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

By Jeff J. Brown

Pictured above: your truly with Leo Zhao on the right.

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

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Intro

It’s been way too long, but so wonderful to have Leo Zhao back on the show. To read/watch/listen to his first three, click on this link,

https://chinarising.puntopress.com/search/?q=zhao 

To read his excellent article that is the basis of our discussion, see here. At the end are the books he recommends reading,

https://www.greanvillepost.com/2023/01/29/censorship-in-china-and-the-cias-war-against-the-cpc/

As usual, what a fun and informative talk!

Note for the video: apologies to Leo and the fans for forgetting to turn on the video recording until about halfway in, though the first part has sound, with a visual skin of us together.

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Audio (download at the bottom of this page),

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Transcript:

Jeff J Brown (Host): Good afternoon, everybody. This is Jeff J. Brown on the beaches of Normandy. And I have got a wonderful old friend, Leo Zhao with us today. How are you doing, Leo?

Leo Zhao (Guest): Hey, I’m good.

Jeff: Leo and I go quite a way back. We’ve actually met each other. Before that, we had two shows all the way back in 2019 if you can believe that. And I’ll tell you how popular his two shows were. We talk so long that it ended up being two shows, One about politics and one about music. And I just went back and checked. And Leo will undoubtedly smile: when I add up the two shows and the two transcripts of the shows that I published, almost 100,000 people have accessed to those four posts (https://chinarising.puntopress.com/search/?q=zhao).

So, it is definitely one of the most popular. Leo’s one of the most popular guests I’ve ever had on this show. And then I guess it would have been sometime thereafter because it was before COVID, I went to Berlin. I think it was that summer. Because we had our interviews in January. And then that summer I came to Berlin and spent a couple of days at your place and got to meet you and your family and your cats and we had a lot of fun together. And so anyway, great to see you again and great to have you back on, Leo.

Leo: Yeah, good to see you also. It’s been a couple of years.

Jeff: Well, the reason we have been going around and around and around and around trying to get together on the show and he recently wrote a wonderful expose on The Greenville Post entitled “Censorship in China and the CIA’s War Against the CPC” (https://www.greanvillepost.com/2023/01/29/censorship-in-china-and-the-cias-war-against-the-cpc/). And he’s obviously done a heck of a lot of research. And then he has three books at the end to recommend if you’d like to do some further study. Please tell us about censorship and its necessity in China.

Leo: Well, why don’t we go all the way to the beginning? Socialism, Marxism, Communism. Marxism is the scientific way, rational way of understanding human society, and the forces that shape it. From the very beginning, suppressed by the bourgeois academies. Because it represents the only real threat to the power structures based on ownership of land and slaves. That capitalism is an evolution is the latest permutation of feudal monarchic slave societies.

And Marxism, the scientific understanding of who produces what and who gets paid and who reaps the benefits and who gets exorbitantly rich, and who remains very, very poor and working in terrible conditions. Marxism the understanding of this is the only real threat in all of human history that has seriously posed to this 6,000, 10,000 years old power structure. And socialism, the path, the transition period from capitalism to communism was under attack from the beginning. So, let’s just talk.

I hope, we know about the 14 countries’ invasion of the Soviet Union merely two weeks after October 1918. Merely 2 or 3 weeks after, 14 countries led by the US and the UK invaded Russia. We all know about the Vietnam War. We all know about hopefully the Korean War. These are like episodes of heinous epic-scale war crimes committed against socialist countries by the US. But what is let’s talk about is the war of information against socialism and the war for hearts and minds that began even before the Soviet revolution, even before the Soviet Union.

I would just like to say from the outset that just logically speaking, right. The biggest enemy of the bourgeois empires. These empires that are very powerful, and very rich, have spent everything that they have, every method that they can come up with to try to destroy them. And the military expenditure. Right. We know very well. The military expenditure and the cost to US American lives, soldiers to go abroad and murder mass murderers a hundred times more deaths than US American deaths.

But this cost is not at all or this cost is paralleled with the cost of the information campaigns, the propaganda campaigns that have been unleashed since even before the Soviet Union. So, I don’t know if three years ago we talked about this, but I would say the very first concerted effort against the Marxist understanding of human society against the rational scientific way to understand human society is the partly separating political science. No, not. Not political science. Sorry.

There was a discipline that political science and economics came out of. It was political economy in the 19th century, economics and politics were together and in universities all over the world, all over the West or Western world, and all over the entire world. And right around the 1870s, 1880s, late 1800s, right after Das Capital was published by Karl Marx, basically, or ten years after, some years after sweeping education reforms all over Europe, all over the United States, all over North America, separating the disciplines of political economy into two.

Jeff: Politics and economics.

Leo: Exactly. So that the two shall never meet or the cross-research and studies are just separated. So, I would say that’s the very first structural, academic, mental, and intellectual assault on Marxism.

Jeff: Wow, go ahead.

Leo: Yeah, from there we can talk about the waves and waves of education reform all throughout the late 1800s and the early 1900s and all the way up to now in the 1960s and the 70s. In the early 20th century, in the early 1900s, 1910, and 1920s, powerful industrialists like Carnegie like DuPont, these powerful capitalists funded more waves of education reform which removed Marxism on a structural level.

Just cleaned up the West from Marxism so it’s like cleaning up biology from Darwin. It’s like all of the biology departments all over the Western Hemisphere, all of a sudden just all the Darwinists, all the evil Darwinists are removed and replaced with whatever creationists or whatever.

