A review of Slavery, Secession, & Civil War: Views from the United Kingdom and Europe, 1856-1865 (Scarecrow Press, 2007) by Charles Adams.
At long last Charles Adams’s new book, Slavery, Secession, & Civil War: Views from the United Kingdom and Europe, 1856-1865, has been published. I’ve been anxiously waiting for this book for about five years. The book contains about 500 pages of excerpts from European (mostly British) magazines and journals on the events leading up to the war, the war itself, and the nature of the Lincoln regime. This is a most valuable effort since the mainstream Northern press was censored during the war. Foreign writers, however, “were not arrested and imprisoned,” as they were in the North, writes Adams. “They were not silenced by armed soldiers, mobs, or censorship of the mails,” and “their editors were not hauled off to prison,” to mention just a few of the more totalitarian acts of the Lincoln regime. Even today, writes Adams, the “gatekeepers” of “Civil War” history are “still making war on the South” by distorting history.
Although it is a very long book, I could not put it down. Nineteenth-century English commentators on the war were remarkably astute, well informed, and articulate in expressing their views—so astute as to make your typical mainstream “Lincoln scholar” of today sound like an uneducated boob. There were supporters of both North and South in the European press, although many Northern supporters switched sides once they began observing the behavior of Dishonest Abe and his regime. They all opposed slavery very strongly, but those who supported the Southern cause believed that the North’s invasion of the Southern states had nothing to do with freeing the slaves.
During the 1856-1860 period, writes Adams, quite a few British editors “saw the separation of the North and South as a good thing,” and believed that “slavery had no significant part in the conflict.” For example, Chamber’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts, one of the “workingman’s journals,” wrote on March 21, 1857, that a major source of conflict was that Northern business interests wanted the South to “consent to the high protective tariff,” and if they did, “anti-slavery agitation would stop.” “Antislavery agitation” meant opposition to the extension of slavery, not Southern slavery. Pretending to want to “check the progress of slavery” in this way “has been only a disguise under which to advance the interests of the [Republican] party.”
This publication also noted that the black population of the North was generally treated as inhuman. “In scarcely any of the large cities of the North did they [blacks] escape violence” at the hand of whites. It was hardly likely, therefore, that Northern whites would fight a war and die by the hundreds of thousands purely for the benefit of black strangers, as has been taught to generations of American school children.
The Edinburgh Review was a prominent British journal that observed in 1858 that “abolition was not a policy of the North,” and that secession would actually spell the end of slavery because it would no longer be propped up by the federal government’s Fugitive Slave Act. This view was echoed by other high-quality British publications such as Fraser’s Magazine and The Saturday Review, among others. Thus, the most prominent British journals agreed on the eve of the War with a statement that Alexander Stephens would make five or six years later, that slavery was actually “more secure” in the union than out of it.
A British publication called The Quarterly Review ran a long article in April 1857 on the New York State Disunion Convention. The stridently pro-North Westminster Review, founded by philosophers James Mill (father of John Stuart Mill) and Jeremy Bentham, also wrote that “Massachusetts was, we believe, the first State which organized Disunion Associations.”
Who has ever run across that fact in an American history book?! The magazine also wrote of a Massachusetts secession convention that was held around the same time in the town of Worcester.
Perhaps the most influential pro-South journal in England was All the Year Round, edited by Charles Dickens. Writing on “The American Disunion” on September 6,1861, Dickens recognized that the opposition to slavery extension in the territories was not based on moral, but political and economic grounds. It was “a question of political power between North and South” because of the Three-Fifths Clause of the Constitution, which added three persons to a state’s population count for every five slaves. This inflated the South’s representation in Congress, which in turn allowed the South to effectively oppose the North’s corporatist or mercantilist agenda of high tariffs, corporate welfare, and a government-ran central bank.
The Morrill Tariff was the main cause of the war as Dickens saw it. “Union means so many millions a year lost to the South [due to high protective tariffs on manufactured goods]; secession means the loss of the same millions to the North. The love of money is the root of this as of many, many other evils.” “The quarrel between the North and South,” Charles Dickens believed, “is … solely a fiscal quarrel.” (Dickens entertainingly wrote of how Lincoln “came across as a bit of a country bumpkin” to those Europeans who had met him.)
The Quarterly Review agreed wholeheartedly with Dickens, calling the protectionist tariff a “revolting tribute” paid to Northern businessmen by Southerners who “had been groaning for years under the crashing bondage of Northern protectionists.” This publication also noted that the Republican Party platform of 1860 supported the “inviolate rights of the states,” especially “the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions” (i.e., slavery); that Lincoln strongly supported his party’s platform; and that he also supported the notorious Corwin Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which would have enshrined slavery in the Constitution explicitly. (The Amendment passed the House and Senate before Lincoln’s inauguration, with exclusively Northern votes.) These are all facts that few, if any, American school students are ever made aware of but which were well known all around the world in the 1860s.
The Athenaeum, a London journal that published such famous authors as T.S. Eliot, George Santayana, and Thomas Hardy, echoed Dickens’s views regarding the economic causes of the war, and excoriated Lincoln as a dictator and a tyrant. “President Lincoln … suspended the writ of habeas corpus. He has muzzled the press and abridged the freedom of speech…. He has, without authority of law and against the Constitution … plunged the country into war, murdered … citizens, burned … houses…. He has seized unoffending citizens [of the North], and, … has imprisoned them in loathsome dungeons.” Moreover, “under the tyrant’s plea, he is proceeding to do a great many acts and things which would more become the savage and the brute.”
Blackwood’s Magazine, which is still being published, argued in 1861 that “slavery had no significant part in the conflict.” The union, through the Fugitive Slave Act, protected slavery, said Blackwood’s, repeating the view of other British journals that secession would actually lead to the demise of slavery by nullifying that federal law. The tariff laws, on the other hand, were “ruinous to the South.” They were “the chief complaint of the South,” and “have been for thirty years oppressive and unjust.” As for Lincoln, “He may possibly be a good attorney,” the magazine wrote, “though we should never have selected him as a legal adviser.”
By 1862, Blackwood’s was denouncing the Lincoln regime as “[M]onstrous, reckless, devilish.” ‘The North seeks to make the South a desert—a wilderness of bloodshed and misery,” and all for money. “The North would league itself with Beelzebub, and seek to make a hell of half the continent.” Lincoln had “inaugurated dictatorship” and “abolished liberty” in the North. ‘Taxes had been imposed, debt incurred, and paper money issued, to the fullest amount possible.” All of this is what today’s court historians call “a new birth of freedom.”
The events of the War proved to Blackwood’s that the “Yankees” of New England “do not care a straw for the Constitution,” for “they have sacrificed both legality and liberty long ago.” Nor did the Yankees “care a cent for the abolition of slavery on the day when the South inaugurated the war by the attack on Fort Sumter.” “With Mr. Lincoln at their head,” they “would have rejoiced exceedingly if the whole race could be transported to their native Africa.”
The prestigious Economist magazine, which is still one of the preeminent publications in the world, editorialized in 1861 that what motivated the North was its obsession for empire. “They have dreamed of omnipotence and immortality; and they feel, with angry disappointment and bitter humiliation, that such a disruption as now seems almost consummated is a deplorable end to all these ambitious hopes and all this … self-glorification.” The magazine published both pro-North and pro-South articles during the course of the war, and its analysis was always very astute.
Fraser’s Magazine, a high-quality publication that won high praise from Charles Dickens, editorialized that “it appears impossible to sympathize with the North” because the North was motivated not by humanitarianism or constitutionalism, but “jealousy, fanaticism, and wounded national vanity.”
By 1865, some British journals, such as MacMillan’s magazine, were expressing fears that the U.S. government, having destroyed the Confederacy, would turn on England next. England had traded with the Confederates, and after the war the Republican Party regime did arrogantly demand “reparations” from Great Britain for this “sin.” Thus, MacMillan’s asked, “Will [the U.S. government] be tempted to employ these [military] forces in an attack upon any foreign country?—and if so, will England be the country attacked?”
