Berlin to Baghdad Railway built by German Jewish Money?

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Berlin to Baghdad
November 28, 2006

    When President Bush spoke of his war on terror a few years ago as a "Crusade", he had to be informed that that was not the word to use when addressing the middle east. (He is unlikely to have thought of replying that Islam has held previously-Christian territory for longer periods than Christianity has ever held previously-Moslem – but that is not a road one wants to go down.)

    On Armistice Day earlier this month, as far as I could see unnoticed, he did it again, at Arlington National Cemetery:

    "From Valley Forge to Vietnam, from Kuwait to Kandahar, from Berlin to Baghdad, our veterans have borne the costs of America's wars, and they have stood watch over America's peace."

    A few in the middle east might have winced at that, because the planned "Berlin to Baghdad" railway was a famous piece of imperialistic intervention at the beginning of the twentieth century. This railway from Berlin to "Byzantium" and on to Baghdad and ultimately to Basra was a German-sponsored scheme. If you prefer to exchange consonants, it was to run from Potsdam to Persia. The plan was to link Germany with the Persian Gulf.

    I suppose some or all of the lines as far as Constantinople already existed. In 1888 a syndicate headed by Deutsche Bank obtained a concession from Turkish leaders to extend the Haydarpaşa-Izmit Railway to Ankara. (Haydarpaşa is close to Kadiköy, opposite Istanbul on the Asian side.) The second stage was from Ankara to Konya. That line was completed in 1896. The Hejaz railway (these links are to an earlier post, but I am using modern place-name spellings here) was also built by German engineers.

    In 1903 the Ottoman Government gave permission to an Ottoman corporation to build the railway from Konya to Baghdad. This Baghdad Railway Company was controlled by German banks – which were no doubt run by "Jews" [I am alluding to conspiracy theories of the time]. Consternation erupted in Russia, France, and Britain as the implications of the German scheme became apparent. The railway would provide Germany with a connection to her colonies in Africa, ie German East Africa and German South-West Africa. German access to a Persian Gulf port could allow them to rival British shipping in trade with India. Even more threatening to British interests was the linkage of German industry to oil from Iraq and Persia. Oil from those countries was an issue long before oil from Arabia was: oil was not exploited on the Arabian side of the Gulf until the 1930s. And this German push also threatened Russia: the Anglo-Russian entente was formed in 1907. Previously Britain had been propping up Turkey to prevent Russian expansion.

    The Baghdad Railway had not been completed when war broke out. By 1915 it ended some 50 miles east of Diyarbakr, the Kurdish centre of eastern Turkey. Another spur, heading east from Aleppo, ended at Nusaybin (ancient Nisibis, or Greek Antiochia Mygdonia), in south-eastern Turkey. Some further rail had been laid starting in Baghdad and reaching north to Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's home town, and south to Kut, on the way to Basra. This left a gap of some 300 miles between the lines. The breaks meant that the Ottoman government had difficulties in sending supplies and reinforcements to the Mesopotamian Front – where Britain was fighting the Turks. During the war, Turkish and German workers laboured to complete the railway for military purposes, but with limited manpower. The gaps were not fully closed.

    In 1919, the Treaty of Versailles cancelled all German rights to their Railway. The Deutsche Bank had transferred its holdings to a Swiss bank. The settlement gave various interests in Turkey, Italy, France and Britain a certain degree of control. The British Army had completed the southeastern section from Baghdad to Basra, so that part was under British control. The French held negotiations to obtain some degree of control over the central portion, and Turkish interests controlled the oldest sections that had been constructed inside Turkey, but talks continued to be held. The American involvement began in 1923, when Turkey approved the Chester concession, to the consternation of France and England.

    In his book on Turkey published in 1917, from which I've already quoted twice (see Category: Ottoman Empire), Toynbee says much about German interests in Turkey. This book is a wonderful mixture of Toynbeean scholarship and propaganda, as are his early writings on the Armenians. He quotes a Dr Wiedenfeld:

"We are certainly interested in the economic advancement of Turkey ... but in setting ourselves to make Turkey strong we have been influenced far more by our political interests as a State among States (das politische, das staatlich-mächtliche Interesse). Even our economic activity has primarily served this aim, and has in fact originated to a large extent in the purely politico-military problems (aus den unmittelbaren Machtaufgaben) which confronted the Turkish Government. Exclusively economic considerations play a very subordinate part in Turco-German relations. ... Our common political aims, and Germany's interest in keeping open the land-route to the Indian Ocean, will make it more than ever imperative for us to strengthen Turkey economically with all our might, and to put her in a position to build up, on independent economic foundations, a body politic strong enough to withstand all external assaults. The means will still be economic; the goal will be of a political order."

