And don’t say it was because leftist Yugoslavian patriot Gavrilo Princip joined with Muslim leftists to assassinate Austrian imperialist Archduke Franz Ferdinand – that explanation exists only because Western schoolchildren need something to recite.

 

Gavrilo Princip, 19 years of age, sitting at the centre of the front row, at his trial on December 5, 1914. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Few know the right answer: it was a war concocted by Western high finance in order to forestall the anti-1% revolution inspired by socialism. Given that the West is a bankocracy, with bankers as their enlightened, benevolent vanguard party – how can we expect their textbooks to tell the truth here?

Thus their “intelligent” analysis is the absurd myth that World War One was actually “an accident”. So we are to believe that the battle of Verdun lasted nine months and caused 700,000 casualties just because the average French and German soldier said, “Well, as long as we’re here… how about a good fight?”

Archduke Ferdinand and morganastic wife Duchess Sophie boarding car a few minutes before their assassination. As fate would have it, Princip thought the attempt had failed when the royal pair serendipitously crossed his path.

It’s preposterous, but it seems plausible when the West’s prior five decades of history also routinely go unexplained. The post-1860s birth of modern capitalism was actually far, far, FAR more deadly and evil than the formative years of socialism (and even without a Cold War to create sabotaging difficulties). The body counts aren’t even close – even further apart are the moral aims of the two systems.

The legendary book Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis illustrated how US, UK and French imperialists purposely created and/or purposely failed to flatten the curve of multimillion-murdering epidemics and famines in order to adhere to (and obviously profit from) the new liberal economic dogma of a “free market”. If you thought 1930s Soviets or 1950s Chinese or 1980s Iranians were ideologically extremist, then that’s because you have not learned about the raging capitalist genocidists of the late 18th century.

WWI: German soldiers in France, wearing gas masks, with their dogs, c. 2016.

If you don’t teach that historical context, then how can World War One make sense? Thus, in order to protect their capitalist-imperialist ideology, World War One is an unexplainable aberration for the “advanced” Western intellectual.

Of course, even in the 1870s liberal ideology failed to create wealth for anyone but the 1% (whether Westerner or client/puppet) – the wealth has never, ever trickled down. What liberalism has always done is to permit increased market concentration and political power in a new 1%er aristocracy controlled by international bankers.

So the problem was not the nation-state, as Trotskyists assert – it was economic liberalism, i.e. globalisation. The idea that globalisation began around 1992 is a fiction, of course. This allows capitalists to keep ignoring their past crimes, and it has worked – their people cannot even explain why just a century ago their great-grandfathers fought their neighbors in trenches with chemical weapons.

We now know that the reason is that the Western 1% had stolen the wages and natural wealth from the entire world but now on an industrial scale and without any national patriotism, thus they conspired to forestall the socialist-inspired, progressive social changes which were the Western 99%’s only logical response to being forced to witness and participate in such atrocious money- and power-grabbing schemes. The common Marxist analysis back then was too hopeful: World War One was not the “final decline” of capitalism and imperialism – it was proof that international high finance will conspire however they can to prevent that final decline.

Indeed, socialism began in Western Europe and not elsewhere not because they are more “advanced” but because their lower classes were witnessing what their upper class was doing with the widest overview. Of course, they were shocked and proposed alternatives which they called “socialism”. But how could an Iranian or Chilean or Ethiopian have come up with such an idea – industrial & high-finance capitalism, and these “worst of humanity impulses on the largest scale”, were totally unimaginable and foreign until the moment that the Western 1% dropped their (debt) slave net on him or her?

Today we must say “no” to such collusions, not only because we have a duty to learn from a history our great-grandparents could not understand, but also because the same scheme keeps on being employed.

Tough hombres: As usual, the British mobilized hundreds of thousands of "colonials". India's Singhs, renowned for their warrior ethic, died by the tens of thousands. France's colonies in Africa, Asia and the Middle East also saw their men spilling their blood for a cause that certainly was not theirs.