The Hidden Link between Taiwan and Ukraine dating back over 60 Years
Plus, the new Asian NATO and Taiwan’s 2/28 “Massacre”
Post WW II, the CIA has been acting as the needle and the common thread, piercing through and holding vassal beads in a necklace adorning the “free world.” Two emerald beads have stood out and dominated today’s geological scenes — Ukraine and Taiwan. I’m publishing this piece on a very special memorial day, a public holiday here — the anniversary of one of the most influential events in Taiwan’s history of politics.
Given the recent military escalation by the empire, not only with Japan vastly increasing military budgets, joint military drills with South Korea, even joint training with Taiwanese troops deliberately leaked out in the open, and now the latest with the Philippines being courted into a de facto Asian NATO overlapping with the AUKUS, all pointing to China, of course, as it has been since the Korean War.
To understand the roots of all current geopolitical entanglement in East and South East Asia, two very important, highly correlated essays both published recently must be read by anyone concerned with the current situation in East Asia in order to have a clearer view framed in proper historic contexts. The first one is titled: China Appears Poised to Achieve through Cooperation in the 21st Century what Japan Sought to Achieve through Coercion in the 20th.
This long essay was based on a book written by someone who goes by the alias “Abrams,” as explained in the essay:
A.B. Abrams[1] points out in the new revised edition of his book, Power and Primacy: A History of Western Intervention in the Asia-Pacific (New York: Peter Lang, 2022), that China is poised to achieve by cooperation in the next decade what Japan set out to achieve by coercion in the first three decades of the 20th century—the creation of a Southeast Asia power bloc capable of resisting Western empires that have ravaged Southeast Asia since the 16th century.
“Abrams is the pseudonym for a former U.S. intelligence officer with deep experience in Southeast Asia who is a prolific writer on geopolitics and an astute political analyst.”
Obviously his motivation behind writing the book was a (guilty) conscience that he also had a part in the past in all this abomination.
I’d like to just add some minor critiques and provide supplementation to Abrams’ writing here.
Link between Chiang and the Banderites
Not many people today realized that Chiang Kai-Shek was a good friend of both Stepan Bandera and Yaroslav Stetsko of Ukraine. Prior to that, Chiang’s thinking during the 1920s was somehow shaped by the fascist icons in Europe, culminating in a wholly possessed fascination with destroying the communists at all costs. The zero-sum game he chose cost him a hometown he yearned for, along with the whole mainland China.
Déjà-vu all over — wash, rinse, and repeat
The seeds sown by fascism of yesteryears, with extreme hatred toward communists, have lived on alive and kicking today in the minds of millions of school-indoctrinated, psyop-gaslit and presstitute-brainwashed people, especially the youth, serving as useful idiots in the two key US vassals waging proxy wars resisting multipolarity — Ukraine and Taiwan. From a now deleted tweet on Twitter:
Stepan Bandera's deputy for the OUN and the head of the Anti-Bolshevik Front of the Peoples, created by the USA from fascists and collaborators, Stetsko, together with the leader of the reactionary-bourgeois Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek
From the article The World Anti-Communist League: the Internationale of Crime by French journalist Thierry Meyssan:
The World Anti-Communist League (WACL) was established in Taiwan by Chiang Kai-shek, Reverend Moon and Nazi and Japanese war criminals. It was first used under Nixon to spread counter-insurrectionary measures in South East Asia and Latin America.
From 1958, the President of the Anti-Bolshevist Bloc of Nations (ABN) participates in the annual conferences of the Anti-Communist League of theAsian People held in Taipei. Cline and Stetsko supervise the establishmentof the Political Warfare Cadres Academy at Taiwan. This academy is taskedwith training cadres from the Regime of Chiang Kai-Shek for anti-communist repression.
…
The academy is the Asian equivalent of the Psychological Warfare Centre at Fort Bragg (USA) and the Panama School of Americas [8]. Gradually, the CIA forms a global network of political groups and instructors incounter-insurrection. In 1967, ABN and APACL merge under the banner of the “World Anti-Communist League (WACL)” and extend their activities acrossthe entire “free world”
The postage stamps released in Taiwan back then provide a testament to the above. CIA, the common thread in WACL, is also the central character in Abrams’ book on their previous covert operations in Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia.
Most geopolitical analysts today have overlooked the aforementioned history. They mostly intuitively think of the KMT as the anti-separatism party recognizing the One-China principle. Unbeknownst to them, it was exactly the KMT who was the one spreading anti-Communist fear and hatred, starting 70+ years ago all the way through end of 1990s, rather than the current ruling neoliberal, pro-globalist Democratic Progressive Party which did not exist until 1986. The anti-Communist ghost was easily revived in a walk-in-the-park relay from 2000-2008 with the baton passed to the then ruling DPP separatists with help from the National Endowment for Democracy. There’s even a localized Taiwanese version of NED behind the Sun Flower color revolution in the same year as Ukraine’s Maidan coup. KMT’s current and two-time chairman Eric Chu has also been certified by Wikileaks to be a CIA asset, also overlooked by most western analysts. Both major parties in Taiwan have been effectively captured for decades just like in its “American daddy’s” homeland — a sarcastic term used mostly by anti-sepatism nationalists in Taiwan. This is why there’s been a tradition of “interviews” between Taiwan’s presidential candidates from all parties and American think tanks and politicians, during their trips to US months before election day. All “disqualified” candidates, eventually all ended up losers, without exceptions over the past two decades, in their uphill battles against covert character assassination smear campaigns operated and funded by the mighty Empire.