    Toynbee adds:

It is worth remembering that a railway, following [a] route from the Syrian coast to the Persian Gulf, has more than once been projected by the British Government. As early as the thirties of last century Colonel Chesney was sent out to examine the ground, and in 1867 the proposal was considered by a Committee of the House of Commons. For the economic development of Western Asia it is clearly a better plan, but then Dr. Rohrbach bases the "necessity for the East Anatolian section of the Bagdad Railway" on wholly different grounds.

"The necessity," he declares, "consists in Turkey's military interests, which obviously would be very poorly served" (by German railway enterprise) "if troops could not be transported by train without a break from Bagdad and Mosul to the extremity of Anatolia, and vice versa."

The Bagdad Railway is thus acknowledged to be an instrument of strategy for the Germans and for the Turks of domination – for "vice versa" means that Turkish troops can be transported at a moment's notice through the tunnels from Anatolia to enforce the Ottoman pretension over the Arab lands.

    Turkey, A Past and a Future, Hodder & Stoughton, 1917

http://davidderrick.wordpress.com/2006/ ... o-baghdad/

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Rothschild action noted:
---------

D'Arcy captures the secret of the burning rocks

By 1905, British Secret Services and the British government had finally realized the strategic importance of the new fuel. Britain's problem was that it had no known oil of its own. It had to rely on America, Russia or Mexico to supply it, an unacceptable condition in time of peace, impossible in the event of a major war.

A year before, in 1904, Captain Fisher had been promoted to the rank of Britain's First Sea Lord, the supreme commander of British naval affairs. Fisher promptly established a committee to "consider and make recommendations as to how the British navy shall secure its oil supplies."

Britain's presence in Persia and the Arabian Gulf—the latter still part of the Ottoman Empire—was quite limited in this time. Persia was not part of the formal British Empire. For some years, Britain had maintained consulates at Bushire and Bandar Abbas, and kept British naval ships in the Gulf to deter other powers from entertaining designs on strategic waters so close to Britain's most vital colonial source of looting, India. In 1892, Lord Curzon, later Viceroy of India, writing on Persia, stated, "I should regard the concession of a port upon the Persian Gulf to Russia, by any power, as a deliberate insult to Great Britain and as a wanton rupture of the status quo, and as an international provocation to war..."2

But in 1905, Her Majesty's Government, through the agency of the notorious British "ace of spies," Sidney Reilly, secured an extraordinarily significant exclusive right over what were then believed to be vast untapped petroleum deposits in the Middle East. In early 1905, Her Majesty's Secret Service sent Reilly (born Sigmund Georgjevich Rosenblum in Odessa, Russia) with the mission to extract rights to exploit the mineral resources of Persia from an eccentric Australian amateur geologist and engineer named William Knox d'Arcy.

D'Arcy, a devout Christian who had studied history deeply, became convinced that accounts of "pillars of fire" at the holy sites of the ancient Persian God of Fire, Ormuzd, derived from the practice of the priests of Zoroaster lighting naptha—oil—seeping from the rocks in those select sites. He spent years wandering the areas where these ancient Persian temples existed, searching for oil. He made numerous visits to London to secure financial support for his quest, with diminishing support from British bankers.

Sometime in the 1890's, the new Persian monarch, Reza Khan Pahlevi, a man committed to modernizing what today is Iran, called on D'Arcy as an engineer who knew Iran thoroughly, asking him to aid Persia in development of railways and the beginnings of industry.

In 1901, in gratitude for his services to Persia, the Shah awarded to D'Arcy a "firman," or royal concession, giving D'Arcy "full powers and unlimited liberty, for a period of sixty years, to probe, pierce and drill at their will the depths of Persian soil; in consequence of which all the sub-soil products sought by him without exception will remain his inalienable property."

