Prof. James Craven | Tuesday, July 24, 2012, 17:03 Beijing
Every time I am in China, I am struck with how kind, open, warm and helpful people are to me; especially as it is obvious that I am a foreigner, and many think, another American (I am also Canadian and a Blackfoot Indian and a veteran of the U.S. Army 1963-66). I wonder how many would be so kind and open if they knew some of the real history of U.S.-China “relations” even prior to Liberation in China in 1949.
On the other hand, I wonder how many of the reflexive “China-bashers” in America and would continue their anti-China posturing, rants about being in debt to China (who forced them to borrow?), memes about China as a supposed “existential threat”, if they knew some of the same secret history.
I learned some of the real and secret history behind U.S.-China relations, in books and documents that have been leaked or declassified that I later found buried in all sorts of leaked secrets and declassified archives.
Yet some of it I, early on, got from my father who was part of some of this secret history. What he told me of it, he did not discuss outside of our home; and he told me also not to speak of his views on U.S.-China relations or his views on U.S. Government policies and actions against China to any outsiders.
My father, Homer Henry Craven Jr., was a top-turret gunner and engineer on B-25s with the 14th Air Force, the successor to the Flying Tigers, with the 490th Bomb Squadron the famed “Burma Bridge Busters”, and flew 94 missions against the Japanese forces in (then-called) Burma and in China.
He also flew, as an engineer on C-46 missions over “The Hump” from Burma into China. My father later became a pilot for Northwest Airlines, for 33 years, many of those years as a 747 captain and who spent most of his 33 years flying in Asia—many times to Taiwan since the mid-1950s.
He once flew Chiang Kai-Shek from Taipei to Tokyo and according to the captain of that flight, for whom my father was a co-pilot and a friend, he was angered at my father when he refused to shake the hand of Chiang Kai Shek (often flew in commercial airliners for security against assassination attempts thinking no one would take out a whole airliner to get him) causing him to “lose face” when he came up to the cockpit to inspect, eyeball-to-eyeball, as he did at all times, who would be flying him.
Later, in the early 1970s, my father, a senior 707-320 captain, flew some of the very last flights into and out of Vietnam (he was opposed to the Vietnam War and U.S. involvement and went into Vietnam empty to take out troops and to witness the war).
In the early 1980s, as a senior 747 captain, he finally got to see the new China he always wanted to see but couldn’t because of the Cold War isolation imposed upon China, when he flew some of the first flights back into Shanghai and Beijing, as Northwest Airlines resumed their historical routes into China with more US-China engagement.
My father believed that Taiwan was part of China (as was Hong Kong, Macao, Xinjiang and Tibet) and that the Kuomintang on Taiwan had largely continued and expanded their corruption and despotism that he saw during World War II in Burma and China in Taiwan and elsewhere.
He believed this even as, in fact because, he was flying in and out of Taiwan regularly; he was not the kind to stay isolated in 5-star hotels but wandered around, with the everyday working people, wherever he went. My father did not want his children to be taken in by Cold War lies that he knew from direct experience to be lies including the notion of any kind of “democracy” under the KMT and their kind on Taiwan.
But such thinking was extremely dangerous not only in Taiwan, but in America even today.
Among pilots, (I am also a pilot) many of whom were then and still are, ultra-conservative, not well schooled or educated, even about the world they fly around, and with many who were military veterans conditioned just to follow orders without asking a lot of questions, my father’s views would have been considered treason even though they were not.
I say this as a former commercial pilot who, especially in those days, knew few pilots with my father’s experiences and whose views were similar; and they all kept their views very covert.
My father had respect for the original Flying Tigers. He would also quip that unlike them, he was not a mercenary or adventurer although for a good cause, and he did not get $500 (a lot of money then and now) for each Japanese aircraft shot down. Plus he lived most of his time in the jungles in tents.
My father told me that Japanese forces were often so near them that sometimes they could be observed in the hills watching them and even their outdoor movies. My father and his comrades slept with guns under their pillows because Kuomintang (KMT) troops, supposedly their allies, would come in the night and try to bayonet them through the tents to steal valuables for sale on black markets.
My father only had any respect for the communist or “Red Army” forces. That was not something one openly said in America in the 1950s and 60s; and really not even now is such a statement healthy to say and believe.
I remember my father telling me these things, expressing these views quietly and not publicly, and telling me not to repeat them outside the house in the 1950s when I was seven or eight years old.
Specifically, I remember 1954, I was eight years old, when the Army-McCarthy hearings were going on, and, although we were poor, we got a television just so we could watch them.
My mother, of Blackfoot Indian ancestry that she was taken away from early on in her life, married to a white man in 1945, which was very rare, a man who had only $35.00 and a lot of wounds and combat fatigue to his name when they married, would point to the demagogue Joe McCarthy and the McCarthy-Army hearings on TV and say: “See and remember that always; that is one of the many faces of evil.”
Red Allies in World War II
My father told me that it was well known among the aircrews in the 14th Air Force, that if shot down and captured by the Japanese, they would die a very horrible death—usually as the object of bayonet practice.
But they also knew that their so-called “allies”, the KMT (Kuomintang) forces of Chiang Kai Shek, were often far more anti-communist than anti-Japanese (many were former or present collaborators and some trained by the Japanese in military academies) and some would sell them to the Japanese.
So the first lesson I learned as a child was that the crews, the real ones, not the ones “in the rear with the gear”, but the ones who flew so low that they did not carry parachutes, knew that only the “Red Army” forces, the communists, could be trusted and were the most effective forces against the Japanese.
But was this just my father’s memories (often we find that “the older we get the better we used to be”) and ideology being passed on to me?
Well in my over 40 years of study of the nature, contradictions, intentions, logic, dynamics and victims of imperialism and colonialism, inspired by my mother, father, and my own life experiences, I have found as 60-year-old documents are declassified, or leaked as they have been in some cases, more is coming to light about a history nowhere to be found in U.S. history books.
We are finding in various documents of the U.S. Government and its allies, and in the work of scholars like William Blum[1], some of the history that remains hidden to this day.
