Letter to the Taiwan Peace Movement

Note: A Chinese version of this article, translated and edited by National Yang-Ming Chao-Tong University Emeritus Professor Fu Daiwie and activists in the peace movement in Taiwan, has been published in a Taiwan newspaper.  You can find it here.

To my fellow lovers of peace in Taiwan,

Greetings from the United States, and my best wishes to you for peace and prosperity.  I know that you are in a complex and difficult situation right now, caught in the middle of the struggle between Washington and Beijing.  As a third-generation Chinese American born and raised in the USA, I can’t tell you any more than you already know about the relationship between yourselves and the Chinese mainland.  But what I can tell you about is my country, and what, in my 76 years of life, I have observed about my country and its treatment of friends, allies, neutral nations, enemies, and independent countries around the world.

Let me start at the beginning of my experiences and observations, then I’ll explain in my conclusion what the American global strategy is, and what it means for you.

I once believed in America and its ideals.  In high school I had been a cadet 1st Lieutenant in Army ROTC and believed in serving my country. Then in 1969, I became a young soldier in the US Army during the Viet Nam war.  However, the peace movement had been saying for some time that the Viet Nam war was illegal and immoral, and that war crimes were being committed, while our government and army indoctrination classes told us that we were fighting for “freedom and democracy.”  But off the record, our instructors and sargeants returning from the war zone told us specific experiences and stories of war crimes being committed, with sometimes very graphic examples.  Among ourselves we studied, debated, and discussed the war passionately, trying to understand what was really happening. I learned that after the French colonial defeat in Viet Nam, the country had been divided.  An internationally supervised election was to reunite the country under an elected national government once the French completely left.  But knowing that Ho Chi Minh and the communists were almost sure to win a fair and free election, the American CIA stepped in, artificially creating a “government” in the southern half of Viet Nam, called it a new country, “South Vietnam,” and blocked internationally supervised elections.  The US proceeded to build up the new “country,” installing Ngo Dinh Diem as president, arming it heavily and suppressing any resistance, including hunting down and killing communists, attacking pacifist Buddhist temples with tanks and troops, and declaring “independence” from the northern half of Viet Nam.  Ho Chi Minh first tried to negotiate with the Americans, but got nowhere.  The war started, then intensified, and when it wasn’t going well, the US decided that President Ngo Dinh Diem needed to go and in 1963 supported a coup against him, resulting in his assassination.  This was all later documented in the Pentagon Papers, the US government’s own records, famously leaked by Daniel Ellsberg and published in the New York Times and other papers.

This assassination highlights what former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said: “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”  I invite readers to keep that maxim in mind.   We will come back to it.

 

Then in 1964, with the war still going badly, US President Lyndon Johnson used a false claim that North Viet Nam had attacked two US destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin to get the US Congress to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, allowing him to use major US military forces in Viet Nam.  The war expanded with major US and allied forces including South Korean, Thai, and Australians fighting in Viet Nam, bombing of North Viet Nam, and bombing and raiding into neighboring Cambodia and Laos.

As a US Army soldier in 1969, I heard stories directly from returning soldiers – our instructors and sargeants – of war crimes being committed in Viet Nam, stories that confirmed everything the peace movement said; murders, rapes, torture, whole villages being carpet bombed, and burned with napalm.  These crimes were systematic, promoted by policy, encouraged by stereotyping of the Vietnamese, and ordered by officers. General William Westmoreland, the top US commander in Viet Nam, infamously said, “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. … We value life and human dignity. They don’t care about life and human dignity.” Source: https://www.vietnamfulldisclosure.org/the-long-reach-of-vietnam-war-deceptions

The army was divided, with more and more soldiers, including myself, rebelling at the illegality of the war and the war crimes being committed.  Finally, the My Lai massacre, in which an American Army platoon went into the village of My Lai and raped and murdered 504 unarmed Vietnamese civilians – old men, women, and children – triggered intense anger against the military war machine.

