Rockwell: Well, good morning. This is Lew Rockwell. What an honor to have as our guest this morning, Judge John V. Denson. Judge Denson is not only an important lawyer in Alabama and nationally, but a revisionist historian. His book, A Century of War, is a tremendous introduction to the crimes of Lincoln, Wilson, and Franklin Roosevelt. His edited books, The Costs of War and Reassessing the Presidency are also very important works.
But one of the things we love about John Denson is he’s constantly reading and finding new books. It’s just an astounding, wonderful thing. And today, he’s come to us with two new books on the origins of World War I that tell a different story from the normal stuff we’re told.
So, Judge Denson, tell us about these books and their authors and why they’re important.
Denson: Well, I brought you some more hidden history. I came earlier with another book by the name of Hidden History.
Rockwell: A great book, too, yes.
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Denson: This book is entitled Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War. The authors are Gerry Doucherty and Jim Macgregor and they are from Scotland. They spent about 10 years doing the research for these two books. This one was published in 2013. The second book has just come out in the last couple of months. I have a first-edition here in paperback, and it’s called: Prolonging the Agony: How the Anglo-American Establishment Deliberately Extended World War I by Three-and-a-Half Years.
Rockwell: Three-and-a-half years.
Denson: So it brings up a lot of new materials. I was just looking at the back. It says that everything you learned about who started World War I is probably wrong.
(LAUGHTER)
Denson: To me, it’s almost like a lawsuit where you’re the judge and you have lawyers submitting two different briefs. And we’re talking about one event, the First World War. We’ve got one book that says, “Germany is entirely at fault. Exhibit A is the Versailles Treaty. Germany was guilty.” These authors say that’s not true at all, that the guilty party is British – started it –and they started it for a specific purpose. The only country standing in the way of them creating a New World Order was Germany. So that’s the aim of the study, to show how this group, a secret elite group, started World War I.
The inspiration, I guess you would call it, or the reason they got into this was the earlier works of Carroll Quigley. Carroll Quigley wrote two books about World War I and he went into World War II also. But the first book Carroll Quigley wrote was called The Anglo-American Establishment, and that was from World War I up through 1947. He finished writing it in 1949. It told about this secret Anglo-American group that was put together for the purpose of creating a New World Order. And he couldn’t find a publisher for that one.
(LAUGHTER)
Denson: So he did 10 years of research and toned it down some and wrote Tragedy and Hope. This is the first book I read that indicated there was some secret society that was causing things to happen.
Rockwell: This man was a professor. He taught at Harvard and he taught at Georgetown.
Denson: He did.
Rockwell: He was a very important guy.
Denson: Very accomplished historian, taught at Georgetown. He had a student by the name of Bill Clinton. And when Clinton gave his acceptance speech, his first acceptance speech, he gave credit to Carroll Quigley for being the most important man that affected his thinking. I think, if I’m not mistaken, Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar.
Rockwell: Yes, he was a Rhodes Scholar.
Denson: So part of this group’s plan was to create the Rhodes Scholarships and bring Americans to Oxford.
So let me read something I’ve quoted a lot of times out of the Tragedy and Hope. It gives you the indication there is such a group that is influential and that’s causing things to happen. Here’s what Quigley wrote:
There does exist, and has existed for a generation, an international Anglophile network which operates to some extent, in the way the radical right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups, and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960’s to examine its papers and secret records.
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So here is a very accomplished historian. I don’t know for what purpose they had him doing this, but they obviously trusted him to look at their secret documents and nobody else was able to see them outside.
He says,
I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies (notably to its belief that England was an Atlantic rather than a European power and must be allied, or even federated, with the United States and must remain isolated from Europe), but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known.
So, you know, this really fascinated me. You know, it has never made much sense to me how you get a world war going over the assassination of an Archduke in Austria, I mean, assassinations of political leaders and so forth, and what it had to do with England, you know.
The authors of these two new books, Hidden History, and the Prolonging the Agony, go into a lot of Carrol Quigley’s book. They rely on that. In each of these two new books, Chapter one is on how all this originated. So it all starts in 1891 with a Professor John Ruskin at Oxford. He had two students that were a major part of this secret elite group, Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Milner. And Alfred Milner ends up being with the whole group until his death in 1925. He’s sort of the quarterback of the group. But Cecil Rhodes took down notes of what John Ruskin said and recruited a group.
Both Rhodes and Milner went to South Africa. The Dutch had settled that area down there as farmers. The group that Rhodes put together started the Boer War. It’s one of the most brutal wars in history. The British were criticized a lot for it because these were farmers on this land down there, and that land happened to contain the world’s best supply of gold and diamonds. So this group took over that. You know the country of Rhodesia is named for Cecil Rhodes.
