* DCA means US occupies Finland
with as many military personnel (with families etc.) it seems
appropriate, and that these people are outside Finnish law, drive
vehicles with false registration plates (similar as ordinary plates but
withous identity) etc. All these people have secret diplomat status on
steroids. Add to this that what military equipment US brings to the
Russian border is kept secret from the Finnish authorities. This info is
based on reports of similar DCA in Sweden. Moreover, the whole war
crazy floodgate in Finland and Sweden would never have happened without
Russia's special operation which would never have happened if the
aggressive US/Nato nuke expansion never had happened.
Finland's defense blogger Peter Klevius: You also want cooperation with China, but doesn't seem to understand that all of this US enforced war politics is caused by US desperation to lose its stolen hegemony - since 1971 when US robbed the world dollar for itself - because of China's success which undermines US dollar hegemony to a point where the 1971 chickens inevitably are coming home to roost!
Sackur (BBC): "You've lived in La la land. You ignored Putin's expansionist desires. You were Prime Minister and you tried to convince me that Finland and Europe should learn to work together with Russia. You said Nordstream is a great idea, "we need access to cheap Russian energy". You said that we Finns will build a nuclear power plant together with Russia, that it is good for Finland. You said that we must learn to trust the Russians. You were completely wrong.
Stubb: In those two cases – absolutely yes. In politics, it is important to understand that you make mistakes and learn from them. My idea was to achieve greater cooperation with Russia through integration.
Peter Klevius: How ignorant (or worse) of both of you! It was US/Nato's expansionist desires, starting with Obama administration's 2013 plan to take over Sevastopol (see below).
Sackur: You ignored clear signals of Russian aggression. You decided that a pragmatic agreement in which Georgia effectively lost territory was the right thing to do – without punishing Russia. You decided that the right way forward was to seek cooperation with Russia. You personally ignored all signals of Putin's expansionist desires.
Stubb: After the peace talks in Georgia, I wanted Finland to change its attitude towards Russia, impose sanctions on Russia and Finland join NATO As recently as 2018.
Peter Klevius: Could the 2008 Georgia crisis have anything to do with US/NATO's membership offer to Georgia?! Look at the map and you'll sea how US planned to place its nukes at Black sea as a stranglehold against Russia. And today US "rules based order" and US "democracy defense" has constantly meddled against the democratically chosen majority in the Georgian parliament who wanted to pass a law against foreign meddling - with a text that is meaker than similar laws in US, UK etc. Western "democracies".
Sackur: Despite what Russia did in Ukraine in 2014, Lavrov was still your friend in 2018. Here you sit and say that Europe should stop living in 'La la land'. You yourself have lived in "La la land".
Stubb: I think I have been in many ways. I think we should admit that we all were. Now it's about how we change tactics. One must learn from the mistakes of the past. I have been one of the most "hawkish" politicians in Finland vis-à-vis Russia and one of the toughest advocates of NATO. There was a rapid change of opinion among Finns regarding NATO membership after Russia launched its ground invasion of Ukraine in spring 2022. Ukraine's place is in NATO.
Peter Klevius: From a peaceful PM working in the best interest of Finland, to a warmongering puppet president aiding US attack plans ultimately against China, but first building a stranglehold on and weakening of Russia. And you don't seem to understand that US, not Russia or China, is the main threat to Erupe because US is facing collaps if it lets China continue to grow - and you have now contributed to transfer Finland from a neutral country to a US nuke base against Russia! And although you don't know when US brings its nukes, Russia may well know - and if scared enough may start protecting itself against possible false flag initiated US nuke attacks from Finnish soil.
The Obama Regime’s Plan to Seize the Russian Naval Base in Crimea
November 2, 2019 | Categories: Guest Contributions | Tags: | Print This Article Print This
by Eric ZuesseClear and convincing evidence will be presented here that, under U.S. President Barack Obama, the U.S. Government had a detailed plan, which was already active in June 2013, to take over Russia’s main naval base, which is in Sevastopol in Crimea, and to turn it into a U.S. naval base. There can now be no question that the war in Ukraine started, and resulted from, the U.S. Government’s plan to take over all of Ukraine, and especially to take over that Russian naval base, in Crimea, which then was in Ukraine.
The war in Ukraine didn’t start at the time when a lot of people think that it did, with the overthrow of Ukraine’s President Viktor Yanukovych. It was already underway considerably before that time, because it started in Washington, as the folloowing masterful 11-minute documentary makes clear — it started as a subterranean war by Washington to take over Ukraine, before it became an overt war (a “civil war”) within Ukraine:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWkfpGCAAuw
The CIA-edited and written Wikipedia claims that the war commenced in “a series of military actions that started in February 2014”; and, that, from the outset, it has been a “Russian military intervention in Ukraine (2014–present)” — not any sort of American intervention in Ukraine. However, to the extent that Russia has been involved in the Ukrainian war, that involvement came later, and was a reaction against what the U.S. Government and its agents had done to Ukraine (which nation is, of course, on Russia’s doorstep, and so Russia inevitably did respond). Therefore, the propagandistic function of Wikipedia must be acknowledged, even though Wikipedia is adequate for providing an introductory overview of some non-geostrategic subjects.
The U.S. regime, under Barack Obama, had been planning, ever since June 2011, a takeover of Ukraine, in order to become enabled ultimately to place its nuclear missiles within less than five minutes flying-time to a first-strike blitz destruction of the Kremlin (thus preventing any effective Russian counter-attack). However, things didn’t work out quite according to the plan for the takeover of Ukraine, and here is how the war in Ukraine actually began:
We’ll open by describing the planning for the conquest of Russia’s key naval base, in Sevastopol in Crimea. Crimea was inside Ukraine during 1954-2014, but had otherwise been inside Russia, going all the way back to 1783. (During 1954, the Soviet dictator, Khrushchev, arbitrarily transferred Crimea, from Russia to Ukraine, even though the vast majority of Crimeans considered themselves to be Russians, and their native language was Russian — but, after all, the Soviet Union was a dictatorship. Crimeans had no say in the matter.)
The U.S. regime prepared for its planned takeover of Crimea by commissioning Gallup to poll Crimeans in 2013 to find out whether the residents there considered themselves to be Ukrainians (which would make the U.S. regime’s job in Crimea easier), or instead still Russians (which would foretell resistance there); and the findings were that Crimeans overwhelmingly still considered themselves to be Russians, definitely not Ukrainians. Nonetheless, the plan for the takeover went forward — the U.S. team, it is clear, decided that the residents of Crimea could be dealt with, in such ways as is shown here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loKajkXoTBU
Some were clubbed to death, others became permanently disabled from their injuries, but this was a warning to Crimeans, to buckle under, and give up: be ruled from Kiev, by Washington’s regime. It didn’t work. A referendum was quickly held in Crimea about whether they wanted to be ruled by the newly installed Ukrainian government, and the results were in line with Gallup’s findings: Crimeans wanted to be ruled from Moscow, not from Kiev.
The U.S. then hired Gallup to survey Crimeans soon after the referendum. (Perhaps the U.S. regime was hoping to find that a scientific sampling of Crimeans would show a far smaller percentage favoring the breakaway of Crimea from Ukraine than the referendum had reported, which could greatly intensify international skepticism about the legitimacy of Russia’s takeover of Crimea. But, if that was the purpose, Gallup’s findings again turned out to be a disappointment.)
Here is what Gallup found in both its 2013 and 2014 polls of Crimeans:
When Gallup did their “Public Opinion Survey Residents of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea May 16-30, 2013” (which was called that because even when Crimea was part of Ukraine, it had a special status, as being an “Autonomous Republic” — not a province), only 15% (slide 8) of Crimeans viewed themselves as “Ukrainian,” but 40% said “Russian,” and 24% said “Crimean.” 53% (slide 14) wanted Crimeans to be part of the “Customs Union with Russia, Belarus and Kazakhstan,” but only 17% wanted Crimeans to be part of “The European Union.” 68% (slide 15) said their feelings toward “Russia” were “warm,” but only 6% said their feelings toward “USA” were “warm.
When Gallup in April 2014 (right after the referendum) polled Crimeans again (slide 25), 76.2% had a “negative” view of the United States, and 2.8% had a “positive” view of it; 71.3% had a positive view of Russia, and 8.8% had a negative view of it. Asked whether (slide 28) “The results of the referendum on Crimea’s status likely reflect the views of most people there/here,” 82.8% said yes; 6.7% said no. 89.3% in the poll expressed an opinion on this matter, and 93% of those who expressed an opinion said that the referendum “likely did reflect the views” of Crimeans. That was almost exactly the same percentage as those who in the referendum had voted to rejoin Russia. It couldn’t have been stronger verification of the referendum-results, than that. The Gallup poll findings (like its predecessor) were hidden from the public — not broadcast to the public by the regime’s propaganda-media. After all: the U.S. Government is a regime — it’s not a democracy. All of the formalities, now, are just for show. Both of its political parties are imperialists (“neoconservative”). Only their style differs.
So: the U.S. regime knew that it wasn’t, at all, wanted nor welcomed by Crimeans, but that Russia very much was. The U.S. regime thus moved forward on the basis that the government of Ukraine owned that land; the residents who lived there did not, and should have no say about what government owned it and would rule them. The idea was that, if the people there didn’t like it, they should emigrate to Russia (and, according to a Russian source, “4.4 million went to Russia” — removed themselves from Ukraine — after the coup).
The U.S. regime, clearly, wanted the land, not the people who were living on it. The expectation, as soon as Ukraine was under U.S. control from the coup, had been that America would get the entirety of Ukraine, including Crimea; but, then, Russia’s Vladimir Putin stepped in and protected Crimeans who were clamoring to hold a referendum in order to express their collective will on this matter; and this referendum was held, on 16 March 2014, and it produced over 90% voting for Crimea to be a part of Russia, such as Crimea had been before Khrushchev transferred it to Ukraine.
So: the U.S. regime failed to get the naval base that it had expected to get in Sevastopol in Crimea. That was a crucial failure for Obama.
Those events — the coup and, three weeks later, the Crimean referendum — occurred in 2014, but the planning for the coup had already been going on for years, and it wasn’t being called off once Gallup reported in 2013 that most Crimeans loathed the U.S. The active operation to take over Ukraine had started actually on 1 March 2013 inside the U.S. Embassy in Kiev, which was almost 9 months before Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, on 20 November 2013, rejected the EU’s demand that Ukraine must bear the full $160 billion cost of abandoning its existing trading relationships with Russia and its allies, in order to join the EU. Wikipedia says that the overthrow of Yanukovych started on 21 November 2013 when he said no to the EU, but actually it started on 1 March 2013; and the planning for it had started by no later than June 2011. And it may be said to have begun even prior to that, when, near the very start of Obama’s Presidency, Obama called the then-Ukrainian-Presidential-candidate Yanukovych to Washington in order to sound him out on — if Yanukovych would become the winner — getting Ukraine into NATO, America’s anti-Russian military alliance. Getting Ukraine into the EU was really just to be a steppingstone to getting it into NATO so that U.S. nuclear missiles could be placed there against Moscow. This is what everything was really about. On 7 January 2010, the Kiev Post bannered “Yanukovych: Ukraine will remain a neutral state” and this is what actually sealed his fate. Yanukovych, with that now in his platform, won the Presidential election on 7 February 2010. So: he was in Obama’s gunsight even at the very moment when he won the Presidency.
There was no question as to whether Ukrainians wanted to be in NATO: they did not. During 2003-2009, only around 20% of Ukranians wanted NATO membership, while around 55% opposed it. In 2010, Gallup found that whereas 17% of Ukrainians considered NATO to mean “protection of your country,” 40% said it’s “a threat to your country.” Ukrainians predominantly saw NATO as an enemy, not a friend. But after Obama’s February 2014 Ukrainian coup, “Ukraine’s NATO membership would get 53.4% of the votes, one third of Ukrainians (33.6%) would oppose it.” The coup turned what remained of Ukraine sharply against Russia. NATO is the key; the EU is more like an excuse for Ukraine to be admitted into NATO.
