For Pacifica Radio, September 8th, 2019.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is Anti-War Radio.
All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
It is Anti-War Radio.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the author of the book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and the editorial director of Antiwar.com.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 8.30 to 9 on KPFK, 90.7 FM in LA.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5,000 of them now, going back to 2003, at scotthorton.org.
All right, you guys, on the line, I've got Dan Cohen from thegrayzone.com, and he's got this important article behind a made-for-TV Hong Kong protest narrative, Washington is backing nativism and mob violence.
Oh, say it ain't so.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm good.
Good to be with you, Scott.
Good to have you here.
Did I mention that you are the co-director, co-producer, co-maker with Max Blumenthal of the absolutely essential documentary, Killing Gaza?
Yes, still relevant.
I'll tell you what it is.
It's Dan walking around interviewing regular Joes in Gaza.
Hey, regular Joe in Gaza, what do you think about things?
And it's, I guess, right during and right after the slaughter of 2014, right?
Yeah, exactly.
I was there for about most of the year afterwards, just kind of documenting how people were surviving under the siege and the rubble and the aftermath of the 2014 slaughter.
So the first half is kind of about the war itself.
And then you have testimony from survivors.
And then the second half is kind of documenting how people lived after all the press went away and they weren't able to rebuild and everyone had kind of forgotten about it.
So it's so important.
It's such a great documentary.
And you know what I like about it too, is nobody says, oh yeah, well, my religion says kill Jews or some crazy thing.
Everybody just says, you see this dirt?
This is my dirt.
This is where I'm from.
And in fact, on the other side of that fence, that's actually my dirt.
I'm a refugee here, but that belonged to my grandma, that field right there, this kind of thing, which in other words, they're speaking the universal language of manhood.
This is my property.
Get the hell off of it.
There's no Islamic extremism and anti-Semitism anywhere in the thing.
And I know you didn't just unfairly edit all that out.
It's just, that's not what's going on here, right?
No, that was about, anti-Semitism was about 90% of what I filmed.
So I just had to take about a thousand hours and take it down to one hour.
It was really hard to do that.
I didn't encounter any anti-Semitism there.
And in fact, the anti-Semitism that I did encounter was from Israelis who were calling me a traitor Jew for daring to document the plight of Palestinians that they're subjugating and oppressing.
Anyway, you do good journalism.
Let's talk about this one.
Appreciate that.
Now in Hong Kong, we got a simple narrative.
And I think we do have some simple truths, like the average Hong Kongian might be really scared of what happens when their little semi autonomous island state lit thing here is fully subsumed and absorbed under the Beijing dictatorship, which is in fact, still a one party communist party dictatorship, although it's more of a fascist dictatorship than a communist one now.
And so I'm a believer in universal rights for all people.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that protests against an authoritarian government are for universal rights.
Although even then, even if they are for exactly my politics, for example, they still could be hijacked and manipulated by the National Endowment for Democracy.
And that's my interest as an American is keeping my government out of anyone's protest movement.
After all, there were some peaceful protesters in Syria while America was helping to back a bunch of mercenaries who caused a war that killed hundreds of thousands of people while hiding behind the fact of some peaceful protesters.
And we see this time and again with the color code of revolutions and all of that.
And it seems like you went digging and didn't have to go very far to find Washington, DC and Hong Kong.
Yeah, it's all pretty much out there in the open.
I mean, you know, I, to be fair, I would disagree with your characterization of China as a fascist dictatorship.
But I mean, it's kind of irrelevant to, I think, the thing that we agree on, the overarching story here is that the U.S. is meddling, interfering directly in Chinese Hong Kong affairs.
And for as much as we heard about Russian interference that turned out to be totally bogus for the last few years, you would think that, you know, the U.S. press and kind of political class would have something to say about the Trump administration's blatant interference in Hong Kong.
But they're totally on board with this.
You know, it's kind of like when Trump bombed Syria, it was all of a sudden, you know, he went from being Hitler and Pol Pot to like, oh, Trump is presidential.
And there's a similar dynamic here when he kind of goes along with the Washington consensus, then he gets praised.