He wrote something like seven wills. One of them talked about the secret group, and they pointed out that if you put that in a will, it’s going to be a public document, so he took that out. But he made Milner the trustee for his seventh will, and that’s when he created those Rhodes Scholarships.
The idea of Ruskin that these people adopted – and I don’t know if this was just a cover or whether they really believed this – but Ruskin thought that the British Empire was the greatest political organization that had ever been. It was created by the most intelligent, wealthy people. That needed to be expanded into reclaiming America as part of Anglo-American establishment, a secret elite. So that’s the way they got started.
The books, Hidden History and Prolonging the Agony, put together a diagram of who exactly these people are. It shows you the inner circle, a very small inner circle of about seven people, Lord Rothschild and others, international bankers that have a tendency to loan money for purposes of war.
So the thing about going back to Tragedy and Hope, the tragedy that Quigley talked about was that this group undoubtedly had a terrible effect on the 20th century by causing World War I and World War II. But the hope is that people will recognize that wars and depressions are not natural events like an eruption of a volcano or an earthquake; they’re man-made. The way to end war in the future is to learn from the mistakes. And that was his hope, that this would help us do that. But Quigley never abandoned his support of the idea of the secret elite because he wanted a New World Order.
Let me point out that this book, Hidden History, has 51 pages of footnotes. The way I read it, I kept a marker there at the footnotes. Every sentence almost contains a fact or a footnote, and I’d go back to the footnotes and read it. And sometimes the footnotes tell you a whole lot more than the text. But the sources they went to are phenomenal.
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They came from all over the world. And a lot of established professors furnished them information and sources and told them where to look, as long as they didn’t use their names.
(LAUGHTER)
Denson: These guys maybe want tenure or something and so they don’t want to be associated with this kind of revisionism.
The other book, Prolonging the Agony, has about 35 pages of footnotes. But each book has this diagram. So it’s useful when you read these books to use that diagram and see who these people are and what section that they control. In other words, they had the control of the academia, which is Oxford. They control the writing of history. They had to control the politics. Balfour is related — his mother was a member of the Cecil family which had been the power behind the throne forever, and with the Rothschild’s. Lord Rothschild was a member and financed many wars. International banking, the news media, the people that own the major newspapers were part of it. So they controlled the academia, the history, the politics and the international finance. And J.P. Morgan and Rockefeller eventually became members of that group.
Talking about getting into World War I, they recognized that they were going to have to have America in the war eventually, so they decided they needed a central bank in America. This group, as we all know from Jekyll Island, the book about it –they went secretly to Jekyll Island and created this Federal Reserve. The first bill was opposed by President Taft. He said that it needed more government control; this is a bunch of private individuals. So they had to get rid of Taft so they ran Teddy Roosevelt. The group sent a fellow named Colonel House to promote a very obscure politician named Woodrow Wilson. They got him elected to New Jersey, the governorship, then into the presidency. And he was in full agreement with this group and wanted to create the Federal Reserve and get America into the war.
So here’s their plan of how to proceed. The only way they could create this New World Order with the English-speaking hierarchy in control was to get rid of Germany. Germany had progressed to the point economically and in other ways to even surpass the British Empire in some ways, and it was a real threat to their idea of the English-speaking Anglo-Saxon world government, so they planned this war. They knew that they had to get Russia and France and their land armies in to squeeze Germany. There was a lot of behind-the-scenes talking to Russia and France back as early as 1904 about the war.
Rockwell: Wow.
Denson: None of this was known to the Parliament. This was all secretly done. So they promised the Russians that, you know, you get into this war and you can get Constantinople and get your warm water port, get into the Mediterranean, when in reality, they never intended for Russia to be successful in that. They were going to let Russia get in the war and help them but they were going to prevent Russia from achieving that goal. They talked to France suggesting that, they can get Alsace and Lorraine back. So that was the carrot at the end of the stick for these two countries.
So, they’re waiting for a spark that they can fan the flames and get the war going. There was an incident in Morocco that looked promising but it turned out the Germans didn’t take the bait. But when the Archduke of Austria was assassinated –they weren’t a part of the plot to assassinate– but they took that spark and fanned the flames by putting their representatives into the inside of the Austrian government and the decisions it made as well as in Serbia to make sure that they did not settle the incident. And the demand that Austria made was, we want to come into Serbia and make our own investigation, and the Serbians were instructed not to agree to that. The Kaiser had indicated to the Austrians that he would support them. Then when he saw how bad it was getting, he tried to talk them out of the conditions. But they went on, and Austria then declares war.
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So Edward, who became Edward VII, was, of course, related to the Czar. He was considered a ne’er-do-well by Victoria and she had him on a very strict allowance, you know, but he was traveling around extensively just going on pleasure trips. But Lord Rothschild created an unlimited expense account for him. He would talk to heads of government. The Russians were convinced that they needed to mobilize and go to war. So then their treaty with France then brought France in. So Russia and France mobilized before Germany ever did anything. Finally, Germany had to protect itself.
