State propaganda was there to induce an “intense and cohering fear” into the hearts and minds of the people and all the fighting age males were called to defend the homeland. Leaving their farms, businesses and families behind was never an easy choice, but the patriotic call of duty could not easily be disregarded. The state often incentivized men to do the right thing by promising a share in the spoils of war or offering them tax benefits.
Many avoidable wars then turned into needless, protracted quagmires, resulting in large-scale slaughter of soldiers at the front. Invariably, history tends to ascribe such episodes to errors of incompetence, missed opportunities, issues of leader egos or other plausible factors. For some reason, the possibility that a war was deliberately orchestrated and that that the wholesale slaughter of troops was its desired outcome is virtually never even entertained.
Who would ever do such incomprehensibly evil things? In fact, historians often invoke Robert Hanlon’s quip, “never ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity.” But why should we be so sure that our leaders are only stupid or that they are incapable of deliberate malice. Take the history of World War I: most books and documentary films present the massive casualties of its many battles like those at Gallipoli, Loos or Somme as results of military generals’ stupidity…
The scene of the biggest British World War I offensive against the German forces was at Loos in north-east France, some 100 kilometers south-east of the city of Calais. In the morning of September 26, 1915, German troops saw about 10,000 British troops walking towards them across more than half a mile of no man’s land. The German machine guns were in protected bunkers behind long intact rolls of barbed wire, in belts up to 30 feet thick. The British moved forward in 10 columns, each about a thousand men - dead easy targets for German machine guns.
In the first two hours of the Battle of Loos more British soldiers died than the total number of casualties in all three services on both sides on D-Day 1944. Again and again they were called upon to attempt the impossible, and in the end, nearly all of them were killed. Shocked and nauseated by the sight of the massacre on what they called the Leichenfeld – field of corpses – the Germans occasionally held their fire to allow a few surviving British soldiers to retreat back to their trenches.
British offensive at Loos, under the command of General Sir Douglas Haig continued for another two weeks with more than 61,000 British casualties. Subsequent accounts explained this disaster in terms of incompetence, delusion, failure of intelligence and pig-headedness of General Haig. Generals, they say, always fight the last war and General Haig was no different. Supposedly, he didn’t appreciate that the invention of machine guns made infantry advances an impossible and obsolete tactic.
Except, Sir Douglas knew exactly what machine guns coud do. While serving in the Queens’ Hussars (Cavalry), he obtained a prestigious post at the Staff College in Camberley where he studied the new weapons, including the water-cooled Maxim machine guns that could fire 600 rounds per minute. In the Battle of Omdurman (Sudan) in September 1898, Haig and Winston Churchill saw first-hand the huge destructive power of the machine gun when tens of thousands of Mahdist warriors were mowed down in a matter of hours. Nevertheless, 17 years later he would send hundreds of thousands of British soldiers to walk slowly out over open grounds facing superior German machine guns.
If Haig’s performance was a failure of stupidity, one might expect that he’d be promptly demoted or discharged from service, but that’s not what happened. Sir Douglas was put in charge of another major British offensive at the Somme. On 1 July 1916, the very first day of the battle, British troops were ordered to walk slowly across the no-man’s land against German machine guns. That same days, 19,240 men were killed. The battle continued for 140 days during which the British army suffered 419,654 casualties.
One year after the Somme disaster, “Butcher Haig” came up with another plan for a major offensive and “war-winning breakthrough.” The Third Battle of Ypres was fought between July and November 1917. It is remembered for its utter futility: British forces gained only several miles of muddy terrain at a cost of over quarter of a million men killed, wounded or missing. In all, General Haig is believed to be responsible for approximately two million British (and Empire) casualties under his command.
Did the British high command investigate General Haig and punish him for the massive and needless sacrifice of British soldiers? Of course, they did not. After the war, General Haig was awarded 100,000 British pounds in recognition of the “great service he had rendered the nation.” This sum would be equivalent of about 4 million in today’s currency, but this was not all: British government bought the old clan Haig family estate at Bemersyde and presented the stately home with 1,400 acres of prime land to him. He was also given the noble title of Earl.
Adding insult to injury (and death) of ordinary soldiers, General Haig set up a welfare organization that raised revenues through the sale of artificial poppies commemorating the fallen soldiers. He lived out his days playing golf and touring Britain and the Commonwealth, officially unveiling war memorials to soldiers who died for “freedom and civilization.”
It may be that the story of General Haig is only a spectacular example of stupidity at all levels of the British establishment. From today’s perspective however, the episode is suspect. Today again, avoidable wars appear to be escalating and multiplying with no end in sight and Western political “elites” don’t seem phased in the slightest by the mounting casualties. Western economies are in deep crises, social uprisings and potentially even civil wars are looming, but state propaganda has raised the spectre of barbarian hordes once more.
The Russians are coming! If you live in the Americas, the Chinese are coming! President Trump’s war of choice against Iran is still escalating and its collateral damage could include a nuclear exchange and famine for a large proportion of the global population. There can be no doubt that stupidity is an important ingredient of the whole toxic brew. But we can’t dismiss the possibility that malice is also at play.
In 2001, Hollywood producer Barry Josephson wrote to Jeffrey Epstein, stating the following email message:
“I’ve been thinking a lot about that question that you [Jeffrey Epstein] asked Bill Gates, ‘how do we get rid of poor people as a whole,’ and I have an answer/comment regarding that for you.”
Today we know that Epstein and Bill Gates collaborated extensively. Their collaboration included work on planning pandemics and developing vaccines. Bill Gates even publicly mused about reducing the population through vaccination programs and “reproductive health.”
A whole long book could be written about these topics, and about Jeffrey Epstein’s employers, the Rothschild banking family who have been active in fomenting and funding many wars over the past two centuries. There is much circumstantial evidence that they may have played a role in instigating the current conflict in Ukraine, which is corroborated in Epstein’s 2014 correspondence with Arianne de Rothschild.
In light of all this, we must question the continued predictions about new pandemics, climate alarmism, attacks on farmers and food production systems, the “elites’” obsession with overpopulation, and other seemingly contrived crises, all of which seem to undermine life-sustaining systems humanity has created over decades and centuries, and push humanity closer to cataclysmic crises that could materialize in the future.
This may seem far fetched perhaps. But having witnessed many instances of “stupidity” over the past few years alone, we should be extra vigilant about the possibility of malice. Otherwise, we all risk slow-walking across no-man’s land like General Haig’s two million troops, resigned to the idea that complying and following orders is the right thing to do, or that non-compliance could be risky.
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By Independent News Roundup