalitarian movements such as communism and fascism exploited. Mix in the effects of an economic cataclysm, the Great Depression that began in late 1929 and enervated the democracies even as it energized the dictatorships, and the coming of a Second World War in 1939 was just a matter of time. That crescendo of violence gave birth to a bipolar world dominated by rival empires, each with its own universal ideology and armed with nuclear weapons.

The trends of the 20th century can be made to appear inevitable and humanity subject to cruel fate. But what if we err to think it can all be traced back to 1914? What if the subsequent calamities really trace back to 1917 and the foolish American decision to join the Great War?

What If?

One of the gems of historiography in my lifetime was written in 1999 by the brilliant young Scottish historian Niall Ferguson. He edited a fat volume of essays called Virtual History, which is to say, alternative history based on plausible counterfactual events, an exercise that he insisted was “the antidote to determinism.”[2] Ferguson opened the book with a 90-page introduction examining the legitimacy of virtual history from the standpoints of 30 writers, from Augustine of Hippo to Bertrand Russell. Most of the historians he cited argued against it, if not dismissed it as a parlor game. To them history was shaped either by the hand of a providential God or by universal laws such those postulated by Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, or Arnold J. Toynbee.

Indeed, the whole notion of accident was abhorrent to believers in religion and science alike: Chance disconnects cause and effect, seeming to rob history of meaning as if it really were a tale told by an idiot. Thus did G.F.W. Hegel state, “The sole aim of philosophical inquiry is to eliminate the contingent.”

Ferguson gave a patient hearing to all the negative views before arriving at a positive argument based on chaos theory, which concerns the stochastic (seemingly random) behavior that occurs in systems otherwise governed by natural laws (for example, biology or meteorology). Thus the ubiquity of chance occurrences in history does not necessarily prove that natural laws don’t exist, but rather that they are too numerous and complex to sort out even in hindsight. The way to reconcile causation with contingency, wrote Ferguson, is precisely to do virtual history, drawing distinctions between what happened and what might plausibly have happened based on alternative choices the actors really considered.

His own contribution was a 52-page speculation entitled, “The Kaiser’s European Union: What if Great Britain Had Stood Aside in August 1914?” It cogently argued that if Britain had not gone to war or else limited itself to a naval war of defense—options seriously considered by the cabinet of Prime Minister Herbert Asquith in 1914—the result would have been a German victory, but one that the still-mighty British Empire could have lived with. A German-dominated Mitteleuropa under the Kaiser’s constitutional monarchy would not, Ferguson speculated, have differed so much from the European Union of today. And the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany would not have existed at all.

Let that serve as a model for our own (much briefer) inquiry into Woodrow Wilson’s decision to lead the United States into the First World War. For President Wilson not only considered, but really made, “alternative choices” for two-and-a-half years before changing his mind and with it the whole course of American, European, and world history in the “short 20th century.”

The Imperial Moment

Wilson was a High Progressive who, as one of the earliest participants in the then-new discipline of political science, cheered America’s rise to world power because vigorous foreign policy empowered the presidency. He was also a liberal Presbyterian whose modern theology imagined Jesus Christ a social reformer who called followers to build heaven right here on earth.

The diplomatic implications of his Progressive Social Gospel could hardly have been more profound: they gave rise to a heresy in American civil religion. For a century after 1796, Americans had deemed sacred the veritable Mosaic commandments laid down in George Washington’s Farewell Address, such as the need to cultivate religion and republican virtue, and practice unilateralism, neutrality, reciprocity, peace, and commerce with all nations, no inveterate sympathies or antipathies toward foreign countries, and husbandry of the public credit.

The Progressive Era turned those principles upside down. Secular and religious elites now imagined that government staffed by credentialed experts and endowed with centralized power could literally perfect society at home and abroad. Virtue, humility, and prudence in foreign relations gave way to power, glory, and pride.

The transition can be precisely timed. Contrast President William McKinley’s first inaugural address of 1897, in which he pledged to uphold traditional American values, with his second inaugural of 1901, in which he praised as God’s will for the United States the Spanish-American War, the annexation of colonies, and the bloody suppression of the Filipino independence movement. “Our institutions will not deteriorate by extension, and our sense of justice will not abate under tropic suns in distant seas,” predicted McKinley, none too accurately.

Wilson was thus not out of the mainstream when he lectured in 1911 that when nations take up arms to defend liberty, “there is something sacred and holy in the warfare. I will not cry ‘Peace’ so long as there is sin and injustice in the world.”[3] The following year he was elected President in spite of his candidacy’s being a fluke, his campaign a fraud, and his landslide a fable.

Democrats nominated him on their 46th ballot thanks to a deal brokered by an eccentric Texan named Edward M. House, author of a futuristic novel (Philip Dru, Administrator: A Story of Tomorrow, 1912) that extolled a Progressive dictator whose wise authoritarian rule prevented a second U.S. civil war. Wilson’s platform, called “New Freedom,” disingenuously promised to fight concentrations of power. What got him into the Oval Office was the third-party candidacy of former President Roosevelt, which allowed Wilson to defeat a deeply split Republican Party with just 42 percent of the popular vote.

In 1821, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams had lectured the Congress that “America goes not abroad in search of monsters of destroy”; should she do so, the “maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force” and “she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.” As President, Wilson asserted the opposite. He told a convention of businessmen in 1913 that it is “a very perilous thing to determine the foreign policy of a nation in terms of material interest” and that Americans were climbing a moral mountain toward “those great heights where there shines unobstructed the light of the justice of God.” To a British diplomat he defined his foreign policy toward the Mexican revolution this way: “I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men.” The following year, his graduation address at the U.S. Naval Academy proclaimed that the very “idea of America is to serve humanity.”

Thus did a scholar recently conclude: “Wilson’s optimism concerning the power of humankind to do good hailed not from his Reformed heritage but from liberal theology, the Social Gospel, progressivism, and, ultimately, the romantic spiritualization of religion.” The doctrine of total depravity, Calvin’s equivalent for original sin, was nowhere to be found in Wilson’s Presbyterianism. Indeed, his rhetoric implied that America—and by implication himself—had a messianic destiny.[4]

To be sure, when the Great War erupted, Wilson proclaimed neutrality and clung to it for 31 months. But his policies were neutral in name only given that the President, Anglophile to the core, allowed private Americans to extend “all aid short of war” to Great Britain 25 years before Franklin Roosevelt coined that phrase. By the end of Wilson’s first term, the British and French were importing 40 percent of their war materiel from the United States and borrowing heavily to finance it. World War I thus reversed trans-Atlantic capital flows and crowned Wall Street king. The Wilson administration complied with Britain’s surface blockade of Europe, all the while hotly protesting Germany’s submarine blockade of the British Isles.

Neutrality was also good politics. The vast majority of Americans wanted no part of the bloodbath in the trenches.[5] But soon after Wilson squeaked through re-election in the fall of 1916, having run as the peace candidate, he got very bad news. The British secretly let it be known that their exchequer was broke, their larder almost bare. They would be unable to carry on without the massive assistance U.S. belligerence would provide.

The British were disappointed when Germany’s resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare failed to move the needle of U.S. public opinion. So in late February of 1917 British intelligence leaked to Americans the captured Zimmermann Telegram in which Germany offered Mexico a war alliance in case of American belligerence. Contrary to conventional wisdom, even that failed to outrage American opinion.[6]

Wilson’s Fateful Reversal of Course

Over those weeks of early 1917, Wilson famously agonized until, by the end of March, he made up his mind to wage war. For all the historical debate over the issue, “one incontrovertible fact remains: the United States entered World War I because Woodrow Wilson decided to take the country in.”[7] Moreover, he made that personal, unforced choice to preach a crusade for liberal internationalism under the worst possible circumstances.

By the spring, Wilson knew or should have known that prominent Senators led by Henry Cabot Lodge (R-Mass.) were hostile to his League of Nations idea. He knew the Allied powers led by Britain and France were hostile to most of the liberal principles he would espouse in his Fourteen Points. He knew that most of the points, not least national self-determination, were inapplicable in much of Europe where ethnic groups were hopelessly mixed, much less in the colonial world, where nationalism was still in its infancy and the imperial rulers were now Wilson’s allies. He knew that the vast majority of Germans, however war-weary, remained loyal to their emperor. He knew that to maximize his leverage at the peace conference the United States must wage a total ground war, not a limited naval war. He also knew in advance that war would undermine his domestic agenda, violate civil liberties, and unleash Americans’ most bigoted instincts.

Nevertheless, Wilson chose to flip Washington’s biggest “Thou shalt not”—meddle in Europe’s broils—into “Thou must,” and to demand that all Americans fall into line.[8] Most damning of all, Wilson knew well, unlike overconfident Europeans in 1914, exactly how hellish this war had become.[9]

Here are the four options the President had in mid-1917:

1) He could have kept the United States neutral, accepting the risk of a German victory.

2) He could have justified total war, but on the realistic grounds of preserving the European balance of power and thus U.S. security.

3) He could have gone to war over neutral rights, as in 1812, and waged a naval campaign rather than shipping an army to France.

4) He could preach a crusade, a holy “war to end all war,” enthrall Americans with that fantasy, and hope to persuade or cajole Europeans to convert as well.

Ferguson and others have speculated that the first option might have been best. The Kaiser was not Hitler after all, and after their sacrifices in a total war the Germans themselves would likely have demanded democratic reforms. Moreover, a German victory in the Great War might well have meant no fascism, no World War II, no Holocaust, and no Cold War.

Henry Kissinger and others have speculated that the second option (which was Theodore Roosevelt’s preference) might have been best, with Americans helping to restore a balance of power on terms the Allies, the Germans, and the U.S. Senate could grudgingly have accepted.

Scholars such as myself have speculated that the third choice might have been best since a naval war would have been vastly cheaper in money, blood, and damage to civic values, would have given both sides a powerful new incentive to end the carnage, and would have left Europe’s Great Powers to hammer out a compromise peace.[10] As we know, Wilson chose the fourth option—presumably because he had persuaded himself that God was calling America to redeem the horrible war by turning it into a “war for righteousness.” Liberal Protestant clergy, previously divided over the war, turned zealous. Celebrity pastor Lyman Abbott thought it “more than a coincidence” that the Senate went to war on Good Friday. He called Germany heathen, America righteous, and the war the climactic chapter in God’s plan for redemption.

The dean of Yale’s divinity school asked, “May we not believe that this country, strong and brave, generous and hopeful is called of God to be in its own way a Messianic nation?” Evangelist Billy Sunday cried, “Christianity and Patriotism are synonymous terms, and hell and traitors are synonymous.” The cross all but disappeared behind the American flag.

A good reason for Wilson to encourage the mania was that he meant to do the unthinkable: to conscript, train, and ship a million-man army “over there.” He even praised the “singular insight” of a Social Gospeler who declared the President’s goal to be nothing less than the kingdom of God.[11]

With what results? Suffice to say the Wilson administration’s mobilization was what inspired philosopher Randolph Bourne’s phrase, “War is the health of the state.” The executive branch accumulated enormous power. The national debt exploded from 2.5 percent of GNP to more than 30 percent. The War Industries Board turned the most laissez-faire society in the world into a command economy and made the military-industrial complex a permanent feature of life.

The butcher’s bill numbered 53,000 combat deaths (in just five months), 116,000 lives overall, and twice that many wounded. The anti-German hysteria generated by George Creel’s propaganda agency, the Committee on Public Information, belied Wilson’s claim that America was not waging war against the German people, inflamed nativism, and brought persecution of Americans of German descent. The CPI employed every medium to propagate what Creel called the “gospel of Americanism,” including a feature film that heralded the doughboys in France as “Pershing’s Crusaders.” The Espionage Act of 1917, and its extension as the Sedition Act of 1918, mandated the worst violations of civil liberties in American history. In effect, the war no one had wanted became overnight the war it was illegal to question.

Overseas, the Great War, the Russian and Chinese revolutions, and Japanese imperialism sowed unfathomable chaos from one end of Eurasia to the other. So the President of the United States can scarcely be faulted for not getting all of his policies right. But Wilson arguably got nothing right.

When on October 5, 1918, the Germans secretly contacted the President in hopes of negotiating an armistice on the basis of the Fourteen Points, Washington exchanged notes with Berlin for several weeks without even informing the Allies. When Wilson did consult the (furious) British and French, they understandably insisted on harsh terms that would render the enemy harmless; the insistence, too, clearly signaled their intention to impose a victor’s peace. Their cruelest condition was maintenance of the food blockade after the war so they could present the peace treaty on a “sign-it-or-starve” basis.

But the worst blunder might have been Wilson’s demand for regime change: Kaiser Wilhelm must abdicate. Hence the ones who got blamed for “stabbing the army in the back” on November 11, and then for ratifying the draconian Versailles Treaty, were those who succeeded Wilhelm, namely Germany’s fledgling democrats.

Also the legitimacy of the treaty was undermined when Wilson’s moralistic pretensions were exposed as naive, if not hypocritical. He had promised open covenants openly arrived at, but the treaty was a diktat hammered out by the British, French, and Americans and foisted on the Germans.

The infamous war-guilt clause, inserted at the beginning of the draconian sections on German reparations, was inspired by American legalism, which required that damages be awarded as if in a civil tort case. As a result, Germany’s newly democratic government, the soon to be the “Weimar Republic,” was obliged to bear all the responsibility for the outbreak of war in 1914. That not only crippled German democracy, but undermined the very legitimacy of the treaty once revisionist historians began to argue that all the European Great Powers shared more or less guilt for the outbreak of the war. The other principles promised by Wilson, such as disarmament, economic opportunity, freedom of the seas, and self-determination, were either ignored or, if denied, denied to Germany alone. Wilson’s sole consolation was that all these grievances might be resolved peacefully through the League of Nations that his precious treaty would create.

Wilson should not have led the American peace delegation and thus frittered away his prestige in daily bickering and compromise. He should not have appointed a delegation composed exclusively of Democrats (especially since Republicans had captured the Senate in the mid-term elections of 1918). He should not have promised an impossible new world order sure to disillusion public opinion, not least his own avid supporters, who predictably recoiled when the peace terms were published in May 1919. The Nation editorialized that the “one-time idol of democracy stands today discredited and condemned,” proving again that “wherever liberalism strikes hands with war it inevitably goes down.” The New Republic wrote:

The Treaty of Versailles subjects all liberalism and particularly that kind of liberalism which breathes the Christian spirit to a decisive test. If a war which was supposed to put an end to war culminates without strenuous protest by humane men and women in a treaty of peace which renders peace impossible, the liberalism which preached this meaning for the war will have committed suicide.[12]

Having been forced to make serial concessions to British, French, Italian, and Japanese nationalists, Wilson refused to accommodate American nationalists. When Senator Lodge placed 12 Reservations to the Treaty of Versailles before the Senate as conditions for its advice and consent, the President rejected them and insisted that Democratic Senators do likewise. In Wilson’s mind, the League Covenant had become the ark of the covenant—a holy thing that belonged not to him or to the Senate but to God. The League justified the war’s suffering, justified Wilson’s decision to lead America into it, and promised to lift humanity to those glorious heights where shines the light of the justice of God.