In June 2013 (well before the ‘democratic revolution’ in Ukraine started), NAVFAC, the U.S. Naval Facililities Engineering Command, published on its website, a “Project Description” for “Renovation of School#5, Sevastopol, Ukraine,” under the euphemistic title “EUCOM Humanitarian Assistance Program”. EUCOM is the U.S. European Command — it is purely military, not “humanitarian,” at all. The 124-page request for proposals (RFP) showed extensive photos of the existing school, and also of the toilets, floor-boards, and other U.S.-made products, that the U.S. regime was requiring to be used in the renovation (by some American corporation, yet to be determined) of that then-Ukrainian school in Crimea, which at that time was a Ukrainian Government property, not at all American-owned or operated. So: why were U.S. taxpayers supposed to fund this ‘humanitarian’ operation, by the U.S. military?
A remarkably full description, of what that extraordinary RFP was about, was provided on 24 April 2014 by a “Lada Ray,” under the headline “Breaking! US Planned to Turn #Crimea into Military Base Against Russia”, and here is its opening:
—
Breaking! US Planned to Turn #Crimea into Military Base Against Russia
24 April 2014, Lada Ray
A couple of weeks ago Crimea and Sevastopol almost unanimously voted to re-join Russia. The Crimeans said: we had been unappreciated guests, now we are returning home after a long voyage. More about that in my articles:
Why is Crimea Overwhelmingly Pro RE-Unification With Russia? https://futuristrendcast.wordpress.com/2014/03/17/why-is-crimea-overwhelmingly-pro-re-unification-with-russia/
Prediction: Crimea Independence Vote https://futuristrendcast.wordpress.com/2014/03/15/prediction-crimea-independence-vote/
The information coming to the surface now shows that if Crimea stayed as part of Ukraine, it would have become a huge NATO/US military base. I seriously doubt that the people of the Crimea would have stood for that, but if such a thing did happen, it would have meant WWIII as Russia would never allow it. From this perspective it’s especially clear why NATO, USA and EU were so shocked that Russia decisively accepted Crimea back. They already considered it theirs.
The city of Sevastopol is the prized possession. This is one of the best harbors in the world. But the entire Crimea is of huge strategic importance – first and foremost, if you want to attack Russia. In addition, Crimea is important for the control over other countries, including Iran and Turkey. As they say, he who controls Crimea, controls the Black Sea.
At least one hospital in Crimea’s capital Simferopol and at least one school in Sevastopol were targeted by the US/NATO just recently. They were planning on turning the hospital into a base for their troops after a massive renovation. One of the high schools (a gymnasium) in Sevastopol the Kiev authorities were about to sell to the US to be repurposed as a school for spies, targeting Russia. It was planned that the kids going to that school would be learning languages and spying techniques since an early age.
It appears Americans wanted to turn the Crimea into a massive military/navy/intelligence complex. The famous, one-of-a-kind Soviet underground submarine base in Balaklava, which is now the Museum of the Cold War, was visited in the past several years by at least 25 delegations from the Pentagon, US Navy, NATO, and Western political circles. Kiev gave them access to super-secret Russian/Soviet sectors of the base, which were supposed to be off limits. They studied with great interest the secret documentation and technology.
In Sevastopol, called “the city of the Russian glory” and the “hero city,” the NATO and US navy ships and military have been present for years. The population greeted them with constant protests, which prevented some of the planned joint military exercises between NATO and Kiev. Sometimes, the NATO ships had to leave because of the population’s resistance (protest footage on video below at 1:54). US/NATO ships in the Sevastopol harbor tried many times to “park” right in front of the Russian ships stationed there just out of spite. As we know, for 23 years, since the breakup of the USSR in 1991. Russia has been leasing its own base on its historic land for $100mln a year from Kiev.
Sevastopol had been the important base of the Russian Fleet since 1776. Sevastopol is a large and beautiful city populated with ethnic Russians, many of whom are retired navy officers and their families. These people dreamed for 23 years of going home – and by home they always meant Russia. Add to that that Kiev constantly attacked Russian language, little by little taking away the right of the Russian-speakers to speak their native language.
In Crimea, the US financed very generously various media, NGOs, and politicians, who would essentially become their agents. Of course, much of that was styled as support for democracy.
People of the Crimea felt deeply insulted by such attitude by the bought-and-paid-for Kiev and such disrespect of their heritage and wishes by the US/NATO.
—
You didn’t see that information in the New York Times, Washington Post, London Times, Telegraph, Guardian, or any other U.S.-regime propaganda-organ; and, so, the facts that are told there might be surprising (or even shocking) to readers under the U.S. regime; but they are true, and the propaganda isn’t.
Then, Ukraine’s far eastern Donbass region, which had voted over 90% for the democratically elected President of Ukraine whom Obama had overthrown, also broke away. Here is how that happened:
Ukraine started its war against resisters by drafting everyone they could grab, and sending them in tanks into the south and east, in order to prevent any more secessions than Crimea had already done. The draftees were terrified, and didn’t want to kill. On 16 April 2014, the Kiev Post bannered “A day of humiliation, as Ukrainian military offensive stalls, six armored vehicles seized”. It opened: “On April 15, Ukraine’s military began an anti-terrorist operation against Kremlin-backed insurgents who have taken over numerous government buildings and police headquarters in several cities of Donetsk Oblast, Ukraine’s most populous region where 10 percent of the nation’s 45 million people live.” The residents in Donbass were now officially (by gther Obama-installed government) called “terrorists,” and Ukraine called its war to exterminate them the “Anti-Terrorist Operation” or ATO. Its objective was to eliminate as many of Yanukovych’s voters as possible (and Donbass having voted over 90% for Yanukovych meant that all of it was now a free-fire zone for Ukraine’s soldiers and bombers), so that the new regime would be able to win future elections (by eliminating the government’s opponents).
On 2 May 2014, thugs who were organized by the newly installed American regime in Kiev burned to death an uncounted number, perhaps over a hundred, individuals inside the Odessa Trade Unions Building, who had been distributing flyers against the coup-regime. Some of the massacre’s key organizers had friends inside the Obama White House. That event set off a panic throughout the eastern and southern half of Ukraine, where Yanukovych had overwhelmingly won the Presidency. The secession movement in the areas where Yanukovych had won (southern and eastern Ukraine), formed, and during 4-9 May 2014 took over some government buildings. Donbass, where Yanukovych had won by over 90%, seceded. The bombings and cannonades against Donbass — and sometimes even firebombings against them— took over.
That’s how the war started.
The U.S. regime and its supporters imposed severe sanctions against Russia for responding.
The accounts that have been given about the Ukrainian war by U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media have been boldly blatant lies.
Peter Klevius wrote:
Finland-Swedish Peter Klevius exhibits the art of the Finland-Swedish artist Hugo Simberg, calling it The Rape of Finland and Åland
Read Peter Klevius Origin of the Vikings from 2005 - now again available after Google deleted it 2014 and again in February 2024.
How US robs the world
* Democracy in any meaningful sense is now completely destroyed in the West and replaced with coteries of politicians who decide among themselves what is in the best interest of their de facto leader US, which they have to bow for as "the leader of the free world", because not licking US ass means they're out. US has repeatedly been one of the worst Human Rights violators to a point where undemocratic and theocratic US Supreme court has abandoned them "when it's in the best interest of US", and the equally undemocratic Federal reserve is the world dictator over the dollar hegemony! And when Chinese meritocracy produces leaders like Xi who has the people's supprt on a level completely out of reach for Western "democratic" leaders, then Xi is called an "authoritarian dictator"!
US
is the new Nazi Germany (and BBC is its Ministry of Propaganda* in the
US master's delusional puppet state UK in line with Goebbel's approach) -
albeit even more dangerous and devastating
for the world! How long will people blink this open truth?!
*
Now, and no later, time's up for whistleblowers within BBC to step
forward to save themselves from the inevitable future "Nuremberg" trial
when its master US goes down! BBC's consumer programs etc. are mostly
safe but news and non-nature documentaries are filled with hate
propaganda, often with a thin make up of s.c. "anti-racism" excuses -
just compare how China and Chinese are treated , or just neglected.
US
started its proxy war against Russia 2013-14 and pushed Russia to war
2022 by threatening to place for Russia devastating new stealthy
tactical nukes on the Russian border in Ukraine - and don't forget that
just like US (together with its tiny UK puppet where councils and people
already suffer under economic hardship while the government and its
propaganda ministry BBC beg for even more money for militarism and war)
is complicit to the genocide against Palestinians in Palestine now (and
instead of bombing the perpetrator i.e. IDF, or at least demanding
ceasefire, US - together with its warmongering UK puppet - bombs other
countries it doesn't like), US participated in genocide against Russians
in Ukraine and now uses Ukrainian soldiers as cannon fodder. And don't
forget that UK after the Russian invasion, stopped ceasefire and peace
talks which were already prepared and going on between Russia and
Ukraine!
Compare today's axis of evil (US/UK) with WW2
1933,
Hitler announced that rearmament must be undertaken. A year later he
told his military leaders that 1942 was the target date for going to war
in the east. Goebbels was one of the most enthusiastic supporters of
Hitler aggressively pursuing Germany's expansionist policies sooner
rather than later. At the time of the Reoccupation of the Rhineland in
1936, Goebbels summed up his general attitude in his diary: "[N]ow is
the time for action. Fortune favors the brave! He who dares nothing wins
nothing."
This video should be the most viewed to understand why US became the evil of the world!
The Nixon chock 1971 - the biggest financial robbery ever - and growing in enormity and danger by the day!
The Volcker shock 1979/1981 - how an economy professor reveals his ignorance about US evilness because of its 1971 financial theft of the world dollar.
And
there are no mitigating circumstances but just the opposite, i.e. US
has used its stolen gains from its financial fraud to cover up its crime
and to invest its looted money in arms and wars.
US Fed rules
supreme over the world currency US stole 1971, but only bothers about US
- not what its behavior means for the rest of the world.
US
stolen (1971-) gdp is also heavily inflated because of Fed's
manipulations. Two natural elements of economy is inflation and trade
balance. However, since 1971 both have been replaced by artificial ones
dictated by US Fed.
Peter Klevius feels that Hugo Simberg would have 100% approved of this 2023 art exhibition on the web as a follow up to his 1903 exhibition of the 'Wounded Angel' at Ateneum (Helsingfors) - where Peter Klevius would have no access today
More than a century after Hugo Simberg painted the The Wounded Angel, it was voted Finland's "national painting" in 2006.
The Garden of Death by Hugo Simberg - updated by Peter Klevius.
The main problem for Finland (and other US puppets) is that US is now a dangerous losing criminal due to its dollar theft 1971- coming home to roost thanks to Cina's success, and that China surpasses US in all tech categories - which means that hanging on to US hegemony inevitably means retarding in technology, wealth, and security.
To understand the civil war in Ukraine you need to understand how US managed to reintroduce fascism in Europe, and how this has made it possible for US controlled media to support what it previously used to attack, and to attack what it previously used to support. What would normally be called neo-fascism, neo-nazism and genocide is now called "heroic", and liberation from state terror and oppression is now called crime of aggression.
A real genocide in Ukraine backed by US is dismissed while China's treatment of muslims is applauded by OIC (muslims' world organization) but declared "genocide" by US and its puppets!
The Neo-Nazi Question in Ukraine
The real problem is actually the administration's over-engagement in this case -- as in meddling in the affairs of another state and trying to rearrange its domestic political machinery to suit Washington's agenda.
By Michael Hughes, Contributor
Foreign Policy Analyst
Mar 11, 2014, 12:44 AM EDT
|
Updated May 11, 2014
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.
