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.