Document:Hidden History - Concluding chapter

The concluding chapter of a seminal work of historical revision on the origins of World War I and 100 years of establishment lies to hide where responsibility really lies

 book extract  by Gerry Docherty, Jim Macgregor dated 2013/07/04

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Subjects: World War I, The Great Game
Source: Hidden History

Note: All headings and sub-headings in the text have been added by Wikispooks as aids to on-line readability and citation. Otherwise the text and emphases follow the original as closely as the wiki-format allows.

Wikispooks Comment

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The history of World War I is a deliberately concocted lie. Not the sacrifice, the heroism, the horrendous waste of life or the misery that followed - these were VERY real, but the truth of how it all began and how it was unnecessarily and deliberately prolonged beyond 1915 has been successfully covered up for a century. A carefully falsified history was created to conceal the fact that Britain, not Germany, was responsible for the war; a victor's history that remains the Official Narrative to this day.

This concluding chapter of "Hidden History summarises a monumental work of detailed documented facts that clearly explain how this was done.

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Lies, Myths and Stolen History

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IN AUGUST 1914, THE SECRET ELITE began the war they so coveted. In Britain, Liberal, Labour and Irish Nationalist Members of Parliament were in shock, stunned by the fait accompli Sir Edward Grey presented on 3 August 1914. They had been ambushed and betrayed. Cast adrift by the excited jingoism, democracy looked on in impotent disbelief. And it was all predicated on a myth: the myth of Belgian neutrality. From 1906 onwards, Britain’s military link with Belgium was one of the most tightly guarded secrets, even within privileged circles.

Documents found in the Department of Foreign Affairs in Brussels shortly after the war began proved Anglo-Belgian collusion at the highest levels, including the direct involvement of the Belgian foreign secretary, had been going on for years. Like the ‘conversations’ with French military commanders, the Belgian ‘relationship’ was never put in writing or adopted as official policy by Britain, since that would have risked exposure to Parliament and the press. Indeed, because Belgium’s behaviour violated the duties of a neutral state, the Secret Elite could not entertain any move to openly include them in the entente. That act alone would have put an end to neutrality and with it their best cause for war. Professor Albert Geouffre de Lapradelle, the renowned French specialist on international law, explained: ‘The perpetually neutral state renounces the right to make war, and, in consequence, the right to contract alliances, even purely defensive ones, because they would drag it into a war …’

The American journalist and writer, Albert J. Nock, completely destroyed the lie of Belgian ‘neutrality’. In his words:

To pretend any longer that the Belgian government was surprised by the action of Germany, or unprepared to meet it; to picture Germany and Belgium as cat and mouse, to understand the position of Belgium otherwise than that she was one of four solid allies under definite agreement worked out in complete detail, is sheer absurdity.

And yet this absurd notion was used to take Britain into war and has been propagated ever since by British historians. Belgium posed as a neutral country in 1914 like a siren on the rocks, set there to lure Germany into a trap, whimpering a pretense of innocence.

Every ruse was used to vilify Germany and the kaiser. The carnage was barely under way before blame was heaped on them. German responsibility was allegedly based on the official ‘books’ of diplomatic documents published by each government. The British Blue Book, which contained the diplomatic exchanges from just before the start of the war, was presented to Parliament on 6 August. Arranged in chronological order, the ‘evidence’ appeared to be complete, candid and convincing: a studied confirmation of Sir Edward Grey’s ‘determined efforts to preserve peace’. Later evidence released from Moscow in the wake of the Russian Revolution clearly showed that three of the telegrams Grey had presented to Parliament as proof of his attempts to prevent war had never even been sent. The claim by the British ambassador in St Petersburg, Sir George Buchanan, that, with one exception, all of the diplomatic exchanges between him and the Foreign Office were included in the Blue Book was a scandalous lie. Professor Sydney Fay of Harvard found that ‘more than a score’ had not been included and that important passages from telegrams and letters had been judiciously cut.

The Russian Orange Book contained 79 documents that emphasised her efforts for peace, but it concealed the truth about Russia’s mobilisation and blamed the Central Powers. The Orange Book omitted the conciliatory proposals that had been made by Germany during the July crisis and all evidence of the aggressive Franco-Russian policies. The long-delayed French Yellow Book likewise suppressed some telegrams altogether and altered others to imply the French desire for peace and German guilt for the war.

