The
Lies That Form Our Consciousness and False
Historical Awareness
By Paul
Craig Roberts
May 11,
2019 "Information
Clearing House"
- My generation associated
dystopias, such as George Orwell’s 1984,
with the Soviet Union, a country in which
explanations were controlled and criticism of
Stalin would land a person in the Gulag.
We thought of the United States and our
life here much differently. But with the passage
of time the difference between life in the
Soviet Union in the 20th century and life in the
Western world today is disappearing.
Today, the journalist Julian Assange is
undergoing the same kind of state terror and
torture as any Soviet dissident, if not worse.
The Western media is as controlled as the
Soviet media, with print, TV, and public radio
serving as a propaganda ministry for government
and the interest groups that control government.
Social media, such as Facebook and
Twitter are systematically denying their
platforms to those who express views not
supportive of the ruling order and its agendas.
It has turned out to be easy to get rid
of the First Amendment guarantee of free speech
as the media have neither the ability nor the
intention of exercising it.
It was
a mistake for my generation to associate
Orwell’s Memory Hole and falsified history only
with fictional or real dystopias.
Falsified history was all around us.
We just didn’t know enough to spot it.
What living and learning has taught me is
that history tends to always be falsified, and
historians who insist on the truth suffer for
it.
It has been established that many of the ancient
historians are unreliable, because they were
“court historians” who sought material benefit
by writing to please a ruler.
In my time many an historian has written
for income from book sales by enthralling the
public with tales of glorious victories over
demonized enemies that justified all the sons,
grandsons, brothers, fathers, uncles, husbands,
friends, and cousins who were sacrificed for the
sake of capitalist armaments profits.
No publisher wanted a truthful account
that no one would buy because of the stark
portrayal of the pointlessness of the deaths of
loved ones. Everyone, or almost so, wants to
think that their loss was for a noble cause and
was “worth it.”
With
few exceptions, English speaking historians have
put the blame for both world wars on Germany.
This is false history.
The first real historian of World War I,
or what was called at the time the Great War or
the World War, was Harry Elmer Barnes. Barnes
was Professor of Historical Sociology at Smith
College and the William Bayard Cutting Fellow in
History at Columbia University. His book, The
Genesis of the World War, was published in
1926 by Alfred A. Knopf in New York.
Instead
of covering up, as expected, the allied crimes
and treachery against Germany, Barnes told the
truth.
The German Kaiser, a relative of the
British and Russian royal families, was known
throughout the world as a peacemaker, praised by
the New York Times for that role. It is a known
and indisputable fact that the German government
acted for peace until Germany, the last power to
mobilize, had to mobilize or be overrun by
Russia and France, who were allied with the
British against Germany. Never before in history
has the very last power to mobilize been blamed
for starting a war.
But facts never get in the way of court
historians.
The
genesis of the war was the desire on the part of
two of the Russian Tsar’s ministers for
Constantinople and the French president for
territory, Alsace-Lorraine, lost to Germany in
the 1870 Franco-Prussian war.
These schemers used Austria’s response to
the assassination of the Austrian archduke in
Serbia, which they likely orchestrated, to
declare war as Germany was the protector of the
Austrian-Hungarian Empire.
American president Woodrow Wilson secured an
armistice to the World War, which had
senselessly destroyed millions of lives, by
promising Germany that if she agreed to an
armistice, there would be no territorial losses
for Germany and no reparations.
When Germany agreed to the armistice, it
was Germany that occupied territories of the
opposing camp. There were no foreign troops on
German territory.
As soon
as Germany disengaged, the British put into
effect a food blockade that forced starving
Germans to submit to the exploitative Versailles
Treaty that violated every promise that
President Wilson had made.
Some
intelligent people, including the most famous
economist of the 20th century, John Maynard
Keynes, said that the Versailles Treaty, an
exercise in coverup for who caused the war,
guaranteed a future war.
And they, not the grasping corrupt
establishment, were right.
For his
truth-telling efforts, Harry Elmer Barnes was
declared by the court historians to be a German
agent paid to write a false history.
As Barnes’ voice was greatly outnumbered,
the history of the Great War remained, for most,
falsified throughout the 20th century.
Barnes
was vindicated in 2014 when Christopher Clark at
Cambridge University published The
Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914.
Clark added to Barnes’ evidence that the Great
War resulted from a plot by two Russian
government ministers and the president of France
to steal coveted territory from Germany and
Turkey.
But one
hundred years after the war who is around to
care?
All the people who died in the war as
well as their bereaved families who suffered
from the plot of three evil men are dead and
gone. The consciousness of the world has already
been distorted by a century of false history, a
false history that set up Germany for blame
again, this time for World War II.
Stay
tuned, the lies about World War II are even more
grand.
Dr. Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of
the Treasury for Economic Policy and associate
editor of the Wall Street Journal. He was
columnist for Business Week, Scripps Howard News
Service, and Creators Syndicate. He has had many
university appointments. His internet columns
have attracted a worldwide following. Roberts'
latest books are
The Failure of Laissez Faire
Capitalism and Economic Dissolution of the West,
How America Was Lost,
and
The Neoconservative Threat to
World Order.
The
views expressed in this article are solely those
of the author and do not necessarily reflect the
opinions of Information Clearing House.