The True Origins of World War I

When World War I was taught in elementary schools, the usual explanation given for the war was the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand by - you guessed it - a lone nut. From there all of the alliances, ententes, and shenanigans of international political intrigue snapped to attention to ineluctably embroil the European continent in yet another war. But this explanation is as deceitful as the British aristocracy who planned the war as early as the 1890s.

The archduke explanation is indeed for elementary children incapable of fathoming the complexities of foreign entanglements which undergirded the inevitability of that war. But the various alliances were not the cause of the war either - they were merely frameworks for guaranteeing it.

There was a cabal of British aristocrats whose sole raison d'etre in life was to advance the British Empire, the vast expanse of territories and colonies upon which the sun to this day does not set. Expanding the British Empire was not the only aim of this group - conquering the entire world was its true end.

These and many other details are provided by Gerry Dooherty and Jim Macgregor in their fascinating book describing the etiology of World War I. The starting point for understanding how the war was ignited is identification of the men who formed the British Deep State. Dooherty and Macgregor insist upon calling the cabal the Secret Elite consisting of a group of 5 men, but this is somewhat misleading.

The authors in fact have uncovered a deep state accountable to no one. The group which they designate the Secret Elite consisted of 5 men: Cecil Rhodes, William Stead, Lord Esher, Nathaniel Rothschild, and Alfred Milner, the latter of whom was chairman, so to speak, of this privileged and imperious group.

This cabal gathered around them like minded men, some of whom came willingly, others who were bribed and compromised such as David Lloyd George. Names like Balfour, Asquith, Haldane, Haig, Robertson, Churchill, and on and on formed the close inner orbit around this group. One name which cannot be overlooked is Edward VII who was exceedingly involved in the machinations of this deep state, snaring into his web of death France and Russia.

Another tool in their arsenal was the entire British press, none of which spoke independently of the Secret Elite, whether it was the Times, Observer, Mail, Herald or any other - they all wrote in accord with the will the Elite. The Red Scare owes its origins to these yellow journalists who printed without question the most preposterous stories about the impending invasion of Britain by the Germans.

With this massive propaganda machine, the British government was able to whip its dim-witted citizens into a frenzy of fear and hate for all perceived enemies, whether it was the Boers or the Germans.

One of the pre-requisites for conquering the world was the destruction of the Boers in South Africa since they stood in the way of the great gold and diamond wealth thought to be needed to fund covert operations around the world.

The Elite had paranoid hatred of the Germans, one reason of which was that it was seen as the only credible threat to British hegemony over the world. The fact that the Germans had no such ambitions to make war against the British was of no moment. Part of the resentment stemmed from German successes commercially and technologically. As a parvenu Continental power, Germany was despised for its threat to British domination in areas it had taken for granted for a century. Rather than keep up with the times, its industrial classes sat on laurels.

Milner's grand scheme for destroying Germany was strategic envelopment - surrounding it with enemies who would be British allies. Thus after the Boer War, Milner pursued maniacally to reconfigure alliances and foreign entanglements favorable to this scheme. Without resorting to formal treaties, he directed his government apparatchiks to create agreements or ententes with France and Russia, both of which had been traditional British enemies or combatants for control of various parts of the world.

Two key players, one Russian and the other French, who lead these realignments were Alexander Isvolsky, and Theophile Delcasse. The former was a bought and paid for political whore of the Elite, while the latter was brought to heal by appealing to his Revanchist ideas of reclaiming Alsace-Lorraine lost to the Germans in the Franco-Prussian war.

French president Raymond Poincare was another sock puppet who worked with Isvolsky and others to bribe French politicians and newspapers to beat the drums of war. Without Poincare, there may have been no World War.

Military planning for World War I began no later than 1907 which required a significant reorganization of the British army and navy necessitated by the abysmal performance of the British army in the Boer War. On top of the massive increase in military expenditures, one of the chief innovations in the reforms was the creation of the British Expeditionary Force which was an elite army of soldiers who could be dispatched to the continent in roughly 2 weeks upon mobilization.

Lying to Parliament and the British Cabinet, Milner's team began joint military planning with the French and later the Russians for the invasion of Germany. They reconnoitered in great detail the Belgian countryside to identify all terrain details. Nothing was left to chance.

Although the British nearly succeeded in 1911 in starting the war, it wasn't until 1914 that the psychopathic British government was able to incite an event which led to gunfire. That of course was the assassination of the Archduke of Serbia.

Hidden History draws upon the work of Carroll Quigley and Barbara Tuchman, both of whom, in their own ways, narrated how the plans for World War I antedated by far the events of August 14, 1914.

Reference
Gerry Dooherty, Jim Macgregor, Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War, Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh, 2013, 461pp

Copyright 2020 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.

