“National Assembly Symposium on the Historical Importance of the Ancient Ruins at Jungdo”
Presentation at the Library of the National Assembly of the Republic of Korea by Emanuel Pastreich at 3:30 PM on “The perspectives of Western scholars on the value of the ruins at Jungdo and approaches for their preservation”
This symposium is a response to the recent move to destroy much of these yet unresearched ancient ruins to make way for the amusement park “Lego Land.”
Huey Long was the main political challenger to the New Deal policies of the Roosevelt administration after it failed to deliver its promised relief to Americans in the first years of the administration (which Long had initially supported). Long launched his “Share Our Wealth Society” as governor of (and later senator from) Louisiana. He transformed that backwards state into a space for remarkable social and economic innovation aimed at the working man and he made efforts to address racial discrimination that others (like Roosevelt) dared not.
Long delivered a series of powerful speeches in 1934 and 1935 that moved the nation as he prepared to run for president as an independent, not dependent on the Democratic or Republican Parties.
Long was assassinated on September 10,1935, just as he started to achieve significant political impact. That murky incident was most likely planned and carried out by those representing global finance in New York and London who feared his calls to redistribute the wealth, not as a communist ideological movement, but in accord with the teachings of the New Testament and the principles of the Constitution. That argument had such a broad appeal, and had such a convincing internal logic, that it spread like wildfire across the country.
Although I most certainly do not support all of Long’s policies, he offers much that we cannot ignore.
I feel that Long’s critiques are essential for us to consider as we try to understand how today’s crisis is a product of the failures of the New Deal.
Roosevelt was forced to address social injustice directly because of the powerful criticisms he received from Huey Long and from Charles Coughlin through his social justice movement.
Roosevelt also received justified criticism from the American Communist Party which cited examples from the Soviet Union of how that country had avoided the worst of the depression through the use of a planned economy and the creation of a collectivist economy.
These three powerful critiques pushed Roosevelt away from his Harvard pals and wealthy patrons and made him truly a “traitor to his class” for the purpose of his political survival.
Moreover, it was the failure of the New Deal to address the contradictions of the Federal Reserve that led us to where we are today. If we do not look at the proposals of Long and Coughlin, we cannot solve the problems we face today.
Dismissing them as fascists is simply not accurate or productive.
I contend, my friends, that we have no difficult problem to solve in America, and that is the view of nearly everyone with whom I have discussed the matter here in Washington and elsewhere throughout the United States—that we have no very difficult problem to solve.
It is not the difficulty of the problem which we have; it is the fact that the rich people of this country—and by the rich people I mean the super-rich—will not allow us to solve the problem, or rather the one little problem that is afflicting this country, because in order to cure all of our woes it is necessary to scale down the big fortunes, that we may scatter the wealth to be shared by all of the people.
How many of you remember the first thing that the Declaration of Independence said? It said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that there are certain inalienable rights for the people, and among them are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness;” and it said, further, “We hold the view that all men are created equal.”
Now, what did they mean by that? Did they mean, my friends, to say that all men were created equal and that means that any one man was born to inherit $10 billion and that another child was to be born to inherit nothing?
Did that mean, my friends, that someone would come into this world without having had an opportunity to have one lick of work, that another should be born with more than what all of his children and his children’s children could ever dispose of, but that another man would have to be born into a life of starvation?
That was not the meaning of the Declaration of Independence when it said that all men are created equal.
Nor was it the meaning of the Declaration of Independence when it said that they held that there were certain rights that were inalienable—the right of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Do we have that right of life, my friends, when the young children of this country are being reared into a sphere which is more owned by 12 men than it is by 120 million people?
Is that, my friends, giving them a fair shake of the dice, or anything like the inalienable right of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, or anything resembling all people created equal; when we have today in America thousands, and hundreds of thousands, and millions of children on the verge of starvation in a land that is overflowing with too much to eat and too much to wear?
I do not think you will contend that, and I do not think for a moment, that they will contend it.
Now let us see if we return this government to the Declaration of Independence and see if we can do anything about it. Why should we hesitate, or why should we quibble, or why should we quarrel with one another to find out what the difficulty is, when we know the Lord told us what the difficulty is, and Moses wrote it out so a blind man could see it, and then Jesus told us all about it, and it was later written up in the Book of James, so everyone could read it.
I refer to the Scriptures, now, my friends, and give you what it says not for the purpose of convincing you of my wisdom, not for the purpose of, ladies and gentlemen, of convincing you that by quoting the Scripture I am to be more believed than someone else; no, I quote you the Scripture, or rather refer you to the Scripture, because whatever you see there you may rely upon.
The Scripture says, ladies and gentlemen, that for a country to survive it is necessary that we keep the wealth scattered among the people, that nothing should be held permanently by any one person., and that fifty years should be the year of jubilee in which all property is scattered about and returned to the sources from which it originally came, and every seventh year, the debt shall be remitted.
We have in America today more wealth, more goods, more food, more clothing, more houses than we have ever had. We have everything in abundance here.