The Obama administration has vehemently denied charges that Ukraine's nascent regime is stock full of neo-fascists despite clear evidence suggesting otherwise. Such categorical repudiations lend credence to the notion the U.S. facilitated the anti-Russian cabal's rise to power as part of a broader strategy to draw Ukraine into the West's sphere of influence. Even more disturbing are apologists, from the American left and right, who seem willing accomplices in this obfuscation of reality, when just a cursory glance at the profiles of Ukraine's new leaders should give pause to the most zealous of Russophobes.
In a State Department "fact sheet" released last week the U.S. accused Putin of lying about the Ukrainian government being under the sway of extremist elements. The report stated that right wing ultranationalist groups "are not represented in the Rada (Ukraine's parliament)," and that "there is no indication the government would pursue discriminatory policies."
It isn't too surprising that conservative outlets like FOX News would downplay Russian allegations but the so-called "liberal" press has also contributed to the American disinformation campaign. Celestine Bohlen from The New York Times considers harsh epithets, like the word "neo-Nazi," which Putin has hurled at the demonstrators in Kiev as part of a Russian propaganda effort to tarnish Ukraine's revolutionary struggle against authoritarianism.
Yet after simply Googling the terms "Ukraine" and "Neo-Nazi," the official position of the United States government along with the stance taken by many in the American media both now seem quite dubious, if not downright ridiculous, especially considering that one would be hard-pressed to machinate the lineup that now dominates Ukraine's ministry posts.
For starters, Andriy Parubiy, the new secretary of Ukraine's security council, was a co-founder of the Neo-Nazi Social-National Party of Ukraine (SNPU), otherwise known as Svoboda. And his deputy, Dmytro Yarosh, is the leader of a party called the Right Sector which, according to historian Timothy Stanley, "flies the old flag of the Ukrainian Nazi collaborators at its rallies."
The highest-ranking right-wing extremist is Deputy Prime Minister Oleksandr Sych, also a member of Svoboda, who believes that women should "lead the kind of lifestyle to avoid the risk of rape, including refraining from drinking alcohol and being in controversial company." This is the philosophy underlying one of his "legal initiatives," according to the Kyiv Post, "to ban all abortions, even for pregnancies that occurred during rape."
The Svoboda party has tapped into Nazi symbolism including the "wolf's angel" rune, which resembles a swastika and was worn by members of the Waffen-SS, a panzer division that was declared a criminal organization at Nuremberg. A report from Tel-Aviv University describes the Svoboda party as "an extremist, right-wing, nationalist organization which emphasizes its identification with the ideology of German National Socialism."
According to this BBC news clip two Svoboda parliamentarians in recent weeks posed for photos while "brandishing well-known far right numerology," including the numbers 88 -- the eighth letter of the alphabet -- signifying "HH," as in "Heil Hitler." This all makes Hillary Clinton's recent comments comparing Putin to Hitler appear patently absurd, as Stanley adeptly points out: "After all, in the eyes of many ethnic Russians, it is the Ukrainian nationalists -- not Putin -- who are the Nazis."
Last week Per Anders Rudling from Lund University in Sweden, an expert on Ukrainian extremists, told Britain's Channel 4 News: "A neo-fascist party like Svoboda getting the deputy prime minister position is news in its own right." Well, except in the U.S.
Even more disconcerting has been the emergence of phone intercepts between high-ranking U.S. and Ukrainian officials which make it look as if the U.S. was basically, in the words of Princeton's Stephen Cohen, "plotting a coup d'état against the elected president of Ukraine." In other words, the U.S., in addition to providing moral support, may have paved the way for extremists to seize power in Kiev. Such a development would counter the American right's condemnation of Obama for not "engaging" in the world. The real problem is actually the administration's over-engagement in this case -- as in meddling in the affairs of another state and trying to rearrange its domestic political machinery to suit Washington's agenda.
This gambit has backfired in a number of ways. Not only has a neo-fascist-laden regime secured power in Kiev but it may have played the U.S. and its allies for fools by insinuating it would become part of the Western sphere when it really had no such designs. As Svoboda political council member Yury Noyevy baldly admitted: "The participation of Ukrainian nationalism and Svoboda in the process of EU [European Union] integration is a means to break our ties with Russia."
Be they radical mujahideen or neo-fascists, Washington certainly has a penchant for bolstering shadowy forces, usually labeling them with risible euphemisms like "freedom fighters," in order to satiate short-term geopolitical needs, despite said factions being inimical to America's true long-term interests.
It's not Russia that's pushed Ukraine to the brink of war
This article is more than 9 years old
Seumas Milne
The attempt to lever Kiev into the western camp by ousting an elected leader made conflict certain. It could be a threat to us all
Wed 30 Apr 2014 21.01 BST
The threat of war in Ukraine is growing. As the unelected government in Kiev declares itself unable to control the rebellion in the country's east, John Kerry brands Russia a rogue state. The US and the European Union step up sanctions against the Kremlin, accusing it of destabilising Ukraine. The White House is reported to be set on a new cold war policy with the aim of turning Russia into a "pariah state".
That might be more explicable if what is going on in eastern Ukraine now were not the mirror image of what took place in Kiev a couple of months ago. Then, it was armed protesters in Maidan Square seizing government buildings and demanding a change of government and constitution. US and European leaders championed the "masked militants" and denounced the elected government for its crackdown, just as they now back the unelected government's use of force against rebels occupying police stations and town halls in cities such as Slavyansk and Donetsk.
"America is with you," Senator John McCain told demonstrators then, standing shoulder to shoulder with the leader of the far-right Svoboda party as the US ambassador haggled with the state department over who would make up the new Ukrainian government.
When the Ukrainian president was replaced by a US-selected administration, in an entirely unconstitutional takeover, politicians such as William Hague brazenly misled parliament about the legality of what had taken place: the imposition of a pro-western government on Russia's most neuralgic and politically divided neighbour.
Putin bit back, taking a leaf out of the US street-protest playbook – even though, as in Kiev, the protests that spread from Crimea to eastern Ukraine evidently have mass support. But what had been a glorious cry for freedom in Kiev became infiltration and insatiable aggression in Sevastopol and Luhansk.
After Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to join Russia, the bulk of the western media abandoned any hint of even-handed coverage. So Putin is now routinely compared to Hitler, while the role of the fascistic right on the streets and in the new Ukrainian regime has been airbrushed out of most reporting as Putinist propaganda.
So you don't hear much about the Ukrainian government's veneration of wartime Nazi collaborators and pogromists, or the arson attacks on the homes and offices of elected communist leaders, or the integration of the extreme Right Sector into the national guard, while the anti-semitism and white supremacism of the government's ultra-nationalists is assiduously played down, and false identifications of Russian special forces are relayed as fact.
The reality is that, after two decades of eastward Nato expansion, this crisis was triggered by the west's attempt to pull Ukraine decisively into its orbit and defence structure, via an explicitly anti-Moscow EU association agreement. Its rejection led to the Maidan protests and the installation of an anti-Russian administration – rejected by half the country – that went on to sign the EU and International Monetary Fund agreements regardless.
No Russian government could have acquiesced in such a threat from territory that was at the heart of both Russia and the Soviet Union. Putin's absorption of Crimea and support for the rebellion in eastern Ukraine is clearly defensive, and the red line now drawn: the east of Ukraine, at least, is not going to be swallowed up by Nato or the EU.
But the dangers are also multiplying. Ukraine has shown itself to be barely a functioning state: the former government was unable to clear Maidan, and the western-backed regime is "helpless" against the protests in the Soviet-nostalgic industrial east. For all the talk about the paramilitary "green men" (who turn out to be overwhelmingly Ukrainian), the rebellion also has strong social and democratic demands: who would argue against a referendum on autonomy and elected governors?
Meanwhile, the US and its European allies impose sanctions and dictate terms to Russia and its proteges in Kiev, encouraging the military crackdown on protesters after visits from Joe Biden and the CIA director, John Brennan. But by what right is the US involved at all, incorporating under its strategic umbrella a state that has never been a member of Nato, and whose last elected government came to power on a platform of explicit neutrality? It has none, of course – which is why the Ukraine crisis is seen in such a different light across most of the world. There may be few global takers for Putin's oligarchic conservatism and nationalism, but Russia's counterweight to US imperial expansion is welcomed, from China to Brazil.
In fact, one outcome of the crisis is likely to be a closer alliance between China and Russia, as the US continues its anti-Chinese "pivot" to Asia. And despite growing violence, the cost in lives of Russia's arms-length involvement in Ukraine has so far been minimal compared with any significant western intervention you care to think of for decades.
The risk of civil war is nevertheless growing, and with it the chances of outside powers being drawn into the conflict. Barack Obama has already sent token forces to eastern Europe and is under pressure, both from Republicans and Nato hawks such as Poland, to send many more. Both US and British troops are due to take part in Nato military exercises in Ukraine this summer.
The US and EU have already overplayed their hand in Ukraine. Neither Russia nor the western powers may want to intervene directly, and the Ukrainian prime minister's conjuring up of a third world war presumably isn't authorised by his Washington sponsors. But a century after 1914, the risk of unintended consequences should be obvious enough – as the threat of a return of big-power conflict grows. Pressure for a negotiated end to the crisis is essential.
Zach Dorfman·National Security Correspondent
January 13, 2022·7 min read
The CIA is overseeing a secret intensive training program in the U.S. for elite Ukrainian special operations forces and other intelligence personnel, according to five former intelligence and national security officials familiar with the initiative. The program, which started in 2015, is based at an undisclosed facility in the Southern U.S., according to some of those officials.
The CIA-trained forces could soon play a critical role on Ukraine’s eastern border, where Russian troops have massed in what many fear is preparation for an invasion. The U.S. and Russia started security talks earlier this week in Geneva but have failed thus far to reach any concrete agreement.
Ukrainian Military Forces servicemen walk on a trench on the frontline with Russia-backed separatists near to Avdiivka, Donetsk, southeastern Ukraine.
Ukrainian troops walk in a trench on the frontline with Russia-backed separatists near Avdiivka, Donetsk, southeastern Ukraine, on Jan. 8. (Anatolii Stepanov/AFP via Getty Images)
While the covert program, run by paramilitaries working for the CIA’s Ground Branch — now officially known as Ground Department — was established by the Obama administration after Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014, and expanded under the Trump administration, the Biden administration has further augmented it, said a former senior intelligence official in touch with colleagues in government.
By 2015, as part of this expanded anti-Russia effort, CIA Ground Branch paramilitaries also started traveling to the front in eastern Ukraine to advise their counterparts there, according to a half-dozen former officials.
The multiweek, U.S.-based CIA program has included training in firearms, camouflage techniques, land navigation, tactics like “cover and move,” intelligence and other areas, according to former officials.
How to characterize the program is a matter of dispute. The U.S. over three presidents has debated whether to provide military assistance to Ukraine, and how much, with discussions often focusing on whether that help is offensive or defensive in character.
U.S. officials deny that the CIA training program is, or was ever, offensively oriented. “The purpose of the training, and the training that was delivered, was to assist in the collection of intelligence,” said a current senior intelligence official.
But just what intelligence support entails, in the paramilitary context, can be ambiguous. And how this training will be applied by the Ukrainians may change rapidly with facts on the ground.
Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces, the military reserve of the Ukrainian Armes Forces, take part in a military exercise near Kiev on December 25, 2021. (Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images)
Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces, the military reserve of the Ukrainian Armes Forces, take part in a military exercise near Kiev on December 25, 2021. (Sergei Supinsky/AFP via Getty Images)
The program has involved “very specific training on skills that would enhance” the Ukrainians’ “ability to push back against the Russians,” said the former senior intelligence official.
The training, which has included “tactical stuff,” is “going to start looking pretty offensive if Russians invade Ukraine,” said the former official.
One person familiar with the program put it more bluntly. “The United States is training an insurgency,” said a former CIA official, adding that the program has taught the Ukrainians how “to kill Russians.”
The program, which does not appear to have ever been formally aimed at preparing for an insurgency, did include training that could be used for that purpose. Another former agency official described technical aspects of the program, like showing Ukrainians how to maintain secure communications behind enemy lines or in a “hostile intelligence environment” as potential “stay-behind force training.”
