Eurasia note #78 – Churchill’s Wars And Financial Ties

If you stay close, you win the cigar

• Germany’s unification as Churchill was born was the defining feature of his era

• As was the collapse of Britain’s empire from internal and external challenge

• Oil, banking and rentier interests, their wealth derived from empire, were nervous

• The idea that Churchill alone spotted the threat of Germany does not stand up

• British and U.S. worldview and policy, including towards Russia, is pathalogical

• You might paraphrase it as ‘hate and accumulate’

• A lesson from those provoking war in Winston’s time is believing it’s “the game”

• Churchill is viewed differently by those with more recent colonial experience

• Too embarrassing to be acknowledged; evolving views are dismissed as “revision”

• Competitors are frozen in the history of the ‘rules-based international order’

• This tells us that today’s crises are, like those before, wars for resources

• Similarly today’s private foundations facilitate that which they claim to oppose

See part one: Ukraine - The War Everyone Saw Coming (Moneycircus, May 5, 2023)
Also 70 Years Since Stalin; His Role In Globalism (Moneycircus, Mar 5, 2023)

(About 4,100 words or 19 minutes of your company)

It’s not that long ago

Tbilisi, May 18, 2023

Prelude: It’s the coronation, stupid

We are told that kings and queens, revolutionaries and presidents forge nations. Draw a line long enough, however, and you will see how great socioeconomic crises intersect.

If you look at what shaped England and parts of northern Europe over the past 500 years, it was first the Reformation — a social and economic, as well as doctrinal and thus institutional challenge — and the way in which individuals stepped into the resulting political and financial vacuum.

The spy regime implemented in the 1570s by Sir Francis Walsingham created the one of the oldest intelligence services and the modern police state.

In 1688-89 the “glorious revolution” overthrew the Catholic King James II, putting England back on the Puritan path, establishing the primacy of Parliament over the monarch. This was in part, however, the primacy of bankers, institutionalised under Oliver Cromwell, who in our time display their power in the Covid response — when legislatures around the world are rusticated and foam in their toothlessness at the feet of private foundations and the corporate-investor owners.

It is appropriate, therefore, that King Charles III was given the role of anointing The Great Reset in Jun 2020, during the Covid response which is, as we’ve argued, a monetary event: the massive money printing may have paid people furlough, but it was above all a timely bailout to insolvent governments, corporations and banks.

TGR consists in replacing the cash-based monetary system with ration vouchers (a central bank digital currency) apportioned by the stakeholders (owner-investors) who will impose “sustainability” upon the population while they retain control of oil and mineral resources, and food.

Ducks and dukes

Almost no-one thought there was going to be world war in the 1910s and even when it was declared, in August of 1914, most were convinced it would be over by Christmas.

Though an Austrian archduke had been assassinated in June 1914, few saw the fate of an individual, let alone any dialectical force of history, leading the continent into unprecedented conflagration and bloodshed.

The interpretation of history modulates like a pendulum between the hagiography of great individuals — at school we learned by rote the names of British monarchs, “Willie, Willie, Harry, Steve; Harry, Dick, John, Harry three” — and, on the other hand, analysis of large-scale socioeconomic developments.

In universities the rising profile of Marxist historians, from Fernand Braudel and Eric Hobsbawm to the more activist academics like Régis Debray (the names you select depend on your field of study — the author’s was the English Interregnum and the revolutions of Latin America) — demolished the walls between innovation, economics, trade and the manipulation of statecraft.

Perception slumbers betwixt bowers. Some powerful forces interpret history in real time or even shape it. They do not wait for the historian to pick up his or her pen. Past being prelude, the wealthiest forces finance historians to shape the narrative, just as private foundations have taken over scientific research. See Nobel prize-winning physicist Robert Laughlin: The Crime of Reason: And the Closing of the Scientific Mind (2008). [1]

See the career of the historian Waldo Gifford Leland, in Spies, Dupes and Charities: Rivals for Power, Part 4. Norman Dodd and the tax-exempt foundations (Moneycircus, Aug 7, 2021).

“The activities of William Leland match precisely the strategy and institutions that the Carnegie trustees were discussing in order to take over the teaching of history. The timing matches that noted in the transcripts seen by Norman Dodd.”

