NOW IN 22 DIFFERENT LANGUAGES. CLICK ON THE LOWER LEFT HAND CORNER “TRANSLATE” TAB TO FIND YOURS!

By Jeff J. Brown

Pictured above: guest James Bradley on the left and China Rising Radio Sinoland host Jeff J. Brown on the right.

Do your friends, family and colleagues a favor to make sure they are Sino-smart: 
Journalism: https://chinarising.puntopress.com/blog-2/
Books: http://chinarising.puntopress.com/2017/05/19/the-china-trilogy/ and
https://chinarising.puntopress.com/2018/06/18/praise-for-the-china-trilogy-the-votes-are-in-it-r-o-c-k-s-what-are-you-waiting-for/
Website: https://www.chinarising.puntopress.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/44_Days
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/44DaysPublishing
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-j-brown-0517477/
WeChat/WhatsApp: +8613823544196
VK: https://vk.com/chinarisingradiosinoland
About me: https://chinarising.puntopress.com/about-the-author/

Sixteen years on the streets, living and working with the people of China, Jeff

Here is the original audio/video interview, with an introduction about James,

James Bradley tells it like it is on China Rising Radio Sinoland 180406

Interview transcript

Jeff J. Brown: Good morning, everybody. This is Jeff J. Brown, China Rising Radio Sinoland, Shenzhen just south of the Tropic of Cancer and today I am honored and happy to have on the show today Mr. James Bradley. How are you doing, James?

James Bradley: I’m very good. Glad to be here.

Jeff: Hey, listen. For fans out there who might be listening the first time, I do use the word Eurangloland. And basically it’s NATO, Western Europe, and we could even throw in Israel since it’s the Western empires or Patriot Guard in the Middle East. I may use the term Baba Beijing, which is my affectionate name for China’s leadership.

So, James has written four books to cover World War Two “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Flyboys”. The other two are “Imperial Cruise” and the “China Mirage” and these to explain how America got into World War Two in the first place. And I have just read the last two recently. And I’m a fellow writer and I am thoroughly impressed, James with your two books. Because I know I’ve read a good book when I know a few things about Asia and I still learn such a huge amount of new facts, events in history. So that was the case for me with Imperial Cruise and China Mirage. So, Bravo.

James: Thank you so much. And I’d like to say to your listeners, I do many, many interviews throughout my career. And it’s rare to be interviewed by somebody who reads and devours and studies the book.

Jeff: Before we dig into your books, I want to encourage China Rising fans out there to read James’s two books. I mean, they are pulling- no-punches books.

And I expect I think this is kind of a writer’s question. I experienced something in reading them that makes me want to ask you this.

Do you feel an emotional detachment when you research all the horrific genocide and racism you write about and maybe you even can keep that same, cold-bloodedness, reading your work but when you read similar passages by other writers, all the feelings of disgust and revulsion manifest themselves because that’s what happened to you. That’s what happened to me. Reading your books, I’m just curious.

James: Well, my career started with Iwo Jima.

My father fought on Iwo Jima and he would say that Iwo Jima was a massacre. The bodies were stacked like cordwood. They couldn’t bury them, a tiny island, the smell of death. And if you start there and go on to human history, you realize, from Teddy Roosevelt’s waterboarding in the Philippines to Abu Ghraib today, the last CIA woman who was nominated to head the CIA approved to waterboarding. It goes back to Teddy Roosevelt.

So I don’t think I’m writing about unusual human behavior. I think what hits people is they don’t read about it a lot because they don’t want to know that side of human nature. And I’m not writing about it to focus on it. I’m writing about it because it’s the norm when you send young boys out to war.

Jeff: Like your father.

James: Well, you got to kill and you got a gun an you’re 19 and I went to My Lai and I was interviewing My Lai Massacre in 1968 and Vietnam.

And Americans think that was a one-off thing. It’s still presented that way. And at the end of the day, after hearing all these stories, my interpreter said, would you like to go to another one (massacre), like it’s a Western.

If I don’t want it, if you don’t like that one, we can go to one just north of here and south of here. What I’m trying to say in these books is this is what happens when you send troops. They can be Chinese or Russian or they’re Mexican or whatever. But when we send our troops to countries where we don’t speak the language. And that’s when bad things happen.

Jeff: Absolutely. Well, let me ask you this. How did you get this Imperial Cruise past the Gatekeepers at your publisher, Do they edited heavily, I was surprised you being classified as a quote, mainstream, end of quote writer. But how did they react when you submitted the book?

James: Well, can you tell me and that the listeners and what are you surprised by that.

