Private statement by British admiralty official regarding the British responsibility in the "Lusitania" disaster, 1915.
The truth of the statement is being demonstrated with particular vividness in Washington currently. Unfortunately it's one of those catchy aphorisms that we think "sounds good" (like "taxation is theft") but then dissolve in the long-inculcated fiction that government, more accurately government officials and legislators, serve the people and uphold their interests and protect them from harm.
We need to remind ourselves every day of those words from the Winston Churchill admiralty of the First World War: "Government doesn't exist to protect the people. Government exists to protect the government."
Ironically, the German government made a greater attempt to prevent American and British civilians from meeting death on the luxury liner "Lusitania" than did the US and British governments. At the New York dock the British passenger ship's hold was clandestinely loaded with explosive armaments being smuggled unlawfully to England from supposedly "neutral" America. The passengers were unaware they would be sailing on a floating bomb; when the liner was later hit by a single torpedo in the war zone, there was a tremendous secondary explosion of the munitions which sank the ship in less than twenty minutes, with great loss of life.
Before the Lusitania sailed from New York the German government sent fifty anonymous telegrams addressed to prominent passengers, warning them not to sail on the liner. More importantly, the German government placed the following advertisement in the leading metropolitan newspapers next to Cunard Line ads.
'NOTICE !
'Travelers intending to embark on the Atlantic voyage are reminded that a state of war exists between Germany and her allies and Great Britain and her allies; that the zone of war includes the waters adjacent to the British Isles; that, in accordance with formal notice given by the Imperial German Government, vessels flying the flag of Great Britain or of any of her allies, are liable to destruction in those waters and that travelers sailing in the war zone on ships of Great Britain or her allies do so at their own risk.
'Imperial German Embassy,
'Washington, D. C., April 22, 1915.'
The German government had pre-paid for its ad to be placed in fifty US newspapers a number of days ahead of the liner's departure date. Of all the papers, only the Des Moines Register published the warning on the requested date. It is reported that the U.S. State Department frightened newspaper publishers by raising the possibility of libel suites if they published without prior clearance from State Department attorneys. The result was that despite the German early request, the advertisement was not published in New York until the morning before the Lusitania sailed.
"Government doesn't exist to protect the people. Government exists to protect the government."
