All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I'm the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the brand new Enough Already, Time to End the War on Terrorism, and I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003, almost all on foreign policy, and all available for you at scotthorton.org.
You can sign up for the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, you guys, introducing James Bradley.
You're all familiar with him.
He's most famous for writing the book, The Flags of Our Fathers, not the, just Flags of Our Fathers, which was turned into a Clint Eastwood movie, of course, and his most recent book is The China Mirage, The Recent History of American Disaster in Asia, and he's got a podcast all about, called The Untold Pacific at untoldpacific.com.
Sorry, I didn't get a chance to listen to some of these episodes.
Oh, look, an interview with Gareth Porter.
What a great podcast this must be.
Welcome back to the show, James.
How are you doing?
Good to be here, Scott.
Great to talk to you again.
As everyone knows, I am the greatest Gareth Porter fan in the whole world, so anybody else who likes him must be smart, I think.
That's kind of how that goes.
Well, you know, he was good friends with the Fred Bronfman group, Noam Chomsky, and I knew those guys have a lot of respect for Gareth Porter.
Yeah, man, of course.
Good old Fred Bronfman, too.
I guess he died a few years ago, but I had interviewed him a couple of times.
These are the guys who told the truth about Vietnam back when, some of them.
Well, you know, Fred exposed the secret bombing of Laos, specifically, and then he, I don't know if people realize this, he went on national news.
They interviewed him, he showed his drawings, America knew about it, and then America turned the channel and did not care that we were bombing.
You know, Fred sent me out to Laos, I looked around, about 35% of the country is still full of American bombs.
So you walk on a path that says, you can walk on this path, don't step off.
You know, you might blow up, there might be a 500 pound bomb, we don't know.
Yeah.
Hey, that's no lie, and by bombs, I mean, a lot of the times that means cluster bombs.
So little kids pick them up, you know, oh, what's this?
It doesn't look like a big explosive, you can hold it in your hand, right?
It's not an obvious, like, shell from a howitzer, you know, bomb-shaped bomb, you know, dropped from a plane.
Looks like it might be a toy.
They call them bombies.
Yeah.
They call them bombies.
Right.
And so I went into this Laotian village with my interpreter, and the first house we saw, a woman was knitting on her porch, and we walked up to her, and I said, excuse me, ma'am, do you know of anyone who's been injured by American munitions?
This was in 2017.
And then she pulled open her dress, and she, and it was bloody, she had, something had exploded in her garden the day before.
Anyway.
Yeah, I think, it was like 600 a year.
We're talking about, we're deep into Laos, right?
Yeah, people, like, I think it's like 600 a year.
I interviewed experts who had done a documentary about this back years ago.
Oh, man, I'm sorry, the name of the documentary is escaping me.
But you know, you say, I mean, I was living in Vietnam for seven years recently.
And so I'm interviewing this guy out on a farm, and then you have to take a taxi and turn at this one corner.
So let's call it the one corner.
At the one corner, there was a farmer with two kids and his wife, and he took his hoe every day and he put the hoe in the ground.
So one morning he woke up and it rained and he put his hoe in the ground and a 200 pound bomb went off and the kids picked the body parts out of the trees.
And we helped them with school fees and things like, I mean, it's happening, you know, right now when we leave these little calling cards all over the world.
I'll tell you what, hey, listen, as long as we're on this subject, might as well bring up that there's this thingamajig, I forgot which documentary it was again, different one.
But they have drones now that are sophisticated enough that they can fly around, they can detect these undetonated bombs, and then they can drop a tiny little shape charge on top, fly a safe distance away and detonate it.
And in fact, it's all completely automated.
They don't even need, you know, a human person doing all the controlling.
And they could conceivably and I mean, they are already sending these out in small numbers.
But you know, if the world empire wasn't busy patrolling the entire planet, and maybe their job was just cleaning up their messes from recent history, this seems like the kind of job for the US military to send to Laos an invading horde of robots whose only job it is to go around detecting metal and dropping little shape charges on it and detonating these bombs, allowing people to clean up, you know, the aftermath of detonated explosives instead of hot explosives.
You know, people die trying to clean up all the landmines and all the undetonated bombs to protect their people.
But you know, you could have the robots take all the risk.
And it's already proven technology.
They've already done it.
And in terms of like the real cost, compared to the Pentagon budget or whatever, a couple of billion dollars, and you could make a major difference in cleaning up the mess left behind in all three of those nations, you know, involving Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.
And but there's no priority behind it.
Like you said, people turn the channel back then when it was happening live.
Somebody really gives a damn now, you know.
But Scott, empire means you never have to say you're sorry.
You know, the story of Norman Solomon going to the Washington Post and asking them, did they ever retract the Tonkin Gulf situation, which never happened.
But the Washington Post reported that it did happen.
And he said, you know, did you retract it like you would in an auto accident?
You reported that incorrectly.
And an editor looked at him and said, if we retracted that, we'd have to retract 11 years of reporting.
And we don't do that.
Empire is never saying, you know, Russia, Russia, Russia.
They want to pull it, sir.
And you know what I mean?
Isn't that funny?
