The history of US intervention in East Asia is crucial background to understanding world events and the balance-of-power today. This week on
The Truth Perspective we're going back in time to explore some of that history with James Bradley, a
New York Times #1 bestselling author of four books about US involvement in East Asia.
These are, in chronological order:
Flags of Our Fathers, co-written with Ron Powers,
Flyboys, a True Story of Courage,
The Imperial Cruise, A Secret History of Empire and War, and
The China Mirage: The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia.
His books can be found via his website at
JamesBradley.com. Bradley has also spoken to audiences, appeared on TV and radio across the US and China, Russia, Japan, and Europe, and penned op-eds in major US newspapers.
Join us today for a conversation with the author, from 4 - 6pm UTC (12 - 2pm EST, 6-8pm CET).
Running Time: 01:37:17
Download: MP3
Here's the transcript of the show:
Niall: Hello and welcome to the Truth Perspective on the SOTT Radio Network. I'm Niall Bradley and today is Sunday, June 18, 2017. This week on the show we're taking a break from the endless madness in the news to get some historical perspective on how things got the way they are.
So several weeks ago we had the opportunity to interview an author, James Bradley. He is no relation of mine. He's the bestselling author of four books on US involvement in east Asia and the wider Pacific. Unfortunately we had some technical difficulties at the time which meant that we lost the beginning of that interview. We still have a good hour of it though, so rather than let it just collect dust in the files we've decided we're going to air it. I will just give a brief introduction to his books then we'll play it for you.
So there were four books, all of them New York Times bestsellers I believe. First is Flags of our Fathers. That was actually made into a Hollywood movie. Then there's Flyboys - a True Story of Courage. The two books that we're most interested in - the ones that we read actually - in part because they give a wider perspective on US/Chinese and US/Japanese relations and indeed on relations with other east Asian countries. They are his two most recent books: The Imperial Cruise - The Secret History of Empire and War and The China Mirage - the Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia.
So the Imperial Cruise concerns the 1905 diplomatic mission by then-secretary of war William Howard Taft as well as the larger implications of then-president Theodore Roosevelt's foreign policy, particularly with regard to Japan. The book exposes the blatantly racists and exploitative policy of the United States in its attempt to extend its influence into the Pacific Rim, acquiring Hawaii by conquest and the Philippines by purchase from the Spanish after ostensibly entered the conflict to aid the Filipino freedom fighters. That American occupation was marked by torture, repression and mass murder of the very people they had come to help. So that's The Imperial Cruise.
The China Mirage was James' fourth and last book. This details American involvement in China since the 19th century during the height of the opium trade through the conclusion of the Second World War and Mao Zedong's rise to power. The premise of the book is how the US failed to understand Asian cultures that led to poor decision making by policymakers in the US state department as well as by both president Theodore Roosevelt and his cousin Franklin Roosevelt. Ultimately Bradley make the suggestion that the war in the Pacific, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, would have been avoided had president Franklin Roosevelt not been unduly influenced by the China Lobby that supported Chiang Kai-shek.
So much of this is covered by James in our interview with him. Some of the earlier conversation - obviously we went back to the origins as sketched out in his book of this time period - and the earliest conversation was about the drugs trade and the resulting opium wars in the mid-19th century. I should warn you now that you're going to hear every now and then thunderclaps and possibly pouring rain in the background of this. That was because we were interviewing James when he was in Vietnam where he's currently researching for his fifth book. It was obviously raining cats and dogs at the time. It must have been some kind of monsoon event. However it won't affect the audio. I think you'll still be able to hear him loud and clear. I think his location is a clue to what his next book will be about - the Vietnam War.
In summary, both of these books, Imperial Cruise and the China Mirage, there is some overlap between them. There certainly is in terms of the time period that's examined, so the mid-19th century roughly to the mid-20th. Obviously you cannot fill in everything that happened in that time. But the book isn't really about any one country. It's about the relationship, the dynamic that went down between the US and these countries, primarily China because as you'll see, the US relations with countries smaller than China were all framed by the question of how the US could develop its access into China proper, into the mainland of east Asia.
So the story kind of begins in the mid-19th century or early 19th century with the opium wars. That's an incredible episode in itself. James briefly sketches it out in The China Mirage and thus begins what, from the Chinese perspective, is the century of humiliation. The country itself was never completely colonized, but it was piece-by-piece being carved up and the way in which that happened was via the mass importation of opium into the country. It's very well established with no historical argument really about what went down. What's probably not clear to people though is the scale of it. It was incredible.
Basically in the space of half a century China went from having an enormous trade surplus, particularly with the European colonial powers and then particularly with the British empire, to having a massive deficit. The incredible amount of silver and other precious metals and currencies that the Chinese had built up was essentially drained out of the country in a very short space of time. And that was in large part because of the western powers, particularly the British empire, striking gold, so to speak and what this was, was instead of paying for goods from China in hard currencies, they realized they could sell drugs into China for enormous profits and with the proceeds from that they could export goods produced in China and raw materials out into the west and all over the world. It's horrific to think of it that way but that's how it was. It was a gold mine. It's basically one of the things that made the British empire as powerful as it became.
The Chinese of course were dead set against this. I'm thinking of the elites of the country of course and the people as well. They did not like this one bit. But it was too lucrative trade. It enticed some of the traders in southern China in particular, even when it was outlawed and was all made illegal, it still continued to take place offshore. Eventually the Chinese authorities put their foot down and there's an incident where the young emperor I believe, sent a letter to Queen Victoria in London pleading with her to stop this and pleading a moral case saying it was immoral to essentially push drugs on their country and to profit from it.
The British answer was more or less to send gunboats to China which by then were superior in their fire power and to sink Chinese ships and to fire the ports and thus began the first opium war. The upshot of that was the beginning of the colonization of parts of China, the opening of treaty ports where finally western traders were legally allowed to be in China where up until then they'd been kept out or kept at an arm's distance anyway. They could continue to trade in opium and of course in other commodities and a lot of people got exceedingly rich, not just in the UK, not just in Europe but in the US because people across the so-called civilized world were enticed by this opportunity to get into China. It had long been acknowledged as being an incredibly wealthy part of the world in terms of the sheer number of people. It's always been extremely populous relative to other countries, in terms of the sheer number of raw materials that passed through there or are from there and in terms of the sheer number of high quality manufactured goods that come from China.
So this is not a modern development. When you associate "made in China" with just today, made in China has been the way of things for a long, long time. If anything we're now only returning to that status quo.
Anyway, the US wanted in on a piece of the cake and they weren't the only ones. The Russian empire too was coming down from it's only specific region and wanting ports just like all the other imperial powers at the time. The first opium war gave, if you like, the western powers a foothold and where this ties in with our story really is that the first Americans to arrive there became some of the wealthiest. Some of them were wealthy to begin with but really, when you think of the US elite families, the east coast, the ivy leagues, all this, these people cut their teeth on what they knew then, what they called euphemistically the China Trade. But the China Trade left out the part in brackets where it was the China Trade, i.e., the opium trade. That was substantially what they were dealing with there and a lot of people got fabulously rich and this money began pouring back into the US as it did into the British empire and the French too of course.
