Hidden History: a compelling and captivating study of the causes of WW1 that turns everything you think you know on its head

3 Reviews For This Product

1. 

   Rated 5 out of 5

   03

   by Dr John ODowd October 3, 2023

   This book is a triumph. It examines the anatomy of the ruling class at a particular and crucial historical turning point, dissects and reveals its structure, identifies its membership, agents, dupes and placemen, and displays its putrid innards for all to see.

   Although this book is about the first world war, and the tricks of its procurement, its importance and salience are current – for the same interests persist, and their methods – deceit, the formation and operation of occult networks, their embodiment in the Establishment, the subornment of states , law, parliaments and the flimsy veneer of pretend liberal `democracies’, and the co-option and penetration of key elements of civic society, especially the civil service, academia and the media, as well as the military, to serve their personal ends – remain the crucial means by which money power dominates the globe today.

   As I write, an attempt has just been made by the Establishment to bounce us into attacking Syria on its behalf, without even the fig-leaf of a `dodgy dossier’. On this occasion it has apparently miscalculated, and the UK Parliament, much to its evident amazement, has thwarted its intentions – for now. Be sure they’ll be back. This book will tell you why – and how.

   This evil clique have always owned governments, elected or not – and their armed forces – and they have always emplaced dictatorships – at home and abroad. They own banking and finance, because they ARE banking and finance. Their stock is secrecy, subterfuge, bribery, propaganda, threats, ruthlessness and violence.
   And this persistence is more than symbolic – their names, genes and continuing interests have penetrated both time and global societies, such that the direct descendents of those who unleashed the savagery of World War I, to serve their insatiable lust for power and wealth, perpetuate and extend these lusts and their means of satisfaction down to the present day, and across the globe – with continuous wars and ever-present human misery. Perpetual war is its hallmark, its order, its ultimate means of enrichment and its perennial principle instrument.

   War is abhorred by most human beings, so the apparatus described above is used to `persuade’ ordinary people to give up their sons, brothers, husbands to `King and Country’ against a fiendish enemy that has to be manufactured and demonised -in this case Germany – ‘the Huns’, but subsequently the Commies, or Saddam or Islam – take your pick – any fiend will do. In contrast, for the money elite, war and the threat of war, are its stock in trade. War and preparation for war are hugely profitable in themselves (and are now just about the only industries left in the US and UK), but they are also the means, or behind the means, by which economic and political hegemony is maintained.

   ‘Trade’, and more importantly its Financial counterpart, are its front and `legitimate’ businesses, but to ensure that it is carried out on their terms, war is the overt or covert enforcer. The latter is described, quaintly, as `statecraft’. Behaviours that in private individual life would be described as immoral, unethical, psychopathic and criminal, are excused, or celebrated in businessmen and statesmen alike, and ordinary men and women are made monsters and victims in their service.

   As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman so succinctly and revealingly put it:
   “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the US Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps.”

   In other words, to make market capitalism work, you have to murder people.

   At the point in history described in this book, empires were territorial, and in this particular embodiment, the elite were espousing the rule of the English-speaking white man. Since then things have moved on: Empires are still based on plunder and slavery, but its means are more commercial, financial and based on one-sided so-called `free- trade’ -all backed up by the open or implicit threat of war, rather than territorial occupation. Drones and cruise missiles, rather than boots on the ground – although these will march if required.

   The beneficiaries remain the same: the international ruling class. Behind formal `democratic’ structures, there still stands, in the UK for example, a bureaucracy closely connected to the ruling class through the individuals going through the same private schools, exclusive universities workplaces and public institutions. They have imbibed the same culture and the same bonds of loyalty to the nation and state. They have their hands on the levers of power. This has not changed. This book exposes how it – `the secret elite’ worked in the lead up to the first world war, and in doing so reveals its unchanging aims and methodologies.

   This has been described as a `one-sided’ book – but it is not an unbalanced one. It provides a necessary correction and counterbalance to nearly a century of establishment-biased propaganda posing as history, written largely by Establishment ‘court’ historians and apologists for the money elite -none of whose explanations ever made much sense. An assination in Sarajevo? the invasion of ‘neutral’ Belgium (a country steeped in African blood)? How do these lead to world war? This book will tell you.