 

When we saw the pictures, our rage against the war and the army exploded. Our beliefs in the US as a benevolent force for peace, freedom and democracy disappeared.

Our platoon almost had a riot against the war.  Throughout the entire US military, morale fell so low and rebellion spread so wide that the US military came close to collapse, as documented in  (The Collapse of the Armed Forces by Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr.).  In “South Vietnam,” American soldiers were refusing to fight, and even killing their own officers in revolt. An entire anti-war movement evolved in the US military, which is well documented in the film, Sir! No Sir!”.  Soldiers marched in anti-war demonstrations, organized in coffee shops, created underground newspapers against the war and spread them by hand in the barracks, and returning combat veterans formed the national organization, Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW).

After a year in the army, I finally got orders to Viet Nam.  But as one of the soldiers who had turned against the war, I decided to resist the army and the war.  I took a two week leave and returned to my hometown, San Francisco, where I talked with peace movement organizers, got a lawyer, and after overstaying my leave by two weeks, turned myself in with my lawyer to what was then the Presidio army base located in San Francisco.  I refused orders to Viet Nam and tried to press a conscientious objector case.  I was held in the army jail for a short time, an officer told me that they had fifteen years worth of charges against me for refusing orders to Viet Nam, but they were dropping the charges, releasing me, and putting me back on orders to report to Oakland Army Terminal for shipment to “South Vietnam.”  My lawyer advised me to just sign that I received the orders.  I did so. As we left the stockade, my lawyer explained that because so many soldiers were choosing jail over going to Viet Nam, they were trying to force soldiers to go to Viet Nam.  After thinking about it intensely, I realized that I had tried to refuse orders and go to jail, and that didn’t work.  My only choices left were to either go to Viet Nam or desert to Canada.  I chose Canada.

After the war I returned, got an “Undesirable Discharge,” and have never regretted this choice.

America Invades Iraq

In 1980, Saddam Hussein ordered Iraqi forces to attack and invade Iran, which they did. This set off eight years of the Iran – Iraq war (1980 – 1988), which resulted in an estimated one million deaths. The US backed Saddam’s Iraq in this war, supplying him with arms (including illegal chemical weapons), advice, and critical intelligence information, while also secretly supporting Iran.   At the time, Henry Kissinger said, “It’s a pity both can’t lose”:

But in March of 2003, based on lies that Iraq had been involved in 9/11 and that it was preparing WMD, the United States attacked Iraq in a “Shock and Awe” campaign of bombing and a ground invasion.  To this day, many people believe this.  Then we captured and executed Saddam Hussein.

Like Diem before him, Saddam had become no longer useful to the US, so we got rid of him. Again as Kissinger said, it is dangerous to be the US’s enemy, but it is fatal to be its friend. In the run-up to the invasion, the peace movement warned that overthrowing Saddam would set off a chain reaction of events that risked destabilizing the entire middle east, but the Bush administration and the US mainstream media wouldn’t listen.  Now, twenty years later, the peace movement’s predictions have proved all too true. During the US war on Iraq, American troops again saw policies and practices of war crimes that some troops went along with, and others revolted against.  The most famous of those war crimes was the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison, where Iraqi prisoners were stripped naked, beaten, and tortured.

Veterans For Peace, a national US organization formed in 1985, helped new Iraq war veterans form their own organization, Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW, renamed after the Iraq war as About Face: Veterans Against War), which organized and led the new generation of anti-war veterans in protest against this new war.

These are just two of America’s many wars that my country initiated in which the US used, abused, and threw away its proxy allies or others who made agreements with the US.

The United States talks a great deal about freedom, democracy, human rights, and so on.  But if measured by the number of legitimate foreign democracies the US has overthrown, the United States is actually the most anti-democratic country in the world by far.  For example, a 2005 Harvard University study stated: “In the slightly less than a hundred years from 1898 to 1994, the U.S. government has intervened successfully to change governments in Latin America a total of at least 41 times. That amounts to once every 28 months for an entire century (see table).” And this is just in Latin America.  This is not to mention US meddling in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, and elsewhere.  Here’s another list of US interventions around the world.