And so, yeah, you know, if you're watching these protests on TV, on CNN or, you know, MSNBC or Fox or whatever, any of the mainstream media, whether it's, you know, considered liberal or conservative, it's all kind of the same narrative that these are just, you know, freedom loving people who want democracy, who are rising up organically against this authoritarian, you know, communist dictatorship.
And, you know, there's no doubt that there's major problems in Hong Kong economically.
The fact that, you know, there isn't democracy, people don't have, you know, the right, they don't have the right to vote.
There's constituencies, how it works.
But, I mean, you know, so there are very legitimate, real criticisms.
And as, you know, as you mentioned, we see, we saw in Syria or we saw in Ukraine where there's, where the US basically takes any kind of spark of indignation or unrest and just tries to pour gasoline on it.
You know, we haven't seen like snipers like we did in Ukraine or, you know, armed jihadist firing the government in like we did in Syria.
But what you see is basically disaffected youth who have been through trainings by the US government and how to carry out what is kind of like a low level insurgency.
And they use tactics that essentially seek to provoke the police into overreacting.
So then they can put the cameras on them and have a crackdown.
And then the US can kind of exploit that for political capital.
Some of the, you know, you have figures like Joshua Wong, who is now 22 years old.
He, when he was 17, he was in the 2014 Hong Kong protests and he was being groomed by the US, the National Endowment for Democracy, Freedom House.
These are all US soft power groups that, you know, pour money into, you know, pro-US political parties around the world.
And he's kind of one of the main figures in China.
There was a Netflix documentary about him called Teenager versus Superpower.
Though, you know, conveniently omits that it's a teenager backed by another superpower.
And, you know, he's just hailed on CNN.
He's been, he came to Washington to meet with Marco Rubio, with a bunch of the top neocons, also, you know, Democratic Party elite like Nancy Pelosi.
But you'd never know any of that from watching, you know, American news.
And so he's kind of the face.
He's been trained by Otpor, which is the Serbian anti-communist regime change mercenary group that came out of Yugoslavia.
Yeah, the very first color-coded revolution there against Milosevic.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So that was the first one.
And then these guys, Serge Popovich is the guy's name who was like leading this whole thing.
He was a student.
He started getting money from National Endowment for Democracy and the CIA.
He created this regime change mercenary group called Canvas that goes basically all over, you know, around the world to train these like mostly student youth protesters that specifically and only that the United States government wants to overthrow.
And then, you know, with the CIA money, he organizes these groups.
And you know, when this was happening, like Juan Guaido, the fake president, this coup puppet figure in Venezuela, he went through one of these trainings also.
And I started, when I was reporting on that, I got in touch with one of the top Venezuelan oligarchs.
I was writing about him.
And I started asking him, you know, did you fund, there were reports that he had funded Juan Guaido's training and all this other stuff.
And he said, oh, there are thousands of Venezuelans who have been trained.
So it's not like they just take like one or two or three of these people.
They take like thousands of students, pump them through these trainings, and then have one or two as kind of the like, you know, the friendly face.
And so what you see in Hong Kong right now are these highly organized protests.
It's not like, you know, protests in the US where it's like a bunch of people, you know, kind of shouting, marching with signs, that kind of thing.
I mean, these are like actual, very clearly like militarized tactics they're using.
And, you know, for instance, they'll have like sniper rifles, but without a barrel.
So it doesn't actually fire bullets, but they'll have laser pointers pointing in the eyes of the Hong Kong police in order to, you know, blind them, prevent them from doing their job.
And you'll have hundreds of these laser pointers pointed at people.
They're extreme, they move extremely quickly.
So, you know, suggesting that there's like some, there's some high level of organization, not just, you know, like you saw, like an, I don't know, an Antifa protest, or Black Lives Matter, or whatever, a right wing protest that it's just like people out kind of doing whatever they do.
And the protest goes however it goes.
At the same time, there's been, I don't know how inflated the numbers are, but at least hundreds of thousands of people participating in this thing, more than that, maybe, right?
Yeah, I don't, you know, I don't know what the numbers are.
And there's definitely, and I guess I read that after they initially suspended, you know, aka withdrew mostly the extradition law that most of the people went home then.
Now, I've read that some of them came back out since then.
I don't know, but well, so they basically the extradition bill, which has a really fascinating backstory that we can get into.
But that bill, yeah, a few days ago, Carrie Lam, the whatever, head of Hong Kong's government, suspended it, like it's dead.
