Conjuring Hitler
How Britain and America
Made the Third Reich
By Guido Giacomo Preparata
Preface
Nazism. For many this topic is a fixation, especially for the peoples that
suffered defeat and utter disfigurement because of it. Being Italian, I
remember clearly my paternal grandfather reminiscing interminably about
the days of Fascism, echoed by my grandmother; he never seemed able to
untangle within himself the knot of sentiments towards Mussolini, the
Germans, the war, and the horror of it all. At times he wished the Axis
had won the war, at others he fancied France had not fallen so fast as
to precipitate Italy in her catastrophic downfall – he would eventually
experience combat in the Balkans, survive and remain indissolubly tied
to the old world till his death, long after 1945. My father and I – the
‘modern ones’ – would listen to these tirades, rolling our eyes, and excusing
the impropriety of even alluding to a possible Nazi victory on account of
grandfather’s earnest but essentially ‘screwed-up’ worldview. A worldview
that, as we moderns had come to learn, had spelled the damnation of
Europe and justified the Americanization of the vanquished.
But the Pax Americana that followed, deep down, was itself of dubious
value: it began with a nuclear holocaust, brought affluence to the West
perhaps, but gave very little by way of peace to the rest of the world. And
what was left to feel of the defeated West was dismal: Germans and Italians
had been reduced to a couple of emptied out, identity less tribes.
Presently, in the collective imagination of the West, there is nothing worse
than Nazism. No greater sacrilege, no greater manifestation of brutality,
inhumanity, and deception than the rule of this unique regime that held
sway over Central Europe for a dozen years. The Nazis violated life in ways
unseen, and the record of their atrocities during the war grew to be such
that after their defeat, Germany was prostrated by a moral dilapidation on the
part of the victors, which still hasn’t ceased. Ever since, a continuous torrent
of books, articles, instruction and films, crafted by the Anglo-Americans,
and diffused by their acquired minions in Europe, has flooded the venues
of debate, impeding any views other than the ‘truth’ of the establishment.
This truth being that Europe had been compromised by the belligerence of
the outcast in her fold: the accursed Germans, who plunged their European
brethren into war, and deservedly suffered thereby, all of them, the benign
domination of their ‘American uncles.
I wanted to understand how all this came to pass. I wondered how
Europe could commit such a messy suicide as to give herself to a foreign
ruler possessed by a worldview different from the old one, yet equally
violent and barbarous. And to answer the question it was obvious that I
had to turn to the recent origin of the story, and that is to the Nazi curse
itself. Why did it happen?
Being an economics graduate, I began by directing my interest to the
Nazi boom of the 1930's and the financial contrivances employed to fuel
the recovery, which later formed the topic of my doctoral dissertation. The
research expanded around that core over the course of nearly a decade.
In this study there is no desire to reassess the record of the German
cruelties: these have been sufficiently scrutinized, although only with
anatomical (thus voyeuristic) fascination. Rather, it is my intent to push
back the point of attack of this story by a few years: for the official
‘narratives,’ which are for the most part biased either by excessive contrition
or apologia if written by Germans,1 and more or less subtle execration if
written by Anglo-Americans,2 generally course through the gestation of
Nazism only to dismiss it as a confused interlude marked by the raving
vengefulness of the old Germany, and by the alleged effects of ‘great
historical forces’ and ‘irrational-ism’ – two half-baked and substantially
meaningless notions, in fact.
1. Ernst Nolte’s Der europäische Bürgerkrieg, 1917–1945: Nationalsozialismus und
Bolschevismus (The European Civil War, 1917–1945: National-socialism and Bolshevism
(Berlin: Propyläen Verlag, 1987) is a fair instance of a mitigatory approach to the rise
of Nazism.
2. A literally stereotyped production stretching from, say, William Shirer’s The Rise and
Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960) to Michael Burleigh’s The
Third Reich, A New History (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000), or Ian Kershaw’s recent
biography of Hitler (in two volumes: Hubris, 1998, and Nemesis, 2000. New York: W.W.
Norton & Company).
The poor treatment of the Nazi gestation is due to two factors: first,
the historical interval that covers the breeding of Hitlerism is notoriously
complex, and that does not make for ‘good cinema’: for instance, when
the Crisis hit the West in 1930, and the Nazis began to gather votes, Liberal
historians hand the narration over to their fellow economists, and the
economists, who understand famously nothing of the Crisis, throw it back
to the historians, who are thus saddled with the last and sadly disappointing
word in the current, miserable explication of the Nazis’ rise to power.
Second, a detailed analysis of the emergence of Nazism is generally
shunned so it seems, for it might reveal too much; in truth, it might
disclose that the Nazis were never a creature of chance. The thesis of the
book suggests that for 15 years (1919–33), the Anglo-Saxon elites tampered with German politics with the conscious intent to obtain a reactionary
movement, which they could then set up as a pawn for their geopolitical
intrigues. When this movement emerged immediately after World War I in
the shape of a religious, anti-Semitic sect disguised as a political party (that
is, the N.S.D.A.P), the British clubs kept it under close observation, proceeded
to endorse it semi-officially in 1931 when the Weimar Republic was being
dismantled by the Crisis, and finally embraced it, with deceit, throughout
the 1930's. This is to say that although England did not conceive Hitlerism,
she nonetheless created the conditions under which such a phenomenon
could appear, and devoted herself to supporting financially the Nazis and
subsequently arming them to the teeth with the prospect of manipulating
them. Without such methodical and unsparing ‘protection’ on the part
of the Anglo-American elites, along with the complicit buttress of Soviet
Russia, there would have been no Fuhrer and no Nazism: the political
dynamism of the Nazi movement owed its success to a general state of
instability in Germany, which was wholly artificial, a wreckage engineered
by the Anglo-American clubs themselves.
By ‘clubs’ and ‘elites’ I mean the established and self-perpetuating
fraternities that ruled the Anglo-Saxon commonwealths: these were (and
still are) formed by an aggregation of dynasts issued from the banking
houses, the diplomatic corps, the officer caste, and the executive aristocracy,
which still remains solidly entrenched in the constitutional fabric of
the modern ‘democracies.’ These ‘clubs’ act, rule, breed and think like
a compact oligarchy, and co-opt the middle class to use it as a filter
between themselves and their cannon fodder: the commoners. In fact,
in the so-called ‘democratic constituency,’ which represents to date the
most sophisticated model of oligarchic rule, the electorate wields no clout
whatever, and political ability is but another expression for the powers of
persuasion needed to ‘build consensus’ around (momentous) decisions
already taken elsewhere.3
3. So-called ‘democracy’ is a sham, the ballot a travesty. In modern bureaucratized
systems, whose birth dates from the mid-nineteenth century, the feudal organization
has been carried to the next level, so to speak. A chief objective of what Thucydides
referred to in his epoch as synomosiai (literally ‘exchanges of oaths’), that is, the outof-sight
fraternities acting behind the ruling clans, has been to make the process of the
exaction of rents from the population (a ‘free income’ in the form of rents, financial
charges and like thefts) as unfathomable and impenetrable as possible. The tremendous
sophistication, and the propagandistic wall of artfully divulged misconceptions
surrounding the banking system (we will return to this theme in Chapter 4), which is
the chief instrument wherewith the hierarchs expropriate and control the wealth of
their supporting community, is the limpid testimony of this essential transformation
undergone by the feudal/oligarchic organization in the modern era. The West has
moved from a low-tech agrarian establishment built upon the backs of disenfranchised serfs to a highly mechanized post-industrial hive that feeds off the strength of no less
disenfranchised blue- and white-collar slaves, whose lives are mortgaged to buy into the
vogue of modern consumption. The latter-day lords of the manor are no longer seen
demanding tribute since they have relied on the mechanics of banking accounts for the
purpose, whereas the sycophants of the median class, as academics and publicists, have
consistently remained loyal to the synomosiai. The other concrete difference between
yesterday and today is the immensely increased throughput of industrial production
(whose potential level, however, has always been significantly higher than the actual
one, to keep prices high). As for the ‘democratic participation’ of the ordinary citizens,
these know in their hearts that they never decide anything of weight, and that politics
consists in the art of swaying the mobs in one direction or another according to the
wishes and anticipations of the few having the keys to information, intelligence and
finance. These few may at a point in time be more or less divided into warring factions;
the deeper the division, the bloodier the social strife. The electoral record of the West
in the past century is a shining monument to the utter in consequence of ‘democracy’:
in spite of two cataclysmic wars and a late system of proportional representation that
yielded a plethora of parties, Western Europe has seen no significant shift in her socioeconomic
constitution, whereas America has become, as time progressed, ever more
identical to her late oligarchic self, having reduced the democratic pageant to a contest
between two rival wings of an ideologically compact monopartite structure, which is in
fact ‘lobbied’ by more or less hidden ‘clubs’: the degree of public participation in this
flagrant mockery is, as known, understandably lowest: a third of the franchise at best.
The story told in this book is the story of the British empire, which by 1900, fearing the rising power of the young German Reich, contrived in secrecy a plan for a giant encirclement of the Eurasian landmass. The main objective of this titanic siege was the prevention of an alliance between Germany and Russia: if these two powers could have fused into an ‘embrace,’ so reasoned the British stewards, they would have come to surround themselves with a fortress of resources, men, knowledge and military might such as to endanger the survival of the British empire in the new century. From this early realization, Britain embarked upon an extraordinary campaign to tear Eurasia asunder by hiring France and Russia, and subsequently America, to fight the Germans. The vicissitudes of the first half of the twentieth century made up the epic of the great siege of Europe.
As will be shown in Chapter 1, World War I completed the first act of the attack, which was crowned by the imperial ingress of the United States on the grand chessboard. Germany had lost the war, but she had not been defeated on her own territory; Germany’s elites, her political and economic structure had remained intact. Thus after 1918 began the second act of the siege: that is, an astounding political maneuver willingly performed by the Allies to resurrect in Germany a reactionary regime from the ranks of her vanquished militarists. Britain orchestrated this incubation with a view to conjuring a belligerent political entity which she encouraged to go to war against Russia: the premeditated purpose was to ensnare the new, reactionary German regime in a two-front war (World War II), and profit from the occasion to annihilate Germany once and for all. To carry out these deep and painstaking directives for world control, two conditions were necessary: (1) an imposing and anti-German regime secretly aligned with Britain had to be set up in Russia, and (2) the seeds of chaos had to be planted in Germany to predispose the institutional terrain for the growth of this reactionary movement of ‘national liberation’. The first objective was realized by backstabbing the Czar in Russia in 1917 and installing the Bolsheviks into power; the second by drafting the clauses of the Peace Treaty so as to leave the dynastic clans of Germany unscathed: indeed, it was from their fold that Britain expected the advent of this revanchist movement (Chapter 2).
What unraveled in Germany after the Great War was the life of the Weimar Republic, the puppet regime of the West, which incubated Nazism in three stages: a period of chaos ending with the hyperinflation and the appearance of Hitler (1918–23, dealt with in Chapter 3); a period of artificial prosperity during which the Nazis were quiet and the future war machine of Germany was in process of being assembled with American loans (1924–29); and a period of disintegration (1930–32) paced by the financial mastermind of the twentieth century: Montagu Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England (Chapter 4).
After the incubation was completed and the Hitlerites obtained with the aid of Anglo-American financial capital the chancellorship of the Reich (January 1933), the formidable recovery of Germany began under the Nazi wing, British loans, and the financial artistry of Germany’s central banker: Hjalmar Schacht, Montagu Norman’s protege. There followed the unbelievable ‘dance’ of Britain and Nazi Germany (1933–43), led by the former to push the latter to go to war against Russia. And Russia, too, acting in sync with London, appeased the Nazis in order to lure them into the trap of the Eastern Front. England put out a mesmerizing show by feigning before the world that her ruling class was divided between pro-Nazis and anti-Nazis, and that such a scission accounted for the apparent lack of commitment to fight Hitler on the Western Front after the invasion of Poland had triggered World War II. The truth was quite different: a bargain was being transacted behind the scenes; Britain calculatingly prevented the Americans from opening a western front for three years so as to allow the Nazis to penetrate and devastate Russia undisturbed in exchange for the prompt evacuation of German forces from the Mediterranean basin, which was one of Britain’s zones of vital interest. In the end, after this spectacular feat of dissimulation, Britain dropped the mask and closed in on the duped Nazis, who would be crushed on two fronts by the colluded Soviet and Anglo-American forces (Chapter 5).
To annihilate the German threat, the British ruling elites had gambled for high stakes; for over 30 years (1914–45) they had woven a web of financial machinations, international complicity, intelligence conspiracies, diplomatic devilry, military savvy, and inhuman mendacity, and they finally succeeded. This game for Anglo-American supremacy came at the cost of approximately 70 million lives (two world wars): a holocaust whose nature is beyond words. Both conflicts were willed and set off by Britain. In the first one, it was political incapacity that lost Germany, in the second there was no longer a Germany worth speaking of: all we see is a benumbed population harnessed to a native automaton fitted, armed and wound up by the British (and the Soviets).4
So the West has to think again – to think, in fact, that there is something far worse than Nazism, and that is the hubris of the Anglo-American fraternities, whose routine is to incite indigenous monsters to war, and steer the pandemonium to further their imperial aims.
4. The leitmotiv of this book is the conscious nature of the effort expended by the British clubs to preserve the empire, it being understood that such an effort was worthwhile even if it meant surrendering leadership to the American brethren, whom the London clubs cultivated as their spiritual heirs. The message conveyed here is that Britain’s imperial way was possibly the most atrocious manifestation of machiavellism in modern history for she stopped at nothing to defend her dominant position; she knew of no means that could not justify the end. To achieve world hegemony, Britain did not retract from planning in Germany an interminable season of pain and chaos to incubate an eerie, native force, which she thought of manipulating in a second world conflict – that too a British idea. All of this was, from the beginning in 1919 till the end in 1945, a cool-headed, calculated plot. Needless to say, I am well aware that such a thesis might too easily lend itself to being booed by the patriotic ‘experts’ of Western academia as yet another grotesque conspiracy theory; but in fact this thesis provides no more than a thread with which one may finally string together a collection of clues and solid evidence, which have been available for years, and have formed ever since a platform for dissenters, that is, for those students of history and economics that have had the candor to acknowledge that the central tenet of international relations was, then as now, secrecy. One need only think of the multibillion-dollar budgets devoted in our time to so-called ‘intelligence’, managed by non-elected ‘officials’ and earmarked for undisclosed acts of sabotage and disinformation perpetrated at home and abroad, nebulous ‘surveys’, mercenary commissions, and god-only-knows what else, of which the taxpayers themselves have naturally no knowledge whatsoever. Again, the democratic public is to have no say, yet is enjoined to pay for allowing the absentees to conspire behind closed doors. True, not all conspiracies succeed – some are riper ‘for the times’, as they say, than others – but all great historical developments, good or ill, are unfailingly animated, fought and countered by the initiates of the several antagonistic ‘societies’; and the herds, despite themselves, always follow. In the twentieth and early twenty-fi rst centuries, it is the Anglo-American clubs that have carried the day, and their tenure has little to do with human rights, free markets and democracy, regardless of what they may shamelessly profess. What follows is the story of the most important battle they victoriously fought so far: the horrifying campaign against Germany.
The story told in this book is the story of the British empire, which by 1900, fearing the rising power of the young German Reich, contrived in secrecy a plan for a giant encirclement of the Eurasian landmass. The main objective of this titanic siege was the prevention of an alliance between Germany and Russia: if these two powers could have fused into an ‘embrace,’ so reasoned the British stewards, they would have come to surround themselves with a fortress of resources, men, knowledge and military might such as to endanger the survival of the British empire in the new century. From this early realization, Britain embarked upon an extraordinary campaign to tear Eurasia asunder by hiring France and Russia, and subsequently America, to fight the Germans. The vicissitudes of the first half of the twentieth century made up the epic of the great siege of Europe.
As will be shown in Chapter 1, World War I completed the first act of the attack, which was crowned by the imperial ingress of the United States on the grand chessboard. Germany had lost the war, but she had not been defeated on her own territory; Germany’s elites, her political and economic structure had remained intact. Thus after 1918 began the second act of the siege: that is, an astounding political maneuver willingly performed by the Allies to resurrect in Germany a reactionary regime from the ranks of her vanquished militarists. Britain orchestrated this incubation with a view to conjuring a belligerent political entity which she encouraged to go to war against Russia: the premeditated purpose was to ensnare the new, reactionary German regime in a two-front war (World War II), and profit from the occasion to annihilate Germany once and for all. To carry out these deep and painstaking directives for world control, two conditions were necessary: (1) an imposing and anti-German regime secretly aligned with Britain had to be set up in Russia, and (2) the seeds of chaos had to be planted in Germany to predispose the institutional terrain for the growth of this reactionary movement of ‘national liberation’. The first objective was realized by backstabbing the Czar in Russia in 1917 and installing the Bolsheviks into power; the second by drafting the clauses of the Peace Treaty so as to leave the dynastic clans of Germany unscathed: indeed, it was from their fold that Britain expected the advent of this revanchist movement (Chapter 2).
What unraveled in Germany after the Great War was the life of the Weimar Republic, the puppet regime of the West, which incubated Nazism in three stages: a period of chaos ending with the hyperinflation and the appearance of Hitler (1918–23, dealt with in Chapter 3); a period of artificial prosperity during which the Nazis were quiet and the future war machine of Germany was in process of being assembled with American loans (1924–29); and a period of disintegration (1930–32) paced by the financial mastermind of the twentieth century: Montagu Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England (Chapter 4).
After the incubation was completed and the Hitlerites obtained with the aid of Anglo-American financial capital the chancellorship of the Reich (January 1933), the formidable recovery of Germany began under the Nazi wing, British loans, and the financial artistry of Germany’s central banker: Hjalmar Schacht, Montagu Norman’s protege. There followed the unbelievable ‘dance’ of Britain and Nazi Germany (1933–43), led by the former to push the latter to go to war against Russia. And Russia, too, acting in sync with London, appeased the Nazis in order to lure them into the trap of the Eastern Front. England put out a mesmerizing show by feigning before the world that her ruling class was divided between pro-Nazis and anti-Nazis, and that such a scission accounted for the apparent lack of commitment to fight Hitler on the Western Front after the invasion of Poland had triggered World War II. The truth was quite different: a bargain was being transacted behind the scenes; Britain calculatingly prevented the Americans from opening a western front for three years so as to allow the Nazis to penetrate and devastate Russia undisturbed in exchange for the prompt evacuation of German forces from the Mediterranean basin, which was one of Britain’s zones of vital interest. In the end, after this spectacular feat of dissimulation, Britain dropped the mask and closed in on the duped Nazis, who would be crushed on two fronts by the colluded Soviet and Anglo-American forces (Chapter 5).
To annihilate the German threat, the British ruling elites had gambled for high stakes; for over 30 years (1914–45) they had woven a web of financial machinations, international complicity, intelligence conspiracies, diplomatic devilry, military savvy, and inhuman mendacity, and they finally succeeded. This game for Anglo-American supremacy came at the cost of approximately 70 million lives (two world wars): a holocaust whose nature is beyond words. Both conflicts were willed and set off by Britain. In the first one, it was political incapacity that lost Germany, in the second there was no longer a Germany worth speaking of: all we see is a benumbed population harnessed to a native automaton fitted, armed and wound up by the British (and the Soviets).4
So the West has to think again – to think, in fact, that there is something far worse than Nazism, and that is the hubris of the Anglo-American fraternities, whose routine is to incite indigenous monsters to war, and steer the pandemonium to further their imperial aims.
4. The leitmotiv of this book is the conscious nature of the effort expended by the British clubs to preserve the empire, it being understood that such an effort was worthwhile even if it meant surrendering leadership to the American brethren, whom the London clubs cultivated as their spiritual heirs. The message conveyed here is that Britain’s imperial way was possibly the most atrocious manifestation of machiavellism in modern history for she stopped at nothing to defend her dominant position; she knew of no means that could not justify the end. To achieve world hegemony, Britain did not retract from planning in Germany an interminable season of pain and chaos to incubate an eerie, native force, which she thought of manipulating in a second world conflict – that too a British idea. All of this was, from the beginning in 1919 till the end in 1945, a cool-headed, calculated plot. Needless to say, I am well aware that such a thesis might too easily lend itself to being booed by the patriotic ‘experts’ of Western academia as yet another grotesque conspiracy theory; but in fact this thesis provides no more than a thread with which one may finally string together a collection of clues and solid evidence, which have been available for years, and have formed ever since a platform for dissenters, that is, for those students of history and economics that have had the candor to acknowledge that the central tenet of international relations was, then as now, secrecy. One need only think of the multibillion-dollar budgets devoted in our time to so-called ‘intelligence’, managed by non-elected ‘officials’ and earmarked for undisclosed acts of sabotage and disinformation perpetrated at home and abroad, nebulous ‘surveys’, mercenary commissions, and god-only-knows what else, of which the taxpayers themselves have naturally no knowledge whatsoever. Again, the democratic public is to have no say, yet is enjoined to pay for allowing the absentees to conspire behind closed doors. True, not all conspiracies succeed – some are riper ‘for the times’, as they say, than others – but all great historical developments, good or ill, are unfailingly animated, fought and countered by the initiates of the several antagonistic ‘societies’; and the herds, despite themselves, always follow. In the twentieth and early twenty-fi rst centuries, it is the Anglo-American clubs that have carried the day, and their tenure has little to do with human rights, free markets and democracy, regardless of what they may shamelessly profess. What follows is the story of the most important battle they victoriously fought so far: the horrifying campaign against Germany.
1
Introductory:
The Eurasian Embrace
Laying Siege to Germany
with World War I,
1900–18
‘A petty Navy Royall of three score tall ships or more, but in case fewer…
seemeth to be almost a mathematical demonstration, next under the
merciful and mighty protection of God, for a feasible policy to bring
and preserve this victorious British monarchy in a marvellous security.
Whereupon the revenue of the Crown of England and wealth public
will wonderfully increase and fl ourish; and then…sea forces anew to be
increased proportionately. And so Fame, Renown, Estimation and Love,
and Fear of this Brytish Microcosmus all the whole of the great world over
will be speedily and surely be settled.’
John Dee The Brytish Monarchy [1577]1
The Second Reich:
the tragedy of an imperial upstart
The sudden growth of the German Reich during the second half of the
nineteenth century compelled the British Commonwealth to launch a
sweeping maneuver against the world’s continental landmass. The chief
objective was the prevention of a durable alliance between Russia and
Germany. Britain proceeded to deter the union by signing a triple alliance
with France and Russia designed to encircle the German Reich (1907).
