This article on free thought comes from this link.
CONSOLIDATION AND EXPORT OF THE REVOLUTION
Marx's great book Das Kapital is at once a monument of reasoning and a
storehouse of facts.
Lord Milner, member of the British War Cabinet, 1917, and director of the London Joint Stock Bank
William Boyce Thompson is an unknown name in twentieth-century history, yet Thompson played a crucial role in the Bolshevik Revolution.
Indeed, if Thompson had not been in Russia in 1917, subsequent history might have followed a quite different course.
Without the financial and, more important, the diplomatic and propaganda assistance given to Trotsky and Lenin by Thompson, Robins, and their New York associates, the Bolsheviks may well have withered away and Russia evolved into a socialist but constitutional society.
Who was William Boyce Thompson?
Thompson was a promoter of mining stocks, one of the best in a high-risk business.
Before World War I he handled stock-market operations for the Guggenheim copper interests.
When the Guggenheims needed quick capital for a stock- market struggle with John D. Rockefeller, it was Thompson who promoted Yukon Consolidated Goldfields before an unsuspecting public to raise a $3.5 million war chest.
Thompson was manager of the Kennecott syndicate, another Guggenheim operation, valued at $200 million.
It was Guggenheim Exploration, on the other hand, that took up Thompson's options on the rich Nevada Consolidated Copper Company.
About three quarters of the original Guggenheim Exploration Company was controlled by the Guggenheim family, the Whitney family (who owned Metropolitan magazine, which employed the Bolshevik John Reed), and John Ryan.
In 1916 the Guggenheim interests reorganized into Guggenheim Brothers and brought in William C. Potter, who was formerly with Guggenheim's American Smelting and Refining Company but who was in 1916 first' vice president of Guaranty Trust.
Extraordinary skill in raising capital for risky mining promotions earned Thompson a personal fortune and directorships in Inspiration Consolidated Copper Company, Nevada Consolidated Copper Company, and Utah Copper Company — all major domestic copper producers.
Copper is, of course, a major material in the manufacture of munitions.
Thompson was also director of the Chicago Rock Island & Pacific Railroad, the Magma Arizona Railroad and the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company.
And of particular interest for this book, Thompson was "one of the heaviest stockholders in the Chase National Bank."
It was Albert H. Wiggin, president of the Chase Bank, who pushed Thompson for a post in the Federal Reserve System; and in 1914 Thompson became the first full-term director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York — the most important bank in the Federal Reserve System.
By 1917, then, William Boyce Thompson was a financial operator of substantial means, demonstrated ability, with a flair for promotion and implementation of capitalist projects, and with ready access to the centers of political and financial power.
This was the same man who first supported Aleksandr Kerensky, and who then became an ardent supporter of the Bolsheviks, bequeathing asurviving symbol of this support — a laudatory pamphlet in Russian, "Pravda o Rossii i Bol'shevikakh."-
Before leaving Russia in early December 1917 Thompson handed over the American Red Cross Mission to his deputy Raymond Robins.
Robins then organized Russian revolutionaries to implement the Thompson plan for spreading Bolshevik propaganda in Europe (see Appendix 3).
A French government document confirms this: "It appeared that Colonel Robins . . . was able to send a subversive mission of Russian bolsheviks to Germany to start a revolution there."
This mission led to the abortive German Spartacist revolt of 1918.
The overall plan also included schemes for dropping Bolshevik literature by airplane or for smuggling it across German lines.
Thompson made preparations in late 1917 to leave Petrograd and sell the Bolshevik Revolution to governments in Europe and to the U.S.
With this in mind, Thompson cabled Thomas W. Lamont, a partner in the Morgan firm who was then in Paris with Colonel E. M. House.
Lamont recorded the receipt of this cablegram in his biography:
Just as the House Mission was completing its discussions in Paris in December 1917, I received an arresting cable from my old school and business friend, William Boyce Thompson, who was then in Petrograd in charge of the American Red Cross Mission there.
Lamont journeyed to London and met with Thompson, who had left Petrograd on December 5, traveled via Bergen, Norway, and arrived in London on December 10.
The most important achievement of Thompson and Lamont in London was to convince the British War Cabinet — then decidedly anti-Bolshevik — that the Bolshevik regime had come to stay, and that British policy should cease to be anti-Bolshevik, should accept the new realities, and should support Lenin and Trotsky.
Thompson and Lamont left London on December 18 and arrived in New York on December 25, 1917.
They attempted the same process of conversion in the United States.
A CONSULTATION WITH LLOYD GEORGE
The secret British War Cabinet papers are now available and record the argument used by Thompson to sell the British government on a pro-Bolshevik policy.
The prime minister of Great Britain was David Lloyd George.
