The Soldiers Memorial and WWI cemeteries
CHAPTER 21
The cost of the Bush war against Iraq was running at around
$420 billion in mid 2005, and the Bush family wants more
money for their ill-starred venture. And knowing the
American people and their hapless, helpless ail-but useless
representatives in the legislature, Bush will get what he
wants.
The figures of the dollar cost of WWI do not tell anything about the sorrow and suffering brought to America by Wilson, the transgressor. We insert here a recent article, which gives a poignant, personal touch to the dreadful loss of life in that nightmarish war.
"Several weeks ago I visited with my family the Soldier's Memorial Museum in the heart of downtown St. Louis. It is a huge and deeply impressive building, dedicated in 1936 by President Roosevelt as a memorial to the 1075 men of St. Louis who died in the First World War. The memorial is painfully beautiful, all mosaics and marble, with terrazzo floors and Bedford stone sculptures. It is dominated by the vast black granite cenotaph in its center, covered with the hundreds of dead men's names in neat row upon row."
"On the day we visited this striking but haunted place it seemed completely empty. While empty of visitors, it was, however, full of the spirits and voices and faces of the pale, tousled-headed boys in neatly-pressed uniforms, who had marched off from St. Louis 86 years ago to fight in a glorious war so far away in a far-off land, boys who had never come back home.
The poignancy of that was rendered all the stronger by the fact that we are living daily with the repercussions of current conflict, the savage bloody war in Iraq. We read daily of the boys who will never come back home."
"What struck me most as I walked around the memorial and the museum, holding my newborn baby girl, was the fact that it looked like so many memorials that I had visited in my home country of Scotland. It also looked like those I had visited in France, in England and in Canada and New Zealand and it looked just like the memorials in almost every other country touched by the carnage of World War One."
"In almost every country touched by the carnage of WWI, the so-called "War to End all Wars;" men rushed to join the military and marched off to war with great enthusiasm. They believed it would be a short, sharp and successful war, fought for good reasons, and glorious for the winners. They believed they were building a better world."
"They were wrong. An average of 5,500 men died every single day for four and a half years in the First World War; that is roughly four men per minute, every minute, for four and a half years, until 10 million men were dead. The First World War did more than destroy lives; it destroyed the confidence in progress, in prosperity and in reasonableness of civilized human beings that had become so characteristic of the nineteenth century. The war destroyed much of the next generation which would have provided leadership to Europe ..."
"And this morning, as I sit holding my baby girl I read daily reports of escalating violence in Iraq, with British, Iraqi and American men continuing to die, the St. Louis Soldier's - a memorial to a war that should have never been fought - haunts me and their ghosts haunt the Memorial. It was the worst of all disasters, the war that should have never been fought-haunts me."
"The Neo-Conservative brains in the U.S. Administration would have been wise to visit places like this and think long and hard about the lessons of such memorials before embarking on a war in the Middle East that has already killed an unknown number of people and which will certainly kill many more, directly and indirectly.
(Written by Professor Dr. James Lachlan MacLeod, Associate Professor of History, University of Evansville, Indiana).
My experiences parallel those of Professor MacLeod. I visited the battlefields of Verdun and Passchendale where most of the slaughter he so ably recounts, occurred. I tried to imagine 10 million soldiers dying so young, the terror, the horror and the sorrow they experienced, and the inconsolable sorrow of the ones they left behind. While standing in the afternoon's fading light in one of the many war cemeteries in France, and looking upon the thousands upon thousands of neat white crosses marching across the war cemeteries, I was overcome by anger and then overwhelmed by grief, so much so that I swear I heard the cries and the shouts of anguish of the dead calling for justice to be done, so cruelly cut down in their prime, and seemed to see their faces reflected in the clouds above.
