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Killing St. George

There is an old Persian saying that if you go to any of the world’s trouble spots and turn over a stone you will find an Englishman.  These days, of course, it will be an Englishman doing an American’s bidding.  But for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, England enjoyed the power of decision on the world stage.  And so, no matter who appeared to be the troublemaker, it always seemed to be the British elites who came out on top.

This needs some qualifying because of the simplistic manner in which a dumbed-down version of history is taught these days.  Ordinary British working people did not come out on top.  Nor, for the most part, did the British state – which usually ended up adding yet more administrative and military costs to the increasingly crippling financial burden of empire.  And since, one way or another, the British people were required to fund that overburdened state, both tended to be net losers.  It was only a section of the ownership class – and especially the big banking families – who were the true winners from imperialism… effectively persuading the state and – as the franchise widened – the people to support military interventions on their behalf.

Of interest – and as relevant today as it was more than a century ago – is the – remarkably crude, but effective – means by which this was done.

The story begins with Richard Coeur de Leon – one of England’s non-English speaking Plantagenet kings (romanticised in the Robin Hood legend) – who adopted the emblem of St. George to provide spiritual protection to the Crusader armies.  St. George – who famously if implausibly saved the princess by slaying the dragon – was widely regarded as a military patron, and several European states had adopted the red cross on white background as their national flag.  But despite the use of the motif by various English armies in the Middle Ages, it would be several centuries before it was adopted by England as its national flag – appearing on naval ships during the reign of Henry VIII and incorporated into the union flag of England and Scotland in 1606.

St. George, a classical version of the hero archetype, chimes to a large extent with the Biblical story of David and Goliath, as the noble third party who intercedes in a conflict against the seemingly unassailable tormentor, and wins against all odds… And since both stories would have been readily known to our much more god-fearing nineteenth century ancestors, they were an ideal propaganda tool in the hands of an imperial elite determined to own or control every habitable landmass on the planet.

The approach which was developed by Britain’s imperial expansionists came in two forms which we ought easily to recognise today as:

  • The colour revolution, and
  • The just war.

Both were deployed by representatives of the banking and ownership class in the 1890s to secure the profits from diamond and gold deposits in the Transvaal.  British infiltrators along with anglophile Boers were encouraged to whip up anti-government sentiment among the Uitlanders – European settlers considered second class within the Boer Republic.  Government attempts to quell the protests were then exaggerated in the British press, making relatively modest policy actions appear like crimes against humanity.

Had this been simply an exercise in regime change, at this point the alternative – British-backed – government would have arrived to restore order.  But the banking class wanted complete control.  This meant that war had to be fought.  And, crucially, Britain had to avoid being seen as the perpetrator.  The Boer government was provoked into making a pre-emptive attack on the British troops mounting on the border, and before greater forces arrived from Britain.  This though, allowed the propagandists in the British media to paint the Boers as the aggressor.

The story of St. George was in place:  The Boers were the dragon, the Uitlanders the princess, and Britain the heroic St. George altruistically riding to the rescue.  It is a story which has been deployed by the Empire time and again to great effect in the decades since.  Most obviously in august 1914… a portrayal which adds another detail to the propagandists’ approach – to never admit the history leading up to the event.

The German army invaded Belgium on 2 August 1914.  On the same day, Britain’s Foreign Secretary made honouring the 1839 Treaty guaranteeing Belgian neutrality a resigning issue – either the cabinet honour the commitment or Grey would resign and the government would fall.  The following day, Grey put the matter before parliament, and issued Germany with an ultimatum to withdraw its forces by midnight.  This was for show, of course, since nobody expected Germany to comply.  But, once again, it allowed the British Empire to take on the mantle of St. George against the German dragon so as to save the Belgian princess.

It should go without saying that the geopolitics of the era were far more complex, and the British imperial elite far more perfidious.  Germany was certainly an economic rival to Britain.  And its foolish and wasteful naval build up had prompted Britain to upgrade the Royal Navy.  But for all that, Imperial concerns lay further east.

India was the lynchpin of the entire empire, providing the Royal Navy with control over the key Indian Ocean shipping lanes, and securing the key passage through the Strait of Malacca into the Pacific.  More recently, Persia – modern day Iran and Iraq – had grown in importance as the only secure source of oil for the empire at a time when the navy was switching from coal to oil.  But both were increasingly threatened by the Russian Empire’s expansion into Central Asia.  On India’s northwest frontier, Afghanistan – the place where empires go to die – acted as a buffer zone for the time being.  No such buffer stood to prevent Russia rolling up Persia from the north.  And so, one way or another, Russia had to be stopped.

