Published On: Wed, Nov 7th, 2018

The First World War and the March of Socialism

There is a growing tendency in works of revisionist history to blame Britain for the commencement of the First World War – and this may well be the correct thing to do. One such example is a book published in 2013, written by Docherty and Macgregor. According to the synopsis, at least (for the author hasn’t read it), Hidden history: the secret origins of the First World War proposes that Cecil Rhodes, William Stead, Lord Esher, Lord Nathaniel Rothschild and Alfred Milner were the founding fathers of a “Secret Elite”: a secret society for the organisation of British world domination. Germany was identified as an obstacle to this goal, hence subsequent conniving to generate a war against her. Another objective was the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race – notwithstanding the Rothschilds’ jewishness.

Moreover, the major criticism that one could make about this theory is the failure to name the “secret society” as the Masons (Rhodes was one of the brotherhood) – which, then, could not have been formed at the turn of the 20th century either, and in the same case would not be a secret organisation, but one that was deliberately overlooked, and one that worked openly to create a worldwide socialist state (and has been doing so in one form or another since time immemorial). As such, Rhodes’ “Secret Elite” wouldn’t be proponents of British imperialism as an expression of blanket Anglo-Saxon superiority per se, but instead would be looking to achieve that Masonic goal long desired by a class of people who might think that racial characteristics give them an advantage or an entitlement to dominate, but more importantly think that they in particular must rule. In that case, Rhodes et al look as if they might have been adherents of British Israelist Masonry, whereby the Anglo-Aryan, a mytho-political racial construct, is entitled by dint of being a lost tribe. Complete nonsense, of course.

If Germany was an obstacle, it may well be that she, as Russia appears to be today, wasn’t for subsuming her national identity into a global order run out of London, but instead would be threat to it by being a model of powerful and successful independence. Ultimately, the book appears to be based on the work of Carroll Quigley, which has never been widely available, and thus never popularly consumed as first hand information, but upon which an entire and long-lived conspiracy theory industry has been built: an industry whose customers largely assume Quigley is represented to them accurately.

Perhaps a better approach to finding hidden history, than relying on something that could have been especially introduced for the purposes of providing disinformation, is to look to the regular historical accounts for the tell tale signs. This is an exercise that is going to take place at FBEL during the month of November as the British Government and willing sheeple engage in New Age religious ceremony. The chief source material is a book by Sean McMeekin, July 1914: Countdown to war. As an introduction, this article looks broadly at some of the outcomes of the First World War, for these are the things for which the war would have been started. What the “war as British imperialist endeavour” approach perhaps won’t penetrate is that an attack on the British people by their own Government was perhaps more important than the conflict with Germany. Protected by the Royal Navy, the British Government didn’t have to be concerned about being thrown over by invading armies. It could send Britons to die in foreign fields with impunity, and then it could introduce a new socio-political reality based on the industrial war circumstances that it had engineered. As evidence, consider Christopher Addison, a Liberal MP, and later a “labourite” Viscount, and the Ministry of Reconstruction which he administered in 1917. The aim of such men and such government departments created for the task was not a return to pre-1914 circumstances, but on “moulding a better world out of social and economic conditions which have come into being during the war.” (From The Evolution of the British Welfare State, by Derek Fraser).

The big headline ramification of World War I was the overthrow of several European Emperors. Although it is somewhat more complicated than all that, traditionally, at least, the will of a king and the will of a nation is one and the same thing (in some countries, the will of the king was dictated by the nation), and begets a situation whereby the globe remains politically divided. However, when a country can be ruled instead by a committee, and the committee doesn’t answer to the nation, then it can be paid-off to undermine national identity in the interest of “offshore” parties looking to acquire the assets of that country. At least that would be the theory. H.G. Wells, an influential advocate for a New World Order, expressed disappointment for the Soviet Union on its becoming an entity that looked to its national interests – and of course he would (for our part we should note that Russian dictatorship equated to the unified leadership of a king). There are still many people in the UK who mistakenly think that the Queen represents British national interests; she doesn’t of course, because Britain is a country ruled by a corrupted committee in the pay of the City of London.

