If you have been following the news at all for the last
couple of weeks – a practice I would advise against, as “the news” consists
almost entirely of brain-rotting disinformation peddled by the corrupt
corporations and even more corrupt government bureaucracies that control all
but a fraction of a percentage of the main media organs – you are likely aware
that the travel itinerary of Nancy Pelosi, the speaker in the lower house of
the congress of the American republic has generated a bit of a brouhaha. Included in that itinerary was a trip to the
Republic of China on the island of Formosa.
When the People’s Republic of China on the Asian mainland learned about
this they raised a stink about it and began issuing all sorts of warnings,
threats and ultimatums, telling the American republic that they would be
“playing with fire” if the trip were not cancelled, and even talking about
shooting her plane down. By doing so
they accomplished something that few others have been able to do, especially in
the last decade or so. They brought the
Democrats and the Republicans in the American republic together and united them
on an issue. Both took the position
that the Chinese government must not be allowed to bully American officials and
tell them where they can and cannot go.
I had rather expected her to pull a Captain Airhead or a Joe
Whatshisname and come down with a sudden case of the bat flu but on the evening
of Tuesday 2 September she arrived in Taipei.
While I have nothing but loathing for Communism and
Communists, I admit that I can see the point of the brutal Chinese despots on
this matter. I don’t care for the fact
that for most of the year Nancy Pelosi is across the 49th Parallel
from the Dominion of Canada and would prefer her to be much further away on the
other side of the world. There is
little I can do about that, alas, but it makes it easier to understand what
must have been going through Xi Jingping’s head when he learned that soon there
would be nothing but a 110 mile strait separating him from this creature. I assume that apart from the whole “nobody
tells us what to do” attitude of the Americans, the reason for the bipartisan
consensus of indignation towards the People’s Republic’s threats was that Democrats
and Republicans alike did not want her trip and thus their time free of her to
be cut short.
Since China and not Pelosi is my subject here, the only
thing I will say about the person who looks and acts like she is auditioning
for the role of a female or transgender Skeletor in a cheesy woke remake of the
Masters of the Universe in which the protagonist He-Man would likely be dressed
in his twin-sister She-Ra’s outfit and calling himself She-Man and who managed through
trading that many see as just a tad suspicious to amass a fortune of about
$120 million dollars in her career of almost forty years as a politician is to
note that back in May she was excommunicated by the Church of Rome’s Archbishop
in San Francisco over her using her elected position to support a special
privilege for her own sex, the gruesome and unconscionable special privilege of
having the legal right to murder unborn children. I mention this only because the Archbishop
in question, Salvatore Cordileone, deserves commendation for his courage, rare
in this day and age, by contrast with the clownishness of the current Pretender
to St. Peter’s throne in Rome who ignored the excommunication and administered the
Sacrament to her anyway, if it can still be called a Sacrament coming from the
hand of a man better suited to be a contortionist than a prelate judging from
the performance he recently put on here in Canada, in which he bent over
backwards to stick his head, pointy mitre and all, up his own rear end, by
issuing a groveling “apology” for his Church’s past humanitarian and missionary
educational outreach endeavours.
This whole controversy has undoubtedly been confusing to
those who are only slightly familiar – or not at all – with the situation in East
Asia. This is not like some bizarre
scenario where Mexico objects to the point of threatening military action to an
official from France visiting the United States. It is not even like Russia objecting to
Western politicians visiting the Ukraine at some point prior to the current
war, although this is a little closer.
The island of Formosa, although it has been claimed politically, in
whole or in part, by various empires over the last millennium, has ethnically
and culturally long been part of China.
Ceded to the Japanese Empire late in the nineteenth century, after
Japan’s defeat in World War II it returned to Chinese governance, specifically
that of the Republic of China then based on the mainland. At the same time, however, the Chinese Civil
War, which had been officially on hold for World War II, restarted and in 1949
the Chinese Communists led by Mao Tse-Tung had driven the Nationalist
government led by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek out of the mainland. The Nationalists, and the Republic of China
which they governed, retreated to Formosa which has been governed by the
Republic ever since. The Communists
have remained in control of mainland China, governing their People’s Republic
from Beijing. Now, obviously there has
been a de facto political separation of Formosa from mainland China ever since
1949. However, unlike the situation with
the Ukraine after the Soviet Union collapsed and she declared her independence
from Russia in 1991, the independence has not been formally recognized by both
sides. Indeed, it has not been
recognized by either. The People’s
Republic of China claims Formosa to belong to China and itself to be the sole
legitimate government of all of China.