If we only count the period after WWII, since then, the US has overthrown at least 36 foreign governments, interfered in 86 foreign elections, attempted to assassinate 50 foreign leaders, and dropped bombs on 30 sovereign countries.  It has initiated 201 of the 248 armed conflicts since WWII.

If we look at the entirety of its history,  the US has not been at war only16 years out of its existence. It has militarily invaded 84 countries and been militarily involved in 191.  It is as MLK Jr. said, “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”  The business of the US is war – it is the most warmongering country on the planet.

Note that nowhere in the global south is safe, and whether or not a nation is a genuine democracy, a dictatorship, communist, or capitalist, are not the determining factors.  The determining factors have always been American power and economic interests.

America’s use of “Allies”

One might ask, “What about nations that America economically built up, such as South Korea or Japan after World War 2?

Let’s start with discussing South Korea.  After World War 2, the United States occupied the southern half of Korea, and quickly suppressed local political organizations which had set up self governance. Instead the US installed former Japanese collaborators in a new government, including the police, army, and bureaucrats from the former Japanese puppet government in Korea, and declared “South Korea” to be a new country, run by the Koreans who had previously collaborated with Japan.  They were willing puppets for Japan, then became equally willing puppets for the United States, and the US ran rigged elections to place them in power “democratically.”  The new government crushed popular protests, in 1946 killing 300, wounding 26,000 and arresting 15,000.  When another revolt erupted in 1980, eventually 20,000 troops with tanks, helicopters, and APCs crushed the revolt, resulting in uncounted thousands of Korean deaths.  Korean politics has swung back and forth since then, but the US has always been the puppetmaster pulling the strings. In time of war, the United States has full operational control over South Korean military forces.  South Korea thus does not even have sovereignty over its own military.  (Note that the US legislature, through the TERA act, has also given itself the right to inspect, monitor, and interfere with Taiwan’s military.)

In Japan, the emperor was returned to his position, and while numerous Japanese war criminals were convicted and punished, others were excused for their war crimes and put back into power.  The United States needed both South Korea and Japan to be proxy nations helping to counter China after 1949 when the Communist Party of China (CPC) came to power, so the US simply re-empowered the core of the previous Japanese wartime elite and built the  capitalist Asian economy with Japan at the center.

But the US also could not let its proxies become too strong, lest they become great powers in their own right.  When during the ‘80’s and ‘90s, Japan began to rise economically, there was a period of concern in the US elite – concerns that Japan, a close ally of the US and fellow democracy, could become strong enough to become a heavyweight international power in its own right.  Ally or not, the US felt this needed to be prevented, and destroyed Japan’s tech industry, by sanctioning Toshiba and their chip industry, and by forcing exchange rate reform through the Plaza Accords. Japan has never recovered economically but has stagnated for 4 decades.

The American media also exaggerated concerns about the rise of Japan, and when Japanese car sales started to hurt American auto companies and American jobs, two White American auto workers killed Vincent Chin, a young Chinese American, because they mistook him for Japanese (see Resources below).  There was even talk of war with Japan, as discussed in the book, The Coming War With Japan, by George Friedman (see Resources).

The Case of Hong Kong

Hong Kong became a big news story in 2019, when protests against the government broke out.  The US and allied media portrayed the protests as peaceful protests against Hong Kong passing an extradition law that could be used to send dissidents to mainland China.  But a deeper dive into the facts showed a different story.

Let’s start at the beginning. The story began when two lovers from Hong Kong, a pregnant young woman and her boyfriend, went on a romantic getaway to Taiwan. The New York Times reported that the woman, “Poon Hiu-wing, 20, never returned to Hong Kong from that Valentine’s Day trip last year, but her boyfriend, Chan Tong-kai, 19, did.”

