BRITAIN PLANNED WAR ON
GERMANY YEARS BEFORE 1914:
(Excerpts from Pat Walsh's book published recently in Belfast)
The Great Fraud of
1914/18
In 1910, the following conversation took place between
Arthur Balfour and the US
Ambassador to London,
Henry White. Balfour was then the leader
of the Unionist Party, and had been Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905. He went on to become Foreign Secretary in
1917 and gave British support for “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine in what became
known as the Balfour Declaration.
“Balfour: We are probably fools not to find a reason for declaring
war on Germany
before she builds too many ships and takes away our trade.
“White: You are a
very high-minded man in private life. How can you possibly contemplate anything
so politically immoral as provoking a war against a harmless nation which has
as good a right to a navy as you have? If you wish to compete with German
trade, work harder.
“Balfour: That
would mean lowering our standard of living. Perhaps it would be simpler for us
to have a war.
“White: I am
shocked that you of all men should enunciate such principles.
“Balfour: Is it a
question of right or wrong? Maybe it is just a question of keeping our
supremacy.”
(‘Thirty Years Of American Diplomacy’, by Henry White and
Allan Nevins p.257.)
Britain’s Great
War
The Great War was a Great Fraud because it wasn’t what it was
made out to be or what it is made out to be. It didn’t come about in the way it
is said it came about. It wasn’t waged for the reasons proclaimed. It involved
doing things in the world that are not mentioned in discussing it. It produced
things in the world that are not mentioned in discussing it.
The Great War was Britain’s Great War.
This is because British intervention made it into what it was - a catastrophic world
war. Without British intervention it would have remained a Balkan War (Austro-Hungary
versus Serbia)
and would have been over quickly. Or perhaps it would have been a European War (Germany and Austro-Hungary versus Russia and France) which would have been a
more limited war. But Britain’s
intervention made it into a World War.
Britain
also gave it its peculiar catastrophic character. This was because the Liberal
Government proclaimed it in universalistic moral terms - good v evil. That
determined that it would last much longer and be much more destructive than it
otherwise would have been. It also made it very difficult to stop. For
instance, Pope Benedict’s Peace efforts were blocked. There could be no
compromise between ‘civilisation’ and ‘barbarism.’ Finally, there was no functional
peace settlement possible since evil had to be punished in a way that the peace
of Europe became secondary. Along with this,
the moral propaganda whipped up in service of the war effort was detrimental to
stability.
The revolution in
British Foreign Policy
The Committee of Imperial Defence, which planned the war on
Germany, was established in 1902 by the Unionist Prime Minister, Arthur
Balfour, under pressure whipped up by the Liberal Imperialists.
Balfour made the Committee of Imperial Defence into a regular Department of
State with a permanent secretariat composed of Army and Navy representatives,
who could enforce conformity to policy. The idea behind this was to protect it
against future Liberal Ministers who might wish to divert it from its work or
run it down. But Balfour need not have worried on this score because the
Liberal Imperialists, Haldane and Grey, were given the key Ministries of War
and Foreign Affairs in the new Liberal Cabinet of 1906 by Campbell-Bannerman as
the price for Party unity in defence of Liberal Free Trade.
Although the Committee of Imperial Defence organised the
future war on Germany, at
the time it was established it took it that Britain’s
main rival in Europe was France
and it had to be redirected to view Germany as the enemy. The CID began
to pursue the idea of the employment of the British Army with the French within
a year of the 1904 Anglo-French Entente. The French interpreted the agreement
as the opening of the door to a military understanding aimed at fighting a war
against Germany.
A revolution in British Foreign Policy was conducted between
1904 and 1907 to encircle Germany
and arrange the forces necessary for its destruction. Leo Maxse, in conjunction
with Sir Edward Grey and other important figures in the Foreign Office, mapped
this out in a series of articles for the ‘National Review.’ These, written in
1901/2 accurately indicated the direction of future British Foreign policy.
