Hidden History: How British Bankers Shaped America’s 20th Century

Clash of the Two Americas Volume 2: Open vs Closed Systems Collide

By Matthew Ehret (2021)a

Purchase link: https://canadianpatriot.org/untold-history-of-canada-books/

Book Review

In Volume 2,  Ehret’s narrative about the political clash between America’s Anglophile pro-colonization elite and pro-international cooperation forces who opposed them continues into the 20th century.

The second volume begins with a brief discussion of Gilpin’s Landbridge, proposed by Lincoln advisor William Gilpin (who Lincoln appointed as Colorado’s first governor in 1861). In 1890 Gilipin published Cosmopolitan Railway: Compacting and Fusing Together All the World’s Continents, calling for a Tunnel to be built between Alaska and Siberia connecting Russia’s Trans-Siberian Railroad [1] with a North American transcontinental rail network. This proposal arose in part out of a strategy first put forward by Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward, General (and later president) Ulysses Grant and Senator Charles Sumner. The surprise purchase of Alaska from the Russians in 1867 was the first step in this venture. 

According to Ehret, most of British foreign policy in the early 20th century was aimed at disrupting the strong US-Russia-German alliance supported by Lincoln, Seward, Grant, Gilpin and Sumner.

For example

• The 1902 Anglo-Japanese treaty which resulted in the disastrous Japan-Russian war (in which Anglophile US banker Jacob Schiff financed the Japanese), which substantially weakened Russia’s pro-US Romanov rulers.
• According to Ehert, Britain’ primary purpose in instigating World War I was to break up the continuing US-German-Russian-Ottoman alliance committed to international rail development (a major threat to Britain’s monopoly on maritime trade).
• The substantial support the British/Wall Street banking establishment provided Russia’s two revolutions in 1905 and 1917. According to Schiff’s grandson, Schiff funded the Bolsheviki revolution to the tune of $20 million. Prominent member of Lloyd George’s war cabinet Lord Alfred Milner also contributed 21 million rubles to the Bolshevik cause.
•  The collaboration of British banks and Wall Street banks and corporates to finance the rise of Hitler.[2] Prescott Bush (grandfather of George W) bailed out the German Nazi party when it went bankrupt and collapsed in 1932.[3] J P Morgan and Henry Luce, founder and owner of Time Magazine, also helped fund both Hitler and Mussolini, while the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations funded the Nazis eugenics program, including the experiments Dr Mengele conducted on concentration camp victims.

The book includes some fascinating details about Franklin D Roosevelt’s presidency that are rarely covered in high school history classes. Immediately on taking office, anti-colonist FDR immediately declared war on Wall Street, with his Pecora Commission sending dozens of bankers to prison. He only agreed to support Europe during World War II on condition the European powers surrender their colonies at war’s end. However he ran into major resistance from Churchill 1) when he and Eisenhower tried to open a second front in Western France after Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941 and when 2) FDR (seeking to prevent a dangerous nuclear arms race)  tried to bring the Soviets into the secret US-British project to develop an atomic bomb.

Ehert also devotes a chapter to President John F Kennedy, an anti-colonist like Franklin, Lincoln and Roosevelt, and to the role of Anglophile CIA elements (and even British intelligence agents in Montreal) in his assassination.

My favorite part of the book concerns extensive evidence Ehert has compiled revealing the alleged 1989 Tienanmen Square massacre was actually a color revolution funded by George Soros and the CIA-sponsored National Endowment for Democracy.[4] Both Soros and color revolution guru Gene Sharp were in Beijing on June 4, 1989. See George Soros, Gene Sharp and the 1989 Failed Color Revolution in Tiananmen Square and The CIA and Nonviolence

I feel some chapters towards the end of Volume 2 are somewhat one-sided in terms of Ehert’s unconditional embrace of new technological development. At times new technologies can be extremely hazardous to human health, eg our 70-year-old toxic chemical technology which has left us with a global epidemic of chronic diseases.

