How Britain Initiated Both World Wars

Recently Hollywood has given us two movies lionizing the brave British and their government about World War II, Dunkirk and Darkest Hour. This is not a good sign. We can’t help but be reminded, after all, that only four months before the events of September 11, 2001, we were treated to Hollywood’s romantic and thoroughly fictitious account of what happened on December 7, 1941, with its movie, Pearl Harbor. Darkest Hour is particularly ominous because it has been heavily publicized and because Gary Oldman was given the Academy Award for best actor for his performance as the movie’s hero, British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill.

That is the Winston Churchill who was on the scene and was instrumental in the lighting of the match that ignited both World War I and World War II, as revealed by Nick Kollerstrom in his short, incisive book, How Britain Initiated Both World Wars. We are also talking about the admittedly war-loving Churchill who had already made his reputation fighting in and writing reports from British colonial wars in India, the Sudan, and South Africa. At the dawn of World War I, the aristocratic Churchill had risen to the position of First Lord of the Admiralty, which placed him in charge of the British Navy.

We note the psychology of Winston Churchill, the terrific happiness he felt as the war was approaching. All the other Cabinet members, the Liberals, they are all ashen-faced and despairing, with all the principles they have worked for all their life…peace…going out the window, as they are dragged into horrible war. Whereas Churchill was exultant, and he wrote to his wife Clementine, “My Darling, everything tends towards catastrophe and collapse, but I am geared up and happy, is it not horrible to be built like that?” To someone else a year later, he says, “Why, I would not be out of this glorious, delicious war for anything the world could give me.” He gets a terrific thrill from managing it, moving the ships around and managing the war. He loves war more than anything else, more even than brandy, or the sound of his own voice – he loves the war and he gets on with it.

You’ll find omitted, in a lot of WW I books, the fact that the entire Royal Navy was sent up North, by Churchill’s own initiative. How amazing is that? This is not the Prime Minister. This is the decisive war-initiating act. When we come to the Second World War, you’ll find him as Prime Minister ringing up Bomber Command, on his own initiative, without having to tell anyone else. On his own initiative, he can send the fleet right up to its wartime base, in full battle-readiness. The whole of Europe was in a condition of fear, and there was the horrible argument that the war is going to happen anyway, so one might as well be first.

If this reads less like excerpts from a book than from a talk, that is because that’s what this book mainly is, the edited, 144-page version of an oral presentation that Dr. Kollerstrom, who is English, gave in 2016. Greater depth can be found in the various references that he cites.

Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm, as Kollerstrom explains it, was the most reluctant of the parties to the Great War. The initial spark lighting the flame of war was the assassination of the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, by a Serbian independence zealot. Russia was allied with its fellow Slavs in Serbia and anticipated increase in its strength by a war that would loosen the grip of the empire over Slavs throughout Eastern Europe, not just Serbia. Germany was allied with its fellow German rulers of the tottering empire. France was allied with Russia as a counterweight to the Germans. Like Russia, France saw benefit in a war against Germany in which the Germans would be forced to fight on two fronts, because they were still smarting from the loss of Alsace and Lorraine to the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and wanted to regain those territories.

Feeling cornered, the Germans saw there only hope in victory against both the Russians and the French was to implement the Schlieffen Plan, in which they would take out the French quickly with an attack through neutral Belgium and then take on the Russians, who perhaps would even back down at that point without their French ally. It would be a quick replay of the Franco-Prussian War, with a minimum of casualties. The British, though, were the joker in the deck. How would they respond to the German attack on the French?

On the eve of hostilities, the highly respected German ambassador to Britain, Prince Lichnowsky, met with British Foreign Secretary Edward Grey to get an answer to that question. The Lichnowsky guarantee to the British was that France would only be forcibly neutralized; her territorial integrity, including her colonies, would not be infringed upon. Had Grey responded clearly that the British would stand with the French, the Schlieffen Plan would have been out the window and it would have been back to plan B, which was to lean harder on the Austrians to exercise restraint in punishing the Serbs and hoping for the best. The Germans might still be in a very difficult position, forced to fight a war on two fronts, but World War would likely have been avoided.

At this point I am reminded of two other episodes, one fairly recent and real, the other from fiction. The first is the meeting between U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie with Saddam Hussein before the Iraqi attack on Kuwait. Glaspie left Hussein with the impression that the United States would do nothing if Iraq were to take military action against Kuwait for what it claimed to be the theft of oil from its oil fields. The United States, in effect, suckered Hussein into attacking Kuwait and then came down on him with full force, including the full demonization of the national propaganda machine. Grey, like Glaspie, was equivocal, so ambiguously so that Kaiser Wilhelm thought that the Germans had been given the green light.

Unknown to the Germans, to the British people, and, amazingly, to the British Parliament, the cabal running the show, Prime Minister H.H. Asquith, Grey, and Churchill had given their solemn assurance to the French that they would come into the war on the side of the French. At this point, I am reminded of the Soviet Doomsday Machine in the movie, Doctor Strangelove. It was set to unleash nuclear-armed ICBM’s that would essentially destroy the world if the Soviet Union were to be attacked by nuclear weapons. Known to the world in advance, it would have been an effective deterrent, but the Soviets had to be true to their nature, so they had kept it secret. Similarly, the British secret assurances to the French, rather than serving as a deterrent to war, made war and the British participation in it all but inevitable, which, by Kollerstrom’s analysis, was the plan all along.