The current senior intelligence official strongly denied that the program was designed in any way “to assist in an insurgency.”
“Suggestions that we have trained an armed insurgency in Ukraine are simply false,” said Tammy Thorp, a CIA spokesperson.
Going back decades, the CIA has provided limited training to Ukrainian intelligence units to try and shore up an independent Kyiv and prevent Russian subversion, but cooperation “ramped up” after the Crimea invasion, said a former CIA executive.
Militants of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic walk at a fighting position on the line of separation from the Ukrainian armed forces near the settlement of Frunze in Luhansk Region, Ukraine December 24, 2021. REUTERS/Alexander Ermochenko
Militants of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People's Republic walk at a fighting position on the line of separation from the Ukrainian armed forces near the settlement of Frunze in Luhansk Region, Ukraine Dec. 24, 2021. (Alexander Ermochenko/Reuters)
The CIA paramilitaries in Ukraine have “a very small footprint,” said the former agency executive, and are helping train Ukrainian forces in “potential critical nodes the Russians may focus on” if Moscow seeks to push farther into the country.
Though the agency’s paramilitary resources have been otherwise stretched thin in Afghanistan and on other counterterrorism missions, the U.S.-based training program has been a “high priority” for the CIA since its Obama-era inception, said the former senior intelligence official.
The program did not require, or receive, a new presidential finding, which is used to authorize covert action, and has been run under previously existing authorities, according to former officials.
The Trump administration — partially at the urging of Congress — later expanded funding for the initiative, increasing the number of Ukrainian cohorts brought over yearly to the U.S., according to former officials.
Training forces that could take part in an insurgency is not the same as actively supporting an insurgency if one takes place following a Russian invasion. The Biden administration has reportedly assembled a task force to determine how the CIA and other U.S. agencies could support a Ukrainian insurgency, should Russia launch a large-scale incursion.
“If the Russians invade, those [graduates of the CIA programs] are going to be your militia, your insurgent leaders,” said the former senior intelligence official. “We’ve been training these guys now for eight years. They’re really good fighters. That’s where the agency’s program could have a serious impact.”
Over the years, the CIA training programs have been “very effective,” said the former CIA executive.
It has helped “turn the tide,” said the first former CIA official, who said he or she was briefed that “gains were being made on the battlefield” as a “direct result” of the program.
Snipers in camouflage suits during The celebrations on the occasion of the 5th anniversary of the National Guard of Ukraine, Kyiv, Ukraine. (Maxym Marusenko/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Snipers in camouflage suits during The celebrations on the occasion of the 5th anniversary of the National Guard of Ukraine, Kyiv, Ukraine. (Maxym Marusenko/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Both U.S. and Ukrainian officials believe that Ukrainian forces will not be able to withstand a large-scale Russian incursion, according to former U.S. officials. But representatives from both countries also believe that Russia won’t be able to hold on to new territory indefinitely because of stiff resistance from Ukrainian insurgents, according to former officials.
Working so closely with the Ukrainians has presented unique challenges, according to former officials. For years, U.S. officials have believed that, because of Russia’s web of spies within Ukraine’s intelligence services, the program has very likely been compromised by Moscow.
Senior Trump administration officials discussed worries about Russian penetration of the program with their Ukrainian counterparts, according to a former national security official. The Ukrainians, well aware of the issue, have tried to vet the U.S.-bound trainees to weed out moles, according to former officials.
Still, Trump-era National Security Council officials established a rule not to tell the Ukrainians anything they weren’t comfortable with the Russians subsequently learning about, recalled the former national security official.
A small number of trainees in the earlier U.S.-based cohorts were sent back to Ukraine for breaking security rules, like possessing unauthorized electronic devices, according to the first former CIA official.
CIA officials also believed their trainees were being targeted by the Russians once they returned to Ukraine. “Russians and traitorous Russian loyalists within the Ukrainian security services were seeking out graduates of those classes to assassinate,” said the former CIA official.
Forensic police experts and military intelligence examine the wreckage of a car in Kyiv. The commander of Ukraine's military intelligence special ops unit colonel Maksym Shapoval was killed by a bomb attached to the bottom of his vehicle in central Kyiv. (Sergii Kharchenko/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Forensic police experts and military intelligence examine the wreckage of a car in Kyiv. The commander of Ukraine's military intelligence special ops unit colonel Maksym Shapoval was killed by a bomb attached to the bottom of his vehicle in central Kyiv. (Sergii Kharchenko/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Russian penetration of Ukrainian intelligence has been a long-standing problem for the CIA, according to former intelligence officials. For decades, the agency has tried to work only with special select Ukrainian units — some created at the agency’s insistence — that have been isolated from the rest of the country’s intelligence services in order to prevent Russian compromise, according to former officials.
Even though the CIA assumes some Russian compromise when working with the Ukrainians, the agency still believes the training program has been, on balance, highly valuable, according to former officials.
If the Russians launch a new invasion, “there’s going to be people who make their life miserable,” said the former senior intelligence official. The CIA-trained paramilitaries “will organize the resistance” using the specialized training they’ve received.
“All that stuff that happened to us in Afghanistan,” said the former senior intelligence official, “they can expect to see that in spades with these guys.”
Peter Klevius wrote:
Just like the Nazis in the 1930s against Communists and Jews, US is now - by using its global dictatorship based on its stolen dollar hegemony (1971-) - inciting hatred against China and Chinese people.
US spread of hateful Sinophobia to cover up its own crime and failure, is easy considering the already existing anti-Chinese racism created in the West first in the UK's opium wars and US' racist "Yellow peril" laws more than 100 years ago!
And
it's all wrapped under the insidious and so misdirected connotations
about the modern China labelled "the Communist party dictatorship" which
could possibly pose a threat in the future if not now".
Peter
Klevius is 100% convinced the hate would continue even if China changed
to a Western system of "one party at the time democracy" - especially if
China would keep its well functioning meritocracy politics. After all,
China could change sometime in the future, right!
$-freeloader and techno loser US' anti-China smear campaign has long since reached sports - here's one of the latest effects of it from the enormous pile.
And is this BBC's contribution to sports Sinophobia?
The only match in women's World Cup 2023 made impossible to see on Freeview because of extreme picture distortion was when China played!
Peter Klevius wrote:
Sunday, April 16, 2023
Heinous politicist-journalist Nicolle Wallace shares much with Donald Trump but nothing with Xi Jinping. Ever!
Nicolle Wallace and Donald Trump would both fail in Chinese meritocracy - is that why they both hate China for no sane reason at all!
China hating EU neo-fascist women adore militant Ursula von der Leyen and want her to become next Nato Fuhrer attacking China. This program has been repeated for days by Euronews after Macron's China visit.
MSNBC Nicolle Wallace: Xi Jinping is one of the world’s most heinous authoritarians!
This
caricature of a journalist - or rather algorithmed talk-machine -
seemingly also somehow puts Xi in the same category as Trump who
actually is much closer to Nicolle herself.
First of all Nicolle
Wallace ought to consider the horrifying situation US has put itself and
the world in because the chickens from the criminal dollar theft back
in 1971- are coming home to roost - which fact now with China's success
puts US in a situtation to give up its dirty game - or start trying to
shoot itself out!
Peter Klevius: Nicolle Wallace's heinous
"assessment" of the world's not only most powerful man in the most
powerful country, but also the by far most successful and trusted
leader, with a support from the people that exceeds everything US
politicians can dream of. Ever! And the way he got this position is as
far you can get from authoritarian, because he is a product of Chinese
meritocracy, which means that he at every stage has had a huge majority
of the people backing him. Dear Nicolle, just consider that Trump and
you would never have become a leader based on political merits. Ever!
Moreover,
do consider how Xi had to bow for his people's Confucian respect for
the elderly and, unlike in the West, protect them from Covid 2020,
despite this meaning less growth, and then 2022 bowed again when the
people demanded opening up!
Xi Jinping is not only the world's
most powerful and liked leader, he is also the most vulnerable for
criticism from the people - which is precisely his and the Chinese
political meritocracy's hallmark. And should stand as the most important
lecture for US. This, dear Nicolle, is not even close to "autharian"!
Ever!
And when stupidly and ignorantly demonizing China for
"censorship", try first to take a closer look at how US is censoring,
spying, militarizing and demonizing over the world thanks to its dollar
web dictatorship, and then consider what you would do as a Chinese
leadership if you were constantly negatively bombarded by the world's
biggest Goebbelian platforms, steered by CIA's attempts to saw
discontent and hate among your own people. Wouldn't you try to protect
your country from such evil - especially when knowing that your country
performs much better than the demonizer! Add to this how Chinese people -
unless, of course, they spit on their own country of origin ethnicity -
because of US hate- and warmongering have become the target of
appalling racism and hate crimes - which the media blinks.
Xi
Jinping is as far you can get from Mao - just look at China's progress
since he came to power in 2012! And the only "communist" in his ruling
is what every Western country admits ought to be the most important
political goal, namely a fairer distribution - which Xi has achieved on a
level never EVER seen before on the planet! This is Xi's "communism"
and seriously that part of Marxism that no one sane person can oppose.
Also
consider the extreme contempt US shows against the majority of the
world that doesn't believe in the ridiculous oxymoron "monotheism", and
how this medieval darkness is presented as "civilized".
So
Nicolle, to get some perspective inside your dark head: What if the
Chinese had been Jews or "blacks"? Can you even think that far by
yourself?
A modern high tech society needs Confucianism much more than evil god-religions. But see what hapened in the darkness of US - Confucianism was forbidden and kicked out, just as US kicked out Chinese more than 100 years ago (see below), while islamism is welcome in US universities and in US military state terrorism campaigns. Shame on US!
Says anti-Maoist Peter Klevius who can't see anything of Xi and his modern China resembling Mao and his destructive peasantry Communism - which was a product of evil Western interference (see below).
While Western journalists have turned into political demonizers of easy targets while saying nothing about real issues - such as e.g. US dollar theft 1971- and how it now has made US a dangerous (d)evil feeding on the dollar hegemony and warmongering.
Harry S. Truman on 24 June 1941 (two days after the Nazi-German invasion of Russia) 'If we see that Germany is winning, we should help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we should help Germany, so that as many as possible perish on both sides.'
Unlike the wayward teenager US, China, the world's oldest civilization, and now again by far the largest economy, has been fostered through constant mongol attacks to build a double-sided wall, i.e. one that not only protects China but also protects others against China. US should take note.
March 10, 2023
A Very Brief History of Capitalism, Empire, and the Yellow Peril
by David Rovics
David Rovics: Unlike the propagandists that publish most of the textbooks that we brainwash our children with in the US, reality-based historians have oft observed that the history of civilization is a history of the ongoing conflict between the haves and the have-nots, the rich and the poor, the ruling class and those they would like to rule. One of the main factors that continually makes this conflict a very dynamic one that is forever unfolding in new ways is the obvious inequity of the whole thing, with a small class of rulers, owners, and landlords always trying to control a very large majority of subjects, workers and tenants. In order to maintain such a state of constant inequality, particularly in severely unequal societies/empires like the United States, strategies of divide and rule are always in play, whether we’re talking about maintaining domestic tranquility, or running the global American empire.
From the time of British colonization of the Americas, the colonial rulers and later the sovereign US rulers of this land have sought to keep the bulk of the population — the tenant farmers, the small landowners, the urban workers and renters, the immigrant and the native-born, the enslaved and the free — at each other’s throats, and thus distracted with fratricidal conflict, rather than united in opposition to their common oppressors. The ways society is divided and the ways the rulers seek to exploit those divisions locally and globally evolves over time, just as other things evolve, such as technology, and different forms of organization, such as corporations, unions, parliaments, and developments such as the massive US military industrial complex.
