Who gets to write the history textbooks? Where do the history teachers learn about history? What documents are allowed into the historical record, and what documents are excluded? These are not merely academic questions, they go right to the heart of the question of history itself. Join James Corbett for today’s edition of The Corbett Report and an in-depth exploration of the formation of the historical record about World War One.

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TRANSCRIPT

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to another edition of The Corbett Report podcast.

I’m your host, as always, James Corbett of corbettreport.com, coming to you here on this 14th day of December 2018.

This is Episode 350 of The Corbett Report podcast: “History Is Written By The Winners.”

Now, I’m sure we’ve all heard that phrase before. But it probably has special meaning after having watched something like The WWI Conspiracy documentary, available now for free viewing at corbettreport.com/wwi. If you haven’t checked it out yet, why not? But, as I say, for viewers of that documentary, or for a lot of the work that I do here at The Corbett Report, this phrase has special meaning and resonance.

It obviously is true that the people who end up writing the history books are the ones who are in control of any particular period of time and are going to reflect the biases of the ruling establishment that allows such things to be printed. That is true of every historical period and no less true of our own, although we always like to think we live in a special pocket of reality that’s so different from times past. Yes, conspiracies and things happened in the past, but they don’t happen today. History was written by the winners in the past, but today we’re all objective and academics living in ivory towers.

Well, no, I’m here today to remind you that this is not the case and to remind you in the context of The WWI Conspiracy, which we’ve been examining here on The Corbett Report for the last several weeks. This is part of the follow-up to that documentary that I did promise.

So, again, if you are not familiar with the documentary itself, please go to corbettreport.com/wwi. And, if you are not familiar with the follow-up work, I’ve also done a couple of episodes of #PropagandaWatch on this subject, such as the recently released “Freedom Fries and Liberty Cabbage.”

And also I’ve released the full interview with Richard Grove, which is now available on my website. The link to “Interview 1402: Richard Grove on the Rothschilds and WWI” will be in the show notes.

And the full interview with Gerry Docherty. Again, the full interview is there on the website. The link to “Interview 1405: Gerry Docherty on the Hidden History of WWI” will be in the show notes.

Let’s listen to a little segment from that Gerry Docherty interview, where we raise this question of how is history written, by whom, and who is excluded from that narrative.

JAMES CORBETT: Well, given the enormity of the discrepancy between the story of World War I that we all learn in school and the story that you’re painting for us, the picture that you’re painting for us here, what does that tell us about history itself? History as a subject of study, history as something that is written and, as we’re told, written by the winners? What are the implications of this for people like yourself, who are trying to study this information but, as you say, a lot of it has been carefully scrubbed from the records or there are murky details that we can’t ultimately drill down on and we’ll never find that ledger connecting this person to that payment to that event, what does this tell us about the construction of history itself?

 

GERRY DOCHERTY: I find that a fascinating question. I gave a lecture a couple of years ago in Dublin and began by asking the audience, “How did you learn about the First World War?” And you know what? About half-an-hour later we were still discussing what had just been an opening remark. And what it did for me was it made me very, very aware of how exactly we learn history ourselves.

 

There are those who are keen on history, for whom history grabs a part of their soul and they want to learn more and they read books and newspapers and watch documentaries and get into discussion.

 

There are those who aren’t and just run with whatever the headline of the day is. That’s the nature of the world.

 

But in school, we expect our teachers to be teaching us the truth. But then you’ve got to ask the question, “Well, who taught your teacher? How did your teacher become a teacher?”

 

And, of course, teachers have passed through a college university process. They’ve learned from the works that their professors have said “Here are the sources you will use when you are writing an essay. Here are the reviews and the various periodicals which we tell you are the ones that will guide you toward the answer to the question that we have set.”

 

Now, this is hundreds of years old—this process of the universities becoming the guardians of history. Inside that product, the teacher has to pass his university exams. If the teacher wants to use sources that someone else has deemed inappropriate, then I’m afraid they can’t expect to pass their exams. And that’s a fact.

 

Then [there’s the] whole process also of actually getting articles approved. One of the processes Jim and I went through, we sat with a number of lecturers from different universities asking about the control of history in their university. All of these men and women were guaranteed that we would not use anybody’s name. And they come from all over the world, by the way, not just Scotland.

 

First of all, what surprised us, what we didn’t realize is, if James Corbett was a young history lecturer and he wanted to progress, he might write a paper on the Cuban crisis. Okay? And he might have discovered that, in fact, one of the consequences of the Cuban crisis was an increase in refugees coming from Cuba to the United States and the impact that had on society. Now, so the young James Corbett goes and does this and investigates and discovers records which haven’t been used and puts together a paper on this very subject.

 

For that to be recognized as an official paper of worth by the academic community, it would have to go through a process where peers read it. You wouldn’t actually ever know who had read your paper, by the way, but it would be submitted to peers to read it. And if they read it and they liked it and they thought it had some new light to shed on that particular topic, it might well find its way into a professional magazine, a professional periodical.

 

If they didn’t like [your paper] because it was perhaps suggesting that there had been malpractice and there was evidence of something that people shouldn’t have been doing or something had happened behind the scenes which no one wants to know about, then that would not be published. And [you] would be told that perhaps [you] haven’t used enough recognized official text within the concept of what [you’re] writing. And [you’d] be advised, if [you] wanted to proceed and move up the ladder, that [you] really should follow the orthodox method and the orthodox view.

 

Jim [Macgregor] and I got into a discussion, not heated, but it was very lively, with a fairly senior lecturer, and he turned to us and said, “But don’t you realize, you know more about the First World War than we do, because we become specialists in micro-subjects. And we talk, we give lectures to our students, based on the orthodox thinking or the latest approved book.”

 

There’s an excellent new book called The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went To War In 1914, written by Christopher Clark, which infers that Europe sleepwalked into a war—that nobody saw this coming. Rather a clever wee concept, because it begins to unpack the notion that there were other influences here, you know, but doesn’t seek to blame anybody.

 

This is the way in which the centre controls those new thinkers. For example, over the last four years, we’ve had a history blog going out about the truth of the First World War. At least two people have contacted us to say that they have been told that they cannot use us even though our evidence comes from archive papers, from cabinet documents, from the Library of Congress, from secondary sources of high repute. The actual formation of history is very closely guarded.

 

SOURCE: Interview 1405 — Gerry Docherty on the Hidden History of WWI

Once again, Gerry Docherty, co-author, with Jim Macgregor, of Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War, a book I have recommended highly and continue to do so for anyone who is interested in this story of World War I and how the history books have not told you all the details.