Jeff: Well, the Imperial Cruise, just literally. Well, you and I are there, but there are very few, White guys out there who write unflinchingly about Western racism. And so that’s why I mean, you just lay it all out, when it’s usually avoided. People dance around. We’ve gone past that. We had civil rights in the 50s, the 50s, and 70s. And we’re integrated now.

And Obama’s presidency, you and I do the same thing and my writing, the racism is at the top of the list because I think it’s the genesis of so many of the horrible things that have happened and are going on in the world. So, that’s why I just spell it out. And it’s refreshing because like I say, you do to.

And you’re like one of the first and there are Indians and people of color who write and have written about it very eloquently. But there’s just very few Caucasians out there that do it. And that’s why I was asking.

James: Well, OK, now I got it. One very interesting thing, “You write about racism in Imperial Cruise”. I didn’t and let me explain. Racism was a word invented in the 1930s and the imperial Cruise takes place with Teddy Roosevelt.

You know Teddy I was writing about racial theory, about see, I’m doing the research about Roosevelt in the Philippines and he’s talking about how Americans have thousands of years of democracy in their veins and the Filipinos don’t. So I’m like thousands of years. Wrong. No, that’s not fair. Yeah. Ten thousand years. So I do the research. And Teddy Roosevelt went to Harvard and at Harvard, in the middle of the 19th century, there wasn’t science. We didn’t know science. There was scientific speculation here. And the number one theory that drove scientists was a racial theory. You measured skulls and big noses, small craniums. And the White man. And history showed that the White man was superior. At that point, the Whites were taking over the world. China was sinking. India was under the boot of the British.

The American Indian had been wiped out. So scientific told Theodore Roosevelt these racial theories that the White was superior because they came from the Aryan thousands of years ago and the Aryan became the Teutons and the Teutons in the German force became the Anglo Saxon. And the Anglo Saxon swam across the Atlantic and created the Americas. So this was a racial theory. And as you see in the book, Roosevelt was facing his foreign policy not on some personal dirty racism, but Harvard. Wonderful, shiny racial theory.

Jeff: Yeah, that’s true. And that’s something that, I’m half Irish. And I wrote an article about racism. And there’s a plate from a supposed – It’s as you said at that time, a scientific journal, a credible, well
-respected scientific journal in the United Kingdom and it showed the silhouette of an Irishman and they called him an Iberian and then showed an Anglo Saxon face and then a black face to show that the Irish descended from Africans. And that was considered, as you said, good science.

James: Yeah. Yale, Harvard. I went back and I read what these guys had studied and again, it was racial here.

Jeff: You know, that it’s just surreal as you kind of talk about an imperial cruise here we are in the Philippines in the late 1800s, early 1900s.  And the Filipinos were being waterboarded, the local natives. The U.S. had a nationwide campaign of genocide, to try to control the country on the ground. We can add concentration camps. And as you talked about, untold numbers of lives, massacres, raping, torching villages, etc. And even the Spanish used concentration camps in the Philippines and then the U.S. did the same thing.

And you wrote about the fact that the word “concentrata” from Spain, Spanish is where we get the word concentration camp. And so I just I’m impressed that you wrote about all that.

And so at what point did this idea of White supremacy. How did that, when did that fit into your Western empire puzzle, to where it all started to make sense?

James: Well, I was in San Francisco. The book, The Imperial Cruise traces the cruise of Secretary of War, William Howard Taft, who later became president. So it’s Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency. His secretary of war is number one man is William Howard Taft and he gets on a ship in San Francisco and goes to Hawaii, Philippines, China, Korea, and Japan. And on that cruise, he makes secret deals with Japan regarding Korea. He gave Korea to Japan, Theodore Roosevelt. He goes to the Philippines to see how the war is going. And I just write about Theodore. It’s the biggest dispatch of a diplomatic delegation in U.S. history. So I thought, I wonder what happened.

So 100 years to the month, I started on my imperial cruise, I shadowed them and I went from San Francisco to Hawaii. So I’m in the San Francisco library and I’m reading William Howard Taft’s speeches and he’s standing up and he said the Filipinos cannot have their freedom because they don’t have the tens of thousands of years of history with democracy that we do. And as I told you, I’m stumped.

He’s talking about it like talking in code. Now, the key thing is that, as I said before, he’s referring to the racial theory that we came, us White people who came from the Aryans and the Aryan Mountains. And the word “Iran” for the nation comes from the word Aryan. And he’s talking about the fact that Americans are part of the Aryan tradition of thousands of years. It’s race theory. And I didn’t get this. So he went to Yale and I went back and I studied the stuff he studied at Yale and then I broke the code.