After the outbreak of war, the operation was deepened by enlisting the
aid of the United States in a phase during which the Russian link of the
alliance seemed to be giving (1917). As a perilous gap opened in the East,
Britain hastened to fix it by encouraging a Liberal experiment under a
straw man, a barrister by the name of Kerensky, which dissolved in a
few months. Meantime, as a possible alternative, revolutionary nihilists
– the so-called Bolsheviks commanded by the intellectual radical Lenin
– were transferred to Russia through a labyrinthine network of organized
subversion by obscure ‘agents’ such as the Russian Parvus Helphand, with
the expectation that out of such inflow would emerge a despotic regime,
whose polarity (materialist, anti-clerical, and anti-feudal) was the inverse
of that of the German Reich. The involvement of the United States became part of a broader deployment ranging from a military reinforcement on the
Western Front to Zionist propaganda for the joint (with Britain) occupation
of Palestine, which loomed as a vital geopolitical zone on the East–West
divide. The Reich’s surrender at the end of World War I (1918) completed
the initial stage of Germany’s annihilation. If we are to understand the rise of the Nazi era and the conflict between Britain and the German Reich, we must first examine the international relations of the new German nation from 1870 onward.
*** *** ***
By 1900 it was all clear.
Improbable as it might have appeared, a German empire had emerged from
the post-Napoleonic morass: a nation culled from a garbled constellation
of feisty principalities had at last coagulated, ‘by blood and iron,’ round
the martial core of its feistiest province, the kingdom of Prussia. And so, in
the 1870's, there it stood before the eyes of the West: the Second German
Reich.
An unstable compound: a coupling of feudal hunger and formidable
scientific achievement. After all, this was the uncouth matrimony of the
unfailing Prussian armies with the best music, physics, chemistry, political
economy, historiography, philosophy, and philology the West had to offer.
A formidable beginning.
And soon enough, this German dynastic state, conscious of its potential
and bursting with overconfidence, enticed the curiosity of the great British
Commonwealth.2 In those early days, England had paid scarce attention
to German politics, preoccupied as she was with French colonial rivalry
and the ‘Great Game’ in Central Asia that pitted her military forces against
czarist Russia.3 Germany had been too fragmented to claim a piece of the
geopolitical surveys of the British generals. Not that German commerce did
not matter to Britain: the opposite was true. But when, under the leadership
of the master tactician and Chancellor of the Empire, Otto Bismarck (1870–
90), the nature of the trade between Britain and Germany was gradually
reversed; that is, when Germany ceased to act vis-à-vis the United Kingdom
as the mere supplier of foodstuffs and recipient of her manufactures, to
become, in turn, a growing industrial power in her own right, the British
Foreign Office and the subsidiary clubs began to ponder the matter over
with some apprehension.4
Evidently, the Germans were benefiting from the merits of borrowing:
they had had the opportunity to snap up a panoply of technological know-how ready-made from their European counterparts, and perfect it
dramatically, without the encumbrances and sunken costs of pioneering.
Yet even if untrammeled industrial production remained problematic: if
manufactures were to yield a profit, national business could seldom rely on
the local markets – they might be too narrow, they saturated fast. Where
was one to dump the surplus at a profit? Where did Britain unload hers?
In her colonies. Hence Germany too pushed for ‘a place in the sun.’
The bill for national expenses incurred in outfitting warships and consular
administration overseas, which as a rule far outweighed the pecuniary
gains of the protected concerns, was, and has been, naturally footed by
the public. Indeed, colonies also served as a comfortable springboard for
imperial intrigue. Though the imperial chancellor Bismarck had preferred
to consolidate Germany’s continental, that is, Middle-European position,
by weaving a steady and diplomatically criss-crossed reticulation of
arrangements in the midst of the other ‘big players’ (Britain, Russia, Austria/Hungary,
and France), the vested interests of commercial enterprise became
persuasive enough to change the iron chancellor’s mind, and induce
him to bless the Reich’s colonial bid. This took place in the first half of
the 1880's.
As was to be expected, the costs associated with the Reich’s penetration of
Africa (southwest Africa, Togoland, the Cameroons, a stake in Tanganyika),
the Pacific (part of New Guinea, the Solomon, Marshall and Caroline
Islands), and the Far East (the outpost on the Kiao-Chao bay, with its
state-of-the-art colonial architecture, masterful civil engineering, and the
fashionable beach resort of Tsing-Tao), were, gauged against the profitable
extraction of raw materials and foodstuffs, somewhat disproportionate.
Germany acquired ‘colonial territories some four times as large as herself.’5
Notwithstanding (1) the public outlay for shielding commerce with ‘the
flag,’ (2) the earnest commitment of the Deutschkolonialer Frauenbund
(colonial women’s league of Germany) to supply Teutonic females to the
meager German corps of settlers 6 (they were 25,000, including the soldiers,
by 1914), and (3) the rather speedy turnover of German investments in
hemp, phosphates, cocoa and rubber, these territorial acquisitions were
rated by the ruling circles a ‘sad disappointment.’7 Too costly, too thorny:
the Germans lacked that imperial désinvolture with the natives, they knew
nothing of that calm poise wherewith the British sahib seeped into the
‘local mind’ to lay a firmer hold of it.
Naturally, the Germans faced a number of violent insurgencies among their indigenous subjects – other than repress them ruthlessly, they did
nothing more. Bismarck grew impatient, the great Berlin banks showed no interest in these exotic experiments, and in the interlude, the British
empire was resenting ever more such German intrusion at the periphery:
for all its flamboyant Kultur, the Reich was evidently the imperial parvenu
of the world. Herbert Bismarck, the chancellor’s son, in his capacity of
insider, confessed that embarking on a colonial policy ‘was popular and
conveniently adapted to bring Germany into conflict with England at
any given moment.’8
So the Germans wanted attention; they were keen to share with their
British cousins the condominium of the world, and eventually clash with
them, though it would assuredly have to be a collision of short duration.
It appeared Germany desired competition for its own sake – a competition
which, in the imagination of German rulers and nationalist intellectuals
alike, should historically have led to a theoretical ‘change of the guard’
between Britain and Germany, something akin to the transition from the
Spanish to the British empire in the seventeenth century.
And so while Bismarck junior did not conceal his imperialistic enthusiasm,
the late chancellor Bernhard von Bülow (1900–09) would years later decry
in his memoirs that the German people had no political ability whatever.9
Possibly it was all true, but it did not bode well for Germany’s national
security. The ablest student of the era, Norwegian-American social scientist
Thorstein Veblen, remarked in 1915:
Doubtless, a penchant for profundity and deliberation bulks large among
the habits of those who cultivate German culture. But nothing can
be more profoundly and meticulously deliberate than the measured
footsteps of the man who no longer knows where he is going, though
he is on his way.10
Because it knew not precisely where it was going, German imperial
policy might have been judged amateurish, but the facts facing external
observers persisted: here was an educated ‘anthill’, replete with technique
and presumption that was seeking to expand. And expand it did: despite
its naivety in the arts of imperial scheming, the Reich laid rail – the most
sophisticated – everywhere it could, established an enviable network of
commercial stations, introduced impeccable administration, and eventually
hoped to crown it all with the diffusion of its unsurpassed arts and sciences.
Not as politically experienced as the British, but nonetheless a competitor
of disturbing brilliance. To restrain, challenge, and defeat the Germans
would be no simple task.
By 1890, admittedly not even the master strategist, Bismarck himself, who
was now being dismissed by the new Emperor, Wilhelm II, had been capable
of identifying a ‘new course’ for Germany. He clearly comprehended, as
will be emphasized hereafter, the importance of not antagonizing Russia,
though that proved extremely difficult, considering that Germany’s closest
ally, the Austrian empire, was perennially at odds with Russia’s aspirations
in Eastern Europe. Hence, Bismarck’s cherished goal, a solid alliance of the
three continental sovereigns (the Dreikaiserbund), never materialized. Then,
the tentatively ‘friendly’ feelers he had sent toward England had always
been received with suspicion in London, for the Reich had been for some
time unabashedly fashioning itself as a rival – there only remained to assess
its degree of hostility. But that, as mentioned above, was a matter fuzzy to
Germany herself.
What was certain was that France, within the shifting circles of alliances,
was for Germany ‘hopeless’: in 1871, after the Franco-Prussian War, the
newly proclaimed Reich had annexed industrially-rich Alsace and Lorraine,
and thenceforth it was sworn hate between the two powers. By the time
Bismarck left, he had done precious little to allay the discomfort of
Britain.
Collectively, the gist of all such interminable diplomatic jockeying
consisted in the Germans’ unresolved complex of political inferiority vis-
à-vis the British: Kaiser Wilhelm, the grandson of Queen Victoria; Bismarck,
Admiral Tirpitz, the future father of the German Imperial Navy; and a slew
of German grandees were all fluent in English, and educated in the ways
of the British gentleman of leisure: the German attraction to Britain, the
fascination with her mastery of power, were strong. But the German Reich
was altogether a ‘different’ creature: it only wished it possessed an equal
level of imperial savvy to make itself heard. And so it tried, with whatever
it had – which was much, as the Allies were to realize two decades later,
but not enough.
Thereafter, with Wilhelm II, came the neuer Kurs: and this ‘new course,’
which was in truth but the continuation of the old one, brought in relief
the former orientation and unveiled its blurred medium-term aim: in brief,
antagonism with Britain; antagonism to be settled by naval skirmishes, bold
diplomacy, and commercial and technological swagger.
In the voluminous stream of scholarly production dealing with the
Second Reich and the Gründerzeit (the ‘founding epoch’ of German imperial
hegemony in the late nineteenth century) much has been made of Wilhelm
II’s infantile antics and capricious shallowness; much catastrophic action
ascribed to the Kaiser’s neurotic shame for his withered left arm and hand.
Leaving aside such psychologistic etiology à bon marché, which is graciously
passing out of vogue, it may be more to the point to remark that the
abiding tendency of Germany’s new course appeared to be nothing more
than a disquieting drift to dissolution. As one German historian recently
observed, Wilhelm II was not the creator of German hubris, simply its most
conspicuous functionary.11
Thus by the end of the nineteenth century, economically speaking,
Germany and America were breathing down Britain’s neck. But this
elementary recognition on Britain’s part hardly exhausted the matter.
America spoke passable English, could be ‘Liberal’, and most important,
was, like Britain herself, an island: she could not represent a threat. But
the German language was as remote from the English as Wilhelmshaven
was close to Dover. Germany was at hand, on the continent. And there
was more.
Naval skirmishes…
It became apparent by the end of the century that Wilhelm II was
enthusiastically supporting the project of expanding the Imperial Navy.
At home, the cosmopolitans, the Socialists and the Liberals, were wary
– of course, such a move would have meant a positive confrontation with
Britain – but so were the conservative agrarians: a great Navy signified some
form of open trade, and heavy taxes. The Reich silenced its landlord class
– the so-called Junkers*
– with protective tariffs, and set out to ratchet up
the maritime effort, cheered by the vast majority of the country – Liberals,
Catholics, pan-Germans, the rich absentee owners and not so rich Socialist
underclass, all, in one shape or another, ‘nationalists’: at the time it seemed
indecorous not to wear some of that collective pride for the so many
astounding achievements of the young Reich.
*
That is, the landed aristocracy, which rules from the bastion of the agrarian class, the
Junkers, from the Old High German Juncherro, ‘young lord.’
Propaganda, public rallying and, to respond to German jingoism,
whipping the average Briton into patriotic frenzy by feeding him a ‘good
hate’ amounted to so much routine for the British governors and their
dependable press organs: these things could be effected effortlessly, if the
need arose.12 But the German intrusion upon the waters of the North Sea,
and therefrom the new fl eet’s predictable reach for the maritime expanses
of the globe constituted for Britain, to put it mildly, a grave worry. This
time the Reich had gone too far. It was encroaching upon the very means
of British imperial management, the hallowed ‘Royal Navy,’ which had
been the chief instrument of Great Britain’s conquest of the world since the prophetic Elizabethan days of John Dee, the Queen’s astrologer,
cartographer, occultist, and intelligence officer.
The Germans were intuiting one thing too many: they were slowly
understanding that if they successfully coupled continental might – which
they could readily wield, being the Prussian divisions, solidly planted in the
heart of Europe, the best in the world – with a powerful fleet, their military
force de frappe would assuredly overpower that of Britain.
So then the issue of alliances came to the fore. Intuitively, the Germans
knew since the epoch of Bismarck that it would not do to fi nd themselves
trapped between the ‘hopeless’ French, and the ambivalent Russians. A
prolonged war, if fi ght one must, on two fronts had to be avoided. This
was why Bismarck never sought to alienate Russia entirely; but the clumsy
anti-Slav intrigues of the Austrian partner in the Balkans stood in the way:
the Austro-Hungarian empire was the weak appendage of the Reich; the
German General Staff was conscious of this burden. And would live to
regret it – ‘we are fettered to a corpse,’ they would wail a mere month
after the beginning of the war.13 But for the time being, Austria remained
the natural ally because she afforded a continuum of Germanic control
upon the southeastern reaches of Europe, and, moreover, Austrians spoke
beautiful German. That fin de siècle Vienna, though showing spreading
symptoms of decadence, was one of the vanguards, if not the vanguard of
‘German’ artistic expression – a crucible of extraordinary inventiveness,
second not even to Paris – is an important consideration in this regard.
Austrians spoke German, and the Prussians were convinced they could
bring off the great European race in any case; they thought they could
abundantly make up for the heavy military deficiencies of the Hapsburg
empire. All such expectations were clearly misplaced. But while the Reich
wallowed in its imprecision, Britain lost no time.
By 1900 it was clear to the British that the Reich could indeed ‘pull it
off’. It could overwhelm Britain and cause an advantageous (to the Reich),
yet temporary, paralysis of European affairs, during which it might turn
against France again to subdue her once and for all, and then direct her
gaze at Russia…Russia could either be inveigled by Germany into a binding
alliance, in which the latter would obviously dominate the former, or,
alternatively, the Russians could be slowly mangled into submission by the
Prussian armies. In either case, the British cauchemar would come true: if
Germany and Russia united in one form or another, the Eurasian Embrace
would come into existence: that is, a concrete Eurasian empire at the center
of the continental landmass, which would come to rest on an enormous
Slav army and German technological mastery. And that, the British elite sentenced, was never to be, for it would have mortally threatened the
supremacy of the British empire.
The heartland, the
crescent, and the nightmare
of British geopolitics
The ‘heartland’ was a hypothetical area centered in Eurasia, which would
be so situated and catered to by resources and manpower as to render it
an unconquerable fortress and a fearsome power; and the ‘crescent’ was
a virtual semi-arc encompassing an array of islands – America, Britain,
Australia, New Zealand and Japan – which, as ‘Sea Powers,’ watched over the
Eurasian landmass to detect and eventually thwart any tendency towards
a consolidation of power on the heartland.
This lingo was coined by the pioneers of Geopolitics, a new-fangled
discipline developed at the turn of the twentieth century: on the surface,
it consisted of a systematic and semi-erudite compilation of geography,
elementary logistics, economic lore, and Machiavellian mystagogy collated
ad usum Delphini. But its ulterior motive was a transliteration of individual
human conduct into the dynamics of social aggregates: a political likening of
nations to organic, willed, living creatures.14 Because of this, geopolitics was
likely to reveal in clear terms what the political agenda of a certain power
might have been at a given point in time. A revelatory and much influential
testimony was drafted during these times of anti-German conspiracies by
Sir Halford Mackinder (1861–1947), a professor at the London School of
Economics and one of Britain’s founding fathers of geopolitics, in a piece
entitled ‘The Geographical Pivot of History,’ which was published in the
Geographical Journal of the Royal Society in 1904. This article illustrated in
unequivocal terms the nature of the coming engagement.
Mackinder envisioned the alternatives and enumerated the stakes of the
game. This was a public document, telling a simple story. Its drift was a fair
exposition of the policy of the British Commonwealth, and subsequently of
that of its spiritual heir, the American empire: indeed, up until the present
time, the international policy of the US Administration has been waged
seamlessly and coherently in the spirit of Mackinder’s vision.
By 1900, the writing was on the wall.
The conception of Euro-Asia to which we thus attain is that of a continuous
land, ice-girt in the north, water-girt elsewhere, measuring twenty-one
million square miles, or more than three times the area of North America,
whose center and north, measuring some nine million square miles, or
more than twice the area of Europe, have no available water-ways to the ocean, but on the other hand, except in the subarctic forest, are very
generally favorable to the mobility of horsemen and camel men. To east,
south, and west of this heart-land are marginal regions, ranged in a vast
crescent, accessible to ship men. According to physical conformation,
these regions are four in number, and it is not a little remarkable that in
a general way they respectively coincide with the spheres of the four great
religions – Buddhism, Brahaminism, Mahometanism, and Christianity…
Britain, Canada, the United States, South Africa, Australia, and Japan,
are now a ring of outer and insular bases for sea-power and commerce,
inaccessible to the land-power of Europe…The spaces within the Russian
empire and Mongolia are so vast, and their potentialities in population,
wheat, cotton, fuel, and metals so incalculably great, that it is inevitable
that a vast economic world, more or less apart, will develop inaccessible
to oceanic commerce…In the world at large [Russia] occupies the central
strategical position held by Germany in Europe. She can strike on all sides,
save the north. The full development of her modern railway mobility
is merely a matter of time…The over setting of the balance of power in
favor of the pivot state, resulting in its expansion over the marginal lands
of Euro-Asia, would permit of the use of vast continental resources for
fleet-building, and the empire of the world would then be in sight. This might
happen if Germany were to ally herself with Russia. The threat of such an
event should, therefore, throw France into alliance with the over-sea
powers, and France, Italy, Egypt, India and Korea would become so many
bridgeheads where the outside navies would support armies to compel the
pivot allies to deploy land forces and prevent them from concentrating
their whole strength on fleets.15
What this signified was that henceforth the modern struggle for world power would come to be driven by the images of a British nightmare. And these were the dreaded insights:
1. Britain feared most of all the possible emergence of a ‘heartland’ or ‘pivot’ as the nave of a land-fastness, impregnable behind bastions of ice, moated by uninviting shores, and towering in the midst of a continental space traversed by an extensive network of transportation – a chilling dream of Cossack's at a gallop, bullet trains and shadowy Huns blazing the highways of Central Asia. The earliest formulation of Mackinder’s plan was the product of Britain’s inveterate enmity towards Russia rather than a warning issued directly against Germany: it was in the plains of Russia that the heartland was initially identified.
After World War I, as Germany became the cynosure of international checkmating, Mackinder, in a successive version of the original 1904 article, updated his theory in keeping with British imperial designs by shifting the pivot along a southwestern trajectory, from the steppes of Siberia down to a nondescript midpoint along the great fault line that divides the West from the East, and which later came to coincide with the Churchillian ‘iron curtain’ separating Eastern from Western Europe. This virtual boundary may be imagined as a meridian issuing from the shores of the Red Sea, which meets the Black Sea by way of Palestine and shoots through the Balkans and the Baltic, all the way north to Murmansk in Russia (see Figure 1.1). Conceptually, the ‘fault line’ is the great divide that roughly sets Muslim Arabs in the south and Orthodox Slavs in the North, apart from the Modern Europeans in the West.
The fault line ideally bisects the heartland, which is located within Eurasia. The heartland is the islands’ island; Mackinder’s motto thus intimated that ‘whoever rules the heart-land, rules the world island; whoever rules the world island, rules the world.’16 In the northwest this came to mean that if Germany would find ways of bridging the fault line by cementing the technological strength of the European West with the geographical immensity of the East via Russia, she would become the unconquerable head of the dreaded fortress looking over the Eurasian heartland.
2. The immediate revelation of such a nightmare was that no forces were to be spared to obstruct political let alone military coalitions of any form across the heartland, beginning with the plausible Russo-German alliance. And this Britain could best achieve by marshaling a league of sister islands, which she could dispose against Eurasia as a besieging crescent of Sea Powers. Excepting the Japanese trump, sea-power is Anglo-Saxon through and through; all the challenging isles listed by Mackinder are emanations of Britain herself: from America, with the addition of Canada, all the way round to Australia, including New Zealand – the empire’s white dominions.
3. Should Europe, the Near East, and Central Asia have been capable of coalescing into a solid confederation, their combined mineral, hydric, and natural resources (oil, grain, steel, water, lumber, and so on) would have afforded this enormous Eurasian League a defensive advantage such as would have nullified any prolonged blockade of the Sea Powers. Eurasia could then resist a British embargo à outrance.
4. From this it followed that such a wealth of resources on the heartland could have been naturally channeled, in the face of overt naval aggression, to the launch of a defensive Eurasian fleet. The combined shield of land and sea forces from the continent against the crescent of maritime foes would have not only repulsed easily the onslaught from the sea, but in all likelihood ended with the utter defeat of the Sea Powers and their concomitant subjugation to the hypothetical joint command of the heartland.
5. The sudden appearance of the Prussian Reich had turned this Eurasian chimera into a tangible eventuality: this time the menace was real; the great enemy could come into being through a genial amalgam of Russian vitality and German sophistication. The Eurasian Embrace is the consummation of a Russo-German political, military and spiritual fusion. Against such a fusion, Mackinder seemed to suggest, Britain would have found herself powerless in the long run.
6. Hence the strategy of Britain became crystal clear: in order to deter the emergence of this threatening rival on the heartland, she would have no alternative but to encircle the heartland in a permanent siege. This would be effected by driving wedges (the bridgeheads) in the vital nodes of the continental body. In such areas the land armies could be trapped in perennial warfare, and their generals would be so engrossed by the exertion as to deflect their attention from the keen urgency to arm a Eurasian fleet and drive out the foreign (seafaring) aggressor.
The remarkable character of this piece, aside from its fastidious prescience, was its openly aggressive tenor. Though it was written in the shade of a Russian menace, its reasoning seemed to suggest that Britain had to favor the line of least resistance, and single out Germany as the proximate adversary because: (1) the Reich was the dynamic half of the Russo-German threat, and, (2) it could be surrounded and blockaded by an entente of neighboring parties with somewhat greater ease, hence Britain’s forthcoming rapprochement with Russia, her traditional antagonist.
Naturally, such warming of Anglo-Russian relations led to no permanent settlement of the Eurasian question, nor was it its purpose to do so: the issue, overwhelming as it was from the British standpoint had to be tackled one bridgehead at a time; the détente with Russia served as a mere prelude to a general stratagem seeking the destruction of Germany. Britain could not, and possibly did not wish to foresee the unfathomable costs that she, and the world at large, would have to incur in order to accomplish this stratagem, but the empire took its chances nonetheless.
The evidence that the destruction of Germany became Britain’s chief objective after 1900 is provided by the elaborate diplomatic activity that she would weave to provoke the world war, as will be recounted in the subsequent sections of this chapter.
In fact, it is one of the tenets of Anglo-American historiographical catechism that Germany had always been the incorrigible aggressor of the Pax Britannica.
The rhetoric prevailing in Germany in the first decade of the twentieth century about Einkreisung (encirclement) and the consequent popular appeal to wage a ‘righteous defensive war’ to break out of this ‘encirclement,’ accompanied by the irresponsible magniloquence of the military-industrial and imperial cliques led by Wilhelm II, as well as the drunken claims of so many nationalists about ‘Germany’s historical mission‘ and her ‘duty to wage war,’17 have all been summarily singled out as so many definitive and screaming proofs of Germany’s indisputable guilt for triggering the first world conflict. But these meager elements prove nothing other than the malign influence of Germany’s archaic nationalism and the utter confusion among her rulers as to the country’s immediate strategic imperatives: stacked against the lucid analysis of Mackinder, which contemplated already in 1904 a massive pre-emptive strike against threatening rivals in Eurasia, German bombast shrank into insignificance: a prolonged world confrontation could have never been the idea of an isolated, and also inexperienced, German government. In Mackinder’s paper there was little if any indication that Germany was going to attack.