World War II

Kollerstrom strongly suggests that the real power behind the British actions were the bankers of the City of London, particularly the Rothschilds, who guaranteed that they would provide financing for the coming war. Their role loomed even larger in the run-up to World War II. At this point we turn to a quote from an article from the European Independent Media Centre that captures the gist of Kollerstrom’s exposition, which is preceded by a long 1920 quote from Winston Churchill on the Jewish responsibility for Bolshevism:

Now, having read that article written by Winston Churchill in 1920, ask yourself WHY would he later turn full circle, team up with the Jewish Marxists and start a war with the people fighting against this enemy that he had tried to expose and warn the world about?

The reason that he gave for declaring war on Germany, and starting World War 2, was that Germany invaded Poland.

What the schools and media do not tell us is that Russia had already invaded Poland from the east, and were already in the process of this invasion before Germany entered Poland.

Germany entered Danzig (then officially Polish territory) what was German land, that had been given to Poland after the First world war as part of the Treaty of Versailles. They were re-claiming their own territory, where the German people were being persecuted by the authorities. A large number of the officials in Danzig coincidentally happened to be Jews.

The Prime Minister at the start of World War 2 was Neville Chamberlain, who did not want a war. Churchill however, had for years been barracking Parliament, calling for a war on Hitler, earning himself the reputation as a “war monger”. WHY?

Winston Churchill enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, for example, smoking expensive cigars, and drinking a bottle of champagne for breakfast every morning (even during the war when the British people where struggling with rationing).

During his “wilderness years”, he had become bankrupt, and as well as struggling to finance his luxury lifestyle, he was about to lose Chartwell, his family stately home.

Between 1930 and 1939 he was financed by a slush fund emanating from a secret pressure group known as the Focus.

The Focus was a rich Jewish group, it almost goes without saying. As Kollerstrom explains, the people who most wanted a war against Hitler’s National Socialist Germany were the major Jewish leaders, who had declared a worldwide boycott on Germany in 1933, preceding German discriminatory actions against Jews in Germany. Churchill was their chosen vessel to take action against Germany and its people. At this point, a long quote from Kollerstrom is apropos. This is after the war that Churchill had worked for, by torpedoing any hope for resolution of the Danzig problem in Poland, had gotten underway:

Then Churchill said, “You must understand, the war is not against Hitler or National Socialism, but against the strength of the German people, which is to be smashed once and for all.” What kind of statement is that? I suggest that you will not find in the utterances of Winston Churchill any traces of ethics or morality. This is the Man of the Century and it’s just my interpretation. Again Churchill: “The war is not just a matter of elimination of fascism in Germany, but rather about obtaining German sales markets.” Huh? Then again: “Germany’s unforgiveable crime before WW2 was to attempt to loosen its economy from out of the world trade system and build up an independent exchange system from which the world finance could not profit any more.” The ever-glorious achievement of Nazi Germany in the 1930s was to manage its own money at source. That’s why it had that terrific economic recovery that no other European country could match. No other country before or since in Europe managed that in the 20^th century, escaping from the clutches of international bankers. Churchill is seeing that as a Reason for War.

Kollerstrom also tells us that the British were spared at Dunkirk only because Adolf Hitler was such an Anglophile and held out hope until it was too late that he could work with the British and countermanded his generals and let them escape. If that were not enough of a shock to the system of the average propagandized Westerner, he also informs us that it was the British who first developed long-range heavy bombers for the purpose of massive bombing of population centers, and that is what they did first, doggedly provoking the Germans into retaliating in some small degree. The British people were not told about their own bombing of the German cities and the fact that there was a standing offer by the Germans of an end of the blitz if the British would stop what they had started, the bombing of German cities, but they never did. It only got worse, at a tonnage ratio of 20:1 of British and American bombs on Germany to German bombs on Britain.

That Churchillian Reason for War, though, is what should really give us pause these days. The world economic system, apparently controlled by the same people who controlled Churchill is once again seen to be challenged by those who would break free from it. Most disturbing is that the trumped up provocations, from the supposed poisoning by Russians of a former spy and his daughter in Salisbury, England, to the phony gas attack in Syria, apparently originated with the same people who Kollerstrom argues precipitated the first two world wars.

For what it is worth, the top-grossing movie in the United States in 1941, which was also nominated for an Academy Award, was Sergeant York, about the heroic World War I exploits of Sergeant Alvin York. Nominated the year before was Foreign Correspondent, by the British director Alfred Hitchcock, which, according to Wikipedia, “tells the story of an American reporter who tries to expose enemy (read German) spies in Britain involved in a fictional continent-wide conspiracy in the prelude to World War II.” No less an expert on the subject than Nazi Germany’s Joseph Goebbels declared it “a masterpiece of propaganda.”

David Martin

April 19, 2018

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