This week Secretary of State Marco Rubio – supposedly one of the more intelligent members of Donald Trump’s grotesque cabinet of cranks – sought to impress the media by suggesting that the US would “unleash Chiang” on the defiant Iranians.
Some American journalists showed they hadn’t the foggiest idea what Rubio was talking about, by reporting his comment phonetically as “Unleash Chang”.
But it turns out Rubio didn’t know what he was talking about either.
The phrase dates back to the 1950s when an earlier version of the boneheaded American ‘right-wing’ – typified by the John Birch Society – called for the Chinese nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek and his exiled Kuomintang forces to be “unleashed” against Mao’s communists.
The Birchers’ notion was typically daft. Chiang’s party was notoriously corrupt and chaotic. Their army had already been thoroughly beaten by the communists and had zero chance of winning back control of China.
But in the fantasy world of the American ‘right’ – similar in some ways to the crackpot world of today’s online ‘right’ – Chiang was only losing because he was being kept on a ‘leash’ by feeble liberals in the US State Department. Hence the slogan: “Unleash Chiang”.
President George H.W. Bush (i.e. the older of the two President Bushes) was one of those “liberal” Republicans, and he showed his contempt for the Bircher fantasies by joking when losing at tennis that it was time to “unleash Chiang”. This family joke was sometimes repeated by his son Jeb, and Jeb Bush’s sometime ally in Florida politics (and later rival) Marco Rubio must have picked up the phrase without understanding it.
In an odd way, Rubio’s idiocy underlines a frequent American problem.
The American right – with Trump as the latest and crudest example – believe that if only they can project “strength” around the world, they can remake it in their image.
Chiang Kai-shek’s Chinese ‘nationalists’ took advantage of this naive attitude and also took advantage of American greed. Their notoriously corrupt ‘China Lobby’ poured cash into the coffers of American conservatives for decades, with Chiang’s banker brother-in-law T.V. Soong holding the purse strings.
The Kuomintang and their allies in South Korean and Japanese ‘right wing’ politics and organised crime bankrolled a ‘World Anti-Communist League’.
Genuine patriots from both Europe and the USA (including the late Dr Roger Pearson) were sidelined after this “League” fell under the spell of Zionist wirepullers such as the arms dealer Shaul Eisenberg, whose sinister dealings with the Mossad and KGB agents Robert Maxwell and Armand Hammer have been examined in an earlier blog article here and in a video podcast here.
The clearest example of this sinister influence was the close relationship between Robert Maxwell and the Japanese gangster and leading WACL figure Ryoichi Sasakawa.
Far from keeping Chiang on a leash, it was Chiang who kept American conservatives in line and on the KMT payroll. This even extended to allowing his wife to have an affair with the alcoholic womaniser and Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie.
While American conservatives were once paid off by Chiang and his South Korean allies, today they are variously the puppets of Israeli and Russian interests – and sadly the same goes for many so-called ‘leaders’ of the ‘far right’.
It’s difficult to know which is worse – the crass stupidity of the ‘right’ or their greed and corruption. Marco Rubio’s bumbling reference to “unleashing Chiang” reminds us that both these phenomena are nothing new.