Quite a few British publications understood the War as the final showdown between the true federalists (Jeffersonian states’ rights advocates) and the nationalists that animated the American government from its founding. The North British Review, for example, wrote in May of 1861 that “The whole South stand upon State rights, or a nearly sovereign exercise of power; and a majority in the North sustains Federalism, or the delegation of a portion of that power to the national Government.”
Summing up American events in 1862, the Review wrote that the essence of the War was that “twenty million say to the other ten millions, ‘You shall continue to live under a government you detest, you shall submit to laws you wish to change, you shall obey rulers you repudiate and abjure.’” Only a “‘nisi riius’ [trial] lawyer could deny the right of a state to secede,” the magazine wrote, in what appears to have been a slap at Dishonest Abe the old railroad industry’ trial lawyer.
The Review had nothing but seething contempt for the Lincoln regime. “Mr. Seward has been one of the most signal failures ever known,” it wrote in 1862. And “Mr. Stanton has made up for want of real vigour and talent, by a lawless, fitful, and ineffective violation of the civil rights of every [Northern] citizen whom he fancied he could oppress with impunity.” Furthermore, “looking over all the … chief Federal authorities … never was a country so miserably served.”
Nor was the Review fooled by the Emancipation Proclamation. It clearly understood that by applying only to “rebel territory,” the Proclamation freed no one. It was denounced as “perhaps the most grotesquely illogical and inconsistent decree ever issued by a government.” It catalogued numerous reasons why it believed the Proclamation was “a blunder and a crime.” The real cause of the War, the Review believed, was so that “a mighty conception of universal empire may be realized.”
The humorous journal Punch published hundreds of editorial cartoons related to the War. One particularly eye-catching one reproduced by Adams is entitled “The Federal Phoenix,” published in December of 1864. A giant Lincoln head is the head of a “phoenix,” a mythical bird of ancient Egypt which, according to Adams’s account, “was consumed voluntarily by fire and rose again from its own ashes to a youthful life.”
There is a blazing fire in the cartoon, and the crumbling logs in the fire represent the old Jeffersonian republic of the founders that was facing imminent destruction. Written on the logs are “low tariff and world trade”; “United States Constitution”; “states’ rights”; “habeas corpus”; and “free press.”
The Quarterly Review went so far as to say that “there was little difference … between the government of Mr. Lincoln and the Government of Napoleon III.” The reason given for this harsh condemnation was that in the Northern states “scarcely any dared to oppose” the party in power for fear of “a charge of treason”; there has been “the manipulation of elections”; “pitiless conscription”; and “disregard of personal liberty” (in the North, mind you). Moreover, “There is no Parliamentary authority whatever for what has been done. It has been done simply on Mr. Lincoln’s fiat.” He declared himself dictator, in other words, all in the name of promoting “freedom.”
This magazine was just getting started: “Mr. Lincoln is a poor plagiarist in the art of tyranny. There is nothing striking or original in his proceedings; his plan is just like that of any Old-world despot, to crush out adverse opinion by sheer force.” These awful precedents created a situation whereby “it is now the undisputed law of the United States that a President may suspend civil liberty whenever and for as long as he thinks fit.” Wilson, FDR, and George W. Bush, among others, have all proven this prediction to be prescient.
The prestigious Times (of London) turned against the North as the war proceeded, editorializing that the North was fighting for “nothing more than the old idea of Empire and national grandeur expressed in more specious language.” It harshly condemned the Republican Party for putting “empire above liberty” and having “resorted to political oppression and war rather than suffer any abatement of national power.”
Adams includes a few excerpts from French, Spanish, and Italian publications as well, but they seem quite feeble compared to the extraordinarily well-informed and incredibly well-written British essayists that he surveys.
The most striking thing to me about this collection of essays is how so many of them supported the Southern cause simply because the writers were aware of many of the essential facts about Lincoln, his regime, and the War—facts that most Americans seem completely unaware of. They all knew about his promise of everlasting support for Southern slavery, his eagerness to codify it in the Constitution, his dictatorial destruction of personal liberty in the North, and his waging of a barbaric war on the civilians of the South. They also knew that the Republican Party was the party of political plunder, and that it fully intended to plunder the South economically with protectionist tariffs and corporate welfare funded by a central bank, among other schemes.
These and many other facts have been swept under the rug by generations of American “gatekeepers” in academe and elsewhere. Most Americans today are so ignorant of this period of history that all they know about it is a few of Dishonest Abe’s political slogans and a little nineteenth century Republican Party propaganda. This propaganda is repeated over and over and over again in the public schools, by all the “Lincoln scholars,” and by (mostly) contemporary Republican Party politicians and their media mouthpieces.
The Lincoln Myth is the ideological cornerstone of the American empire and its sole claim to moral authority. Thanks to Charles Adams, we now know that during Lincoln’s time there were a great many highly educated and articulate Europeans who saw this spectacular bundle of lies for what it was.
This article was originally published in the Volume 26, Number 3 issue of Southern Partisan magazine.
December 2, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Book Review, Civil Liberties, Timeless or most popular | UK, United States |
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One of the tell-tale signs that an action or actions are being covered up is that the explanations given for them keep shifting — basically because the ones previously given do not comport with reality. Yet with each new shift, more reality contortions are seen and more questions raised. Objective reality is a kicker, isn’t it?
This is basically what the BBC Panorama programme — Salisbury Nerve Agent Attack: the Inside Story — did. It’s account of Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey is a case in point. Let me once again state that I do not know what Mr Bailey’s role was in the events of 4th March. What I do know with absolute certainty, however, is that the account he gave on the Panorama programme was completely at odds with many previous accounts we have heard from both the media and public officials of high rank. For instance:
- The British Prime Minister, Theresa May, stated a few days after the incident that, “In particular, my thoughts are with DS Nick Bailey, one of the first responders, who remains in a serious condition in hospital.” And the then Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, stated of Mr Bailey that he was “one of the first responders on Sunday, acting selflessly to help others.” It’s all very odd, though, since according to Mr Bailey not only was he not a first responder, he wasn’t even at the bench at the same time that the Skripals were said to be there.
- According to media reports drawing on testimony from Mr Skripal’s neighbours, police arrived at 47 Christie Miller Road at 5pm on 4th March. I assume that they entered the property, or at least tried, as I cannot imagine they just turned up to admire the curtains. Yet according to the Panorama programme, Mr Bailey was the first official to attempt to enter the house, and this was around midnight.
Now I know that we live in days when subjective truth is trying very hard to knock objective truth off its perch, but this won’t do. A=A and A will never = non-A. If Mr Bailey was a hero first responder at the bench when the Skripals were there — as the Prime Minister, the Home Secretary and other officials claimed — then he cannot not have been at the bench when the Skripals were there, can he? His being there as a first responder, and his not being there as a first responder cannot both be true, can they? Like I say, objective reality really is a kicker, and it’s clear that someone’s being economical with the actualité. And yet no one on that programme had the honour to explain why we’d been told something, and were now being told something completely incompatible.
But I want to focus on another attempt at reality bending, which the programme engaged in, and in so doing unwittingly put to rest the cornerstone of the whole Metropolitan Police and Government narrative of how the poisoning occurred. I am referring to the claim that the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal occurred at the door handle of his house. As far as I am concerned, thanks to the Panorama programme that explanation is now dead, kaput, expired, gone West, shuffled off its mortal coil, and is now pushing up the daisies to join the choir invisible. As dead as a doornail handle is an expression I might find myself using from this time forth.
How so?
Well, first let me preface my comments by stating that the explanation was already on a life support machine before the BBC came anywhere near it. Even before the programme, there were a number of absurdly improbable things that you needed to believe to accept this explanation, including:
- That two highly trained GU assassins would walk in broad daylight down a cul-de-sac, to place the world’s most deadly chemical on the handle of a door, before going into town to do some window shopping.
- That the house, bought for Mr Skripal by MI6, for whom he was still working, did not have CCTV installed around the front door.
- That Sergei and Yulia Skripal were so unaffected after being contaminated by the world’s deadliest nerve agent that they went into town for a meal and a drink.