James Bradley details in his book how some of the biggest names during what was for the US at the time this period of development. It's industrialization took place then. It's hard not to see the way that things connect, that it looks quite like - I can't remember if Bradley stated this explicitly - but it looks as if the US industrialization took place pretty much thanks to the incredible profits made from selling opium to the Chinese people because then these very powerful families emerge. They used their money well, if you like. They reinvested in the country and the US's first big public hospitals, some of its biggest buildings, its biggest cities are substantially built from the profits made from the so-called China Trade. Harvard, Princeton, there were already some foundations for these ivy league universities but they substantially became "ivy league" as a result of the money that poured in.
So anyway, one of the families that did extremely well was thanks to a man named Warren Delano. Warren Delano was the grandfather of both Theodore Roosevelt who was US president at the turn of the century around 1900 and later Franklin Delano Roosevelt, US president for four terms in the 1930s and 1940s. That gives you an idea of the connection with the power between doing well in China and what it meant to the capitalist class if you like, to get access to Chinese goods and Chinese labour and US power.
So that's some background on the entry into China. Basically thereafter it remained a case of opening it further, and keeping it open. The big strategic thing of the day was the open door policy and this was negotiations between the emerging US empire and the European empires as to who gets what of the Chinese pie and more broadly, access to east Asian resources, both people and goods. Everything else that follows from that is basically a consequence of the management of this open door policy. I'm talking about the Spanish-American War, perhaps not WWI exactly, but certainly WWII, certainly the Pacific theatre of WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, all these major events of the 20th century arose because of this primary geostrategic concern of the 19th century.
The open door policy entailed getting access to China. They had a foothold from the first opium war and then the second one gave the US even more of a foothold but it remained the case that they could not colonize the entire country. The population was almost half a billion already at that time. Furthermore, because it was so large, because they were competing with each other, the open door policy stipulated that no one country could get to dominate all of China and thus it was a case of managing access and dividing the spoils between the various European and US empires.
So that is the rough overall context in which James Bradley tells you the stories. It's really one story but I suppose it's across two books, of how the specific characters, particularly the US president Theodore Roosevelt in The Imperial Cruise went about ensuring the US dominance in east Asia or at least ensuring that the US was not pushed out by the European powers in China specific. You will see that our interview with James picks up at a point where we're discussing what mentality the Americans and the Europeans included, had in going to China and Asia and what justifications they gave for prying open these countries ostensibly for trade and sharing culture but of course in reality it was for plundering and domination.
One of the things that is brilliantly described in both books actually, is the explicitly racist rationales given for US expansion and European expansion of the time. If you were to hear this today it would be so un-PC (politically correct) you could probably be put up for hate speech. But back then this was just normal. In universities, heck in the media among the common people it was commonly understood that the white race was the superior race and that it was tasked with - by god or whoever or whatever - with taking over the world to help it of course, to civilize it, to bring the light of civilization to the world over.
And Bradley does a very good job of showing the mythos, particularly in this context, that the US elite had in justifying doing what they were doing. As they saw it, and in a way they saw it correctly, they had come from Europe, their ancestors, arrived on the east coast of the US. They had colonized the whole continent to the Pacific coast and then why stop there? They were on a mission, they believed, to carry on westward to "follow the sun". They were the Aryan master race.
Now if you're thinking "Hang on a second, that's Hitler's stuff", no, Hitler was a Johnny-come-lately to this kind of mythic narrative building. This was common among the British and American elites in the late 19th century. They were the Aryan master race destined to conquer the planet and it was explicitly stated and it was propped up in policy, it was stated in the media, it was taught at the universities. It was an explicit, scientific racism. There was a hierarchy of racism and the white man was top.
Of course it was crazy but we know that. It was crazy also in that it was logically inconsistent in itself. Let me give you something that ties in with what's going on today, the incredible Russophobia. So people are bringing up this idea that "It's a continuation of the Cold War you see. The US was the capitalist society and the USSR was the communist one so it was a conflict of ideologies." Okay. "And we have some kind of inertia involved because Putin's the leader, he's trying to recreate the USSR so yeah, it's still a Cold War and that's why they're bad." It's logically inconsistent, right?
Well get this! Back in the day, the same kind of attitudes were held about Russians even though arguably Russia then behaved more like the western countries. They had an empire too and they were expanding. I'm going to quote Bradley here. This is his commentary on it. "Roosevelt realized that the Russian extension of the trans-Siberian railway meant that China's riches would flow overland to Europe rather than across the Pacific to the United States." You see there that's the geostrategic... I mean, that's the 19th century and they're thinking big picture there. That's Eurasian integration stuff. "How do you ensure that Russia is blocked from doing what we want to do?" A professor of the time Franklin Giddings of Columbia University warned, "The great question of the coming 20th century is whether the Anglo-Saxon or the Slav is to impress his civilization to the world."
Roosevelt went to Harvard himself and he would have heard all these ideas about the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race and that it was charged with taking over the world to save it. Bradley writes in The China Mirage, "Roosevelt learned about the glorious destiny of the 'higher races' and how the Aryan had arisen in the Caucasus to found the white race, migrated to Europe to become the Teuton and then gone on to the British Isles to morph into the most superior race of all, the Anglo-Saxon."
It's ludicrous to us today, because we've since heard it from the mouth of Hitler and it will be forever tarnished by that. That mythic arc will only ever be taken by a fringe minority and never go any further. But that was the dominant narrative of the time. Like I said, Hitler was late to the show. This was being taught in universities. Just think of the madness of that. So they're on a mission. They're from the Caucasus and then they went to Germany. Actually Roosevelt would say later in speeches how our great people arose from the forests of Germania in the Roman era and eventually came to Britain, became perfected and then came across the seas to the US and on we go. We're carrying the torch now to China.
Political discourse was rife with this kind of stuff at the time. So that's kind of where we lead into our conversation with James. I'll just say one last thing. The books are very well written. They're easy to read. There's two basic story lines and then it peels off to one side or another at different times to give you some more detailed background of the specific events. So for example, the colonization of the Philippines. If you want to understand where Rodrigo Duterte, the current leader of the Philippines is coming from with his remarks about US colonialism, you read these books and you'll understand why. This guy remembers his history. Okay, so without further ado I'll pass you over to our interview with James Bradley. Enjoy.
Joe: The last question was, I asked, if there was a qualitative moral difference between western white people and Asians, let's say or specifically Chinese in terms of their world view and you were saying something that led up to you referencing a historian. You kind of cut off at that point so we weren't sure exactly what you were saying so if you remember what you were saying maybe you could just take it from there.