The Republic of China agrees with the People’s Republic of China that
the island and the mainland are one country.
She, however, although this rhetoric has been toned down in recent
decades, has insisted since 1949 that she, rather than the Communists in
Beijing, is the legitimate government of all of China.
Therefore, when the People’s Republic of China says that she
does not want Nancy Pelosi going to Formosa, her objection is to the American
politician going to what she regards neither as another country nor a territory
in conventional secession whose independence she refuses to recognize, but to part
of the country over which she claims to be the sole legitimate government. Leaving aside for the moment the question of
the truth or falsity of her claim to legitimacy, her objection to Pelosi’s
visit would be simply hot air if she was the only party that regarded Formosa
as part of China. The matter is
complicated greatly by the fact that the government of the Republic of China on
Formosa agrees with her and so does the third party to this dispute.
That third party is the United States. The United States has, ever since she
decided in the Nixon administration to take advantage of the split in the
Communist world between Moscow and Beijing by opening up diplomatic and trade
relations to Red China, taken a “One China” policy in which she agrees with
Beijing and Taipei where they agree – that there is only one China and Formosa
is part of it – while remaining ambiguous on the rather stickier point on which
they disagree. Due to her taking this
position and opening up relations with Red China, the United States
dishonourably withdrew her previous recognition of the Republic of China, but
she tried to make it up to the latter by promising to supply them with enough
arms to deter the Communists from attacking.
Thus, her “One China” policy contradicts both that of the People’s
Republic and that of the Republic of China in that her commitment is, above all
else, to preserving the status quo.
This is understandable, perhaps, in that the United States bears
a great deal of responsibility for creating that status quo in the first place.
The Communist takeover of mainland China began with the
overthrow of the Chinese monarchy and the establishment of the Republic of
China in 1911. This led to several
years of turmoil as attempts were made to fill the power vacuum left by the
abolition of the legitimate government.
The second president of the Republic attempted unsuccessfully to seize
the monarchical power for himself, then the country was torn apart as military
factions headed by warlords took control of the various regions of the large
empire. Then Sun Yat-Sen, the leader of
the 1911 Revolution who had been briefly the first president of the Republic,
formed the Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party, which fought against the
warlords to re-unite the country. These
efforts ultimately succeeded in 1926, by which time the Kuomintang was headed
by Sun Yat-Sen’s successor, Chiang Kai-Shek.
The success war short-lived however.
Sun Yat-Sen had made a foolish and naïve decision to co-operate with the
Chinese Communist Party, backed by the Bolsheviks in Russia. As was the case with Kerensky in Russia in
1917, this provided the Communists with an opening they were able to exploit to
seize power for themselves. As a
consequence his successor was soon embroiled in a Civil War against Mao’s
Communists.
The Chinese Civil War began about a little over a decade
before the Second World War started and had that latter conflict not broken out
it might have ended differently. World
War II forced the Nationalists and the Communists in China to put their
conflict on hold, for the most part, to fight against their common enemy in the
Japanese Empire. This, however, placed
China in alliance with the other countries fighting against Japan and the
Axis. More specifically it placed her
in alliance with the Soviet Union and the United States. Due to this alliance, when the hostilities
in the Chinese Civil War resumed after World War II, the balance had already
shifted to the Communists.
That an alliance with the Soviet Union, the sponsors of Mao’s
Communists, would tip the scales in the Chinese internal conflict to the
latter, hardly needs explanation. That
an alliance with the United States would have the same effect will sound
strange to those used to looking at the United States and the Soviet Union
through the interpretive lens of the Cold War in which they are portrayed not
just as hostile powers in an ordinary conflict but as polar opposites
representing capitalism and communism.
It is nevertheless the case.