- That they managed to contaminate a table in Zizzis to such an extent that it had to be burned, yet strangely enough they apparently didn’t contaminate other items or people they came into contact with prior to this, such as the door handle of the restaurant, the door handle of The Mill pub, and — most crucially — the three boys who fed ducks with them, despite reports that one of those boys actually took a piece of the bread from Mr Skripal’s hand and ate it.
- That both Sergei and Yulia Skripal somehow managed to touch the outside door handle upon leaving the house — a thing so ridiculous that even the makers of the Panorama programme couldn’t bring themselves to show it in their reconstruction, instead just showing the actor playing Mr Skirpal touching it.
- That it took investigators more than two weeks to point to the door handle as the location of the poisoning, even though Mr Bailey had visited the house, which therefore made it one of only two places where both he and the Skripals had been, and so one of only two locations where the source of the poison could have been.
- That the Government very conveniently discovered an FSB manual, allegedly describing how nerve agent could be applied to a door handle, just prior to the door handle being claimed as the location of the poisoning.
Add to this that Panorama confirmed the Skripals were at home at the time of the alleged attack, with Mr Skripal’s car in the driveway, and I think it would take a brave or a foolish man — take your pick — to believe that the Skripals were poisoned at their door handle.
But there was much more than this. The programme decided to go overboard on certain claims about the substance used, only to then find itself with the impossible task of trying to explain why it is that we didn’t see what we should have seen if these claims are true. Here, for instance, are five claims about the toxicity of the substance in question — “Novichok” — that the programme made known to its viewers:
“It’s very unique in its ability to poison individuals at quite low concentrations.” – Porton Down Professor Tim speaking about Novichok.
“The Russians called it Novichok. Thought to be 10X more toxic than any nerve agent created before or since.” – Jane Corbin.
“To kill a person, you need only 1mg. To be sure, 2mg.” – Vil Mirzyanov, who worked on the Foliant project.
“The Russians weaponised Novichok for the battlefield. The tiniest dose can be fatal.”– Jane Corbin.
“It’s difficult to say, you know, possibly into the thousands.” – Deputy Assistant Commissioner Dean Haydon when asked how many people could have been killed by the substance in the bottle.
Got that? The takeway points that the BBC wanted you to know are:
- “Novichok” is extraordinarily deadly.
- A tiny dose of just 2mg is enough to produce certain death in a person.
- The two suspects had enough of the substance in the bottle to kill 1,000s of people.
So let’s see how these claims stack up against what actually happened.
A crucial question to ask is how much “Novichok” was sprayed on the door handle? Since we don’t know this for certain, we are going to have to come up with a reasonable estimate, based on two things: firstly, we must give an estimate of how many miligrams of “Novichok” there is in a millilitre, and secondly how much would have been sprayed on the door handle.
On that first point, it is of course impossible to say exactly, without knowing the precise properties of the substance. However, most nerve agents have a liquid density of just over 1,000 kg/m3 (Tabun = 1,080 kg/m3; Sarin = 1,100 kg/m3; Soman = 1,020 kg/m3 ; VX = 1,008 kg/m3 (see here for details)), and so assuming that “Novichok” is somewhere in this range, and taking 1,000 kg/m3 as a conservative estimate, this would mean that in a 5.5ml bottle, there might have been as much as 5,500mg. According to Vil Mirzyanov, this is enough to potentially kill between 2,750 and 5,500 people.
As I say, these are estimates, but it does comport with Deputy Assistant Commissioner Haydon’s claim of there being enough of the substance in the bottle to kill “into the thousands”.
Next up is the question of how much “Novichok” would have been sprayed on the door handle of Mr Skripal’s house? Atomisers generally tend to spray between about 1/10th and 1/15th of a millilitre with every spray. And so even if we assume that the door handle was sprayed just once, if 1ml of the substance is approximately 1,000mg, this would mean that somewhere between 67-100mg would have been sprayed onto the door handle. Enough to kill getting on for 100 people, according to the Panorama programme.
I realise that the calculations I have given are not exact, but actually they don’t need to be. The claim that the Novichok in the bottle could have killed thousands, which was made by the Deputy Assistant Commissioner of The Met, along with the claim made by Mr Miryzanov that 2mg is enough to lead to the certain death of a person, are enough to know that the amount sprayed on the door handle would have been enough to kill dozens of people, and into the hundreds if multiple sprays were used.
But of course it didn’t. So how did the programme attempt to get around this glaring anomaly? Cue Mr Mirzyanov once again:
“Maybe the dose was not high enough. Salisbury was rainy and muggy. Novichok breaks down in damp conditions, reducing its toxicity. It’s the Achilles Heel of Novichok.”
So this is the BBC explanation — and I might add the official explanation since the programme was clearly made with the approval of the Metropolitan Police — for why this most deadly of substances did not kill the Skripals:
- Maybe the dose wasn’t high enough
- Novichok loses its toxicity in damp conditions.
Okay, let’s rip this folly to pieces once and for all.
On the first point, the idea that the dose was too low is impossible. The programme had Mr Mirzyanov assuring us that just 2mg was enough to cause certain death. But of course the amount sprayed on the handle would have been many times higher than this.
And it cannot be claimed that maybe it dripped off onto the doormat. Firstly, part of the Government’s case rests upon the Russians apparently testing “Novichok” on door handles. Well, if it was prone to drip off, do you think they wouldn’t have somehow realised this and eliminated it as a possible method? But much more crucially, Mr Skripal allegedly had enough of the substance on his hand to contaminate so many places in the city that they had to be cordoned off and closed for months. No, the “Maybe the dose wasn’t high enough” claim is utter nonsense, especially coming from Mr Mirzyanov who had already claimed that 2mg of the substance would lead to certain death.
What of that second explanation, that the “Novichok” may have lost its toxicity? Unfortunately for the weavers of the door handle yarn, there are a number of impossibly huge problems with this:
Firstly, the official claim only allows for the “Novichok” to be on the door handle between 12:10pm and 13:30pm – that is, 80 minutes maximum before the alleged contamination.
Secondly, during that time, there was no rain or snow — in fact it was fairly sunny — and so the only thing that the substance would have come into contact with was the air.
Thirdly, given that this substance, which according to the programme was developed for battlefield use, was in contact with nothing more than air for just 80 minutes, can any rational person believe that it was possible in this very short time for oxidation and hydrolysis to occur to such an extent that its toxicity went from having the potential to kill in the tens or even hundreds to killing nobody?
Fourthly, even if there had been some degradation by exposure to 80 minutes in the air(which is absurd), there would still be many milligrams of the substance remaining to kill people.
Fifthly, however according to a statement from the OPCW on 4th May no such degradation took place:
“The samples collected by the OPCW Technical Assistance Visit team concluded that the chemical substance found was of high purity, persistent and resistant to weather conditions.”
Here’s the crux of this matter: The BBC went out of its way to tell us that the substance allegedly sprayed on the door handle of Mr Skripal’s house was so deadly that it:
a) Only needed 1-2mg to kill people and that
b) There was enough in the bottle to kill thousands.
Yet, because it killed neither Sergei nor Yulia Skripal, who allegedly touched it less than an hour-and-a-half after it was applied, the programme then went out of its way to tell us that the reason for this was either:
a) The dose was too low or
b) The substance lost its toxicity due to the damp conditions
But both these explanations are not just highly improbable — they are impossible.
The dose could not have been too low, since the atomiser would clearly have sprayed far more than the 2mg apparently needed to be certain of killing a person. This is also attested by how much Mr Skripal apparently contaminated various places in Salisbury.
The substance could not have lost its toxicity in just 80 minutes in clement weather conditions, such that instead of certainly killing a person with a dose of just 1-2mg, it killed none of those who became contaminated by it. This is also attested by the OPCW claim that more than two weeks later they found a substance of “high purity” and “resistant to weather conditions”, which means that the BBC and The Met are essentially asking us to believe that the substance lost its toxicity in 80 minutes, only to regain it two weeks later.
And so having overreached themselves with the claims of the potency of the substance sprayed on the door handle, and the minuscule amount needed to kill a person, the BBC and The Met have come up with two explanations as to why these claims don’t comport with what actually happened. And yet both of these explanations are utterly impossible, and frankly utter nonsense. As I said at the start, objective reality really is a kicker, isn’t it?