D'Arcy paid the equivalent of 20,000 dollars cash and agreed to pay the Shah a 16% "royalty" from sales of whatever petroleum was discovered. Thus the eccentric Australian secured one of the most valuable legal documents of the day, granting him and "all his heirs and assigns and friends" exclusive rights to tap the oil potential of Persia until 1961. D'Arc/s first successful oil discovery came in the region of Shushtar north of the Persian Gulf.3 Sidney Reilly managed to track D'Arcy down in 1905, just as the latter was on the verge of signing a joint oil exploration partnership with the French through the Paris Rothschild banking group, before retiring back to his native Australia.

Reilly, disguised as a priest and skillfully playing on d'Arcy's strong religious inclinations, persuaded d'Arcy instead to sign over his exclusive rights to Persian oil resources in an agreement with a British company which he claimed to be a good "Christian" enterprise, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. The Scottish financier Lord Strathcona was brought in by the British government as a key shareholder of Anglo-Persian, while the government's actual role in Anglo-Persian was kept secret. Reiily had thus secured Britain's first major petroleum source.

By rail from Berlin to Baghdad

In 1889, a group of German industrialists and bankers, led by Deutsche Bank, secured a concession from the Ottoman government to build a railway through Anatolia from the capital, Constantinople. This accord was expanded ten years later, in 1899, when the Ottoman government gave the German group approval for the next stage of what became known as the Berlin-Baghdad Railway project. The second agreement was one consequence of the 1898 visit to Constantinople by German Kaiser Wilhelm II. German-Turkish relations had gained high importance over those ten years.

Germany had decided to build a strong economic alliance with Turkey beginning in the 1890's, as a way to develop potentially vast new markets to the East for export of German industrial goods. The Berlin-Baghdad Railway project was to be the centerpiece of a brilliant and quite workable economic strategy. Potential supplies of oil lurked in the background and Britain stood opposed. The seeds of animosities tragically acted out in the Middle East in the 1990's trace directly back to this period.

For more than two decades, the question of construction of a modern railway linking Continental Europe with Baghdad was at the center of German-English relations as a point of friction. In the estimation of Deutsche Bank director Karl Helfferich, the person responsible at the time for the Baghdad rail project negotiations, no other issue led to greater tensions between London and Berlin in the decade and half before 1914, with the possible exception of the issue of Germany's growing naval fleet.4

In 1888, under the leadership of Deutsche Bank, a consortium secured a concession for construction and maintenance of a railway connecting Haidar-Pascha outside Constantinople, with Angora. The company was named the Anatolian Railway Company, and included Austrian and Italian shareholders as well as a small English shareholding. Work on the railway proceeded so well, that the section was completed ahead of schedule and construction was further extended south to Konia.

By 1896 a rail line was open which could go from Berlin to Konia deep in the Turkish interior of the Anatolian highlands, a stretch of some 1,000 kilometers of new rail constructed in less than 8 years in an economically desolate area. It was a true engineering and construction accomplishment. The ancient rich valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers was coming into sight of modern transportation infrastructure. Hitherto, the only rail infrastructure built in the Middle east had been British or French, all of it extremely short stretches in Syria or elsewhere to link key port cities, but never to open up large expanses of interior to modem industrialization.

For the first time, the railway gave Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire vital modern economic linkage with its entire asiatic interior. The rail link, once extended to Baghdad and a short distance further to Kuwait, would provide the cheapest and fastest link between Europe and the entire Indian subcontinent, a world rail link of the first order.

From the English side, this was exactly the point. "If 'Berlin-Baghdad' were achieved, a huge block of territory producing every kind of economic wealth, and unassailable by sea-power would be united under German authority," warned R.G.D. Laffan, at that time a senior British military adviser attached to the Serbian Army.

"Russia would be cut off by this barrier from her western friends, Great Britain and France," Laffan added. "German and Turkish armies would be within easy striking distance of our Egyptian interests, and from the Persian Gulf, our Indian Empire would be threatened. The port of Alexandretta and the control of the Dardanelles would soon give Germany enormous naval power in the Mediterranean."5

Laffan hinted at the British strategy to sabotage the Berlin- Baghdad link. "A glance at the map of the world will show how the chain of States stretched from Berlin to Baghdad. The German Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Bulgaria, Turkey. One little strip of territory alone blocked the way and prevented the two ends of the chain from being linked together. That little strip was Serbia. Serbia stood small but defiant between Germany and the great ports of Constantinople and Salonika, holding the Gate of the East... Serbia was really the first line of defense of our eastern possessions. If she were crushed or enticed into the 'Berlin-Baghdad' system, then our vast but slightly defended empire would soon have felt the shock of Germany's eastward thrust."

