CashMcCall says:

China is winning. China Trade is 4 Trillion a year and up 15% a year. US Trade is falling. Trump Tariffs were levied against Supply chain goods. 95% of China trade to the US is supply chain. Companies like Cummins engine and Rustoleum import their own Chinese made products as components for their US production.

Trump tariffed phenols for example and hundreds of other chemicals. Some dumbass Trumptard claimed that the phenols should be made in Merica, they could not be made cheaper than the US companies that make them in China and ship them globally. Even with a tariff of 100% they would still be cheaper than making them in the USA.

So American paint and coating companies import the phenols for products mixed in the USA for domestic and export markets. Trump Tariffs on phenols only hurt US paint and coating companies. ALL BTW have requested exemptions from Trump Tariffs and are getting them. Thus the Trump Tariffs are a paper tiger fraud.

China is also moving to bypass the Trump Tariffs. They are shipping the US Chinese factory made phenols to the Asian Tigers such as Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam. The Asian tigers are then packaging and adding value and shipping to the USSA. There are no tariffs from phenols from the Asian Tigers. Trinh Thi Thu Trang is a leading paint coating producer and private labeler out of Vietnam.

But it gets worse for Merica. The Asian tigers and cubs are also setting up mixing lines for epoxy, and paint coating and shipping finished products to the USA cheaper than they can be made in Merica. Thus, just as happened with Smoot Hawley, international competition has taken away US foreign ready made markets. So this is why Trump’s Tariffs are nothing but a blowhard song in the wind. The Tariffs are just a Goldman scheme to buy cheap emerging market while selling off US Tech.

This is also why Trump Tariffs have not reported any accounting for how much Tariff tax has been collected. This is because it is all a Trump Fraud. Once the realization was noted that Chinese imports to the US were up 15% with Tariffs, the Trump Tariffs collections immediately became suspect.

Since then, the Asian Tiger imports to the US are up 20%. There is no DNA to trace the origin of the China and Asian Tiger chemicals. RPM International a leading US coating company has operations in China. They make Rust Oleum products BTW.

So you see, old dottard, low tech, no-brains Trump is just scamming the tards. With Tards all they can think of is their anti-Chinese racism and their stupid orange blowhard. Meanwhile, China has outflanked the Orange idiot, and is shipping [exporting] US ready made markets through Asian affiliates. Trump is just a fraud. He can’t stop any of this.

Trump admin projected $582 million tariffs from steel imports and $195 million from Aluminum WITH NO EXEMPTIONS! This is a bogus number. Even if you accepted this Trump bullshit, it doesn’t even come close to the $1.6 Trillion in damages to the US Farmer which are verifiable.

This is why you have not seen any decline in Chinese PMI, manufacturing and why Chinese exports are at record levels. Look no further than to John Deere to see how US Companies are doing. The Trump Tariff plan is leaking like a sieve. Trump’s a fraud.

China produces

90% of PCs
80% of Air Conditioners
80% of Energy Saving Light Bulbs
74% of Solar Cells
70% of Mobile Phones
63% of shoes
60% of cement
49% of pork
48% of coal
45% of shipbuilding

etc etc etc

The creation of digital content led to the re-establishment of claqueurs:

By 1830 the claque had become an institution. The manager of a theatre or opera house was able to send an order for any number of claqueurs. These were usually under a chef de claque (leader of applause), who judged where the efforts of the claqueurs were needed and to initiate the demonstration of approval. This could take several forms. There would be commissaires (“officers/commissioner”) who learned the piece by heart and called the attention of their neighbors to its good points between the acts. Rieurs (laughers) laughed loudly at the jokes. Pleureurs (criers), generally women, feigned tears, by holding their handkerchiefs to their eyes. Chatouilleurs (ticklers) kept the audience in a good humor, while bisseurs (encore-ers) simply clapped and cried “Bis! Bis!” to request encores.

Today anyone can create content and rent or buy virtual claqueurs in from of “likes” on Facebook or “followers” on Twitter to increase its distribution.

An alternative is to create artificial social media personas who then promote ones content. That is what the Internet Research Agency, the Russian “troll factory” from St. Petersburg, did. The fake personas it established on Facebookpromoted IRA created clickbait content like puppy picture pages that was then marketed to sell advertisements.

The profit orientated social media giants do not like such third party promotions. They prefer that people pay THEM to promote their content. Selling advertisements is Facebook’s business. Promotional accounts on its own platform are competition.

The anti-Russian mania in U.S. politics gives social media companies a welcome excuse to clamp down on promotional schemes for sites like Liberty Front Press by claiming that these are disinformation campaigns run by the U.S. enemy of the day.

Yesterday Facebook announced that it deleted a number of user accounts for “inauthentic behavior”:

We’ve removed 652 Pages, groups and accounts for coordinated inauthentic behavior that originated in Iran and targeted people across multiple internet services in the Middle East, Latin America, UK and US. FireEye, a cybersecurity firm, gave us a tip in July about “Liberty Front Press,” a network of Facebook Pages as well as accounts on other online services.
…
We are able to link this network to Iranian state media through publicly available website registration information, as well as the use of related IP addresses and Facebook Pages sharing the same admins. For example, one part of the network, “Quest 4 Truth,” claims to be an independent Iranian media organization, but is in fact linked to Press TV, an English-language news network affiliated with Iranian state media.

Cont. reading: Facebook Kills “Inauthentic” Foreign News Accounts – U.S. Propaganda Stays Alive

“America First” Versus China’s Strategy of the Four Continents
ALFRED MCCOY

As the second year of Donald Trump’s presidency and sixth of Xi Jinping’s draws to a close, the world seems to be witnessing one of those epochal clashes that can change the contours of global power. Just as conflicts between American President Woodrow Wilson and British Prime Minister Lloyd George produced a failed peace after World War I, competition between Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and American President Harry Truman sparked the Cold War, and the rivalry between Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and President John F. Kennedy brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, so the empowered presidents of the United States and China are now pursuing bold, intensely personal visions of new global orders that could potentially reshape the trajectory of the twenty-first century — or bring it all down.

The countries, like their leaders, are a study in contrasts. China is an ascending superpower, riding a wave of rapid economic expansion with a burgeoning industrial and technological infrastructure, a growing share of world trade, and surging self-confidence. The United States is a declining hegemon, with a crumbling infrastructure, a failing educational system, a shrinking slice of the global economy, and a deeply polarized, divided citizenry. After a lifetime as the ultimate political insider, Xi Jinping became China’s president in 2013, bringing with him a bold internationalist vision for the economic integration of Asia, Africa, and Europe through monumental investment in infrastructure that could ultimately expand and extend the current global economy. After a short political apprenticeship as a conspiracy advocate, Donald Trump took office in 2017 as an ardent America First nationalist determined to disrupt or even dismantle an American-built-and-dominated international order he disdained for supposedly constraining his country’s strength.

Although they started this century on generally amicable terms, China and the U.S. have, in recent years, moved toward military competition and open economic conflict. When China was admitted to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, Washington was confident that Beijing would play by the established rules and become a compliant member of an American-led international community. There was almost no awareness of what might happen when a fifth of humanity joined the world system as an economic equal for the first time in five centuries.

By the time Xi Jinping became China’s seventh president, a decade of rapid economic growth averaging 11% annually and currency reserves surging toward an unprecedented $4 trillion had created the economic potential for a rapid, radical shift in the global balance of power. After just a few months in office, Xi began tapping those vast reserves to launch a bold geopolitical gambit, a genuine challenge to U.S. dominion over Eurasia and the world beyond. Aglow in its status as the world’s sole superpower after “winning” the Cold War, Washington had difficulty at first even grasping such newly developing global realities and was slow to react.

China’s bid couldn’t have been more fortuitous in its timing. After nearly 70 years as the globe’s hegemon, Washington’s dominance over the world economy had begun to wither and its once-superior work force to lose its competitive edge. By 2016, in fact, the dislocations brought on by the economic globalization that had gone with American dominion sparked a revolt of the dispossessed in democracies worldwide and in the American heartland, bringing the self-proclaimed “populist” Donald Trump to power. Determined to check his country’s decline, he has adopted an aggressive and divisive foreign policy that has roiled long-established alliances in both Asia and Europe and is undoubtedly giving that decline new impetus.

Within months of Trump’s entry into the Oval Office, the world was already witnessing a sharp rivalry between Xi’s advocacy of a new form of global collaboration and Trump’s version of economic nationalism. In the process, humanity seems to be entering a rare historical moment when national leadership and global circumstances have coincided to create an opening for a major shift in the nature of the world order.

Trump’s Disruptive Foreign Policy

Despite their constant criticism of Donald Trump’s leadership, few among Washington’s corps of foreign policy experts have grasped his full impact on the historic foundations of American global power. The world order that Washington built after World War II rested upon what I’ve called a “delicate duality”: an American imperium of raw military and economic power married to a community of sovereign nations, equal under the rule of law and governed through international institutions such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization.

On the realpolitik side of that duality, Washington constructed a four-tier apparatus — military, diplomatic, economic, and clandestine — to advance a global dominion of unprecedented wealth and power. This apparatus rested on hundreds of military bases in Europe and Asia that made the U.S. the first power in history to dominate (if not control) the Eurasian continent.

Even after the Cold War ended, former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski warned that Washington would remain the world’s preeminent power only as long as it maintained its geopolitical dominion over Eurasia. In the decade before Trump’s election, there were, however, already signs that America’s hegemony was on a downward trajectory as its share of global economic power fell from 50% in 1950 to just 15% in 2017. Many financial forecasts now project that China will surpass the U.S. as the world’s number one economy by 2030, if not before.

In this era of decline, there has emerged from President Trump’s torrent of tweets and off-the-cuff remarks a surprisingly coherent and grim vision of America’s place in the present world order. Instead of reigning confidently over international organizations, multilateral alliances, and a globalized economy, Trump evidently sees America standing alone and beleaguered in an increasingly troubled world — exploited by self-aggrandizing allies, battered by unequal trade terms, threatened by tides of undocumented immigrants, and betrayed by self-serving elites too timid or compromised to defend the nation’s interests.

Instead of multilateral trade pacts like NAFTA, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), or even the WTO, Trump favors bilateral deals rewritten to the (supposed) advantage of the United States. In place of the usual democratic allies like Canada and Germany, he is trying to weave a web of personal ties to avowedly nationalist and autocratic leaders of a sort he clearly admires: Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orbán in Hungary, Narendra Modi in India, Adel Fatah el-Sisi in Egypt, and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.

Instead of old alliances like NATO, Trump favors loose coalitions of like-minded countries. As he sees it, a resurgent America will carry the world along, while crushing terrorists and dealing in uniquely personal ways with rogue states like Iran and North Korea.