I have remarked many times during these pieces that I am not indulging in some conspiracy theory here. All I have done above is taken the words and claims of certain officials, and analysed them against their own statements, or those made by other officials. And the result is that the idea that the Skripals were poisoned at the door handle of 47 Christie Miller Road by a substance called “Novichok”, which apparently only needs 1-2mg to kill one person, is shown to be an absolute impossibility. As an idea, it is done for, passed on, expired, bitten the dust and bought the farm. As dead as a door handle.
December 1, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Deception, False Flag Terrorism | BBC, UK |
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Watch this video on BitChute / DTube / YouTube or Download the MP3 AUDIO or MP4 VIDEO
PART THREE – A NEW WORLD ORDER
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.
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 kilometer 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 I 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 [I] 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
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 the 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, their grandsons, whose lives were ruined forever by war.
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 were 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.
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.
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 … the 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 re-ordering 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.”
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 swathes 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, over-worked 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
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 and a very high status family. He pursues his art and his science and his scientific theories and research and he has zoological museums and he’s collecting specimens. And he’s famously the Rothschild that’s riding the 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 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.
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
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.
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. 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)
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 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
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. . .
November 30, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Video | France, UK, United States, WWI |
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The Anglophone Israel Lobby benefits from its ability to mold the media narrative while at the same time using financial incentives to corrupt the political class. For those who do not succumb to the corruption, there is always the option of direct pressure, which in the United States and Britain consists of targeted interference in the political system to remove critics either through promotion of scandal or by supporting well-funded alternative candidates in the following election. In the United States, this has led to the removal of a number of congressmen who had dared to criticize the Jewish state, terrifying the remainder into silence. All of this goes on with little or no debate in the media or in congress itself.
There are signs, however, that the general tolerance of Israeli misbehavior might be ending. The election of at least three Democratic Congresswomen Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who might be willing to discuss Israel in something less than worshipful ways is a minuscule shift in the alignment of the Democratic party, where Jewish money dominates, but it reflects the views of the party’s grass roots where a recent poll demonstrates that surveyed Democrats favor Israel over Palestine by a margin of only 2%, twenty-seven per cent versus twenty-five per cent with the remainder of responders favoring neither side.
Much more significant is last week’s announcement by Senator Rand Paul that he intends to place a “hold” on the current package of $38 billion in military aid to Israel, which means he can filibuster the issue in the Senate to delay its passage. Paul, who, like his father, is a skeptic regarding foreign aid in general, did not cite any specific issues connected to the aid package, but critics have long noted that Israel is in fact ineligible for any foreign aid from the United States because it has an undeclared nuclear arsenal consisting of at least 200 weapons. For that reason, providing aid to Israel is illegal under the Symington Amendment of 1961 as well as due to the fact that Tel Aviv has rejected signing the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT.
Paul’s action is extremely courageous as he is the first Senator since William Fulbright to dare to say anything negative about the Jewish state. Fulbright was, of course, punished by the Israel Lobby, which committed major resources to defeating him when he next came up for reelection. Another U.S. Senator Charles Percy was so bold as to maintain that Palestinian Arabs might actually have “rights” also found himself confronted by an extremely well-funded opponent who defeated him for reelection, so Paul’s action is far from risk free. In fact, the Israel Lobby is already reacting hysterically to the “hold,” as is the Israeli government, and one can be sure that all their massive resources will be used to punish the senator.
Another area where one might have expected more pushback from Americans is the lack of any serious resistance from Christian groups to the process whereby the conservative Likud dominated Netanyahu government is seeking to turn Israel into a purely Jewish state. That too is changing due to Israeli behavior. Even though Israel boasts that it provides a safe haven for Christians to practice their religion, reports occasionally surface suggesting something quite different. Jewish Zealots spit on Christian clergy and curse them out in the streets without any fear of repercussions. Some clergy have been harassed and even assaulted by Jewish extremists. Churches and religious foundations are frequently vandalized or defaced with obscene graffiti and the Israeli government has also confiscated or destroyed church property.
America’s Presbyterian Church has led the charge in criticizing Israeli brutality. At its June General Assembly it passed a resolution condemning Israeli apartheid. Its Office of Public Witness has been in the forefront in calling on Israel to cease and desist. An Action Alert issued this summer entitled “Tell Congress: 70 years of suffering is enough! Stop the killing, hold Israel accountable, and support human rights for all” denounced the slaughter of unarmed Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza by the Israeli Army.
Now it is the turn of the Quakers in Britain, who have banned any investment by the church in companies that exploit the “military occupation of Palestinian territories by the Israeli government.”, prompting a furious response from Jewish leaders. It is the first British Church to do so and leaders of the group have compared their action to taking steps against apartheid and the slave trade.
It is certainly a turnabout to see anyone taking on Israel and its all too often invincible lobby. What is significant is that Christian churches and even some congressmen have begun to speak out in spite of the knowledge that immense Jewish power in the United States and Britain will make them pay a price for doing so. May the realization that Israel’s interference in friendly countries damages their democracy finally reach a point where some people in Congress, the media and even in the White House will begin to listen.
November 29, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Timeless or most popular | Israel, Rand Paul, UK, United States, Zionism |
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On Tuesday, CNN published a survey of anti-Semitism in Europe. The poll revealed that “more than a quarter of Europeans surveyed believe Jews have too much influence in business and finance. One in five say they have too much influence in media and politics. In some countries the numbers are often higher: 42% of Hungarians think Jews have too much influence in finance and business across the world.”
In my recent book, Being in Time, I argue that Jewish power is the power to silence opposition to Jewish Power. CNN’s poll supports my thesis. That some Jews enjoy significant influence in politics, culture and finance is not a matter of ‘opinion,’ it is an established fact as reports in the Jewish and mainstream media reveal on a daily basis. Jewish prominence in certain areas is a frequent boast of renowned Jews such as Alan Dershowitz. Yet only one of five Europeans is brave enough to admit that in the open.
CNN’s poll suggests that 80% of those who dwell in Europe are either lying, blind or, most likely, terrified of the truth. They have good reason to be scared. They have seen the onslaught of revenge from Jewish institutions against artists, writers, comedians, politicians, activists and academics including: Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, Richard Falk, Alison Weir, Norman Finkelstein, David Icke, Jeremy Corbyn and yours truly. Telling the truth about Israel, Zionism or expressing any form of criticism of Jewish politics subjects the teller to an immediate and colossal smear campaign. The CNN poll suggests that 80% of Europeans seem to have accepted the present tyrannical and authoritarian conditions. But this isn’t exactly a stable situation. It is only a question of time before the genie pops out of the bottle as has happened far too many times in the past.
By now it has become clear that the more Jewish institutions ‘fight’ anti-Semitism, the more the opposition is directed against Jewish politics and Israeli brutality. The same applies to the holocaust; the caravans of Jewish youngsters visiting Poland didn’t kill anti-Semitism nor did it revive the memory of the holocaust. In Poland, according to the CNN poll, “50% of people think that Jews use the Holocaust to advance their position.”
What can Jews do about anti-Semitism? Simple– look in the mirror– introspect.
If Jews want to be loved or simply just ignored, then:(1) maybe The European Jewish Congress should seriously consider the possible consequences of its ‘demand’ that “the Bible and the Koran use ‘trigger warnings’ to highlight anti-Semitic passages,” (2) The French Jewish organisations might want to reconsider their relentless campaign to decimate the artistic career of France’s most popular comedian, or (3) It might not be a great idea for Britain’s Jewish institutions to interfere with British national politics by smearing Britain’s number one anti racist.
If Jews want to rid the world of antisemitism, Jewish bodies should carefully self reflect and take responsibility for their own actions instead of blaming the Goyim…
November 29, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance | France, UK, Zionism |
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While the world attention is riveted to the situation in the Azov Sea and the relationship between Russia and Ukraine, US forces are getting prepared for a large-scale military operation in Syria.
US President Donald Trump announced this past March that the military personnel would be leaving Syria “very soon.” Looks like he has changed his mind since then. The five-ship strong Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group has recently entered the Mediterranean Sea. American, British, French and Israeli aircraft are conducting round the clock flights across Syria’s airspace under the pretext of holding an exercise. The US-led anti-ISIS coalition aircraft are constantly on patrol. French Dupuy de Lome intelligence gathering vessel is also there, coordinating its activities with the American ships.
