Read Parts I and II:
“The War to End All Wars” Part I: “World War I Begins”
By , May 28, 2025
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“The War to End All Wars” Part II: “US Dollar Neutrality,” “The US Enters the War”
By , May 31, 2025
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Wartime Propaganda
How is it that one day we look at a situation without emotion and the next, once war has been declared, we hate and want to kill our “enemies”? Are human beings really so lacking a moral center? Surely there has to be some unconscious force that triggers such inflamed emotions.
In past American wars, the combatants and their supporters certainly had a direct emotional commitment. In the American Revolution, those favoring independence were willing to stake their property and even their lives on winning. The Continental Congress that voted for independence did so on the basis of a document—the Declaration of Independence—that provided much detail about the transgressions of King George III. Later wars were preceded by speeches and written statements by presidents and other officials on the reasons for declarations of war that were printed in newspapers and distributed in written flyers.
But it was really “Remember the Maine” at the start of the Spanish-American War that shifted the conversation in the direction of slogans and propaganda. And with World War I, propaganda in the generation of public support for war came into its own. Now it was “Remember the Lusitania!”
The mass media propaganda machine quickly became an industry. Similar to the proxy Ukraine war against Russia which inflamed instant hatreds through modern cybercommunications, World War I propaganda was able to mold the very fabric of human consciousness, leading even highly educated individuals to become pro-war zombies.
A thorough discussion of the madness of World War I may be found in Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s The Untold History of the United States and will not be repeated here. They describe the activities of the newly-minted Committee on Public Information, the government’s official propaganda bureau, the firing of university faculty members who spoke out against the war, and the jailing of dissidents under the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. “Hundreds of people were jailed for criticizing the war, including IWW leader ‘Big Bill’ Haywood and Socialist Eugene Debs.”[i]
There was little in US history that could explain the extent and vehemence of the suppression of free speech by the US government during World War I. It was as though an alien force had taken over. [ii] This appears to be the same force of nihilism and societal self-destruction that has continued to erupt time and again over the past century, a force depicted by George Orwell in 1984. Today that force seems to be on the move again, possibly leading us into the final nuclear conflagration.
Zionism and the Balfour Declaration
On November 2, 1917, British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour sent a letter to Lord Lionel Rothschild, a leading British banker. This letter contains what is known as the Balfour Declaration and includes the following statement:
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
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The original of the letter is in the British Library with a notation listing Walter Rothschild as the author, along with Arthur Balfour, Leo Amery, and Lord Milner. Walter Rothschild was the son and heir of Nathaniel Rothschild, who died in 1915. Leo Amery was a member of Parliament and a close associate of Milner, whose exploits were addressed earlier [in discussions of the Boer Wars]. Given this authorship, it is evident that the Zionist project that resulted in the creation of the modern state of Israel was in fact a joint undertaking of the Rothschild family, the British government, and the Round Table secret society founded by Cecil Rhodes of which Milner was the head.
It was once possible, but today less so, to discuss the merits or provenance of Zionism, since the US establishment is on a hair-trigger alert to condemn anyone they perceive as critical of the Jewish people, Zionism, or the modern state of Israel. Those who do so face the dreaded epithet “anti-Semitic,” to the point where it might be concluded that Israel and the Jews can “do no wrong,” though it is universally agreed that no human on earth can “do no wrong.”
Zionism was originally a movement that aimed at establishing a “homeland” somewhere on the planet for the Jews. At different times, the British government considered East Africa, the Sudan, and Mozambique, but those options were rejected by the Zionists and their supporters who insisted on Palestine.
Why did people in Europe who identified as Jews want their own homeland in Palestine—in addition to the obvious religious associations? Could it have had anything to do with the desire on the part of Britain to control the Middle East and its oil? [Commentators have also pointed out that Britain’s intention of establishing a “Jewish homeland” in Palestine long predated Zionism.]
The Russian Revolution
Discussions concerning the history of the Russian Revolution, the attempted erasure of the Christian roots of Russian society and culture, and the massive suffering of the Russian people are complex and still rife with controversy. [During World War I], with the Russian army suffering massive casualties on the front against Germany and Austria, the government of Czar Nicholas II had begun to consider a separate peace. The British were outraged and favored the creation of the Provisional Government under Kerensky that vowed to continue fighting.
Some state that what enabled Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolsheviks to succeed in overthrowing Kerensky and the Provisional Government in November 1917 was that the Russian people, sick of the bloodletting, backed them in their determination to take Russia out of World War I—that this was the policy that formed the catalyst and core of their support rather than the struggle for communism per se. It was the Germans who allowed Lenin to journey from Zurich to Russia on the “sealed train,” understanding that the Bolsheviks would sue for peace.
It was the Jews of Russia and the world that had been most strongly opposed to Czarist Russia. Millions of Russian and Eastern European Jews had already migrated to America. New York banker Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb & Company provided substantial amounts of financial aid to millions of Jews leaving Russia before the war. Schiff is also known to have financed the return of Leon Trotsky from New York to Russia to help steer the Bolshevik Revolution. Trotsky became head of the Red Army that crushed the Whites in the Russian Civil War. Later, having broken with Stalin, Trotsky fled Russia, emigrated to Mexico, and was assassinated by one of Stalin’s agents in 1940. Some say that Britain and the US secretly favored the Bolsheviks, despite their token aid to the Whites in the civil war, because they feared a future alliance between the ruling class of Germany and those of Czarist Russia.
With Russia out of the conflict, Germany was able to shift its army to the Western front. But this was not enough to counter the arrival of over a million fresh troops from the US.
Britain always knew that US “boots on the ground” were their “ace in the hole.” [The huge American army that entered France allowed the British to send substantial numbers of their own troops to Palestine, where they drove out the Ottomans and took over the region being planned for the Jewish homeland. After the war, Palestine became a British-controlled “mandate” under the League of Nations.]
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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.
Notes
[i] Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick, The Untold History of the United States, Gallery Books, 2012, p.14.
[ii] An outstanding account of the extreme development of pro-war propaganda, as well as the financial machinations by Wall Street during World War I may be found in F. William Engdahl’s Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century. Some believe that the early Zionist forces made a deal with the British that if they could bring the US into the war then they would receive British support on setting up a homeland in Palestine. See this and this.
Featured image: Revolutionaries protesting in February 1917 (Public Domain)
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