By Paul Craig Roberts —
Does President Barack Obama realize that he is leading the United States and its puppet states to war with Russia and China, or is Obama being manipulated into this disaster by his neoconservative speechwriters and government officials? World War I was the result of the ambitions and mistakes of a small number of people. Only one head of state was actually involved—the president of France.
In 1926, historian Harry Elmer Barnes* wrote that WWI was the product of four or five people. Three stand out: President of France Raymond Poincaré, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Sazonov and Russian Ambassador to France Alexander Izvolski. Poincaré wanted Alsace-Lorraine from Germany, and the Russians wanted Istanbul and the Bosporus Strait, which connects the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. They realized that their ambitions required a general European war and worked to produce the desired war.
Barnes’s reward for confronting the corrupt court historians with the truth was to be accused of being paid by Germany to write his history. Eighty-six years later historian Christopher Clark in his book The Sleepwalkers** comes to essentially the same conclusion
as Barnes.
In the history I was taught the war was blamed on Germany for challenging British naval supremacy by building too many battleships. The court historians who gave us this tale helped to set up World War II.
We are again on the road to world war. One hundred years ago the creation of a world war by a few had to be done under the cover of deception. Germany had to be caught off guard. The British had to be manipulated and, of course, people in all the countries involved had to be propagandized and brainwashed.
Today the drive to war is blatantly obvious. The lies are obvious, and the entire West is participating, both media and governments.
Obama, or his handlers and programmers, are relying on the total historical ignorance of Western peoples. The ignorance and gullibility of Western peoples allows the American neoconservatives to fashion “news” that controls their minds.
Washington is the government that invaded and destroyed Afghanistan and Iraq on the basis of lies. Washington is the government that financed and organized the overthrow of the Libyan and Honduran governments and that is currently attempting to do the same thing to Syria and Venezuela. Washington is the government that attacks with drones and bombs populations in the sovereign countries of Pakistan and Yemen. Washington is the government that has troops all over Africa. Washington is the government that has surrounded Russia, China and Iran with military bases. It is this warmongering collection of Washington war criminals that now asserts that it is standing up for international ideals against Russia.
The position of the government in Washington and its puppet states (Eastern and Western Europe, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Georgia, Japan) and other allies purchased with bagfuls of money is that Washington’s violation of international law by torturing people, by invading sovereign countries on totally false pretenses, by routinely overthrowing democratically elected governments that do not toe the Washington line, is nothing but the “indispensable and exceptional country” bringing “freedom and democracy to the world.” But Russia’s acceptance of the self-determination of Crimean people to return to their home country is “a violation of international law.”
Just what international law has Washington, D.C. and its puppets not violated?
Who can possibly believe that Obama, whose government is responsible for the deaths of people every day in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya and Syria, cares a whit about democracy in Ukraine?
Paul Craig Roberts is a former assistant undersecretary of the U.S. Treasury and former associate editor of The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of many books including The Tyranny of Good Intentions, Alienation and the Soviet Economy, How the Economy Was Lost and others.
*For a sample copy of the magazine dedicated to the memory and work of Harry Elmer Barnes, please send a request to TBR, P.O. Box 15877, Washington, D.C. 20003. Also available: Who Started World War One?: An Unbiased Analysis of the Mitigating Factors of World War I by Dr. Barnes. Softcover, 60-page booklet. Order from above address or call TBR toll free at 1-877-773-9077 to charge.
**The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (softcover, 697 pages, $20 minus 10% for TBR subscribers plus $5 S&H inside the U.S.) is available from TBR BOOK CLUB at the above address. Call 1-877-773-9077 toll free. NOTE: Expect delivery in 2-4 weeks.
Special Subscription offer from Willis A. Carto, TBR publisher:
We are so pleased to see that columnist Paul Craig Roberts is aware of the work of historian Harry Elmer Barnes, the man I named my history journal after back in 1994. If you will subscribe to THE BARNES REVIEW magazine for one year at $46 (U.S. offer) from this ad, I will authorize the staff to send you a free copy of Dr. Barnes’s booklet Who Started World War One?: An Unbiased Analysis of the Mitigating Factors of World War I. We’ll start your subscription out with the first two issues of this year, January/February (“In Defense of Adolf Hitler”) and March/April (The Gunpowder Plot: 17th-Century False Flag?”). You’ll get four more issues this year—the May/June through November/December issues, as they come off the presses. Order by calling 1-877-773-9077 toll free. Mention you saw the ad here and I’ll also send you a free copy of my booklet on World War II! Note: Each TBR issue is 64 pages of factual, politically incorrect information.