James: I was saying I don't think there's a qualitative difference between any humans. We are all motivated by the same thing. So there's really no difference between east and west morally, but in terms of practice you can judge it morally. I'm just a historian documenting.
Joe: Right.
James: That the United States started on the east coast and that was an invasion. That was an invasion of another country just like Iraq. And then we invaded all across the geography from Virginia. Why did we really want the revolution? Because George Washington was a surveyor and he was surveying land beyond the Alleghany mountains. And London had a problem. They had Cape Town in South Africa and they had the east coast of America and they didn't want to fight every African in Africa and they didn't want to fight every Indian in America. So they said to George Washington and the boys, "You can't go beyond the Alleghany mountains." And they said to the Capetonians "You can't go beyond this." And both rebelled and both expanded.
Well in the American expansion we killed all the natives. This is not an accusation or a shock or I'm not trying to make anyone feel guilty. I'm just a historian. If you walk across the United States, there were people there that don't look like me and now there's people that look like me. So that's the history of every country. The reason the Yamato people are in Tokyo is because they killed all the Ainu. The survivors went up to Hokkaido. It's the history of every country, so east and west. But in terms of expansion with military-industrial might, that's a western phenomenon.
Joe: Right. And do you think the industrialization in western nations seemed to give them that edge where they were able to sail around the world and if necessary, blow up coastal towns in order to force an agreeable economic situation?
James: It's the same today. Nothing's changed. When you talk about the drug money back in the opium times, how many London banks have paid fines for facilitating drug cartels? Really? How many of the biggest name, mainstream banks in the world are rigging markets and get caught once in a while moving drug money. Drug money is so huge, where is it going? None of the banks are participating? It's an old story but it's a new story. It's today's story.
Joe: So in that sense then the reason that the US for example and the British and whoever else participated, could dominate and force the Chinese into accepting these fairly punitive economic deals was because it was a case of might makes right. The Chinese couldn't defend themselves, didn't have the military prowess to defend themselves or to fight against the west's industrialized militaries. It's kind of as simple as that in a certain sense.
James: Yeah. Well so what's the question?
Joe: Is that pretty much the bottom line, that there's nothing ideological about why the Chinese submitted to these punitive trade agreements with the west? They were forced to by western military might?
James: Oh definitely. Again, I learned in school Vasco Da Gama went out of Portugal and I learned about the wonderful school he studied at and how he had foresight and he was a discoverer. I didn't realize that after he got around Africa he went to India and went to a town and bombarded it and then some of the leaders came out to negotiate and he hung them up from the ship's whatever so the town could see. You know! It's called international commerce.
Niall: And as soon as the US was more or less from coast-to-coast it seems like there's a couple of stories that began and one of them ended. The first story I have in mind is the beginning of US imperialism as it was being practiced at the time by the Europeans.
On the other hand, it only had a short lifespan because there was another development taking place. Maybe there wasn't enough of the world left to colonize so that ended and there was a different kind of economic conquest or control at a distance that began to take place.
The reason I'm separating these two things is because the US had a brief colonial period and it was substantially in the Pacific. Can you tell us a bit about the Philippines? Why was the US in the Philippines and what came of that?
James: Okay, so I agree that if you read American history you're going to say that statement you said, that America had a brief outburst of colonialism and I would rather restate it that from the 1600s we built the country on colonialism.
Niall: Right.
James: I'm from Wisconsin. It took the whites from Europe about 200 years to get from the east coast of the United States out to Wisconsin. Well Wisconsin, that's an Indian name. My hometown is an Indian name. There's no Indians in my hometown. So we colonized the whole country then in the 1890s some intellectuals - you read it in The Imperial Cruise - some intellectuals said "Oh my god! We ran out of killing! This has fed us. We're the barbarian in the jungle and we're fed by this. We've grown by this." And you can look at economic charts. "We're America. Look what's happened because of what we did!"
So we got to San Francisco to the California coast and we said "By Jesus, we'll just take the army that did all this killing and we'll just move it out to another tribe." And there's beautiful books on the Philippines that were produced in the 1890s that said the tribes of the Philippines. The tribes of the Philippines? What do you mean? Well there's Chief Whatever and in this area there's Chief Whatever and I can understand it. I was an American. I owned a house in Wyoming or California or New Mexico. All this was going on because I killed the people who had it. I got it.
So we went out to the Philippines. And let's take Hawaii and Guam. Why? Because those are the highways. Those are the transit points to empire. So this was Teddy Roosevelt. We'll have these jumping off posts - Hawaii, Guam, and then from the Philippines, it's an aircraft carrier just like Japan. Teddy Roosevelt thought he already had an aircraft carrier with Japan pointed at China and the Philippines would be another one. It would have been a lot cheaper and millions would not have died if he had just rented some warehouse space in Hong Kong. We didn't need to take the Philippines. Later in his life Teddy Roosevelt regretted it, said it was a huge mistake but he never told the American public that.
Niall: Right. This is what's crazy about it. If It's about making money, well there's ways to do that. But this is about more than that. Like you said, the frontier couldn't come to an end. There had to be somewhere else to send the fighting men. So there was this kind of strategy in mind, even before Roosevelt, right? Whereby they were thinking China is a great prize. We need to get access to China. We need stepping stones along the way so that our ships can refuel and the Philippines was sort of that, but at the same time they went whole hog and tried to colonize and manage and run the country and it was a disaster. Is that actually taught in US schools, just how much of a disaster it was?
James: Let's go back to these poor Americans. The problem is you Brits! They looked at the Brits and Admiral Perry in 1853 when he went to Japan, he was ashamed that he had to go from the east coast of America, not even the Pacific. America was so weak and so infrastructure undeveloped in terms of the world that they had to sail along their British cousins' routes. And the English could laugh at them and London on the coasts of Africa. Then the Americans had to beg for coal in Capetown from the English. Then they went to India where the English were in the process of killing a lot of people and it's all British, British banks. I'm an American. I'm an admiral, 1853. There's not even an American bank out there. Singapore, I have to deal with the English. I'm humiliated.
Theodore Roosevelt said we're going to stop taking the British highway to Asia. Here's our chance. And he built a navy that sprung out. Come on! Hawaii? Everyone in the world wanted Pearl Harbour. That's a wonderful port to project power. Well Japan's an aircraft carrier. Philippines is an aircraft carrier. We had to do it the Pacific way. The English had already done the Singapore/Hong Kong thing.
Niall: This is an interesting point because the British empire beforehand had set the standard for what is civilization and the standards then for how to go about maximizing the benefits of it and so the US was following in its wake, so to speak.
James: Can I interrupt for a second?
Niall: Yeah, sure.