Thus it is not surprising to find that behind the enormous unrest and wars throughout the Balkans in the decade before 1914, including the Turkish War, the Bulgarian War, and continuous unrest in the region, the guiding hand of England was actively fostering conflict and wars, directed at rupturing the Berlin-Constantinople alliance, and especially the completion of the Berlin-Baghdad rail link, just as Laffan hints. But it would be a mistake to view the construction of the Berlin-Baghdad railway project as a "German" coup against England. Germany repeatedly sought English cooperation in the project. Since the 1890's, when agreement was reached with the Turkish government to complete a final 2,500 kilometer stretch of rail, which would complete the line down to what is today Kuwait, Deutsche Bank and the Berlin government made countless attempts to secure English participation and co-financing of the enormous project.

In November 1899, following his visit to Constantinople, German Kaiser Wilhelm II went to meet with Queen Victoria in Windsor Castle to personally intercede in favor of soliciting a significant British participation in the Baghdad project. Germany well knew that Britain asserted interests in the Persian Gulf and Suez in defense of her India Passage, as it was known. Without positive English backing, it was clear that the project would face great difficulties, not least political and financial. The size of the final leg of the railway was beyond the resources of German banks, even one as large as Deutsche Bank, to finance alone.

From its side, however, for the next fifteen years, England sought with every possible means to delay and obstruct progress of the railway, while always holding out the hope of ultimate agreement to keep the German side off balance. This game lasted literally until the outbreak of war in August, 1914.

But the trump card which Her Royal Britannic Majesty played in the final phase of the negotiations around the Baghdad railway, was her tie with the corrupt Sheikh of Kuwait. In 1901, English warships off the Kuwait coast dictated to the Turkish Government that henceforth they must consider the Gulf port located just below the Shaat al Arab, controlled by the Anaza tribe of Sheikh Mubarak al-Sabah, to be a "British Protectorate."

At that point, Turkey was too economically and militarily weak to do anything but feebly protest the British de facto occupation of this distant part of the Ottoman Empire. Kuwait in British hands blocked successful completion of the Berlin-Baghdad rail from important eventual access to the Persian Gulf waters and beyond.

In 1907, Sheihk Mubarak Al-Sabah, a ruthless sort who reportedly seized power in the region in 1896 by murdering his two half-brothers as they slept in his palace, was convinced to sign over, in the form of a "lease in perpetuity," the land of Bander Shwaikh to "the precious Imperial English Government." The document was co-signed by Major C.G. Knox, Political Agent of the Imperial English Government in Kuwait. Reportedly, there were generous portions of English gold and rifles to make the signing more palatable to the Sheikh.

By October 1913, Lt.-Colonel Sir Percy Cox secured a letter from the ever-obliging Sheikh, wherein the Sheikh agreed not to grant any concession for development of oil in the land "to anyone other than a person nominated and recommended by the British government."6.

By 1902, it was known that the region of the Ottoman Empire known as Mesopotamia—today Iraq and Kuwait—contained resources of petroleum. How much and how accessible was still a matter for speculation. This discovery shaped the gigantic battle for global economic and military control which continues to the end of the 20th century.

In 1912, Deutsche Bank, in the course of its financing of the Baghdad rail connection, negotiated a concession from the Ottoman Emperor giving the Baghdad Rail Co. full "right-of-way" rights to all oil and minerals on a parallel 20 kilometers either side of the rail line. The line had reached as far as Mosul in what today is Iraq.

By 1912, German industry and government realized that oil was the fuel of its economic future, not only for land transport but for naval vessels. At that time, Germany was itself locked in the grip of the large American Rockefeller Standard Oil Company trust. Standard Oil's Deutsche Petroleum Verkaufgesellschaft controlled 91% of all German oil sales. Deutsche Bank held a minority 9% share of Deutsche Petroleums Verkaufgesellschaft, hardly a decisive interest.

In 1912, Germany had no independent, secure supply of oil. But geologists had discovered oil in that part of Mesopotamia today called Iraq, between Mosul and Baghdad. The projected line of the last part of the Berlin-Baghdad rail link would go right through the area believed to hold large oil reserves.

