Lest We Repeat

Māori Television has flunked 20th Century War History Class.  The indigenous broadcaster offered its audience Bubble Gum TV News History during its day-long coverage to commemorate Australia’s and New Zealand’s war remembrance day, ANZAC Day on April 25. Māori TV failed to investigate critical ‘But, Why?’ questions about the two global conflicts of the 20th Century, World War I and II . This absence without explanation conveyed an unspoken convention of war remembrance days among the Allied Powers that their sanitized official history is a settled matter. Snoopman goes beyond the Coffee Table Military History Book treatment that tells viewers how wars happen, but not why. Instead, our intrepid Editor in-Chief outlines the deep politics of a psychopathic Anglo-American Brotherhood that set their goal-setting sites on asserting their dominance over finance and oil, as a means to the age-old end: World Domination.

Absent Without Explanation (AWOE)

188 million human lives were terminated in the armed conflicts of the 20th century. The reasons regarding why the 20th century is the bloodiest on record seem to be settled facts. These ‘settled facts’ are the stuff of sanitized official war history, as promoted by the Allied Powers.

This sanitized official war history, or Bubble Gum TV News History, pervades the popular cultural memory of mass populaces living in the Anglo-Saxon nations, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. (The term Anglo-Saxon refers to two Low German tribes, the Angles and the Saxons, that eventually drove the Celts out of England after their initial 5th century invasion. Thus, countries with a high proportion of English-speaking peoples are deemed Anglo-Saxon).

Bubble Gum TV News History creates simple understandings that mask the real reasons behind major political events, including the horrors that unfolded in 20th  Century armed conflicts. These over-simplified understandings are supported by a widespread meme, or idea, that wars are just a part of human nature.

It’s easy to see why.

Even if people don’t know that almost 4 billion lives have been extinguished in wars since 3600 B.C., it’s common knowledge that history is riddled with war. It’s as though conflict it’s just something humans need to do with those prehensile, multi-fingered extremities at the end of our arms, dem two hands, when our nice leaders can’t get other peoples’ bad leaders to behave.

However, if wars are just a part of a vague idea, that old chestnut ‘human nature’, that is evidently deep within our core, or our ‘heart of hearts’, then why did Adolf Hitler have to shout so theatrically hard at the people of Germany to get them hated up about their new ‘enemies’: Jews, gypsies and homosexuals? And why did Hitler need  such a consummate manipulator as the Nazi government’s Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebells, to create the ideological buy-in from the German people?

Indeed, tourists to the Nazi concentration camps have been puzzled about how the German people could have fallen for Hitler’s spell. This confusion arises partly because they are aware that at the time that the Fuehrer rose to become one of ‘history’s’ most famous tyrants, they were industrious, intelligent and cultured.

The ‘riddle’ of this biased Bubble Gum TV News History is do with how it aligns with dominant political institutional voices, and how such ‘voices’ shape each successive generations’ minds through state-provided school curricula in the countries that came to be known as the ‘Allied Powers’.

Within such a widespread cultural ideological dome, one capable of shielding out the mucky truth about Anglo-American projection of power (that we visit soon), it is understandable that Māori Television flunked out on 20th Century War History Class recently. In it’s coverage of New Zealand’s war remembrance day, ANZAC Day on April 25, the indigenous broadcaster fell into the Official Sanitized History Line. By opting for the Bubble Gum TV News History treatment, Māori TV failed to ask critical ‘But, Why?’ questions about why exactly the two global conflicts of the 20th Century, World War I and II, occurred.

This failure meant the indigenous broadcaster’s coverage was uncritical of the war activism perpetrated by war criminals that comprised the key leadership roles of the belligerent Allied Forces. These key insiders were the main agitators behind the major armed conflicts of Planet Earth’s bloodiest century on record.

The television station failed to provide its viewers with a critical basis from which they might question why exactly almost one century after the beginning of the ‘War to End All Wars’, the two leading Allied Powers of what became known as ‘the Great War’ or World War I, Britain and America, are still fighting in far-flung places.

New Zealand and Australia share their war remembrance day on April 25 because their soldiers in World World One comprised the Australia and New Zealand Army Corps, who were referred to as Anzacs. The Anzacs suffered heavy casualties when they participated in an ill-conceived Allied invasion of the Gallipoli Pennisula, so that Allied navies could advance troops to take the city of Gallipoli, and then attack Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, because it had allied with Germany.

