Friday, June 24, 2011

L'Histoire contemporaine: une "fable convenue"


par Sagesse Païenne, Foi Chrétienne 16 juin 2011

L'Histoire contemporaine:

une "fable convenue"


« Fable convenue » – en français dans ses textes – c'est ainsi que Rudolf Steiner qualifiait toujours l'Histoire contemporaine dans ses conférences, insistant systématiquement sur le caractère illusoire, voire outrageusement frauduleux, de ce que seul un aveugle ou un benêt pourrait encore aujourd'hui gober : autrement dit tout ce que la grosse médiacratie politique s'entend si bien à présenter depuis 60 ans sans vergogne aux masses – masses de plus en plus manipulées, flouées, baladées au gré de l'information du jour. L'hypocrisie éhontée des gouvernements et des médias de notre époque devient, en effet, telle que quiconque réfléchit un tant soit peu ne peut que se sentir enclin à révoquer toujours plus en doute ce qu'ils s'efforcent de faire accroire : « Nous ne te contraindrons pas, nous pénétrerons dans ton âme, dans ton inconscient et nous te ferons vouloir ce que nous voulons que tu veuilles. » (Sergueï Kara-Mourza, « La Manipulation de la conscience »)
Dans quelque direction que vous vous tourniez, vous vous trouverez sans cesse confrontés, pour peu que vous vous donniez la peine de vérifier, au mensonge, à l'imposture d'état conditionnant les esprits en vue d'intérêts partisans sans nul égard envers la plus élémentaire vérité, muselant et bâillonnant d'autant plus fort toute tentative de la mettre en lumière.
Il n'est besoin que de se remémorer la grosse imposture du 11 septembre et celle des armes de destruction massive de feu Saddam Hussein en vue de mettre la main sur les ressources pétrolières d'Iraq, et plus près de nous l'agression de la Libye en vue de s'assurer pareillement les gisements de ce pays, sous les mêmes prétextes éculés de « droits de l'Homme » ou de protection des populations quotidiennement écrabouillées pourtant sous les bombardements de l'OTAN et de ses flibustiers. Remake de ceux de la « Libération » de l'Europe en 44 qui réduisit celle-ci à l'état de dominion anglo-américain. Impostures, falsifications toujours, comme celles des charniers de Katyn* ou de la catastrophe d'Oradour sur Glane dont c'est en ce moment le triste anniversaire. Ce dernier événement bien connu de moi puisque j'eus l'occasion d'habiter longtemps non loin de ce petit village aujourd'hui fantôme. Un exemple emblématique, s'il en est, d'une Histoire maquillée :
Sans que le le public français en soit clairement informé, il existe, en effet, depuis 1997, un ouvrage éclairant sur cette lamentable affaire : « Le Massacre d'Oradour, un demi-siècle de mise en scène »**, prestement interdit lors de sa parution sur arrêté ministériel, annulé quatre ans plus tard par arrêt de la Cour européenne des droits de l'homme du 17 juillet 2001 au terme d'une bataille juridique acharnée. Comme bien d'autres ouvrages de ce genre réduisant à néant la version officielle, celui qui s'imaginerait pouvoir disposer de ce type de document dans une bibliothèque municipale serait bien naïf : n'y figureront toujours en bonne place que les titres entérinant la relation politiquement correcte et nulle autre.
