Eric Zuesse: The Pathetic History of the Anti-War Movement

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Written by Eric Zuesse

Anti-war demonstrations are as old as war itself, but almost never stop or prevent a war, and the reason is that the aristcracy’s ‘news’-media always devote so much ‘news’ to demonizing ‘the enemy’, so that to report favorably on public demonstrations against a war will drive away advertizers and also much of the audience. If an aristocracy’s government is set upon a war, then, usually, nothing can stop it from happening or continuing, nor stop the public from believing it to be right. Also, the same super-rich who own controlling shares in the armaments-makers and in the press, and in the mining and other extraction companies that will benefit from the war, are usually donating to, or promoting, the public officials who will be making the decision. However, there’s also another reason, which is never talked about, and it’s that demonstrating against a war, or for peace, is naive, because the problem is never really war, and the solution is never peace: the problem is instead imperialism, and the solution is to end that — and NOT to end war. Because: if one’s nation is being aggressed-against, then for one’s nation to quit the war (on its side) will be surrender to that aggressor, which is wrong to do. And this means that anti-war, or pro-peace, demonstrations are always against the wrong thing (the war, instead of the imperialism). The publicly presented arguments always focus wrongly — on war and peace, instead of on the aggressor and the defender in the given case. Individuals who benefit from aggressions are also funding the politicians who make the decision, and the ‘news’-media that shape the public’s views; so, the public are misinformed and mis-led — and that’s why the demonstrations are against war, instead of against imperialism. 

After WW I, the millions who had been killed in that war produced enough of a ‘peace’-movement backlash so that the aristocracy’s ‘peace’ Establishment could respond to it only with silence. For examples: the late Cecil Rhodes’s Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which had been funded by the Rhodesist Andrew Carnegie, whose recently formed Carnegie Endowment for International Peace had actually propagandized for America’s entrance into WW I on the side of England, was silent about the demonstrations. This imperialistic sentiment from the ‘peace’ Establishment was hardly new. Carnegie’s own 1901 book The Gospel of Wealth had closed, at the end of its final chapter, “Imperial Federation”:

Fate has given to Britain a great progeny and a great past. Her future promises to be no less great and prolific. Many may be the members of the family council of all the English-speaking nations, each complete in itself, which I have predicted as sure to come sooner or later; but, however numerous the children, there can never be but one mother, and that mother, great, honored, and beloved by all her offspring, — as I pray she is to be, —“ this Sceptered Isle,” my native land. God bless her!

Here is how the seed for this support of ‘peace’ was stated by Rhodes himself, in the 1877, first version, of his will (as it became published in 1920):

“To and for the establishment, promotion and development of a Secret Society, the true aim and object whereof shall be for the extension of British rule throughout the world, the perfecting of a system of emigration from the United Kingdom, and of colonisation by British subjects of all lands where the means of livelihood are attainable by energy, labour and enterprise, and especially the occupation by British settlers of the entire Continent of Africa, the Holy Land, the Valley of the Euphrates, the Islands of Cyprus and Candia, the whole of South America, the Islands of the Pacific not heretofore possessed by Great Britain, the whole of the Malay Archipelago, the seaboard of China and Japan, the ultimate recovery of the United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, the inauguration of a system of Colonial representation in the Imperial Parliament which may tend to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire and, finally, the foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity.”

Rhodes’s final (1899) version of his will (which established the Rhodes Trust) was far more tactful, but expressed the same intent: “Whereas I consider that the education of young Colonists at one of the Universities in the United Kingdom is of great advantage to them for giving breadth to their views for their instruction in life and manners and for instilling into their minds the advantage to the Colonies as well as to the United Kingdom of the retention of the unity of the Empire.” (Note: Americans, etc., are still mere “colonists.” Only Brits are colonizers, instead of colonists.)

In any case, like his follower, Carnegie, later did, Rhodes stated his goal, but earlier than Carnegie (in 1877), as being the unification of all Governments under Britain’s Government — the British Empire. Rhodes’s “to weld together the disjointed members of the Empire and, finally, the foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity” was no different from Carnegie’s advice that Britain must “grasp the outstretched hand of her children in America, and become again as she was before, the mother member of the English-speaking race.” This UK/U.S. empire was the foundation of the anti-war movement, and it also was the foundation for the new form of imperialism, Rhodesism: the English dream to use its colonies (nowadays commonly called its ‘allies’) in order to conquer the rest of the world.

Both Rhodes and Carnegie supported the British empire as being the solution to the problem of war: England would impose its dictatorship over all nations. Their solution was to expand the British empire until there would be no nations against it (no nation independent from its dictates). It was the international peace of the graveyard, that they actually aimed for.

But Rhodes and Carnegie institutionalized, in their respective wills, two different strategies to attain it.

Whereas Rhodes’s strategy was the Rhodes scholarships, which would seek-out and train-up (educate in Oxford’s pro-empire way) the future leaders of the empire in not only politics but every field of propaganda for the empire, Carnegie’s Endowment would, more directly, hire and spread the propaganda amongst the masses to fool them to believe that the way to bring international peace is to get all governments to become like one’s own already is — to make the “mother” country, England, universal.

