Serialization of selections from my book Our Country, Then and Now continues with the cooperation of my publisher, Clarity Press. Today we have the first installment of Chapter 10, “The War to End All Wars,” entitled “World War I Begins.”
Previously, in Chapter 9, “The Money Trust,” we explained that after Great Britain carried out the Rhodes/Rothschild plan to “recover the United States of America for the British Empire,” “next to come would be Britain’s project of launching a century of world wars, with essential US help, in order to annihilate Germany, then Russia, as the last standing opponents to British global hegemony. Capturing of the US as accessory to the crime would be accomplished by financial means; namely by using the US Money Trust, headed by J.P. Morgan and the Rockefellers, to create the Federal Reserve. This would allow US banks, in league with the overarching power of the Bank of England, to supply Britain with the immense monetary sums needed to launch and carry out World War I, soon to be called ‘The Great War.’”
We have now reached that point. Let’s watch and see how the plan—and it was in fact a carefully orchestrated plan—unfolds. Let’s also ask where that plan originated and how it was implemented.
World War I Begins
By the 20th century, the European system of states built on the balance of power that had been so revered by the British during the 400 years they had spent constructing their empire had reached the brink of catastrophe. It was one thing to found, grow, and protect this empire using wooden sailing ships, trade goods, cannons, and muskets. But with the industrial age having arrived, with its steel warships, refined fuel, machine guns, barbed wire strung across trenches, poison gas, and submarines—with tanks and airplanes being readied for battle—the world had a new potential for a living nightmare.
In the America of 1914, with the income tax amendment enacted and the Federal Reserve System coming on-line, the US powers-that-be in charge of managing the explosion of credit needed to finance the coming war looked to the future with sanguinity. If the wars leading up to the great conflagration—the Boer War and the Russo-Japanese War—were any indication, the cost of the great European war, with or without the US becoming a combatant, would be immense. The money to be made—unimaginable.
Image: J.P. Morgan Jr. (Public Domain)
J.P. Morgan, the banker with most to look forward to, had passed away in 1913, but his son, J.P. “Jack” Morgan, Jr, heir to his father’s bank and fortune, took over without missing a beat.[i] As Jack Morgan wrote to President Woodrow Wilson in a letter dated September 14, 1914,
“The war should be a tremendous opportunity for America.”[ii]
Two armed camps were fixed in place—the Central Powers of the German and Austrian Empires vs. the Triple Entente of Britain, France, and Russia. Later, other nations would pick sides. The Ottoman Turks would join Germany/Austria, as would Bulgaria. Italy, and of course the US, would side with the Entente.
But why did Britain, the main manipulator in any balance of power contest, take sides with France and Russia and not with Germany? During the latter part of the 19th century, it had seemed that a German alliance would provide Britain a valuable counterweight to its greater imperial rivals—France in the Middle East and Africa and Russia with respect to control of the Black Sea-Mediterranean naval route and the Russian push through Central Asia towards India.
What may have been key, however, was money and finance. France was solvent, and like Britain, a lender to the world. And the interests of the Bank of England and the Banque de France were joined in controlling the world’s gold supply. Nothing could matter more in a world based on the gold standard, where nations literally sent gold bullion back and forth on steamships, depending on the exigencies of trade and lending. A nation whose gold ran out was “kaput.” Historians tend to cite Britain and France as exemplars of “democracy,” but that’s propagandistic nonsense. Both nations were plutocracies, as the US was on its way to becoming. And rich people tend to hang together, especially when they are raking in fortunes by financing businesses such as the Maxim-Nordenfelt Guns and Ammunition Company, a Rothschild flagship mentioned in a previous chapter.
As far as Germany and Austria-Hungary were concerned, neither was sitting on top of the world financially or politically. In fact, both nations were politically volatile, potential power kegs. Germany, under Bismarck, had imposed viciously repressive policies in outlawing the Socialist Party. German workers were not impressed by Prussian militarism and were not keeping up with living expenses in a country that lacked a lucrative empire to funnel profits into the home economy, as Britain and France possessed. Germany’s would-be African empire never got off the ground—not much there in the way of diamonds and gold, or any other commodity. Austria-Hungary was an outdated hodgepodge of divergent nationalities, languages, and religions that was not that far advanced economically over its medieval past. Did the German and Austrian imperial elites go to war to divert the masses? Maybe. And maybe so did Russia, which had its own powder keg of dissidents.
The alignment in Europe was almost the worst imaginable from the standpoint of potential for carnage. The foregoing might tempt us to believe that if only Europe had a functioning financial system, instead of a system where bankers financed both sides and reaped bonanzas on the manufacture and utilization of armaments, World War I might not have happened. At the same time, deeper spiritual forces may have brought world civilization to the point of either hitting the wall or rising to the many challenges a new age had wrought. Mechanistic analysis may take us only so far in understanding events.