The French were worried that the fall of the Balfour
Government and its replacement with the Liberals might mean that the Entente
would not be followed through with the military arrangements that they had
hoped for. So just before the 1905 General Election, Repington (who he?) went
to see Sir Edward Grey to sound him out about the continued support of a future
Liberal Government for the contingency plans that had begun to be made with the
French for a war with Germany. These plans, which were at that time under
discussion with the French military, included the landing of a British Army of
more than 100,000 men in France; simultaneous attacks by British and French
forces on Germany’s African colonies; and the division of captured German ships
between the two navies.
The view was that the British should command the sea
campaign and the French, the land. As a result of this the French concentrated
their navy in the Mediterranean so that the Royal Navy could be redeployed in
force to the North Sea. This division of
labour was made for no other reason than to prepare for war on Germany.
The Entente Cordiale was made with France in 1904 in which
the French irredentist desire to regain the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine
lost in the 1870/1 war with Germany was utilised in the mutual interest. Secret
conversations were had between the British and French General Staffs for a
future war on Germany in which the battlefields were surveyed and the
depositing of a British Expeditionary Force on the left flank of the French
Army arranged in minute detail. Haldane’s continental expeditionary force, and
a parallel militarisation of English society produced a military innovation
proving Britain’s intent on intervening in a European war on Germany.
Now the Tsar was promised Constantinople and this meant the
destruction of the Ottoman Empire, something Britain had supported as a bulwark
against Russian expansion for the best part of a century. This had momentous
consequences because it meant the break-up of the great Islamic state. But
breaking it up into what? Nations and Nationalism did not exist and the
mixtures of religions and ethnicities in the region, which functioned side by
side within the loose Ottoman structures, were to be forced into conflict to
carve out new territories in a process that could only involve ethnic cleansing
on a large scale, as it had in the Balkans after a similar process had been
provoked.
Poor Little
Belgium’
‘Poor Little Belgium’ was nothing of the kind. It was a
highly militarised society at the centre of the world’s arms industry with a
massive army and a dubious neutrality. It was one of the most brutal and
reactionary of the Imperialist powers. One of its possessions in Africa was
referred to, before the war in Britain,
as “The Congo Slave State”, where the Belgians worked millions of natives to
death.
Belgium was
not a natural entity and was constructed by external forces, largely by Britain, to
curb the French geographically on the other side of the Channel. It was a state
rather than a country, made up of two distinct peoples who did not like each
other. But it was kept together to serve a strategic purpose for Britain, which
claimed a right of hegemony over it. Lord Palmerston, who was the individual
most responsible for it, recognised that its position made it advantageous to
traverse by French armies going east and the declarations of neutrality should
not be religiously respected.
During the 1870/1 Franco-Prussian War Lord Granville
concluded treaties with both France
and Germany guaranteeing the
neutrality of Belgium. Article 3 of both treaties declared that they
were only to remain in force during the continuance of the war and for twelve
months afterwards. Both treaties
therefore had expired by 40 years in 1914. There were earlier treaties from the
1840s but Lord Derby accurately described their use in giving Britain “a
right to make war, but would not necessarily impose the obligation.”
The Belgian ‘treaty’ that the Liberals insisted on honouring
to engage in their Great War on Germany
was not a treaty with Belgium
but a treaty about Belgium. Britain
itself breached the treaty by negotiating with Belgium
about what would happen in the event of Germany wanting to pass an army
through the country. And the Germans found considerable evidence later in the
Belgian archives that the Belgians had played fast and loose with their
supposed ‘neutrality’ by entering into military discussions with Britain as early as January 1906 about how they would
co-operate in a future war on Germany. So it was Belgian neutrality had already
been breached and would be breached subsequently, whatever the Germans
did. And Walter Page, the Anglophile US
Ambassador in London, in a conversation with
Colonel House, President Wilson's special adviser, in September 1916, revealed
that the White House also believed that Belgium neutrality was really just
a canard for the British to justify a war.
The famous Belgian treaty ‘guaranteeing’ its neutrality was
worthless but Britain still
exercised the right to use Belgium
in the way it saw fit. And so the German defensive sweep into Belgian was the
cassus belli in England,
when in reality it was merely the pretext for war, from Britain’s point
of view.