Jeff: That’s true in a number of states in the United States. The textbooks expunged Darwin from textbooks in the United States, in the red states, the conservative states. That’s the absolute truth.

Leo: Yes, my metaphor or my ridiculous example to show how ridiculous that would be. It’s actually also reality. So anyway, yeah, anything is possible when you remove science.

Jeff: I wanted to point out you were saying before the Soviets and but Karl Marx was actually in Paris in 1848 and wrote a very powerful piece on what was happening there. And I’d like to say that, yeah, Marxism was inspired by the French Revolution in 1789 and I just read a couple of books about the biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte one in English and one in French. And it’s quite interesting.

The one in English is an Englishman and it was from the viewpoint of the 99%, the have-nots. And then the one in French is from the viewpoint of the haves during the revolution. So, it was quite interesting. But it was the clarion call to bring down monarchy and the power of the church in society to keep the feudal oppressive society in existence. And God loves him.

Napoleon gave it his very best from 1799 until 1815, he brought democracy and justice, and freedom too many of the people of Europe. But he was constantly being attacked by the elites of his day. The monarchs, the aristocrats, the nobles, and England was the biggest culprit financing gunpowder soldiers and bribes and everything to get Russia and Holland and Italy and Germany and Austria and Spain to constantly be attacking Napoleon.

And, of course, he won 50 out of 54 battles. And finally, ran out of gas. But to me, that is a foundational event because he really, in fact, was a democratic socialist. And for the people, in fact, his famous expression was, “All for the French People”! And these rich elites later became the DuPonts and the Rockefellers et cetera. They did everything. He had a target on his back. And the revolution had a target on its back from the very first day, just like the Soviets did in 1917 with the Russian Revolution.

And anyway, this has been going on for a long time, this terrible the 1% versus the 99% is, this has been going on since there has been class division in organized society. And I think censorship probably started at the same time as class differentiation in human society whatever it was 10,000 years ago. 5,000 years ago. Anyway, what else would you like to continue to share in today?

Leo: Yeah. So slowly. Let me just say a couple of words on the French Revolution was hijacked, as you say, by the newly emerging bourgeois class to displace feudal structure. And the more radical demands of the left wing of the French Revolution were defeated by the newly emergent owners of industry of factories.

So, the more radical demands actually for the people of actual universal freedom, democracy, and the slogan of the French Revolution were not able to be authentically or fully realized at all. It was realized in part, these things were for free citizens, meaning property owners, meaning white property owners. So, the French Revolution definitely gave us a lot of it, wasn’t advanced, but it was an advance that was kept for the bourgeois class.

And freedom and democracy were not made available to common people to the working class, the people who work for a living. And just one very interesting side note, David Graeber’s last book (https://davidgraeber.org/books/), a very interesting that he illuminated that some of these foundational ideas behind the enlightenment, such as universal health care, such as democracy, parliamentary democracy actually came from the colonies, actually came from the Mayans, the Aztecs.

Jeff: Native culture.

Leo: Native cultures. Yes. That had a very advanced political philosophy. He talks about this one Aztec or was it Mayan, a Mayan thinker that was visiting Paris that was very popular with all the French intellectuals and hung out in the cafes with all the movers and shakers of the mid-1800s or late 1800s, I mean early, early 1800s. And yeah, influenced their thinking quite a bit. But anyway, that’s a little side note.

So, the war against socialism in terms of hearts and minds continues from this point onward. And it is ceaseless. It is relentless, and it is backed by billions, trillions of dollars by the might the power of these colonial capitalist empires. That was, of course, 100 times stronger, more rich than the socialist countries, which did not develop from opium profits, from transatlantic slavery profits.

Jeff: Sugar, tobacco.

Leo: Yep, all of that. So, the warfare in the 20th century after World War Two against socialism continued without missing a beat. Right? Without missing a single beat. Right after World War two, the CIA began to fund extremists in the countries in the region surrounding the Soviet Union and began to fund Nazis specifically.

Jeff: In Ukraine, they were funding Nazis in Ukraine from 1945 on.

Leo: Exactly, exactly, and many other places as well. They were in Taiwan funding opposition groups to the Mainland, opposition groups that are against communism, anti-communists, fascists, nationalists, feudalists, people who want to bring the King back, people who want to bring slavery back, all funded by the US in their long-term strategy to eliminate socialism completely from the face of the planet so that they can rule forever. I mean, I know it sounds a bit too.

Jeff: Oh, no, no, you’re exactly right. I mean, that’s why I’ve always said that as soon as a country declares its independence from what I call the Global Capitalist Trillionaires, as you said because they’ve got trillions. The Global Capitalist Trillionaire Dictators, as soon as they make that declaration of independence, they are at war. War is immediately declared on them. And it never stops. It never ceases. And I saw I read an article.

The numbers vary quite a bit, but I’ve seen articles where since 1959, the Cuban Revolution people say, oh, well, they don’t have a lot of clothes and housing is a problem, and blah, blah, blah, blah. And but they have calculated that no fewer than hundreds of billions of dollars have been sucked out of the Cuban economy or have been deprived from the Cuban economy since 1959 because they can’t import this. They can’t buy this. They can’t develop this.