His version of a foreign policy has found its fullest statement in his administration’s December 2017 National Security Strategy. As he took office, the nation, it claimed, faced “an extraordinarily dangerous world, filled with a wide range of threats.” But in less than a year of his leadership, it insisted, “We have renewed our friendships in the Middle East… to help drive out terrorists and extremists… America’s allies are now contributing more to our common defense, strengthening even our strongest alliances.” Humankind will benefit from the president’s “beautiful vision” that “puts America First” and promotes “a balance of power that favors the United States.” The whole world will, in short, be “lifted by America’s renewal.”

Despite such grandiose claims, each of President Trump’s overseas trips has been a mission of destruction in terms of American global power. Each, seemingly by design, disrupted and possibly damaged alliances that have been the foundation for Washington’s global power since the 1950s. During the president’s first foreign trip in May 2017, he promptly voiced withering complaints about the supposed refusal of Washington’s European allies to pay their “fair share” of NATO’s military costs, leaving the U.S. stuck with the bill and, in a fashion unknown to American presidents, refused even to endorse the alliance’s core principle of collective defense. It was a position so extreme in terms of the global politics of the previous half-century that he was later forced to formally back down. (By then, however, he had registered his contempt for those allies in an unforgettable fashion.)

During a second, no-less-divisive NATO visit in July, he charged that Germany was “a captive of Russia” and pressed the allies to immediately double their share of defense spending to a staggering 4% of gross domestic product (a level even Washington, with its monumental Pentagon budget, hasn’t reached) — a demand they all ignored. Just days later, he again questioned the very idea of a common defense, remarking that if “tiny” NATO ally Montenegro decided to “get aggressive,” then “congratulations, you’re in World War III.”

Moving on to England, he promptly kneecapped close ally Theresa May, telling a British tabloid that the prime minister had bungled her country’s Brexit withdrawal from the European Union and “killed off any chance of a vital U.S. trade deal.” He then went on to Helsinki for a summit with Vladimir Putin, where he visibly abased himself before NATO’s nominal nemesis, completely enough that there were even brief, angry protests from leaders of his own party.

During Trump’s major Asia tour in November 2017, he addressed the Asian-Pacific Economic Council (APEC) in Vietnam, offering an extended “tirade” against multilateral trade agreements, particularly the WTO. To counter intolerable “trade abuses,” such as “product dumping, subsidized goods, currency manipulation, and predatory industrial policies,” he swore that he would always “put America first” and not let it “be taken advantage of anymore.” Having denounced a litany of trade violations that he termed nothing less than “economic aggression” against America, he invited everyone there to share his “Indo-Pacific dream” of the world as a “beautiful constellation” of “strong, sovereign, and independent nations,” each working like the United States to build “wealth and freedom.”

Responding to such a display of narrow economic nationalism from the globe’s leading power, Xi Jinping had a perfect opportunity to play the world statesman and he took it, calling upon APEC to support an economic order that is “more open, inclusive, and balanced.” He spoke of China’s future economic plans as an historic bid for “interconnected development to achieve common prosperity… on the Asian, European, and African continents.”

As China has lifted 60 million of its own people out of poverty in just a few years and was committed to its complete eradication by 2020, so he urged a more equitable world order “to bring the benefits of development to countries across the globe.” For its part, China, he assured his listeners, was ready to make “$2 trillion of outbound investment” — much of it for the development of Eurasia and Africa (in ways, of course, that would link that vast region more closely to China). In other words, he sounded like a twenty-first century Chinese version of a twentieth-century American president, while Donald Trump acted more like Argentina’s former presidente Juan Perón, minus the medals. As if to put another nail in the coffin of American global dominion, the remaining 11 Trans-Pacific trade pact partners, led by Japan and Canada, announced major progress in finalizing that agreement — without the United States.

In addition to undermining NATO, America’s Pacific alliances, long its historic fulcrum for the defense of North America and the dominance of Asia, are eroding, too. Even after 10 personal meetings and frequent phone calls between Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Donald Trump during his first 18 months in office, the president’s America First trade policy has placed a “major strain” on Washington’s most crucial alliance in the region. First, he ignored Abe’s pleas and cancelled the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade pact and then, as if his message hadn’t been strong enough, he promptly imposed heavy tariffs on Japanese steel imports. Similarly, he’s denounced the Canadian prime minister as “dishonest” and mimicked Indian Prime Minister Modi’s accent, even as he made chummy with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and then claimed, inaccurately, that his country was “no longer a nuclear threat.”

It all adds up to a formula for further decline at a faster pace.

Beijing’s Grand Strategy

While Washington’s influence in Asia recedes, Beijing’s grows ever stronger. As China’s currency reserves climbed rapidly from $200 billion in 2001 to a peak of $4 trillion in 2014, President Xi launched a new initiative of historic import. In September 2013, speaking in Kazakhstan, the heart of Asia’s ancient Silk Road caravan route, he proclaimed a “one belt, one road initiative” aimed at economically integrating the enormous Eurasian land mass around Beijing’s leadership. Through “unimpeded trade” and infrastructure investment, he suggested, it would be possible to connect “the Pacific and the Baltic Sea” in a proposed “economic belt along the Silk Road,” a region “inhabited by close to 3 billion people.” It could become, he predicted, “the biggest market in the world with unparalleled potential.”

Within a year, Beijing had established a Chinese-dominated Asian Infrastructure and Investment Bank with 56 member nations and an impressive $100 billion in capital, while launching its own $40 billion Silk Road Fund for private equity projects. When China convened what it called a “belt and road summit” of 28 world leaders in Beijing in May 2017, Xi could, with good reason, hail his initiative as the “project of the century.”

Although the U.S. media has often described the individual projects involved in his “one belt, one road” project as wasteful, sybaritic, exploitative, or even neo-colonial, its sheer scale and scope merits closer consideration. Beijing is expected to put a mind-boggling $1.3 trillion into the initiative by 2027, the largest investment in human history, more than 10 times the famed American Marshall Plan, the only comparable program, which spent a more modest $110 billion (when adjusted for inflation) to rebuild a ravaged Europe after World War II.

Beijing’s low-cost infrastructure loans for 70 countries from the Baltic to the Pacific are already funding construction of the Mediterranean’s busiest port at Piraeus, Greece, a major nuclear power plant in England, a $6 billion railroad through rugged Laos, and a $46 billion transport corridor across Pakistan. If successful, such infrastructure investments could help knit two dynamic continents, Europe and Asia — home to a full 70% percent of the world’s population and its resources — into a unified market without peer on the planet.

Underlying this flurry of flying dirt and flowing concrete, the Chinese leadership seems to have a design for transcending the vast distances that have historically separated Asia from Europe. As a start, Beijing is building a comprehensive network of trans-continental gas and oil pipelines to import fuels from Siberia and Central Asia for its own population centers. When the system is complete, there will be an integrated inland energy grid (including Russia’s extensive network of pipelines) that will extend 6,000 miles across Eurasia, from the North Atlantic to the South China Sea. Next, Beijing is working to link Europe’s extensive rail network with its own expanded high-speed rail system via transcontinental lines through Central Asia, supplemented by spur lines running due south to Singapore and southwest through Pakistan.

Finally, to facilitate sea transport around the sprawling continent’s southern rim, China has already bought into or is in the process of building more than 30 major port facilities, stretching from the Straits of Malacca across the Indian Ocean, around Africa, and along Europe’s extended coastline. In January, to take advantage of Arctic waters opened by global warming, Beijing began planning for a “Polar Silk Road,” a scheme that fits well with ambitious Russian and Scandinavian projects to establish a shorter shipping route around the continent’s northern coast to Europe.

Though Eurasia is its prime focus, China is also pursuing economic expansion in Africa and Latin America to create what might be dubbed the strategy of the four continents. To tie Africa into its projected Eurasian network, Beijing already had doubled its annual trade there by 2015 to $222 billion, three times that of the United States, thanks to a massive infusion of capital expected to reach a trillion dollars by 2025. Much of it is financing the sort of commodities extraction that has already made the continent China’s second largest source of crude oil. Similarly, Beijing has investedheavily in Latin America, acquiring, for instance, control over 90% of Ecuador’s oil reserves. As a result, its commerce with that continent doubled in a decade, reaching $244 billion in 2017, topping U.S. trade with what once was known as its own “backyard.”

A Conflict with Consequences

This contest between Xi’s globalism and Trump’s nationalism has not been safely confined to an innocuous marketplace of ideas. Over the past four years, the two powers have engaged in an escalating military rivalry and a cutthroat commercial competition. Apart from a shadowy struggle for dominance in space and cyberspace, there has also been a visible, potentially volatile naval arms race to control the sea lanes surrounding Asia, specifically in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea. In a 2015 white paper, Beijing stated that “it is necessary for China to develop a modern maritime military force structure commensurate with its national security.” Backed by lethal land-based missiles, jet fighters, and a global satellite system, China has built just such a modernized fleet of 320 ships, including nuclear submarines and its first aircraft carriers.

Within two years, U.S. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson reportedthat China’s “growing and modernized fleet” was “shrinking” the traditional American advantage in the Pacific, and warned that “we must shake off any vestiges of comfort or complacency.” Under Trump’s latest $700-billion-plus defense budget, Washington has responded to this challenge with a crash program to build 46 new ships, which will raise its total to 326 by 2023. As China builds new naval bases bristling with armaments in the Arabian and South China seas, the U.S. Navy has begun conducting assertive “freedom-of-navigation” patrols near many of those same installations, heightening the potential for conflict.

It is in the commercial realm of trade and tariffs, however, where competition has segued into overt conflict. Acting on his belief that “trade wars are good and easy to win,” President Trump slapped heavy tariffs, targeted above all at China, on steel imports in March and, just a few weeks later, punished that country’s intellectual property theft by promising tariffs on $50 billion of Chinese imports. When those tariffs finally hit in July, China immediately retaliated against what it called “typical trade bullying” with similar tariffs on U.S. goods. The Financial Times warned that this “tit-for-tat” can escalate into a “full bore trade war… that will be very bad for the global economy.” As Trump threatened to tax $500 billion more in Chinese imports and issued confusing, even contradictory demands that made it unlikely Beijing could ever comply, observers became concerned that a long-lasting trade war could destabilize what the New York Times called the “mountain of debt” that sustains much of China’s economy. In Washington, the usually taciturn Federal Reserve chairman issued an uncommon warning that “trade tensions… could pose serious risks to the U.S. and global economy.”

China as Global Hegemon?

Although a withering of Washington’s global reach, abetted and possibly accelerated by the Trump presidency, is already underway, the shape of any future world order is still anything but clear. At present, China is the sole state with the obvious requisites for becoming the planet’s new hegemon. Its phenomenal economic rise, coupled with its expanding military and growing technological prowess, provide that country with the obvious fundamentals for superpower status.