Efforts to pass legislation in the Berlin Reichstag in 1912-13 to establish a German state-owned company to develop and run the new found oil resources, independent of the American Rockefeller combine, were stalled and delayed, until the outbreak of World War in August 1914 pushed it off the agenda. The Deutsche Bank plan was to have the Baghdad rail link transport Mesopotamian oil over land, free from possible naval blockade by the British and thereby make Germany independent in its petroleum requirements.

http://u2r2h.blogspot.com/2008/02/berli ... ilway.html

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Fashoda, Witte, Great Projects and Great Mistakes

Indeed, fear of the emerging German economic challenge towards the end of the 1890's was so extreme among the leading circles of the British establishment, that Britain made a drastic change in its decades-long Continental alliance strategy, in a bold effort to tilt European events back to England's advantage.

A seminal event, which crystalized this alliance shift, was, oddly enough, an eyeball-to-eyeball military confrontation over Egypt, where historically both England and France had major interests through the Suez Canal Company. In 1898, French troops marching across the Sahara to the east under Colonel Jean Marchand, encountered British forces under command of General Kitchener at Fashoda on the Nile. A tense military showdown ensued, with each ordering the other side to withdraw, until finally, after consultation with Paris, Marchand withdrew. The Fashoda Crisis, as it became known, ended in a de facto Anglo-French balance-of-power alliance against Germany, in which France foolishly ceded major possibilities to industrialize Africa.

The decision to send the French Expeditionary Force under Marchand to Fachoda for a head-on military confrontation with England in Africa, came from Colonial Minister Theophile Delcassé. Britain had steadily moved to what became a de facto military occupation of Egypt and the Suez Canal, despite French claims to the area going back to Napoleon. Since 1882, British troops had "temporarily" occupied Egypt, and British civil servants ran the government in order to "protect" French and British interests in the Suez Canal Company. England was stealing Egypt out from under France.

Delcasse acted against the better interests of France and against the explicit policy design of French Foreign Minister Gabriel Hanotaux. Hanotaux, who was absent from government for a critical six months when the Fashoda folly was decided, had a conception of development and industrialization of France's African colonies. A moderate Republican who was known as an Anglophobe, Hanotaux had a conception of an economically unified French Africa centered around development of Lake Chad, with a railroad linking the interior from Dakar in French Senegal to French Djibouti on the Red Sea. The idea was referred to in France as the Trans-Sahara Railway project. It would have transformed the entirety of Saharan Africa from West to East. It would also have blocked major British strategic objectives to control the entire region from Africa, across Egypt and into India. Hanotaux carefully pursued a policy of normalizing relations between France and Germany, a development most threatening to British balance-of-power machinations. In early 1896, the German Foreign Secretary asked the French Ambassador in Berlin whether France would consider joint action in Africa for "limiting the insatiable appetite of England... [It] is necessary to show England that she can no longer take advantage of the Franco-German antagonism to seize whatever she wants."

Then, the infamous Dreyfus Affair erupted in the press in France. Its direct aim was to rupture the delicate efforts of Hanotaux to stabilize relations with Germany. A French army Captain named Dreyfus was prosecuted on charges of spying for the Germans. Hanotaux intervened into the initial process in 1894, correctly warning that the Dreyfus affair would lead to "a diplomatic rupture with Germany, even war." Dreyfus was exonerated years later, and it was revealed that Count Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, in the pay of the Rothschild banking family, had manufactured the evidence against Dreyfus. By 1898, Hanotaux was out of office, and succeeded by the malleable Anglophile, Theophile Delcasse.

After Fachoda in 1898, Britain skillfully enticed France, under Foreign Minister Delcasse, to give up fundamental colonial and economic interests in Egypt and concentrate on a French policy against Germany, with Britain secretly agreeing to back French claims on Alsace-Lorraine, as well as supporting French ambitions in other areas not vital to British designs. Describing these British diplomatic machinations around Fachoda some years later (in 1909), Hanotaux remarked, "It is an historical, proven fact that any colonial expansion of France has been seen with fear and concern in England. For a long time, England has thought that, in the domination of the Seas, she has no other rival to consider than that power endowed by nature with a triple coastline of the Channel, the Atlantic and the Mediterranean Sea. And when, after 1880, France, induced by the circumstances and stimulated by the genius of Jules Ferry, began to reconstitute her dismembered colonial domain, she came up against the same resistance. In Egypt, in Tunisia, Madagascar, Indo-China, even the Congo and Oceania, it is always England she confronts."

