Assassination in Sarajevo tomorrow marks the 105th anniversary of this dreadful activity. 105 years ago, 28 June, marks the 105th anniversary of the assassination that sparked or ignited, set in motion, the First World War. 28 June 1914, the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Usturek, the Eastern Empire that had protected Europe for centuries from the Ottoman Turkish threat. The heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, were assassinated in Sarajevo, Bosnia. Considering the catastrophic consequences, it's remarkable how little is generally known about that fateful day and what led up to it. Security personnel and bodyguards can learn no end of lessons of what not to do from the catalogue of security failings of that day. That is probably the textbook example of everything you should not do is what they did that day from a security point of view. It was a violent and volatile province and city. First of all, a scheduled visit of Archduke Franz Ferdinand to Bosnia was published as early as March. Sarajevo was a volatile, cosmopolitan, half-oriental community of 42,000 people. For hundreds of years it had been under Ottoman Turkish Muslim rule. The Austrians had liberated Bosnia and Herzegovina from the Ottoman Turkish Empire in the war of 1877 to 1878. So, here's Bosnia, the Austrians took it from the Turks and freed a whole lot of other areas from it. The Turks had been controlling this whole area for many years. In 1908, the provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina were incorporated formally into the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Here we've got Bosnia, there's Sarajevo. The date chosen for the state visit of Archduke Franz Ferdinand to Sarajevo was a date of painful historic significance for the Serbs, one of the most important dates in the calendar. It was the anniversary of their most disastrous defeat in history, 28 June 1389, at the hands of the Ottoman Turks at Kosovo. Just another reason why Kosovo is very important to the Serbs, and the fact that Muslim Bosnians wanted a hijack from Serbia, Kosovo was a cause of a major war in our recent memory. But at this stage, they are looking at 28 June as a time to do something of great significance to fight back. Now, despite Austria playing a leading role in liberating the Balkans, They did most of the fighting, a lot of the dying to free them from the Ottoman Muslim Turks. This was all part of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Turkish Empire reached right to the gates of Vienna in the 1500s and the 1600s. They were besieging Vienna as late as 1689. They had taken Budapest. and sacked the city, took 200,000 Christian slaves back to Constantinople. They killed the king of Hungary in the 1500s. They controlled this area, so Bosnia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Albania, all part of the Ottoman Empire, and even Greece, which only won its freedom in 1829. Many people forget this. So this was the situation. Ottoman Turkish Empire not only controlled the Balkans but in fact what today would be called Israel, a lot of Iraq, even Libya and so on. All that was part of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. The neighboring country of Serbia was intensely hostile to Austria which seemed strange because Austria had freed them from the Turks and Serbia wanted to greatly expand its territory to include all the Slavs of the Balkans. Now the word Slav is by the way where we get the word slave from. The Romans used to enslave the Slavs, and that's where the term slave comes from. The white people of Eastern Europe were the Slavs, and they were the ones that the Romans chose to enslave. So interesting etymology of the word. So here you can see Bosnia, part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. There's Serbia, Montenegro, Greece is down here, Bulgaria, Romania above, and so on. That just gives you a bit of an idea of some of what was going on. This is just 1913. If you look at the Austro-Hungarian Empire in terms of ethno-linguistic relationships, you can see here's the Croats and the Slovaks and the Bosnians, Dalmatia, Herzegovina here, Serbia's out here. So the Hungarians, the German, Austrians on red, Hungarians on green and so on. You've got what we today would call the Slovaks in yellow and so on. So the Balkan War of 1912 to 1913 saw these major battles and adjustments. Serbia was able to expand greatly south and the Austrians also managed to liberate a whole chunk of Montenegro and so on. Bulgaria won a massive amount of territory back from the Turks. Greece expanded as well. It was all in all a major liberation of Europe, pushing the Ottoman Turks right back to just a little sliver of Europe and then the rest on the other side of the Bosphorus in what is Asia. Serbia was a monarchy, and having tasted victory against the Turks in the Balkan War of 1912, where they weren't the only ones fighting, there's a whole lot of, there's a coalition, but nevertheless, the Serbs now deluded themselves that they were a great power, able to take on even the Austro-Hungarian Empire. in their dreams, maybe, but that's what they thought. And so this is the situation at the time of 1914. You've got Serbia controlling a pretty large section. They are bordered with Austria and Hungary and Romania and Bulgaria and also Greece and Albania. But nevertheless, they think they can basically take on the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The head of Serbian military intelligence, Colonel Dregutin, Dimitrovic, known by his codename Apis, which is named after the Egyptian bull god, remember? That's the ones that were making golden calves for one's own. He also controlled the Black Hand, which was an international terrorist group run by Major Vijin Tankarsovic. So these are three key elements in the battle. It was this group, the Black Hand, that provided the young Bosnians, as they called them, although they were Serbs, including Gavrilo Princip. He's the assassin who sparked the war. And he equipped them with four Browning semi-automatic pistols, six bombs, and cyanide capsules. This is even on the inventory of the Serbian army, having provided these to these terrorists. This was in May 1914. Princip received some training in pistol target practice in a park in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, in the park, in the middle of the city, the capital. They're doing practices at targets in the park with the pistols that have just been provided by the government there. Colonel Dragutin Dimitrovic is described as a revolutionary fanatic. Pale, bald, heavy, enigmatic, like a giant Mongolian. Draguta never married. It was said he is actually married to the movement. He is devoted to the movement of Serb nationalism and international terrorism. He required his revolutionaries to undergo a hooded initiation ritual, which include a seal engraved with skull and crossbones and a dagon bomb and poison, and all seemed pretty occultic. Murder had been his business since his involvement in the 1903 assassination of the King of Serbia, King Aleksandar and Queen Draga of Serbia. King Aleksandar was considered a fine man and his wife were respected and yet they were murdered, the King and Queen were murdered in their own palace bedroom by the Serbian army, the Serbian officers, which included Dragutin. They were so disrespectful they even threw them from the balcony of the king and queen to lie on the ground in their bedclothes, stretched them out on the table, mutilated them, absolutely despicable, and then took pictures of themselves around the royal bedchamber where they had committed a dastardly deed. So Serbia is hardly a democracy. Serbia is described by many as a rogue state whose rulers were intimately involved in international terrorism. In our time, governments have gone to war over countries that they claimed were rogue states or terror-sponsoring states, even if there wasn't much evidence. But there was no doubt Serbia was a rogue state. If there's ever been a terror-sponsoring state, it was Serbia. The evidence is overwhelming that the young Serbian terrorists who murdered Archduke Franz Ferdinand received their weapons from the Serbian military in the basic training in Belgrade Park. Here's this general, the principal assassin who succeeded in killing Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. The Serbian Prime Minister Pasic informed the Cabinet of Serbia at the end of May the assassins were on their way to Sarajevo to kill Franz Ferdinand. This was minuted. It's in the Cabinet minutes. No secret. They knew about it. Of course, they never bothered to inform the Austrian government about this. The Serbian state documents include details about the movements of the assassins and of the bombs and the pistols in their luggage. In fact, here's the tracking. The blue marks the movements of Princip and Grazebich, and then the green, all three of the assassins, all the way to Sarajevo, and the yellow, the one who threw the bomb. So this just shows some of the tracking. The Interior Ministry of Belgrade was fully briefed on all aspects of the assassination mission, yet no warning was forwarded to the Austrian authorities of the planned assassination. Obviously, because it was a state operation. From the Austrian side, the lack of rudimentary security arrangements on that tragic day is absolutely astounding. Acts of terrorism in and from the Balkans were a clear and present danger. The Balkans had been torn apart in centuries. of Ottoman Turkish upheaval and basically one of the problems when people want to understand what was behind the Yugoslav war and the Kosovo war and the Bosnian war and all the other things, well the Turks practiced a blood levy. When Ottoman Turks took over they required from every Christian one out of every five males to be raised as Janissaries, soldiers for the Sultan. And of