I’m also skeptical of his high praise of China’s embrace of unrestrained fossil fuel use and nuclear energy. Serious problems with particulate pollution pose (from coal burning a vehicle exhaust) are responsible for serious health problems (in some cases life threatening) for residents of all China’s major cities. Likewise, I don’t believe there is sufficient evidence to conclude China has “solved” the nuclear waste problem by vitrifying it.[5] While transforming nuclear waste to a solid makes it easier to store, the waste still remains radioactive for thousands of years. You also have to wonder whether the massive temperatures (1000° C) required for vitrification lowers the Energy Returned for Energy Invested below the break even point to justify the major investment required.

Finally I’m confused when he writes in one section about global warming being a myth and about the Polar Silk Road made possible by Arctic ice melting.

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[1] Which was built with generous US engineering support.

[2] According to Ehret increasing calls by residents of British Columbia for the province to be annexed to the United States (to facilitate the construction of the transcontinental railroad between Oregon and Alaska) put the UK under pressure to unite Canada’s provinces as a dominion under the British king on July 1st 1867.

[3] First documented by journalist George Seldes in Facts and Fascism in 1943.

[4] It’s also significant that Bush was an insider of the US/British banking conspiracy that created the $5.7 billion Wall Street bubble (via an astronomical level of broker loans) and then deliberately crashed the economy by suddenly calling them due. Bush, like others involved the conspiracy, made his fortune by selling his holdings prior to the crash. In 1942, he was found guilt of under the Trading with the Enemy Act and the federal government all the capital assets of his bank, Union Banking.

[5] In vitrification of nuclear waste, the fission products are made solid by being incorporated into molten glass.

[6] See USA: Exportng Democracy Since 1948

Chile’s Secret Nazi Past

The Colony: Chile’s Dark Past Uncovered

Al Jazeera (2013)

Film Review

This documentary concerns a secretive post-World II German colony in Chile. Named Colonia Dignidad, the colony was run as a cult by ex-Nazi pedophile and Baptist minister Paul Schaefer. Roughly 300 of Schaefer’s followers emigrated from Germanye in 1961, after he persuaded him the Soviets were about to invade. In Chile, Schaefer and his close circle of supporters were in close contact with Mengele, Rauff and other Nazi war criminals who escaped to South America.

On Schaefer’s orders, the cult removed babies from their parents’ custody at birth and raised them communally. Parents who tried to establish close relationships with their offspring were publicly punished humiliated and sometimes beaten. Cult members who escaped and sought sanctuary in the German embassy (in Santiago) were returned to the colony.

Children began a life of heavy farm labor at age 7. Allowed only one rest day a year, both children and adults worked 12-hour days seven days a week. Schaefer used the farm profits to expand his land holdings.

When the fascist dictator Pinochet came to power in a 1973 CIA coup, Schaefer made his hospital facilities available to the Chilean army to interrogate human rights activists under torture.

Despite the restoration of Chilean democracy in 1990, it would take the government until 2005 to investigate and close Colonia Dignidad. Schaefer (who died in 2010) was arrested and given a 20 year sentence for child molestation in 2005. Five of his accomplices were arrested and sent to jail in 2013. The sixth fled to Germany, which doesn’t have an extradition treaty with Chile.

Winfried Hempel, one of the children abused at the colony, has since become a lawyer. He’s suing the governments of Chile and Germany. He has compelling evidence that both were aware of the atrocities yet did nothing to stop them.

In 2019 the German government agreed to pay 50,000 euros to each of the 50 remaining victims. See https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-48318295

 

The 1972 US Coup Against Australia

Hot Money and the Politics of Debt

RT Naylor

McGill-Queens University Press (2004)

Book Review

Hot Money is about the trillions of dollars of global financial activity that is never recorded in official economic statistics. Corporate money laundering of illegal narcotics profits is the form of “hot money” that gets the most publicity. However according to Naylor, it accounts for a relatively small proportion of “hot money” percolating through offshore banks and dummy corporations.

Most “hot money” starts out as funds generated via “legitimate” business which rich elites sebd offshore to avoid taxes or in anticipation of economic calamity or regime change. All the world’s most ruthless dictators stashed funds in Swiss banks or similar financial havens prior to being deposed.

A sizeable chunk of hot money is generated from other illegal enterprises, such as gun running, illegal arms deals, prostitution, phony charities and religious groups (eg Reverend Moon’s Unification Church and L Ron Hubbard’s Church of Scientology) and government agencies (eg CIA) who use “hot money” to finance coups and insurgencies.