In that segment we just listened to, Gerry raises a number of important points, not just about the history of World War I specifically, but about the subject of history in general.

For example, who teaches the teachers of history and where do they get their knowledge? Who publishes those books that become the standard history books and under what circumstances? What kinds of records are allowed into the historical narrative and what is excluded?

Again, very foundationally important questions. And, in our current day and age, I think there can be no doubt: All of the biases that inevitably sneak into any historical narrative are at this point institutionalized. This is an institutional system where, in the academic setting, of course, there’s the peer review process and the academic journals that closely gatekeep the historical record for the consensus of any given era.

And there is, in the general world, the education system. For example, the textbooks are published in curricula that are developed by boards that are influenced by grants from foundations. And other things [are] happening behind the scenes—the formation of cadres, of teachers, [and of] institutions like the American Historical Association. There are some very interesting roots to the system we have today that most people in their day-to-day lives will never think about, will never encounter, but that have been important in shaping and molding their perception of history itself.

That’s a very profound point, so we need to do a little bit of unpacking here. Perhaps the easiest way to do that is to look at some specific examples.

Let’s use The WWI Conspiracy as a ready-to-hand example we can use to unpack this notion for today. We’ll start by taking a very obvious inroad into this issue. I think it should be obvious to anyone who’s thinking in terms of World War I and education.

The WWI Conspiracy, as you’ll know from having watched the documentary, revolves around a clique that emerged from a secret society—it turned out to not be so secret when William T. Stead blew the whistle, as it were, in 1902—that was formed in the 1890s by Cecil Rhodes.

Cecil Rhodes is a name that I think still has resonance with the general public today—not from Rhodesia, which, of course, is now Zimbabwe, but from the other enduring part of the Rhodes legacy. If you go out and ask people on the street, most of them are going to associate the name Cecil Rhodes with . . . let’s all say it together: The Rhodes Scholarship. THE RHODES SCHOLARSHIP!

By the time of his seventh will, Cecil Rhodes had refined his vision enough to understand that leaving his money for a particular purpose—namely, to mold and shape the perception and thinking of the next generation or generations of people—was going to require control of the education system and process itself.

Now, obviously, that’s a very tall order for anyone, even someone as magnificently wealthy as Cecil Rhodes. So, the idea is not to try to outright buy the entire education system itself, whatever that would mean.

No, you select the best and the brightest minds in the upcoming generation, people who are clearly going to go on to be some of the leading academics or researchers or historians or people in particular positions of power, and mold and shape their perceptions. Get them at a young and impressionable age with the power of the pocketbook. Throw money at them and say, “Hey, guys, why don’t you come over to Oxford? We’ll help shape your understanding of the world.”

And that’s exactly what Rhodes did. Right away the other robber barons and would-be social engineers of the era picked up on that idea. It was a very powerful idea. That’s why, for example, Andrew Carnegie is a name that people will associate with institutions like the public libraries that are now part of his legacy. Oh, he gave back to the public.

The Rockefellers are associated with the Rockefeller Foundation and all of the philanthropic work they do. But that philanthropic work started with their first steps in the world of education and academia.

For example, as we saw in How Big Oil Conquered the World, what was John D. Rockefeller’s first step into philanthropy? His very first step was the foundation, the endowment, and the funding for the University of Chicago. The formation of the University of Chicago. It is a Rockefeller creation.

And what was one of his very next steps before the formation of the Rockefeller Foundation proper? He endowed the General Education Board with a staggering $180 million, an incredible amount of money—especially, of course, in 1905 or that era—a staggering sum of money, almost unbelievable.

Why was this Rockefeller oil monopolist business tycoon so interested in education? Well, the answer, again, should be obvious, especially to people who have seen How and Why Big Oil Conquered the World.

But to spell it out a little, we did also see in that How Big Oil Conquered the World report how Rockefeller and Carnegie teamed up to produce something called the Flexner Report.

That was a report that went on to standardize the medical education system, as we know it today, which itself cemented into place the allopathic Big Pharma system that we still associate with [modern] medicine. That is what medicine is. It is the allopathic Big Pharma system, which, oh, by the way, relies on Big Oil for a lot of the pharmaceuticals that it pimps on people.

So, that’s a very specific example of how this functions. In the World War I case, we have another very specific example of how this functions. It comes to us from someone who will be familiar to my long-term listeners: Norman Dodd, head researcher for the Reece Committee, a congressional committee formed in the 1950s to examine the doings of the tax-exempt foundations like the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation and the Ford Foundation and the other major tax-exempt foundations that were operating at that time.

Now, the Reece Committee, as my longtime listeners will know, came to a number of startling conclusions. One that was, I think, of particular relevance to our topic here today was contained in that Norman Dodd interview, which I’m assuming most of you have seen by now. The link will be in the show notes in case you haven’t.

Let’s listen to a segment where the thread is connected directly from World War I—and the use of war in shaping and molding public perception and opinion—and how that ties into the story of the creation of the institutions that now gatekeep the historical record.

NORMAN DODD: We are now at the year 1908, which was the year that the Carnegie [Endowment] began operations.

 

And in that year, the trustees, meeting for the first time, raise a specific question, which they discuss throughout the balance of the year in a very learned fashion.

 

And the question is: Is there any means known more effective than war, assuming you wish to alter the life of an entire people? And they conclude that no more effective means than war to that end is known to humanity.

 

So then in 1909 they raise the second question and discuss it. Namely, how do we involve the United States in a war? Well, I doubt at that time if there was any subject more removed from the thinking of most of the people of this country than its involvement in a war. There were intermittent shows in the Balkans, but I doubt very much if many people even knew where the Balkans were. Then finally, they answer that question as follows: “We must control the State Department.”

 

And then that very naturally raises the question, “How do we do that?” And they answer it by saying, “We must take over and control the diplomatic machinery of this country.” And finally they resolve to aim at that as an objective.

 

Then time passes, and we are eventually in a war, which would have been World War I. And at that time, they record on their minutes a shocking report in which they dispatched to President Wilson a telegram, cautioning him to see that the war does not end too quickly.

 

And finally, of course, the war is over. At that time, their interest shifts over to preventing what they call a reversion of life in the United States to what it was prior to 1914, when World War I broke out. And they come to the conclusion that to prevent a reversion, we must control education in the United States.

 

And they realize that that’s a pretty big task. To them, it is too big for them alone, so they approach the Rockefeller Foundation with the suggestion that that portion of education which could be considered domestic be handled by the Rockefeller Foundation and that portion which is international should be handled by the [Carnegie] Endowment.