In light of these realities, it’s not hard to understand scenes like President Biden going to Alabama to remember those killed by white supremacists in a church bombing in 1963, while having nothing to say about state-sanctioned pogroms being committed by organized mobs of people against Palestinians — towns being burned to the ground by mobs sanctioned by one of the biggest recipients of US military aid on the planet. In light of these realities, we can understand why the US Attorney General is once again in Ukraine,
talking about prosecuting Russian war crimes in the International Criminal Court, while saying nothing about prosecuting war crimes committed by Americans, Saudis, or Israelis. In light of these realities, we can see why the State Department can justify the double-standard involved with publicly attacking the Chinese government for allegedly considering selling arms to Russia on the same day as they announce the sales of the US’s most advanced fighter jets to Taiwan.
Turning on the news in the US today means hearing a constant drumbeat of anti-Russian and anti-Chinese rhetoric that is completely detached from any sense of history, and which involves less and less effort at maintaining any semblance of objectivity.
Hearing our leaders demonize Vladimir Putin and the Chinese Communist Party, one might think the leaders of the free world have only had it out for the Russians and the Chinese since Putin or Xi came to power. Or if not then, perhaps since both countries had revolutions, in 1917 and 1949, respectively. The historical reality is far more insidious.
The powers-that-be in the US have been actively vilifying Russian and Chinese migrants, while tremendously profiting from their labor, since the 19th century, just as the US military and State Department has been actively working to weaken and control Russia and China for most of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.
Don’t be fooled by the rhetoric about specific Russian or Chinese leaders or governments. US policies towards Russia, China, and towards Russian and Chinese people has nothing to do with that. It has to do with methods of divide and rule at home, and abroad, with geopolitical concerns around how to effectively dominate the world.
History, from the 19th century right up to today, illustrates what I’m talking about. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure this is history that is entirely lost on the likes of Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, Merrick Garland, or the supposedly, fashionably “anti-globalist” leaders of the Republican Party, either. I’ll highlight a little bit of this history.
In the 19th century the US authorities and business owners actively solicited migration of workers from Europe as well as from China, Japan, and elsewhere. In the case of Chinese and Japanese migration, it was more about guest worker programs — families not welcome. So when we talk about the US having a whites-only immigration policy back then, this didn’t include those who were brought in from China to build the railroads, and then deported afterwards, which is what happened, on a huge scale.
Asian workers were super-exploited, facing discrimination of all kinds, and frequent massacres at the hands of desperate mobs of their fellow workers, many of whom had swallowed the nonsense propaganda about the Chinese as people who would always be willing to work for half the going wage. Several different Exclusion Acts were passed, aimed specifically at Asians, that prevented workers from bringing their families over, and/or forced workers to go back to Asia after the corporate barons had no more need of their labor. Exclusion laws against Asian emigration were in place until 1943.
Meanwhile in China itself, the US military participated in the Opium Wars, along with the British, the French, and the Russians, among others, which involved imperial European and American troops burning entire Chinese cities, killing tens of thousands of people, and forcing the Chinese government of the time to import addictive opium from the British-run farms in British-occupied India. This invasion which forced China to open the gates to what became a nationwide epidemic of opium addiction is what the British and the American authorities referred to as the “opening” of China to “free trade.” The deadly Opium Wars were known as “trade wars.”
On the east coast in particular, as the US was flooded with migrants from Ireland to Russia and most everywhere in between throughout the 19th century — actively solicited by the kingpins of American industry — those migrating from eastern and southern Europe in particular developed a reputation for being especially subversive. This reputation, of course, was actively promoted by the powers-that-be, as one more avenue for creating division among the source of their profits, and their class enemy, the working class.
In reality, the horrific conditions of the factories, mines and mills of 19th-century America made radicals out of most people who weren’t killed off by those conditions, regardless of their race, gender, or national origin. But certainly the ranks of the organized workers and rebels was indeed full of Italians, Germans, and Russians, along with everybody else. So other exclusion laws were passed to target eastern and southern Europeans, which were not lifted until 1944. These laws meant that throughout the 1920s, 1930’s, and well into the 1940’s, Germans and Russians — Jews included — were barred from migrating to the US directly. Germans, Russians (Jewish or non-Jewish), along with Italians, were especially singled out by those in power and their media mouthpieces as undesirable subversives. The prejudice against these groups was only amplified by events such as the Russian Revolution.
Meanwhile in Russia itself, as World War 1 was coming to an end, after the Bolsheviks had seized power, the US, the UK, and many other allied countries participated in an invasion of the Soviet Union with hundreds of thousands of soldiers, aimed at supporting the Czarist forces that were attempting to take power back from the Red Army, an effort which failed.
After the Chinese Revolution in 1949, the US and many other participating forces from other countries invaded Korea, which was basically in the course of having a popular national revolution against the dictator which the Japanese Empire had put into power, a dictator which the US backed. China supported the revolutionary forces in Korea, against the US-supported dictator. In the course of three years of active conflict, hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers were killed, along with tens of thousands of US soldiers.
The US empire has hundreds of military bases around the world, which have strategically, intentionally surrounded both Russia and China. The US is the only country with such military bases around the world, that can transport large numbers of troops wherever it wants to. The notion that the US authorities are concerned with the lives of Ukrainians, Taiwanese, or people in Xinjiang is just as laughable as the notion that the US authorities are concerned with the lives of Palestinians, Yemenis, or Guatemalans. We hear about the former and not the latter groups for purely cold, geopolitical, strategic reasons. Anyone who thinks otherwise is engaging in a futile exercise to put a human face on an entirely inhuman set of imperial calculations — a set of calculations which has its roots in centuries past.
I am a descendant of Russian Jewish migrants who were subject to every form of discrimination, before they left Minsk, and later in the northeastern United States. I am raising a family with a Japanese woman, and our children look visibly Asian. One doesn’t need to have any personal involvement in the history of abuse of Russian or Asian migrants in this country, or the history of US imperialism in Europe or Asia, to be worried about what the future might look like, as the leadership of both parties in this country paint a rising China as somehow threatening to the US, and we hear more and more about Chinese expansionist intentions, Chinese coal plants causing climate change, Chinese surveillance apps stealing our data, Chinese subsidies to Chinese industries undermining American industry, Chinese workers undercutting American workers, Chinese spies among us in academia and in Silicon Valley, seeking to steal our secrets, and even Chinese viruses.
One of the many things about Biden’s trip to Alabama, and all his new-found rhetoric about racial equality, at least when it comes to discrimination against Black Americans, is that out of the other side of his mouth he is telling us to fear the Russians and the Chinese out there in Russia and China, as well as the ones among us who may fail to demonstrate the requisite loyalty to the American Way, and loathing of their respective governments and everything they stand for. This is how the politicians talk before the wars and the lynchings begin.
The Yellow Peril
The anti-China Immigration Act of 1917 established the Asiatic Barred Zone from which the U.S. admitted no immigrants.
Under nativist political pressure, the Immigration Act of 1917 established an Asian Barred Zone of countries from which immigration to the U.S. was forbidden. The Cable Act of 1922 (Married Women's Independent Nationality Act) guaranteed citizenship to independent women unless they were married to a nonwhite alien ineligible for naturalization.[67] Asian men and women were excluded from American citizenship.[68][69]
In practice, the Cable Act of 1922 reversed some racial exclusions, and granted independent woman citizenship exclusively to women married to white men. Analogously, the Cable Act allowed the government to revoke the citizenship of an American white woman married an Asian man. The law was formally challenged before the Supreme Court, with the case of Takao Ozawa v. United States (1922), whereby a Japanese–American man tried to demonstrate that the Japanese people are a white race eligible for naturalized American citizenship. The Court ruled that the Japanese are not white people; two years later, the National Origins Quota of 1924 specifically excluded the Japanese from entering the US and from American citizenship.
The religious racialism of The Yellow Peril (1911, 3rd ed.), by G. G. Rupert, proposed that Russia would unite the Oriental races to invade, conquer, and subjugate Christian civilization in the Western world.
The eugenic racialism proposed in The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), by Lothrop Stoddard, presents either China or Japan as uniting the Oriental races to invade, conquer, and subjugate the white civilizations of the Western world.
Ethnic national character
To "preserve the ideal of American homogeneity", the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 (numeric limits) and the Immigration Act of 1924 (fewer southern and eastern Europeans) restricted admission to the United States according to the skin color and the race of the immigrant.[70] In practice, the Emergency Quota Act used outdated census data to determine the number of colored immigrants to admit to the U.S. To protect WASP ethnic supremacy (social, economic, political) in the 20th century, the Immigration Act of 1924 used the twenty-year-old census of 1890, because its 19th-century demographic-group percentages favored more admissions of WASP immigrants from western and northern Europe, and fewer admissions of colored immigrants from Asia and southern and eastern Europe.[71]
To ensure that the immigration of colored peoples did not change the WASP national character of the United States, the National Origins Formula (1921–1965) meant to maintain the status quo percentages of "ethnic populations" in lesser proportion to the existing white populations; thus, the yearly quota allowed only 150,000 People of Color into the U.S.A. In the event, the national-origins Formula was voided and repealed with the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.[72]
Eugenic apocalypse
Eugenicists used the Yellow Peril to misrepresent the U.S. as an exclusively WASP nation threatened by miscegenation with the Asian Other by expressing their racism with biological language (infection, disease, decay) and imagery of penetration (wounds and sores) of the white body.[73]: 237–238 In The Yellow Peril; or, Orient vs. Occident (1911), the end time evangelist G. G. Rupert said that Russia would unite the colored races to facilitate the Oriental invasion, conquest, and subjugation of the West; said white supremacy is in the Christian eschatology of verse 16:12 in the Book of Revelation: "Then the sixth angel poured out his bowl on the great Euphrates River, and it dried up so that the kings from the east could march their armies toward the west without hindrance".[74] As an Old-Testament Christian, Rupert believed the racialist doctrine of British Israelism, and said that the Yellow Peril from China, India, Japan, and Korea, were attacking Britain and the US, but that the Christian God himself would halt the Asian conquest of the Western world.[75]
In The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920), the eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard said that either China or Japan would unite the colored peoples of Asia and lead them to destroy white supremacy in the Western world, and that the Asian conquest of the world began with the Japanese victory in the Russo–Japanese War (1905). As a white supremacist, Stoddard presented his racism with Biblical language and catastrophic imagery depicting a rising tide of colored people meaning to invade, conquer, and subjugate the white race.[76]
Political opposition
In that cultural vein, the phrase "yellow peril" was common editorial usage in the newspapers of publisher William Randolph Hearst.[77] In the 1930s, Hearst's newspapers conducted a campaign of vilification (personal and political) against Elaine Black, an American Communist, whom he denounced as a libertine "Tiger Woman" for her interracial cohabitation with the Japanese-American Communist Karl Yoneda.[78] In 1931, interracial marriage was illegal in California, but, in 1935, Black and Yoneda married in Seattle, Washington, where such marriages were legal.[78]
Socially acceptable Asian
In the 1930s, Yellow Peril stereotypes were common to US culture, exemplified by the cinematic versions of the Asian detectives Charlie Chan (Warner Oland) and Mr. Moto (Peter Lorre), originally literary detectives in novels and comic strips. White actors portrayed the Asian men and made the fictional characters socially acceptable in mainstream American cinema, especially when the villains were secret agents of Imperial Japan.[79]: 159
American proponents of the Japanese Yellow Peril were the military-industrial interests of the China Lobby (right-wing intellectuals, businessmen, Christian missionaries) who advocated financing and supporting the warlord Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, a Methodist convert whom they represented as the Christian Chinese savior of China, then embroiled in the Chinese Civil War (1927–1937, 1946–1950). After the Japanese invaded China in 1937, the China Lobby successfully pressured the U.S. government to aid Chiang Kai-shek's faction. The news media's reportage (print, radio, cinema) of the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–45) favored China, which politically facilitated the American financing and equipping of the anticommunist Kuomintang, the Chiang Kai-shek faction in the civil war against the Communist faction led by Mao Tse-tung.[79]: 159
Pragmatic racialism
In 1941, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Roosevelt administration formally declared China an ally of the U.S., and the news media modified their use of Yellow Peril ideology to include China to the West, criticizing contemporary anti-Chinese laws as counterproductive to the war effort against Imperial Japan.[79]: 165–166 The wartime zeitgeist and the geopolitics of the U.S. government presumed that defeat of the Imperial Japan would be followed by postwar China developing into a capitalist economy under the strongman leadership of the Christian Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party).
