HIDDEN HISTORY
The Secret Origins of the First World War
Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor
Dedicated to the victims of an unspeakable evil.
Acknowledgements
FIRST AND FOREMOST WE OWE a debt to those writers and historians who, in the aftermath of the First World War, began to question what had happened and how it had come about. Their determination to challenge official accounts was largely dismissed by the Establishment, but they left a clear trail of credible evidence that has helped guide us through the morass of half-truths and lies that are still presented as historical fact. Without their cumulative effort, together with the profoundly important revelations of Professor Carroll Quigley, it would have been impossible for us to unpick the web of deceit woven around the origins of the war.
Special thanks are due to those who have encouraged our research over the years, made valuable suggestions and helped find sources to our enormous benefit. Will Podmore read our early chapters and offered sound advice. Guenter Jaschke has given us invaluable help in many ways, not least in providing and translating Austro-Hungarian and German political and military documents into English. Tom Cahill, American photojournalist and vibrant activist in the US Veterans against War movement, provided ongoing support, as did the American-Irish writer and political analyst Richard K. Moore. Other valued assistance came from Barbara Gunn in Ireland, Dr John O’Dowd in Glasgow and Brian Ovens, more locally.
We have to thank the ever-helpful librarians and researchers at the Scottish National Library in Edinburgh, both in the general reading rooms and the special documents section. We are grateful to the staff at the National Archives in Kew and the Bodleian Library, Oxford, especially in the special collections department, for their patience with us. Apologies are most certainly due to those we buttonholed and quizzed about missing documents, correspondence and papers at Oxford and Kew Gardens. As we were so correctly reminded, librarians and archivists can only provide access to the material that was passed into the library’s safekeeping by the Foreign or Cabinet Offices. What was removed, withdrawn, culled or otherwise destroyed, was effected many years ago by those empowered to do so.
The good advice of our literary agent, David Fletcher, and the enthusiasm of our superb editor, Ailsa Bathgate, is genuinely appreciated, though we may not have said so at the time. Thanks too are due to the other members of the wonderful team at Mainstream, including Graeme Blaikie for guiding us through the photographic content with consummate patience. Above all we thank Bill Campbell, who displayed great enthusiasm for the project.
Finally, tremendous gratitude is due to Maureen, Joan and our families, who have patiently supported us through the long years of research and writing. While we have often not been there for them, they have always been there for us.
July 2013
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Introduction
CHAPTER 1 The Secret Society
CHAPTER 2 South Africa – Disregard the Screamers
CHAPTER 3 The Edward Conspiracy – First Steps and New Beginnings
CHAPTER 4 Testing Warmer Waters
CHAPTER 5 Taming the Bear
CHAPTER 6 The Changing of the Guard
CHAPTER 7 1906 – Landslide to Continuity
CHAPTER 8 Alexander Isvolsky – Hero and Villain
CHAPTER 9 Scams and Scandals
CHAPTER 10 Creating the Fear
CHAPTER 11 Preparing the Empire – Alfred Milner and the Round Table
CHAPTER 12 Catch a Rising Star and Put it in Your Pocket
CHAPTER 13 Moroccan Myths – Fez and Agadir
CHAPTER 14 Churchill and Haldane – Buying Time and Telling Lies
CHAPTER 15 The Roberts Academy
CHAPTER 16 Poincaré – The Man Who Would be Bought
CHAPTER 17 America – A Very Special Relationship
CHAPTER 18 The Balkan Pressure Cooker – 1912–13
CHAPTER 19 From Balmoral to the Balkans
CHAPTER 20 Sarajevo – The Web of Culpability
CHAPTER 21 July 1914 – Deception, Manipulation and Misrepresentation
CHAPTER 22 July 1914 – Leading Europe Towards the Brink
CHAPTER 23 July 1914 – The First Mobilisations
CHAPTER 24 July 1914 – Buying Time – The Charade of Mediation
CHAPTER 25 Ireland – Plan B
CHAPTER 26 August 1914 – Of Neutrality and Just Causes
CHAPTER 27 The Speech That Cost a Million Dead
Conclusion – Lies, Myths and Stolen History
Picture Section
Appendix 1 – The Secret Elite’s Hidden Control and Connections, 1891–1914
Appendix 2 – Key Players
Notes
List of References
Copyright
Introduction
THE HISTORY OF THE FIRST World War is a deliberately concocted lie. Not the sacrifice, the heroism, the horrendous waste of life or the misery that followed. No, these were very real, but the truth of how it all began and how it was unnecessarily and deliberately prolonged beyond 1915 has been successfully covered up for a century. A carefully falsified history was created to conceal the fact that Britain, not Germany, was responsible for the war. Had the truth become widely known after 1918, the consequences for the British Establishment would have been cataclysmic.
At the end of the war Britain, France and the United States laid the blame squarely on Germany and took steps to remove, conceal or falsify documents and reports to justify such a verdict. In 1919, at Versailles near Paris, the victors decreed that Germany was solely responsible for the global catastrophe. She had, they claimed, deliberately planned the war and rejected all of their proposals for conciliation and mediation. Germany protested vehemently that she was not responsible and that it had been, for her, a defensive war against the aggression of Russia and France.