It was well known in Belgian governing circles that England was pursuing a secret policy of war
against Germany and the
Belgian state was really part of the political front against Germany and a
kind of unofficial member of the entente. Belgium had its own war aims of an
Imperial kind - and subsequently did very well out of the spoils of victory in
1919. In 1912 Belgium
adopted a military programme raising the war strength of its army to a massive
340,000 and introduced the principle of universal compulsory service, in
preparation to meet her obligations and responsibilities to her ‘allies.’ In
August 1914, Belgium was
able to put a larger army in the field than Britain - despite, in theory, being
a neutral country.
In July 1914 Edward Grey lured Germany
into Belgium
by not giving a clear warning to Germany of Britain’s position. He was criticised
at the time for this.
Britain’s
freedom of action was the major element of uncertainty in the situation that
had the effect of oiling the wheels of war. During the critical few days at the
end of July, Britain
had in great measure the power to determine the course of events. If, it had
declared its intention to commit its army in support of France that would have exerted considerable
influence on German behaviour, which would in turn would have greatly
influenced Austria, and Austria might well have warded off Russian
mobilisation by taking a different attitude to Serbia. Or, if Britain had declared its intention to be neutral
under specified conditions, that would have influenced French behaviour in
drawing back, discouraging Russia.
But England
did neither of these things. Instead, it gave the Germans hope that it would
remain neutral, encouraging the Kaiser to back Austria, whilst signalling to the
French and Russians its intentions if they went ahead.
After Austria
had declared war on Serbia
both sets of alliances eagerly made representations to Britain to
determine her position. The Germans argued that if England
declared it would remain neutral, France
and Russia
would not dare to fight. The French and Russians argued that if England declared she would side with them, Germany and Austria would at once back down.
But Asquith and Grey decided to do neither and maintained a dangerous ambiguity
in Britain’s
position. They, instead, by their deliberate inactivity encouraged neither side
to draw back, thereby giving impetus to both alliances to go to war.
The British
State, in the critical
week, did not state a position that the other European states could take
account of when deciding what to do themselves. It looked like indecisiveness
by British statesmen at the critical juncture and it has become usual to say Britain drifted
into war. But it was nothing like that at all. Asquith, Grey, Haldane and
Churchill had all decided a week before the declaration of war that, in the
event of a conflict, Britain
would take part in it. They calculated the chain of events and their drift,
encouraged them to occur, and then in the time-honoured fashion of the Balance
of Power strategy, they entered the war as part of a military alliance against
their main European rival.
It was at this crucial point that the Anglo-French Entente
came into its own for Grey. There were fairly tight treaty obligations existing
between France, Germany, Austria
and Russia,
which would probably draw them into any war that might break out among two of
the parties. Britain
was the only real free agent in the situation not bound by treaty to join
forces with France or anyone else. Its options were open and it was not under
any obligation to take part in the war. It could afford to let a European
conflict run its course and sit back and watch the territorial sorting out as a
result of it, without risking any loss to itself.
Germany
offered Belgium
friendly neutrality, and promised to maintain her independence if she would
give free passage to German troops across a part of her territory. If the king
of the Belgians refused, Germany
would have to treat his country as an enemy. But it was vital for the Liberal
Imperialists that they draw the Germans into Belgium. That would be the only
factor enabling them to bring the bulk of their party – who were not
predisposed to supporting Balance of Power wars – into supporting British
participation in war. They knew that the Shlieffen Plan was the only feasible
German defensive manoeuvre to deal with its encirclement and much larger forces
mobilizing on its borders. But the German plan was a plan for a defensive war
on Germany’s
borders and was most unlike the British plans made in the decade before the war
– which were actually plans for a Great War and Imperial expansion across the
globe.
If Asquith and Grey had told the Germans that England would
declare war on them if they crossed Belgian territory the Kaiser would have thought
twice and Germany would have had to back down or chance taking Paris through
the French frontier. But that would have let the opportunity slip for British
intervention in a very favourable conflict situation against Germany. To
accomplish the Liberal Imperialist objectives of war and party support the
Germans had to be lured into Belgium
by Britain
saying nothing at the vital hour.