The Secret Elite were ruthless in their manipulation of official documents. The French Yellow, British Blue and Russian Orange Books were riddled with omissions and misinformation to conceal the truth and were faithfully portrayed by their propaganda machines as evidence of German guilt.

The German White Book was presented to the Reichstag on 3 August, and its brevity (it contained only 27 telegrams and letters) gave rise to the myth that Germany had only printed selections that suited her cause. A great mass of telegrams had been exchanged between Germany and Austria in the days and hours before publication of the White Book, and, even had they been published, it would have been impossible to read and digest their contents in such a short time. In 1919, Karl Kautsky, the German socialist leader (and no lover of the kaiser’s regime), released volumes of evidence on the origins of the war. The Kautsky documents comprised 1,123 records which proved absolutely that Germany made every effort to avoid the war and that evidence to the contrary was a pure myth.

The Secret Elite control over four years of mindless slaughter will be explained in detail in our next book in the Hidden History series. On 11 November 1918, the armistice with Germany was signed in General Foch’s railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne, north of Paris. It was claimed that the kaiser waged war to expand the German empire and tyrannise Europe, while Britain, France and Russia had made every possible effort to prevent it. The jaundiced analysis was that ‘Germany deliberately worked to defeat all of the many conciliatory proposals made by the Entente Powers and their repeated efforts to avoid war’. Germany was ‘guilty of the greatest crime against humanity and freedom that any nation calling itself civilized had ever committed’. The terrible responsibility for millions of war dead was placed firmly at Germany’s door because ‘she saw fit to gratify her lust for tyranny by resort to war’. These lies were presented as ‘truth’.

The Secret Elite mobilised all the resources at their command, including universities, the press, the pulpit and the whole machinery of government to preach this false gospel of guilt. The kaiser and Germany were vilified. The Allied Powers were glorified. Their men, after all, had fought and died for ‘civilisation’.

Treaty negotiations in Paris were crammed with representatives from Britain, France and the US who were closely linked to the Secret Elite. The few German delegates permitted to attend Versailles asked for proof of Germany’s alleged guilt but were denied it. In truth, none existed. They asked for an independent investigation into the responsibility for war but were denied it. They asked for a non-partisan commission to examine the archives of all the warring nations and to question the principal leaders but were denied. No defence was permissible. On 28 June 1919, the formal peace treaty was signed in the Palace of Versailles. It had taken the Secret Elite exactly five years from the murders in Sarajevo to achieve their aim. The German delegates were obliged to sign Article 231, accepting all blame:

The Allied and Associated Governments affirm, and Germany accepts, the responsibility of herself and her allies, for causing the loss and damage to which the Allied and associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.

By signing, Germany acquiesced and accepted sole responsibility for the First World War. A starving, desperate nation had been confronted with the choice of admitting her ‘guilt’ at once or suffering an Allied occupation with every likelihood that an admission of guilt would ultimately be extorted in any case. Professor H.E. Barnes stated:

Germany occupied the situation of a prisoner at the bar, where the prosecuting attorney was given full leeway as to time and presentation of evidence, while the defendant was denied counsel or the opportunity to produce either evidence or witnesses.

The lies, vindictive reparation schemes and headline-grabbing assertions continued long after 1918 in order to protect the real culprits in this crime against humanity and conceal the truth from the world. In his groundbreaking book The Anglo-American Establishment, Professor Carroll Quigley dared to reveal how the Secret Elite continued their malicious influence and controlled and manipulated the truth through their triple-front penetration of politics, the press and education:

No country that values its safety should allow what the Milner group accomplished – that is, that a small number of men would be able to wield such power in administration and politics, should be given almost complete control over the publication of documents relating to their actions, should be able to exercise such influence over the avenues of information that create public opinion, and should be able to monopolize so completely the writing and the teaching of the history of their own period.

The Rhodes secret society, expanded as it was by Alfred Milner and his acolytes into the Secret Elite, had achieved stage two of their great plan: war with Germany. The combination of money power, intellectual conviction and ruling-class mentality, the All Souls, Oxford, power base and the aristocratic heritage harnessed to the Northcliffe stables had ambushed Germany into a war in 1914 and now ambushed the truth about their complicity in the war’s origins.