World War II began in the second of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s four terms
as American president. FDR was so
horrible that only a few years after his death the Americans passed the
twenty-second amendment to their constitution limiting a president to two
terms. Had they not revolted against
their legitimate Sovereign in the eighteenth century, they would have had no
need to create the office of president and would never have had to impose a
term limit on it to prevent another rotten politician from clinging to elected
power as long as FDR did. One of the
things that made FDR so bad was his attitude towards Communism in general, and
Stalin in particular. Later, in the
Cold War era, liberals talked and acted pro-Soviet for a number of
reasons. Sometimes they were actually
Soviet agents. Most often it was simply
a case of their liberalism being that of the squishy sentimentality that Robert
Frost so appropriately captured when he defined a liberal as “a man too
open-minded to take his own side in a quarrel”, the quarrel at the time being
with the Soviets. FDR, however, was the
kind of liberal who saw the Communists as fellow progressives, sharing the same
ideals and working towards the same ends as American liberals, who were just a
little misguided about the means. The
first year of his first term as president, he sent the first American
ambassador to Stalin’s Soviet Union, right at the time the Holodomor – the
artificially induced famine that killed millions in the Ukraine – was going
on. He recalled that ambassador when he
sent back truthful reports of just how awful the USSR was, and in his place
sent Joseph E. Davies, who arrived just in time for the Great Purge, i.e., the
show trials through which Stalin eliminated his rivals, and sent back to FDR
just what he wanted to hear, glowing reports about how wonderful Stalin and
Communism and the USSR were, complete with an account of the Great Purge that
depicted the victims as guilty and justice as having been served. FDR would later personally request that the
Warner Brothers turn Davies’ pro-Stalin memoir Mission to Moscow into a pro-Stalin propaganda film, with which
request, much to the discredit of the company that gave us Bugs Bunny, Elmer
Fudd, Yosemite Sam, Sylvester and Tweety, they complied. Had
this been all, FDR would merely have gone down as the biggest moron in
history. Unfortunately, however, his
attitude towards Communism and Stalin also manifested itself in his World War
II policies, and in his meetings with Churchill and Stalin from the first at
Tehran (1943) to the last at Yalta (1945), convinced that he had some kind of
power of persuasion over Stalin – see Robert Nisbet’s Roosevelt and Stalin: The Failed Courtship (1988) - he made
concession after concession to the Soviet dictator that ensured that after the
war about a third of the world would end up under Communist tyranny. Unfortunately Churchill, who understood
Communism much better than FDR, had been scraping to the American president
since even before Pearl Harbour – see Robert Shogan’s Hard Bargain: How FDR Twisted Churchill’s Arm, Evaded the Law, and
Changed the Role of the American Presidency (1995), an account of how FDR
swindled Churchill with the destroyers in 1940 – and so was in no position to
do anything about it.
While Eastern Europe – including Poland, to protect which
from the Nazis who had agreed with the Soviets to divide her between
themselves, was the original reason for the war in the first place – is the
most discussed of Soviet territorial gains due to World War II, the USSR also
took over several regions in Asia that had been controlled by Japan. This included a number of regions to the
north of China that had, for much of the past millennium, been part of the
Chinese Empire and which were of strategic importance to the Soviets in their
designs to help Mao’s Communists take over China. Mongolia, which had declared its independence
from China when the last dynasty was overthrown, had been taken over by
Soviet-allied Communists in the early 1920s, and while the Soviets had
refrained from recognizing Mongolian independence in this early period, at the
end of World War II during which they had repelled the Japanese invasion of
Mongolia and used Mongolia as a base from which to launch their own attack on
Japan, which FDR had “persuaded” Stalin to do at Yalta, they convinced China to
recognize the independence of the Mongolian People’s Republic. This was part of a treaty the Soviets signed
with China in August 1945, the terms of which Nationalist China abided with –
recognizing Mongolian independence following a plebiscite in October that had
obviously been rigged by the Communists – but which the Soviets were covertly
violating before the ink was even dry on it. Bordering Mongolia was Manchuria, the region
that had been home to the last ruling dynasty of China. This had been taken over by the Japanese
Empire in 1932 and on the day the Americans dropped the atomic bomb on
Nagasaki, the Soviets, armed with weapons provided by the United States,
invaded and took it from Japan. When
the Soviets withdrew from Manchuria the following year, nominally turning it
over to the Republic of China, it was actually Mao’s army that took control of
the region and turned it into a base to attack the Nationalists.