After Fachoda, the Entente Cordiale was fashioned and ultimately formalized in a secret agreement between France and Britain, signed by Delcasse, Hanotaux' successor, in 1904. Germany's economic threat was the glue binding the two unlikely allies.

Commenting on this sad turn of events afterwards, Hanotaux noted the success with which Britain had imposed a new foreign policy on France, "a marvelous invention of English diplomatic genius to divide its adversaries."

Over the next eight years, Britain reversed its geopolitical alliance policy in another profound manner as well, and shifted developments in Russia to British advantage. Beginning 1891, Russia had embarked on an ambitious industrialization program with the passage of a stringent protective tariff and railroad infrastructure program. In 1892, the man responsible for the railroad plan, Count Sergei Witte, became Minister of Finance. Witte had enjoyed close relations with France's Hanotaux and a positive basis for Franco-Russian relations developed around the construction of the railway system of Russia.

The most ambitious project initiated in Russia at that time had been construction of a railroad linking Russia in the West to Vladivostock in the far East—the Trans-Siberian Railway project, a 5,400 mile-long undertaking, which would transform the entire economy of Russia. This was the most ambitious rail project in the world. Witte himself was a profound student of the German economic model of Friederich List, having translated List's "National System of Political Economy"into Russian, which Witte termed, "the solution for Russia."

Witte spoke of the rail project's effect on uplifting the culturally backward regions of the interior. "The railroad is like a leaven which creates a cultural fermentation among the population. Even if it is passed through an absolutely wild people along the way, it would raise them in a short time to the level requisite for its operation," he said in 1890. A central part of Witte's plan was to develop peaceful and productive relations with China, independent of British control of China's ports and sea lanes, through the overland openings which the Siberian rail line would facilitate.

As Finance Minister from 1892 until he was deposed during the suspiciously-timed Russian 1905 "revolution," Witte transformed Russia's prospects dramatically from its former role as "bread basket" for British grain trading houses, into a potentially modem industrial nation. Railroads became the largest industry in the country and were inducing transformation of the entire range of related steel and other sectors- Furthermore, Witte's friend and close collaborator, the scientist Dimitri Mendeleyev, who had founded Russian agro-chemistry based on the ideas of the German Justus Liebig, was appointed by Witte to head a new Office of Standard Weights and Measures, in which he introduced the metric system to further facilitate trade with the Continent of Europe.

Britain energetically opposed the economic policies of Witte and the Trans-Siberian Railway project with every means at its disposal, including attempts to influence reactionary Russian landed nobility linked to English grain trade. Shortly after the inception of the Trans-Siberian Rail project, a British commentator, A. Colqhum, expressed the dominant view of the British Foreign Office and the City of London. Referring to the new Russian rail project, undertaken with French financing and which would ultimately link Paris to Moscow to Vladivostock by rail, Colqhum declared, "This line will not only be one of the greatest trade routes that the world has ever known, but it will also become a political weapon in the hands of the Russians whose power and significance it is difficult to estimate. It will make a single nation out of Russja, for whom it will no longer be necessary to pass through the Dardanelles or through the Suez Canal. It will give her an economic independence, through which she will become stronger than she has ever been or ever dreamed of becoming."

For decades, British balance-of-power alliance strategy in Europe had been built around support of Ottoman Turkey's Empire, as part of what British strategists called the Great Game—blocking the emergence of a strong and industralized Russia. Support of Turkey, which controlled the vital Dardanelles access to warm waters for Russia, had been a vital part of British geopolitics until that time. But as German economic links with the Ottoman Empire grew stronger at the end of the century and into the early 1900s, so did British overtures to Russia, and against Turkey and Germany. It took a series of wars and crises, but following unsuccessful British attempts to block Russia's Trans-Siberian Railway to Wladiwostok, which the Russians largely completed in 1903, Russia was badly humiliated in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, in which Britain had allied with Japan against Russia. After 1905, Witte was forced to resign his position as Chairman of the Council of Ministers under Czar Nicholas II. His successor argued that Russia must come to terms with British power, and proceeded to sign over rights to Afghanistan and large parts of Persia to the British, and agreed to significantly curtail Russian ambitions in Asia.

Thus, an Anglo-French-Russian Triple Entente in effect had been fully established by 1907. Britain had created a web of secret alliances web encircling Germany, and had laid the foundations for its coming military showdown with the Kaiser's Reich. The next seven years were ones of preparation for the final elimination of the German threat.10.