We have the farm problem, my friends, because we have too much cotton, because we have too much wheat, and have too much corn, and too many potatoes.
We have a home-loan problem because we have too many houses, and yet nobody can buy them or live in them.
We have trouble, my friends, in the country because we have too much money owing; this is the greatest indebtedness that has ever been given to civilization.
It has been shown that we are incapable of distributing actual things because the people do not have money enough to purchase them, and because the greed of a few men is such that they think it necessary to own everything.
Their pleasure consists in the starvation of the masses, and in possessing things they cannot use, and that their children cannot use. Still they bask in the splendor of sunlight and wealth, casting darkness and despair, and impressing that image on everyone else.
I am going to tell you what the wise men of all ages and all times, down even to the present day, have all said: that you must keep the wealth of the country scattered, and you must limit the amount that any one man can own.
You cannot let any man own $300 billion or $400 billion. If you do, one man can own all of the wealth that the United States has in it.
Now, my friends, if you were off on an island where there were one hundred lunches, you could not let one man eat up the hundred lunches, or take the hundred lunches and not let anybody else eat any of them. If you did, there would not be anything left for most people to consume.
So, we have in America today, my friends, a condition wherein ten men dominate the means in at least 85 percent of your activities. They either own directly everything, or they have got mortgage on it, excepting a very small percentage.
They own the banks, they own the steel mills, they own the railroads, they own the bonds, they own the mortgages, they own the stores, and they have chained the country from one end to the other until there is not any business that a small, independent man could go into today and make the money to buy an automobile with.
They have finally, gradually and steadily, eliminated everybody from the fields in which there is a living to be made, and still they want to get even more business out of it.
If you reduce a man to the point where he is starving to death, bleeding and dying, how do you expect that man to get hold of any money to spend? It is not possible.
How do you expect people to live, when the wherewithall cannot be had?
If I were in their place tonight, the place where millions are, I hope that I would have the fortitude to praise and to honor my government here in this land with too much to eat and too much to wear. But many starve in order that a handful of men can have more that they can ever eat, or they can ever wear.
Now, we have organized a society, and we call it the “Share Our Wealth Society,” a society with the motto, “Every man a king.”
Every man a king means that there will be no such thing as a man or woman who does not have the necessities of life, that no one will be dependent upon the whims and caprices of the financial giants for a living.
What do we propose by this society?
We propose to limit the wealth of big men in the country.
Corporate newspapers and social media have been flooded with horrific images of the Shanghai lockdown for the last week, a massive enterprise that has confined millions of Chinese to their homes for weeks and has resulted in the implementation of severe restrictions on access to basic supplies.
Images of citizens yelling from their apartments in frustration, or screaming heartfelt protests in moving soliloquies, videos of drones and robots patrolling the empty streets of Shanghai, present us with a terrifying vision of the totalitarian rule by technology that so many have predicted.
The underlying message is that China is the source of this nightmare.
The official story put out by the city of Shanghai, and not denied by the Chinese Communist Party, is so extreme as to invite ridicule.
A new “zero tolerance” policy for COVID-19, which is a bogus non-existent disease in the first place, was imposed on all Shanghai citizens, first on the East side of the Huangpu River from March 28, and then for the entire city from April 1st. Supposedly all citizens will be tested for COVID-19. According to media reports, only 26,087 new cases of COVID-19 have been found, and of those, only 914 were symptomatic (and there were no pictures of bodies on the ground, as was in the case in Wuhan at the end of 2019).
That is to say that the justifications for the lockdown are so absurd as to make the entire process farcical, perhaps an action intended to show citizens that they must do exactly what they are told to do, no matter how ridiculous and groundless the premises are.
The Western corporate media had a ready answer for what was going on: The Chinese Communist Party, following its undemocratic socialist ideas, is violating the fundamental rights of citizens that we Westerners respect.
The American Jack Posobiec, who refers to himself as a “veteran Navy intel officer,” posted extensively on Twitter about the lockdown, blaming Communism and making statements like “This is what the CCP is doing to the 26 million people of Shanghai.”
Human Rights Watch was quick to condemn China for its human rights violations in Shanghai, stating on April 6 that “The Chinese government should respect the right to health and other basic rights in its response to the Covid-19 surge in the country,” but did so without any reference to similar, or worse, policies being carried out around the world.
The problem is that although this lockdown is blamed on Communism, there is no precedent for the shutdown of a major city too be found in the Chinese communist tradition; no part of the imposition of technofascism can be traced back to the calls of Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai for class struggle and for resistance to imperialism.
The model for the Shanghai lockdown, it turns out, is the lockdown of Boston after the Boston Marathon bombing of April 15, 2013, exactly nine years ago. On that occasion, the United States Federal government, specifically the FBI, used a murky charge of a terrorist attack (about which serious doubts remain) as an excuse to lock down vast sections of the city of Boston and to confine citizens to their homes while armed police patrolled the streets.
