THE MAD LOGIC
OF EMPIRE
You may laugh, but David Chou, a Taiwanese citizen, is perfectly serious.
As the founder of the "51 Club" an organization that probably
doesn't have many more members than the original 51 present
at its founding Chou embodies the absurdity of the American
stance on the question of China and the mad logic of empire.
Ever since Chiang Kai-chek fled the mainland and established
a military dictatorship in what had been a backwater province,
his Nationalist government has endured only because it has
been sheltered under the protective wing of the American eagle.
Of Taiwan's political figures, to my knowledge Chou is the
only one with the courage to say this out loud.
HAMBURGERS AND
RICE
Never mind all this nonsense about "redefining"
Taiwan's status in terms of "state-to-state" relations with
the mainland, begone with this illusion that Taiwan
is a separate "nation" with its own cultural and national
identity and history. "Special state-to-state relations, yes,
as a U.S. state," says Chou. "That's the only state we should
want to be, the state of Taiwan." Chou is a true citizen of
the new world order we are fighting for from Kosovo to Taipei,
and its perfect spokesman: "I know a lot of Taiwanese have
reservations about this," he avers. "They may worry that they'll
lose their culture. But I tell them, you can still eat rice;
no one will force you to eat hamburgers." All that old-fashioned
stuff about history and cultural identity boils down to a
question of cuisine. In the brave new "progressive" world
Bill Clinton and Tony Blair are building for us, culture,
nationalism, and the very concept of national sovereignty
are the artifacts of a bygone era, and hardly matter. What
matters now is money and power.
THE AMERICANIZATION
OF TAIWAN
The Nationalist government would never admit
it, but it has certainly been acting like a state government
for the past fifty years, lobbying quite successfully for
more federal funding in the guise of "foreign aid." The Nationalists
had barely set up shop in Taipei before they launched a huge
publicity campaign in the United States. It was the height
of the Cold War and plenty of conservatives were ready to
believe that if they paid the price of globalism and perpetual
war they would one day live in freedom.
A TRAGIC PARADOX
They never realized, of course, that this
freedom was doomed by their decision or, if they did, cynically
dismissed it as part of the tragic paradox of life on this
earth. In any case, they were willing to go to war to defend
a place they had never seen and a cause they barely understood.
The Nationalists, who lorded over the native people of Taiwan
and ruthlessly suppressed all opposition, did not want to
be understood and so it was a useful alliance. The dictatorship
of the Nationalists was dressed up in the glamorous figure
of the mediagenic Madam Chiang, who toured the country and
whipped up support for the Nationalist cause the way any American
politician would naturally take to the hustings.
THE OLD CHINA
LOBBY
Some day
someone will write a book-length account of how the old China
Lobby infiltrated and influenced our political system and
established a full-fledged American protectorate, or colony,
overseas. It was an well-organized and very well funded enterprise,
encouraged if not entirely created by the Taipei regime. A
magazine, Plain Talk, was established by the wealthy
silk merchant Alfred Kohlberg that specialized in the "who
lost China" bout of agonizing then taking place among conservatives.
(How could we have "lost" China, if it was never ours to begin
with? But never mind.) Amid a spy scare in which Alger Hiss
and other prominent Commies were exposed in the highest levels
of the US government, and the seeming relentlessness with
which the Soviet balloon was expanding almost to its full
size, the Kohlberg propaganda outfit did a bang-up business.
Until Nixon went to China, Kohlberg and his confreres had
the field pretty much to themselves, and they made the most
of it.
THE PRICE OF
BETRAYAL
When it came time to recognize the inevitable,
and even their Washington sponsors could no longer maintain
the fiction of Taiwanese "independence," the China lobby was
ready with the Taiwan Relations Act as the price of betrayal.
It would be an amicable divorce, but the obligation on our
part would never end: it was a de facto annexation
dressed up as a bill of divorcement. What is so delightful
about Chou is that he has ripped the mask off the formalized
pretensions and airs of the Taiwanese leadership, who pay
lip service to the patriotic myth of One China. By being more
royalist than the king, by openly naming and advocating what
has in fact been the program of the ruling clique in Taipei
all along, he underscores the inevitable logic of Empire with
every word he utters. "If we were a state, our most serious
problem security would be solved," says Chou. "The current
government can't solve it; neither can the opposition. But
statehood can."
A CONGRESSIONAL
MISSILE DEFENSE SYSTEM
I, for one,
am in favor of it. For one thing, we won't have to give them
any seats in Congress they already have more than enough.
Between Ben Gilman and Jesse Helms, that alone is enough congressional
firepower to shoot down any incoming political missile. The
Democrats would no doubt back the idea, if not in the name
of "human rights" and "inclusiveness," then because the
Republicans in Congress have so alienated both Taiwanese and
mainlanders in their persecution of Chinese-American scientists
(such as the unfortunate Wen Ho Lee) that these voters will
be driven into the waiting arms of the DNC.