I mean, seriously, it was funny at the time, but it's even funnier now.
When in Pulitzer Prizes for Russiagate, when not one iota of that garbage held up, not one bit of it.
Can I can I tell you a personal story about that, Rush?
I mean, I don't know.
You want to go right ahead.
It's yours, man.
China.
Yeah.
OK.
Russia, Russia.
OK.
Great.
Let's put our hands together for Ray McGovern, Ray McGovern, ex CIA.
OK.
So, you know, right.
Right.
Very good friend for 15 years now.
So I publish a book in 2015 called The China Mirage, which is about how Time magazine, Washington Post, New York Times, blah, blah, blah, fooled the American public about China, China, China.
Right.
And it's published 2015.
I don't have the next book to write.
And then I hear about the wonderful three P scandal, Putin, P and prostitutes.
And I'm thinking, man, James Bradley, you know, Putin, P and prostitutes in the Moscow Ritz Carlton.
This is great.
And I knew George Herbert Walker Bush, who had been briefed by Ray McGovern when he was CIA.
So I thought, well, good enough for the White House.
Good enough for me.
So I fly down to Washington.
I had this thing that Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein never figured out.
It's called GPS.
And then I got to Ray's house.
And then I did something that Judy Woodruff and The New York Times, Washington, nobody could do this.
I brought some paper and pen into Ray's house.
And Ray said, this Putin, P prostitute thing is a Hillary scandal, a Hillary thing made up in lawyers offices.
So I'm like looking at the cover of newspapers, you know, Trump has an Alpha Bank server in the Trump Tower and it's connected to Putin's bedroom and they're sharing, you know.
And I'm like, Ray, this is just all made up.
He's all made up.
So I said, I need a second opinion.
So Ray has me go to Moscow.
And I go talk to people.
I go into the Ritz Carlton, talk to the employees.
I say back to America, there is no P in the Moscow Ritz Carlton, sorry.
It is just bullshit.
And then I spend the next four years, I had to travel a lot around the world, listening to people tell me fables.
You know, university presidents, tycoons in Hong Kong, Japanese businessmen, Texas heads of universities telling me fables that were written in a lawyer's conference room.
And in 2016, Ray and Bill, the great Bill Binney had proven that this is all baloney.
And you know, it got so bad, I was at an investor conference in Kuala Lumpur in 2019.
And a speaker said, folks, if you go to America, go to Disneyland and watch the people coming in.
All the kids believe in Cinderella and 60% of the adults believe in a Russian fable.
You know, I mean, that was a strange part of my life.
I was involved, you know, not, I mean, not central, but I was there at Ray's kitchen table.
I went to Moscow, figured out it was bullshit.
And then I thought that would be it.
It would just fall away.
But Jake Sullivan, the current national security, what is the national security advisor, national security advisor.
If you want to.
OK, I want to work for Jake.
And then when he, he interviews me, I have to say, Jake, I understand that Trump had an alpha server, a server in the Trump tower connected to Alpha Bank in Moscow, because that's what you said for Hillary Clinton.
I have it right here in print.
So I believe that too, Jake.
I think Putin, you know, was in the underwear.
You're telling me you said that to him?
No, I'm saying, look at this is the world we live in.
If you want a job with this creature, with this cretin, with this pinhead who just blew Kabul, you've got to say, hey, Jake, I guess Alpha, I mean, he was making up lies for Hillary Clinton.
I'm sure.
I mean, I've got the tweets right here.
If you want me to read it.
Well, I have to tell you, I mean, you know, me and my group were libertarians.
So we're non-partisans.
Right.
Right.
But just, you know, and I have, you know, leftist and right wing friends, too, who are just they're not partisan types.
And so many of us saw right through this from the very, very beginning.
I mean, if you go back to 2016 on April Glaspie Day, July 25th, I interviewed a computer security expert named Jeffrey Carr, who explained that no one can forensically examine a server and tell you exactly who hacked it.
That's not how it works, man.
But there is one group of people in the world and only one who can tell you exactly who hacked what.
And that's the NSA, because they can rewind the whole damn Internet if they want and go back and watch any packet and wherever it went.
And no problem.
But they're the only ones who can.
And they can tell you with 100 percent confidence who did what.
But nobody else can tell you anything.
Certainly not CrowdStrike looking at a server after the fact and examining it and telling you what the what.
So, you know, and then there are all kinds of great leftists who from the very beginning, like Ray McGovern, he's not really a leftist, but he's certainly no Trump Republican.
He you know, he's avowed to me that he thinks that Trump is the very worst Republican ever simply for his refugee policy, if for no other reason, for religious reasons.
Ray is like this guy is a monster, but he's not a Russian monster, for God's sake.
And just going through, you know, I'm sure people may have seen it's the spotlight actually today on Antiwar.com is Matt Taibbi's new piece where he like only Aaron Maté before him went and actually interviewed this guy who, of course, his name is on my tongue.
I'm sorry.
Yeah.
No, I've seen it.
Yeah.
I know the article you're referring.
All right.
Now I got it.
You pronounce it.
You pronounce it.
I'm not going to pronounce it.
Oh, yeah.
It's that's that's what it is.