But it’s important to realize that the president of the United States and his top guys could speak to Americans in 1895 in racial code. And they all got. And we were all walking around thinking that we were the pride of the Aryan race.

Jeff: Yeah. It’s amazing to admit there’s I don’t know if you’ve read many of these books, but there’s some really good books that talk about this, Franz Fanon, he wrote “The Wretched of the Earth” and Eduardo Galeano, he wrote the “Memories of Fire” trilogy and China’s Yan Fu, wrote in his essays. Are there any other writers out there, Caucasian or otherwise who have informed you about Western racism and genocide and imperialism and any that you can recommend?

James: Yeah. Many. But, you know, I just know you’re challenging me to remember. I would just suggest looking at my bibliography.

Jeff: Okay.

James: there’re full of great sources and you know. Well, Looking I will recommend Richard Drinan and I think is the book that first opened my eyes. But my reading just it’s like I say, I’m reading about Teddy Roosevelt talking I didn’t realize it in code. It was just breaking the code that I realized, what they are doing here.

Jeff: Well, that’s what. Go ahead. Go ahead, James.

James: I was just going to say in the end, if anybody wants to read a book should read mine.

Jeff: Mine too (laughing).

James: Yes, mine first (laughing).

Jeff: I can recommend them to the fans out there. There is “Savage Anxieties”. And I’d like to ask you to send me after we finish. Send me the link today to “Looking West” by Richard Drinan and I’ll add it to the article introduction. But what had a big impact on me was “Savage Anxieties: The Invention of Western Civilization”, by Robert Williams Junior.

He goes back to the great, the ancient Greeks and he gets into the prehistoric Greece, as you say. I mean, I’m sure probably the Ayran, this Aryan myth is kind of around that period. And he goes all the way up to the extermination of the New World’s First Nation peoples because he is a Native American.

And then the other one is obscure. It was originally written in Swedish and it was translated into English, and it’s “Exterminate All the Brutes! One Man’s Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide”, by Sven Lindqvist. And of course, in “The Heart of Darkness”, “Exterminate all the brutes!” is the last line in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness – just had a brain burp. But are you familiar with either of those books, James?

James: Yes, of course. And for your listeners, I’d like to bring it down to my semi-educated level and say that we can intellectualize this in racism and whatever.

But what I would like to say about my writing of the Imperial Cruise, what I’m proving there is let’s say our grandfathers were bricklayers coal shovelers or train locomotive engineers or whatever in 1905 that they believed in this simple, they didn’t know the word racism hadn’t been invented, but they believed that some Aryans rose in the Caucasus Mountains near Iran and they had  race intelligence, it was called “to kill everybody who didn’t look like them”.

And they flourished and they went west. That’s the key. The sun goes west. The sun is bright and white. And just like that bright sun, the Aryan went west, had the race intelligence and it went to Germany. And in the Dark force of Germany, the Aryan became over time superior, who was big and strong and had the race intelligence to kill everybody that didn’t look like him.

He didn’t make a mistake, but some of his offspring made a mistake and they went south. They went to Greece and Italy and Spain and they mated with those colored women who had less smarts. It was the Teutons that kept the seed. See, it sounds funny, but this is my grandfather’s belief.

Now the Teutons goes to England becoming the Anglo-Saxon and massacre everyone who doesn’t look like them. And that was the brilliance of the Americans. The Americans came to America and killed all the Indians rather than mate with them.

Theodore Roosevelt’s writings, he writes that’s the race intelligence of the American is because we didn’t mate with the natives like the Spanish did down in South America. We kept the sea pure.

Now you go into the racism in the south in the 20th century. And the argument was, don’t kill the goose that lays the golden egg, keep the seed pure. The reason you couldn’t mix with other races was that the Aryan and the Teuton and the Anglo-Saxon and the American had what it was called the race intelligence to keep the seed pure and the pure seed that would be the locomotive for pulling all the other cars of civilization. Now, you think of that, what I’m trying to say is our great grandfathers in 1905 would not have even turned their head if I said that was what they believed.

Jeff: I think that mentality still exists subconsciously and maybe even consciously in the halls of power in Eurangloland. I don’t think it’s gone, what you said. Now they internalize it and they are not as open about it. But I think that philosophy is still there. What do you think?

James: I think so. And again, we’re speaking intellectually about what books affected us. It wasn’t books that gave me insight when I was 19 or hitchhiked around the world. I went around to the other side of the globe. I walked across Afghanistan.

Jeff: Cool.