For me, the high point of Hot Money  is the excellent history Naylor provides of the CIA role in the world heroin and cocaine trade, especially their move to make Afghanistan the major global supplier of heroin.

Nalylor also provides a detailed history about the role of the Vatican Bank as a “hot money” center, the rise and fall of Propaganda Due (P2), a secret collaboration between the CIA, Mafia and right wing Masonic lodges that infiltrated all aspects of Italian public life in the 1970s; the role of Nazi war criminals Klaus Barbie and Josef Mengele in setting up Latin American death squads and cocaine networks; the rise and fall of the two biggest CIA banks, Australia’s Nugan Hand Bank and the Bank of Commerce and Credit International;  and the importance of “hot money” in the Iran Contra scandal, in which the Reagan administration illegally sold weapons to Iran to finance the Contra war against Nicaragua.

The most shocking chapter describes the role of the Nugan Hand Bank in funding a bloodless coup US Naval Intelligence carried out against Australia in 1972 – to remove a prime minister whose political views were inconsistent with US interests. Most Americans are totally unaware of this heinous attack against a close US ally. I’ve only learned of it since moving to New Zealand (Australia is New Zealand’s closest neighbor).

A 241 Year Fairy Tale About American Democracy

 

War is a Lie

By David Swanson

Just World Books (2016)

Book Review

In War is a Lie, author David Swanson presents extensive historical evidence that the US has never been a democratic republic – that this is a carefully crafted fairy tale the ruling elite has been telling us since the late 18th century. He also demolishes the myth that warfare is deeply ingrained in human nature. Ninety-eight percent of people are deeply opposed to killing and warfare and require extensive brainwashing to commit to either. Although the species homo sapiens is 60,000 – 1000,000 years old, they have only engaged in war for the last 10,000 years. Many human civilizations (including the people of the Arctic, Northeast Mexico, Australia and Nevada’s Great Basin) had no experience of war prior to contact with Europeans. Among the more astonishing facts Swanson reveals is that 80% of the US troops drafted into World War II declined to kill enemy troops.

Starting with the Revolutionary War, War is a Lie is full of delightful little factoids that are omitted from high school and college US history courses.

Among the high points:

Revolutionary War

The two real goals of the US War of Independence were to 1) remove the King’s representatives from positions of power in North America and replace them with colonial merchants and bankers and 2) to overturn the British ban on western expansion (via the slaughter of indigenous tribes). The Continental Army consisted mainly of poor farmers who were forcibly conscripted, brutally mistreated and rarely paid (even though General Washington was the richest man in the colonies. During and after the war, numerous “democratic reforms” were enacted to motivate these the “recruits, with all being promptly nullified.

War of 1812

Contrary to what we’re taught in school, the US started the War of 1812, with the intention of invading and occupying Canada. They lost this war.

Mexican-American War (1846-48)

Another war about western expansion that resulted in the US annexation of Texas, California, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and parts of Colorado and Oregon. Many Irish and other European immigrants fought for Mexico.

Civil War

Swanson maintains the Civil War was also about western expansion and whether the North or South would control the new western territories. Swanson stresses that Lincoln could have easily freed the slaves without launching a war (other countries did so). The Emancipation Proclamation was issued well after the war started, as public sentiment turned against the war due to high casualties. Swanson reminds us that the Proclamation only applied to states that had seceded – slavery remained legal in Union states.

World War II

Swanson details the deliberate Wall Street strategy of arming Hitler to neutralize the Soviets, highlighting orders US pilots received not to bomb German munitions factories owned by Americans. He also writes at length about the Nazi eugenics experiments that originating in the US under the guidance of Rockefeller, Carnegie and Harrison. I was intrigued to learne the Rockefeller Foundation funded Josef Mengele’s experiments on Jewish prisoners. Swanson attributes Roosevelt’s eagerness to enter World War II to increasing working class militancy in the US (which the compulsory draft ended) and fears of full blown insurrection. He also discusses numerous efforts Hitler made (as late as 1940) to negotiate a peace settlement with the allies – which they rebuffed.