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)