   In its 361 pages, and massive, fully cited bibliography, it describes in detail how the money elites – at that time largely Anglo-American (but in fact, as today, standing above any state) plotted, connived, bribed, murdered and lied their way to procure an imperial war that served their greater ends. The bias of this book is to the truth that the elite did their best to hide. Its authors, a doctor and a leading teacher have used their considerable diagnostic, forensic and pedagogical skills to analyse a disease and present their findings with remarkable facility and verve – fully documented, convincingly argued, and wholly credible. It is a work of substantial scholarship, written in a highly accessible form and utterly, totally persuasive.

   None of this is taught in our universities, where sociology does not discuss a ruling class, politics courses do not discuss the political influence of wealth, economics courses justify inequality using bad maths and worse psychology, and as this book clearly demonstrates, academic political and military history, particularly emerging from so-called elite universities, is largely propaganda written in the service of the same elites. With primary sources often `lost’, destroyed or hidden. These authors have filled some of the gaps and tied together hitherto diverse material to provide a persuasive account of motives, means and methods of an ongoing criminal conspiracy against the ordinary people of the world.

   In the words of Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns: “Facts are chiels that winna ding”. This book is replete with facts that ding the very foundation of the Establishment to its rotten core.

2. 

   Rated 4 out of 5

   03

   by conjunction October 11, 2023

   If most of what this book contains is true, I’d say it is more about history that’s buried than hidden. If this is the case this is a very important book, and for that reason, please forgive the length of this review.

   A few years ago I read Andrew Roberts’ biography of Lord Salisbury, reviewed by me on this site. Salisbury had been Disraeli’s foreign secretary before he became PM himself. When he did he continued to act as foreign secretary, combining the roles. He was a consummate diplomat, and for a number of years ran Europe like a train in partnership with Bismarck.

   In his last few years, things went awry a little, notably in the Boer war which was at best mismanaged. The official histories I had read talked about the difficulties of governing via the new device of telegraph, and headstrong behaviour by our people in Cape Town, but there was something odd to me particularly about the behaviour of Joe Chamberlain which seemed to bring a new element, a brashness into politics which had not been there before.

   Salisbury retired and Balfour took over and a lot of changes in the style of politics occurred and some to me puzzling incidents occurred in the lead up to the First World War. I felt that I did not understand what was going on and none of the books I read seemed to speak to this new politics that led us into dangerous negotiations over crises that sprang out of nothing.

   The someone recommended ‘Hidden History’ to me.

   Docherty and McGregor tell a story about the lead-up to the war which is utterly different to the narratives in any other book on the period that I have read. I have some issues with the way they tell their story, which I’ll go into later, but their version of history is the only one I have heard which makes sense to me, which explains so many things I had not understood about the war, a war which still puzzles historians and causes endless arguments. Who was responsible?

   D&M answer unequivocally that the prime responsibility was with a cosy cabal they call the Secret Elite, (hereafter the SE), who were initially Milner, of Boer War fame, Lord Esher, Haldane, and subsequently Balfour, Asquith, Lloyd George, Churchill, and crucially Nathaniel Rothschild. Allied to these were important diplomats in France and Russia, and a number of bankers in the USA as time went on.

   D&M argue that these men largely directed the course of history in those years, deliberately manipulating and misinforming not only Parliament but the cabinet as well as the public in Britain and other countries.

   Their object was to promote the ongoing hegemony of the British Empire, and to do that by knocking out Germany, then beginning to overtake them economically, from the equation.

   The two crises in Morocco were set up by France behaving in a rash imperialist manner and then with Britain putting all the blame on Germany. The SE managed the press – sound familiar? – in both countries to assist with this.

   Edward VII, far from being the vacant playboy posterity prefers to remember, was a suave and accomplished diplomat, whose lifestyle was an excellent cover for his diplomatic forays.

   Rothschild, who D&M claim controlled many major banks in the US and Europe bankrolled monarchs and governments all over Europe at the request of the SE.