 

They then decide that the key to the success of these two operations lay in an alteration of the teaching of American history. So they approach four of the then-most-prominent teachers of American history in the country, people like Charles and Mary Byrd. Their [question to the Byrds is]: will they [the Byrds] alter the manner in which they present this subject, and they get turned down flat.

 

They [the trustees] then decide that it is necessary for them to, as they say, “build our own stable of historians.”

 

And then they approach the Guggenheim Foundation, which specializes in fellowships, and say, “When we find young men in the process of studying for doctorates in the field of American history, and we feel that they are the right caliber, will you grant them fellowships on our say-so?” And the answer is “Yes.”

 

So, under that condition, eventually they assemble twenty [students]. And they take these twenty potential teachers of American history to London. There, they’re briefed in what is expected of them when and if they secure appointments in keeping with the doctorates they will have earned. And that group of twenty historians ultimately becomes the nucleus of the American Historical Association.

 

SOURCE: Norman Dodd – The Hidden Agenda For World Government

Some interesting and, I think you’ll agree, highly relevant information with regards to the question of the formation of the historical record about World War I and the historical record generally and how that all ties into the First World War itself and the types of people who actually desired such a war to shape public opinion in the first place.

It’s an incredible story, and one that, as I say, will be familiar at least in part to my long-term listeners—specifically that piece of the puzzle presented by Norman Dodd in that interview, which I have played before—an interview that was conducted in the early 1980s by G. Edward Griffin at a time when I believe Mr. Dodd was something like 82 years old. It was something on the order of three decades after the committee had wound up its investigation. So, clearly, this is a second-hand account at this point of something long in the past, and it might lead people to believe that this is all we have on the Reese Committee.

Well, what else can we know about what they discovered? Actually, quite a lot. Here it is, folks, historical documents and historical research. And, given the incredible power of the internet now, all you have to do is go to the show notes at corbettreport.com for this episode and click on the link to the archive.org repository of information about the Select Committee to Investigate Tax-Exempt Foundations and Comparable Organizations, the full title of which has become commonly known as the Reece Committee.

Specifically, on archive.org you can find the complete hearings of that committee, a “light” 818 pages of bedtime reading of all of the hearings they conducted, as well as the Tax-exempt Foundations and Charitable Trusts: Their Impact On Our Economy document that was the Chairman’s Report To The Select Committee On Small Business of the 87th Congress, and a very interesting little tome, published in 1958 by The Devin-Adair Company, called Foundations: Their Power and Influence, by René A. Wormser, who was the chair of that special Committee to Investigate the Tax-Exempt Foundations. It goes into a great degree of detail but it is also in a readable narrative about the committee and its work and its findings.

So, let’s look at a specific point of that narrative, where René Wormser, in Foundations: Their Power and Influence, is talking about the Carnegie Endowment specifically.

He writes about the Reece Committee and its work. He says:

“The Reece Committee said of the Endowment’s work (quoting the Reece Committee report):

 

“An extremely powerful propaganda machine was created.

 

“It spent many millions of dollars in:

 

• The production of masses of material for distribution;
• The creation and support of large numbers of international policy clubs, and other local organizations at colleges and elsewhere;
• The underwriting and dissemination of many books on various subjects, through the International Mind Alcoves and the International Relations Clubs and Centers, which it organized all over the country;
• The collaboration with agents of publicity, such as newspaper editors;
• The preparation of material to be used in school textbooks, and cooperation with publishers of textbooks to incorporate this material;
• The establishing of professorships at the colleges and the training and indoctrination of teachers;
• The financing of lecturers and the importation of foreign lecturers and exchange professors;
• The support of outside agencies touching the international field, such as the Institute of International Education, the Foreign Policy Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Council on Education, the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Historical Association, the American Association of International Conciliation, the Institute of Pacific Relations, the International Parliamentary Union and others, and acting as mid-wife at the birth of some of them.

The Carnegie Endowment was utterly frank in disclosing its propaganda function. It frequently used terms such as “the education of public opinion.” This is not “public education,” but molding public opinion. The Committee report indicated that one thing seemed “utterly clear: no private group should have the power or the right to decide what should be read and taught in our schools and colleges,” yet this is what the Endowment sought to do in “educating public opinion.”

Now, that’s just one small snippet from this much larger work, which itself is based on hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pages of hearings that the committee conducted and the investigation that it conducted through people like Norman Dodd and the incredible things that were uncovered in the course of that investigation.

So, it’s only one piece of this puzzle. Fit that piece of the puzzle into the larger puzzle that is the American education system and the formation of the American historical academic milieu, which itself is only one part of the puzzle of the larger global context of this—including the Oxford clique that surrounded Alfred Milner and the Rhodes scholarships and all of that.

I mean, again, this is an interlocking mechanism of such scale and scope that no one person can even comprehend it, let alone direct all of it. And yet, it persisted and it creates this fabric which underlies, as an institutional basis, our formation of historical understanding as well as understanding in other fields. In fact, a great degree of the René Wormser writing and the work of the Reece Committee generally was about the the social sciences generally and the way that they were being applied to direct people’s thinking along certain lines.

Again, much too much detail there to go into detail here in this podcast, but when it comes specifically to the formation of the historical record, we can see how this consensus functions. We can see the ultimate effects of this in some of the greatest and most hailed works of historical research, scholarship, writing when it comes to the First World War.

I’m going to frame this by looking at a book that probably everyone’s heard of, probably a few people have read, called The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman, which was written in the early 1960s or published in the early 1960s and won the Pulitzer Prize [for General Nonfiction in 1963]. It was a bestseller at the time. It was hailed by the academic community as a great work of history. It’s a popular book still to this day—quite a popular book, one of the best-known books about World War I.

The bulk of the book is about August 1914, obviously, and the various battles that were taking place there. But it starts in the first chapter, quite famously, with the painting of the scene of the funeral of King Edward VII, who died in 1910, and Kaiser Wilhelm’s appearance at that funeral. The scene sets the stage of the pre-war period by looking at that event and the events surrounding it.

It’s interesting to see the way this hailed work of great scholarship or great historical writing by Barbara Tuchman is not scholarship. It’s not academic because it’s not a footnoted scholarly document. It is meant to be popular history. There are no footnotes. No references. It isn’t scholarship in that sense. There was obviously research that went into it, but it’s in the back door somewhere where you can’t see it.

But the book does effectively continue what had been a narrative—for the better part of half-a-century by that point—of Kaiser Wilhelm being a bloodthirsty, militaristic, mad tyrant who was hellbent on war.

