[old thread] The Myth of German Warguilt

The Myth of German Warguilt 

A good enough number of Salotreans still believe that Germany or Kaiser Wilhelm is responsible for starting the First World War and that, by extension, to him could be attributed the whole malaise of modernity – since WWI is generally acknowledged to be “the beginning of the end”. To go on thinking this way is to go on wandering in the labyrinth built for you by those that built the 20th century. Unless you've totally re-interpreted the events of the 20th century, you haven't zoomed out far enough. Many probably already know this so for them it will sound like a broken record, monomaniacal obsession with revisionism, etc. But many don't know and should, so here we are. 

German historian Ernst Nolte's thesis was that the 20th century is incomprehensible by itself; the centuries 20 and 19 must be assessed as a single unit: Fascism as a reaction to the tales of the horror of Bolshevism relayed by White Russians, which were a consequence of the tales of horror lived by many, originating in the 'dark satanic mills' of Great Britain.

The standard-issue view of 20th century history is something like this: the British Empire was massively wealthy but ultimately a force for good. European barbarians who hated freedom squabbled and tried to take over the world a few times, and thankfully they didn't. Given what we know about history, which is that the heads of state are usually capable enough to at least know their own self-interests, this doesn't make much sense. Why did they love war and hate freedom so much? It's almost like these Europeans are like nuts and bolts bursting off of an over-pressurized steam-pipe. They really can't help themselves those bloodthirsty Jerries! As a human race, we were fortunate that there was an over-arching power, ready to clamp down what needed to be clamped down. 

A different interpretation of the 20th century is given by “Yamaguchy”, one dutiful compiler of memory-holed histories, who has collected some of the materials necessary to sufficiently zoom out of British Empire propaganda: 

A History of the 20th Century: 

1. The English Oligarchy organized allies around themselves and for 15 years warred against a Continental axis power because Napoleon wanted to free himself from Great Britain's tentacles; because he thought the oceans were common property not English territorial waters. 

2. The London Oligarchy organized allies around themselves and fomented and started a war against a Continental axis power because Germany developed some strange ideas, and not only wanted for herself her own industry, railways, shipping and commerce, but, perhaps, even her own money power. 

3. The British Oligarchy fomented and started a war, and organized allies around themselves because following the 'Great War' some things went wrong and the flow of history had to be adjusted. 

This isn't obvious because the average Westerner has been enveloped by British Empire propaganda all his life. And he protests “But this is nonsense! For that to be true, everything would have had to be one big hoax for over a hundred years!”

Some time in the 1890's, the arch-oligarch of South Africa, Cecil Rhodes got together with his friends and decided to form a secret society, composed of the most wealthy and patriotic English businessmen, whose purpose would be to guarantee the unification and global supremacy of the British Empire. They wanted the UK, South Africa, India, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USA all united in a single confederated political unit, all loyal to the Crown. They believed not only that Anglo-Saxon man was meant to be the master race, but that the ideology of the British Empire was factually true and that, for the good of the human race, this hierarchy of Englishmen and British Ideology over the rest of the world had to be immutably ensconced. In functional terms, in terms concerning the politico-economic aspect of the ideology, the idea of the British Empire is that a college of corporations should be above the law of every polity on earth and that every polity which tried to impose its law on them would be considered an aggressor, rather than a sovereign exercising his due power over his domain. It meant a world free and open for the wealthy to exercise their influence without restraint or suffer to be molested by state-sovereignties (aside from the British Crown). We can see similarities in today's political landscape of corporatocracy, lobbying, psychological warfare, social engineering, the intelligence-entertainment complex, the Popperian foundations, etc. Recent history suggests that the traditional aims of warfare, i.e. to subjugate a nation and its resources for the usage of the victor, can be accomplished by economic and socio-cultural means, but anyways. Whenever anyone from this group spoke of 'Democracy' in the public sphere, this is what they meant by it, that states should be powerless to shield themselves from private influence. 