Mentionnant ici Oradour*** que tout livre scolaire se fait un « devoir de mémoire » de citer en exemple de la « barbarie nazie » en rappelant que les Waffen SS de la division « Das Reich » y avaient massacré des dizaines de paisibles habitants de ce petit village tranquille et sauvagement brûlé vifs dans l'église toutes les femmes et les enfants : qui, jusqu'alors, s'était seulement posé la question de savoir si pareil crime était conforme à la vérité ? Qui se serait seulement douté que toutes ces femmes et ces enfants avaient, en réalité, été rassemblés dans l'église, non pour les exterminer, mais, tout au contraire, pour les mettre à l'abri de ce qui allait risquer de se passer ? Qui aurait pu se douter aussi que les combles et le clocher de cette innocente église avaient été transformés en copieux dépôt d'explosifs et de munitions par les maquisards du lieu avec la complicité du bon curé ? Ou même que des FTP rouges se dissimulaient encore dans le clocher lorsque les soldats allemands avaient procédé au rassemblement des femmes et des enfants dans l'église ? Qui, de nos jours, sait aussi que l'église en question n'a nullement été incendiée comme on tente encore aujourd'hui de le faire croire, mais qu'elle fut ravagée par le souffle de la terrible explosion du dépôt d'armes lors de la tentative d'évasion des maquisards planqués ? Qui sait enfin que ce drame fut ensuite grossièrement maquillé en crime de guerre pour les besoins de la propagande de la Résistance et de ses complices ?...
On comprends dès lors sans peine que (tout comme en d'innombrables cas de ce genre) cette remise en question de l'histoire, ainsi que les documents irréfutables qu'elle comporte ait pu mettre en émoi les tenants et les bénéficiaires de la bonne vieille version qu'ils entendent maintenir sous séquestre jusqu'en... 2053 ! Mais lorsqu'on songe à ce que Rudolf Steiner tint à enseigner des conséquences spirituelles mortelles du Mensonge qu'il assimilait ni plus ni moins à un meurtre au plan astral, que penser, en ce cas, des conséquences de l'incroyable accumulation de mensonges et de contre-vérités, ne serait-ce que dans l'Histoire officielle des deux dernières guerres mondiales et dans ce qu'il est convenu d'appeler l' « Holocauste », objet, de nos jours, d'un véritable tabou religieux, intouchable et quasi mystique ?
L'implantation du faux et de la calomnie dans l'esprit de millions d'êtres humains, et dans l'esprit de millions d'enfants de toutes races en vue d'une manipulation psychologique et mentale au niveau planétaire participe pourtant d'un objectif ahrimanien sans exemple en vue d'assujettir l'Homme et d'entraver son élévation spirituelle, car comment rapprocher les hommes parmi tant de mensonges agissant comme autant de ferments de haine ?
« J'ai souvent attiré l'attention sur le fait que si un jour, à l'avenir, on écrit l'histoire de ce qu'on appelle la guerre [de 14-18 Ndt] aucun critique ne l'a encore fait, bien que ce soit très faisable –, on ne pourra pas employer la méthode qui a abouti à ce conte, à cette légende comment l'appeler ? que l'on désigne actuellement du nom d'histoire. Cette « Histoire », des érudits ainsi les qualifie le monde sont restés des mois, des années, des décennies dans les bibliothèques à étudier des documents diplomatiques pour l'écrire. Il faudra que le temps vienne où la plus grande partie de l'histoire confectionnée de cette façon sera bonne à mettre au rebut. » (R. Steiner, La Chute des esprits des ténèbres, 1ère conférence)
En tout état de cause une œuvre de salubrité déjà commencée depuis des années, mais à quel prix ?! Combien de chercheurs et d'historiens ruinés, chassés de leurs chaires, emprisonnés, calomniés, voire pire, qui s'attelèrent à cette tâche ? Si donc il est écrit que la Vérité rend libre (Jn. 8, 32), elle ne s'acquiert qu'à haut prix. Il vaut mieux le savoir d'avance. WH.