James:  Iran. You know, I started I went to school in Japan. So I went all the way from Tokyo to London for two years. And slowly I became you know, I had come from Wisconsin. I was a member of a Christian tribe, Catholics, northern Wisconsin. And I had been taught, these things are true. Jesus, a dead man, rose, and then, but people in India, they have superstitions, and people in China have superstitions.

And going around the world as a young man, I just noticed, wow, mothers all suckle their kids. There are similarities here. People get up in the morning and they have breakfast. They sleep at night. When a son dies, the tears from the parents, they’re similar. And so the differences faded. And I began to see that we’re all the same.

And as my mother once said when I was writing, she said all wars are civil wars because we’re fighting each other. So if you look at that whole… So it’s just that holistic view that was formed in my mind as a young guy. So I’m just trying to put it across that maybe, those people that were taught are so different than us. Maybe they’re the same.

Jeff: well, it’s interesting so you’re arc of awareness started early. I guess I wasn’t quite so lucky. I was in the Peace Corps for two years and in Tunisia, In North Africa. And, I should have been a little bit more aware back then. But I still clung to them for years and years, up until, when I came to China in the early 90s and then I came back in 2010, I still clung to the myth of American democracy being the great shining temple on the hill.

And I still thought in 2010, when I came back here for the second time, I thought Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton were great people and Hillary would make a great president. And so for me, it took a long time to pull the scales off my eyes.

I wanted to ask you, Do talk of the spiritual, especially in the “China Mirage” about the missionaries and their role in China before liberation in 1949. And except for militarized Japan, that when they took a Shinto sect and kind of fused it into the imperial armies, rape, and plunder of Asia, Buddhism just doesn’t seem to have a history of genocide and on other peoples. And even Genghis Khan, I was shocked to learn that he dabbled in and in his sons, dabbled in Christianity and Islam as they massacred their way across Asia to create the world’s largest empire.

So thinking about how missionaries played such a big role in your China Mirage story, do you think that Westerners’ expansionist racism or as you call it, race intelligence is in any way correlated to Christianity’s strong evangelical drive to convert people? Because it is there.

James: Well, yeah, the foundation, Western explorers, the Portuguese and the Spanish in the beginning, and then the French were all sent out with the blessing of the Popes and their papal bulls, that I’m working at on my next book back in 1300s and 1400s the infidel didn’t have fidelity didn’t believe, so was outside the circle of humans.

Humans believed in the Catholic dogma so you the king of Portugal or Spain, and then later friends had the right to subjugate these people and take their lands because they’re unbelievers. I mean, this is the beginning of the White man going out to other lands. So they weren’t horrible racists. They put the banner of the Catholic Church in the ground.

Christopher Columbus. The pictures show him with crosses and missionaries. They came to do good and the good was to enslave. These are not Christians had no sense in their head. So the Crusades. See, that was an aggressive Europeans going down there to wreak havoc that was good. Catholics going down to knock some sense into those Muslims.

And once we put missionaries into the land, it was called the protectorate of missions. There was another papal bull, another law that came from the Vatican that said once you put those missionaries in there, they’re doing the right thing. They’re trying to get the infidels to get on the right side hereby becoming Christian. And once they’re threatening you, the state, France, Portugal, Spain, whatever, you’ve got the right to go in there and kill to protect those missionaries. So, yeah, the foundation of the White man going out was all sanctioned this way.

Jeff: Yeah. Well, moving along on this Trail of Tears, I want to compliment you as well in the “China Mirage” you’re willing to talk about the West’s grotesque illegal drug empire from the latter part of the 18th century, all the way up until China was liberated by the communists in 1949. And I’ve also written a lot about it and but more from the perspective of the Chinese. But you expose just how wide and deep imperial drug money penetrated American society and the economy in the 19th and 20th centuries.

And I found a quote and I’ve used it in my writings that someone said that the Western drug cartel was the largest and longest-running, most profitable criminal enterprise in human history, although an argument could be made that Western slavery was right up there in the same category. Do you agree?

James: Well, it’s just a fact. There were many documented sources. The largest commodity trade of that time, the 19th century, was not oil was not even wheat, rice, kerosene. No, it was opium.

Jeff:  Yes, sir.

James: Is was the most profitable – opium was the number one most valuable trade in humanity of the 19th century. Opium accounted for almost a quarter of the British Empire as well.

Look at how costly it is for America to have 100 plus bases around the world. Empire is not profitable. It’s a drag on the Treasury. Well, how did the British Empire get so rich? Was all that costly empire? It was opium. Opium was the magic plant that turned the empire into silver. It was huge. Enormous. Why the Chinese empire says, OK, let’s be fair. Don’t poison us. Don’t run your opium here. It’s illegal. Why would a young Queen Victoria immediately dispatch the Royal Navy halfway around the world to bombard Tianjin? Because she was getting 25 percent of her income from opium. Now, it was critical. It wasn’t something to negotiate. She needed that lifeline of money. Queen Victoria is the largest drug dealer in history.