They can’t do this because of all of the horrible sanctions that have killed over time hundreds of thousands of Cubans over the last 60 years. And not to mention also that the United States has attacked Cuba with bioweapons, dengue fever and swine fever and they destroyed their tobacco crop, their sugar crops and their cassava crops, and their other tropical crops by flying over and dumping viruses and bacteria on cropland areas.

So that’s just for Venezuela, for Eritrea and Africa, for Cambodia, Laos, Zimbabwe, it just goes on and on and on. They’re trying to destroy you, as you said, expunge as they did in Indonesia. That’s what they did with Sukarno to Suharto when they killed somewhere between 1 million and 3 million teachers and leftists and union members.

And now in Indonesia, it is against the law to even say the word Communism. And so, in Indonesia, it has been completely expunged. And that was all, of course, thanks to the CIA with the genocide there. And what was it, 1965, 66. Anyway, so what about China and your wonderful article about how China must and all socialist countries, they have to apply censorship to keep from being destroyed from the outside and from the inside?

Leo: Yeah, let’s just continue with the bigger narrative that we are constructing here. Those things are even more visible. Those things are hidden. The corporeal violence that the empire unleashed on struggling socialist countries is even more visible. They’ve been buried for sure, but those are even more visible than the countless counterfeit radio stations set up after World War Two.

The Labyrinthine Global Media Networks set up by Empire against socialism such as Radio Free Europe, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free… Many other networks with tentacles deep in every continent, spreading constant anti-communist propaganda. The CIA and Pentagon deal with Hollywood studios goes back to the old Cold War. The hordes of independent think tanks published mountains and mountains of lies about the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, about Korea. This elaborate global structure of anti-communist propaganda mutually supporting each other. Of course, very, very well coordinated.

I mean, we talk about organizational structure. We talk about long-term thinking, right? People say that capitalists are incapable of long-term thinking. But this is only true when it comes to the benefit of their own people. The benefit of the infrastructure for Chicago and Los Angeles and New York City. The well-being, the health care of their own citizen’s long-term thinking, building public transportation is nonexistent does not exist. But long-term thinking and amazing centralized organization is a state of the art in the USA when it comes to the war against socialism.

Jeff: Absolutely. You were talking about the media. Again, it even goes back to before the Russian Revolution. And I was reading another book, another by Ramin Mazaheri, about the Yellow Vests. And he ties the Yellow Vests to the French Revolution. And he commented that during the Paris Commune in 1871, it was the monarchs. The monarchs were so frightened of it that the French monarchs called in German troops to Paris and they massacred 30,000 of the Communards.

They basically wiped out the Communards all 30,000 of them. And they were already doing this. There was a media blackout in 1871. There was a media blackout. And all the newspapers were censored. All the magazines were censored. Posters were censored. It was completely expunged from the history of France and from the history of the world. And even to this day, if you ask French about what happened, nine out of ten of them or 19 out of 20 of them are not even going to know about that particular fact.

So, this ability to use their power and their money to suppress information, censor information, not to mention psyops psychological operations publishing lies and just complete and total fiction to tarnish their enemies the socialists, the communists, the populists, the working class I mean, I hate to say it and I call it the Big Lie Propaganda Machine, but unfortunately, it’s awesome.

They are really, really good at what they do. And that’s one of the reasons our world is in such a heck of a mess right now because people don’t know what’s going on. They don’t take the time like you and me to dig past the headlines and mainstream news. And if Westerners think they have freedom of the press, they are completely deluded and delusional. And they’re living in a simulacrum because it is highly controlled and has been controlled for at least 150 years.

Leo: The director of the CIA in the 1960s, I believe, famously boasted that they have a very well-oiled, very highly efficient global megaphone. Actually, he used the word of this.

Jeff: The Wurlitzer, the organ. That was Frank Wisner Junior. He was one of the founders of the CIA. And he called their ability to do, as you said, to brainwash the people. A mighty Wurlitzer and of course, for those of you who don’t know what a Wurlitzer is, it’s an organ that’s about as big as a king-size bed. And it’s got all these keys and buttons on it and switches and stuff that so that you can play all, basically it was the Moog synthesizer of its day. And so, yeah, it’s like a gigantic sort of Wizard of Oz Keyboard. He actually said that, you’re right.

Leo: Yeah, that they can just come up with a narrative, in Langley, Virginia, and have every local radio station in Thailand, in Indonesia, in El Salvador, in Mali echo and repeat this same narrative verbatim often throughout the entire world in the next week a very, very efficient propaganda machine that propagated stories like the absurdly exaggerated versions of the gulag system of the Soviet Union, absurdly fabricated versions of the Holodomor.

Jeff: Which didn’t even happen. It was a complete and total fabrication.

Leo: There were some difficulties. There was some starvation. But wildly exaggerated.

Jeff: Also, not to mention the Great Leap Forward in China, the Cultural Revolution has been completely…

Leo: The eighty million Chinese killed by Mao and the list goes on and on and on. The Castro violations, the myth of the Tiananmen Square massacre, the Falun Gong Organ transplants, and the North Koreans, all males are forced to get the same haircut as Kim Jong-Un. and of course, until today the 1 million Uighurs…

Jeff: The supposedly 20% of Xinjiang population is living in dungeons. But people believe it.

Leo: Yeah, it’s amazing without a single refugee. If you look at UN statistics for refugees coming out of Xinjiang, no abnormalities.

Jeff: Yeah.