Destruction of records

From the conception of the secret society, members of the Secret Elite took exceptional care to remove all traces of their conspiracy. Letters to and from Alfred Milner were culled, removed, burned or otherwise destroyed. Milner’s remaining papers, held in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, bear witness to the zeal with which much evidence of wrongdoing has been obliterated. Secret dispatches that he sent to his friend Lord Selborne have disappeared. Milner burned private and personal telegrams and what remains of the cull undertaken by Lady Violet Milner after his death represents only the bare rump of his voluminous correspondence. Incriminating letters sent by King Edward were subject to an order that on his death they must be destroyed immediately. Admiral Jacky Fisher noted in his Memories that he had been advised by Lord Knollys, the king’s private secretary, to burn all letters sent to him by the king. Fisher consequently burned much of his royal correspondence but couldn’t bear to part with it all. Lord Nathaniel Rothschild likewise ordered that his papers and correspondence be burned posthumously lest his political influence and connections became known. As his recent biographer commented, one can but ‘wonder how much of the Rothschilds’ political role remains irrevocably hidden from posterity’. That is exactly what they tried to do: hide their role in causing the First World War from posterity.

If anything, the systematic conspiracy of the British government to cover all traces of its own devious machinations was far worse and utterly inexcusable. Even if we assume that the surviving records of the Committee of Imperial Defence were accurate, what remains tells us more about what is missing. Cabinet records for July 1914, covering the 4th to the 21st, relate almost exclusively to Ireland. Discussion about the Balkans? None. Belgium? None. No paper appeared that weighed concerns and consequences of a German invasion of Belgium. It had to appear that this conundrum had suddenly been sprung on Britain.

While the official notice in the Public Record Office List of Cabinet Papers warns that ‘the papers listed … are certainly not the whole of those collectively considered by Cabinet Ministers’, the gap is breathtaking, and no effort has been made to explain why crucial records are missing or what happened to them. Nothing is included from 14 July until 20 August, by which time the First World War had entered its third week. It beggars belief that so much has disappeared, been destroyed, burned or ‘not been kept for whatever reason’. In fairness to the librarians and custodians of the Public Record Office, they could only catalogue what was passed to them from the Cabinet Office, the Foreign Office, the War Office and the Colonial Office. The British public has a right to know the full extent of what has been secretly retained, hidden or gone ‘missing’.

In the early 1970s, the Canadian historian Nicholas D’Ombrain began researching War Office records. He noted:

The Registry Files were in a deplorable condition, having suffered the periodic ravages of the policy of ‘weeding’. One such clearance was in progress during my foray into these files, and I found that my material was being systematically reduced by as much as five-sixths.

Astonishingly, a large amount of ‘sensitive’ material was actually removed as the researcher went about his business. Where did it go? Who authorised its removal? In addition, D’Ombrain noted that minutes of the Committee of Imperial Defence and ‘circulation and invitation lists’ together with much ‘routine’ correspondence had been destroyed. What still required to be hidden from historians and researchers in 1970? That D’Ombrain found five-sixths of the total files melting away in front of him demonstrated clearly that others still retained a vested interest in keeping the evidence of history hidden.

Official memoirs covering the origins of the First World War were carefully scrutinised and censored before being released. Sir Edward Grey’s Twenty-Five Years is an appalling excuse for a record of fact, and the convenience of his failing memory rings hollow. Lloyd George’s War Memoirs naturally centre on himself but contain pieces that suggest a censor’s pen. Instead of detailing the help he received from Lord Rothschild at the very start of the war, Lloyd George restrained his comment to ‘it was done’, leaving the reader to wonder precisely what ‘it’ was. Ambassador Sir George Buchanan’s memoirs, My Mission to Russia and other Diplomatic Memories, contained information too revealing for publication. His daughter Meriel stated that he was obliged to omit passages from his book on pain of losing his pension.