Māori Television excels at covering Anzac Day in the sense that it provides viewers with a full day of programming dedicated to remembering New Zealand’s involvement in military campaigns around the world. This coverage included, as always, a live presence at the impressive dawn service at the Cenotaph in front of the War Memorial Museum in New Zealand’s largest city, Auckland.

It also crossed live to show the dawn service at Gallipoli. Four newly made documentaries weaved personal stories with particular campaigns or battalions. In between, there were news updates from around New Zealand, live interviews with two military historians, war film classics The Dam Busters and Das Boot, and highlights of the day’s coverage.

However, the unstated assumption of Māori Television’s ANZAC Day coverage was that New Zealand and its ‘Five Eyes’ spy partners, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and Canada are benign state-powers that have worked to genuinely keep the world secure from the ‘enemies’ of ‘free societies’; the thin red line of fascism, communism and terrorism.

The lack of critical voices by the indigenous broadcaster on New Zealand’s war Remembrance Day is ironic, when thought is given to the British Crown’s conspiracy with its Colonial Government of New Zealand to subjugate Aotearoa’s native Māori people through genocide during the New Zealand Wars. Māori, regardless of occupation and education, well-know the cunning, callousness and conspiratorial behaviours of the British ruling class.

But Māori TV participates in an unspoken norm cultivated by the British ruling class that at the close of the 19^th Century, the British Empire somehow became a force for ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ in the world. In short, it seems as though the British ruling class suddenly applied their famously good table manners to their foreign policy.

It was poignant that during the Anzac Day broadcast just prior to crossing live to the pre-dawn war remembrance ritual at Chunuk Bair on the Gallipoli Pennisula, a music video for a song called “Chunuk Bair”, by Wellington band Gravel Road, was played. In the song, the question is asked why the soldiers were fighting:

We gather at Anzac Cove each year

To remember the fallen at Chunuk Bair.

Chunuk Bair, oh Chunuk Bair.

Does anyone know why they fought over there?

The absence without explanation of critical coverage about New Zealand’s embroilment in other people’s wars could only occur because the history of Anglo-American antagonism used to create the conditions for World War I and II, is still not widely known in New Zealand, or in other Anglo-Saxon countries. Or, perhaps it’s also because it’s considered bad taste for Sharp Pencil Critical History to rub shoulders with Bubble Gum TV News History (a mixing of political actors, as it were), on a day framed with ideologically-infused, ritualistic words and phrases like ‘sacrifice’, ‘lest we forget’ and ‘we will remember them’.

Here, we offer for reconsideration New Zealand’s ‘international relations’ with Britain and America, which were solidly fortified as military alliances in these global conflicts.

Bombing the World into Freedom: World Wars One and Two

A very British oligarchy deliberately created the conditions to make war with Germany well before 1914, and devised a two global war strategy, with their American counterparts’ conscious help. Germany’s industrial strength was perceived as a threat to the waning British Empire, as assistant professor of political economy at the University of Washington, Guido Giacomo Preparata, compellingly demonstrated in his book Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich.

To correct this intolerable situation, the British oligarchy pursued an encirclement strategy over the entire Eurasian landmass to ‘lock out’ the rival European power. Indeed, the British oligarchy long had a belligerent policy for making war against the strongest power of continental Europe by making secret agreements with the second strongest power. In 1907, the British oligarchy had completed its ‘Triple Entente’ agreement with Russia, (having gained France alliance in 1904), that bound these powers to fight with Britain if any were at war with Germany, or other Axis Powers.

The British oligarchy was intent on preventing Germany completing a railroad to Baghdad, and thus, gaining a trans-continental link to a major source of oil that would rival the British and French-controlled Suez Canal route. A consensus, traceable back to early 1890s, drove the ambitions of Britain’s oligarchy to reignite the British Empire. The British oligarchy were (and still are) bound by a fraternal brotherhood of London clubs, particularly Freemasonry, comprised of bankers, diplomats, officers and the aristocrats. The British Fraternity’s biggest fear was that Germany would forge an alliance with Russia.