Rather, Germany’s boisterousness was no more than a heartening cry in the face of uncertainty. Nervous rather than cocky, the Reich prepared for war with stage fright, cheering itself up, cursing its good fortune, and damning everything, specially the day it had started gambling its fate on the grand chessboard. Undoubtedly, if left to herself, Germany would have never made the first move and opened the hostilities: she had too much to lose. Germany had to be driven to it. In truth, her sole concrete goal, had Britain kept out of Europe, never went beyond the wish to consolidate a ‘Middle-European Empire of the German Nation’, that is, an ante diem German-led European customs union, severed from Russia, and such an arrangement was something England could cohabit with.18
Five years after the end of World War I, a US Senator, Robert Owen, would undertake a deep, dispassionate study of the war’s origins and present his finding to the American people on December 18, 1923: the several claims of Allied propaganda, namely that the Entente had to fight (1) to thwart the Kaiser’s plan to dominate the world by force, (2) to make the world safe for democracy, and (3) to defend American ideals, Owen construed respectively as ‘false’, ‘ludicrous’, and ‘untrue’.19 He found that Neither the Russian or the French government was really believed that the German government intended aggressive war on them but the military preparedness of Germany and the bombast of some of its chauvinists laid a convenient but false foundation for the French and British propaganda that the German leaders had plotted the brutal military conquest of the world…In 1914 Germany had no reason for war, no terra irredenta, no revenge and knew that a general European war might easily destroy its merchant marine, its commerce, both of which were rapidly expanding, and cause the loss of its colonies.20
The Germans were new to the heady breeze of world success – their imperial tenure had yet to harden into maturity – but with their British enemies it was a different story.
The last thing Britain would want to do at this early stage was to give any inkling to the public, the enemy, or potential allies, of her desire to strangle Germany in a permanent siege. Instead, in public she set out to treat her nascent antagonism to the Reich as if it boiled down to a mere matter of business: the British thus affected the irked demeanor of jealous proprietors rushing to defend their commercial interests against the provocation of the German upstart.
This justification was a full-fledged travesty, though it appears still to be the explanation favored by the historians of the victorious West.21
Yet in fact, the deep worry and restlessness caused by the German unknown among the stewards of the British empire marked an epochal divide in the overall strategy of Britain. By 1904, as revealed by her pattern of alliances, Britain appeared to have resolved for the all-out encirclement of the heartland, and the phenomenal, if half-blind, growth of Germany during the last two decades of the twentieth century provided her with the occasion.
From the beginning Britain was the aggressor, not Germany.
Years later, in 1916, as Wilhelm brooded over the unspeakable butchery at the front, he whimpered in a letter he sent the mother of a fallen officer that he had never wanted this war, by which he meant a massacre of global magnitude. ‘This is exactly right,’ rejoined the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, in a public response to the Kaiser’s lament, ‘The emperor Wilhelm did not want this war. He wanted another war, one that would have allowed him to dispatch France and Russia in two months. We were the ones that wanted this war, as it is being fought, and we shall conduct it to victory.’22[We know from our current reading at this blog in "Wall St and the Bolsheviks" that GEORGE was a corrupt and dark soul and worked lockstep with the American bankers in the Russian Revolution that brought the Jewish Bolsheviks to power DC]
Britain’s – and later on America’s – drive to conquest was foreshadowed unmistakably by Mackinder’s cursory yet almost oracular mention of the several bridgeheads that the Sea Powers needed to graft unto the heartland to draw out its armies in a deliberate sequence of separate clashes. To isolate each conflict, the targeted territorial portion had to be severed from its adjacent district, and bled white by prolonged strife waged in the name of political, religious, or ethnic diversity.[Does this ring a bell with the West's actions in Iraq,Libya,Syria,etc in the Middle East here in 2017/ DC] Thus the Anglo-Americans have always acted: in Europe by spinning everybody against Germany (1904–45); in the Near East, by jamming Israel in the heart of the Arab world (1917– present); in the Far East, by planting thorns in the side of China: Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan (1950–present); in Central Asia by destabilizing the entire region into tribal warfare with the help of Pakistan to prevent the Caspian seaboard from gravitating into the Russian sphere of influence (1979–present).
Most importantly, in such trying games of conquest, results might never be expected to take shape quickly, but might take a matter of weeks, months or even decades. Imperial stratagems are protracted affairs. The captains of world aggression measure their achievements, or failures, on a timescale whose unit is the generation. It is within such a frame that the incubation of Nazism should be gauged: it was a long and elaborate plan to eliminate the possibility of German hegemony over the continent. And the stewards of the empire took their time.
Germany and England prepared for war; the former looking forward to a
limited engagement, the latter to an all-out siege. In 1898, the German
Reich began to expand the Imperial Navy in earnest; by 1906, it had the
second-biggest fleet in the world. In 1900–02, Britain shifted her strategic
focus away form the outmoded anti-Russian intrigues in Central Asia,
and the petty African jealousies versus France, and narrowed it on the
progressive encirclement of Germany, with a view to directing upon
her at the propitious moment the first, northwestern land-bridge of the
comprehensive attack.
In 1904, by diplomacy, Britain drew France closer – according to the deal, or the Entente Cordiale, as it came to be known: to the tricolor went Morocco: Egypt to the Union Jack.23
In March, Helmuth von Moltke, the commander in chief of the Germany
army, who would later bear the blame for losing the war after the first
collapse on the River Marne (September 1914, discussed below), fearing
the coming tempest, noted: ‘No one has any idea what thunderstorms are forming above us; instead of preparing in solemn earnestness for the serious
times ahead the nation is tearing itself to pieces.’24
In July of 1904, after four girls, a boy – an heir, the Czarevich Alexi was finally born to the Romanov's, Nicholas and Alexandra. The doctors noticed suspicious bleeding from the infant’s navel, but the matter was promptly dismissed. One year later, to the month, Alexei suffered the first bout of what was, to the terror of his mother and father, diagnosed as hemophilia. ‘Since the blood would not clot, the slightest cut endangered his life.’25 Conventional medicine was powerless against the disease.
Six months prior to the Czarevich’s first hemorrhage, in January 1905, Russia witnessed her first and last spontaneous, popular uprising: it was not led by self-styled ‘irreconcilable atheists’ like the Communist Trotsky, who would have joined the ebullient flow shortly thereafter,26 but by a priest, pope Gapon. Protesting food shortages, low wages, and tyranny, thousands marching behind the pope reached the Winter Palace, to be shot at and dispersed by Cossack's and police officers: the day was remembered as ‘Bloody Sunday.’ There followed strikes and mounting tension. The Czar made concessions; the St. Petersburg Soviet (Russian for ‘Council’) came into existence as the spontaneous institutional embodiment of the local interests of the community, along with the emperor’s reluctant assent to the formation of an advisory body, the Duma.
Throughout the year, in this ambiguous intermission of illusory reform, many future leading revolutionaries partook in the fervor of the newly founded Soviet, but their agitation was repressed: the Czar had indeed bluffed, and many such disturbers of the imperial peace were arrested and sent to Siberia, whence, one by one, they would all escape. Russia had been shaken within. Without, a few months after the popular sedition, she was beaten in Korea and Manchuria by Japan in a distant colonial dispute. The defeat was unprecedented.
In the midst of the Russian debacle Wilhelm, at last, attempted the Eurasian rapprochement; in July 1905 he lured the Czar to Björkö, on the Gulf of Finland, and succeeded in obtaining the approval of Nicholas to a treaty, whereby (1) the two powers were bound to mutual support in the case of war, and (2) Russia committed herself to informing France of the agreement with a view of involving the latter in the alliance.27
But as the Germans failed to grasp until the very last that Great Britain was orchestrating a monumental siege against them – the ultimate political misjudgment that would spell the ruin of Germany – a late alliance with Russia could not be concluded. Probably, by 1905 it was too late. Indeed, when Germany could have tied Russia to herself by accepting Russian securities (that is, extending her loans), as the occasion arose in 1887, piqued by Russia’s economic antagonism, she had refused. The financial interests of France, and to a lesser extent Britain, had moved in at once to advance the money, and thereby fastened resolutely the fate of the Russian empire to their imperial policies.
Bismarck had merely toyed with Russia; he had never bound her to Germany, as he ought to have done. The Eurasian embrace could have only come into being through a German composition of Austrian and Russian ambitions in Mitteleuropa, with or without France. This was at heart the Central Powers’ geopolitical mission, as a counter to the Sea Powers’ forthcoming siege; in that, from Bismarck to Bethmann-Hollweg, the last pre-war Reich chancellor, they failed utterly. There lay the seeds of Europe’s past and present dissolution.
The treaty of Björkö was never ratified. Upon returning home, Nicholas was severely dressed down by his ministers, who sobered him up by recalling the Czar to his commitments vis-à-vis France, which in turn, after having been informed of Nicholas’s disquieting escapade, vetoed categorically any participation in an entente with the Reich – it seemed that Wilhelm had forgotten that the French were ‘hopeless’. So Nicholas retracted and the Kaiser protested vehemently, but in vain, for by September it was all over. If deep Anglo-French money and German obtuseness had alienated Russia from an understanding with the Reich, likewise time-honored and intense Franco-Russian military cooperation definitively impeded any belated German wish to remedy the irremediable; the Germans had missed their opportunity, long before Björkö.28
In October 1905, the Czar recorded in his diary his first encounter with
a ‘Man of God.’ Rasputin had landed in St. Petersburg. The circumstances
surrounding his introduction in the imperial circle are still obscure, but
between this first meeting and 1907, Rasputin must have been summoned
to court during one of the Czarevich’s hemophiliac attacks, and brought
it to a miraculous end.29 By touch and prayer, the Siberian healer alone
could keep the Romanov heir alive. Alexandra, thanking the heavens for
the auspicious appearance of this wandering monk, took him in as the
spiritual guide, and let his unquestioned ascendancy grow upon her. The
Czarina was in Rasputin’s thrall, as the Czar was in hers. Thus the fate of
the Russian empire fell into the hands of a peasant magus.
Meanwhile, the naval race continued. Between 1907 and 1909 Britain invited Germany twice to agree to a general curtailment of construction, provided that Britain was assured numerical superiority in this respect. Twice Germany refused: France and Russia might as well have been permitted to enjoin the Reich to limit its own land forces, quipped Wilhelm.31 And he added:
We simply are Central Europe and it is quite natural that other and smaller nations tend toward us. To this the British object because it absolutely knocks to pieces their theory of the Balance of Power, i.e. their desire to play off one European power against another at their own pleasure, and because it will lead to the establishment of a united continent.32
The premise was, from Germany’s angle, correct, but the inference erroneous: again, Britain had been fatally underestimated. Germany counter proposed twice in 1909: first, in April, the diplomats of the Wilhelmstrasse* suggested that the parties seal a naval convention, provided that Britain acquiesced to a ‘benevolent neutrality’ in case of Germany’s engagement in a continental war. In other words, the Reich demanded that Britain play the role of the passive spectator; second, in December, the Germans offered anew to trade a limitation of tonnage for British neutrality and the agreement on fixed naval ratios. Twice Britain refused. And what was more, she resolved to scale up production so as to assemble two Dreadnoughts, Britain’s new, much perfected destroyers, for every German warship.
* The domicile of Germany’s Reich Chancellery and ministerial offices; by metonymy it came to indicate the German Foreign Ministry
One last overture was made to Russia in 1911 during the parleys at Potsdam, which had been officially scheduled to deal with the penetration of German capital in the Middle East, and lasted several months: Germany declared herself willing to rein in Austria’s intrigues in Eastern Europe if Russia proved amenable to withdrawing her support from an eventual hostile policy instigated by Britain against Germany.
The Kaiser obtained a stretch of railway in Mesopotamia – the other, broken, tracts of Germany’s long-sighted and formidable blueprint were bartered away to Britain and France – but no guarantee of neutrality on the part of Russia.
Presently the margin for additional diplomatic maneuvering was exhausted. From this time onward Europe was on the path to war. The more the Kaiser had tardily sought to weaken the Triple Entente, the more Britain strengthened it: in 1912 Britain signed a secret naval convention with France, and the latter did likewise with Russia. Secretly, unbeknownst to the Houses and most ministers, Lord Grey of the Foreign Office exchanged with Cambon, the French ambassador in London, a series of letters in which, on the basis of classified military conventions drafted by the General Staff of both countries, Britain, in case of war, pledged intervention on the side of France.33
In these days, the strategists of Germany’s General Staff were at work rehearsing and fine-tuning the Schlieffen Plan.* This plan had been drawn up in 1905, and, after 1906, modified by Schlieffen’s successor, the younger Helmuth von Moltke, the nephew of the victorious general at Sedan in 1871.
* After Count von Schlieffen, chief of the General Staff from 1891 to 1905.
The plan aimed at settling the war with a single, potent, blow. Schlieffen assumed that Germany would be engaged on two fronts: France to the West, Russia to the East; the former having to be annihilated before the latter could mobilize. Any fighting of extended duration, which would have predictably drained the embattled and resource-poor Reich, was to be avoided, and replaced instead by a stubborn resistance in the East, and a stationary contingent facing France, to make room for the pearl of the plan: ‘a great wheeling wing going through Holland and Belgium and coming down on the flank and rear of the French armies by passing west of Paris.’34
The British had intelligence of the plan, down to its minute details: ‘unbeknown to anyone in Berlin, [the Schlieffen Plan] had come into the possession of the French army in 1906, thanks to a traitor bought for sixty thousand francs.’35 Indeed, Belgium was going to provide the cornerstone of Britain’s diplomatic pretext for the commencement of hostilities.
Britain counted on Germany’s inevitable violation of Belgian neutrality as soon as Moltke was to launch the Schlieffen blitzkrieg. Already, in 1906, the British General Staff, with the full logistical, and secret, cooperation of its Belgian counterpart, was involved in simulated maneuvers across Belgium featuring the deployment of a British Expeditionary Force on the continent – which, indeed, would have been regularly fielded in August 1914 under the command of Sir John French to aid the French armies against Germany’s Parisian offensive. The public was never informed of such plans.36
From then on (1911–14) the series of crises had been almost uninterrupted:37 incidents in North Africa, intrigue and tugs-of-war in the Balkans, warnings, defiance, and counter-warnings from all sides.
By the spring of 1914 the Entente was ready to ambush the Germans. On May 29, 1914, Edward House, President Wilson’s chief adviser from Texas and America’s éminence grise behind the Anglo-American imperial covenant, reported from Europe: ‘Whenever England consents, France and Russia will close in on Germany and Austria’.38
Now, with an excuse or an ‘incident,’ one merely had to ignite this great
and patiently amassed bonfire of pent-up hostility in the heart of Europe.
What was wanting for sparking a war was a timely ‘act of terror.’ And a
terrorist to effect it. It was rather easily found in the inconspicuous figure
of a Serb student by the name of Gavrilo Princip. The occasion? Sarajevo.
On June 28, 1914, the legitimate heir to the Hapsburg throne, Archduke Ferdinand, and his consort Sophie descended on an official visit to the new province’s capital.
As a retaliatory act against Austria’s 1908 single-handed annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which the Serbs had claimed for themselves, Cabrinovic, abetted by Grabez – two militants of a secret Pan-Serbian organization suggestively called ‘The Black Hand’, whose motto was ‘Union or Death!’ – hurled a bomb at the vehicle carrying their Royal Highness'es, and missed.
The bomb went off and wounded a few passers-by. The carriage moved on, and the visit proceeded as scheduled.39 When the reception at the town hall came to an end, the Archduke and his wife boarded the car anew; suddenly Gavrilo Princip, the third party to the commando, came swinging to the right side of the vehicle; as he approached he fired at Ferdinand and his wife and killed both.
At the time, all three ‘terrorists’ were not even 20 years old.
The inciting incident that would have triggered the imbricate system of alliances and eventually dragged their signatories into battle had happened, at last.
This was an instance of terrorism: namely, a deed of violence, which, at best, was devoid of any appreciable political gain or motive, and at worst, as it elicited a far bloodier reprisal, was entirely deleterious to the terrorists themselves. An act of terror generally takes the form of a spectacular feat of devastation capable of rippling waves of public indignation, and accordingly provides the adversarial faction(s) with the pretext for commencing war. Recruiting terrorists never seems a problem: these appear at the basic level to be a loose collection of desperadoes, who end up being easily trained, provisioned, and oriented by the undercover intelligence services of the home country.
Thus, on the face of it, a senseless crime; in substance, a political gambit orchestrated elsewhere. Where? The covert role of Serbian intelligence in casting the three teenage students for the assassination was widely acknowledged, but ‘the real director of the conspiracy had been Russia’s military attache, Colonel Victor Artamanov, who had told [the chiefs of Serb intelligence] in the early stages: ‘Go ahead. If attacked you will not stand alone.’40
In general, the art of terror entails the (state’s) underground promotion of a fractious grouping: say, an ‘ethnic army of liberation,’ or a radical militia, whose vanguard – the expendable fringe – numbers so many Princips as are readied for gaol or the gallows. Meanwhile the higher levels of this conspiratorial franchise feature a mix of intelligence officers in charge of disinformation, organization and cover-up, and hired ‘consultants’ – themselves intelligence officers ‘on loan’ from other state agencies, foreign and otherwise, or former soldiers of fortune, whose expertise runs the gamut of recruitment, financial shuffle, subversive methods and like techniques of destabilization.
In the simplest configurations, the subterranean instruction of the terrorist ‘cell’ by the state’s secret services is part of a maneuver aimed at implicating this phantom ‘organization’ into a more or less spectacular act of sabotage. Sabotage either against the state itself, or against the ‘targeted enemy’, that is, a nation whose ruling clans are to be antagonized by the terrorist recruits in the name of ethnic or religious rivalry. In the first case, while the wounded government in the vengeful heat of retaliation ‘clamps down on the terrorists,’ a variety of prearranged ends, all congruent in point of social control and surveillance, is swiftly implemented.*
* This seems to be the stable pattern of terrorist activity throughout the twentieth century, from the plot of the Black Hand in Sarajevo to the political assassinations carried out by European revolutionary cells in the 1970s (for instance, the Meinhof gang in Germany, or the Red Brigades and their various counterparts of the extreme Right in Italy. By striking panic among the population, Italian terrorist squads progressively fomented a state of collective psychosis, which came to be perceived popularly as ‘the strategy of tension’ of Italy’s ‘deviated secret services’, and which ultimately corroborated the grip on the country of then tottering US-backed Christian Democrat mafia), up to the carnage perpetrated by the Islamist Front in Algeria (1992), and the recent lurking ‘threat’ of Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda – a true ‘Godsend’ for America’s imperial Establishment (as known, the evanescent Bin Laden and his lieutenants are from the start an invention of the CIA).
Sarajevo’s example was a ‘standard terrorist act’ of the second kind; in fact, it did not fail to achieve all the objectives expected from such enterprise, namely, to (1) bring Germany into the war by way of Austria, the enemy of Russia, who in turn protected Serbia; (2) advance the cause of Serbia by harnessing her to the chariot of the Triple Entente; (3) sacrifice the material perpetrators by condemning them to imprisonment and capital execution; and (4) keep well hidden from historical memory the identity of the plot’s commanditaires.
Gavrilo Princip was the first of a long sequence of ‘patsies,’ ‘pawns,’ or ‘useful idiots,’41 whose individually unflattering but politically expeditious task is to bring to a head decisions matured beforehand by the Elder Statesmen. Many such ‘useful idiots’ will be encountered in this narrative in connection with significant episodes: Felix Youssoupov (the agony of Rasputin, 1916), Anton von Arco-Valley (the shooting of Kurt Eisner, 1919), Oltwig von Hirschfeld, Heinrich Tillesen and Heinrich Schultz (the attempted assassination, 1920, and final dispatch of Erzberger, 1921), Erwin Kern, Hermann Fischer and Ernst von Salomon (the trio behind the death of Rathenau, 1922), Martin van der Lubbe (the Reichstag fire, 1933), and Alexei Nikolaev(the killing of Kirov, which triggered the anti-Troskyist purge, 1934).
On July 6, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Lord Grey, informed the German ambassador that Russia was yet unprepared to intervene, and that Britain had no binding obligation vis-à-vis either Russia or France: a deliberate lie.42
Two days later, the British Foreign Minister assured the Russians that, according to ‘very reliable military sources’, the Germans were rapidly conveying divisions to the East, and that the situation looked upon the Reich with disfavor: an even bigger lie.43
All such deceiving signals issued by the Foreign Office in cross-directions behind closed doors were accompanied in Britain by a public show of phony attempts at mediation in the name of peace, initiated with an eye to deceiving the multitudes.44 Britain had always been careful to spin the international tangle so as to drive the opponent in the position of the assailant, and reserve for herself the role of the peace-loving defender. This was a psychological artifice tailored for mass seduction, and the Germans had no knowledge or understanding of such tricks.
Austria issued the ultimatum to Serbia: a comprehensive injunction to annihilate any form of anti-Austrian propaganda in Serbia, and to open a formal investigation into the assassination, in which delegates of the Austrian empire were to partake.45 Serbia accepted all points but the last one, which, in a theatrical diplomatic counter-move, she offered to submit to international arbitration at the international court of The Hague. Clearly, she had been instructed to turn down the ultimatum by her patrons, who had been waiting a long time for this moment: already on July 25, the British Treasury began printing special Notes, non-convertible into gold, marked for war expenses.46
The war against Serbia into which Austria was deliberately incited by the ruinous intrigues of Serbia at the instigation of Russia was a trap into which Austria fell, not knowing it was fomented by Russia to create a pretext of general mobilization and war and to make Austria and Germany appear to the world as the willful originators of the great conflict.47
The armies of Franz Josef prepared the attack against Serbia, Wilhelm was overjoyed – heedless of the consequences. After one more round of perfunctory diplomatic waltzes between London, Berlin, Paris, and St. Petersburg, Austria-Hungary went ahead and on July 28 bombarded Belgrade. The war had begun.
Russia, secretly goaded by France, who promised her support,48 mobilized along her western frontier, and the German generals nervously awaited the green light from the Kaiser to launch the Schlieffen offensive. Pourtalès, the German ambassador in St. Petersburg, rushed to the foreign ministry, and asked its head, Sazanov, to halt the Russian mobilization. He implored three times. And when the Russian minister refused for the last time, Pourtalès handed him, with a trembling hand, Germany’s declaration of war. It happened on August 1.
However, upon hearing the news of Russia’s massing of troops, Wilhelm somewhat broke out of his stupor and commiseratively brought himself to acknowledge the truth of the situation:
In this way the stupidity and clumsiness of our ally is turned into a noose. So the celebrated encirclement of Germany has finally become an accomplished fact…The net has suddenly been closed over our heads, and the purely anti-German policy which England has been scornfully pursuing all over the world has won the most spectacular victory which we have proved powerless to prevent while they, having got us despite our struggles all alone into the net through our loyalty to Austria, proceed to throttle our political and economic existence. A magnificent achievement which even those for whom it means disaster are bound to admire.49
Indeed it was, and for such a disaster, the Germans had only themselves to blame.