Among the founding members of this secret society, the two premier members were Lord Rothschild, at whose estate the first meetings were held, and Edward VII, king of England. We know this because Carroll Quigley, sympathetic enough with this group to be entrusted with its history by Alfred Zimmern, revealed these organization secrets in his works. This group would later come to be known as the Round Table Group, composed of the Royal Institute for International Affairs, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Pilgrims Society and other groups made up of, but not limited to, Anglo-American friendship societies.

 The first action of the group was to start a war against the Boers in order to get the gold from under their feet into British political boundaries. This was accomplished by a few personalities, the main one being Alfred Milner, whom Rhodes had selected to be the leader of the group before he died. Rhodes left his estate to Rothschild but selected Milner to be the 'party secretary'. The history of Rhodes, Milner and Rothschild in the 2nd Boer War sets the necessary context for the group and its capabilities, but is a long and complicated story beside our current focus. Suffice it to say that it established the group's capabilities under Milner's leadership, which through its influence in media, academia, finance, intelligence and government, contrived the political pretexts necessary to start a war with the Boer's and get the resources they kept from Rhodes-Rothschild Britain. 

The biggest immediate aim of the group was to neutralize Germany. As a nation that had developed a system of closed and developmental political economy, a system in which the interests of state, finance and manufacturing cooperated to result in fantastic gains in productive capacity, it posed the biggest threat to the British Empire's predominance. Germany had started building a navy, it was getting wealthy, it was producing new technologies, it had too much power and too much independence from the international system. Germany's success not only threatened Britain's tangibly, but also ideologically. As proof that the ideas of List and Saint-Simon (i.e. the ideas of protection and finance-as-utility / subsidy-to-industry) were a boon to national wealth, they threatened the credibility of British Ideology and therefore Britain's control mechanisms over the other nations of the world. So the Rhodes-Milner group set out to contrive another war, this time against Germany. 

The Rhodes-Milner Group's campaign would proceed on the fronts of education, press/media, military, finance and politics. Because the members of the group either owned the companies/institutions in question, or had enough influence to put their policy through with the help of friends, this was no great challenge. To address these fronts individually: 

They made grants to Oxford, All Souls and Balliol generous enough to allow them to appoint professors, create new departments, fast-track promising young candidates and provide scholarships and awards. Later, through the Council on Foreign Relations-connection, by which the men who collectively owned roughly the entire economic output of the USA (Rockefeller, Morgan, Schiff, Warburg, Astor, Du Pont, Vanderbilt, etc.), they achieved the same thing with Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Columbia. 

They staffed the membership of the paper The Times with reliable men. The Times wasn't a newspaper for public consumption but a newspaper aimed at the higher, more literate segments of society and determined the most respectable opinions. Control of The Times therefore meant influence over the intellectual currents of society from further upstream than the control of conventional newspapers would. In addition to this, the members of the Rhodes-Milner Group owned other newspapers, like the Daily Mail, Daily Chronicle, Daily Mirror, Daily Telegraph, Evening News, Fortnightly Review, Manchester Guardian, National Review, Sunday Times, Pall Mall Gazette, Review of Reviews, and Standard, to name a few. Not only did the Group exercise editorial control over these papers but some of the members would sometimes write articles themselves, when the occasion called for it, Alfred Milner included. 

As for the military, they used their influence to get their members into top positions in the military, if the members didn't already themselves occupy those positions in the first place. Winston Churchill was gifted multiple positions by the group: First Lord of the Admiralty, Undersecretary for the Colonies, Home Secretary, etc. As an aside, Winston Churchill grew up completely within the influence of the Rothschild family; his father was a degenerate gambler whose debts were paid for by the Rothschilds and he and his progeny lived forever after as their loyal spaniels. An odd and recurring theme in this time and place of the world was that many such patriots of Britain identified the object of their Patriotism and Britishness with a transnational family of devoted talmudic Jews. 