Utterly unacceptable as this is, in the light of the lies that have been purveyed as history, it is surely of even greater concern that Carroll Quigley pointed an accusing finger at those who monopolised ‘so completely the writing and the teaching of the history of their own period’. There is no ambivalence in his accusation. The Secret Elite controlled the writing and teaching of history through numerous avenues, including the Northcliffe stables, but none more effectively than Oxford University. Almost every important member of the Milner Group was a fellow of one of three colleges – Balliol, New College or All Souls. The Milner Group largely dominated these colleges, and they, in turn, largely dominated the intellectual life of Oxford in the field of history. The influence of the Milner Group at Oxford was so powerful that it controlled the Dictionary of National Biography, which meant that the Secret Elite wrote the biographies of its own members. They created their own official history of key members for public consumption, striking out any incriminating evidence and portraying the best public-spirited image that could be safely manufactured.

The immediate advantage lay with the victors, and they ensured that their voluminous histories carried the message that the ‘Great War’ had been Germany’s responsibility. Kaiser Wilhelm, viciously maligned by the Secret Elite, abdicated on 28 November 1918 and went into exile in Holland. His memoirs, published in 1922, strongly defended Germany’s innocence. For years, few believed Wilhelm’s protestations, but the steady release of documents from Russia and Germany in the 1920s drew others to question the official ‘evidence’. American historians began to pay closer attention to the war’s origins, including Sidney Bradshaw Fay, professor of history at Harvard and Yale. He published articles in 1920 that led to demands for a ‘revision’ of the Versailles war-guilt conclusions. Fay’s masterly twin volume, The Origins of the World War, first published in 1928, was matched by another powerful denunciation of the lies, The Genesis of the World War by Harry Elmer Barnes, professor of history at the prestigious Columbia University. It went deeper and further than Professor Fay’s work in supporting Germany, but, like Carroll Quigley’s history Tragedy and Hope, it was suppressed. Barnes explained:

A major difficulty has been the unwillingness of booksellers to cooperate, even when it was to their pecuniary advantage to do so. Many of them have assumed to censor their customers’ reading in the field of international relations as in the matter of morals. Not infrequently have booksellers even discouraged prospective customers who desired to have The Genesis of the World War ordered for them.

Booksellers unwilling to sell books? That was surely an unusual situation, unless of course other influences – powerful, moneyed influences – wanted to restrict the circulation and squeeze the life from such work. Barnes expanded the historic debate by inviting German and Austrian politicians who played key roles in July 1914 to provide eyewitness evidence for a special edition of the New York Times Current History Magazine in July 1928. The result was a fierce rejection of German war guilt. The Secret Elite grew concerned. If this revisionist historical research was allowed to continue unabated, they faced the possibility of being unmasked. The peasant revolt had to be put down.

A steady stream of anti-revisionist histories that once more blamed Germany for causing the war began to appear. In 1930, American historian Professor Bernadotte Schmitt, who had studied at Oxford, published The Coming of the War: 1914. His work was heavily biased against Germany and reaffirmed her war guilt. Schmitt was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and, fittingly, the George Louis Beer Prize from the American History Association. Beer was specifically named by Professor Quigley as a member of the American branch of Rhodes’ secret society. Was it simply a coincidence that Schmitt had been a Rhodes scholar and was consequently awarded a major honour in memory of a Rhodes devotee who was the American correspondent for Milner’s Round Table journal?

One year later, Professor M.H. Cochran of the University of Missouri demolished Schmitt’s work. Among other things, he proved that it contained major errors and used false methodology to ‘uphold the fantasies of 1914’. He demonstrated that Schmitt’s book was ‘an appalling attempt, clothed in the elaborate trappings of scholarship, to uphold with pro-British bias the Entente myth which mountains of objective historical evidence had discredited since 1920’.

In 1961, Fritz Fischer, professor of history at Hamburg University, rocked the academic world with his book Germany’s Aims in the First World War. He presented selected evidence from German archives to ‘prove’ Germany had indeed deliberately abused the archduke’s assassination and the July crisis as an excuse to go to war. Here, surely, was the final proof: German fault proven by a German historian. The Times immediately sang the praises of Fischer’s book in the Literary Supplement:

A brilliant example of history written from the original records … It is by far the most comprehensive study of its subject yet produced and, startling as some of its conclusions must at first appear, it seems unlikely that they can be seriously challenged in view of the weight of the evidence …

The book helped suppress the truth for decades, but in 2006 Marc Trachtenberg, professor of political science at the University of California, demolished Fischer’s thesis. Amongst other elementary ‘errors’, Fischer had distorted and misrepresented documents, and paraphrased conversations that did not correspond to the actual wording.