Leo: Zero abnormalities. Julian Assange leaked hundreds of thousands of documents about war crimes and human rights violations at the hands of the United States, by the hands of NATO in Afghanistan and Iraq and Syria, and Libya. Blah, blah, blah. Not a single leak from Xinjiang of the millions of Muslims in concentration camps and forced labor. Not a single mobile phone. Everybody has a mobile phone these days.

The Uighurs on YouTube, there are millions of videos from Xinjiang of people dancing and eating amazing food. I mean, on one side, the Chinese government is so incompetent and on the other side, they’re able to block every single cell phone video. Watch like and prevent WikiLeaks from leaking. As if the United States could not prevent WikiLeaks from leaking their secrets, but the Chinese government is able to anyway.

Jeff: WikiLeaks is where I found all about Tiananmen and how the US embassy in their internal wires going back to Washington said there was no massacre. And no one will admit that. And then there were other internal documents that I found on WikiLeaks that said that the organ harvesting, of course, Falun Gong is a CIA front. And the harvesting of Falun Gong organs is completely fake and total it’s just psyops. It’s just fake news.

So even in the internal documents, like in WikiLeaks, the truth is there. But the New York Times is not going to publish it and BBC is not going to put it on their television shows. So, it did happen. So, it’s just awful. So, what else do you have to tell us about? Tell us a couple of things that really worry you or concern you or give you hope about 2023.

Leo: Sure. Sure. But let me just wrap up the previous topic very fast.

Jeff: Okay, sure. And take all the time you want, Leo.

Leo: Yeah, just to wrap it up, it’s in this context, in this historical context of the continuing war for hearts and minds against socialism and against the real movement towards justice, peace, equality, harmony, the freedom to reach the human potential that censorship is made absolutely necessary in socialist countries in a world information sphere dominated by bourgeois empires completely.

I mean, global media is Western media because the media of Africa, the media of Asia, and Latin America are just not powerful enough to compete with the BBC with the structure of information dissemination that we’ve been describing. So, it’s unfortunate, but it is the reality that the global information sphere is just entrenched, saturated with lies, with literal lies, with anti-communist values, and anti-communist deceptions.

And so, it’s unfortunate, but in the 20th century, especially when the socialist countries were so weak when their citizens want people to want good things, people want nice things, which is very human. There’s nothing wrong with that. You see Hollywood movies or commercials about how rich, the colonial empires are but they don’t understand that they are colonial empires.

They just think that they are rich because they are free and democratic and we are not. We are an authoritarian dictatorship. According to the movies they see, according to Western media, according to the Global Media Network, citizens of poor countries that are struggling to build socialism, to survive against ceaseless economic sanctions and military violence, it was absolutely necessary to have censorship to block the deluge of falsehoods coming.

Jeff: Fake news, all the lies and you’re exactly right. Absolutely.

Leo: So, until today in China, the Great Firewall is an amazingly prescient decision or method.

Jeff: Absolutely. You can see what happens in countries like Venezuela, where in Bolivia and Peru, you can see the disaster in Peru right now with President Castillo deposed by a fascist coup. And those countries, Argentina, Brazil, and elsewhere, they’re trying to realize a socialist society, but the media is still owned by the oligarchs. And so, they just spew constant vomit on the population with the lies and exaggerations and censorship and et cetera.

And you can see the troubles it causes them by not having that power to censor, like in China, Iran, Korea, Russia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba, and Laos. I’m leaving a few out. But those countries really actively make sure that the Big Lie Propaganda Machine cannot get in there. And they still do. I mean, they still get in. It’s just unbelievable. They have so much money and so much power and so many resources that even in the best of times, it’s not maybe North Korea, that would be about the only one that’s probably the most successful.

But it’s just it’s relentless. It is absolutely relentless. And so, I would like to point out that a lot of people don’t know this, but China has had an official government censor for over 2,000 years. They go all the way back to the Han Dynasty, back to the times of Jesus Christ, the Chinese government has always had an official censor, and this comes from Confucianism and Daoism, and the individual is less important than the society.

The society and the country and the people and so, the censor has for 2,000 years made sure that these kinds of fifth columnists and lies and fiction and exaggerations and subversion are limited to the greatest extent possible, for social harmony and for the benefit of the people. Of course, that did not happen after the Opium Wars of 1839.

And then 1856 was the second one. So, for 110 years until 1949, China’s censor was under the control of the West. But other than that, this censorship in China has worked remarkably well. China has had many fewer wars than the West has over the last 2,000 years. And part of the reason is that they have actively controlled the media of their day to people to keep things in perspective. Just wanted to point that out.

Leo: Yeah, that’s really interesting. There are so many different layers of understanding. And of course, within feudalism, I mean, let’s not make any mistake. Feudalism is an oppressive system in which the peasants pay a really insane amount of taxes to the kings and but within feudalism, there are better ways to do it. There are more humane ways to do it. There are more legitimate political systems and less political systems, even within the monarchy, even within feudalism. And you’re right, absolutely. The Chinese political system was the Chinese feudal system was much more advanced than those of many other areas of the world.

Jeff: Well, as I always say, if I had to be a serf, I’d rather be a serf in China, in ancient China than I would in ancient Europe, because there’s just no comparison in terms of cruelty, domination, exploitation. Of course, over 3,000 or 4,000 years, there have been some bad characters in China. But I was just thinking one of those books on Napoleon I read was really informative. One of the guys who was basically a fifth columnist to destroy Napoleon was Metternich.