And it continues in that tradition. It fosters and helps to bring that tradition to the next generation, which continued it on, so that to this very day Kaiser Wilhelm is often portrayed as some sort of proto-Hitler who was just a mad tyrant. All he was interested in was military and the war, and he was plotting and scheming for warfare for decades prior to the outbreak of World War I.

You can understand why in Paris 1919 they came up with a War Guilt Clause that laid the entire blame for World War I on Germany, because, you know, Kaiser Wilhelm was a warmonger, so it makes sense. I mean, it might have been a mistake in retrospect, I guess, but they were doing the best they could. Amazingly enough, that’s now the historical consensus around Paris 1919. “Well, they were peacemakers. They were trying their best.”

[The consensus] stems to a large extent [from the fact that] people have swallowed this narrative unquestioningly—that Kaiser Wilhelm was absolutely a mad, bloodthirsty tyrant. And it comes from works like Barbara Tuchman’s. Let’s look at some specific examples from Tuchman that paint this picture. Here’s a paragraph that jumps out at me. I’ll just present it, and we’ll examine it afterwards. But I want you to really think about this paragraph. It’s referring to Kaiser Wilhelm’s appearance at King Edward VII’s funeral. That day, that scene, what was happening. It says:

Publicly his [Kaiser Wilhelm’s] performance was perfect; privately, he could not resist the opportunity for fresh scheming. At a dinner given by the King that night at Buckingham Palace [King George, at this point] for the seventy royal mourners and special ambassadors, he buttonholed M. Pichon of France and proposed to him that in the event Germany should find herself opposed to England in a conflict, France should side with Germany. In view of the occasion and the place, this latest imperial brainstorm caused the same fuss that had once moved Sir Edward Grey, England’s harassed foreign secretary, to remark wistfully: “The other sovereigns are so much quieter.” The Kaiser later denied he had ever said anything of the kind; he had merely discussed Morocco and “some other political matters.” M. Pichon could only be got to say discreetly that the Kaiser’s language had been “amiable and pacific.”

Think about that paragraph. Think about the information you have just been presented in that paragraph. Again, contextless, there’s no footnote, there’s no reference. All of this we’re just taking at face value, at Tuchman’s word for it.

So, we are presented with this little scene of, okay, well, outwardly, from all outward appearances, from everything that anyone could see or the general public could observe or write about or in any way document, yeah, Kaiser Wilhelm looked like a mourning nephew of his uncle, King Edward VII. He was amiable enough to the British people and was paying his respects and condolences.

But inwardly, in his heart of hearts that I, Barbara Tuchman, can secretly know about, he was scheming and plotting for war. And wait, I know this because he buttonholed Monsieur Pichon that very night at Buckingham Palace. At the ceremony that was being held by the king, he buttonholed Monsieur Pichon. He got him into the corner and he started plotting and scheming and trying to get France on Germany’s side in case there’s a war with England.

Hold on a second. How does Barbara Tuchman know this? Because obviously Kaiser Wilhelm denied it. Well, he would. He’s a mad, bloodthirsty, warmongering tyrant. Of course he would deny ever having said that. That’s to be expected.

And, oh yeah, the other participant in this conversation, Monsieur Pichon, actually said he was “amiable and pacific.” That’s the direct quote. All the rest of that quote is Tuchman inserting herself into this: He could only be got to say discreetly that the Kaiser’s language had been “amiable and pacific.” So he said, yeah, he was “amiable and pacific.” And Tuchman is saying, Oh, you know, they needled him and pressed him and got out of him that he was “amiable and pacific”—i.e., he was not bloodthirsty. He was not hankering after war. He was not plotting and scheming like a mad tyrant.

The only two people with direct knowledge of this conversation, at least according to Tuchman, are saying that this wasn’t about warfare. It wasn’t about plotting and scheming. It wasn’t about who will be on whose side, and you gotta fight the English. It wasn’t about that. But Tuchman is saying it was about that, because she can magically read these people’s minds somehow or something. I don’t know.

This is insanity when you actually drill down on the details of a moment like this. And this is just one paragraph in this voluminous book, but it shows you something about the mindset of this Pulitzer Prize-winning historian. This is Pulitzer Prize-winning history, folks. The Guns of August. It’s a great work of history that presents passages like that, that we’re just supposed to swallow and internalize. Oh yeah, Kaiser Wilhelm was always plotting and scheming for war. So, of course, I mean, we don’t even need people in these conversations to confirm that the conversations were about what Tuchman was saying they’re about. We just accept it because we know he was a bloodthirsty tyrant.

This pattern continues itself. There was something called The Daily Telegraph Affair of 1908, which refers to an “interview” of Kaiser Wilhelm that was published in The Daily Telegraph, one of the propaganda vehicles of the secret elite, documented in Jim Macgregor and Gerry Docherty’s The Hidden History of World War One.

[Their book] documented that this was a propaganda vehicle that was part of the concerted propaganda push that was going on in the first decade of the 20th century to demonize the Germans and Kaiser Wilhelm in particular. The Daily Telegraph published an “interview” in October of 1908 that made quite a scandal at the time and shocked and horrified the British people and even the German nation. As we can tell from Barbara Tuchman, who writes about the affair this way. She says:

The year 1908 closed with the most explosive faux pas of the Kaiser’s career, an interview given to the Daily Telegraph expressing his ideas of the day on who should fight whom, which this time unnerved not only his neighbors but his countrymen. Public disapproval was so outspoken that the Kaiser took to his bed, was ill for three weeks, and remained comparatively reticent for some time thereafter.

So, that’s the one-paragraph summary of The Daily Telegraph Affair that you’ll find in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns of August.

But there’s a little bit more to that story, as you might imagine. And you can find that in various works, but in a work that I think is extremely important to counterbalance this Kaiser-Wilhelm-bloodthirsty-tyrant-hell-bent-on-war narrative that is so unquestioningly parroted by people in this day and age—influenced by Tuchman, who herself was influenced by the scholars and academic historians who’d come before her—the counterbalance to this is presented in a book called, provocatively enough, The Innocence of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

I must admit, upon first hearing the title of this book, I thought, “Well, that’s a bit much.” I mean, I get that there’s some skewing of the historical record, but to say “The Innocence”—as Gerry Docherty points out in that full interview we conducted for The WWI Conspiracy, well, it’s ridiculous to paint anyone in black-and-white. The Kaiser was no pure angel. He was not innocent. He was not a pure soul.

There’s no good side in a war like this, which is very true. But as a counterbalance, when all of the history tells us repeatedly that the Kaiser wanted nothing but blood and warfare, I do understand the counterbalance being, well, you have to say “The Innocence” to protect the historical record from that falsity, that bias that has systematically crept into the historical record.