It's not that I forgot.
It's I forgot how to pronounce it.
Kalimnick.
This is Kalimnick.
Constantine Kalimnick.
This is the guy.
God bless you.
And another.
Yeah, exactly.
This is, you know, one of the many that they hung the whole thing on is, you know, this is the guy who was the go between with Manafort and the Russians where it was a total lie.
The guy worked for John McCain for years.
We knew that all along.
He worked at the Republican National Institute or International Institute thing.
But anyway, so, you know, he's always been really great on this.
And he does go through and mention the major accusations that the story hinged on, such as against Sessions and against Flynn and the Trump Tower meeting and, you know, all of these things, the bigger accusations, I guess, along with the Alfa Bank thing, which I thought was more of a lower level, dumber one.
But either way, and and just showed how there was nothing to any of it at all.
There just never was like the worst you could say is that Trump Jr. was dumb enough to hope that he was going to get something from someone connected to the Russian government.
But he never did.
So that's it.
Scott, can I go back to what you know, I mean, how I started that I finished this book in 2015.
And it's about this.
See, Trump, Biden, FDR, LBJ.
I'm not political.
I'm a historian.
So whoever wins, I got to say this guy won and then who loses.
You know what I mean?
So I mean, I finish a book on China and it's China, China, China.
FDR spent more money on Chiang Kai-shek, the Christian dictator, than he did on the atom bomb.
FDR was out in public saying that China, that Chiang Kai-shek, who slept on top of, you know, torture cells, you know, was it was a great Liberty guy.
China's a democracy.
Pearl Buck, number one author of the 1930s, The Good Earth, two years in a row, number one New York Times, only author to do that.
She's lying for this Christian dictator to the American public.
Henry Luce hired, remember Teddy White, who wrote The Making of the President in 1960.
And he was a great journalist, Teddy White.
Teddy White, in my book, talks about how he worked for Chiang Kai-shek and made up battles.
He made up whole battles out of whole cloth, things that never happened, writing them into Time magazine.
Gee, Henry Luce loved Teddy.
He hired him.
He was a propagandist for, so we've been through this before.
The China, China, China thing that I document in my book, I call it a mirage because I was flying between the United States and China researching.
And I realized everything that really happened in China didn't get to the States.
And everything the States read, I'm talking New York Times, statesmen, senators, debating facts on the floor of the Senate, didn't exist.
It was propaganda.
It would just, you know, you go to China and it was different, that we have this same mirage that's being presented to the American public regarding China, China, China.
We just finished Russia, Russia, Russia.
I mean, you're really onto something here.
I mean, I think, isn't it the case too that like, go back to World War II where Winston Churchill and FDR, they're just W. Bush and Tony Blair.
They're just a couple of idiots making the same kinds of mistakes, telling the same kind of lies.
It's the same thing over and over again.
See, I think people don't, they're not really critical about the stuff that happened before we were born.
You know what I mean?
America's in black and white.
All that is engraved in the stone of history, right?
That's over, whereas it's a little bit different when you're in the Obama era and the lies about Libya are still ringing in your ear kind of thing, you know?
But it always is like this, you know, all the way back, right?
All of these guys and all of their stupid wars are based on the same kind of lies from, you know, Mexican troops on the wrong side of the San Jacinto River all the way through, you know, weapons of mass destruction and Assad gassing his own people and on and on.
You know, that was James.
If your listeners don't know what you're referring to, the Mexican troops.
So President James Polk wanted to get a bunch of land.
He's the number one land acquirer in American history.
He got little things like, let's see, California, you know, huge pieces of land, Mexican War.
Okay, but what Scott's referring to is that he did a brilliant maneuver that's been used, you know, they just rejiggered a border and then said, hey, we have American troops already, you know, fighting.
We have to support the troops.
Yeah.
Same thing every time.
Support the troops.
Yeah.
And Congress was like, just a minute.
What did you just do?
You invaded a country?
No, no.
Just a minute.
We're going to support the troops.
You know, it was brilliant and it's been going on since 1848.
Yeah.
Okay.
Hang on just one second.
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All right.
Now, so back to who lost China here.
I mean, the problem is that Mao won it.
And so you're saying the truth favors Mao Zedong, and that is bothersome.
Well, here, let's go back to the 19, early 30s.
Mao beat Chiang three times before the Great March, but the US kept pouring money into Chiang.
Mao should have taken over China in the 30s, but it was America who was giving Chiang Kai-shek the armaments.
Anyone here of Afghanistan spending a lot of money on anyone here of South Vietnam?
You know, people want to ignore that it was FDR for years and years and years who poured military money into the Christian dictator.
The reasoning was, you know, the people around Chiang Kai-shek were in the FDR administration telling them what every American wants to hear.
China wants to be just like you, Mr. President.
Chiang Kai-shek wants to be a Democrat like you.
We want to have a New Deal like you.
And guess what?
The Chinese people want to have potluck dinners on Sunday in Christian churches.
I mean, it's unbelievable.
And they just convinced the administration.
You know, Roosevelt had never been to China.
None of these guys had gone across the Pacific to China.
But China was going to be just like America.
And look in the book.
