The Co-operation Model of Genocide

We have to ask serious questions, including of ourselves.

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Warren Thornton, the journalist who exposed the former Waffen SS officer who took the standing ovation at the Canadian Parliament, will be speaking on the 11th of January at our Edinburgh event: The Truth About Ukraine. All views are welcome - we want open discussion. You can book your free ticket here.

Both my grandfathers fought in the First World War. Yet I feel little connection to the annual Remembrance commemorations. I feel pity when I visit a small Scottish village and see the local cenotaph with the list of names that show an action greater than decimation inflicted on the people of those communities, but I can’t help feeling some anger too. Anger at the credulous, gullibility of those who went to war and stayed there. It’s stupid to run at machine guns. It’s stupid to do it if someone tells you to do it; it’s stupid to do it of your own volition. To do it multiple times over four years with less resistance than you might expect, well, what can you say?

I realised that the population was lied to about German soldiers killing Belgian babies - how often has that trope been used now? - and misled about German plans for expansion; however, it would not take a sharp mind to realise that the continual slaughtering of men did not serve any worthwhile purpose. And the men themselves would not have lacked the education or the individuals in their numbers who were unsophisticated. The reading material and literacy of the working class then is greater than it is now. It would not be unusual for the men to be reading pamphlets, newspapers and notable works of Literature.

What makes the situation more confusing is the tactics (which should have given any sensible human being cause to pause in their hurried charge to their own destruction): the bombardments of the enemy by heavy guns that were ineffective due to the use of trenches; the silencing of those guns that signalled an attack; the putting bromide in the tea of troops before an attack so that they were practically dazed sitting ducks; the charge over muddy, broken ground, littered with all sorts of impediments that gave the defender ample opportunity to shoot down those in the assault. It does not make sense.

If events are not coherent to me, I’ve learned to look for reasons that make them more intelligible. When we are given the Armistice Day version of the war, it is provided with little context. A context that shows the entire war in a different light. In a Europe dominated by the aristocracy and ruled by monarchies, and had been for centuries; a Europe whose empires stretched across the globe, the backbone and muscle of that system was unsettled. The working class was growing in its demand for greater democracy and an economic share of the pie. There had almost been a revolution in Russia in 1905. In Britain, as Internationalism writes in the articles Mass strikes in Britain: the ‘Great Labour Unrest’, 1910-1914:

“Between 1910 and 1914, the working class in Britain and Ireland launched successive waves of mass strikes of unprecedented breadth and ferocity against all the key sectors of capital, strikes that blew apart all the carefully cultivated myths about the passivity of the British working class that had blossomed in the previous epoch of capitalist prosperity.” 

France and Germany both had serious strikes and strong, restive labour movements wanting a new accord with government, perhaps coveting government itself. Therefore, the Old Order had a problem. The mass of the workforce wanted change and they were many, too many of them to be successfully stalled. Is it possible that the oligarchs of those days might reason that a few million less might make the situation more manageable? They certainly seem to be reasoning that way now.

Jean Jaures, the French socialist leader and anti-militarist, was assassinated nine days before an international conference intended to dissuade the pro-bellum parties from going to war. He had also been calling for a General Strike to prevent the conflagration. His murder, by a nationalist, shocked France and moved them closer to war as it broke an important link in the international opposition to war and, with deceitful cunning, his death was re-interpreted as ‘aggression’ by ‘Aggressors’: the French Left’s leaders swung behind the war (probably bought off too). As we know now, assassinations by lone wolf assassins is always suspicious and indicate an invisible hand of Power is present.

The events after the war, the shelter given to ruling families and the preservation of status, all suggest ‘belligerents’ that were not as ill-disposed to one another as they had led their populations to believe. In fact, they seemed to be on each other’s side. They were family after all. Were they really trying to conquer one another?

Would it strain credibility too much to say that the First World War was an organised genocide that exploited nationalist feelings, utilised social coercion and propaganda to encourage workers across the continent to kill each other? Given what we are witnessing in the present day, I do not think that hypothesis is too much of a stretch.

Of course, the oligarchs and their Renfields who malevolently planned and executed this are criminals. Nonetheless, how did they do it? They exploited the buried resentments, the secret fears, the credulousness, the bigotry and the delusions of a generation to position them in those trenches and eventually run to their own destruction, killing who they’d been ordered to kill as they did so. An outcome that benefitted not them but the cold blooded factions of the world.

The First World War makes more sense to me this way rather than the noble attempt to defeat an expansive Germany bent on global domination. The war in Ukraine too makes greater sense now with this more saturnine interpretation. At one point, it might be argued that Russia was too influential in Ukraine and its influence must be resisted. From the Russian side, it can be understood that a traditional Rus people joining NATO and pointing nuclear weapons at a fellow country of Rus and Slavs was unacceptable from a security and cultural standpoint. Whatever strength lies in those arguments is now a moot point. It’s clear Ukraine has lost.

A negotiated peace in 2014 for both countries was always the better option, even in 2022. Now it looks like Ukraine is no longer capable of making any peace; it will simply have to accept terms, if those terms are ever offered. The decision to continue the war after the failed counter-offensive and its losses is madness. The rumours, if true, about calling-up all men from teenagers to men in their seventies and to press-gang women as well makes no military sense and is more in line with a strategy of de-population rather than resistance. It not only does not make sense, it’s insane. Ukraine has long had corrupt and degenerate leaders, both seen and unseen. They are exploiting the trauma and resentment of the Ukrainian people in a part of the world that has an extremely bitter and bloody history. Still, the Ukrainian people do not have to continue to take up arms. (In elections they have voted for peace three times, yet still they have walked into the trenches en masse. The only reason why the flow of recruits have stopped is that there are precious few left to fight.)

The same is true of what is happening in Gaza. Very ugly feelings, wearing the mantle of justice in each side’s head, with a partial validity, have been marshalled to release hell on the people of Gaza. The border between Israel and Gaza, Israel’s southern border, is the hi-tech border in the world. Why do Israelis, why do Hamas fighters, why do IDF soldiers, why do Gazans, why do we, not ask why that border was open for seven hours with no military response by Israel? How could Hamas cross with hand gliders and bulldozers? And attack an international music festival? It does not make sense!

And if it is not comprehensible, then there is something else going on, by someone else, for someone else.

Warren Thornton, a well-connected journalist with contacts on the ground will be revealing what he knows about Ukraine and the war there. Book your ticket here.