The Royal Navy
Blockade
Something about the Great War that is almost unmentionable
is the Royal Navy Blockade on Germany
and its effects on continental Europe. The
blockade of Germany was the
centrepiece of the war British Liberalism declared on Germany.
The type of liberal free market industrial capitalism that
existed in England never
developed in Germany.
The state interference, subsidy and social security characteristic of the
German system would have been anathema to the English bourgeoisie. But it was
also seen as a weakness to be exploited in Britain’s
Great War on Germany.
The German workers, who had not been as exposed as the
English masses to the rigours of the free market, and who were presumed to have
a softness about them as a result of their comfortable living within the
socialistic provisions of the German
State, were believed to
be very susceptible to a collapse under pressure. Britain had just the thing to
promote such a collapse in the most powerful instrument of war that ever
existed in the world, in the British Navy. Prominent Britons therefore noted in
their Imperial publications that Germany’s social progressiveness
was also its weak spot - its “powder magazine” which could be exploded by
British naval blockade.
The British blockade represented an encirclement of Germany, in which under British pressure, the
neutral Low Countries, Scandinavia and the Baltic States
were stopped trading with the Germans. Germany was prevented from
purchasing the raw materials needed for existence. It represented a siege of Europe by the Royal Navy or in geopolitical terms the
Atlantacist sea-power disrupting the Eurasian land-power.
On New Year's Day 1915 a departure was made from the old practice
of Blockade in stopping cargoes of foodstuffs only when destined for enemy
forces, and the Royal Navy began stopping them even when they might be used for
the civil population. The justification for interfering with food meant for
civilians was that Germany
had engaged in price-fixing. The Liberal Government saw this as tantamount to a
crime against the Free Market which blurred the distinction between the civil
and military.
In response to this the Germans threatened a submarine
campaign, making it clear that if the Royal Navy ceased to prevent foodstuffs
for civilians reaching Germany it would withdraw this threat. President Wilson
proposed that the Royal Navy should allow the foodstuffs intended for the
civilian population to enter Germany
under American guarantee and distribution in return for the Germans dropping
their threat of submarine warfare. However, the British refused Wilson’s compromise,
believing the submarine threat to be all bluff. Most of the British press did
not bother to conceal the fact that the British policy with regard to
contraband started the submarine campaign rather than the other way about and
it was the Royal Navy that were the provocative element in the escalation of
naval conflict. But that is forgotten today.
The Royal Navy blockade of Germany
was, from Britain’s view,
the decisive factor in Germany’s
defeat. It was effective in cutting off Germany’s
imports of food and material, and led to the policy of unrestricted submarine
warfare which brought America
into the war and tightened the noose around the Germans further. It was
maintained for eight months after the official ending of the war in order to
turn Germany’s
conditional surrender at the Armistice into an unconditional one in July 1919.
A.C. Bell,
the official Royal Navy historian of the Blockade, puts the number of deaths resulting
from it at 760,000 up to the Armistice, and 250,000 after - a total of over 1
million civilians. The Official History of the Blockade describes the exercise
in counting the number of Germans killed by the Royal Navy as “frivolous.”
Killing the poor, the unborn, the young and women was not what the great
planning, effort and machinery that went in to the Blockade was all about. The
killing of innocents was a mere by-product of the actual objective. As Bell stated the important question was: “What damage was
done to the national resistance of Germany?” and the great achievement
of the Royal Navy campaign was to “infect the German people with an anger
against authority, wherever situated.”
The Blockade represented a Famine lever. Noel Brailsford’s
book ‘Across the Blockade’ describes the conditions that were produced out of
the distorting and catastrophic effects of blockade on Germany. Just
before the Armistice famine conditions were prevalent in many German cities and
industrial regions. More than 3,500 people were dying each day of hunger and
malnutrition. A British report, from February 1919, concluded that while Germany was
“still an enemy country, it would be inadvisable to remove the menace of
starvation by a too sudden and abundant supply of foodstuffs. This menace is a
powerful lever for negotiation at an important moment.” Balfour, at that time
Foreign Secretary, summed up the value to British interests of the continuation
of the blockade by arguing that it would speed up the signing of the peace
treaty. It would help to control the prices of Germany’s food imports and provide
a direct supply of food and raw materials to those provinces and proletariats
resisting Bolshevism. So by ensuring that the distribution of food and other
supplies remained exclusively under the control of the Royal Navy and by using
starvation as a weapon of war the Germans could be squeezed until they
submitted to the full Allied demands.