I'm not making it up.
FDR is saying, you know, they're going to replicate us.
FDR made a stamp, a U.S. stamp that compared Lincoln to Sun Yat-sen.
You know, Sun Yat-sen taking train rides with 30 little girls at a time, you know.
He's the same as Abraham Lincoln, a U.S. stamp.
People licked it, put it on their postage.
Support China.
After Pearl Harbor, two weeks after, they did a poll.
Who's America's favorite ally?
It was China, because China wanted to be just like us.
And Japan was the bad guy.
But China was so wonderful, it was going to be Christian.
Pearl Buck told us, missionaries, Henry Luce.
So look at the names, like General MacArthur, FDR, Winston Churchill, huge names.
No, no, no, no, no.
Time Magazine.
Who's the number one guy on the cover of Time Magazine still today?
Number one.
Chiang Kai-shek.
Because China's going to be Christian, and then America's going to have this America-loving thing out in Asia called China.
I'm not kidding you.
It's in our words.
So what about the China lobby, though, that said that actually things weren't that bad until all the wimps at the State Department called off support for Chiang and kind of turned everything over to Mao?
That was certainly the narrative then.
Well, OK.
Well, OK, now you're jumping to— 20 years of treason, man.
You know, they turned all of Eastern Europe over to Stalin.
They turned over China to Mao, and then on from there.
Well, let me do that one quickly.
It's in the book.
So I was talking about the 1930s.
Now Roosevelt dies in 45, and America still keeps pumping the Civil War.
Millions didn't have to die.
Mao had the upper hand, but Chiang had, just like the Afghan army, he had this artificial American money and weapons to keep a false story going.
And he was stealing.
And, I mean, it's the same as the, you know, the criminals in Afghanistan and the American criminals that abetted him.
But anyway, Truman, you know, is stuck.
He's got to support Chiang.
Mao finally rises.
He should have rose, you know, a decade earlier.
And this shocks the American public.
Who lost China?
Well, see, if the American public had been in China, they wouldn't have been surprised.
Because the State Department was writing home, the Chinese people want Mao.
It's not about liking Mao.
Mao is going to be the next emperor, and we better adjust.
Well, FDR and Truman, you know, didn't want to adjust to that.
Mao rises.
The Americans are shocked.
And then Joe McCarthy from Wisconsin, where I'm from, went to the same church as my mom and dad, Joe McCarthy, did.
Joe McCarthy needed, you know, McCarthyism came out of China, not the USSR.
McCarthy stood up and said, John Service of the State Department, I got this sheath of paper in my hands, but he only mentioned one guy.
John Service talked him out.
John Service speaks Chinese, he works in the State Department, and he knows the leader of China.
Oh, my God, let's crucify this guy.
So they cleaned out the State Department so that in the 50s and early 60s, zero people spoke Chinese in the State Department.
That was very important.
Get rid of everybody who spoke Chinese.
You met Mao Zedong?
You know the leader of the largest country in the world?
You're fired.
China's this rock over here in the Pacific called Taiwan.
You can help us negotiate with China?
You're fired.
You know, until when Nixon, when Mao allowed Nixon to come and pay homage, the Chinese invited John Service and all these guys got fired.
You know, they knew him and respected him, and they were truth tellers, but they all got shot.
All right, so we got a narrative now that says that essentially Nixon screwed up and that actually communism is the best self-inflicted wound that you could hope on your enemy, and they should have left it at that, and instead they encouraged the right wing of the Communist Party to come to power, and Deng Xiaoping declared to get rich is glorious, and Milton Friedman taught him about markets and stuff.
And so now the bet was, in fact, I heard Bill Kristol say recently, I forget, I don't think it was in the debate, I think it was some other time, we made a bet that if we helped China get rich, that they'll also liberalize politically and, you know, have democracy and stuff like that, and instead, oops, we just helped this evil totalitarian state make more money and, you know, gain more resources and capital, and now they're going to use it to take over the world, and they threaten our friends in South Korea and Japan and Australia and Vietnam, where we get along really great with the Communist Party in Hanoi now, and for that matter, the Indians and everybody else.
And maybe the last few dictators were okay, but this new guy, he has this whole new aggressive policy and, you know, only weaklings and women and Democrats are afraid to do the right thing to face down the rising Chinese dragon.
So what about all that?
Well, that's a recurring thing that I document in my book.
It's always, let's just talk about the emperor, okay?
Right now, you know, people, CCP and communists, and we're talking about China, we're talking about Beijing, we're talking about one time zone, we're talking about an emperor, and the, you know, I mean, the, who serves the emperor, who, jeez, I lost the name, mandarins, and the Communist Party is 90 million mandarins.
I mean, it's a pretty old system, right?
Going back a few thousand years.
And that's what they're doing.
Now, Bill Kristol said, what is the China mirage?
And this goes back to the 19th century, gee, China's got to change because they use chopsticks and they don't know how to use ties.
Hmm, who are they going to change like?
The best people in the world, America, especially missionaries from the East Coast.
And China's going to become Christian and potluck suppers, and they must admire us for our democracy because they're so screwed up.
And then we'll expose ourselves to them.