So that’s how they got World War I started, using that incident, the Archduke, as the spark. But they had all these other plans made to get the war going.
Rockwell: John, what about the Lusitania?
Denson: Yes, they had to get America in, so the Lusitania is a major thing. Of course, Winston Churchill was involved there. He made sure that he was not in England at the time, but all of this was planned in advance. The Lusitania was built to have secret compartments to store things in. It was financed partly by the British government with an understanding that in time of war they could control the Lusitania, but it was still a passenger ship.
One new thing I learned from these books was that the true manifest of the Lusitania showed it was carrying a huge supply of explosives that were being taken to Britain. This true manifest was found in the presidential library of Franklin Roosevelt in 2012. The false manifest that was used at Customs showed a few bullets were stored there, nothing to worry anybody. But the secret compartments on the Lusitania were designed for hiding and storing the explosives. The Secretary of State tried to get Wilson to warn people not to be on the Lusitania. He refused to give the warning because the whole plan was to use that to get America in. But America was so much against getting in, that the sinking of the Lusitania didn’t do the trick. But it shows you sort of a Pearl Harbor deal, where you’re trying to provoke something and to get America into the war. So that was the important part of it.
I was going to read a little bit of a section from Hidden History. This is page 12. It says,
What this book sets out to prove is that unscrupulous men, whose roots and origins were in Britain, sought a war to crush Germany and orchestrated events in order to bring this about. 1914 is generally considered as the starting point for the disaster that followed, but the crucial decisions that led to the war had been taken many years before.
Rockwell: So this was in 1904?
Denson: Right. It says, continuing here,
The horror of the British concentration camps in South Africa, where 20,000 children died, is conveniently glossed over; the devastating loss of a generation in a world war for which these men were deliberately responsible has been glorified by the lie that they died for ‘freedom and civilization.’ This book focuses on how a cabal of international bankers, industrialists and their political agents successfully used war to destroy the Boer Republics and then, Germany, and were never called to account.
Rockwell: No war guilt there.
Denson: Right. This is on page 14 of the introduction to Hidden History. It says,
The members of this Secret Elite were only too well aware that Germany was rapidly beginning to overtake Britain in all areas of technology, science, industry and commerce. They also considered Germany to be a cuckoo in the Empire’s African nest and were concerned about its growing influence in Turkey, the Balkans and the Middle East. They set out to ditch the cuckoo.
The Secret Elite were influenced by the philosophy of the nineteenth century Oxford professor John Ruskin, whose concept was built on his belief in the superiority and the authority of the English ruling classes acting in the best interests of their inferiors. And they professed that what they intended was for the good of mankind – for civilization. A civilization they would control, approve, manage and make profitable. For that, civilization, they were prepared to do what was necessary. They would make war for civilization, slaughter millions in the name of civilization. Wrapped in the great banner of civilization, this became a secret society like no other before it. Not only did it have the backing of privilege and wealth but it was also protected from criticism and hidden beneath a shroud of altruism. They would take over the world for its own good. Save the world from itself.
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So that shows you how the war got going.
The second book was published by another publisher. Random House bought the publisher that did Hidden History, and Random House didn’t agree and they didn’t want to do the second volume.
Rockwell: I wonder if they bought the publisher for that reason.
Denson: You would think so. So they went to another publisher. And that’s why this book didn’t come out until this year, Prolonging the Agony of the War.
But they’ve got two quotes here that really show the reason for prolonging the war. In other words, by 1915, it looked like it was just a stalemate. There was no way that either side was going to win. Well, that’s the worst thing that could happen for this group. Because, number one, the international bankers needed to make more money for a long war. And this group needed to smash Germany. They didn’t need to leave Germany in power.
So the first quotation, from the opening of Prolonging the Agony, is from Smedley Butler’s great book called War is a Racket:
War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside group” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.
In the World War [1] a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their tax returns no one knows.
So he points out what this book is about, prolonging the war in order to make money.
The second quote is from a soldier, a famous soldier and poet named Siegfried Sassoon. He wrote this a year before the war ended to his commanding officer. This would be called, I guess, treason today. But he says:
I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest…I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops and I can no longer be a party to prolonging these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.
I don’t know what they did to him but he was still famous after the war.
Rockwell: He had an important reputation as a poet.
Denson: Yes.
Rockwell: So my guess is that that gave him strength, that they couldn’t crush him.