* Tuerie de masse où 4500 officiers polonais furent assassinés d'une balle dans la nuque en 1940 par le NKVD. Longtemps mise au compte des Allemands, ce ne fut qu'en 1990 que la Russie reconnut sa responsabilité dans ce qui concerna au total quelques 15 000 exécutions sommaires en divers lieux. C'est à la suite de l'ouverture des archives soviétiques concomitante à cette affaire que les historiens révisionnistes furent à même de réviser avec précision l'histoire des camps de concentration allemands dont celui d'Auschwitz.
** Ouvrage traduit et publié en Allemagne sous le titre « Die Wahrheit über Oradour, Rekonstruktion und Forschungsbericht » (Vincent Reynouard, La vérité sur Oradour, Reconstitution et rapport d'enquête, Druffel-Verlag, 1999).
*** On rappellera que l'occupation du village d'Oradour par la division Das Reich en route vers le front de Normandie fut effectuée en vue de retrouver le Sturmbannführer Kämpfe enlevé, puis assassiné, le lendemain du massacre atroce d'une soixantaine de soldats allemands le 9 juin à Tulle et de la répression qui s'en était suivie.





"Truth is always the first war casualty. The emotional disturbances and distortions in historical writing are greatest in wartime."
These are the words of historian, sociologist and criminologist Prof. Harry Elmer Barnes, who founded a school of historical thought following World War One that became known as Revisionist.

But why Revisionist? What is Historical Revisionism? And what makes it different from the history we learn in school and see portrayed in the popular media?

For the late Dr. Barnes, Revisionism meant "...nothing more or less than the effort to correct the historical record in the light of a more complete collection of historical facts, a more calm political atmosphere, and a more objective attitude."

The term originated with a group of scholars (French, British, American, German and others) whose researches undermined the presumption of unique German responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. Although the term Revisionist originally was used to apply only to the question of guilt for WW I, it has subsequently come to include all historical findings at odds with the Establishment version. Revisionism is freedom of speech in history.

Those early Revisionists and those who followed the tradition recognized a fact of life pertaining to the writing of history: in the case of wars, historians of the victorious nations tend to write historical accounts that ignore relevant facts not favorable to the victor while, at the same time, misrepresenting or inventing other facts in order to cast the loser in an unfavorable light. Most of these historians had played an active role in World War I, many in propaganda and intelligence; after the Second World War, it was not uncommon for them to continue to have links with intelligence agencies.

The efforts of Establishment historians to remain on the good side of the powers-that-be (like the court historians who served kings and emperors of old) created a historical record that oftentimes resembled wartime propaganda more than independent scholarship.

"To the victor go the spoils" is a well-known saying of American president Andrew Jackson. One of the great spoils of winning a war is being able to write the history of it from your own perspective.

When history is written by partisan historians from a victor nation, the winning side emerges simplistically as the "good guys." The losers, of course, are the "bad guys." Questions about the origins of the war (for instance, about the real story behind the sinking of the Lusitania or the attack on Pearl Harbor), about its conduct (did the "Huns" really cut off infants' hands in Belgium? Were we justified in annihilating the populations of whole cities like Dresden and Tokyo from the air?), and about its conclusion (such as the wisdom of the Treaty of Versailles or the secret deals at Teheran and Yalta) are ignored or swept aside.

Following the First World War, Harry Elmer Barnes and other historians, both in the victor nations and the vanquished, "revised" the official version of the winners by gaining access to the secret records of the wartime governments—their ministers, generals and diplomats. The documents demonstrated that there was a very big difference between what the leaders were saying in public and what they were doing in private. The Revisionists demonstrated that millions of men had gone to their deaths for ideals at which those in power secretly scoffed. A great and healthy revulsion against war and warmakers set in and Americans set their faces against further "crusades" across the oceans.

But the upheaval which the First World War had brought about in Europe and Asia and the short-sighted settlements which the victors had imposed on the defeated nations led to another war. This time the ruling Establishments in the victor nations determined that there would be no "revision" of their wartime propaganda, no "bringing history into accord with the facts." The men who wrote the authorized histories of the Second World War were tied to their society's ruling elites—both public and private—just as closely as the court historians of bygone days. They enjoyed privileged access to the records, many of which they had helped create themselves with their wartime roles in propaganda and intelligence. Dissident historians—the "Revisionists"—were excluded.

It is crucial, however, that we gain an understanding of the actual origins, course and consequences of World War II and of all modern wars. "Good guys" vs. "bad guys" history reinforces wartime propaganda. Carried over into peacetime it stands in the way of reconciliation and fosters an atmosphere in which all the world's conflicts are viewed as epochal struggles between Good and Evil.

It is the Revisionists' aim to understand wars, not to continue to fight them in endless polemical battles. Revisionists search for the underlying causes of wars, hold the self-serving claims of all parties to those struggles to critical review, and investigate the role of often shadowy third parties that sought to profit from wars waged ostensibly on behalf of nation-states.

Revisionist scholars are working in many nations. The movement defies political classification on the conventional "left-right" spectrum. Revisionists are dedicated first to discovering the truth that is often hidden away in secret archives that governments and established powers everywhere would seal up in perpetuity. They are further dedicated to the principle that citizens have a right to know what their governments are actually doing behind the scenes.

The Revisionists are deeply concerned with the imposition of a monolithic orthodoxy in any area of historical research. The Revisionists have challenged, in particular, some of the most sacrosanct dogmas of World War II propaganda, from the unmitigated evil and aggressiveness of Germany, Japan, and their allies, to the unquestioning acceptance of the so-called Holocaust in all its improbable details.

