In the modern age of democracy and volunteer armies, a pretense for war is required to rally the nation around the flag and motivate the public to fight. That is why every major conflict is now accompanied by its own particular bodyguard of lies. From false flag attacks to dehumanization of the “enemy,” here are all the examples you’ll need to help debunk a century of war lies.
TRANSCRIPT:
If, as the old adage has it, the first casualty of war is the truth, then it follows that the first battle of any war is won by lies.
Lies have always been used to sell war to a public that would otherwise be leery about sending their sons off to fight and die on foreign soil. In times long past, this was easy enough to accomplish. A proclamation by a king or queen was enough to set the machinery of war in motion. But in the modern age of democracy and volunteer armies, a pretense for war is required to rally the nation around the flag and motivate the public to fight.
That is why every major conflict is now accompanied by its own particular bodyguard of lies. From false flag attacks to dehumanization of the “enemy,” here are all the examples you’ll need to help debunk a century of war lies.
This is The Corbett Report.
WWI
In 1915, the RMS Lusitania, a British ocean liner en route from New York to Liverpool, was sunk by a German U-boat 11 miles off the coast of Ireland. The ship’s sinking, which resulted in the death of 128 of the 139 Americans aboard, became a symbol of German evil and helped psychologically prepare the US public for their country’s eventual entry into WWI. But every facet of the story of the Lusitania as it has been presented to the public was a deliberate lie or a lie by omission.
The boat was not a purely civilian vessel carrying 3,813 40-pound (unrefrigerated) containers of “cheese” and 696 containers of “butter,” as the official manifest held, but guncotton, in keeping with the shipment’s stated destination: the Royal Navy’s Weapons Testing Establishment.
It was not sunk by the German torpedo boat but by secondary explosions from the munitions the ship was (illegally) carrying.