THE SPARK THAT WENT OUT
Long dormant at the grassroots level, the
China Lobby is trying to make a comeback, although nothing
like the first time around. With the Cold War just a memory,
and dreams of reviving it not quite a reality, the crusading
fervor and sense of outrage is lacking. While the mighty "Committee
of One Million" against the admission of "Red China" to the
United Nations engineered by the energetic ex-Communist-turned-conservative Marvin Liebman in the 1950s was a huge
political and financial success, today's China lobby is a
pale shadow of its storied past. David Horowitz's outfit,
the "Committee for a Non-Left
Majority" (CNLM) which specializes in scare stories about
Chinese "subversion," has turned out to be a non-starter.
Announced as an ambitious plan to raise hundreds of thousands
of dollars to promote the cause of more military spending
and warmongering in the Republican party, the CNLM started
out with high expectations. In preparation for the bales of
cash he expected to rake in, Horowitz made sure that the online
form contributors have to fill out lists the smallest
contribution at $1000. But from the sad and somewhat abandoned
look of the CNLM website the only thing that has changed
beyond the initial postings a month ago is the date Horowitz's
"Hate China" campaign seems to have fizzled out before it
ever began. The Spark, as the CNLM calls its online
newsletter, has failed to catch fire.
A LESSON LEARNED
Faced with
the illogic of their own position, which mandates war on behalf
of the breakaway province of Taiwan but not in the
cause of the breakaway province of Kosovo, many if not most
conservatives show every sign of learning the main lesson
of the post-Cold War era: they always knew Communism didn't
work. Now they are learning that all form of globalism
are similarly flawed.
STATEHOOD NOW
OR NEVER!
I am perfectly serious about the prospect
of Taiwan statehood. If the people of Taiwan are going to
fall under the protection of US armed forces, if we are bound
to them forever because of a treaty authored and signed by
none yet living, even against our own strategic and economic
interests, then let them help pay for it. If the United States
government is going to make life and death decisions for the
people of Taiwan, then let them have a voice and a vote
in their fate. My answer to Taipei's amen-corner in the
US, conservative "anti-Communists" who demand that Taiwan
must be recognized as independent from China and that the
US must guarantee it, is identical to the one given by the
redoubtable Colonel Robert Rutherford McCormick, the "isolationist"
(i.e. pro-American) publisher of the Chicago Tribune,
when he took up the cudgels against those Anglophiles in America
who pushed for a Trans-Atlantic pact. His editorial, entitled
"States Across the Sea' [April 25, 1943], reads as if it were
written yesterday:
THE COLONEL
SPEAKS
"Certainly
it is difficult to see why those who say their goal is integration
of the free peoples have consistently neglected the most obvious
method of achieving it, and the one that would be most readily
acceptable to the American people." No need to form transnational
alliances and sign endless treaties, "the method is found
in the Constitution of the United States," specifically the
provisions of article IV, "which are not all that onerous."
It's really very simple, he explained, "all they need do is
adopt written constitutions and apply for membership and all
we need do is accept them as we once accepted Texas." Great
Britain, he suggested, could be admitted as four states: England,
Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. McCormick despised the Eastern
Anglophile elite whom he blamed for dragging us into two world
wars, and took great pleasure in his needling. He caused an
international uproar when he wrote: "Certainly the handkissers
and Tories in this country should welcome the closer relationship
if only because it would strengthen their representation in
Congress. They should look forward pleasurably to more intimate
social and political ties with their English friends, particularly
as the new relationship would be one of equals."
WHY STOP THERE?
Therefore,
I say, with the Colonel: let Taiwan petition Congress for
admission to the Union. Surely they can count on their good
friends Ben Gilman and Jesse Helms to push it through. But
why stop with Taiwan? Kosovo, too, deserves some consideration:
after all, didn't Bill Clinton go there and pledge that we
would not abandon the Kosovar people? Or are we going to be
guilty of the horrible sin of "discrimination"? And what
about the rest of our protectorates around the globe? Israel,
Egypt, Colombia, and Kuwait are they to be left out in
the cold?
FACING MECCA
Naturally
this would change the political and social composition of
the "American" electorate, but perhaps it will be for the
better. With so many Muslims incorporated into the SuperUSA,
American conservatives may live to see prayer in the public
schools. (Will they change their minds when their children
are asked to face Mecca?)
HE'S GOT THE
WHOLE WORLD IN HIS HANDS
Certainly
this multicultural stew will please the Left: not only will
we have an administration that "looks like America," but an
"America" that looks like the world. Indeed, America, at this
rate, will become the world, with only a few "rogue"
states holding out for independence. And this, as Murray Rothbard
pointed out in a famous essay, is the ultimate endpoint and
logical goal of the interventionists: the annexation of the
entire earth!
A PILE OF BONES
The mad
"logic" of interventionism leads us straight down the well-trod
path of empire, a road littered with the bones of Romans,
Englishmen, and others guilty of the same fatal hubris. They
thought they could rule the world, when they could not even
begin to control themselves and their own worst impulses.
Will we end up on the side of the same road, a sad pile of
bones weathered by wind and sun?
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