Although now widely accepted as highly suspect, Fischer’s thesis continues to receive support in Britain. Among others who have recently held it up as sound history is Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, professor of modern history at Oxford. Professor von Strandmann was a student of Fischer’s before he moved to Oxford in the 1960s as research fellow and junior dean at Balliol College.

The Oxford link goes ever on. Norman Stone, one of von Strandmann’s professorial predecessors between 1984 and 1997, wrote: ‘Princip stated if I had not done it, the Germans would have another excuse. In this, he was right. Berlin was waiting for the inevitable accident.’ Sir Hew Strachan, Chichele professor of the history of war at Oxford and a fellow of All Souls, also absolved Britain and France of blame. His conclusion was that for those liberal countries struggling to defend their freedoms (against Germany), the war was far from futile. With reference to Poincaré, Professor Strachan wrote: ‘he firmly believed that the solidarity of the alliance system in Europe helped create a balance which prevented war’. The Oxford don added: {{QB| the original purpose of the Anglo-French Entente of 1904 was not to create a united front against Germany, but to settle the two powers’ long-standing imperial rivalries in North Africa … The Kaiser … had little interest in Morocco but he was anxious to disrupt the Anglo-French Entente.

No mention here of the secret clauses and what they hid. No mention either of Poincaré the Revanchist, or his blatant anti-German outbursts.

A.J.P. Taylor, a fellow of Magdalene College and lecturer in modern history at Oxford from 1938 to 1963, was a prolific and popular historian from the 1960s until his death in 1990. He was the classroom ‘guru’. Virtually every school course in modern history in the land used A.J.P. Taylor’s texts. When he decided that it was not true to claim that ‘mobilisation means war’, then that was what was learned as fact, no matter the evidence from Russia, from France, or from the waves of diplomatic telegrams warning them to mobilise in secret. In like vein, Sir Michael Howard, formerly Chichele professor of the history of war at Oxford, fellow of All Souls and emeritus professor of modern history at Oxford, denied the automatic implication of mobilisation, claiming that ‘Russian mobilisation gave her [Germany] the excuse’.

So the mobilisation of between one and two million Russian soldiers on Germany’s border was simply an excuse for her to go to war: a war on two fronts that she had desperately striven to avoid? Little evidence was offered by either of these learned authorities. They spoke ex cathedra, pronouncing the verdict of Oxford on the causes of the First World War like medieval popes, and God help the student that questioned their divine bull.

The message has been made clear: blame Germany. It is our opinion that modern histories of the First World War should be treated with critical caution, especially those that have emanated from Oxford University, the spiritual home of the Secret Elite. In Britain generally, diaries and memoirs have been censored and altered, evidence sifted, removed, burned, carefully ‘selected’ and falsified. Bad as this is, it is of relatively minor importance compared to the Secret Elite’s outrageous theft of the historical record from across Europe. In the immediate post-war years, hundreds of thousands of important documents pertaining to the origins of the First World War were taken from their countries of origin to the west coast of America and hidden away in locked vaults at Stanford University. The documents, which would without doubt have exposed the real perpetrators, had to be removed to a secure location and hidden from prying eyes.

A 45-year-old ‘mining engineer’, Herbert Clark Hoover, was the Secret Elite agent charged with the mammoth task of removing incriminating documents from Europe. During the war, Hoover played a major role for the Secret Elite in operating an emergency food-supply organisation that was allegedly created to save starving Belgian civilians. In reality, the Commission for Relief of Belgium (CRB) had a much more sinister motive that will be revealed in our next book.

An American by birth, Herbert Hoover worked in an Arizona mine owned by the Rothschilds. His geological surveys won high praise, and he came to the attention of Rothschild mining experts. Sent in 1897 to manage Australian gold mines, Hoover proved himself ruthless. He became notorious as a hard, callous manager who cost lives by cutting back on safety props and was cordially hated by even the toughest of the Australian miners.

