World War One: The Western 1% colluded to start WWI – is the Great Lockdown also a conspiracy?

Quick: What’s the reason World War One started?

By Ramin Mazaheri for Ooduarere vis the Saker Blog

And don’t say it was because leftist Yugoslavian patriot Gavrilo Princip joined with Muslim leftists to assassinate Austrian imperialist Archduke Franz Ferdinand – that explanation exists only because Western schoolchildren need something to recite.

Few know the right answer: it was a war concocted by Western high finance in order to forestall the anti-1% revolution inspired by socialism. Given that the West is a bankocracy, with bankers as their enlightened, benevolent vanguard party – how can we expect their textbooks to tell the truth here?

Thus their “intelligent” analysis is the absurd myth that World War One was actually “an accident”. So we are to believe that the battle of Verdun lasted nine months and caused 700,000 casualties just because the average French and German soldier said, “Well, as long as we’re here… how about a good fight?”

It’s preposterous, but it seems plausible when the West’s prior five decades of history also routinely go unexplained. The post-1860s birth of modern capitalism was actually far, far, FAR more deadly and evil than the formative years of socialism (and even without a Cold War to create sabotaging difficulties). The body counts aren’t even close – even further apart are the moral aims of the two systems.

The legendary book Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World by Mike Davis illustrated how US, UK and French imperialists purposely created and/or purposely failed to flatten the curve of multimillion-murdering epidemics and famines in order to adhere to (and obviously profit from) the new liberal economic dogma of a “free market”. If you thought 1930s Soviets or 1950s Chinese or 1980s Iranians were ideologically extremist, then that’s because you have not learned about the raging capitalist genocidists of the late 18th century.

If you don’t teach that historical context, then how can World War One make sense? Thus, in order to protect their capitalist-imperialist ideology, World War One is an unexplainable aberration for the “advanced” Western intellectual.

Of course, even in the 1870s liberal ideology failed to create wealth for anyone but the 1% (whether Westerner or client/puppet) – the wealth has never, ever trickled down. What liberalism has always done is to permit increased market concentration and political power in a new 1%er aristocracy controlled by international bankers.

So the problem was not the nation-state, as Trotskyists assert – it was economic liberalism, i.e. globalisation. The idea that globalisation began around 1992 is a fiction, of course. This allows capitalists to keep ignoring their past crimes, and it has worked – their people cannot even explain why just a century ago their great-grandfathers fought their neighbors in trenches with chemical weapons.

We now know that the reason is that the Western 1% had stolen the wages and natural wealth from the entire world but now on an industrial scale and without any national patriotism, thus they conspired to forestall the socialist-inspired, progressive social changes which were the Western 99%’s only logical response to being forced to witness and participate in such atrocious money- and power-grabbing schemes. The common Marxist analysis back then was too hopeful: World War One was not the “final decline” of capitalism and imperialism – it was proof that international high finance will conspire however they can to prevent that final decline.

Indeed, socialism began in Western Europe and not elsewhere not because they are more “advanced” but because their lower classes were witnessing what their upper class was doing with the widest overview. Of course, they were shocked and proposed alternatives which they called “socialism”. But how could an Iranian or Chilean or Ethiopian have come up with such an idea – industrial & high-finance capitalism, and these “worst of humanity impulses on the largest scale”, were totally unimaginable and foreign until the moment that the Western 1% dropped their (debt) slave net on him or her?

Today we must say “no” to such collusions, not only because we have a duty to learn from a history our great-grandparents could not understand, but also because the same scheme keeps on being employed.

The same scheme, which aims only for more concentration – not redistribution – of wealth & power

Without this fundamental acceptance of the roots of World War One, how can anything which follows be understood? It cannot, and this is why the anti-socialist West so easily fell into existentialism, nihilism, apathy, materialism, relying on intoxicants, and an easy “polytheism minus the collectivist culture” faux-spirituality.