   Britain amazed the world by allying itself with Japan in 1902. This was to pressurise Russia and soften them up prior to making an alliance with them against Germany.

   Sir Edward Grey, who in his biography claimed to have forgotten to mention to the cabinet his secret alliance with the French a number of years before war broke out, and who lied repeatedly to Parliament and almost everyone else on this matter, acted as a man only wanting peace in public, all the time committing his government without their knowledge to Machiavellian intrigue all with the design of making Germany look bad and crucially engineering France and Russia to force Germany into a position where she had to look the aggressor.

   To do this Belgium, who knew exactly what was going on years before war broke out, had to be neutral and refuse to allow German troops to cross their borders, to give Britain the pretext for war of defending them.

   According to D&M Germany until the very last minute held out for peace, and at no stage wanted war.

   Germany pleaded with Russia to call off their mobilisation, and when the Tsar seemed to relent at the last minute and sent an envoy with conciliatory messages to Berlin, the SE’s man in Moscow had him arrested before he could get on a train.

   How has all this been concealed for so long?

   Published books have been suppressed, and tons of documents have been shredded, memoirs ruthlessly edited.

   The SE operated across parties, and ignored the cabinet and parliament except when they had to face them.

   This may all seem pretty unlikely, but I had always thought, well, the war happened because there were some pretty dodgy diplomats around who never got their act together.

   The Tsar may not have been the world’s greatest politician, and the Kaiser may have been naïve – although according to D&M not nearly as neurotic and temperamental as public legend has it – but the evidence is here that they were on the case. The war was not an accident.

   Now for my reservations.

   This book has been well researched, relying heavily on a number of publications written in the several decades after the war by a series of eminent historians, most of which were apparently rubbished or even suppressed by the publishing industry for some time. However these books have now resurfaced and a lot of people are reading them.

   However when you read ‘Hidden History’, in many places you see the numbers for notes, but exactly how the referred text backs up the points made you are rarely told. And there are long passages where the authors say ‘The SE did this, and said that…’ with no notes or reference at all. I wondered whether in some of these passages the authors were relying on a crucial work by a man called Quigley, who had supposedly once been part of the SE, but this is not stated.

   However the narrative is put together very carefully and frankly is very convincing. Its just that given the controversial nature of the story I would have preferred a book that adopted a more conventionally rigorous academic approach, even if it meant adopting a less certain position on some points.

   Almost as a digression, mention is made of Churchill’s escape from prison in South Africa at the time of the Boer War. It is strongly suggested that Churchill lied about his experiences, his escape is referred to as a ‘myth’. The authors present no evidence for this whatsoever except that Churchill has no corroborative witnesses.

   In view of the fact that after Churchill’s dismissal form the cabinet in 1915 he went and fought very bravely according to William Manchester in the trenches for six months I don’t find D&M’s criticisms helpful and they detract from the book.

   Another criticism is that D&M may be correct in asserting that Germany didn’t want war, but the narrative is very much London centred, and looks quite closely at what was going on in Paris and Moscow, but sheds very little general light on the desires of the Austrian and German governments.

   If you had read nothing else you could come away from this book thinking the Germans saints. There is much criticism in this book of British behaviour in South Africa. Germany’s record as colonists in Africa is worse than Britain’s by tenfold – see Pakenham’s ‘The Scramble for Africa’.

   Despite these criticisms this is an important book, most of what they say is evidenced, and should be read by anyone who can’t understand exactly why the twentieth century turned into a horror story.

3. 

   Rated 3 out of 5

   03

   by Frank J.L.Sage November 5, 2023

   The book “Hidden History”, 40yrs of reading widely about the Great War and it’s origins and now this comes along.

   It’s scary stuff, and you can see parallels with the world today. But how accurate is it?

   In it’s concluding chapter it says that so many documents have been destroyed, or is that an assumption on the auther’s part?

   At no time does it discuss Germany’s pre war planning for war, although it was certainly going on for many years.

   In the end I was left with a feeling that it was more an Anti-semitic, Anti conservative rant.

   I’m not trying to say that there isn’t something more to discover about the history introduced, but without balance I feel it has a long way to go.