In fact, Americans owe the “Red Army” of China a large debt of gratitude and assistance for their fierce and principled resistance to Japanese imperialism during WWII, resistance that saved many American lives:
“The communists in China had worked closely with the American military during the war, providing important intelligence about Japanese occupiers, rescuing and caring for downed U.S. airmen.” [2]
“United States planes regularly made reconnaissance flights over communist territory to scout the position of their forces. The communists claimed that American planes frequently strafed and bombed their troops and in one instance machine-gunned a communist-held town.” [3]
“There were, however, American survivors in some of the many crashes of the United States aircraft. Surprisingly, the Reds continued to rescue them, tend to their wounds, and return them to US bases.
It may be difficult to appreciate now, but at this time the mystique and the myth of ‘America’ still gripped the imagination of people all over the world, and the Reds helped to rescue scores of American flyers and had transported them through Japanese lines to safety. ‘The Communists’ wrote the New York Times ‘did not lose one airman under their protection. They made a point of never accepting rewards for saving American airmen.’ “ [4]
Now that alone should cause one to wonder between the U.S. and China, who exactly is an “existential threat” to whom? If communists automatically viewed capitalists as an “existential threat” (merely because of fundamental differences in ideologies and systems and not to do with any declared threats or actions), as we view China in our own classified and even unclassified documents to this very day, then why would the Chinese take such care with US airmen to ensure their return to U.S. forces?
Yet in internal documents, it is clear that the U.S. Government knew very well that their own allies were hated by the people for their corruption and that the communists were admired not only for their fierce and courage in their resistance to Japanese invasion and occupation, but for their honestly, kindness and refusal to tolerate corruption. For but one of many examples that my father told me about long before I read this:
“‘By 1949, United States aid to the Nationalists since the war amounted to almost $2 billion in cash and $1 billion worth of military hardware; 39 Nationalist army divisions had been trained and equipped.[5] Yet the Chiang dynasty was collapsing all around in bits and pieces. It has not only been the onslaught of Chiang’s communist foes, but the hostility of the Chinese people at large to his tyranny, his wanton cruelty, and the extraordinary corruption and decadence of his entire bureaucratic and social system. By contrast, the large areas under communist administration were models of honesty, progress, and fairness; entire divisions of the Generalissimo’s forces defected to the communists. American political and military leaders had no illusions about the nature and quality of Chiang’s rule. The Nationalist forces, said General David Barr, head of the U.S. Military Mission in China, were under ‘the world’s worst leadership’.” [6]
Former Enemies as New Allies vs. Former Allies as New Enemies
But this is only the tip of the iceberg. Now imagine, that after the war, after all that China suffered, including many years while the world stood by and watched and even profited from the rape of China by foreign powers, that former Japanese occupiers, torturers, war criminals and troops would be given back their arms, and, worse yet, turned into garrison police to control and kill some of the very same communist forces (which also included a united front of many non-communists but patriotic bourgeoisie) that had saved U.S. Airmen.
And this was not only the pattern in China, but also in Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Europe, under the banner of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”. Even in Europe, former Nazis and war criminals were turned into police, prison guards and spies against communists that had once been U.S. allies and the most effective anti-fascists.
President Truman was up front about what he described as “using the Japanese to hold off the communists”:
“It was perfectly clear to us that if we told the Japanese to lay down their arms immediately and march to the seaboard, the entire country would be taken over by the communists. We therefore had to take the unusual step of using the enemy as a garrison until we could airlift Chinese National [Chiang's] troops to South China and send Marines to guard the seaports.” [7]
“The American soldiers in China began to protest about not being sent home, a complaint echoed around the world by other GIs kept overseas for political (usually anti-communist) purposes. ‘They ask me too, why they’re here, said a Marine lieutenant in China at Christmas time, 1945. As an officer, I am supposed to tell them, but you can’t tell a man he’s here to disarm the Japanese when he’s guarding the same railway with [armed] Japanese’. “ [8]
Well I never learned any of this in school; not anywhere in my thirteen some years of university. And when my father told me about this, and he mentioned this use of former fascist enemies as police and to spy on and kill former communist allies, I was told never to mention this and other things he and my mother told us to outsiders. But there is more to this story; so much more.
WMD and War Criminals as Blowbacks and Sub-Contractors in Genocide
Imperial forces have used biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction over many centuries actually. Smallpox was used in the 1700s in the U.S. and Canada, including by Major Stephen Amherst, after whom a university is named, against Indigenous populations[9].
The Japanese had several units such as the infamous Unit 731 that operated in Japan, China and elsewhere that used live Chinese, minorities, and U.S.-Allied POWs, as experimental subjects to develop ultimately, ABC (Atomic, Biological and Chemical) weapons.
The Nazis did the same in parallel, and shared “findings”, and interestingly, pathologically, both the Japanese and the German fascists referred to the human subjects as “logs”.[10] They also tested their weapons of mass populations in Manchuria and elsewhere and even in Japan itself.
After the war, the U.S Government and its allies, did not put these types of top Japanese and German war criminals on trial with others. Rather, members of Unit 731 and like units, wanted as Class-A war criminals for war crimes by name by the US. Army CIC, were hidden by other agencies of the U.S. Government, sometimes even by other fellow members of the same U.S. Army CIC, and protected from trial and punishment.
These war criminals, Japanese and German, along with collaborators from occupied nations, in exchange for their “research” findings on human subjects that shipped to Fort Dietrich Maryland and other U.S. and Allied ABC “research centers”, they were given protection and much more.
Many of them, in Japan and Germany, even while being sought by U.S. Army Counter-Intelligence (CIC) by name and after, wound up in high positions in elite clusters[11] as physicians, educators, politicians, industrialists, financiers, businessmen, media celebrities and Yakuza leaders[12].
Even one of them, Kishi Nobosuke was installed as a Prime Minister of Japan. This pattern was replicated in Germany, Italy and other places where wanted war criminals, and their collaborators wound up in the highest positions in the various elite clusters of the post-war governments. They also went on to fuel Cold War conflicts and escalations with falsified intelligence estimates of the intentions and capabilities of the USSR and China.
In Japan, others like Sasakawa Ryoichi and Kodama Yoshio wound up at the highest levels of the Yakuza and Japanese Kereitsu. These wanted war criminals were also influential in shaping post-war foreign policy and faked intelligence estimates fueling the Cold War, their job security and immunity from prosecution.