And if you read The Innocence of Kaiser Wilhelm II, which I suggest you do, it presents a coherent narrative that presents counterarguments for all of the arguments that you will see presented in the standard WWI histories for why Kaiser Wilhelm was this militaristic, horrible warmonger with no redeeming qualities. You will see the other side of that story. There are convincing counternarratives for all the standard narratives that you ever read about Kaiser Wilhelm presented in that book. For example, as opposed to Barbara Tuchman’s one paragraph little summary of The Daily Telegraph Affair, we get this in The Innocence of Kaiser Wilhelm II:

Even throughout his uncle’s reign [that would be Uncle King Edward VII], Wilhelm continued to enjoy his visits to England and, in the summer of 1907, while recuperating from a persistent throat complaint, he rented Highcliffe Castle, the Dorset home of a seasoned British soldier, General Stuart-Wortley. During their visit, he and Wortley spoke much of relations between their two nations and, in an informal conversation, Wilhelm expressed his exasperation at Britain’s persistent mistrust of his motives. Impressed by his obvious desire for peace, Wortley related the conversation to a journalist named Spender who suggested that, with the Kaiser’s permission, it could be written in the form of an interview which the Daily Telegraph would print. The completed article was duly sent to Wilhelm for his approval, and before sanctioning its publication, he forwarded it to his Chancellor, von Bulow, who concurred that there was no reason why it shouldn’t be printed. When, however, it eventually appeared in the press in November 1908, it raised such a storm of protests in Germany and England that Wilhelm was left prostrate on the verge of a nervous breakdown.

 

While the English viewed it as insulting, the Germans saw it as a demeaning attempt to appease Britain, but in reality it accurately captured the Kaiser’s genuine desire for peace and his exasperation at the growing tensions between the two countries. The English, he had said, were “mad, mad, mad as March hares” to mistrust him, and, although admitted that there was a good deal of anti-British feeling in Germany, he stressed that he personally was a true “friend of England.”

 

“I strive with all my power to improve our relations, and in spite of all, you persist in viewing me as your arch-enemy.”

We’ll end the quote there.

So, a very different fleshing out of that story of The Daily Telegraph Affair than what you received in Tuchman, I think you’ll understand. And this paints a little bit more of the context of that. Tuchman presented this as an interview that was published in The Daily Telegraph. It was not an interview. These were notes that General Stuart-Wortley had taken of conversations that he had had with Kaiser Wilhelm the previous year that were then written up and presented as an interview in The Daily Telegraph. It was not an interview. And it was presented that way to the public.

It obviously upset people when the interview starts with Kaiser Wilhelm rebuking the English people.

“You English,” he said, “are mad, mad, mad as March hares. What has come over you that you were so completely given over to suspicions quite unworthy of a great nation? What more can I do than I have done? I declared with all the emphasis at my command in my speech at Guildhall that my heart is set upon peace, and that it is one of my dearest wishes to live on the best of terms with England. Have I ever been false to my word? Falsehood and prevarication are alien to my nature. My actions ought to speak for themselves, but you listen not to them but to those who misinterpret and distort them. That is a personal insult, which I feel and resent. To be forever misjudged, to have my repeated offers of friendship weighed and scrutinized with jealous, mistrustful eyes, taxes my patience severely. I have said time after time that I am a friend of England, and your press—at least a considerable section of it—bids the people of England refuse my proferred hand and insinuates that the other holds a dagger. How can I convince a nation against its will?”

 

SOURCE: The Daily Telegraph Affair 

Well, that’s the opening paragraph of this Daily Telegraph “interview,” which, of course, does present, wow, he’s in some sort of rage. What’s this anger? He’s clearly a crazed person.

That’s the impression that I think the British public was left with. Again, completely disregarding all of the context of this. This was not an interview. He did not just suddenly go into this rant about how the English are mad as March hares. This was obviously part of a series of conversations he’d been having over a period of time in which he had expressed frustration with the fact that he wanted peace. He wanted peace, and he was constantly being portrayed as a warmonger.

That interview is then transmuted and presented to the public to reinforce the idea that he’s a warmonger. And interestingly, again, look at the way Tuchman presents that in her one paragraph explication of this. She says that Daily Telegraph interview—which is not an interview—”expressed his ideas of the day on who should fight whom.” Expressing his ideas of the day on who should fight whom.

I invite you, I implore you, to go click the link in the show notes to that Daily Telegraph article so you can read it for yourself. And you tell me if you would summarize that interview as Kaiser Wilhelm expressing “his ideas of the day on who should fight whom.”

That is not at all what that interview says, what it is about, or the subject that it touches on. It is all about Kaiser Wilhelm professing that he wanted peace. That is what it is about, at least on the surface level.

Now, you could say, well, okay, but, you know, he was scheming and plotting behind the scenes, and he was just talking. It was just lip service to peace.

But at any rate, that’s what the interview is about. It’s about Kaiser Wilhelm wanting peace with England. And somehow, in the one-sentence summary here in Tuchman, we get expressing “his ideas of the day on who should fight whom.” It’s a complete mischaracterization of that interview. But again, Pulitzer Prize-winning history, guys. It’s remarkable. And it goes on and on from there.

In fact, there’s another really telling piece in that opening chapter of Guns of August that really struck me when I was reading about it. We were looking at the event of King Edward VII’s death and how he was being mourned in various places around the world where the royal rake had made an impression, bizarrely enough, favorably on a number of countries. So there were public displays of mourning in various countries. And Tuchman is writing about this.

For example, she says:

In France, the king’s death created “profound emotion” and “real consternation,” according to Le Figaro. Paris, it said, felt the loss of its “great friend” as deeply as London. Lampposts and shop windows in the Rue de la Paille wore the same black as Piccadilly; cab drivers tied crepe bows on their whips; black-draped portraits of the late king appeared even in the provincial towns as at the death of a great French citizen. In Tokyo, in tribute to the Anglo-Japanese alliance, houses bore the crossed flags of England and Japan with the staves draped in black. In Germany, whatever the feelings, correct procedures were observed. All officers of the army and navy were ordered to wear mourning for eight days, and the fleet in home waters fired a salute and flew its flag at half-mast. The Reichstag rose to its feet to hear a message of sympathy read by its president and the Kaiser called in person upon the British ambassador in a visit that lasted an hour and a half.

Again, think about what has just happened in that paragraph, talking about all of the things, the different ways that public mourning took place in these different places, and the way that is presented. In France, we are told, the king’s death created “profound emotion” and “real consternation.”