To the victors go the spoils, and their judgement was immediately reflected in the official accounts. What became the generally accepted history of the First World War revolved around German militarism, German expansionism, the kaiser’s bombastic nature and ambitions, and Germany’s invasion of innocent, neutral Belgium. The system of secret alliances, a ‘naval race’, economic imperialism, and the theory of an ‘inevitable war’ later softened the attack on Germany, though the spurious notion that she alone had wanted war remained understood in the background.
In the 1920s, a number of highly regarded American and Canadian professors of history, including Sidney B. Fay, Harry Elmer Barnes and John S. Ewart seriously questioned the Versailles verdict and the ‘evidence’ on which the assumption of German war guilt was based. Their work in revising the official Versailles findings was attacked by historians who insisted that Germany was indeed responsible. Today, eminent British war historians place the blame on Germany, though most are willing to concede that ‘other factors’ were also involved. Professor Niall Ferguson writes of the kaiser’s strategy of global war.1 Professor Hew Strachan maintains that the war was about liberal countries struggling to defend their freedoms (against German aggression),2 while Professor Norman Stone states that the greatest mistake of the twentieth century was made when Germany built a navy to attack Britain.3 Professor David Stevenson quite unequivocally writes that ‘it is ultimately in Berlin that we must seek the keys to the destruction of peace’.4 It was Germany’s fault. End of story.
Several other recent accounts on the causes of the war offer alternative ideas. Christopher Clark’s book, for example, loo
ks on the events leading up to August 1914 as a tragedy into which an unsuspecting world ‘sleepwalked’.5 We reveal that far from sleepwalking into a global tragedy, the unsuspecting world was ambushed by a secret cabal of warmongers in London. In Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War, we debunk the notion that Germany was to blame for this heinous crime against humanity, or that Belgium was an innocent, neutral nation caught unawares by German militarism. We clearly demonstrate that the German invasion of Belgium was not an act of thoughtless and indiscriminate aggression, but a reaction forced upon Germany when she faced imminent annihilation. From the day of its conception, the Schlieffen Plan6 was a defence strategy and the last desperate act open to Germany to protect herself from being overrun simultaneously from east and west by the huge Russian and French armies massing on her borders.
What this book sets out to prove is that unscrupulous men, whose roots and origins were in Britain, sought a war to crush Germany and orchestrated events in order to bring this about. 1914 is generally considered as the starting point for the disaster that followed, but the crucial decisions that led to war had been taken many years before.
A secret society of rich and powerful men was established in London in 1891 with the long-term aim of taking control of the entire world. These individuals, whom we call the Secret Elite, deliberately fomented the Boer War of 1899–1902 in order to grab the Transvaal’s gold mines, and this became a template for their future actions. Their ambition overrode humanity, and the consequences of their actions have been minimised, ignored or denied in official histories. The horror of the British concentration camps in South Africa, where 20,000 children died, is conveniently glossed over; the devastating loss of a generation in a world war for which these men were deliberately responsible has been glorified by the lie that they died for ‘freedom and civilisation’. This book focuses on how a cabal of international bankers, industrialists and their political agents successfully used war to destroy the Boer Republics and then Germany, and were never called to account.
Carefully falsified history? A secret society taking control of the world? Britain responsible for the First World War? Twenty thousand children dying in British concentration camps? A cabal based in London whose prime objective was to destroy Germany? Lest any readers jump immediately to the conclusion that this book is some madcap conspiracy theory, they should, amongst other evidence, consider the work of Carroll Quigley, one of the twentieth century’s most highly respected historians.
Professor Quigley’s greatest contribution to our understanding of modern history was presented in his books, The Anglo-American Establishment and Tragedy and Hope. The former was written in 1949 but only released after his death in 1981. His disclosures placed him in such potential danger from an Establishment backlash that it was never published in his lifetime. In a 1974 radio broadcast, Quigley warned the interviewer, Rudy Maxa of the Washington Post, that ‘You better be discreet. You have to protect my future, as well as your own.’7
The Anglo-American Establishment contained explosive details of how a secret society of international bankers and other powerful, unelected men controlled the levers of power and finance in Great Britain and the United States of America, and had done so throughout the twentieth century. Quigley’s evidence is considered highly credible. He moved in exalted circles, lectured at the top universities in the United States, including Harvard, Princeton and Georgetown, and was a trusted advisor to the Establishment as a consultant to the US Department of Defense. He gained access to evidence from people directly involved with the secret cabal that no outsider had ever seen. Though some of the facts came to him from sources which he was not permitted to name, he presented only those where he was ‘able to produce documentary evidence available to everyone’.8
Quigley noted a strong link between the highest echelons of power and influence in British government circles and Oxford University, particularly All Souls and Balliol colleges. He received a certain amount of assistance of a ‘personal nature’ from individuals close to what he called the ‘Group’, though ‘for obvious reasons’ he could not reveal the names of such persons.9 Though sworn to secrecy, Quigley revealed in the radio interview that Professor Alfred Zimmern, the British historian and political scientist, had confirmed the names of the main protagonists within the ‘Group’. Without a shadow of doubt, Zimmern himself was a close associate of those at the centre of real power in Britain. He knew most of the key figures personally and was a member of the secret society for ten years before resigning in disgust in 1923.