Revisionists have learned, and teach, that a misunderstanding of the nature of conflicts between nations allows politicians, often fronting for special interests, to lead us blindly into wars in which the great majority of the citizenry has no real interest. The failure to properly understand our own involvement in the European wars has involved Americans in one crisis after another in the decades following World War II, from Korea to Vietnam to Beirut. Each time the politicians have assured us that we are repelling "aggression," staving off "bloodbaths," "fighting Communism" or "terrorism" or what have you. And each time the interventions have ended not in victory, but in death, frustration, and dishonor.

Still, special interests conjure up new Bad Guys, new devils. The tangle of rivalries and hatreds that outside intervention has created in the Middle East continues to provide our leaders with excuses for new adventures, from the Persian Gulf to Libya. Will the kind of popular hatred manufactured against foreign leaders like Khadafy or Khomeini lure us into a new crusade? Or even into a catastrophic nuclear conflict?

Not if the findings of Revisionists are heeded. Barnes and his colleagues, and their successors, working from a deep conviction that war is unnecessary, have demonstrated how specious were the justifications and how injurious the results have been of the wars America has blundered into over the past century. These wars have diminished our freedoms, undermined our wealth and created a false illusion of national rectitude. 
 
The Revisionists are perhaps the only students of the past who have heeded the warning of George Orwell that: "Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past." By wrestling control of the past from established interests and returning it to those who lived and suffered it, Revisionists may make possible a secure and prosperous future for all of us.

If we can face up to and acknowledge the existence of the underlying causes of war and what our own leaders have done to encourage war, prolong it and make it more destructive than at any other time in history, we may be on our way to achieving the just and lasting peace that every person of good will desires.





Historians as Tools  of the Global Elite
 Court Historians Regurgitate New Versions of Prewar and Wartime Propaganda Dressed Up as History

“TO THE VICTOR BELONG THE SPOILS,” the old saying goes. It might be amended to say, “To the victor belongs the privilege of writing history.” Julius Caesar certainly recognized that when he wrote in Commentaries on the Gallic War, Book I, that “It is the law of war for conquerors to deal with the conquered at their pleasure”—and that, of course, included the writing of “court” history. Another writer, a diplomat and scientist, Benjamin Franklin, had his own twist on the subject, declaring in Poor Richard’s Almanac that, “Historians relate, not so much what is done, as what they would have believed [by the people].” This distortion of history is what Revisionists are fighting against.

BY MICHAEL COLLINS PIPER

In the years following both World War I and World War II when real historians such as Dr. Harry Elmer Barnes and his colleague dared to suggest that the postwar histories, written by the victors, were hardly more than the product of “court historians” essentially regurgitating new versions of prewar and wartime propaganda dressed up as “history,” Barnes and his fellow Revisionists were defamed as “conspiracy theorists” and worse.

However, with even the most cursory review of the role that many eminent and “respected” American postwar historians played as top-level intelligence officers during World War II, for example, one cannot help but wonder how reliable their academic accounts of the history of that period were.

In 1987 Yale University professor Robin W. Winks (now deceased) published his award-winning 607-page book, Cloak and Gown: Scholars in the Secret War, 1939-1961 (New Haven: Yale University Press) outlining the very substantial (but until then largely little-known) details surrounding the involvement of American academics in the activities of the CIA and its World War II predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

“Each government accuses the other
of perfidy, intrigue and ambition, as a
means of heating the imagination of
their respective nations, and incensing
them to hostilities”
—THOMAS PAINE

In his book, Winks provided readers with an eye-opening list of the names of some—but far from all—American academics (largely historians) who served in the OSS during World War II and were therefore part of (and directing) America’s official covert intelligence operations against the enemy. The list is remarkable and demonstrates that there is reason to suggest the ties between academia and the U.S. government propaganda apparatus are even more profound than Harry Elmer Barnes may have suspected.
Many of the names will be immediately familiar. The names constitute a veritable laundry list of those whom Barnes quite correctly called “the court historians” and whom—by virtue of their wartime roles in the propaganda operations of the OSS—revolutionary statesman Thomas Paine might have been foreshadowing. He wrote of war-time propagandists in The Rights of Man declaring: “Each government accuses the other of perfidy intrigue and ambition, as a means of heating the imagination of their respective nations, and incensing them to hostilities”—not only during wartime but afterward as well. And that is why there is the need for Revisionist scholars to continue fighting to bring history into accord with the facts, wartime and postwar propaganda notwithstanding.

