THE BRITISH BLACK BOOK

By Rudolf Cronau

New York, New York, U.S.A.

1915

(pages 58-59)

Honi soit qui mal y pense.

Who began the present war? Who is responsible for all the distress and destruction, which now sweeps over the world?—

Was it Servia, whose criminal politicians plotted that foul murder of the Crown Prince of Austria and his wife?—Was it Russia, that would prevent Austria from punishing the culprits?—Was it France, which could not forget that Alsace and Lorraine was retaken by the Germans in a fair way?—Was it Germany, which by sending her armies through Belgium, committed, as her enemies say, an unpardonable breach of neutrality?

In our opinion none of them is directly responsible for the present catastrophe. The guilt for the greatest crime in history rests rather upon the leaders of that nation, which, by its boundless selfishness, insatiable greed and wretched shopkeepers-spirit became the curse for almost all other nations of this globe. The awful charge rests first of all with the late king Edward VII, and his evil adviser and executor, Sir Edward Grey, the true originators of that unholy conspiracy, described in our former chapter.

In her mad desire to annihilate Germany, England however did not forget her traditional policy to have her fighting done by other nations.

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To the historically unnatural alliances with France and Russia, England added the most contemptible treason against the whole white race, by forming a league with Japan, the Chieftain of Mongolism. And she made guilty herself of the most abominable crime against her own race by uniting with these Mongols in the slaughter of the few brave defenders of Kiautschau.

That not all English citizens agree with this policy of her depraved government, may be judged from an article by Allister [sic] Crowley, a well known British poet. His article “Honesty is the Best Policy,” unpublished yet in England, circulates there secretly in manuscript. A copy of it reached, however, the United States and has appeared in No. 23 and 24 of the “Fatherland.” In this article Crowley says: “The world has been ransacked of every tribe and race. Algerians, not only of Arab, but of negroid and even negro stock, have been hurled into the line; India has gushed out a venomous river of black troops—the desperate Ghoorka, whose kukri is thrust upward through the bowels; the Pathan, whose very women scavenge the battlefield to rob, murder, and foully mutilate the dead; the fierce Sikh, the lithe Panjabi, the Bengale even, whose maximum of military achievement is the Black Hole of Calcutta! And, with all that, we use the Japanese! Can we complain if the German papers say that the Kaiser is fighting for culture, for civilization, when the flower of the allied troops are black, brown and yellow “heathens,” the very folks, whom we have stopped from hook-swinging, suttee, child-murder, human sacrifice and cannibal feast? From Senegambia, Morocco, the Soudan, Afghanistan, every wild band of robber clans, come fighting men to slay the compatriots of Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Beethoven, Wagner, Mozart, Duerer, Helmholtz, Haeckel, and a million others perhaps obscurer, no less noble, men of the Fatherland of music, of philosophy, of science and medicine, the land where education is a reality and not a farce, the land of Luther and Melanchton, the land whose life blood washed out the Ecclesiastical tyranny of the Dark Ages!”—

Thus writes a British poet, who, as appears from the names of the great Germans he has quoted, is acquainted with the achievements of the German nation.

But what shall we say of the Poet Laureata of England, who likens the present war to a conflict between Christ and the devil? And what shall we say of Conan Doyle, H. G. Wells, Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling, who humiliated themselves by penning articles and poems, of which we are sure they will be ashamed later on.

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