By this time FDR was dead and the remainder of his fourth
term as president was being filled by Harry S. Truman. That Truman was little better than FDR when
it came to Communism, he would later demonstrate in his refusal to let General
MacArthur win the Korean War. At the
time in question, however, the last half of the 1940s, the problem was not so
much the American president but the Communists and Communist sympathizers who
had become entrenched in the American Department of State with the previous
president’s blessing. Also problematic
was another American World War II general with a decidedly different attitude
towards Communism than that of the Pacific commander. General George C. Marshall, whom FDR had
made Chief of Staff of the US Army, was sent to China as a special envoy late
in 1945 tasked with trying to resolve the Chinese Civil War. The only solution that he was capable of
thinking of was that the Nationalists needed to accept the Communists who were
actively waging revolutionary war against them into a coalition
government. This was an obvious recipe for total Communist
takeover. Marshall threatened to
withhold American financial assistance to China if the Nationalists refused to
cooperate. As it happened, the
Communists were not interested in such a coalition either but, when Marshall’s
mission ended in failure, he returned to the United States blaming the failure
on Chiang Kai-Shek. When, soon after, he
was appointed Secretary of State by Truman, he used the position to fight
against American assistance to the Chinese Nationalists. Indeed, through the entire period that he
served as special envoy to China and American Secretary of State and even
earlier during World War II, Marshall worked to prepare public opinion to
accept a Communist takeover of China by whitewashing Mao and his forces,
claiming that they were merely “agrarian reformers” rather than Soviet style
Bolsheviks. Marshall died in 1959, one
year into the “Great Leap Forward”, the Maoist version of a Stalinist five-year
plan that generated a famine that killed more people in China than the
Holodomor had done in the Ukraine. It
would have been interesting, had he lived to the end of the “Great Leap Forward”,
to see whether he would have finally admitted just how much of a fool he had
been about Mao in the 1940s. He was
hardly the only one, however. His
deputy and successor as Secretary of State, Dean Acheson was just as bad or
worse, writing a thousand page White Paper at the time Mao was driving the
Nationalists off the mainland, justifying the Truman administration’s policies
towards the Republic of China and arguing that had they done anything differently
it would not have prevented the Communist takeover, a laughable obscenity
considering that what they had done was insist that the Republic of China clasp
the viper of revolutionary Communism to its breast. Aiding and abetting Marshall and Acheson in
this, were the dolts working for the Institute of Pacific Relations, an
international think tank funded by the Rockefeller and Carnegie Foundations,
that published the academically acclaimed journals Pacific Affairs and Far
Eastern Survey that had become heavily infested with Communists and
Communist sympathizers, a great many of whom also served in the State
Department and other bureaucratic and diplomatic offices in the Roosevelt and
Truman administrations. This was the
basis of the charges of Communist infiltration made against the State
Department by Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. Although the newsmedia and academic
institutions made his name synonymous with witch-hunting over this, William F.
Buckley Jr. and his brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell Jr made a convincing case as
early as 1954 in McCarthy and his Enemies
that there were witches indeed to be found in the State Department, cackling
around their cauldron as if they were acting out the first scene of the fourth
Act of Macbeth. The mid-1990s public release of the files of
the Venona Project, along with the opening of the Soviet archives after the
Soviet Union collapsed at the end of the Cold War, established the point beyond
a reasonable doubt, although the progressive nitwits in the media and academe,
including or especially all those who accepted without question the
unsubstantiated claims of Hilary Clinton that her failure to win a third term
in the White House in 2016 was due to interference by the current Russian
government, are unlikely to acknowledge this any time soon. For the whole sordid tale of the IPR, which shared
board members, staff, and a building with Amerasia
the journal caught with almost 2000 classified documents stolen from the OSS
and other American and British military intelligence agencies after it had
rather stupidly published one in 1945, and the FDR-Truman policies that helped
the Communists take over so much of Asia, see John T. Flynn While You Slept: Our Tragedy in Asia and Who
Made It (1951).
It is easier to understand how the American leadership of
the 1930s and 1940s could have been so naive at best and collaborative at worst
towards Communism if we grasp that in a sense FDR was right about the
relationship between American liberalism and Communism. The two are cousins of a sort. Both are the children of the Modern Age, and
the philosophical spirit of that Age which spirit can be summed up in the idea
that human beings need to abandon tradition, time-proven established
institutions, religion and the like and pursue maximum freedom and equality
through reason and science, movement towards which goal is what is meant by the
word “progress” in its political-philosophical sense. American liberalism is the direct descendent
of the earliest manifestation of this spirit in the sixteenth-seventeenth
century English movement that began as Calvinist Puritanism and secularized
into Whiggery. Communism is descended,
through Karl Marx as interpreted by V. I. Lenin, from the Jacobin movement
responsible for the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror (the revolutionary
movement with which Marx aligned himself and for which he wrote began as a faction
of the Jacobins). Jacobinism, like
American liberalism, was descended from Puritanism-Whiggery, but through the
intermediary of continental philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and especially
Jean-Jacques Rousseau. So FDR was
right that American liberalism and Communism have the same goal – a society in
which freedom and equality are both maximized – but with different ideas about
the means to achieve it. Where he was
wrong was in thinking that this was a worthy goal. It is not.