This basic explanation allows us to understand World War Two as a reaction to the failure of international socialism – the world revolution never arrived, as the German leftists infamously let down the Russians, who forged ahead anyway. Trotskyists would be proven wrong as Daddy Stalin remained socialist of course, but in the West socialism was corrupted into the mere brand-slogan of “national socialism” – it was really “corporate fascism”, of course. We have zero doubt about why this war started: to destroy the socialist USSR and to murder other socialist movements (many of which were rabidly atheistic, foolishly), and in retribution for their continued efforts to reverse the decades-long process of Western 1%-er market & political power concentration.

Increasing the concentration of power and money in the Western-led 1% is also the explanation for the US-Saudi petrodollar deal: what did the 1% care if consumer prices rose due to higher oil costs when the resulting hyper-financialisation created fabulous wealth for them?

When the dot-com bubble exploded a phony War on Islam was devised to redirect attention, and to solidly anchor the Pentagon’s collusion with the Western 1%, and to further concentrate the political and market power of the Western-led neo-aristocratic class.

The 2008 QE and ZIRP responses undoubtedly only continued this 150-year trend of financial consolidation and political concentration for 1%-er benefit, as evidenced by the 2010 court ruling that corporations are “people” in the US.

During these turbulent times I thus foresee one historical trend sure to continue for the West and their clients: increased political power and market concentration for their 1%.

The failure to see, or report, or educate oneself about what certainly appears to be a law which results from the foolish application of free market ideology means consigning oneself to total economic misunderstanding of one’s times, from 1914 until 2020.

So is the Great Lockdown a ‘conspiracy’ of the Western 1%?

As a longtime daily hard news reporter (and by nature and training) I have little use for conspiracy theories. For example: Was 9/11 an inside job, in order to deal with the dot-com bubble burst and to re-militarise Western culture after the fall of the USSR? There is, I’m told, a lot of evidence that the World Trade Center towers fell due to controlled demolition, but on that point I am rather apathetic: radical Islamic terrorism has been a Western creation and manipulation since their backing of the Taliban against the Soviets (indeed, since long before with their backing of the House of Saud). I simply prefer to deal with the real-world consequences upon the average person – 9/11 happened, somehow, and that’s enough for me to handle. I admit this even has a self-interested basis: I am not going to waste time and risk my reputation by publishing ideas for which I cannot provide a fully factual basis. World War One was NOT such an event, and people from Lenin to the man on the street hollered exactly that.

But is the Great Lockdown?

I only see three realistic answers, given that coronavirus has not, at least thus far, had the initially-predicted dangerously high fatality rates among even healthy sectors of the population:

1. This is a case of hysteria. China may have overreacted by locking down Hubei as a result of their MERS and SARS experiences. Or perhaps they are simply a victim of being too good and too experienced in dealing with epidemics: they are fully cognisant of their incredible capabilities to unite, fight and economically protect & rebound from pandemics, but they did not realise that others would try and do the same when they have no such abilities. Of course, that would not really be China’s fault, and certainly China’s lockdown was not made with any sort of collusion with the Western 1%.
2. This is a case of stupidity. The West, arrogantly assuming they could take the measures China did – despite the lack of popular support for their governments, and despite a long-standing refusal & inability to intervene economically to mitigate the impact of such measures, and despite an economy so weak they were in the West’s “Great Recession” – embarked on a Great Lockdown without foresight, intelligence or adult realism.
3. This is a case of Western 1% collusion: Realising the need to “bank one’s profits”, which had been generated by the 2008-2020 QE and ZIRP policies, the Western 1% took advantage of China’s sincerely-motivated lockdown policy to insist on the same policy for their own nations. They knew that whatever “Western Great Recession” economic bubbles were popped, controlling this popping was perhaps as key as controlling the outcomes. Of course, since the 1860s the Western 1% has been well-aware that aristocratic/bourgeois Western liberalism gave them all the power to control the outcomes.

I can’t say which it is, but I can say that #3 is certainly in keeping with liberal economic history. From the famines of the late 19th century, to World War One, to World War Two, to the oil price shock, to the dot-com bust, to the Great Recession to the hysterical “the Great Lockdown is the only solution” of 2020, the trend is the same: increased economic and political power in the West’s anti-democratic neo-aristocratic class.