And he was basically telling Napoleon one thing and Russia the other. And the reason he wanted the French Revolution to come to a halt is because, before the French Revolution, he had 15,000 serfs working all over his lands. And at night, these serfs, when they came back to wherever they came back to sleep, were put in huge barns with 500 people per barn to sleep on the dirt. That’s Feudalism.

That’s Western Feudalism and that did not, maybe there were some isolated cases in China, but at least in China the houses may not have been very nice but they had houses and shacks or whatever, at least they had their own family unit where they could go back to. But can you imagine the 15,000 serfs that this aristocratic traitor to Napoleon had lost? And of course, he got them all back after Napoleon was deposed.

Leo: Let me just add another episode to our earlier, topic.

Jeff: Sure. Yeah, absolutely. There’s no time limit.

Leo: The main topic after 1945, the concerted effort to continue the academic propaganda in academia to turn Western intellectuals against the Soviet Union, to turn Western leftists against existing socialism, and to turn Western people against Lenin, that would be U.S Americans, against Lenin or German or French leaders of working-class rebellion into anti-communists and into anti-socialists was extensive.

This push, this Cold War strategy of not only trying to destroy socialism abroad but to wage war on internal socialism in the West, in the imperial core to prevent any kind of real revolution from happening in the West. And as over overreaching strategy to turn global consciousness against existing socialism. So right after World War Two, MI5, the British intelligence formed an organization which existed for some years that people like George Orwell were a part of.

That was a founding when he turned in the list of several hundred or thousands of British communists through the state. After that, this organization, the name of which I don’t remember was carried on by the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the United States, which was a scion, which was a scion inheritor that carried on the torch of this earlier British organization. So, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, we can look it up on Wikipedia, was an extensive academic network set up by the CIA. It was an offshoot, whereas NED…

Jeff: Yeah, the National Endowment for Democracy. Yeah.

Leo: NED is a kind of scion of the Congress for Cultural Freedom. But its focus is a little bit different in actually fomenting color revolutions and regimes.

Jeff: Yeah.

Leo: Coup d’état. But the Congress for Cultural Freedom specifically focused on academia. And the Wikipedia article for this organization used to says only a few months ago because this is a page I frequent and send to people quite often, and I noticed that until some months ago, it had a list of prominent Western intellectuals that was on their payroll, that was directly funded by the CCF.

They still do have yeah, this list of names has been removed from the Wikipedia page for some reason only in the last few months, but they do still have a historian on that page saying that exact quote. There were few Western thinkers in the postwar era that were not affiliated, somehow directly or indirectly with the Congress for Cultural Freedom CCF. Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Susan Sontag, and the list goes on and on. All of the French philosophers, the French School, the Structuralists, the Post-Structuralists, and the Existentialists.

Jeff: Well, there were even artists. There were artists, directors, and actors. It was just unbelievable. The Frankfurt School.

Leo: Yeah, The Frankfurt School, The New York School, all of these, are offshoots. The groups like the Situationists as psychoanalysis. I mean all of these people did valuable work that is good but they were all tainted. They were all shaped by this anti-fundamental anti-communism. So whatever good work they did, it was positioned as like it was in a position against existing authoritarianism which is a concept that is largely meaningless because every society is authoritarian, every government. I mean, there’s nothing more authoritarian than paying rent or dying of exposure.

Jeff: Yeah.

Leo: Paying rent or dying of exposure is like the most authoritarian thing that we can imagine. But anyway, so the Congress for Cultural Freedom. And I just want to pick up this academic, Gabriel Rockhill. He studied with the French theory luminaries such I think. But anyway, it doesn’t matter. He went to school in Paris, and he studied with many of these postmodern psychoanalysts and deconstructionists, and linguists for decades. And he has been doing this crucial work of deconstructing the deconstructionists.

Jeff: Okay, Gabriel Rockhill (https://gabrielrockhill.com/home-2/).

Leo: And kind of Gabriel Rockhill healing the geopolitical impetus behind all of this academic realm of pseudo rebellion that this kind of theory that’s focused on language and culture and like subversion and sexuality and power and but all in anti-class emphasis. Their analysis ultimately directs you towards this sort of fancy language and obfuscation to direct you away from Marxism. So anyway, Gabriel Rockhill is amazing at doing I think probably the most important academic work being done today.

Jeff: If we for the Congress for Cultural Freedom going to archive.org, their Wayback Machine where websites were saved going back months and years and months and years (http://web.archive.org/). That list of people might be found if you look up the Congress for Cultural Freedom on the Wayback Machine and then pick up a download of that Wiki website going back say six months before they took all those names off. I’m sure they’re there. Have you ever used the Wayback Machine before?

Leo: I haven’t. I should check it out.

Jeff: Okay. It’s called archive.org.

Leo: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I see it.

Jeff: And it’s called the Wayback Machine. And I back up my website every month just in case something terrible happens. And at least for posterity’s sake. So, it does work. I mean, there are hundreds of millions of Internet pages on that website and you could probably find them by just typing in like Sontag or Susan Sontag. But try the Congress for Cultural Freedom and see what you can find it. And we’ll publish the list.

I do want to point out that yeah, it got more insane and more psychopathic after 1945. But at least in the United States, we can go back to the 1880s with the populist movements and the Prairie Populist Movements and the labor movements and the unionization movements of the late 19th century.