Investigating, the Hong Kong police eventually learned that the couple had an argument, she told him that she was pregnant by another man, they had a fight, and he killed her. The Times reported: “He would later tell the Hong Kong police that he had strangled her, stuffed her body in a suitcase and dumped it in a thicket of bushes near a subway station in Taipei.” Then he escaped back to Hong Kong, which does not have an extradition treaty with Taiwan (Hong Kong has extradition treaties with many countries including the US, but not with Taiwan, Macau, or mainland China). The Hong Kong police informed the Taiwan police, who found the body in the suitcase.

Thus, the proposed law was a response to a grisly murder, and an attempt to create a legal basis for returning a murderer to Taiwan. The law carefully stated that extraditable crimes must be crimes in both Hong Kong and the jurisdiction to which the person is being extradited to (“double criminality”); the crime must be serious enough to be punishable by imprisonment for seven years or more, and all extraditions must first be approved by a Hong Kong court on a case by case basis and then confirmed by the Hong Kong Chief Executive. Political crimes are clearly excluded from extradition.

The law was initiated by Hong Kong’s Chief Executive, Carrie Lam, who among other points said that her proposal was partly in response to Poon Hiu-wing’s mother, who begged Carrie Lam not to let her daughter’s murderer get away. Mainland China was initially silent on the issue until the British and U.S. governments started demanding that the law be withdrawn or consequences might follow. Then mainland China said that this was an internal Chinese issue, and other nations should butt out.

Opinion in Hong Kong was divided and there were large demonstrations in support of the Hong Kong government (see the videos in the Resources list, below), but this was not reported in the U.S. This refusal by the U.S. media to report both views of people in Hong Kong was unfair and scandalous. The political division within Hong Kong on the issue of Hong Kong’s relationship to mainland China is long standing, very deep, and partly generational – young people more often have idealistic ideas about “American/British style democracy,” older people more often remember that they didn’t have any democracy under British rule, and the racist British oppression during a century of colonialism.

The demonstrations against the extradition bill and the Hong Kong government escalated to violent levels beyond anything previously seen there in recent years, when anti-government protesters wearing black and often covering their faces began attacking police with bricks, homemade spears, and other objects. The protesters attacked the Hong Kong legislative building and trashed it causing extensive damage, while police withdrew from the scene and did not stop them. This caused the South China Morning Post, which had initially been supportive of the protesters, to post a video

At various points during the protracted protests the police used tactics ranging from doing nothing, to verbally trying to calm people, to using tear gas, clubs, and rubber bullets. But nothing worked and the violence on all sides including the black clad protesters and white clad counter-protesters escalated. The protesters, now rioters, continued further escalation with no limits. The black clad anti-government protesters accused the police of both brutality and of doing nothing to protect them from the white clad counter-protesters.  See the video documentation, “A year of anti-government protests in Hong Kong” by the South China Morning Post

There is strong evidence that U.S. government funding was and is still going to organizations behind the extradition law protests via the National Endowment for Democracy, which funds pro-Western groups formerly funded by the CIA. Singapore’s Straits Times documented millions of US dollars going to Hong Kong dissident groups (see “Resources” below).  A faction of anti-government protesters have been found to have been storing explosives and other weapons of terrorism. The protesters also have displayed a degree of organization far above protesters almost anywhere else in the world, to the level of an almost military operation, raising questions about whether the leaders received training somewhere. Multiple bills were passed in US congress supporting the protestors. But the Western media downplayed or did not investigate these aspects.  Leaders of the anti-government protests, including Jimmy Lai and Nathan Law, met with high ranking US officials including Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and high officials of the US consulate.

This is part of a pattern of the American media reporting only one side of many issues involving China and Asia, too often painting complex issues in black and white with China and Asia being judged purely by American values without regard to Chinese and Asian values and views, actual facts, situations, and ignoring the actual complexity and different sides of issues.