The problem – apparent to strategists at the time – was that Russia was invulnerable.  There was no Russian coastline which the Royal Navy could assault that the Russians could not defend in larger numbers.  This had been glimpsed during the Crimean War – which Britain could only fight with the support of the Ottomans, who guaranteed access to the Black Sea.  By the late nineteenth century, the Russian railway network had been developed to the point that even with Ottoman support, it would be impossible to land in the Black Sea.  The same went for the Baltic and the White Sea.

This provides us with a glimpse of another element of imperial strategy.  Put simply, if you can’t beat them, join them.  Since Britain had no means of defeating Russia militarily, and could do little to undermine them economically, senior figures within the British elite engaged in a massive geopolitical U-turn – abandoning Britain’s historic ties with Austria-Hungary, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire in favour of an “entente” with its thousand-year enemy, France… a process designed to ingratiate Britain with France’s ally Russia – and in the longer-term, to surround Germany with hostile states.

The entente was a fig-leaf for domestic consumption – designed to pretend that Britain had not entered into an alliance.  It came, however, with all of the drawbacks of alliance with none of the benefits.  That is, under the terms of the entente, the British army and navy entered into joint planning with France in preparation for war with Germany.  Indeed, so advanced were the plans that by August 1914, the British army knew which railway carriages had been allotted to it, which billets its troops would sleep in, and where in Belgium its divisions would take up their frontline positions.  Meanwhile, the Anglo-French secret naval arrangement left the Royal Navy as the sole defender of the Belgian and Northern French coasts, so that the French navy could take the lead role in defence of the Mediterranean.  Neither arrangement was known to a majority in cabinet, still less in the government as a whole.

Exactly what happened in the “July Crisis” of 1914 will never be known because – rather too conveniently – all of the records have gone missing.  After the Russian revolution, for example, the Bolsheviks were more than happy to publish the secret diplomacy of their predecessors but were unable to throw light on this key month because the records had been destroyed in a fire.  What we do know is that the Russian government – against its objective best interests – was encouraged by the French President and his ambassador in St. Petersburg to take a militaristic response to Austro-Hungarian demands on Serbia.

The Austro-Hungarian government for its part was probably correct to detect the hand of Russia’s ambassador in Belgrade in the plot which led to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand on 28 June 1914.  Certainly, the weapons used had come from Russia, and Ambassador Hartwig had a track record of souring relations between Austria-Hungary and Serbia.  If true, this would square a circle in which Russia – at French behest – triggered the events which led Russia to mobilise its armies, thereby lighting the fuse of a European war.  But even if Russia wasn’t behind the assassination, its statesmen used the Austro-Hungarian response as a pretext for an attack on Germany.

In true British Imperial fashion, the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey gave the appearance of trying to defuse the crisis while providing no substance at all.  Publicly, Grey went through the motions of suggesting four-power (Germany, Russia, France, and Britain) conferences, while urging the German government to exercise restraint on its Austro-Hungarian ally.  Less obviously though, Grey acted with indifference, at best, to the gathering crisis.  Warned on 17 July 1914 by Sir Maurice de Bunsen, Britain’s Ambassador in Vienna, that Austria-Hungary was going to present Serbia with an ultimatum so harsh that it would inevitably result in war, Grey chose to go off on a weekend break. 

The following day, Sir George Buchanan, Britain’s Ambassador in St. Petersburg telegraphed Grey with the only form of words which might have caused Germany to stay Austria-Hungary’s hand:

“I thought you might be prepared to represent strongly at Vienna and Berlin danger to European peace of an Austrian attack on Servia.  You might perhaps point out that it would in all probability force Russia to intervene, that this would bring Germany and France into the field, and that if war became general, it would be difficult for England to remain neutral.”

A British intervention was the German government’s biggest fear throughout the crisis.  And right up until the last minute, they had hoped that Britain would remain neutral.  Buchanan’s wording would have disabused them of this while there was still time to prevent the war.  Instead, Grey pointedly chose to tell Count Mensdorff and Prince Lichnowsky, respectively the Austro-Hungarian and German Ambassadors in London, that he feared the outbreak of a four-power war – that is, a war between Austria-Hungary and Germany against France and Russia, with Britain pointedly absent.  Again, this gave the appearance of peace diplomacy while actually encouraging Austria-Hungary to take reckless actions which would likely, if not inevitably, result in a continental war.  Also notable by its absence was any attempt by Grey to persuade either Russia or France to tone down their increasingly belligerent attitude to Austria-Hungary and Germany – again demonstrating that Britain was anything but neutral during the crisis.