The influence of whole fields of research by philanthropic foundations leads to a paradox. At a time when universities are supposedly dominated by Marxists, the economic rivalry of classes gains less attention than a postmodern narrative of ever-more thinly sliced and diced identities, which leads this author to conclude that wealthy class interests do indeed divert debate.

This tends to confirm the idea that wealthy class interests have derailed our attention and misdirected our focus. Younger journalists who increasingly see themselves as activists — as Glenn Greenwald has cautioned — tend to impose the ideological horse blinkers, restricting discussion to discrete political furrows. That makes it all the harder to challenge narratives in historical or present time.

We examined this narrowing of perspective in our 9/11 anniversary article, The Objectives Of 9/11 And The Covid Response (Moneycircus, Sep 11, 2022).

“The drive to understand things may stem from an interest in history as it shapes our present, but that further breaks down into those who see history as a soup, murky but perceiving flavours that conform to their identity, and those who like their historical perspectives raw.

It is reflected in people’s personality. Some are less informed, some are knowledgeable but guarded, and some are well-formed and comfortable in their nakedness. This means being open to discomfiting ideas, and weighing them without putting a finger on the scales: you have to let your guard down and be disappointed sometimes.”

Central to this is the use of historical perspective, whose purpose is to sharpen our view of the present, as opposed to history which is the study of the past.

“Historical perspective refers to understanding a subject in light of its earliest phases and subsequent evolution,” says Barbara Lawrence in a paper on the topic.

Eternal interests; eternal rivals

Or how Germany became not just Winston’s obsession.

Winston Churchill’s political ideology is best described as imperialist rather than partisan (he spent decades in both the Conservative and Liberal parties) and as patrician rather than politician.

He was not ideological but “learned on the job” — Harrow of his time was gloriously free of the constraints of modern education — and his first job was empire: as a soldier-journalist in India and Africa, whose perceptions had been formed by his father’s adventures in the gold fields. Both Winston and his father were sustained by banking and resource interests rooted in the colonies, and which dominated the political class.

That class suffered palpable angst from the competition posed by Germany’s rise. The nation had become a unified state in 1871, three years before Churchill’s birth. The rentier, banking and resource interests who had had the globe to themselves, looked askance at the rapid emergence of the Teutonic power during precisely the years that Churchill came to maturity. [2]

At the same time, the oil and resource interests would have known very well what Germany lacked: it had little coal, its limited oil was best suited to lubricant, it was short of chemicals for refining, and though it was by the turn of the century the top producer of steel, it was reliant on imports to fuel that industry.

Germany’s quest for independent access to fuel, the Berlin-Baghdad railway, by which it hoped to reach the Persian Gulf, was obstructed for four decades.

Its other source, the Russian oil industry, had been knocked out of the market for half a century by the withdrawal of the biggest producers: Nobel, Rockefeller and Rothschild. The latter sold their interests just before the first Russian revolution.

Between 1904 and 1913, the Russian share in the world’s total oil exports collapsed from 31 to 9 percent, writes Danil Yergin, author of Extraction: World History of the Fight for Oil, Money and Power (1999). Russian oil output did not recover to 1900 levels for over 50 years.

The Rothschilds’ exit from Russia was staged gradually from the first Russian revolution of 1905 up to 1912, when they folded their Russian assets into Royal Dutch Shell. They were praised for the world’s luckiest business decision. For a potted timeline see Tourist Batumi's Lessons For Today (Moneycircus, Mar 3, 2023)

For more on this anomaly, please:

Sent to Coventry

Germany was clearly being isolated economically, but what about diplomatically?

The Boers, of mostly Dutch and German ancestry, would find themselves caught between British and German ambition in southern Africa, especially after the discovery of diamonds in Kimberley in the 1860s, and the world’s largest goldfields on the Witwatersrand in the 1880s.

The historian and National Liberal member of the Reichstag, Heinrich von Treitschke, wrote in 1884, “it would be no more than a natural turn of events if racially-related Germany should some day in some manner become responsible for the protection of the Teutonic population of Southern Africa.”

The new power found itself, as did peripheral Russia to some extent, necessarily in competition and forced to choose sides: whether to parlay German idealism into champion of the underdog — albeit pups of shared ethnicity — or to seek a place at the imperial table. The latter it would be denied.

