Britain & America: the evolution of a partnership – Part 2

2005-07-15

Richard Moore

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* Britain's game plans in World War 1

The Great War was the most deadly war the world had ever seen,
with unprecedented levels of civilian casualties, and claiming
the lives of a whole generation of Europe's young men. In
Matrix reality the conflict was promoted at the time as The
War to End All Wars, and recorded afterwards as an unfortunate
accident caused by unwise treaty entanglements. In actual
reality the conflagration was planned and arranged by The
City, and is more accurately remembered as "The War to
Preserve London's Banking Interests." What are a few million
anonymous lives lost and a devastated continent, compared to
so lofty an objective?

The British state dedicated itself fully to The City's agenda,
and all the traditional British imperialist virtues came into
play as the war game unfolded. The British skill in propaganda
enabled them not only to solidify British popular support for
the war, but also to seduce the young men of Ireland,
Australia, Canada, and elsewhere in the "Commonwealth" into
joining the military - donating their lives as willing cannon
fodder to the Noble Cause. Britain's skill in alliance-
building began to show itself with the initial entangling
treaties and the financing arrangement with the House of
Morgan, and continued to shine during the war as Britain
recruited fighting allies and found sources for needed war
materiel, food, etc.

As always, the overall British perspective was based in the
Balance of Powers doctrine. As an island power, Britain could
never compete on an equal basis militarily with the major
continental powers. One key to her long-term geopolitical
success was her ability through the centuries to play
continental players off against one another. Although Britain
certainly donated her own fair share of young corpses to the
Great War pyre, at the same time she had adroitly arranged for
most of the fighting in Europe to be between the Germans, the
Russians, and the French - none of whom wanted a war nor had
much hope of gaining anything from it. Due to its success in
this balancing act, Britain was able to send a million of its
troops off to the Middle East - while its allies were pinned
down fighting Germans - and pursue The City's objectives
regarding long-term control of oil sources.

British skills in alliance-building, acting, and betrayal were
brought together dramatically in the person of TE Lawrence "of
Arabia," who played the part of an Arab Freedom Fighter and
managed to get the Arabs to fight many of Britain's battles in
the struggle for oil dominance. Lawrence's acting achievements
in that theater make the Academy Awards pale by comparison.
After the war the promises of Arab independence were betrayed,
the hard fist of British imperialism came down on its wartime
Arab allies, and Winston Churchill went down in history as the
first government leader to order the gassing of the Kurds. In
similar fashion Argentina, which had provided all-important
beef to wartime Britain at good terms in return for British
promises of postwar benefits, found after the war that those
promises were worth less than the paper they were printed on.

---

* The bankers take control: the birth of the Council on Foreign Relations

I think the best way to present this material is to simply quote 
from Engdahl. Here are some key excerpts, selected from Chapter 5,
and re-ordered into chronological sequence...
           
            Had Woodrow Wilson not been persuaded to sign the Federal
            Reserve Act into law on December 23, 1913, it is questionable
            whether the United States would ever have committed the
            resources it did to a war in Europe. Without this new law, it
            is also doubtful whether Britain would have launched her bold
            designs... The house of Morgan and the powerful international
            financial interest of The City of London played the critical
            role in shaping a U.S. Federal Reserve System in the months
            just before outbreak of the European war.
            
            Morgan...as sole purchasing agent for the entire Entente
            group, became virtual arbiter over the future of the U.S.
            industrial and agricultural export economy... Firms such as
            DuPont Chemicals grew into multinational giants as a result of
            the privileged ties to Morgan. ....As purchasing agent alone, 
            Morgan took a 2 per cent commission on the net price of all 
            goods shipped. 

            At the time of the Versailles peace conference in 1919,
            Britain owed the United States the staggering sum of $4.7
            billion in war debts, while its own domestic economy was in a
            deep postwar depression, its industry in shambles...
            
            Morgan & Co. had quitely shifted their private British
            government loans over to the general debt of the U.S. Treasury
            as soon as the United States officially entered the war, in
            effect making the British debts the burden of the American
            taxpayers after the war. . . . As the U.S. war debt grew
            beyond anything known before in her history, the distinction
            between Morgan's interest and that of the government became
            blurred. The U.S. government increasingly made itself simply a
            useful instrument for the extension of the new power of New
            York's international bankers.

            The scale of the combined war debt burden of Europe was so
            large that is annual debt service demands on the world
            financial system were greater than the entire annual foreign
            trade of the United States during the 1920s. New York's
            international banking community redirected world capital flows
            to the service of this staggering debt burden...at the expense
            of the desperately needed investment in rebuilding...the
            war-torn economies of Europe.
            