In the early years of the twentieth century, Hoover moved to China and fraudulently gained control of the state-owned Kaiping coalmines. The Secret Elite in London backed Hoover’s activities to the extent that Royal Navy ships were sent in to protect his interests. The Chinese government eventually took legal action against him in the London courts, and Hoover was forced to confess that he had used repeated threats and brute force to claim ownership of the mines.

Through the Chinese Engineering and Mining Company, which became ‘an octopus, racketeering in the stock market, racketeering in the mines and racketeering in human lives’, Hoover expanded his own empire. He supplied the British South Africa Company with the Chinese labourers whose abuse cost Alfred Milner dear, and his Rothschild/Milner links were embedded in his racketeering excesses. His co-director in the mining company, and its highly profitable slave-driving sideline, was Emile Francqui, an ex officer in the forces of King Leopold of Belgium. Francqui had ‘distinguished’ himself in the brutal Belgian regime that massacred, tortured and mutilated millions of natives in the Congo to provide vast profits for Leopold’s company. This same Francqui later worked closely with his ‘humanitarian’ colleague, Herbert Hoover, to relieve the starving children in Europe – or so it was officially portrayed. Hoover’s bloody reputation was revised during the war to project the false image of an enlightened Quaker philanthropist, a caring man who had repatriated Americans stranded in Europe in August 1914 and gone on to head the CRB. Hoover the ruthless, evil racketeer was reinvented as Hoover the saviour of starving children.

In early 1919, Herbert Hoover was given another important task by the Secret Elite as they set about removing documentary evidence about the origins of the First World War. They reinvented him again, this time as a scholarly individual who ‘loved books’ and wished to collect manuscripts and reports relating to the war because they would otherwise ‘easily deteriorate and disappear’. No government gave official sanction to his removal of historical artefacts. It was theft dressed as a philanthropic act of preservation for the use of future historians. Indeed, like the thief in the night, stealth was the rule of thumb.

On the basis that it was kept ‘entirely confidential’, Ephraim Adams, professor of history at Stanford University, a close friend of Hoover’s from their student days, was called to Paris to coordinate the great heist and dress it in a cloak of academic respectability. Hoover ‘donated’ $50,000 to the project, recruited a management team of ‘young scholars’ from the American army and secured their release from military service. His team used letters of introduction and logistical support from Hoover to collect material and establish a network of representatives throughout Europe. He persuaded General John Pershing to release 15 history professors and students serving in various ranks of the American Expeditionary Force in Europe and sent them, in uniform, to the countries his agency was feeding. With food in one hand and reassurance in the other, these agents faced little resistance in their quest. They made the right contacts, ‘snooped’ around for archives and found so many that Hoover ‘was soon shipping them back to the US as ballast in the empty food boats’.

Hoover recruited an additional 1,000 agents whose first haul amounted to 375,000 volumes of the ‘Secret War Documents’ of European governments. Hoover’s $50,000 ‘donation’ would have paid for around 70 of these agents for a year, and it has not been possible to discover from which sources he funded the other 930. Most likely they were American or British military personnel released to Hoover under the direct orders of the Secret Elite, in which case the ultimate source of their funding was the British and US taxpayer.

Hoover’s backers believed that there would only be ten years within which the most valuable material could be ‘acquired’, but it could take ‘a thousand years’ to catalogue it. The collection was accelerated to a ‘frenzied pace’. They were primarily interested in material relating to the war’s origins and the workings of the Commission for Relief of Belgium. Other documents relating to the war itself were ignored. The secret removal and disposal of incriminatory British and French material posed little or no problem for the Secret Elite, and, surprisingly, once the Bolsheviks had taken control, access to Russian documents proved straightforward. Professor Miliukov, foreign minister in the old Kerensky regime, informed Hoover that some of the czarist archives pertaining to the origins of the war had been concealed in a barn in Finland. Hoover later boasted that ‘Getting them was no trouble at all. We were feeding Finland at the time.’

The Secret Elite thus took possession of a mass of evidence from the old czarist regime that undoubtedly contained hugely damaging information on Sarajevo and Russia’s secret mobilisation. Likewise, damning correspondence between Sazonov and Isvolsky in Paris, and Sazonov and Hartwig in Belgrade, has been ‘lost’ to posterity. As shown in Chapter 19, the Russian diplomatic papers from 1914 revealed an astonishing gap. Ambassador Hartwig’s dispatches from Belgrade for the crucial period between May and July 1914, when the decisions on Franz Ferdinand’s assassination were being finalised, were removed from the archives of the Russian Foreign Ministry by an unknown person. These were documents of momentous importance that would have changed for ever the myth of Sarajevo.