Yet neither China nor any other state seems to have the full imperial complement of attributes to replace the United States as the dominant world leader. Apart from its rising economic and military clout, China, like its sometime ally Russia, has a self-referential culture, non-democratic political structures, and a developing legal system that could deny it some of the key instruments for global leadership.

In addition to the fundamentals of military and economic power, “every successful empire,” observes Cambridge University historian Joya Chatterji, “had to elaborate a universalist and inclusive discourse” to win support from the world’s subordinate states and their leaders. Successful imperial transitions driven by the hard power of guns and money also require the soft-power salve of cultural suasion for sustained and successful global dominion. Spain espoused Catholicism and Hispanism, the Ottomans Islam, the Soviets communism, France a cultural francophonie, and Britain an Anglophone culture. Indeed, during its century of global dominion from 1850 to 1940, Britain was the exemplar par excellence of such soft power, evincing an enticing cultural ethos of fair play and free markets that it propagated through the Anglican church, the English language and its literature, and the virtual invention of modern athletics (cricket, soccer, tennis, rugby, and rowing). Similarly, at the dawn of its global dominion, the United States courted allies worldwide through soft-power programs promoting democracy and development. These were made all the more palatable by the appeal of such things as Hollywood films, civic organizations like Rotary International, and popular sports like basketball and baseball.

China has nothing comparable. Its writing system has some 7,000 characters, not 26 letters. Its communist ideology and popular culture are remarkably, even avowedly, particularistic. And you don’t have to look far for another Asian power that attempted Pacific dominion without the salve of soft power. During Japan’s occupation of Southeast Asia in World War II, its troops went from being hailed as liberators to facing open revolt across the region after they failed to propagate their similarly particularistic culture.

As command-economy states for much of the past century, neither China nor Russia developed an independent judiciary or the autonomous rules-based order that undergirds the modern international system. From the foundation of the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague in 1899 through the formation of the International Court of Justice under the U.N.’s 1945 charter, the world’s nations have aspired to the resolution of conflicts via arbitration or litigation rather than armed conflict. More broadly, the modern globalized economy is held together by a web of conventions, treaties, patents, and contracts grounded in law.

From its founding in 1949, the People’s Republic of China gave primacy to the party and state, slowing the growth of an autonomous legal system and the rule of law. A test of its attitude toward this system of global governance came in 2016 when the Permanent Court of Arbitration at The Hague ruled unanimously that China’s claims to sovereignty in the South China Sea “are contrary to the Convention [on the Law of the Sea] and without lawful effect.” Beijing’s Foreign Ministry simply dismissed the adverse decision as “invalid” and without “binding force.” President Xi insistedChina’s “territorial sovereignty and maritime rights” were unchanged, while the state Xinhua news agency called the ruling “naturally null and void.” Although China might be well placed to supplant Washington’s economic and military power, its capacity to assume leadership via that other aspect of the delicate duality of global power, a network of international organizations grounded in the rule of law, is still open to question.

If Donald Trump’s vision of world disorder is a sign of the American future and if Beijing’s projected $2 trillion in infrastructure investments, history’s largest by far, succeed in unifying the commerce and transport of Asia, Africa, and Europe, then perhaps the currents of financial power and global leadership will indeed transcend all barriers and flow inexorably toward Beijing, as if by natural law. But if that bold initiative ultimately fails, then for the first time in five centuries the world may face an imperial transition without a clear successor as global hegemon. Moreover, it will do so on a planet where the “new normal” of climate change — the heating of the atmosphere and the oceans, the intensification of flood, drought, and fire, the rising seas that will devastate coastal cities, and the cascading damage to a densely populated world — could mean that the very idea of a global hegemon is fast becoming a thing of the past.

Alfred W. McCoy, a TomDispatch regular, is the Harrington professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade , the now-classic book which probed the conjuncture of illicit narcotics and covert operations over 50 years, and the recently published In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power (Dispatch Books).

Authored by James George Jatras via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Since 1991 and the formal end of the first Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the world has experienced an American “unipolar moment” as the bipartisan US policy establishment sought to consolidate and perpetuate its hegemonic control over the entire plant. Doomed to fail even before it received its fullest articulation in 1996 by neoconservative ideologists William Kristol and Robert Kagan (misleadingly billed as “Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy”), that misbegotten moment thankfully is coming to an end.

The main question today is whether the grinding to a halt of a quest so foolish and destructive can peacefully devolve into a tripolar entente among the US, Russia, and China – or whether the entrenched Washington establishment will, Sampson-like, crash everything down in a desperate but futile attempt to hang on to its power and privileges. We appear to be approaching the cusp at which that question will be resolved one way or the other. What the Trump Administration does next with respect to Iran will be a key, perhaps decisive, indicator.

However, of late there has emerged an alternative concept that may be seen as a middle way between America’s stubbornly hanging onto our diminishing hegemony versus working out a new Concert of Powers with the two countries the Trump Administration has dubbed rivals in a new “great power competition.” This concept suggests that the United States should play odd-man-out, teaming up with one of the other two powers against the third. Such a triangulation conceivably could perpetuate and enhance America’s global dominance (it is assumed the other nation would be the junior partner) while limiting the influence of the designated adversary.

Strangely, given the unhinged levels of Russia-hatred that define the American political class, no one seems to have proposed trying to flip Beijing away from its quasi-alliance with Moscow in a repeat of President Nixon’s “playing the China card” against the USSR in the early 1970s. Rather, the hot talk is all the other way ‘round, that the US should woo Russia as an ally against China. As presented by Harry J. Kazianis of the Center for the National Interest (“The Coming American-Russian Alliance Against China”):

‘[T]here is a very real possibility that Washington and Moscow will collude for a very big reason—and soon.

‘Both nations have a reason to fear a coming change in the international order that will impact them both. And as history shows us time and again, a rising power that seeks to overturn the international system can make the most dedicated enemies join forces—and fast.

‘I can only be talking about one thing: a growing and more powerful China. [ … ]

‘While it might not happen right away, and an armed clash over, say, Ukraine or Syria could delay or even destroy any chance of a geopolitical realignment, there is the very real possibility that the stars could align for Russia and America to take on China in the future. Stranger parings have occurred in the past. While we might rightly see Moscow as a rogue nation today, tomorrow it could be a partner in containing a common foe. History and circumstance still stand for no one.’

Playing the Russia card against China is even presented by former Indian diplomat M. K. Bhadrakumar as part of a long term strategy (“Trump Has a Grand Strategy, He Wants to Do a ‘Reverse Nixon’ — Partner Russia for an Alliance vs China”) foreseen by the architect of Nixon’s long-ago outreach to communist China, Henry Kissinger (who reportedly is advising Trump to this end):

‘As far back as 1972 in a discussion with Richard Nixon on his upcoming trip to China, signifying the historic opening to Beijing, Kissinger could visualize such a rebalancing becoming necessary in future. He expressed the view that compared with the Soviets (Russians), the Chinese were “just as dangerous. In fact, they’re more dangerous over a historical period.” Kissinger added, “in 20 years your (Nixon’s) successor, if he’s as wise as you, will wind up leaning towards the Russians against the Chinese.”

‘Kissinger argued that the United States, which sought to profit from the enmity between Moscow and Beijing in the Cold War era, would therefore need “to play this balance-of-power game totally unemotionally. Right now, we need the Chinese to correct the Russians and to discipline the Russians.” But in the future, it would be the other way around.’

The possibility that Trump or some people in his Administration may be seriously considering the idea can’t be dismissed. It should be noted that among the few sane voices about Russia in US public life, such as Fox News’ , it is axiomatic that “China is the real threat, not Russia.”

However, whether or not the US is open to teaming up with Russia against China doesn’t address the question of whether such a ploy would be objectively viable. There are three strong reasons to suppose it wouldn’t be:

US hostility toward Russia is unalterable for the foreseeable future. In a rational policymaking context, it should be obvious that there is no inherent reason for US-Russia animosity. The basic interests of the two states do not conflict and there is much, other than China, that should be a basis for cooperation, such as the common threat of Islamic terrorism (as opposed to the decades-long US penchant of employing jihadists against Russia and other countries, like Serbia, Libya, and Syria).

Unfortunately, there is little rationality about Russia in Washington. Diehard, uncompromising detestation of Russia, which decent people are not suppose to see as anything but an enemy, is inseparable from the transatlantic conspiracy to eject Trump from office. Indeed, Trump’s pledge to improve relations with Moscow is among the top reasons Trump is being targeted for removal.

Hostility to Russia (and to any Trumpian hopes of détente) unites virtually all the Democrats, almost all prominent Republicans, the entire legacy media (of course), almost every prestigious think tank, and seemingly every high-level official on Trump’s own team. In the wake of his Helsinki summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump’s innocuous skepticism on supposed election “meddling,” the hysteria of this phalanx of hate has reached new heights of derangement. Senators promise a new “sanctions bill from hell” even as Trump insists existing sanctions are here to stay, presumably forever. The new Senate measure even includes a preposterous requirement that the Secretary of State “submit a determination of whether the Russian Federation meets the criteria for designation as a state sponsor of terrorism” – evidently ignoring the fact that for over seven years the US has armed and funded bona fide al-Qaeda-linked terrorists in Syria while Russia has been killing them.

Trump’s own top officials openly press him not only on bogus 2016 meddling but already accusing Moscow of interfering in advance in the 2018 Congressional vote with the intent, without any sense of irony, to “undermine our democracy.” Social media like Facebook are on a search-and-destroy mission against anything even suspected of being “Russian-linked,” whatever that means. A young Russian student advocating gun rights and networking in Washington is treated as a conflation of Anna Chapman and Natasha Fatale while being smeared and slut-shamed across the major media(and her lawyer is threatened with a gag order). Stepped-up military aid is being provided to Kiev. The NATO Pac-Man is set to gobble up next (the Former Yugoslav Republic of) Macedonia, while in the process alienating Russia from longtime Orthodox Christian friend Greece.

No wonder Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov can only look on with sardonic laughter.

In short, anything and everything Russian is toxic and becoming more so. Even if Trump really wanted to change this state of affairs – sure proof the evil Russians must “have something on him,” according to former CIA Director Leon Panetta – he couldn’t do it. Not only his opposition but his own team will see to that. US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley says Russia “is never going to be our friend.” The Russians have every reason to take her at her word.

This makes any notion of enlisting Russia as an ally against China impractical, to say the least. To even contemplate it the US would have to be able to extend some sort of olive branch to Russia, but that can’t happen anytime soon, if ever. You can’t build a partnership on the basis of unremitting antagonism.

Russia is once burned, twice shy. Even in the event, currently inconceivable, that the US did offer to bury the hatchet with Russia, the Russians would have to be fools to accept.

They are not fools.

