If, as the old adage has it, the first casualty of war is the truth, then it follows that the first battle of any war is won by lies.

Lies have always been used to sell war to a public that would otherwise be leery

about sending their sons off to fight and die on foreign soil. In times long

past this was easy enough to accomplish.

A proclamation by a king or queen was enough to set the machinery of war in motion.

But in the modern age of democracy and volunteer armies,

a pretense for war is required to rally the nation around the flag

and motivate the public to fight.

That is why every major conflict is now accompanied by its own particular bodyguard of lies.

From false flag attacks to dehumanization of the enemy,

here are all the examples you'll need to debunk a century of war lies.

This is the corporate report.

World War I.

1. In 1915, the RMS Lusitania, a British ocean liner en route from New York to Liverpool was sunk by a German U-boat 11 miles off the coast of Ireland.

The ship sinking, which resulted in the death of 128 of the 139 Americans aboard became a symbol of German evil and

helped psychologically prepare the U.S. public for their country's eventual entry into World War

1. But every facet of the story of the Lusitania, as it has been presented

to the public, was a deliberate lie or a lie by omission. The boat was not a purely civilian vessel carrying 3,813 40 pound unrefrigerated

containers of cheese and 696 containers of butter, as the official manifest held, but gun cotton, in keeping with the

shipment's stated destination, the Royal Navy's weapons testing establishment.

It was not sunk by the German torpedo boat, but by secondary explosions from the munitions the ship was illegally carrying.

It was not the victim of a cowardly German surprise attack.

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