It might at first appear strange that the Bolsheviks cooperated so willingly by allowing Hoover’s agents to remove 25 carloads of material from Petrograd. According to the New York Times, Hoover’s team bought the Bolshevik documents from a ‘doorkeeper’ for $200 cash, but there were darker forces at play that we will examine at a later date.

The removal of documents from Germany presented few problems. Fifteen carloads of material were taken, including ‘the complete secret minutes of the German Supreme War Council’ – a ‘gift’ from Friedrich Ebert, first president of the post-war German Republic. Hoover explained that Ebert was ‘a radical with no interest in the work of his predecessors’, but the starving man will exchange even his birthright for food. Hoover’s people also acquired 6,000 volumes of court documents covering the complete official and secret proceedings of the kaiser’s war preparations and his wartime conduct of the German empire.

Where then is the vital evidence to prove Germany’s guilt? Had there been proof it would have been released immediately. There was none. Possession of the German archives was especially crucial since they would have proved conclusively to the world that Germany had not started the war.

By 1926, the ‘Hoover War Library’ was so packed with documentary material that it was legitimately described as the largest in the world dealing with the First World War. In reality, this was no library. While the documents were physically housed within Stanford, the collection was kept separate and only individuals with the highest authorisation and a key to the padlock were allowed access. In 1941, 22 years after Hoover began the task of secreting away the real history of the First World War, selected documents were made available to the public. What was withheld from view or destroyed will never be known. Suffice to say that no First World War historian has ever reproduced or quoted any controversial material housed in what is now known as the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace. Indeed, it is a startling fact that few if any war historians have ever written about this illicit theft of European documents to America: documents that relate to arguably the most crucially important event in European and world history. Why?

Before his death in 1964, Hoover reflected that the institution had to constantly and dynamically point the road to ‘peace’, to ‘personal freedom’ and ‘private enterprise’. His words betray an Orwellian doublespeak, a contradiction conjured from the past by the rewriting of history. To him and his ilk, black was white, war was peace. ‘Personal freedom’ was restricted to rich, white Anglo-Saxons, not men of Chinese origin such as those he sold into slavery, or the black people his good friend Francqui mutilated and butchered in the Congo. ‘Private enterprise’ was the obscene profits they made from such atrocities. It was the language of the Secret Elite.

What this Hidden History has revealed is not reflected in British historical writing. Perhaps one day it will be. What is taught in classrooms and lecture halls bears no resemblance to the narrative in this book. Some historians have worn a straightjacket, limited by their willingness to go no further than the official evidence provided by departments of state, government reports, selected documentation, officially sanctioned histories and well-cleansed memoirs. Those who consider that the only true history is that which can be evidenced to the last letter necessarily constrain their own parameters. The individual who attempts to climb a mountain by taking only the given pathway may well discover that, far from reaching the summit, he/she has become a cross-country runner moving between markers deliberately set to confuse.

Ian Bell, the renowned Scottish journalist, wrote recently:

What is known has to be said. What happened has to be faced. History, that baffling mess, has to be confronted. When you fail in the duty to truth, malevolence fills the vacuum. The evidence for that miserable proposition has been accumulating for generations.

After a century of propaganda, lies and brainwashing about the First World War, cognitive dissonance renders us too uncomfortable to bear the truth that it was a small, socially advantaged group of self-styled English race patriots, backed by powerful industrialists and financiers in Britain and the United States, who caused the First World War. The determination of this London-based Secret Elite to destroy Germany and take control of the world was ultimately responsible for the deaths of millions of honourable young men who were betrayed and sacrificed in a mindless, bloody slaughter to further a dishonourable cause. Today, tens of thousands of war memorials in villages, towns and cities across the world bear witness to the great lie, the betrayal, that they died for ‘the greater glory of God’ and ‘that we might be free’. It is a lie that binds them to a myth. They are remembered in empty roll calls erected to conceal the war’s true purpose. What they deserve is the truth, and we must not fail them in that duty.