Apart from the most minimal, easily verified circumstances, why would anyone in Moscow believe any assurance from anyone in Washington? Did the US honor our commitment to Boris Yeltsin not to move NATO “one inch” further east following Germany reunification? Did the US respect the United Nations Charter, the Helsinki Final Act, and UN Security Council Resolution 1244 during the Bill Clinton Administration’s 1999 military aggression against Serbia over Kosovo or the George W. Bush Administration’s spearheading of Kosovo’s purported secession in 2008? Does the US show good faith in baseless accusations of Russian guilt in false flag chemical attacks in Syria and the United Kingdom?

While Russian officials by nature remain open to “businesslike” and professional discussion with those they still insist on referring to as “partners,” they also know blind ideological and zoological hatred when they see it.

Even if tomorrow the US would offer the Russians the sun, the moon, and the stars in exchange for cooperation against China, they wouldn’t bite. Nor should they.

Russia has more objective incentives to get along with China than with the US. The main thing Russia needs from the US is basically – well, nothing. That is to say, there is very little of a practical, especially economic, nature Russia needs in a positive sense from the US, and vice versa. What Russia mainly wants from the US is negative: to stop regarding Russia as an enemy and get out of Moscow’s face in regions vitally important to Russia but of little or no value to the US.

Without taking the analogy to George Orwell’s 1984 too far (with America as the primary component of Oceania, Russia of Eurasia, and China of Eastasia), geographically America and Russia not only have no reason for conflict, they have little natural need for interdependence. Russia is the closest approximation of the “Heartland” of Halford Mackinder’s “World Island. The United States is the principal in Mackinder’s “Outlying Islands” (Western Hemisphere and Australia) and “Offshore Islands” (British Isles and the Pacific “First Island Chain”). But, contra the fantasies of some half-baked graduates of an elementary geopolitical “Mackindergarten,” this configuration need not give rise to a predetermined and inevitable conflict but points as easily to the self-sufficiency of each dominant power within its own exclusive sphere.

With a common boarder of over 2,500 miles, Russia and China are locked into a relationship by the simple fact of geography in a way neither is with the United States, which inherently is in the most secure position of the three. The Russo-Chinese relationship can be hostile (as it notably was in the late 1960s, when the two then-communist giants fought a short border war that threatened to escalate into a nuclear conflict and set the stage for Nixon’s China initiative) or it can be cooperative. Fueled in part by an entrenched American animus against Russia and a growing one towards China, Moscow and Beijing have chosen full-spectrum partnership via the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), the New (formerly BRICS) Development Bank (NDB), and other initiatives. Finally, Russia and China are working in concert to de-dollarize their financial systems in favor of local currency and of gold, which both countries have been buying in massive amounts.

Such ties between Russia and China are as natural, complimentary, and obvious as are America’s with Canada and Mexico. It’s hard to picture Moscow (or Beijing) abandoning them because someone in Washington flashes a come-hither look.

* * *

If Trump survives the efforts to remove him (either politically or physically) – a tall order, given the forces arrayed against him – and doesn’t plunge the US and the Middle East into an Iran misadventure that would destroy his presidency, it is still an open question whether he can deliver on an America First policy. Along with getting control of our borders and restoring America’s industrial base eroded by bad trade policies, that must mean completing his demolition of the failed neoliberal order of which the US has been the guarantor and enforcer.

In its place the only stable and mutually advantageous arrangement for America is a Big Three accord with both Russia and China. The notion of turning one against the other should be dismissed as the distraction it is.

BEIRUT, LEBANON (6:20 P.M.) – Russian President Vladimir Putin went “off-script” while addressing a meeting of ambassadors and permanent representatives of the Russian Federation at the Ministry of Foreign affairs in Moscow on Thursday, severely criticising “forces” in the United States seeking to undermine Russian-American relations at their own expense.

“Going off script and speaking personally, I’d like to say a few words,” the Russian president said.

“We see that there are forces in the US which are prepared at the drop of a hat to sacrifice Russian-American relations for the sake of their internal political ambitions in America,” he said.

“They are prepared to sacrifice the interests of their own businesses” and “the interests of their allies in Europe and the Middle East,” as well as “their own national security,” Putin said.

“These people are neither despicable or pathetic,” he said referring to famous Russian satirists. “The opposite, they are quite powerful and strong if they can peddle, sorry for my expression, various hard to swallow stories to millions of people,” he concluded.

During his speech, Putin also stressed the need to “develop relations with the European Union” despite current political tensions. He also said that any country looking to try and include Ukraine or Georgia in the NATO sphere of influence “should think of the possible consequences of this irresponsible policy” because Russia would “respond in kind to any aggressive steps that directly threaten Russia.”

The speech comes days after Putin and US President Donald Trump held bilateral talks in Helsinki. Trump has faced harsh criticism back home after appearing to side with Russia instead of the FBI over Russia’s alleged interference in the 2016 presidential elections.

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

Beginning his joint press conference with Vladimir Putin, President Trump declared that U.S. relations with Russia have “never been worse.”

He then added pointedly, that just changed “about four hours ago.”

It certainly did. With his remarks in Helsinki and at the NATO summit in Brussels, Trump has signaled a historic shift in U.S. foreign policy that may determine the future of this nation and the fate of his presidency.

He has rejected the fundamental premises of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War and blamed our wretched relations with Russia, not on Vladimir Putin, but squarely on the U.S. establishment.

In a tweet prior to the meeting, Trump indicted the elites of both parties: “Our relationship with Russia has NEVER been worse thanks to many years of U.S. foolishness and stupidity and now, the Rigged Witch Hunt!”

Trump thereby repudiated the records and agendas of the neocons and their liberal interventionist allies, as well as the archipelago of War Party think tanks beavering away inside the Beltway.

Looking back over the week, from Brussels to Britain to Helsinki, Trump’s message has been clear, consistent and startling.

NATO is obsolete. European allies have freeloaded off U.S. defense while rolling up huge trade surpluses at our expense. Those days are over. Europeans are going to stop stealing our markets and start paying for their own defense.

And there will be no Cold War II.

We are not going to let Putin’s annexation of Crimea or aid to pro-Russian rebels in Ukraine prevent us from working on a rapprochement and a partnership with him, Trump is saying. We are going to negotiate arms treaties and talk out our differences as Ronald Reagan did with Mikhail Gorbachev.

Helsinki showed that Trump meant what he said when he declared repeatedly, “Peace with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing.”

On Syria, Trump indicated that he and Putin are working with Bibi Netanyahu, who wants all Iranian forces and Iran-backed militias kept far from the Golan Heights. As for U.S. troops in Syria, says Trump, they will be coming out after ISIS is crushed, and we are 98 percent there.

That is another underlying message here: America is coming home from foreign wars and will be shedding foreign commitments.

Both before and after the Trump-Putin meeting, the cable news coverage was as hostile and hateful toward the president as any this writer has ever seen. The media may not be the “enemy of the people” Trump says they are, but many are implacable enemies of this president.

Some wanted Trump to emulate Nikita Khrushchev, who blew up the Paris summit in May 1960 over a failed U.S. intelligence operation — the U-2 spy plane shot down over the Urals just weeks earlier.

Khrushchev had demanded that Ike apologize. Ike refused, and Khrushchev exploded. Some media seemed to be hoping for just such a confrontation.

When Trump spoke of the “foolishness and stupidity” of the U.S. foreign policy establishment that contributed to this era of animosity in U.S.-Russia relations, what might he have had in mind?

Was it the U.S. provocatively moving NATO into Russia’s front yard after the collapse of the USSR?

Was it the U.S. invasion of Iraq to strip Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction he did not have that plunged us into endless wars of the Middle East?

Was it U.S. support of Syrian rebels determined to oust Bashar Assad, leading to ISIS intervention and a seven-year civil war with half a million dead, a war which Putin eventually entered to save his Syrian ally?

Was it George W. Bush’s abrogation of Richard Nixon’s ABM treaty and drive for a missile defense that caused Putin to break out of the Reagan INF treaty and start deploying cruise missiles to counter it?

Was it U.S. complicity in the Kiev coup that ousted the elected pro-Russian regime that caused Putin to seize Crimea to hold onto Russia’s Black Sea naval base at Sevastopol?

Many Putin actions we condemn were reactions to what we did.

Russia annexed Crimea bloodlessly. But did not the U.S. bomb Serbia for 78 days to force Belgrade to surrender her cradle province of Kosovo?

How was that more moral than what Putin did in Crimea?

If Russian military intelligence hacked into the emails of the DNC, exposing how they stuck it to Bernie Sanders, Trump says he did not collude in it. Is there, after two years, any proof that he did?

Trump insists Russian meddling had no effect on the outcome in 2016 and he is not going to allow media obsession with Russiagate to interfere with establishing better relations.

Former CIA Director John Brennan rages that, “Donald Trump’s press conference performance in Helsinki … was … treasonous. … He is wholly in the pocket of Putin. Republican Patriots: Where are you???”

Well, as Patrick Henry said long ago, “If this be treason, make the most of it!”

In Berlin, in January 2015, a march for tolerance united political and Muslim leaders in reaction to the attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris. Madame Merkel marched arm in arm with Aiman Mazyek, general secretary of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany. Although he pretends to have broken with the Muslim Brotherhood, and maintains an open dialogue, Mr. Mazyek offers protection within his organisation to the Milli Gorus (the supremacist organisation of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan) and the Muslim Brotherhood (the matrix of jihadist organisations, under the international presidency of Mahmoud Ezzat, ex-right hand of Sayyid Qutb).by Thierry Meyssan

Relations between Germany and Syria, which used to be excellent under Emperor Wilhelm II, are today abysmal. This is because since the Cold War, Berlin has become the ground-base for the Muslim Brotherhood where they organized their attempt to overthrow the Syrian Arab Republic. Since 2012, the Minister for Foreign Affairs and the federal think-tank SWP have been working directly on behalf of the US deep state for the destruction of the country.

Historically, beginning of the 20th century, Germany maintained excellent relations with the Ottoman Empire. Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was fascinated by Islam, pursued archeological excavations, notably in Baalbeck, and participated in the construction of the first railways, including the Damascus-Medina line. The Reich and the Sublime Porte stood together against the British when they organized the “Great Arab Revolt” of 1915. Then they lost the First World War, and as a result, were excluded from the region (Sykes-Picot-Sazovov agreements).

In 1953, President Eisenhower received a delegation of the Muslim Brotherhood led by Saïd Ramadan. From then on, the United States supported political Islam overseas.

During the Cold War, the CIA recuperated some of the best Nazi officers in order to continue its struggle against the USSR. Among them were Gerhard von Mende, who had recruited Soviet Muslims against Moscow [1]. In 1953, this senior civil servant installed the chief of the Muslim Brotherhood outside of Egypt, Saïd Ramadan, in Munich [2].