So here, Tuchman is just quoting Le Figaro, and presumably quoting it as a way of accurately capturing the feeling, the real sentiment, of the French people. “Profound emotion,” “real consternation,” and then she talks about the lampposts and shop windows being dressed in the black-draped portraits of the late king, etc.—so giving all the impression: Okay, the French people really felt this as a loss. In Tokyo, in tribute to the Anglo-Japanese alliance, even the store windows had English and Japanese staves draped in black.

Whatever the feelings, correct procedures were observed. Look at that. Look at that editorial intrusion there by Tuchman. Yes, the French people do all of these things that we can observe, and that shows that they really had profound consternation at the death of King Edward VII. In Japan, in Tokyo, the store owners do this, and that shows the Japanese people valued the English-Japanese alliance.

But in Germany, whatever their true feelings, I, Barbara Tuchman, can see into their heart of hearts. And I know that they were actually doing this just as an outward display because they didn’t really care, but they were doing all of the correct procedures. Oh, I guess their army and navy were ordered to wear mourning—ordered to wear mourning—for eight days. And the fleet in home waters fired a salute and flew its flags at half-mast. The Reichstag rose to its feet to hear a message of sympathy read by its president. The Kaiser called in person upon the British ambassador.

But all of those were just outward displays, and none of them were profound or real. They were all just, you know, formal procedure. And I, Barbara Tuchman, know this because I can see into the hearts and minds of people. I know the French people were really upset. I know the Japanese people were really upset. I know the Germans weren’t really upset, even though they all were outwardly manifesting displays of mourning.

Again, most people read right through that, not realize that, no, the writer is inserting herself very strongly into this narrative to tell you what is going on in the hearts and minds of an entire nation of people—just by telling you. I mean, that’s all she’s doing. She’s just saying. She’s just putting that phrase in: “whatever the feelings.” What an incredible phrase to put in there to show that she knows what’s really going on in the hearts and minds of the German people.

Now, look, no one should have been mourning Edward VII. He was a horrible person. He was a schemer who was very much involved with the formation of World War I. But at any rate, I don’t claim to know what the French or German or average person in Tokyo was thinking or feeling at that moment and how profoundly true or fake their expressions of mourning were.

But Barbara Tuchman will do that because . . . Pulitzer Prize-winning history, folks. This is how it’s done. Again, think about that. Think about that when you’re reading these great works of history and how the writers will insert themselves into that narrative, as they always do, as they have to. There is no way to take yourself out of that and to write some objective thing about only the surface level. If you’re writing a narrative, you have to create the narrative. The narrative here is subtly inserted in a way that you don’t consciously recognize that it’s happening. But at the end of it, you’re going to come out of that book thinking, yeah, Kaiser Wilhelm really was a mad, bloodthirsty tyrant.

Mission accomplished. It’s almost as if someone like Barbara Tuchman has a dog in this fight. Oh, wait.

Barbara Tuchman. I wonder if there are any biographical details about Barbara Tuchman. I mean, who is she? What family does she come from? Oh, that’s right. Her grandfather was Henry Morgenthau Sr., who was a Wilson supporter who was appointed ambassador to the Ottoman Empire during the First World War. So, someone who had some relation to the events that were being described here.

And not incidentally, Barbara Tuchman was also the niece of Henry Morgenthau Jr., who was, of course, the Secretary of the Treasury under FDR during the New Deal. So again, someone intimately tied to the power establishment, someone who actually had some role to play in the First World War, who’s writing the history of that First World War in a way that makes the enemy seem like the bloodthirsty tyrant. I wonder if there’s any relation there.

Actually, that brings to mind another part of this interesting familial relations when it comes to the people who are writing the history of the First World War, because I guarantee if you have heard anything about the First World War in the last five years or done any reading or research into it, you have come across the name of Margaret MacMillan.

Type “World War I” into YouTube or anywhere else, and you’re going to come across lectures and/or books and/or papers written by Margaret MacMillan, who is perhaps at this point best known for her work on Paris 1919: Peacemakers: The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War.

It’s been released under a couple of different titles—the other title being Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World. It is her treatment of the Treaty of Versailles and the other treaties that were signed in Paris in 1919.

Her narrative, as you’ll discover, is . . . well, first of all, obviously what came out of Paris in 1919 wasn’t ideal. It wasn’t the best, but maybe it was the best they could have done. At any rate, they were trying their best to come up with a good peace. They weren’t horrible people, and we can’t blame World War II on them. And, oh, it was just, it was all just an accident, and people were doing their best.

That’s the narrative that comes out of Margaret MacMillan. She’s also, in the last couple of years, taken to talking about the origins of the First World War and British involvement in the First World War and whether it was justified. And unsurprisingly, coming to the conclusion, yes, I mean, it had to be fought and it was for the good, and the British were on the side of the righteous and the Germans were warmongers.

I’ve seen so many of MacMillan’s lectures by now, and she always tells the same couple of anecdotes over and over and over. I get it. You get a little anecdote you think is funny and you drop it into every lecture you ever do. But anyway, this is the pinnacle of historical research at this point. But there was one particular debate that I will throw in the show notes. Please click the link. Watch the Intelligence Square debate on whether Britain should have entered the First World War. That was the question being debated. And on the pro side, on the side of, “Yes, Britain was right to enter the First World War,” Margaret MacMillan and her colleague were arguing for all of the reasons that you might imagine, including, of course, that, well, Germany was warmongering and it was this crazy Kaiser Wilhelm. And if you hadn’t have intervened, then they probably would have overrun France. And then that would have created this horrible situation where you have this bloodthirsty, maniacal, militaristic tyrant ruling the continent of Europe. And that would have meant war with Britain anyway, eventually. So it’s better to nip it in the bud, and whatever. That kind of narrative is essentially what’s being presented.

I invite you to go watch that full debate because, I mean, not only are there weird tricks being played—like the opening remarks are 10 minutes long, and the “Britain should have entered the war” side gets their 10 minutes, but then, for some reason, the “No, they should not have entered the war” side gets seven and a half minutes. They say, “No, it’s been 10 minutes,” and he’s “Are you sure about that?” “Yes, 10 minutes,” and [yet] you could go look at the actual counter on YouTube, and it’s only at seven minutes and 30 seconds or whatever.

So, weird tricks like that. But also, more importantly, more profoundly, the types of things that are put forward by the “Yes, Britain should have gotten involved in the war” side that are just, again, just inserted into that, including, of course, the demonization of Kaiser Wilhelm.