Lloyd George's private and political machinations rivaled those of a Tammany Hall politician — yet in his lifetime and for decades after, biographers were unable, or unwilling, to come to grips with them.
In 1970 Donald McCormicks The Mask of Merlin lifted the veil of secrecy.
McCormick shows that by 1917 David Lloyd George had bogged "too deeply in the mesh of international armaments intrigues to be a free agent" and was beholden to Sir Basil Zaharoff, an international armaments dealer, whose considerable fortune was made by selling arms to both sides in several wars.
Zaharoff wielded enormous behind-the-scenes power and, according to
McCormick, was consulted on war policies by the Allied leaders.
On more than one occasion, reports McCormick, Woodrow Wilson, Lloyd George, and Georges Clemenceau met in Zaharoff s Paris home.
McCormick notes that "Allied statesmen and leaders were obliged to consult him before planning any great attack."
British intelligence, according to McCormick, "discovered documents which incriminated servants of the Crown as secret agents of Sir Basil Zaharoff with the knowledge of Lloyd George. "
In 1917 Zaharoff was linked to the Bolsheviks; he sought to divert munitions away from anti-Bolsheviks and had already intervened in behalf of the Bolshevik regime in both London and Paris.
In late 1917, then — at the time Lamont and Thompson arrived in London — Prime Minister Lloyd George was indebted to powerful international armaments interests that were allied to the Bolsheviks and providing assistance to extend Bolshevik power in Russia.
The British prime minister who met with William Thompson in 1917 was not then a free agent; Lord Milner was the power behind the scenes and, as the epigraph to this chapter suggests, favorably inclined towards socialism and Karl Marx.
The "secret" War Cabinet papers give the "Prime Minister's account of a conversation with Mr. Thompson, an American returned from Russia,"- and the report made by the prime minister to the War Cabinet after meeting with Thompson.
The cabinet paper reads as follows:
The Prime Minister reported a conversation he had had with a Mr. Thompson — an American traveller and a man of considerable means — who had just returned from Russia, and who had given a somewhat different impression of affairs in that country from what was generally believed.
The gist of his remarks was to the effect that the Revolution had come to stay; that the Allies had not shown themselves sufficiently sympathetic with the Revolution; and that MM. Trotzki and Lenin were not in German pay, the latter being a fairly distinguished Professor.
Mr. Thompson had added that he considered the Allies should conduct in Russia an active propaganda, carried out by some form of Allied Council composed of men especially selected for the purpose; further, that on the whole, he considered, having regard to the character of the de facto Russian Government, the several Allied Governments were not suitably represented in Petrograd.
In Mr. Thompson's opinion, it was necessary for the Allies to realize that the Russian army and people were out of the war, and that the Allies would have to choose between Russia as the friendly or a hostile neutral.
The question was discussed as to whether the Allies ought not to change their policy in regard to the de facto Russian Government, the Bolsheviks being stated by Mr. Thompson to be and-German.
In this connection Lord Robert Cecil drew attention to the conditions of the armistice between the German and Russian armies, which provided, inter alia, for trading between the two countries, and for the establishment of a Purchasing Commission in Odessa, the whole arrangement being obviously dictated by the Germans.
Lord Robert Cecil expressed the view that the Germans would endeavour to continue the armistice until the Russian army had melted away.
Sir Edward Carson read a communication, signed by M. Trotzki, which had been sent to him by a British subject, the manager of the Russian branch of the Vauxhall Motor Company, who had just returned from Russia [Paper G.T. — 3040].
This report indicated that M. Trotzki's policy was, ostensibly at any rate, one of hostility to the organisation of civilised society rather than pro-German.
On the other hand, it was suggested that an assumed attitude of this kind was by no means inconsistent with Trotzki's being a German agent, whose object was to ruin Russia in order that Germany might do what she desired in that country.
After hearing Lloyd George's report and supporting arguments, the War Cabinet decided to go along with Thompson and the Bolsheviks.
Milner had a former British consul in Russia — Bruce Lockhart — ready and waiting in the wings.
Lockhart was briefed and sent to Russia with instructions to work informally with the Soviets.
The thoroughness of Thompson's work in London and the pressure he was able to bring to bear on the situation are suggested by subsequent reports coming into the hands of the War Cabinet, from authentic sources.
The reports provide a quite different view of Trotsky and the Bolsheviks from that presented by Thompson, and yet they were ignored by the cabinet.
In April 1918 General Jan Smuts reported to the War Cabinet his talk with General Nieffel, the head of the French Military Mission who had just returned from Russia:
Trotski (sic) . . . was a consummate scoundrel who may not be pro-German, but is thoroughly pro-Trotski and pro-revolutionary and cannot in any way be trusted.
His influence is shown by the way he has come to dominate Lockhart, Robins and the French representative.