Of course, World War I is notorious for its industrial scale of killing (although there appears these days to be an official effort to tell us that not as many died as we might think); not only did this constitute a quasi-religious foundation for the New Order in the shape of a fitting sacrifice (and the alchemical burning-off of the baser material for the revelation of a purer element), but it provided the actual mechanics of chaos out of which the order would come. In terms of numbers killed in one fell swoop, the First World War might well have been unprecedented except for occasions of plague, such as the Black Death. Although the proportion of the population of England killed by the disease still makes the First World War look like small fry (and numerically the deaths by the plague were greater also), it is wholly appropriate that they are tied together like this, because one saw the start of the end of feudalism, and the other saw the start of its reintroduction albeit in a different form: the welfare state.

Unlike the mass death of war, as far as we can see, through a shortage of labour that it had created, the plague actually gave individual peasants leverage against the land owner that previously held them. Attempts by Government to negate supply and demand realities were ineffective. We might imagine that after the First World War, the 887,858 military deaths (from all causes), and the 1,675,000 military wounded would have meant shortages of labour, fuller employment, and an economic boom, and indeed, this is what happened initially. However, the interwar years are associated with high unemployment and numerous pockets of penury, strikes and protest marches. So, when exploring to discover what happened we should look for deliberate Government efforts to stop the economy heating up. We can also surely expect to find collaboration with the Trade Unions with whom any leverage against the “landowner” (i.e. industrial employer) arising from labour shortages would have arrived in collectivised form, for they would have had effective ownership of and bargaining power for the capital asset of workforce.

The regular FBEL reader will recall earlier pieces on the electric circuit economic model where the reduction of a population by warfare equates to decreasing “inductance” to produce a return for capital owners in the face of capital input failure. Moreover, committal of the workforce into a welfare state is a substitute for death in war as an economic inductor. It appears that global oversupply did reduce the value of raw materials, and the unionised labour movements resisted wage cuts to keep pay in line with falling prices (leading to a situation where there is an effective greater supply of labour than there is a demand for it – and therefore real wage unemployment). The Government tried to maintain the price of pound sterling too high in comparison to the dollar, without US loans that had helped the former currency hold value during the war. The upshot was overpriced exports (reducing demand from foreign markets), deflation (so less inclination in the market to buy because of the expectation of lower prices in future, and, it follows, no buying in greater volume to compensate profit-wise), and ultimately poor rates of growth – all without getting into how debt was stretched into greater amounts. There is an element of Government fiscal policy that rings a bell with recent history, and 21st century austerity, which is basically siphoning tax payer’s money into debt repayment – or reducing real worth holdings of the tax payer in the name of servicing debt (these days the oversupply of labour is not artificially constructed, but due to EU immigration – but comparisons are in fact complicated because the welfare state applies to the work force these days in ways it didn’t after the war).

The welfare state after the First World War would have had to have been instant even if it was much smaller, because of the huge numbers debilitated by it one way of another. A ministry to oversee dispensation of war victim’s relief or disabled soldiers, widows and orphans was set up in 1916. After the war, the welfare state was enlarged with a restructuring of unemployment insurance: the British Government abstained from intervening in industrial labour relationships, which on one hand is entirely reasonable, but also convenient for engineering a spurt of growth in the welfare state. We should notice that while 1920 saw the Insurance Act of that same year, to cover some 20 million workers against unemployment, in 1921 worklessness rocketed to 10 million, and didn’t fall below 6 during the inter-war years.

So to tie this all up: if a Government wanted control of an economy whereby a preferred class of capital owners weren’t under pressure to own the most to dominate – in other words to compete – it could have an industrial-scale war which would create an instant welfare state client class that hadn’t existed before, and during which it borrowed against future growth in the name of executing the war. After the war, conditions could be cooked up to put further millions onto welfare in the name of being grateful for their wartime sacrifice.