And then the early 20th century and the Wobblies and groups like that and the elites in the United States, the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Morgans, and all the wealthy families that bought up all the newspapers and the magazines just ruthlessly, ruthlessly crushed all of these movements in the United States. So that and, of course, that’s one of the reasons they formed the FBI in 1908 was to continue to ruthlessly crush these groups.

(Jeff see a cat next to Leo) And so, he’s beautiful. Is that the same cat that I saw when I was at your place in 2019?

Leo: Yep.

Jeff: Oh, yeah. He was beautiful. So, anyway, this relentless socialism was with the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital and in the late 19th century, and early 20th century, there was a lot of interest in socialism and communism in the United States. Lots. And of course, they went on. And then with the Soviet Union being founded in 1917, it just got even more intense. And so, but they have been going after and crushing these popular liberation freedom-type movements for many, many, many decades.

Leo: Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, so, the freedom of speech fundamentalists, the ultra-liberals of the Western left today simply are lacking this entire perspective. The anarchists, the pro-Julian Assange people are almost formulaically, almost completely in agreement with each other that freedom of speech is absolute. And there are no exceptions. And so, China is as authoritarian and bad and oppressive as the USA which imprisons Julian Assange.

So, in their mind are missing this entire perspective that we have been talking about, of this bigger perspective of the geopolitical war that has been going on for more than 100 years against existing socialism. So, these people will be like, yeah, freedom of speech is an absolute. And there are no exceptions. And China has a censorship program and you cannot be pro-censorship. If you are pro-censorship, you are a fascist.

Jeff: Yeah, well the censorship in the West is omnipresent and omnipotent. And the difference is the outlook on society even before socialism and communism in China, in 1921 with the founding of the Communist Party of China. In Chinese culture to go take a sign and hold it up in Tiananmen Square and say, “Xi Jinping is a jerk”!, is not acceptable because it is not useful. It doesn’t do anything to help the society.

However, if you want to go to your local government office and this is true going back even way before Jesus Christ, Chinese have always had the right to go to their local government entity, whether it’s a mayor or a governor or whatever, a judge or whatever, they have always had the right to go and make complaints. And that has been a part of China for at least 3000 years. But to do it publicly, if it’s being done publicly, it’s a loss of face for the people, it’s a loss of face for society and it’s a loss of face for their leaders.

Now, obviously, if the situation is so bad, I mean, there are 300 to 500 protests a day, 300 to 500 public protests a day in China, but for reasons. There is some existential problem pollution, corruption anything, I even wrote an article about a woman who was, I think in Beijing and she was selling her breast milk on the sidewalk in Beijing, because she had a complaint about her health insurance.

I can’t remember what it was, her health insurance or a government payment that she wasn’t receiving. And it made national news. But she didn’t get beaten. She didn’t get maced. She didn’t get imprisoned. She, in fact, got her problem solved. But they didn’t bother her because she had a reason to be there. So, this idea to go out and talk and hold up signs about Biden and Trump and Obama and all this, it’s theater. It’s just Kabuki theater. It’s not freedom. It’s just it’s fake. It’s fake freedom as far as I’m concerned because it doesn’t solve a damn thing.

Leo: Yeah. You point out a very, very important fundamental difference in political philosophy, right? With capitalist fake democracy. It’s all theater. And people are free to cajole and joke and mock and political comedy is huge in the US, right? You have all these pundits making jokes and like, slandering each other. It’s like pro wrestling politics.

Jeff: Yeah, that’s a good analogy.

Leo: And policies remain the same. The safety measures for public transportation, such as the train network remain the same, like underfunded, zero funding. no safety measures, health care, every single thing, nothing changes ever. And in China, the policies change.

Jeff: They listen to the people.

Leo: They listen to the people. And also, the censorship in China is all to prevent Western imperialist media from influencing the people in a massive way, but the voices of people are absolutely allowed to be heard. You point out that back in the day public protest against the government is frowned upon, but today is a little bit different because, on Chinese social media, there are hundreds of groups called Xi Jinping is a jerk.

People are absolutely free to express discontent and being angry with either the local government or even the central government. But most of the hundreds of protests daily in China are against the local governments and local corruption. Some asshole, who is doing asshole things and calling for Beijing to step in. Beijing usually steps in, always steps in on the side of the workers, of the people, and punishes the corrupt politicians.

But anyway, I just want to add one thing what I was going to say about censorship. Chinese says, yeah what is real totalitarianism, like where dissent is not allowed here in Germany? And it absolutely, journalists have their bank accounts frozen. Journalists just doing journalism. This year like happening right now, people are getting into legal trouble for talking about a different perspective of the conflict in Ukraine.

It is absolutely like dissenting voices are not allowed here in Germany. In fact, I have to be very careful in what I say on the internet for fear of reprisals, not immediately, but maybe some years down the line when things maybe get even worse. But I just want to say that I just hung out with some friends from Russia recently as well and they were telling me they’re political people, very active. Actually, they work in politics.

They were just telling me that in Russia you are allowed to disagree. You’re allowed to disagree with each other at the workplace or in your social circles. You’re allowed to say I don’t like Putin. You’re allowed to say NATO is not aggressively expanding. You’re allowed to say Ronald Reagan was a nice guy. Churchill was a humanitarian. You’re allowed to say all of these things. You’re allowed to say, disagree. And you’re not going to get fired. You’re not going to get exiled from social circles or professional circles.