This is also a part of the U.S. Pivot to Asia, intended to “contain” China and maintain American dominance in Asia, which is part of the U.S. global aim to dominate the entire world whether it’s in the Middle East, Asia, Latin America, Africa, or anywhere. Part of this strategy requires demonizing China and by extension, casting suspicion on anyone who advocates restraint or balance, including members of the Chinese community here in America. But as in America’s “forever wars,” we Americans simply can’t dominate the whole world, people everywhere will resist. Peace and mutual cooperation are the only sane alternatives.

In the end, the violence of the Hong Kong protesters, more commonly referred to in the Chinese American community as “rioters,” lost them the support of the majority of people in Hong Kong. As many of their own participants melted away and simply withdrew from the violence, the rioters’ numbers declined sharply, and eventually their final elements made a last stand at Polytechnic University where the majority were arrested, and the 2019 rioting finally ended. China made a National Security Law which outlawed subversion of the state and collusion with foreign countries.  The United States loudly denounced the defeat of the 2019 rioters and the new national security law as authoritarianism and a form of  human rights oppression.  But if you compare the Hong Kong National Security Law to its counterparts in the US or the UK, you find that in fact the Hong Kong law is quite normal as national security laws go.  Please see the “Resources” list below for the full text of the Hong Kong and United States national security laws, and judge the comparison for yourself.

The US and its allies soundly denounced the handling of the Hong Kong rioters as an authoritarian “crackdown.”  But compare it to how the United States itself handled a similar but less lengthy situation. Here’s what I wrote after the January 6, 2021 riot in Washington, DC:

A crowd of thousands of Trump supporters storm the Congressional building on Capitol Hill. They climb the walls, they break through the doors, and they throw rocks, boards, and other objects at the police. The US mainstream media and Washington officials call the crowd “a mob,” “rioters,” and denounce them as “un-American,” people who would tear down our democracy. The crowd fights with the police. One rioter, a woman, is shot and killed by police. The crowd occupies congressional offices and poses for pictures. The National Guard is called in, not only from Washington, DC, but also from surrounding areas. Police from nearby states, FBI, Secret Service, and other agencies come from nearby states as well. After hours of struggle, the police and soldiers push the rioters out of the building. The mayor of Washington declares a 6 pm curfew, and immediately after 6 pm, police and soldiers push the demonstrators out of the area immediately around the capitol building. The media and congressional officials describe the events of the day “shocking,” saying this is what happens “in banana republics,” not the United States of America. They claim to never have seen this before, and that “this isn’t who we are.”

Hong Kong, July 1, 2019: A crowd of hundreds storm the Legislative Building in Hong Kong, using a battering ram to smash the front door and enter the building. They charge into the building, occupying it for several hours, painting anti-government slogans on the walls, smashing furniture and damaging the building’s interior, and draping Hong Kong’s former colonial era flag on the podium. Police had withdrawn and were not present, but were accused of brutality anyway. That accusation, proven false by news videos of the scene—including Western news videos—was then used as an excuse for hundreds of thousands of protestors to go on rampages for the remainder of 2019, throwing rocks, bricks, and petrol fire bombs at police, firing at the police with bows and arrows, attacking police with sticks, metal rods, knives, spears, and other deadly weapons, and beating up civilian bystanders who voiced any disagreement with the protesters.

At the Hong Kong airport they blocked international passengers getting off or going to flights, tied up, beat, and tortured a mainland China reporter, and throughout Hong Kong smashed and burned stores they thought were either connected to the Chinese mainland—including American chain stores that were headquartered on the mainland—or not supportive of the demonstrators, and smashed and set fires in Hong Kong subway stations, often with passengers trapped in the stations. Rioters killed one elderly civilian and set another man on fire with gasoline. Police officers were cut by knives, wounded by arrows and fire bombs, and beaten with sticks. But throughout an entire year of such attacks, the police did not kill one person. The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) stayed in their barracks and never engaged the rioters, not even when the rioters went to their army base and threw rocks and fire bombs at it. Riot police in nearby mainland China never went to Hong Kong.</p?