Rake’s progress

Winston would find himself, two years after suppressing Pashtuns on the Northwest Frontier, in Cape Town in 1898 for the second Anglo-Boer war. [3]

Did Churchill turn against Germany — he called Prussia “the source of the recurring pestilence” — or did he represent a commercial interest, a class view, the corporate finance that was coming into being, and which would one day rival nation states?

He was just as wedded as the German elite to eugenic superiority — amply evidenced by his behaviour in the Boer War, Gallipoli, Ireland, the General Strike and the Bengal famine. This may have contributed to his being defeated in the general election of 1945, but has been forgotten in the following decades of adulation. [4]

Poorly balancing this elitist mindset, Churchill would absorb the ethos of the Victorian age, exemplified in Sir Henry Newbolt’s poem Vitai Lampada which was published in those years:

“Play up! play up! and play the game!”

Do we not espy a parallel in those who today call themselves elites?

Entitled without title

It is odd to encounter on Reddit and other places the snarky dismissal of suggestions that Winston Churchill was financed by bankers — isn’t everyone?

In a plutocratic age like ours, as that of Churchill a century before, the question is not whether money talks but who in any transaction gets the better end of the deal. Today we are familiar with publishers offering multi-million dollar book deals, and corporations paying politicians half a million for a speech.

What matters is the scale of one’s borrowing, the collateral offered, and the penalty due if one cannot pay the interest. And Winston, like his father, could not meet the interest.

Winston identified his career with war from his days as a journalist reporting on the suppression of the Boers. As we shall see he was no mere newspaperman.

Upon his father’s early death in 1895, the 21 year-old Winston was in the Queen’s Own Hussars, and got himself posted abroad where he doubled as a journalist, profiting handsomely from the newspaper publishers, as his father had done.

It would not be long before he would be calling on the same bankers to finance his lifestyle and career.

Churchill’s financial dependence on sponsors is said to be evidence of his sense of entitlement, while those whose largesse sated his desires are said to have accommodated him through bonhomie, with little expectation of recompense and demanding nothing in return.

Having lived through three years of wealth snatching by the “elite” — of increasing Pareto distribution under cover of the Covid response — if you maintain that plutocrats are glad handed, seeking to distribute their beneficence rather than seize the wealth of others, congratulations for reading this far.

If you read the International Churchill Society’s own web site, it makes perfectly clear the family’s intimate connection to the Rothschilds, not just as borrowers but deeply connected to gold prospecting and the Rhodes project — in other words the resource wars in Africa and elsewhere, which led to competition with Germany that was “a manifestation of the imperial rivalry that was the leading cause of World War I.” [5]

Family business

In 1871 Cecil Rhodes had set off to Africa to buy up the diamond mines of Kimberley, financed by Lord Nathaniel “Natty” Rothschild (1840-1915), who after Rhodes’ death managed the eponymous scholarship. Rhodes, after all, had been a parson’s son with no money of his own.

It is on the Churchill society website that one comes across the related story. Nathaniel Rothschild, a lifetime friend of the family, suggested in 1891 that Lord Randolph should form a syndicate to prospect for gold in Mashonaland, southern Africa, with the Rothschilds providing banking and logistical services.

Alfred Beit, a German-born mining engineer and financier who was close to the Rothschilds, was focused on Central Rand. Randolph arrived in Cape Town with a Rothschild letter of credit for £10,000 to cover expenses, which he proceeded to squander on supplies for his traveling party described as sufficient for a continental army. He did profit from newspaper articles which also provided the opportunity to research the prospects of the Transvaal, and made investments including in De Beer.

He fared better when Beit sold him Witswatersrand mining company, Deep Levels, at a preferential price. It would later be known as Rand Mines.

Engaged, extravagantly

Like his father Randolph, Winston was extravagant, and was bailed out by bankers on many occasions. In “No More Champagne: Churchill and his Money,” (2015) British banker David Lough lists WC’s creditors, from Austrian-born Sir Henry Strakosch to Sir Ernest Cassel, and the provider of his cigars, J. Grunebaum & Sons, who saw their revenues go up in smoke and remained unpaid.

As Ofer Aderet wrote in his review for Haaretz, Winston was a schnorrer, a Yiddish term for a sponger or scrounge. [6]

He was also financed through lavish fees for newspaper articles and later for his books and films. Lough says Churchill gave his financiers nothing directly in return but that disguises a more complex and lengthy story.

