The Pointlessness of it All: None Dare...Ch. 4 pp. 37 -40

 Ok, so the search for a pdf version that has page numbers continues. Every place that hosts a pdf of this book is using the same version. I could get a kindle/epub version but I'll be damned if I'm forking over a dime to the John Birch Society or whatever white supremacist/sovereign citizen group that is selling it. I didn't pay for the Turner Diaries and I am not paying for this. What I am going to do is just work of the page that the PDF itself (not the book) says that I am on. The PDF pages are longer so that's why we are back to page 37, it's all very confusing and if I hadn't run up about twenty bucks in late fees we'd still have the paper copy. Anyway, on with the post.

I would never accept a paper from a student that was written like Allen's unfortunately influential book. It's just too scattered, it raises points just to forget about them, and uses discredited sources. However, that is all the point of the book. We ended last week discussing the breakup of Standard Oil into 34 separate companies by the US government under the Sherman Anti-trust Act. I had begun looking into this story, because Allen claims that this was the design of people like JP Morgan as a way to "compound their wealth tax-free while their competitors had to face a graduated income tax which made it difficult to amass capital." 

I wanted to look into this, dear reader believe me I did because it seemed like this was going to be a thread that would run through the rest of the work. Or, at the very least, Allen would have to explain how this would work. How did Rockefeller escape the graduated income tax? Allen is implying that the breakup would have pushed his income down so that the higher tax would no longer apply to him, but that only occurs if he loses control of the 34 companies. If that's the case, he loses all the money and the influence; if it's not the case then the breakup was useless and doesn't give Allen a leg to stand on with regard to the point he's making. What happened was the Rockefeller's quarter ownership in the stock (he had been retired) was key. The stock prices doubled and Rockefeller became the richest man in the world. He didn't however escape the income tax like Allen thinks he did, so I want to hear how he thinks this plan was a success...but then he drops it. he drops it so fast and so suddenly that I checked to see if the PDF was corrupted. Allen makes a passing comment about the Reece committee which I discussed awhile back and then that's it. 

The very next thing he begins talking about is Woodrow Wilson and WWI. Now, one common thread in all of the conspiracy literature, and I've discussed that it might actually be because of this book, is the idea that the debt is the tool of the conspiracy. I've discussed why this is stupid (short answer: because the banks don't repossess countries like they would your car), but they cannot let it go. 

So here is the story Allen is going to tell. President Wilson runs a campaign of staying out of the problems in Europe in 1916. Allen is correct about that, Dan Carlin's excellent podcast series on WWI discusses this, and this is where I get my information on the Great War. The causes of the war were many, and I would direct readers to the book "Why Nations go to War" by Stoessinger for a much better breakdown of the causes of WWI than I can give. We know the story though, Gavrilo Princep assassinates Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, and then WWI starts. 

That's the story I was told in high school and it's about as accurate as describing gravity as "things fall." The assassination story is the one that Allen is betting that is all that anyone reading Allen's book remembers. Ignoring the centuries of mistrust and animosity in Serbia towards what was, at the time, the Austro-Hungarian Empire; ignoring the rise of Prussian militarism, ignoring the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Tsars, and just the general political tension in Europe...if we do all of that the WWI story is pretty simple. 

Allen calls the assassination an "incident providing an excuse for starting a chain reaction."

"An excuse," I don't know what that means, but if we excise it from the sentence, the sentence is more accurate than not. WWI was going to happen, and if Stoessinger is correct (I have no reason to believe he isn't) the Germans were marching eventually--whether the archduke lives or not. The assassination was convenient for those that wanted war, but even the Kaiser couldn't settle his own people once that first domino fell. Allen claims that while the sun was still not setting on the British empire the Germans were becoming quite the international businessmen and England couldn't have that. So, is this why WWI started? Allen won't say. He just likes to imply and he does so because if he says that England started WWI and blamed it on the Germans, then he's got to figure out how to explain why Germany invaded the declared neutral country of Belgium on August 4th of 1914. He can't do that, but like all ultra-right-wing conspiracy theorists, he feels a need to make Germany the victim. 

For all that Allen gets wrong here, he gets a few things right. First, is the seeming coin flip of a decision by Wilson to ramp up support for US involvement in the war. He wins the 1916 election on "no war" but then a year later he's asking Congress for a declaration of war. It began as a preparation, but then a few things happened that Allen is happy to gloss over: the Zimmerman telegram wherein Germany asks for Mexico to invade the US and gets caught by the British. The second is that German U-boats begin sinking American merchant ships. 

The second thing Allen gets superficially right is the sinking of The Lusitania, which had been sunk in 1915 and was used as an excuse for American entry into the war. This is roughly correct though it took two years for Americans to remember that they were angry about it (which is not our style), the Zimmerman telegram and the sinking of other merchant ships were really the triggers here. The Lusitania was carrying weapons intended for England, but if Morgan et. al was selling them, I couldn't find confirmation. Either way, none of this matters, as Allen refers to the submarine war as a phony issue. What is phony? That it happened, that people died, or that their deaths were important. I'm thinking that is the latter, because Allen and his type believe that everyone is part of the conspiracy. Their deaths only matter in proving the point of the conspiracy theorists other than that: Allen doesn't care about them at all. 

This whole diatribe on WWI is about setting up the debt that allowed people like Morgan to buy the world. The problem for this theory and all others like it is the question of "why do this when they already had the world?" If Morgan/Rockefeller were so rich and so powerful that they could A) set up a legal system to break up their businesses to avoid taxes, b) assassinate a royal and his wife in order to offer up an excuse for European countries to begin a war that c) they will fake a new type of warfare (submarine warfare) in order to drag the US into it, in order to create a debt which they will then use to own the country--then they don't have to actually own the country. This entire plan requires that they already have the money, influence, and power--that is the seeming goal of the end of the plan. Why do all of this just to end up back where you started? For fun I guess.