course, they could be as brutal with them as they liked. They didn't care how much lives they lost them because it wasn't their people. They were Christians, but they were trained to be Muslim fanatics. They took them away from their mothers at a young age. And so for the Christians as a source of great bitterness that One out of every five of the young men were taken away to be Muslim Janissaries, mercenaries for the Sultan. But then, there was this carrot-stick approach that you got extra taxes and a lot of burdens if you're a Christian, but if you convert to Islam, there are all kinds of benefits and financial benefits and all the rest of it. So there were the traitors. A Bosnian is a Serb who converted to Islam. traitors. You can imagine over the centuries the bitterness, especially when you think of the atrocities, places where they literally built pyramids of skulls of decapitated Serbian Christians and so on. So make no mistake, the bitterness goes deep. It goes back centuries out there in the Balkans. Acts of terrorism in the Balkans were legion. British newspapers published cartoons of Serbian anarchists asking one another, what time is it by your bomb? As Archduke Franz Ferdinand left his estate on the 23rd of June 1914 to travel by train to Bosnia, he commented, our journey starts. Down there, they will throw bombs at us. And it's just a few days before he's making jokes about it. And of course, they did throw bombs at him. The emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Franz Joseph, who was the longest reigning monarch in Europe at that time, had lost his wife, the Empress Elizabeth. Beloved Elizabeth, probably one of the most beloved empresses and woman in all of Europe at that time. She had been murdered in 1903 by a Serbian anarchist, one of these, we would call them communists today, they were called anarchists at that time. And so the empress of the great Austro-Hungarian empire was stabbed with an ice pick in Geneva. She was boarding a steamer to Geneva at the time on the lake, and this anarchist walked up and plunged this ice pick into her heart. 25-year-old anarchist, Luigi Lucea. And so this was the report all over the world. One of the most popular beloved women in Europe ruthlessly cut down by an assassin. And the death scene of the empress was tragic, stabbed to the heart. The anarchist said, I am an anarchist by conviction. I came to Geneva to kill a sovereign with object of giving an example. It did not matter to me who the sovereign was whom I should kill. And by the way, do you see the grin on his face after being arrested by the police and his smug expression? Just no remorse. A person who had absolutely nothing but delight about killing a woman who was unarmed, and she didn't have bodyguards or entourage around her. She despised that. She never liked processions. She is walking from a hotel to the to the boat. And this is the ice pick that was used for the murder and an explanation pictures of the assassin and of the murdered Empress. So Austria had suffered at the hands of assassins to the highest, right to the top. In 1908, a 20-year-old Slav student assassinated Count Potocki, the governor of Galicia, another important province in Austria. At the trial of an American-born Croat who had fired at a member of the royal family, the judge asked, did he think killing people was justified? The man responded, in this case, it is. It is the general opinion in America, and behind me are 500,000 American Croats. I think many Americans today may be surprised to know how the Americans had been perceived that the government was pro-revolutionaries. They were so anti-monarchist, anti-imperialist, anti-colonial, and all the rest, that they were more than sympathetic to anarchists and revolutionaries, such as one of the things that has been a great frustration of people in Britain about the Americans is the vast amount of Roman Catholic Irishmen in America, especially in Chicago and in New York, who have been funding the Irish Republican Army terrorists for decades. In fact, for something like a century and a half. The amount of murders and assassinations carried out with American weapons like AR-15 Armalites and so on, provided by Americans. The IRA terrorists have been butchering people, blowing up members of the royal family like Lord Mountbatten, the Queen's cousin, and so on, with munitions provided and funds provided by American sympathizers of the IRA terrorists. In 1906, an anarchist bombed the wedding procession of King Alfonso XIII of Spain, who was marrying a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. They threw a bomb at the wedding procession. I mean, there's nothing sacred. So the people of Europe were sick of these anarchists, and she did survive, thankfully, this granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Queen of Spain, and some of her children there. In June 1908, a young Bosnian, Bogdan Zeradzik had failed in his attempt to assassinate the Emperor Franz Josef, the oldest, longest reigning monarch in Europe, in Mostar. Later, the same assassin had travelled to Sarajevo and fired at General Marjan Veruzanin. It was alleged that the Black Hand of Serbia had provided his revolver. In June 1912, the governor of Croatia, which is also part of of what was then Austria, was fired upon in Zagreb. Although the governor was missed, a member of his administration was wounded in this attack. In March 1914, the Vicar General of Transylvania, also part of what today is Romania, but then was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was killed by a time bomb sent through the post from Romania. Numerous conspiracies to assassinate officials were detected and prevented by the Austrian police. Interestingly enough, Gavrilo Princip was known by the Austrian police to be a potential threat. He was on their files. What was he doing in the country anyway, in a city that the heir to the throne was visiting, in a time when assassinations like this was common? Yet when the General Oskar Pitoric, the governor of Bosnia, was warned of the threat from the young Bosnians, who were Serbs, but I mean, this is the way it works. They've often got names in order to justify what they're doing. The general only laughed. The officials at Sarajevo spent more energy discussing dinner menus and the correct temperature at which to serve the wines than any issues of security. Security? Who cares about that? The temperature of the wine is the important thing. So, on 28 June 1914, a date of intense significance for the Serbians, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand set out in the uniform of a cavalry general. Blue tunic, gold collar, three silver stars, black trowels with red stripes. His wife Sophie wore a white hat with a veil and long white silk dress with red and white fabric roses tucked into the red sash. On the morning of 28 June, in accordance with the published schedule that you could read about in the newspapers, you didn't need any spies for this, the motorcade left Sarajevo railway station. in this vehicle. Shortly before reaching its first scheduled stop, a bomb was thrown by Nedo Kigo Kabrinovic. Now, the kind of bombs at that point, it had a percussion cap, and he struck the percussion cap against a nearby lamppost, which made a sharp crack. So it immediately drew the attention of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in his open car and as the bomb was thrown he was able to deflect it out of the vehicle. I mean it was going to land basically in the lap of his wife and he knocked this grenade out. It exploded behind the vehicle wounding two bystanders. As Kibrevnik was arrested and led away, he shouted loudly, I'm a Serbian hero. Now he actually jumped into this canal, tried to escape, was captured, and just before he was captured, he bit on a cyanide capsule, which for some reason didn't work. And then he was, as he was taken away, he shouted out, he's a Serbian hero. Now his other conspirators, who also had bombs and pistols, They lost their nerve and they failed to use their weapons and there was quite a bit of bitterness from this Kobrivanek, the fact that he had done his duty but the others failed to follow up. Despite the attack, the archduke continued with his published schedule, not deviating from the course, meeting the governor-general where he watched two local girls perform a folklore dance, and there were speeches on the town hall, and all the rest of it, and he insisted, in fact, afterwards to go past the hospital to visit the two people who'd been wounded in the bombing attack. This, of course, made it possible for the assassins to try another attack. After visiting those who'd been wounded by the bombs, upon leaving the town hall, the driver took a wrong turn, turning left after crossing the river instead of turning right. And so you can see the planned route is in purple and the green route is the actual altered route that they used. And you can also see where the different assassins were. Popovic, Mehmed Basik, Ilyin, and Kubrivalik, who threw the bomb. And Princip is over here. The driver was told to stop and turn back. Now, in those days, cars had no reverse gear, so you had to push it backwards to get it back to where it was. They couldn't turn around the road, so they were pushing the car backwards with it in neutral, I presume, in order to go into the apple quay. And this is where it was, outside this building, where the assassination took place, after crossing this bridge. It was at this point that Gavrilo Princip walked up to the open car and fired at fronts and Sophie Ferdinand at point-blank range, firing one shot into each of their hearts. And you can just imagine the shock The cold-bloodedness. This is the Serbian military-issue pistol, which is on display in the Austrian War Museum. The last words of the Archduke was, Sophie, Sophie, do not die. Stay alive for our children. But there was no chance of her surviving either. Both had been shot in the heart. And this is on a picture at the time and then on display to this day the light blue jacket that the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was wearing that day. You can see at the time how much of blood splatter was evident because it's all dried very much by now, over 100 years later. Here's how the New York Herald announced that Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his consort, the Duchess of Hohenberg, assassinated while driving through the streets of Bosnia. And bombs had previously been thrown at them. And all different details. Assassin kills heir to the Austrian throne and wife in streets of Bosnian capital. Now bearing in mind how very old Archduke Franz Ferdinand was. This man was about to become the next emperor of Austria within a year or two. And so, absolutely outrageous, Serb student assassinates Archduke and his Duchess. Bomb hurled into carriage fails to explode. That's not accurate, but remember, sometimes you get information coming that the newspapers rushed to print. And this is in Washington, D.C., Evening Post, June the 28th, 1914. So the wire service and they did the best they could with what they knew. They were survived by their daughter and two sons. Every village in Austria draped in mourning in black colors and bells tolling. 