The daydream of the 1960s flower-power generation was that someone will fill an airplane with lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and spray it around the globe thus render everyone harmless to their neighbors.
That’s gone now but what’s not gone is the idea of
daydreaming a universal sort of happening that would change the existing status
quo if not reverse it. Most of the time such topics are not talked about openly
or nostalgically as the hippies of the 1960s used to do when fantasizing about
LSD. Rather it is now incorporated in the discourses of the day with some
subtlety.
One such discourse is offered by Clifford D. May who
wrote: “China’s global supremacists,” an article that also came under the subtitle:
“Communists in Beijing have grand ambitions.” It was published on March 7, 2023
in The Washington Times.
Clifford May who founded FDD (Foundation for Defense of
Democracies) brags about having produced, and now maintains disciples such stalwarts of the American war culture as
(1) Rep. Mile Gallagher, a Wisconsin Republican who served seven years of active duty
in the Marine Corps including two deployments to Iraq, and holds a doctorate in
international relations from Georgetown; (2) Matt Pottinger,
a China expert who served as deputy national security adviser in the
Trump administration; and (3) retired Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster who served as
national security adviser to then-President Donald, and now chairs the board of
advisers of FDD’s Center on Military and Political Power.
So then, what’s the daydream that’s occupying these
dudes? It is that of creating a Soviet Union kind of boogeyman whose threat
they can invoke every time they think up an effort to pressure the government on
granting them funds and legislation. What they want is a regime that will help
them prepare war plans behind closed doors and away from the consent of the
population.
Given that there is now a growing universal opposition to
such plans, Clifford May started his column by denouncing one such opposing
group. It calls itself Code Pink (also known as Women for Peace.) It is
composed of hundreds of organizations from around the globe; organizations
whose aim is to bring peace and social justice to the world primarily by ending
the US-funded wars and occupations. Here, in condensed form is how Clifford May
formulated his thoughts:
“Code Pink, attempted to disrupt a hearing of a House Committee on the
Chinese Communist Party. Protesters held up signs and wore T-shirts reading,
“China is not our enemy.” Committee members did not seem to disagree.
China’s Communist rulers regard America as their enemy. The protesters held up
a sign that read “Stop Asian Hate.” If Code Pink has a plan to stop the CCP’s
persecution of Tibetans and Uyghurs, its erasure of the freedoms once enjoyed
by the people of Hong Kong, and its threats to Taiwan, I’m confident House
members would be all ears”.
Perhaps. But by the same token, if the proxies that
America recruits in the name of a false democracy and funds them to inflict
murderous wars and indefinite occupations in such places as East Asia, the
Middle East and Palestine — if these proxies would end their criminal
activities, the likelihood is that the world will again embrace the American
ideal the way it did in the aftermath of the Second World War. It was a
beautiful relationship between America and the world, but one that began to
erode half a century ago, and seems intent to vanish for good.
What happened? What happened that caused such a sad
ending to what promised will be a new beginning for the human race; a race that
had gone through half a century of horror exemplified by two world wars of
unbelievable human suffering and property destruction?
Simply stated, the answer to that question, is that people
of the Clifford May sort, and organizations of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies
(FDD) sort began to crop up in America at the end of the Second World War, and
they turned the Doctor Jekyll that America was into the Mr. Hyde that America
became.
But that’s not the history that the FDD people cite. They
have a version that is truncated, mutilated, and distorted all at once. Here is
how it goes: “The United States and other nations
across the free world underwrote the erosion of their competitive advantages
through the transfer of capital and technology to a strategic competitor,
determined to gain preponderant economic and military power”.
The truth of the matter is that the
determination of the Chinese was not to gain preponderant economic or military
power. It was to undergo the Cultural Revolution that raised hundreds of
millions of their people from the level of abject poverty to an acceptable
standard of living. The Chinese began to succeed as did their North Korean
allies who also began to look like a modern country. This happened at a time
when South Korea, Hong Kong and Taiwan – who were under Western influence – continued
to look like backward and delipidated Third World countries.
It was only then that the United States and Britain
panicked, thus quickly determined it was important to prop up their client
states lest their people revolt and agitate in favor of the Communist causes.
These countries prospered alright but could not eclipse the progress that the
Chinese Cultural Revolution was accomplishing for Mainland China.