The blockade was relaxed after the Germans submitted to Versailles and it was then used as a lever to return Germany to the
authority of the government that signed the diktat. By then Bolshevism had
become a real danger and Germany
had to be managed back to order so that the government could impose the terms
of the treaty on its population. So the provision of food was rationed out to
secure German obedience to the peace terms and the new regime at Weimar.
This was achieved through the placing of the German merchant
navy under the control of the Allied command so that it could not engage in
feeding the German population independently of how much the British wanted them
to be fed. And the threat was ever-present that if the German government and
populace did not remain compliant it could be starved again at will.
The British Blockade, more than any other event of the Great
War had long term repercussions for Europe of
a serious nature. And that is why it has been forgotten.
There was the shattering of European political order it
brought about; there was the dislocation of its economy with widespread
unemployment and poverty; there was the reduction of Germany to its elementals
in politics; there were people driven to madness and desperation; there was the
fear of hunger and the fundamental desire for order and security; there was the
taking away of the means to achieve this until something was produced to do it;
there was the feeling of the stab in the back about people who have given in to
an obnoxious and humiliating diktat; there was a dysfunctional settlement
imposed on a reluctant people at the threat of starvation; and there was the
natural human desire for something or someone to give the German people hope
again.
It appears that more than anything else it was the Royal
Navy’s blockade, the fundamental means that Britain
waged its Great War on Germany,
that produced Hitler and the Nazis.
Ireland defrauded
The calculation that Redmond made in committing Ireland to
Britain’s Great War was something like this: the war would be a comparatively
short affair - lasting a year at most - because the astute statesmanship of the
Liberal Imperialist Government had ensured Germany was all but isolated and was
caught between two large armies on her flanks with massive population reserves
to draw upon and a Royal Navy blockade of her coasts. An Irish Parliament would
then become a reality by the end of 1915, when the war would be over. At that
point the Ulster Unionists would have become either reconciled to Nationalist
Ireland’s loyalty through its common blood sacrifice in the field, or else the
Dublin Parliament’s Irish army - which had been armed, trained and equipped by
the Imperial government - could be brought into play to prevent a reneging on
the Home Rule Bill.
But in 1916 Asquith conceded the War Office to the Unionists
and the supporters of the Curragh mutineers became the High Command of the British
Army - the most important institutions of the State in wartime. The military
caste that had planned the war on Germany - which was predominantly
Unionist and anti-Home Rule - became the indispensable thing in August 1914.
The army itself naturally became the most important institution in the life of
the state at war, and as the war dragged on, and the democratic process was
subordinated to the war effort, Unionism began to acquire the substance of
power more and more.
While the Irish Leader and his Party were going around Ireland recruiting soldiers for an ‘Irish
Brigade’ of the British Army and claiming that Home Rule was now a formality,
the important people in the British
State were acting on the
basis that there was no Irish army and no Irish Home Rule. So, although John
Redmond had joined the war against the Kaiser, the only part Britain allocated for Ireland in its war was as cannon
fodder for the front. Ireland’s
usefulness boiled down to how much cannon fodder Redmond could supply. The Great War became a
contest between the two communities in Ireland
about who would raise the greater number of soldiers for England. And it
was no surprise that where the two communities came face to face in Belfast the greatest and
most enthusiastic recruiting was done in Catholic Ireland.
As far as Nationalist Ireland was concerned, Catholics had
to volunteer for the business of killing Germans, or whomever else Britain chose to make war on, so that Britain would
grant Irish Home Rule. And if Nationalist Ireland did not fill the ranks of the
British Army while the Ulster Unionists did, Britain would call off Home Rule.