28th June 1914 was Franz and Sophie Ferdinand's 14th wedding anniversary. Talk about the importance of dates. Many people miss the importance of dates. If anyone had studied the history of Sarajevo and Bosnia, they would not have planned a visit by the heir to the throne on that volatile date in that volatile city at that time. What's significant about 9-11? September 11th is not an arbitrary date. The date chosen by the bombers for hijacking those aircraft and flying them into the buildings in Washington D.C. and in New York in 2001 was not arbitrary. It was on September the 11th, 1689, that the high water mark of the Turkish attack on Europe was thwarted with a counter-attack by German and Polish cavalry outside the gates of Vienna. Vienna was besieged, long siege, on September the 11th, 1689. The King of Poland led the cavalry charge across the plain and wiped out the Turkish threat to the heart of Europe. And interestingly enough, that is why the Viennese bakers made a crescent-shaped pastry, which is called a croissant, because an Austrian princess later went to France, married the Dauphin of France, became Louis XVI, and hence the French term croissant came to be termed for the pastry made in the crescent shape to remind the people that they'd had the Turks for breakfast. And a Capuchin monk found a lot of coffee in the abandoned trains and carriages and all the different tents of the Turkish besiegers, and he opened up a coffee shop. And because he was a Capuchin monk, therefore the coffee that he was making was called a cappuccino. So cappuccinos and croissants come from the great siege of Vienna, ended on September 11, 1689. Now that was a great shame to the Turks and so you can imagine Muslim jihadists to know their history thinking we need to wipe out that shame. There was another day too. The Great Siege of Malta, 1565, was finally ended on September the 11th in 1565 as the Turks fled. So again, Muslim jihadists have got something with that date. There are dates that are significant in history which security people should pay attention to. The district judge, Leo Pfeffer, commented on Princip, it was difficult to imagine that so frail a looking individual could have committed so serious a deed. In fact, when Princip had volunteered to fight for Serbia in the First Balkan War of 1912, he was rejected as being too small. At his first interrogation by the police in Sarajevo, Princip declared that throughout his life, wherever he went, people took him for a weakling and he wanted to prove them wrong by murdering someone and his wife. Within days, all the conspirators were in custody, except the Muslim Mohammed, who escaped to Montenegro. As Ostrid did not execute adolescents, and Princip was either 17 or 18 years old, but still he had to be 20 for them to consider him for an execution, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and he died of natural causes, tuberculosis, April 1918, before the war he had initiated came to an end. A chaplain reported that right before he died, he asked him if he had any regrets, and he said none at all. He's asked by the prison psychiatrist, do you have any regrets that your deed sparked a world war, the death of millions? Princip made clear, no, I have no regrets. If I had a chance, I'd do it again. Interestingly, Princip had killed the one man an Austrian Empire was committed to averting war with either Serbia or Russia. Franz Ferdinand had been the one member of the Austrian royal family who had good relationships with the Russians. Franz Ferdinand was on record declaring, I shall never lead a war against Russia. I shall make sacrifices to avoid it. A war between Austria and Russia would end, either with the overthrow of the Romanovs, or the overthrow of the Habsburgs, or perhaps the overthrow of both. pretty far-sighted. He once wrote to the foreign minister, let us not play Balkan warriors ourselves. Let us not stoop to this hooliganism. Let us stay aloof and watch the scum bash in each other's skulls. It would be unforgivable, insane, to start something that would pit us against Russia. Franz Ferdinand's moderate stand was clearly seen by how, despite all the threats, he chose to make a state visit to one of the most volatile cities in one of the most unstable parts of Europe in an open car with next to no security. and he didn't alter his plans of the first bombing attack. These days, if there's any attempt, everything changes, the routes are changed, everything, they will pull out the prisoner, whoever it is, from that area. Security there, I think I've learned a few lessons from this, that you don't continue with your scheduled plan after assassination attempt, because normally there's more than one assassin. However, it is the practice of terrorists to assassinate moderates, to provoke reaction. Remember, what's Karl Marx's theory? Thesis. Anti-thesis. Synthesis. They wanted the synthesis. The thesis, their action, was designed to provoke a reaction. They need counter-revolutionaries. They like it when we are reactionary because we play into their hands often. They do atrocities, atrocities, atrocities. What are they wanting? They're wanting to provoke counter-atrocities. Then they make themselves the victims after they've provoked it. But that's what they want. They want you to play into their hands. The British ambassador in Germany declared that the assassination was a dreadful act of which the political consequences are incalculable. In St. Petersburg, Russia, the journalists dismissed the assassination as a characteristic bit of Balkan savagery. Almost every country in Europe had suffered the effects of assassinations by communist revolutionary anarchists like Princip, and there was general sympathy for Austria and disgust for Serbia's obvious role. the funeral of Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in the Catholic-style open coffins where they are buried. Yet, despite all of Europe uniting in common revulsion against the Serbian terrorism, just over a month later, most of Europe would mobilize against Austria's attempts to deal with the Serbian terrorist threat. And so, Austria mobilized against Serbia. In fact, Austria gave a one-month warning with an ultimatum of things they had to do, which even people like First Lord, the Admiralty, Winston Churchill in Britain said, very reasonable. And everyone around the world thought Austria's demand to Serbia was completely reasonable. When Serbia refused, Austria went to war against Serbia. So Russia mobilized against Austria. So Germany mobilized in support of Austria against Russia. So France mobilized against Germany. So Germany was forced to counter to France. The next thing what no one expected was Great Britain would declare war on Germany. Britain and Germany had never ever been at war before 1914. Britain and Germany were the best of friends. They were the best of allies. In fact, the British Royal Family was completely German. If you've seen the Young Victoria film, where Queen Victoria has this suitor, Prince Albert, struggling to speak and halting English to nonsense. They spoke in German to one another in Buckingham Palace while raising their children. German was their first language. Queen Victoria was as German as Prince Albert. He didn't have to stumble and struggle to speak English. And it's just the fact that the British have forgotten that their royal family is completely British. In fact, the British are German. Anglo-Saxons. Where the Angles come from? Angleland. Denmark and Germany. Saxons come from? Well, what was Martin Luther? Saxon. What's Wittenberg and Dresden? Well, capitals of Saxony at that time, and so on. So it surprised everyone that Britain went to war against a traditional ally for her traditional enemies, France and Russia. Why? Admiral Tirpitz said at the time, the German Admiral of the High Seas Fleet, this war is really the greatest lunacy ever committed by the white races. Kaiser Wilhelm II said, it's not I who bears the responsibility for this disaster, which now threatens the entire civilized world. Although he had given the Austrian support to act against Serbia when the Austrian Archduke was murdered by Serb terrorists on June 28, 1914, by the last days of July, there was no monarch in Europe trying more desperately to stop Europe's plunge of war than the Kaiser, who later on was branded by the Versailles Treaty as the sole person responsible for the war. Yet no one had done more to avert the war. This is an American poster, Save Serbia, Our Ally. Serbia is a