It was already all but dead.
But, you know, the protesters just continue to kind of add demand.
Well, I think what it was, was before, and I don't speak Cantonese, but I think before it was suspended, and the protesters were saying, that's not good enough.
And that then, so now only finally, at the beginning of September, has she officially withdrawn it all the way and declared it dead, dead, dead.
And they're saying, yeah, nice try, too little, too late, was what I saw on PBS NewsHour.
They were going, oh, yeah, well, that's not good enough anymore, and this kind of thing.
But, right.
I mean, they had a, you know, probably a real fear there, that they could be extradited for whatever supposed crimes off to Beijing or wherever, you know.
I mean, that's not, I'm sorry, that's possible.
I wouldn't, I wouldn't rule that out, you know, and say that, like, you know, Chinese government is like perfect or whatever.
And I think, you know, people have every right to want independence or whatever it is.
I will say that, you know, I think this is not an independence movement.
It's a separatist movement, because Hong Kong is part of China, and was under, you know, British colonialism, which was taken, British rule, which was taken at gunpoint about, you know, 100 years ago.
But with that said, even this, this, the extradition bill that's, you know, now off the table.
Well, even a separatist movement is still, I don't mind that, certainly none of my business, but like, morally speaking, it might even be the right thing.
You know, it's, it's no more proper for the Han to dominate the Cantonese speakers than vice versa, or for, you know, so if the Uyghurs or the Tibetans want to secede from China, I don't care about that.
I just don't want the CIA involved in it.
You know, that's somebody else's problem, not mine.
Right, right.
Well, my point is just that it's always called a democracy movement in the US.
Like, they'll never just say, this is a secessionist movement.
Like, let's just call it what it is.
Or it's a separatist movement.
Yeah, like, why can't we just call it that?
Yeah.
And why can't we talk all about the NED and the National Democratic Institute, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, the NED and its different outfits, the Freedom House, International Republican Institute, and the National Democratic Institute.
Yeah, these are completely missing, missing from the narrative.
You know, so regardless of your, you know, political kind of, you know, beliefs, right or left, whatever, I mean, it's, it's just bull**** that we cannot talk about that in any kind of US media.
But you know, the other thing about the extradition bill, it was proposed after a guy from Hong Kong went on vacation with his girlfriend to Taiwan, he found out that she was impregnated by another man.
So this guy from Hong Kong, while they're on vacation, he finds this out, he murdered his girlfriend, then chopped her up, put her in a suitcase, threw her body out in the bushes.
And he takes the credit cards, goes back to Hong Kong, and starts and like withdraws a bunch of cash.
And so that's when this proposed extradition bill came about.
And so while there are legitimate, you know, I'm not going to say there aren't legitimate concerns or whatever, it's illegitimate to say, you know, we don't want an extradition bill, that's for them to figure out.
But the fact that everyone rallied around a guy who essentially who murdered and dismembered his girlfriend, and, you know, the extradition bill would have been with Taiwan and China, mainland China.
So it's like, well, what about, you know, punishing this guy, this like murderer, which has is just also totally missing from the mainstream narrative.
And then, you know, I talked to some experts in Chinese experts, and they're, they're like, well, they're also billionaires in Hong Kong, who fled China for, you know, various, various crimes, kind of like how, you know, Bill Browder embezzled huge, huge, you know, millions upon millions of dollars from Russia, and then fled the country, and then gave up US citizenship in order to not be, you know, taxed or prosecuted for that.
So, you know, there's, there's definitely an element of where like criminals can go, you know, to that side where there's no extradition bill, so they can, they can hang out and not just, you know, again, that's not to say, to dismiss everyone in the protest movement in Hong Kong, and say that, you know, there absolutely should be a, you know, extradition bill, blah, blah, blah.
But it's worth, it's definitely worth pointing out.
And I'm saying that that hasn't been, you know, I haven't seen that addressed in mainstream media.
Hey guys, Scott here for Liberty Under Attack Publications.
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Hey guys, check out Listen and Think audiobooks.
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And now, so talk about Julie, how do you say her name?
And what's the point?
Oh, Julie.
I don't know how you say her name.
Iyade?
I don't know.