Germany, for its part, had its own war plans. However, unbeknown to Germany, Britain obtained these plans in 1906 for a mere 60,000 francs.[i]

Amid rising international tensions, the conflict in Europe that began in 1914 was remarkably easy to start. According to Preparata in Conjuring Hitler, Britain’s ally Russia had a hand in the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo. A Russian military attaché, Colonel Victor Artamanov had encouraged the Serbian intelligence chiefs to carry out their plans to have three teenage students assassinate the heir to the Hapsburg throne.[ii]

Furthermore, all the European states had adopted a rigid method of following pre-drawn war plans that had been invented to deal with mass armies with great lethality amid poor communications during the American Civil War. Triggering events for mobilizing forces essentially equated with signals to attack.[iii]

All the while, the British Fraternity cast itself as a peace-loving defender of ‘liberal freedom’, even as it spun a tangle of intrigue, which not only worked to draw the naïve German Reich into role of overt aggressor. It also ensnared the mass populaces of the British Empire (and eventually ‘the American people’) into believing British war propaganda.

Drawing Germany into a two front-war with France and Russia was designed to ensure Germany would be smashed, and its remnant society would be ripe in the inter-war years for financial and economic attack. The two-front war strategy was designed to ensure that Germany would weaken Russia.

The result of World War I is not as well-known as it needs to be. Several empires fell, including the second German Empire, the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

With characteristic shrewdness, the British government came to dominant the Middle East oil through its covert co-ownership of Royal Dutch/Shell and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.[v] Although Great Britain became greater in its geographical spread, its emergence as the dominant military power was costly since it was funded on borrowed money. The war debts that Britain owed to a consortium of Wall Street bankers was an incredible sum of $4.7 billion, and all its national debt totaled £7.4 billion.[vi]

In this inter-war period, the Bank of England’s governor, Montagu Norman, managed the collapse of the Germany economy, in conspiracy with Wall Street and the US Federal Reserve, by masterminding an unstable web of debt, speculation and international trade between 1925 and 1931.

Norman did this as part of a broader, older plan hatched by the British Fraternity to conjure a political foe in the German Republic that could be provoked to make war in a misguided attempt to regain territory, resources and markets through force. Thus, in the ensuing conflict Britain’s two strongest rivals on the European continent, Germany and Russia, could be counted on to wrecking their opponent’s cities, infrastructure and people.

In the years that followed World War I, the American people discovered that they had been lied to when it became evident that the maps of the Middle East were redrawn.[iv] It was not until 1933 that Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company of California (Socal) was able to gain an oil concession in Saudi Arabia. Socal , which later became Chevron, struck oil in Saudi Arabia and Qatar in 1938 and founded the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO). Chevron partnered with Standard Oil of New Jersey (later Exxon), Standard Oil of New York (later Mobil), and Texaco. The American oligarchy now had the biggest prize yet from which it could make its bid for global domination.[vii]

Since the American capitalist oligarchy and elites that comprised the US state saw the opportunity to emerge from these global conflicts as the world’s dominant military and financial empire, they devised their own belligerent strategy. In Gods of Money, William Engdahl draws on excellent scholarly work to disclose that the Wall Street banking and industrial cartel did not stop at financing the Allied Powers in the European war that became World War I.[viii]

Because this criminal group was left intact, they were free to make bigger and bolder plans. As Engdahl, and Anthony Sutton, in Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler, make clear, the American Fraternity deliberately financed the Nazis. The Wall Street banks included: the Chase National Bank (now JP Morgan Chase); the Schroeder-Rockefeller Company; the Manhattan Bank; the National City Bank of New York (now Citibank); the New York Trust Company; V. A. Harriman & Co. and Dillon & Read.[ix]

Furthermore, Engdahl and Sutton, along with Charles Higham in Trading with the Enemy: The Nazi-American Money Plot 1933-1949, and Edwin Black in numerous books, including Nazi Nexus, and IBM and the Holocaust, separately demonstrate that some of America’s leading industrial corporations supplied the fascist regime with patents, technologies and materials, in order to ultimately gain from the destruction of the Third Reich’s war machine.[x] These corporations included: International Business Machines (IBM), Rockefeller’s Standard Oil cartel, General Motors, General Electric, DuPont, Dow Chemical and International Telephone and Telegraph (IT&T).

Without these technologies and co-investments from American industrial and banking corporations, the Nazis could not have: motorized their army; flown bombers and fighter planes; manufactured explosives on an epic scale; and exploited information to make the inevitable Holocaust as horrific as it became.