terrorist state, a rogue state. Every 28th of June, during the First World War, the American President Woodrow Wilson hoisted the Serbian flag at the White House in solidarity with this rogue state on the very date when it assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which led to the First World War. Does this make any sense? Proverbs 26 verse 17 says, he who passes by medals in a quarrel not his own is like one who takes a dog by the ears. You're going to get bitten in the face. 1914 shattered Europe. An entire generation of young men died in brutal trench warfare. No other war changed the map of Europe so dramatically. Three great European empires were destroyed in the First World War. The German Empire, which was a very young empire. It had only come about in 1871. The house of the Hohenzollerns, Germany, land of some of the greatest of the fairy tales and of theology and Bach, Handel, all great musicians you can think of. And you think of the destruction of Germany. And on their belt buckles was God met uns, God with us. But of course the soldiers on the other side were taught that they were godless. Both sides were probably taught that the others were godless. The Russian Empire of Tsar Nicholas, who had managed to civilize and Christianize the whole of Northern Asia, the phenomenal achievement of the small Christian kingdom managing to take from the Muslims all of Northern Asia and make it Christian in the Orthodox style. And the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Ustaraik, who had stood firm against the Ottoman Turks for centuries, being the eastern bulwark protecting Europe from the threat of Islamic invasion for centuries. 1914 marked the end of the greatest century of Christian advance and the beginning of what has proved to be the worst century of persecution. More Christians have died in the 20th century for their faith than all other 19th centuries combined. The consequence of the First World War continues to have far-reaching repercussions to this present day. You think how the war began with cavalry, progressed through gas warfare, aircraft being used in warfare. trench warfare, machine guns, flame throwers. What people had to endure. This is one of the biggest man-made craters by an explosion. I've been to this very lake. The British brought in Welsh coal miners to dig under the German trenches, actually concrete bunkers and fortifications, and they put something like a million pounds of explosives under and set, exploded, killed something like 6,000 people in a matter of a few seconds. Created this massive inland lake which didn't enable them to gain any territory at all because they couldn't cross this either. It made it such chaos that their assaulting forces couldn't get over the obstacle either. Russia mobilized 12 million soldiers. Germany mobilized 11 million. France 8.4 million. Great Britain mobilized 8.9 million, including a quarter of a million underage boys serving in the British Army, including one who's discovered to be just 12 years old. I've been at the grave of a 14-year-old boy in Ypres in Belgium, 14-year-old British boy who died fighting in the First Battle of Ypres. The Australians, the Canadians, the Indians, South Africans, Rhodesians, average life expectancy in the trenches was about six weeks. Italy mobilized 5.6 million, Austria 7.8 million, and the USA, at the end of the war, 4.3 million. Of the 60 million European soldiers who were mobilized from 1914 to 1918, over nine million were killed. Nine million were permanently disabled, or as they would have said at the time, crippled. and 15 million were seriously injured, including gas attacks. Contemporaries called it the Great War. They didn't call it the First World War, it was called the Great War, because it was literally greater than any war waged before that time. They also called it the war to end all wars. There wouldn't be another war after this. In numbers of soldiers involved, in numbers of casualties, in terms of the disastrous consequence, it was the most catastrophic event in the history of European civilization. And while the West may try to glamorize it, it was a disaster. Do not strive with a man without cause, if he has done you no harm. We read in Proverbs 3, verse 30. Do you know that the Versailles Treaty, and tomorrow, marks not only the 105th anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie in Sarajevo, it marks the 100th anniversary of the Versailles Treaty. The Versailles Treaty was signed on 28th June, 1919. They chose to sign to mark the fifth anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. It has to be recognized the very worst failure of a peace treaty ever signed in history. The Treaty of Versailles was meant to guarantee peace, but it's led to the most violent, destructive century in the history of mankind. The legacy of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended the First World War, so they say, well, people like Pat Buchanan says it didn't end it. It actually, you should think of the First and Second World War as Europe's 30 years war. It's just one war. It guaranteed the Second World War and it also led to the destruction of Christian civilization, much of Europe and throughout the world for over a century. Why is the world no longer Christian? Look no further than the First World War and the Versailles Treaty. You cannot understand the history of the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe without understanding the pivotal role played by the destructive, vindictive Versailles Treaty of 28 June 1919, of which tomorrow is the 100th anniversary. Do not be deceived. God is not mocked, for whatever man sows, that he will also reap. The U.S. Secretary of State Lansing said of the peace treaty that he and President Wilson brought home, the Versailles Treaty menaces the existence of civilization. This is why we are living in a so-called post-Christian world, because of the First World War and the unbelievably self-destructive policies that came through the Versailles Treaty. Injustice, arrogance, displayed in our triumph will never be forgiven or forgotten. Prime Minister Lloyd George of Britain, one of the architects of it, declared in 1919, Those three all-powerful, all-ignorant men sitting there carving continents with only a child to lead them, said Lord Balfour, the one who signed the Balfour Declaration, guaranteeing Palestine to the Jews to set up a Jewish state if the Jews, meaning Lord Rothschild, who was being given this letter, would bring the Americans in on the side of the British, so that they wouldn't have to make a peace treaty with Germany in a stalemate, but that they could win by bringing the American might. And Lord Balfour looked and said, this is a disaster. Timed to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by Serbian terrorists, 28 June 1914, which is credited as being the spark which led to the catastrophic First World War. 2 Chronicles 19 verse 2 says, should you help the wicked and love those who hate the Lord, therefore the wrath of the Lord is upon you. Why would God be angry with us in Western civilization? Well, how many times have we helped the wicked? Soviet Union, communist regimes, wicked Islamic regimes, and others who butcher God's people. While they promised them liberty, they themselves are slaves of corruption. And so they marched to war. And you can just see all these nations, with the exception of Switzerland, wisely stayed out of it, went to war and caused havoc. He showed last week how the circles indicate the peacetime budgets in dollars, millions of dollars, and the pillars represent the numbers of soldiers under arms. And Britain was spending more on their defense than Germany was. Germany was spending no more than France, and France had a smaller population. And Russia was spending almost twice as much and had an army almost twice as much as that of Germany. So France and Russia together on both sides of Germany, bearing in mind Germany didn't have a moat like the Channel or oceans like the Americas had with Atlantic and Indian Ocean. They were very vulnerable to people wandering across. And this understanding that the British Empire was one fifth of the world's population and land surface before the war and one fourth of it at the end of the war. So they speak about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand with a spark in the tinderbox. He has shown you a man what is good and what does the Lord require of you but to do justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God. So, some of the materials are on our Reformation Essay website. Some of my sources, A.J.P. Taylor's The First World War Illustrated History, very helpful. World War I by Stone, Who Started World War I? Alexander Solzhenitsyn's August 1914, classic. The Best of Enemies, absolutely brilliant. At some stage, I must give a presentation on how Britain and Germany were the best of friends and allies all the way until 1914, and now they became the best of enemies afterwards. Stephen Mitford Goodson gives an economic explanation of these wars and shows the role of the Bankster Illuminati kind of Rothschild criminals behind the scenes, very much the Freemasons who hated Christian civilization, want to destroy it. And Patrick Buchanan's Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War, how Britain lost its empire and the West lost the world, points out that only Winston Churchill was part of the British war cabinet before the First World War and before the Second. And more than any other single individual, Winston Churchill is to credit taking Britain into both wars and being the only member of the British cabinet in 1914 who supported going to war against Germany. Everyone, even Asquith, the Prime Minister, was against it. And this manipulative, warmongering, deceitful character of Winston Churchill, what he did to destroy the British Empire, when he