On Mao
As the essay on Abrams’ book goes:
The communists under Mao’s leadership by contrast had worked to increase the living standards of China’s peasants and built a reputation for honesty,…
It seems Mao was glorified by the author unnecessarily — here I’m contrasting it with an excerpt from the seminal "Tragedy and Hope" by Carroll Quigley, a historian writing from the treasure trove archives of the CFR, note the highlighted section:
In 1927 the Communist collaboration was ended by the Kuomintang [KMT], the Russians were expelled from China, and the Kuomintang became the only legal party. The native Chinese Communists, under Moscow-trained leaders like Mao Tse-tung, concentrated their strength in the southern rural areas where they established themselves by agrarian reforms, expropriating landlords, reducing rents, taxes, and interest rates, and building a Communist rural militia manned by the peasants. As soon as the Nationalist forces under Chiang Kai-shek completed the conquest of northern China with the capture of Peking in June 1928, they shifted their attack southward in an effort to destroy the Communist center in Kiangsi. [Jiangxi] The Communist army, whose growing exactions had disillusioned its peasant supporters, retreated in an orderly withdrawal on a twisting six-thousand-mile route to northwestern China (1934-1935). [officially glorified as “the Long March” by PRC, as the victors always get to shape the official narratives] Even after the Japanese attack on Manchuria in 1931, Chiang continued to fight the Communists, directing five large-scale attacks upon them in the period 1930-1933, although the Communists declared war on Japan in 1932 and continued to demand a united front of all Chinese against this aggressor for the whole period 1931-1937.
Incidentally, there is a paper with a thought-provoking title: Chiang Kai-Shek and the USA: Puppet and Puppeteer, but Which Was Which? by historian David White, containing many interesting and precious historic pictures, recounting the decades between Chiang’s fleeing to Taiwan after defeat by Mao in 1949, all the way to Nixon/Kissinger dumping Chiang and formally recognizing PRC.
Critique — on the Feb 28th (2/28) Incident
Abrams went on to write:
In the summer of 1949, the GMD [=KMT with the old spelling system] leadership fled to Taiwan, taking numerous national and artistic treasures and China’s gold reserves with them.
Massacres carried out against the local population resulted in the death of at least 28,000 Taiwanese. Americans present in Taiwan equated the imposition of Guomindang [KMT] rule with having “put all Formosans [Formosa: Taiwan’s old name given by early Portuguese voyagers, meaning Beauty Island] into slavery.”
[a painting from Wikipedia]… It shows a Guomindang soldier shooting a Taiwanese native, which was symptomatic of the period of white terror that is largely ignored in contemporary discussions about Taiwan.
Maybe it was ignored by most western historians as he claimed, but certainly not in Taiwan — the following was reported by a major newspaper in Taiwan last year (machine translated):
The anniversary of the February 28th Incident is approaching. Cai Zhengyuan, a former legislator of the Kuomintang who published a million-word book "Taiwan Island History" three years ago, said that in 1994, the Taiwan Provincial Documentation Commission published the “Supplement to the February 28th Incident,” which compiled 850 deaths and 173 missing, a total of 1,023. Cai Zhengyuan said that there is no evidence to overturn the above statistics at present, which is also the closest to the figure recognized by the February 28th Incident Foundation by the end of 2005 (681 deaths and 177 missing people in this province). At the same time, it is also most in line with the research of Lin Yixuan, a doctoral student at the Institute of Social Studies of National Taiwan University in 2017 with his model of speculation.
The number of casualties according to the official narrative written in school textbooks in Taiwan has been vastly inflated. This is analogous to the fact that after riots and mayhem broke out in the 1989 Tiananmen Square color revolution, when VOA, CNN and media in Taiwan were the first in the world to report a “tens of millions of casualties” number while the reality is more in line with a few hundred rioters and policemen killed.
This 228 Incident, however, has over the years become an ATM machine providing ongoing political capitals for independence-leaning candidates, an ATM that never goes into overdraft. A demagogue who got elected as the mayor of Taipei claimed to be decedents of 228 victims. He’s aiming for the presidential race next year after finishing two mayoral terms. This is also analogous to a certain ethnic group using past tragedies during WW II in Europe as their ATM machine.
Jeju uprising
The Jeju Island massacre in South Korean history was omitted in this essay. Perhaps Abrams’ book does contain it. As I have not done enough research into this incident, I will not elaborate here.
From League of Nations in Europe to today’s Japan
The second important essay was published by Cynthia Chung 20 days ago, with an intriguing title: Why Shinzo Abe Was Assassinated: Towards a ‘United States of Europe’ and a League of Nations where she cited a paper by Emanuel Pastreich on the motivation behind the Abe assassination, which I think is well-reasoned, judging in hindsight with all the latest developments in Japan with the Asian NATO taking shape. In addition, Professor Hamamoto on YouTube speculated (in a past video I am no longer able to locate) that the nationalist Abe’s upholding the homegrown Shinto religion, might have been in conflict with the old Jesuit order in Japan.
Just to add a lesser known fact that, Nobuo Kishi, the current Defense Minister of Japan in the photo below, is actually the kid brother of the assassinated Shinzo Abe (second son in the family of 3 brothers). As you can easily find links in Wikipedia showing the two brothers born to identical parents. Somehow the younger brother decided to have his family name changed. In normal circumstances, such an act is considered to be most disrespectful and disgraceful to the family in East Asian cultures where a person’s family name always comes first — “Shinzo Abe” is actually called “Abe Shinzo” domestically — western individualism vs Eastern collectivism in full display here.
Here’s a photo from his ministry on the new Asian NATO.
Note the perfectly positioned imperialism-tinged flag between the two men. Enough said.
Tiger,
Your piece compliments several that I read recently by Cynthia Chung and Matt Ehret.
What you report about Chiang and Bandera is amazing. In broad strokes, China was faced with a civil war between a friend of Bandera and a truer communist than Stalin; all while holding off the Japanese. As we say in more northern climes, that makes for some rough sledding.