James: For your listeners, I don't want to make this sound like some conspiracy theory, like this is secret. No! If I went to Harvard they actively said "Come on! You have to come to the conclusion that the white race is superior." As Theodore Roosevelt said "The evidence is we're spreading over the majority of the earth." The Africans were at the white feet. Asia was at the white feet. So it wasn't really much of a debate. And for you to think that the whites were not superior, give me your evidence?
Joe: I suppose it depends what you mean by superior. Okay, superior doesn't necessarily have to be a pejorative term or it doesn't have to be a positive term either. It just is what is, right? But there's a well-known contemporary of Teddy Roosevelt in the UK and Great Britain, Cecil Rhodes. You probably know of him.
James: Well I've been in his home in South Africa about two months ago.
Joe: Oh yeah? Well then you know him pretty well.
James: I got married in South Africa in 1979.
Joe: Oh yeah? Wow.
James: Cecil Rhodes, yes.
Joe: He's an interesting character to say the least. For me he embodies that spirit of the white man's colonialism at that time in particular and there's a quote attributed to him, and I'm paraphrasing here, but he was basically lamenting the fact that most of the world had been colonized at that point and he mentions looking up at the stars and seeing these worlds so far away and laments that fact that they're so far away because if they weren't so far away he would colonize every one of them.
So for me that's a particular mindset. I'm sure the vast majority of people on this planet don't necessarily when they look up at the stars think "Oooooh, if only I could get my hands on those how rich I would be" or something. So for me it just seems that there was a particular mindset amongst the leaders of colonial Britain and then in the US afterwards that wasn't necessarily shared by the rank and file of the ordinary people of those countries and in terms of what they did and how they did it, as you said, racism wasn't around at the time, it was just what was.
I don't know what I'm trying to say here. I just think that there's something particular about the mindset of these people who led the British empire and its colonialism and the Americans afterwards that sets them apart from the average person but I suppose maybe that's self-evident.
James: I think everything you said, if you replay it, you could say it about today or any day in history.
Joe: Yeah, right, that there are always people who are the leaders basically, who are doing these things. And I suppose my only issue with it is that as you've mentioned about this part of American history and the fact that a lot of America was industrialized, partly anyway, via the profits from opium, from selling drugs basically and the history of the British empire for example, is whitewashed in British school books, very much so in terms of the excesses of what British forces did overseas, and other European countries as well.
It's not really told and I'm not sure it would be a benefit for people to know the true history of this or what, if anything it would change, but it just seems to me strange that because it's actively removed from the school books is that a conspiracy or is that just part of the way things happen in the sense of people not being interested in the more sordid side of the history of their nation and what was done and they prefer to look at the positives?
It doesn't necessarily have to be conspiratorial from a government point of view, hiding the truth of our history and what we did to the poor people of the world. And the only reason that today we in the West are wealthy and the top rank of the world's nations, our wealth is based on the exploitation and the impoverishment of many other people around the world. If that's not told, and it's not told, an alternative whitewashed history is told that puts a positive spin on it, then there's more popular support for a continuation of these policies today that are spun also, as for example in the Iraq War, freedom and democracy, civilizing the people of the world and stuff. I suppose that's not a question.
James: No, but I'll leave your statement as it is.
Joe: Okay. As Niall was saying earlier on about your two most recent books, they're focused mostly on Japan. There's a lot in there on Japan. It's not so much about China, but if we could maybe bring it up to today. What's your perspective on what's going on in Asia today in terms of where China is, vis-ร -vis the US, and where Japan is? There's a lot going on with North Korea. There's a lot of disinformation and media spin. But what's your take on what's going on in Asia today, vis-ร -vis the US?
James: Well, pick a country. Do you want to talk about Korea or China?
Joe: Yeah, the recent stuff on Korea particularly.
James: I'm an American so maybe one's my number one slogan or the number one word "land of the free" maybe. Let's think of it. Okay, Korea. What are the three words that all Koreans through the centuries, or the eight words? Korea is the shrimp caught between two whales and the saying is "When the whales collide the shrimp get crushed". So the fact that Russia, China, America, Japan, everybody in the world can get focused on the Korean peninsula because that's the keyhole. That's where Japan invaded China. Thirty million dead! Right through that Korean keyhole. That's the keyhole that Teddy Roosevelt gave to Japan, killed 30 million people. That keyhole has been very dangerous for China. That keyhole, the American military napalmed and bombed and unbelievable, North Korea was a molten glass whatever. You can't say we bombed it. It's so small we ran out of sites almost immediately because we had bombed them all.
So we kept bombing and bombing. There were molten glass sites. We were boiling the rubbish, for years. So what we did to North Korea is unbelievable. So if I was a North Korean I would be a defensive mode and I'd get nuclear weapons.
And then what's very interesting is that if you go across America - I'm in Vietnam right now but I just went across the Americas to talk to Americans, they've got images of a crazy young kid shaking his fists at America. Those images are very clear and they see him in the newspaper. They see him in the magazines. They see him on TV. They see him on their computer. They're really well told and the story of the crazy Asian is really well told.
Well if you look at a couple of my books you'll see Teddy Roosevelt told that story about how the king of Korea was so crazy that he had to give it to Japan. And that resulted in 40 years of enslavement of the Korean people and then that's where Japan launched WWII into China.
So these great ideas about Korea, it's a tinderbox. Now let's talk about the crazy boy that everybody thinks we should kill, the president is asked "Do you think he's sane? Is he sane or insane?" Well Bill Clinton was a racist in office.. Is he sane? Let's have some sanity. Anthony Weiner just was a congressman. He just cried in federal court regarding his paedophilia, okay? He was going to be in the White House close to Hillary. So insane? Just a minute! This guy's insane? Let's talk about insane!
So you get the United States military, number one in the world that's still pissed because they didn't win in Korea. That's what people have to realize. All these Americans went to Korea and they didn't gain an inch. The border held because China can't allow a foreign power to get up to its border. The last time they did that guys, 30 million Chinese died! Japan was an aircraft carrier. When Japan invaded China and killed 30 million Chinese, with whose oil and steel? Franklin Delanor Roosevelt's oil and steel! You've got to look at it. This is not an accusation. Wall Street was so happy when Japan went into China. It takes a lot of oil and steel to kill 30 million Chinese. Up until Pearl Harbour we were fine to support the military industrial complex in Japan. It was a profit centre.
Niall: Something changed. Do you know what changed? Why was it if everything was fine?
James: About what?
Niall: Well if they were happy to essentially see Japan's military build up with Californian oil, what changed then for that to end and for the US and Japan to end up in a war?
James: It was okay when Japan was on the leash. That was Teddy Roosevelt's idea. Well let them jump on to Korea but we've got a leash. We're the white man. And they'll only go as far as we want. This is all documented. In The Imperial Cruise he's having discussions talking about how far he'll go, the Japanese are bowing to him, oh yes sir, we would never go beyond that line.
Niall: Right, but then they invaded China.