The Russian government miscalculated badly in July 1914.  At the time, it was half-way through a French-funded military infrastructure programme designed to allow it to match Germany in mobilisation speed.  It would thus have made more sense for Russia to hold back until 1917 or 1918, when the programme was complete.  On the other hand, the July crisis may have seemed too good an opportunity to pass up.  In any case, and almost certainly with the backing of the French President during his visit to St. Petersburg, the Russian chose to engage in the fiction of a “partial mobilisation” (no such thing existed, and any mobilisation was bound to lead to war) on 25 July 1914 – rendering all of Britain’s later faux-diplomacy irrelevant… it was only a matter of time until a pan-European war broke out.

The German government had come to more or less the opposite conclusion.  Since Russia’s military strength was going to increase, it was better to go to war sooner rather than later.  This attitude – particularly strong among the German military – no doubt persuaded the German government to give far more encouragement than it should have to Austria-Hungary.  Although this situation demonstrates another flaw in imperial geopolitics – all too often it is the junior partner which ends up calling the shots.  Without Germany’s almost unthinking “blank cheque,” Austria-Hungary could not have gone to war with Serbia.  Then again, the four-power war which Sir Edward Grey kept promising them was precisely the war they had planned for… only realising at the very last minute that the thing they feared most – a British naval blockade – was going to pull the rug out from beneath their military plans.

Those military plans have been greatly over-stated in the received history.  Far from being a rigid strategy, the “Schlieffen plan” was more a series of notes developed from military exercises since the turn of the century.  The apparent rigidity owes more to the high command seeking to steady the kaiser’s nerves on the eve of war… the kaiser had asked Von Moltke is the armies could be turned east if France remained neutral.  Von Moltke told him, it couldn’t be done, to which the kaiser famously retorted, “your uncle would have told me otherwise.”  The basic – albeit already flawed – proposition stood, however – Germany’s only hope of victory was in defeating the French armies in the west before the Russians had completed their mobilisation.

What was obvious to any planner with quarter of a brain was that, given the line of French forts along the common border with Germany, The German armies were bound to invade Belgium.  The question facing the British cabinet as war grew nearer was not whether but to what extent the invasion would be.  If the German armies just went through “a small corner of Belgium,” the majority of the government were prepared to allow it.  Only if the German army made a full-scale invasion would the war party – Grey, Asquith, Churchill, and Haldane – win the argument.  Which is why, despite French pleas and – more importantly – Russian threats, the British were unable to decide in favour of war until 3 August 1914… and even then, for public consumption, they insisted on issuing their ultimatum first (one consequence of which – recorded by Barbara Tuchman in The Guns of August – was that the two German battleships in the Mediterranean – the Breslau and the Goben – sailed past the Royal Navy and gained safety in Constantinople, where they became a key lever in bringing the Ottomans into the war against the entente).

Like the Boers in 1898, the Germans been manoeuvred into playing the role of the dragon to Belgium’s princess, allowing Britain’s St. George to ride to the rescue without public allegations of duplicity.  And the Germans undoubtedly played the role well, shooting innocent civilians and famously torching the library in Louvain.  But it is hard to argue that what Germany did in Belgium was any worse than what Britain had done in South Africa… the key difference was that the British always managed to appear regretful where the Germans celebrated atrocities – later, for example, the issuing of medals celebrating the torpedoing of the Lusitania very nearly brought the USA into the war.

The unwritten war aim pursued by Britain throughout the first half of the twentieth century – was to engineer a conflict between Germany and Russia in the expectation that both states would be burned to the ground in the process.  In 1914, “plucky little Belgium” had been cast in the role of the princess.  In the late 1930s – long before anyone knew just how depraved the Nazis were going to be – Britain’s imperial elite attempted to re-engineer the 1914 conflict.  This time Poland would play the princess.  And, for the most part, Britain’s press simply dusted off the stories from 1914, crossed out Belgium and substituted Poland…  What the imperial elite hadn’t bargained on was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which, at the stroke of a pen, rendered Britain’s naval blockade irrelevant.