The Focus

Having lost his parliamentary seat in the early 1920s Churchill became a lobbyist for oil companies and in the 1923 election Labour Party opponents challenged him openly about the money he’d taken from the banker Cassel. By the 1930s, Churchill was in debt to the tune of $4 million in today’s money, according to Lough.

This financial support coalesced around The Focus, a covert group financed by Robert Mond, owner of several chemicals companies, and Robert Waley Cohen, who had negotiated the merger of Shell Oil with Royal Dutch Oil Company in 1906-07 and was a director of the firm in which the Rothschilds now held a major interest. The Focus was run by Eugen Spier, a German emigrant, who later authored an account, titled with perhaps arch modesty, The Focus. A footnote in history (1963). [7]

In Spier’s sixties account of the group (full title “Focus in Defence of Freedom and Peace”) he describes that Hitler had “singled out for extermination” the Jews “in the name of a purely Aryan Germany.”

“But I felt that it was wrong to concentrate on the sufferings of the Jews, and that more was needed of the British people than mere sympathy and indignation. Hitler had other aims beyond the extermination of a hated race and their religion with its deep-rooted ethical teachings and laws.”

Violet Bonham Carter, the daughter of H. H. Asquith, Prime Minister from 1908 to 1916, wrote in the foreword to the same book:

“We had at the outset no material and little moral backing. We were a small group of like-minded individuals swimming against the tide-not only of government policy but of the prevailing public attitude and mood.”

Nonetheless it is questionable that a self-described “footnote” of a group with “no material backing” succeeded in overturning the “prevailing public attitude” and maneouvering its candidate, Winston Churchill into the prime role.

The recruit

Churchill may have been recruited to The Focus, not only because its cohort paid his bills, but because its members recognised in him the prejudices and predilections of the aristocracy that bent him to their purpose.

He is laughably cited as a humanitarian because he ordered that shipments of food, from the USA and intended for the UK, be diverted to starving Germany.

If it happened, it was a repeat of the strategy to keep Germany fighting in WW1, described in the book Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War (2014). Authors Gerry Docherty and James MacGregor make the case that the Commission for Relief in Belgium was really a way to channel supplies to Germany to prolong the war. They show how the committee was almost entirely composed of bankers. [8]

As for the Rothschild-Rhodes pursuit of world dominance by an Anglo-American establishment, Churchill plotted the overthrow of the Ottoman empire even before the caliphate took a side in WW1 and he launched his ill-fated Dardanelles campaign.

Churchill’s views did evolve. He was racist and dismissive of the Bolsheviks-as-Jews, just as he had been of the Boers. He fancied himself a military strategist. “I have it in me to be a successful soldier. I can visualize great movements and combinations.”

Here is the ego poised to be manipulated by those who would sate his physical and mental needs.

This is not to say a politician as complex as Churchill is a simple equation of pay for play — but there is no doubt he is viewed very differently by Americans and Britons (where he is above criticism) than by peoples with a more recent colonial experience.

American plutocracy

In President Roosevelt’s “Campaign To Incite War in Europe: The Secret Polish Documents,” Mark Weber of the Institute for Historical Review makes the argument that U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt declared to the British ambassador in 1938 his intention to blockade Germany and provoke it into war. [9]

Roosevelt had form. He was advised not to blockade Japan’s fuel supplies from Indonesia but would do so, provoking it into war. Before the First World War, president Woodrow Wilson had been elected on a platform of keeping the U.S. out of war and promptly reversed direction by 180 degrees.

In short, one can barely escape the scurrying of motives and men, as opposed to the grand sweep of history.

Former ambassador to Britain Joseph Kennedy, father of president John F Kennedy and grandfather of current presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. explained that the British position in 1938 was that Britain lacked the materiel to go to war with Germany and that “Hitler would have fought Russia without any later conflict with England” had it had not been for the urging of the senior U.S. ambassador to Europe, the banker William Bullitt’s pressure on Roosevelt that Poland must be made a casus belli with Germany.

Mark Weber is of course, a priori, dismissed in a Google search as a Holocaust denier, a phrase often used to shut down debate before the anyone has stated a case, let alone denied anything. History, we are told is, like science, a product of consensus.

We have seen that same accusation applied to people as distant from Weber as the scientist and MP Andrew Bridgen, who dared to criticise the “safe and effective.” If you wish to see in what knots people tie themselves when they appeal to consensus, watch the final part of a debate between Del Bigtree and celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson on the same topic.