Alois Brunner, considered to be responsible for the deportation of 130,000 Jews, was installed by the CIA in Damascus in 1954, in order to prevent the régime of President Choukri al-Kouatli from concluding an alliance with the Soviets.

In the same period, the CIA secretly sent Nazi officers all over the world to fight the pro-Soviets. For example, Otto Skorzeny went to Egypt, Fazlollah Zahedi went to Iran, and Alois Brunner [3] to Syria. They all organised the local secret services on the model of the Gestapo. Brunner was only to be ousted much later, in 2000, by President Bachar el-Assad.

In the period between the Khomeinist revolution of 1979 and the attacks of 9/11, West Germany remained prudent in their dealings with the Muslim Brotherhood. However, at the demand of the CIA, and while Syria recognised East Germany, it accepted to offer political asylum to the putschists who attempted the coup d’etat of 1982 against President Hafez el-Assad, including the ex-Supreme Guide Issam al-Attar (brother of Syrian Vice-President Najah el-Attar). In the 1990’s, the Brotherhood reorganised itself in Germany with the assistance of two businessmen, the Syrian Ali Ghaleb Himmat and the Egyptian Youssef Nada, who was later to be accused by Washington of financing Osama Bin Laden.

For many years, German academic Volker Perthes participated alongside the CIA in the preparation of the war against Syria. He directed the most powerful European think-tank, the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik (SWP), and took part, in the name of the UNO, in the Geneva negotiations .

When the United States began the “never-ending war” in the “Greater Middle East”, the CIA encouraged reunified Germany to launch a “Dialogue with the Muslim world”. In Berlin, the Minister for Foreign Affairs based his work for that purpose mostly on the new local chief of the Brotherhood, Ibrahim el-Zayat, and on an expert, Volker Perthes, who would become the director of the main federal think-tank, the Foundation for Science and Politics (SWP).

In the name of the UNO, Detlev Mehlis accused the Lebanese and Syrian Presidents, Emile Lahoud and Bachar el-Assad, of having assassinated Rafic Hariri. His work was based on false witness reports which, when revealed, forced him to resign.

In 2005, Germany participated in the assassination of Rafic Hariri by supplying the weapon which was used to kill him – (it was obviously not a classic explosive, contrary to the propaganda of the special “Tribunal”) [4]. Thereafter, Germany supplied the head of the UN inquiry, the ex-prosecutor Detlev Mehlis [5], and his assistant, the ex-police commissioner Gerhard Lehmann, who was implicated in the affair of secret CIA prisons.

In 2008, while the CIA was preparing the Syrian “civil war”, Volker Perthes was invited by NATO to the annual reunion of the Bilderberg Group. He worked with a Syrian civil servant of the CIA, Bassma Kodmani. Together, they explained to all participants the profit that could be made by the West by overthrowing the Syrian Arab Republic and placing the Muslim Brotherhood in power. Having adopted the double language of the Brotherhood, in 2001 he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times mocking President Assad who believed he had unearthed a “conspiracy” against his country [6]. In October of the same year, he participated in a meeting of Turkish business leaders organised by the private US intelligence agency, Stratfor. He told his listeners of the oil and gas resources that they could steal from Syria [7].

Clemens von Goetze (director of the 3rd department of the German Ministry for Foreign Affairs ) and Anwar Mohammad Gargash (Emirati Minister for Foreign Affairs), during the meeting in Abou Dhabi of the work group on the carving up of the Syrian economy.

Expanding this work, Germany organised in Abou Dhabi a meeting of the Friends of Syria under the presidency of one of its diplomats, Clemens von Goetze, who shared among those present the future concessions for exploitation which would be awarded to the winners once NATO overthrew the Syrian Arab Republic [8].

In mid-2012, Volker Perthes was tasked by the US Department of Defense with preparing “The Day After” (in other words the government which would be imposed on Syria). He organised meetings at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs with the participation of 45 Syrian personalities, including his friend Bassma Kodmani and Muslim Brother Radwan Ziadeh, who had come especially from Washington [9]. Finally, Perthes became one of Jeffrey Feltman’s assistants at the UN. With that title, he participated in all the Geneva negotiations.

The positions of the German Ministry for Foreign Affairs were adopted word for word by the European External Action Service (EEAS) of Federica Mogherini. This administration, directed by a French senior civil servant, drew up confidential notes on Syria for the heads of state and government of the Union.

In 2015, Chancellor Angela Merkel and Turkish President, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who had become the world protector of the Muslim Brotherhood, organised the transfer of more than a million people to Germany [10], thus conforming to the demand by German industrial business leaders. A number of these migrants are Syrians, including those the AKP no longer wants, and which Germany does not want to return home.

Chancellor Angela Merkel will be in Beirut and Amman this week to talk about Syria.

Thierry Meyssan

Translation
Pete Kimberley

[1] The CIA under Alan Dulles placed Nazi ex-leaders as supervisors of almost all the secret services of the allied states on all five continents. This system was dismantled in the 1970’s, after the revelations of the Church and Pike Congressional committees. All the Nazi leaders were chased out by President Carter and Admiral Stanfield Turner at the end of the 1970’s. The Europeans wrongly believed that the CIA used the Nazis exclusively in Latin America (for example, Klaus Barbie in Bolivia). But the system was in fact generalised, including in Europe (operation Gladio). In all probability, the placing of these Nazi « experts » was coordinated from Germany by Reinhard Gehlen, whom the CIA nominated as the first head of the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND).

[2] A Mosque in Munich, Ian Johnson, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.

[3] Alois Brunner is believed to be responsible for the deportation and assassination of 130,000 people, in Austria, Greece, France, Germany and Slovakia. In 2001, he was sentenced in absentia to life imprisonment in France for his responsibility in the death of the children of Izieu.

[4] “Revelations on Rafik Hariri’s assassination”, by Thierry Meyssan, Оdnako (Russia) , Voltaire Network, 29 November 2010.

[5] “The disgrace of the Mehlis Commission”, by Talaat Ramih, Voltaire Network, 12 January 2006.

[6] “Is Assad Capable of Reform ?”, Volker Perthes, The New York Times, March 30, 2011.

[7] « Küresel Enerji Stratejileri Simülasyonu : Türkiye’nin Gelecek 10 Yılı », Tusaid, 6 Ekim 2011.

[8] “The “Friends of Syria” divvy up Syrian economy before conquest”, by German Foreign Policy, Voltaire Network, 30 June 2012.

[9] The Day After Project, August 2012. The Day After. Supporting a Democratic Transition in Syria, United States Institute of Peace & Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik, August 2012.

[10] Turkey took over from Saudi Arabia after it had dropped the Brotherhood, following the speech by Donald Trump in Riyadh, 21 May 2017.

An edited version of this article is posted on Dr. Henry Makow’s site at http://henrymakow.com/2014/03/do-americans-face-a-red-terror.html

The murderous Bolshevik Revolution made communism a political reality. Alarming similarities to today’s political climate invite comparison.

Czar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917. Since Bolshevik leaders Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky weren’t even in Russia then, how did they gain control of it by November 1917? Western analysts uncovered parts of this mystery, but much remained unknown due to the Soviet government’s stranglehold on its history – as Orwell said, “Who controls the present controls the past.” With glasnost, archives creaked open. Perhaps no one has collated the information better than Juri Lina, whose out-of-print Under the Sign of the Scorpion can be found online until his new edition is released this April.

The Rothschild-Illuminati axis, through their network of banksters and Freemasons, controlled the Bolshevik operation.

• In February 1917, an artificially induced bread shortage accompanied orchestrated rioting in Petrograd (then Russia’s capital). In a “false flag,” the mobs were machine-gunned from hidden positions; the casualties were blamed on the Czar.

• British agents bribed Russian soldiers to mutiny and join the rioting. White Russian General Arsene de Goulevitch wrote: “I have been told that over 21 million rubles were spent by Lord Milner in financing the Russian Revolution.” 33rd degree Freemason Alfred Milner was a Rothschild front man.

• Several Russian generals were Freemasons who betrayed the Czar under Masonic instructions.

• Russians thought the provisional government, established under Alexander Kerensky after the Czar’s fall, meant future democracy. But Kerensky, Grand Secretary of Russia’s Grand Orient, was “phase one” of communist takeover. His government pardoned all political exiles – green light for return to Russia of fellow Freemasons Lenin and Trotsky.

• Jacob Schiff and Federal Reserve founder Paul Warburg ran Kuhn, Loeb & Co. – the Rothschilds’ New York banking satellite. Schiff supplied $20 million in gold to Trotsky, who sailed from New York with 275 other terrorists on a passport obtained through pressure the bankers put on the Wilson administration.

• In Germany, Warburg’s brother Max helped persuade the government to provide millions to Lenin and allow him to cross Germany with other revolutionaries in a special train. The Germans agreed because the Bolsheviks promised to remove Russia from the raging First World War after taking power.

• The Bolsheviks succeeded because they had what other revolutionaries (e.g., Mensheviks) lacked – limitless cash. By May 1917, Pravda already had a circulation of 300,000.

• It is a myth that Kerensky and the Bolsheviks were adversaries. Kerensky received $1 million from Jacob Schiff. During summer 1917, when it was revealed the Bolsheviks were on Germany’s payroll – treason during wartime – Kerensky protected them. When the Bolsheviks moved to seize power that autumn, he declined the option of requesting troops to preserve the government. Lenin and Trotsky gave Kerensky money and safe passage out. He died wealthy in 1970 in New York, where the Russian Orthodox Church refused him burial services.

• Postwar Britain sent the Bolsheviks rifles and ammunition for 250,000 men. With this and other Western assistance, the Reds crushed the White opposition. Loans and technology from Western capitalists poured in for decades, as documented in such books as Antony Sutton’s Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution and Joseph Finder’s Red Carpet.

In 1992, the newspaper Literaturnaya Rossiya estimated that, including starvation and civil war, Soviet communism left 147 million dead. Even accepting the more moderate claim of Harvard University Press’s Black Book of Communism – that communism murdered “only” 100 million worldwide – what these numbers represent is beyond comprehension. Stalin reportedly said: “One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic.”

• By December 1917, the Bolsheviks established their instrument of terror, the Cheka (the KGB’s precursor). Lina writes: “Lists of those shot and otherwise executed were published in the Cheka’s weekly newspaper. In this way it can be proved that 1.7 million people were executed during the period 1918-19. A river of blood flowed through Russia. The Cheka had to employ body counters.” By contrast, under the czars, 467 people were executed between 1826 and 1904.

