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Notes from the Sceptered Isle
by John Nobull
4 November 2004
[From Instauration, October 1998]
Allow me to say a few words about America's involvement in WWI, WWII, and (probably) WWIII. In all three cases, America was, or will be, the key factor. In all three cases propaganda was a decisive weapon, propaganda that later rebounded on the propagandists.
At the death of Queen Victoria, Great Britain was the greatest world power, with a more populous empire than any in the past. Her power was based on her navy, by far the largest in the world. Britain, however, had an Achilles' heel: the maintenance of free trade long after it had ceased to benefit the mother country. During Victoria's reign, the standard of living of the British worker increased by about one percent a year. But its two principal competitors, the U.S. and Germany, later began to pull ahead. Both had armies bigger than Britain's.
U.S. capital operated from behind a high tariff wall (47% in 1861), which was the principal economic reason for the secession of the agricultural South. Germany was also protected by a high tariff wall. By Victoria's death in 1901 it was evident that the U.S. and Germany were pulling ahead of the British economically.
To counter this, Joseph Chamberlain began to make speeches in favour of "Imperial Preference," an imperial tariff wall. He was struck down by a paralytic stroke in July 1906.
The alternative to a tariff was for Britain to destroy one of her two trading rivals. America had been an impossible target since the end of the War Between the States, from which the North emerged with a huge army. The reason that it did not march into Canada was that the British Navy guarded the seaways as America expanded westwards. It was safer to expand economically than militarily into Canada. Yet even as late as Teddy Roosevelt's presidency, he was considering invading Canada, if Britain did not play ball.
The chief promoters of a British anti-German policy were Sir Ernest Cassels, the Jewish banker mentor of Edward VII, and Admiral Lord Fisher, the son of a Ceylonese court prostitute. As the Entente Cordiale developed strength, the Germans began to fear that postponement of the inevitable war would result in Germany's defeat. The most important factor was the extraordinary speed of Russia's economic development prior to 1914.
In the longer run, Russia was likely to be the more dangerous rival. Before 1914, Russian productivity was so high it looked as though Russia would be capable of outclassing both Germany and the U.S. That is why, in 1917, J.P. Morgan went along with Kuhn Loeb, Jacob Schiff and Rothschild's in liberally funding Trotsky and his murderous Jewish Communist revolutionaries. (Lenin was also of part-Jewish origin, though this was denied for many, many years.)
The crippling of Russia was the Jewish aim. Huge quantities of Russian furs and jewelry soon made their appearance in New York, the property of massacred aristocrats and bourgeois. Then came the obliteration of the engineers, as Solzhenitsyn records. Without engineers, no effective economy! Ordinary Russians were then progressively enslaved, thought the peasantry was allowed to function for a few more years before massacre and collectivisation became their lot as well.
British lies were to play a big part in WWI. They were the work of some very effective propagandists, including Arnold Toynbee, the poor man's Oswald Spengler, and John Buchan, later governor-general of Canada. In his Richard Hannay novels (The 39 Steps, Greenmantle, and Mr. Standfast) Buchan went so far as to cast a slur on German women, whom he likened to a herd of cows. What a contrast with Rupert Brooke's reverie at the beginning of WWI, when he declared his love for England but referred to the "admirable beauty of German women!" Love for their country makes soldiers fight more effectively than hatred of the enemy -- as we saw in both world wars. There is a lesson in this for the future. We should love the best of our own people more than we hate our enemies. It may well be necessary to kill some enemies, but that is another matter.
The British had an excellent model to follow: William Randolph Hearst's propaganda from 1895 to 1898. Readers of his publications were informed that the Spaniards were in the habit of throwing prisoners to the sharks, raping Cuban women, imprisoning nuns and burning priests alive (25 by one count). None of these tales was substantiated later. Mark Twain protested in print against the hysteria generated by Hearst's publications, but he was ignored.
Then came the destruction of the Maine, which was seized upon as a casus belli. (In fact the explosion appears to have happened inside the ship, not outside it.) Bible Protestants found it easy to hate the Spaniards, because of the intolerant popery of Spain, a line of assiduously propagated over more than three centuries. How many people know that the Inquisition never burned a witch or that it had strict rules against severe torture? (Unlike Walsingham, the head of Elizabeth I's secret service, who boasted that he could make a man a foot taller than God had made him.)
JOHN NOBULL
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