[quote]Headhunter wrote:
DrSkeptix wrote:
Headhunter wrote:
DrSkeptix wrote:
Headhunter wrote:
DrSkeptix wrote:
Why bother looking into all this? If one believes in maniacal conspiracies, one can find fragments and threads in support. If you resent that you are a pawn, why would you surrender to the most manipulative sources out there, the Conspiracy Theorists?
Use your skills, man!
Don’t swallow it all, hook, line and “sinker.”
I am at work so obviously can’t research too much now. However, I have read from several sources. Here’s an over view: Britain was being beaten by sub warfare. This was making it harder and harder to sell British paper on the US Bond market. The British would be unable to continue fighting except by destroying the pound. They HAD to bring in the USA. So, Winston ordered that his ships fire on white flags, and never surrender. This made the Germans attack ships with no warning, which would eventually cause a catastrophe, like the Lusitania.
The Lusitania was a warship btw, not a passenger liner.
Not quite…
“…At the onset of World War I, the British Admiralty considered Lusitania for requisition as an armed merchant cruiser; however, large liners such as Lusitania consumed too much coal, presented too large a target, and put at risk large crews and were therefore deemed inappropriate for the role. They were also very distinctive. Smaller liners were used as transports, instead.
The large liners were either not requisitioned, or were used for troop transport or as hospital ships. Mauretania became a troop transport while Lusitania continued in her role as a luxury liner built to convey people between Great Britain and the United States.”
Your earlier assertions are more difficult to dispute because they are vague, but they also do not ring true and sound. First, the sub war was only 3 months along in May 1915; the burn rate was not yet threatening. (For the devastation caused to civilians–Germans, in 1918–see the horrifying descriptions in “Einstein in Berlin.”) Second, the Brits had no trouble selling paper to the US; by 1918, the US was converted from a net debtor nation to the largest creditor nation, largely by virtue of British debt (without much devaluation.)
My purpose here is to suggest, HH, that you are being led astray by “your sources.” I suggest, humbly, that you, as a teacher, would demand of yourself the same rigor which you demand of your students.
Alright, here we go:
“I think that the pressure of this approaching crisis has gone beyond the ability of the Morgan Financial Agency for the British and French Governments…The greatest help we could give the Allies would be such a credit…Unless we go to war with Germany, our Government, of course, cannot make such a direct grant of credit.”
(America’s Sixty Families, 1937, p. 141)
“On April 27, 1917, Ambassador Page reported confidentially to the President that the food in the British Isles was not more than enough to feed the civil population for more than six weeks or two months.”
(Crowded Years, W McAdoo, 1931)
Submarine warfare was devestating the British:
“At that time, it certainly looked as though we were going to lose the war.” — British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour (Woodrow Wilson and World War I, Robert Ferrell)
So let’s sum up: Submarine warfare was starving the British. It therefore looked as if they’d have to negotiate with the Kaiser. This made the bonds that Morgan had sold for them here unsafe and made it impossible to sell more bonds. The rich people, who had invested in British bonds, would be devestated.
You can fill in the blanks with what happened next.
Well, done. But I am not convinced.
The first quote is out of context. It refers to the failure of the French to pay war debt from WWI. I am not sure, then, to what period the quote refers. Perhaps it refers to the debt failure of the '20’s or later. But it certainly does not substantiate a debt crisis in 1915.
McAdoo’s recllectin is of interest. Vetted:
Ferrell here refers to Balfour as “foreign secretary” a post he did not hold until 1916. He was out of government in 1915, and not really part of the inner war cabinet at all until late 1917. So his quoted impression here refers to a later, more critical time in the WWI sub war.
My point: snippets, taken out of context may be challenging, but unless they fit the flow of fact, they are questionable “proof.” Surely, GB wanted US “in the war,” in one way or another, but I see no evidence whatsoever that Churchill personally arranged anything of which you accuse him.
No fact, no conspiracy. Where there are blanks, acknowledge blankness.
Why does a discussion (first quote) about French debt from WWI not being paid AFTER the war involve going to war with Germany? The war was over.
Balfour is speaking of the past, when it looked like we we’re ‘going to lose’. Being out of the government doesn’t make him blind to events.
I think you’re trying a little spin control here.
More, from Winston:
“The first British countermove made upon my responsibility…was to deter the Germans from surface attack. The submerged u-boat had to rely increasingly on submerged attack and thus ran the greater risk of mistaking neutral for British ships and of drowning neutral crews and thus embroiling Germany with other Great Powers.” (Churchill, The World Crisis, 1949, page 300).
Hmmm…encouraging Germans to murder innocent crews and passengers, all to get the USA into a war to save Britain.
I realize that morals have nothing to do with national survival but how’d this guy sleep at night? Maybe THAT’S why he took catnaps, instead of sleeping.
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I am sorry, I did not make myself clear. I was trying to discern context for each of these “supportive fact,” quotes called to support your contention of events in 1915.
In referring to Balfour–perhaps his comments had to do with 1917, when he was foreign minister, and not to the state of affairs in 1915.
Regarding the debt crisis referred to in a book of 1937: recall that the dabt crisis was at its worst in 1922-ish. France could not repay its debts to the US because Germany could not pay its reparations. There was talk, even after the occupation of the Saarland, of another war with Germany. Perhaps this quotation refers to that period, and not to 1915?
The quote from Churchill himself is wonderful, but I am going to have to go to my straining attic to find the book myself. I bet there is another explanation to offer…Do you really think he forced a tactic of warfare for the sole purpose of endangering neutrals? And no one else in the cabinet–or Lord Fisher, his nasty enemy–never revealed it???
And Churchill did not write the Zimmerman letter, did he?
Sorry, I am still not convinced by these citations.
OK. I confess.
I am not a scholar of WWI, and I am not particularly interested in it. I am an amateur.
I am picking on you, HH, in this fashion because I detest “conspiracy theories.” Mind you, I like good revisionist history, but the emphasis is on rigor, not bald conjecture. (If you would like to read about a real conspiracy of certain Britons to manipulate events after WWI, you may like Paul Johnson’s “The Intellectuals.”)
Conspiracy theories, or crackpot history, is no more to be respected than crackpot trigonometry. They are misleading; they are the ultimate conspiracy of lies in themselves. Conspiracy theorists are the real manipulators: it is their “hidden” agendas, which I suspect. Crackpot history deludes us into easy answers, and away from the rigorous search for something elusive called truth.
[In that regard, I give credit to Sloth, who, on another thread, is meticulously answering one more set of ridiculous assertions about 9/11]