At the outbreak of war, Rasputin brooded: ‘No more stars in the sky…An ocean of tears…Our Motherland has never suffered a martyrdom as that which awaits us…Russia will drown in her own blood.’50
In yet another sudden coup de théatre, as Germany prepared to unleash the onslaught on the Western Front, Britain issued one last cunning call for peace by informing the soon-to-be-warring parties that she was willing to guarantee her neutrality and provide assurances that France would not join the side of Russia in an eventual Russo-German conflict, provided Germany did not attack France. This last mischievous prank, which Wilhelm, with diabolical perseverance, took for a British accolade to his eastern invasion, nearly caused the already shaken Chief of the German General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke, to break down: the German mobilization was complete; the armies had to push forth, he insisted.
Pressured by the general, the German government as a brash counter bargain demanded no less than the acquisition of two French fortresses (Toul and Verdun) as ‘security’ for France’s neutrality. France naturally rejected the offer. On August 3, Germany declared war upon France. Staggering from one pitfall to another, Germany had turned herself into the world aggressor. Abel Ferry, the French Under-Secretary of State, wrote in his notebook: ‘The web was spun and Germany entered it like a great buzzing fly.’51
Finally, as her turn was next, Britain came full circle: knowing that Moltke was ready to thrust Ludendorff’s fusiliers through Belgium, the British government solemnly declared that it could not possibly tolerate the violation of Belgium’s neutrality; it then professed its unconditional adherence to peace, and, shameless, assured the public that it had signed no secret compacts with either France or Russia.52
When the Schlieffen Plan was enacted and the Reich’s armies crossed into Flanders, Britain sent Germany an ultimatum, which she knew the Reich would have ignored; but to avoid surprises (it expired at midnight) the British Cabinet exploited the time lag between London and Berlin, and shortened the waiting by an hour.
Sitting in silence round a large circular table covered with a neat green cloth, the ministers furtively eyed the big clock until it struck 11:00. Twenty minutes later Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, walked into the hall to inform his colleagues that a telegram had been dispatched across the empire summoning the Royal Fleet to begin operations.53
And where did the summer of 1914 find Adolf Hitler? At 25, already a veteran of Viennese flophouses – one among many bourgeois ratés – young Hitler joined, with a profound sense of deliverance and expectancy a Bavarian regiment with the rank of private. A man that enlists, said Pasternak, is not a happy man:
A few day later I was wearing the tunic which I was not to doff until nearly six years later. For me, as for every German, there now began the greatest and most unforgettable time of my early existence. Compared to the events of this gigantic struggle, everything past receded to shallow nothingness.54
Hitler would fight on the Western Front and earn several decorations for bravery.
The German March through Belgium and the initial clashes against the French, who lost 300,000 men in less than two weeks, were entirely successful for the Germans. Victory seemed assured. Paris was only 30 miles away. But then the Schlieffen Plan went awry. Moltke, believing victory certain, sent two corps to the East, for ‘the Russians,’ as he explained in his memoirs a year later, ‘had been able to invade East Prussia quicker than expected, and before we had been able to achieve a decisive victory against the Anglo-French armies’; he then concluded: ‘I recognize that this was a mistake, and one that we would pay for at the Marne.’55
What really came to pass in the course of the offensive on the River Marne, during which Moltke allegedly lost his wits, and communication broke down among the several corps of the otherwise unfaltering German war machine, remains a mystery. But for one reason or another, Germany, overwhelmed by her rivals to a degree far deeper than expected, ultimately faced the impossibility of carrying out the Schlieffen Plan as rapidly as she had originally intended in the unfamiliar environment of modern industrial warfare.
The German advance in the West came to a halt,
and in the next few months the French tried to dislodge the Germans from their positions. Neither was able to make any headway against the firepower of the other. A succession of futile efforts to outflank each other’s position merely succeeded in bringing the ends of the front to the English Channel on one extreme and to Switzerland on the other. In spite of millions of casualties, this line, from the sea to the mountains across the fair face of France, remained almost unchanged for over three years.56
Caught between the wedge of trench warfare in the West and the stifling naval blockade – which Britain was tightening all around the Fatherland, including neutral outlets, thus violating international conventions – the Germans tried to break free. Neither Germany's resistance on the home front, nor the unrestricted submarine warfare of 1917 would slacken the siege.
As for the eastern theater of war, things in late summer had gone badly for the Reich: the front was broken.
General Hindenburg was ‘a retired officer, whose principal occupation for some years had been sitting at a marble-topped table outside a café in Hamburg, making puddles with his beer’. ‘To the amusement of young German military cadets who regarded him as half-witted, [he explained] that these puddles were the Masurian Lakes in which he would drown the enemy if he ever had the good fortune to command an army in that area’.57 He had volunteered to serve in the army at the outbreak of hostilities, but was subsequently rejected. Yet his good fortune came nonetheless when Headquarters suddenly recalled him on account of his profound familiarity with the terrain upon which combat was being waged against the Russians.
Hindenburg reversed the outcome of the engagement swiftly; accompanied by Ludendorff, who had been dispatched by Moltke from Belgium to eastern Prussia (now northeastern Poland) to assist the German counter-offensive, he directed during September 8–15 the battle of the Masurian Lakes and its last stages were fought on Russian soil.
Whether other generals – German and Russian, the former for sagacity, the latter for incompetence – should have claimed authorship for such victories 58 is a matter of minimal import if weighed against the implacable German successes in the East throughout 1915. Though it had failed to cause a complete collapse of the enemy, Germany’s eastern advance so alarmed the Russians that Czar Nicholas II assumed the superior command of the armed forces.
The Germans were flattered by the panicked resolution.
In June of 1916, running westward from the Romanian frontier, the Russian General Brusilov, who had become a hero for smashing the Austrian armies in Galicia at the inception of the war, attempted one massive offensive against the Austro-German forces. Over the course of three months, the outcome of the onslaught remained indecisive, but the losses were unheard of: the Central Powers lost 600,000 men, and the Russians over 1 million.
Though Britain might claim that she was fighting for her empire, France for her honor, and Germany for her survival, what could Russia advance to justify the holocaust? That such misgivings would have soon preyed on the Russians had been a predictable affair in London; for that reason in 1915 the Czar had been promised by the British, as a tempting bait, Costantinople and the Straits (yet to be wrested from Turkey) – no less facile was the suspicion in St. Petersburg that the British promise was empty, which indeed it was.
The year 1916, despite the human losses and the resurfacing restlessness of the hinterland (starvation and political agitation), had not witnessed catastrophic setbacks for the Russian army; therefore from a position of relative strength, Russia could afford to initiate parleys conducive to a separate peace with the Germans. Rasputin certainly wanted peace, and if he did, so did Czarina Alexandra, who, with her husband away at the front, was left in charge of the internal affairs of Russia.
Rumors started to circulate to the effect that Alexandra, being a ‘German’ (her mother, Alice, a daughter of Queen Victoria, had married the Grand Duke of Hesse, Louis IV), was conspiring with German agents to surrender Russia wholesale to her enemy. ‘Down with the German woman!,’ the populace clamored.59 Yet the Czarina was embroiled into something altogether different. ‘That [Alexandra] became an instrument in the hands of men who sought to bring about a separate peace with Germany is probable.’60 And Britain now had to make sure that such ‘men’ ceased this activity forthwith.
In December 1916, a cabal of blue-blooded rakes and shady bureaucrats lured Rasputin into an evening feast, accompanied by opera singing. In the midst of such merriment, the healer gulped down a poisoned drink that could have sucked the life out of a regiment. Manifesting no visible distress from the ingested bane, Rasputin, before he was given time to regain the live music show, was repeatedly shot, stabbed, and beaten into a pulp by the scion of one of Russia’s most prestigious families, Prince Felix Youssoupov, with a violence that petrified his accomplices. These then rushed to throw the body of the healer, still breathing, into the icy waters of a canal. A transvestite since the age of twelve, bordello impersonator in drag and petulant libertine, Youssoupov had convinced himself, by 1916, that Rasputin, through his magnetic hold on the Czarina, was driving Russia to perdition. On February 1, the Daily Mail, uniting its voice to the chorus of the Russian mob, rejoiced at the magus’s death.61
To the Romanov's the healer had prophesied: ‘If I die or you abandon me, you will lose your son and your throne within six months.’62
War debts: in 1916–17 Russia owed to Britain a sum that was roughly a third of her annual income,63 which was more than what Britain owed the United States; and what Russia owed to France was half of what she owed to Britain. Identifying what party benefited from the Russian holocaust presents no difficulty: Britain obviously did. The conduct of the war in Russia was no more in the Czar’s hands than in those of Rasputin: rather, orders were dictated by the British Treasury.64 In Russia it was said at the time that ‘England and France will fight to the last Russian man.’65
On January 12, 1917, Lord George Buchanan, British ambassador in St. Petersburg, conferring with the Czar, was informed by the latter that a peace conference, ‘the final one,’ was to be expected soon. Buchanan rejoined that the Czar should take after the British government, and draw into the Imperial Cabinet an exponent of the ‘moderate Left’ so as to reach the twofold objective of soothing social disquiet while pursuing the offensive against the Germans. The Czar did not seem to decipher the message, and reiterated his intention of seeking the peace with Wilhelm II. Veiling a threat, Buchanan alluded mysteriously to the possibility of revolution and dropped the hint that he had had foreknowledge, by a week, of Rasputin’s assassination. Nicholas paid no heed.66 Like his German counterparts, he could not fathom how determined Britain was to prevent any form of dialogue between Russia and Germany.
The British ambassador in Russia himself was at the center of the scheme to overthrow the czar if he ever should lose his stomach for war…[To that end, he] had gathered a coterie of wealthy bankers, liberal capitalists, conservative politicians, and disgruntled aristocrats.67
Violent strikes erupted in the Russian capital a month after the entretien between the Czar and Buchanan: the turmoil would turn into Russia’s famed February Revolution. When it exploded, Buchanan was ‘out of the office,’ on holiday: safely withdrawn from the scene of a tumult that he had contributed to kindle.
Undismayed at the thought of eventually facing 70 German divisions wheeling into the Western Front, the British War Cabinet instead received the news with satisfaction; Lloyd George, the Prime Minister, exclaimed: ‘One of England’s goals had been achieved!’ Likewise, sharing Britain’s expectant mood, US President Woodrow Wilson in an address to Congress acclaimed on April 2, 1917, the deposition of the Czar, speaking of ‘those marvelous and comforting events’ in Russia, where ‘autocracy’ had finally been struck down.68
This was truly absurd: in the midst of an unprecedented world war, the Allied public was to believe that its rulers were worried about the ‘democratic temperature’ of Russia far more than they were about the risk of losing the Russian ally altogether! Yet the public should have known that of all scenarios it was a Russo-German peace that the Anglo-American clubs feared the most, and that it was precisely to avoid this occurrence that the war was being waged. And the Liberal press was surely not going to enlighten its readers on the matter. Thankfully for these clubs, in 1917 Eurasia miscarried: Russia and Germany were, yet again, successfully kept separated.
The overthrow of the Czar was no minor achievement. Indeed it must
have been part of a far wider scheme that had its significant counterpart
in a parallel mission conducted on the other side of the Russo-German
border (the ‘fault line’ proper) from a network connecting Berlin to the
Scandinavian capitals. Working assiduously against the Eurasian embrace
was another exceptional set of capable individuals. Their leader, Alexander
Israel Helphand (1867–1924), better known by his sobriquet, Parvus, had
started his modern adventure by joining the ranks of the revolutionaries.
From Odessa, his Russian hometown, he had gravitated naturally towards the
German-speaking world, and after earning a doctoral degree in economics
at the University of Basle, he had become politically active on the side of the German Socialists. Around 1910, disillusioned by organized socialism’s
impotence, and having fallen foul of Germany’s Leftist elite, Parvus had
disappeared from the chronicles. Inconspicuous and modest, he had left
Berlin…and resurfaced in Istanbul, transformed into a rich, extravagant
merchant with a knack for international intrigue.
That Helphand, on account of his multiple talents – as an energetic, but disenchanted polyglot, deeply acquainted with the whole wide spectrum of Socialist agitation, and wielding a fluent pen and economic sense – must have been inducted into some form of ‘network’ can scarcely be doubted. However, other than a passing allusion of the German Minister Brockdorff Rantzau to the nondescript ‘powers ranged behind Helphand’ (see below), historical documentation affords no material wherewith the contours of such an organization may be drawn with precision.
When the war came, Parvus was operative. In Istanbul, by guaranteeing a steady supply of armaments and war materials to the government of the Young Turks, he appeared to have played a significant role in securing Turkey’s entrance in the war on the side of Germany. Thereafter, as Russia began to suffer the vertiginous reversal on the Eastern Front and the Entente powers feared that the Czar might have renounced the fight, he was selected for the top mission to Germany.
Effortlessly, he managed to come into immediate contact with the highest levels of the German Foreign Ministry. His proposal: to invite the gentlemen of the Wilhelmstrasse to finance and supervise the creation of a destabilizing movement within Russia that could have toppled the czarist regime and brought about a separate peace with the Reich. On the face of it, this plan seemed a variation on the theme of Eurasian cooperation. But the intent was the opposite.
Parvus would have later claimed that he had maneuvered the Germans to foment a general revolutionary wave in Russia, which would have hopefully spilled over to Germany and the rest of Europe, in the name of his long cherished dream: the international Socialist alliance of the world. His sincerity in this regard is hard to assess. The German diplomats, on the other hand, were convinced that they were spinning the game; they had naturally no curiosity for revolutionary experiments, and sought to ‘use’ Parvus’s ‘Red’ network of Communist agitprops as ‘a means of exerting pressure on the czar, and thus speeding diplomatic negotiations.’69
The Danish capital, along with Stockholm, was selected as Parvus’s Scandinavian base of intrigue between Berlin and Russia. From there Helphand ran an active and most profitable import-export company, as well as a research institute and its associated newsletter, as fronts for his circle of espionage. Suspended, like most aldermen of the Reich, between patronizing benevolence and provincial presumption, Brockdorff-Rantzau – a superb expression of Germany’s despairing political ineptitude – left posterity a record of his thoughts as he stepped into the trap that Parvus laid out for him:
It might perhaps be risky to want to use the powers ranged behind Helphand, but it would certainly be our admission of our own weaknesses if we were to refuse their services out of fear of not being able to direct them…Those who do not understand the sign of our times will never understand which way we are heading or what is at stake in this movement.70
He, least of all, understood the sign of the times. It is evident from this important passage that Brockdorff, and the German Foreign Ministry in general, was incapable of identifying the nature of ‘these powers ranged behind Helphand’, and that such a fact naturally caused Brockdorff anxiety. Given the stakes, a lacuna of such depth was, from the German standpoint, absolutely inexcusable. Nonetheless, stubbornly refusing to fathom the danger, and certainly encouraged by more than a few of his superiors, Brockdorff persevered, convinced that he was the master of the game. Little did the German diplomat perceive that, having succumbed entirely to the seduction of the tireless Parvus, he was in fact allowing these enigmatic ‘powers’ backing Helphand to undermine the life-saving (for Germany) peace talks with Russia, and quicken thereby the disintegration of the German imperial establishment.
The message conveyed in the 1915 memorandum penned by Parvus for Brockdorff and the Foreign Ministry was unequivocal: czarist Russia was the irredeemable enemy of the Reich. Parvus admonished the Germans that, if they resolved to sign a contract with Nicholas, the likely outcome would have been the formation in Russia of a reactionary government, which, on the strength of its repossessed armies (freed from the war engagement), might have circumvented the agreement and turned once more against the Reich. The party they should have wagered on, Parvus insisted, was that of the Bolsheviks, a determined, if somewhat meager, group bent on peace, and the resolute enemy of Czar Nicholas. Lenin was the name of their leader. Brockdorff was thoroughly captivated by the plausibility of such utterly deceptive arguments.71
In 1915 Germany started to pay. In two years the Reich allegedly devoted over nine tons of gold to the subversive effort against the Czar.72 Parvus provided the business channels and the banking connections for remitting the sums, which were devoted to fitting the revolutionary militia and funding a sweeping propaganda apparatus, Pravda being the most notorious organ originating from the gift. After such profuse immobilization of resources, the Germans waited impatiently for these to bear fruit, but nothing stirred. Parvus pacified the Herren at once and assured them that the investment would yield. He then promised: they should have expected a quake on January 9, 1916; ‘the organization,’ he told them, had scheduled a mass strike on the eleventh anniversary of ‘Bloody Sunday.’
Then, on January 9, the czarist regime recorded without particular alarm isolated acts of insurgency and sabotage, the sinking of a warship, and scattered hiatuses caused by labor demonstrations, which were all brought under control by the police without great difficulty. Von Jagow, the German Foreign Minister, did not conceal his irritation, and a few other, more alert diplomats, grew suspicious and begged their chief to terminate the intrigue with Parvus. But Brockdorff vouched passionately for him, and the top generals were not willing to discard the Bolshevik trump just yet: agog, they kept on dreaming of a merciless peace and vast annexations in the East – the granary of Ukraine, the Baltic seaboard, and indemnities in gold.
However, it was evident by then that, contrary to Parvus’s tendentious claims, czarist Russia, despite the country’s innumerable infirmities – such as her large debt, retarded industrial adoption, rural misery, or the unspeakable squalor of her city slums – was not a bankrupt concern, a rotten fruit about to decompose, but rather an economic unit with enormous manufacturing potential that was already exporting a third of the world’s grain.73
Notwithstanding, the Germans, blinded by greed, resolved to wait a day longer, and continued to pay until, from the East, the signal was given in February, merely two months after the death of Rasputin.
The February Revolution of 1917 was never a German affair, and least of all a Bolshevik production. Lenin, when it erupted, was caged like a lion in Zurich, while Trotsky – the other protagonist of the subsequent November takeover – was agitating in Manhattan. The latter, on the basis of several testimonies, would expatiate in his lengthy history of the revolution on the presumed genuineness (‘namelessness’) of the February uprising, which he reconstructed in his narrative as the authentic proletarian prelude to the forthcoming Bolshevik rumble.74 It was nothing of the sort.
In February 1917, as the mob was cued once again to take to the streets, seven of Russia’s foremost generals and several garrisons of the capital forsook the Czar, who, bereft of military authority, was de facto forced to abdicate.75 After placing themselves at the front of the protesting cohorts, the mutinous officers headed for the Duma – Russia’s surrogate State Council – where they formally surrendered the ‘revolutionary’ will of the masses to the bourgeois exponents of the assembly, that is, to the Liberal conspirators (and interlocutors of Buchanan), with whom they (the seditious military) colluded.
The Liberals, in turn, were ready to hand over the scepter of power to Nicholas’s brother, the Grand Duke Michael. But the Grand Duke did not want anything short of popular investiture: he thus refused. So the Liberals alone were saddled with the burden of command. There was no paradox in this ramshackle devolution of power, as Trotsky would claim – as power bounced from the masses back to royalty by way of the soldiery and the conniving bourgeoisie. The February Revolution was in truth a misbegotten Liberal putsch, designed to retain the Russian armies on the Eastern Front under the aegis of a constitutional regent. But as the royalty withdrew, the matter nested uncomfortably in the widening gulf formed by the uneasy coupling of bourgeois with Socialist leaders. The equilibrium was precarious, to say the least.
For the time being, out of the putschist Duma was carved the nucleus of Russia’s new executive: the Provisional Government. It was oddly complemented by the resurrected Soviet, which was rapidly attracting Russia’s motley wing of revolutionaries: the Bolsheviks were itching to capture it.
So at long last the time came to implement Parvus’s masterstroke: in April 1917, with the agreement of the German authorities, he secured Lenin’s passage through Germany in an armored train, from Switzerland to Finland, and thence to St. Petersburg.
Once alighted from the car, Lenin proclaimed his ‘April Theses’ (the Bolshevik program): peace with no annexations; no parliamentary republic, but a republic of Soviets; confiscation of all landed estates and the establishment of ‘Model Farms’; one bank under the control of the Soviets.
Under German, and thus treasonous, sponsorship, Lenin returned; so did the Menshevik Plekhanov, who would support the pro-war Provisional Government, escorted to Russia by British destroyers.76 En route from New York with an American passport, Trotsky, after being intercepted aboard a Norwegian liner and detained in Halifax by Canadian naval officers on legitimate suspicion of traitorous and subversive activities (that is, to conspire against Russia’s new Provisional Government, a fighting member of the Entente), was inexplicably released upon orders from London and allowed in May to join his comrades in the Russian capital.77
Admittedly, this was for Britain the delicate piece of the great siege. The czarist regime had proved too unreliable and weak to play along the British directives since 1914. Before the dreaded (by Britain) prospect of a separate peace with the Reich materialized, the Czar was successfully ousted from the stage. This was the dynamics behind the February Revolution. Then Britain contemplated three possible courses of action:
1. The continuation of the February plot. According to its original architecture, the plan envisaged the creation of a Liberal Cabinet, buttressed by the Soviet (a parliament of sorts), and formally bound to the Royal House. The February episode was, in short, designed to implement at once Britain’s political structure – a constitutional monarchy – in Russia. Evidently, the grafting was impracticable, but the coup, by repatriating pro-war Marxists like Plekhanov and other Mensheviks, who could be counted on to legitimate in the Soviet the Cabinet’s protracted war effort, and by salvaging the royal superstition in the figure of a Romanov, was not lacking in brilliance. In fact, Allied power, beginning with the United States on March 9, had promptly accorded the new government diplomatic recognition. It remained to be seen whether the Provisional Government, even if shorn of imperial galloons, because of Grand Duke Michael’s defection, could foster the cohesion necessary to pursue the war.
2. If the Provisional Government failed, the Bolshevik card could have been played, for which Britain could also thank Parvus and the unwittingly self-serving dealings of the German rulers, and attempt the social experiment in terra nova: for no one, despite the April Theses, could clearly foresee what sort of regime Lenin and his associates would have erected if they were to take power.
This second eventuality evidently presented a higher degree of risk, because the Bolsheviks had vowed to withdraw Russia from the conflict. The advantage of their takeover, however, resided in their congenital aversion to the German dynastic spirit, which was capitalist and imperialist.
Colonel House, privy councilor of US President Wilson and always a pragmatic supporter of Bolshevism, offered in late 1917 the rationale for the West’s conspiratorial endorsement of the otherwise repugnant (to Western Liberalism) Bolshevik Communism:
It is often overlooked that the Russian revolution, inspired as if by deep hatred of autocracy, contains within it…great motives of serious danger to German domination: [for example], anti-capitalist feeling, which would be fully as intense, or more intense, against German capitalism…78
Though the Leninists would have made peace – to withdraw the peasants and workers from the front – so went the British reasoning, imperial Germans and Bolshevized Russians could hardly fuse into the embrace: ‘A treaty means nothing,’ Lenin would tell his followers after signing the peace with Germany in March 1918, ‘there is no justice that can exist between two classes.’79
In years to come, through financial manipulation – especially military aid – and fine diplomacy, one could hope to instigate a vast Communist state against the Reich: the path was indeed fraught with mortal hazards, but well worth the walk.