So he launched a national tour to stump for the League, collapsed, suffered a stroke, and lived out his term an invalid.

Playing to National Vanity and Piety

Wilson did not make the world safe for democracy. It might even be argued that his hapless policies toward Russia made the world safe for communism.[13] Surely the disillusionment caused by his “democratic” statecraft contributed to the cultural despair that made communism, fascism, and wars to overthrow the 1919 order real possibilities.

Historian Michael Kazin, who has just published a book on the antiwar movement that Wilson betrayed in 1917-18, asked, in a New York Times op-ed on the centenary of the conflict, how it might have ended had America stayed out. Wrote Kazin:

If the Allies, led by France and Britain, had not won a total victory, there would have been no punitive peace like that completed at Versailles, no stab-in-the-back allegations by resentful Germans, and thus no rise, much less triumph, of Hitler and the Nazis. The next world war, with its 50 million deaths, would probably not have occurred.

Why then, has Wilson’s Progressive civil religion—a heresy from the perspective of the classical American creed—remained the “default position” of U.S. foreign policy almost ever since? Perhaps historian Richard Gamble is correct in suggesting that “Righteous interventionism appeals to our national vanity and piety. We have to face the fact that there is something deeply and authentically American about Wilsonianism.”[14]

After the Soviet Union went poof, our elites even imagined the United States a benevolent hegemon policing a new world order through militarism and globalization.[15] Of course, that crusade also aborted and has triggered a backlash in the person of Donald Trump. But I predict that Trump will be no more willing or able than Barack Obama to break the spell Wilson cast on the nation 100 years ago.

Is it possible to distill that incantation down to its essence? Rereading an old book of essays on religion and history recently, I stumbled on the following passage:

Man is not content merely to study history. The ego will not be satisfied with this, because the ego in its unredeemed or natural state is not able to see history apart from itself. The ego is the center of creation; history, therefore, has no meaning outside its own understanding. Thinking that it is the creator, the ego drives toward the reduction of history in order to assimilate and master history. What occurs when this takes place is that the ego compels its finite mind to reduce the infinite to finiteness, in order that the mind may understand, control, and use the infinity that is history.[16]

These are the thoughts of none other than Arthur Link, the Princeton professor who devoted his whole career to the sanctification of Woodrow Wilson.


[1] Thomas Boghardt, The Zimmermann Telegram: Intelligence, Diplomacy, and America’s Entry into World War I (Naval Institute Press, 2012), pp. 181-90.
[2] Niall Ferguson, editor, Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals (Basic Books, 1999), pp. 1-90 (quote, p. 89).

[3] “The Bible and Progress, Address by The Honorable Woodrow Wilson on the Tercentenary Celebration of the Translation of the Bible into the English Language” (Denver, May 7, 1911), http://frontiers.loc.gov/service/gdc/scd0001/2012/20120129002bi/20120129002bi.pdf

[4] Barry Hankins, Woodrow Wilson: Ruling Elder, Spiritual President (Oxford University, 2016). See also Malcolm D. Magee, What the World Should Be: Woodrow Wilson and the Crafting of a Faith-Based Foreign Policy (Baylor University, 2008).

[5] See Michael Kazin, War Against War: The American Fight for Peace, 1914-1918 (Simon and Schuster, 2017); Thomas Fleming, The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I (Perseus Books, 2003); and Richard M. Gamble, The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation (ISI Books, 2003) on the powerful pacifist movements during the era of U.S. neutrality.

[6] Boghardt’s The Zimmermann Telegram establishes this beyond doubt. Many editorialists scoffed at the absurdity of the German proposal, and public uproar over it quickly subsided; it was not mentioned as a casus belli even after the U.S. declaration of war.

[7] John Milton Cooper, Jr., Woodrow Wilson: A Biography (Knopf, 2009), p. 4. See also Justus D. Doenecke, Nothing Less Than War: A New History of America’s Entry into World War I (University Press of Kentucky, 2012), pp. 217-49.

[8] See Walter A. McDougall, The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How American Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest (Yale University Press, 2016), pp. 141-53.

[9] Michael S. Neiberg, in The Path to War: How the First World War Created Modern America (Oxford University, 2016), argues instead that American opinion at large had grown increasingly alarmed about the national security threat that a victorious Germany would mount. I disagree, but even if he is correct, that would seem to imply that the President ought to have argued for belligerence on realist grounds as Theodore Roosevelt always recommended.

[10] Otis L. Graham, Jr., “1917: What If the United States Had Stayed Neutral,” in Morton Borden, Jr. and Otis L. Graham, Jr., Speculations on American History (D. C. Heath and Company, 1977), pp. 103-17. Graham mentions as plausible the sorts of prohibitions against American trade, investment, and travel that Congress later enacted in the 1930s Neutrality Acts.

[11] Gamble, War for Righteousness, pp. 149-208 (quotes, pp. 154-59, 202-3).

[12] The Nation cited in Robert E. Osgood, Ideals and Self-Interest in America’s Foreign Relations: The Great Transformation of the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago, 1953), pp. 321-32. The New Republic cited in John A. Thompson, Reformers and War: American Progressive Publicists and the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 234-36.

[13] First, the U.S. war effort, by ensuring Germany’s defeat, perversely eliminated the only external force capable of suppressing the Bolshevik regime in Russia. As a condition of the Armistice, the Germans had to renounce the annexationist Treaty of Brest-Litovsk they had made with the Bolshevik regime and evacuate western Russia. Second, the U.S. military interventions in the Russian Arctic, which Wilson ordered over the summer of 1918, were too small and remote to affect the course of the civil war that broke out between the “Reds” and the “Whites,” but nevertheless fed Bolshevik propaganda. Third, Wilson (wisely) refused the Anglo-French proposals at the Paris Peace Conference to intervene massively in support of the White Russian armies. Fourth, the 5,000 troops Wilson sent to Vladivostok to secure the Trans-Siberian Railway (and defend Russian sovereignty from the grasping Japanese) served only to hold the region “in escrow” until the victorious Bolsheviks arrived to claim it.

[14] Richard Gamble, “Wilsonian Slaughter,” The American Conservative, February 23, 2009.

[15] Lloyd E. Ambrosius, in Wilsonianism: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy in American Foreign Relations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), described the flood of books and articles celebrating Wilsonianism after the American “victory” in the Cold War.

[16] C.D. McIntyre, editor, God, History, and Historians: Modern Christian Views of History (Oxford University, 1977), p. 375.

 

[Apollonian]

Re: Book Review: "Hidden History..." by Docherty and MacGregor, on real origins of WWI--satanic perf

The Roots of World War II​

by Sheldon Richman
February 1, 1995

Link: https://www.fff.org/explore-freedom/article/roots-world-war-ii/

It is commonly thought that the 20th century witnessed two world wars. It would be more accurate to say that the century had but one world war — with a 21-year intermission. To put it another way, World War II grew out of World War I; indeed, it was made virtually inevitable by it. More specifically, a case can be made that World War II was a result of American intervention in the First World War.

Counterfactual history is a risky endeavor. But the events that followed America’s entry into World War I strongly suggest that had President Woodrow Wilson permanently “kept us out of war,” as his 1916 presidential campaign slogan boasted, the conditions that produced World War II would not have been sown.

The Great War began in August 1914. America did not enter the war until April 1917. By that time both sides were exhausted from years of grinding warfare. There is ample reason to believe that had nothing new been added to the equation, the belligerents would have agreed to a negotiated settlement. No victors, no vindictiveness.

But it was not to be.

The messianic President Wilson could not pass up what he saw as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to help remake the world. As historian Arthur Ekirch writes inThe Decline of American Liberalism , “The notion of a crusade came naturally to Wilson, the son of a Presbyterian minister, imbued with a stern Calvinist sense of determinism and devotion to duty.” He was goaded by a host of Progressive intellectuals, such as John Dewey and Herbert Croley, editor of The New Republic, who wrote that “the American nation needs the tonic of a serious moral adventure.”

On the other side, the opponents of war understood what, ironically, Wilson himself pointed out in private just before asking Congress for a declaration of war: “War required illiberalism at home to reinforce the men at the front. We couldn’t fight Germany and maintain the ideals of Government that all thinking men shared.”

Wilson was right. Within months, the United States had conscription, an official propaganda office, suppression of dissent, and central planning of the economy (a precedent for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal).

While Wilson said the United States was going to war to make the world safe for democracy, he in fact entered for the less lofty principle of making it safe for American citizens to sail on the armed ships of belligerents. Regardless, what matters here is the effect U.S. intervention had on the war.

Aside from the general exhaustion of the warring nations, a major development was occurring to the east. The war had caused great hardship in Russia. Food was in short supply. Workers went on strike, and housewives marched in protest. Army regiments mutinied. In March 1917, Czar Nicholas II abdicated, and when his brother refused the throne, a provisional, social democratic government was set up in Russia. As historian E. H. Carr wrote, “The revolutionary parties played no direct part in the making of the revolution.”

Despite the people’s revulsion, Alexander Kerensky’s provisional government stayed in the war at the insistence of the Allies and Wilson, who by then had sent American boys to Europe. When Lenin returned to Russia from Zurich, he made his Bolsheviks the one antiwar party in the country. This gave Lenin the opportunity to become the world’s first communist dictator. An earlier negotiated settlement would have eased the Russians’ misery and probably averted the second revolution. Lenin immediately accepted Germany’s peace terms, including territorial concessions, and left the war. (Toward the end of the war, the Allies invaded the new Soviet Union, ostensibly to safeguard war materiel. The invasion created long-lasting distrust of the West.)

Thus, the first likely consequence of U.S. prolongation of the war was the Bolshevik Revolution (and the Cold War). Communism — its threat of worldwide revolution and its wholesale slaughter — was a key factor in the rise of the European despotism that sparked World War II. (Had the Bolsheviks come to power anyway and Germany had won the war, Germany would have thrown the communists out.)

Entry of fresh American power gave the advantage to the Allies, and Germany signed the armistice in November 1918. Before allowing that, Wilson, in the name of spreading democracy, demanded that the Kaiser go. The president thus was responsible for the removal of what would have likely been an important institutional obstacle to Hitler and his aggressive ambitions.

The armistice set the stage for the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles. Article 231 of that Treaty — the infamous war guilt clause — said:

The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.

Germany was to become an outcast nation on the basis of its war guilt. The problem was that Germany was not uniquely guilty. World War I was the product of a complex political dynamic in which nations other than Germany — Russia and France, for example — played important roles. Nevertheless, Germany was branded as the perpetrator.

The victors imposed crushing reparations on Germany for the cost of the war. That was contrary to Wilson’s original, nonpunitive program (The Fourteen Points) and to the prearmistice agreement with Germany. But at the peace conference, he acquiesced to England and France in order to achieve his dream of a League of Nations. Adding to the humiliation was the Allied occupation of the Rhineland and the tearing away of German-speaking areas in order to reconstitute Poland and create Czechoslovakia. Moreover, the treaty nullified German control in the East, which Lenin had conceded, removing what would have been a formidable barrier against Bolshevism.

Not all the hardship resulted from the treaty. During the war the Allies imposed a starvation blockade on Germany. Due to French insistence, that blockade remained in place until the treaty was signed in June 1919. The German people were made to watch their children starve for six months after the guns fell silent. The blockade killed an estimated 800,000 people.

In the 1920s, many people — Germans and others — would call for revision of the unjust treaty. But no one in a position to do anything about it heeded the call. Can one imagine ground more fertile for the growth of the poisonous vine called Nazism?

The second likely consequence, then, of U.S. prolongation of the war was the rise of Nazi Germany.

Other consequences can be speculated on. For example, Murray Rothbard has argued that the Federal Reserve System engaged in a prolonged postwar inflation of the money supply in order to help Great Britain restore its prewar gold-Pound relationship. That inflation led to the crash of 1929 and the Great Depression. Perhaps if the United States had refrained from entering the war, and if a negotiated settlement had been reached, the Fed would not have felt obliged to assist Britain in achieving its unrealistic aims.

We can now do an accounting of the likely consequences of U.S. intervention in Europe: communism in Russia (and everywhere else it later reverberated), Nazism in Germany, the Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War II (not to mention the Cold War and the growth of the American leviathan).

No one would suggest that Woodrow Wilson foresaw those consequences and intervened anyway. But the intelligent men who warned that war would lead to revolution and totalitarianism were vindicated. The war critic Randolph Bourne observed that “it is only ‘liberal’ naivete that is shocked at arbitrary coercion and suppression. Willing war means willing all the evils that are organically bound up with it.”

And what if U.S. forbearance had not permitted a negotiated settlement and Germany had won the war? Aside from the fact that Wilson’s closest adviser, Col. E. M. House, saw no threat to the United States from a German victory, we can best answer that question with another question: Who would not trade the events of 20th-century military and political history for the Kaiser?

 

[Apollonian]

Re: Book Review: "Hidden History..." by Docherty and MacGregor, on real origins of WWI--satanic perf

Ralph Raico on first world war revisionism

 

[Apollonian]

Re: Book Review: "Hidden History..." by Docherty and MacGregor, on real origins of WWI--satanic perf

The WWI Conspiracy​

Corbett • 11/19/2018

Link: https://www.corbettreport.com/wwi/

Watch on Archive / BitChute / LBRY / Minds / YouTube or Download the mp4

What was World War One about? How did it start? Who won? And what did they win? Now, 100 years after those final shots rang out, these questions still puzzle historians and laymen alike. But as we shall see, this confusion is not a happenstance of history but the wool that has been pulled over our eyes to stop us from seeing what WWI really was. This is the story of WWI that you didn’t read in the history books. This is The WWI Conspiracy.

TRANSCRIPT

Skip to Part One / Part Two / Part Three

PART ONE: TO START A WAR

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INTRODUCTION

November 11, 1918.