The opposite of social reality here where I live. I mean, in the past five, or six years, the number of friends I have lost because of my politics and the number of professional relationships that me, I’m a little bit careless and not careful enough. So, it’s my own fault. But only expressing things like Stalin made decisions under extreme pressure in extremely desperate situations. Just saying something like that gets you completely exiled from the cultural institution or academic institution that you have a relationship with. They just completely cut you off.

Jeff: Well, Leo, that happened to me in spades.

Leo: I’m sure I only imagine, Jeff.

Jeff: In fact, my best friend from high school and college was in the Peace Corps for two years in South Korea. And of course, he has had and still has a very American point of view. And several years ago. Well, I don’t know when it was maybe 4 or 5 years ago, I started doing research about North Korea and came up with a completely different understanding of that country than what we’re told by the Big Lie Propaganda Machine.

And I wrote a couple of articles about North Korea from the perspective of the North Koreans. And from that point on, even though my wife and I got married in his backyard and we did all kinds of stuff together and everything else, we have become estranged because of that. And it’s not just him, it’s just a lot of people. Of course, the other good thing is that, okay, I’ve lost all these people who can’t accept a different idea or a different point of view on how the world is and how it works.

But I’ve gained many, many, many wonderful friends like you who have helped enlarge my horizon and educated me, and informed me. And so, it’s sort of like a wave. I lost all the people behind the wave. But now I’ve caught a lot of friends in the wave moving forward. So, it’s not like I’m friendless or whatever. It’s just all the past is gone. And now I’ve got the future to look forward to.

Leo: Yeah, which is ironic. We who talk about community, we who talk about collectivity find ourselves in the West isolated and ironic. And having to absolutely embody the very American rugged individualist ethic of like the lone cowboy riding.

Jeff: I call it the Marlboro Man. Do you remember the Marlboro advertisements? I call it the Marlboro Man affliction. It’s a strange world we live in. And I’m glad that I get to know people like you and I learned so much from people like you compared to the friends that I had in the past. I remember when I got back from the Peace Corps. I was in the Peace Corps from 80 to 82 in Tunisia. And I came back and I was speaking and reading and writing fluent Arabic. And I’d been traveling. I’d been overseas and everything.

And I got together with my five best friends from high school. And it was a disaster. It was a complete and total disaster. It was like they had not evolved at all. It was like they were still in high school. And I had been through so much and I’d gone to Brazil and I had done traveling. And it was just a complete. No, it was actually later, because I had actually gotten my job where I was traveling all over Africa in the Middle East after Peace Corps.

But it was just like two ships in the night. It was just like we had nothing to talk about together. They weren’t interested in anything I had done or any of my experiences. They didn’t care about what I saw or learned or heard or anything, and they were still talking about the same local subjects, local sports, and local news. And that’s the last time I saw them. I never saw them again. So, Evolution, Non-Darwinian Evolution, Social Evolution.

Well, Leo any closing comments? What do you think is what’s going to happen this year? We’ve got Ukraine. NATO’s getting its clock cleaned. We’ve got the US trying to start a war with China and Russia at the same. And I even read that there even now that the Russians are saying that many of the soldiers that they are killing and capturing are Poles. So, NATO is already in Ukraine. But what do you see happening in 2023, or 2024?

Leo: Well, we just have so many different trajectories, right, on different levels. I mean, we have so many differences. The de-dollarization that’s rapidly happening. The geopolitical alliances that are forming between the anti-imperialist bloc, and Iran joining BRICS. We have even Saudi Arabia.

Jeff: That wants to join them.

Leo: Yeah, possibly joining. We have India still on the fence kind of doing the not this, not that side thing. But we have these larger things happening and then we have the things on the ground. Ukraine running out of weapons. We have an economic downturn, a severe downturn in Europe. We have European populations beginning just beginning to really realize that something is very wrong with their political establishment who don’t care about their own constituency. We have just we have the social ongoing collapse in the US. We have train wrecks.

We have just the ongoing bipartisan animosity that is ever-intensifying, that is threatening to break out into Civil War 2.0. We have Taiwan choosing the Guomindang, the Pro-One-China Party over the Democratic Party that is installed by the US to be anti-Mainland. We have just so many multiple things. I mean we are definitely not bored. but it’s of course impossible to say which of these trajectories is going to happen before the others, which one of them is going to eclipse the others or join with the others to steer the direction for this planet in which direction. I mean, it’s, I would say, impossible to predict.

Jeff: Yeah, I’m actually pretty upbeat. Leo this has been going on for, I think the West has had a good run since ancient Greece in 1,000 B.C. And the exploitation, the expansionism, the slavery, the expropriation, they’ve had a good run. And then the Romans and then the Roman Catholic Church and then colonialism and monarchy and then all the imperialism of the 19th century and all the horrific capitalist wars started in the 20th century and killed tens and tens and tens of millions of people.

But I really feel like this I think the Ukraine situation is a tipping point. I really think it has exposed the West for what it is. China, I’ve been reporting on it, is really coming out now, like Mao Zedong, becoming much more vocal and much less Confucian and much more Mao Zedong, standing up to the United States. We’ve got Russia who’s winning in Ukraine in spite of what everybody wants to say they’re just grinding NATO and whatever NATO throws at them to dust.

And what really impresses me is, I’ve got what I call now the Asian Quint. We’ve got Iran, Belarus, Russia, DPRK, and China together locked geographically. And as long as they stick together, there’s nothing that the West can do to combat them. And I’m really impressed with Africa. Mali has kicked the French out. The Central African Republic has kicked the French out. Burkina Faso has kicked the French out.