3. Again, were Russia’s Provisional Government to fall, a coalition of ‘White,’ czarist, counter-revolutionary generals could plunge Russia into civil war and tame the country thereby. A meeting of like minds between Russian Whites and the Reichswehr generals, greatly facilitated by spiritual and class affinity, would have become, in time, an embrace.
Of the three possible developments, this last was for Britain the least desirable. And if it came to pass, no choice was left to the Sea Powers other than attempting to bribe the Whites away from the German embrace, which in turn carried even more risk than the Bolshevik option.
In the eight months of uncertainty between February and October 1917, the Provisional Government legislated much, but effected little. Populist barrister Kerensky assumed the role of prime minister; thereupon he rushed to the front to enhearten the faltering troops. In June, the Russian army ventured one last sally against the Austrians, who were forthwith adjoined by supporting divisions of Germans. At the sight of the German Feldgrau (field-gray) uniforms, the Russians threw down their shields and fled in panic. In July the Bolsheviks bungled a putsch. The Provisional Government responded with firmness. Lenin disappeared in Finland; Trotsky and other Communist ringleaders were thrown in jail. Informed of the Parvus connection, Kerensky was about to arraign the Leninst gang on charges of treason and conspiracy as ‘German agents,’ but as the White counter-insurgency (the czarist loyalists) appeared to stir in several districts, he refrained from persecuting the Bolsheviks and let them loose instead. Desperate logic brought him to think he could use the Red agitators as allies against czarist counter-revolutionaries.
Meanwhile, the Sea Powers deemed it was time to switch program, drop Kerensky, and opt for second best (Bolshevism).
Germany and ‘the powers ranged behind Helphand’ had paid in the West, and evidence suggests that Wall Street paid in the East: behind the humanitarian facade of a ‘Red Cross War Council,’ American capitalists had been conveying sums earmarked for the Russian Revolution. J. P. Morgan associates and interests linked to the Federal Reserve Board of New York fronted such a Council, which paid Kerensky after May 1917, and according to an article of the Washington Post (February 2, 1918), successively shifted the funding to the Bolshevik cause.80 In September of 1917,
Buchanan, the British ambassador, told his government that the Bolsheviks ‘alone have a definite political program and are a compact minority…If the Government are not strong enough to put down the Bolsheviks by force, at the risk of breaking with the Soviet, the only alternative will be a Bolshevist government.’81
One month later, the Bolsheviks, a fringe movement with no popular backing, which in May had run ‘a poor third to the socialist parties,’82 seized power without firing a shot.
On the day of the revolution, the fashionable people were on the Nevsky Prospect* as usual, laughing together, and saying that the Bolshevik power would not last more than three days. Rich people in their carriages were scolding the soldiers, and the soldiers ‘argued feebly, with embarrassed grins’.83
* St. Petersburg’s main artery.
Five years of civil war lay ahead.
In March 1918, Bolshevik Russia signed a harsh peace with the German generals at Brest-Litovsk,† and, fulfilling the rapacity of these, ceded to them the Ukraine, the Baltic's and gold. The Eastern Front was now quiet and the Reich divisions in the East could be rolled back to France…but the Sea Powers had acted with prudence.
† Now in Poland.
As they soberly pondered over the scenarios outlined above and waited to see which would have come to a boil first, they took no chances, and jammed into the Western Front the American infantry. Not coincidentally, America formally joined the war, in April 1917, when the Russian front appeared to be creaking. ‘The important fact was that Britain was close to defeat in April 1917, and on that basis the United States entered the war.’84
America’s intervention to the side of Britain was effected rather adroitly. Pressured by the Germans to plead with Britain in order to make her desist from the illegal blockade of the Reich, the Americans refused. By doing so, they left Germany no option but to engage in unrestricted submarine warfare, which was officially declared on January 31, 1917. The anticipated sinking of American cargoes, which were profusely refurbishing the Allied military engagement, would have then yielded the suitable pretext to break off diplomatic relations with the German Reich, and in fine wage war against it. The spectacular precedent for the casus belli (to rouse the patriotic masses) had been previously engineered with the sinking of the British cruiser, the Lusitania, which was made to yaw deliberately into the maws of German submarines in May 1915.85
Germany had managed to delay America’s intervention from 1915 to 1917. Submarines had been withheld from combat, apologies given and reparations paid, but [by 1917] time had run out.86
The sequence of events in flashes: on February 22 revolution broke out in Russia, the czar fell on March 2, Lenin’s passage was scheduled for March 27, Trotsky was intercepted on April 1, President Wilson declared war on Germany on April 6 and Lenin shipped on the 9th, Trotsky disembarked at St. Petersburg on May 18, US Commander Pershing sailed for Europe on May 29, 1917. Russia and Germany signed the peace on March 3, 1918; thereafter American soldiers – build-up completed – reached the European shores in waves of 330,000 per month.87 By November 1918 they numbered over 2 million.88
And it was in 1917 that Britain, who was nearly bankrupting herself in the first onslaught against the heartland, gradually passed on the military command of the great siege to the far fitter and greener might – military and economic – of the United States. This was done with the understanding, however, that Britain, being the experienced player, always retained an exclusive right to the strategic command of this siege.
By accepting the responsibility and committing her troops to the European fight, America took on consciously the duty of an imperial power. This was an ominous relay between the two English-speaking islands, and a decision that would have radically disfigured the complexion of America, and eventually that of the world at large.
The United States was not prepared to take over control of the sea herself, therefore she could not allow the defeat of Britain – nor did she trust Germany in the least. America’s elites were Anglophile, and the American public, who had lent millions of dollars to Britain, saw the world through the lens of British propaganda: if the boom of inflation and prosperity sparked by the enormous Entente purchase of war materiel had collapsed because of an Allied defeat, the money loaned in Wall Street would have been as good as gone. All these factors demanded that the United States, beckoned by Britain, throw her imperial lot in with the vicissitudes of the heartland.89
The days of a great confederation of free cities in free states, the reverence due to Virginian gentlemen of letters, the reconciliation with Nature, and the pioneering spirit of the communes, that is, all the American treasures that could have afforded Old Europe and the world a kingdom of peace were abandoned remorselessly. A studied hunger for more time and space, and the irresponsible pursuit of bellicose vainglory – the late trademarks of the British empire– were being purchased by America at the expense of her youth. In the United States, the mood changed.
In 1914 90 percent of the American people had been against joining the war;90 presently such temperance had to make room for aggressiveness: it was soldiers and cheering crowds that the US needed. The clubs saw to it that the shift was a fast one, through fear. Armaments were scaled up and punitive expeditions were hatched in the midst of ‘a popular fear of aggression from without.’91 Imbued with ‘a spirit of particularism…and animosity between contrasted groups of persons,’ America turned patriotic. 92 Now it was all about the gung-ho ‘love for one’s country,’ which was not love at all, but the readied call to hurt the ‘enemy,’ whoever he was, wherever he lurked, anyhow, any time. Riding the wave of this induced, collective dementia, the citizen came to see himself and his folks as victims of plots, which were rumored to feed his credulity and strengthen within him the new idolatry of the red, white, and blue, ‘American Pride,’ and the ‘Star Spangled Banner’.93
From 1917 the public was fed fantastic stories dressed up as news, such as the ‘discovery’ that the Germans had secret gun emplacements in the United States ready to bombard New York and Washington. This alarming ‘news’ had been planted by the Allies as early as October 1914 and had succeeded in finding its way into presidential intelligence reports…94
Beyond the appeal to geopolitical likeness, cultural kindred, the threat of German submarine warfare, and the jumbo loans to the Entente, there was one more means whereby the United States could be baited to share the burden of the great siege, and this was Palestine.
Within the British Cabinet, the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, and the War Minister, Earl Kitchener, did not wish to fragment the European offensive for the sake of a Middle Eastern adventure. But the vanguard of imperial stalwarts, who were ranged behind the charismatic figure of Lord Alfred Milner, a former colonial officer turned oligarchical mastermind, thought otherwise.95
From the Manchester Guardian, in November 1915, recruits of the so-called Kindergarten – Milner’s club, also known as the Round Table – intimated ‘that “the whole future of the British Empire as a Sea Empire” depended upon Palestine becoming a buffer state inhabited “by an intensely patriotic race”.’96 Indeed, Palestine was ‘the key missing link’ that joined together the limbs of the British empire in a continuum stretching from the Atlantic to the middle of the Pacific.97
If World War I represented in fact the beginning of the heartland’s great besiegement, the Milner faction thought it appropriate to seize the occasion and thrust, with the opening assault, two wedges at once: one at each extremity of the fault line. For that, America could be involved with troops in the Eurasian north (versus Germany), and the political campaigning of her Zionist lobby in the Middle Eastern south (versus the Arabs; see Figure 1.1, p. 11). But Asquith and Kitchener were not gazing that far. And the Kindergarten had no intention of letting the opportunity pass.
On 6 June, 1916, Kitchener drowned in a ‘providential’ shipwreck on his way to Russia in a mine-laden sea.98 Betrayed in a backroom conspiracy of the Liberal Party, Asquith fell, and on December 7, 1916, David Lloyd George became Prime Minister. Exponents of the Round Table were forthwith raised to several high posts, and the master himself, Milner, was made into the chief strategist of the War Cabinet. Thereupon British troops were embarked for the Middle East to fight the Turks.
On December 11, 1917, General Sir Edmund Allenby and his officers entered the Holy City of Jerusalem at the Jaffa Gate, on foot.99
By August 1918 the first act of the great northwestern siege was brought to a close. After Ludendorff’s last great attack in the spring, the Allies, bolstered by American manpower, repelled the infiltration, and beat the influenza-ridden Germans back to the ‘Hindenburg Line.’ Germany realized that she could not hold out any longer. She capitulated, and the armistice was signed in November.
By August of 1918 Germany had given her best, and it had not been adequate. The blockade and the rising tide of American manpower gave the German leaders the choice of surrender or complete economic and social upheaval. Without exception, led by the Junker military commanders, they chose surrender…Looking back on the military history of the First World War, it is clear that the whole war was a siege operation against Germany.100
Ten million dead had not been sufficient to break the country and bring it among the satellites of the Sea Powers. Germany had not yet been vanquished on her own soil. To make her suffer a crushing and final defeat within her confines – the second and final act of the northwestern siege (that is, World War II) – the British schemers of the interwar period would apply themselves for the next 20 years to enforcing vis-à-vis the defeated Reich an ambivalent policy mix of sanctions and foreign direct investment. In fact, the obverse of this underhanded policy concealed the clubs’ peculiar intent, which was to revamp the military and economic establishment of Germany while waiting to identify the ‘right’ sort of political leadership that could have ‘used’ this new, refitted Reich to Britain’s advantage. In brief, the scheme consisted in rearming the enemy of yesterday, and so conspiring as to plunge Germany in another battle, which would offer (1) the pretext to annihilate Germany finally, and (2) the chance to take possession of Germany’s geopolitical position. To this complex feat of provocation, which featured the incubation of Nazi Führer Adolf Hitler as the extraordinary ‘drummer’ of an unrecognizable, orientalized Germany, the remainder of the present narrative is devoted.
to be continued...next...
The Veblenian Prophecy From the Councils to Versailles
by Way of Russian Fratricide,1919–20
footnotes Chapter 1
1. Robert Deacon, John Dee. Scientist, Astrologer & Secret Agent to Elizabeth I (London: Frederick Muller, 1968), pp. 92, 94.
2. Thorstein Veblen, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (London: Macmillan & Co., 1915), pp. 50–84.
3. David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace. The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Avon Books, 1989), p. 27.
4. Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise of Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860–1914 (London: Ashfi eld Press, 1980), pp. 41–58.
5. Michael Balfour, The Kaiser and His Times (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1972), pp. 54–5.
6. Paolo Giordani, L’impero coloniale tedesco (Milano: Fratelli Treves, 1915), pp. 30, 89ff.
7. Balfour, The Kaiser.
8. Kennedy, Anglo-German Antagonism, p. 110.
9. Bernhard von Bülow, La Germania Imperiale (Prodenone: Edizioni Studio Tesi, 1994 [1914]), p. 87.
10. Veblen, Imperial Germany, pp. 231–2.
11. Michael Stürmer, L’impero inquieto, 1866–1918 (Das ruhelose Reich, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993 [1983]), p. 326.
12. Kennedy, Anglo-German Antagonism, p. 362.
13. S. L. A. Marshall, World War I (Boston: Houghton Miffl in Company, 1992), p. 114.
14. Andreas Dorpalen, The World of General Haushofer. Geopolitics in Action (New York: Farrar & Rinehart Inc., 1942), p. 52.
15. Ibid., pp. 194, 196, 198, 200; emphasis added.
16. Carlo Jean, Geopolitica (Bari: Laterza, 1995), pp. 29–31.
17. F. von Bernhardi, Germany and the Next War (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1914 [1911]), pp. 18, 25, 52, 90ff.
18. Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (New York: Basic Books, 1999), pp. 169–73.
19. Robert L. Owen, The Russian Imperial Conspiracy [1892–1914] (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1927), p. vii.
20. Ibid., pp. 3, 25–6.
21. See for instance, Donald Kagan, On the Origins of War, and the Preservation of Peace (New York: Doubleday, 1995), pp. 206–12.
22. Evgheni Tarle, Breve storia d’Europa (Bologna: Editori Riuniti, 1959 [1928]), p. 354.
23. Stürmer, Impero inquieto, p. 440.
24. T. H. Meyer (ed.), Light for the New Millennium. Rudolf Steiner’s Association with Helmuth von Moltke. Letters, Documents and After-Death Communications (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1997), p. 3.
25. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope. A History of the World in Our Time (New York: Macmillan Company, 1966), p. 100.
26. Dmitri Volkogonov, Trotsky, the Eternal Revolutionary (New York: The Free Press 1996), p. 42.
27. Tarle, Breve storia, p. 143.
28. A. S. Erusalimskij, Da Bismarck a Hitler. L’imperialismo tedesco nel XX secolo (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1974), p. 185. 269 Preparata 03 chap06 269 10/3/05 12:01:16 pm 270 Conjuring Hitler
29. Greg King, The Man Who Killed Rasputin. Prince Felix Youssoupov and Murder That Helped Bring Down the Russian Empire (New York: Citadel Press, 1995), p. 27.
30. Fromkin, Peace, p. 31.
31. Erusalimskij, Bismarck, p. 198.
32. Balfour, The Kaiser, p. 328.
33. Ibid., p. 203.
34. Quigley, Tragedy, pp. 226, 228.
35. Léon Degrelle, Hitler: Born at Versailles (Costa Mesa: Institute for Historical Review, 1987), p. 111.
36. Erusalimskij, Bismarck, p. 255.
37. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 221.
38. Owen, Russian Imperial Conspiracy, p. 15.
39. Leon De Poncins, The Secret Powers Behind Revolution (San Pedro, CA: GSG Publishers, 1996 [1929]), p. 78.
40. Degrelle, Hitler, pp. 14–15.
41. Such was one of the several attributes wherewith Timothy McVeigh (the man convicted of bombing the FBI building in Oklahoma City, April 19, 1995), a modern-day Princip in his own right, was labeled in the public discussion of his case (Gore Vidal, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002, p. 121).
42. Erusalimskij, Bismarck, p. 234.
43. Ibid., p. 235.
44. The philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote: ‘I had noticed during the previous years how carefully Sir Edward Grey lied in order to prevent the public from knowing the methods by which he was committing us to the support of France in the event of war’ (Fromkin, Peace, p. 125).
45. Tarle, Breve storia, p. 279.
46. Quigley, Tragedy, pp. 316–17.
47. Owen, Russian Imperial Conspiracy, p. 14.
48. Erusalimskij, Bismarck, p. 269.
49. Balfour, The Kaiser, p. 351.
50. Quoted in Geminello Alvi, Dell’estremo occidente. Il secolo americano in Europa. Storie economiche (Firenze: Marco Nardi Editore, 1993), p. 75.
51. Degrelle, Hitler, p. 86.
52. Fromkin, Peace, p. 125.
53. Erusalimskij, Bismarck, pp. 255–56.
54. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston: Houghton Miffl in Company, 1971 [1924–26]), pp. 163–4.
55. Meyer, Millennium, p. 89.
56. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 230.
57. Dennis Wheatley, Red Eagle. The Story of the Russian Revolution (London: Book Club, 1938), p. 103.
58. B. H. Liddell Hart, The Real War, 1914–1918 (Boston: Little, Brown, & Company, 1930), p. 113.
59. Richard Pipes, A Concise History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 77.
60. John Maynard, Russia in Flux (New York: Macmillan Company, 1948), p. 173.
61. King, Rasputin, pp. 148–62.
62. R. H. Bruce Lockart, British Agent (London: G. P. Putnam & Sons, 1933), p. 161.
63. For a GNP of 20 billion rubles in 1913 (Paul Gregory, Russian National Income (1885–1913) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 56), at 17.3 rubles to the pound in 1917 (Angiolo Forzoni, Rublo. Storia civile e monetaria della Russia da Ivan a Stalin (Roma: Valerio Levi Editore, 1991), p. 226). Britain by then owed the United States £497 million (Alvi, Occidente, p. 75). Preparata 03 chap06 270 10/3/05 12:01:17 pm Notes 271
64. Alvi, Occidente, p. 75.
65. Pietro Zveteremich, Il grande Parvus (Milano: Garzanti, 1988), p. 195.
66. Alvi, Occidente, pp. 77ff.
67. Degrelle, Hitler, p. 271.
68. Henri Vibert, Fronte a l’Inghilterra (Firenze: Beltrami Editore, 1936), p. 111.
69. Z. A. B. Zeman and W. B. Scharlan, The Merchant of Revolution. The Life of Alexander Israel Helphand (Parvus), 1867–1924 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 151.
70. Ibid., p. 152.
71. Ibid., pp. 182, 199.
72. Pipes, Concise History, p. 122.
73. Alvi, Occidente, p. 79.
74. Leon Trotsky, The Russian Revolution. The Overthrow of Tzarism & the Triumph of the Soviets (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959 [1930]), pp. 131–47.
75. Ibid., p. 84.
76. Zveteremich, Parvus, p. 249.
77. Anthony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House Publishers, 1981), pp. 25–8.
78. N. Gordon-Levin Jr., Woodrow Wilson and World Politics. America’s Response to War and Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 60.
79. Alfred Döblin, Karl & Rosa (New York: Fromm International Publishing Corporation, 1983 [1950]), p. 50.
80. Sutton, Bolshevik Revolution, pp. 72, 82.
81. Maynard, Russia, p. 190.
82. Pipes, Concise History, p. 120.
83. Maynard, Russia, p. 195.
84. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 250.
85. ‘The Lusitania was a British merchant vessel…carrying a cargo of 2,400 cases of rifle cartridges and 1,250 cases of shrapnel, and with orders to attack German submarines whenever possible. Seven hundred and eighty-five of 1,257 passengers, including 128 of 197 Americans, lost their lives. The incompetence of the acting captain contributed to the heavy loss, as did also a mysterious “second explosion” after the German torpedo struck. The vessel, which had been declared “unsinkable”, went down in eighteen minutes. The captain was on a course he had orders to avoid; he was running at reduced speed; he had an inexperienced crew; the portholes had been left open; the lifeboats had not been swung out, and no lifeboat drills had been held…’ (Quigley, Tragedy, pp. 250–1).
86. Degrelle, Hitler, p. 267.
87. Tarle, Breve storia, p. 362.
88. Liddell Hart, Real War, p. 386.
89. Quigley, Tragedy, pp. 249–50.
90. Edward House, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, Arranged as a Narrative by Charles Seymour (Boston: Houghton Miffl in Company, 1926), p. 60.
91. Thorstein Veblen, ‘Dementia Pracox,’ in Thorstein Veblen, Essays in Our Changing Order (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1964 [1922]), p. 424.
92. Thorstein Veblen, An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1998 [1917]), p. 38.
93. Veblen, ‘Dementia,’ p. 434.
94. Degrelle, Hitler, p. 244.
95. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment. From Rhodes to Cliveden (San Pedro, CA: GSGS & Associates Publishers, 1981), pp. 10, 130, 131.
96. Fromkin, Peace, p. 271
97. Ibid., pp. 281–2. Five years later, Winston Churchill, taking offi ce as Colonial Secretary, would reiterate that ‘A Jewish State under the protection of the British Preparata 03 chap06 271 10/3/05 12:01:17 pm 272 Conjuring Hitler Crown…would be especially in harmony with the truest interest of the British Empire’ (ibid., p. 519).
98. Fromkin, Peace, p. 217.
99. Ibid., pp. 217, 312.
100. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 236.
What this signified was that henceforth the modern struggle for world power would come to be driven by the images of a British nightmare. And these were the dreaded insights:
1. Britain feared most of all the possible emergence of a ‘heartland’ or ‘pivot’ as the nave of a land-fastness, impregnable behind bastions of ice, moated by uninviting shores, and towering in the midst of a continental space traversed by an extensive network of transportation – a chilling dream of Cossack's at a gallop, bullet trains and shadowy Huns blazing the highways of Central Asia. The earliest formulation of Mackinder’s plan was the product of Britain’s inveterate enmity towards Russia rather than a warning issued directly against Germany: it was in the plains of Russia that the heartland was initially identified.
After World War I, as Germany became the cynosure of international checkmating, Mackinder, in a successive version of the original 1904 article, updated his theory in keeping with British imperial designs by shifting the pivot along a southwestern trajectory, from the steppes of Siberia down to a nondescript midpoint along the great fault line that divides the West from the East, and which later came to coincide with the Churchillian ‘iron curtain’ separating Eastern from Western Europe. This virtual boundary may be imagined as a meridian issuing from the shores of the Red Sea, which meets the Black Sea by way of Palestine and shoots through the Balkans and the Baltic, all the way north to Murmansk in Russia (see Figure 1.1). Conceptually, the ‘fault line’ is the great divide that roughly sets Muslim Arabs in the south and Orthodox Slavs in the North, apart from the Modern Europeans in the West.
The fault line ideally bisects the heartland, which is located within Eurasia. The heartland is the islands’ island; Mackinder’s motto thus intimated that ‘whoever rules the heart-land, rules the world island; whoever rules the world island, rules the world.’16 In the northwest this came to mean that if Germany would find ways of bridging the fault line by cementing the technological strength of the European West with the geographical immensity of the East via Russia, she would become the unconquerable head of the dreaded fortress looking over the Eurasian heartland.
2. The immediate revelation of such a nightmare was that no forces were to be spared to obstruct political let alone military coalitions of any form across the heartland, beginning with the plausible Russo-German alliance. And this Britain could best achieve by marshaling a league of sister islands, which she could dispose against Eurasia as a besieging crescent of Sea Powers. Excepting the Japanese trump, sea-power is Anglo-Saxon through and through; all the challenging isles listed by Mackinder are emanations of Britain herself: from America, with the addition of Canada, all the way round to Australia, including New Zealand – the empire’s white dominions.
3. Should Europe, the Near East, and Central Asia have been capable of coalescing into a solid confederation, their combined mineral, hydric, and natural resources (oil, grain, steel, water, lumber, and so on) would have afforded this enormous Eurasian League a defensive advantage such as would have nullified any prolonged blockade of the Sea Powers. Eurasia could then resist a British embargo à outrance.