They will change, and then we will have advantage.
So that the missionaries did that, and then they got disappointed, and then there was a reaction.
That was the FDR thing.
We are just going to work with China, and they are absorbing our democracy, Czech wants to be like FDR.
And then who lost China?
Oh, gee, we can't trust them anymore.
You know, we tried to help them be just like us, and they won't eat hamburgers.
They keep going back to being Chinese, God damn it.
Yeah, that's what Bill Kristol's talking about.
We opened up, we sent Walmart.
I mean, why, you know, if you meet a Walmart executive, of course you'd like to be like an American.
You know what I mean?
We brought these Chinese to steakhouses and taught them how to use knives and forks, and they continue to use chopsticks.
They disappoint the hell out of us after we tried so hard.
See, the assumption is they want to be just like us.
History is moving across the Pacific, and democracy is...
You're talking about China.
It's an ancient situation, and it's different than the mirage that America's being presented with.
Taiwan is historically part of China, and I'm not pro-China.
I'm not pro any centralized government where they're screwing around.
How about, if you want to talk about democracy, how about Australia?
I'm right next to Australia, where they're beating everyone up Tiananmen Square style.
How's that democracy going in America?
Americans want to defend democracy in Taiwan.
Why don't you look at Chicago or St. Louis or Washington, D.C.?
Fences around the Capitol and mandates and what?
It boggles my mind.
My daughter lives in Taipei.
When I turn on the American media, there's a general saying that she's got seconds to live, it sounds like.
Then I call her in Taipei, it's her birthday today.
She thinks the difference between Taiwan reuniting with China or not is like a different color ID pass.
She's going to have the same clients, same apartment, same food, same streets, same transportation.
I call my friends in Hong Kong and I say, hey, the American media says that China came to Hong Kong, ate you, chewed you, took a toothpick and then spit you out and threw you in the Hong Kong Bay.
And they're like, well, we're eating dumplings in the Bay Area here in Hong Kong.
They're knitting it together with bridges and infrastructure and we have more IPOs than ever and business is great.
So there's a mirage being presented that there's this huge conflict in the Pacific and it's democracy versus, you know, well, General Keane was on Fox News and he let it slip.
Bill Hemmer says, oh my God, China, World War III, four, five, six, all at once, what do we do?
And General Keane said, retool.
Well, I thought, retool, I'd love to, who, what are we going to re, oh, I got it.
The diplomatic solution to the Taiwan-China situation is let's give money to the military industrial complex.
I never thought of it.
Yeah.
You know, I was reading about it.
I was reading about the new nuclear subs replacing the French diesel subs for Australia.
And they said, well, you know, they won't be ready until 2050.
And I'm going, wait a minute.
You guys' policy is not that we're going to figure out a way to get along with the Chinese sometimes in the next 30 years before these goddamn subs go online?
Are you kidding me?
But the, you know, Michael Clare, K-L-A-R-E, who I interviewed on my podcast, he, he shows you that the civilian leadership of America, intergenerational, has decided in their crystal ball that conflict with China is a, is a high probability and the military must prepare for it.
And we want forward deployment.
We'd rather fight, you know, out there than here.
It's still, I hate to say it, but that is embedded in the thinking of the whole structure.
So yeah.
And then preparation, as Scott Horton knows better than anyone else, preparation for war under clouds of fear is more profitable than war.
So we got to keep this China's going to eat everyone in Taiwan thing going in the American media and get that, you know, budget pumped up.
Yeah.
Well, okay, Mr. Smart Guy.
There's got to be some kind of steel man argument here where like, yeah, no, but Z is worse than the previous guy.
And what about these artificial reefs they're building?
They're going to get in a fight with Japan over them or something.
I don't know.
I know that I know a lot more about the Middle East, so I must be missing something really dangerous about red China right now.
Come on.
Okay.
Again, I'm not, I mean, the way you ask it is like, I'm going to defend and say no, there's no problem.
I mean, every big centralized country, I mean, we've got to watch out for it.
Look at Australia.
How about, how about your government?
You know, aren't people, isn't your transportation system breaking down because of central government heaviness?
I mean, so it's not just, okay.
But I mean, it's not just China.
If I talk, if I call Texas and talk to them about New York, the difference might be greater than New York to China.
I mean, I don't know, but let's go back to G why are Americans talking about who's leading China?
What?
Why don't they talk about who's leading America?
Figure that one out.
Well, I guess the idea is that the last few guys were not too bad, but this guy's got this aggressive new policies.
So what?
But you're in a tiny little country, you got 350 million people, you're brand new.
And why?
You know, just if we just begin to talk about it, like I really am.
So what?
It always has to end and we'll retool the military.
Because the Chinese use chopsticks and they don't, and they're not the right color.
And we, you know, we made laws so they couldn't marry our daughters.
And we have testimony in the Senate that their brains can't absorb democracy.
You know, we have a long history of embedding in the American genes, his hatred of Russia and China.
Now, let's talk specifically about Taiwan.
I'm sure your audience knows that Taiwan was under Chinese influence until the 1870s, when an American general by the name of General Legendre, General Legendre, American general, the one eye from the Civil War, went over to the Meiji Emperor in Tokyo and said, hey, Meiji Emperor, you ever hear of Andrew Jackson?