Following British consolidation of its new Triple Entente strategy of encirclement of Germany and allies, a series of continuous crises and regional wars were unleashed in the "soft underbelly" of Central Europe, the Balkans. In the so-called First Balkan War in 1912, Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece, backed secretly by England, declared war against the weak Ottoman Turkey, resulting in stripping Turkey of most of her European possessions, followed by a second 1913 Balkan War over the spoils of the first, in which Romania joined to help crush Bulgaria. The stage was being set for Britain's Great European War.

On July 28,1914, three months after Edward Grey's Paris talks, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo by a Serb, setting off a predictably tragic chain of events which detonated the Great War.

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Arthur Bal four's strange letter to Lord Rothschild

Postwar British designs for redrawing the military and economic map of the Ottoman Empire included an extraordinary new element for its completion—more extraordinary, in that the advocates of the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine were English "Gentile Zionists" for the most part, including Lloyd George."

On November 2,1917, in the darkest days of the Great War, with Russia's war effort on behalf of the Anglo-French alliance collapsing under economic chaos and the Bolshevik seizure of power, and with the might of America not yet fully engaged in Europe as a combatant on the side of Britain, Britain's Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, sent the following letter to Walter Lord Rothschild, representative of the English Federation of Zionists:

"Dear Lord Rothschild, I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet: 'His Majesty's Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours for the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-]ewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.' 1 should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation. Yours sincerely, Arthur )ames Balfour" q

The letter was the basis on which a post-1919 British League of Nations Mandate over Palestine was established, and under whose guiding hand, territorial changes of global consequences were to be wrought. The almost casual reference to "existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine" by Balfour and the Cabinet was a reference to the more than 85% of the existing population, who were Palestinian Arabs. In 1917, less than 1% of the inhabitants of Palestine were Jewish.

It is notable that the letter was an exchange between two close friends. Both Balfour and Walter Lord Rothschild were members of an emerging imperialist faction in Britain, which sought to create an enduring global Empire, one based on more sophisticated methods of social control.

Also notable, is the fact that Lord Rothschild spoke, not as head of any international organization of Jewry, but rather as a member of the English Federation of Zionists, whose president at the time was Chaim Weizmann. Rothschild money had essentially created that organization, and had subsidized since 1900 the emigration of hundreds of Jews fleeing Poland and Russia to Palestine, through the Jewish Colonisation Association, of which England's Lord Rothschild was president for life. England was generous in offering lands far away from her shores, while in the same period she was far from having open arms to welcome persecuted Jewish refugees to her own shores.

But more relevant than the evident hypocrisy in the Balfour-Rothschild exchange, was the British geopolitics which lay behind the Balfour note. It is not insignificant that the geographical location for the new British-sponsored Jewish homeland lay in one of the most strategic areas along the main utter/ of the enlarged post-1914 British Empire, in a sensitive position along the route to India as well as in relation to the newly-won Arab petroleum lands of Ottoman Turkey. A minority settlement under British protectorate in Palestine, argued Balfour and others in London, would give London strategic possibilities of enormous importance. It was, to say the least, a cynical ploy from the side of Balfour and his circle.

Balfour backs the new concept of Empire

Beginning approximately in the early 1890's, a group of English policy elites, primarily from the privileged colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, formed what was to become the most influential policy network in Britain over the next half century and more. The group denied its existence as a formal group, but its footprints can
be found around the establishment of a new journal of Empire, The Round Table, founded in 1910.

The group argued that a more subtle and more efficient system of global empire was required to extend the effective hegemony of Anglo-Saxon culture into the next century.

At the time of its inception, this "Round Table" group as it was sometimes called, was explicitly anti-German and pro-Empire. Writing in the Round Table in August 1911, three years before England declared war against Germany, the influential Philip Kerr {Lord Lothian) declared, "There are at present two codes of international morality—the British or Anglo-Saxon and the continental or German. Both cannot prevail. If the British Empire is not strong enough to be a real influence for fair dealing between nations, the reactionary standards of the German bureaucracy will triumph, and it will then only be a question of rime before the British Empire itself is victimized by an international 'hold-up' on the lines of the Agadir incident. Unless the British people are strong enough to make it impossible for backward rivals to attack them with any prospect of success, they will have to accept the political standards of the aggressive military powers."10

In place of costly military occupation of British colonies, they argued for a more repressive tolerance shaped around creation of a British "Commonwealth of Nations," which were to be given the illusion of independence, enabling England also to reduce the costs of expensive far-flung armies of occupation from India to Egypt, and now across Africa and the Middle East. The term "informal empire" was sometimes used to describe the shift.