• Trotsky declared: “We will reduce the Russian intelligentsia to a complete idiocy.” Lina writes: “1,695,604 people were executed from January 1921 to April 1922. Among these victims were bishops, professors, doctors, officers, policemen, gendarmes, lawyers, civil servants, journalists, writers, artists…” The Bolsheviks considered the intelligentsia the greatest threat to their dictatorship. This sheds light on the Marxist buzzword “proletariat.” The Illuminati knew nations are easier to enslave if only peasants and laborers remain. But even the proletariat wasn’t spared. The Cheka brutally suppressed hundreds of peasant uprisings and labor strikes, executing victims as “counter-revolutionaries.”

• Satanic torture often accompanied killings. Many priests were crucified. Some victims had eyes put out, or limbs chopped off, or were otherwise mutilated, while the next victims were forced to watch.

• Although Russia had been “the world’s granary,” over five million died of starvation during the famine of 1921-22. This wasn’t “socialist inefficiency,” but genocide from grain confiscation. In the Holodomor, Stalin murdered 7 million Ukrainians, including 3 million children, by ordering all foodstuffs confiscated as punishment for resisting farm collectivization. Communist brigades went house to house, ripping down walls with axes searching for “hoarded” food.

• In Soviet gulags (concentration camps) millions perished. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn estimated that, just during Stalin’s “great purge” of 1937-38, two million died in gulags.

• The Bolsheviks meanwhile lived royally. Lenin, who occupied Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrov’s estate, placed 75 million francs in a Swiss bank account in 1920. Trotsky, who lived in a castle seized from Prince Felix Yusupov, had over $80 million in U.S. bank accounts. Top Cheka officials ate off gold plates. Communism was plunder masked by ideological slogans. Money and jewelry were stripped from homes at gunpoint.

Lenin and Trotsky repaid their masters. Lina writes: “In October 1918, Jewish bankers in Berlin received 47 cases of gold from Russia, containing 3125 kilos of gold.” The Grand Orient de France refurbished its Paris Lodge with money Lenin sent in 1919. In New York, Kuhn, Loeb received, in the first half of 1921 alone, $102 million in Russian wealth.

Bolsheviks were predominantly Jewish – unsurprising given the long linkage of cabalistic Jews to Freemasonry and revolution. I state this objectively, without anti-Semitism. I am half-Jewish; my paternal grandparents emigrated from Russia in 1904.

• In Les Derniers Jours des Romanofs (1920), Robert Wilton, The Times’s Russian correspondent, named each person in the Bolshevik government. The tally:

Bolshevik Party Central Committee: of 12 members, 9 were Jews.
Council of People’s Commissars: 22 members, 17 Jews.
Central Executive Committee: 61 members, 41 Jews.
Extraordinary Commission of Moscow: 36 members, 23 Jews.

• In 1922, the Morning Post listed all 545 civil servants in the Soviet administration; 477 were Jews, 30 were ethnic Russians. “Russian” Revolution was a misnomer.

• Leon Trotsky (real name Lev Bronstein) was a Ukrainian Jew. He introduced the cabalistic five-pointed star as the Red Army’s symbol. In New York, Trotsky belonged to B’nai B’raith – the Jewish Masonic order – as did his financial angel, Jacob Schiff. Juri Lina has unearthed evidence that Schiff ordered the murder of the Czar and royal family.

• Under Lenin, anti-Semitism became a capital offense. The Bolsheviks destroyed 60,000 churches; many became latrines or museums of atheism. Yet Russia’s synagogues went untouched.

• Jews dominated the Cheka. Lina lists 15 Jewish gulag commandants (Under the Sign of the Scorpion, p. 310). The Cheka targeted classes and ethnicities: the “bourgeoisie”; “kulaks” (landowning farmers); and Cossacks, whom the Central Committee declared “must be exterminated and physically disposed of, down to the last man.” They tried to eradicate , renaming Petrograd and Tsaritsyn after the revolution’s psychopaths. In Ukraine, the Bolsheviks seized traditional national costumes. Obliterating nationalism is a precursor to the Illuminati world order.

• Though it is sometimes claimed Jewish dominance ended under Stalin, in 1937 17 of 27 Presidium members were still Jewish, and 115 of 133 Council of People’s Commissars. Stalin did turn against the Zionists in 1949, heavily persecuting Jews during 1952, after which he was poisoned.

From Hungary’s Bela Kun, to Germany’s Rosa Luxemburg, to America’s Rosenbergs (atomic spies), to Karl Marx himself, Jews were undeniably disproportionate among communists. This observation is not meant to stigmatize Jews. But why are communism’s victims forced to sit in the back of the holocaust bus? Why are we constantly reminded of Kristallnacht, but never the Bolsheviks’ destroying 60,000 churches and murdering over 300,000 priests? Why was historian David Irving imprisoned for challenging the Shoah’s official version (“hate crime”), whereas New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty denied the Ukrainian Holocaust and received a Pulitzer Prize? Why are no Ukrainian Anne Franks honored in films? They are all God’s children.

Could Americans experience a modernized Red Terror? Though America would never have accepted outright communist revolution, it is now adopting measures accurately termed socialism. The Illuminati are employing a timeworn principle: To boil a frog, don’t toss him in boiling water – he’ll jump out. Instead, put him in lukewarm water and gradually raise the heat; the frog never realizes he’s been boiled. This slow warming is “Fabian socialism” (gradual communism).

• In communist states, religion was abolished; that was impossible in America, so the Illuminati had Supreme Court Freemasons (whose Masonic oaths transcended their oaths to uphold the Constitution) destroy religious freedom by degrees – banning school prayer, outlawing Ten Commandments displays, etc.

• Whereas communists seize the economy, socialism does it gradually, confiscating income through rising taxes, while burdening businesses with mounting regulations. Whenever government usurps another sector of life – be it learning (Education Department) or health (Obamcare) we draw nearer to communism. Socialism’s end result is IDENTICAL to communism, but achieved over decades.

This fulfills the famous Ford Foundation President Rowan Gaither made to Congressional investigator Norman Dodd: that Establishment foundations planned “to alter life in the United States, that it can be comfortably merged with the Soviet Union.”

However, this had a corollary. East-West merger required communist states to temporarily abandon hard-line communism and adopt moderate socialism with democratic trappings. I consider this the likely purpose of Gorbachev introducing glasnost in 1989. The ending of Orwell’s Animal Farm, where the pigs and farmers became indistinguishable, is being played out.

Communist genocide was not confined to Russia. Under Mao Tse-tung, China’s death toll rose above 60 million; Pol Pot eliminated nearly one-third of Cambodians in the 1970s. Yet suddenly, in the 1990s, worldwide communism put on a smiley. It made no sense; totalitarians do not voluntarily yield power.

Glasnost’s meaning was disclosed by Anatoly Golitsyn, highest-ranking KGB officer to defect during the Cold War (Alfred Hitchcock dramatized his escape in Topaz). In Golitsyn’s 1984 book New Lies for Old, he revealed the groundbreaking strategy the KGB disclosed to him. His book predicted: Yuri Andropov’s replacement by “a younger leader with a more liberal image” [Gorbachev]; democratic liberalization throughout the Eastern bloc; the Berlin Wall’s fall and reunion of East and West Germany. Golitsyn’s book made 148 predictions; by 1993, 139 were fulfilled. Though a political prophet, the media ignored him.

Golitsyn warned the changes were a TEMPORARY DECEPTION. In the end, he wrote, “all the totalitarian features familiar from the early stages of the Soviet revolution and the postwar Stalinist years in Eastern Europe might be expected to reappear.”

Is America on the precipice of another “Red Terror”?

• Empowered by the Patriot Act, the Homeland Security Department could become a Cheka, and FEMA’s a gulag archipelago. Last year the Department made headlines by ordering 1.6 billion ammunition rounds – enough to kill every American five times.

• To facilitate enslavement, the Bolsheviks outlawed gun ownership. Their war on the people became “machine guns against pitchforks.” Although Americans aren’t disarmed yet, the pressure to ban weapons has never been greater, as “lone gunman shooting sprees” have increased exponentially, causing many to wonder if some incidents are as staged as “Bin Laden’s death.”

• We aren’t razing churches yet, but the media relentlessly demonize Christians while courts increasingly suppress religious expression.

• Genocide is not overt, but the elites’ comments about population control, divulge the agenda behind legalized abortion, HAARP, GMOs, and mandatory vaccination.

None of this should surprise us: the Rothschild-Illuminist-Masonic network that ruled in 1917 still rules in 2014.

by Robert S. Rodvik, via VoltairNet.com

In the first part of his study of the low-intensity warfare carried out by the United States against communist China since the Cold War, Robert S. Rodvik focuses on the U.S. collaboration with the nationalist government of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. As a rabid anti-communist, Washington knew it could count on the Generalissimo to be more preoccupied with anti-Communist extermination campaigns than with resisting the Japanese invaders, and complicitly turned a blind eye to Chiang’s massacres and unbridled corruption.

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek (L) appointed Allied Commander-in-Chief in the China theater in 1942, with his very influential wife, and U.S. General Joseph Stilwell (R) who served as Chiang’s Chief of Staff, and at the same time commanded US forces in the China Burma India Theater.

For as long as I can remember the US has been waging an undeclared war against China, the latter very lucky to have avoided being nuked when it joined North Korea in its battle against the Empire. Considering that millions of North Koreans were wiped out by the bombing, killing, murdering giant, its land devastated by the marauding monster, the mere fact that the Joint Chiefs were unable to get the OK to nuke China seems a rare non-happening of great importance. This doesn’t mean, however, that the US hasn’t continued its covert wars to actually destroy communist China over the years. So don’t be surprised when that scenario actually comes into play; sooner, I believe, rather than later.

At the end of WWII writes William Blum, “The ink on the Japanese surrender treaty was hardly dry when the United States began to use the Japanese soldiers still in China alongside American troops in a joint effort against the Chinese communists.” [1]

Blum was referring to US collaboration with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang (KMT) nationalist army and their plans to repel Mao Tse-Tung’s communist soldiers, at war with the rampantly corrupt KMT. Chiang’s nationalist army hoarded US aid monies, arms and material to such a degree that President Truman wrote that “the Chiangs, the Kungs and the Soongs (were) all thieves” having stolen some $750 million dollars of US funds. [2]

To understand the role of the Generalissimo and the KMT in the long, tortured history of modern China we need to go back in time and examine Chiang’s monstrous role in the country’s development.

Dr. Sun Yat-sen was the respected leader of modern China and the early leader of the KMT. His death in 1924 led to a scramble for power, which, in turn, led to the head of the Green Gang triad, Big Eared Tu (Tu Yueh-sheng) succeeding Sun as leader. Tu was the undeniable head of opium trafficking in China and also the head of worker suppression for the Chinese elites and their foreign counterparts in the International Settlement who found labour turmoil as anathema to profit. In 1925 worker and student unrest was such that police from the International Settlement were called in and a British detachment “fired into the crowd killing twelve workers and wounding fifty others. This ‘May 30th Incident’ precipitated strikes, boycotts, and demonstations,” [resulting in the further killing of fifty-two protestors in Canton] murdered by “French and British machine gunners.” [3] Big Eared Tu and his close drug trafficking sidekick Chiang Kai-shek were on their way to controlling all of China.