What’s the connection? The United States government funded and actively supported the Hong Kong rioters. Our government not only had “seen” this before, we promoted it overseas. The US National Endowment for Democracy (a CIA spin-off operation) gave millions of dollars over the course of years to protest groups in Hong Kong, high ranking American officials including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Julie Eadeh, who is a US consulate official, and others met with protest leaders in Hong Kong and in the States, and publicly declared their support for the protesters, claiming they were fighting for “democracy.” But Hong Kong, according to the conservative think tank, the Cato Institute, was rated the third most democratic place in the world, while the US itself was rated number seventeen. Not reported in the Western media was the fact that there were also large demonstrations in Hong Kong in support of the Hong Kong government. The US has a long history of engineering coups, “color revolutions,” and other ways of overthrowing governments that don’t bend the knee to our wishes, be they in Asia, Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, or elsewhere. Now a riot mob has come to Washington. It seems there is indeed truth to the old saying, “What goes around, comes around.

But there is one major difference between Hong Kong last year and Washington, DC, today. The mob in Washington was not aided or abetted by any foreign government; not China, not Russia. No, indeed. Today’s mob was aided and abetted by a US government official – the democratically elected President of the United States.

The Washington riot lasted only one day; the Hong Kong riots went on for an entire year. No fire bombs were thrown in Washington, no one was covered in gasoline and set on fire, or killed by the rioters.  All that happened in Hong Kong.  Yet it was the United States that bought in the army, not China.  It was the United States that bought in police forces from outside the city, not China.  And if you research the prison sentences given to convicted rioters in Washington and Hong Kong, you will see that the Washington rioters generally got harsher sentences with more prison time.  Don’t take my word for it, do your own research. See which country is the harsher, more authoritarian nation.

Conclusion

What does this all mean for your island of Taiwan? I think that many are looking at the devastation in Ukraine and asking if the same fate awaits you.  And well you should ask.  But Ukraine is just the tip of the iceberg.  You should look at the whole pattern of US  abuse of  other nations, friends and foes alike, and the results.  Just in my lifetime, the toll includes the devastation of Viet Nam, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Haiti, Libya, the governments overthrown through coups or “color revolutions” in Central and South America, Africa, and the Middle East, and elsewhere.  Millions died, were disabled for life, lost loved ones, or became refugees because of these American wars. None of these countries threatened or attacked the United States.

I came to this personal realization of US aggression and treachery slowly.  But I believe you should learn from other’s mistakes rather than make your own.

But why does the United States attack nation after nation and destroy them?

Why? Professor John Walsh explains it clearly in his article, WWII redux: The endpoint of US policy, listed below. After World War 2, the US emerged as a superpower because all the other great powers – Germany, the USSR, Japan, and other European nations – lay in ruins after fighting each other.  The United States built up South Korea and Japan because it needed to pit all the nations of Asia against each China so the US could remain dominant over all.  It is the classic Colonial Era strategy of divide and conquer, updated for modern times.

Then, after the Soviet Union fell, the US became the number one world power.  Now, the US is trying to recreate that WW2 scenario, pitting the European nations against Russia and the various Asian nations against China, in hopes that they will all devastate each other and again leave the US as the lone standing superpower.  Professor Walsh quotes US historian Alfred McCoy:

“Like all past imperial hegemons, US global power has similarly rested on geopolitical dominance over Eurasia, now home to 70% of the world’s population and productivity. After the Axis alliance of Germany, Italy and Japan failed to conquer that vast landmass, the Allied victory in World War II allowed Washington, as historian John Darwin put it, to build its ‘colossal imperium … on an unprecedented scale,’ becoming the first power in history to control the strategic axial points ‘at both ends of Eurasia.’

“As a critical first step, the US formed the NATO alliance in 1949, establishing major military installations in Germany and naval bases in Italy to ensure control of the western side of Eurasia.

