The Hoover Institution at Stanford was not the sole depository for the concealment and sifting of incriminatory documents. In his book The History Thieves, Ian Cobain, an investigative journalist with The Guardian newspaper in London, revealed a secret facility just an hour’s drive north of London. Concealed in dense woodland near the tiny hamlet of Hanslope, lies ‘one of the most secure facilities operated by any government, anywhere in the world.’ It is an outpost used by Britain’s domestic and foreign spy agencies, MI5 and MI6 and guarded by a seven-foot-high chain-link fence, just beyond which is a ten-foot-high fence topped with coils of razor wire. Every few yards between the fences are closed-circuit television cameras and floodlights. Cobain wrote, ‘Only from the air can the enormous scale of the compound be comprehended, it measures almost half a mile across … It is a perfect place to bury difficult secrets.’ [1]
And bury difficult secrets they have. Cobain exposed how millions of files containing top secret British government documents are kept at Hanslope Park. They date back further even that the First World War. Some which were recently released, albeit very reluctantly under direct order of the Courts of Law, revealed the true horrors of British colonial rule in Kenya and elsewhere in the world. The Hanslope documents are among those which have survived the bonfires. Cobain described how just prior to Malaya’s independence from Britain, five truckloads of sensitive documents relating to British colonial rule were driven 220 miles from Kuala Lumpur under police escort to the naval base at Singapore ‘and destroyed in the Navy’s splendid incinerator there’.
Papers at the National Archives at Kew ‘testified to a worldwide purge of sensitive or damning documentation: there was correspondence that described the laborious burning of papers; there were telegrams from London giving precise instructions for methods of destruction; there were even “destruction certificates”, signed and witnessed by colonial officials to confirm that certain classes of documents had been incinerated.’ [2] Systematic and institutional vandalism aimed at wiping out the truth.
Controversial files relating to Britain’s colonial outrages were destroyed, and there can be no doubt whatsoever that files incriminating British responsibility for starting WW1, have likewise either been destroyed or hidden in the vaults at Hanslope. ‘Files have been concealed for years, held where no historian or lawyer or interested member of the public could find them.’ [3] Many of these documents have been withheld well beyond the freedom of information time limits for the release of confidential papers. Freedom of Information laws exist, but so many exemptions are applied that it can still prove impossible to access documents that are a century and more old. [4] It is difficult to decide what is the greatest outrage; concealment of the documents or the fact that academic historians and mainstream journalists have remained totally supine when they should be standing up to the Money Power and creating hell about this. Ian Cobain is an exception and we are indebted to him.
The fruits of our research very clearly show that the entire mainstream thesis that Germany was to blame for the war, is a complete fabrication. This leads us to the inevitable but depressing conclusion that, apart from the few notable exceptions, brave and honest war historians are few and far between. Before the First World War had even begun, a dedicated team of ‘eminent’ English court historians was brought together at Oxford University and richly rewarded for creating anti-German propaganda in the form of ‘Oxford Pamphlets.’
They created fake history which blamed a completely innocent Germany while depicting Britain as the saviour of the free world. It was but the beginning of a great lie. The vast majority of academics beyond Oxford unwittingly swallowed the great lie, or were too cowed to question it. The ‘argument from authority’ meant that it was true because an authority figure said so. Little has changed over the intervening century. To this day Court Historians churn out new books about the First World War. They throw in the odd caveat that Germany was not solely to blame, but basically rehash the old lies about German guilt.. These books are extravagantly praised by fellow Court Historians, and puffed and critiqued in the mainstream media as ‘new and radical interpretations’. It is likely that a number of academics outside the charmed circle recognise the falsehood, but comfortable academic careers, incomes and mortgages have to be protected. The quiet life is infinitely better to being hounded out of a job and ridiculed as a ‘conspiracy theory’ crank. We understand that. they have jobs to keep, mortgages to keep, families to feed.
In faking history, lies are created and truth is twisted or suppressed. Revisionists presenting genuine historical information are fiercely criticised and their work publicly ridiculed. Quite ludicrously, the ‘anti-Semitic’ pejorative is thrown around like mud today if one even mentions ‘international bankers’. Our Hidden History has been subjected to attacks on the web by what some consider to be a paid disinformation agent of the Money Power. Bold revisionist historians such as Professor Harry Elmer Barnes who stood virtually alone in revealing the true history of WW1, and Professor Antony Sutton and Dr Guido Preparata, who revealed Wall Street’s role in creating Hitler and WW2, were brilliant American scholars whose careers were ruined for daring to speak truth about the real holders of power.