Also the results and findings of these ABC experiments were then continued by the U.S. Government and its allies, also using live-human-subject experimentation; this time using poor whites, African-Americans and American Indians as well as indigenous minorities abroad[13].
The U.S. Government after World War II, in the 1950s up to the late 1970s, even used civilian populations in cities in the U.S. to conduct covert aerial spraying and water contamination to test biological and chemical agents and optimum means of delivery to mass populations.
And in China, from the record of the International Scientific Committee a 600-page report on U.S. activities in China post-war[14], after an investigation in China of more than two months, the committee produced a report of some 600 pages, many photos and the conclusion that:
“‘The peoples of Korea and China have been the objectives of bacteriological weapons. These have been employed by units of the U.S.A. armed forces, using a great variety of different methods for the purpose, some of which seem to be the developments of those applied by the Japanese during the second world war.’ “The last reference has to do with the bacteriological warfare warfare experiments the Japanese had carried out against China between 1940 and 1942” [15]
“The Japanese scientists responsible for this program were captured by the United States in 1945 and given immunity from prosecution in return for proving technical information about the experiments to American scientists from the Army biological research center at Fort Dietrick, Maryland. The Chinese were aware of this at the time of the International Scientific Committee’s investigation.[16] …In 1970… the “New York Times” reported that during the Korean War, when US forces were overwhelmed by ‘human waves’ of Chinese, the Army dug into captured Nazi chemical warfare documents describing Sarin, a nerve gas so lethal that a few pounds could kill thousands of people in minutes…By the mid nineteen-fifties, the Army was manufacturing thousands of gallons of Sarin.”[17]
In various internal documents that have surfaced, the U.S. Government was well aware of how the results of “medical experiments” were gathered and the horrible prices paid for the data. The U.S. government was also aware that U.S. and Allied POWs, along with Chinese and various indigenous minorities (they were also seeking, as the U.S. Government sought then and still seeks now, race-ethnicity-specific biological and chemical weapons both WMD and “surgical” or “tactical” were used:
“Evidence gathered in this investigation has greatly supplemented and amplified previous aspects of this field. It represents data which we have obtained by Japanese scientists at the expenditure of many millions of dollars and years of work. Information has accrued with respect to human susceptibility to those diseases as indicated by specific infectious doses of bacteria. Such information could not be obtained in our own laboratories because of scruples attached to human experimentation. These data were secured with a total outlay of Yen 250,000 to date, a mere pittance by comparison with the actual cost of the studies.” [18]
And of course many U.S. and Allied veterans who were subjects and victims of these “medical experiments”, and their families, were denied any legal or other recourse and not even recognition for their own heroism and suffering. The history books have been denied this story largely because:
“Some veterans today—veterans captured and imprisoned in World War II’s Pacific Theater—have a story to tell and an agonizing chapter of their lives to resolve. These veterans…have not received justice…These men are victims of a terrible secret, born 44 years ago deep in Manchuria in Japanese POW camps. Theirs perhaps has been the longest and best kept secret of World War II, long denied by Japan and long concealed by the U.S. Government…. Bit by bit and year by year, despite our government’s public statements of ignorance, the truth has been leaking out. We know now that Mukden was more than just another Japanese POW camp for Allied soldiers….Operated by Japanese scientists from Unit 731, Mukden was a site for deadly chemical and biological experiments, for injections, body dissections, blood and feces tests, freezing of body parts, infection of wounds with anthrax, the applications of plague bacillus, cholera, dysentery, and typhoid….That.. Was what was waiting for many of the American fighting men who survived the Bataan Death March? Along with our soldiers at those terrible camps were also men from China, Great Britain, Australia, and the Soviet Union. We don’t know how many survived, but we do know that the U.S. government knew of the experiments at the war’s end.”[19]
And many communities and citizens of the U.S. have a lot more in common with the people and victims of China than with “their own” government for sure. I only half-agree with the statement of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1967 in his “After Vietnam” speech, often not quoted: “The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today—is my own government”.
Well I agree with half of his statement and it still applies, even more, than when he spoke it in 1967, that the U.S. Government is, and has been for some time, “the greatest purveyor of violence [terrorism] in the world today”. But that Government is not and never was, “ ‘my’ government” or even MLK’s government. And just as lies beget more lies, and violence begets more violence, so U.S. Imperial violence against innocents abroad, eventually causes “blowbacks” to be used against American citizens at home:
“And during the 1950s and 1960s, the Army and the CIA conducted numerous experiments with biological agents within the United States. To cite just two examples: In 1955, there is compelling evidence that the CIA released whooping-cough bacteria into the open air in Florida, followed by an extremely sharp increase in the incidence of the disease in the state that year.[20]
The CIA received the bacteria from the Army’s bacteriological research center at Fort Dietrick, Maryland.] The following year another toxic substance was disseminated in the streets and tunnels of New York City.[21]
The cover-up continues to this day including in the findings of the War Crimes Trials of the German and Japanese war criminals that were basically cover-ups and selective prosecution as in the case of the Nuremberg Trials.
Cover-ups of facts like: that some 380 U.S. corporations continued to trade with the Axis powers throughout World War II; that one-third of the trucks used by the Nazis were produced during the war by Ford Co; that the German Focke-Wulf 190 aircraft and fighter, that shot down many allied aircraft, was produced through subsidiaries by the American ITT Corporation that was even given actual “reparations” payments for Allied bombings during World War II as late as 1967; that Coca Cola developed the soft drink “Fanta” to refresh Nazi troops.[22] Also:
“The story of Japanese bacteriological warfare implicates more than half the persons tried by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and moiré than 5,000 others who worked on the BW program in some capacity. It involved a genuine conspiracy of silence…Allied prosecutors from half a dozen countries affected by the issue remained silent at the Tokyo War Crimes Trial about what they knew…The Chinese [Nationalists]…must have lived in hope of gaining some kind of quid pro quo for their silence….The Russian authorities who sought to raise the matter…allowed themselves to be silenced…What seems quite incredible is that the cover-up conspiracy—for it is by no means a demonological exaggeration to speak of it as a conspiracy—was maintained throughout the three years which elapsed between the Japanese defeat and the conclusion of the Tokyo trial…and that…the conspiracy was sustained for so long afterwards.” [23]…”how many survived, but we do know that the U.S. government knew of the experiments at the war’s end.” [24]
Why do I say that the Tokyo and Nuremberg War Crimes Trials were cover-ups and show-trials? Am I saying that those tried and executed or imprisoned did not deserve their fate and worse? No I am not saying that. I am only saying that there is a whole lot of secret history, very damaging to many U.S. Government notions of “democracy”, “city-on-the-hill-leader” of “civilization; etc. Real trials, without fear or favor, would have revealed all sorts of ugly crimes on all sides at Nuremberg and Tokyo.