Progress is not desirable but
evil. The end of the Modern Age is based
upon a contradiction. Freedom and
equality, in their purest forms, are utterly incompatible with each other. Freedom is compatible with justice but not
with equality. Freedom and justice were
considered to be goods in the pre-Modern tradition, that is to say, desirable
ends that were what they were as part of the transcendent order. Freedom and equality are considered to be
values in the Modern Age. Equality is a
perversion of justice. It is to justice
what a $3 bill is to real currency.
When idealists make equality their goal rather than justice – and when
modifiers such as “social”, “racial”, “sexual” are added to the word “justice”
it is actually equality that is meant – they think they are working towards a
better society, but are actually making it worse. Gresham’s Law states that bad money drives
out good. Similarly, equality, the counterfeit of justice, drives out justice –
and freedom along with it. The ancients
understood this – it is the point, or one of the points at least, of the myth
of Procrustes, the giant with the “one size fits all” policy regarding beds,
whom Theseus encountered on his way to Athens.
Just as Modern thought errs in thinking that freedom and equality are compatible,
so it errs in thinking of pre-Modern thought and tradition as something to be
dismissed and discarded except in that it can be interpreted, ala the Whig
Interpretation of History, as leading to the Modern Age and its goals. See Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn’s writings,
especially Liberty or Equality (1952)
and The Menace of the Herd (1943) for
a fuller explanation of the incompatibility of equality and freedom. For an illustration look to the French Revolution
and all the Communist Revolutions that took their inspiration from the
French. While the Jacobins who founded
the first French Republic, the Bolsheviks, the Maoists, the Khmer Rouge, etc.
all saw themselves as “liberators” and claimed “liberty” or “freedom” as an
ideal as much as the Americans do – the motto of the French Revolution,
remember, was “liberty, equality, fraternity” - the French Republic and all the
People’s Republics were terror states, life within which could hardly be
described as freedom. That the American
Revolution did not immediately produce a similar state is due to a number of
reasons, the foremost being that while the leaders of the Revolution were
liberals with the same contradictory program of freedom and equality as the Jacobins
and Bolsheviks, the Revolution they led was a secession movement rather than
the seizing of a central state and furthermore, a secession movement on the
part of a coalition of political entities which, once secession was achieved, initially
established a much weaker central government than what it eventually grew into
because they wished to preserve their own powers in the new federation, and
thus the liberals were not able at first to impose their agenda like a
Procrustean bed on all Americans from the top down, which meant that much of
the freedom of the pre-Revolution tradition was able to survive.
While nobody in their right mind wants to see the
inhabitants of Formosa fall under the totalitarian rule of Beijing – the recent
example of what happened to the inhabitants of Hong Kong when it was
transferred to the People’s Republic should suffice to convince anyone not yet
persuaded that life under Red Chinese rule is not desirable – it is a mistake
to look to the United States to preserve their freedom. It is not just that American liberalism is
cousin to Communism and that the United States failed to prevent the Communist
takeover of mainland China and arguably abetted it. It is America’s self-contradictory policy with
regards to China. By agreeing with both
Beijing and Taipei that there is only “One China” including both the mainland
and Formosa, they take a position that keeps them from supporting Formosan
independence qua independence and requires
them to support one of the governments as the sole legitimate government of all
of China. They cannot support the government
in Taipei as the legitimate government of all of China and retain their
relations and trade with the Peoples’ Republic. Therefore, they logically have to support the
People’s Republic as the legitimate government. So far their commitment to keep Formosa from
falling into Communist hands has prevented them from doing so in an unambiguous
manner. This does not seem to be a
sustainable position in the long run however.
The current incident that is the occasion of this essay demonstrates
that among other things.
I will conclude by saying that in my view neither the
Republic of China in Formosa nor the People’s Republic of China on the mainland
is legitimate. My views lean towards
Jacobitism rather than Jacobinism, albeit Dr. Johnson’s brand of Jacobitism in
which loyalty is to the current reigning house, and accordingly I regard no
republic as legitimate. I therefore
take a legitimist position with regards to China. The legitimate heir of one of the ancient
dynasties – I will leave it to the Chinese to determine which one – should be
found, and restored to his throne over all of China, and both the Republic and
the People’s Republic ought to be dissolved into the restored Chinese
monarchy. That is the proper resolution
to the situation. Since the Americans
are not likely to get on board with it any time this side of the Second Coming,
when they will have to repent of their republicanism and democracy and bow the
knee to the King of Kings if they don’t want to share the fate of the first
Whig, the devil, the Chinese will just have to do it themselves.
