Posts: 2,690
Threads: 253
Likes Received: 0 in 0 posts
Likes Given: 0
Joined: May 2013
Posts: 2,690
Threads: 253
Likes Received: 0 in 0 posts
Likes Given: 0
Joined: May 2013
The following is excerpted from The Web of Conspiracy, by Theodore Roscoe, published by Prentice-Hall in 1959.
"...Historians know no more than the information made available to them, and for many years the United States War Department kept the records on Lincoln's assassination locked in files marked "secret." The War Department was in charge of the manhunt for Booth and his accomplices. It also assumed charge of the subsequent conspiracy trials. Although trial proceedings were published at the time, the Bureau of Military Justice sat on a great deal of conspiracy information, and the Army chiefs refused to release much of the data on the assassination and the pursuit of the conspirators. Not until the mid 1930's were pertinent War Department records placed in the public domain.
Accordingly, all previous accounts of the assassination were based on official Government statements and press releases angled, slanted and otherwise doctored to suit popular consumption, and on the sketchy (although voluminous) trial reports published by the official court reporters. Thus a towering edifice of so-called history was erected on sand. It made popular reading, but it lacked the exacting foundations of true historicity. How could the facts be known or assessed when the War Department withheld them from inquiring historians and even from such authorized investigators as senators and congressmen on contemporary Congressional Committees?
...The military censors had a field day with the Lincoln Murder case. From the outset [Secretary of War Edwin] Stanton held that many of the facts relating to the assassination were "not in the public interest." Eventually so much of the truth was tampered with that no one could learn the truth. Thus an immense deception was imposed and a stupendous crime was covered.
Today the cover-up is conceded by at least one Government agency which tells us in its official literature that "confusion and mystery" cloak Lincoln's assassination and "we probably shall never know all the facts."
...For seventy years the War Department kept the official files on the assassination conspiracy, the pursuit and capture of John Wilkes Booth, and the trial of Booth's accomplices under lock and key. One might assume that during the Reconstruction Era some legitimate purpose was served in this. But in decades long after the Civil War, what "national security" was protected by the military censors? As of 1890, for example, what strategic plans, operations, or weapons were safeguarded by this secrecy?
...In respect to the Lincoln murder case no modern intelligence device could be compromised. What could be compromised is the security of a myth, or the reputation of an institution, or the concealment of some figure or group who had been party to a heinous crime.
...Says the pamphlet issued by the Medical Museum of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, D.C.: "Confusion and mystery still surround the shooting of Abraham Lincoln, and we probably will never know all the facts. One thing is sure...his murder was part of a larger conspiracy."
But the facts of the murder conspiracy are lost to history. Probably they will never be unearthed. All participants in the great conspiracy are now dead. The last surviving witness to Lincoln's assassination ... died in 1956. (He was five years old when his godmother took him to see the President at Ford's Theater...)"
Posts: 3,038
Threads: 437
Likes Received: 0 in 0 posts
Likes Given: 0
Joined: Sep 2008
Flawed, for sure, but indubitably one of the great parapolitical texts of the twentieth century:
https://archive.org/details/whywaslincolnmur00eise
A promotional leaflet for the book:
http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/traveling-cult...ochure.pdf
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
Joseph Fouche
Posts: 3,038
Threads: 437
Likes Received: 0 in 0 posts
Likes Given: 0
Joined: Sep 2008
Historians reveal secrets of UK gun-running which lengthened the American civil war by two years
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scienc...57937.html
DAVID KEYS, Monday 23 June 2014
Quote:New historical and archaeological research is shining an embarrassing light on one of the darkest periods of British foreign policy.
Investigations by a leading Scottish maritime historian have succeeded, for the first time, in locating the main secret British headquarters of the American Civil War Confederate government's transatlantic gun-running operation.
Other research, carried out over the past decade, has revealed the extraordinary extent to which substantial sections of Britain's business elite were working with impunity to help the slave-owning southern states win the Civil War despite the fact that Britain was officially neutral and had outlawed slavery almost 30 years earlier.
What's more, in the Bristol Channel, the remnants of one of the Confederate gun-runners the 395 ton Matilda has been tentatively identified on the seabed off the coast of the island of Lundy.
Three other confederate wrecks had already been identified in British waters off the west coast of Scotland, off Liverpool and in the Bristol Channel.
In total some 200 vessels were purpose-built or upgraded on Clydeside, in Liverpool or in London for the Confederate states and hundreds of thousands of guns (including heavy artillery) were manufactured in Birmingham, Newcastle and near London for the Confederate Army.
The entirely illegal, but tacitly British-Government-approved pro-Confederate gun-running operation is thought to have lengthened the American Civil War by up to two years and to have therefore cost as many as 400,000 American lives.
"The identification of the Confederacy's main secret gun-running headquarters should serve to highlight the role played by key elements of the British business elite in helping the slave-owning states in the American Civil War," said maritime historian Dr Eric Graham of Edinburgh University.
"The clandestine headquarters was established just 32 miles by railway from Clydeside because it was the big shipbuilding magnates there who were being contracted to build or upgrade more than half of the two hundred vessels supplied to the Confederacy by UK shipyards."
"It demonstrates that Britain's neutrality was, in reality, a complete sham," said Dr Graham, the author of a major book on the Civil War gun-runners, Clyde Built: The Blockade Runners of the American Civil War.
The guns were shipped from Britain to the British crown colonies of Bermuda and the Bahamas on board commercial cargo vessels. But from Bermuda and the Bahamian port of Nassau, they were carried by 300 high-speed gun-running vessels - mainly shallow-draught paddle-steamers - two thirds of which had been purpose-built or adapted for the job in British shipyards.
Today none of these blockade runners survives above water but of those that were wrecked or sunk, a number have been identified off the US and UK coasts.
Indeed, English Heritage has just turned one of the gun-runner wrecks, the 80m Iona 2, which sank in a storm off the island of Lundy in the Bristol Channel in 1864, into an underwater tourist attraction. An official scuba diving trail, complete with suitably waterproof guide books for use underwater, has been officially launched around the vessel and its illicit "dark heritage" status will undoubtedly make it all the more intriguing.
"This dive trail - English Heritage's fifth underwater tourist trail for protected wrecks to open since 2009 is an important historical reminder of a part that Britain played in the American Civil War," said English Heritage maritime archaeologist Terry Newman. A leading UK archaeological consultancy, Wessex Archaeology, has been monitoring the condition of the wreck on behalf of English Heritage.
http://www.independent.co.uk/incoming/ar...ulloch.jpg
Three other Confederate wrecks around Britain's coastline are the Iona 1, which collided with another ship and sank in the Clyde in 1862, the Lellia, which went down in a storm off Liverpool with the loss of 47 lives in 1865, and the Matilda, which sank in dense fog in the Bristol Channel in 1864.
The newly discovered main secret UK headquarters of the blockade-busting operation was a still extant mansion in the quiet and secluded Stirlingshire village of Bridge of Allan. At any one time, it housed around 10 Confederate agents who held their planning meetings there and used it as a base from which they could visit top shipbuilding magnates and others on Clydeside and "test drive" vessels to assess their speed.
They seem to have located their headquarters in the countryside so as to avoid the attentions of the various detective agencies which had been appointed by the US Federal government to track them down. However, their wish for rural anonymity did not prevent some of the southern agents from wearing "big hats and smoking large cigars" key clues which, in early 1864, led the amateur sleuths of the anti-slavery Dundee Ladies' Emancipation Society to realize who they were and to inform the US consul in Dundee accordingly. After much pressure had been exerted by the US on the British Government, the exposure of the secret headquarters led a year later to the British preventing the export of a giant, potentially game-changing 130m armoured warship - and four other warships - to the Confederate Navy.
Other research into the Confederate blockade-busting operation, currently being carried out by a Manchester-based historian, is revealing how the Confederate network extended over many different parts of Britain.
Researcher Gerald Hayes is piecing together the previously unstudied details of a complex of more than half a dozen blockade-busting companies based in Liverpool and London and their relationship with other Confederate sympathizers including pro-Confederacy MPs at Westminster.
Britain was split down the middle in its attitude to the American Civil War. The left, many liberals and much of the working class was pro-US and anti-Confederate mainly because of the South's pro-slavery stance. But many Tories and much of the business sector were actively pro-Confederate, as there were considerable fortunes to be made from supplying guns, uniforms, medicines, textiles and even food to the south.
Geopolitically, the British government saw the USA as a growing challenge to its global domination especially in terms of merchant marine carrying capacity. The British also feared US expansionism and potential US-originating threats to Canada and British colonies in the Caribbean.
"Economically Britain saw huge advantages in the break-up of the United States. It saw the American South as a source of raw cotton and as a market for manufacturing goods, whereas it saw the North as an industrial competitor which sought to use protectionist policies to exclude Britain from American markets," said Dr. Graham.
Mike Rivero (of Whatreallyhappened) contributed the following comment:
The reason Britain was assisting the Confederacy had nothing to do with slavery and everything to do with Abraham Lincoln funding the war with a government-issued currency instead of borrowing bank notes at interest from private bankers.
"If this mischievous financial policy, which has its origin in North America, shall become endurated down to a fixture, then that Government will furnish its own money without cost. It will pay off debts and be without debt. It will have all the money necessary to carry on its commerce. It will become prosperous without precedent in the history of the world. The brains, and wealth of all countries will go to North America. That country must be destroyed or it will destroy every monarchy on the globe." -- The London Times responding to Lincoln's decision to issue government Greenbacks.
In 1872 New York bankers sent a letter to every bank in the United States, urging them to fund newspapers that opposed government-issued money (Lincoln's greenbacks).
"Dear Sir: It is advisable to do all in your power to sustain such prominent daily and weekly newspapers... as will oppose the issuing of greenback paper money, and that you also withhold patronage or favors from all applicants who are not willing to oppose the Government issue of money. Let the Government issue the coin and the banks issue the paper money of the country... [T]o restore to circulation the Government issue of money, will be to provide the people with money, and will therefore seriously affect your individual profit as bankers and lenders." -- Triumphant plutocracy; the story of American public life from 1870 to 1920, by Lynn Wheeler
"It will not do to allow the greenback, as it is called, to circulate as money any length of time, as we cannot control that." -- Triumphant plutocracy; the story of American public life from 1870 to 1920, by Lynn Wheeler
"Slavery is likely to be abolished by the war power, and chattel slavery destroyed. This, I and my European friends are in favor of, for slavery is but the owning of labor and carries with it the care for the laborer, while the European plan, led on by England, is for capital to control labor by controlling the wages. THIS CAN BE DONE BY CONTROLLING THE MONEY." -- Triumphant plutocracy; the story of American public life from 1870 to 1920, by Lynn Wheeler
The private banking families of Europe had been horrified at the upstart United States throwing off the slavery of the Bank of England, then darting to shut down the first two attempts to re-enslave them to private central banks (the first such shut down triggered the war of 1812 and the second the attempted assassination of Andrew Jackson).
The banking families of Europe saw in the Civil War a chance to end Lincoln's greenbacks and with a Confederate victory, bring the United Stares back into the clutches of a predatory banking system where all commerce must be carried out using bank notes borrowed at interest from the bankers; the very system the United States had fought a revolution to be free of.
"The refusal of King George 3rd to allow the colonies to operate an honest money system, which freed the ordinary man from the clutches of the money manipulators, was probably the prime cause of the revolution." -- Benjamin Franklin, Founding Father
At one point, both Britain and France considered invading the United States ion support of the Confederacy but were held at bay by Russia, which had just ended the serfdom system and had a state central bank similar to the system the United States had been founded on.
Britain's gun-running to the Confederacy was never about the slavery of the blacks, but about the slavery of all people to the private central banks.
"There are three sorts of conspiracy: by the people who complain, by the people who write, by the people who take action. There is nothing to fear from the first group, the two others are more dangerous; but the police have to be part of all three,"
Joseph Fouche
Posts: 9,353
Threads: 1,466
Likes Received: 0 in 0 posts
Likes Given: 0
Joined: Sep 2008
More than interesting Paul. Nothing changes eh. Gun running then as today. But the story of the banking system and issuance of Greenbacks and the English plan for controlling labour by controlling the wages hits right between the eyes.
The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge. Carl Jung - Aion (1951). CW 9, Part II: P.14
|