All across the Western front, the clocks that were lucky enough to escape the four years of shelling chimed the eleventh hour. And with that the First World War came to an end.

From 10 o’clock to 11 — the hour for the cessation of hostilities — the opposed batteries simply raised hell. Not even the artillery prelude to our advance into the Argonne had anything on it. To attempt an advance was out of the question. It was not a barrage. It was a deluge.

[. . .]

Nothing quite so electrical in effect as the sudden stop that came at 11 A. M. has ever occurred to me. It was 10:60 precisely and — the roar stopped like a motor car hitting a wall. The resulting quiet was uncanny in comparison. From somewhere far below ground, Germans began to appear. They clambered to the parapets and began to shout wildly. They threw their rifles, hats, bandoleers, bayonets and trench knives toward us. They began to sing.

—Lieutenant Walter A. Davenport, 101st Infantry Regiment, US Army
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And just like that, it was over. Four years of the bloodiest carnage the world had ever seen came to a stop as sudden and bewildering as its start. And the world vowed “Never again.”

Each year, we lay the wreath. We hear “The Last Post.” We mouth the words “never again” like an incantation. But what does it mean? To answer this question, we have to understand what WWI was.

WWI was an explosion, a breaking point in history. In the smoldering shell hole of that great cataclysm lay the industrial-era optimism of never-ending progress. Old verities about the glory of war lay strewn around the battlefields of that “Great War” like a fallen soldier left to die in No Man’s Land, and along with it lay all the broken dreams of a world order that had been blown apart. Whether we know it or not, we here in the 21st century are still living in the crater of that explosion, the victims of a First World War that we are only now beginning to understand.

What was World War One about? How did it start? Who won? And what did they win? Now, 100 years after those final shots rang out, these questions still puzzle historians and laymen alike. But as we shall see, this confusion is not a happenstance of history but the wool that has been pulled over our eyes to stop us from seeing what WWI really was.

This is the story of WWI that you didn’t read in the history books. This is The WWI Conspiracy.

PART ONE – TO START A WAR

June 28, 1914.

The Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife Sophie are in Sarajevo for a military inspection. In retrospect, it’s a risky provocation, like tossing a match into a powder keg. Serbian nationalism is rising, the Balkans are in a tumult of diplomatic crises and regional wars, and tensions between the kingdom of Serbia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire are set to spill over.

But despite warnings and ill omens, the royal couple’s security is extremely lax. They board an open-top sports car and proceed in a six-car motorcade along a pre-announced route. After an inspection of the military barracks, they head toward the Town Hall for a scheduled reception by the Mayor. The visit is going ahead exactly as planned and precisely on schedule.

And then the bomb goes off.

As we now know, the motorcade was a death trap. Six assassins lined the royal couple’s route that morning, armed with bombs and pistols. The first two failed to act, but the third, Nedeljko Čabrinović, panicked and threw his bomb onto the folded back cover of the Archduke’s convertible. It bounced off onto the street, exploding under the next car in the convoy. Franz Ferdinand and his wife, unscathed, were rushed on to the Town Hall, passing the other assassins along the route too quickly for them to act.

Having narrowly escaped death, the Archduke called off the rest of his scheduled itinerary to visit the wounded from the bombing at the hospital. By a remarkable twist of fate, the driver took the couple down the wrong route, and, when ordered to reverse, stopped the car directly in front of the delicatessen where would-be assassin Gavrilo Princip had gone after having failing in his mission along the motorcade. There, one and a half metres in front of Princip, were the Archduke and his wife. He took two shots, killing both of them.

Yes, even the official history books—the books written and published by the “winners”—record that the First World War started as the result of a conspiracy. After all, it was—as all freshman history students are taught—the conspiracy to assassinate the Archduke Franz Ferdinand that led to the outbreak of war.

That story, the official story of the origins of World War I, is familiar enough by now: In 1914, Europe was an interlocking clockwork of alliances and military mobilization plans that, once set in motion, ticked inevitably toward all out warfare. The assassination of the Archduke was merely the excuse to set that clockwork in motion, and the resulting “July crisis” of diplomatic and military escalations led with perfect predictability to continental and, eventually, global war. In this carefully sanitized version of history, World War I starts in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914.

But this official history leaves out so much of the real story about the build up to war that it amounts to a lie. But it does get one thing right: The First World War was the result of a conspiracy.

To understand this conspiracy we must turn not to Sarajevo and the conclave of Serbian nationalists plotting their assassination in the summer of 1914, but to a chilly drawing room in London in the winter of 1891. There, three of the most important men of the age—men whose names are but dimly remembered today—are taking the first concrete steps toward forming a secret society that they have been discussing amongst themselves for years. The group that springs from this meeting will go on to leverage the wealth and power of its members to shape the course of history and, 23 years later, will drive the world into the first truly global war.

Their plan reads like outlandish historical fiction. They will form a secret organization dedicated to the “extension of British rule throughout the world” and “the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of a British Empire.” The group is to be structured along the lines of a religious brotherhood (the Jesuit order is repeatedly invoked as a model) divided into two circles: an inner circle, called “The Society of the Elect,” who are to direct the activity of the larger, outer circle, dubbed “The Association of Helpers” who are not to know of the inner circle’s existence.

“British rule” and “inner circles” and “secret societies.” If presented with this plan today, many would say it was the work of an imaginative comic book writer. But the three men who gathered in London that winter afternoon in 1891 were no mere comic book writers; they were among the wealthiest and most influential men in British society, and they had access to the resources and the contacts to make that dream into a reality.

Present at the meeting that day: William T. Stead, famed newspaper editor whose Pall Mall Gazette broke ground as a pioneer of tabloid journalism and whose Review of Reviews was enormously influential throughout the English-speaking world; Reginald Brett, later known as Lord Esher, an historian and politician who became friend, confidant and advisor to Queen Victoria, King Edward VII, and King George V, and who was known as one of the primary powers-behind-the-throne of his era; and Cecil Rhodes, the enormously wealthy diamond magnate whose exploits in South Africa and ambition to transform the African continent would earn him the nickname of “Colossus” by the satirists of the day.

But Rhodes’ ambition was no laughing matter. If anyone in the world had the power and ability to form such a group at the time, it was Cecil Rhodes.

Richard Grove, historical researcher and author, TragedyAndHope.com.

RICHARD GROVE: Cecil Rhodes also was from Britain. He was educated at Oxford, but he only went to Oxford after he went to South Africa. He had an older brother he follows into South Africa. The older brother was working in the diamond mines, and by the time Rhodes gets there he’s got a set up, and his brother says “I’m gonna go off and dig in the gold mines. They just found gold!” And so he leaves Cecil Rhodes, his younger brother—who’s, like, in his 20s—with this whole diamond mining operation. Rhodes then goes to Oxford, comes back down to South Africa with the help of Lord Rothschild, who had funding efforts behind De Beers and taking advantage of that situation. And from there they start to use what—there’s no other term than “slave labor,” which then turns in later to the apartheid policy of South Africa.

GERRY DOCHERTY: Well, Rhodes was particularly important because in many ways, at the end of the 19th century, he seriously epitomized where capitalism was [and] where wealth really lay.
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Gerry Docherty, WWI scholar and co-author of Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War.

DOCHERTY: Rhodes had the money and he had the contacts. He was a great Rothschild man and his mining wealth was literally uncountable. He wanted to associate himself with Oxford because Oxford gave him the kudos of the university of knowledge, of that kind of power.

And in fact that was centered in a very secretive place called “All Souls College.” Still you’ll find many references to All Souls College and “people behind the curtain” and such phrases [as] “power behind thrones.” Rhodes was centrally important in actually putting money up in order to begin to gather together like-minded people of great influence.
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Rhodes was not shy about his ambitions, and his intentions to form such a group were known to many. Throughout his short life, Rhodes discussed his intentions openly with many of his associates, who, unsurprisingly, happened to be among the most influential figures in British society at that time.

More remarkably, this secret society—which was to wield its power behind the throne—was not a secret at all. The New York Times even published an article discussing the founding of the group in the April 9, 1902, edition of the paper, shortly after Rhodes’ death.

The article, headlined “Mr. Rhodes’s Ideal of Anglo-Saxon Greatness” and carrying the remarkable sub-head “He Believed a Wealthy Secret Society Should Work to Secure the World’s Peace and a British-American Federation,” summarized this sensational plan by noting that Rhodes’ “idea for the development of the English-speaking race was the foundation of ‘a society copied, as to organization, from the Jesuits.’” Noting that his vision involved uniting “the United States Assembly and our House of Commons to achieve ‘the peace of the world,’” the article quotes Rhodes as saying: “The only thing feasible to carry out this idea is a secret society gradually absorbing the wealth of the world.”

This idea is laid down in black and white in a series of wills that Rhodes wrote throughout his life, wills that not only laid out his plan to create such a society and provided the funds to do so, but, even more remarkably, were collected in a volume published after his death by co-conspirator William T. Stead.

GROVE: Rhodes also left his great deal of money—not having any children, not having married, dying at a young age—left it in a very well-known last will and testament, of which there were several different editions naming different benefactors, naming different executors.

So in 1902 Cecil Rhodes dies. There’s a book published that contains his last will and testament. The guy who wrote the book, William T. Stead, was in charge of a British publication called The Review of Reviews. He was part of Rhodes’ Round Table group. He at one time was an executor for the will, and in that will it says that he laments the loss of America from the British Empire and that they should formulate a secret society with the specific aim of bringing America back into the Empire. Then he names all the countries that they need to include in this list to have world domination, to have an English-speaking union, to have British race as the enforced culture on all countries around the world.

The will contains the goal. The goal is amended over a series of years and supported and used to gain support. And then, by the time he dies in 1902, there’s funding, there’s a plan, there’s an agenda, there’s working groups, and it all launches and then takes hold. And then not too long later, you’ve got World War One and then from that you’ve got World War Two and then you’ve got a century of control and slavery that really could have been prevented.
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When, at the time of Rhodes’ death in 1902, this “secret” society decided to partially reveal itself, it did so under the cloak of peace. It was only because they desired world peace, they insisted, that they had created their group in the first place, and only for the noblest of reasons that they aimed to “gradually absorb the wealth of the world.”

But contrary to this pacific public image, from its very beginnings the group was interested primarily in war. In fact, one of the very first steps taken by this “Rhodes Round Table” (as it was known by some) was to maneuver the British Empire into war in South Africa. This “Boer War” of 1899–1902 would serve a dual purpose: it would unite the disparate republics and colonies of South Africa into a single unit under British imperial control, and, not incidentally, it would bring the rich gold deposits of the Transvaal Republic into the orbit of the Rothschild/Rhodes-controlled British South Africa Company.

The war was, by the group’s own admission, entirely its doing. The point man for the operation was Sir Alfred Milner, a close associate of Rhodes and a member of the secret society’s inner circle who was then the governor of the British Cape Colony. Although largely forgotten today, Alfred Milner (later 1st Viscount Milner) was perhaps the most important single figure in Britain at the dawn of the 20th century. From Rhodes’ death in 1902, he became the unofficial head of the roundtable group and directed its operations, leveraging the vast wealth and influence of the group’s exclusive membership to his own ends.

With Milner, there was no compunction or moral hand-wringing about the methods used to bring about those ends. In a letter to Lord Roberts, Milner casually confessed to having engineered the Boer War: “I precipitated the crisis, which was inevitable, before it was too late. It is not very agreeable, and in many eyes, not a very creditable piece of business to have been largely instrumental in bringing about a war.”

When Rhodes’ co-conspirator and fellow secret society inner circle member William Stead objected to war in South Africa, Rhodes told him: “You will support Milner in any measure that he may take short of war. I make no such limitation. I support Milner absolutely without reserve. If he says peace, I say peace; if he says war, I say war. Whatever happens, I say ditto to Milner.”

The Boer War, involving unimaginable brutality—including the death of 26,000 women and children in the world’s first (British) concentration camps—ended as Rhodes and his associates intended: with the formerly separate pieces of South Africa being united under British control. Perhaps even more importantly from the perspective of the secret society, it left Alfred Milner as High Commission of the new South African Civil Service, a position from which he would cultivate a team of bright, young, largely Oxford-educated men who would go on to serve the group and its ends.

And from the end of the Boer War onward, those ends increasingly centered around the task of eliminating what Milner and the Round Table perceived as the single greatest threat to the British Empire: Germany.

DOCHERTY: So in the start it was influence—people who could influence politics, people who had the money to influence statesmen—and the dream. The dream of actually crushing Germany. This was a basic mindset of this group as it gathered together.
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Germany. In 1871, the formerly separate states of modern-day Germany united into a single empire under the rule of Wilhelm I. The consolidation and industrialization of a united Germany had fundamentally changed the balance of power in Europe. By the dawn of the 20th century, the British Empire found itself dealing not with its traditional French enemies or its long-standing Russian rivals for supremacy over Europe, but the upstart German Empire. Economically, technologically, even militarily; if the trends continued, it would not be long before Germany began to rival and even surpass the British Empire.

For Alfred Milner and the group he had formed around him out of the old Rhodes Round Table society, it was obvious what had to be done: to change France and Russia from enemies into friends as a way of isolating, and, eventually, crushing Germany.

Peter Hof, author of The Two Edwards: How King Edward VII and Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey Fomented the First World War.

PETER HOF: Yes, well from the British perspective, Germany, after their unification in 1871, they became very strong very quickly. And over time this worried the British more and more, and they began to think that Germany represented a challenge to their world hegemony. And slowly but surely they came to the decision that Germany must be confronted just as they had come to the same decision with regard to other countries—Spain and Portugal and especially France and now Germany.

German finished goods were marginally better than those of Britain, they were building ships that were marginally better than those of Britain, and all of this. The British elite very slowly came to the decision that Germany needed to be confronted while it was still possible to do so. It might not be possible to do so if they waited too long. And so this is how the decision crystallized.

I think that Britain might possibly have accepted the German ascendance, but they had something that was close at hand, and that was the Franco-Russian Alliance. And they thought if they could hook in with that alliance, then they had the possibility of defeating Germany quickly and without too much trouble. And that is basically what they did.
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But crafting an alliance with two of Britain’s biggest rivals and turning public opinion against one of its dearest continental friends was no mean feat. To do so would require nothing less than for Milner and his group to seize control of the press, the military and all the diplomatic machinery of the British Empire. And so that’s exactly what they did.

