Lenin’s Angel Investor and the German-Made Jihad: A Selection from Niall Ferguson’s The Square and the Tower (2019)
“All but one of the German plots to win the First World War by subterfuge failed. The ‘German–Hindu Plot’ to send arms to Indian nationalists was a flop . . . . The German consignment of 25,000 captured Russian rifles to Ireland could not make a revolution of the doomed Easter Rising. . . . Yet the one German plot that worked proved to be so successful that it very nearly revolutionized the whole world. This was the plot to send the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, then living in exile in Switzerland, back to Russia, in the wake of the February 1917 Revolution that overthrew Tsar Nicholas II. Having been alerted to the potential of Lenin’s doctrine of ‘revolutionary defeatism’ by two professional revolutionaries . . . the German government supplied Lenin not only with a railway ticket from Zurich to Petrograd—via Frankfurt, Berlin, Sassnitz and Stockholm—but also with lavish funds to subvert the new provisional government. . . . 50 million gold marks were channelled to Lenin and his associates . . . . Adjusting on the basis of unskilled wage inflation, that is equivalent to around $800 million today. . . . The Bolsheviks set to work, buying a centrally located new headquarters . . . a private printing press, and literally handing out banknotes to get people to join their demonstrations. To an extent that most accounts still underrate, the Bolshevik Revolution was a German-financed operation. . . .
Even before the military stalemate on the Western Front had become apparent, the German government had begun experimenting with what would prove to be the decisive, war-winning weapon. The idea was to destabilize the other side’s empires by unleashing an ideological ‘virus’. With help from their Ottoman allies, the Germans sought to spark a jihad throughout the British Empire, as well as the French. . . . William became fascinated by the idea that the Muslim subjects of the British Empire could be turned against it by a summons to jihad. Indeed, this was the Kaiser’s first thought on learning that Britain would not remain neutral in the war that was breaking out on the Continent. Incensed by the prospect of the ‘encirclement of Germany’, William scribbled down what amounted to the plot of Greenmantle. ‘Our consuls in Turkey and India, agents etc., must fire the whole Mohammedan world to fierce rebellion against this hated lying, conscienceless nation of shop-keepers; for if we are to be bled to death, England shall at least lose India.’ The idea was taken up in August by Helmuth von Moltke, the chief of the general staff, who issued a memorandum on the need to ‘awaken the fanaticism of Islam’ in the Muslim populations of the empires fighting on the other side. In October 1914, Oppenheim responded with a 136-page top-secret ‘Memorandum on the Revolutionizing of the Islamic Territories of Our Enemies’, in which he described Islam as ‘one of our most important weapons’.”—Niall Ferguson, The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook (2019)
