Harry Dexter White – The Pull Of The Land

Growing up in the 50s and 60s, I had friends who pooh-poohed the concerns of many adults, such as my father, with Communist ideology and its seeming attractiveness to American intellectuals.

In my teenage years, this attitude of disrespect was evident, especially among the more affluent. I recall, in my twenties, spending a Saturday on a sailboat in St. Thomas with a couple who had sailed around the world twice. The husband was an outstanding, hilarious raconteur who made me wonder if he had not missed his calling as a Hollywood storyteller.

Inevitably, his stories devolved into mockery of American “scaredy cats”. Of course, the false fears he referred to were about Communism. As a young man, I must admit he had me somewhat persuaded. If this man, very streetwise, not only in America but in the Greek islands and the extremely dangerous, pirate-infested waters of the vast seas of Asia, saw no threat in the Communists ideology, maybe, just maybe, my father’s concerns may have been overwrought?

That man’s spell over me was strong enough to persuade me to expand my reading a bit. The Road to Serfdom was something of an eye-opener. And so was Witness, and The Ghosts on the Roof, both by Whittaker Chambers.

I began to realize that the issue was not so much a nuclear attack or military invasion, but rather the complete undermining and overthrow of the historic faith of our fathers, which faith built the foundations of our country.

At bottom, the issue is as old as the Garden of Eden: God or man?

This explains much.

In previous posts, I’ve alluded to Project Venona, the US Army Signal Corps’ successful attempt to decode the innumerable daily messages between the Soviet Union and its missions in the United States. This project was declassified in 1995.

However, it is important to remember that the decoding was successfully done in the 30s. And proceeded throughout the Second World War and beyond.

Most significantly, this success was kept secret from the US State Department, the rest of the Armed Forces, including the Army itself, and the White House — both Roosevelt and Truman.

It is outrageous but true that the few men who were involved also knew that if they reported on their success, such would have been made known to the Soviet Communists within hours. Men such as Harry Dexter White, the number two man of the US Treasury and Lauchlin Currie, the president’s personal assistant, were actively spying for the Communists and against the interests of our friends and neighbors.

This was going on before, during, and after the cataclysmic Second World War. Including during the catastrophic fall of China to Mao’s Communists.

The Venona files tell us that there was no area of American life that those committed to the atheistic Communist ideology did not penetrate. In other words, not just the military.

How was this possible? Regrettably, it was possible because thousands of prominent American citizens believed in the possibility of man becoming god. A metaphysical impossibility.

That belief impelled them to betray their friends and neighbors without a second thought.

Their success was evident not only in government and academia, but in all spheres of life, including religion and entertainment.

This success eventually led us to the absurdities of New York City high society entertaining and sitting at the feet of radicals and murderers and to government policies that rewarded the destruction of the family while penalizing thrift and enterprise.

By the time I was in my twenties, to speak of the dangers of atheistic theories was to invite ridicule and contempt. To question the received, mainstream opinion that Senator McCarthy knew nothing about which he spoke was to be expelled from polite company.

And now, we have people wearing T Shirts mocking the assassination of Mr. Charlie Kirk and actually “acting out” the dastardly event in mockery and laughter. Their anger is not so much against a person — although it certainly is that — as it is against God Himself. Therefore anyone who might point us to a return to the Lord is worthy of death.

I believe that, once you scratch a bit below the surface, our country is still a conservative, traditional land. When speaking to others, I am encouraged by the common faith that undergirds us still — though much emaciated, for sure.

But the divide is also there. It may not be 50-50, but it is significant.

This ought to drive us to:

First, prayer. Prayer for our homes and for our neighbors and communities. Principally, that the Lord would be gracious to us and give us a Spirit of reformation and a return to the historic faith.

And, second, a determination to be unafraid to defend our faith and our love for our heritage. And to do so in a kind, compassionate manner, knowing when we are being listened to and when it’s time to stop casting our pearls before swine and move on.

