Manchester: A Revolutionary General Strike?

Foreign Interference – The War Series Part 4

Foreword: Once you have understood how propaganda works, you will recognise it time and time again. Revolution is often just a means to an end - above all we should be concerning ourselves with finding out in WHOSE name is it fomented and for WHAT purpose?

Involuntary Abdication

World War One ended almost as abruptly as it had apparently started. Instead of the defeat of the German armies, there was an Armistice. An Armistice is a ‘temporary cessation of fighting by mutual consent; a truce’. Having been abandoned by Austria-Hungary and Emperor Charles, Kaiser Wilhelm II was forced to prepare for separate peace talks with the Entente (Alliance), as his generals could not guarantee a military victory, as detailed in Kaiser Wilhelm’s Memoirs.

After the installation of his new government, who seemed to be making all the decisions, together with the War Cabinet, in communications with President Woodrow Wilson, Generals Gallwitz and Mudra reported to the Kaiser at the end of September 1918 on the disarray their armies were in. Insubordination, absence without leave and soldiers returning to camp after ‘furlough’ ‘wearing the red flag’. The troops were being heavily influenced by calls for peace from Germany and were simultaneously exposed to revolutionary propaganda. The Kaiser ordered a fall back to the Antwerp-Meuse Line, which did not sit well with Field Marshall von Hindenburg (p275). When the Kaiser finally got to read the last missive to Wilson, it appeared that abdication was the talk on the streets.

Wilhelm believed that his government conspired with Wilson to unseat him. He also heard that the Government, whilst he was on the front line in the last months of the war at Spa, were actively destroying morale by tearing down the old and leaving nothing to replace it with. Communications had been seized from the attaché of the Russian Bolshevist Ambassador to Germany, indicating that the Bolsheviks were indeed planning a Russia style revolution in Germany (p284), the ground work for which appeared to be already laid. On the 7^th and the 9^th of November the Social Democrats and Secretaries of State requested the Kaiser’s abdication, the Social Democrats then oddly left Government and the Imperial Chancellor announced the Kaiser’s abdication before the Kaiser’s response had reached him.

The abdication did not appear to resolve the unrest in Germany in the slightest. The Kaiser contemplated handing himself over to the Entente for trial. He saw such action would bear little chance of being any use, unless the archives of all decision makers in the war were thrown open for public scrutiny, and all were subject to the rigors of an international court to find out who had actually done what. He was convinced that the calls for his abdication and the ‘red flags’ in the troops and the populace were fomented by the enemy in the form of propaganda.