4. From this it followed that such a wealth of resources on the heartland could have been naturally channeled, in the face of overt naval aggression, to the launch of a defensive Eurasian fleet. The combined shield of land and sea forces from the continent against the crescent of maritime foes would have not only repulsed easily the onslaught from the sea, but in all likelihood ended with the utter defeat of the Sea Powers and their concomitant subjugation to the hypothetical joint command of the heartland.
5. The sudden appearance of the Prussian Reich had turned this Eurasian chimera into a tangible eventuality: this time the menace was real; the great enemy could come into being through a genial amalgam of Russian vitality and German sophistication. The Eurasian Embrace is the consummation of a Russo-German political, military and spiritual fusion. Against such a fusion, Mackinder seemed to suggest, Britain would have found herself powerless in the long run.
6. Hence the strategy of Britain became crystal clear: in order to deter the emergence of this threatening rival on the heartland, she would have no alternative but to encircle the heartland in a permanent siege. This would be effected by driving wedges (the bridgeheads) in the vital nodes of the continental body. In such areas the land armies could be trapped in perennial warfare, and their generals would be so engrossed by the exertion as to deflect their attention from the keen urgency to arm a Eurasian fleet and drive out the foreign (seafaring) aggressor.
The remarkable character of this piece, aside from its fastidious prescience, was its openly aggressive tenor. Though it was written in the shade of a Russian menace, its reasoning seemed to suggest that Britain had to favor the line of least resistance, and single out Germany as the proximate adversary because: (1) the Reich was the dynamic half of the Russo-German threat, and, (2) it could be surrounded and blockaded by an entente of neighboring parties with somewhat greater ease, hence Britain’s forthcoming rapprochement with Russia, her traditional antagonist.
Naturally, such warming of Anglo-Russian relations led to no permanent settlement of the Eurasian question, nor was it its purpose to do so: the issue, overwhelming as it was from the British standpoint had to be tackled one bridgehead at a time; the détente with Russia served as a mere prelude to a general stratagem seeking the destruction of Germany. Britain could not, and possibly did not wish to foresee the unfathomable costs that she, and the world at large, would have to incur in order to accomplish this stratagem, but the empire took its chances nonetheless.
The evidence that the destruction of Germany became Britain’s chief objective after 1900 is provided by the elaborate diplomatic activity that she would weave to provoke the world war, as will be recounted in the subsequent sections of this chapter.
In fact, it is one of the tenets of Anglo-American historiographical catechism that Germany had always been the incorrigible aggressor of the Pax Britannica.
The rhetoric prevailing in Germany in the first decade of the twentieth century about Einkreisung (encirclement) and the consequent popular appeal to wage a ‘righteous defensive war’ to break out of this ‘encirclement,’ accompanied by the irresponsible magniloquence of the military-industrial and imperial cliques led by Wilhelm II, as well as the drunken claims of so many nationalists about ‘Germany’s historical mission‘ and her ‘duty to wage war,’17 have all been summarily singled out as so many definitive and screaming proofs of Germany’s indisputable guilt for triggering the first world conflict. But these meager elements prove nothing other than the malign influence of Germany’s archaic nationalism and the utter confusion among her rulers as to the country’s immediate strategic imperatives: stacked against the lucid analysis of Mackinder, which contemplated already in 1904 a massive pre-emptive strike against threatening rivals in Eurasia, German bombast shrank into insignificance: a prolonged world confrontation could have never been the idea of an isolated, and also inexperienced, German government. In Mackinder’s paper there was little if any indication that Germany was going to attack.
Rather, Germany’s boisterousness was no more than a heartening cry in the face of uncertainty. Nervous rather than cocky, the Reich prepared for war with stage fright, cheering itself up, cursing its good fortune, and damning everything, specially the day it had started gambling its fate on the grand chessboard. Undoubtedly, if left to herself, Germany would have never made the first move and opened the hostilities: she had too much to lose. Germany had to be driven to it. In truth, her sole concrete goal, had Britain kept out of Europe, never went beyond the wish to consolidate a ‘Middle-European Empire of the German Nation’, that is, an ante diem German-led European customs union, severed from Russia, and such an arrangement was something England could cohabit with.18
Five years after the end of World War I, a US Senator, Robert Owen, would undertake a deep, dispassionate study of the war’s origins and present his finding to the American people on December 18, 1923: the several claims of Allied propaganda, namely that the Entente had to fight (1) to thwart the Kaiser’s plan to dominate the world by force, (2) to make the world safe for democracy, and (3) to defend American ideals, Owen construed respectively as ‘false’, ‘ludicrous’, and ‘untrue’.19 He found that Neither the Russian or the French government was really believed that the German government intended aggressive war on them but the military preparedness of Germany and the bombast of some of its chauvinists laid a convenient but false foundation for the French and British propaganda that the German leaders had plotted the brutal military conquest of the world…In 1914 Germany had no reason for war, no terra irredenta, no revenge and knew that a general European war might easily destroy its merchant marine, its commerce, both of which were rapidly expanding, and cause the loss of its colonies.20
The Germans were new to the heady breeze of world success – their imperial tenure had yet to harden into maturity – but with their British enemies it was a different story.
The last thing Britain would want to do at this early stage was to give any inkling to the public, the enemy, or potential allies, of her desire to strangle Germany in a permanent siege. Instead, in public she set out to treat her nascent antagonism to the Reich as if it boiled down to a mere matter of business: the British thus affected the irked demeanor of jealous proprietors rushing to defend their commercial interests against the provocation of the German upstart.
This justification was a full-fledged travesty, though it appears still to be the explanation favored by the historians of the victorious West.21
Yet in fact, the deep worry and restlessness caused by the German unknown among the stewards of the British empire marked an epochal divide in the overall strategy of Britain. By 1904, as revealed by her pattern of alliances, Britain appeared to have resolved for the all-out encirclement of the heartland, and the phenomenal, if half-blind, growth of Germany during the last two decades of the twentieth century provided her with the occasion.
From the beginning Britain was the aggressor, not Germany.
Years later, in 1916, as Wilhelm brooded over the unspeakable butchery at the front, he whimpered in a letter he sent the mother of a fallen officer that he had never wanted this war, by which he meant a massacre of global magnitude. ‘This is exactly right,’ rejoined the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, in a public response to the Kaiser’s lament, ‘The emperor Wilhelm did not want this war. He wanted another war, one that would have allowed him to dispatch France and Russia in two months. We were the ones that wanted this war, as it is being fought, and we shall conduct it to victory.’22[We know from our current reading at this blog in "Wall St and the Bolsheviks" that GEORGE was a corrupt and dark soul and worked lockstep with the American bankers in the Russian Revolution that brought the Jewish Bolsheviks to power DC]
Britain’s – and later on America’s – drive to conquest was foreshadowed unmistakably by Mackinder’s cursory yet almost oracular mention of the several bridgeheads that the Sea Powers needed to graft unto the heartland to draw out its armies in a deliberate sequence of separate clashes. To isolate each conflict, the targeted territorial portion had to be severed from its adjacent district, and bled white by prolonged strife waged in the name of political, religious, or ethnic diversity.[Does this ring a bell with the West's actions in Iraq,Libya,Syria,etc in the Middle East here in 2017/ DC] Thus the Anglo-Americans have always acted: in Europe by spinning everybody against Germany (1904–45); in the Near East, by jamming Israel in the heart of the Arab world (1917– present); in the Far East, by planting thorns in the side of China: Korea, Vietnam, and Taiwan (1950–present); in Central Asia by destabilizing the entire region into tribal warfare with the help of Pakistan to prevent the Caspian seaboard from gravitating into the Russian sphere of influence (1979–present).
Most importantly, in such trying games of conquest, results might never be expected to take shape quickly, but might take a matter of weeks, months or even decades. Imperial stratagems are protracted affairs. The captains of world aggression measure their achievements, or failures, on a timescale whose unit is the generation. It is within such a frame that the incubation of Nazism should be gauged: it was a long and elaborate plan to eliminate the possibility of German hegemony over the continent. And the stewards of the empire took their time.
The blood of the Romanov's
and the encirclement of Germany
In 1904, by diplomacy, Britain drew France closer – according to the deal, or the Entente Cordiale, as it came to be known: to the tricolor went Morocco: Egypt to the Union Jack.23
In July of 1904, after four girls, a boy – an heir, the Czarevich Alexi was finally born to the Romanov's, Nicholas and Alexandra. The doctors noticed suspicious bleeding from the infant’s navel, but the matter was promptly dismissed. One year later, to the month, Alexei suffered the first bout of what was, to the terror of his mother and father, diagnosed as hemophilia. ‘Since the blood would not clot, the slightest cut endangered his life.’25 Conventional medicine was powerless against the disease.
Six months prior to the Czarevich’s first hemorrhage, in January 1905, Russia witnessed her first and last spontaneous, popular uprising: it was not led by self-styled ‘irreconcilable atheists’ like the Communist Trotsky, who would have joined the ebullient flow shortly thereafter,26 but by a priest, pope Gapon. Protesting food shortages, low wages, and tyranny, thousands marching behind the pope reached the Winter Palace, to be shot at and dispersed by Cossack's and police officers: the day was remembered as ‘Bloody Sunday.’ There followed strikes and mounting tension. The Czar made concessions; the St. Petersburg Soviet (Russian for ‘Council’) came into existence as the spontaneous institutional embodiment of the local interests of the community, along with the emperor’s reluctant assent to the formation of an advisory body, the Duma.
Throughout the year, in this ambiguous intermission of illusory reform, many future leading revolutionaries partook in the fervor of the newly founded Soviet, but their agitation was repressed: the Czar had indeed bluffed, and many such disturbers of the imperial peace were arrested and sent to Siberia, whence, one by one, they would all escape. Russia had been shaken within. Without, a few months after the popular sedition, she was beaten in Korea and Manchuria by Japan in a distant colonial dispute. The defeat was unprecedented.
In the midst of the Russian debacle Wilhelm, at last, attempted the Eurasian rapprochement; in July 1905 he lured the Czar to Björkö, on the Gulf of Finland, and succeeded in obtaining the approval of Nicholas to a treaty, whereby (1) the two powers were bound to mutual support in the case of war, and (2) Russia committed herself to informing France of the agreement with a view of involving the latter in the alliance.27
But as the Germans failed to grasp until the very last that Great Britain was orchestrating a monumental siege against them – the ultimate political misjudgment that would spell the ruin of Germany – a late alliance with Russia could not be concluded. Probably, by 1905 it was too late. Indeed, when Germany could have tied Russia to herself by accepting Russian securities (that is, extending her loans), as the occasion arose in 1887, piqued by Russia’s economic antagonism, she had refused. The financial interests of France, and to a lesser extent Britain, had moved in at once to advance the money, and thereby fastened resolutely the fate of the Russian empire to their imperial policies.
Bismarck had merely toyed with Russia; he had never bound her to Germany, as he ought to have done. The Eurasian embrace could have only come into being through a German composition of Austrian and Russian ambitions in Mitteleuropa, with or without France. This was at heart the Central Powers’ geopolitical mission, as a counter to the Sea Powers’ forthcoming siege; in that, from Bismarck to Bethmann-Hollweg, the last pre-war Reich chancellor, they failed utterly. There lay the seeds of Europe’s past and present dissolution.
The treaty of Björkö was never ratified. Upon returning home, Nicholas was severely dressed down by his ministers, who sobered him up by recalling the Czar to his commitments vis-à-vis France, which in turn, after having been informed of Nicholas’s disquieting escapade, vetoed categorically any participation in an entente with the Reich – it seemed that Wilhelm had forgotten that the French were ‘hopeless’. So Nicholas retracted and the Kaiser protested vehemently, but in vain, for by September it was all over. If deep Anglo-French money and German obtuseness had alienated Russia from an understanding with the Reich, likewise time-honored and intense Franco-Russian military cooperation definitively impeded any belated German wish to remedy the irremediable; the Germans had missed their opportunity, long before Björkö.28
Lord Grey
On Britain’s agenda, after France came Russia: the Entente Cordiale (à
deux) with France became the Triple Entente of Britain, France and Russia.
In 1907, the mastermind of Germany’s entanglement in the first world
conflict, Lord Grey, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, negotiated with Russia a partition of Iran in exchange for Afghanistan and the surrender of Tibet.
‘The Great Game [in the East] had seemingly been brought to an end’30
and a war on two fronts predisposed against Germany. Meanwhile, the naval race continued. Between 1907 and 1909 Britain invited Germany twice to agree to a general curtailment of construction, provided that Britain was assured numerical superiority in this respect. Twice Germany refused: France and Russia might as well have been permitted to enjoin the Reich to limit its own land forces, quipped Wilhelm.31 And he added:
We simply are Central Europe and it is quite natural that other and smaller nations tend toward us. To this the British object because it absolutely knocks to pieces their theory of the Balance of Power, i.e. their desire to play off one European power against another at their own pleasure, and because it will lead to the establishment of a united continent.32
The premise was, from Germany’s angle, correct, but the inference erroneous: again, Britain had been fatally underestimated. Germany counter proposed twice in 1909: first, in April, the diplomats of the Wilhelmstrasse* suggested that the parties seal a naval convention, provided that Britain acquiesced to a ‘benevolent neutrality’ in case of Germany’s engagement in a continental war. In other words, the Reich demanded that Britain play the role of the passive spectator; second, in December, the Germans offered anew to trade a limitation of tonnage for British neutrality and the agreement on fixed naval ratios. Twice Britain refused. And what was more, she resolved to scale up production so as to assemble two Dreadnoughts, Britain’s new, much perfected destroyers, for every German warship.
* The domicile of Germany’s Reich Chancellery and ministerial offices; by metonymy it came to indicate the German Foreign Ministry
One last overture was made to Russia in 1911 during the parleys at Potsdam, which had been officially scheduled to deal with the penetration of German capital in the Middle East, and lasted several months: Germany declared herself willing to rein in Austria’s intrigues in Eastern Europe if Russia proved amenable to withdrawing her support from an eventual hostile policy instigated by Britain against Germany.
The Kaiser obtained a stretch of railway in Mesopotamia – the other, broken, tracts of Germany’s long-sighted and formidable blueprint were bartered away to Britain and France – but no guarantee of neutrality on the part of Russia.
Presently the margin for additional diplomatic maneuvering was exhausted. From this time onward Europe was on the path to war. The more the Kaiser had tardily sought to weaken the Triple Entente, the more Britain strengthened it: in 1912 Britain signed a secret naval convention with France, and the latter did likewise with Russia. Secretly, unbeknownst to the Houses and most ministers, Lord Grey of the Foreign Office exchanged with Cambon, the French ambassador in London, a series of letters in which, on the basis of classified military conventions drafted by the General Staff of both countries, Britain, in case of war, pledged intervention on the side of France.33
In these days, the strategists of Germany’s General Staff were at work rehearsing and fine-tuning the Schlieffen Plan.* This plan had been drawn up in 1905, and, after 1906, modified by Schlieffen’s successor, the younger Helmuth von Moltke, the nephew of the victorious general at Sedan in 1871.
* After Count von Schlieffen, chief of the General Staff from 1891 to 1905.
The plan aimed at settling the war with a single, potent, blow. Schlieffen assumed that Germany would be engaged on two fronts: France to the West, Russia to the East; the former having to be annihilated before the latter could mobilize. Any fighting of extended duration, which would have predictably drained the embattled and resource-poor Reich, was to be avoided, and replaced instead by a stubborn resistance in the East, and a stationary contingent facing France, to make room for the pearl of the plan: ‘a great wheeling wing going through Holland and Belgium and coming down on the flank and rear of the French armies by passing west of Paris.’34
The British had intelligence of the plan, down to its minute details: ‘unbeknown to anyone in Berlin, [the Schlieffen Plan] had come into the possession of the French army in 1906, thanks to a traitor bought for sixty thousand francs.’35 Indeed, Belgium was going to provide the cornerstone of Britain’s diplomatic pretext for the commencement of hostilities.
Britain counted on Germany’s inevitable violation of Belgian neutrality as soon as Moltke was to launch the Schlieffen blitzkrieg. Already, in 1906, the British General Staff, with the full logistical, and secret, cooperation of its Belgian counterpart, was involved in simulated maneuvers across Belgium featuring the deployment of a British Expeditionary Force on the continent – which, indeed, would have been regularly fielded in August 1914 under the command of Sir John French to aid the French armies against Germany’s Parisian offensive. The public was never informed of such plans.36
From then on (1911–14) the series of crises had been almost uninterrupted:37 incidents in North Africa, intrigue and tugs-of-war in the Balkans, warnings, defiance, and counter-warnings from all sides.
By the spring of 1914 the Entente was ready to ambush the Germans. On May 29, 1914, Edward House, President Wilson’s chief adviser from Texas and America’s éminence grise behind the Anglo-American imperial covenant, reported from Europe: ‘Whenever England consents, France and Russia will close in on Germany and Austria’.38
The ‘useful idiots’ of Sarajevo
On June 28, 1914, the legitimate heir to the Hapsburg throne, Archduke Ferdinand, and his consort Sophie descended on an official visit to the new province’s capital.
As a retaliatory act against Austria’s 1908 single-handed annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which the Serbs had claimed for themselves, Cabrinovic, abetted by Grabez – two militants of a secret Pan-Serbian organization suggestively called ‘The Black Hand’, whose motto was ‘Union or Death!’ – hurled a bomb at the vehicle carrying their Royal Highness'es, and missed.
The bomb went off and wounded a few passers-by. The carriage moved on, and the visit proceeded as scheduled.39 When the reception at the town hall came to an end, the Archduke and his wife boarded the car anew; suddenly Gavrilo Princip, the third party to the commando, came swinging to the right side of the vehicle; as he approached he fired at Ferdinand and his wife and killed both.
At the time, all three ‘terrorists’ were not even 20 years old.
The inciting incident that would have triggered the imbricate system of alliances and eventually dragged their signatories into battle had happened, at last.
This was an instance of terrorism: namely, a deed of violence, which, at best, was devoid of any appreciable political gain or motive, and at worst, as it elicited a far bloodier reprisal, was entirely deleterious to the terrorists themselves. An act of terror generally takes the form of a spectacular feat of devastation capable of rippling waves of public indignation, and accordingly provides the adversarial faction(s) with the pretext for commencing war. Recruiting terrorists never seems a problem: these appear at the basic level to be a loose collection of desperadoes, who end up being easily trained, provisioned, and oriented by the undercover intelligence services of the home country.
Thus, on the face of it, a senseless crime; in substance, a political gambit orchestrated elsewhere. Where? The covert role of Serbian intelligence in casting the three teenage students for the assassination was widely acknowledged, but ‘the real director of the conspiracy had been Russia’s military attache, Colonel Victor Artamanov, who had told [the chiefs of Serb intelligence] in the early stages: ‘Go ahead. If attacked you will not stand alone.’40
In general, the art of terror entails the (state’s) underground promotion of a fractious grouping: say, an ‘ethnic army of liberation,’ or a radical militia, whose vanguard – the expendable fringe – numbers so many Princips as are readied for gaol or the gallows. Meanwhile the higher levels of this conspiratorial franchise feature a mix of intelligence officers in charge of disinformation, organization and cover-up, and hired ‘consultants’ – themselves intelligence officers ‘on loan’ from other state agencies, foreign and otherwise, or former soldiers of fortune, whose expertise runs the gamut of recruitment, financial shuffle, subversive methods and like techniques of destabilization.
In the simplest configurations, the subterranean instruction of the terrorist ‘cell’ by the state’s secret services is part of a maneuver aimed at implicating this phantom ‘organization’ into a more or less spectacular act of sabotage. Sabotage either against the state itself, or against the ‘targeted enemy’, that is, a nation whose ruling clans are to be antagonized by the terrorist recruits in the name of ethnic or religious rivalry. In the first case, while the wounded government in the vengeful heat of retaliation ‘clamps down on the terrorists,’ a variety of prearranged ends, all congruent in point of social control and surveillance, is swiftly implemented.*
* This seems to be the stable pattern of terrorist activity throughout the twentieth century, from the plot of the Black Hand in Sarajevo to the political assassinations carried out by European revolutionary cells in the 1970s (for instance, the Meinhof gang in Germany, or the Red Brigades and their various counterparts of the extreme Right in Italy. By striking panic among the population, Italian terrorist squads progressively fomented a state of collective psychosis, which came to be perceived popularly as ‘the strategy of tension’ of Italy’s ‘deviated secret services’, and which ultimately corroborated the grip on the country of then tottering US-backed Christian Democrat mafia), up to the carnage perpetrated by the Islamist Front in Algeria (1992), and the recent lurking ‘threat’ of Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda – a true ‘Godsend’ for America’s imperial Establishment (as known, the evanescent Bin Laden and his lieutenants are from the start an invention of the CIA).
Sarajevo’s example was a ‘standard terrorist act’ of the second kind; in fact, it did not fail to achieve all the objectives expected from such enterprise, namely, to (1) bring Germany into the war by way of Austria, the enemy of Russia, who in turn protected Serbia; (2) advance the cause of Serbia by harnessing her to the chariot of the Triple Entente; (3) sacrifice the material perpetrators by condemning them to imprisonment and capital execution; and (4) keep well hidden from historical memory the identity of the plot’s commanditaires.
Gavrilo Princip was the first of a long sequence of ‘patsies,’ ‘pawns,’ or ‘useful idiots,’41 whose individually unflattering but politically expeditious task is to bring to a head decisions matured beforehand by the Elder Statesmen. Many such ‘useful idiots’ will be encountered in this narrative in connection with significant episodes: Felix Youssoupov (the agony of Rasputin, 1916), Anton von Arco-Valley (the shooting of Kurt Eisner, 1919), Oltwig von Hirschfeld, Heinrich Tillesen and Heinrich Schultz (the attempted assassination, 1920, and final dispatch of Erzberger, 1921), Erwin Kern, Hermann Fischer and Ernst von Salomon (the trio behind the death of Rathenau, 1922), Martin van der Lubbe (the Reichstag fire, 1933), and Alexei Nikolaev(the killing of Kirov, which triggered the anti-Troskyist purge, 1934).
Besieging Germany
In the summer of 1914, Germany stood behind Austria, Russia behind
Serbia. British diplomacy could now entrap both: the ally and the enemy
alike. On July 6, Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Lord Grey, informed the German ambassador that Russia was yet unprepared to intervene, and that Britain had no binding obligation vis-à-vis either Russia or France: a deliberate lie.42
Two days later, the British Foreign Minister assured the Russians that, according to ‘very reliable military sources’, the Germans were rapidly conveying divisions to the East, and that the situation looked upon the Reich with disfavor: an even bigger lie.43
All such deceiving signals issued by the Foreign Office in cross-directions behind closed doors were accompanied in Britain by a public show of phony attempts at mediation in the name of peace, initiated with an eye to deceiving the multitudes.44 Britain had always been careful to spin the international tangle so as to drive the opponent in the position of the assailant, and reserve for herself the role of the peace-loving defender. This was a psychological artifice tailored for mass seduction, and the Germans had no knowledge or understanding of such tricks.