The first major coup occurred in 1899, while Milner was still in South Africa launching the Boer War. That year, the Milner Group ousted Donald Mackenzie Wallace, the director of the foreign department at The Times, and installed their man, Ignatius Valentine Chirol. Chirol, a former employee of the Foreign Office with inside access to officials there, not only helped to ensure that one of the most influential press organs of the Empire would spin all international events for the benefit of the secret society, but he helped to prepare his close personal friend, Charles Hardinge, to take on the crucial post of Ambassador to Russia in 1904, and, in 1906, the even more important post of Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office.

With Hardinge, Milner’s Group had a foot in the door at the British Foreign Office. But they needed more than just their foot in that door if they were to bring about their war with Germany. In order to finish the coup, they needed to install one of their own as Foreign Secretary. And, with the appointment of Edward Grey as Foreign Secretary in December of 1905, that’s precisely what happened.

Sir Edward Grey was a valuable and trusted ally of the Milner Group. He shared their anti-German sentiment and, in his important position of Foreign Secretary, showed no compunction at all about using secret agreements and unacknowledged alliances to further set the stage for war with Germany.

HOF: He became foreign secretary in 1905, I believe, and the foreign secretary in France was of course Delcassé. And Delcassé was very much anti-German and he was very passionate about the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine, and so he and the king hit it off very well together. And Edward Grey shared this anti-German feeling with the king—as I explained in my book how he came to have that attitude about Germany. But in any case, he had the same attitude with the king. They worked very well together. And Edward Grey very freely acknowledged the heavy role that the king played in British foreign policy and he said that this was not a problem because he and the king were in agreement on most issues and so they worked with very well together.
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The pieces were already beginning to fall into place for Milner and his associates. With Edward Grey as foreign secretary, Hardinge as his unusually influential undersecretary, Rhodes’ co-conspirator Lord Esher installed as deputy governor of Windsor Castle where he had the ear of the king, and the king himself—whose unusual, hands-on approach to foreign diplomacy and whose wife’s own hatred of the Germans dovetailed perfectly with the group’s aims—the diplomatic stage was set for the formation of the Triple Entente between France, Russia and Great Britain. With France to the west and Russia to the east, England’s secret diplomacy had forged the two pincers of a German-crushing vise.

All that was needed was an event that the group could spin to its advantage to prepare the population for war against their former German allies. Time and again throughout the decade leading up to the “Great War,” the group’s influential agents in the British press tried to turn every international incident into another example of German hostility.

When the Russo-Japanese War broke out, rumours swirled in London that it was in fact the Germans that had stirred up the hostilities. The theory went that Germany—in a bid to ignite conflict between Russia and England, who had recently concluded an alliance with the Japanese—had fanned the flames of war between Russia and Japan. The truth, of course, was almost precisely the opposite. Lord Lansdowne had conducted secret negotiations with Japan before signing a formal treaty in January 1902. Having exhausted their reserves building up their military, Japan turned to Cecil Rhodes’ co-conspirator Lord Nathan Rothschild to finance the war itself. Denying the Russian navy access to the Suez Canal and high-quality coal, which they did provide to the Japanese, the British did everything they could to ensure that the Japanese would crush the Russian fleet, effectively removing their main European competitor for the Far East. The Japanese navy was even constructed in Britain, but these facts did not find their way into the Milner-controlled press.

When the Russians “accidentally” fired on British fishing trawlers in the North Sea in 1904, killing three fishermen and wounding several more, the British public was outraged. Rather than whip up the outrage, however, The Times and other mouthpieces of the secret society instead tried to paper over the incident. Meanwhile, the British Foreign Office outrageously tried to blame the incident on the Germans, kicking off a bitter press war between Britain and Germany.

The most dangerous provocations of the period centered around Morocco, when France—emboldened by secret military assurances from the British and backed up by the British press—engaged in a series of provocations, repeatedly breaking assurances to Germany that Morocco would remain free and open to German trade. At each step, Milner’s acolytes, both in government and in the British press, cheered on the French and demonized any and every response from the Germans, real or imagined.

DOCHERTY: Given that we’re living in a world of territorial aggrandizement, there was a concocted incident over Morocco and the allegation that Germany was secretly trying to take over the British/French influence on Morocco. And that literally was nonsense, but it was blown up into an incident and people were told “Prepare! You had better prepare yourself for the possibility of war because we will not be dictated to by that Kaiser person over in Berlin!”

One of the incidents —which I would need to make reference to to get the date perfectly right—referred to a threat. Well, it was portrayed as a threat. It was no more of a threat than a fly would be if it came into your room at the present moment—of a gunboat sitting off the coast of Africa. And it was purported that this was a sign that in fact Germany was going to have a deep water port and they were going to use it as a springboard to interrupt British shipping. When we researched it, Jim and I discovered that the size of that so-called gunboat was physically smaller than the king of England’s royal yacht. What? But history has portrayed this as a massive threat to the British Empire and its “masculinity,” if you like—because that’s how they saw themselves.
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Ultimately, the Moroccan crises passed without warfare because, despite the best efforts of Milner and his associates, cooler heads prevailed. Likewise the Balkans descended into warfare in the years prior to 1914, but Europe as a whole didn’t descend with them. But, as we well know, the members of the Round Table in the British government, in the press, in the military, in finance, in industry, and in other positions of power and influence eventually got their wish: Franz Ferdinand was assassinated and within a month the trap of diplomatic alliances and secret military compacts that had been so carefully set was sprung. Europe was at war.

In retrospect, the machinations that led to war are a master class in how power really operates in society. The military compacts that committed Britain—and, ultimately, the world—to war had nothing to do with elected parliaments or representative democracy. When Conservative Prime Minister Arthur Balfour resigned in 1905, deft political manipulations ensured that members of the Round Table, including Herbert Henry Asquith, Edward Grey and Richard Haldane—three men who Liberal leader Henry Campbell-Bannerman privately accused of “Milner worship”—seamlessly slid into key posts in the new Liberal government and carried on the strategy of German encirclement without missing a step.

In fact, the details of Britain’s military commitments to Russia and France, and even the negotiations themselves, were deliberately kept hidden from Members of Parliament and even members of the cabinet who were not part of the secret society. It wasn’t until November 1911, a full six years into the negotiations, that the cabinet of Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith started to learn the details of these agreements, agreements that had been repeatedly and officially denied in the press and in Parliament.

This is how the cabal functioned: efficiently, quietly and, convinced of the righteousness of their cause, completely uncaring about how they achieved their ends. It is to this clique, not to the doings of any conspiracy in Sarajevo, that we can attribute the real origins of the First World War, with the nine million dead soldiers and seven million dead civilians that lay piled in its wake.

But for this cabal, 1914 was just the start of the story. In keeping with their ultimate vision of a united Anglo-American world order, the jewel in the crown of the Milner Group was to embroil the United States in the war; to unite Britain and America in their conquest of the German foe.

Across the Atlantic, the next chapter in this hidden history was just getting underway.

PART TWO: THE AMERICAN FRONT

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May 7, 1915.

“Colonel” Edward Mandell House is on his way to meet with King George V, who ascended to the throne after Edward VII’s death in 1910. Accompanying him is Edward Grey, British foreign secretary and acolyte of the Milner Group. The two speak “of the probability of an ocean liner being sunk” and House informs Grey that “if this were done, a flame of indignation would sweep across America, which would in itself probably carry us into the war.”

An hour later, at Buckingham Palace, King George V inquires about an even more specific event.

“We fell to talking, strangely enough, of the probability of Germany sinking a trans-Atlantic liner, . . . He said, ‘Suppose they should sink the Lusitania with American passengers on board. . . .'”

And, by a remarkable coincidence, at 2:00 that afternoon, just hours after these conversations took place, that is precisely what happened.

The Lusitania, one of the largest passenger liners in the world, is en route from New York to Liverpool when it is struck by a torpedo from a German U-boat. She sinks to the bottom in minutes, killing 1,198 passengers and crew, including 128 Americans. The disaster—portrayed as a brazen, unexpected attack on an innocent passenger liner—helps to shift public opinion about the war in the US. To the average American, the war suddenly doesn’t feel like a strictly European concern.

Every aspect of the story was, as we now know, a deception. The Lusitania was not an innocent passenger liner but an armed merchant cruiser officially listed by the British Admiralty as an auxiliary war ship. It was outfitted with extra armour, designed to carry twelve six-inch guns, and equipped with shell racks for holding ammunition. On its transatlantic voyage the ship was carrying “war materiel”—specifically, more than four million .303 rifle bullets and tons of munitions, including shells, powder, fuses and gun cotton—“in unrefrigerated cargo holds that were dubiously marked cheese, butter and oysters.” This secret manifest was officially denied by the British government for generation after generation, but in 2014—a full 99 years after the event—internal government documents were finally released in which the government admitted the deception.

And, most remarkably of all, by Edward Mandell House’s own account, both Edward Grey and King George V himself were discussing the sinking of the Lusitania just hours before the event took place.

It’s a story that provides a window into the secret society’s years-long campaign to draw the United States into World War I. But in order to understand this story, we have to meet Edward Mandell House and the other Milner Group co-conspirators in America.

Strange as it might seem, there was no shortage of such co-conspirators in the US. Some, like the members of the influential Pilgrim Society, founded in 1902 for the “encouragement of Anglo-American good fellowship”—shared Rhodes’ vision of a united Anglo-American world empire; others were simply lured by the promise of money. But whatever their motivation, those sympathetic to the cause of the Round Table included some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the United States at the time.

Many of these figures were to be found at the heart of Wall Street, in the banking and financial institutions revolving around J.P. Morgan and Company. John Pierpont Morgan, or “Pierpont” as he preferred to be called, was the nucleus of turn-of-the-century America’s banking sector. Getting his start in London in 1857 at his father’s merchant banking firm, the young Pierpont returned to New York in 1858 and embarked on one of the most remarkable careers in the history of the world.

Making his money financing the American robber barons of the late 19th century—from Vanderbilt’s railroads to Adolph Simon Ochs’ purchase of The New York Times to the buyout of Carnegie Steel—Morgan amassed a financial empire that, by the 1890s, wielded more power than the United States Treasury itself. He teamed up with his close allies, the House of Rothschild, to bail out the US government during a gold shortage in 1895 and eased the Panic of 1907 (which he helped to precipitate) by locking 120 of the country’s most prestigious bankers in his library and forcing them to reach a deal on a $25 million loan to keep the banking system afloat.

As we saw in “Century of Enslavement: The History of the Federal Reserve,” Morgan and his associates were only too happy to use the banking crises they helped to create to galvanize public opinion toward the creation of a central bank. . . so long as that central bank was owned and directed by Wall Street, of course.

But their initial plan, the Aldrich Plan, was immediately recognized as a Wall Street ploy. Morgan and his fellow bankers were going to have to find a suitable cover to get their act through Congress, including, preferably, a President with sufficient progressive cover to give the new “Federal Reserve Act” an air of legitimacy. And they found their ideal candidate in the politically unknown President of Princeton University, Woodrow Wilson, a man who they were about to rocket straight into the White House with the help of their point man and Round Table co-conspirator, Edward Mandell House.

Richard Grove, TragedyandHope.com.

GROVE: Woodrow Wilson was an obscure professor at Princeton University who, from reading all that I’ve read about him, wasn’t the smartest guy, but he was smart enough to pick up when other people had good ideas and then he bumps into this guy named Colonel House.

Colonel House, he grew up in Beaumont, Texas, and Colonel House’s dad was like a Rhett Butler type of smuggler privateer pirate during the Confederate war with the Union. So Colonel House: first of all, he’s not a colonel. It’s just like a title he gave himself to make him seem more than he was. But he did come from a politically connected family in the South that were doing business with the British during the Civil War. So Colonel House in the early 1900s makes Woodrow Wilson his protegé, and Colonel House himself is being puppeted by a few people in the layers of the Anglo-American establishment above him, and so we are left with the public persona of Woodrow Wilson. And here he is.

And he’s got this, you know, this whole new Federal Reserve System that’s going to come in during his administration, which was also kind of a precursor to getting America into the war because it changed our financial dependency from being self-reliant and printing our own debt-free money to being indentured to international bankers who charge us as they print money out of thin air and charge future generations for it.
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The election of Woodrow Wilson once again shows how power operates behind the scenes to subvert the popular vote and the will of the public. Knowing that the stuffy and politically unknown Wilson would have little chance of being elected over the more popular and affable William Howard Taft, Morgan and his banking allies bankrolled Teddy Roosevelt on a third party ticket to split the Republican vote. The strategy worked and the banker’s real choice, Woodrow Wilson, came to power with just forty-two percent of the popular vote.

With Wilson in office and Colonel House directing his actions, Morgan and his conspirators get their wish. 1913 saw the passage of both the federal income tax and the Federal Reserve Act, thus consolidating Wall Street’s control over the economy. World War One, brewing in Europe just eight months after the creation of the Federal Reserve, was to be the first full test of that power.

But difficult as it had been for the Round Table to coax the British Empire out of its “splendid isolation” from the continent and into the web of alliances that precipitated the war, it would be that much harder for their American fellow travelers to coax the United States out of its own isolationist stance. Although the Spanish-American War had seen the advent of American imperialism, the thought of the US getting involved in “that European war” was still far from the minds of the average American.

A 1914 editorial from The New York Sun captures the sentiment of most of America at the time of the outbreak of the war in Europe:

“There is nothing reasonable in such a war as that for which Europe has been making ready, and it would be folly for this country to sacrifice itself to the frenzy of dynastic policies and the clash of ancient hatreds which is urging the Old World to its destruction.”
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The Sun was by no means unique in its assessment. A vote taken among 367 newspapers throughout the United States in November of 1914 found just 105 pro-Ally and 20 pro-German papers, with the vast majority—242 of them—remaining firmly neutral and recommending that Uncle Sam stay out of the conflict.

Once again, just as they did in Britain, the cabal was going to have to leverage its control of the press and key governmental positions to begin to shape public perception and instill pro-war sentiment. And once again, the full resources of these motivated co-conspirators were brought to bear on the task.

One of the first shells in this barrage of propaganda to penetrate the American consciousness was the “Rape of Belgium,” a catalogue of scarcely believable atrocities allegedly committed by the German forces in their invasion and occupation of Belgium at the start of the war. In a manner that was to become the norm in 20th century propaganda, the stories had a kernel of truth; there is no doubt that there were atrocities committed and civilians murdered by German forces in Belgium. But the propaganda that was spun from those kernels of truth was so over-the-top in its attempts to portray the Germans as inhuman brutes that it serves as a perfect example of war propaganda.