It was a mystical experience I will never forget, much like the experience of a British officer who visited these battlefields in 1919:
Yesterday I visited the battlefields of the last years. The place was scarcely recognizable. Instead of a wilderness of ground torn up by shells, the round was a garden of wild flowers and tall grasses. Most remarkable of all was the appearance of many thousands of white butterflies which fluttered around. It was as if the souls of the dead soldiers had come to haunt the spot where so many fell. It was eerie to see them. And the silence! It was so still that I could almost hear the beat of the butterflies' wings. (From records in the British War Museum in London)
My intense feelings of outrage made me determined to find out everything I could about a terrible war that began with massive gout of propaganda, the scourge of the modern world. It was another decisive reason for writing this book and exposing the evil of Tavistock. Sir Roger Casement thought Lord Bryce ought to have been hanged for treason and I feel Wilson ought to have suffered a similar fate, which would have stopped Roosevelt and Churchill from plunging the world into a second round of carnage. Propaganda prevailed, and the western civilized world was lost.
The world we knew, the world established by western civilization, is gone. Spengler's gloomy predictions proved right. In place of our western civilized world we shall soon see the ghastly edifice of the new Communist Socialist One World Government looming up through the darkness of the coming long night.
Let there be no doubt that the First World War was caused by Britain and her ally, the United States of America with the aide of Wellington House. The war could not have been mounted without the dark forces of Wellington House. The name of Lord Grey, its principal architect will go down in history as traitorous dishonest politician.
There is no consensus as to why Britain started WWI. But by 1916, the German Army had defeated the French and British armies in a most decisive manner. Wilson was under heavy pressure to get American troops shipped to Europe, so Wellington House unleashed an all-out propaganda war against the American people, but which nevertheless, remained ineffective until the Bryce Report was published.
To understand what is happening in Iraq is impossible unless we make ourselves fully cognizant with the terrible propaganda deployed against the British and American people in 1913 and 1940. It was one of the darkest and most foul chapters in history, with Wilson mouthing such lies as a" just war", and "a war to end all wars", a war "to make the world safe for democracy." What the war was about was to make trade safe for Britain especially, and France now being threatened by German industry.
But they were words in obfuscation of his true intent and meaningless in that context, just what you'd expect from a politician. The kind of bunkum one find's on a society page.
Wilson's talk of "making the world safe for democracy" was nothing more than colored gas bubbles. He was proposing to go into the war on the side of the English, who were at that very moment making sure there was no popular democracy in the Empire.
The English had just brutally finished off the Boers in South Africa in a cruel war that lasted three years. If Wilson wanted to make the world "safe for democracy", he ought to have gone to war on the side of Germany against England, the aggressor and instigator of the war.
Instead of "making the world safe for democracy" it turned out to be the greatest calamity ever to befall civilized nations that had fallen into the clutches of men who were corrupt immoral liars, into a war quite properly called, "The Great War." It was of course only "great" in its size and scope.
We will never understand how the United States became the "sole great power," unless we confess to the sins of Wilson and the British establishment of 100 years ago. The United States has continuously entangled itself in the affairs of other sovereign nation's affairs, despite the dire warning of George Washington, and the first instance of this was our entry into WWI and the failed League of Nations. Wilson made full use of the master propagandists of Wellington House using sloganeering as a sword, told the reluctant Senate that if it did not ratify the League of Nations "it will break the heart of the world."
Thanks to Senator Cabot Lodge, and a number of U.S. Senators who after sober reflection and examination of the U.S. Constitution, declined to ratify the League of Nations treaty because they discovered it sought to kill U.S. sovereignty. Using and abusing his penchant for propaganda, Wilson tried to carry the day by declaring his re-election campaign "a great and solemn referendum for acceptance of the treaty" but not having Lord Bryce to back him, lost, and was swept away.
Unfortunately it did not take the pliers of propaganda long to stage a comeback with the revamped United Nations version of the League of Nations. Truman, (not the simple hat seller from Missouri but the Master Mason) betrayed the American people by permitting this one-world edifice in the U.S. and Truman used propaganda left over by Wilson to persuade key senators to vote for his lies.
What Truman did was force the American nation to enter into a pact with the devil-the devil of power over justice and truth, justice from the barrel of a gun. We applied that "justice" in WWII through mass bombing of civilian centers without regard to loss of life and we used atomic bombs on Japan, although the war was over, in the propaganda ploy of "shock and awe" echoed by Rumsfeld in the unconstitutional war against Iraq.
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