Jeff: Now, I remember reading that quote in the China Mirage. It’s excellent. All right. This is interesting.

And the next thing I want to ask you about is I also really appreciated in “China Mirage” your accurate portrayal of Chiang Kai-shek. And for those of you who need to dig into your memory, Chiang Kai-shek was the leader of the KMT, the Guomindang, in China fought against Mao and lost ignominiously and was run off to Taiwan. And I have written that he was a corrupt, inept, fascist gangster, end of quote. Would you like to comment on that?

James: Well, it was the Chinese civil war. He was not a kindergarten teacher. Power comes out of the barrel of a gun. And they both thought that way.

What was very interesting about Chang is not what he was, but how he was sold to America. He married into the Soong family who had been educated in the United States. And they understood the China Mirage. What’s the China Mirage, the China Mirage is the American belief that, it is today, that those Chinese are going to throw off their despotic government and become more like us. Underneath it all, they want to become little Democrats like us.

Jeff: And Christians then.

James: Yeah, and Christian. So the Soong family says to Chiang Kai-shek, we have to propagandize you as a Christian into America. So this was a Christian head of China and there would be trickle-down democracy. So Henry Luce, head of Time Inc, whose father was a missionary, got on board. Franklin Roosevelt got on board and Chiang Kai-shek sold into the 1920s, 30s, and 40s America as the rising Christian to Christianized, all of China.

So it’s I think the big story for me and the China Mirage is how he was sold and believe Pearl Buck, Henry Luce, Franklin Roosevelt, all promising America for just a few billion dollars more to Chiang Kai-shek. We’re going to have white steeple Christian churches all across China. And then hell…

Jeff: But that’s not, it’s true.

James: Because, the shock of “Who lost China”? I’m writing about Vietnam right now. David Halberstam, who wrote “The Best and the Brightest” in 1972. Well in 1992, he wrote the introduction to the 20th-anniversary edition. And he said, if I could rewrite “The Best and the Brightest”, the book, he said I would more heavily emphasize that it was McCarthy who lost China period.

He said the fear of losing Vietnam was in every 1960’s politicians by Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy. They were afraid of the blowback. Of course, they saw Harry Truman knifed in the Who Lost China? fights. Well, why was that such a shock? Who lost China, It was such a shock because the American public had been marinated in 30 years of propaganda that Chiang Kai-shek was a Christian, beloved by the Christian wannabes, Chinese.

And when Mao got the mandate of heaven, it wasn’t a shock to the Chinese as much as it was to the Americans. And that began the Who lost China, which began you can’t lose in Korea and you can’t lose to Vietnam

Jeff: Millions dead in the process.

Well, speaking of Mao, another thing I’d like to compliment you on and the China Mirage. And then again, this is usually sort of a taboo subject in a lot of other books. But you have an honest appraisal of Mao Zedong and the Communist Party and how successful they were in ridding the country of fascist Japanese.

In the end, ridding Chiang Kai-shek, KMT, not to mention all the drug dealing Western colonialists, and all the wonderful things that they did for the vast majority of the citizens. This is something that I have written about is that in addition to the West’s behavior being distorted by this deep-seated sense of White supremacy, it is multiplied logarithmically by the West’s zealous hatred of communism and rabid fear of socialism. Do you think that? What do you think?

James: Can you state the question again?

Jeff: Well, that in addition to this innate sense of White superiority, the racial intelligence that you were talking about, that Western, especially American foreign policy geopolitics has also been completely distorted by its rabid fear of communism.

James: Well, it’s just unbelievable. I don’t know how many thousands of examples I could bring up. It’s just another world. Secretary of State Dean Acheson under Truman is announcing to the United States that Ho Chi Minh is the enemy of Vietnamese independence, because what academics want to do is enslave people.

And at the time Ho Chi Minh was beating the French. And he was the national hero.

He was beyond George Washington. He was like all the founding fathers and people are painting pictures of Ho Chi Minh on the side of their houses. And going crazy over this guy because he’s got the secret to throw off foreign domination. And Dean Acheson and all the geniuses in Washington are saying this guy’s bad for you.

So the French Catholics are beaten and I don’t know if people realize this, but what America did is we hired all the people who worked for the French Catholics. So that’s the number one thing in 20th century Vietnamese history if you go back. Let’s just pick a date like 1960 at that point, if I walked up to a Vietnamese. The thing they’re proudest the most is that Ho Chi Minh let them beat the French.