Often overlooked amongst the many dead were the British aristocracy whose end also meant the end of power and influence. The significance of this sort of death is related to political direction that a country potentially might take while those who had the wherewithal to determine it remained alive to do so. Many people these days just don’t understand (and the television fare for the uneducable, Downton Abbey, will presumably not do it justice) that many a British lord, baronet – and even duke – were socially integrated with the middle class (with elements of it being elevated into the ranks of the titled) of the settlements situated near to their estates so that symbiotic relationships existed: what was good for the town corporation was also good for the local aristocrat. In Britain, there was not a divergence of interests between elements of the aristocracy and the middle and working classes that put them in a culture war that could be exploited as in other countries. However, the aristocracy at loggerheads with itself (and reaction to gentrification would have been an historical factor for division) would affect the fate of the country (we have hereabouts at FBEL already presented the hypothesis that labourism is in actual fact a branch of 19th century Toryism, with no real liberalism in the political party system surviving past the establishment of the Labour party except where it went to the Conservative party and in the 1980s actually held sway). What if fatalities amongst the aristocracy were such that one faction could win out over another?

Consider an editorial published February 16th, 1916, in the Irish Times, that was recently reproduced at the same publication. Here is a pertinent extract:

We think… that the politicians who, not so long ago, sought votes by attacking the British aristocracy have special cause to blush for themselves. They used to say that our titled families were worthless idlers and ‘enemies of the people’. When the test came, these families, without any fuss or advertisement, and in the natural order of duty, gave of their best and dearest to the people.

The Times has published a list of heirs to British peerages who have fallen in the war. This roll of honour includes 47 names. One heir is ‘missing’ and many younger sons of peers have died, in addition to several members of the House of Lords. The peerage’s losses in the war have been heavier than those suffered by any other class in the community [perhaps meaning in terms of proportion]. Moreover, it risks one loss which the other classes do not share: a German bullet may write finis to a title that has shone in the forefront of British history for half a dozen centuries.

Of these 47 young men, six left no brothers or other near relatives to succeed them; their deaths will mean the extinction of six peerages at the deaths of the present holders…

The war may have quickened the march of Socialism, but it has destroyed the worst element in the sort of Socialism that was rampant in England three years ago – the element of class hatred. The British aristocrat and the British working man have learned to know one another in the trenches, and the knowledge will bear good fruit in the coming years of peace.”

Obviously, the point made above is abundantly clear in the piece: death in this case is not about the end of an individual existence, but of immense political influence. Also of great interest is the mention of the “march of Socialism”. A fact being betrayed is that working class resentment – clearly provoked by those who would profit by engendering it and manipulating it – clearly hurried aristocracy into the trenches to avoid accusations of “not doing their bit”. We also notice that the idea that the death of aristocracy in a shared experience with those who (thought that they) had no choice but to get sent to France seems to act like a societal penance, or a ransom payment to ensure that a virulent class hatred – conveniently well-stimulated in the English by 1913 – was eradicated, and Socialism could progress without overt revolutionary bloodshed; for it was “on the March” as if it was a fait accompli. But make no mistake, dear reader, although the scale was much different, the British socialist state was yet initiated by a culling of the landed classes as surely as was the Soviet Union.

 

Further FBEL reading:

The socialist “Rights of Man” – towards a New World Order (link).

“Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars”; Part One: “Inductance” for economic dominance (link).

In which we observe H G Wells agitating for a New World Order in 1940 (link).

Analysis of “Things to Come”, Part One: Mystery Babylon does all the war (link).

Reflections on a by-election: another charlatan claims to represent the people, this time of Lewisham East (link).

It's important to donate to FBEL - please see here to find out why
A PayPal account not required.