In his relations with the American government and his China Lobby sponsors, Chiang requested the repeal of American anti-Chinese laws; to achieve the repeals, Chiang threatened to exclude the American business community from the "China Market", the economic fantasy that the China Lobby promised to the American business community.[79]: 171–172 In 1943, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was repealed, but, because the National Origins Act of 1924 was contemporary law, the repeal was a symbolic gesture of American solidarity with the people of China.
Science fiction writer William F. Wu said that American adventure, crime, and detective pulp magazines in the 1930s had many Yellow Peril characters, loosely based on Fu Manchu; although "most [Yellow Peril characters] were of Chinese descent", the geopolitics of the time led white people to see Japan as a threat to the United States. In The Yellow Peril: Chinese Americans in American fiction, 1850–1940 (1982), Wu said that fear of Asians dates from the European Middle Ages, from the 13th-century Mongol invasion of Europe. Most Europeans had never seen an Asian man or woman, and the great differences in language, custom, and physique accounted for European paranoia about the nonwhite peoples from the Eastern world.[80]
21st century
The American academic Frank H. Wu said that anti-Chinese sentiment incited by people such as Steve Bannon and Peter Thiel is recycling anti-Asian hatred from the 19th century into a "new Yellow Peril" that is common to White populist politics that do not distinguish between Asian foreigners and Asian-American U.S. citizens.[81] That American cultural anxiety about the geopolitical ascent of the People's Republic of China originates in the fact that, for the first time in centuries, the Western world, led by the U.S., is challenged by a people whom Westerners viewed as culturally backward and racially inferior only a generation earlier.[82] That the U.S. perceives China as "the enemy", because their economic success voids the myth of white supremacy upon which the West claims cultural superiority over the East.[83] Moreover, the COVID-19 pandemic has facilitated and increased the occurrence of xenophobia and anti-Chinese racism, which the academic Chantal Chung said has "deep roots in yellow peril ideology".[84]
Australia
The White Australia policy arose from the growth of anti-Asian (particularly Chinese) sentiments that peaked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Pictured: The Melbourne Punch (c. May 1888)
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, fear of the Yellow Peril was a cultural feature of the white peoples who sought to establish a country and a society in the Australian continent. The racialist fear of the nonwhite Asian Other was a thematic preoccupation common to invasion literature novels, such as The Yellow Wave: A Romance of the Asiatic Invasion of Australia (1895), The Colored Conquest (1904), The Awakening to China (1909), and the Fools' Harvest (1939). Such fantasy literature featured an Asian invasion of "the empty north" of Australia, which was populated by the Aboriginal Australians, the nonwhite, native Other with whom the white emigrants competed for living space.[85] In the novel White or Yellow?: A Story of the Race War of A.D. 1908 (1887), the journalist and labor leader William Lane said that a horde of Chinese people legally arrived to Australia and overran white society and monopolized the industries for exploiting the natural resources of the Australian "empty north".[85]
The Yellow Peril was used to justify the White Australia Policy, which excluded dark-skinned Melanesians from immigration to Australia.
White nation
As Australian invasion literature of the 19th-century, the future history novel White or Yellow? (1887) presents William Lane's nationalist racialism and left-wing politics that portrayed Australia under threat by the Yellow Peril. In the near future, British capitalists manipulate the Australian legal system and then legislate the mass immigration of Chinese workers to Australia, regardless of the socioeconomic consequences to White Australian society. Consequent to the British manipulation of Australia's economy, the resulting social conflicts (racial, financial, cultural, sexual) escalate into a race war for control of Australia.
The Yellow Peril racism in the narrative of the novel White or Yellow? justifies White Australians' killing Chinese workers as a defensive, existential response for control of Australia.[53]: 26–27 Lang's story of White racial replacement appeals to the fears that labor and trade union leaders exploited to oppose the legal immigration of Chinese workers, whom they misrepresented as racial, economic, and moral threats to White Australia. That Asian libertinism threatens White Christian civilization, which theme Lang represents with miscegenation (mixing of the races). The fear of racial replacement was presented as an apolitical call to White racial unity in among Australians.[53]: 24
Culturally, Yellow Peril invasion novels expressed themes of the White man's sexual fear of the supposed voracious sexuality of Asian men and women. The stories feature Western women in sexual peril, usually rape-by-seduction facilitated with the sensual and moral release of smoked opium.[85] In the patriarchal world of invasion literature, interracial sexual relations were "a fate worse than death" for a white woman, afterwards, she was a sexual untouchable to white men.[85] In the 1890s, that moralistic theme was the anti-Chinese message of the feminist and labor organizer Rose Summerfield who voiced the White woman's sexual fear of the Yellow Peril, by warning society of the Chinese man's unnaturally lustful gaze upon the pulchritude of Australian women.[53]: 24
Racial equality thwarted
In 1901, the Australian federal government adopted the White Australia policy that had been informally initiated with the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, which generally excluded Asians, but in particular excluded the Chinese and the Melanesian peoples. Historian C. E. W. Bean said that the White Australia policy was "a vehement effort to maintain a high, Western standard of economy, society, and culture (necessitating, at that stage, however it might be camouflaged, the rigid exclusion of Oriental peoples)" from Australia.[86] In 1913, appealing to the irrational fear of the Yellow Peril, the film Australia Calls (1913) depicted a "Mongolian" invasion of Australia, which eventually is defeated by ordinary Australians with underground, political resistance and guerrilla warfare, and not by the army of the Australian federal government.[87]
In 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference (28 June 1919), supported by Britain and the U.S., Australian Prime Minister Billy Hughes vehemently opposed Imperial Japan's request for the inclusion of the Racial Equality Proposal to Article 21 of the Covenant of the League of Nations (13 February 1919):
The equality of nations being a basic principle of the League of Nations, the High Contracting Parties agree to accord, as soon as possible, to all alien nationals of states, members of the League, equal and just treatment in every respect, making no distinction, either in law or in fact, on account of their race or nationality.[88]
Aware that the British delegation opposed the racial equality clause in Article 21 of the Covenant, conference chairman U.S. President Woodrow Wilson acted to prevent de jure racial equality among the nations of the world, with his unilateral requirement of a unanimous vote by the countries in the League of Nations. On 11 April 1919, most countries in the conference voted to include the Racial Equality Proposal to Article 21 of the Covenant of the League of Nations; only the British and American delegations opposed the racial equality clause. Moreover, to maintain the White Australia policy, the Australian government sided with Britain and voted against Japan's formal request that the Racial Equality Proposal be included to Article 21 of the covenant of the League of Nations; that defeat in international relations greatly influenced Imperial Japan to militarily confront the Western world.[89]
France
Colonial empire
In the late 19th century, French imperialist politicians invoked the Péril jaune (Yellow Peril) in their negative comparisons of France's low birth-rate and the high birth-rates of Asian countries.[90] From that racist claim arose an artificial, cultural fear among the French population that immigrant-worker Asians soon would "flood" France, which could be successfully countered only by increased fecundity of French women. Then, France would possess enough soldiers to thwart the eventual flood of immigrants from Asia.[90] From that racialist perspective, the French press sided with Imperial Russia during the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), by representing the Russians as heroes defending the white race against the Japanese Yellow Peril.[91]
French postcard captioned "Make way for the yellows" shows Japanese imperialism running over four great nations of Europe—Russia, Britain, France, and Germany
French Indochina: In the oriental French Empire, the country and people of Vietnam were renamed French Indochina. (1913)
In the early 20th century, in 1904, the French journalist René Pinon reported that the Yellow Peril were a cultural, geopolitical, and existential threat to white civilization in the Western world:
The "Yellow Peril" has entered already into the imagination of the people, just as represented in the famous drawing [Peoples of Europe, Guard Your Most Sacred Possessions,1895] of the Emperor Wilhelm II: In a setting of conflagration and carnage, Japanese and Chinese hordes spread out over all Europe, crushing under their feet the ruins of our capital cities and destroying our civilizations, grown anemic due to the enjoyment of luxuries, and corrupted by the vanity of spirit.
Hence, little by little, there emerges the idea that even if a day must come (and that day does not seem near) the European peoples will cease to be their own enemies and even economic rivals, there will be a struggle ahead to face and there will rise a new peril, the yellow man.
The civilized world has always organized itself before and against a common adversary: for the Roman world, it was the barbarian; for the Christian world, it was Islam; for the world of tomorrow, it may well be the yellow man. And so we have the reappearance of this necessary concept, without which peoples do not know themselves, just as the "Me" only takes conscience of itself in opposition to the "non-Me": The Enemy.[32]: 124
Despite the claimed Christian idealism of the civilizing mission, from the start of colonization in 1858, the French exploited the natural resources of Vietnam as inexhaustible and the Vietnamese people as beasts of burden.[92]: 67–68 In the aftermath of the Second World War, the First Indochina War (1946–1954) justified recolonization of Vietnam as a defense of the white West against the péril jaune — specifically that the Communist Party of Vietnam were puppets of the People's Republic of China, which is part of the "international communist conspiracy" to conquer the world.[93] Therefore, French anticommunism utilized orientalism to dehumanize the Vietnamese into "the nonwhite Other"; which yellow-peril racism allowed atrocities against Viet Minh prisoners of war during la sale guerre ("dirty war").[92]: 74 In that time, yellow-peril racism remained one of the ideological bases for the existence of French Indochina, thus the French news media's racialist misrepresentations of Viet Minh guerrillas being part of the innombrables masses jaunes (innumerable yellow hordes); being one of many vagues hurlantes (roaring waves) of masses fanatisées (fanatical hordes).[94]
Contemporary France
In Behind the Bamboo Hedge: The Impact of Homeland Politics in the Parisian Vietnamese Community (1991) Gisèle Luce Bousquet said that the péril jaune, which traditionally colored French perceptions of Asians, especially of Vietnamese people, remains a cultural prejudice of contemporary France;[95] hence the French perceive and resent the Vietnamese people of France as academic overachievers who take jobs from "native French" people.[95]
In 2015, the cover of the January issue of Fluide Glacial magazine featured a cartoon, Yellow Peril: Is it Already Too Late?, which depicts a Chinese-occupied Paris where a sad Frenchman is pulling a rickshaw, transporting a Chinese man, in 19th c. French colonial uniform, accompanied by a barely dressed, blonde French woman.[96][97] The editor of Fluide Glacial, Yan Lindingre, defended the magazine cover and the subject as satire and mockery of French fears of China's economic threat to France.[97] In an editorial addressing the Chinese government's complaint, Lindingre said, "I have just ordered an extra billion copies printed, and will send them to you via chartered flight. This will help us balance our trade deficit, and give you a good laugh".[97]
Italy
In the 20th century, from their perspective, as nonwhite nations in a world order dominated by the white nations, the geopolitics of Ethiopia–Japan relations allowed Imperial Japan and Ethiopia to avoid imperialist European colonization of their countries and nations. Before the Second Italo-Ethiopian War (1934–1936), Imperial Japan had given diplomatic and military support to Ethiopia against invasion by Fascist Italy, which implied military assistance. In response to that Asian anti-imperialism, Benito Mussolini ordered a Yellow Peril propaganda campaign by the Italian press, which represented Imperial Japan as the military, cultural, and existential threat to the Western world, by way of the dangerous "yellow race–black race" alliance meant to unite Asians and Africans against the white people of the world.[98]
In 1935, Mussolini warned of the Japanese Yellow Peril, specifically the racial threat of Asia and Africa uniting against Europe.[98] In the summer of 1935, the National Fascist Party (1922–43) often staged anti–Japanese political protests throughout Italy.[99] Nonetheless, as right-wing imperial powers, Japan and Italy pragmatically agreed to disagree; in exchange for Italian diplomatic recognition of Manchukuo (1932–45), the Japanese puppet state in China, Imperial Japan would not aid Ethiopia against Italian invasion and so Italy would end the anti–Japanese Yellow Peril propaganda in the national press of Italy.[99]
Mexico
Two men in sombreros riding in a donkey-cart with a line of feet sticking out the back. They are riding down a dirt street away from the camera, with a line of buildings on the right. Dated 15 May 1911.