Jeff: Yeah.

James: Ok. Well, then they look to the Saigon Potemkin government that the CIA set up and everybody fought against them to keep the French president. These guys were all Catholics who had served as officers in the French military, bombing Vietnamese villages, their people.

So when you say, did our fear of communism distort things and wouldn’t let us see things. I mean, Nixon still today people on Nixon opened China and I’m like, if you read the China Mirage, you’ll see that Mao reached out to the State Department under Roosevelt and said, I want to come to Washington and explain that I don’t want to deal with Moscow. Moscow has borscht, and you all have, I want Wall Street.

What has happened with China and America, Chinese ingenuity and labor, and American technology and capital? Mao was talking about that in a cave to a State Department guy in 1944. And he wanted to go explain that to Roosevelt. Roosevelt wouldn’t see him. So then Mao reached out to Truman. Truman wouldn’t see him. He reached out to Eisenhower. He reached out to Kennedy. He reached out to Johnson.

Mao is always saying, America, China. Let’s get together. So Nixon finally realizes, like 40 years later, what Mao was talking about. And then we put a crown on Nixon’s head. Oh, he opened China, we’re talking about the Nixon move. For 40 years.

Jeff: Oh, my gosh and millions of dead later, unfortunately.

James: Well, this is the domino theory. Vietnam, I’ve interviewed a lot of American vets. They were under the domino theory if Vietnam falls all Asians are going to fall to China. Well, at the end of his life, Robert McNamara gave an interview and he said the domino theory drove us. But now that I look at it was never studied within the U.S. government. There was no official study. Nobody ever said, does this make sense? It was a belief. The best and the brightest. John Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, McNamara, Bundy these are big brains.

And they’re operating under a myth that could never happen, that had no foundation. It’s just The New York Times is writing about a Russian hack three years ago. It was proved by these CIA guys. You can see it at www.consortium.com there was no hack, the information went out on a USB drive, it wasn’t a hack. It’s just there is a belief system. You can have people believe stuff and they walk into walls.

Jeff: Well, that’s why you do a great job of showing in the “China Mirage”. How there was this tripartite of the U.S. government – the Chinese government, which is tantamount to treason – and Wall Street, the church was more than a tripartite.

It he had Wall Street, the churches working, all of those elements working hand in hand with Western media to put out it just decade after decade of fake news, it was total propaganda. And as you just pointed out, I mean, I don’t know what you think, but I don’t think it’s much better. I don’t think it’s gotten any better. In fact, if anything it has gotten worse because of all the ability to adopt all the sophisticated technology. What do you think about the Western media today?

James: Well, I don’t read it. It’s corporate media and I’m not criticizing it. It’s just it says the same the things about China. I go to China and I say, this is what your media says. And they said, well, it’s propaganda state control and I think that’s a healthier attitude. Americans don’t understand that their media is state-controlled.

Jeff: At least the Chinese are honest about it.

James: Yeah, it is. Americans are under the illusion that they have a free press. And I just I’d like to quote the great philosopher George Carlin, who said, I love America and all the rights that we use.

Jeff: And I think we started losing it back in about the 1880s with the oil and steel and railroad magnates. But I’ll go ahead.

James: If you’re doing links, I’ll give the audience a link. Swiss Institute has studied American media and with graphs, they show how it’s controlled where it is coming from.

Jeff: Please do.

James: It’s very simple but they spent years on this and I think every American should see Swiss link regarding America. The title of the four-page article with two graphs is the American Empire.

Jeff: Ok, cool. I’m excited to see that. Thank you. One more taboo subject. You may want to hang up on me, but I’m going to bring up another one that I’ve been dealing with recently. And again, for me, it’s just been like peeling an onion and putting all the pieces of the Western empire into the puzzle to make it sense.

And the final piece of the puzzle with after White supremacy, racism, imperialism, colonialism. I have now added capitalism to the puzzle to complete it. And I realize that capitalism is like almost like a religion. It’s like a god. Do you think that capitalism is an important element in Western empire and its drive to dominate the world?

James: Yes, of course, but for me to be a capitalist, I have to move. I’m an American. For me to be a capitalist, I’d have to go to Singapore a couple of other places. America is not a capitalist system. It’s a socialist system. Cradle to the grave for the military. Cradle to the grave for the banksters, they can’t lose. The profits are theirs and the losses are the taxpayers to pay.

So, you know the capitalists. I don’t know. I see for me a communist, the capitalist system has not existed.

Jeff: That’s true.

James: Mao was an emperor. And I see the Chinese system as an emperor system. It’s just a committee. The emperor is a committee. And the idea to talk about capitalism today in America, it’s not there.

