The greatest red pill I ever took was entirely accidental. I had to write a paper about British perceptions of the Egyptian slave trade in the 19th century. What I discovered in the course of my research made me question everything. 1/
And my research was exhaustive. I pored over hundreds of dispatches from the British Foreign Office, letters sent between French, English, and Ottoman officials, etc. I read through years of newspaper columns on microfiche. But the most indispensable resource was this book 2/
"The Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt" by Sir Wilfred Blunt. Therein Blunt, a sympathiser and eventually friend of Ahmed Urabi - Egypt's equivalent to Nelson Mandela - outlined how the British and French governments, and (not kidding) the house of Rothschilds 3/
In essence: the Rothschilds funded an otherwise insolvent Ottoman sultan to carry out the bidding of the French and British governments to prevent the nationalisation of the Suez Canal heralded by a newly-forming, democratic government led by Ahmad Urabi 4/
There was a coordinated effort to discredit Urabi in the British press. The Greek military was hired to carry out a 'false flag' attack in Egypt that was made to enrage the British populace who were led to believe there was an attack. Think Gulf of Tonkin. 5/
Eventually, all these efforts: manufacturing a foreign villain, creating anger and fear, and forming consensus that "those people must be stopped before they go any further," led to the British invasion of Egypt that lasted sixty years until Nasser finally arrived on the scene 6/
In his preface, Blunt wrote: It does not do to leave truth to its own power of prevailing over lies, and history is full of calumnies which have remained unrefuted, and of ingratitudes which nations have persisted in towards their worthiest sons. 7/
and "absolutely true of the present shameful position of England in Egypt..and our sin of that sad morning on the Nile which saw the first English gun open its thunder of aggression just forty years ago at Alexandria in the name of England's honour. " 8/
I know it's extremely unlikely anyone will follow this thread but for posterity's sake, this is Blunt's book: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/41373  and this is a paper I found recently that addresses the British press' role in the who debacle: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43663144?seq=1
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