The Coming War On China - documentry by John Pilger

[Hi_Henry]

This is a very good documentary which will give you many "Ah ha" moments regarding very important events in history. I would say that this documentary is a continuation of the discussion in the "Books" forum about the book "The Gulag Archipelago". There the theme of revisionism is brought up and this documentary continues it.

Here is the interview with Mr. Pilger about his work,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6StL-AJLDwY

The documentary

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt6197028/

 

[Altair]

I watched and can only recommend this documentary. By the way, almost all of his films are available for free on his website http://johnpilger.com/videos

 

[Hi_Henry]

I'll put a little meat into this thread less some who were not motivated to watch the documentary might change their minds. In part I am doing this as I have come across a book that I plan to read and what it describes nicely fits into what I will be quoting,

'Gold mine of drugs' and Mao 'paranoia'

Starting from the 19th century, an anti-Chinese "racial stereotype" has been spread across the United States.

According to the film, such a policy concealed a deeper agenda – opium. For the American elite back then China was a "gold mine of drugs."

Warren Delano, the grandfather of America's 32nd president Franklin D. Roosevelt, "was the American opium king of China," author James Bradley says. "Much of the east coast of America – Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Princeton were born from opium money. The American industrial revolution was funded by huge pools of money which came from illegal drugs [from] the biggest market in the world – China," he says, adding that of course it wasn't talked about, but called it "the China trade."

Pilger’s thesis is this: The USA’s refusal to accept the possibility that it should not be the world’s dominant leader has driven its foreign policies, particularly with respect to China (although he acknowledges the cold war with Russia). He traces this relationship back to the China Trade in the 19th century when China’s opium trade with America built the town of Lowell, Massachusetts and five of America’s big railroads. The grandfather of Franklin D Roosevelt, the only US President to be elected four times, was king of the opium trade and his son inherited his wealth. When the Boxer rebellion attempted to rid the country of Western and Japanese influence it was ‘savagely put down.’ The advent of Mao Tse-tung met with fierce propaganda in the USA including the stereotyping of the Yellow Peril, which persists.

"racial stereotype" is a long and evolving tradition in the US.

So lets back up to the 18th century Slave Trade because the pattern is the same in terms of what "capital" is used to build the Greatest Democracy on Earth. This where the book which I just found comes in ,

Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America's Universities – by Craig Steven Wilder

From the "Democracy Now" interview of the author I found out that,

AMY GOODMAN: Explain. For example, Mather. In fact, at Harvard University, there is a house named after Mather.
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yeah, the Mathers actually go back a long way. And so, you know—and they actually are part of the colonial story of slavery, too. Increase Mather, of the second generation, is actually a president of Harvard, and he uses his slave, which was a person given to him by his parish—he uses his slave to actually run the business of the college in the colonial period. This slave runs errands between the various trustees. And he writes in his diary that he sent his Negro to do various bits of work for the college.
And if you think about, you know, Edward Everett, Jared Sparks, one of the ways that their influence—that they had managed to achieve the kind of influence that they did—Sparks, for instance, becomes rather famous, actually, for his writings about early American history. He becomes something of a really quite polished American historian, but that was actually a way of also creating ties with the South, intellectual relationships with the South. And so, his writings as a historian also allowed him to create intellectual connections to these very important regions, and regions that remained important in the financing of higher education long after slavery ends in the Northeast.
AMY GOODMAN: What about Yale University?
CRAIG STEVEN WILDER: Yale actually is a very similar story. Yeah, in 1701, when the original founders were actually meeting to establish what was then the Collegiate School, they—as one of their chroniclers puts it, they come from the various towns to meet up, and they’re followed by their menservants, or their slaves. The slave—the enslaved people are actually at the founding of the institution. And once it’s established, like most of the 18th century colleges—and especially by the 18th century as the slave trade peaks—the new business of higher education, the financial model for a successful college, requires in fact tapping into these new sources of wealth in the Americas. And that means the slave trade in the plantations of the South and the West Indies.

We can throw in here also the city of Miami. How did it rise up out of the swampy areas of Florida in the 70's ? Marijuana/Cocaine ;)

See the excellent documentary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocaine_Cowboys

Connect the Dots :)