As for finance, that was mostly already taken care of; finance was the was the sphere from which the project had started in the first place. Rothschild was the biggest banker in Britain and was one of the half-dozen founding members of the group. The other two big banks at the time, Barings and Lazard followed closely in suit. Lazard, much like the Rothschild bank, was a family affair of transnational Jews stationed in Paris and London. Ties between the UK and US would grow much closer starting with the financial connection that was established with the Council on Foreign Relations, on which anglophile WASPs and recently-Americanized Jews would privately deliberate national policy for the US in coordination with its sister organization in London, the Royal Institute for International Affairs. With simple recourse to the facts, it's no hyperbole to say that Rockefeller, Rothschild and Morgan, as masters of the largest financial centers of the world and accomplices through the Round Table Groups, formed a global monopoly of finance-capital in service of the British Empire. 

As for politics, this is the area requiring the most detailed explanation, and where the introduction stops: 

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In 1904 King Edward signed the Entente Cordiale with French Prime Minister Emile Loubet. Present at the time of the agreement was French nationalist Theophile Delcasse, who was one of the main proponents of conflict with Germany. Delcasse felt that Germany's occupation of Alsace-Lorraine was illegitimate and grounds for war. He would be an asset to the group's plans in the coming years. The signing of the Entente Cordiale was the beginning of a series of diplomatic actions, in which France and Britain would become closer and closer, coordinating their military plans and making secret agreements.

Also in 1904, Arthur Balfour (Conservative MP) and Lord Esher (Personal advisor to the King), both members of the Rhodes-Milner Group, started the Committee for Imperial Defense (CID), whose purpose was to put the country on a war footing and secure political encirclement of Germany. Members of the CID, in conjunction with Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs Landsdowne made secret military agreements with France and Belgium, in which they shared and drafted war-plans in the hypothetical event of war with Germany. 

In 1905, a crisis emerged in Morocco, where French troops reacted strongly to a local uprising. The French government presented some harsh demands to the Sultan in the aftermath of these events and Kaiser Wilhelm objected to these demands, not wanting Morocco to become essentially French property. The British press pounced on the opportunity to paint these events as Kaiser Wilhelm stirring the pot, creating a pretext for German war on France. The nationalist Delcasse said that the Kaiser's intrusions were grounds for a French retaliatory war. Other French ministers with better sense were embarrassed and forced Delcasse to resign from his position at the Foreign Office. He was shortly thereafter invited to King Edward's estate for a well-publicized meeting, in which the King offered his support for the revanchist cause. Also in 1905, the Kaiser and Czar reached an agreement in the Bjorko sound off of Finland to make an alliance. Shortly afterwards the Czar's French financial backers (Rothschild) convinced him to exit the agreement. Two years later King Edward reached an agreement with the Czar regarding Western Asia. In the time surrounding this event, Sir Arthur Nicholson, British diplomat and personal friend to King Edward, befriended and gave a healthy allowance to Russian diplomat Alexander Izvolsky, who would henceforth be the main agent of the Group in Russian foreign affairs. Izvolsky was promoted to Secretary of Foreign Affairs from his lower post as ambassador in Copenhagen after his role in the Anglo-Russian Agreement of 1907. 

Also and most importantly in 1905, three members of the Milner group (Rhodes had died by this point) and personal friends of Milner came to occupy top positions in the otherwise anti-war Campbell-Bannerman administration in the UK. How did these imperialists come to get their positions? King Edward essentially twisted Henry Campbell-Bannerman into accepting the arrangement. Campbell-Bannerman, as prime minister, was rather preoccupied by the Ireland question and so these three members were able to operate with regard to their goals of encirclement with a free hand. The three are: Edward Grey, Herbert Asquith and Richard Haldane and were respectively the Secretary of Foreign Office (top diplomatic position), Chancellor of the Exchequer (top financial position), and Secretary of State for War (top politico-military position). The three would become known as the Relugas Three, because they met at a private place in Scotland called Relugas to discuss their plot to get into office with the help of King Edward, Arthur Balfour, and Lord Landsdowne. The supposedly liberal and anti-imperialist administration of Campbell-Bannerman was staffed with Rhodes-Milner Imperialists at the most key positions. When Haldane and Grey came into office, they re-approved the agreements made with Belgium and France in the 1900-1905 period and did not inform the rest of the cabinet of their actions. Britain was in a secret military alliance with Belgium and France and only the Milner Group members in the anti-war cabinet knew about it. Edward Grey, Richard Haldane and the CID would continue to develop war plans with France from 1905 on. In 1908 and 1909, the Czar and King Edward met informally to discuss diplomacy. There are no surviving record or minutes from the conversation, but Izvolsky escorted the Czar on both occasions. 