This emerging faction was grouped around the influential London Times, and included such voices as Albert Lord Grey, historian and member of British secret intelligence Arnold Toynbee, as well as H.G. Wells, Alfred Lord Milner of the South Africa project, and the proponent of a new field termed geopolitics, Halford J. Mack-inder, of the London School of Economics. Its principal think-tank became the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House), formed in the corridors of Versailles in 1919.

The idea of a Jewish-dominated Palestine, beholden to England for its tenuous survival and surrounded by a balkanized group of squabbling Arab states, formed part of this group's concept of a new British Empire. Mackinder, commenting at the time of the Versailles peace conference, described his influential group's vision of the role a British protectorate over Palestine would play in the of British advance toward a post-1918 global empire, to be shaped around the new British-defined and dominated League of Nations.

Mackinder described how the more far-thinking of the British establishment viewed their Palestine project in 1919: "If the World-Island be inevitably the principle seat of humanity on this globe, and if Arabia, as the passage-land from Europe to the Indies and from the Northern to the Southern Heartland, be central to the World-Island, then the lull citadel of Jerusalem has a strategical position with reference to world-realities not differing essentially from its ideal position in the perspective of the Middle Ages, or its strategical position between ancient Babylon and Egypt."

He noted that "the Suez Canal carries the rich traffic between the Indies and Europe to within striking distance of an army based on Palestine, and already the trunk railway is being built through the coastal plain by Jaffa, which will connect the Southern with the Northern Heartland."

Commenting on the special significance of the thinking behind his friend Balfour's 1917 proposal to Lord Rothschild, Mackinder noted, "The Jewish national seat in Palestine will be one of the most important outcomes of the war. That is a subject on which we can now afford to speak the truth...a national home at the physical and historical center of the world, should make the Jew 'range' (sic) himself ...There are those who try to distinguish between the Jewish religion and the Hebrew race, but surely the popular view of their broad identity is not far wrong."11

Their grand design was to link England's vast colonial possessions, from the gold and diamond mines of Cecil Rhodes' and Rothschild's Consolidated Gold Fields in South Africa, north to Egypt and the vital shipping route through the Suez Canal, and on through Mesopotamia, Kuwait and Persia into India in the East.

British conquest of the German colony of Tanganyika (German East Africa) in central Africa in 1916 was not a decisive battle in a war to bring Germany to the Peace table; it constituted completion of a vital link in this chain of British imperial control, from the Cape of Good Hope to Cairo.

The Great Power able to control this vast reach would control the world's most valuable strategic raw materials from gold, the basis of the international Gold Standard for world trade, to petroleum, emerging as the energy source of the modern industrial era in 1919.

This has remained as much geopolitical reality in the 1990's as it was in 1919. With such control, every nation on earth would fall under the sceptre of the Britannic Empire. Until his death in 1902, Cecil Rhodes was the prime financial backer of this elite new "informal empire" group.

The Boer War (1899-1902) was a project of the group, financed and personally instigated by Rhodes in order to secure firm English control of the vast mineral wealth of the Transvaal, at that time in control of a Dutch-origin Boer minority. The war itself, in which Winston Churchill rose to public notice, was precipitated by Rhodes and Alfred Milner, and others of their circle, in order to bring what was believed to be the world's richest gold-producing region firmly under British control.

The Transvaal held the world's largest gold discovery since the 1848 California Gold Rush, and its capture was essential to the continued role of London as the capital of the world's financial system and of its gold standard. Lord Milner, Jan Smuts and Rhodes all were part of the new Empire faction which defeated the independent Boers, and created a Union of South Africa as part of Iheir Great Game.12

Thus, by 1920 Britain had succeeded in establishing her firm control over all of southern Africa, including former German South West Africa, as well as the newly-discovered vast petroleum wealth of the former Ottoman Empire, by means of its military presence, conflicting promises, and the establishment of a British Protectorate over Palestine as a new Jewish homeland. But all accounts were not quite in order in 1920. The British Empire had come out of the war as bankrupt as she had entered it, if not more so.