Interwar 1919-1931 episode 1:The Looting System

Reading the first two chapters of Michael Hudson’s Superimperialism, we study the transformation of the world financial system after World War I. That transformation is driven by a surprising decision by the US to insist on repayment of its loans to its allies, which in turn leads the allies (UK and France) to insist on getting those payments from Germany. This is a story of how the interwar system set the world up for WWII.

Civ 1919 – Treaty of Versailles 10: England gives Palestine to the Zionists

On November 2, 1917, England’s foreign secretary sent a letter to an English Baron, declaring that the land of Palestine, which was in the process of being taken militarily from the Ottoman Empire by England, would be given to the Jewish people as their homeland. Known to history as the Balfour Declaration, the first draft was written by its recipient, Rothschild, and maneuvered by the Zionist movement’s secretary Chaim Weizmann. One Christian Palestinian warned in 1917 that “Politically, a Jewish State in Palestine, will mean a permanent danger to a lasting peace in the Near East.” How the British Empire and the Zionist movement, in the face of anti-Zionist dissent and objections on grounds of self-determination, set the region up for more than a century of war and the current genocide.