James: They wanted to go beyond the line!
Niall: Yeah.
James: They got a bunch of militarists in who said "Hey, we don't have to be the pawn of America. We'll do it ourselves." Well when you want to do it yourself then it's regime change.
Joe: Right.
James: So why Pearl Harbour? It's hard to say in a sentence but when Franklin Roosevelt went to see Winston Churchill up in Canada there's so many books and pictures about it, but as you'll see from the China Mirage, while he was gone these geniuses in the deep state - just like they're manipulating Trump - they manipulated the Japanese deal where they cut off the oil and Roosevelt didn't know. If you read history books you'll read "We cut off the oil and it led to war." Well if you spend about a year-and-a-half trying to get the documents about this as I did, you'll learn that Roosevelt didn't cut off the oil. Congress did not cut off the oil. The American public on the day they cut the oil didn't know we cut the oil. This was done by the geniuses of the deep state.
Roosevelt learned a month later and politically had to accept it as a fait accompli. Well guess what? Before Roosevelt even knew, the emperor was being told "Unless you do something dramatic we're going to die. It's the end of Japan." So Roosevelt doesn't even know. He's up there singing songs with Winston Churchill up in Canada and the emperor of Japan is being told "Roosevelt did this and if you don't do something huge it's the end of Japan."
Joe: So are you suggesting that the deep state, cut off the oil deliberately to provoke Japan into something like Pearl Harbour and to get America into the war in the Pacific?
James: No, no, no, no. First of all, I'm not suggesting anything. I've documented it. So there's no thesis or hypothesis. I'm talking about the book The China Mirage in which I document that the deep state geniuses who did this believed that it would bring peace!!
Joe: Really?
James: Because the Japanese would never face the strength of America. They can go fool around with Chinese, an inferior race!
Joe: Right.
James: But they never fought a big white man from the University of Alabama! The little Japs, why they would never ever - we can do anything! We can cut off the oil and piss on it. They're just an American client and this will bring peace to Asia.
Niall: It'll reign them in, they thought.
James: No but why? It'll reign them in! See the Japanese need our oil and steel to kill the Chinese. And we were fine with that but now we realize they have a mind of their own so we're going to cut that off. And then the Japanese military machine will grind to a halt and then guess what? Moderates in the Tokyo government will take over because we're the deep state. We've got all the strategies. We went to George Washington University and Georgetown University and Yale and we have a lot of time and money to spend. So we're going to cut of Japan's oil and that will result in the humiliation of the military therefore moderates will arise in Tokyo and just trust it! Well okay, but hey, why don't you tell the American people or the president? Well because the president doesn't get it and the American people never get it. So they cut off the oil. Another genius move.
Niall: In their calculations this would force regime change and problem solved. But as you've explained, at every stage, every time they come in and they say "We've got to do this way, problem solved" it rarely works out that way. One of the key things I think, and I'd like you to talk about it a bit, that is the cause of this mirage in the US about how things were in the east, and particular in China, was the China Lobby. I think this is a key part in all this because it's sort of like the elites in China told the elites in the US exactly what they wanted to hear and then they were completely blindsided by later events. Can you explain, what was the China Lobby?
James: Well first of all Google and Facebook now are in a sense running the internet and there's bad words you can't use. Hello?
Niall: Yes.
James: I didn't know if they just cut us off for me saying that.
Niall: No.
James: By the way, just to bring your listeners up to date, I'm in Con Dao, Vietnam, the island of Con Dao and it's raining tropical cats and dogs.
Joe: Yeah, we hear it.
James: Can you hear the rain?
Niall: We can hear that.
Joe: We heard the thunder beforehand too.
James: Oh my god! The lightning just went so you're going to get some thunder. So I hope the listeners aren't too irritated by the background noise.
Joe: It's very calming.
Niall: You're still clear.
James: So what are we talking about then?
Niall: The China Lobby. I think it's an important part in understanding how the myth...
James: Oh, the China Lobby.
Niall: Go ahead.
James: The China Lobby is a word suppressed. Just like Google and Facebook now are suppressing, editing, they call it trying to help us but it's censorship. So the China Lobby is such a hot term. The China Lobby was formed in the 1930s with Franklin Roosevelt and it rose from a little power defending Chiang Kai-shek and Taiwan in the 50s. Huge political power. But in 1960 a guy writes a book called The China Lobby and he has a contact. He writes the book. The editors edit it. They print it and somebody visits his editor, McMillan, and all of a sudden the book's not published, not only not published, all the copies are burned.
And it takes another 14 years for it to come out in paperback. So the word China Lobby has been excised. Everybody Will say "What's the China Lobby?" But it was this huge force. So in Washington, D.C. the Washington newspapers wrote about the China Lobby as having enormous influence from Franklin Roosevelt to Richard Nixon. Amazing!
So I don't know if your listeners know the story about how Richard Nixon committed treason by asking the president of South Vietnam not to agree to LBJ's Paris peace talks conditions until after the election. Well that message was transmitted by Mrs. Chennault, the key member of the China Lobby. That was 1968, LBJ election with Humphreys. 1968! China Lobby was begun back under Franklin Roosevelt. It has enormous power.
I'm not talking conspiracy. We've got to get it simple. Right now the world's complicated, the internet and people can fly in an airplane to China. Back in the 1930s nobody went to China. Come on! It's a three-month trip. So yeah, maybe you were in a lecture with someone who went to China but you didn't know people who went to China and you didn't know any Chinese. It was illegal for Chinese to be in America. We had the Chinese Exclusion Act. So you were white, you were protestant and you didn't know any Chinese.
So there's this extremely wealthy Rockefeller-style family in Shanghai that knows how to talk to Harvard people like Franklin Delano Roosevelt. They know how to dress. They know how to talk about Jesus. They know quotes from the bible. They know Shakespeare. They went to Harvard, Wellesley, they spent decades in the United States and they learned what America wanted. And what America wanted was the China Mirage. America looks at China and thinks "Someday they'll be like us."
So you know the famous quote from the Vietnam War movie Full Metal Jacket, when the sergeant comes up...
Niall: Yes.
James: ...and says "What's inside every gook...
Niall: gook.
James: ...is an American waiting to come out." So today Americans are waiting. "When will China democratize? When are they going to get rid of that horrible communist leadership and experience freedom?" This has been going on for 300 years in the American mind.
Niall: Yeah.
James: So they're imagining that America has the better way and that China can get towards it. Well China's building this idea in the world, the silk road and we better get going. They have a few centuries of experience doing things well. But the China Lobby's purpose was to get money from Franklin Roosevelt for Chiang Kai-shek. So Chiang Kai-shek married into this family called the Soong family and there was a banker Soong. I can get into the details, Madam Chiang Kai-shek. There's books written about it. There's books written about every one of these characters. And then Chiang Kai-shek opposed Mao.