Well, she was Julie Iyade, whatever it is, is a political, she's like a top political affairs manager at the US consulate in Hong Kong.
And Joshua Wong, who I mentioned before, this 22-year-old youth pro-democracy leader who's been groomed by the US government, was caught meeting with this consulate figure, this top consulate figure, which you'd think that, I mean, if, for instance, a Black Lives Matter activist was caught meeting with a Russian consulate official or a Chinese consulate official in the US, that would be a huge scandal.
But it didn't even get touched in US media at all.
And the US government, the State Department denounced it, denounced China's reaction to it.
Especially if Occupy, imagine if Occupy was like, I don't know, 10,000 times the size it was, right?
At the time, it was a bunch of hippies in a park compared to this.
Right, exactly, exactly.
And then they were waving Chinese flags and saying, oh, President Xi, please come liberate me.
Like, imagine that's what Occupy was.
It was just a totally discredited thing.
Right, while shutting down JFK airport and major ports in New York.
Exactly, exactly.
I mean, the other thing I think, so Joshua Wong met with Julia Day privately.
It was in this candid photo that came out and it sparked this kind of diplomatic crisis between Washington and Beijing.
But no one talked about it in the US.
That's totally cool.
Yeah, it's not interference.
It's not meddling.
It's not conspiring with a foreign power.
It's just normal.
The other figure that I think is really important to talk about, and you can read about him, your listeners can read about him in the article, but it's Jimmy Lai, who actually, he is the kind of Rupert Murdoch of Hong Kong.
He's worth several hundred million dollars.
And he owns Hong Kong's largest media empire, which is like a xenophobic kind of tabloid where they do, for years, they did like reviews of porn videos.
They have all kinds of trashy content.
And they regularly publish, well, they took out a full page ad calling Chinese mainlanders invading locusts and saying, like, stop sending your pregnant women here to take our resources, which just reminded me of, it's like the anchor baby talking point that it's like, oh, the Mexicans are invading to take over everything.
There's a similar dynamic between Hong Kong and China mainland, because for years, for decades, Hong Kong was the kind of financial hub of China.
And before China was as wealthy and powerful as it is today, Hong Kong was the financial center.
It had a big manufacturing base, all this stuff.
And now that's gone.
I mean, the manufacturing base has gone into mainland China because of cheaper labor.
And so now Hong Kong is feeling the effects of that, where young people don't really have any future.
I mean, it's like a service industry.
It's like here.
It's very similar to the U.S. You're a young person coming out of college.
You have a bunch of student debt.
And what, you can work in a bar or restaurant or drive Uber or something like that, where it's not very promising.
And that's the main reason that so many people are participating in these protests.
But you have the U.S. and these oligarchs redirecting that popular discontent to suit their own interests and against the interests of these young people, which, I mean, that's the ultimate goal here.
And Jimmy Lai is one of the key figures.
So he uses his media empire to just directly promote these protests, get people to go out on the street.
And meanwhile, he's actually profiting from it.
So there's a major conflict of interest.
His next media is his business.
And then his big magazine is called Apple Daily.
And he's making huge amounts of money by covering the protests that he's promoting.
So Lai also traveled.
He came to Washington earlier this year and met with a whole host of all the top neocon Trump administration officials, Pompeo, Pence.
There's a great photo of him with Bolton, which just says everything, arm in arm.
And he went to the Foundation of Defense for Democracies, one of the top neocon think tanks, that the Israel lobby documentary that was censored by Al Jazeera on orders from the Qatari theocrats, that movie, that documentary identifies Foundation of Defense for Democracies as an agent of the Israeli government.
And so this is where he appears.
And if you listen to what he says, he's into this whole clash of civilizations narrative where it's like, the Chinese are backward.
And it's also ironic because he's actually originally from mainland China.
He earned his wealth.
He was a poor kid and he came to Hong Kong when he was young and made his wealth in the garment industry.
But now he hates mainland Chinese on kind of an ethnic basis.
It's really weird.
But he has these ties to Washington.
He's one of the main guys promoting it.
And of course, just like Joshua Wong, he's pumped up as this pro-democracy figure.
He's fighting back against China and he's a hero.
And no one will talk about any of his actual ties to Washington.
