James Corbett, “The Corbett Report (Episode 348: The WWI Conspiracy – Part Two: The American Front)” (November 2018)
Having established in Part 1 that a Deep State within the British government in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with connections to the monarchy and the civil service, connived to isolate Germany through propaganda and by forming alliances with nations on either side of that country, this three-part series continues with all the major European powers now at war after mid-1914, Germany having to fight enemies on two fronts on its western and eastern borders, and all opposing sides bogged down either in trench warfare in the west or ineffective leadership and strategies leading to constant back-and-forth exchanges of territory in the east. In the west, with both the British, French and German forces locked in stalemate, and all losing hundreds of thousands of soldiers in trench warfare, the British government connived with American financiers to get the American people involved in fighting the war against Germany. Part 2 examines how the groundwork was laid to push the US into allying with Britain and France to fight Germany in World War I well before the war even began.
The work begins with wealthy American banker John Pierpont Morgan and his allies in the US finance industry supporting obscure Princeton university professor Woodrow Wilson as Presidential candidate in the 1912 elections and ensuring that he wins by using former President Theodore Roosevelt as a third party candidate to split the Republican vote. Once in, in 1913 Wilson approves the passage of the income tax act and the Federal Reserve Act which creates the Federal Reserve as a central bank with Morgan and several of his friends as shareholders. From then on, these bankers would be in charge of printing money and would charge the government interest on any money it borrowed from the Federal Reserve. Several of these men were members of the Milner Group, that secret organisation formed by William T Stead, Reginald Brett and Cecil Rhodes, which had worked to influence the British government to make Germany an enemy and to turn the British people against Germany, and the American and British members of the Group plotted to turn the American people against Germany through extensive news propaganda – even though most Americans at the time, being of Irish or Germany descent, were opposed to Britain – and to create a pretext to bring the United States into fighting a European war.
The pretext comes with Britain’s war against Germany on the high seas in the North Atlantic, with Britain enforcing a trade blockade against Germany that eventually leads to widespread starvation in that country. Because of this blockade and other trade sanctions against it, Germany resorts to submarine warfare against British merchant shipping. In May 1915, Germany torpedoes the British passenger liner RMS Lusitania, resulting in the deaths of nearly 1,200 passengers and crew, including 128 Americans. The incident helped to turn American public opinion against Germany. In 1916, Wilson was re-elected President, riding high on propaganda that he had kept the US out of war. In April 1917, after continued German submarine warfare on merchant shipping in the North Atlantic (including US merchant ships), the Germans having become desperate due to the prolonged blockade, Wilson declares war on Germany and the US governt begins conscripting and training men to fight in the battlefields of northern France.
Again the documentary does a good job presenting its case that Wall Street financiers and banks created a situation in which they were able to select their own preferred Presidential candidate and install him as President by weakening his opposition, and then connived with their British partners to put a cruise ship and its passengers and crew in harm’s way to pressure Washington DC into agreeing to join the war in Europe. Archival film footage and photographic stills including cut-outs of significant personalities flesh out the voice-over narration and the whole film proceeds at a leisurely pace. Interviews with historians go into considerable detail on how the US government ignored the British blockade of Germany – clearly a war crime – and ignored British interference with American merchant shipping but castigate the Germans for blowing up British merchant ships carrying munitions if American citizens happen to be on board.
In this documentary, the way in which a secret cabal not only gains power behind the British government but also gains power behind the American government, and moreover uses that power to control America’s money supply and money creation functions, to potentially hold the American government and the American people to ransom by demanding interest payments on loans to the government, and (later) to influence post-war European politics and German reconstruction, resulting in the spread of the Great Depression and paving the way for Adolf Hitler to gain power in Germany, is made very clear.