All you got to do is declare some people barbarians, and then you can militarily wipe them out and take the land.
That's what Andrew Jackson did, and it's called civilization.
Meiji made General Legendre his first foreign advisor, hired him, and they retooled an American ship and they invaded Taiwan, 1870s.
So this begins the sorry history of Taiwan under Japanese rule, 1945.
We napalm Japan to death, and the war ends, and then Taiwan's in our hands.
We got it from Japan, the colonial brutal masters of Taiwan.
And then we take it and we give it to Chiang Kai-shek.
So Ghani from Afghanistan fled to the Middle East, right?
But back in Truman's day, we gave Chiang Kai-shek a whole island and he stole China's gold.
This is a criminal who lost the Civil War, took Taiwan, and Taiwan's part of China.
So we can talk all we want, but the Chinese, when they wake up in the morning, it's about 1.5 billion people, and the most uneducated or the most educated, they can understand that Taiwan is Chinese.
And I'm not defending that.
I'm not pushing that.
I'm not like, James is for China.
No, Taiwan is Chinese.
Korea is not.
China's not going to step into Korea.
Who invaded who?
Japan invaded China.
Who invaded who?
I don't know.
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Well, look, China, Japan.
For 50 years or at least since Carter, but I guess really since Nixon, right?
The idea has been that America agrees that Taiwan is part of China.
But the question is, how are they to be reunified?
Is it going to be a naval invasion or some kind of handshake?
Seems to make it.
It's going to be a naval invasion if the Americans don't get out of there and they need a war for their military industrial complex.
I was in East Germany.
I'm so old I was in East Germany.
A lot of tension, nuclear tip tension, man.
East Germany, West Germany, a wall, blah, blah, blah.
Well, they reunited.
No, no nuclear war.
So Taiwan, the China, Taiwan's like 25 million people.
It's nothing.
You know, it's not a big deal.
Everyone can calm down.
My daughter is going to eat noodles today in Taipei, you know, and see that America's being rattled by the aggressiveness of China.
That's always the word.
And I'm not defending China.
I don't like any country with an air force that can drop bombs on children.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
But listen, but listen, we put the United States Marines into Taiwan, didn't tell the American public.
Well, guess what?
Beijing has eyes.
So they fly planes over.
We did it first.
We put the troops in.
These troops are aggressive.
You know, they're Marines.
They hit beaches.
You know, I mean, my dad was on Iwo Jima, I know a little about it.
So we put the Marines in Taiwan.
How stupid.
But we didn't report it.
We just reported the aggressive Chinese flying over them.
Well, let's balance it out.
We put them in.
You're not right.
He's not right.
You're not wrong.
They're not wrong.
We should specify here, though, that, I mean, they did not break Taiwanese airspace in terms of like the 12 mile zone at all.
It's just the air defense identification zone, which extends hundreds of miles and is not a violation of their airspace.
But more importantly, the American media just lied about that and conflate that with violating their airspace, which is an entirely different matter.
And it goes to show how quickly they could just ramp up fear, go, oh, my God, look, China's making moves on Taiwan.
I saw, you know, this guy, it sounds silly, maybe, but the Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams is a very influential guy among the Trump.
Yes.
And he said, listen, the war is coming soon.
Here it comes.
It's breaking out because of this violation of the airspace that was not.
But can I say, OK, Scott Adams now there, you know, he's an intelligent guy, whatever his positions are, I'm not sure.
My point is, Scott is like, you know, the Pearl Bucks of the 1930s and the right.
No, almost all the writers about China, they haven't been to China.
They don't speak Chinese.
They haven't been in Chinese homes.
You know, you know what I mean?
And I'm not talking, you know, kindergarten patty cake.
I'm, you know, I've been all over China and it it only means that.
You understand the mirage being presented to the United States.
Scott, can I give you an example?
Yeah.
And I'd really like people to think about this.
I think after the interview, they'll dismiss what I'm about to say, because it's kind of strange to think about.
But you saw the Ken Burns documentary on Vietnam, right?
Yeah.
I looked at all the maps of North and South Vietnam, and then Ken Burns said there was a country, North Vietnam, South Vietnam, they had a civil war.
And then I grew up in that era, you know, and I looked at all the maps in the New York Times and North Vietnam and the DMZ and there was a border there and this was a separate country and they had a separate flag and all this stuff.
So I, as I told you, I walked around Vietnam for about seven years doing research and I went up to the DMZ and I spent months there, not a day, but I spent months there.
And I talked to people around that border.
And one guy, I have the interview, I could send it to you.
He says, North and South Vietnam, we thought there was one Vietnam.
You never convinced us.
This was the United Nations and drawings in the New York Times.
But for there to be a border there, I need a visa to go see my uncle.
My uncle is in a different, he's a North Vietnamese and I'm a South.
He never had that conception, Mr. Bradley.
You Americans have big imaginations.
So Ken Burns is spinning a civil war between two countries that the Vietnamese didn't think existed.
This is how strange it is.
