On Bravery, Anzac Day And Lies, Damn Lies.

I am not a New  Zealander. I am Dutch. The Dutch were not involved in WWI so I have no connection with the war through my history.

In the Netherlands we remember WWII on two separate days. On May 4th we commemorate our dead and the start of the war and on May 5th we celebrate surviving the war and the end of it.

What we do not do is make this about our National identity or glamorize the battle. Yes, we do honour the people who fought in the underground against the German occupation and who helped Jews and political dissenters to survive but to me the emphasis on military bravery is lost. Wars are death, destruction and the damage of generations, and generations of humans and nature and animals. What is worse is they are all, without exception, about making profit for a very small group of very evil people.

This year, as we are being propagandised into another illegal war by our Prime Minister and his MSM cronies, I thought I’d spend some extra time reading up on the battle of Gallipoli and what happened there.

I showed my husband the King, the Kaiser and the Czar doco I posted here a couple of days ago and he was blown away by the fact that the king of England, the Kaiser from Germany and the Czar from Russia were cousins and that their little squabble we now know as WWI cost the lives of 9 million people.

What is even more pernicious is that while most people here in NZ see the war in very black and white “German bad guys and English (Australians, New Zealanders) good guys” kind of way. To most of them Gallipoli was needed in order to fight the Germans and the myth we are told to believe does nothing to dispel that notion.

We are told that the Anzacs fought bravely on the soil of the Ottoman Empire and that they died for our freedom. In fact the other day someone said that we would all have spoken German if it wasn’t for our brave soldiers.

But the reality is that Gallipoli was an unmitigated disaster. The poor young men who died there were seduced into service, which was presented to them as a great adventure, and later, when people got wise to what was happening and they ran out of cannon fodder, conscripts who had no choice in the matter were send in to replace the first loads.

In fact the first people send in, were more or less hijacked and instead of going to England for their training they were dumped in Egypt to be transported straight into battle, without any training whatsoever, to die on a filthy piece of about 400 acres of land, somewhere far away from home.

That is not bravery, that is madness. Bravery is going into a situation you know very well is dangerous but doing it anyway because you are compelled to do so for reasons of valour or compassion. Being send to die violently and quick if you were lucky or slow and painful, without choice or escape, by arrogant leaders, has nothing to do with bravery. That is murder.

Here is a song that kept popping up in my head over the last few days and an article I though many New Zealanders should read as once again troops are being send into the same resource rich area of the world to die for another rich men’s war.

James blunt: No Bravery

World War I and the British Empire: The Gallipoli Campaign, The Untold Story

The truth about Gallipoli has, unlike its victims, been buried deep. Historians like Peter Hart who describe it as “an idiocy generated by muddled thinking”¹ are justified in their anger, but not their conclusions. The campaign was conceived in London as a grotesque, Machiavellian strategy to fool the Russians into believing that Britain was attempting to capture Constantinople for them. The paradox of its failure lay in its success. Gallipoli was purposefully designed to fail.

A secret cabal of immensely rich and powerful men – the Secret Elite – was formed in England in 1891 with the explicit aim of expanding the British Empire across the entire globe. They planned a European war to destroy Germany as an economic, industrial and imperial competitor and, to that end, drew France then Russia into an alliance termed the Entente Cordiale. Their massive land armies were needed to crush Germany. France would be rewarded with Alsace and Lorraine, while Russia was conned into believing she would get Constantinople.² Thereafter, seizing the Ottoman capital became a “widespread obsession, bordering on panic” in St Petersburg.³

Had Britain encouraged the friendship of Turkey in 1914, the disaster of Gallipoli would never have happened.⁴The Turks generally disliked the Germans and their growing influence,⁵ and made three separate attempts to ally with Britain. They were rebuffed on each occasion.⁶ They also pleaded in vain with the French to accept them as an ally,⁷ and protect them against their old enemy, Russia.⁸ Poor fools. The French and British alliance with Russia was at the expense of the Turks, not an alliance with the Turks to save them from Russia. Britain and France planned to carve up the oil rich Ottoman Empire. To that end, the Turks had to be pushed into the German camp and defeated.