Spies Turned ‘Court Historians’

The World War II-era Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was the forerunner of the modern CIA, and also the spawning ground for a host of American academics who rose to prominence in postwar years. Most of these ex-spies—with little deviation—touted the “official” U.S.-British-Zionist intelligence propaganda version of the events that led up to the war, accounts of the war’s conduct and the twists of history that followed. Not for nothing did such independent historians as Dr. Harry Elmer Barnes refer to these characters as the “court historians.”

http://www.marcuse.org/herbert/images/herbohlbfinger250pxw.jpg
Above, Herbert Marcuse: It wasn’t “Hanoi Jane” Fonda or Huey Newton and the Black Panthers who invented the ideas and slogans that came to be identified with the “drop out” generation. It was Marcuse, drawing on Hegel, Marx and Sigmund Freud, who introduced the theory of “the great refusal,” meaning that individuals should reject and subvert the existing social order as repressive and conformist without waiting for a revolution. Marcuse left Germany one step ahead of the Gestapo to bring his “enlightenment” to America. He taught philosophy at various U.S. universities until his death in 1979.

Among the ex-OSS spies who became influential postwar arbiters of “official” history included (1) Arthur Schlesinger Jr., (2) Carl William Blegen and (3) James Phinney Baxter. 
What follows is the list of OSS-spawned academics taken from Winks’s book, including the sometimes-glowing descriptions that Winks provided:
  • James Phinney Baxter III, president of Williams College;
  • Carl Blegen, professor of history, University of Cincinnati, and a leading authority on American immigration and ethnic history;
  • Crane Brinton, professor of history, Harvard University, perhaps the leading historian of ideas on the European front;
  • Dr. Frederick Burkhardt, director of the American Council of Learned Societies;
  • John Christopher, professor of history, University of Rochester, who with Brinton and Robert Lee Wolff wrote an extremely influential (and extremely successful) textbook, History of Civilization, immediately after the war, a text that became one of two that dominated the market for the immediate postwar generation of undergraduate students. “Brinton, Christopher and Wolff,” as the text was known, reflected the synoptic view the authors developed while in the OSS, and it would not be totally revised until 1983;
  • Dr. Ray Cline, who wrote a first-rate volume in the official history of World War II and then returned to the intelligence profession. He became the CIA’s deputy director for intelligence from 1962 to 1966;
  • John Clive, professor of history, Harvard University, a major figure in 19th century British studies;
  • Gordon Craig, professor of history, Princeton and later Stanford universities, author of the leading books on the role of the military in German history;
  • John Curtiss, professor of history, Duke University, an authority on France;
  • Harold C. Deutsch, professor of history, University of Minnesota, also an important figure in the development of modern German history in the United States;
  • Donald M. Dozer, professor of history, University of California, Santa Barbara, a Latin Americanist;
  • Dr. Allan Evans, a medievalist from Yale who remained with the Department of State at the end of the war;
  • John K. Fairbank, professor of Chinese history at Harvard University, the leading sinologist of his generation;
  • Franklin L. Ford, professor of history, Harvard University, and the dean of Harvard College during the student disorders of the late 1960s;
  • Felix Gilbert, historian at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, an elegant diplomatist;
  • S. Everett Gleason, who worked with William Langer in the OSS and after, and returned to become the State Department’s historian;
  • Moses Hadas, professor of classics, Columbia University, who wrote on the expansion of the Roman empire;
  • Samuel W. Halperin, professor of history, University of Chicago, and after the war editor of The Journal of Modern History;
  • Henry B. Hill, professor of history, University of Kansas, who developed British history there and later at Wisconsin;
  • Hajo Holborn, Sterling professor of history, Yale University, who worked on occupation policy for Germany at the end of the war and wrote on the history of military occupation, becoming a dominant figure in the training of postwar Germanists;
  • H. Stuart Hughes, professor of history, Harvard University, who moved on from where Crane Brinton had left off in European intellectual (and especially Italian) history, and unsuccessfully ran for the House of Representatives in Massachusetts;
  • Sherman Kent, who left Yale to preside over ONE, the Office of National Estimates, at the CIA;
