Three of the BIG LIES of World War I






1. It was called "the war to end all wars".  
Of course it didn't!  As I have written elsewhere, the first world war was simply the first act,  placed into intermission by the armistice in 1918, with the second act taken up in 1939.
"The War to End All Wars".  That's a bit like spreading tuberculosis to end tuberculosis.
2. To make the world safe for democracy.  (U.S. President Woodrow Wilson).
Democracy for who?  Certainly not for **Negroes (as they were then called) in the U.S.A.
They had fought with enormous skill and bravery on the western front.  They returned to an America with defacto racism in the north, and with dejure racism in the former confederate states ( "Jim Crow" laws, brutality and lynchings).
(Remember please that Woodrow Wilson was an ardent segregationist. When he became President he re-segregated the Federal Civil Service).
3. To make the United Kingdom "a land fit for heroes".
The British and Irish ( the territory which we now call the Republic of Ireland) men and women who served King and Country came back, not to a land fit for heroes but to poverty, unemployment, the great depression, and often to  destitution.  
They also came back to a land where the much vaunted and over rated Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill  treated them not as heroes but as dangerous subversives.  
In 1919, under Churchill, by now Secretary of State for Air and War;  tanks and an estimated 10,000 troops were deployed to Glasgow during a period of widespread strikes and civil unrest,  amid fear of a Bolshevist revolt. (BBC NEWS WEBSITE)
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**  I use the word 'negro" in the historical sense as it was used right up to the time of the Revd. Dr, Martin Luther King, 


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