So one of the Soong sisters went towards Mao. The other two went to Chiang Kai-shek. The Chiang Kai-shek sisters propagandized into the United States just like you do today with millions of dollars paid to journalists who are not journalists. We supported Chiang Kai-shek. So we gave Chiang Kai-shek, the loser, more money than we paid for the atom bomb. And then after he lost we said "Oh, we'd like to make an announcement. China has ceased to exist. China is now this island in the Pacific, Taiwan." Well why? There are 600 million people in China and there's hardly anybody from Taiwan. Why is Taiwan officially China now? Well because Chiang Kai-shek is there. Oh. So all my life I was told that I couldn't go to China because Mao wouldn't let me in. He hated Americans so much he wouldn't let me in. I didn't realize it until later, it was my State department that kept me out. Mao would have welcomed me but the United States said "Mao and you 600 million, you're not real Chinese."
So this might sound ridiculous to the audience but I'm 63. For the majority of my life my country, my leaders said this island in the Pacific, this is the country of China.
Niall: And Mao's China was the false or communist China. Among the countless light bulbs that went off in my head reading your books was an understanding now I think of the beginning of the red scare after the second world war. I found this episode fascinating. Can you explain about John Service and the China Hands and how that led into McCarthy's witch hunt and this fascinating paranoia about who lost China?
James: Okay I will but after I said that Taiwan was China you said yes and Mao's China was communist China. No! The state department said it didn't exist. There was non-recognition.
Niall: Right.
James: We didn't say there was a communist China and a Taiwan China and you can go to either one. We said it's too evil to even exist. We won't even talk about it. So one journalist, Walter Cronkite, name all the famous journalists you know from the 1950s. None of them went to China. Too intimidated. They just reported State Department handouts like they do today. So one reporter from Baltimore goes to China in the 1950s. It's such an event Time Magazine reports on it. An American reporter went to the biggest country in the world! Are your listeners realizing? America says the number one country in the world with the most people, now I think that would be an important country to know something about. It's illegal to go there and we don't want you to go there and we don't want any information about it.
So a reporter goes there. When he gets back Dwight Eisenhower takes his passport away. So we don't know about China. Look at the campaign. What we know is China rapes the country. China's unfair. Front page of the Times "China just shot 10 CIA guys."
Niall: Yeah.
James: China's indescribably bad and they need a change. And the change is they should become more like America.
Niall: This has been the belief since the beginning. Today it's China has to be democratized. Then it was a fervent belief, reinforced by the Chinese Lobby, namely very powerful Harvard-trained Americanized Chinese, that "Yes, any day now China's going to embrace America, it's going to become Christian even."
James: Can I interrupt?
Niall: Sure.
James: That's where the money was. "Any day China's going to be Christianized." You saw the letters and the articles. New York Times, Time Magazine, Life Magazine. "The Chinese are straining, trying to be just like us. They want to have a San Francisco, a St. Louis, a Miami. They want Christian churches, potluck dinners! And if we just support Chiang, he's trying to get it through their thick heads! You're laughing but this is no theory. You can see it in the book.
Niall: Yeah.
James: And the Americans are like "Wow, we're challenged by the depression. We have our own insecurities. Europe, they're snobbish. But here's this country wants to be just like me." So every week when my grandparents went to church, "Now we'll take up a collection for the missions in China".
Well what does that mean? That meant that there was a missionary from our community. Now it might not be our local town or it my neighbourhood, but in some circle, some ring, there was somebody out in China and he would write letters back and the letters were about the progress. They guy sitting there for five years making no converts and the Chinese are laughing at him, and he's writing letters. "We're praying to god and there's hope." Nothing's happening and we're funding this missionary thing which is a multi-million dollar assault on China. And it comes out of the east coast, mostly Maine and a lot of east coast money. "We're going to save the pagans."
And then all of a sudden this military guy, this Chiang Kai-shek - you can make up your own opinion about him - says "I want to be the military ruler of China. China's all fragmented. And I'll marry into this China Lobby woman - Mei-Ling Soong." They have a funnel into American money. So all of a sudden the guy's talking about democracy. He slits people's throats. He sleeps on top of dungeons where they're being tortured but he becomes an expert on democracy and Jesus Christ and the bible.
Niall: He becomes a southern Baptist.
James: Oh he wants to get baptized. into the religion of his wife who was their conduit into the United States, southern Baptist religion. So all of a sudden he just understands Jesus and wants to bring China to Jesus. Not Jesus to China. But he's going to bring all the Chinese to Jesus and an American Jesus. Franklin Roosevelt perceived the vision of the China Lobby. Wow! The two biggest countries in the Pacific are going to unite and it'll be okay because China wants to be just like America.
I'm not kidding you but you can see Franklin Roosevelt writing those words in my book.
Joe: And there's no evidence that there was actually any will amongst any significant percentage of the Chinese population that they were inclined towards Western Christian values, right?
James: Yeah, but that's the point of the book. The president's ideas didn't go to China. They went to somebody in a room who told him this is what the Chinese believe.
Niall: Yeah, it was a feedback loop that kept the mirage going.
James: Yeah it was a feedback loop. It was a mirage. So the Americans were talking to each other. Henry Luce built Time-Life. Like CNN, fake news, baloney.
Niall: Yeah.
James: So he called Henry Luce. "Mr. President, I think that if you give $100 million it'll send 100 million volts of electricity through China and they'll see our commitment and redouble their commitment to become Christians." Okay, well thank you Mr. Luce." A hundred million dollars, a hundred million volts of electricity.
Niall: Shock therapy.
James: And see the Chinese are just these dumb little people. They need to see that the master cares and if they see that the master cares they'll see that we're kind and they'll want to become Christian. And I'm not making this up! So my grandparents, the listeners' grandparents, whatever, went to church and put in dimes and nickels. This turned into millions of dollars for the missions in China. And the mirage was they want to be just like us.
So the China Lobby comes to America, goes to school. They study "How do Americans think about China?" "Oh, they think we're all going to be Christians! It's a joke! But we'll feed it back to these idiots." So they go to Time and the New York Times and Washington. They have this huge machine that says "Let's go to church. Let's read the bible together. China just can't wait for a Rooseveltian democracy. New deal? We're going to call it the New Spirit. Roosevelt goes nuts. They're copying the New Deal.
So there's sophisticated propaganda and they milk Franklin Roosevelt for more money than he spends on the atom bomb.
Joe: Was there anybody in the US government at the time being more practical or being more honest I suppose, about the reasons for that because that kind of a narrative a person tells themselves doesn't have any basis in reality. It's usually for the point of achieving some other goal and obviously other practical goals would be getting access economically to China. Was there anybody actually talking in practical terms about why we needed to get access to China, over and above the "They want to be Christians"?
James: Well of course. As I said, Warren Delano, the grandfather of Franklin Delano Roosevelt was very clear about why he should go to China - to make a million dollars.