In February 1927 yet another worker’s strike took place in Shanghai and along with them student supporters were passing out leaflets on city streets. As Sterling Seagrave informs us in his valuable book The Soong Dynasty, “Police and soldiers fell upon them, dragging them into the middle of streets and beheading them on the spot. In the presumed sanctuary of the International Settlement and French Concession, British, American and French police arrested students handing out leaflets, and expelled them from the barricades into the waiting arms of warlord soldiers—who immediately beheaded them. Two hundred were decapitated that day…In an act of calculated treachery, Chiang ordered his army vanguard [alleged rescuers] to stop twenty-five miles outside Shanghai…The man whose troops carried out these beheadings, Li Pao-chang, was rewarded by Chiang a few weeks later with the command of the Eighth Nationalist Army.” [4]

By now the Western leaders of the International Settlement were closely aligned with Big Eared Tu and the Green Gang with the French Concession becoming the heart of China’s opium and heroin trade-all of which was controlled by Big-eared Tu, Chiang, and the Green Gang. As Seagrave writes, “Each month Big-eared Tu was realizing profits of $6,500,000 and passing $150,000 of this on to French government officials and concession police to guarantee a happy working relationship between the Concessionaires and the Green Gang.” [5] It also helped that the chief of detectives of the narcotics police was Green Gang honcho Pockmarked Huang (Huang Chih-jung). By now Chiang was the undisputed leader of the drug-dealing killer triad, as ruthless as any hoodlum in written history. As Seagrave informs us, “Chiang’s police record in the British-administered International Settlement grew over the years to include murder, extortion, numerous armed robberies, and assorted other crimes. He was indicted on all the listed charges, but was never brought to trial, or jailed.” [6]

Shanghai 1927: Chiang’s execution squad beheading a communist worker.

April 1927 soon became infamous with Chiang’s ‘White Terror’ slaughters of leftists and communists (massacres that would accompany Chiang throughout his murderous career). Throughout April more than 12,000 were killed in Shanghai alone. Two Chinese scholars write that, “In the year after 1927, over 300,000 people died across China in anti-communist suppression campaigns executed by the KMT.” [7] Other researchers estimate the deaths being in the millions, mostly in the rural areas where communists and leftists had retreated from Chiang’s terror.

Publisher Henry Booth Luce of Life and Timemagazine fame (later the leading light, along with wife Clare Booth Luce, of the ‘China Lobby’) became an early apologist of Chiang’s butcher gang and of Chiang himself. In its April 25 edition of Time, Luce would have Time declare that the Shanghai Massacre was merely an example of Chiang “impeaching” the leftists. [8] As Luce was equally a rabid anti-communist I believe it is accurate to say that he was fully informed of the Generalissimo’s Nazi-like operations and therefore, with his defense of Chiang, approved of the massacres undertaken by Chiang and his KMT armies.

Chiang, meanwhile, was extorting massive payments from all segments of society and T.V. Soong, Minister of Finance, was aware that virtually none of this money was going to the national treasury, most of it going into Chiang’s endless pockets. T.V. knew that he was “no match for a military man whose troops enjoyed disemboweling young girls and winding their intestines around their naked bodies while they were still conscious.” [9]

The illicit partnership was consummated when T.V.’s sister Mei-ling (Madame Chiang) married the Generalissimo in a royal wedding in Shanghai. Chiang now had an inroad into the wealth of China via T.V.’s role as head of the Central Bank and Soong stood by helplessly as the silver reserves vanished into Chiang’s personal accounts. Another of T.V.’s sisters, Ai-ling, married wealthy industrialist H.H. Kung, principal agent of the Standard Oil Company of China. Both Kung and wife Ai-ling happened to be personal intimates of Big Eared Tu and FBI reports stated that she was responsible for the assassinations of family enemies.

Now, in the 1930s, Chiang became enamored with Italy’s Benito Mussolini and Germany’s Adolf Hitler. Thus, when Hitler came to power in 1933 Chiang asked him for help in his ongoing war with Mao Tse-tung and the communists fighting against the massive corruption of Chiang and his warlord armies. Hitler dispatched his top military strategist, General Hans von Seect and his aide Lieutenant General George Wetzell. Together they devised a ‘Scorched earth’ policy for Chiang and the KMT, which brought famine to the mountain populations that provided shelter for the communists. Historian Edgar Snow estimated that “in all a million people were killed or starved to death.” [10]

Chiang became so enthralled with Hitler and the Nazis that he sent his younger son, Wei-kuo, to be schooled by the Nazis. As Sterling Seagrave reports, “Wei-kuo became a second lieutenant in the 98th Jaeger Regiment and before returning to China took part in the invasion of Austria in 1938.” [11]

By now, Chiang, T.V. Soong, H.H. Kung and Big Eared Tu were entirely in charge of China’s opium and heroin trade. “Shanghai police reports indicate that in 1930 T.V. Soong personally arranged with Tu to deliver 700 cases of Persian opium to Shanghai under KMT military protection to supplement depleted Chinese stocks.” [12]

Then in 1931 came the ‘Mukden Incident’ by which the Japanese contrived (Like the Reichstag fire in Berlin) a self-inflicted event thus allowing them opportunity to invade northern China (Manchuria) where it established a puppet state called Manchukuo. Chiang was not eager to fight the Japanese, preferring to continue his war with the ill-equipped communists in their mountainous retreats. Even within his KMT army an uprising against Chiang and his policies gave rise to the ‘Xi’an Incident’ whereby the despised Generalissimo was kidnaped by some of his generals and held in confinement till he agreed to opening another front to fight the Japanese. Chiang agreed, took the generals with him to Shanghai, then had them executed. Killing communists was far more important.

The Second Sino-Japanese War broke out in July 1937 and Chiang’s leadership led to the retreat of the KMT towards the interior city of Wuhan. Prior to their flight however, Chiang ordered General Shang Chen to destroy the dams around Nanjing in order to impede the advace of the Japanese army. This resulted in the “killing of 500,000 people in the 1938 Yellow River flood.” [13] Barbara Tuchman elaborates further: “Eleven cities and 4,000 villages were flooded, the crops and farms of three provinces ruined, two million people rendered homeless, and in that vast and sodden wasteland another fund of animosity stored up against the Government.” [14] As Sterling Seagrave notes, “General Ku Chu-t’ung, the author of the atrocity, was eventually promoted to commander-in-chief of all KMT armies.” [15]

Numerous secret files on Chiang et al from this time period seem to have disappeared from US Treasury and FBI archives, nevertheless still leaving a damning indictment via those files still in existence and which author Sterling Seagrave has meticulously researched. What the existing record shows is a continuation of horrifying atrocities that took place up to the time of his death.

With Chiang in virtual control of all of China (except for Mao’s mountainous retreats), the country’s most notorious gangster, drug trafficker, murderer and extortionist, Big Eared Tu, was now “respectable, the director of many banks, companies and exchanges, including the Bank of China.” [16] Sort of like the fox being in charge of the henhouse, but with very sinister designs for the future of China’s wealth.

Mao recruited peasants to join his Red Army. He then trained them in guerrilla warfare. Nationalists attacked the Communists repeatedly but failed to drive them out.

Chiang’s KMT government was so thoroughly corrupt that masses of China’s peasant class willingly joined Mao’s communist army and after a protracted struggle Chiang’s nationalists were handily defeated on the fields of battle, resulting in preparations for the evacuation of KMT criminal forces to the Island of Formosa (renamed Taiwan by Chiang himself). The Generalissimo quickly made plans for the departure. As Sterling Seagrave informs us, “Chiang set his most trusted men to systematically emptying China’s banks, her arsenals, and her museums…[which included]…treasures collected by Chi’en Lung, the Fourth Emperor of the Manchu Dynasty. His reign, from 1735-96, had been a golden age of the arts…The Generalissimo regarded these as his dynastic heritage...[thus]…Nearly a quarter of a million paintings, porcelains, jades, and bronzes ultimately were spirited away to Taipei before the conclusion of the Battle of Huai-hai. Eleven days after the battle ended, on January 21, 1949, Chiang Kai-shek resigned as President of Nationalist China…That February, although he was no longer President of Nationalist China, Chiang Kai-shek arranged for the government’s remaining gold reserves to be removed urgently to Taipei.” [17]

A study of the historical record shows that every ruthless dictator worldwide supported by the US; the Shah of Iran, Marcos of the Philippines, Somoza in Nicaragua and numerous others, all driven out of office, departed with their nation’s wealth, leaving the poor to pay the debts undertaken by these depraved gangsters – all with the approval of their US patrons.

“In Shanghai that April, Big Eared Tu saw Chiang one last time…Chiang’s real reason for coming to town was to get Big Eared Tu and the Green Gang to help him rob the Bank of China…Chiang’s plans for the Bank of China had been laid with considerable care. A dingy freighter was tied up on the Bund, opposite the Cathay Hotel. Its coolie crew, dressed in filthy rags, were hand-picked naval ratings in disguise. Several executives of the Bank of China had been given large bribes and a promise of passage to safety on the waiting freighter, in return for opening the vaults. Nationalist troops had cordoned off an area of several blocks around the bank.” [18] The country’s wealth was being stolen by the leading bandit of the era. All with the USA’s approval.