All throughout this time, the British public was being terrorized by the Round Table-subsidized media complex, which printed fictitious stories of the coming German naval superiority, the Kaiser's ambitions for global domination and the decrepitude of the British navy, which served as the pretext for the passage of bigger and bigger naval budgets that were used to modernize (switched all the engines off coal and onto oil) the fleet. 

In 1911, in the Asquith Cabinet, it somehow came out that the UK and France had been running secret military planning sessions. Haldane and Grey were harangued by the rest of the Cabinet. Their excuse? They forgot to tell everyone about it and promised that they would stop. Yet they had already lied before parliament several times, saying that there were no secret agreements with France. The Cabinet was apparently satisfied by their explanation and the two, with implicit approval of Asquith, now the Prime Minister, went back to business as usual. 

During this period, Alexander Izvolsky had stepped down from his post at the Foreign Office to become the Ambassador to Paris but appointed his successor Sergei Sazonov, who was loyal to him. In Paris, he lived an upper-class lifestyle subsidized by his patrons in the Milner Group. Living in Paris, it was easier for him to coordinate Russia's war plans with the English and France's new nationalist and anti-German Prime Minister Raymond Poincare. Izvolsky's work in Paris would consist of taking the Group's funding to turn French politics against Germany. Target number one was the then-Prime Minister Joseph Caillaux, who believed that “Our [France's] true policy is an alliance with Germany.” As it regarded the corruption of French newspapers and according to the documents of the German Foreign Office of the time, compiled and presented by Friedrich Stieve, Poincare advised Izvolsky “on the most suitable plan of the subsidies”. Remember that at the time banking in France was dominated by the Rothschild and Mirabaud families, in the form of the banks Paribas, L'Union Parisienne, and Lazard Freres. The Rothschild family also controlled the largest French media company Havas. So it was no exaggeration to say that the Milner Group's power flowed uninterruptedly from England into France. 

Izvolsky telegraphed Sazonov requesting 3 million francs for the purpose of buying off the Radical, a paper which represented anti-war interests, and the French politicians which formed the electorate, saying that if Poincare should lose the election, “it will be a disaster for us.” 

Caillaux was accused of collaboration with the Kaiser and betraying France's national interests and resigned in early 1912. Poincare stepped up to the office and his first action in that capacity was to personally go to Izvolsky's office and assure him of France's military solidarity with Russia. He also assured Sergei Sazonov that England would enter the war on the side of France. After this, Poincare removed the pacifistic Georges Louis from Ambassador in St. Petersburg and replaced him with the nationalist and revanchist Delcasse, who had been part of King Edward's designs earlier. After this he put through a law increasing national conscription. Predictably, The Times in England ran an article congratulating France on its muscular new administration. 

During all this time, British, French and Russian diplomats affiliated with the Milner Group were at work in the Balkans, trying to organize Slavic political movements as a thorn in the side of Austria. Full treatment of those machinations would shed much valuable light on Izvolsky's relationship to the Group, but they are too complicated and intricate for our current scope. 