The US Army has rushed another 500 Marines to the Al Tanf base straddling the borders of Syria, Jordan and Iraq. 1,700 members of the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), which operates under US command, have also moved to reinforce the garrison. There are over a dozen US military locations in northeastern Syria, including at least four air strips stretched from Manbij in the vicinity of the Turkish border to Al-Hasakeh, the hub of the pro-American Kurds-dominated SDF forces located in northern Syria.
US soldiers started to patrol the Syrian-Turkish border earlier this month. The move is seen as offering a kind of protection to Kurdish forces from Turkey, probably because their support would be crucial if shooting starts. Russia warned the US twice in September about possible consequences in case Syria starts an operation to free its territory from foreign troops but the warning fell on deaf ears.
According to the Washington Post, the US is preparing to strike Iran in Syria under the pretext of being a target of unprovoked attack.
There are other signs an operation is a possibility. “Russia has been permissive, in consultation with the Israelis, about Israeli strikes against Iranian targets inside Syria. We certainly hope that that permissive approach will continue,” James Jeffrey, Washington’s special representative to Syria said in early November. Back then, the ambassador noted that forcing Iran to leave Syria was an objective of Trump’s economic pressure campaign against the Islamic Republic. With the Islamic State reduced to insignificance and holding no territory to control, it would be a large order to find a legal pretext for a military action but the administration appears to be unfazed. With no threat to national security or strategic interests to justify getting embroiled in a conflict, it is adamant to stay.
The Arab nations, which are candidates for the “Arab NATO” membership, held a joint large-scale military exercise dubbed Arab Shield 1. It ended on Nov.16. The training event was seen as a preparation for a joint military operation. Tamer al-Shahawi, a member of the parliamentary National Defense and Security Committee and a former Egyptian military intelligence officer, said “There is close cooperation between the Gulf states, Egypt and Israel against Tehran. Arab countries are trying to benefit from any possible support against the Iranian influence.”
To increase the effect of sanctions, Iran should be separated from the Mediterranean Sea. The route across Iraq, Syria and Iran-friendly Lebanon should be made inaccessible. If Israel decides to strike what it calls Iranian targets, it would badly need US backing. Another reason to stay in Syria is making sure the nation would be divided in case the reconciliation and restoration process starts to gain momentum. Separating the SDF-controlled areas from the rest of the country is the only way to achieve it. Rebuilding rebel forces and controlling a vast chunk of land is the way to deny Syrian President Assad the international legitimacy he so desperately strives for. The ongoing American presence at Tanf and elsewhere demonstrates Washington has no intention to leave the Middle East as President Trump promised it would do. Neither would it pull out from Syria until a security situation in the region meets its goals.
The concentration of US military in the region is a worrisome sign. This huge force has gathered for something much more serious than just training. With the events in Europe grabbing public attention, the situation creep in Syria is staying under the radar. It shouldn’t be. Something is definitely being cooked up.
November 29, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Illegal Occupation, Militarism, Wars for Israel | France, Israel, Middle East, Syria, UK, United States |
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Sixty percent of us believe in “conspiracy theories”, and we shouldn’t. At least according to Hugo Drochon, Professor of Politics at Nottingham University.
He doesn’t raise the question of whether or not some “conspiracy theories” may be true, his blanket assumption is that all of them are not. His article is not about WHAT people think, WHY they think it, or IF they’re wrong. The article is about rationalizing social control – specifically steps the state can take to assert control over the political opinions of the electorate.
Indeed the entire premise of the article is right there in the headline:
Britons are swallowing conspiracy theories. Here’s how to stop the rot
British people think things they shouldn’t, and here’s how we can stop them. The flawed logic is aggressive. The patronising tone nauseating. It’s the terrifying smiling face of a Brave New World.
The article deals only in absolutes. There are “conspiracy theories”, and they are all wrong. Even such vague concepts as the idea the government might publish misleading statistics or that there could be unelected people running the country in spite of our notional democracy.
It’s a programmed response. A piece of hard code: If(Conspiracy).addClass(“false”)
No space is given over to the raft of historical “conspiracy theories” which turned out to be completely true. NSA mass surveillance. The “sexed up” dossier. Iran-Contra. The DNC rigging the primaries. The Gulf of Tonkin incident.
They are disregarded, ignored because they do not serve the narrative.
It is so blatantly dishonest it needs, and merits, no refutation. An alleged “academic” should know better, should be better.
Leaving aside the cod-psychological waffle, the frankly offensive assumptions, the frequent lies by omission and the constant conflation of all “conspiracy theories” as broadly the same thing, (People who believe aliens crashed at Roswell are filed alongside people who debate Global Warming, 9/11, and vaccination). What we’re presented with is a five-point plan to make sure we stop thinking things of which Professor Drochon does not approve. It’s just that simple.
1. Stage Interventions for your deluded loved ones
Although mistrust in politicians and other leaders is at an all-time high, trust among friends (87%) and family members (89%) remains rock solid. This can be a double-edged sword: if conspiracy theorists are friends with other conspiracy theorists, then that’s likely to be mutually reinforcing. But conspiracy theorists will also listen to their friends and family who are not. So if you have a friend who starts sayings things about how the CIA was behind 9/11, try talking to them. You never know, they might come round to thinking it was al-Qaida who hijacked the planes, after all.
Drochon doesn’t go into WHY people don’t trust politicians, of course, which may be connected to the “conspiracy theories” that turned out to be true. The lies about WMDs in Iraq, for example, would be held up as a “conspiracy theory” if hadn’t been conclusively proved.
Ignore history or facts or precedent or debate and remember – “conspiracy theorists” are ALWAYS wrong. It’s like a mental illness or a drug addiction. The important thing is you sit down any friends/family you have who believe things they shouldn’t believe, and you berate and/or shame them into changing their mind.
2. Argue from authority
Sadly journalists (77%) are no better trusted than government ministers or company bosses. Academics, however, fare better and retain the trust of 64% of the public. So academics should engage more with the public: Cas Mudde for instance, an expert on populism, has just launched a new series with the Guardian about “the new populism”. Consider this column my own attempt to do so, too.
Again, he doesn’t ask WHY journalists aren’t trusted (coughIraqcough), he just thinks it’s “sad”. Obviously, in a perfect world, we’d all trust journalists who are all great guys and just trying to help.
Anyway, we can’t be expected to learn, understand or debate issues amongst ourselves. We need to listen to academics*, who know what they’re talking about. Including, fortunately, Professor Drochon himself. Remember, someone with a PhD is not only smarter than you, but morally superior as well. They are also incapable of ever being mistaken or having an agenda.
*When he says “academics” he only means SOME academics, obviously the academics who research JFK, 9/11 or alternate theories of global warming don’t count. Disregard them entirely.
3. Indoctrinate Your Children
Studies show that those with higher educational achievements are less prone to believing conspiracy theories. The implication here is there should be more investment in education, which of course would be welcome. But compulsory courses on online education – learning to tell fake news from real for instance – should be considered, too.
Compulsory education courses for children. We need to teach our kids that anything they read on the internet which departs from the acknowledged government position is WRONG. This will help stamp out dissent conspiracy theories, and is not at all Stalinist.
4. Online Censorship Regulation
By asking questions about social media consumption, our latest poll confirms what has been suspected for a while: social media encourages conspiracy theories. Not all, mind you: Facebook encourages conspiracy theories, but Twitter mitigates against them. It turns out YouTube is the worst offender: those who get their news from the video platform are much more likely to believe conspiracy theories.
So far most of these new technologies have been left to regulate themselves, which has led to scandals surrounding the role Facebook might have played in recent elections. Politicians should take a more active role in regulating the spread of fake news and conspiracy theories. Falling that (sic), you’re welcome to delete your various accounts.
As mentioned above, “conspiracy theorists” talking to each other can be self-reinforcing. We need to stop that. The best way to do that is to regulate the internet. To make sure certain opinions don’t get shared and certain thoughts don’t get expressed.