The line of democracy with Taiwan, there's a wall of democracy and unless this little island and we and nuclear, well, folks, I hate to tell you, the U.S. Navy is up on charges for bribery, prostitutes, all that Fat Tony or whatever, Fat Thomas or that scandal.
How about the submarine that just collided underwater?
Google U.S. Navy mishaps.
They're not driving the ship straight.
Something's wrong.
It's not the Navy that won Iwo Jima.
We got to watch out.
We're 6,000 miles away debating who's the best ruler for China.
It's none of our business.
We got enough problems that like I just like we don't need a nuclear war to sort this out.
East and West Germany did it.
Yeah, well, I totally agree with that.
And it's amazing the way that people in the opinion polls and I know whatever regular people aren't the ones pulling the trigger.
So it sort of doesn't matter in a way kind of thing.
But it matters in a way that people say, yeah, we ought to nuke China.
If China moves on Taiwan, absolutely.
We should go to war.
It's like, yeah, but you know, they have H-bombs and missiles that can deliver them.
Thank you, Bill Clinton.
So that means stalemate before we start.
Let's not start because they can destroy our entire civilization.
It only takes a couple of hundred nukes to destroy your entire civilization.
I mean, I want to add to that, Scott, for your listeners that people I mean, I don't know.
Everything's a video game.
The Russia, Russia, Russia might be true, might not.
Just let's go on with that.
No, no.
Stop, America.
If you want to do this liberty thing, freedom, Taiwan, you don't even know where it is, then you know, I've been all over Okinawa and seen the troops there, the Marines.
You got to just evaporate them like in 30 seconds.
They are toast dust.
35,000 in Korea, you're going to start a war with China.
Guess what China is going to do?
They're going to get rid of the Americans in Korea.
Guam, just the whole thing's gone.
You know, we're talking toast.
So don't talk stupid.
You know, talk about withdrawing a little bit back to Hawaii.
China doesn't want to take California.
Don't believe all that stuff.
But Taiwan's part of China.
That's what the Americans have to realize.
They don't conceive of it as an invasion.
They conceive of it as, you know, I'm from Wisconsin and the UP, we called it, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
Folks, I know this is far away for you sophisticated, but the UP, we called it, the Upper Peninsula.
They wanted to secede.
Let's say they seceded, you know, America has a problem, Canada grabbed it.
Well, for 200 years, Americans would, you know, we might fly airplanes over it saying we need to reunite the UP with America.
That's how they're looking at it.
And so it gets reunited.
And then what happens?
If any of your listeners would please write to me or call me about the danger my daughter's in in Taipei, I need to know.
Well, I know when I talk to Peter Van Buren, who has been to China, he's a State Department official over there stationed in Japan and Korea for a long time.
And he's like, China is not invading Taiwan.
They're just not.
And get the hell out of here.
You know, like Doug Bondo says, well, this is probably the greatest danger of a real war like getting touched off here would be China moves on Taiwan.
The Americans start talking tough, lose an aircraft carrier to start escalating, you know, this kind of thing.
But PVB is like, forget it.
This isn't even going to happen anyway.
So change the channel.
It doesn't matter.
It's like when we attacked Iraq because he was going to give nukes to Osama to nuke our cities with, except that actually at the time he was semi-retired and writing a romance novel, according to a CIA interrogator, John Nixon, and had no interest in attacking anyone, much less the Americans.
Well, you know, John Pilger did the documentary, which I'm in called The Coming War with China.
And we are at war.
Information.
I mean, we're at war every way except, you know, kinetic.
The statement that you just said, you know, no war, that's China's position.
They want to reunite peacefully.
The war card is America sending ships out into that area and being so bellicose.
It just makes sense.
If China shoved ships into the Caribbean, was poking in San Francisco Bay, was up there in Newfoundland coming down to Maine, you know, it's too much, folks.
Yeah.
We don't have to honor China, love China, but there are 1.5 billion people that they, you know, they had some influence in that area for a few thousand years.
America got there just yesterday, accidentally.
All this South China Sea Pacific stuff, again, let's look at history.
In World War II, after World War II, Japan surrendered, the U.S. military controlled it all and they drew lines.
I said to an admiral, Admiral, I'm not criticizing the American military for drawing those lines.
They were the victor and they had to draw lines, but there was no China.
China was having a civil war.
So now all these lines that the Wall Street Journal, you know, this is Croston, this reef and this belongs to Japan and that is an independent country, oh, that's all 1945 stuff when China didn't exist.
China exists now.
Why don't we sit at the table and talk to them?
And the admiral took a bite of his hors d'oeuvres and said, you know, if they cross a line, the president orders me, I got to go.
So I'm interested in the Japanese perspective on this or Japanese perspectives.
I have a friend who lives there who told me, he said, so look at here, China, I mean, pardon me, Japan divested from this gigantic fund in China and, you know, I guess they're worried about financial problems there and whatever other things.
And he said, you know, for whatever kind of fear mongering about the rise of China, Japan knows how to deal with them.
And the Japanese establishment, the government, the power elite there, they're not worried that China's coming.
But then meanwhile, we got Joe Biden, I think it was just last week, maybe it was two weeks ago.