RICHARD GROVE: The American population at that time had a lot of German people in it. Thirty to fifty percent of the population had relations back to Germany, so there had to be this very clever propaganda campaign. It’s known today as “babies on bayonets.” So if you have no interest in World War I but you think it’s interesting to study propaganda so you don’t get fooled again, then type it into your favorite search engine: “babies on bayonets, World War I.” You’ll see hundreds of different posters where the Germans are bayonetting babies and it brings about emotions and it doesn’t give you the details of anything. And emotions drive wars, not facts. Facts are left out and deleted all the time in order to create wars, so I think that putting facts back in might help prevent wars. But I do know that they like to drive people on emotion. The “babies on bayonets” getting America into World War I, that’s a key part of it.
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GERRY DOCHERTY: Children who had their arms chopped off. Nuns that were raped. Shocking things, genuinely shocking things. The Canadian officer who was nailed at St. Andrew’s cross on a church door and left there to bleed to death. These were the great myths peddled in order to defame and bring down the whole image of any justification for German action and try and influence America into war.
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Gerry Docherty, co-author of Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War.

DOCHERTY: That’s not to say that there weren’t atrocities on both sides. War is an atrocious event, and there are always victims. Absolutely. And I offer no justification for it. But the lies, the unnecessary abuse of propaganda.

Even when in Britain they decided that they would put together the definitive volume of evidence to present it to the world, the person they asked to do this just so happened to have been former British ambassador to the United States, a man called Bryce, who was very well-liked in the States. And his evidence was published and put forward and there were screeds of stories after stories. But then later it was discovered that in fact the people who took the evidence hadn’t been allowed to speak to any of the Belgians directly but in fact what they were doing is they were listening to a middleman or agents who had supposedly taken these stories.

And when one of the official committee said “Hold on, can I speak to someone directly?” “No.” “No?” He resigned. He wouldn’t allow his name to be put forward with the [official report]. And that’s the extent to which this is false history. It’s not even acceptable to call it fake news. It’s just disgusting.
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The campaign had its intended effect. Horrified by the stories emerging from Belgium—stories picked up and amplified by the members of the Round Table in the British press, including the influential Times and the lurid Daily Mail, run by Milner ally Lord Northcliffe—American public opinion began to shift away from viewing the war as a European squabble about an assassinated archduke and toward viewing the war as a struggle against the evil Germans and their “sins against civilization.”

The culmination of this propaganda campaign was the release of the “Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages,” better known as “The Bryce Report,” compiled for “His Britannic Majesty’s Government” and presided over by Viscount James Bryce, who, not coincidentally, was the former British Ambassador to America and a personal friend of Woodrow Wilson. The report was a sham, based on 1,200 depositions collected by examiners who “had no authority to administer an oath.” The committee, which was not allowed to speak to a single witness itself, was tasked merely with sifting through this material and deciding what should be included in the final report. Unsurprisingly, the very real atrocities that the Germans had committed in Belgium—the burning of Louvain, Andenne and Dinant, for example—were overshadowed by the sensationalist (and completely unverifiable) stories of babies on bayonets and other acts of villainy.

The report itself, concluding that the Germans had systematically and premeditatedly broken the “rules and usages of war” was published on May 12, 1915, just five days after the sinking of The Lusitania. Directly between these two events, on May 9, 1915, Colonel House—the man whom Wilson called his “second personality” and his “independent self”—wrote a telegram, which the President dutifully read to his cabinet and was picked up by newspapers across the country.

“America has come to the parting of the ways, when she must determine whether she stands for civilized or uncivilized warfare. We can no longer remain neutral spectators. Our action in this crisis will determine the part we will play when peace is made, and how far we may influence a settlement for the lasting good of humanity. We are being weighed in the balance, and our position amongst nations is being assessed by mankind.”
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But despite this all-out propaganda assault, the American public was still largely against entering the war. It was in this context that the same group of Wall Street financiers who had maneuvered Wilson into the White House presided over the 1916 presidential election, one that the country knew would decisively conclude America’s neutrality in the war or its decision to send forces to engage in European combat for the first time in history.

The bankers left nothing to chance. Wilson, who would predictably follow House’s lead on all matters including war, was still their preferred candidate, but his competitor, Charles Evan Hughes, was no less of a Wall Street man. Hughes’ roots were as a Wall Street lawyer; his firm represented the New York, Westchester, and Boston Railroad Company for J.P. Morgan and Company and the Baptist Bible class that he led boasted many wealthy and influential members, including John D. Rockefeller, Jr.

The affable Hughes was stiff competition for the wooden and charmless Wilson, but such was the importance of American neutrality that “He Kept Us Out of War” actually became the central slogan of the campaign that saw Wilson return to the White House.

----------------[END OF PART ONE; SEE BELOW FOR PART 2]----------------

 

[Apollonian]

Re: Book Review: "Hidden History..." by Docherty and MacGregor, on real origins of WWI--satanic perf

-------------------------[HERE'S PART 2 TO ABOVE]-------------------------

DOCHERTY: And then, of course, came the famous election of 1916. Wilson wasn’t popular, but Wilson, simply—he had no kind of public persona which warmed people. On the contrary, he was a cold fish. He had dubious links with several of those who were powerful in Wall Street. But his propaganda for the election was “He Kept Us Out of War.” “He was a man, vote for Wilson, he kept us out of war.” And then having promised that he would continue to keep America out of war, and in fact of course within months America was thrown into the war by its own government.
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“He Kept Us Out of War.” But just as in the British election of 1906—which saw the British public overwhelmingly voting for Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberal Party and their platform of peace only to get the Milnerites in the cabinet entering secret agreements to bring about war—so, too, was the American public duped at the ballot box in 1916.

In fact, in the fall of 1915, over one year before the election even took place, Wilson’s string-puller, Edward Mandell House, was engaged in a secret negotiation with Edward Grey, the Milnerite heading Britain’s foreign office. That negotiation—long hidden from the public but finally revealed when House’s papers were published in 1928—shows the lengths to which Grey and House were willing to go to draw America into the war on the side of the Allies and against the Germans.

On October 17, 1915, House drafted a letter to Grey which he called “one of the most important letters I ever wrote.” Before sending it, he split it into two separate, coded messages, to ensure it would not be readable if it were intercepted. In it, he laid out a plan to steer the US into war with Germany under the false pretense of a “peace conference.”

Dear Sir Edward :

. . . In my opinion, it would be a world-wide calamity if the war should continue to a point where the Allies could not, with the aid of the United States, bring about a peace along the lines you and I have so often discussed.

It is in my mind that, after conferring with your Government, I should proceed to Berlin and tell them that it was the President’s purpose to intervene and stop this destructive war, provided the weight of the United States thrown on the side that accepted our proposal could do it.

I would not let Berlin know, of course, of any understanding had with the Allies, but would rather lead them to think our proposal would be rejected by the Allies. This might induce Berlin to accept the proposal, but, if they did not do so, it would nevertheless be the purpose to intervene. . . .
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Perhaps realizing the gravity of what was being proposed, Woodrow Wilson, the man who would later be elected for his ability to keep America out of war, merely added the word “probably” to House’s assurance that America would join the war.

The negotiations for this plan continued throughout the fall of 1915 and winter of 1916. In the end, the British government balked at the proposal because the thought that the Germans might actually accept peace—even a peace of disarmament brokered by the US—was not enough. They wanted to crush Germany completely and nothing less than total defeat would be sufficient. Another pretense would have to be manufactured to embroil the US in the war.

When, on the morning of May 7, 1915, House assured Grey and King George that the sinking of the Lusitania would cause “a flame of indignation [to] sweep across America,” he was correct. When he said it would “probably carry us into war,” he was mistaken. But in the end it was the naval issue that eventually became the pretext for America’s entry into war.

The history books of the period, following the familiar pattern of downplaying Allied provocations and focusing only on the German reactions, highlight the German policy of unrestricted submarine warfare which led to the downing of the Lusitania. The practice, which called for German U-boats to attack merchant ships on sight, was in contravention of the international rules of the sea at the time, and was widely abhorred as barbaric. But the policy was not instituted out of any insane blood lust on the part of the Kaiser; it was in response to Britain’s own policy of breaking international rules of the sea.

At the outbreak of war in 1914, the British had used their position of naval superiority to begin a blockade of Germany. That campaign, described as “one of the largest and most complex undertakings attempted by either side during the First World War,” involved the declaration of the whole of the North Sea as a war zone. As a so-called “distant blockade,” involving the indiscriminate mining of an entire region of the high seas, the practice was in direct violation of the Declaration of Paris of 1856. The indiscriminate nature of the blockade—declaring the most basic of supplies, like cotton, and even food itself to be “contraband”—was a violation of the Declaration of London of 1909.

More to the point, as an attempt to starve an entire country into submission, it was a crime against humanity. Eventually reduced to a starvation diet of 1,000 calories a day, tuberculosis, rickets, edema and other maladies began to prey on those Germans who did not succumb to hunger. By the end of the war the National Health Office in Berlin calculated that 763,000 people had died as a direct result of the blockade. Perversely, the blockade did not end with the war. In fact, with Germany’s Baltic coast now effectively added to the blockade, the starvation actually continued and even intensified into 1919.

Faced with protestations from the Austrian ambassador about the illegality of the British blockade, Colonel House, now America’s de facto president, merely observed: “He forgets to add that England is not exercising her power in an objectionable way, for it is controlled by a democracy.”

This double standard was not the exception but the rule when it came to those in America’s East coast establishment, who were hungry to see the US join the Allies on the battlefields of Europe. As historian and author Ralph Raico explained in a 1983 lecture, it was these double standards that led directly to America’s entry into the war.

RALPH RAICO: The Wilson Administration now takes the position which will ultimately lead to war. The German government is to be held strictly accountable for the death of any Americans on the high seas regardless of circumstances.

The Germans say, “Well let’s see if we can live with this. As long as you’re willing to put pressure on the British to have them modify their violations of international law—that is, they’re placing food on the list of contraband materials, which had never been done before. The British, as you know, take your merchant ships off the high seas on the way to Rotterdam because they say anything that goes to Rotterdam is going to go to Germany, so they take American ships off the high seas. The British have put cotton—cotton!—on the list of contraband, confiscating these materials. They interfere with letters going to the continent because they think there’s military intelligence possibly involved. The British are imposing in many ways on Americans. So if you hold them responsible, we’ll behave ourselves as far as submarines go.”

This was not to be the case, and the attitude of the Americans towards British violations of neutral rights were quite different. One reason is that the American ambassador to London, Walter Hines Page, was an extreme Anglophile. One time, for instance, he gets a message from the State Department saying, “Tell the British they have to stop interfering with American mail shipments to neutral ports. And the American ambassador goes to the British Foreign Minister Edward Grey and says, “Look at the message I’ve just got from Washington. Let’s get together and try to answer this.” This was his attitude. The British were never held to the same standard as the Germans.

At home, Theodore Roosevelt, who in previous years had been a great friend of the Kaiser’s and a great admirer of Germany, now says we have to get into this war right away. Besides that, there’s a campaign for preparedness for building up the American Navy, drilling American citizens in combat techniques. There’s a kind of hysteria, really, that travels over the country considering that there’s—at this time, certainly—no chance, no chance of some kind of immediate threat to the United States.

And people like Roosevelt and Wilson begin talking in a very unfortunate way. Wilson says, for instance, “In America we have too many hyphenated Americans”—of course he meant German-Americans, Irish-Americans—”and these people are not totally loyal to our country.” Already scapegoats are being looked for and public opinion is being roused.

And this diplomatic negotiation, the exchange of memos, goes on for the next few years. In January of 1917, the Americans, not having been able to budge the British in the least on any British violation of American rights; the British blockade intensifying; the Germans really feeling hunger in a very literal sense, especially the people on the on the home front; the Kaiser is persuaded by his Admirals and Generals to begin unrestricted submarine warfare around the British Isles.

The American position by this time had solidified, had become a totally rigid one, and when all is said and done, when you go through all of the back-and-forth memoranda and notes and principles established, the United States went to war against Germany in 1917 for the right of Americans to travel in armed belligerent merchant ships carrying munitions through war zones. Wilson’s position was that even in that case the Germans simply had no right to attack the ship as long as there are Americans on the ship. Shall I repeat that? Armed belligerent—that is to say, English—armed English merchant ships carrying munitions could not be fired upon by the Germans as long as there were American citizens on board. And it was for the right of Americans to go into the war zone on such vessels that we finally went to war.

SOURCE: The World at War (Ralph Raico)
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After months of deliberations and with the situation on the home front becoming increasingly desperate, the German military commanders decided to resume their unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917. As expected, US merchant ships were sunk, including four ships in late March alone. On April 2, 1917, Woodrow Wilson made his historic speech calling for Congress to declare war on Germany and commit US troops to European battlefields for the first time.

The speech, made over one hundred years ago by and for a world that has long since passed away, still resonates with us today. Embedded within it is the rhetoric of warfare that has been employed by president after president, prime minister after prime minister, in country after country and war after war right down to the current day. From it comes many of the phrases that we still recognize today as the language of lofty ideals and noble causes that always accompany the most bloody and ignoble wars.

With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of the step I am taking and of the grave responsibilities which it involves, but in unhesitating obedience to what I deem my constitutional duty, I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war against the government and people of the United States.

[…]

The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them.
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Four days later, on April 6, 1917, the US Congress issued a formal declaration of war against the Imperial German Government.

NARRATOR: Inside the White House, President Woodrow Wilson conferred with advisers and signed the proclamation of war against Germany. [. . .] Everywhere there was cheering and waving of flags. Hindsight or cynicism might make us smile at the thought that this war was sometimes called That Great Adventure. Never again would we see our entry into a major conflict excite so many to such heights of elation. Naive? Probably. But here was a generation of young men not yet saturated by the paralyzing variety of self-analysis and the mock sciences. They believed!

SOURCE: U.S. ENTERS WORLD WAR I, MILITARY DRAFT – 1917
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All along the Western front, the Allies rejoiced. The Yanks were coming.

House, the Milner Group, the Pilgrims, the Wall Street financiers and all of those who had worked so diligently for so many years to bring Uncle Sam into war had got their wish. And before the war was over, millions more casualties would pile up. Carnage the likes of which the world had never seen before had been fully unleashed.

The trenches and the shelling. The no man’s land and the rivers of blood. The starvation and the destruction. The carving up of empires and the eradication of an entire generation of young men.

Why? What was it all for? What did it accomplish? What was the point?