To its detriment in the decades after World War Two, Britain emerged on the winning side despite having been defeated in 1940.  The British Isles together with its imperial possessions in North Africa, India, and the Pacific, became staging posts for the Americans as they brought the war to the Italian, German, and Japanese heartlands.  The Royal Navy, meanwhile, became mostly responsible for ferrying supplies across the Atlantic and on to the Soviet Union via Murmansk… the Soviet Union bearing the majority of the casualties in fighting the Germans to defeat.

Insofar as Churchill chose to carry on fighting in 1941 to preserve the British Empire, then he lost.  The price of the American support, without which the war could not be won, was the dismantling of the British Empire.  After 1945, the world’s affairs would be run by two superpowers – the USA and the USSR.  The old British and French empires were dismantled, and the home states relegated to the second tier.

The Americans gained a moral embellishment to the story of St. George courtesy of Nazi depravity.  As the allied armies entered Germany in 1945, the full horror of the network of death camps was revealed.  So much so, that Allied Supreme Commander Eisenhower decided to visit the Ohrdruf concentration camp – part of the Buchenwald complex – to see for himself.  Visibly shocked, Eisenhower told the accompanying journalists that:

“They say the American G.I. doesn’t know what he is fighting for.  At least now he knows what he is fighting against.”

More importantly – and perhaps anticipating the era of fake news – Eisenhower insisted that the world’s media document the atrocities to prevent any possibility of claims that they had not happened.

In the hands of the post-1945 American imperialists – many of whom were descended from British aristocratic families – the evils of the Nazis became another stick with which to beat any national leader whose regime they had decided to change.  Ho Chi Minh became “literally Hitler!”  So, in turn, did Gaddafi, Saddam, Kim Jong Un, Putin, and Xi Jinping, as each were portrayed as the latest dragon to be slain by the American version of St. George.

The list of surrogate Belgiums has grown accordingly to include South Korea, South Vietnam, Afghanistan (twice), Kuwait, Georgia, Ukraine, and (coming to a new warzone soon) Taiwan – each engineered as targets for attack by the western imperialists through the use of economic warfare and colour revolutions.

The only remarkable thing is that, despite revolutions in mass communications, the story of St. George and the dragon persists… and the majority of westerners fall for it every time it is deployed.  Which says something else about the nature of empire – that it is far too hard to control.  While a small neocon inner circle may be playing – and losing so far as I can see – a geopolitical grand strategy game, it is impossible to communicate a justification of this via a deliberately dumbed-down media whose editors and journalists are not in on it.  Instead, the same dumb story is trotted out without any serious attempt to question its obvious flaws.

Even more important than the internal flaws within the St. George narrative though, are the external consequences.  Because while the British and later the Americans may have claimed to be fighting just wars, it ought not to escape our attentions that for the most part the empire ends up on the losing side.  The British were given a bloody nose by the Boers.  The Russian and French collapses in 1917 left Britain in hock to the Wall Street banks at the end of a First World War that had to be saved by US intervention.  And following the British 1934 default on those war debts, the USA which once again pulled the British fat out of the fire after 10 December 1941, was determined that the price of victory would be the dismantling of the British Empire.

The US wannabee imperialists might have taken time out to study this.  Instead, within months of the end of the Second World War they were playing St. George on the Korean peninsula – and having their arses handed to them by the Chinese.  Ditto former French imperial Indochina.  Military success of sorts was achieved in Afghanistan and Iraq – but only for the price of ruinous – and ultimately unsustainable – occupations to pacify local populations more hostile to the empire than the governments that were removed.

The limits of empire were spelled out in 2011, when the – then – loose association of China, Iran, and Russia stepped in to prevent the US neocons from conducting regime change in Syria… a defiance which has undoubtedly fuelled neocon determination to conduct regime change in all three countries, beginning with Russia.  But that too, has failed.  All of those hi-tech weapons that the western arms manufacturers claimed would be war-winners have proved to be next to useless in a real war against a country with the resources to fight back.  Moreover, the attempt at economic warfare against a country with most of what remains of the world’s energy and mineral resources has proved disastrous for western economies whose main product is fiat currency and accounting services.  Indeed – although you wouldn’t know it from western establishment media coverage – the main consequence of the western attempt at regime change in Russia has been the development of a BRICS economic bloc containing more than 75 percent of the world’s countries and more than 80 percent of the world’s remaining resources.

This time around – hopefully economically rather than militarily – the dragon looks set to kill St. George.  And given the tragic history, that is surely no bad thing… at least unless your wealth is solely a product of the sale of ultimately worthless fiat currency.

As you made it to the end…

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