And from the Ulster Unionist point of view, if young Protestant men did not
enlist to sacrifice their lives for the Empire in sufficient numbers, Britain might draw the conclusion that
Nationalist Ireland was more loyal after all then Unionist Ulster and would
compel them to be governed by a Home Rule Parliament in Dublin. And so a kind of blackmail was used
by Britain, against the two
communities in Ireland
for its own interest in getting them into the trenches, and the graves.
1916 was a revolt against all of this. It is claimed that
what happened in 1916 was an assault against democracy. The 1916 Insurrection
had no more of an electoral mandate for making war on Britain than the Home Rule Party had for making
war on Germany, Austria and
Ottoman Turkey. But that similarity does not establish a moral equality between
Home Rulers and Republicans in the matter of going to war without an electoral
mandate.
Democracy was not operational in Ireland in 1916 for a start. The
Government of the State, which had been elected in 1910, had been replaced
without troubling the electorate by a different administration made up of
people deeply hostile to Ireland
– people who wished to exterminate the Irish in the great slaughter at the
front. In Ireland
a one-Party embryonic-state was in formation. There was no prospect of
elections. And all political opposition was being suppressed by the military
authorities under extraordinary legislation. The population was under pressure
from all the propaganda resources of the State and most of the Catholic clergy,
and the one party in Catholic Ireland, to take part in killing for political
ends - with no one to say when it would end. And now the unelected Government
of the State was moving toward bringing in a measure to enrol by compulsion all
men of military age who had failed to volunteer for Imperial killing duties.
The Home Rulers might have sought an electoral mandate for
war on Germany by resigning
their seats in Parliament and contesting them in Ireland on a programme of
war-making. They chose not to do this and when their ordinary electoral mandate
ran out in December 1915, they continued to sit in Parliament as unelected
members and to take part in the British war effort, which by this time had
become greatly expanded, reckless and catastrophic.
If the Home Rulers had sought a war mandate at any time
between 1914 and 1915 they would probably have secured it with all the
resources of the state at their disposal. The Republicans, on the other hand,
could not have sought a mandate for their war. They could only, like everybody
else, make war without an electoral mandate.
To realise their objective of independence the Republicans
had to make war in 1916 because Britain
made it abundantly clear that Ireland
could not gain independence by voting for it, but only by defeating the Empire.
And it had set aside the electoral basis of Government for the duration of the
Great War on Germany, Austria and
Ottoman Turkey, making a democratic protest impossible.
After the War the chickens came home to roost. The issue of
‘self-determination’ is a subject that has been curiously neglected by Irish
historians, who seem to have taken it to be of the ‘natural order of things’
that the British Government, which was supposedly fighting for “the freedom of
small nations” and establishing a great number of new states across Europe and
the Near East where none had previously existed, would, in 1918, not respect
the democratic decision of Ireland for ‘self-determination.’
The majority of people in Ireland
expected some British respect for the General Election result in Ireland. Why
else would they have voted so overwhelmingly for Sinn Fein? The newly
established Dáil Éireann took the trouble to appeal to the victors at Versailles on the basis of Wilson’s Fourteen Points relating to
self-determination and the democratic propaganda of the Allies. The first
manifestation of the British double-standard and fraud was demonstrated when
the Irish were refused entry to the Peace conference despite a resolution
passed in the US Senate in support of their presence.
But the greatest victims of Britain’s Great War in Ireland
were the Northern Catholics. A year after the Armistice and the ‘war for small
nations’ there was no sign of the Home Rule Act that their leaders had claimed
lay ready and waiting for the end of the War. The Home Rule Party had recruited
hundreds of thousands to fight for the Empire on the understanding that Ireland had
already been granted its Home Rule Parliament and now the British army they
fought for and local Unionist forces were being used to suppress the small
nation’s democratic verdict of 1918.
Disillusion became widespread even amongst the strongest
believers in good British intentions in Ireland and the world. The real
nightmare was just about to become a reality when the Catholics of the North
were told they were to become a subdued and permanent minority within the
perverse new construct of ‘Northern Ireland’
cut off from the rest of the nation and the normal political structures of the UK state.
Britain had won its Great War and they had become another
set of victims of the Great Fraud it had perpetrated on the world.
(The Book is available from Athol Books in Belfast:
