I am grateful for the following contribution from a reader: The Year 1915 in the Ottoman Empire and the Work of the War Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House – A Departure Point for the Truth Seeker – James Bryce’s “The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire 1915-1916”, (London: G.P.Putnam’s Sons for HMSO, 1916) is […]
In 1914 there was unease within British Liberalism about allying itself with Russia in pursuance of its Great War. Sure, the Russian Steamroller was the necessary instrument to occupy the Germans in a two front war while they could be worn down by a Royal Navy Blockade. But Russia was, after all, geopolitical enemy number […]
Did the “Great War for Democracy”– which was nothing of the sort – result in a democracy that subverted the Peace in 1919? That is an awkward question that has been ignored by historians. A very astute Frenchman, Andre Siegfried, wrote a number of books in the 1920s and 1930s about the character of England, […]
The great dream of the Tsars over the centuries had been to conquer and convert the Ottoman capital of Istanbul/Constantinople into Tsargrad and free the Straits for the Russian Black Sea fleet. In 1914 Tsar Nicholas II entered into alliance with the British Empire in order to fulfil that dream as a part of the […]
The short answer is: when Tsar Nicholas II offered his country and its population up to Britain in its Great War of 1914 to destroy Germany and break up the Ottoman Empire. In waging that War, in which Russia was bled to collapse in return for substantial British finance to continue fighting to the bitter […]
May 2019 marks the Centenary of the invasion of Ottoman Anatolia by the Greek Army, acting as Lloyd George’s cat’s-paw to enforce a punitive settlement on the Turks. The political and military assault launched by Britain during the Great War on neutral Greece and the devastating effect this ultimately had on the Greek people across […]
An article in the NY Review of Books of October 2018 entitled The Suffocation of Democracy by Christopher R. Browning states the following, in a mindless anti-Trump piece of pseudo-history: “Today, President Trump seems intent on withdrawing the US from the entire post–World War II structure of interlocking diplomatic, military, and economic agreements and organizations that have preserved peace, […]
The British Great War on Ottoman Turkey had nothing at all to do with the establishment of an Armenian state. However, the making of a functional Peace Settlement with Turkey was made problematic because of what the Great War produced and the fact that the Armenian cause had been made into such a celebrated and […]
Aside from the policy of the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George, there were two other factors that led to the loss of the Caucasus to the Bolsheviks. The first of these was that special and discordant element in the region, the Armenians – who immensely complicated matters. The second was Britain’s continuing and purposeless hostile […]
Lloyd George gave the coup de grace to the Russian Whites in his infamous Guildhall speech of 8 November 1919. He made the speech without consulting his Cabinet colleagues and it had the effect of a bombshell. As Harold Nicolson wrote the diplomacy of Lloyd George was most of all characterised by its privacy – […]