  • Clinton Knox, who also left the historical profession, becoming ambassador to Guinea;
  • Leonard Krieger, who returned from the OSS to become a professor at Yale and then of German intellectual history at the University of Chicago;
  • William L. Langer, the outstanding European diplomatic historian of his generation;
  • Val Lorwin, professor of history, University of Oregon, and the nation’s leading authority on the Low Countries;
  • Herbert Marcuse, who moved from history to philosophy at Brandeis and the University of California, and from the contemplative life to that of guru to the student revolt during the war in Vietnam;
  • Henry Cord Meyer, professor of history, Pomona College, another leading Germanist who left Yale for the West Coast;
  • Saul K. Padover, professor at the New School for Social Research, authority on Jefferson and democratic thought, and a pioneer lecturer on American history at a wide range of universities overseas;
  • Michael B. Petrovich, professor of history, University of Wisconsin, who developed Russian studies there;
  • David H. Pinckney, professor of history, first at the University of Missouri and then the University of Washington, a major force in French history and, like Brinton, Craig, Fairbank, Holborn, Langer, and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., a president of the American Historical Association, perhaps the highest honor the discipline can bestow on one of its own;
  • David M. Potter, professor of history, Yale University (and later at Stanford), who with Ralph Gabriel and Norman Holmes Pearson firmly established American studies at Yale;
  • Conyers Read, professor of history, University of Pennsylvania, an authority on Elizabethan England and the prime mover behind the Council on Foreign Relations in Philadelphia;
  • Henry L. Roberts, professor of history, Columbia University, who followed Geroid Robinson in developing a front-rank Russian studies program at that institution;
  • Elspeth D. Rostow, University of Texas, who with her husband,
  • Walt Whitman Rostow, worked out major interpretations on American foreign policy;
  • John E. Sawyer, economic historian who left Yale to become president of Williams College and then of the Mellon Foundation;
  • Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., professor of history, Harvard University, polymath, adviser to and historian for the Kennedys before his transition to a Schweitzer chair at the City University of New York;
  • Bernadotte E. Schmitt, who after the war lived in retirement, lauded as the leading historian of the causes of WWI;
  • Carl E. Schorske, professor of history at Wesleyan and then Princeton University, an authority on European intellectual history;
  • Raymond Sontag, professor of history, University of California at Berkeley, the first of the old OSS team to publicly remind the student generation of the 1960s of his service and of why academics had felt it appropriate to engage in intelligence work, which he had
  • Wayne S. Vucinich, professor of history, continued to do as a consultant to ONE;
  • L.S. Stavrianos, professor of history, Northwestern University, who carried the idea of global history further than any other scholar, in a series of notable texts;
  • Richard P. Stebbins, a man Sherman Kent felt could turn out more work of high quality than anyone else in his shop, who became director of the Council on Foreign Relations;
  • Paul R. Sweet, who also remained with the State Department, in change of its official histories and archives.
  • Alexander Vucinich, professor of history, San Jose State University, a leading authority on Eastern Europe; Stanford University, who covered the same waterfront;
  • Paul L. Ward, who became the executive director of the American Historical Association;
  • Albert Weinberg, technically a political scientist, although the author of a fine historical analysis of American imperial expansion, who remained in government work after the war;
  • Robert Lee Wolff, professor of history, Harvard University, that institution’s outstanding authority on Eastern Europe;
  • John H. Wuorinen, professor of history, Columbia University, who covered Scandinavia and in particular Finland;
  • T. Cuyler Young, professor of archeology, Princeton University, who, with Richard Frye at Harvard (who also was in the OSS), pioneered Iranian studies in the United States.

This list, needless to say, is highly revealing, if only because it demonstrates how closely American academics have been linked to the intelligence community, and in this case, during wartime. The truth is that—despite the passing of decades—nothing has changed. The American academic community has consistently been influenced by—and in many respects, has been a part of—the high-level policy-makers, war-planners, and other elements of the high level ruling elite.






Barnes Harry Elmer - Who started world war one ?