Cold War surveillance post

Allusion to The Ghosts on The Roof by Whittaker Chambers

This post reviews the second of two events which help demonstrate the very real, deleterious impacts of Darwinian, Marxist, and Nietzschean philosophies in our education, entertainment, media, civil government, and other public and private spaces. The first event, the European, related to Tito.

The second event, the Asian, relates to Mao.

It is difficult for us today to understand or sympathize, let alone vicariously experience the shock, disappointment, and demoralization of the Second World War generation upon learning that China had fallen to Communist tyranny.

I was born a few years after the fall of China to the Communists and a few years after that I would hear phrases such as “we lost China”, “we betrayed China”, and “we betrayed our ally.” Later in life, when I did my own reading and research, I saw that such sentiments were very widespread across America, but not so in the institutions of Washington D. C., despite a significant minority of congressmen and senators who attempted to get to the bottom of whatever had happened.

Similar to the intrigues which eventually succeeded in betraying Mihailovich and installing Tito in Yugoslavia, the Soviet Union had placed critical listening posts in both Japan and China, as well as in Washington D.C. Remember that the Soviets were our “ally”, and security was lax if not nonexistent with regards to Communists in critical intelligence and policy centers. Recall how “Wild Bill” Donovan knowingly and recklessly contracted Communists because they will “fight Nazis”. We are still bleeding from the damage that pragmatic yet foolish policy did to our country.

Who were these listening posts? Men such as Lauchlin Currie, administrative assistant to FDR; Professor Owen Lattimore, assigned by FDR to China as “advisor” to Chiang Kai-shek, the writer, Agnes Smedley, a tireless promoter of the Communists in Yenan, China, who was a favorite of Gen. Joseph Stillwell, who never failed in undermining, undercutting, and loudly insulting Chiang Kai-shek, our ally in the efforts against Japan.

Stillwell was not named in the Venona files; he was a useful idiot. The rest were nefariously immortalized therein, along with others who played their own sinister roles: John Service, a U. S. State Department “reporter” whose “dispatches” were nothing less than rivers of venom against the anti-Communist Nationalists and swooning encomiums on behalf of the Communists; Sol Adler and Harry Dexter White, of the United States Treasury who successfully withheld critical assistance to the Nationalists which assistance had been authorized by law.

(Are we surprised at the unequal application of law that we are seeing today, over seven decades later? This contempt for law and for its just application has a long pedigree in world history and is not new in our own experience, sad to say.)

Two more mentions are important for this narrative: Chen Han-seng, a Comintern agent who, in 1949, after his work was done, decamped, along with many others, to Peking (now Bejing) where he was installed as an official of the Communist regime there; and Richard Sorge, a German-born Communist operative based in Tokyo known to history as perhaps the most successful Red agent of all time. Although his is not a household name, his impact has affected us all.

Sorge’s objective was simple: make certain that Japan does not go to war with her traditional enemy, Russia, now the Soviet Union. In order to protect Stalin, all efforts were focused on instigating war with the United States.

Internally, in Japan, Sorge’s highly connected Japanese assistants forcefully lobbied the Imperial Cabinet to strike, not north at Russia, but to the south against British, Dutch, or American Pacific interests. The pretext was oil, sorely needed by the Empire.

Eugene Lyons in The Red Decade, wrote, “While the invasion of China was under way, Moscow did not relax its efforts to obtain a nonaggression pact with Japan. But no stone was left unturned in the effort to force a Japanese-American conflict … The Soviet hope — quite justifiable from the angle of Russia’s own Realpolitik — was to get Japan and the United States at each other’s throats….”

Sorge also had his contacts in the United States, where discussions were taking place about the advisability of seeking a truce with Tokyo, who was winding down its four-year war with China, and so avert a direct clash between Japan and the United States, who were ostensibly championing the anti-Communist Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek.

Sorge’s friends jumped into action, with Currie strongly advising FDR that such a modus vivendi with Japan would do “irreparable damage to the good will we have built up in China.” Others also argued and lobbied forcefully against any approach between Japan and the United States.

