BamaD
Posts: 20687
Joined: 2/27/2005 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Real0ne you have no evidence what so ever that telegram was real, as in sent by zimmerman, just the lying asshelmet fucktard british who orchestrated the war and merely claim it happened. the lusitania was a valid target, it in fact was carrying munitions, which the torpedo set off, but I love your ZOG propaganda which was used as a pretext for war to help the motherland when it was found britain didnt want anyone going near it till they had time to whitewash and scrub the evidence In 1914, the US intended to stay out of a conflict that seemed emblematic of the rottenness of old Europe, a place from which most Americans were thankful to have escaped. Step by inexorable step, the US was dragged in. The austere, high-minded president Woodrow Wilson won the 1916 election vowing to maintain neutrality. Germany’s actions, though, made the position untenable. In May 1915, a German U-boat sank the British liner Lusitania, killing 1,198, including 129 Americans. This and other sinkings piled further pressure on Wilson. and On November 2, 1917, Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour writes a letter to Britain’s most illustrious Jewish citizen, Baron Lionel Walter Rothschild, expressing the British government’s support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Britain’s public acknowledgement and support of the Zionist movement emerged from its growing concern surrounding the direction of the First World War. By mid-1917, Britain and France were mired in a virtual stalemate with Germany on the Western Front, while efforts to defeat Turkey on the Gallipoli Peninsula had failed spectacularly. On the Eastern Front, the fate of one Ally, Russia, was uncertain: revolution in March had toppled Czar Nicholas II, and the provisional government was struggling against widespread opposition to maintain the country’s disintegrating war effort against Germany and Austria-Hungary. Although the United States had just entered the war on the Allied side, a sizeable infusion of American troops was not scheduled to arrive on the continent until the following year. Against this backdrop, the government of Prime Minister David Lloyd George—elected in December 1916—made the decision to publicly support Zionism, a movement led in Britain by Chaim Weizmann, a Russian Jewish chemist who had settled in Manchester. The motives behind this decision were various: aside from a genuine belief in the righteousness of the Zionist cause, held by Lloyd George among others, Britain’s leaders hoped that a formal declaration in favor of Zionism would help gain Jewish support for the Allies in neutral countries, in the United States and especially in Russia, where the powerfully anti-Semitic czarist government had just been overthrown with the help of Russia’s significant Jewish population. Finally, despite Britain’s earlier agreement with France dividing influence in the region after the presumed defeat of the Ottoman Empire, Lloyd George had come to see British dominance in Palestine—a land bridge between the crucial territories of India and Egypt—as an essential post-war goal. The establishment of a Zionist state there—under British protection—would accomplish this, while seemingly following the stated Allied aim of self-determination for smaller nations. snip On November 2, Balfour sent a letter to Lord Rothschild, a prominent Zionist and a friend of Chaim Weizmann, stating that: “His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” By the time the statement was published in British and international newspapers one week later, one of its major objectives had been rendered obsolete: Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks had gained power in Russia, and one of their first actions was to call for an immediate armistice. Russia was out of the war, and no amount of persuasion from Zionist Jews—who, despite Britain’s belief to the contrary, had relatively little influence in the country to begin with—could reverse the outcome. Nonetheless, the influence of the Balfour Declaration on the course of post-war events was immediate: According to the “mandate” system created by the Versailles Treaty of 1919, Britain was entrusted with the temporary administration of Palestine, with the understanding that it would work on behalf of both its Jewish and Arab inhabitants. Many Arabs, in Palestine and elsewhere, were angered by their failure to receive the nationhood and self-government they had been led to expect in return for their participation in the war against Turkey. In WW1 we were totally unprepared for war. Our military leaders were not the greatest generals we had ever produced. For example they wouldn't give pilots parachutes because it "would hurt moral" and they saddled our infantry with a French light machinegun that was the worst in the world at the time because they were afraid te germans might capture and copy the BAR if when issued them. What we provided, and tipped the scales, was fresh bodies who where not burned out by the trench warfare. This forced the Germans into taking chances they wouldn't have otherwise.
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Government ranges from a necessary evil to an intolerable one. Thomas Paine People don't believe they can defend themselves because they have guns, they have guns because they believe they can defend themselves.
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