In short, Serbia was full of radical nationalists emboldened by their expectation of support from Russia. They made it difficult for Austria as administrator. On June 28 1914, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, was murdered by a Serbian nationalist. Austria responded by presenting a list of demands to the Serbian government which would surrender up degrees of sovereignty. Unsurprisingly, the Kaiser was unnerved by this series of events and was in contact with the English top diplomat Sir Edward Grey, who continued to falsely reassure him that Britain was not in any secret agreements, nor had any plan to go to war with anyone. Austria tried to make Serbia accept the demands but Serbia would only make a partial acceptance, deeming the demands unacceptably harsh. The Kaiser in fact sent a telegram to the Austrian office imploring that they accept the partial concession, saying "This is capitulation, of the most humiliating sort, with it disappears every reason for war - every cause for war now falls to the ground." In other words, Serbia's partial acceptance of the demands was itself such a show of humility that there could be no grounds for Austria sending troops to occupy Belgrade. But they decided to do it anyway. The Kaiser continued to telegram, begging them to “Stop in Belgrade!” It's clear from the documents of the time that the Kaiser understood what a delicate situation this was: Austrian repression of Serbia would invite Russia into the mix, due to her self-appointed title as Protector of All Slavic Peoples, and she would declare war on Austria and Germany, thus bringing France into the war as well. Throughout this time, Edward Grey supplied the Kaiser with soothing lies of British neutrality and that Britain wanted nothing more than peace. 

In response to Austrian occupation of Serbia, on July 26th the Czar approved a 'partial' mobilization of the army against Austria and Germany. At the time, mobilization was a kind of 'crossing of the rubicon', it was a de facto declaration of war. Even if war hadn't been declared diplomatically, it had been declared logistically. The idea was to get the armed forces as close to the front as possible before declaring war so as to have an immediate advantage, right off the bat. After issuing an order for mobilization it was difficult, if not impossible, to reverse the situation. As later documents would show, the Czar made this decision under the duress of Sazonov. When Edward Grey heard the news of Russia's mobilization, he acted with indifference, saying that it was a matter of “inevitability” that they should react in such a way against Austria. Knowing it meant war, he made no attempt to reach out to Russia to question their decision. 

Perhaps sensing duplicity, German diplomats repeatedly pressed Grey for an explication of the British position and he continued to respond vaguely that they had no official obligation to enter into the war. In a desperate move, the German diplomat Max Lichnowsky traveled personally to England in order to meet with Grey to defuse the rapidly expanding situation. Grey ignored and avoided his visit. Having returned to Berlin empty-handed, Lichnowsky begged Grey to do anything he could to reverse Russian mobilization. Grey said he would give it a shot and sent out 4 dispatches on the 29th of July. Except it came out later, when access to the national archives was granted, that these telegrams had only been drafted but were never in fact sent to Sazonov. They had been drafted solely to exculpate Grey. 

During this time, the Czar was distraught over his decisions. He was a weak man and buckled under pressure to his surrounding advisors. He sent (July 29th) a telegram to Kaiser Wilhelm begging for assistance: “I appeal to you to help me... I foresee that very soon I shall be unable to resist the pressure exercised upon me and that I shall be forced to take extreme measures that will lead to war...” This is in light of already having ordered mobilization; ®an understatement to be sure. The Kaiser responded saying he would try and keep the peace but he needed assistance from him, especially in calling off the mobilization, which Wilhelm was already aware of by this point. 

On July 30th, Wilhelm was still aware of the advancing Russian army and implored Czar Nicholas a second time to call off the mobilization. This time the telegram hit home. The Czar decided to send his personal emissary, General Tatischev, to Berlin with a mandate to broker a peace. But unbeknownst to Nicholas, Sazonov had Tatischev arrested before he could get on the train to Germany. The peace deal would never go through. Sazonov then instructed the diplomats at the Foreign Office to 'smash their telephones' and make themselves generally unavailable, so that no messages of peace talks could get through. 

On the 29th, following a meeting with Grey, Haldane, and Asquith, Churchill ordered a nighttime mobilization of the British navy; Britain would be on a war footing without raising the alarm of the public seeing the gears of war turning off of their coasts. 

