Balder Ex-Libris

Authors : Docherty Gerry - Macgregor James
Title : Hidden history The secret origins of the First World War
Year : 2013

Link download : Docherty_Gerry_-_Macgregor_James_-_Hidden_history_The_secret_origins_of_the_First_World_War.zip

Introduction. The history of the first World War is a deliberately concocted lie. Not the sacrifice, the heroism, the horrendous waste of life or the misery that followed. No, 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. Had the truth become widely known after 1918, the consequences for the British Establishment would have been cataclysmic. At the end of the war Britain, France and the United States laid the blame squarely on Germany and took steps to remove, conceal or falsify documents and reports to justify such a verdict. In 1919, at Versailles near Paris, the victors decreed that Germany was solely responsible for the global catastrophe. She had, they claimed, deliberately planned the war and rejected all of their proposals for conciliation and mediation. Germany protested vehemently that she was not responsible and that it had been, for her, a defensive war against the aggression of Russia and France. To the victors go the spoils, and their judgement was immediately reflected in the official accounts. What became the generally accepted history of the First World War revolved around German militarism, German expansionism, the kaiser’s bombastic nature and ambitions, and Germany’s invasion of innocent, neutral Belgium. The system of secret alliances, a ‘naval race’, economic imperialism, and the theory of an ‘inevitable war’ later softened the attack on Germany, though the spurious notion that she alone had wanted war remained understood in the background. In the 1920s, a number of highly regarded American and Canadian professors of history, including Sidney B. Fay, Harry Elmer Barnes and John S. Ewart seriously questioned the Versailles verdict and the ‘evidence’ on which the assumption of German war guilt was based. Their work in revising the official Versailles findings was attacked by historians who insisted that Germany was indeed responsible. Today, eminent British war historians place the blame on Germany, though most are willing to concede that ‘other factors’ were also involved. Professor Niall Ferguson writes of the kaiser’s strategy of global war. Professor Hew Strachan maintains that the war was about liberal countries struggling to defend their freedoms (against German aggression), while Professor Norman Stone states that the greatest mistake of the twentieth century was made when Germany built a navy to attack Britain. Professor David Stevenson quite unequivocally writes that ‘it is ultimately in Berlin that we must seek the keys to the destruction of peace’. It was Germany’s fault. End of story. ...