To this day, over 100 years later, we still look back on the horrors of that “Great War” with confusion. For so long we have been told non-answers about incompetent generals and ignorant politicians. “It’s the senselessness of war,” the teachers of this fraudulent and partial history have told us with a shrug.

But, now that the players who worked to set the stage for this carnage have been unmasked, these questions can finally be answered.

PART THREE: A NEW WORLD ORDER

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February 21, 1916.

A week of rain, wind and heavy fog along the Western Front finally breaks, and for a moment there is silence in the hills north of Verdun. That silence is broken at 7:15 AM when the Germans launch an artillery barrage heralding the start of the largest battle the world had ever seen.

Thousands of projectiles are flying in all directions, some whistling, others howling, others moaning low, and all uniting in one infernal roar. From time to time an aerial torpedo passes, making a noise like a gigantic motor car. With a tremendous thud a giant shell bursts quite close to our observation post, breaking the telephone wire and interrupting all communication with our batteries. A man gets out at once for repairs, crawling along on his stomach through all this place of bursting mines and shells. It seems quite impossible that he should escape in the rain of shell, which exceeds anything imaginable; there has never been such a bombardment in war. Our man seems to be enveloped in explosions, and shelters himself from time to time in the shell craters which honeycomb the ground; finally he reaches a less stormy spot, mends his wires, and then, as it would be madness to try to return, settles down in a big crater and waits for the storm to pass.

Beyond, in the valley, dark masses are moving over the snow-covered ground. It is the German infantry advancing in packed formation along the valley of the attack. They look like a big gray carpet being unrolled over the country. We telephone through to the batteries and the ball begins. The sight is hellish. In the distance, in the valley and upon the slopes, regiments spread out, and as they deploy fresh troops come pouring in. There is a whistle over our heads. It is our first shell. It falls right in the middle of the enemy infantry. We telephone through, telling our batteries of their hit, and a deluge of heavy shells is poured on the enemy. Their position becomes critical. Through glasses we can see men maddened, men covered with earth and blood, falling one upon the other. When the first wave of the assault is decimated, the ground is dotted with heaps of corpses, but the second wave is already pressing on.
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This anonymous French staff officer’s account of the artillery offensive that opened the Battle of Verdun—recounting the scene as an heroic French communications officer repairs the telephone line to the French artillery batteries, allowing for a counter-strike against the first wave of German infantry—brings a human dimension to a conflict that is beyond human comprehension. The opening salvo of that artillery barrage alone—involving 1,400 guns of all sizes—dropped a staggering 2.5 million shells on a 10-kilometre front near Verdun in northeastern France over five days of nearly uninterrupted carnage, turning an otherwise sleepy countryside into an apocalyptic nightmare of shell holes, craters, torn-out trees, and ruined villages.

By the time the battle finished 10 months later, a million casualties lay in its wake. A million stories of routine bravery, like that of the French communications officer. And Verdun was far from the only sign that the stately, sanitized version of 19th century warfare was a thing of the past. Similar carnage played out at the Somme and Gallipoli and Vimy Ridge and Galicia and a hundred other battlefields. Time and again, the generals threw their men into meat grinders, and time and again the dead bodies lay strewn on the other side of that slaughter.

But how did such bloodshed happen? For what purpose? What did the First World War mean?

The simplest explanation is that the mechanization of 20th century armies had changed the logic of warfare itself. In this reading of history, the horrors of World War One were the result of the logic dictated by the technology with which it was fought.

It was the logic of the siege guns that bombarded the enemy from over 100 kilometres away. It was the logic of the poison gas, spearheaded by Bayer and their School for Chemical Warfare in Leverkusen. It was the logic of the tank, the airplane, the machine gun and all of the other mechanized implements of destruction that made mass slaughter a mundane fact of warfare.

But this is only a partial answer. More than just technology was at play in this “Great War,” and military strategy and million-casualty battles were not the only ways that World War One had changed the world forever. Like that unimaginable artillery assault at Verdun, the First World War tore apart all the verities of the Old World, leaving a smouldering wasteland in its wake.

A wasteland that could be reshaped into a New World Order.

For the would-be engineers of society, war—with all of its attendant horrors—was the easiest way to demolish the old traditions and beliefs that lay between them and their goals.

This was recognized early on by Cecil Rhodes and his original clique of co-conspirators. As we have seen, it was less than one decade after the founding of Cecil Rhodes’ society to achieve the “peace of the world” that that vision was amended to include war in South Africa, and then amended again to include embroiling the British Empire in a world war.

Many others became willing participants in that conspiracy because they, too, could profit from the destruction and the bloodshed.

And the easiest way to understand this idea is at its most literal level: profit.

War is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War [One] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dug-out? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried a bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle?

–Major General Smedley Butler
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As the most decorated Marine in the history of the United States at the time of his death, Smedley Butler knew of what he spoke. Having seen the minting of those tens of thousands of “new millionaires and billionaires” out of the blood of his fellow soldiers, his famous rallying cry, War Is A Racket, has resonated with the public since he first began—in his own memorable words—”trying to educate the soldiers out of the sucker class.”

Indeed, the war profiteering on Wall Street started even before America joined the war. Although, as J.P. Morgan partner Thomas Lamont noted, at the outbreak of the war in Europe, “American citizens were urged to remain neutral in action, in word, and even in thought, our firm had never for one moment been neutral; we didn’t know how to be. From the very start we did everything we could to contribute to the cause of the Allies.” Whatever the personal allegiances that may have motivated the bank’s directors, this was a policy that was to yield dividends for the Morgan bank that even the greediest of bankers could scarcely have dreamed of before the war began.

John Pierpont Morgan himself died in 1913—before the passage of the Federal Reserve Act he had stewarded into existence and before the outbreak of war in Europe—but the House of Morgan stood strong, with the Morgan bank under the helm of his son, John Pierpont Morgan, Jr., maintaining its position as preeminent financier in America. The young Morgan moved quickly to leverage his family’s connections with the London banking community and the Morgan bank signed its first commercial agreement with the British Army Council in January 1915, just four months into the war.

That initial contract—a $12 million purchase of horses for the British war effort to be brokered in the US by the House of Morgan—was only the beginning. By the end of the war, the Morgan bank had brokered $3 billion in transactions for the British military—equal to almost half of all American supplies sold to the Allies in the entire war. Similar arrangements with the French, Russian, Italian, and Canadian governments saw the bank broker billions more in supplies for the Allied war effort.

But this game of war financing was not without its risks. If the Allied powers were to lose the war, the Morgan bank and the other major Wall Street banks would lose the interest on all of the credit they had extended to them. By 1917, the situation was dire. The British government’s overdraft with Morgan stood at over $400 million dollars, and it was not clear that they would even win the war, let alone be in a position to repay all their debts when the fighting was over.

In April 1917, just eight days after the US declared war on Germany, Congress passed the War Loan Act, extending $1 billion in credit to the Allies. The first payment of $200 million went to the British and the entire amount was immediately handed over to Morgan as partial payment on their debt to the bank. When, a few days later, $100 million was parceled out to the French government, it, too, was promptly returned to the Morgan coffers. But the debts continued to mount, and throughout 1917 and 1918, the US Treasury—aided by the Pilgrims Society member and avowed Anglophile Benjamin Strong, president of the newly-created Federal Reserve—quietly paid off the Allied powers’ war debts to J.P. Morgan.

DOCHERTY: What I think is interesting is also the bankers’ viewpoint here. America was so deeply involved in that war financing. There was so much money which could only really be repaid as long as Britain and France won. But had they lost, the loss on the American financial stock exchange’s top market—your great industrial giants—would have been horrendous. So America was deeply involved. Not the people, as is ever the case. Not the ordinary citizen who cares. But the financial establishment who had, if you like, treated the entire thing as they might a casino and put all the money on one end of the board and it had to come good for them.

So all of this is going on. I mean, I personally feel that the American people don’t realize just how far duped they were by your Carnegies, your J.P. Morgans, your great bankers, your Rockefellers, by the multi-multimillionaires who emerged from that war. Because they were the ones who made the profits, not those who lost their sons, lost their grandsons, whose lives were ruined forever by war.
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After America officially entered the war, the good times for the Wall Street bankers got even better. Bernard Baruch—the powerful financier who personally led Woodrow Wilson into Democratic Party headquarters in New York “like a poodle on a string” to receive his marching orders during the 1912 election—was appointed to head the newly created “War Industries Board.”

With war hysteria at its height, Baruch and the fellow Wall Street financiers and industrialists who populated the board were given unprecedented powers over manufacture and production throughout the American economy, including the ability to set quotas, fix prices, standardize products, and, as a subsequent congressional investigation showed, pad costs so that the true size of the fortunes that the war profiteers extracted from the blood of the dead soldiers was hidden from the public.

Spending government funds at an annual rate of $10 billion, the board minted many new millionaires in the American economy—millionaires who, like Samuel Prescott Bush of the infamous Bush family, happened to sit on the War Industries Board. Bernard Baruch himself was said to have personally profited from his position as head of the War Industries Board to the tune of $200 million.

The extent of government intervention in the economy would have been unthinkable just a few years before. The National War Labor Board was set up to mediate labor disputes. The Food and Fuel Control Act was passed to give the government control over the distribution and sale of food and fuel. The Army Appropriations Act of 1916 set up the Council of National Defense, populated by Baruch and other prominent financiers and industrialists, who oversaw private sector coordination with the government in transportation, industrial and farm production, financial support for the war, and public morale. In his memoirs at the end of his life, Bernard Baruch openly gloated:

The [War Industries Board] experience had a great influence upon the thinking of business and government. [The] WIB had demonstrated the effectiveness of industrial cooperation and the advantage of government planning and direction. We helped inter the extreme dogmas of laissez faire, which had for so long molded American economic and political thought. Our experience taught that government direction of the economy need not be inefficient or undemocratic, and suggested that in time of danger it was imperative.
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But it was not merely to line the pockets of the well-connected that the war was fought. More fundamentally, it was a chance to change the very consciousness of an entire generation of young men and women.

For the class of would-be social engineers that arose in the Progressive Era—from economist Richard T. Ely to journalist Herbert Croly to philosopher John Dewey—the “Great War” was not a horrific loss of life or a vision of the barbarism that was possible in the age of mechanized warfare, but an opportunity to change people’s perceptions and attitudes about government, the economy, and social responsibility.

Dewey, for example, wrote of “The Social Possibilities of War.”

In every warring country there has been the same demand that in the time of great national stress production for profit be subordinated to production for use. Legal possession and individual property rights have had to give way before social requirements. The old conception of the absoluteness of private property has received the world over a blow from which it will never wholly recover.
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All countries on all sides of the world conflict responded in the same way: by maximizing their control over the economy, over manufacturing and industry, over infrastructure, and even over the minds of their own citizens.

Germany had its Kriegssozialismus, or war socialism, which placed control of the entire German nation, including its economy, its newspapers, and, through conscription—its people—under the strict control of the Army. In Russia, the Bolsheviks used this German “war socialism” as a basis for their organization of the nascent Soviet Union. In Canada, the government rushed to nationalize railways, outlaw alcohol, institute official censorship of newspapers, levy conscription, and, infamously, introduce a personal income tax as a “temporary war time measure” that continues to this day.

The British government soon recognized that control of the economy was not enough; the war at home meant control of information itself. At the outbreak of war, they set up the War Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House. The bureau’s initial purpose was to persuade America to enter the war, but that mandate soon expanded to shape and mold public opinion in favour of the war effort and of the government itself.

On September 2, 1914, the head of the War Propaganda Bureau invited twenty-five of Britain’s most influential authors to a top secret meeting. Among those present at the meeting: G. K. Chesterton, Ford Madox Ford, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells. Not revealed until decades after the war ended, many of those present agreed to write propaganda material promoting the government’s position on the war, which the government would get commercial printing houses, including Oxford University Press, to publish as seemingly independent works.

Under the secret agreement, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote To Arms! John Masefield wrote Gallipoli and The Old Front Line. Mary Humphrey Ward wrote England’s Effort and Towards the Goal. Rudyard Kipling wrote The New Army in Training. G. K. Chesterton wrote The Barbarism of Berlin. In total, the Bureau published over 1,160 propaganda pamphlets over the course of the war.

Hillaire Belloc later rationalized his work in service of the government: “It is sometimes necessary to lie damnably in the interests of the nation.” War correspondent William Beach Thomas was not so successful in the battle against his own conscience: “I was thoroughly and deeply ashamed of what I had written for the good reason that it was untrue . . . [T]he vulgarity of enormous headlines and the enormity of one’s own name did not lessen the shame.”

But the Bureau’s efforts were not confined to the literary world. Film, visual art, recruitment posters; no medium for swaying the hearts and minds of the public was overlooked. By 1918, the government’s efforts to shape perception of the war—now officially centralized under a “Minister of Information,” Lord Beaverbrook—was the most finely tuned purveyor of propaganda the world had yet seen. Even foreign propaganda, like the infamous Uncle Sam that went beyond a recruitment poster to become a staple of American government iconography, was based on a British propaganda poster featuring Lord Kitchener.

Control of the economy. Control of populations. Control of territory. Control of information. World War One was a boon for all of those who wanted to consolidate control of the many in the hands of the few. This was the vision that united all those participants in the conspiracies that led to the war itself. Beyond Cecil Rhodes and his secret society, there was a broader vision of global control for the would-be rulers of society who were seeking what tyrants had lusted after since the dawn of civilization: control of the world.

World War One was merely the first salvo in this clique’s attempt to create not a reordering of this society or that economy, but a New World Order.

GROVE: What World War One allowed these globalists, these Anglophiles, these people who wanted the English-speaking union to reign over the whole world, what it allowed them to do, was militarize American thinking. And what I mean by that is there was a whistle blower called Norman Dodd. He was the head researcher for the Reese committee that looked into how nonprofit foundations were influencing American education away from freedom. And what they found was the Carnegie [Endowment] for International Peace was seeking to understand how to make America a wartime economy, how to take the state apparatus over, how to change education to get people to continually consume, how to have arms production ramp up.