Britain and Belgium had a secret military alliance. Britain needed Belgium as her casus belli, her pretext for entry into the war. This was because the Milner Group knew that the public would not accept entry into war on behalf of Russia, they would only accept it on behalf of chivalrous purposes. The invasion of a smaller and weaker nation by a bully, termed as such, would give enough emotional currency to push through a war. Germany's war plan required that they sweep through Belgium on their way to France, in order to hit Paris as quickly as possible (the Schlieffen plan), after which point they would wheel East to confront the Russian forces. 

Lichnowsky asked Edward Grey if he could give a declaration of British neutrality if Germany respected Belgium's borders by not marching through it. Grey responded that he could not make that commitment to Germany, saying that Britain didn't have any designs against her at the moment. Lichnowsky pressed on to ask, if Germany guaranteed Belgium, France and all French colonies, would Britain declare her neutrality? Again Grey responded that Britain needed to keep a “free hand” to make decisions. Grey, the heart of the Rhodes Relugas Three Group and architect of the war plans, was presented by a German diplomat the option to stop the whole war right there. Russian involvement was contingent on French involvement and French involvement was contingent on British involvement. Britain, as the reigning global financial, commercial and naval superpower, was the lynchpin of the Triple Entente. Had he accepted this offer, the war would've lasted only months if it began at all, in light of the British backing down from their secret agreements. Grey did not inform the rest of the cabinet of this generous peace offer from Germany but kept it secret to himself. The record of it exists because of Lichnowsky's memoirs. 

Kaiser Wilhelm's diaries show his awareness of the evidence of British war planning with Belgium: when the German army swept through, when they were quartering in Belgian villages, they found all sorts of military supplies: medical supplies, uniforms, and maps written in English, noting strategic points of interest all over the country, showing where the British would land, what their troop and logistical movements would be, and so on. This, despite all the Belgian and British claims of neutrality. On August 1st, in light of the Czar's failure to demobilize, Germany declared war on Russia. 

On August 3rd, shortly before the German invasion of Belgium, Edward Grey blustered on in Parliament for hours and was backed up by co-conspirator Arthur Balfour. Essentially he made an emotional issue out of Belgium's phony neutrality, appealed to Britain's 1840 guarantee of her, said that everything had been done to preserve peace (a lie), and offered up a war ultimatum to the room. He also said that there was no time to discuss anything and stormed out of parliament after he'd finished speech. England had essentially been forced into war. After the speech and the comments made afterwards by the well-placed men of the Milner Group, saying it was their moral obligation to protect Belgium, any protest in favor of peace would be tantamount to an admission of cowardice. They had gotten their war. 

In the following years, several status quo ante peace offerings would be made by the Germans, all rejected by the British. If they wanted peace so badly, why was it rejected after the start of the war? The Milner Group and their associates (AKA the Establishment, the CFR/RIIA group, the New World Order, whatever) had bought off Italy, turned the French political process to alliance, developed secret war plans with France and Belgium, engineered a three-part military alliance between France, Russia and Britain, modernized their navy while constantly lying about the ballooning capabilities of Germany's navy, dialed up the tension in the Balkans and consistently lied about and thwarted every attempt at peace that Germany attempted, who was herself the main agent of peace (by the agency of Kaiser Wilhelm) throughout the months of July and August in 1914. Afterwards the records were falsified (as in the case of Grey's telegrams to Sazonov) and others were destroyed. Milner ordered all of his correspondences burned after his death, as did Rothschild. The whole truth will likely never come out. This is not an exhaustive account, but maybe the bare minimum necessary to show that the First World War was the result of decades of planning by a secret society of bankers, businessmen, politicians, diplomats, royalty and their associates. 

Credit goes to: 

Diaries of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Yamaguchy (yamaguchy.com) 

The Secret Origins of the First World War, Docherty and MacGregor 

How Britain Initiated Both World Wars, Nicholas Kollerstrom 

The War in South Africa, J.A. Hobson

Tragedy and Hope, Carroll Quigley