So now overall, from the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute and the NED, and I don't know if USAID is in there this time or what, and maybe even including if there's some of these NGOs that are so very closely tied to the NED, do you have some kind of ballpark estimates of how much money the Americans have spent propping up the groups that are leading this protest movement?
I would have to look.
I mean, it's been at least tens of millions of dollars over the years.
I'd have to look at the specifics.
I don't have right in front of me.
But it's a pretty significant amount of money to just pour into some faraway tiny place, especially considering how kind of ragged so much of this country is looking.
Well, it's at least hundreds of thousands a year.
I mean, I don't know what percentage of the budget it is, but as you're saying, it's meaningful on the receiving end.
It's definitely meaningful on the receiving end.
Yeah, it goes a long way.
And also, it's millions per year.
You can look at the National Endowment for Democracy's website and they'll say, you know, 300,000 to this, 300,000, you know, and you start to add it up and it's like, wow, they sent, they sent 10 million, you know, 5 million, 8 million, 10 million dollars this year.
And then you start to look at what, you know, that's just in Hong Kong.
You start to look at all the places the National Endowment for Democracy is spending, you know, tax dollars, our tax dollars all over the world.
You know, this is insane.
So, no, it's a serious amount of money, without a doubt.
These protests have been going on for a few months now.
So what stage are they at now?
What percentage of the total protest movement is still out there?
And what's the real danger of Chinese troops coming in to round them up?
Or what's going to happen, do you think?
I mean, you know, I haven't, I haven't been in Hong Kong to cover these protests.
You know, my article was basically about kind of how the US is, the US role in it.
So I can't, you know, say that I was there and reporting from the ground.
So I don't know, you know, what, how many of the people are still out there from, you know, from the reports I have seen.
If you watch like, RT America has a great correspondent out there named Michelle Greenstein, who's been out there for the past week or so reporting on it.
She kind of shows how, you know, there's these popular protests, and then towards the end of them, that's where they, you know, when most of the people are starting to go home, that's when they start to get rowdy.
And that's like the same, that's really the same phenomenon as we've seen in other color revolutions, where it's not like the entire, you know, the entire like, thousands, you know, tens of thousands of people or hundreds of thousands are all trained by, you know, Canvas and funded by the CIA and all this stuff.
It's that you have this like, highly organized group and the most organized group that's able to kind of exploit the protests and, and then, you know, becomes violent at the end.
So in terms of, you know, where, where it goes from here, I mean, Carrie Lam, she taped, or you know, she totally suspended, withdrew the extradition bill, but it's still, but they're still protesting.
As far as I can tell, the protests are still pretty strong.
And while there's been a lot of talk about China sending troops over to Hong Kong, I think that is exactly what the US government would want to have some kind of bloody crackdown, some kind of like, shootout, like Tiananmen Square style.
And so that's really, I think, what the US is hoping will happen here.
But I don't think that China is going to do that.
It seems like it would play right into the Trump administration's hands.
And the Hong Kong police seem to be, you know, more or less capable of handling it.
I mean, they're also not falling into the trap that, you know, kind of the same mistake, I think the Syrian government made, where they, you know, opened fire on protesters.
And don't get me wrong, some of those protesters were armed, and there were fanatical elements.
But, you know, basically, I think the Hong Kong government, the Hong Kong police's strategy is, well, we're just going to use minimal force necessary, we're not going in and be like the US where we just kill people on the street, and then just kind of see where this goes.
And hopefully, you know, eventually it will, it will fade out for them.
But that seems to be the strategy for now.
So it's, you know, hard to say how long this will go.
It's been, you know, going on for for months now.
But that's where it is for the moment.
All right, well, listen, thank you so much for coming back on the show, Dan, great to talk to you again.
Hey, a pleasure.
Thanks a lot for having me, Scott.
All right, you guys, that's Dan Cohen, writing again for thegrayzone.com.
This one is called Behind a Made-for-TV Hong Kong Protest Narrative.
Washington is backing nativism and mob violence.
All right, you guys, and that is anti-war radio for this morning.
I'm your host, Scott Horton.
I'm the author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and editorial director of antiwar.com.
You can find my full interview archive, more than 5000 of them now, going back to 2003 at scotthorton.org.
I'm here every Sunday morning from 830 to nine on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA.
See you next week.