It’s important to remember that this is NOT censorship. This is regulation. Bad people censor the truth. Good people “regulate” lies. The Government (who only 23% of people trust) can, of course, be trusted to carry out this task. There is no chance, at all, that they would use this to their own ends. After all, an academic suggested it… and they are not only smarter, but morally superior. I know, because an academic said that too.
5… wait, what?
Conspiracy theories spread among those who feel they are not being heard. Politicians have a responsibility to be more responsive to the demands of their citizens: it is true, for example, that the question of this country’s relation to the EU had long been off the table, and fears about immigration often fell on deaf ears. That is not to say they should follow Hillary Clinton in saying immigration into Europe should stop, but a coherent account of what type of immigration this country wants, and why, needs to be offered, alongside a clear vision of what its future relationship with the EU is going to be.
Conspiracy theories only spread as a result of people not being listened to, so we should stay in the EU and offer a more coherent immigration policy. Then people will stop believing in Aliens and won’t question 9/11 anymore?
Is he saying the government should make some token populist compromise or face a backlash? How does that relate to global warming? Is he saying anything even approaching that coherent?
Is it simply that every article in the Guardian needs to be related back to Brexit?
I’m struggling with this one, honestly. Does anyone have the faintest idea what he’s talking about?
Answers on a postcard, please.
Kit Knightly is co-editor of OffGuardian. The Guardian banned him from commenting. Twice. He used to write for fun, but now he’s forced to out of a near-permanent sense of outrage.
November 29, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Nottingham University, The Guardian, UK |
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If a journal’s decision can make or break your career, its employees wield extraordinary power.
A week ago I discussed a paper that comes right out and says what everyone knows: most academic research eventually gets published in a peer-reviewed journal of some description. After all, there are 34,000 journals out there.
Because universities need criteria by which to award promotions and fast-track careers, it has become accepted wisdom that the most dazzling discoveries are the ones that get published in the most fashionable places. This is a hierarchy, with everyone scrambling for a spot in the high prestige journals at the top of the pyramid.
In the words of a former editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal, “For an academic, publication in a major journal like Nature or Cell is to win the jackpot.”
As neurobiologist Bjorn Brembs observes, the “underlying assumption is that only the best scientists manage to publish in a highly selective tier of the most prestigious journals.” Where their research appears is “one of the most crucial factors determining their career.”
Government grants get distributed along exactly the same lines. Everyone knows that a scientist whose work has just been accepted by Science has a bright future.
This is an alarming state of affairs. Brilliant minds shouldn’t be sidelined by subjective, unsophisticated snobbery. For his part, Brembs demonstrates that “several lines of evidence” suggest high prestige journals may actually be publishing lower quality research than less prestigious ones.
But there’s actually an entire minefield lurking here. If a journal’s decision can make or break your career, it then follows that the people who work at these journals wield extraordinary power. They exercise that no-fooling power every day. They hold, in their hands, the lives of real people.
We all know power corrupts. We also know the stakes are incredibly high. So what safeguards are in place? What checks and balances prevent journal employees from abusing their power? What mechanisms discourage blatant corruption?
Let us not be naive. As Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, explains:
Whenever the following three conditions are met, you always have rampant cheating:
1. Cheating is easy
2. The payoff is huge.
3. The odds of getting caught are low
Western, affluent societies have placed tremendous trust in institutions of higher learning, in the scholarly publishing industry, and in entities that spend our tax dollars on scientific research.
It takes one’s breath away to comprehend the wobbly foundations on which all three of those now stand.
November 28, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | UK, United States |
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Moai sculpture from Easter Island in the British Museum © Veronika Lukasova © Global Look Press
Is it possible to ‘loan’ something back to the person or place you stole it from? The British Museum in London, which houses one of the biggest permanent collections of world art and artifacts, certainly seems to think so.
Last week, responding to an emotional plea from the governor of Easter Island, the museum generously announced that it would consider “loaning” an 800-year-old statue back to the territory, which is now part of Chile.
The Hoa Hakananai’a was stolen — or “taken without permission” as The Guardian more delicately put it — in 1868 by the British HMS ‘Topaze’ and delivered to Queen Victoria. The museum itself uses even more sanitized language. Its online information page about the statue explains that it was “collected” during the frigate’s expedition to Rapa Nui (Easter Island) and was “gifted” by the Queen to the museum a year later.
“This statue would have originally stood on a specially built platform on the sacred site of Orongo,” the museum explains. “It would have stood with giant stone companions, their backs to the sea, keeping watch over the island.”
The reason it doesn’t still serve this purpose, is because the museum refuses to give it back. The 2.4-meter statue has no cultural or emotional significance to British people. To the Rapa Nui people, on the other hand, the Hoa Hakananai’a is extremely culturally and spiritually significant.
“We are just a body. You, the British people, have our soul,” Governor Tarita Alarcon Rapu said through tears during a visit to the museum last week. “You have kept him for 150 years. Just give us some months and we can have it there.”
The Hoa Hakananai’a is just one example of many when it comes to spoils of the British Empire which sit permanently in UK exhibitions. The museum has also refused to return the Rosetta Stone, something the head of Egypt’s new national museum recently called for, and the Parthenon Marbles. Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras recently raised the issue with Theresa May, saying that their “natural place” is at the Parthenon. In 2013, India called for the return of the Koh-i-noor diamond, which was taken and given to Queen Victoria in 1850. David Cameron dismissed the notion, saying he did not believe in “returnism.”
Just this week, news reports said that the London museum would temporarily return some of the iconic ancient Benin bronze sculptures to Nigeria. There are more than a thousand of the bronzes sitting in museums across Europe, and successive Nigerian governments have sought their return for decades. France is set to give back 26 of the sculptures permanently, a decision made after a report commissioned by President Emmanuel Macron called for thousands of African artworks to be returned.
“I cannot accept that a large part of the cultural heritage of several African countries is in France,” Macron said last year in Burkina Faso. “There are historical explanations for this but there is no valid, lasting and unconditional justification.”
According to the French report, about 90 percent of Africa’s cultural heritage is situated outside of the continent. When the British Museum returns “some” of their 700 Benin bronzes, however, it will only be on loan.
In a recent article for The Guardian, Tiffany Jenkins, the author of an entire book about why Western museums should refuse to return their stolen treasures, writes that when the first wave of Benin bronzes were created, Benin was an empire and the objects were crafted on the back of the slave trade. Maybe the descendants of the Benin king should apologize for slavery before they are approved as “morally worthy owners of the artefacts,” she writes, rather ironically.
Jenkins argues reductively that history is ugly and tussling over the rights and wrongs of the past is a pointless exercise. If Western countries start returning artifacts looted during the colonial era, she says, “there could be no end to competitive claim-making.”
Well, so be it.
It is not any British or European museum’s right to withhold plundered treasures while it decides who is “morally worthy” of possessing them. The very suggestion reeks of colonial arrogance. Ultimately, Jenkins writes, artifacts in Western museums “enlighten us about the world” and that is the job of our museums. How lovely; stolen cultural heritage enlightens us deserving Westerners, so of course, it has fulfilled its one, true purpose.
The fact that repatriating colonial loot is complicated and uncomfortable is no good reason to avoid facing reality and doing the bare minimum to atone for past sins. This is cultural property we are talking about. It belongs to the peoples and cultures where it originated — and to quote Macron, there is “no valid, lasting and unconditional justification” for refusing their return.
Of course, it is not only British or French museums that house looted art and cultural objects. There has been an ongoing dispute between Russia and Germany over artwork looted when the Red Army conquered Berlin in 1945. Much of the looted items were returned to East Germany after 1945, but not all of them. Moscow claimed the looting was a legitimate response to Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union and its destruction of Soviet national treasures. Germany begged to differ.
In October, the British Museum launched an initiative to counter the perception that everything within its walls is looted treasure — but Twitter users quickly made fun of the effort. ‘We didn’t steal all of it’ is hardly a very persuasive or positive-sounding plea.