It certainly is easy for that class to collude: in the 21st century their medias are privately owned by a handful of billionaires, so one simple phone call decides the editorial policy of often 90% of their media; their people have been told so often that There Is No Alternative to neoliberalism & neo-imperialism that they don’t even question the way they are totally disregarded by their own technocratic class; their wars on socialists and then Muslims have created a “perpetual war” popular mentality so they have been well-prepared to embrace a “war on coronavirus” no matter how much it costs them economically, politically, culturally or personally.

Market concentration is absolutely certain to increase, already: By making the historic decision to buy corporate debt Western central banks are going to dramatically cull the corporate herd – only profitable companies will get bailouts, with the roughly 20% of zombie corporations certain to fail and be stripped for parts. Because Western liberalism hates government – the only tool of the 99% to reign in an aristocracy which has neutered their (often still in place) monarchy – the Western taxpayer will get nothing for this financial assistance, as nationalisations cannot be permitted, with the idea itself being heavily censored across the West.

But the effect on the non-corporate capitalist classes – the Mom and Pop stores, the medium-sized businesses of 499 employees – will be just as deadly. In the US their loans to these types of establishments are totally insufficient: bankruptcies will be widespread, thus – yet again – market concentration will increase as their real estate, assets, machinery and labor force get bought up at a fraction of the price by an ever-smaller, ever-richer elite. Europe will see the same trend, though only slightly mitigated: the idea that in thee years small-town France won’t have even more empty shop fronts and more (unthinkable 10 years ago) part-time work companies is absurd.

On top of the Western economic pyramid – ever since the monarchy was gutted – sits international high finance. In today’s terms they are the hedge funds, investment groups and major banks. A socialist-inspired revolution would mean a permanent reckoning for them, but in 2020 we will likely only see a partial one, yet again: For every Lehman Brothers which fails there is a BlackRock which rises even higher in the always-rigged-for-the-rich, faux-democratic system of Western liberalism.

These outcomes are absolutely nothing new, and it is a process which goes back to the East India Company because economic liberalism is not new, nor are its methods unknown, nor are the results ever anything but increased concentration of wealth and political power: the only time liberal economics “worked” is when it has been mixed with socialism (and thus is no longer liberal economics). What’s certain is that the bailout “solutions” for the Western Great Lockdown are only aimed to make whole the 1%’s losses of the “Double Bubble” economic chaos which will begin in earnest when the Great Lockdown hysteria ends.

Banks loved World War One: global national debts increased 475% from 1914-20; every dead soldier made a profit of $10,000 to international bankers. What will their profits be from the economic devastation undoubtedly already wrought by the Great Lockdown? Unsurprisingly, the West is talking about that as much as they talk about why World War One occurred.

Whether it was corona or not, or a conspiracy or not: those double bubbles were going to pop. It now turns out that it is World War One which popped them. Excuse me, the coronavirus.

The “accidental” famines of capitalism’s formative decades, World War One, the creation of the petrodollar, 9/11 coming on the heels of the dot-com bust, the continuation of trickle-down economics despite 40+ years of failure, the Great Lockdown’s forced suicide march for the West’s lower classes – are these the result of conspiracies among the international 1% class?

That’s up to the reader, but it’s not really important to me – what I care about is dealing with the outcomes.

And yet, some countries will avoid these outcomes – the “global economy” is not synonymous with the “Western economy”; some countries had modern, socialist-inspired revolutions and the only catastrophe they have been unable to avoid is perpetual Western hot and cold war.

But repeat after teacher like a good student: “World War One started when crazy anarchist Gavrilo Princip worked alone to murder the noble Archduke Franz Ferdinand….” (You know – just repeat what German corporate fascists taught their kinder.)

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Corona contrarianism? How about some corona common sense? Here is my list of articles published regarding the corona crisis, and I hope you will find them useful in your leftist struggle!

Ramin Mazaheri is the chief correspondent in Paris for Press TV and has lived in France since 2009. He has been a daily newspaper reporter in the US, and has reported from Iran, Cuba, Egypt, Tunisia, South Korea and elsewhere. He is the author of the books ‘I’ll Ruin Everything You Are: Ending Western Propaganda on Red China’ and the upcoming ‘Socialism’s Ignored Success: Iranian Islamic Socialism’.