For example, take those evil German and Japanese “Scientists” who used live human beings from many nationalities, including American POWs, for their barbaric research into “genetics”, “immunology”, “bacteriology” and “biochemistry”, etc. What were they looking for and what and who inspired them? The answer can be found in the history of the British and American “Eugenics Movement” that began in the late nineteenth century in England and spread rapidly to America.
This is the Eugenics “movement”, with many conferences in America and England during the early 1900s, that was forging policies and laws through networking and connections that later showed up in Nazi Germany as models and templates for Nazi “Race Hygiene” theories, policies, laws and extermination campaigns.
These connections and shared “research” and “research paradigms”, produced the 1928 Alberta [compulsory] Sterilization Act first used in Canada against my own ancestors Blackfoot and other Indian nations along with the 1933 British Columbia Race Hygiene Law.
The “Eugenics Movement”, in which Theodore Roosevelt was very prominent and active, also produced the “sterilization laws” of 27 U.S. states that defined poor Whites, along with all African-Americans, Indians, and disabled people, as “feeble-minded” to be sterilized as a mandate of law.
These specific laws, the Nazis specifically cited in speeches and documents as their inspiration for their 1933 Race Hygiene Law and 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws.[25] In fact, not only were U.S. and British sterilization laws and inspiration for the German and Japanese racial laws and constructs about “race” and “racism”, but from Hitler’s own mouth, in his “table talk” recorded by Martin Bormann, his inspiration for the possibility of genocide, for the possibility of covering–up and even gaining mass participation in and acceptance of genocide, came from his reading of U.S. and Canadian histories with respect to “treatment” of Indians:
Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa And for the Indians in the Wild West; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination-by starvation and uneven combat-of the ‘Red Savages’ who could not be tamed by captivity.[26]
And from the Canadian side, while using literally the same language of the Nazis:
“It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habitating[sic] so closely in these schools, and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this alone does not justify a change in the policy of this Department, which is geared towards the FINAL SOLUTION [emphasis added] of our Indian problem.”[27]
From an internal document of the Bureau of Indian Affairs:
“Set the blood-quantum at one-quarter, hold to it as a rigid definition of Indians, let intermarriage proceed, and eventually Indians will be defined out of existence. When that happens, the federal government will finally be freed from its persistent Indian problem.” [28]
Tibet as an Historic and Integral Part of China
My father had an opinion on Tibet as being an integral part of China. He did not know a lot about Tibet and had been only as close as Chongqing (Chunking then) in China. But he was aware of some of the history. He knew that the Tibet before Liberation in 1949 was a place of barbarism under the Tibetan aristocrats and rich monks who kept the serfs illiterate and brutalized.
He did not know about a Nazi expedition in 1938, of five hard-core Nazi SS “scientists” two of whom, Ernst Shafer and Bruno Berger, unrepentant Nazis, who became life-long friends (along with another life-long Nazi, Heinrich Harrer) of the so-called current “Dali Lama in exile”.
He did not know that these life-long Nazis and close friends of the Dali had praised the cruelty in Tibet in 1938 as a “model” of the kind of cruel Nazi society they wanted to create[29].
But my father did see the wartime newsreels and the maps that portrayed Tibet and Taiwan as unalienable parts of China. And of course there was the official position of the U.S. Government that recognized the claims of the Peking Government over Tibet for over two centuries, which was well known and broadcast, in all the wartime newsreels on China and in the “Why We Fight Series” of Frank Capra on what was at stake in China and the war against the Axis powers.
It was not until after 1949 that the U.S. Government began to make moves to try to suggest and deny Tibet as an integral and historical part of a wider China that has included different minority groups ruling a broader China over hundreds of years.
This was the official position of the U.S. and Allied governments in 1943, as it was on Taiwan as a part of China, when allied with the Kuomintang forces, but also supposedly with Red Army forces as allies as well. This was testified to in Congress as the official policy and understanding of the U.S. Government with respect to Tibet as an integral part of a broader China:
“The Government of the United States has borne in mind the fact that the Chinese Government has long claimed suzerainty over Tibet and that the Chinese constitution lists Tibet among areas constituting the Territory of the Republic of China. This Government has at no time raised a question regarding either of these claims.” [30]
U.S. Imperial Social Systems Engineering (SSE) Campaigns Against China
US encirclement, destabilization and “regime change” began by the U.S. Government in the 1870s with long-run intentions for “final conquest” of Asia, long before being employed against socialist social formations starting with the Bolshevik revolution in 1917.
They were also conducted against independence forces who were U.S. allies during World War II of the U.S. in Europe and Asia, even while the U.S. was still at war against their mutual enemies Germany and Japan[31].
Hard-core Nazis, Japanese fascists and war criminals, and Italian fascists, along with Eastern European fascists and wanted war criminals, were all put on the U.S. Government payroll and placed in very high and influential positions. The U.S. Government looked for weak links to exploit and Tibet was one of them early on:
“After the communist revolution, Washington officials tended to be more equivocal about the matter. But U.S. actions against Tibet had nothing to do with the niceties of international law.”…By the mid-1950s, 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 often referred to picturesquely as ‘the fearsome Khamba horsemen’, and others who had already engaged in some guerilla activity against Peking rule and/or the profound social changes being instituted by the revolution (Serfdom and Slavery were, literally, still present in Tibet). 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. There, hidden away as much as possible from the locals, they were trained in the fine points of paramilitary warfare.” [32]
The same set of “regime change” tactics, and the rationales to justify them, were employed in so many places for the same reasons and interests served: Taiwan 1946-; Italy, 1948; Korea, 1950; China 1945-; Hungary, 1956; Vietnam 1945-; Chile (their own “9-11”) 1973[33] and so many other places past, present and those openly and covertly targeted for future SSE campaigns.