In Revolutionary Mexico (1910–20) a wagonload of Asian corpses is en route to a common grave after fear of the Yellow Peril fear provoked a three-day massacre (11–15 May 1911) of 308 Asian people (303 Chinese, 5 Japanese) in the city of Torreón, Coahuila, in northern Mexico.
During the Mexican Revolution (1910–20), Chinese-Mexicans were subjected to racist abuse, like before the revolt, for not being Christians, specifically Roman Catholic, for not being racially Mexican, and for not soldiering and fighting in the Revolution against the thirty-five-year dictatorship (1876–1911) of General Porfirio Díaz.[100]: 44
The notable atrocity against Asian people was the three-day Torreón massacre (13–15 May 1911) in northern Mexico, wherein the military forces of Francisco I. Madero killed 308 Asian people (303 Chinese, 5 Japanese), because they were deemed a cultural threat to the Mexican way of life. The massacre of Chinese- and Japanese-Mexicans at the city of Torreón, Coahuila, was not the only such atrocity perpetrated in the Revolution. Elsewhere, in 1913, after the Constitutional Army captured the city of Tamasopo, San Luis Potosí state, the soldiers and the town-folk expelled the Chinese community by sacking and burning the Chinatown.[100]: 44
During and after the Mexican Revolution, the Roman Catholic prejudices of Yellow Peril ideology facilitated racial discrimination and violence against Chinese Mexicans, usually for "stealing jobs" from native Mexicans. Anti–Chinese nativist propaganda misrepresented the Chinese people as unhygienic, prone to immorality (miscegenation, gambling, opium-smoking) and spreading diseases that would biologically corrupt and degenerate La Raza (the Mexican race) and generally undermining the Mexican patriarchy.[101]
Moreover, from the racialist perspective, besides stealing work from Mexican men, Chinese men were stealing Mexican women from the native Mexican men who were away fighting the Revolution to overthrow and expel the dictator Porfirio Díaz and his foreign sponsors from Mexico.[102] In the 1930s, approximately 70 per cent of the Chinese and the Chinese–Mexican population was expelled from the Mexican United States by the bureaucratic ethnic culling of the Mexican population.[103]
Turkey
In 1908, at the end of the Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) the Young Turk Revolution ascended the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) to power, which the 1913 Ottoman coup d'état reinforced with the Raid on the Sublime Porte. In admiration and emulation that the modernization of Japan during the Meiji Restoration (1868) was realised without the Japanese people losing their national identity, the CUP intended to modernize Turkey into the "Japan of the Near East".[104] To that end, the CUP considered allying Turkey with Japan in a geopolitical effort to unite the peoples of the Eastern world to fight a racial war of extermination against the White colonial empires of the West.[105]: 54–55 Politically, the cultural, nationalist, and geopolitical affinities of Turkey and Japan were possible because, in Turkish culture, the "yellow" color of "Eastern gold" symbolizes the innate moral superiority of the East over the West.[105]: 53–54
Fear of the Yellow Peril occurs against the Chinese communities of Turkey, usually as political retaliation against the PRC government's repressions and human-rights abuses against the Muslim Uighur people in the Xinjiang province of China.[106] At an anti–PRC political protest in Istanbul, a South Korean woman tourist faced violence, despite identifying herself: "I am not Chinese, I am Korean".[106] In response that Yellow Peril racism in Turkey, Devlet Bahçeli, leader of the extreme right-wing Nationalist Movement Party, rhetorically asked: "How does one distinguish, between Chinese and Koreans? Both have slanted eyes".[106]
South Africa
The Randlord's (mine owners') exploitive employment of Chinese labor contributed to the Liberal Party victory in the 1906 elections. (Punch magazine, 1903)
In 1904, after the conclusion of the Second Boer War, the Unionist Government of the Britain authorized the immigration to South Africa of approximately 63,000 Chinese laborers to work the gold mines in the Witwatersrand basin.
On 26 March 1904, approximately 80,000 people attended a social protest against the use of Chinese laborers in the Transvaal held in Hyde Park, London, to publicize the exploitation of Chinese South Africans.[107]: 107 The Parliamentary Committee of the Trade Union Congress then passed a resolution declaring:
That this meeting, consisting of all classes of citizens of London, emphatically protests against the action of the Government in granting permission to import into South Africa indentured Chinese labor under conditions of slavery, and calls upon them to protect this new colony from the greed of capitalists and the Empire from degradation.[108]
The mass immigration of indentured Chinese laborers to mine South African gold for wages lower than acceptable to the native white men, contributed to the 1906 electoral loss of the financially conservative British Unionist government that then governed South Africa.[107]: 103
After 1910, most Chinese miners were repatriated to China because of the great opposition to them, as "colored people" in white South Africa, analogous to anti-Chinese laws in the US during the early 20th century.[109][110] In the event, despite the racial violence between white South African miners and Chinese miners, the Unionist government achieved the economic recovery of South Africa after the Second Boer War by rendering the gold mines of the Witwatersrand Basin the most productive in the world.[107]: 103
New Zealand
In the late 19th and the early 20th centuries, populist Prime Minister Richard Seddon compared the Chinese people to monkeys, and so used the Yellow Peril to promote racialist politics in New Zealand. In 1879, in his first political speech, Seddon said that New Zealand did not wish her shores "deluged with Asiatic Tartars. I would sooner address white men than these Chinese. You can't talk to them, you can't reason with them. All you can get from them is 'No savvy'".[111]
Moreover, in 1905, in the city of Wellington, the white supremacist Lionel Terry murdered Joe Kum Yung, an old Chinese man, in protest against Asian immigration to New Zealand. Laws promulgated to limit Chinese immigration included a heavy poll tax, introduced in 1881 and lowered in 1937, after Imperial Japan's invasion and occupation of China. In 1944, the poll tax was abolished, and the New Zealand government formally apologized to the Chinese populace of New Zealand.
The Chinese Exclusion Act was a United States federal law signed by President Chester A. Arthur on May 6, 1882, prohibiting all immigration of Chinese laborers for 10 years. The law excluded merchants, teachers, students, travelers, and diplomats.[1] The Chinese Exclusion Act was the first and only major U.S. law ever implemented to prevent all members of a specific national group from immigrating to the United States.
Passage of the law was preceded by growing anti-Chinese sentiment and anti-Chinese violence, as well as various policies targeting Chinese migrants.[3] The act followed the Angell Treaty of 1880, a set of revisions to the U.S.–China Burlingame Treaty of 1868 that allowed the U.S. to suspend Chinese immigration. The act was initially intended to last for 10 years, but was renewed and strengthened in 1892 with the Geary Act and made permanent in 1902. These laws attempted to stop all Chinese immigration into the United States for ten years, with exceptions for diplomats, teachers, students, merchants, and travelers. They were widely evaded.
The law remained in force until the passage of the Magnuson Act in 1943, which repealed the exclusion and allowed 105 Chinese immigrants to enter the United States each year. Chinese immigration later increased with the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which abolished direct racial barriers, and later by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished the National Origins Formula.
The first significant Chinese immigration to North America began with the California Gold Rush of 1848–1855 and it continued with subsequent large labor projects, such as the building of the first transcontinental railroad. During the early stages of the gold rush, when surface gold was plentiful, the Chinese were tolerated by white people, if not well received.[6] However, as gold became harder to find and competition increased, animosity toward the Chinese and other foreigners increased. After being forcibly driven from mining by a mixture of state legislators and other miners (the Foreign Miner's Tax), the immigrant Chinese began to settle in enclaves in cities, mainly San Francisco, and took up low-wage labor, such as restaurant and laundry work.[7] With the post-Civil War economy in decline by the 1870s, anti-Chinese animosity became politicized by labor leader Denis Kearney and his Workingman's Party[8] as well as by California governor John Bigler, both of whom blamed Chinese "coolies" for depressed wage levels. Public opinion and law in California began to demonize Chinese workers and immigrants in any role, with the latter half of the 1800s seeing a series of ever more restrictive laws being placed on Chinese labor, behavior and even living conditions. While many of these legislative efforts were quickly overturned by the State Supreme Court,[9] many more anti-Chinese laws continued to be passed in both California and nationally.
In the early 1850s, there was resistance to the idea of excluding Chinese migrant workers from immigration because they provided essential tax revenue which helped fill the fiscal gap of California.[10] The Xianfeng Emperor, who ruled China at the time, was supportive of the exclusion, citing his concerns that Chinese immigration to America would lead to a loss of labor for China.[11] But toward the end of the decade, the financial situation improved and subsequently, attempts to legislate Chinese exclusion became successful on the state level.[10] In 1858, the California Legislature passed a law that made it illegal for any person "of the Chinese or Mongolian races" to enter the state; however, this law was struck down by an unpublished opinion of the State Supreme Court in 1862.[12]
The Chinese immigrant workers provided cheap labor and did not use any of the government infrastructure (schools, hospitals, etc.) because the Chinese migrant population was predominantly made up of healthy male adults.[10] In January 1868, the Senate ratified the Burlingame Treaty with China, allowing an unrestricted flow of Chinese into the country.[13] As time passed and more and more Chinese migrants arrived in the United States and California in particular, violence would often break out in cities such as Los Angeles. The North Adams strike of 1870, broken by the replacement of all workers by 75 Chinese men was the trigger that sparked widespread working-class protest across the country, shaped legislative debate in Congress, and helped make Chinese immigration a sustained national issue.[citation needed]
Numerous strikes ensued, notably Beaver Falls Cutlery Company in Pennsylvania and others[14][15] After the economy soured in the Panic of 1873, Chinese immigrants were blamed for depressing workmen's wages.[13] At one point, Chinese men represented nearly a quarter of all wage-earning workers in California,[16] and by 1878 Congress felt compelled to try to ban immigration from China in legislation that was later vetoed by President Rutherford B. Hayes. The title of the August 27, 1873, San Francisco Chronicle article, "The Chinese Invasion! They Are Coming, 900,000 Strong", was traced by The Atlantic as one of the roots of the 2019 anti-immigration "invasion" rhetoric.[17]
In 1879, however, California adopted a new Constitution which explicitly authorized the state government to determine which individuals were allowed to reside in the state, and banned the Chinese from employment by corporations and state, county or municipal governments.[18] Three years later, after China had agreed to treaty revisions, Congress tried again to exclude working class Chinese laborers; Senator John F. Miller of California introduced another Chinese Exclusion Act that blocked entry of Chinese laborers for a twenty-year period.[19] The bill passed the Senate and House by overwhelming margins, but this as well was vetoed by President Chester A. Arthur, who concluded the 20-year ban to be a breach of the renegotiated treaty of 1880. That treaty allowed only a "reasonable" suspension of immigration. Eastern newspapers praised the veto, while it was condemned in the Western states. Congress was unable to override the veto, but passed a new bill reducing the immigration ban to ten years.[19][20] The House of Representatives voted 201–37, with 51 abstentions, to pass the act.[21] Although he still objected to this denial of entry to Chinese laborers, President Arthur acceded to the compromise measure, signing the Chinese Exclusion Act into law on May 6, 1882.[19][20]
Anti-Chinese Wall cartoon in Puck
After the act was passed, most Chinese workers were faced with a dilemma: stay in the United States alone or return to China to reunite with their families.[22][4] Although widespread dislike for the Chinese persisted well after the law itself was passed, of note is that some capitalists and entrepreneurs resisted their exclusion because they accepted lower wages.[23]
Content
For the first time, federal law proscribed entry of an ethnic working group on the premise that it endangered the good order of certain localities. The earlier Page Act of 1875 had prohibited immigration of Asian forced laborers and sex workers, and the Naturalization Act of 1790 prohibited naturalization of non-white subjects.