“After its defeat of Japan, as the new overlord of the world’s largest ocean, the Pacific, Washington dictated the terms of four key mutual-defense pacts in the region with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines and Australia, and so acquired a vast range of military bases along the Pacific littoral that would secure the eastern end of Eurasia.

“To tie the two axial ends of that vast landmass into a strategic perimeter, Washington ringed the continent’s southern rim with successive chains of steel, including three navy fleets, hundreds of combat aircraft, and most recently, a string of 60 drone bases stretching from Sicily to the Pacific island of Guam.”

The picture is clear: The US wants to use your island as a proxy – like Ukraine – to start a war that will draw in other players in Asia, ending with the destruction or devastation of all, and again leave the United States as the lone superpower standing.  This is the classic “Divide and Conquer” strategy used by the European Colonial Powers during their era of dominance. And being an American ally is deadly here, as we can see in Ukraine.

As for US loyalty or genuine concern for freedom, democracy, or the people or leaders of your island, remember the fate of Ngo Dinh Diem and Saddam Hussein.  They, too, once trusted and believed in the United States.

Whatever you do, don’t let this be your fate.  Don’t play the US game; play your own game.  War will destroy you.  Peace is your only hope for survival.  Do whatever it takes to maintain the peace. As Henry Kissinger once said, “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.” 

Again, my best wishes to you for peace and prosperity, long into the future.

Michael Wong
National Vice President,
Veterans For Peace,
United States of America

Resources:

• The Pentagon Papers, by the New York Times, 1971.
• The Truth About Tonkin – US Naval Institute
• The Collapse of the Armed Forces by Col. Robert D. Heinl, Jr., North American Newspaper Alliance, Armed Forces Journal, 7 June, 1971:
• Documentary film about the anti-war movement within the US military – Sir! No Sir!
• The Ground Truth, documentary of the Iraq war veterans: Trailer , from Amazon
• United States Interventions – ReVista, Harvard Review of Latin America
• The Semiotics of Face Slashing in South Korea
• The US is Set on a Path to War with China. What Is to be Done?
• US is maintaining tensions with North Korea to draw in allies against China
• WWII redux: The endpoint of US policy by Professor John Walsh
• Stark contradiction at root of US-China conflict, by Professor John Walsh
• Secret plan for global dominance leaked – Nury Vittachi
• The Coming War With Japan, by George Friedman and Meredith Lebard
• Vincent Chin was beaten to death 40 years ago. His case is still relevant today:
• What Many US Corporate Media Hide About Hong Kong Crisis
• “A year of anti-government protests in Hong Kong” – South China Morning Post
• Hong Kong protests: Pro-government supporters rally in Tamar Park – CNA
• Pro-China Protesters In Hong Kong Denounce Anti-Government ‘Rioters’ | TIME
• Pro-China and anti-government protesters in musical standoff – South China Morning Post
• A day after Kowloon protest, Jimmy Lai Meets Pence, Pompeo on Hong Kong Issues – First Post
• Hong Kong activist Nathan Law meets US Secretary of State Pompeo in London –Taiwan News
• Storming The U.S. Capitol—Hong Kong Comes to Washington
• Full text of the Hong Kong National Security Law
• Full text of the United States National Security Act
• The Straits Times is a mainstream Singapore newspaper founded in 1845.  Here they report on the US’ National Endowment for Democracy’s money to the Hong Kong protests of 2019, as well as money from Jimmy Lai
• Secret doc AND modern policy aims to slow development in China – Nury Vittachi
• A Call to Action: Lessons from Ukraine for the Future Force
• Will Schriver explains in his essay, “The Fleeting mirage of imagined supremacy“: “the US could only sustain high-intensity industrial-scale warfare for 6 – 8 weeks, at most, until severe losses, munitions exhaustion, and broad-spectrum logistical breakdowns compelled them to cease operations”
• The Wall Street Journal quote from Henry Kissinger: