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Imperialism by Other Means
The United States had already refused to join the League of Nations twice. But, as a Round Tabler, Zimmern understood the power of patience. He knew that plans were already afoot to bring the Yanks around. And he knew that Great Britain would proceed with her plans for global government in any case. As Zimmern explained it, Great Britain was voluntarily giving up its global power. She had promised to grant self-rule to her colonies, as soon as they showed themselves ready for it. The British Navy would no longer serve as policeman for the world. Henceforth, the League of Nations would provide a system “fitted to replace that which passed away for Britain in 1914,” Zimmern wrote. Behind these pretty words lurked a hard-nosed reality. British elites understood that the true purpose of the League of Nations was to expand British power, not diminish it. Some of the more idealistic U.S. supporters of the League of Nations had discovered this while butting heads with their British counterparts. For instance, US socialist writer Charles Edward Russell, after dining with a group of prominent British newspaper editors, found that they were “obsessed with forming a permanent Anglo-American league to ‘control the world,” notes Susan Brewer in her 2019 book To Win the Peace. As previously noted in Chapter 30, British novelist and propaganda asset H.G. Wells had admitted in 1914 that the purpose of the proposed “Peace League” was to “control the globe.” He later wrote, “The British Empire… had to be the precursor of a world-state or nothing…”
302 Alfred Zimmern, The Third British Empire (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), page 1 303 Zimmern (1926), page 60
304 H.G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1962), pp 650-653 305 Peter Edgerly Firchow, The Death of the German Cousin: Variations on a Literary Stereotype, 1890-1920 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1986), pp 114; Burton Yale Pines, America’s Greatest Blunder: The Fateful Decision to Enter World War One (New York: RSD Press, 2013), pp 39; Kenneth J. Calder, Britain and the Origins of the New Eruope, 1914-1918 (New York: Cambridge University Press, for the Centre for International Studies, London School of Economics and Political Science, 1976), page 54
306 H.G. Wells, Experiment in Autobiography (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co., 1962), page 652
Poe, Richard. How the British Invented Communism (And Blamed It on the Jews). Richard Poe, 2024