Thankfully, we are both retired and now have no careers to protect.
The polar opposite of revisionists are the ‘eminent’ historians willing to sell themselves in return for important professorships, stellar careers, lucrative lecture tours, television documentary productions and book publishing deals. These are the individuals carefully selected to create false histories. Glowing critiques of their work in the controlled mainstream media are assured. The odd Pulitzer Prize or knighthood in Britain will be thrown in for good measure. But such acquiescence to falsehood among academic historians is not simply a modern phenomenon. Classics scholar Professor Peter Wiseman relates how ancient historiography is plagued by mendacious writings from ‘modest elaboration of fact to outright, even flagrant, lying.’ [5]
Peter Hoffer, Research Professor of History at the University of Georgia, explained just how difficult it now is for historical truth to prevail: Lying may be rational or illogical or both, but it is a subject that cannot be avoided in any philosophy of history for our time. History itself is replete with lies and lying. The best and worst example is the big lie. The big lie is a simple message of allegedly great importance. Repeated over and over, despite the piling up of counter-evidence, it has a power that truth cannot deflect and evidence to the contrary cannot undo … [however], a lie does not have to be all that big to make a difference in history. [6]
In bygone days such dishonest academics operated under the patronage of Europe’s royal courts and were termed ‘Court Historians’. They related only accounts that were favourable to the monarchy, no matter how false they might be. The power of royalty has greatly diminished, but Court Historians remain a significant entity. They remain the intellectual bodyguards of the State. They shape and defend the ‘official line’ or interpretation on the State’s wars, its presidential regimes, foreign policy or other key historical events and policies. As a result they enjoy high esteem and recognition in the mainstream media and academia. As defenders of the status quo they frequently attack and label their critics as ‘conspiracy theorists, revisionists, isolationists, appeasers, anti-intellectuals, or other bogey men, rather than engage in civil discourse or discussion. [7]
There are, of course, more subtle ways of projecting fake history than the straightforward big lie or concealment/destruction of evidence. John Tosh, Professor of History at Roehampton University, London, and former Vice-President of the Royal Historical Society, has studied the basics of historiography and the problems involved in using primary and secondary sources in ascertaining ‘facts’. Tosh related how many primary sources used in historical works are inaccurate, muddled, based on hearsay or actually ‘intended to mislead’. Indeed, ‘the majority of sources are in some way inaccurate, incomplete or tainted by prejudice and self-interest.’ [8] According to Professor Tosh ‘Historical writing of all kinds is determined as much by what it leaves out as by what it puts in’. [9] Add that to the fact that so many primary sources have been concealed or destroyed, and the honest investigator faces a major barrier to the truth.
The late Cambridge University historian, Professor Herbert Butterfield, warned that omission of important documents from the historical record is not always the fault of historians employed by government. They can only deal with the material they are given. The processes by which official papers are accumulated offers government officials and individual Cabinet Ministers the opportunity to cull these before they are handed over. As Professor Quigley explained, many of these political figures are effectively puppets of the Secret Elite.
Thereafter, when the official histories are read by the public they have no idea what has been suppressed or withheld. It may be that a single document is more important than all the rest – the exclusion of one document out of three hundred is even capable of destroying the clue to the whole series. … It has proved possible in the history of historical science for a release of diplomatic documents to carry students further away from the truth than before, if the release has not been a total one. [10] On the role of ‘official’ government historians Professor Butterfield adds: ‘… Nothing could be more subtle than the influence of upon historians of admission to the charmed circle … a well-run State needs no heavy-handed censorship, for it binds the historian with soft charms and with subtle, comfortable chains.’ [11]
1. Ian Cobain, The History Thieves, pp. 101-103.
2. Ibid., pp. 119-120.
2. Ibid., p. 109.
4. 1bid., p. 160.
5. T.P. Wiseman, Lying Historians: Seven Types of Mendacity. http://liverpool.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.5949/liverpool/9780859893817.001.0001/upso-9780859893817-chapter-4 6. Peter Hoffer, The Historians Paradox, The Study of History in our Time, p.88.
7. http://www.johnccarleton.org/court_historians.html
8. John Tosh, The Pursuit of History: Aims, Methods and New Directions in the Study of Modern History, pp.33, 65-66.
9. Ibid., pp. 136-137.
10. Herbert Butterfield, History and Human Relations, pp. 201-209.
11. Ibid., p. 198.
First World War Hidden History 
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