Bent history

In general, the media’s “first draft” of history does begin to unravel with the passage of time, as with the assassination of president John F Kennedy, or the events of September 11, 2001. In the case of Adolf Hitler, the process seems to work the other way. The further we move from those events, the more they are embellished and embroidered. Something similar happens with Churchill.

Granted, history is written by the winners, but the AH phenomenon is something different: the myth and distortions have grown with time — thus it is not history. The modern representation of WW2 is propaganda as praxis. History is used, from Hitler to the Holocaust, to shape the present world.

Hitler’s life and even death are enveloped in mystery; rational clarity is explicitly avoided. He serves as a mythic figure on whom any dread can be projected; and comparison with whom represents instant excommunication.

Today’s foreign policy is shaped by reference to AH, often directly: presidents Saddam Hussein and Vladimir Putin were not only compared, we were told they were “literal Hitler,” prior to our launching into wars.

It is notable that there is not nearly such a close examination of the USSR and almost none of China. If it were not for the work of one single historian, Antony Sutton, we should know nothing about the Western banks and the Bolsheviks, or the industrial integration between these supposedly competing political-economic systems.

We stress again, that one should steer clear of imputing motive and concern ourselves with interests, even when, or especially when those interests clash.

It may be little surprise that Lord Palmerson gave the classic economic exposition in 1848 at the height of Whig liberalism:

“We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow” he said in a speech on… the Polish Question — the issue of whether Poland should exist as an independent state.

It was a perennial topic in European politics for close to two centuries, and was the issue upon which Britain and France would declare war on Germany in 1939.

It was Poland to which Britain made commitments that it could not keep, over a city, Danzig or Gdańsk, when Britain had no interests at stake.

Here we are, almost 200 years later, facing a similar question over another borderland, Ukraine and agitated, apart from the U.S. and Britain — by Poland!

There are likely to be interests, in resources and civilisational ambitions, that influence the willingness to allot more than $100 billion to a war in a far-off land about which we know little and care less.

Tidbits: Quad swatted

Joe Biden has effectively cancelled the Quad summit, calling off his trip to Australia. The Quad is an attempt to isolate China, through the concept of the Indo-Pacific.

The excuse is that Biden needs to focus on debt ceiling negotiations but now India and Japan will also not attend.

Former UK PM Liz Truss was dispatched to Taiwan — China called it a “dangerous political show” but perhaps the Quad is being delayed so that Truss can serve her masters and inveigle Taiwan into the Quad. That would really raise the risk of conflict with Beijing.

In pre-released comments, Truss pursued the closure of 30 Confucius Institutes in the UK.

The Bilderberg Group is not so lilly livered. At least someone is trying to steer the world (/s sarcasm).

The Group traditionally meets in June but has brought forward this meeting to May 17-20. Those of 2020 and 2021 were canceled because so many Bilderberg attendees were involved in orchestrating the Covid response. [10]

The Jun 2022 meeting was held in Washington and focused on war in Ukraine, arranging the world’s energy constraints, and proceeding with the medical security state. Key attendees included the major oil companies, intelligence agencies and defence chiefs, thus representing both the owners of energy and mineral resources, and what is effectively their surveillance and enforcement arm.

Those topics in Lisbon are likely to dominate given that the world’s scales of justice and order have been upended in the direction of chaos... with which the Great Resetters are contending, if they are not orchestrating.

[1] Robert Laughlin, 2008 — The Crime of Reason: And the Closing of the Scientific Mind

[2] Britannica — Germany, the economy, 1890–1914

[3] Franz-Stefan Gady, The Diplomat, 2015 — How Churchill Fought The Pashtuns in Pakistan

[4] Priyamvada Gopal, The Guardian, 2021 — Why can't Britain handle the truth about Winston Churchill?

[5] ICS, 2015 -- Churchill’s World – Lord Randolph Churchill’s Legacy: Shares not “Sacks” of Gold

[6] Haaretz, 2016 -- Blood, Sweat and Booze: Churchill’s Debts and the Moguls Who Saved Him

[7] Wikipedia — The Focus

[8] Gerry Docherty and James MacGregor, 2013 — Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War

[9] Mark Weber, 1980s — President Roosevelt's Campaign To Incite War in Europe: The Secret Polish Documents

[10] Sourcewatch - COVID-19/Perpetrators/Bilderberg