Now imagine for a moment another—reversed—scenario. Suppose one of the over 200 hundred separatist and secessionist groups that actually exist in the U.S. today[34], were composed of wanted criminals in the mainland (many are) and waged a successful takeover of say the Government of Alaska and declared “The Republic of Alaska” (ROA).
Suppose further, that this ROA asserts itself to be the only legitimate “Government” of “all of America”. Suppose further that the Government of China recognizes this ROA, presents it in the UN as the “only and sole legitimate Government of all of America”. Suppose further that the Government of China sells lethal arms to this ROA; signs basing, arms and intelligence-sharing agreements with this ROA; sells state-of-the-art weapons to this ROA; even garrisons Chinese military troops and intelligence bases on Alaskan soil.
Imagine that China sends all sorts of Red Missionaries to America: demanding that “freedom of conscience and religion” be respected for communists as well as non-communists; demanding the “right” of Chinese immigrants and visitors to demonstrate, fund dissidents, engage in subversion and espionage.
Suppose they form alliances with dissidents and engage in sabotage, kidnappings, poisoning water supplies, burning crops etc. Suppose they occupy, protest publicly against “U.S. [mainland] imperialism and state-sponsored terrorism”; and engage in civil unrest or whatever no matter any U.S. laws.
Suppose the Chinese visitors and tourists and visiting officials came to America, claimed that their notion of “human rights” in China is only correct one that they have every right to apply their concepts and meet with whom they wish, while staying in America.
Suppose the Chinese leadership ask to visit American Indian political prisoners like Leonard Peltier and to visit Indian reservations and ghettos. Imagine all that, along with all sorts of embargoes, sanctions, threats of nuclear attack, all of which are terrorism, aimed firstly at non-combatants per se.[35] Some concrete examples:
“The communists in China had worked closely with the American military during the war, providing important intelligence about Japanese occupiers, rescuing and caring for downed U.S. airmen.[36]… But no matter. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek would be Washington’s man. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS, forerunner of the CIA) estimated that the bulk of Chiang’s military effort had been directed against the communists rather than the Japanese. He had also done his best to block the cooperation between the Reds and the Americans. Now his army contained Japanese units and his regime was full of officials who had collaborated with the Japanese and served in their puppet government. … “But no matter. The Generalissimo was as anti-communist as they come. Moreover, he was a born American client. His forces would be properly trained and equipped to do battle with the men of Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai.” [37]
Flash forward today, that describes the present situation for China vis-a-vis Taiwan and formerly in Hong Kong and Macao plus what is still going on covertly, and overtly, through NGOs etc, in Xinjiang and Tibet and elsewhere in China. It is called social systems engineering.
The idea is to, as Nixon put it with respect to Chile: “Make the economy scream”. The idea is to gather various kinds of scientists and “scholars” from diverse academic disciplines, coupled with military and intelligence expertise, to identify the commanding heights, key levers of power and vulnerabilities of a targeted society[38].
They study and apply pressure to the four basic spheres or dimensions of any location: lithosphere, atmosphere, hydrosphere, and biosphere. The four basic dimensions of any social formation are also targeted: economy; politico-legal; socio-cultural; historical-geographic:
As in the case of America and Canada, the new supposed “Republic of China” of Taiwan, was built on terrorism and dispossession of Indigenous peoples along with despotism:
“The Generalissimo, his cohorts and soldiers fled to the offshore island of Taiwan (Formosa). They had prepared their entry two years earlier by terrorizing the islanders into submission—a massacre which took the lives of as many as 28,000 people” [39] … “In 1992 the Taiwan government admitted that its army had killed an estimated 18,000 to 28,000 native-born Taiwanese in the 1947 massacre.” [40]
“Prior to the Nationalists’ escape to the island, the US government entertained no doubts that Taiwan was a part of China. Afterward, uncertainty began to creep into the minds of Washington officials. The crisis was resolved in a remarkably simple manner: the US agreed with Chiang that the proper way to view the situation was not that Taiwan belonged to China, but that Taiwan was China. And so it was called.” [41]
The idea is to put a society under such siege, from so many directions, in so many ways, that the U.S. engineers the “proof” of the supposed inferiority of socialism (and also supposed “despotism”) of the targeted regime that has been driven into emergency measures typical of any society under siege or perceived to be so.
The U.S “Patriot Act”, passed without one Congressman reading it, and other such as “emergency measures” to deal with terrorism. This is also used to show supposed superiority of multi-Party “pluralism” over single-party political rule.
The idea is to force massive diversions of scarce resources from urgent imperatives and priorities of development, and addressing historical legacies of imperialism, into ongoing and more costly defense expenditures. A “tit-for-tat” dynamic of U.S. aggression and covert/overt operations against China or other targeted systems that then trigger both back-channel protests and overt responses from China or a targeted social formation.
The responses by the target regimes are caricatured and misrepresented, used to publicly marginalize, demonize, isolate and make possible further SSE campaigns and built alliances against the target. Of course the covert provocations against the targeted regime are denied, while the over responses of the targeted regimes are caricatured and portrayed as the paranoid rants, deception, etc of those targeted and under siege.
The Social Systems Engineering (SSE) Process looks something like this:
Imperial Social Systems Engineering Campaigns [“To make the economy scream”. Nixon]
When China and other targeted nations protest and try to argue for respect for international law no matter by whom or against whom, they are labeled “an existential threat” and targeted even more for “regime change”. When the regime reacts, as will any under siege and slated for regime change (e.g. emergency measures, national security acts etc), this is taken as “evidence” of the supposed “despotism” of not only the regime, but of the whole social system being targeted.