Jeff: Yeah, exactly. Well, just looking back, writing that of course it all started in the 15th century and it has just been I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the quote by, Dharampal, the great Indian.

I’ve found this the source document where he did actuarial and statistical studies on the census of the Indian subcontinent. And he came up with over the 300 years when the British were there, he calculated that the British system in the Indian subcontinent shorten the lives of no fewer than five hundred million people.

And it sounds like a lot, but when you stretch it out over 300 years, it’s only a few million a year. He said it could be as high as one and a half billion souls. So, very candidly very openly I say Western empire in history is responsible for the death of a billion people since the 15th century. And it just goes on and on. Afghanistan, Syria, color revolutions, false flags. It’s just up to today’s headlines.

And I love the end of your book. In the Imperial Cruise, as you say, so many still follow the sun. In other words, you’re saying, you’re suggesting that so many still follow the Aryan myth of White supremacy. Well you know, is it ever going to stop? What can we do before Eurangloland possibly destroys the world and wipes out humanity? As you said, they’re to wipe everybody else out so that they can have it all to themselves. What can we do?

James: Well, two thoughts.

One, we’ve got to look at the profit. The Vietnam War is thought of as a tragedy by Americans, I look at it as a profit center.

Jeff: Yeah.

James: Well, if you had the Vietnam account at Chase Manhattan Bank, you made generational wealth. It’s that capitalism’s impulse is to kill. It’s the vast profits that are involved here. When you build a school in America, that’s a tiresome process, you got committee meetings and bids and people look at the numbers and you build the school and the darn thing will last for a hundred years. But, there’s a lot of money when you build a fighter jet and it crashes.

You’ve got to build another one. You need better bombs, more than five hundred million dollars of research for something that won’t turn out. But there are five million dollars spent on the research, so war is vastly proud.

Jeff: Yeah.

James: It’s the profit of war. It’s just unbelievable when you can go into Afghanistan and within three years, the General Accounting Office says, Jesus, there is six billion unaccounted for. Well, those are pallets of money that’s pretty profitable. That doesn’t happen when you’re building roads and school in America that stretch out and pay and paying off municipal bonds.

So, the profit in war is huge. And I think that’s a huge driver but we don’t want to look at it because our leaders talk about WMD and fear and poisoning and glory and all these other things that we sheeple who are propagandized by the corporate media will believe it. All I’m saying is. Well, let’s look over here at the dollars. What happens to these dollars and cents?

Jeff: Yeah.

James: That is the driver.

Jeff: Pallets of money also went missing – pallets, I saw photographs of them. Pallets of money in Iraq also went missing. Billions of dollars of pallets of money just disappeared into the bowels of war in Iraq. So we’ll go to the final question and maybe this is part of your way of trying to stop a Western empire and its genocide. You have founded the Bradley Peace Foundation and another organization called Youth for Understanding. What do you hope to accomplish?

James: Well, Youth for Understanding is a big worldwide organization founded in the 50s, and I just kind of buy scholarships there.

Jeff: Okay, I see. All right.

James: I don’t have the infrastructure to do medical insurance, and that’s it. So, I just, my dad survived massacres on Iwo Jima, I wrote a book, and I thought some of this money is gonna go to just to stop these massacres. So I’ve given scholarships for kids to go to Japan, China, and Vietnam and study and the idea is very simple.

I just think if you take an American mush head kid and put their mush head in the living room of an Asian mother for a year, they might come back with changed minds. And the next time, 20 years from now, we’re thinking whether we should fight it out or talk to these kids or make a difference.

Jeff: Yeah. Well, that was raison d’etre for the Peace Corps,nto send kids out and one of the missions is to come back and be able to explain to Americans what they learned, like when I came back from the Peace Corps. Please tell us about the Bradley Peace Foundation, that’s got your name on it. So you must have some association.

James: Yeah. No, that’s all it is. A kid applies to James Bradley’s foundation for the scholarship.

Jeff: Oh, I see. OK. Yeah.

James: I got them through the Youth for Understanding.

Jeff: Ok. So it’s like a cooperative deal. OK, that’s cool.

James: It’s a legal foundation.

Jeff: ok.

James: But it differs from the Peace Corps in that the Peace Corps, John Kennedy said we’re gonna go help people.

James Bradley Foundation says you’re not a missionary to teach the people how to wash their hands. You’re going to sit in the Asian mother’s living room and learn.

Jeff: One last question. You’re now living and writing in Vietnam and you’re on the tiny archipelago. Is it Con Dao? How do you pronounce it?