And then once this happened in World War One, if you look at what happened in the 1920s, you’ve got people like Major General Smedley Butler, who is using the US military to advance corporate interest in Central and South America and doing some very caustic things to the indigenous people, insofar as these were not American policies really before the Spanish-American War in 1898. Meaning that going and taking foreign military action was not part of the diplomatic strategy of America prior to our engagement with the British Empire in the late 1800s and as it ramped up after Cecil Rhodes’s death. So what these people gained was the foothold for world government from which they could get through globalism, what they called a “New World Order.”
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The creation of this “New World Order” was no mere parlor game. It meant a complete redrawing of the map. The collapse of empires and monarchies. The transformation of the political, social, and economic life of entire swaths of the globe. Much of this change was to take place in Paris in 1919 as the victors divvied up the spoils of war. But some of it, like the fall of the Romanovs and the rise of the Bolsheviks in Russia, was to take place during the war itself.

In hindsight, the fall of the Russian Empire in the midst of the First World War seems inevitable. Unrest had been in the air since Russia’s defeat by the Japanese in 1905, and the ferocity of the fighting on the Eastern Front, coupled with the economic hardship—which hit Russia’s overcrowded, overworked urban poor particularly hard—made the country ripe for revolt. That revolt happened during the so-called “February Revolution,” when Czar Nicholas was swept from power and a provisional government installed in his place.

But that provisional government—which continued to prosecute the war at the behest of its French and British allies—was competing for control of the country with the Petrograd Soviet, a rival power structure set up by the socialists in the Russian capital. The struggle for control between the two bodies led to riots, protests, and, ultimately, battles in the street.

Russia in the spring of 1917 was a powder keg waiting to explode. And in April of that year, two matches, one called Vladimir Lenin and one called Leon Trotsky, were thrown directly into that powder keg by both sides of the Great War.

Vladimir Lenin, a Russian communist revolutionary who had been living in political exile in Switzerland, saw in the February Revolution his chance to push through a Marxist revolution in his homeland. But although for the first time in decades his return to that homeland was politically possible, the war made the journey itself an impossibility. Famously, he was able to broker a deal with the German General Staff to allow Lenin and dozens of other revolutionaries to cross through Germany on their way to Petrograd.

Germany’s reasoning in permitting the infamous “sealed train” ride of Lenin and his compatriots is, as a matter of war strategy, straightforward. If a band of revolutionaries could get back to Russia and bog down the provisional government, then the German Army fighting that government would benefit. If the revolutionaries actually came to power and took Russia out of the war altogether, so much the better.

But the curious other side of this story, the one demonstrating how Lenin’s fellow communist revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, was shepherded from New York—where he had been living well beyond the means of his income as a writer for socialist periodicals—through Canada—where he was stopped and identified as a revolutionary en route to Russia—and on to Petrograd, is altogether more incredible. And, unsurprisingly, that story is mostly avoided by historians of the First World War.

One of the scholars who did not shy away from the story was Antony Sutton, author of Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, whose meticulous research of State Department documents, Canadian government records, and other historical artifacts pieced together the details of Trotsky’s unlikely journey.

ANTONY C. SUTTON: Trotsky was in New York. He had no income. I summed his income for the year he was in New York; it was about six hundred dollars, yet he lived in an apartment, he had a chauffeured limousine, he had a refrigerator, which was very rare in those days.

He left New York and went to Canada on his way to the revolution. He had $10,000 in gold on him. He didn’t earn more than six hundred dollars in New York. He was financed out of New York, there’s no question about that. The British took him off the ship in Halifax, Canada. I got the Canadian archives; they knew who he was. They knew who Trotsky was, they knew he was going to start a revolution in Russia. Instructions from London came to put Trotsky back on the boat with his party and allow them to go forward.

So there is no question that Woodrow Wilson—who issued the passport for Trotsky—and the New York financiers—who financed Trotsky—and the British Foreign Office allowed Trotsky to perform his part in the revolution.

SOURCE: Wall Street Funded the Bolshevik Revolution – Professor Antony Sutton
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After succeeding in pushing through the Bolshevik Revolution in November of 1917, one of Trotsky’s first acts in his new position as People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs was to publish the “Secret Treaties and Understandings” that Russia had signed with France and Britain. These documents revealed the secret negotiations in which the Entente powers had agreed to carve up the colonial world after the war. The stash of documents included agreements on “The Partition of Asiatic Turkey,” creating the modern Middle East out of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire; “The Treaty With Italy,” promising conquered territory to the Italian government in exchange for their military aid in the campaign against Austria-Hungary; a treaty “Re-Drawing the Frontiers of Germany,” promising France its long-held wish of reacquiring Alsace-Lorraine and recognizing “Russia’s complete liberty in establishing her Western frontiers”; diplomatic documents relating to Japan’s own territorial aspirations; and a host of other treaties, agreements, and negotiations.

One of these agreements, the Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France, which was signed in May 1916, has grown in infamy over the decades. The agreement divided modern-day Turkey, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon among the Triple Entente and, although the revelation of the agreement caused much embarrassment for the British and the French and forced them to publicly back away from the Sykes-Picot map, served as the basis for some of the arbitrary lines on the map of the modern-day Middle East, including the border between Syria and Iraq. In recent years, ISIS has claimed that part of their mission is to “put the final nail in the coffin of the Sykes-Picot conspiracy.”

Other territorial conspiracies—like the Balfour Declaration, signed by Arthur Balfour, then acting as Foreign Secretary for the British Government, and addressed to Lord Walter Rothschild, one of the co-conspirators in Cecil Rhodes original secret society—are less well-known today. The Balfour Declaration also played an important role in shaping the modern world by announcing British support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, which was not under British mandate at the time. Even less well-known is that the document did not originate from Balfour but from Lord Rothschild himself and was sent to fellow Round Table conspirator Alfred Milner for revision before being delivered.

GROVE: So this was Lord—he’s known as Lord Walter Rothschild, and professionally he’s a zoologist. He inherits a lot of wealth in a very high status family. He pursues his art and his science and his scientific theories and research. But he has zoological museums and he’s collecting specimens. And he’s famously the Rothschild that’s riding the giant tortoise and leading him around with a piece of lettuce on his stick, and there’s a piece of lettuce hanging out of the tortoises mouth. And I’ve always used that: here’s the metaphor for the bankers, like they’re leading people around with stimulus-response. This turtle, this tortoise, can’t ask questions. It can’t question its obedience. So that’s Lord Walter Rothschild.

Why is he important? Well, he and his family are some of the early financiers and backers of Cecil Rhodes and promoters of his last will and testament. And in the question of America being brought back into the British Empire, there are newspaper articles—there is one in 1902 where Lord Rothschild is saying, you know, “This would be a good thing to have America back in the British Empire.” He’s also the Lord Rothschild to whom the Balfour Declaration is addressed.

So in 1917 there’s a letter of agreement sent from the British government—from Arthur Balfour—to Lord Rothschild. Now Lord Rothschild and Arthur Balfour, they know each other. They have a long history together and there’s a lot of Fabian socialists in this whole story of what led up to World War One. Specifically with Balfour, he’s acting as an agent of the British government, saying, “We are gonna give away this land that’s not really ours, and we’re gonna give it to you guys in your group.” The problem is the British had also promised that same land to the Arabs, so now the Balfour Declaration is going against some of the foreign policy plans that they’ve already promised to these other countries.

The other interesting thing about the Balfour Declaration is it just had its hundredth anniversary, so they last year had a site that had the whole history of the Balfour Declaration. You could see the originals from Lord Rothschild and going to Lord Milner for changes and coming through Arthur Balfour and then being sent back as an official letter from the monarchy, basically. So that’s interesting. But there’s also interviews where the current Lord Rothschild—Lord Jacob Rothschild—comments on his ancestors’ history and how they brought about the Jewish state in 1947–48 because of the Balfour Declaration.

So there’s a lot of history to unpack there, but most people, again, they’re not aware of the document let alone the very interesting history behind it let alone what that really means in the bigger story.
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Over two decades after Cecil Rhodes launched the secret society that would engineer this so-called “Great War,” the likes of Alfred Milner and Walter Rothschild were still at it, conspiring to use the war they had brought about to further their own geopolitical agenda. But by the time of the Armistice in November 1918, that group of conspirators had greatly expanded, and the scale of their agenda had grown along with it. This was no small circle of friends who had embroiled the world in the first truly global war, but a loosely knit network of overlapping interests separated by oceans and united in a shared vision for a new world order.

Milner, Rothschild, Grey, Wilson, House, Morgan, Baruch, and literally scores of others had each had their part to play in this story. Some were witting conspirators, others merely seeking to maximize the opportunities that war afforded them to reach their own political and financial ends. But to the extent that those behind the WWI conspiracy shared a vision, it was the same desire that had motivated men throughout history: the chance to reshape the world in their own image.

INTERVIEWER: Just tell us again: why?

SUTTON: Why? You won’t find this in the textbooks. Why is to bring about, I suspect, a planned, controlled world society in which you and I won’t find the freedoms to believe and think and do as we believe.

SOURCE: Wall Street Funded the Bolshevik Revolution – Professor Antony Sutton
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DOCHERTY: War is an instrument of massive change, we know that. It is an instrument of massive change in particular for those who are defeated. In a war where everyone is defeated, then it’s simply an element of massive change, and that’s a very deep, thought-provoking concept. But if everyone loses, or if everyone except “us”—depending on who the “us” are—loses, then “we” are going to be in a position to reconstruct in our image.
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RAICO: Altogether in the war, who knows, some 10 or 12 million people died. People experienced things—both in combat and the people back home understanding what was happening—that dazed them. That stunned them. You know, it’s almost as if, for a few generations, the peoples of Europe had been increased, sort of like a flock of sheep by their shepherds. OK? Through industrialization. Through the spread of liberal ideas and institutions. Through the decrease of infant mortality. The raising of standards of living. The population of Europe was enormously greater than it had ever been before. And now the time came to slaughter some part of the sheep for the purposes of the ones who were in control.

SOURCE: The World at War (Ralph Raico)
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For the ones in control, World War One had been the birth pangs of a New World Order. And now, the midwives of this monstrosity slouched towards Paris to take part in its delivery.

THE END (OF THE BEGINNING)

All over the world on November 11, 1918, people were celebrating, dancing in the streets, drinking champagne, hailing the Armistice that meant the end of the war. But at the front there was no celebration. Many soldiers believed the Armistice only a temporary measure and that the war would soon go on. As night came, the quietness, unearthly in its penetration, began to eat into their souls. The men sat around log fires, the first they had ever had at the front. They were trying to reassure themselves that there were no enemy batteries spying on them from the next hill and no German bombing planes approaching to blast them out of existence. They talked in low tones. They were nervous.

After the long months of intense strain, of keying themselves up to the daily mortal danger, of thinking always in terms of war and the enemy, the abrupt release from it all was physical and psychological agony. Some suffered a total nervous collapse. Some, of a steadier temperament, began to hope they would someday return to home and the embrace of loved ones. Some could think only of the crude little crosses that marked the graves of their comrades. Some fell into an exhausted sleep. All were bewildered by the sudden meaninglessness of their existence as soldiers – and through their teeming memories paraded that swiftly moving cavalcade of Cantigny, Soissons, St. Mihiel, the Meuse-Argonne and Sedan.

What was to come next? They did not know – and hardly cared. Their minds were numbed by the shock of peace. The past consumed their whole consciousness. The present did not exist-and the future was inconceivable.

–Colonel Thomas R. Gowenlock, 1st Division, US Army
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Little did those troops know how right they were. As the public rejoiced in the outbreak of peace after four years of the bloodiest carnage that the human race had ever endured, the very same conspirators that had brought about this nightmare were already converging in Paris for the next stage of their conspiracy. There, behind closed doors, they would begin their process of carving up the world to suit their interests, laying the groundwork and preparing the public consciousness for a new international order, setting the stage for an even more brutal conflict in the future, and bringing the battle-weary soldiers’ worst fears for the future to fruition. And all in the name of “peace.”

The French General, Ferdinand Foch, famously remarked after the Treaty of Versailles that “This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20 years.” As we now know, his pronouncement was precisely accurate.

The armistice on November 11, 1918, may have marked the end of the war, but it was not the end of the story. It was not even the beginning of the end. It was, at best, the end of the beginning.

TO BE CONTINUED. . .

 

[Apollonian]

Re: Book Review: "Hidden History..." by Docherty and MacGregor, on real origins of WWI--satanic perf

Was American Intervention in WW I Justified?​

By Paul Gottfried

Link: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/04/was_american_intervention_in_ww_i_justified.html

Burton Yale Pines’s work America’s Greatest Blunder: The Fateful Decision to Enter World War One is hardly a new book. (It came out in 2012.) Nor was it published by a leading commercial press, despite the author’s long, distinguished career as a Time magazine correspondent and later, as vice-president of Heritage Foundation. My one, brief contact with Pines was our joint appearance on a panel featured by the Philadelphia Society in 1986, in which we were pitted against each other as a critic and defender of the neoconservatives’ influence on the American conservative movement. Our exchanges were extremely acrimonious; and I never again saw the person I jousted with. Although I tried to locate Pines after reading his book, all my efforts (and those of two of my daughters who have far better computer skills) failed. I wanted to congratulate the author on producing his work, which presents a comprehensive case for why the U.S. should have stayed out of World War I. Pines also shows (if further proof is needed) that from the outset the American government took sides in the European conflict and flubbed every opportunity to make peace between the warring blocs.

Most of these arguments have been made before, from Harry Elmer Barnes in the 1920s down to the Cato Institute’s Jim Powell in 2009 and less dramatically, in the historical studies of Justus Doenecke. Indeed there are so many sound revisionist historians who have written about America’s participation in World War I that it would take several pages to list them all. But no matter how cogent their reasoning and evidence, these scholars have been generally ignored by the national press, and since the rise of the neoconservatives, in establishment Republican publications. This may well explain the fate of Pines’ study, which is forcefully written and heavily documented. His contentions that an honest attempt at mediating a peace would have been better than American military intervention on the Allied side and his obvious revulsion for Wilson’s “crusade for democracy” may have cost him the good will of his longtime allies.

Let me note, however, that I don’t fully share Pines’ view, as expressed in his title, that America’s involvement in World War I somehow rendered inevitable the Bolshevik dictatorship in Russia and Hitler’s rampage through Europe. America’s participation in the Great War cost over 115,000 lives, guaranteed an unjust treaty, and helped turn the U.S. into what Walter McDougall characterized as a “crusader state,” waging what Richard Gamble has deplored as “wars for righteousness.” Those things are bad enough without having to blame Wilson’s fateful decision (which by the way enjoyed overwhelming Republican support) for happenings to which it contributed only distantly. The Weimar Republic would have survived, despite Allied efforts to wring obscene reparations from Germany’s constitutional democracy while blaming the Germans exclusively for the war they lost. It was the effects of the Great Depression and a series of contingencies, brought about largely by the scheming of President von Hindenburg’s advisers, that brought the Nazis to power. Although the continuation of the monarchy (a possibility that Wilson raged against) might well have prevented that disaster from occurring, the Republic would have survived if other circumstances had not intervened.