Anglo-American dominance over the world was cemented at the end of World War II. Crucial to this dominance was securing control over petroleum and finance, which was formally established in 1944 at the Bretton Woods Conference in New Hampshire. The Bretton Woods agreement gave superior voting control to the United States and Britain over monetary and trade decisions, through key institutions.

Yet, these two global wars were ostensibly fought to uphold the value of ‘freedom’ that the ‘free world’ was meant to regard highly. As Maori Television’s Native Affairs reported on 21 April, both global conflicts resulted in the destruction of at least 100 million lives.

In light of these revisions of officially sanitized 20th century history outlined super-briefly here, it needs to become common knowledge that the Anglo-American Brotherhood actively helped build-up the Nazi war machine, so that this British-American Alliance could re-order the world at the end of this second global conflict.

In short, the British-American Alliance were worse than the Nazis!

Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.

– George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-four (1949)

To sum up, MāoriTelevision’s Anzac Day coverage lacks a historically-grounded back-story. This is in part because the indigenous broadcaster is also part of New Zealand’s news media culture. Unfortunately, the cultural milieu of New Zealand’s news media is one that is ideologically dominated by syndicated ties to the Global Military Propaganda-Media Complex.

Māori Television needs to feel embarrassed, especially since it is, in essence, offering little more in the way of historical context to its audience than the global subscriber network, Sky TV, on its History and National Geographic channels. in any given month. Given that Sky TV is owned by News Corporation, one of the big seven media conglomerates, that together comprise a cartel that dominates media output in the Anglo-Saxon countries, Maori TV‘s ANZAC Day special needs to offer critical accounts of the suppressed history outlined here, to counter the subterfuge.

Therefore, to arrive at a critical interpretation of what exactly is the role of Anglo-American dominated NATO Alliance, especially given the sordid history of the two global wars outlined here, it will require Māori Television to be brave enough to risk alienating its audience, and its primary sponsor, the New Zealand government (that is in turn financed by ordinary taxpaying citizens).

However, it is possible for ‘the little channel that can’ to forge a new path if it takes it troops with it – they being its passionate workers and its enthusiastic audience – who know in their heart of hearts that its time to find the resolve to end the multi-milennia carnage that has resulted in the misery of nearly 4 billion lives lost to warfare.[xi]

On the 100^th anniversary of Anzac Day, Māori Television could screen excellent documentaries such as Why We Fight, which won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 2005, the BBC’s Banking with Hitler, and The Shock Doctrine, featuring Canadian journalist Naomi Klein.[xii] The ‘Little Channel that Can’ could also cross live to non-establishment experts capable of articulating the dark history touched on here, such as as the authors and people interviewed in documentaries cited in this article.

To date, no major news outlets have published or broadcast retractions pertaining to the uncritically accepted, official versions for the causes of World Wars I and II. It’s as if no one in the mainstream media anywhere in the world reads scholarly, critical accounts of twentieth century history.

As is made clear in Naomi Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine (2007); and in Noam Chomsky’s book Failed States (2006); and Eugene Jarecki’s documentary Why We Fight (2006), the United States continues to use military violence, or terrorism, to deliver the ‘freedom’ of ‘free markets.’ Indeed, the United States has engaged in acts of terror to overthrow democratically elected governments nearly every year since 1945 all over the world.[xiii]

Therefore, we need full disclosure by the state powers with which New Zealand is aligned, of their covert histories. Such disclosure requires the world’s major and significant governments to open their secret records to the full scrutiny of the planet’s citizenry, so that these states cannot continue to hide their terrorism, conspiracies to make war and plots to globalize police states.

The crimes against humanity, especially those committed by the governments of the United States and the United Kingdom, need to be become common knowledge to the world (and most especially to their domestic populations). To achieve this, the world’s ordinary people will need to develop a principled political ethic to more than match the work ethic that the British ruling class spread throughout their empire, in order to confront key insiders who continue to conspire against societies.

For anti-war/pro-peace activists cannot build mass movements to retain rights and develop systems of economic and political autonomy, or self-determination, if mainstream people do not make the effort to learn this dark history. Ordinary people everywhere need to find the resolve to dismantle the power structures, both civil and military that have been constructed as a result of these conflicts, subversion and other intrigues.

In other words, the sentiment for the fallen on war remembrance days needs to change from ‘lest we forget’ to ‘best we learn’, so that it quickly becomes ‘now we know’.

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