But when they’re questioned on that, for example, when people say, “Well, yes, I mean, the rape of Belgium and things that, the atrocities that occurred are horrible, but what about the concentration camps and what the British did in South Africa during the border war that was that was horrific and . . .” they wave it away with a whisk of their hand: “Yes, some bad things happened there, but you can’t blame the British Empire for that. But let me tell you why you can blame Germany and Kaiser Wilhelm for everything that happened in . . .”

I mean, again, whatever you make of whataboutism and what have you, at any rate, there is a double standard that is being applied there, quite obviously. And one of the funniest bits is—well, “funny”—funniest bits is when they’re openly called out.

I believe it was MacMillan, or it might have been her debate partner, but one of them said something to the effect of, “Well, show me, show me any instance of anyone in Britain who was arguing for war before World War I. No one wanted war.”

And someone says, “Well, what about Jackie Fisher?” who of course was the First Sea Lord in the period building up in the naval race and then was appointed Sea Lord again after his retirement, when the war that he had so fervently wished for actually broke out, people say, “Well, what about Jackie Fisher?” This is the person. Go back to my Echoes of World War I lecture, the person who said, “Well, we could Copenhagen the British Navy—i.e., we could do an unprovoked sneak attack, not declare war, just basically bomb them off the face of the earth before they know anything about it.”

He was an open, outright warmonger. And they say, “Well, yeah, I mean, Jackie Fisher, but he was a bit crazy. He was a bit crazy. He was a bit out there anyway.” So I was like, “Yeah, name me one person who was warmongering.” “Oh yeah, well, other than that.”

Again, once you watch the debate, there’s no question that they are absolutely skewing the historical record in favor of their predetermined outcome, that yes, Britain was great and righteous and holy, and Germany was the most horrible thing that ever existed and needed to be wiped off the face of the planet, essentially.

Again, it’s almost like Margaret MacMillan has some sort of dog in this fight. Oh, wait, that’s right. Margaret MacMillan is the great-granddaughter of David Lloyd George.

Even more so than Tuchman, this is an obvious conflict of interest. Do you think the great-granddaughter of the person she’s writing about in 1919 at the peace conference might have some sort of even unconscious bias towards her great-grandfather? Maybe just a little bit? That maybe this should not be the person who is writing the history of 1919, or at least we should keep that front and foremost in our minds when we’re reading her history of what her great-grandfather was doing in the waging the peace of 1919.

Maybe we should keep it in our mind that she is the great-granddaughter of the person she’s writing about. I mean, it is possible for her to be objective in that situation. But at any rate, it is something to think about.

The only way this could get even more ludicrous would be if she was a Rhodes Scholar or something. Oh, wait, I’ll one-up you there. No, no, no, Margaret MacMillan did attend Oxford, but she wasn’t a Rhodes Scholar. She was a former Rhodes Trustee. Yes, one of the trustees who oversees the Rhodes Scholarship.

You cannot make this stuff up. The people who are writing, to this day, the most popular and well-received histories of World War I are still the very same clique, connected to the very same families, connected to the very same institutions.

It’s just insanity. It’s insanity. But who in their right mind, going about their daily business, is ever going to bother to look into this? They’re just going to see some related video on YouTube, something about, oh, there’s a World War I lecture by Margaret MacMillan. Click on it. Watch a few minutes. Oh, that sounds about right.

And that’s the way history is received in this day and age, unfortunately. Who’s going to drill down on those details except for The Corbett Report?

Anyway, so that’s how it’s done. And that’s one aspect of it. But, again, it’s such an overwhelming picture. We’ve touched on the institutional biases. We’ve touched on the way personal biographies can influence this. We’ve looked at the development of narratives like the demonization of Kaiser Wilhelm.

But there’s an entirely other aspect to this. In fact, there are several other aspects that need to be delved into. So let’s do that. We’ll bring this full circle by going back to Jim McGregor and Gerry Doherty and their work on the Hidden History of WWI.

Specifically, their blog on the First World War. It is at firstworldwarhiddenhistory.wordpress.com. Obviously, I’ll put the link in the show notes. They have had a series of articles they published under the title “Fake History”—Fake History 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. And just the titles of these various articles give you a sense of the gist of what they’re writing about here.

For example, you have Fake History 1: Controlling Our Future By Controlling Our Past; Fake History 2: The Rise Of The Money Power Control; Fake History 3: From Burning Correspondence To Permanently Removing The Evidence; Fake History 4: Concealment Of British War-time Documents; Fake History 5: The Peer Review Process; and Fake History 6: The Failure Of Primary Source Evidence.

Each single one of these topics is extremely important and probably deserves its own podcast. But given time restraints and getting everyone on board, let’s just drill down on one aspect of this.

So, all of these have been encapsulated in an article, a single article called “Fake History: How the Money Power Controls Our Future by Controlling Our Past,” which I’ll direct you to. That’s been published by Information Clearinghouse.

Let’s look at a specific blog entry here from “Fake History 3: From Burning Correspondence To Permanently Removing The Evidence” to talk about the incredible and completely unreported story of the theft of hundreds of thousands of primary source documents from the general public. [They were placed in] a sequestered secret library that very few people get access to. That’s a very interesting story and one that Jim and Gerry talk about in this article. I’ll read [an excerpt from it] here.

Quote:

In Britain crucial primary documents about the lies and deceit surrounding the First World War through diaries, memoirs and important letters were censored and altered, evidence sifted, removed, burned, carefully ‘selected’ and falsified. Bad as that may be, it is of relatively minor importance compared to the outrageous theft of crucial papers 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 concealed in locked vaults at Stanford University. The documents, which would doubtless have exposed the men really responsible for the war and their transgressions, had to be removed to a secure location and hidden from prying eyes. It was the greatest heist of history that the world has ever known.

 

Herbert Clark Hoover, a corrupt and bullying ‘mining engineer’ reinvented as a munificent humanitarian and international relief organizer, was the Secret Elite agent charged with the mammoth job of stealing the European documents. In modern day parlance, had it all been recorded on computer, he was the one who pressed the delete button. He had earlier been tasked with ensuring that Germany had sufficient supplies of food, without which the war would have been over by 1915. Far from just being the man who saved the Belgian people from starvation during the war, his so-called ‘Belgian Relief’ agency also fed the German army in order to prolong the conflict and maximize profit for the banking and armaments manufacturing elites on both sides of the Atlantic. Hoover’s American-based organisation raised millions of dollars through loans and public donation, shipped vast quantities of food and necessities to war-torn Europe and made obscene profits for his backers, yet no documentary evidence of this enormous enterprise could be found at the end of the war. It had disappeared. All of it. Impossible, surely?