came to power as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1910, Britain was at the apex of its power. It was the greatest power. The United States was nothing compared to Great Britain in terms of political, military, naval, spiritual, missionary, and every other forms. And by the time Churchill left public office, Britain was a fifth-rate power. dependent on the United States for its own security. And, bear in mind, Churchill wasn't totally English, he was half American, and it shows in his policies, he's probably more than half American, actually, in that his policies always seem to favor the United States and be destructive to Britain's own interests. Patrick Buchanan wrote this book specifically because he said there's a Churchill cult in the West today, especially in the United States, which has led them to wage no end of wars, where in every war your opponent is Hitler, and anyone who doesn't want to go to war is Chamberlain and a Pisa, and you are new Churchill. And so, you know, whether it is Gaddafi, whether it is Assad, whether it is Saddam Hussein, they're always Hitler. And just to justify everything, the way how the Churchill cult has led to the deaths of tens of millions of people, even in our lifetimes, and the American The cult of Churchill has led to no end of unnecessary wars, bombing people who've done nothing whatsoever to threaten the United States and so on, and not only bankrupting America, but destroying the morals and making people around the world hate them. As Patrick Buchanan points out, and he was the speechwriter and strategist for Ronald Reagan's presidency. Pat Buchanan, who himself was a presidential candidate for the Republican Party, he, in this book, Churchill Hit the Unnecessary War, documents the insanity of British policy in both the First and Second World War, that against all interests, it's like the people pulling the strings behind, in fact, he shows how the banksters had bought and paid for Churchill. how this mentality made possible the Soviet Union, saved the Soviet Union in the Second World War as well after making it possible in the First World War, and basically did everything it could to undermine Christian civilization. It's a massive book, well worth looking at. Well, I've looked in different presentations before here. The Causes, Consequences, and Catastrophe of World War I. to understand the First World War and the best of enemies, and evaluating the Hollywood films on World War I, which are pretty treacherous and deceitful, understanding propaganda, discerning between propaganda and real history, which is hard for us. We've got to be some of the most propagandized generations in history. 20th century is just, nothing in history has been like it for propaganda, Hollywood, and the news media, and Americans must be the most propagandized people on the planet, the way they get bombarded with no end of nonsense. morning, noon, night from the Clinton News Network. Of course, the British have got the Bolshevik Broadcasting Network. Many of the soldiers say, if we could have known what should become of our countries, we wouldn't have fought against one another. We would have fought side by side against the real enemy. It's all part of how Marxists avert society, and that's why we like the slogan, smash cultural Marxism, which is the real problem when you get down to it. So, any questions, any comments? Assassination in Sarajevo? It's an interesting thing I was reading today, is that Ferdinand was born in Graz, in Austria. Yes. So was Schwarzenegger. Yes. Interesting. Well, Swartzenegger is an interesting character and of course he's one of few war movie heroes who actually served in an army. He served in the tank corps. I don't know how he fit in those tanks, but maybe they made them bigger in Austria. Maybe not. Before he bolted out, yes. In fact, I'm surprised that he didn't make a push for the presidency because that would probably change the constitution just to let Schwarzenegger... No, he had to be born in America. But considering that you had a person who wasn't born in America, like Barack Hussein Obama managed to be president, the fact that he was born in Kenya didn't seem to prevent... There's no evidence for that. In fact, you can go to Kenya and his grandmother will show you the hospital where he was born and all that sort of thing. They've got tours in Kenya for... Indonesia. Speaking fluent Arabic here. He said the most beautiful sound in his life is the call to prayer from the minaret. Arnold Schwarzenegger. No, no, we're talking about Barack Hussein Obama. No, Schwarzenegger's a Catholic, as most Austrians are. You know, when I met him in 73, I spent three days with him before he was famous. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Just because of the gym connections. He said to me, I said, you know, what hobbies do you have other than training? He says, collecting old Bibles. Can you believe it? Well, that's a surprise. Collecting old Bibles, old antique Bibles. He had a very, very tough relationship with his father, who was extremely strict and he was very involved with the Austrian police. So his lifestyle was rigid beyond belief. It's like Captain Von Trapp, Sound of Music by the Whistles of Time. Are you speaking German if he hadn't led them in? No, not at all. No, I think if he hadn't led Britain into First and Second World War as well, I think it's been well-documented by people like Patrick Hanlon and A.J.P. Taylor. Britain would still have its empire. I think Britain would still be the greatest economic, political, military, spiritual power in the world today. Britain's position was unassailable in 1914. throwing away all that capital of building the world's greatest empire on a worthless, useless, meaningless war in which not a single British interest was at stake. Were they able to walk away from that war? Was there an opportunity? There were. Well, first of all, they didn't have to get involved in the first place. Because, you know, it's understandable that Austria is going to go after Serbia. It wasn't necessary for Russia to back Serbia, but Russia chose to back the Slavs. You would have thought that a royal would not appreciate assassinating another royal, but somehow race triumphed over, or tribe in this case, triumphed over class. And so Russia mobilizing against Austria was not necessary or wise. Then Germany, going to the support of Austria, made sense. France wanted revenge against Germany because when they declared war on Prussia back in 1870, they got quickly smacked and sorted out and beaten up. And that was Napoleon III's last gamble. And they declared war on Prussia and at the end of it, not only were the French army defeated and Napoleon III abdicated, but The Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, declared the Prussian king emperor of a united Germany in the Hall of Mirrors, in the Palace of Versailles, outside Paris, which is why the French forced Germany to sign this treaty in the Hall of Mirrors, in the Palace of Versailles. The Americans and British wanted the peace treaty to be done in Switzerland, somewhere like Geneva. And the French insisted, it's got to be in Versailles, it's got to be in Versailles. Why? Because that's where the Germans had declared their empire in 1871. And so this sense of vindictiveness, symbolism, just like why the Americans, after losing battleships at Pearl Harbor, forced the Japanese to come onto one of their battleships in Tokyo Bay to sign, you know, symbolism, symbolism. When Hitler beat the French in 1940, he had the carriage in which the 11th of November armistice was signed, brought out of the museum and put in the exact same spot in the forest where they'd signed it in 1918 and had the French general sign in that same carriage. So, you know, you can see a lot of these people who fight these battles, they know their history. And it's super important and the symbolism, the significance and all of that. So even when you think the negotiations that B.J. Foster forced on Rhodesia to sit at the carriage. They put it in Victoria Falls Bridge, in the middle, so it's sort of neither Zambia nor Rhodesia. So symbolism is very important in politics and history. So yes, I would say there was no reason for Britain to... It's like you've done your training, you've got your built, so do you want to go to war with your neighbor? Why? There's risks in wars. And of course, in world wars like that, if they're not short and sharp, there's going to be no winners as such, except the ones who didn't take part, or like the Americans came in at the very end, after milking everyone of lots and lots and lots of accumulating massive war debts, because they were selling arms to those involved in the fighting. And so, in the end, Britain had mortgaged their empire for this worthless war. And for what? What did Britain benefit from this. What they basically did was destroy the empire. And I think it's been well documented. Anyway, we looked at some of that with the Versailles Treaty last week. If it wasn't for Britain's involvement, it wouldn't have been a world war. It would have been a couple of months European war. Austria would have smacked Serbia, Germany would have smacked Russia and France, and they were all sat around some table somewhere, and a few borders would have adjusted, but there would have been no toppling of the Tsar, no Bolshevik revolution. The Bolshevik revolution happened, remember, three years into the First World War, after millions and millions of Russians had died. And so, and they were starving, and they were defeated, and they were humiliated. So, not to mention Rasputin and all the other things that was degrading the Russian world. Yes, so he sort of weaned his way into the royal family. Yes, what's also intriguing, only recently has the information come out that the Russian prince, princes actually, there were two of them, who