Thank you to Inversionism.
The WWI Conspiracy, 2018, is an excellent documentary by James Corbett. Above is the documentary in its entirety, but James does break up the 2-hour & 20-minute documentary into 3 parts for easier viewing.
121:32. At the outbreak of war, they set up the War Propaganda Bureau at Wellington House. The bureau's initial purpose was to persuade America to enter the war, but that meant they'd soon expand it to shape and mold public opinion in favor of the war effort end of the government itself. On September 2nd, 1914, the head of the war propaganda Bureau invited 25 of Britain's most influential authors to a top-secret meeting. Among those present at the meeting were G. K. Chesterton, Ford Maddox Ford, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle, Arnold Bennett, and HG Wells. Not revealed until decades after the war ended, many of those present agreed to write propaganda material promoting the government's position on the war which the government would get commercial printing houses, including Oxford University Press to publish as seemingly independent works. Under this secret agreement, Arthur Conan Doyle wrote To Arms!, 1914. John Masefield wrote Gallipoli, 1916, and The Old Front Line, 1917. Mary Humphrey Ward wrote The War on All Fronts: England's Effort: Six Letters to an American Friend, 1916, and Towards the Goal, 1917. Rudyard Kipling wrote The New Army in Training, 1915. GK Chesterton wrote The Barbarism of Berlin, 1914. In total the bureau published over 1,160 pamphlets over the course of the
Hillaire Belloc later rationalized his work in service of the government,
It is sometimes necessary to lie damnably in the interests of the nation.
War correspondent William Beach Thomas was not so successful in the battle against his own conscience,
I was thoroughly and deeply ashamed of what I had written for the good reason that it was untrue . . . [T]he vulgarity of enormous headlines and the enormity of one's own name did not lessen the shame.
But the Bureau's efforts were not confined to the literary world. Film, visual art, recruitment posters; no medium for swaying the hearts and minds of the public was overlooked. By 1918, the government's efforts to shape perception of the war—now officially centralized under a "Minister of Information," Lord Beaverbrook—was the most finely tuned purveyor of propaganda the world had yet seen. Even foreign propaganda, like the infamous Uncle Sam that went beyond a recruitment poster to become a staple of American government iconography, was based on a British propaganda poster featuring Lord Kitchener.
Control of the economy. Control of populations. Control of territory. Control of information. World War One was a boon for all of those who wanted to consolidate control of the many in the hands of the few. This was the vision that united all those participants in the conspiracies that led to the war itself. Beyond Cecil Rhodes and his secret society, there was a broader vision of global control for the would-be rulers of society who were seeking what tyrants had lusted after since the dawn of civilization: control of the world.
World War One was merely the first salvo in this clique's attempt to create not a reordering of this society or that economy, but a New World Order.