Austria issued the ultimatum to Serbia: a comprehensive injunction to annihilate any form of anti-Austrian propaganda in Serbia, and to open a formal investigation into the assassination, in which delegates of the Austrian empire were to partake.45 Serbia accepted all points but the last one, which, in a theatrical diplomatic counter-move, she offered to submit to international arbitration at the international court of The Hague. Clearly, she had been instructed to turn down the ultimatum by her patrons, who had been waiting a long time for this moment: already on July 25, the British Treasury began printing special Notes, non-convertible into gold, marked for war expenses.46
The war against Serbia into which Austria was deliberately incited by the ruinous intrigues of Serbia at the instigation of Russia was a trap into which Austria fell, not knowing it was fomented by Russia to create a pretext of general mobilization and war and to make Austria and Germany appear to the world as the willful originators of the great conflict.47
The armies of Franz Josef prepared the attack against Serbia, Wilhelm was overjoyed – heedless of the consequences. After one more round of perfunctory diplomatic waltzes between London, Berlin, Paris, and St. Petersburg, Austria-Hungary went ahead and on July 28 bombarded Belgrade. The war had begun.
Russia, secretly goaded by France, who promised her support,48 mobilized along her western frontier, and the German generals nervously awaited the green light from the Kaiser to launch the Schlieffen offensive. Pourtalès, the German ambassador in St. Petersburg, rushed to the foreign ministry, and asked its head, Sazanov, to halt the Russian mobilization. He implored three times. And when the Russian minister refused for the last time, Pourtalès handed him, with a trembling hand, Germany’s declaration of war. It happened on August 1.
However, upon hearing the news of Russia’s massing of troops, Wilhelm somewhat broke out of his stupor and commiseratively brought himself to acknowledge the truth of the situation:
In this way the stupidity and clumsiness of our ally is turned into a noose. So the celebrated encirclement of Germany has finally become an accomplished fact…The net has suddenly been closed over our heads, and the purely anti-German policy which England has been scornfully pursuing all over the world has won the most spectacular victory which we have proved powerless to prevent while they, having got us despite our struggles all alone into the net through our loyalty to Austria, proceed to throttle our political and economic existence. A magnificent achievement which even those for whom it means disaster are bound to admire.49
Indeed it was, and for such a disaster, the Germans had only themselves to blame.
At the outbreak of war, Rasputin brooded: ‘No more stars in the sky…An ocean of tears…Our Motherland has never suffered a martyrdom as that which awaits us…Russia will drown in her own blood.’50
In yet another sudden coup de théatre, as Germany prepared to unleash the onslaught on the Western Front, Britain issued one last cunning call for peace by informing the soon-to-be-warring parties that she was willing to guarantee her neutrality and provide assurances that France would not join the side of Russia in an eventual Russo-German conflict, provided Germany did not attack France. This last mischievous prank, which Wilhelm, with diabolical perseverance, took for a British accolade to his eastern invasion, nearly caused the already shaken Chief of the German General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke, to break down: the German mobilization was complete; the armies had to push forth, he insisted.
Pressured by the general, the German government as a brash counter bargain demanded no less than the acquisition of two French fortresses (Toul and Verdun) as ‘security’ for France’s neutrality. France naturally rejected the offer. On August 3, Germany declared war upon France. Staggering from one pitfall to another, Germany had turned herself into the world aggressor. Abel Ferry, the French Under-Secretary of State, wrote in his notebook: ‘The web was spun and Germany entered it like a great buzzing fly.’51
Finally, as her turn was next, Britain came full circle: knowing that Moltke was ready to thrust Ludendorff’s fusiliers through Belgium, the British government solemnly declared that it could not possibly tolerate the violation of Belgium’s neutrality; it then professed its unconditional adherence to peace, and, shameless, assured the public that it had signed no secret compacts with either France or Russia.52
When the Schlieffen Plan was enacted and the Reich’s armies crossed into Flanders, Britain sent Germany an ultimatum, which she knew the Reich would have ignored; but to avoid surprises (it expired at midnight) the British Cabinet exploited the time lag between London and Berlin, and shortened the waiting by an hour.
Sitting in silence round a large circular table covered with a neat green cloth, the ministers furtively eyed the big clock until it struck 11:00. Twenty minutes later Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty, walked into the hall to inform his colleagues that a telegram had been dispatched across the empire summoning the Royal Fleet to begin operations.53
And where did the summer of 1914 find Adolf Hitler? At 25, already a veteran of Viennese flophouses – one among many bourgeois ratés – young Hitler joined, with a profound sense of deliverance and expectancy a Bavarian regiment with the rank of private. A man that enlists, said Pasternak, is not a happy man:
A few day later I was wearing the tunic which I was not to doff until nearly six years later. For me, as for every German, there now began the greatest and most unforgettable time of my early existence. Compared to the events of this gigantic struggle, everything past receded to shallow nothingness.54
Hitler would fight on the Western Front and earn several decorations for bravery.
The German March through Belgium and the initial clashes against the French, who lost 300,000 men in less than two weeks, were entirely successful for the Germans. Victory seemed assured. Paris was only 30 miles away. But then the Schlieffen Plan went awry. Moltke, believing victory certain, sent two corps to the East, for ‘the Russians,’ as he explained in his memoirs a year later, ‘had been able to invade East Prussia quicker than expected, and before we had been able to achieve a decisive victory against the Anglo-French armies’; he then concluded: ‘I recognize that this was a mistake, and one that we would pay for at the Marne.’55
What really came to pass in the course of the offensive on the River Marne, during which Moltke allegedly lost his wits, and communication broke down among the several corps of the otherwise unfaltering German war machine, remains a mystery. But for one reason or another, Germany, overwhelmed by her rivals to a degree far deeper than expected, ultimately faced the impossibility of carrying out the Schlieffen Plan as rapidly as she had originally intended in the unfamiliar environment of modern industrial warfare.
The German advance in the West came to a halt,
and in the next few months the French tried to dislodge the Germans from their positions. Neither was able to make any headway against the firepower of the other. A succession of futile efforts to outflank each other’s position merely succeeded in bringing the ends of the front to the English Channel on one extreme and to Switzerland on the other. In spite of millions of casualties, this line, from the sea to the mountains across the fair face of France, remained almost unchanged for over three years.56
Caught between the wedge of trench warfare in the West and the stifling naval blockade – which Britain was tightening all around the Fatherland, including neutral outlets, thus violating international conventions – the Germans tried to break free. Neither Germany's resistance on the home front, nor the unrestricted submarine warfare of 1917 would slacken the siege.
As for the eastern theater of war, things in late summer had gone badly for the Reich: the front was broken.
General Hindenburg was ‘a retired officer, whose principal occupation for some years had been sitting at a marble-topped table outside a café in Hamburg, making puddles with his beer’. ‘To the amusement of young German military cadets who regarded him as half-witted, [he explained] that these puddles were the Masurian Lakes in which he would drown the enemy if he ever had the good fortune to command an army in that area’.57 He had volunteered to serve in the army at the outbreak of hostilities, but was subsequently rejected. Yet his good fortune came nonetheless when Headquarters suddenly recalled him on account of his profound familiarity with the terrain upon which combat was being waged against the Russians.
Hindenburg reversed the outcome of the engagement swiftly; accompanied by Ludendorff, who had been dispatched by Moltke from Belgium to eastern Prussia (now northeastern Poland) to assist the German counter-offensive, he directed during September 8–15 the battle of the Masurian Lakes and its last stages were fought on Russian soil.
Whether other generals – German and Russian, the former for sagacity, the latter for incompetence – should have claimed authorship for such victories 58 is a matter of minimal import if weighed against the implacable German successes in the East throughout 1915. Though it had failed to cause a complete collapse of the enemy, Germany’s eastern advance so alarmed the Russians that Czar Nicholas II assumed the superior command of the armed forces.
The Germans were flattered by the panicked resolution.
In June of 1916, running westward from the Romanian frontier, the Russian General Brusilov, who had become a hero for smashing the Austrian armies in Galicia at the inception of the war, attempted one massive offensive against the Austro-German forces. Over the course of three months, the outcome of the onslaught remained indecisive, but the losses were unheard of: the Central Powers lost 600,000 men, and the Russians over 1 million.
Conjuring Lenin
Suddenly, in 1916 the Russian rulers began to ask themselves: what did
they stand to gain from all this? What was there to be had from Germany’s
enmity? That Russia could occasionally teach the Hapsburg emperor Franz
Josef a lesson in those eastern European and Balkan stockades that Russians
and Austrians were vying to control? At these costs? Though Britain might claim that she was fighting for her empire, France for her honor, and Germany for her survival, what could Russia advance to justify the holocaust? That such misgivings would have soon preyed on the Russians had been a predictable affair in London; for that reason in 1915 the Czar had been promised by the British, as a tempting bait, Costantinople and the Straits (yet to be wrested from Turkey) – no less facile was the suspicion in St. Petersburg that the British promise was empty, which indeed it was.
The year 1916, despite the human losses and the resurfacing restlessness of the hinterland (starvation and political agitation), had not witnessed catastrophic setbacks for the Russian army; therefore from a position of relative strength, Russia could afford to initiate parleys conducive to a separate peace with the Germans. Rasputin certainly wanted peace, and if he did, so did Czarina Alexandra, who, with her husband away at the front, was left in charge of the internal affairs of Russia.
Rumors started to circulate to the effect that Alexandra, being a ‘German’ (her mother, Alice, a daughter of Queen Victoria, had married the Grand Duke of Hesse, Louis IV), was conspiring with German agents to surrender Russia wholesale to her enemy. ‘Down with the German woman!,’ the populace clamored.59 Yet the Czarina was embroiled into something altogether different. ‘That [Alexandra] became an instrument in the hands of men who sought to bring about a separate peace with Germany is probable.’60 And Britain now had to make sure that such ‘men’ ceased this activity forthwith.
In December 1916, a cabal of blue-blooded rakes and shady bureaucrats lured Rasputin into an evening feast, accompanied by opera singing. In the midst of such merriment, the healer gulped down a poisoned drink that could have sucked the life out of a regiment. Manifesting no visible distress from the ingested bane, Rasputin, before he was given time to regain the live music show, was repeatedly shot, stabbed, and beaten into a pulp by the scion of one of Russia’s most prestigious families, Prince Felix Youssoupov, with a violence that petrified his accomplices. These then rushed to throw the body of the healer, still breathing, into the icy waters of a canal. A transvestite since the age of twelve, bordello impersonator in drag and petulant libertine, Youssoupov had convinced himself, by 1916, that Rasputin, through his magnetic hold on the Czarina, was driving Russia to perdition. On February 1, the Daily Mail, uniting its voice to the chorus of the Russian mob, rejoiced at the magus’s death.61
To the Romanov's the healer had prophesied: ‘If I die or you abandon me, you will lose your son and your throne within six months.’62
War debts: in 1916–17 Russia owed to Britain a sum that was roughly a third of her annual income,63 which was more than what Britain owed the United States; and what Russia owed to France was half of what she owed to Britain. Identifying what party benefited from the Russian holocaust presents no difficulty: Britain obviously did. The conduct of the war in Russia was no more in the Czar’s hands than in those of Rasputin: rather, orders were dictated by the British Treasury.64 In Russia it was said at the time that ‘England and France will fight to the last Russian man.’65
On January 12, 1917, Lord George Buchanan, British ambassador in St. Petersburg, conferring with the Czar, was informed by the latter that a peace conference, ‘the final one,’ was to be expected soon. Buchanan rejoined that the Czar should take after the British government, and draw into the Imperial Cabinet an exponent of the ‘moderate Left’ so as to reach the twofold objective of soothing social disquiet while pursuing the offensive against the Germans. The Czar did not seem to decipher the message, and reiterated his intention of seeking the peace with Wilhelm II. Veiling a threat, Buchanan alluded mysteriously to the possibility of revolution and dropped the hint that he had had foreknowledge, by a week, of Rasputin’s assassination. Nicholas paid no heed.66 Like his German counterparts, he could not fathom how determined Britain was to prevent any form of dialogue between Russia and Germany.
The British ambassador in Russia himself was at the center of the scheme to overthrow the czar if he ever should lose his stomach for war…[To that end, he] had gathered a coterie of wealthy bankers, liberal capitalists, conservative politicians, and disgruntled aristocrats.67
Violent strikes erupted in the Russian capital a month after the entretien between the Czar and Buchanan: the turmoil would turn into Russia’s famed February Revolution. When it exploded, Buchanan was ‘out of the office,’ on holiday: safely withdrawn from the scene of a tumult that he had contributed to kindle.
Undismayed at the thought of eventually facing 70 German divisions wheeling into the Western Front, the British War Cabinet instead received the news with satisfaction; Lloyd George, the Prime Minister, exclaimed: ‘One of England’s goals had been achieved!’ Likewise, sharing Britain’s expectant mood, US President Woodrow Wilson in an address to Congress acclaimed on April 2, 1917, the deposition of the Czar, speaking of ‘those marvelous and comforting events’ in Russia, where ‘autocracy’ had finally been struck down.68
This was truly absurd: in the midst of an unprecedented world war, the Allied public was to believe that its rulers were worried about the ‘democratic temperature’ of Russia far more than they were about the risk of losing the Russian ally altogether! Yet the public should have known that of all scenarios it was a Russo-German peace that the Anglo-American clubs feared the most, and that it was precisely to avoid this occurrence that the war was being waged. And the Liberal press was surely not going to enlighten its readers on the matter. Thankfully for these clubs, in 1917 Eurasia miscarried: Russia and Germany were, yet again, successfully kept separated.
That Helphand, on account of his multiple talents – as an energetic, but disenchanted polyglot, deeply acquainted with the whole wide spectrum of Socialist agitation, and wielding a fluent pen and economic sense – must have been inducted into some form of ‘network’ can scarcely be doubted. However, other than a passing allusion of the German Minister Brockdorff Rantzau to the nondescript ‘powers ranged behind Helphand’ (see below), historical documentation affords no material wherewith the contours of such an organization may be drawn with precision.
When the war came, Parvus was operative. In Istanbul, by guaranteeing a steady supply of armaments and war materials to the government of the Young Turks, he appeared to have played a significant role in securing Turkey’s entrance in the war on the side of Germany. Thereafter, as Russia began to suffer the vertiginous reversal on the Eastern Front and the Entente powers feared that the Czar might have renounced the fight, he was selected for the top mission to Germany.
Effortlessly, he managed to come into immediate contact with the highest levels of the German Foreign Ministry. His proposal: to invite the gentlemen of the Wilhelmstrasse to finance and supervise the creation of a destabilizing movement within Russia that could have toppled the czarist regime and brought about a separate peace with the Reich. On the face of it, this plan seemed a variation on the theme of Eurasian cooperation. But the intent was the opposite.
Parvus would have later claimed that he had maneuvered the Germans to foment a general revolutionary wave in Russia, which would have hopefully spilled over to Germany and the rest of Europe, in the name of his long cherished dream: the international Socialist alliance of the world. His sincerity in this regard is hard to assess. The German diplomats, on the other hand, were convinced that they were spinning the game; they had naturally no curiosity for revolutionary experiments, and sought to ‘use’ Parvus’s ‘Red’ network of Communist agitprops as ‘a means of exerting pressure on the czar, and thus speeding diplomatic negotiations.’69
Brockdorff-Rantzau,
It was precisely these separate negotiations between the German and
Russian empires that Parvus was expected to sabotage. Until the last stages
of the Bolshevik seizure of power, Helphand’s chief assignment would be to steer the Germans so as to ruin their chances of communication with
the czarist empire. While the hired assassins of Rasputin and the British
ambassador, Buchanan, supported by a team of professional spies sent
from London, burned the bridges from St. Petersburg to Germany, Parvus
etal. burned those from Berlin to Russia. The task facing Parvus would
be greatly facilitated by the helpless naivety of his special interlocutor
within the German Foreign Ministry: Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, German
ambassador in Copenhagen. The Danish capital, along with Stockholm, was selected as Parvus’s Scandinavian base of intrigue between Berlin and Russia. From there Helphand ran an active and most profitable import-export company, as well as a research institute and its associated newsletter, as fronts for his circle of espionage. Suspended, like most aldermen of the Reich, between patronizing benevolence and provincial presumption, Brockdorff-Rantzau – a superb expression of Germany’s despairing political ineptitude – left posterity a record of his thoughts as he stepped into the trap that Parvus laid out for him:
It might perhaps be risky to want to use the powers ranged behind Helphand, but it would certainly be our admission of our own weaknesses if we were to refuse their services out of fear of not being able to direct them…Those who do not understand the sign of our times will never understand which way we are heading or what is at stake in this movement.70
He, least of all, understood the sign of the times. It is evident from this important passage that Brockdorff, and the German Foreign Ministry in general, was incapable of identifying the nature of ‘these powers ranged behind Helphand’, and that such a fact naturally caused Brockdorff anxiety. Given the stakes, a lacuna of such depth was, from the German standpoint, absolutely inexcusable. Nonetheless, stubbornly refusing to fathom the danger, and certainly encouraged by more than a few of his superiors, Brockdorff persevered, convinced that he was the master of the game. Little did the German diplomat perceive that, having succumbed entirely to the seduction of the tireless Parvus, he was in fact allowing these enigmatic ‘powers’ backing Helphand to undermine the life-saving (for Germany) peace talks with Russia, and quicken thereby the disintegration of the German imperial establishment.
The message conveyed in the 1915 memorandum penned by Parvus for Brockdorff and the Foreign Ministry was unequivocal: czarist Russia was the irredeemable enemy of the Reich. Parvus admonished the Germans that, if they resolved to sign a contract with Nicholas, the likely outcome would have been the formation in Russia of a reactionary government, which, on the strength of its repossessed armies (freed from the war engagement), might have circumvented the agreement and turned once more against the Reich. The party they should have wagered on, Parvus insisted, was that of the Bolsheviks, a determined, if somewhat meager, group bent on peace, and the resolute enemy of Czar Nicholas. Lenin was the name of their leader. Brockdorff was thoroughly captivated by the plausibility of such utterly deceptive arguments.71
In 1915 Germany started to pay. In two years the Reich allegedly devoted over nine tons of gold to the subversive effort against the Czar.72 Parvus provided the business channels and the banking connections for remitting the sums, which were devoted to fitting the revolutionary militia and funding a sweeping propaganda apparatus, Pravda being the most notorious organ originating from the gift. After such profuse immobilization of resources, the Germans waited impatiently for these to bear fruit, but nothing stirred. Parvus pacified the Herren at once and assured them that the investment would yield. He then promised: they should have expected a quake on January 9, 1916; ‘the organization,’ he told them, had scheduled a mass strike on the eleventh anniversary of ‘Bloody Sunday.’
Then, on January 9, the czarist regime recorded without particular alarm isolated acts of insurgency and sabotage, the sinking of a warship, and scattered hiatuses caused by labor demonstrations, which were all brought under control by the police without great difficulty. Von Jagow, the German Foreign Minister, did not conceal his irritation, and a few other, more alert diplomats, grew suspicious and begged their chief to terminate the intrigue with Parvus. But Brockdorff vouched passionately for him, and the top generals were not willing to discard the Bolshevik trump just yet: agog, they kept on dreaming of a merciless peace and vast annexations in the East – the granary of Ukraine, the Baltic seaboard, and indemnities in gold.
However, it was evident by then that, contrary to Parvus’s tendentious claims, czarist Russia, despite the country’s innumerable infirmities – such as her large debt, retarded industrial adoption, rural misery, or the unspeakable squalor of her city slums – was not a bankrupt concern, a rotten fruit about to decompose, but rather an economic unit with enormous manufacturing potential that was already exporting a third of the world’s grain.73
Notwithstanding, the Germans, blinded by greed, resolved to wait a day longer, and continued to pay until, from the East, the signal was given in February, merely two months after the death of Rasputin.
The February Revolution of 1917 was never a German affair, and least of all a Bolshevik production. Lenin, when it erupted, was caged like a lion in Zurich, while Trotsky – the other protagonist of the subsequent November takeover – was agitating in Manhattan. The latter, on the basis of several testimonies, would expatiate in his lengthy history of the revolution on the presumed genuineness (‘namelessness’) of the February uprising, which he reconstructed in his narrative as the authentic proletarian prelude to the forthcoming Bolshevik rumble.74 It was nothing of the sort.
In February 1917, as the mob was cued once again to take to the streets, seven of Russia’s foremost generals and several garrisons of the capital forsook the Czar, who, bereft of military authority, was de facto forced to abdicate.75 After placing themselves at the front of the protesting cohorts, the mutinous officers headed for the Duma – Russia’s surrogate State Council – where they formally surrendered the ‘revolutionary’ will of the masses to the bourgeois exponents of the assembly, that is, to the Liberal conspirators (and interlocutors of Buchanan), with whom they (the seditious military) colluded.
The Liberals, in turn, were ready to hand over the scepter of power to Nicholas’s brother, the Grand Duke Michael. But the Grand Duke did not want anything short of popular investiture: he thus refused. So the Liberals alone were saddled with the burden of command. There was no paradox in this ramshackle devolution of power, as Trotsky would claim – as power bounced from the masses back to royalty by way of the soldiery and the conniving bourgeoisie. The February Revolution was in truth a misbegotten Liberal putsch, designed to retain the Russian armies on the Eastern Front under the aegis of a constitutional regent. But as the royalty withdrew, the matter nested uncomfortably in the widening gulf formed by the uneasy coupling of bourgeois with Socialist leaders. The equilibrium was precarious, to say the least.
For the time being, out of the putschist Duma was carved the nucleus of Russia’s new executive: the Provisional Government. It was oddly complemented by the resurrected Soviet, which was rapidly attracting Russia’s motley wing of revolutionaries: the Bolsheviks were itching to capture it.
So at long last the time came to implement Parvus’s masterstroke: in April 1917, with the agreement of the German authorities, he secured Lenin’s passage through Germany in an armored train, from Switzerland to Finland, and thence to St. Petersburg.
Once alighted from the car, Lenin proclaimed his ‘April Theses’ (the Bolshevik program): peace with no annexations; no parliamentary republic, but a republic of Soviets; confiscation of all landed estates and the establishment of ‘Model Farms’; one bank under the control of the Soviets.
Under German, and thus treasonous, sponsorship, Lenin returned; so did the Menshevik Plekhanov, who would support the pro-war Provisional Government, escorted to Russia by British destroyers.76 En route from New York with an American passport, Trotsky, after being intercepted aboard a Norwegian liner and detained in Halifax by Canadian naval officers on legitimate suspicion of traitorous and subversive activities (that is, to conspire against Russia’s new Provisional Government, a fighting member of the Entente), was inexplicably released upon orders from London and allowed in May to join his comrades in the Russian capital.77
Admittedly, this was for Britain the delicate piece of the great siege. The czarist regime had proved too unreliable and weak to play along the British directives since 1914. Before the dreaded (by Britain) prospect of a separate peace with the Reich materialized, the Czar was successfully ousted from the stage. This was the dynamics behind the February Revolution. Then Britain contemplated three possible courses of action:
1. The continuation of the February plot. According to its original architecture, the plan envisaged the creation of a Liberal Cabinet, buttressed by the Soviet (a parliament of sorts), and formally bound to the Royal House. The February episode was, in short, designed to implement at once Britain’s political structure – a constitutional monarchy – in Russia. Evidently, the grafting was impracticable, but the coup, by repatriating pro-war Marxists like Plekhanov and other Mensheviks, who could be counted on to legitimate in the Soviet the Cabinet’s protracted war effort, and by salvaging the royal superstition in the figure of a Romanov, was not lacking in brilliance. In fact, Allied power, beginning with the United States on March 9, had promptly accorded the new government diplomatic recognition. It remained to be seen whether the Provisional Government, even if shorn of imperial galloons, because of Grand Duke Michael’s defection, could foster the cohesion necessary to pursue the war.