 

The theft of Europe’s historical documents was dressed in a cloak of respectability and represented as a philanthropic act of preservation. These documents, it was claimed, would be properly archived for the use of future historians. The official line was that if not removed from government agencies in France, Russia, Germany and elsewhere, the papers detailing the extent of Hoover’s work would ‘easily deteriorate and disappear.’ It was no chance decision that only documents relating to the war’s origins and ‘Belgian Relief’ were taken. No official British, French or American government approval was sought or given. 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 and a close friend of Hoover’s from their student days, was called to Paris to coordinate the great heist and give it academic credence.

 

In 1919, Hoover recruited a management team of ‘young scholars’ from the American army and secured their release from military service. They were primarily interested in material relating to the war’s true origins and the sham Commission for Relief of Belgium. Other documents concerning the conduct of the war itself were ignored. His team used letters of introduction and logistical support to collect import / export bills, sales and distribution records, insurance documents and local customs permits amongst a plethora of incriminating evidence.

 

He established a network of representatives throughout Europe and persuaded General John Pershing to release fifteen history professors and students serving in various ranks of the American Expeditionary Force in Europe. He sent them, in uniform, to the countries his agency was feeding. With food in one hand and reassurance in the other, they visited nations on the brink of starvation and faced little resistance in their quest. They made the right local 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’ from European governments. It has not been possible for us to discover who actually funded this gargantuan, massively expensive venture.

 

The removal and disposal of incriminatory British and French material posed little or no problem, and with the Bolsheviks in control, access to Russian documents from the Czarist regime proved straightforward. They undoubtedly contained hugely damaging information on how the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 had been orchestrated through Petrograd, and how Russia’s general mobilisation on Germany’s eastern border had been the real reason for the war starting. It might appear strange that the Bolsheviks cooperated so willingly by allowing Hoover’s agents to remove twenty-five carloads of materials from Petrograd. However, when one realises that the international bankers in the secret society had financed and facilitated Lenin and Trotsky’s return to Russia and the Bolshevik Revolution itself, it becomes clear. The Americans could have what they wanted. This surprising event was reported in the New York Times, which claimed that Hoover’s team bought the documents from a ‘doorkeeper’ for $200 cash. And some people think that fake news is a twenty-first century concept.

 

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 this away with a comment 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 men also acquired 6,000 volumes of German court documents covering the complete official proceedings of the Kaiser’s pre-war activities and his wartime conduct of the German Empire. If Germany had been guilty of planning and starting the war — as decreed by Court Historians ever since — these documents would have proved it. Strange that none have ever been released. Had there been incriminating documents, it is certain that copies would have been sent out immediately to every press and news agency throughout the world, proving Germany was to blame. The removal and concealment of the German archives by the Secret Elite was crucial because they would have proved the opposite: Germany had not started the war.

 

By 1926, the ‘Hoover War Library’ at Stanford University was so packed with archived material that it was legitimately described as the world’s largest collection of First World War documentation. 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 authority had keys to the padlocked gates. It was the Fort Knox of historical evidence, a closely guarded establishment for items too sensitive to share. In 1941 carefully selected archives were made available to genuine researchers. Over the previous two decades the unaccountable ruling cabal — the very men responsible for WWI — had unfettered control over them.

 

What they withheld from view, shredded, or put in the Stanford furnace 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 no war historian has ever written about this utterly astonishing theft of the European war documents and their shipment to America.

 

‘To the victor go the spoils, and history is part of that booty’, but it is our history. We should be demanding to know what is hidden from us. The First World War was the seminal event of the twentieth century, and all that followed, including WW2, came as a direct consequence. The people of Britain and Germany, indeed the world, have a right to know the full extent of what has been secretly retained, hidden, or posted ‘missing’ regarding responsibility for that war.

End quote.

A pretty startling passage that points to an incredible ellipsis in the historical record. Oh yes, well, one of the largest heists of historical documents that the world has ever seen took place in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. That’s not even worthy of a footnote in any of the mainstream histories of the First World War. Hmm, who’s writing those histories? Oh, that’s right. The winners. As always, the winners get the spoils of any war, including the spoils of history itself. And the people who perpetrated that war certainly aren’t going to let the documents that incriminate them come to light.

There is much more detail. Again, this is just one part of one of the six parts of that series written by Jim and Gerry. I hope you’ll read through it because there’s a lot more detail here about specific documents that have been secreted away, burnt, destroyed. And then the question of what documents are allowed to be part of the formation of the historical record. What is allowed through the peer review process, for example. The fact that Jim and Gerry’s book will never be quoted in any academic journal or anything, even though it is based on actual historical reference, has hundreds of footnotes to historical documents, but it will never be allowed to be cited in any of the respectable journals, as Gerry mentioned there.

This is the key crux of the issue, and this is part of the raison d’etre of The Corbett Report. This is part of what it is that I am doing. I’m just one tiny part of it, but there is a chance at this moment in time to reconstruct something more akin to a real historical record here. There is a chance for a people’s history to be written and constructed and reconstructed from the available documents—however much has been secreted away and will never be seen again.

We still have inroads into this hidden history, and it is through the work of people like Jim and Gerry and all of the other researchers out there who are dredging this up and doing the painstaking work of putting these historical pieces back together that we can potentially reconstruct a real history, a people’s history. Because the history of this era is going to be written by the people of the future.

The real question is: Who will be the winners in this era of history that get to decide the history of the future? It’s not a question that you can be a spectator on the sidelines about. You are part of this. You are part of the history that is being made now. You are deciding whether we will be the winners or whether, once again, we will be the losers in this grand game that is taking place around us — and whether the people who control the historical record will continue to maintain that control simply because we do not even know, for the most part, that that control exists at all, let alone the mechanisms by which it functions.

These are incredibly, fundamentally important issues that we’re discussing here today.

But, as I say, all I can do is start to open up the conversation and direct you to some of the resources that we’ve looked at today, so you can start doing this for yourself.

And, again, it’s going to be the work of all of us together that will make a difference in all of this, in constructing a real people’s history written by we the people, the people who should be the winners of history, rather than the gatekeeping of the elite.

Alright, we’re going to leave it there for today. So much more to talk about, obviously. But please do go to the show notes. Some very valuable resources will be down there in the show notes for today’s episode. I hope you’ll join me there on corbettreport.com.

Once again, this work is brought to you by you! I cannot do it without your support. So, if you appreciate the work that I’m doing here, please do support corbettreport.com/members.

We’re going to leave it here for today. I’m looking forward to talking to you again in the near future.

 

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