            During the course of the Versailles talks, a new institution
            of Anglo-American coordination in strategic affairs was
            formed. Lionel Curtis, a longtime member of the secretive
            Round Table or 'new empire' circle of Balfour, Milner and
            others, proposed organizing a Royal Institute of International
            Affairs. ...The same circle at Versailles also decided to
            establish an American branch of the London Institute, to be
            named the New York Council on Foreign Relations, so as to
            obscure its close British ties.

Permit me to summarize our story so far. . . 

In order to protect their position in global finance, leading
bankers in The City decided that they would need to start a
war with Germany. Anticipating Britain's need for financial
support, the City worked with Morgan and others in Wall Street
to establish the Federal Reserve System, so that the U.S.
would be in a position to provide that financing. With that
accomplished, with Morgan ready to arrange the financing, with
their secret entangling treaties in place, and with the
cooperation of their fraternal brethren in British
Intelligence and Government, the conspirators in The City were
ready for their war. Perhaps they arranged Archduke
Ferdinand's assassination, or perhaps that was fortuitous, but
in any case it was The City that had created the powder keg,
and the assassination occurred right on cue, just when The
City had all its ducks in a row.

Morgan had seen his opportunity, not only to enrich his own
banking house, but at the same time to advance the power of
the Wall Street international banking community generally. He
joined forces with The City, becoming a co-conspirator in the
war project, and helped establish the Federal Reserve System.
He then carried out his part of the bargain brilliantly,
orchestrating the biggest private financing deal the world had
ever seen. The British fraternity performed equally well,
balancing the European powers against one another, and holding
the Germans to a near draw. As the war debts grew to
astronomical proportions, Morgan knew that Washington would
have no choice but to bail him out and enter the war, if that
became necessary for victory.

The Anglo-American banker's partnership proved itself to be
very effective. They arranged the biggest war in history,
carried it to a successful conclusion, and emerged in a
position to to effectively manage the postwar circumstances of
America, Britain, and much of Europe. The ongoing partnership
was formalized by the creation of two linked elite
institutions, the Royal Institute and the New York Council on
Foreign Relations, later to be called simply the Council on
Foreign Relations.

Britain had sometime earlier come under the control of an
elite fraternity, consisting of elements from the oil
industry, The City, and British Intelligence - with The City
being the prime mover in that fraternity. He who holds the
purse strings rules, and nothing happens in government or
business without financing. As a consequence of the debts owed
to Morgan and his backers, and with Morgan in control of the
repayment regime, Wall Street was now in a position to
establish a similar elite ruling fraternity in America, with
Wall Street as the prime mover. The Council on Foreign
Relations, controlled ever since by Wall Street banking
interests, became and remains the primary vehicle by which
American elites generally are brought into consensus on
national policy.

The oil industry was brought into the British fraternity not
because of the industry's wealth and power, which was not so
formidable at the beginning, but because control over oil
resources can be leveraged into control over global finance.
(In some sense it is really oil that is the hard exchange
currency in the world today.)  For these same reasons American
policy, under the leadership of the CFR, came to be based on
the synergy between control over oil and control over finance,
with government, Intelligence agencies, and the military
playing a supporting role to the banks and the oil cartels.

Yes Virginia, the world is controlled by an elite conspiracy,
and at the top of the power pyramid are the top Wall Street
international bankers, and their junior partners in The City.
Armed with this knowledge, we can much more easily understand
the agenda for the New American Century, the reasons for the
invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and why Britain always
aligns itself with American strategic policy.

---

I have, however, jumped way ahead in our story, skipping from
the days of Versailles to current time. I think it was
important to show how the arrangements made at that time have
set the pattern for what has followed, but we must go back and
fill in the intervening years. I'll be doing this in the next
installment, and we'll be moving at a much faster pace - just
covering the dramatic highlights. I hope many of you will buy
Engdahl's book ("A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics
and The New World Order") in order to get the full, extremely
interesting story.

For now, I'll set the stage for the next installment by citing two 
more excerpts from Engdahl:

            If Britain emerged as the territorial victor of Versailles,
            the United States, or at least certain powerful international
            banking and industrial interests, emerged in the early 1920s
            with the clear idea that they, and no longer Britain, were now
            the most powerful world economic power. For the next several
            years, a bitter power struggle took place between British and
            American international interests to settle this question.

            It took the entirety of the 1920s, in often bitter, almost
            military conflicts over war-debt repayment terms, rubber
            agreements, naval accords, the parity of a new gold standard
            and most significantly control of untapped oil regions of the
            word, before the Anglo-Amercan condominium emerged in its
            present form, and before the policy harmony between the circles
            of Morgan's Council on Foreign Relations and London' Royal
            Institute could take hold.

-- 

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Richard Moore (rkm)
Wexford, Ireland
blog: http://harmonization.blogspot.com/

"Escaping The Matrix - 
Global Transformation: 
WHY WE NEED IT, AND HOW WE CAN ACHIEVE IT ", old draft:
    http://www.ratical.org/co-globalize/rkmGlblTrans.html
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