He [Nieffel] counsels great prudence in dealing with Trotski, who he admits is the only really able man in Russia.
Several months later Thomas D. Thacher, Wall Street lawyer and another member of the American Red CrAss Mission to Russia, was in London.
On April 13, 1918, Thacher wrote to the American ambassador in London to the effect that he had received a request from H. P. Davison, a Morgan partner, "to confer with Lord Northcliffe" concerning the situation in Russia and then to go on to Paris "for other conferences."
Lord Northcliffe was ill and Thacher left with yet another Morgan partner, Dwight W. Morrow, a memorandum to be submitted to Northcliffe on his return to London.
This memorandum not only made explicit suggestions about Russian policy that supported Thompson's position but even stated that "the fullest assistance should be given to the Soviet government in its efforts to organize a volunteer revolutionary army."
The four main proposals in this Thacher report are:
First of all . . . the Allies should discourage Japanese intervention in Siberia.
In the second place, the fullest assistance should be given to the Soviet Government in its efforts to organize a volunteer revolutionary army.
Thirdly, the Allied Governments should give their moral support to the Russian people in their efforts to work out their own political systems free from the domination of any foreign power ....
Fourthly, until the time when open conflict shall result between the German Government and the Soviet Government of Russia there will be opportunity for peaceful commercial penetration by German agencies in Russia.
So long as there is no open break, it will probably be impossible to entirely prevent such commerce.
Steps should, therefore, be taken to impede, so far as possible, the transport of grain and raw materials to Germany from Russia.—
THOMPSONS INTENTIONS AND OBJECTIVES
Why would a prominent Wall Street financier, and director of the Federal Reserve Bank, want to organize and assist Bolshevik revolutionaries?
Why would not one but several Morgan partners working in concert want to encourage the formation of a Soviet "volunteer revolutionary army" — an army supposedly dedicated to the overthrow of Wall Street, including Thompson, Thomas Lamont, Dwight Morrow, the Morgan firm, and all their associates?
Thompson at least was straightforward about his objectives in Russia: he wanted to keep Russia at war with Germany (yet he argued before the British War Cabinet that Russia was out of the war anyway) and to retain Russia as a market for postwar American enterprise.
The December 1917 Thompson memorandum to Lloyd George describes these aims.
The memorandum begins, "The Russian situation is lost and Russia lies entirely open to unopposed German exploitation .... "and concludes, "I believe that intelligent and courageous work will still prevent Germany from occupying the field to itself and thus exploiting Russia at the expense of the Allies."
Consequently, it was German commercial and industrial exploitation of Russia that Thompson feared (this is also reflected in the Thacher memorandum) and that brought Thompson and his New York friends into an alliance with the Bolsheviks.
Moreover, this interpretation is reflected in a quasi-jocular statement made by Raymond Robins, Thompson's deputy, to Bruce Lockhart, the British agent:
You will hear it said that I am the representative of Wall Street; that I am the servant of William B. Thompson to get Altai copper for him; that I have already got 500,000 acres of the best timber land in Russia for myself; that I have already copped off the Trans-Siberian Railway; that they have given me a monopoly of the platinum of Russia; that this explains my working for the soviet ....
You will hear that talk.
Now, I do not think it is true, Commissioner, but let us assume it is true.
Let us assume that I am here to capture Russia for Wall Street and American business men.
Let us assume that you are a British wolf and I am an American wolf, and that when this war is over we are going to eat each other up for the Russian market; let us do so in perfectly frank, man fashion, but let us assume at the same time that we are fairly intelligent wolves, and that we know that if we do not hunt together in this hour the German wolf will eat us both up, and then let us go to work.
With this in mind let us take a look at Thompson's personal motivations.
Thompson was a financier, a promoter, and, although without previous interest in Russia, had personally financed the Red Cross Mission to Russia and used the mission as a vehicle for political maneuvering.
From the total picture we can deduce that Thompson's motives were primarily financial and commercial.
Specifically, Thompson was interested in the Russian market, and how this market could be influenced, diverted; and captured for postwar exploitation by a Wall Street syndicate, or syndicates.
Certainly Thompson viewed Germany as an enemy, but less a political enemy than an economic or a commercial enemy.
German industry and German banking were the real enemy.
To outwit Germany, Thompson was willing to place seed money on any political power vehicle that would achieve his objective.
In other words, Thompson was an American imperialist fighting against German imperialism, and this struggle was shrewdly recognized and exploited by Lenin and Trotsky.
This series of posts will insure that these free thinkers' works live on in living memory.
If only a few.
There is a reason these books are not taught in the modern skools.
Setting rewards to burn only burns the author portion of the payout.
If you think this type of content should be eligible for author rewards, make your voice heard in this community:
created/hive-104940