Quigley noted that the ‘Group’ appeared oblivious to the consequences of their actions and acted in ignorance of the point of view of others. He described their tendency to give power and influence to individuals chosen through friendship rather than merit, and maintained that they had brought many of the things he held dear ‘close to disaster’. The great enigma of Professor Quigley lies in his statement that while he abhorred the cabal’s methods, he agreed with its goals and aims.10 Were these merely words of self-preservation? Be mindful of his warning to Rudy Maxa as late as 1974. Quigley clearly felt that these revelations placed him in danger.
Through his investigations we know that Cecil Rhodes, the South African diamond millionaire, formed the secret society in London during the last decade of the nineteenth century. Its aims included renewal of the bond between Great Britain and the United States, and the spread of all they considered to be good in English ruling-class values and traditions. Their ultimate goal was to bring all habitable portions of the world under their influence and control. The individuals involved harboured a common fear, a deep and bitter fear, that unless something radical was done their wealth, power and influence would be eroded and overtaken by foreigners, foreign interests, foreign business, foreign customs and foreign laws. They believed that white men of Anglo-Saxon descent rightly sat at the top of a racial hierarchy, a hierarchy built on predominance in trade, industry and the exploitation of other races. To their minds, the choice was stark. Either take drastic steps to protect and further develop the British Empire or accept that countries like Germany would reduce them to bit-players on the world’s stage.
The members of this Secret Elite were only too well aware that Germany was rapidly beginning to overtake Britain in all areas of technology, science, industry and commerce. They also considered Germany to be a cuckoo in the Empire’s African nest and were concerned about its growing influence in Turkey, the Balkans and the Middle East. They set out to ditch the cuckoo.
The Secret Elite were influenced by the philosophy of the nineteenth-century Oxford professor John Ruskin, whose concept was built on his belief in the superiority and the authority of the English ruling classes acting in the best interests of their inferiors. And they professed that what they intended was for the good of mankind – for civilisation. A civilisation they would control, approve, manage and make profitable. For that, they were prepared to do what was necessary. They would make war for civilisation, slaughter millions in the name of civilisation. Wrapped in the great banner of civilisation, this became a secret society like no other before it. Not only did it have the backing of privilege and wealth but it was also protected from criticism and hidden beneath a shroud of altruism. They would take over the world for its own good. Save the world from itself.
The secret society specifically infiltrated the two great organs of imperial government: the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office, and established their control over senior civil servants who dominated these domains. In addition, they took control of the departments and committees that would enable their ambitions: the War Office, the Committee of Imperial Defence and the highest echelons of the armed services. Party-political allegiance was not a given prerequisite; loyalty to the cause most certainly was.
Their tentacles spread out to Russia and France, the Balkans and South Africa, and their targets were agents in the highest offices of foreign governments who were bought and nurtured for future u
se. America offered a different challenge. Initially, the possibility of bringing the United States back into an expanded empire was discussed but, realistically, American economic growth and future potential soon rendered such an idea redundant. Instead, they expanded their powerbase to bring Anglophile Americans into the secret brotherhood, men who would go on to dominate the world through financial institutions and dependent governments.
What’s more, they had the power to control history, to turn history from enlightenment to deception. The Secret Elite dictated the writing and teaching of history, from the ivory towers of academia down to the smallest of schools. They carefully controlled the publication of official government papers, the selection of documents for inclusion in the official version of the history of the First World War, and refused access to any evidence that might betray their covert existence. Incriminating documents were burned, removed from official records, shredded, falsified or deliberately rewritten, so that what remained for genuine researchers and historians was carefully selected material. Carroll Quigley’s histories have themselves been subject to suppression. Unknown persons removed Tragedy and Hope from the bookstore shelves in America, and it was withdrawn from sale without any justification soon after its release. The book’s original plates were unaccountably destroyed by Quigley’s publisher, the Macmillan Company, who, for the next six years ‘lied, lied, lied’ to him and deliberately misled him into believing that it would be reprinted.11 Why? What pressures obliged a major publishing house to take such extreme action? Quigley claimed that powerful people had suppressed the book because it exposed matters that they did not want known.
To this day, researchers are denied access to certain First World War documents because the Secret Elite had much to fear from the truth, as do those who have succeeded them. They ensure that we learn only those ‘facts’ that support their version of history. It is worse than deception. They were determined to wipe out all traces that led back to them. They have taken every possible step to ensure that it would remain exceedingly difficult to unmask their crimes. We aim to do exactly that.
Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War. Page 1