In July 1914 the majority of the Turkish cabinet was still well disposed towards Britain,⁹ but their faith was shattered by the seizure of two battleships being built for them in England. As an essay in provocation it was breathtaking.¹⁰ “If Britain wanted deliberately to incense the Turks and drive them into the Kaiser’s arms she could not have chosen more effective means.”¹¹ Winston Churchill (a loyal servant of the Secret Elite) seized the dreadnoughts because they were “vital to Britain’s naval predominance.”¹² The truth ran much deeper.

Back in February, Russia laid plans for her Black Sea fleet to take Constantinople by landing 127,500 troops and heavy artillery from Odessa. Arrival of the dreadnoughts from England would destroy this plan.¹³ Russia’s Foreign Minister Sazonov issued a thinly veiled warning to London on 30 July: “It is a matter of the highest degree of importance that… these ships must be retained in England.”¹⁴ Fearful that Russia would renege on her commitment to war should the ships be released, the Secret Elite withheld them. It kept Russia on board and helped drive Turkey into the German camp (they signed a treaty on 2 August), but it created a major problem. How to prevent the Russian Black Sea fleet from seizing Constantinople? Two German warships provided the answer. On 4 August, while off the coast of Algeria, the battle cruiser Goeben and attendant light cruiser Breslau received orders to head for Constantinople.

Vastly outnumbered (73 to 2) by French and British warships, the escape of the German cruisers to Constantinople, 1,200 miles away, is described as a “fiasco of tragic errors” by “fumbling” British Admirals.¹⁵The British Admiralty supposedly had no idea where they were heading, but the reality was very different. On 3 August, Kaiser Wilhelm telegraphed King Constantine to say that both warships would be proceeding to Constantinople. This information was transmitted to London,¹⁶ and to the British naval mission in Athens.¹⁷ Naval Intelligence in London had intercepted and decrypted the actual encoded message from Berlin to Goeben: “Alliance concluded with Turkey. Goeben and Breslau proceed to Constantinople.” The Admiralty knew,¹⁸ but relayed information to the Mediterranean fleet that “was either useless or inaccurate.”¹⁹ Goeben and Breslau were allowed to escape in order to neutralise the Russian Black Sea fleet. Foreign Secretary Sazonov was outraged that the Royal Navy had failed to prevent it.²⁰

The Ottoman Ambassador in Berlin summed it up perfectly: “Considering the displeasure and complications which a Russian attack on Constantinople would produce in England, the British navy having enabled the German ships to take cover in the Sea of Marmora, has, with the Machiavellianism characteristic of the Foreign Office, foiled any possibility of action by the Russian Black Sea Fleet.”²¹ Safe arrival of the Goeben rendered a Russian amphibious operation well-nigh impossible,²² and the British Ambassador at Constantinople admitted that their presence served British interests, since “they protected the straits against Russia.”²³

On 9 September Admiral Arthur Limpus, head of the British naval mission in Turkey, was recalled. Turkey, although still neutral, closed and mined the Dardanelles. In late October Goeben and Breslau bombarded Sevastopol and other Black Sea ports. Infuriated, Tsar Nicholas insisted on war with Turkey and the seizure of Constantinople for Russia. British and French fears that he would make peace with Germany if Constantinople was denied him gave the Tsar overwhelming diplomatic leverage, and it was agreed that Turkey must now be brought into the war.²⁴

War Declared & the Secret Elites Initiate Gallipoli Campaign

On 2 November Russia declared war on Turkey. Britain and France followed suit three days later. “November 1914 brought a kind of holy war fever to the Russian Foreign Ministry.”²⁵ With over one million Russian casualties for no gain, anti-war protests and revolution stalked the streets of Petrograd. In London, fear of Russia signing a peace treaty with Germany loomed large. How was Russia to be kept in the war with the promise of Constantinople, without actually allowing it? The solution, an attack on Gallipoli, was fraught with pitfalls. The Tsar had to be tricked into believing Britain was generously responding in his hour of need by mounting an all-out effort to take Constantinople for Russia.

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