In March 1966, Secretary of State Dean Rusk spoke before a congressional committee about American policy toward China. Mr. Rusk it seems was perplexed that:
“‘At times the Communist Chinese leaders seem to be obsessed with the notion that they are being threatened and encircled’. He spoke of China’s ‘imaginary, almost pathological notion that the United States and other countries around its borders are seeking an opportunity to invade mainland China and destroy the Peiping [Peking] regime’. The Secretary then added: ‘How much Peiping’s fear of the United States is genuine and how much of it is artificially induced for domestic political purposes only the Chinese Communist leaders themselves know. I am convinced, however, that their desire to expel our …influence and activity from the western Pacific and Southeast Asia is not motivated by fears that we are threatening them.” [42]
This is but a small example of so many SSE campaigns that included repeated threats of nuclear annihilation causing costly diversions of scarce resources into civil defense away from development:
“The Chinats [KMT in Taiwan] in Burma kept up their harassment of the Chicoms until 1961 and the CIA continued to supply them militarily, but at some point the Agency began to phase itself out of a more direct involvement. When the CIA, in response to repeated protests by the Burmese Government to the United States and the United Nations, put pressure on the Chinats to leave Burma, Chiang responded by threatening to expose the Agency’s covert support of his troops there. At an earlier stage, the CIA had entertained the hope that the Chinese could be provoked into attacking Burma, thereby forcing the strictly neutral Burmese to seek salvation in the Western camp. [New York Times, 25 April 1966, p. 20] In January 1961, the Chinese did just that, but as part of a combined force with the Burmese to overwhelm the Nationalists’ main base and mark ‘finis’ to their Burmese adventure. Burma subsequently renounced American aid and moved closer to Peking.” [43]
The other front of attack in social systems engineering (SSE) is frontal and covert “soft power” attacks on culture, values, language, education, institutions, economy, alliances and the like. Here the real target is the young and those individuals and institutions that will teach and shape them from which future leaders will come.
The older generations they mainly wait for them to pass on and in the meantime put them under siege or schmooze them if possible, to put their own ideas and life experiences, as well as leadership under siege. What is interesting in that as they push political pluralism abroad, the U.S. Government does its most to preserve the traditional two-party duopoly that has run America since its foundation even as there is no requirement for only two parties is anywhere in the U.S. Constitution. Why is that?
Political “Pluralism” and Concentrated Power
Do the math. In the U.S. and in many places, only about 70% of the potential electorate is even registered to vote, of whom maybe 48% of those registered show up to vote on the major elections. Say now, you have only two political parties (we ignore the reality for the moment of no real difference between them) and the candidate of one of them takes and election with 51% of the vote.
That person’s “mandate” is .70 x .48 x .51 or about 17% of the potential electorate. This potential electorate is also made smaller through various tactics such as voter and voter registration suppression and intimidation, denial of convicted felon’s right to vote for life in some states, police harassment at the polls, etc.
Add to this multiple political parties, and you have a recipe for what America is: a bloated, decaying plutocracy; what City Group called in a leaked classified memo to their largest speculators: a “plutonomy”.
It works the same with stock dispersion and concentration of voting power where it takes less than 10% of voting stocks for effective control of a large corporation as dispersions of stocks widely, mean that small groups can hold control with relatively small concentrated percentages of the total dispersed votes.
Thus “pluralism” and dispersions of votes actually can and do lead not to dispersed or “democratic” structures of popular control, but even more concentrated power with the illusions of “democratic dispersion” and “pluralism” of power and control.
And of course masses of people are saying this all over the world. Even in the U.S., the percentage of the electorate (which is smaller than those who can register or actually vote) that calls itself “non-partisan” is higher than the respective percentages of the electorate calling themselves Democrats or Republicans.
The unfavorable ratings for the U.S. Congress and both political parties are in the high 70s to 80s (favorable around 12%) in polls expressed as percentages of the total electorate.
But the U.S. still insists that political party pluralism, and elections are the essence of “democracy”. The intention however, is to use such “freedoms” elections, freedom speech, religion, assembly, association etc, with a focus on the young who do not know about this secret history we are discussing, to build the kind of society in which these very “freedoms” will be abolished for the many used by and under the rule of the few.
China Bashing Today
The reality of globalization and China’s rising role in it, coupled with the mounting and unprecedented fiscal and other crises in the West, means that the old U.S. Cold War machinations have limited utility or are even disastrous for the U.S. and the world.
But the threats remain. In 2002 portions of the U.S. Nuclear Posture Review was leaked with a “Doctrine” (I love how that word, with a capital D, is used to dress up naked terrorism, bullying and naked violations of international law) that announced a policy of developing new generations of “tactical nuclear weapons”, possible preemptive strikes of nuclear weapons even against non-nuclear nations, and, under certain conditions, against a pre-specified target list” of 7 nations:
“A leaked version of the Bush administration’s classified nuclear posture review lists seven countries against which the United States should be prepared to use nuclear weapons and outlines a broad range of circumstances under which it could do so. The document also calls for a large-scale revitalization of the nation’s nuclear weapons infrastructure and discusses the development of new or modified nuclear weapons…The review states that “greater flexibility” in nuclear forces and planning is needed to maintain a “credible deterrent” against adversaries “whose values and calculations of risk and of gain and loss may be very different from and more difficult to discern than those of past adversaries.”
Discussing “requirements for nuclear strike capabilities,” the report lists Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, and Syria as “among the countries that could be involved in immediate, potential, or unexpected contingencies…The Bush review also indicates that the United States should be prepared to use nuclear weapons against China, citing “the combination of China’s still developing strategic objectives and its ongoing modernization of its nuclear and non-nuclear forces.”
Finally, although the review repeats Bush administration assertions that Russia is no longer an enemy, it says the United States must be prepared for nuclear contingencies with Russia and notes that, if “U.S relations with Russia significantly worsen in the future, the U.S. may need to revise its nuclear force levels and posture.” Ultimately, the review concludes that nuclear conflict with Russia is “plausible” but “not expected.” [44]
Just that leaked document alone, protested by the Chinese Government for good cause, causes terror and more diversions of scarce and precious resources from development, and, taking millions of people out of poverty, eradicating the legacies of isolation, imperial plunder and past and present SSE campaigns into defense.
This is especially in the context of the real history of U.S. imperial campaigns against China only a very small part of which has been documented so far in this essay[45]. The idea of SSE campaigns all along is to covertly provoke and engineer, instability and crises on all levels, in targeted socialist and other targeted social formations.