It Wasn't About Slavery - Really

With dumbed down education, and fraudulent historians, it is easy to sell the fake story of the American Civil War as being first and foremost about slavery. While slavery was the fermentation of the zeitgeist, it was not the cup of trembling itself. We will bring you a perspective you haven't heard before. but which is quite obvious if you know one of the leading causes of the first War of Independence.

If you think about to the Revolutionary War, you may recall the tea tax, the Stamp Act, and other impositions which the British placed upon the colonists. And if you think about the events, you will notice that taxes were the burning issues prompting the colonists to rebel against King George III.

It was much the same leading to Fort Sumter when southerners clamored for a more equitable distribution and benefit of taxes, namely in the form of tariffs, a topic which had been most nettlesome for most of the 19th century leading up to the secession of southern states from the union.

Various compromises and see-saw politics managed to keep the pot from boiling over, but the Nullification Crisis of 1828-33 set the stage for the eventual fruition of the Confederacy.

In short, the agricultural and slave powered South depended upon imports, whether northern or European, for its goods, whereas the industrial North sought to protect its fledgling industries from cheap imports. Ultimately no one could craft a compromise, and with Lincoln's anti-conciliatory stance to the South, particularly along the lines of tariffs, there was no pressure escape valve left to ameliorate the frictions between the two sections of the union.

Lincoln was a Whig-Republican who was the puppet of northern industrialists who were intent upon establishing high tariffs to protect their economic interests and empire. Few people know that Lincoln's rise out of the lawyerly slums owed to his work for railroad tycoons in downstate Illinois. This work, plus his political aspirations, finally brought him to the attention of the power brokers at the Chicago Republican convention of 1860 as a compromise candidate who would do their bidding.

Lincoln did not disappoint. Using the pretext of "preserving the union," Lincoln issued a series of blustery statements which gave southerners no doubt about his sentiments on taxes and where his loyalty lay. Without any congressional support, he immediately issued a flurry of unconstitutional orders declaring war on the South, raising initially a 75,000 man army which would grow to over 1 million, and shredding constitutional liberties as though the document was, as George Bush famously said, nothing but a goddamned piece of paper.

But wasn't Lincoln elected to free the slaves? Absolutely not. Many northern states had Black Codes which forbad blacks from residing in their states, owning property, and other activities which we take for granted today.

Lincoln made it very clear during his inaugural address that he would take no actions against the "peculiar institution" of the south, and that he had no constitutional basis for doing so. Even during the war, he fired General Fremont for issuing a statewide emancipation in Missouri - but first he rescinded the order.

But everyone says that the Civil War was about slavery - you are out of your mind. Slavery was the race card par excellence of the 19th C. The abolitionists were an extremist group with not a terribly broad following. However, they made a lot of noise, and were funded by foreigners, giving them a voice outsized to their ranks.

Northerners used the religion of abolition to rouse support for their cause of "preserving the union" while southerners used the religion of slavery to rouse support for their cause of secession. In fact northerners were quite willing to let the south go for a while - until it realized the tax revenues it would lose, and the crumbling prospect of Manifest Destiny.

Yes heated editorials were written both for and against slavery, the southerners usually falling back to states' rights as the basis to repel northern interference, a position with which Lincoln largely agreed. But as Charles Adams noted in his grand book, the more dispassionate Europeans generally reviewed the conflict between north and south as one over tax policy - not about slavery.

The curious exception was John Stuart Mill, but Adams notes his uninformed understanding of the situation in America, and Mill never came to terms with the prospect of freeing 4 million people who did not have the education or standing to make their own ways in the world if freed overnight. Lincoln's solution was to ship the slaves back to Africa. But there is nothing like singing a few choruses of the Battle Hymn of the Republic to rile up a lot emotional blather and calls for war - and the slavery issue fit the bill for a get-down camp meeting full of fulsome self-righteousness.

Adams demonstrated that the critical issue, as expressed in contemporary editorials and political action, all centered around dominating and controlling the south for its tax revenues to both fund the government and to protect northern industries.

The brutality Lincoln used in demolishing the south made him a war criminal of the worst sort - the Adolf Hitler of the 19th century. In fact Hitler borrowed Lincoln's phrase, the final solution, in addressing the concerns brought about by Jews in Germany.

There is no doubt that slavery was a hot topic leading up to and during the war, but it was ultimately a dead end as an issue. The Confederate Constitution outlawed it, and required the states to pass enabling legislation to support it. The South was well on its way to ending slavery although it may have taken some generations to accomplish it.

On the other hand, the Soviet Lincoln would not wait to collect his tax revenues, and so launched the most brutal war in human history by terrorizing combatants as well as civilians - something which his owners required.

Reference

Charles Adams, When in the Course of Human Events: Arguing the Case for Southern Secession, Rowman and Littlefield, [city], 2000, 257pp

Copyright 2020 Tony Bonn. All rights reserved.