1914 AND 2004: THE STEPS TO WAR: OMINOUS PARALLELS

Dateline 29th September 2004

The First World War, like all wars, started long before battle commenced! By 1914 Germany had already fought three wars - against Denmark , Austria and in 1870, France. The outbreak of war is usually traced to the murder of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Bosnian Serb. But for many years Austria-Hungary had consistently pursued its vendetta against Serbia without disturbing Russia. In 1905 the Austro Hungarian Empire blockaded Serbia and in 1908 annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina. Archduke Franz Ferdinand pursued a virulent anti Orthodox and therefore anti Serb policy in the promotion of Roman Catholicism while Germany promoted the foundation of the State of Albania as a bulwark against Serbia.

Does this all sound familiar? It should do - for the same process has been under way in South East Europe since the early 1980s when the German secret services started penetrating Yugoslavia. Just as before the First World War Austria Hungary warned Serbia not to pursue Albanian terrorists across the border into Albania so in 1999 NATO and German Europe bombed Yugoslavia to prevent Serbia fighting the KLA and have occupied Serbian territory (Kosovo) to prevent Serbian access.

When the Serbian resistance to Austro- Hungarian imperialism was expressed by the Bosnian Serb who assassinated Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Austria invaded Serbia and carried out the most appalling massacres of civilians, before being driven back by a strong Serb army. Those massacres were investigated by a Swiss doctor Professor Archibald Reiss, the then leading world expert on forensic pathology who wrote that their troops' "brutality would dog Austria Hungary for all time".

Today of course Al Qaeda-linked Muslim terrorists (initially financed by the USA in their Afghan war against the Soviet Union!) in Bosnia and Albania together with Catholic Croats have driven out one million Orthodox Serbs from Croatia, Kosovo and Bosnia.

Just as the Rambouillet demands of NATO were impossible for the Serbs to meet in 1999 (they were deliberately made impossible to meet as the Labour MP Dr Gilbert admitted to the House of Commons) so, in 1914, Austrian demands of the Serbs were not only so extreme that they could not be met but the Austrian Ambassador in Belgrade was told to turn down any Serb response!

Just as today the Guardian/BBC axis gives great support to the war against the Serbs so in 1914 the Guardian was pursuing its vendetta! If Serbia were towed out into the sea and sunk "the air would be fresher in Europe" wrote the "liberal" Guardian.

Just as the German political class in the 1990s planned the destruction of Yugoslavia and the left wing German magazine Der Spiegel supported the "decimation" of the Serbs so it was the German Kaiser in 1914 who said, not just of Serbs but of all Slavs, that they were "born to obey not to rule"!

In Europe today the forces which Britain and America defeated in two world wars have triumphed (overturning most of the provisions of the Treaties of Versailles 1919 and Potsdam 1945) and those European forces whom they defeated then - Serbs, Poles, Czechs, Russians and Norwegians - are planning their revenge for what has happened since the Euro-State came into being.

Just as Russia under Stalin made an accommodation with Nazi Germany to buy itself time before delivering the fatal blow to German supremacy in Eastern Europe so today President Putin is re-arming and centralising power in Moscow in preparation for avenging German Europe's attack on Slavs and Orthodox Christians and its own post imperial humiliations of recent years. Russia will, as in 1914, come back to put the record straight on Yugoslavia. It will not be a pretty sight and like the post 1945 conquest by communism it will be the tragically inevitable result of western European fascism and imperialism.

Serbs, as in 1919 avenging the brutality of Austria, and in 1945 avenging the ethnic cleansing and murder carried out by fascists and Nazis now await the revival of their Russian ally to avenge the break up of Yugoslavia and the ethnic cleansing of one million Serbs in the 1990s.

Just as Germany allied itself with Muslim Ottoman Turkey in the First World War to frustrate Britain in the Middle East and promoted Nazism to the Arabs in the second World War (with the support of the Grand Mufti in Jerusalem!) so the Franco-German axis today sympathised with the fascist Saddam Hussein and attacked the Anglo American enforcement of 17 UN resolutions.

The parallels between the 1930s and the 1990s have been well documented by Rodney Atkinson (Europe's Full Circle) and to a lesser extent by John Laughland (The Tainted Source) but the above parallels with the period prior to the First World War are perhaps just as striking. They are indeed perhaps more relevant since prior to the First World War, as now, there was no threat of Soviet Communism to distract us from the long term, fundamental antagonisms in Europe.