murdered Rasputin, if you can say, killing a traitor like that in the middle of a war is murder. They were actually working for British intelligence. British Secret Service had, because they'd actually done some studying in England, been recruited in English universities, which is where the British do a lot of their Secret Service recruiting. That's where they recruited Jan Smuts before the Inglebourg War, where there's legal training in Cambridge, really. So Jan Smuts was an agent of influence for the British. even before the Anglo-Boer War. Do you know that Churchill had arranged that in the event of his demise during the war, Jan Smuts would become Prime Minister of Britain? They were quite close, weren't they? Stunningly close. It's staggering, actually. But these bizarre things that come about in this. So, yes, I think we could still have They could have easily avoided the war, but even then, even once they went to war, by Christmas 1914, that's just five months into the war, Britain had lost 85% of their army. Were they fighting on more than just that front? Did they have any other wars going on at the time? Not at that moment. At that moment, well, the Navy was doing a few little things, but nothing serious, long before Jutland. So, before Christmas 1914, they'd lost 85% of the army, and they were still working only on volunteers, which was a professional army, which was a really professional army. In fact, the English had a small army, but it was one of the best trained, and they'd been bloodied in who knows how many little colonial conflicts. So, they were Whereas the Germans hadn't fought a war in 25 years of Kaiser Wilhelms on the throne of that state, they had none of the experience that the British had. The British had a lot of experience, but they wiped out their army on what? In Flanders fields. They were all buried within a 10-mile radius around Ypres. At that point, some people were saying, the Pope and others, and Emily Hobhouse, and there were many suggesting, look, can't we just walk away? And in 1915, the Kaiser actually offered, why don't we just return to pre-war boundaries and admit this has been a bad idea? Offered again in 1916. So what made them do that? They didn't want it. But in 1916, the British were seriously off to the failure of the Battle of the Somme. The Battle of the Somme was really, really, really bad. It was 48,000 in one day, wasn't it? Yes, yes. They were losing 12 officers a minute. And in the four months of the war, of the Battle of the Somme, the British lost 650,000 men. This is starting in July 1916. And they gained four miles of territory, which they lost shortly after. And it cost them 650,000 men. That's more men killed in one battle in four months in one place in France. than they lost in the whole of the six years of Second World War on all fronts combined, including in the air and the sea. And it was insane. You go to a place like Eton and Oxford and Cambridge, and the walls are just full of the plots of the written in gold on the wooden plots of the names of the old boys who died, almost all of them, in 1916 in the Battle of the Somme. And of course, Passchendaele and all that was terrible, too. Even in Milton, Milton High School in Boulogne. Our walls were full of, I couldn't believe how many hundreds of names. Rhodesia is a small country. How on earth did we lose so many men in the First and Second World War? But Milton gave a lot of men to that war too. So we've got them. You go down the road to Bishops and you can see incredible amounts of names there. For what? I'm no pacifist, but honestly, when we fight, it should be against real enemies, not against fellow Christians. And that was the argument. So what happened was, in 1916, after the four-month disaster of the Somme, and they'd basically got nowhere, and they'd used tanks, they'd used everything, they'd used gas, they were using everything you could use, and they had still basically got nowhere. At this point they were seriously considering the Kaiser's offer of let's just all go back to our original boundaries and realize we've all made a terrible mistake. Did they ever discuss that? They did. They were considering it and at that point Lord Nathan Rothschild who was also on the war cabinet and he ran the British, what's it, Bank of England, and he ran the factories that were making the tanks and the bullets and the bombs and everything else, and the shells. He was one of the five sons, was it? Yes, well, he's actually one of those sons. So, because Rothschild was running the banks in France, Italy, Austria, Germany, New York and of course London. The only place there wasn't a Rothschild bank was Russia. Which is why at the beginning of the war, the biggest goal of the Rothschilds was to get rid of Russia. Bring down the Tsar. Get rid of the Russian royal family. And so when the Russians were toppling, they now were beginning to look for the next step. Now Britain was starting to win on the Ottoman Empire front and it looked like they would get Palestine soon. And so Lord Nathan Rothschild said, you don't need to make peace. We can guarantee bringing Americans in. 1916, Americans were about as pro-German as they were pro-British. They were more anti-British than they were pro-British because they still had all colonial power. There was the Irish sentiment. All the Irish Catholics were anti-British. And then you had one-eighth of Americans were German, anywhere at that stage. So there was, in fact, a lot of sympathy for Germany, a lot of hostility to Britain. And so in 1916, Americans were 85% against getting involved in the war. on Britain's side. And that's when Rothschild said You guarantee us, I want a declaration from you, Lord Balfour, who's head of the British Foreign Office, that you'll give us Palestine for a Jewish state, and then we'll get the Americans in the war. And this came out in the Versailles Treaty, because these people waved these and said, we want this. And just when Germans looked at us, they all said, where did this come from? I mean, we never realized that there were... And so, At this stage, the Rothschilds and so on went to Woodrow Wilson, made him an offer he couldn't refuse, and he started the Committee for Public Information. And the Committee for Public Information, CPI, Edward Bernays, he was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, the ultimate psychologist character. And they started the world's first serious propaganda agency. And they turned Americans from 85% against the war into being 85% for the war. So before 1917 was out, The Americans were lynching people for having German-sounding names, locking up Amish pacifists and conscientious objectors who didn't want to get drafted into it. They drafted four and a half million men, shipped over two million across the Atlantic, and it was only propaganda. Edward Bernays even documents how they took the American people from being mostly isolationist, overwhelmingly against war, to being overwhelmingly interventionist and being for the war. took them from being anti-British to pro-British, anti-French to pro-French, pro-German to anti-German, and they did it in a space of about nine months, through News media, films, Hollywood, all that sort of thing. And so the Americans coming in upset the whole balance of power because basically up to then, it'd been a bit of a stalemate. And it wasn't going anywhere. They were pretty evenly matched on all sides. But you throw in millions of fresh American troops and all the industrial might, well, it changed the whole ballgame. We're touching on several other potential presentations. Well, up till then, America wasn't much of a war machine. But the First World War got them into it. In fact, you could put it before that in the Spanish-American War of 1898. And that's another story, classic false flag, where they created a false flag. They sent in the main into the Havana harbor, which was then under Spain. And Spain, of course, was still a major power. And next thing you knew, the American ship, the Maine, blows up and they blame Spain. Well, why would Spain start a war with the Americans? It's come out since. It was rigged. The Americans blew up their own ship in order to justify and mobilize the people to attack. And the moment the Maine blew up, suddenly, The entire American fleet in the Pacific was right there to ambush the Spanish fleet and destroy the entire Spanish fleet in the Pacific out by Manila. And they took Cuba and they took the Philippines and they took a whole bunch of things. You wonder what the American army was doing in the Philippines. Well, this is the Spanish-American war, which Spain didn't want. But America became a major power with the Spanish-American War of 1898. And that's the beginning of America starting these wars. Now, when the First World War started, America used that as an opportunity to invade Mexico. And they did a whole bunch of things there in Poncha Villa and all that. So I think the people in the military-industrial complex start to think, boy, you can make a lot of money in a war. And once they got in the First World War, this started who knows how many others. And in the Second World War, it was Salafiqin gold that funded them. The first thing that Jan Smuts did after ousting our elected Prime Minister, General James Barry Herzog in 1939 for refusing to declare war on Germany was he shipped all of Salafiqin's gold to Simonstown, which the USS Quincy loaded 20 million pounds of it on board off to America to fund Lend-Lease, bombs and bullets to Britain and Russia and all that. And it was never discussed at Cabinet, it wasn't discussed in Parliament, it wasn't voted on in South Africa, it wasn't even in our history books. I only know of it because I read it in the American history books written by Pat Buchanan, that smuts shipped our gold. on Churchill's request to Simonstown for the American Navy