I think it was just last week, swore America to protect the Senkaku Islands, that these are Japanese islands, even though they're uninhabited, and that America would go to war with China to protect Japan's claims to them, which, you know, I think Okinawa is already kind of occupied Japanese, you know, occupied territory by the Japanese of other people anyway.
But to pledge America to defend the Senkaku Islands seems pretty provocative.
And just like you were saying about putting the shoe on the other foot, if the Chinese were all up and down our Atlantic coast or say they were like on the west coast of Mexico, claiming that they were protecting Mexico from American attack and building up their forces there, right, you know, off of San Diego, Americans would be absolutely losing their minds over it and threatening them that they better sail way the hell back the other side of Hawaii from here.
Right now, you know?
I mean, China could do, you know, just a week's worth of press, about 500 January 6th protesters being held as political prisoners.
We got to invade the country.
Look at the leadership and the economy's falling apart, the people protesting and they're not happy and the leadership only has 30 percent.
We got to, China's got to take Catalina Island, got to help out America and invade and, you know, the military answer is not the answer here.
There's only one quiver in the, you know, American deal.
Let's get the military back to Hawaii and let's talk and stop this, you know, we own the South China Sea.
There's a name in the middle of that thing.
It's called China.
I mean, what are we talking about?
And then the South China Sea, that's where John McCain flew from.
We projected power from this.
What's the record of killing?
Everyone's so worried about the world's going to fall apart, China running the South China Sea.
Well, that's like Highway 95 in the United States.
It's a highway for them and they're not going to clog it up and choke people, you know, they have to do business.
But what is the problem with the South China Sea?
That's where John McCain flew from.
That's where America put all those ships and killed 3 million Asians to insert democracy.
So the record in the South China Sea so far is that China hasn't, you know, killed even 10,000 people.
And it's a highway.
And I'm not defending China.
I'm just, why does China have the right to talk about Joe Biden and invade or get involved in Canadian American disputes?
You know, we'd say, get out of there, get the ship out of Chesapeake Bay.
So we're right on top of China.
There could be an accident.
The military experts, much brighter than me, who I interview, say that's their concern.
They're not concerned about China pressing a button.
They're concerned about an accident because there's so much stuff moving around.
You know, we just had a nuclear submarine bump into something and we're not told what it is.
We have major Navy ships that can't get into Asian harbors.
You know, they make a mistake 20, 30 miles out.
This is unbelievable that, you know, people look into it.
I'm just saying you don't have the military on the South China Sea is the military you had in Afghanistan.
Look what happened.
Yeah.
Well, no, but the Japanese army, the Japanese military is trained by the same general failures from the United States that trained the Vietnamese army, that trained the Chiang Kai-shek's Chinese army and they trained the Afghan army.
So when are we going to wake up?
We lost the Chinese Civil War to Mao, Korea, we lost to Mao, Vietnam, we lost to Asia.
We have we have expended tremendous amounts of blood trying to send the military to Asia.
It doesn't work.
Let's try another way.
Yeah.
You know, Daniel Davis has written at length about these red team exercises where the Navy admits that they lose a fight over Taiwan.
I think to boil it down, their supersonic sea skimming missiles have a greater range than our F-18s.
And so that's it.
Our aircraft carriers can't get close enough to strike without getting sunk themselves.
And so game set match, it's already over before it starts.
And you know very well that in the before we started bombing Vietnam, the game said that, you know, it wouldn't work, that we bombed them.
And then the game said it's not working.
And so McNamara said bomb harder.
You know, we knew that it's just but dropping bombs, you know, I interviewed a guy in Laos and he had bomb fragments in his head and he had a X-ray and it was brilliant.
You could see right through his head with all these bomb fragments stuck in his head for his whole life.
And I thought, you know, the U.S. at that point, they couldn't get a Bull of a watch to this guy.
They couldn't sell him a McDonald's.
They couldn't make any money on this Laotian sitting on his farm.
But if you embed American metal that had to be manufactured in America, put on a ship, you paid somebody to move the bomb.
If it got to Laos, it probably went through three different countries.
You had to train the pilots, the fuel, cost a fortune, the airplanes, Lockheed, you know what I mean?
And then we got that we got that metal into that Laotian's head.
That guy couldn't afford a watch.
It's a more efficient way of, you know, doing the economy to some people.
Yeah.
Distributing that metal out to the world there for a price.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
If they're too poor to buy, too poor to buy a watch, just, you know, metal them in a different way.
Yeah, man.
All right.
Well, listen, I can't wait to catch up on this podcast here.
This looks really great.
And consumers of this show also like podcasts.
So I think they'll probably check it out, too.
It's called Untold Pacific at untoldpacific.com.
And the book is The China Mirage, The Hidden History of American Disaster in Asia.
And check out also this interview in covert action quarterly on this same subject to some pretty good stuff here.
Thanks very much.
Really appreciate you coming back on the show, James.
Well, I appreciate your listeners supporting the great Scott Horton, who we need now more than ever.
All right.
Well, thanks.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APSradio.com, antiwar.com, scotthorton.org, and libertarianinstitute.org.