The Chinese Exclusion Act excluded Chinese laborers, meaning "skilled and unskilled laborers and Chinese employed in mining", from entering the country for ten years under penalty of imprisonment and deportation.[24][25]
Front page of The San Francisco Call from November 20, 1901, discussing the Chinese Exclusion Convention
The Chinese Exclusion Act required the few non-laborers who sought entry to obtain certification from the Chinese government that they were qualified to emigrate. However, this group found it increasingly difficult to prove that they were not laborers[25] because the 1882 Act defined excludables as "skilled and unskilled laborers and Chinese employed in mining". Thus very few Chinese could enter the country under the 1882 law. Diplomatic officials and other officers on business, along with their house servants, for the Chinese government were also allowed entry as long as they had the proper certification verifying their credentials.[26]
The Chinese Exclusion Act also affected the Chinese who had already settled in the United States. Any Chinese who left the United States had to obtain certifications for reentry, and the act made Chinese immigrants permanent aliens by excluding them from U.S. citizenship.[24][25] After the act's passage, Chinese men in the U.S. had little chance of ever reuniting with their wives, or of starting families in their new abodes.[24]
Amendments made in 1884 tightened the provisions that allowed previous immigrants to leave and return and clarified that the law applied to ethnic Chinese regardless of their country of origin.[27] The 1888 Scott Act expanded upon the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting reentry into the U.S. after leaving.[28] Only teachers, students, government officials, tourists, and merchants were exempt.[21]
Constitutionality of the Chinese Exclusion Act and the Scott Act was upheld by the Supreme Court in Chae Chan Ping v. United States (1889); the Supreme Court declared that "the power of exclusion of foreigners [is] an incident of sovereignty belonging to the government of the United States as a part of those sovereign powers delegated by the constitution". The act was renewed for ten years by the 1892 Geary Act, and again with no terminal date in 1902.[25] When the act was extended in 1902, it required "each Chinese resident to register and obtain a certificate of residence. Without a certificate, he or she faced deportation."[25]
Between 1882 and 1905, about 10,000 Chinese appealed against negative immigration decisions to federal court, usually via a petition for habeas corpus.[29] In most of these cases, the courts ruled in favor of the petitioner.[29] Except in cases of bias or negligence, these petitions were barred by an act that passed Congress in 1894 and was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in U.S. vs Lem Moon Sing (1895). In United States v. Ju Toy (1905), the U.S. Supreme Court reaffirmed that the port inspectors and the Secretary of Commerce had final authority on who could be admitted. Ju Toy's petition was thus barred despite the fact that the district court found that he was a U.S. citizen. The Supreme Court determined that refusing entry at a port does not require due process and is legally equivalent to refusing entry at a land crossing. All these developments, along with the extension of the act in 1902, triggered a boycott of U.S. goods in China between 1904 and 1906.[30] There was one 1885 case in San Francisco, however, in which Treasury Department officials in Washington overturned a decision to deny entry to two Chinese students.[31]
One of the critics of the Chinese Exclusion Act was the anti-slavery/anti-imperialist Republican senator George Frisbie Hoar of Massachusetts who described the act as "nothing less than the legalization of racial discrimination".[32]
The laws were driven largely by racial concerns; immigration of persons of other races was not yet limited.[33] On the other hand, most people and unions strongly supported the Chinese Exclusion Act, including the U.S. Federation of Labor and Knights of Labor, a labor union, who supported it because it believed that industrialists were using Chinese workers as a wedge to keep wages low.[34] Among labor and leftist organizations, the Industrial Workers of the World were the sole exception to this pattern. The IWW openly opposed the Chinese Exclusion Act from its inception in 1905.
For all practical purposes, the Chinese Exclusion Act, along with the restrictions that followed it, froze the Chinese community in place in 1882. Limited immigration from China continued until the repeal of the act in 1943. From 1910 to 1940, the Angel Island Immigration Station on what is now Angel Island State Park in San Francisco Bay served as the processing center for most of the 56,113 Chinese immigrants who are recorded as immigrating or returning from China; upwards of 30% more who arrived there were returned to China.[36] The Chinese population in the U.S. declined from approximately 105,000 in 1880, to 89,000 in 1900, and to 61,000 in 1920.[21]
The act exempted merchants, and restaurant owners could apply for merchant visas beginning in 1915 after a federal court ruling. This led to the rapid growth of Chinese restaurants in the 1910s and 1920s as restaurant owners could leave and reenter along with family members from China.[37]
Later, the Immigration Act of 1924 restricted immigration even further, excluding all classes of Chinese immigrants and extending restrictions to other Asian immigrant groups.[24] Until these restrictions were relaxed in the middle of the twentieth century, Chinese immigrants were forced to live a life separated from their families, and to build ethnic enclaves in which they could survive on their own (Chinatown).[24] The Chinese Exclusion Act did not address the problems that whites were facing; in fact, the Chinese were quickly and eagerly replaced by the Japanese, who assumed the role of the Chinese in society. Unlike the Chinese, some Japanese were even able to climb the rungs of society by setting up businesses or becoming truck farmers.[38] However, the Japanese were later targeted in the act of 1924, which banned immigration from east Asia entirely.
In 1891, the Chinese government refused to accept U.S. senator Henry W. Blair as U.S. minister to China due to his abusive remarks regarding China during negotiations of the Chinese Exclusion Act.[39]
The U.S. Christian George F. Pentecost spoke out against Western imperialism in China, saying:[40]
I personally feel convinced that it would be a good thing for America if the embargo on Chinese immigration were removed. I think that the annual admission of 100,000 into this country would be a good thing for the country. And if the same thing were done in the Philippines those islands would be a veritable Garden of Eden in twenty-five years. The presence of Chinese workmen in this country would, in my opinion, do a very great deal toward solving our labor problems. There is no comparison between the Chinaman, even of the lowest coolie class, and the man who comes here from Southeastern Europe, from Russia, or from Southern Italy. The Chinese are thoroughly good workers. That is why the laborers here hate them. I think, too, that the emigration to America would help the Chinese. At least he would come into contact with some real Christian people in America. The Chinaman lives in squalor because he is poor. If he had some prosperity his squalor would cease.
The "Driving Out" period
Following the passing of the Chinese Exclusion Act, a period known as the "Driving Out" era was born. In this period, anti-Chinese Americans physically forced Chinese communities to flee to other areas. Large scale violence in Western states included the Rock Springs massacre (1885) and the Hells Canyon massacre (1887).[41]
Rock Springs massacre of 1885
Main article: Rock Springs massacre
The massacre was named for the town where it took place, Rock Springs, Wyoming, in Sweetwater County, where white miners were jealous of the Chinese for their employment. White miners expressed their jealous frustration by robbing, bullying, shooting, and stabbing the Chinese in Chinatown. The Chinese tried to flee but many were burned alive in their homes, starved to death in hidden refuge, or exposed to carnivorous animal predators in the mountains. Some were rescued by a passing train, but by the end of the event at least twenty-eight lives had been taken.[42] In an attempt to appease the situation, the government intervened by sending federal troops to protect the Chinese. However, only compensations for destroyed property were paid. No one was arrested nor held accountable for the atrocities committed during the riot.[42]
Hells Canyon massacre of 1887
Main article: Hells Canyon Massacre
The massacre was named for the location where it took place, along the Snake River in Hells Canyon near the mouth of Deep Creek. The area contained many rocky cliffs and white rapids that together posed significant danger to human safety. 34 Chinese miners were killed at the site. The miners were employed by the Sam Yup company, one of the six largest Chinese companies at the time, which worked in this area since October 1886. The actual events are still unclear due to unreliable law enforcement at the time, biased news reporting, and lack of serious official investigations. However, it is speculated that the dead Chinese miners were not victims of natural causes, but rather victims of gun shot wounds during a robbery committed by a gang of seven armed horse thieves.[43] Gold worth $4,000–$5,000 was thought to have been stolen from the miners. The gold was never recovered nor further investigated.
The aftermath
Shortly following the incident, the Sam Yup company of San Francisco hired Lee Loi who later hired Joseph K. Vincent, then U.S. Commissioner, to lead an investigation. Vincent submitted his investigative report to the Chinese consulate who tried unsuccessfully to obtain justice for the Chinese miners. At around the same time, other compensation reports were also unsuccessfully filed for earlier crimes inflicted on the Chinese. In the end, on October 19, 1888, Congress agreed to greatly under-compensate for the massacre and ignore the claims for the earlier crimes. Even though the amount was greatly underpaid, it was still a small victory to the Chinese who had low expectations for relief or acknowledgement.[43]
Issues of the act
The Chinese Exclusion Act lasted for about thirty years,[44] and it caused the U.S. economy to suffer a great loss.[44] Some sources cite the act as a sign of injustice and unfair treatment to the Chinese workers because their jobs were mostly menial.[45]
Impact on education in the U.S.
Recruitment of foreign students to U.S. colleges and universities was an important component in the expansion of U.S. influence. International education programs allowed students to learn from the examples provided at elite universities and to bring their newfound skill sets back to their home countries. As such, international education has historically been seen as a vehicle for improving diplomatic relations and promoting trade. The US Exclusion Act, however, forced Chinese students attempting to enter the country to provide proof that they were not trying to bypass regulations.[46] Laws and regulations that stemmed from the act made for less than ideal situations for Chinese students, leading to criticisms of U.S. society.[46] Policies and attitudes toward Chinese U.S.s in the US worked against foreign policy interests by limiting the ability of the U.S. to participate in international education initiatives.[47]
The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed by the 1943 Magnuson Act when China had become an ally of the U.S. against Japan in World War II, as the U.S. needed to embody an image of fairness and justice. The Magnuson Act permitted Chinese nationals already residing in the country to become naturalized citizens and stop hiding from the threat of deportation. The act also allowed Chinese people to send remittances to people of Chinese descent living in mainland China, Macao, Hong Kong, and Taiwan and other countries or territories, especially if the funding is not tied to criminal activity. However, the Magnuson Act only allowed a national quota of 105 Chinese immigrants per year and did not repeal the restrictions on immigration from the other Asian countries. The crackdown on Chinese immigrants reached a new level in its last decade, from 1956 to 1965, with the Chinese Confession Program launched by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, that encouraged Chinese who had committed immigration fraud to confess, so as to be eligible for some leniency in treatment.[citation needed] Large-scale Chinese immigration did not occur until the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.
The first Chinese immigrants who entered the United States under the Magnuson Act were college students who sought to escape the warfare in China during World War II and study in the U.S. The establishment of the People's Republic of China and its entry into the Korean War against the U.S., however, created a new threat in the minds of some U.S. politicians: U.S.-educated Chinese students bringing U.S. knowledge back to "Red China". Many Chinese college students were almost forcibly naturalized, even though they continued to face significant prejudice, discrimination, and bullying. One of the most prolific of these students was Tsou Tang, who would go on to become the leading expert on China and Sino-U.S. relations during the Cold War.[48]
Although the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943, the law in California prohibiting non-whites from marrying whites was not struck down until 1948, in which the California Supreme Court ruled the ban of interracial marriage within the state unconstitutional in Perez v. Sharp.[49][50] Some other states had such laws until 1967, when the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled in Loving v. Virginia that anti-miscegenation laws across the nation are unconstitutional.
Even today,[when?] although all its constituent sections have long been repealed, Chapter 7 of Title 8 of the United States Code is headed "Exclusion of Chinese".[51] It is the only chapter of the 15 chapters in Title 8 (Aliens and Nationality) that is completely focused on a specific nationality or ethnic group. Like the following Chapter 8, "The Cooly Trade", it consists entirely of statutes that are noted as "Repealed" or "Omitted".
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