Meanwhile, Marxists and Socialists thought worker solidarity would prevent the outbreak of war. Eugene Debs, head of the Socialist Party of America, ran for president of the US five times, the last time in 1920, when he ran from a prison cell in which he had been confined for alleged violation of the Sedition Act of 1918. There were many who believed that a modern industrial war would be so horrible that this fact alone made it impossible. And yet, war had always been an important part of life—and death—in Europe, still viewed as the path to glory, power, and wealth.
Image: Archduke Franz Ferdinand (Public Domain)
On June 28, 1914, the Austrian heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated by Serbian nationalists. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was breaking apart, with Serbia, friendly to Russia, seeking autonomy. When Austria delivered an ultimatum to Serbia to essentially give up its sovereignty in an investigation of the assassination, then declared war when Serbia balked, Russia mobilized. Then Germany mobilized. Then Britain and France did the same. Mobilization in 1914 had no reverse gear.
Germany knew that a two-front war against Russia in the east and Britain and France in the west could be fatal. So Germany activated the Schlieffen Plan by sweeping through Belgium to outflank the French. Belgium leaned toward France and Britain but was technically neutral. Britain and France feigned outrage. The lie that they acted in order to preserve the honor of poor Belgium is still mouthed in the official history books. It’s similar to today’s idiocy that the US carried out its proxy war against Russia in “defense” of poor Ukraine—or that Custer attacked the Sioux because they refused to become “civilized.”
The disaster that still afflicts the world had begun: the “Christian” nations of Europe, the dominant world powers, began destroying each other and themselves. Though their governments claimed they could knock out the enemy by Christmastime, no one believed it. On the Western front, the British and German troops came out of their trenches to set up Christmas trees and celebrate the holiday together with toasts. But it would be the last time. The inexorable process that would lead to the death of millions had begun and would not stop for over four years. Maybe Europe’s leadership wasn’t so “Christian” after all.
The people of the US did not want to go to war. The largest number of US immigrants, after those from the British Isles, had been German. There were places in the US where German was still spoken. So the US government under Woodrow Wilson feigned neutrality. US bankers began to lend to both sides. But the British and French were by far the favorites among debtors, particularly for the house of Morgan with its long-standing ties to the bankers of London—Barings, the Rothschilds, the Cassels, and others.
In Britain, with David Lloyd George’s Liberal Coalition and Round Table head Alfred Lord Milner embedded as a permanent member of the War Cabinet, it may have seemed that this was the time that Cecil Rhodes’ dream would be achieved—”recovering America for the Empire”—indeed, while rescuing the British Empire itself from ignominy and dissolution.
Germany failed in its initial thrust to achieve a decisive victory by the aforementioned strategy of outflanking France through Belgium in the autumn of 1914. Then it became Total War: 31 million combatants killed on the two sides and at least eight million civilians.
The two-front war that Germany faced saw Russia go down first. In the East, Russia’s armies collapsed before the Czar was overthrown and that nation swallowed up in the Bolshevik Revolution, but leading to a separate peace between Russia and Germany through the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
The Western Front is a thing of legend, with a generation of young European men destroyed by the insanity of war. Less remembered, at least in Europe and America, is the Middle Eastern front. Russia begged Great Britain to attack the Ottoman Empire and force an opening through the Dardanelles to the Mediterranean Sea. Some say that Britain deliberately lost the Gallipoli campaign to assure that Russia would be blocked from that longstanding objective.
Meanwhile, Britain succeeded in breaking up the Ottoman Empire to the south and eventually gaining control of Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq, as well as influence over Arabia and Persia to ensure perpetual access to the oil resources required to fuel its fleet. This would also secure perpetual British control of the Suez Canal along the main route to India and the Far East. The Empire would reign triumphant.
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Richard C. Cook is a retired U.S. federal analyst with extensive experience across various government agencies, including the U.S. Civil Service Commission, FDA, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury. He is a graduate of the College of William and Mary. As a whistleblower at the time of the Challenger disaster, he exposed the flawed O-ring joints that destroyed the Space Shuttle, documenting his story in the book “Challenger Revealed.” After serving at Treasury, he became a vocal critic of the private finance-controlled monetary system, detailing his concerns in “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.” He served as an adviser to the American Monetary Institute and worked with Congressman Dennis Kucinich to advocate for replacing the Federal Reserve with a genuine national currency. See his new book, Our Country, Then and Now, Clarity Press, 2023. Also see his Three Sages Substack and his American Geopolitical Institute articles at https://www.vtforeignpolicy.com/category/agi/.
“Every human enterprise must serve life, must seek to enrich existence on earth, lest man become enslaved where he seeks to establish his dominion!” Bô Yin Râ (Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, 1876-1943), translation by Posthumus Projects Amsterdam, 2014. Also download the Kober Press edition of The Book on the Living God here.
Featured image: French soldiers moving into attack from their trench during the Verdun battle, 1916. (Public Domain)
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