Denson: Right. So they don’t want Russia to get the Dardanelles and Constantinople so they have a plan for that. But the Russians had complained that Britain wasn’t doing enough in the war and the Russians were taking the big losses. So the plot was to have a suicide war in Gallipoli to prove to the Russians that the British were really trying. So it was a planned failure, planned by Churchill, that they fought in Gallipoli and they were defeated. And that was the proof to keep the Russians in.
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The way they got the Russians out is they financed the Bolshevik revolution in Russia and with the understanding that the Bolsheviks would take over, that Russia would get out. So the financing for the Bolshevik revolution came from these people. And I’ve read many times before about Jacob Schiff sending huge sums of money, you know, to the Bolsheviks to get the revolution going. You know, I suppose they probably felt that if they could turn on and off the money, they could defeat the Bolsheviks when they needed to. That’s how they got Russia out. They had to bring America in. So the Lusitania and other things, the submarine-warfare excuse, were brought to bring America in. That had to bring the smashing of Germany. That’s why you get to the Versailles Treaty and Germany is not a part of any of the negotiations. And after six months, they come to the conclusion that the war is completely the fault of Germany.
You and I have talked about this before, and this has been recorded in several books, that John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen, went to the World War I peace conference with their uncle, Secretary of State Lansing, and they let John Foster compose the war-guilt clause. I think the number is part 231, or something of the treaty, holding Germany completely liable. Germany has no role in getting that done. So they accomplished their purpose of smashing Germany but almost ruined Western civilization through World War I and the affect it had.
Quigley admits that this group had great intentions; this world government would eliminate war.
Rockwell: Just have a lot of wars in the meantime.
(LAUGHTER)
Denson: Yes. And the whole thing shows you that wars can be caused by groups that you and I are not aware exist and that strings are being pulled by people behind the scenes. Wars can be avoided, I think, by honesty and transparency. Everything that this group was doing – they had Balfour, they had Lloyd George, Churchill. But they were not informing the Parliament of what was going on. All this was done by a few select, very powerful people.
These are two really great books. I recommend them and I recommend you to read each sentence. People are necessarily going to say this is conspiracy theory, and these authors realize that and say, this isn’t conspiracy theory, this is conspiracy fact.
(LAUGHTER)
Denson: To prove the existence of this group further, David Rockefeller, in his memoirs of 2002, proudly claimed he and his family have been a part of this group from the beginning and he fully supported this New World Order. So this is not some fictitious group. You’ve got Quigley, who was right in the middle of it, studying it, seeing their secret documents. You have David Rockefeller admitting that it exists. And at an earlier Bilderberg meeting, in I think 1991, he thanked the “Washington Post,” and the “New York Times” for the fact that they never revealed this group existed. He said that they would never have been able to accomplish all they had done if it had been exposed by the news media. So there’s been no secret as far as Rockefeller. I don’t know of anybody else that‘s talked about the group, except Quigley and Rockefeller.
But I think it’s a very important thing for history to reflect the truth. And it’s my theory that wars can be avoided if we know the truth; it’s not hidden from us by a secret, powerful group like this.
Rockwell: John thanks a million for talking to us about these important books. We’ll of course, link them in the podcast, and the other books you discussed, the Quigley books. This is just such important information for us to have because they’re constantly ginning up new wars. This is not something that ended in 1917 or whatever. So it’s a constant thing. They make a gazillion dollars out of it. They live on blood there. They’re like vampires. So thank you for exposing them.
Denson: Let me give you one personal experience before we sign off.
Rockwell: Please, yes.
Denson: About a month ago, I was having my car repaired in another city. And this young man, who was about 35 years old, was having his new Porsche repaired in some way. We sat there for about three hours, had to wait until they had it fixed, and so we go into a conversation about how he owned several Porsches. And I said, “What do you do?” He said, “Well, I was in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.” I said, “Really. And are these Porsches from your pay as a soldier?” He said, “No. After the Army, I stayed on and worked for contractors.” He said, “I worked for a private contractor in Afghanistan for about seven or eight years.” And he said, “A person like me, as the driver of a truck, I made over $200,000 a year. And I accumulated quite some wealth, you know, in the Afghanistan War as a private contractor,” he said. I never told him what my views were at all.
(LAUGHTER)
Denson: He said, “There’s no telling what the owner, the private contractor, Halliburton, somebody else, Blackwater or something, there’s no telling what they make,” he said, “if a truck driver can make $200,000.”
So Prolonging the Agony goes into how much money can be made out of war. And that’s why the book, Hidden History is very important also.
Rockwell: Well John, thanks a million. And I hope you’ll come back many times. Keep enlightening us about these important books that we might otherwise not know anything about, and about the issues they discuss.
Denson: Thank you. Always good to be with you, Lew.
Rockwell: Well, thanks so much for listening to the Lew Rockwell Show today. Take a look at all of the podcasts. There have been hundreds of them. There a link on the LRC front page. Thank you.