To get a sense of the absolute lack of integrity in these people, in their total immersion in Marxist ends-justify-any-means depravity, consider that one of their repeated and strongest arguments was that any peace with Japan would be a betrayal of “our noble ally, Chiang Kai-shek”. That such a betrayal would be “destructive of the Chinese belief in America”.

So, we had two large, Red choirs singing the same tune stereophonically: one in Japan, the other in the United States, and both playing and singing a work composed and conducted by Moscow.

They succeeded in both countries: there would be no peace between Japan and the United States; no attack by Japan on Russia; and no peace in the Pacific.

One could argue that Pearl Harbor would have happened anyway. Maybe. However, the more important observation is that the outcome was fully in keeping with Moscow’s intentions. The historical record, including the Venona archives, make this abundantly clear.

And as it became obvious that Germany and Japan would be defeated, the Communists began their volte face operation to discredit Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists while promoting the Reds, led by Mao Tse Tung (Mao Zedong).

The script was almost exactly the same as that employed on behalf of Stalin and Tito, only here it was edited for Stalin and Mao.

The Nationalists, who had been depicted as heroic and tireless in their war against the Japanese invaders, were now, mirabile dictu, incompetent, corrupt, cowardly, and, for good measure, actually did not do any fighting. All the fighting was really done by Mao’s Communists. To say that this was an exact inversion of the truth, is to write with extravagant understatement. This unrelenting Niagara of official disinformation coupled with overt contempt and outright sabotage of stated United States policy of assistance to the Nationalists, succeeded. The Nationalists were indeed defeated and Chiang Kai-shek exiled himself and his people to Taipei (Taiwan).

The reader who would like to know more about this appalling chapter of our history would do well to read Mao: The Unknown Story, by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. Suffice it to say that Mao’s toll of up to 80 million dead are likely underestimates.

One of the culprits in this distressing saga was Philip Jaffe, an American Communist whose influence in the China tale is without measure. Jaffe was an editor as well as publisher and writer of his own magazine, China Today and later, Amerasia. He was caught red-handed (no pun intended) receiving purloined documents from the State Department from John Service. These documents were confidential information from the Nationalists to the United States. The case was eventually swept under the proverbial rug but the record is available for interested parties to peruse.

Perhaps Jaffe’s own words shine a light into the mindset of so many Americans working to undermine their own country and countrymen while promoting an ideology responsible for the murders and tortures of so many millions and the attempt to enslave the rest:

“It was through Chi Chao-ting, a cousin of mine by marriage, that I accepted the Communist version of Marxism as a guide to the contemporary world … For a period of more than fifteen years, Chi Chao-ting and I were intimate personal friends and close personal associates … He would ultimately become the economic adviser to H. H. Kung, the Kuomintang (Nationalist) finance minister, while simultaneously working clandestinely as an underground operative for Mao…. Upon his death in 1963 in Peking he would be given a hero’s funeral.”

The many Americans, many of whom were Ivy League educated, were not motivated by money to act against their country and their neighbors. Recognition and fame were not the guiding star which spurred them in their unflagging promotion of Communism here and abroad.

No. Like Philip Jaffe, Communism was the lens through which they gave meaning to the world and to their lives.

As for the millions dead, as New York Times reporter, Walter Duranty, coldly and pitilessly put it: “To make a good omelet, you must crack a few eggs.” For him, that was justification for his outright lies in denying the Stalin famines in the 1930s. Lies which earned him the Pulitzer Prize, which to this day has not been revoked.

And to this day, the “China hands” were never brought to justice.

At least in this world.

Philip Jaffe (1895-1980) at left, in Yenan (Communist-held) China. Owen Lattimore (1900-1989), second from left; Zhu De (1886-1976), second from right, from a wealthy family he adopted Communism; Agnes Jaffe (1898-2003)

Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975)

Mao Zedong (1893-1976)

Lauchlin Currie (1902-1993)

Harry Dexter White (1892-1948)

Sol Adler (1909-1994) and Mao

Gen. Joseph Stillwell (1883-1946)

Tag: Harry Dexter White

The Divide

The Asian Event — Mao