These are intended as crises that will hopefully, from the U.S. imperial perspective, form a critical mass for “regime-systems change”. And as in the past SSE campaigns and U.S.-inspired uprisings (e.g. Bush administration and the uprisings of Shiites and Kurds in southern Iraq in 1991; Mujahideen in Afghanistan 1979; Hungary 1956) we find all sorts of present-day examples of the U.S. covertly instigating, giving covert aid, cheer-leading and giving green lights for revolts and uprisings of groups that their U.S. patrons then later dumped and left to face their opponents.
This was done, and is still being done in China (Tibet, Xinjiang, Yunnan,) in the 1950s to the present situations in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
And the Blowbacks[46] continue to this day with severe shocks to a global ecology, populations, societies and the global economy, causing suffering for may innocents, due to two illegal wars founded on cherry picked intelligence and lies fueled by massive and unprecedented levels of U.S. and European debt.
We see today in America, ad after ad, politician after politician, decrying the U.S national debt and that part of it is owed to “China”. We hear over and over about “being in debt to “the Chinese”; never any concern about debt to Germans, British, Canadians, or even Japanese. We hear about supposed trade-deficits with China; yet the list of embargoed and export-prohibited items to China from the U.S. lengthens[47].
Many of these so-called “dual-use” commodities, while denied China even today, were routinely shipped to all sorts of unstable regimes in crisis (later labeled terrorists). They were shipped even to those under sanctions at the time, including to Iraq and Iran, during the 8-year Iraq-Iran War that cost over one million casualties.
We know now, for example, that while China still remained isolated and embargoed in many ways in the global community, the U.S. Government, through Israel as a cut-out, was secretly arming Iraq and Iran during the 1980s war between them (instigated by the U.S. giving another green light to Saddam Hussein to attack Iran as the U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie did in 1990 to attack Kuwait[48]) while demanding international isolation and sanctions against Iran, and, over and over, calling the Government of Iran liars for asserting they have no intention of developing nuclear weapons and consider them un and even anti-Islamic.
We know now that Saddam Hussein, as in Indonesia and so many other places, was given by the U.S. Government in 1983, lists of some 43,000 suspected “communist” radicals against him (later all executed summarily) and given intelligence on Iranian forces that they did not even pass to the Israelis. In fact, among the nations recently targeted for “regime change”, Libya and Syria were destinations for the CIA extraordinary rendition program for torture unlawful in the U.S. (subcontractors in torture).
Of the nuclear nations, only China has an announced policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons. And today with China, as with Iran, we have proved liars in the U.S. Government, who lied the U.S. into illegal and aggressive wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere, calling the Chinese and Iranian governments liars with respect to their intentions and policies on a wide range of issues.
These are the ones who have acted as real threats keep calling everyone else some kind of “existential threat.” And what does that term even mean? Most who use it have no idea about Existentialism as a philosophy.
They simply mean that someone or some system’s, mere existence, because it is different at the root, must be taken—and summarily eliminated–as a threat (simply because only we have the truth and virtue on our side) without having to show any kind of actual plans, intentions or actions that are threatening and imminent.
It says my way or we destroy you and your system. It says the U.S. Government cannot and will not tolerate any values or systems different than that of the U.S., or in the way of asserted U.S. “national interests” as only the U.S. Government can and will define them.
Even as China is the largest foreign creditor of the U.S., as well as holder of U.S. dollars, the U.S. Government have learned only to tread more carefully even as the intentions against China remain the same as those announced against the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 by Winston Churchill discussing the invasion force of some 13,000 troops from the U.S., Canada, Britain sent to strangle the Bolshevik Revolution:
“Were they [the Allies] at war with Soviet Russia? Certainly not; but they shot Soviet Russians on sight. They stood as invaders on Russian soil. They armed the enemies of the Soviet Government. They blockaded its ports, and sunk its battleships. They earnestly desired and schemed its downfall. But war shocking interference—shame. It was, they repeated, a matter of indifference to them how Russians settled their own internal affairs. They were impartial—bang.” [49]
But SSE campaigns against China and other targets will never eliminate or diminish the widening and deepening contradictions within the social formation of America—Imperialism—nor diminish the widening and deepening contradictions between it and other social formations in an increasingly interdependent and thus more dangerous world. It only makes it all-the whole global system—worse.
As the American Revolutionary (and known “terrorist” of his time along with Samuel Adams) Tom Paine put it in a different context [of fellow conspirators against the British Crown]: “We must all hang [live] together or surely we shall all hang [die] separately.”
Indeed the Government of China in 1949, despite their own horrible experiences and differences in ideologies and systems with U.S. Imperialism, despite suffering some of the crimes that I have documented here from the U.S. Government’s own internal documents, the Government of China, from 1949 on, tried repeatedly, to forge relations with the U.S. on the basis of principles of international relations since the so-called “Treaties and Peace of Westphalia” in the 1600s.
These principles, seldom respected over the centuries and still evolving, include: mutual equality; mutual respect; mutual non-interference in internal affairs; mutual benefit; mutual accountability to international law; mutual pledges to non-use of war to settle inter-nation disputes that have global spillover effects on many innocents and non-parties to national conflicts; mutual respect for national sovereignty; mutual right to self-determination and independence; mutual right to development of national and indigenous economic political systems to fit national needs and institutions; etc. As but one of many examples:
“Yet short of an all-out invasion of the country by large numbers of American troops, it is difficult to see what more the US government could have done to prevent Chiang’s downfall. Even after Chiang fled to Taiwan, the United States pursued a campaign of relentless assaults against the communist government, despite a request from Chou En-lai for aid and friendship. The Red leader saw no practical or ideological bar to this.” [50]
Where would China and indeed the world be today if the U.S. had simply, in 1949 or earlier, respected the basic international law it demanded for itself and done the following?:
1) respected the same international law applied to China as it demands and asserts for itself;
2) formed alliances really on the basis of professed American values and institutions (democracy, respect for diversity of thought and opinion and systems);
3) looked long-run, to credibility as a strategic asset, and refused to cut the ugly and hidden Faustian deals with evil (evil many times the creation of U.S. Imperialism itself as in terrorist groups now against the U.S. that were once creations and instruments of it) under the banners of all sorts of “noble causes”;
4) competed ideologically, systemically and peacefully with results, not braggadocio, showing the positive contributions and real achievements of capitalism, supposed to benefit many;
5) show what their system, capitalism (also an integral part of the broader socialist social formation of China historically and at this stage) and ideology can do for the many in need;
6) cease trying to slander, destabilize, isolate and demean a supposed enemy that never acted like one, in order to engineer perceptions of a supposed “existential threat” by China, to make socialism look unable to solve basic human problems, and thus inferior in comparison, to a mythical version of capitalism in the textbooks, that has never existed in human history.