Leo: With Russia’s help.

Jeff: Well, with Russia and China. In infrastructure, they’re asking China and Russia to come in and replace what has been 500 years of rape and plunder. And then you look at, you look at countries like Venezuela, they have that dream like that Hugo Chavez Bolivarian dream, like Cuba has and Venezuela has and Bolivia has, it doesn’t matter what you throw at them, as you said, the Bourgeois Trillionaire Dictatorship, they don’t back down.

They don’t back down. And I see those three countries doing well. Peru is a tragedy, because they tried to put in someone like a Hugo Chavez as president. But they did that to Bolivia two years ago and now Bolivia has bounced back. So, I just feel like Vietnam is doing well. They’re humping along. Cambodia and Laos are being tied together by the Belt and Road Initiative with China. I feel pretty good and I agree with you India is to me the one weak link because it is a Western-style democracy and it would be so easy once Modi leaves, God knows what’s going to happen. And he’s fickle. He seems he’s changing his mind every two weeks.

So, Egypt is working tightly. Algeria is working tightly with China. You just go around and I think things look pretty optimistic. You have South Africa, Ethiopia, also with China. Russia is going to be helping Africa with nuclear energy and with security and industry and China with infrastructure et cetera. So, I actually feel pretty good about the way things are going right now. And I think de-dollarization I just saw an article yesterday.

Iran is having a conference with West African countries and is proposing a bank together to avoid the US dollar. So, I mean, it’s just like death by a thousand cuts. How long can the US dollar keep maintaining its suzerainty? I have no idea. But anyway, I think we should be hopeful. I think after 1789 in France and 1917 in Russia and 1949 in China, the three great revolutions are at least popular, people-centered revolutions.

Leo: And don’t forget Haiti that kicked it all off.

Jeff: Yeah, yeah, exactly, where they kicked the French out and unfortunately, they negotiated a bad deal with the banks, and they’re still enslaved by the French banks and Wall Street. Well, any other comments, Leo?

Leo: Yeah, just to add to the optimism, another factor, small factor, big factor Thorium Cycle. The Thorium Fuel Cycle is the latest development in fusion energy. I mean, this is about from all indications, it seems like it’s about to become reality in a big, big way. Literal free, clean, endless energy. I mean, if the Marxist equation of material advancement drives social advancement is still of value to us. I mean, this is going to spell cataclysmic changes in our societies on a global scale and in a very positive way, especially conjoined with the various dynamics that you have been talking about. I really do think the era of imperialism is most likely coming to an end in the next few decades.

Jeff: Yeah, I agree. Yeah, it’s funny, the Americans about a month or so ago announced yeah, we have Tokamak, the solar fusion. We got it to go for whatever it was 1.6 seconds or five seconds or whatever it was, and instead of talking about it benefiting the people, I watched the press conference. This is going to really help us militarily and we’re going to be able to do all kinds of nuclear bomb testing and circumvent all of the international agreements thanks to this new technology.

Nothing about helping humanity. And then I found out later that China has actually done their Tokamak gone for 1,116 seconds or something incredible, magnitudes more than the United States. And what is China talking about: people-centered development, helping the people, helping society, helping progress, helping infrastructure, helping services, the difference is like hell and heaven as far as I’m concerned. Well, listen, my friend, anything else? And if not, we’ll call it a day. And I think we should maybe not wait four years like that like we did this time.

Leo: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s talk again soon. Let’s talk again soon. Thank you so much for having me.

Jeff: Well, thank you for being on. I will put his article about censorship up. I’ll put our four links that have now already gotten almost 100,000 hits from four years ago. And I will put up the books that he recommended to read, and now Leo instead of doing the transcripts weeks or months later, I now will not release an audio-video show without the transcripts. So, it will automatically have the transcript with it, so that people who want to read what we just said can read it or they can watch it or they can listen to it. All right.

Leo: Very nice.

Jeff: Give your cat a hug. Say hello to your wonderful partner and her daughter and hopefully, we’ll get to see each other again soon.

Leo: Yeah, you’re pretty close now.

Jeff: Yeah. Yeah, Normandy is not that far. It’s just a high-speed train, so it’s not that difficult. All right. Talk to you later.

Leo: Have a good day.

Jeff: Bye-bye.

###

Do yourself, your friends, family and colleagues a favor, to make sure all of you are Sino-smart: 

Google ebooks (Epub) and audiobooks:

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 https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=YBKHEAAAQBAJ

https://play.google.com/store/audiobooks/details?id=AQAAAECCkQXRlM

China Rising: Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=YNmLEAAAQBAJ

https://play.google.com/store/audiobooks/details?id=AQAAAECCfHo86M

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

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https://play.google.com/store/audiobooks/details?id=AQAAAECCfHo86M

Amazon print and ebooks (Kindle):

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

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1484939999/

China Rising: Capitalist Roads, Socialist Destinations

https://www.amazon.com/China-Rising-Capitalist-Socialist-Destinations/dp/0996487042

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

https://www.amazon.com/BIG-Red-Book-China/dp/1673322719/

Author page:

https://www.amazon.com/Mr.-Jeff-J.-Brown/e/B00TX0TDDI

Praise for The China Trilogy:

https://chinarising.puntopress.com/2018/06/30/praise-for-the-china-trilogy-the-votes-are-in-it-r-o-c-k-s-what-are-you-waiting-for/

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

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