In this clip from The WWI Conspiracy (Part Two) we examine the propaganda surrounding the "Rape of Belgium" at the start of WWI and the actions of the baby bayonetting evil Hun savages...
TRANSCRIPT
Once
again, just as they did in Britain, the cabal was going to have to leverage its
control of the press and key governmental positions to begin to shape public
perception and instill pro-war sentiment. And once again, the full resources of
these motivated co-conspirators were brought to bear on the task.
One
of the first shells in this barrage of propaganda to penetrate the American
consciousness was the "Rape of Belgium," a catalogue of scarcely
believable atrocities allegedly committed by the German forces in their
invasion and occupation of Belgium at the start of the war. In a manner that
was to become the norm in 20th century propaganda, the stories had a kernel of
truth; there is no doubt that there were atrocities committed and civilians
murdered by German forces in Belgium. But the propaganda that was spun from
those kernels of truth was so over-the-top in its attempts to portray the
Germans as inhuman brutes that it serves as a perfect example of war
propaganda.
RICHARD GROVE: The American
population at that time had a lot of German people in it. Thirty to fifty
percent of the population had relations back to Germany, so there had to be
this very clever propaganda campaign. It's known today as "babies on
bayonets." So if you have no interest in World War I but you think it's
interesting to study propaganda so you don't get fooled again, then type it
into your favorite search engine: "babies on bayonets, World War I."
You'll see hundreds of different posters where the Germans are bayonetting
babies and it brings about emotions and it doesn't give you the details of
anything. And emotions drive wars, not facts. Facts are left out and deleted
all the time in order to create wars, so I think that putting facts back in
might help prevent wars. But I do know that they like to drive people on
emotion. The "babies on bayonets" getting America into World War I,
that's a key part of it.
GERRY DOCHERTY: Children who had
their arms chopped off. Nuns that were raped. Shocking things, genuinely
shocking things. The Canadian officer who was nailed at St. Andrew's cross on a
church door and left there to bleed to death. These were the great myths
peddled in order to defame and bring down the whole image of any justification
for German action and try and influence America into war.
Gerry Docherty,
co-author of Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War.
DOCHERTY: That's not to say
that there weren't atrocities on both sides. War is an atrocious event, and
there are always victims. Absolutely. And I offer no justification for it. But
the lies, the unnecessary abuse of propaganda.
Even when in Britain
they decided that they would put together the definitive volume of evidence to
present it to the world, the person they asked to do this just so happened to
have been former British ambassador to the United States, a man called Bryce,
who was very well-liked in the States. And his evidence was published and put
forward and there were screeds of stories after stories. But then later it was
discovered that in fact the people who took the evidence hadn't been allowed to
speak to any of the Belgians directly but in fact what they were doing is they
were listening to a middleman or agents who had supposedly taken these stories.
And when one of the
official committee said "Hold on, can I speak to someone directly?"
"No." "No?" He resigned. He wouldn't allow his name to be
put forward with the [official report]. And that's the extent to which this is
false history. It's not even acceptable to call it fake news. It's just
disgusting.
The campaign had its
intended effect. Horrified by the stories emerging from Belgium—stories picked
up and amplified by the members of the Round Table in the British press,
including the influential Times and the lurid Daily
Mail, run by Milner ally
Lord Northcliffe—American public opinion began to shift away from viewing the war
as a European squabble about an assassinated archduke and toward viewing the
war as a struggle against the evil Germans and their "sins against
civilization."
The culmination of
this propaganda campaign was the release of the "Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages," better known as "The Bryce
Report," compiled for "His Britannic Majesty's Government" and
presided over by Viscount James Bryce, who, not coincidentally, was the former
British Ambassador to America and a personal friend of Woodrow Wilson. The
report was a sham, based on 1,200 depositions collected by examiners who "had
no authority to administer an oath." The committee, which was not allowed
to speak to a single witness itself, was tasked merely with sifting through
this material and deciding what should be included in the final report.
Unsurprisingly, the very real atrocities that the Germans had committed in
Belgium—the burning of Louvain, Andenne and Dinant, for example—were
overshadowed by the sensationalist (and completely unverifiable) stories of
babies on bayonets and other acts of villainy.
The report itself,
concluding that the Germans had systematically and premeditatedly broken the
"rules and usages of war" was published on May 12, 1915, just five
days after the sinking of The Lusitania.
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