Niall: Right. There were some people in China. At this point, the 1930s, there's been 80-some years of American missionaries going to China, living there and raising kids there, so there are some Americans that are born in China and some of them leave their gated communities and they inevitably learn the language and meet the people and actually understand where they're coming from and they observe what's really going on there.
What I'm getting to is what I asked about earlier. I'd like...
James: Yeah, John Service.
Niall: ...you to talk about John Service because he stands out from the madness of the mirage.
James: For the listeners, we're not talking about somebody inconsequential. This is John Service. This is a nice man. He's born in China, missionary parents. He's a good boy but he's just interested in the truth. So he's the kind of boy that would go outside the gate and look around and talk to Chinese people. He's the kind of boy that when you send him to a private school in Shanghai, some of his idiot friends would just sit in a room and look at the wall and look at a book and he'd go outside the school and walk across Shanghai. He was a great runner, tall, good-looking guy. So he's walking around Shanghai. He's seeing the poor, but he's going where the teachers wouldn't let him go. But he's just intellectually curious.
He comes back to the United States and he says "I want to help out China and America" so he applies for the State Department - and this was brilliant. He doesn't just know Chinese. Do you know how many languages are spoken in China? If you say you know, nobody knows.
Joe: Nobody knows.
James: So he's multilingual. He knows a number of different dialects, north, south, east, west, it's a long story. And he's a great catch for the State Department. So he's in China in the '30s and he's listening to what Franklin Roosevelt is saying and he knows Chiang Kai-shek. He knows the China Lobby. He knows everyone. He's this up and coming guy in his late 20s, early 30s over this period of time and he's just an honest guy.
And he can see that Mao's the future. People were walking over mountains to get to Mao. People were running away from Chiang Kai-shek. The people were voting on their feet for Mao. No matter what you read - and you might get a billion complaints because I said this - but this is what happened. A mandate of heaven. So no matter what you think logically, a mandate of heaven is why president Xi can rule right now. It settled upon him. And the mandate of heaven moved to Mao and the millions moved towards him. And it was an illusion that Chiang Kai-shek had a chance. But the United States supported him just like they support all the losers that the people don't want, from Kabul to Iraq. Name the countries.
Niall: Right.
James: So Chiang Kai-shek we supported. Why? He was this Christian and blah, blah, blah. So John Service as a State Department employee, does something that became illegal later in the State Department, and that was telling the truth. And John Service made this huge mistake, that the China Mirage of the United States said that Chiang Kai-shek was the future and everyone wanted to become Christian and Chiang was their champion and he's sitting in China and seeing people running towards Mao and he knows Mao and he has lunch with Mao and he's in Mao's cave and he's talking to him.
So he does something again, that the State Department - this might shock you - if any current State Department people are listening, there used to be a time when someone in the State Department could tell the truth and John Service was so naรฏve that he told the truth. And he said it wasn't that he supported Mao. He didn't argue for Mao. He just said "We've got to wake up America. Chiang is going to lose and Mao's going to win."
Now for this, he was kicked out of the State Department. He was hounded all his life. He wasn't allowed to rent apartments in America, got hounded by the deep state and then finally after the Vietnam War which John Service could have kept us out of, warned against, the State Department held a ceremony to apologize to John Service for ruining his life, for calling him a traitor and they said "God, you're right!"
Well Henry Kissinger, the secretary of state, was on the floor above. He didn't attend because the China Lobby would have knocked his head off.
Niall: Nevertheless, within 10 years or so Kissinger is making the opening to China, right? And that changes everything again.
James: But can I just...
Niall: Sure.
James: Again, this is the American, western narrative. China opened up. Well I remember the first time I went to Beijing I was in that nice hotel on Tiananmen Square, the Beijing Hotel, and I'm watching reels of film about Beijing during my lifetime and Mao's welcoming the whole world. China was open to the world. The opening to China was America saying "We're going to open Chase Manhattan in Washington." We didn't open China. We said "We will stop ignoring China."
Now, let's talk about opening China. As you see documented in the book The China Mirage by me, Mao says in 1945 in a telegram to Franklin Roosevelt "Why don't I come and sit with you in the Oval Office and we'll talk this over? I'm going to win. I'm going to be the emperor of China. Chiang is going to lose. I'll bring Chou En-Lai." At that point Franklin Roosevelt could have met with Mao but the China Mirage prevented this.
So Franklin Roosevelt died. Mao Zedong doesn't want to screw around with America, doesn't want any wars. He reaches out to Harry Truman, but guess what? The deep state says, "You can't talk to guys like this" and Harry Truman fails to prevent the Korean War and the Vietnam. So Mao reaches out to every president. He sends a friend of his that he knew for 20 years to see John F. Kennedy. The friend got to the Secretary of State. The Secretary of State said "What do you want?" The friend, that famous author, Edgar Snow said "Mr. Secretary of State, China wants good relations." The Secretary of State gave him 10 minutes and kicked him out.
So North Korea wants to talk to America. The new president of Korea wants to talk to North Korea but the American press says North Korea is a threat, we have to deal with them militarily. That's not what South Korea thinks. America says "We have to put missiles into South Korea." That's not what the South Koreans want. They're rioting in South Korea but you can't see this in the American media.
So the China Lobby is not some big, strange, unusual thing. It's happening today. If anybody's watching any corporate media, they're getting variations of the same story and it's not true. Every country has propaganda. I'm not talking about white people in the United States. Every country has their own inbred racism, nationalism and propaganda. The problem is when the biggest country in the world right now, with the biggest military believe that they're not subject to propaganda, the Tao Te Ching, the ancient book of Chinese wisdom says "When the wise man thinks he's wise trouble begins."
Niall: It's one of the great things about what you've done, to dispel the mirage as it was then because it just makes so much sense for this kind of mirage that's still here with us today. There's something else. There's a particular story in all of this in terms of opening up and the US opening to China or China opening to the US and vice-versa. At one point in the 19th century, because of the US going to China, inevitably what always happens, inevitable there is trade, cultural exchange and people start to flow in both directions, right? Tell us the story about the Chinese who went then to the United States, especially to the western states. You mentioned it briefly earlier, the China Exclusion Act. What was going on that led up to what on the one hand was an open door policy for Americans in China, on the other hand was very much a shut door for Chinese in the US?
James: By the way Niall, where are you calling from?
Niall: We're calling from France.
James: Where?
Niall: Near Toulouse.
James: Oh. Well if my good friends from Toulouse go to the number one tourist site in the United States, New York City - not Disneyland, it's New York City - then they can go to the south point of Manhattan and invariably get on a boat to go to the statue of liberty. The statue of liberty of course was built in France, in Paris, a gift of France and at the bottom are those words that everybody in the world admires - give us your helpless you're free. We take immigrants. This is our history. There's a statue of liberty. She's beautiful.