That campaign came after art historian Alice Procter made headlines for giving ‘Uncomfortable Art Tours’ in British museums. The tours focus on slavery and colonialism and Porter encourages participants to wear ‘Display It Like You Stole It’ badges as they wander the exhibitions to advocate for more honest descriptions under artifacts. “On most text panels there’s little or no mention of how objects came to be there. Euphemistic language of ‘acquisition’ obscures the truth,” Procter wrote in a piece for The Guardian.
“You can look at the Gweagal shield in the British Museum and have no idea that it is considered crucial to the story of indigenous and settler relations in Australia, that its position in the museum is extremely controversial, and it’s sought by Gweagal people today,” she adds.
Another argument those against repatriation frequently use is that indigenous people, in some cases, offered or sold cultural objects to colonizers in exchange for something they needed more — money or tools, for example. Those items, they argue, can’t be said to be ‘stolen’ — but this completely ignores the power imbalance of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized.
“Collected,” “acquired,” and “taken without permission” in this context are simply euphemisms for “stolen.” It is clear that the British Museum and people like Jenkins are worried about setting a precedent. Returning just one item would open the floodgates.
The British Museum is nothing short of a temple to colonial theft. If it concedes in one case, where does it end? It will never happen, of course, but in an ideal world, that would be just one extremely tiny — and wholly inadequate — price to pay for hundreds of years of colonial massacre and plunder.
November 28, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Timeless or most popular | British Museum, The Guardian, UK |
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With the US, EU and NATO all bolstering claims of “Russian aggression” – in face of contrary evidence – the real danger is that the Kiev regime will be emboldened to carry out more reckless provocations leading to all-out war.
It seems indisputable that the three Ukrainian Navy vessels were dispatched last Sunday in order to instigate a security response from Russian maritime border forces. In contrast to normal procedures for passage clearance through the Kerch Strait, the Ukrainian warships refused to communicate with Russian controls and acted menacingly inside Russia’s Black Sea territorial limits.
At a United Nations Security Council emergency meeting on Monday, the US, Britain and France pointedly refused to take on board Russia’s legal argument for why it felt obliged to detain the Ukrainian boats and 24 crew. The Western powers automatically sided with the version of events claimed by President Petro Poroshenko – that the Ukrainian Navy was attacked unlawfully by Russia.
The US, EU and NATO denounced Russia’s “aggression” and demanded that the Ukrainian vessels and crew be repatriated immediately, even though under Russian law there is a case for prosecution.
It is the West’s refusal to acknowledge facts that is part of the problem. Russia is continually accused of “annexing” Crimea in 2014 instead of the Western powers recognizing that the Black Sea peninsula voted in a constitutionally held referendum to secede from Ukraine and join the Russian Federation. Crimea was prompted to take that historic step because the US, EU and NATO had only the month before backed an illegal coup in Kiev against the elected Ukrainian government. That coup brought to power the present Kiev regime led by Poroshenko and a parliament dominated by neo-Nazi parties.
So, the problem here is a refusal by Western supporters of the dubious Kiev regime to accept the legal, historic reality that Crimea is part of Russia’s territory. Ships passing through the Kerch Strait between Russia’s mainland and Crimea are obliged to notify Russian maritime controls of passage. Russia has since reopened the strait to civilian cargo transport following the naval skirmish at the weekend.
When the Ukrainian Navy vessels violated legal procedures and entered Russian territorial limits, their action was aggressive, not Russia’s response.
Furthermore, there are already emerging signs that the Ukrainian naval transport was orchestrated for the purpose of inciting an incident.
Some of the detained crew members have admitted carrying out orders which they knew would be seen by Russia as provocative.
It has also been reported by US government-owned Radio Free Europe that the Ukrainian secret services (SBU) have confirmed that its officers were among the crew on the boats. The vessels were also armed. If the transfer was an innocent passage, why were secret services involved?
Recall that Ukrainian secret services have previously been caught staging sabotage operations in Crimea.
Another major background factor is the increasing NATO military buildup in eastern Ukraine and the Black Sea.
When Russian President Vladimir Putin officially opened the 19km bridge linking Russia’s mainland with Crimea in May earlier this year, there were calls in US and Ukrainian media for the structure to be sabotaged. Moscow has understandably stepped up security controls around the vital infrastructure, which cost $3.7 billion and is the longest bridge in Europe.
In recent months, the US and Britain have ordered increasing military deployment to the region under the guise of “training” and “assistance” to the Kiev regime forces.
Earlier this year, in July, the NATO alliance held naval drills, Sea Breeze, along with Ukrainian forces in the Black Sea. That’s in spite of the fact that Ukraine is not a member of NATO, although it is aspiring to join the 29-member US-led bloc at some time in the future.
It was the following month, in August, that Russia began stepping up its controls and searches of vessels through the Kerch Strait linking the Black Sea to the Sea of Azov. The latter leads to ports under the control of the Kiev regime such as Mariupol, which is adjacent to the breakaway Donetsk People’s Republic. The DPR and Luhansk People’s Republic broke away following the coup in Kiev in 2014 and have been under military attack for the past four years despite the so-called Minsk peace treaties. These are more facts that the Western backers of the Kiev regime refuse to deal with.
More NATO buildup continued in September with the supply of two gunboats by the US to the Ukrainian Navy for deployment in the Sea of Azov. Pentagon-linked publication Defense One described that supply as part of efforts by Washington and Kiev to develop a “mosquito navy” in order to skirmish with Russian forces.
Only four days before the latest naval clash, Britain’s Defense Minister Gavin Williamson announced the Royal Navy was to send HMS ‘Echo’ to patrol with Ukrainian special forces to “defend freedom and democracy.” Williamson said: “As long as Ukraine faces Russian hostilities, the United Kingdom will be a steadfast partner.”
This is background to the simmering tensions in the Black Sea between Ukraine and Russia. The situation has arisen because of Western interference in Ukraine – primarily the coup in Kiev in February 2014. Yet, in all discussions about events since then, the Western powers are in denial of facts and their culpability. The recent militarization of the Black Sea by the NATO alliance is a stark provocation to Russia’s national security, but again the Western powers bury their collective heads in the sand.
Given the reckless indulgence by the US, Europe and NATO of the Kiev regime amid its ongoing violations against the populace in eastern Ukraine, its refusal to abide by the Minsk agreements, and its continual inflammatory and unhinged rhetoric against Russia, it should not be surprising if this same regime feels emboldened to provoke an armed confrontation with Moscow.
Arguably, the Kiev regime and its adulation of World War II Nazi collaborators never had any legitimacy in the first place. It continues to demonstrate its lack of legitimacy from the immense social problems in Ukraine of poverty, corruption, human rights violations, neo-Nazi paramilitaries running amok, and now martial law being imposed.
It remains to be seen if the recent naval provocation was carried out with the tacit approval of Washington and other NATO powers as a pretext for further militarization against Russia. The initial misplaced condemnations of Russia have subsided to more measured calls from US President Donald Trump and French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian for “restraint” and “dialogue.”
That might suggest Kiev’s failing President Poroshenko and his security services acted alone to order the naval confrontation as a desperate throw of the dice to escalate NATO and EU support for his shaky regime against Russia.
Trump’s comments hoping that Kiev and Russia would “straighten things out” sound like Washington is not behind the provocation and has no desire for a wider conflict. Just as well, because such a development is a gateway to all-out war.
Nevertheless, such a catastrophe is always a serious risk when Western powers indulge this unhinged Kiev regime.
November 28, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Militarism | Donald Trump, NATO, Russia, UK, Ukraine, United States |
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Trouble has been brewing in the Sea of Azov all year. It started with Ukraine’s seizing a Russian fishing boat and detaining its crew in March. The Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko canceled the Friendship Treaty with Russia. After that he has accepted surplus US naval vessels to prop up a navy that exists in name only.
This is all in response to Russia’s completing the Kerch Strait bridge which Russia can use to block access through. The Kerch strait is Russian territory and, by international law, Russia can limit access to the Sea of Azov.
So, this weekend’s incident in which a tug was rammed, ships fired upon and seized by Russia, ultimately was a proper and legal response to a clear provocation because the Ukrainian military ships refused to announce their intentions.
Let’s not beat around the bush here. This incident is meant to justify further antagonism between the West and Russia on the eve of the G-20 and the planned meeting between Presidents Trump and Putin.