The Bolsheviks took power because the Russian imperial government had plunged headlong into a war from which it couldn’t extricate itself. Unlike the Provisional Government, which seized power from the tsarist regime in March 1917, Lenin and his confreres promised to pull Russia out of a bloody, seemingly endless struggle. The Bolsheviks obtained power, by allowing the Eastern front to collapse. Although Wilson’s government tried to keep the Russian war effort alive while appealing to “democratic” fraternity against “German militarism,” by the time the U.S. joined the fray, the Russian front was coming apart and the Communists were waiting in the wings. Although many grievous sins can be ascribed to the American interventionists, the Bolshevik coup d’état may not be one of them. It was the Germans who brought Lenin from Swiss exile to the Finland Station in Petrograd, in order to push their Russian enemies out of the war.

Pines also misses an opportunity to tell the full story about the sinking of the British luxury liner Lusitania by a German submarine off the coast of Ireland on May 5, 1915. Although the German government warned American passengers to stay off this “war vessel,” the death of 128 Americans as a result of the attack allowed Wilson and his pro-British government to be more open about their pro-Allied sympathies. William Jennings Bryan, the secretary of state, resigned when it became apparent in which direction the president was going; and Bryan’s successor (and the uncle of John Foster Dulles) Robert Lansing, who was passionately in favor of the Allied side, succeeded him. Pines treats as a mystery as well as catastrophic blunder the torpedoing of the Lusitania, but then drops this information: In December, 2008 divers had “discovered a new piece of the puzzle” about why the ship “sank so quickly.” The subsequent report given in the British Daily Mail (December 19, 2008) affirmed that the vessel was carrying bullets and other ammunition that would be used to kill German soldiers. It sank so quickly because the contraband cargo on a ship registered as a British war vessel exploded as soon as a torpedo hit it. The same article also mentions that Churchill welcomed the destruction of the ship because he hoped it would draw the U.S. into the war.

Despite this omission, Pines demonstrates that conventional accounts of the German danger faced by the U.S. in 1917 have been inaccurate. Germany posed absolutely no “military or security threat” to the U.S., when Wilson dragged the U.S. into war in the spring of 1917: “The only reality at that date was the extraordinarily bloody and costly stalemate that the war had become, with the sole certainty that no nation would emerge victorious or even healthy and that all would emerge weak and wounded and disillusioned.” The Germans resorted to submarine attacks on Allied sea vessels, in order to break a British starvation blockade that took many hundreds of thousands of German civilian lives and which may have killed more German inhabitants than all the aerial bombing of the Second World War. Pines stresses that the Wilson government was utterly indifferent to the use of this outrageous weapon, which was contrary to international law (although this weapon was permissible to England, which refused to sign the Hague Convention that barred it). The starvation blockade was only lifted in March 1919, months after the fighting ended, in order to make sure that the representatives of the Weimar Republic would sign “the dictated” Peace of Versailles. (The Germans were not allowed to negotiate the terms.)

For the record, Winston Churchill as first lord of the Admiralty began his blockade in the North Sea on August 1, one day before the Germans entered the war, that is, at the same time that Britain’s ally, Russia, mobilized about a million soldiers on the German and Austrian-Polish borders. Given such circumstances, Pines finds it impossible to assign exclusive or even primary blame for the war’s outbreak to the Germans and their Austrian allies. They were, as the German government complained, “encircled” by hostile powers, namely Russia, France, and more distantly England. And it may have appeared that the Germans were suckered into taking the first shot, except for the fact that however belligerently the French had behaved before the War, they seemed genuinely surprised when German armies came crashing into their country. It was the Central Powers, never the Allies, who from 1916 on were looking to end the war with a negotiated peace and which grabbed at the proposed (insincere) American efforts to mediate. By 1917 the Germans, much to their relief, saw the Eastern Front disintegrate, but their allies, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey, were also collapsing militarily and trying desperately to exit the war.

Although Pines correctly observes that a totally triumphant Imperial Germany would not have behaved better than the side that defeated it, he also maintains the Germany would not have been in a position to dictate such a peace, even if the U.S. had not gone to war. This may be the most illuminating part of Pines’s work, showing that Germany by the end of 1917 had so badly depleted its resources in a grinding war of more than three years that it would have been exceedingly hard for their armies to achieve a one-sided peace. By the fall of 1917 Germany was fighting without effective allies against enemies with superior numbers. Whether or not the Americans joined the conflict, the British blockade would have continued to strangle Germany internally. Moreover, the Germans didn’t have the numbers on the Western front to achieve more than a possible superior bargaining position, if and when it could end the war. Of course the British had no reason to end the war, without totally crushing the German Empire, which had been their stated goal since 1914, since they always counted (with good reason) on the U.S.’s eventual entry into the war.

Pines gets one point right that few Americans writing on this subject seem to be aware of. By the beginning of November 1918 the German military command had collapsed into panic and depression. Eric Ludendorff and his staff were fitfully urging the Kaiser to abdicate. This was done to placate Woodrow Wilson’s anti-monarchist fervor and to obtain the relatively lenient peace terms offered by Wilson in his Fourteen Points, promising a “peace without annexations and reparations.” (Such a peace, Pines observes, quickly became a dead letter as the vindictiveness of the victorious side took over.) Unlike Ludendorff, the German civil government warned against dissolving Germany’s Western Front, which would place their country at the mercy of vengeful enemies. We might also note that in July 1917 a majority in the Reichstag had called for a “peace without annexations.” Needless to say, neither the German military nor the Allies found these peace terms acceptable. But there were those in the German civil government, some of whom had desired “peace without annexations, who later called for protecting the Fatherland against Allied invasion. The “stab-in-the-back” accusation used to explain Germany’s defeat was particularly congenial to some military leaders who took less heroic stands at war’s end. Finally, anger at how Germany was treated after the armistice was not peculiar to the nationalist Right. It was understandably felt, Pines explains, across the political spectrum.

Burton Yale Pines’s work America’s Greatest Blunder: The Fateful Decision to Enter World War One is hardly a new book. (It came out in 2012.) Nor was it published by a leading commercial press, despite the author’s long, distinguished career as a Time magazine correspondent and later, as vice-president of Heritage Foundation. My one, brief contact with Pines was our joint appearance on a panel featured by the Philadelphia Society in 1986, in which we were pitted against each other as a critic and defender of the neoconservatives’ influence on the American conservative movement. Our exchanges were extremely acrimonious; and I never again saw the person I jousted with. Although I tried to locate Pines after reading his book, all my efforts (and those of two of my daughters who have far better computer skills) failed. I wanted to congratulate the author on producing his work, which presents a comprehensive case for why the U.S. should have stayed out of World War I. Pines also shows (if further proof is needed) that from the outset the American government took sides in the European conflict and flubbed every opportunity to make peace between the warring blocs.

Most of these arguments have been made before, from Harry Elmer Barnes in the 1920s down to the Cato Institute’s Jim Powell in 2009 and less dramatically, in the historical studies of Justus Doenecke. Indeed there are so many sound revisionist historians who have written about America’s participation in World War I that it would take several pages to list them all. But no matter how cogent their reasoning and evidence, these scholars have been generally ignored by the national press, and since the rise of the neoconservatives, in establishment Republican publications. This may well explain the fate of Pines’ study, which is forcefully written and heavily documented. His contentions that an honest attempt at mediating a peace would have been better than American military intervention on the Allied side and his obvious revulsion for Wilson’s “crusade for democracy” may have cost him the good will of his longtime allies.

Let me note, however, that I don’t fully share Pines’ view, as expressed in his title, that America’s involvement in World War I somehow rendered inevitable the Bolshevik dictatorship in Russia and Hitler’s rampage through Europe. America’s participation in the Great War cost over 115,000 lives, guaranteed an unjust treaty, and helped turn the U.S. into what Walter McDougall characterized as a “crusader state,” waging what Richard Gamble has deplored as “wars for righteousness.” Those things are bad enough without having to blame Wilson’s fateful decision (which by the way enjoyed overwhelming Republican support) for happenings to which it contributed only distantly. The Weimar Republic would have survived, despite Allied efforts to wring obscene reparations from Germany’s constitutional democracy while blaming the Germans exclusively for the war they lost. It was the effects of the Great Depression and a series of contingencies, brought about largely by the scheming of President von Hindenburg’s advisers, that brought the Nazis to power. Although the continuation of the monarchy (a possibility that Wilson raged against) might well have prevented that disaster from occurring, the Republic would have survived if other circumstances had not intervened.

The Bolsheviks took power because the Russian imperial government had plunged headlong into a war from which it couldn’t extricate itself. Unlike the Provisional Government, which seized power from the tsarist regime in March 1917, Lenin and his confreres promised to pull Russia out of a bloody, seemingly endless struggle. The Bolsheviks obtained power, by allowing the Eastern front to collapse. Although Wilson’s government tried to keep the Russian war effort alive while appealing to “democratic” fraternity against “German militarism,” by the time the U.S. joined the fray, the Russian front was coming apart and the Communists were waiting in the wings. Although many grievous sins can be ascribed to the American interventionists, the Bolshevik coup d’état may not be one of them. It was the Germans who brought Lenin from Swiss exile to the Finland Station in Petrograd, in order to push their Russian enemies out of the war.

Pines also misses an opportunity to tell the full story about the sinking of the British luxury liner Lusitania by a German submarine off the coast of Ireland on May 5, 1915. Although the German government warned American passengers to stay off this “war vessel,” the death of 128 Americans as a result of the attack allowed Wilson and his pro-British government to be more open about their pro-Allied sympathies. William Jennings Bryan, the secretary of state, resigned when it became apparent in which direction the president was going; and Bryan’s successor (and the uncle of John Foster Dulles) Robert Lansing, who was passionately in favor of the Allied side, succeeded him. Pines treats as a mystery as well as catastrophic blunder the torpedoing of the Lusitania, but then drops this information: In December, 2008 divers had “discovered a new piece of the puzzle” about why the ship “sank so quickly.” The subsequent report given in the British Daily Mail (December 19, 2008) affirmed that the vessel was carrying bullets and other ammunition that would be used to kill German soldiers. It sank so quickly because the contraband cargo on a ship registered as a British war vessel exploded as soon as a torpedo hit it. The same article also mentions that Churchill welcomed the destruction of the ship because he hoped it would draw the U.S. into the war.

Despite this omission, Pines demonstrates that conventional accounts of the German danger faced by the U.S. in 1917 have been inaccurate. Germany posed absolutely no “military or security threat” to the U.S., when Wilson dragged the U.S. into war in the spring of 1917: “The only reality at that date was the extraordinarily bloody and costly stalemate that the war had become, with the sole certainty that no nation would emerge victorious or even healthy and that all would emerge weak and wounded and disillusioned.” The Germans resorted to submarine attacks on Allied sea vessels, in order to break a British starvation blockade that took many hundreds of thousands of German civilian lives and which may have killed more German inhabitants than all the aerial bombing of the Second World War. Pines stresses that the Wilson government was utterly indifferent to the use of this outrageous weapon, which was contrary to international law (although this weapon was permissible to England, which refused to sign the Hague Convention that barred it). The starvation blockade was only lifted in March 1919, months after the fighting ended, in order to make sure that the representatives of the Weimar Republic would sign “the dictated” Peace of Versailles. (The Germans were not allowed to negotiate the terms.)

For the record, Winston Churchill as first lord of the Admiralty began his blockade in the North Sea on August 1, one day before the Germans entered the war, that is, at the same time that Britain’s ally, Russia, mobilized about a million soldiers on the German and Austrian-Polish borders. Given such circumstances, Pines finds it impossible to assign exclusive or even primary blame for the war’s outbreak to the Germans and their Austrian allies. They were, as the German government complained, “encircled” by hostile powers, namely Russia, France, and more distantly England. And it may have appeared that the Germans were suckered into taking the first shot, except for the fact that however belligerently the French had behaved before the War, they seemed genuinely surprised when German armies came crashing into their country. It was the Central Powers, never the Allies, who from 1916 on were looking to end the war with a negotiated peace and which grabbed at the proposed (insincere) American efforts to mediate. By 1917 the Germans, much to their relief, saw the Eastern Front disintegrate, but their allies, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey, were also collapsing militarily and trying desperately to exit the war.

Although Pines correctly observes that a totally triumphant Imperial Germany would not have behaved better than the side that defeated it, he also maintains the Germany would not have been in a position to dictate such a peace, even if the U.S. had not gone to war. This may be the most illuminating part of Pines’s work, showing that Germany by the end of 1917 had so badly depleted its resources in a grinding war of more than three years that it would have been exceedingly hard for their armies to achieve a one-sided peace. By the fall of 1917 Germany was fighting without effective allies against enemies with superior numbers. Whether or not the Americans joined the conflict, the British blockade would have continued to strangle Germany internally. Moreover, the Germans didn’t have the numbers on the Western front to achieve more than a possible superior bargaining position, if and when it could end the war. Of course the British had no reason to end the war, without totally crushing the German Empire, which had been their stated goal since 1914, since they always counted (with good reason) on the U.S.’s eventual entry into the war.

Pines gets one point right that few Americans writing on this subject seem to be aware of. By the beginning of November 1918 the German military command had collapsed into panic and depression. Eric Ludendorff and his staff were fitfully urging the Kaiser to abdicate. This was done to placate Woodrow Wilson’s anti-monarchist fervor and to obtain the relatively lenient peace terms offered by Wilson in his Fourteen Points, promising a “peace without annexations and reparations.” (Such a peace, Pines observes, quickly became a dead letter as the vindictiveness of the victorious side took over.) Unlike Ludendorff, the German civil government warned against dissolving Germany’s Western Front, which would place their country at the mercy of vengeful enemies. We might also note that in July 1917 a majority in the Reichstag had called for a “peace without annexations.” Needless to say, neither the German military nor the Allies found these peace terms acceptable. But there were those in the German civil government, some of whom had desired “peace without annexations, who later called for protecting the Fatherland against Allied invasion. The “stab-in-the-back” accusation used to explain Germany’s defeat was particularly congenial to some military leaders who took less heroic stands at war’s end. Finally, anger at how Germany was treated after the armistice was not peculiar to the nationalist Right. It was understandably felt, Pines explains, across the political spectrum.


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