Terrorism and “Existential” Threats
If the definition of terrorism is accepted as simply a set of tactics, without regard to by whom or against whom, and if terrorism is defined as violence in whatever form (physical, psychological, cultural etc) directed against non-combatants, or directed with indifference to violence suffered by non-combatants, then the U.S. Government is, without doubt, the primary, largest and most deadly source of state-sponsored terrorism in the world today—and has been such for many decades.
The reasons for laws of nations, international law and indeed law itself on any level, are not only to protect the parts from the whole (the minority from the majority) but also to protect the whole (majority) from its competing, antagonistic and sometimes warring parts.
Further, in multi-party systems, with only a fraction of the potential electorate voting, it is very easy for fascists and the like, to use the trappings of faux “democracy”, and rights such as “freedom of speech”, “freedom of assembly”, supposed “free elections”, along with some increasingly sophisticated technologies of mind control and persuasion, plus big money sponsors in backrooms, to gain political and other forms of power and abolish for all people, even their own kind, the very same “democratic “rights” that were invoked to take power.
These tactics have been used by fascists since the term “Fascism” was coined by Mussolini. As Hitler once put it:
“Only one thing could have broken our movement: if the adversary had understood its principle and from the first day had smashed with extreme brutality the nucleus of our new movement.”[51]
And:
“Hitler had gone to the meeting with his mind made up on two objectives which his mind which he intended henceforth to pursue. One was to concentrate all power in his hands. The other was to re-establish the Nazi Party as a political organization which would seek power exclusively through constitutional means. He had explained the new tactics to one of his henchman Karl Ludeke while still in prison: ‘When I resume active work it will be necessary to pursue a new policy. Instead of working to achieve power by armed coup, we shall have to hold our noses and enter the Reichstag against the Catholic and Marxist deputies .If outvoting takes longer than out-shooting them, then at least the result will be guaranteed by their own constitution. Any lawful process is slow…Sooner or later we shall have the majority—and after that Germany.’ On his release from Landsberg [prison] he had assured the Bavarian Premier that the Nazi Party would henceforth act within the framework of the constitution… [On February 27, 1932, after labeling Marxists and Jews as ‘the enemy’]: ‘To this struggle of ours, there are only two possible issues: either the enemy passes over our bodies or we pass over theirs.’” [52]
The So-called “Peace and Treaties of Westphalia” in the early 1600s, came out of decades of the newly-formed nation-states, (and the new legal construct of nation) going to war against each other, committing the most barbaric crimes on mass levels, and not only nearly destroying each other, but leaving a trail of carnage on the innocents. They all knew and used the bag of tricks of empire builders.
The warring nation-states had all come up with lies and pretexts to justify going to war against each other. They had all used pretexts to interfere in their internal affairs of and destabilize each other. They had all claimed to have some kind of God or form of “Manifest Destiny” on their side and being “destined” to rule the world.
They had all asserted rights for themselves that they denied other nation-states. They had all claimed imminent danger and the imperative for preemption for survival. They had all used fear, division, ideology, religion, Xenophobia, mysticism and other common tools of divide-and-rule along with “managed consent.”
In today’s world, as we see it shaking all over at unprecedented levels, with the local wars having wider and deeper impacts on a global level, and with WMD that can take out the whole planet, we need now, more than ever, institutions, relations and principles that recognize the global reality of increasing global interdependence and widespread spillover effects on other nations and the whole global economy as we are seeing more and more every day.
A superpower or imperial-dominated world is a doomed world for so many reasons including that where there is oppression, there will be resistance; but not all forms of resistance lead to where those resisting want to go or think they want to go; and the same applies to those who trigger and then try to suppress legitimate resistance.
Yes it is true that genocide within one’s borders is not a matter of national sovereignty; not only as a matter of international law, but as a matter that internal genocide creates global spillover effects on other nations (e.g. Middle East in the present). But concern about genocide elsewhere, when really going on in one’s own country as in the U.S. and Canada, is also often used as a pretext for war, SSE campaigns and interference in internal affairs of a nation.
But when you have nations like the U.S. committing genocide against indigenous peoples inside the U.S today, as is the case also in Canada by the Canadian Government (the legal status and conditions of Indigenous nations in the West, never integral members of a wider nation, are not comparable to that of national minorities in China who have been integral, and at times ruling elements of a larger historical China for many hundreds of years) while they dare to lecture anyone about human rights is priceless.
The Nazis, before their attacks on Czechoslovakia, Poland and other nations, put out propaganda a films showing supposed forms of genocide against Germans in areas of those nations and portrayed their invasions as “liberation”.
Further, it should be noted that the nations on the past and present lists for “regime change”, presently under siege and on the edge of civil war such as Syria and Libya, with the US Government cheering on for uprisings, some of these nations and regimes targeted for “regime change” were among the regimes to which CIA sent alleged al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners involved in CIA “extraordinary rendition flights” for forms of “special handling” in interrogations they could not by law do in the U.S. They included: Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gambia, Israel, Jordan, Kenya, Kosovo, Libya, Lithuania, Mauritania, Morocco, Pakistan, Poland, Qatar, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Somalia, South Africa, Thailand, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan, Yemen, and Zambia.
But I fear that the call for U.S. Imperialism to be sensible and stop its reckless hegemonism, hubris and notions or “Doctrines” (of Triumphalism; Exclusivism; Preemptionism; Unilateralism; Hegemonism; “City on the Hill”; “Beacon of Decency and Progress”; “Leader of the ‘free’ World”) even if only in its own interest, as it is also required the survival of the planet, is a call that is simply utopian. The word utopia is based on the Greek words: “eu-topos” or a good place and “ou-topos” or a place that cannot be.
Once, in the 1980s at the University of Washington, I had the pleasure of a lunch with Mr. Kim Dae Jung of Korea, the former presiden