to pick up to take to New York and the Americans used that to fund the weapons that saved the Soviet Union. Lend-lease. No, it's absolutely staggering. When I brought this up to Stephen Mitford Goodson, which was news to him, and he said, show me the book and the footnotes, and I showed him. And he did an investigation. He came back and he found out from, in fact, our production of gold at the time quite right. We would have had that amount and followed through the USS Quincy. Yes, it was at Simonstown at this time. And he said, it's staggering. So he put it in his revised edition of Jan Smuts, which Stephen Mitford Goodson wrote so we've got Smuts book so he actually in that I think the first South African book that documents what the Americans knew for quite a while that it was South African gold that funded Lend-Lease and we never got anything out of it Well, start from getting betrayal later. So you think that, in fact, as it's also documented by Pat Buchanan, the Unnecessary War, that right at the beginning, it was made clear to Churchill by FDR, we'll save Britain, but we won't save the empire. The cost of us coming in is And it's not that Britain was at risk, because Germany kept wanting peace with them anyway, and never wanted to fight them. 60 different terms. Even Rudolf Hess comes in, the deputy fuhrer, flies in at night, parachutes, first time he parachuted in his life. Pretty brave thing for a man in his late 40s. Parachutes into Scotland in the middle of the night. And he comes to offer peace with Britain as well after they've turned down 60 other offers through Sweden and the Red Cross in Switzerland and so on. So Britain wasn't even at risk, but as Pat Buchanan says, isn't it amazing? Britain chose as its enemy someone who was pro the British Empire and chose as the ally someone determined to dismantle and destroy the British Empire. You know, FDR of America, their policy is to destroy the British Empire. So you can see for us in South Africa and Rhodesia, it was insane because we thought we were fighting for the Commonwealth and they'd fight for us when we need. What we didn't know is he had already agreed to abandon it all. And so the price of American support was You give us, well, it wasn't just giving us islands like Diego Garcia, where they took all the inhabitants of Diego Garcia in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, sorry, Indian Ocean, and just expelled them so that they could put a top secret U.S. Navy base in there. But they took a whole lot of other things, too. And Britain had to agree, America had full access to all Britain's raw materials, colonies, and also that America could market their manufactured goods there. So Britain's building the railways, building the bridges, doing all the expenses, and Americans can come in and snap up the raw materials and snap up the markets without the expenses. So this is where neocolonialism came in. The American imperialism through, well, like what the Chinese are doing. you know, today. And this is what bankrupted not just Britain, but the French, and the Belgian, all the other colonies, that the deals made during the Second World War was basically mortgaging and bankrupting the empires. And the highest policy goal, aside from saving the Soviet Union, was dismantling Britain's empires in Asia, Africa, and so on. Was there a reason for it, just to make it easier to control? Well, yes, I mean, look right now, the two greatest empires of the 20th century, on denial that there were empires, America and Russia, the two greatest empires of the 20th century, and they're both anti-imperialist, anti-colonial. Well, what do they think? What's the American army doing in 156 countries in the world? You know, defending ourselves. What are you doing bombing people? Barack Hussein Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize for bombing eight different countries, which is twice as many countries as Bush bombed. Bush was a warmonger, but Barack Hussein Obama is a peacenik because even though he dropped something like 10 times more smart bombs and drone attacks. He signed something like 2,600 assassination authorizations for drone attacks in his first two years in office. I don't know what was over his eight years, but the amount of people killed, and we mean collateral damage. We're assassinating that person. We happened to get 15 of his neighbors, tough. But these drone attacks, and they're getting upset about Iran shooting down a drone. Well, I'd get a little upset about drones going over me when you think these drones have got Hellfire missiles that have taken out how many different people all over the place, even in Kenya, for goodness sakes. Yeah, but they do it. They're all over the place, and they're sitting there behind a keyboard shooting missiles into somebody's homes in the middle of nowhere where they probably couldn't find a place on a map. And yet the American people think they're defending themselves. This is an imperialist venture, the like of which the world's never seen. So America's become a warmongering state. And it wasn't started that way. At the very beginning, George Washington said, do not get involved in Europe's wars. Do not get involved in entangling alliances. And if America stuck to that, it would be a blessing to the world. So when people say they hate us because we're free, I said, no, they hate you because you bombed them. Nobody hates Switzerland, and Switzerland's freer than you are. It's not the freedom that's at stake, it's stop bombing people and waging economic warfare against them, and maybe they won't hate you so much. I liked our policy in South Africa, we minded our own business. And we should never have sent our troops actually to overseas wars. Did we have an option at that stage? Well, maybe not in the First World War. Not in the First World War. In the Second World War, our Prime Minister, who had won five elections in a row, James Barry Herzog, never been beaten. He gets ousted in a palace coup. I mean, this is how the democracies were run. Nobody elected Churchill, Prime Minister of Britain in 1940. He just somehow took power. Nobody elected Smuts in 1939 to take power in South Africa. He just took power. And we were the democracies, helping another great democracy, Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union, apparently. And so the democracies were, you know, making the world safe for communism. while they say we'll make it safe for democracy, while they're betraying all these democracies in Eastern Europe in the hands of Marxist mass murderers at the altar. As a missionary to Eastern Europe, traveling to places like Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, all these places, I got people giving me a whole different view of history. That's what forced me to change my perspective because I had thought we were the good guys. The Allies fought for freedom and peace and democracy and saved the world and, you know, think how much better off we are because of the Second World War. Well, actually we're not, but you've got to think you are. And you go to Eastern Europe and people say, what freedom? We never got any freedom. And by the way, do you know when George Bush visited Lithuania, they berated him over this sort of thing. And he said, I see your point. And you didn't get anything. You got no freedom after the Second World War. No, no, he was visiting Lithuania for some reason, and the locals took him to task and said, you betrayed us, meaning the Americans, of course not him personally, but America betrayed Eastern Europe, and they did betray Eastern Europe. There were armies in Lithuania, the Lithuanian army was fighting to nine years after the Second World War. 1954, platoon strength, they were still fighting in the forest of Lithuania. The Ukrainian army was fighting company strength and battalion strength even with artillery as late as 1955, ten years after the Second World War, expecting any moment the Marines to arrive and some airdrop of extra supplies for the Americans on which never came. Yes, they were fighting for freedom. So isn't that what the West stands for? 1956, a minister in Hungary, people in Hungary said when they rose up in 1956 against communists and took Budapest and ousted the communists, they were expecting the West to come and help them. Nothing came and they were all slaughtered. I don't know if you've heard the recordings of Radio Freedom in Budapest was broadcasting out and they were, you know, about giving details about how the Communists are closing in. Bill Bathman writes about it and it's going through. And they did the same with Czechoslovakia in 1968. The Czechs, the Czech Spring, they kicked out the Communists and next thing they invaded by the whole Warsaw Pact and no help from the West. That's correct. And then you can think of Mozambique and Angola and so on. So, oh, Rhodesia, South Africa, South West Africa. So, we've seen for the last hundred years there's been a systematic betrayal of Christian countries and a continual support of communist countries. Now, if you look at it this way, if you make a mistake We're all human, everyone makes a mistake. You make the same mistake twice, you're stupid. You make the same mistake 10, 15, 20, 100 times, you've got a hidden agenda. Nobody's that stupid. Now, you know, when they, oh, you know, gee, the British Foreign Office and the American State Department, they just made a mistake. No, this is the consistent policy. You all should remember who Jonas Vimbi was. Jonas Vimbi, UNITA freedom fighter in Angola. I had breakfast with him up in Angola back in 1980s and he had a few jokes. One joke was, do you know why there hasn't been a revolution in America in over 200 years? There's no American embassy in America. Which sounds a bit funny. Then he says, it's better to be America's enemy than America's friend. I remember there's somebody who'd quote