It also was meant to inflame Ukrainian nationalism and drum up support for Poroshenko who is trailing badly in the polls as we approach March elections. Declaring martial law so as to potentially suspend those election, the US satrap is raising the stakes on Russia to it finally responding to these repeated provocations.
At the same time the Ukrainian Army unleashed the heaviest shelling of the Donbass contact line near Gorlovka in years.
There are a number of different angles on this incident and how it will be used to increase tensions between the West and Russia.
Russia is officially taking the position that Poroshenko is doing this to keep his Western backers happy who have dumped billions into him and his government to keep Ukraine a festering wound on Russia’s border.
It is also a desperate attempt to prop up this failing government and potentially suspend March’s elections.
While I am certainly sympathetic to that position, it is also the least interesting part of it because it is so blatantly obvious. I think the deeper gambit here has to do with Poroshenko ending the Friendship Treaty.
According to Rostislav Ishchenko ending the treaty works only in Russia’s favor as it removes the permanence of the boundary between Russia and Ukraine. In effect, it opens up the path to Russia to recognize the breakaway republics of Lugansk and Donetsk.
But, it’s more than that because it also opens up the argument that the Sea of Azov is now International Waters since the border is in dispute. This allows for legal maneuvering by Europe and the US through the UN to find Russia in violation of Ukrainian vessels’ right of passage. I’m not saying this is the case, being no legal scholar on this, but this looks the most likely tack to take to sell the world further on the evil, expansionist Russia narrative.
And that argument can hold weight because no one recognizes Crimea as part of Russia, officially.
The UN Security Council’s usual suspects – Europe and the US – backing Ukraine on this issue was wholly predictable. And the question now will be whether the US got its casus belli to try and force NATO ships into the Sea of Azov under the pretext of keeping the peace in International Waters.
Former British MP George Galloway, writing for RT, suspects this may simply be a ‘Wag the Dog’ moment for not only May but French Poodle Emmanuel Macron and Trump with his Mueller ‘troubles.’ Invoking Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade Galloway muses.
A dangerous constellation of weak, collapsing Western governments and leaders suddenly find their interests coinciding with the tin-pot tyrant Poroshenko. And into the Valley of Death they might just be ready to send their people charging. If they do they will find a resolute Russia far stronger than at Balaclava.
I would go even further at least as it regards Theresa May. This provocation occurred in concert the announcement of British forces being sent to Ukraine next year.
With the May government betraying the British people over Brexit with her awful deal, continuing the distraction of evil Russia is one way to keep support from failing further.
Because, deal or no deal, May is finished once we’re past this and like her accomplishing her mission to betray Brexit, setting NATO on a collision course with Russia is more possible by having British forces on the ground. All manner of false flags can be ginned up to saddle any incoming Labour government with.
Going back to the transition period between the outgoing Barack Obama and the incoming Trump everything imaginable was done to poison Trump’s early days as President. The idea that Trump and Putin could establish normal relations was anathema.
He’s been bogged down ever since.
And who was behind that? British and American Intelligence along with the judiciary who today are slowly being pulled into the limelight of their corruption. This is all part of a carefully stage-managed plan.
Those who cling to power do so out of desperation and will use every trick and point of leverage they have to remain where they are. In that respect Poroshenko is no different than anyone else. He knows if he loses power he will be expendable, to be thrown to the wolves while the US and Europe move to back the next quisling presiding over Kiev.
There doesn’t seem to be much on hope on the horizon regardless of the elections.
The big question at this point is whether Ukraine as a neocon project to destroy Russia is still worth the trouble. That’s what Poroshenko and those behind him hope is the case. I’m not convinced they have enough support to keep this up, given the tepid response from Europe.
If no sanctions are added to Russia over this incident and NATO is not dispatched to ‘calm things down’ in the Sea of Azov then this was nothing more than an attempt by Poroshenko to derail elections and rally Ukrainian nationals. The Verkovna Rada cut his martial law demand down to 3o days from 60 to ensure elections happen on time.
But looking ahead to the G-20, Trump will be saddled with this incident precluding finding any common ground with Putin over anything important. The two need to work out a plan for Syria, Korea, Japan and Iran and now we’re talking about Ukraine.
So, the days pass and nothing of substance changes. Putin knows time is on his side while those arrayed against Russia become increasingly desperate to justify its destruction to a tired and skeptical world.
November 28, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Militarism | Azov Sea, Poroshenko, Russia, UK, Ukraine, United States |
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The right wing Ecuadorean government of President Moreno continues to churn out its production line of fake documents regarding Julian Assange, and channel them straight to MI6 mouthpiece Luke Harding of the Guardian.
Amazingly, more Ecuadorean Government documents have just been discovered for the Guardian, this time spy agency reports detailing visits of Paul Manafort and unspecified “Russians” to the Embassy. By a wonderful coincidence of timing, this is the day after Mueller announced that Manafort’s plea deal was over.
The problem with this latest fabrication is that Moreno had already released the visitor logs to the Mueller inquiry. Neither Manafort nor these “Russians” are in the visitor logs.
This is impossible. The visitor logs were not kept by Wikileaks, but by the very strict Ecuadorean security. Nobody was ever admitted without being entered in the logs. The procedure was very thorough. To go in, you had to submit your passport (no other type of document was accepted). A copy of your passport was taken and the passport details entered into the log. Your passport, along with your mobile phone and any other electronic equipment, was retained until you left, along with your bag and coat. I feature in the logs every time I visited.
There were no exceptions. For an exception to be made for Manafort and the “Russians” would have had to be a decision of the Government of Ecuador, not of Wikileaks, and that would be so exceptional the reason for it would surely have been noted in the now leaked supposed Ecuadorean “intelligence report” of the visits. What possible motive would the Ecuadorean government have for facilitating secret unrecorded visits by Paul Manafort? Furthermore it is impossible that the intelligence agency – who were in charge of the security – would not know the identity of these alleged “Russians”.
Previously Harding and the Guardian have published documents faked by the Moreno government regarding a diplomatic appointment to Russia for Assange of which he had no knowledge. Now they follow this up with more documents aimed to provide fictitious evidence to bolster Mueller’s pathetically failed attempt to substantiate the story that Russia deprived Hillary of the Presidency.
My friend William Binney, probably the world’s greatest expert on electronic surveillance, former Technical Director of the NSA, has stated that it is impossible the DNC servers were hacked, the technical evidence shows it was a download to a directly connected memory stick. I knew the US security services were conducting a fake investigation the moment it became clear that the FBI did not even themselves look at the DNC servers, instead accepting a report from the Clinton linked DNC “security consultants” Crowdstrike.
I would love to believe that the fact Julian has never met Manafort is bound to be established. But I fear that state control of propaganda may be such that this massive “Big Lie” will come to enter public consciousness in the same way as the non-existent Russian hack of the DNC servers.
Assange never met Manafort. The DNC emails were downloaded by an insider. Assange never even considered fleeing to Russia. Those are the facts, and I am in a position to give you a personal assurance of them.
I can also assure you that Luke Harding, the Guardian, Washington Post and New York Times have been publishing a stream of deliberate lies, in collusion with the security services.
I am not a fan of Donald Trump. But to see the partisans of the defeated candidate (and a particularly obnoxious defeated candidate) manipulate the security services and the media to create an entirely false public perception, in order to attempt to overturn the result of the US Presidential election, is the most astonishing thing I have witnessed in my lifetime.
Plainly the government of Ecuador is releasing lies about Assange to curry favour with the security establishment of the USA and UK, and to damage Assange’s support prior to expelling him from the Embassy. He will then be extradited from London to the USA on charges of espionage.
Assange is not a whistleblower or a spy – he is the greatest publisher of his age, and has done more to bring the crimes of governments to light than the mainstream media will ever be motivated to achieve. That supposedly great newspaper titles like the Guardian, New York Times and Washington Post are involved in the spreading of lies to damage Assange, and are seeking his imprisonment for publishing state secrets, is clear evidence that the idea of the “liberal media” no longer exists in the new plutocratic age. The press are not on the side of the people, they are an instrument of elite control.
November 27, 2018
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Russophobia | The Guardian, UK, United States |
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