James: Con Dao.

Jeff: Con Dao. I know “dao” means island because that’s a Chinese word. And it was France’s colonial penal prison. It’s about an hour’s commuter flight south of the south coast of Vietnam. Is this going to be the story of your next book and tell us what your current writing project is?

James: I’m writing a book called How Vietnam Won, and it’s centered on the island of Con Dao. But I’ve done 10 years of interviews with the winners. So if you look at the Ken Burns documentary on Vietnam or if you read, just line up 300 books written by Americans, they all have their lame assumption that we could have won. McNamara and Bundy went to their deaths studying their papers, trying to figure out where they went wrong, which means if they had only zigged, maybe then we would have won.

Or if they had zagged in here. So there is this common assumption among Americans that we could have won in Vietnam if the hippies hadn’t, if the media hadn’t, if the military had only, if in 1962 we just went, and if we had turned North Vietnam into a park. And there are all these ifs. But the point is we lost. So I just went around Vietnam saying, how do you win and I’m writing a book that I hope will explain to America that it was not that America lost. It was that Vietnam had the strategies and tactics to win and they implemented.

Jeff: Yeah. Absolutely. You know, Wilfred Burchett, he wrote a book called “Vietnam Will Win”. I just wrote an article about it. I’ll send you the link if you haven’t read it.

James:  I’ve read the link and I’ve read the book twice.

Jeff: Okay, great. Yeah. “Vietnam Will Win”. It’s like your descriptions of American imperialism in the Philippines. It’s a hard slog reading it because it’s just the brutality and the cruelty and the inhumaneness of what we did there is – it just is takes your breath away, unfortunately.

James: it was very profitable.

Jeff: Yeah.

James: It was a winner for a lot of people. There were people riding motorboats on the Mekong River here in Saigon, living a great life. David Rockefeller ran all the money through Chase Manhattan Bank. He made a fortune.

Jeff: Yeah.

James: But, if I could just say to the listeners here of Jeff’s and mine. No, absolutely. So all the Americans if Americans think they have a free press, all the American correspondents, we’re staying in our air-conditioned hotels.

And when they went to look at the war, they had to go to the U.S. military, get on a military vehicle, and they got to the back end of the war. They saw the American side. Wilfred Burchett is the only guy who put on watchman’s sandals and walked behind the lines, down the whole  Ho Chi Minh Trail. And he’s the only guy who saw the war. And he’s the only guy who was accurate. So we have all these Americans they won Pulitzer Prizes, but they were only looking through the people of the U.S. military and they got it wrong.

Jeff: Go ahead.

James: Burchett, the whole thing, he got it right.

Jeff: I put a very touching photo of Wilfred Burchett in my article where he was, as you said, wearing sandals and wearing a peasant’s sun hat and he was amazing. And he is a hero of mine, and as you said, of yours. So I’ll add that link to the article to introduce our interview.

Listen, James, you have been very generous with your time. I want to thank you so much for being on China Rising Radio Sinoland. It’s been a terrific interview and having you on. And I appreciate your frankness and openness to talk about subjects that are often swept under the rug in the United States. And so I appreciate having you on and let’s stay in touch.

James: Thank you very much and I congratulate your listeners for their intelligence. So listen to Jeff Brown.

Jeff: I’ll be sending you an e-mail to ask you to send me some links and should have this up in the next 48 hours.

James: OK. You’ve got the link to the Swiss thing already, I said.

Jeff: All right. Thanks a lot, James. Talk to you soon. Bye.

###

Become a regular China Rising Radio Sinoland patron and get FREE BOOKS!

Support all my hard work, videos, podcasts and interviews on CRRS via PayPal!

Support my many hours of research and articles on CRRS via FundRazr!

Become a China Tech News Flash! patron and see your future now!

It all goes towards the same win-win goals: unique research, reporting and truth telling in support of the global 99%, for a more just and mutually beneficial 21^st century.

In Solidarity, Jeff

Why and How China works: With a Mirror to Our Own History

44 Days Backpacking in China: The Middle Kingdom in the 21st Century, with the United States, Europe and the Fate of the World in Its Looking Glass

China Rising: Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations

 

 

 

 

 

 

BIG Red Book on China: Chinese History, Culture and Revolution

Read it in your language • Lealo en su idioma • Lisez-le dans votre langue • Lies es in deniner Sprache • Прочитайте это на вашем языке • 用你的语言阅读

Wechat group: search the phone number +8613823544196 or my ID, Jeff_Brown-44_Days, friend request and ask Jeff to join the China Rising Radio Sinoland Wechat group. He will add you as a member, so you can join in the ongoing discussion.