Author : Barnes Harry Elmer
Title : Who started world war one ? An unbiased analysis of the causes and mitigating factors of World War One from the father of historical Revisionism
Year : 2009

Link download : Barnes_Harry_Elmer_-_Who_started_world_war_one.zip

Preface. Wars & the Decline of the West. This pioneering Revisionist work by the doyen of Revisionism, Harry Elmer Barnes, ends with the entrance of the U.S.A. into World War I. Thus, the final gruesome tally of the horrible and unnecessary costs of that war in terms of blood, treasure, and political disaster could not be included. ...





Barnes Harry Elmer - The causes of the world war

Author : Barnes Harry Elmer
Title : The causes of the world war
Year : 1945

Link download : Barnes_Harry_Elmer_-_The_causes_of_the_world_war.zip

Levels or types of responsibility. In generalizing about responsibility for the World War it is necessary to be specific as to just what is meant by tnis term "responsibility." There are some Revisionists who contend that ail of the Great Powers involved were about equally responsible. There are others who state that France, Russia and Serbia were the only leading powers in 1914 who desired a European war and that they worked cleverly to bring it on the least possible appearance of aggression. Both of these opinions would be correct if one clarifies what is meant. Those who argue for equal responsibility in this sense usually mean that, in regard to the causes of wars in general in Europe from 1870 to 1914, all the Great Powers were about equally responsible for the war system. They do not refer primarily to the crisis of 1914, but rather to the situation lying back of the July clash. Those who contend for the primary guilt of France, Russia and Serbia have in mind the responsibility for unnecessarily forcing the Austro-Serbian dispute of 1914 into a general European conflict. Therefore, it is necessary to know just what one implies when he says that everybody was guilty or that this or that group of nations was guilty. ...



Clark Christopher - The sleepwalkers: How Europe went to war in 1914

Author : Clark Christopher
Title : The sleepwalkers How Europe went to war in 1914
Year : 2013

Link download : Clark_Christopher_-_The_sleepwalkers.zip

Introduction. The European continent was at peace on the morning of Sunday 28 June 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie Chotek arrived at Sarajevo railway station. Thirty-seven days later, it was at war. The conflict that began that summer mobilized 65 million troops, claimed three empires, 20 million military and civilian deaths, and 21 million wounded. The horrors of Europe’s twentieth century were born of this catastrophe; it was, as the American historian Fritz Stern put it, ‘the first calamity of the twentieth century, the calamity from which all other calamities sprang’. The debate over why it happened began before the first shots were fired and has been running ever since. It has spawned an historical literature of unparalleled size, sophistication and moral intensity. For international relations theorists the events of 1914 remain the political crisis par excellence, intricate enough to accommodate any number of hypotheses. The historian who seeks to understand the genesis of the First World War confronts several problems. The first and most obvious is an oversupply of sources. Each of the belligerent states produced official multi-volume editions of diplomatic papers, vast works of collective archival labour. There are treacherous currents in this ocean of sources. Most of the official document editions produced in the interwar period have an apologetic spin. The fifty-seven-volume German publication Die Grosse Politik, comprising 15,889 documents organized in 300 subject areas, was not prepared with purely scholarly objectives in mind; it was hoped that the disclosure of the pre-war record would suffice to refute the ‘war guilt’ thesis enshrined in the terms of the Versailles treaty. For the French government too, the post-war publication of documents was an enterprise of ‘essentially political character’, as Foreign Minister Jean Louis Barthou put it in May 1934. Its purpose was to ‘counterbalance the campaign launched by Germany following the Treaty of Versailles’. In Vienna, as Ludwig Bittner, co-editor of the eight-volume collection Österreich-Ungarns Aussenpolitik, pointed out in 1926, the aim was to produce an authoritative source edition before some international body – the League of Nations perhaps? – forced the Austrian government into publication under less auspicious circumstances. The early Soviet documentary publications were motivated in part by the desire to prove that the war had been initiated by the autocratic Tsar and his alliance partner, the bourgeois Raymond Poincaré, in the hope of de-legitimizing French demands for the repayment of pre-war loans. Even in Britain, where British Documents on the Origins of the War was launched amid high-minded appeals to disinterested scholarship, the resulting documentary record was not without tendentious omissions that produced a somewhat unbalanced picture of Britain’s place in the events preceding the outbreak of war in 1914. In short, the great European documentary editions were, for all their undeniable value to scholars, munitions in a ‘world war of documents’, as the German military historian Bernhard Schwertfeger remarked in a critical study of 1929. ...


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