Another word for “Rhodesist” is “neoconservative”, but it’s the most used term by Americans who pretend that the ideology was originated in America, after WW II, by such figures as Irving Kristol and U.S. Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson — so as to hide two important facts: 1. that it comes actually from England, and 2. that it’s devoted to expanding the U.S. empire.

Consequently, in this ‘anti-war’ movement, no distinction would be made between the two sides in any war, the aggressor versus the defender. (Of course, if BOTH sides are imperialists, then they’re BOTH wrong.) Because, if the “mother” country is always right, then whatever aggression it perpetrates, and whatever way it perpetrates that, is ‘right’ and ‘necessary’, according to this myth. (For example, America’s coups and invasions have often been ‘justified’ this way.) And, so, any country which is defending itself against that, is the ‘enemy’, who must, therefore, be defeated. (The anti-imperialist, anti-Rhodesist FDR came up with an alternative, but Truman immediately aborted it. So, we are living in a Rhodesist world, not in the one that FDR had been planning.)

Consequently, this ‘peace’ movement is merely the Rhodesist form of propagandizing for U.S.-and-allied invasions as being for one’s own country to become “so great a Power as to render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity.” Every edition of the U.S. National Security Strategy is written using this Rhodesist lie. And the anti-war movement (or ‘peace’ movement) has no relevance to anti-imperialism, nor to preventing a WW III (both of which had intensely been FDR’s concern).

And the result, ever since America’s anti-war movement got started around WW I, has been marches with people carrying signs “NO MORE WAR!” instead of “NO MORE IMPERIALISM!” So, they’re really no threat against imperialism. Instead, they’re against ‘war’, even by a nation that’s defending itself against an imperial nation that is trying to conquer it by means of military invasion, and/or coup, and/or, sanctions, and/or subversion — aggression against that defender. This is how billionaires pump their imperialistic wars, to expand their empire — by deceiving the public (so as to ignore, or else misrepresent, which side had actually started the war). And it works! This deceit works, even though it’s plain foolish. For example: How can it be that the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace would have been propagandizing in favor of America’s entrance into WW I (which was a war between the British Empire and the German Empire; and, so, both sides in that war were actually imperialistic aggressors)? And, then (as is the only fact that the secretive Carnegie Endowment has made public in recent years, regarding its involvement in that War between two contending imperialisms):

On April 6, 1917, both houses of Congress voted to declare war on Germany. Two weeks later, on April 19, the Carnegie Endowment’s Board of Trustees gathered for its annual meeting. The trustees unanimously declared that “the most effective means of promoting durable international peace is to prosecute the war against the Imperial Government of Germany to final victory for democracy.” Endowment Secretary James Brown Scott subsequently sent a letter to Secretary of State Robert Lansing offering to place the Endowment’s staff and facilities at the disposal of the federal government.

After the Rhodes Trust was set up in 1902, there had become pressure upon Carnegie to endorse it publicly — something which, being the egoist he was, he declined to do. However, on 14 October 1904, he went public saying (in his typical ambiguous and indirect way) that “The peaceful union of Canada and America would lead Britain to a serious view of her position, resulting in the conclusion that Cecil Rhodes reached. … [England’s] children across the Atlantic will hail the day she takes her rightful place in the high council of her reunited race — that race whose destiny, I believe with faith unshakable, is to dominate the world for the good of the world.” Then, on 29 May 1910, the New York Times headlined, “CARNEGIE WILL NOT ADOPT RHODES PLAN; Doesn’t Believe in Educating Our Youth Abroad or Young Englishmen Here.” Instead of endorsing Rhodes’s Trust (and, perhaps, contributing to it), on 25 November 1910, Carnegie announced that he would form the Carnegie Endownment for International Peace, and he hired the nation’s leading Rhodesists for it, and they then hired the nation’s leading Rhodesists to continue it. Today, that Endowment for ‘Peace’ is considered one of the world’s three most influential think tanks; and the other two — Brookings and Chatham House — are likewise staunchly Rhodesist. So: the con goes on.

The pretenses of these war-makers, to be supporting instead “the foundation of so great a Power as to render wars impossible and promote the best interests of humanity,” and, “that race whose destiny, I believe with faith unshakable, is to dominate the world for the good of the world,” are ludicrous.

Interestingly, Carnegie was the biggest investor in steel, whose price goes up when more weapons are produced. And Rhodes was the biggest investor in extraction industries, diamonds and gold, both of which likewise depended upon governmental protection and favors. And, the third major ‘peace’ ‘philanthropist, Alfred Nobel, whose ‘peace’ prizes often went to other war-mongerors, was the biggest tycoon in explosives.

A free-online, well-presented, and documented, book-length (50,000-word) presentation to the U.S. Congress, in 1940, which lays out, and supplements, other interesting and important details of this history, regarding both Rhodes and Carnegie, can be seen here.

All of this concerns the aristocracy’s ‘peace’ organizations, and not the public’s peace movements, and it suggests that whereas the aristocracy are power-crazed liars, the public are their powerless fools, who, if they knew better, would be marching against those ‘peace’ organizations, which are helping to make peace impossible.

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s new book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.

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