George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. I mean, he likes the American constitution. He's promoting America in many ways and trying to model his United Freedom fighters on American principles, not politics though. And he said, if you're America's enemy, you will probably be bought. But if you're America's friend, you'll certainly be sold. He was sold. In fact, he was probably assassinated by, well, there's suspicions whether it was Spesnik or whether it was CIA, but we think that CIA satellites identified for the Spesniks to come in and take him out. And the reason is, because the American Gulf Chevron oil company who was using the Caminda oil and so on, which not only the South African army, remember our Reckie who got arrested, captured up there while he was actually involved in sabotage of the oil fields there. Yes, Vaynant Dutoy. And he, and when UNITA did some raids on the Cabinda oil fields, which is funding the communist government that they're fighting for freedom. And it's basically paying for the Cuban mercenaries who are fighting, 55,000 strong. So, you know, it was a legitimate military target. Well, the CIA basically was tasked by Yalv Chevron, get rid of Savimbi. And next thing, the Russians managed to pinpoint through a satellite phone, And I believe only the Americans had the technological ability at that time to do it. And they came in and assassinated him. Which is probably, the official story is he was assassinated by Spetsnaz, Russian special forces. But I know people who think it was CIA operation. Whether it was partly CIA, partly Russian or all, the point still is they wanted him gone. He was definitely the go-to guy. Jonas Fimby is a good man, and he's a Christian, and his father was a great evangelist, and I never had anything but help from them, and I could preach anywhere, on anything, no limits. There was real religious freedom in UNITA-controlled freedom fighter areas in Angola. And I must say, it's things like that. When I was growing up, I didn't question the narrative. You know, you'd cheer the dam busters while they're drowning civilians in the Rhine Valley and think that that's a good thing. You'd watch films about the bombers going over and you'd somehow be rooting for the bombers and not be thinking about the poor civilians below getting incinerated. And yeah, I just swallowed all of the propaganda and just assumed it was right and that our guys were just on the side of the angels and we never did anything wrong and the other side was totally evil and they didn't even have a reason to fight. And traveling around Eastern Europe and doing Bible smuggling and ministering to Persecute Church, they gave me a whole different story. And that upset and forced me to do some research. But seeing what happened to Rhodesia, Mozambique, Angola, all that, South Africa, you have to revise all your views. And now that I know that the people running Hollywood and our news media and our textbooks are cocaine sniffing, pedophile, drug addicts, blasphemers who hate Christ, why should I trust anything they say? When you get to know what Spielberg is, and these low-life scum like Harvey Weinstein. The Hollywood elite are one big pack of drug addict pedophile rapists. and they all are blasphemous and they loathe Christ. And we've allowed generations of our people to be influenced in how we look at the world and how we look at the world wars in particular, which is basically it's become a new religion for the new secular humanist state. And to think that they've had us thinking, aren't we so lucky? We're the most blessed generation in history. And why? Because the greatest generation. And what did the greatest generation do? Well, they saved the Soviet Union and kept Stalin in power and frustrated Operation Barbarossa's attempt to liberate Russia and Ukraine. And we've grown to cheer when Christians are killed and incinerated and support commies and so on, right down to Mandela Day. and all these other things. And basically it's Stockholm Syndrome on a global scale. We love our chains, we praise our oppressors, and we shout down and hate our own people for standing up for something right. That's bizarre. And then every time they come out, we've got a scandal about, you know, this or that person. Funny how anyone who's anti-communist, somehow they manufacture some scandals just to order at the right time. Very convenient. So Sophie was his wife, Ferdinand's wife. She was like a left-handed marriage, wasn't she? That's correct. Now, the Emperor Franz Ferdinand, sorry, yeah, the Emperor Franz Joseph was very unhappy about this union. Because, in fact, I don't know how many of you have seen the film, The Illusionist, which is a fictionalized version of the real tragedy of the death of the only son of the Emperor of Austria. His son was Prince Karl. He apparently committed suicide, but maybe it was murder. I mean, it's very hard to tell. And his fiancée was killed at the same time, but maybe disappeared. It's one of the great mysteries. But this meant that now his nephew was the most likely, well, the next in line for the throne. Well, the son of the emperor died in his highly confusing, complex, maybe a suicide, maybe a murder, but it was really, really weird. So there's been quite a bit of fictional speculation on what actually happened. So now you've got Franz Ferdinand, his family, And he's been groomed to marry a royal, but he gets excited about this other woman who's actually, she is one of the ladies-in-waiting for, who's meant to be his fiancée. The emperor is very unhappy, so what he says is he'll accept him, but not any of his offspring, as heirs. So his children then, of this marriage, will not be able to be in the royal line. And so that was a bit frustrating. And so Sophie had been very much excluded from a lot of very public things. And so this visit on their wedding anniversary to Sarajevo was one of the first times she's been allowed to take an official royal role. She's not being tucked away somewhere else. She's actually in the public eye. But I mean, this is not a very important province. And at that point, it looked like she was coming out of the cold. And that's why the assassination of one of the most moderate influencers, a real moderate who wanted friendship with the Russians and even the Serbs, he had a pro-Slav policy that he gets assassinated. It's absolutely typical. It's like whenever the leftists are off to assassinations, they go for the moderates, because the moderates are the real threat. That's why in Rhodesia they were murdering the pacifist British, Elam Mishlies, who wouldn't even give information to the Rhodesian forces, who gave not just food but medicines to passing terrorists. They were unfortunately perceived as a bigger threat because Mugabe ordered them specifically to be killed. It was an order straight from him. Yeah, and in fact, we met some of the people who did the murders. They'd been converted and they were studying at the Salvation Army Bible College in Boulware. And confirmed to us, yes, it was straight from MacGarvey. You've got to take them out. It wasn't just that they passed by and didn't know who they were. They were targeted because they were pacifist Pentecostal missionaries who were actually helping the terrorists. They wouldn't say no to anyone. They were just, well, we're neutral. We're not getting involved. They didn't accept any guards on base. They didn't have fences. They didn't even have dogs there. And so they were the ones targeted. It's like, I don't know if you've noticed in the social media wars, this Andili who runs the Blackland First, he made a comment about all those whites who are liberal and supporting our cause. He says, they think it's gonna save them when the day comes. He says, my pango won't hesitate for a second. I mean, that's what he put in his own post. And there's how many of these bleeding-heart liberal whiteys with Stockholm Syndrome who think, you know, because we're supporting them, they're going to ignore us. But that's not the way a communist thinks. You were going to say? Who was next in line after Duke Ferdinand was assassinated? Or who would have been? I've got his name, it's Cole. He became, because within two years, by 1916, the Emperor Franz Josef was dead, and he was succeeded by Emperor Cole. This is the fourth, and he would have been another nephew. Oh yes, beautiful family, yes, and sadly he got abdicated, forced out in 1918 as well. Very tragic. And you've got to know, now people know, when it comes to assassinations, the communists don't just have one assassin. They've got several. So if one, redundancy is built in. That's why nobody believes this lone, what's this lone sniper for John F. Kennedy assassination, 1963, where there was this American who had been taken by the army he isn't signals and they taught him Russian the army taught him Russian and then he goes to Russia need to fix and he renounces American citizenship this is Lee Harvey Oswald the one who's blamed for it and then he comes back to America now if he's renounced American citizenship And he's gone over there, and he used to be in a highly secretive job. What happens when he comes back? Do they arrest him? No. He gets a job working for the defense industry, FBI, and they put him in the very town where John F. Kennedy's going to come past. And it's just unbelievable, the whole story. And then they get him within minutes after the assassination, and then he's assassinated himself, so he can't talk. This is what they call a patsy. It's just classic, classic, classic. There's a book out, Who Killed JFK? And it basically says LBJ, Lyndon Johnson, the successor's vice president, who had invited him to come to that very place at that time to help with the campaign for the Democratic Party. But the evidence is huge because what Kennedy was trying to stop is what Lyndon Johnson pushed ahead, everything.