Well at the same time that that statue of liberty was put up there we said "Chinese aren't human." So in other words French coming to New York were human. That I can understand. Chinese coming to New York, that was illegal. So the biggest country in the world, it was illegal for them to come in. Now what's the reasoning for Congress to do this?
Well as you see in the book, Congress studied the matter, must have cost a fortune in committees. This must have been my great-great-grandparents' time as taxes paid for this. And they came to the conclusion that the Chinese brain is too small to get democracy in it. The cranial circumference of the western white brain is bigger and we are more civilized so we can get democracy but those little Chinks, they've got those little noggins and you can't give them democracy and then we're going to exclude them. We stopped excluding them in 1963.
So if you were French or English and we excluded you as a non-human from 1882 to 1963, I wonder if any French people would remember that?
Niall: Oh yeah.
James: I wonder if that would influence French Americans. So that's how we thought about the Chinese. Now, there was a problem. Abraham Lincoln said "Let's build this railroad from this point to this point." Well this was amazing. So right now the Chinese are doing the new silk road around the world.
Niall: Yeah.
James: That's the biggest idea in the world. Well the biggest idea in the world at another time was when Abraham Lincoln said "Let's have a trans-continental railroad." I mean holy man! You put a railroad across a rich country like America, that's a major! Okay, so they start from the east going west and they start from the west going east. In the west they started in California and they're in San Francisco and they start to make the railroad. These are German, Irish immigrants mostly. White people. They built Germany. They built England. And they hit the Sierra Nevada mountains.
The Sierra Nevada mountains are all granite and they're full of ice and snow and they throw down their picks. You gotta bring in the Chinese. They built the Great Wall. The Chinese come in. They don't get drunk. They manage themselves. They're like peaceful and the governor of California says to the president of the United States "Without the Chinese we couldn't have built this railroad out here. The whites couldn't do it." So the Chinese build a railroad, that when they take the final picture of when the railroads come together, the picture you see in the history books, there's thousands of Chinese standing around but they're not in the camera shot. The Chinese laid the rails that are in the picture but then the whites pushed them out of the picture and took a picture with only white people.
Well the railroads fired all the Chinese. The project was done and they spread out across the country. Now if you look at Chinese, what do they think about? They think about being successful, the kids go to school, happy family, good food, save the money and go to bed early, get up early and they were very successful throughout the west. And Stephen Ambrose, the historian said every American western town had a Chinatown.
What's wrong with John Wayne movies? They don't have John Wayne waking up in a Chinese hotel, being served breakfast by a Chinese, his laundry done by a Chinese, his horse fed by a Chinese. The Chinese were extremely successful merchants all across the west and this pissed the Irish and the Germans off. Now the Chinese built a railroad we couldn't do and now they're making more profits than us. This racial fear came to a head and we started race cleansing.
So think of - I don't know - where are humans race cleansing right now? There was Bosnia before, Senegal, southern Sudan. Southern Sudan's a good example. Some guys come in on camels and they shoot everybody and separate the women and burn the stuff and take the valuables. So it became open season to do that to Chinese. And as you'll see in the book, it's documented. These white people came from their part of town into Chinatowns all across the west with guns and said "You've got 15 minutes to leave. Get on the train. Get on the ship." They marched them down to ships, ransacked their homes, stole everything, shot a number of them and concentrated them in San Francisco and a few Chinatowns.
So that's the history of the Chinese in the United States. They were non-human, below human. With the China Lobby they were accepted. They were Rockefellers. They went to Harvard. There was this elite. And the elite realized Americans look down on Chinese. They have no affinity for Chinese. They won't even let them in the country. But what Americans love is the China Mirage. They love the idea that China's going to become Christian. They have no evidence. They've never been to China but the idea, the pictures in Look Magazine, Life Magazine, Time Magazine. There's a new church in Shandong! A new cardinal went to Kunming. There's hope. As a missionary said out of Yale, "China was the north star. It was our guiding light."
Joe: Do you think the China Mirage still persists among US politicians today in the same way?
James: US politicians, what is that class of like, animals...
Joe: Of animals, yeah.
James: But US politicians come from me. I'm a citizen, so the quality of me creates the politicians. The US politician is me as an American citizen. The citizens create the politicians. They pay them.
Joe: In terms of say, the Trump administration today have you been able to glean anything about what their policy is towards China, if it's changed in any way?
James: Well Trump is being criticized in the press as just this idiot and then he's the first one to see that the biggest idea in the world is the new silk road project. So I'll talk to a Morgan banker, JP Morgan and he says "What's that?" Well it's only the biggest idea in the world and Trump sees it and he's trying. But he's being subverted by the deep state that would prefer he just go back to basics, "Come on! Japan's an aircraft carrier. China's too independent so we have to hate them and the front door is Korea. So we're banging the gongs for Korea and then if that doesn't work, the South China Sea. Oh my god! That's an emergency! We might have to go to war tomorrow."
So they're both prongs towards China. What the deep state wants is to hit China in the chin because they're brilliant. They think they can fight China.
Niall: James, I think we're going to end our interview with you here. You've been a super sport. Thank you so much for coming on and talking with us.
James: My pleasure. Good to talk to you guys.
Niall: It's been a great conversation with James Bradley, author of The Imperial Cruise and The China Mirage. I cannot recommend them highly enough. James is currently ensconced, working on his next project, which we very much look forward to and we wish you the very best of luck.
James: Thank you. I'll have to look up the word ensconced and then I'll know how you feel. Thank you guys. Good chatting with you.
Joe: Alright. You too.
James: Okay, good night.
Niall: Take care.
Joe: Bye-bye.
Niall: So there you have it folks. That wraps up our show this week. You've been listening to the Truth Perspective. Thanks again to James Bradley and we highly recommend that you check out his books. We'll be back next week with another show to be confirmed. Until then take care and have a good week. Bye-bye.
Reader Comments
Inside every "Gook" is an American waiting to come out.
Pure unadulterated hubris.
And that is "maybe" the crux of the matter, or at least what we are lead to believe in a WASP ideology, one could make the analogy, that if you are not a believer, you are also a "Gook"
I prefer to think it is more, the decimation of the human spirit, the slow kill.
Anybody that does not believe in the American/UK/European vision of freedom and democracy, submit to there will, roll over and submit to rape pillage and plunder will suffer the consequences in this day and age of humiliation, financial and resource deprivation and of course the ultimate deterrent, bombing on an unimaginable scale, right back to the stone age.
Bck to the stone age might not be such a bad prospect. At least we can start to build again, and hopefully with a few souls that have memory of the past, can learn from the past and are aware of psychopathology and it's impact on communities, society, countries and the world.
And the ultimate information, the information conveyed in some ancient texts, how to separate the wheat from the chaff. How to live a human life of compassion, empathy and cooperation.