Chiang Kai-shek, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Madame Chiang Kai-shek at the Cairo Conference in 1943. (CNA 11/22/1943)

Native Formosans were appalled at what was happening to their island, suddenly beset by a million thugs in uniform descending unwanted upon them. After WWII “the allies had turned [the island] over to Chiang as part of a secret agreement made during the Cairo talks. [As with Formosa, the US also turned Palestine over to the Zionist thugs and we all know what has happened since, the massacres of thousands of Arabs by the Zionist terrorists] Chiang forced Taiwan to heel. There were massacres: in the first, 10,000 Taiwanese were slain by KMT troops in downtown Taipei. Twenty thousand more were put to death before Chiang was firmly established.” [19]

American statesman George Kerr was in Taipei during this period and had a personal observation of the ongoing terror. He later wrote a book of his experience, Formosa Betrayed, which outlined the KMT’s murder spree against the native islanders. From an upper window in his refuge Kerr saw and reported the following:

“We saw Formosans bayoneted in the street without provocation. A man was robbed before our eyes – then cut down and run through. Another ran into the street in pursuit of soldiers dragging away a girl from his house and we saw him, too, cut down. This sickening spectacle was only the smallest sample of the slaughter taking place throughout the city, only what could be seen from one window on the upper floor of one isolated house. The city was full of troops.” [20]

Kerr continues: “The roadways, the river banks and the harbor shores were strewn with bodies at that moment, and the Nationalist troops were spreading out through the countryside, to bring “peace and protection” a la Kuomintang. In later days when UNNRA members, missionaries, foreign businessmen and our consular staff men could come together to compare notes for that week, the stories were the same from every part of the island. For the government had decided on a policy of pure terrorism.” [21]

“We saw students tied together, being driven to the execution grounds, usually along the river banks and ditches about Taipei, or at the waterfront in Keelung. One foreigner counted more than thirty young bodies – in student uniforms – lying along the roadside east of Taipei; they had had their noses and ears slit or hacked off, and many had been castrated. Two students were beheaded near my front gate. Bodies lay unclaimed on the roadside embankment near the Mission compound.” [22]

The Corruption of USA Politics

Kerr continues: “I shall not forget the wordless appeal in the eyes of four well-dressed young men who passed my gate and my protective American flag at midday on March 13. They were tied together by ropes attached to wires twisted about their necks, their arms were bound, and they were being hurried along toward the execution place on the banks of the Keelung River nearby. The ragged Nationalist soldier prodding them along at bayonet point saw the American flag on my jeep, and gave me the smartest salute he could manage. Here was the betrayal in its most simple terms; the Formosans looked to us for help, we armed and financed the Nationalists, and the Nationalists were making sure, if they could, that there would be no more appeal to the United States and “democracy”. [23] [A fantasy sold to the uneducated at home and abroad].

With Formosa/Taiwan completely under Chiang’s control and fully supported by Henry Booth Luce and General Douglas MacArthur (who in the late 30s was put in charge of unleashing War Plan Red – the invasion of Canada, mostly to take over the immense water resources), [24] the China Lobby promoted Chiang as a model “democrat” and a perfect partner in the US war against Mao and the communists. Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson offer more detail about MacArthur and his role in promoting “the Peanut” as General Stilwell called him. Appearing before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, the General extolled the virtues of the Kuomintang government:

“I superficially went through Formosa. I was surprised by the contentment I found there. I found that the people were enjoying a standard of living which was quite comparable to what it was before the war…I found representative government being practiced…I went into their courts. I found a judicial system which I thought was better than a great many of the other countries in Asia. I went into their schools. I found that their primary instruction was fully on a standard with what was prevalent in the Far East…I found many things I could criticize too, but I believe sincerely that the standard of government that he [Chiang] is setting in Formosa compares favorably with many democracies in the world. [25]

Aside from the fact that he was lying through his teeth, one has to wonder how the members of the Senate Committee could accept that MacArthur accomplished all that he stated in the course of his one day visit. We should accept, rather, that he was speaking to a like-minded cast who cared not for the truth and were fully supportive of elevating Chiang into being the USA’s #1 Chinese hero. A glance at the historic record of the MacArthur family demonstrates a vicious set of cutthroats finding a home in US military life. General Arthur MacArthur, Douglas’s father, was, for a period of time, head of the US expeditionary forces invading the Philippines. US atrocities resembled those inflicted upon native American Indians in the US conquest of tribal lands, not surprising since Gen. Arthur MacArthur led military campaigns during the Indian Wars, most notably against Geronimo. Of the Philippine Campaign, MacArthur displayed his ruthless side, declaring that it would take “ten years of bayonet treatment” to subdue the Filipino people. [26]

Gen. Douglas MacArthur established his own appalling record early on in his military career. In 1932 WWI veterans who had been promised a bonus payment, but had not yet received payment, marched on Washington to demand their promised reward, setting up a tent city in the Capital. President Herbert Hoover ordered the estimated 40,000 protestors removed and Douglas MacArthur led troops and tanks to fulfil the job. In 1934 he sued journalists Drew Pearson and Robert Allen for defamation after they wrote that his treatment of the Bonus marchers as “unwarranted, unnecessary, insubordinate, harsh and brutal“. [27]

South Korea’s first President Syngman Rhee, right, and General Douglas MacArthur attend a ceremony for the establishment of the Republic of Korea in Seoul on Aug. 15, 1948.

Pearson and Allen struck back harshly, adding the name Isabel Rosario Cooper to the witness list. MacArthur had met her in the Philippines and she became his mistress. Adding her name to the witness list caused him to withdraw his suit and the reality of his brutality became recorded in history. President Harry S. Truman relieved MacArthur from his command of the Korean War when it was known that the latter was advocating the dropping of nuclear weapons on China. US military entry into Korea took place to protect Syngman Rhee, another of America’s savage, murderous tyrants. And, contrary to most historical narratives, legendary journalist I.F. Stone pointed out in his book The Hidden History of the Korean War that Rhee and his military were the first offenders, attacking the North which led to their responding invasion of the South. Not a scenario that the propaganda press wanted known. Rhee and Chiang had hold of US foreign policy much the same as Israel’s vicious rulers have taken control of Arab destinies in order to rule their US-appointed land (Israel) and serve as America’s Jannisaries in the Middle East. Killers all. The US war in Korea killed some four million people and also involved numerous atrocities in which American forces massacred South Korean civilians, No Gun Ri [28] being but one of the savageries. Only Chiang, to date, could manage as many deaths.

Thus, along with his American pals and also having an abiding hatred of anything communist, Chiang, immediately on being in control of Taiwan, set up a Nazified academy of terror training designed to overthrow leftists across the world. Fellow assassins in numerous countries were invited to Taiwan to enrol in Chiang’s deadly World Anti-Communist League (WACL) in order to apply their terror education against unionists, scholars and civil rights activists, leading to further death and destruction that knew no end. That record is well delineated in the book Inside the League.

It is impossible to believe that the USA was not aware of the entirety of Chiang’s appalling record, what with the OSS and numerous agents reporting his bestiality at every turn (Which is likely why many records are still off limits to researchers, even to this late date). That the US government nevertheless promoted Chiang to all who would listen (as well as supporting dozens of the world’s worst killers and plunderers), tells us all we need to know about a hypocritical, depraved system that sets about bombing the world into submission, while simultaneously extolling their own revolting values to all who have been brainwashed through US media propaganda. USA#1 indeed.

On February 28, 1947, the KMT troops of the Republic of China began a repressive crackdown of a popular uprising on Formosa against the Chinese-imposed local government, which the United States permitted to rule following Japanese surrender at the end of World War II. Four decades of harsh martial law followed the 228 Massacre and subsequent White Terror period when it was even illegal to commemorate the anniversary of the 1947 tragedy.Wiki Commons photo

Although Chiang and the majority of his KMT army took refuge on Formosa, massacring the indigenous peoples while doing so, a large number of Chinats (as opposed to Chicoms) fled into northern Burma to the resentment of the Burmese government. Here the CIA organized its drugs army into bands of marauders and sent them into China on various sabotage missions, some of the earliest campaigns against the Chinese people by the USA. Having had decades of involvement in the drugs schemes of Chiang and Big Eared Tu, these KMT leftovers also managed a new drugs empire being run out of the Golden Triangle, the CIA flying the finished product to new homes in the western world. [29]

As William Blum writes: “Burma was not the only jumping-off site for CIA-organized raids into China. The islands of Quemoy and Matsu, about five miles off the Chinese coast, were used as bases for hit-and-run attacks, often in battalion strength; for occasional bombing forays, and to block mainland ports…The Chinese retaliated several times with heavy artillery attacks on Quemoy, on one occasion killing two American military officers.” [30]

In August 1954 the Chinats placed 58,000 troops on Quemoy and another 15,000 on Matsu on the basis of “recovering” mainland China; another of Chiang’s delusions. With the artillery attacks devastating the islands the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended the use of nuclear bombs against China, an idea thankfully rejected by Dwight Eisenhower. During this period numerous CIA flights to gather intelligence were conducted against China and many were shot down, with many killed and a few captured, all for little gain.

“Beginning in 1957 or 1958,” writes William Blum, “the CIA began to recruit Tibetan refugees and exiles in neighboring countries such as India and Nepal. Amongst their number were members of the Dalai Lama’s guard…Those selected were flown to the United States, to an unused military base high in the Colorado mountains, an altitude approximating that of their mountainous homeland…[where they were]…trained in the fine points of paramilitary warfare.” [31]

(To be continued…)

Robert S. Rodvik

[1] Blum,William, The CIA: a forgotten history, Zed Books Ltd. (London and New Jersey) 1986, p.15. Reprinted under the title Killing Hope, Common Courage Press.

[2] Bagby, Wesley Marvin, The Eagle-Dragon Alliance: America’s Relations with China in World War II, University of Delaware Press, 1992, p.65.

[3] Seagrave, Sterling, The Soong Dynasty, Perennial Library-Harper&Row Publishers, New York, 1986, p.206.

[4] Seagrave, Soong Dynasty, pp.218-19.

[5] Seagrave, Ibid, p.222

[6] Seagrave, Ibid, p.156.

[7] Barnouin, Barbara and Yu Changgen. Zhou Enlai: A Political Life. Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006. P.38.

[8] Seagrave, op.cit., p.232.

[9] Seagrave, op.cit., p.237.

[10] Seagrave, op.cit., p.290.

[11] Seagrave, op.cit., p.320.

[12] Seagrave, op.cit., p.332.

[13] Wikipedia, Chiang Kai-shek

[14] Tuchman, Barbara, Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-45. (The Macmillan Company, New York 1970). P.186.

[15] Seagrave, op.cit., p.374.

[16] Seagrave, op.cit., p.329.

[17] Seagrave, op.cit., pp. 437-9.

[18] Seagrave, op.cit., pp. 440-1.

[19] Seagrave, op.cit., p. 442.

[20] Kerr, George, Formosa Betrayed, (Cambridge, MA, Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p.293.

[21] Kerr, ibid, p.297.

[22] Kerr, ibid, pp.300-1.

[23] Kerr, ibid, pp.306-7.

[24] On MacArthur’s role in executing ’War Plan Red’, see Rudmin, Floyd, Bordering on Aggression: Evidence of US Military Preparations Against Canada, (Voyageur Publishing, Hull, Quebec) 1993.

[25] Anderson, Jon Lee and Scott, Inside the League, (Dodd, Mead & Company, New York 1986) p. 50.

[26] The Philippines Reader, Edited by Daniel B. Schirmer & Stephen Rosskamm Shalom, (South End Press, Boston 1987) p.14.

[27] Manchester, William, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964, (Little Brown, Boston, 1978) p.156.

[28] Charles Hanley, Martha Mendoza and Sang-hun Choe, The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War, Henry Holt & Co., New York

[29] On the CIA’s drugs operations, see McCoy, Alfred, The Politics of Heroin.

[30] Blum, op.cit., p.19.

[31] Blum, op. cit., p.21.

Robert S. Rodvik

Internet activist and the author of The Balkans: US Covert Activity and American Media Complicity” (1995).