2. If the Provisional Government failed, the Bolshevik card could have been played, for which Britain could also thank Parvus and the unwittingly self-serving dealings of the German rulers, and attempt the social experiment in terra nova: for no one, despite the April Theses, could clearly foresee what sort of regime Lenin and his associates would have erected if they were to take power.
This second eventuality evidently presented a higher degree of risk, because the Bolsheviks had vowed to withdraw Russia from the conflict. The advantage of their takeover, however, resided in their congenital aversion to the German dynastic spirit, which was capitalist and imperialist.
Colonel House, privy councilor of US President Wilson and always a pragmatic supporter of Bolshevism, offered in late 1917 the rationale for the West’s conspiratorial endorsement of the otherwise repugnant (to Western Liberalism) Bolshevik Communism:
It is often overlooked that the Russian revolution, inspired as if by deep hatred of autocracy, contains within it…great motives of serious danger to German domination: [for example], anti-capitalist feeling, which would be fully as intense, or more intense, against German capitalism…78
Though the Leninists would have made peace – to withdraw the peasants and workers from the front – so went the British reasoning, imperial Germans and Bolshevized Russians could hardly fuse into the embrace: ‘A treaty means nothing,’ Lenin would tell his followers after signing the peace with Germany in March 1918, ‘there is no justice that can exist between two classes.’79
In years to come, through financial manipulation – especially military aid – and fine diplomacy, one could hope to instigate a vast Communist state against the Reich: the path was indeed fraught with mortal hazards, but well worth the walk.
3. Again, were Russia’s Provisional Government to fall, a coalition of ‘White,’ czarist, counter-revolutionary generals could plunge Russia into civil war and tame the country thereby. A meeting of like minds between Russian Whites and the Reichswehr generals, greatly facilitated by spiritual and class affinity, would have become, in time, an embrace.
Of the three possible developments, this last was for Britain the least desirable. And if it came to pass, no choice was left to the Sea Powers other than attempting to bribe the Whites away from the German embrace, which in turn carried even more risk than the Bolshevik option.
In the eight months of uncertainty between February and October 1917, the Provisional Government legislated much, but effected little. Populist barrister Kerensky assumed the role of prime minister; thereupon he rushed to the front to enhearten the faltering troops. In June, the Russian army ventured one last sally against the Austrians, who were forthwith adjoined by supporting divisions of Germans. At the sight of the German Feldgrau (field-gray) uniforms, the Russians threw down their shields and fled in panic. In July the Bolsheviks bungled a putsch. The Provisional Government responded with firmness. Lenin disappeared in Finland; Trotsky and other Communist ringleaders were thrown in jail. Informed of the Parvus connection, Kerensky was about to arraign the Leninst gang on charges of treason and conspiracy as ‘German agents,’ but as the White counter-insurgency (the czarist loyalists) appeared to stir in several districts, he refrained from persecuting the Bolsheviks and let them loose instead. Desperate logic brought him to think he could use the Red agitators as allies against czarist counter-revolutionaries.
Meanwhile, the Sea Powers deemed it was time to switch program, drop Kerensky, and opt for second best (Bolshevism).
Germany and ‘the powers ranged behind Helphand’ had paid in the West, and evidence suggests that Wall Street paid in the East: behind the humanitarian facade of a ‘Red Cross War Council,’ American capitalists had been conveying sums earmarked for the Russian Revolution. J. P. Morgan associates and interests linked to the Federal Reserve Board of New York fronted such a Council, which paid Kerensky after May 1917, and according to an article of the Washington Post (February 2, 1918), successively shifted the funding to the Bolshevik cause.80 In September of 1917,
Buchanan, the British ambassador, told his government that the Bolsheviks ‘alone have a definite political program and are a compact minority…If the Government are not strong enough to put down the Bolsheviks by force, at the risk of breaking with the Soviet, the only alternative will be a Bolshevist government.’81
One month later, the Bolsheviks, a fringe movement with no popular backing, which in May had run ‘a poor third to the socialist parties,’82 seized power without firing a shot.
On the day of the revolution, the fashionable people were on the Nevsky Prospect* as usual, laughing together, and saying that the Bolshevik power would not last more than three days. Rich people in their carriages were scolding the soldiers, and the soldiers ‘argued feebly, with embarrassed grins’.83
* St. Petersburg’s main artery.
Five years of civil war lay ahead.
In March 1918, Bolshevik Russia signed a harsh peace with the German generals at Brest-Litovsk,† and, fulfilling the rapacity of these, ceded to them the Ukraine, the Baltic's and gold. The Eastern Front was now quiet and the Reich divisions in the East could be rolled back to France…but the Sea Powers had acted with prudence.
† Now in Poland.
As they soberly pondered over the scenarios outlined above and waited to see which would have come to a boil first, they took no chances, and jammed into the Western Front the American infantry. Not coincidentally, America formally joined the war, in April 1917, when the Russian front appeared to be creaking. ‘The important fact was that Britain was close to defeat in April 1917, and on that basis the United States entered the war.’84
America’s intervention to the side of Britain was effected rather adroitly. Pressured by the Germans to plead with Britain in order to make her desist from the illegal blockade of the Reich, the Americans refused. By doing so, they left Germany no option but to engage in unrestricted submarine warfare, which was officially declared on January 31, 1917. The anticipated sinking of American cargoes, which were profusely refurbishing the Allied military engagement, would have then yielded the suitable pretext to break off diplomatic relations with the German Reich, and in fine wage war against it. The spectacular precedent for the casus belli (to rouse the patriotic masses) had been previously engineered with the sinking of the British cruiser, the Lusitania, which was made to yaw deliberately into the maws of German submarines in May 1915.85
Germany had managed to delay America’s intervention from 1915 to 1917. Submarines had been withheld from combat, apologies given and reparations paid, but [by 1917] time had run out.86
The sequence of events in flashes: on February 22 revolution broke out in Russia, the czar fell on March 2, Lenin’s passage was scheduled for March 27, Trotsky was intercepted on April 1, President Wilson declared war on Germany on April 6 and Lenin shipped on the 9th, Trotsky disembarked at St. Petersburg on May 18, US Commander Pershing sailed for Europe on May 29, 1917. Russia and Germany signed the peace on March 3, 1918; thereafter American soldiers – build-up completed – reached the European shores in waves of 330,000 per month.87 By November 1918 they numbered over 2 million.88
The last days of America:
from republic to truculent empire
By the last quarter of 1916, the Allies had become dependent upon the
United States not only for supplies but also for financing. And it was in 1917 that Britain, who was nearly bankrupting herself in the first onslaught against the heartland, gradually passed on the military command of the great siege to the far fitter and greener might – military and economic – of the United States. This was done with the understanding, however, that Britain, being the experienced player, always retained an exclusive right to the strategic command of this siege.
By accepting the responsibility and committing her troops to the European fight, America took on consciously the duty of an imperial power. This was an ominous relay between the two English-speaking islands, and a decision that would have radically disfigured the complexion of America, and eventually that of the world at large.
The United States was not prepared to take over control of the sea herself, therefore she could not allow the defeat of Britain – nor did she trust Germany in the least. America’s elites were Anglophile, and the American public, who had lent millions of dollars to Britain, saw the world through the lens of British propaganda: if the boom of inflation and prosperity sparked by the enormous Entente purchase of war materiel had collapsed because of an Allied defeat, the money loaned in Wall Street would have been as good as gone. All these factors demanded that the United States, beckoned by Britain, throw her imperial lot in with the vicissitudes of the heartland.89
The days of a great confederation of free cities in free states, the reverence due to Virginian gentlemen of letters, the reconciliation with Nature, and the pioneering spirit of the communes, that is, all the American treasures that could have afforded Old Europe and the world a kingdom of peace were abandoned remorselessly. A studied hunger for more time and space, and the irresponsible pursuit of bellicose vainglory – the late trademarks of the British empire– were being purchased by America at the expense of her youth. In the United States, the mood changed.
In 1914 90 percent of the American people had been against joining the war;90 presently such temperance had to make room for aggressiveness: it was soldiers and cheering crowds that the US needed. The clubs saw to it that the shift was a fast one, through fear. Armaments were scaled up and punitive expeditions were hatched in the midst of ‘a popular fear of aggression from without.’91 Imbued with ‘a spirit of particularism…and animosity between contrasted groups of persons,’ America turned patriotic. 92 Now it was all about the gung-ho ‘love for one’s country,’ which was not love at all, but the readied call to hurt the ‘enemy,’ whoever he was, wherever he lurked, anyhow, any time. Riding the wave of this induced, collective dementia, the citizen came to see himself and his folks as victims of plots, which were rumored to feed his credulity and strengthen within him the new idolatry of the red, white, and blue, ‘American Pride,’ and the ‘Star Spangled Banner’.93
From 1917 the public was fed fantastic stories dressed up as news, such as the ‘discovery’ that the Germans had secret gun emplacements in the United States ready to bombard New York and Washington. This alarming ‘news’ had been planted by the Allies as early as October 1914 and had succeeded in finding its way into presidential intelligence reports…94
Beyond the appeal to geopolitical likeness, cultural kindred, the threat of German submarine warfare, and the jumbo loans to the Entente, there was one more means whereby the United States could be baited to share the burden of the great siege, and this was Palestine.
Within the British Cabinet, the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, and the War Minister, Earl Kitchener, did not wish to fragment the European offensive for the sake of a Middle Eastern adventure. But the vanguard of imperial stalwarts, who were ranged behind the charismatic figure of Lord Alfred Milner, a former colonial officer turned oligarchical mastermind, thought otherwise.95
From the Manchester Guardian, in November 1915, recruits of the so-called Kindergarten – Milner’s club, also known as the Round Table – intimated ‘that “the whole future of the British Empire as a Sea Empire” depended upon Palestine becoming a buffer state inhabited “by an intensely patriotic race”.’96 Indeed, Palestine was ‘the key missing link’ that joined together the limbs of the British empire in a continuum stretching from the Atlantic to the middle of the Pacific.97
If World War I represented in fact the beginning of the heartland’s great besiegement, the Milner faction thought it appropriate to seize the occasion and thrust, with the opening assault, two wedges at once: one at each extremity of the fault line. For that, America could be involved with troops in the Eurasian north (versus Germany), and the political campaigning of her Zionist lobby in the Middle Eastern south (versus the Arabs; see Figure 1.1, p. 11). But Asquith and Kitchener were not gazing that far. And the Kindergarten had no intention of letting the opportunity pass.
On 6 June, 1916, Kitchener drowned in a ‘providential’ shipwreck on his way to Russia in a mine-laden sea.98 Betrayed in a backroom conspiracy of the Liberal Party, Asquith fell, and on December 7, 1916, David Lloyd George became Prime Minister. Exponents of the Round Table were forthwith raised to several high posts, and the master himself, Milner, was made into the chief strategist of the War Cabinet. Thereupon British troops were embarked for the Middle East to fight the Turks.
On December 11, 1917, General Sir Edmund Allenby and his officers entered the Holy City of Jerusalem at the Jaffa Gate, on foot.99
By August 1918 the first act of the great northwestern siege was brought to a close. After Ludendorff’s last great attack in the spring, the Allies, bolstered by American manpower, repelled the infiltration, and beat the influenza-ridden Germans back to the ‘Hindenburg Line.’ Germany realized that she could not hold out any longer. She capitulated, and the armistice was signed in November.
By August of 1918 Germany had given her best, and it had not been adequate. The blockade and the rising tide of American manpower gave the German leaders the choice of surrender or complete economic and social upheaval. Without exception, led by the Junker military commanders, they chose surrender…Looking back on the military history of the First World War, it is clear that the whole war was a siege operation against Germany.100
Ten million dead had not been sufficient to break the country and bring it among the satellites of the Sea Powers. Germany had not yet been vanquished on her own soil. To make her suffer a crushing and final defeat within her confines – the second and final act of the northwestern siege (that is, World War II) – the British schemers of the interwar period would apply themselves for the next 20 years to enforcing vis-à-vis the defeated Reich an ambivalent policy mix of sanctions and foreign direct investment. In fact, the obverse of this underhanded policy concealed the clubs’ peculiar intent, which was to revamp the military and economic establishment of Germany while waiting to identify the ‘right’ sort of political leadership that could have ‘used’ this new, refitted Reich to Britain’s advantage. In brief, the scheme consisted in rearming the enemy of yesterday, and so conspiring as to plunge Germany in another battle, which would offer (1) the pretext to annihilate Germany finally, and (2) the chance to take possession of Germany’s geopolitical position. To this complex feat of provocation, which featured the incubation of Nazi Führer Adolf Hitler as the extraordinary ‘drummer’ of an unrecognizable, orientalized Germany, the remainder of the present narrative is devoted.
to be continued...next...
The Veblenian Prophecy From the Councils to Versailles
by Way of Russian Fratricide,1919–20
footnotes Chapter 1
1. Robert Deacon, John Dee. Scientist, Astrologer & Secret Agent to Elizabeth I (London: Frederick Muller, 1968), pp. 92, 94.
2. Thorstein Veblen, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (London: Macmillan & Co., 1915), pp. 50–84.
3. David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace. The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Avon Books, 1989), p. 27.
4. Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise of Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860–1914 (London: Ashfi eld Press, 1980), pp. 41–58.
5. Michael Balfour, The Kaiser and His Times (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1972), pp. 54–5.
6. Paolo Giordani, L’impero coloniale tedesco (Milano: Fratelli Treves, 1915), pp. 30, 89ff.
7. Balfour, The Kaiser.
8. Kennedy, Anglo-German Antagonism, p. 110.
9. Bernhard von Bülow, La Germania Imperiale (Prodenone: Edizioni Studio Tesi, 1994 [1914]), p. 87.
10. Veblen, Imperial Germany, pp. 231–2.
11. Michael Stürmer, L’impero inquieto, 1866–1918 (Das ruhelose Reich, Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993 [1983]), p. 326.
12. Kennedy, Anglo-German Antagonism, p. 362.
13. S. L. A. Marshall, World War I (Boston: Houghton Miffl in Company, 1992), p. 114.
14. Andreas Dorpalen, The World of General Haushofer. Geopolitics in Action (New York: Farrar & Rinehart Inc., 1942), p. 52.
15. Ibid., pp. 194, 196, 198, 200; emphasis added.
16. Carlo Jean, Geopolitica (Bari: Laterza, 1995), pp. 29–31.
17. F. von Bernhardi, Germany and the Next War (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1914 [1911]), pp. 18, 25, 52, 90ff.
18. Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (New York: Basic Books, 1999), pp. 169–73.
19. Robert L. Owen, The Russian Imperial Conspiracy [1892–1914] (New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1927), p. vii.
20. Ibid., pp. 3, 25–6.
21. See for instance, Donald Kagan, On the Origins of War, and the Preservation of Peace (New York: Doubleday, 1995), pp. 206–12.
22. Evgheni Tarle, Breve storia d’Europa (Bologna: Editori Riuniti, 1959 [1928]), p. 354.
23. Stürmer, Impero inquieto, p. 440.
24. T. H. Meyer (ed.), Light for the New Millennium. Rudolf Steiner’s Association with Helmuth von Moltke. Letters, Documents and After-Death Communications (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1997), p. 3.
25. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope. A History of the World in Our Time (New York: Macmillan Company, 1966), p. 100.
26. Dmitri Volkogonov, Trotsky, the Eternal Revolutionary (New York: The Free Press 1996), p. 42.
27. Tarle, Breve storia, p. 143.
28. A. S. Erusalimskij, Da Bismarck a Hitler. L’imperialismo tedesco nel XX secolo (Roma: Editori Riuniti, 1974), p. 185. 269 Preparata 03 chap06 269 10/3/05 12:01:16 pm 270 Conjuring Hitler
29. Greg King, The Man Who Killed Rasputin. Prince Felix Youssoupov and Murder That Helped Bring Down the Russian Empire (New York: Citadel Press, 1995), p. 27.
30. Fromkin, Peace, p. 31.
31. Erusalimskij, Bismarck, p. 198.
32. Balfour, The Kaiser, p. 328.
33. Ibid., p. 203.
34. Quigley, Tragedy, pp. 226, 228.
35. Léon Degrelle, Hitler: Born at Versailles (Costa Mesa: Institute for Historical Review, 1987), p. 111.
36. Erusalimskij, Bismarck, p. 255.
37. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 221.
38. Owen, Russian Imperial Conspiracy, p. 15.
39. Leon De Poncins, The Secret Powers Behind Revolution (San Pedro, CA: GSG Publishers, 1996 [1929]), p. 78.
40. Degrelle, Hitler, pp. 14–15.
41. Such was one of the several attributes wherewith Timothy McVeigh (the man convicted of bombing the FBI building in Oklahoma City, April 19, 1995), a modern-day Princip in his own right, was labeled in the public discussion of his case (Gore Vidal, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace: How We Got to Be So Hated New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002, p. 121).
42. Erusalimskij, Bismarck, p. 234.
43. Ibid., p. 235.
44. The philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote: ‘I had noticed during the previous years how carefully Sir Edward Grey lied in order to prevent the public from knowing the methods by which he was committing us to the support of France in the event of war’ (Fromkin, Peace, p. 125).
45. Tarle, Breve storia, p. 279.
46. Quigley, Tragedy, pp. 316–17.
47. Owen, Russian Imperial Conspiracy, p. 14.
48. Erusalimskij, Bismarck, p. 269.
49. Balfour, The Kaiser, p. 351.
50. Quoted in Geminello Alvi, Dell’estremo occidente. Il secolo americano in Europa. Storie economiche (Firenze: Marco Nardi Editore, 1993), p. 75.
51. Degrelle, Hitler, p. 86.
52. Fromkin, Peace, p. 125.
53. Erusalimskij, Bismarck, pp. 255–56.
54. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Boston: Houghton Miffl in Company, 1971 [1924–26]), pp. 163–4.
55. Meyer, Millennium, p. 89.
56. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 230.
57. Dennis Wheatley, Red Eagle. The Story of the Russian Revolution (London: Book Club, 1938), p. 103.
58. B. H. Liddell Hart, The Real War, 1914–1918 (Boston: Little, Brown, & Company, 1930), p. 113.
59. Richard Pipes, A Concise History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), p. 77.
60. John Maynard, Russia in Flux (New York: Macmillan Company, 1948), p. 173.
61. King, Rasputin, pp. 148–62.
62. R. H. Bruce Lockart, British Agent (London: G. P. Putnam & Sons, 1933), p. 161.
63. For a GNP of 20 billion rubles in 1913 (Paul Gregory, Russian National Income (1885–1913) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 56), at 17.3 rubles to the pound in 1917 (Angiolo Forzoni, Rublo. Storia civile e monetaria della Russia da Ivan a Stalin (Roma: Valerio Levi Editore, 1991), p. 226). Britain by then owed the United States £497 million (Alvi, Occidente, p. 75). Preparata 03 chap06 270 10/3/05 12:01:17 pm Notes 271
64. Alvi, Occidente, p. 75.
65. Pietro Zveteremich, Il grande Parvus (Milano: Garzanti, 1988), p. 195.
66. Alvi, Occidente, pp. 77ff.
67. Degrelle, Hitler, p. 271.
68. Henri Vibert, Fronte a l’Inghilterra (Firenze: Beltrami Editore, 1936), p. 111.
69. Z. A. B. Zeman and W. B. Scharlan, The Merchant of Revolution. The Life of Alexander Israel Helphand (Parvus), 1867–1924 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 151.
70. Ibid., p. 152.
71. Ibid., pp. 182, 199.
72. Pipes, Concise History, p. 122.
73. Alvi, Occidente, p. 79.
74. Leon Trotsky, The Russian Revolution. The Overthrow of Tzarism & the Triumph of the Soviets (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1959 [1930]), pp. 131–47.
75. Ibid., p. 84.
76. Zveteremich, Parvus, p. 249.
77. Anthony C. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House Publishers, 1981), pp. 25–8.
78. N. Gordon-Levin Jr., Woodrow Wilson and World Politics. America’s Response to War and Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 60.
79. Alfred Döblin, Karl & Rosa (New York: Fromm International Publishing Corporation, 1983 [1950]), p. 50.
80. Sutton, Bolshevik Revolution, pp. 72, 82.
81. Maynard, Russia, p. 190.
82. Pipes, Concise History, p. 120.
83. Maynard, Russia, p. 195.
84. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 250.
85. ‘The Lusitania was a British merchant vessel…carrying a cargo of 2,400 cases of rifle cartridges and 1,250 cases of shrapnel, and with orders to attack German submarines whenever possible. Seven hundred and eighty-five of 1,257 passengers, including 128 of 197 Americans, lost their lives. The incompetence of the acting captain contributed to the heavy loss, as did also a mysterious “second explosion” after the German torpedo struck. The vessel, which had been declared “unsinkable”, went down in eighteen minutes. The captain was on a course he had orders to avoid; he was running at reduced speed; he had an inexperienced crew; the portholes had been left open; the lifeboats had not been swung out, and no lifeboat drills had been held…’ (Quigley, Tragedy, pp. 250–1).
86. Degrelle, Hitler, p. 267.
87. Tarle, Breve storia, p. 362.
88. Liddell Hart, Real War, p. 386.
89. Quigley, Tragedy, pp. 249–50.
90. Edward House, The Intimate Papers of Colonel House, Arranged as a Narrative by Charles Seymour (Boston: Houghton Miffl in Company, 1926), p. 60.
91. Thorstein Veblen, ‘Dementia Pracox,’ in Thorstein Veblen, Essays in Our Changing Order (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1964 [1922]), p. 424.
92. Thorstein Veblen, An Inquiry into the Nature of Peace and the Terms of Its Perpetuation (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1998 [1917]), p. 38.
93. Veblen, ‘Dementia,’ p. 434.
94. Degrelle, Hitler, p. 244.
95. Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment. From Rhodes to Cliveden (San Pedro, CA: GSGS & Associates Publishers, 1981), pp. 10, 130, 131.
96. Fromkin, Peace, p. 271
97. Ibid., pp. 281–2. Five years later, Winston Churchill, taking offi ce as Colonial Secretary, would reiterate that ‘A Jewish State under the protection of the British Preparata 03 chap06 271 10/3/05 12:01:17 pm 272 Conjuring Hitler Crown…would be especially in harmony with the truest interest of the British Empire’ (ibid., p. 519).
98. Fromkin, Peace, p. 217.
99. Ibid., pp. 217, 312.
100. Quigley, Tragedy, p. 236.
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