Boston Lockdown of 2013
The question we should ask is whether what is taking place in Shanghai is being organized by the same people who organized the Boston lockdown, and similar lockdowns around the world over the last two year, and not by the Chinese Communist Party—or not primarily by the Chinese Communist Party.
Horrific videos of Chinese committing suicide by jumping from their windows were also widely circulated, and they may have been real, but there is no reason to assume anything is true just because it was broadly circulated.
Another popular video featured a dog-shaped robot (that resembles a Boston Dynamics SpotMini) patrolling the streets with a microphone on its back telling the people of Shanghai to stay inside. Anyone who looked at the video with critical eyes had to be doubtful. The speaker was carelessly strapped to the back of the robot with barricade tape in what appears to be a careless stunt, and it was most certainly not representative of government policy.
But the giveaway that this lockdown has silent partners who had nothing to do with the CCP bureaucracy was the constant harping in the Western media on the suffering of animals in Shanghai. Images of live cats rounded up and put in bags for disposal were pasted all over the internet, along with a video of a Chinese man cruelly holding a dog in pain with a device and then dropping it into a container with other injured dogs. Although the video certainly was disturbing, I dare horrified Americans to watch a video of a factory-scale slaughterhouse in the United States for even few minutes.
The focus on cruelty to animals is a standard in the operation to demonize Russia in the Ukraine. For example, a call by “Soi Dog co-founder John Dalley” for help to rescue the dogs and cats of Ukraine has been broadly circulated in the United States.
There are numerous indications that the Shanghai lockdown is being marketed for the Western audience as the equivalent of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The narrative presented is of a cruel totalitarian Communist government in China that oppresses the poor citizens of Shanghai who yearn to be free from these unreasonable “zero covid” restrictions (but no suggestion is offered that covid restrictions themselves are wrong).
MSN reported, “There are videos of locked-up residents chanting ‘we want food’ and ‘we want freedom.’ In a video, citizens are seen going to their balconies and protesting against the lack of supplies.”
But the videos, the reports, are just too perfect, to carefully staged.
Shanghai Shutdown as war by other means
The details of the actions by American operatives (perhaps including Israel and other nations) in collaboration with corrupt Chinese officials to plan, and to carry out, this Shanghai lockdown are not available to me. Granted the completely speculative, and often blatantly wrong, reporting that passes for journalism these days, however, I hope that I can be forgiven if I infer, based on the ample evidence I have read in English and Chinese, as to what may be going on behind the scenes.
The Shanghai lockdown must be seen first in proper geopolitical perspective.
China has been subject to high level pressure from Washington D.C. over the last two months in an effort to thwart any possible cooperation with the Russian Federation since Russian troops entered the Ukraine.
Let us consider the critical events leading up to the lockdown.
US President Joe Biden warned the People’s Republic of China on March 18, in a conversation with President Xi Jinping, that there would serious consequences for China if it offered any support for Russia, economic, or, especially, military. White House press secretary Jen Psaki explained, “He made clear what the implications and consequences would be if China provides material support to Russia as it conducts brutal attacks against Ukrainian cities and civilians.”
We do not know what Biden said, but just three days later, on March 21, China Eastern Airlines Flight 5735 was heading for a smooth landing at the Guangzhou International Airport when it suddenly plunged inexplicably into a nosedive. The cause of the crash has yet to be explained—even three weeks later.
Many Chinese believe the arguments made in videos posted on Weibo (and elsewhere) soon after that incident that the crash was the result of a remote hijacking (similar to the 9/11 crashes) probably conducted by United States. The story was confirmed by the American intelligence investigative blog State of the Nation. Moreover, the egregious decision to include a seven-member team from the United States in the formal investigation of this domestic crash suggests something a bit unusual.
Then, on March 28, the Shanghai Municipal People’s Government, not the central government in Beijing that had been easing restrictions, suddenly launched a radical COVID-19 “zero tolerance” policy.
If intelligence operatives for the United States were looking to give China its own “Ukraine,” and to find a new field for the trouble making that they funded in Hong Kong previously, Shanghai was the logical choice.
Shanghai is riddled with global financial interests, with the head offices (or certainly the major branch) for all major multinational investment banks and multinational corporations located there. Their impact on the Chinese economy remains immense.
Shanghai has a history of over a hundred years as a center for global capital with a parasitic relationship to the rest of the nation. It was Shanghai, after all, that offered extraterritoriality to citizens from imperial powers until the 1940s.
Following that tradition, Shanghai today has the most extreme special economic zone policies of any city in China, policies that allow foreign corporations to engage in a broad range of activities without the authorization of the government.
As part of its drive to meet the demands of multinational corporations, the Shanghai government has privatized services and promoted technological solutions to just about everything. Shanghai has been so enthusiastic in adopting smart grids, 5G, online governance, and automation that it won the top rank globally as smart city from Juniper Research this year.
Shanghai has rolled out the red carpet for global finance, giving special privileges to select institutional investors, opening up to just about any investment from offshore, expanding the derivatives markets, and permitting investment banks to create their own “wealth management joint ventures.”
Who might be involved on the Chinese side in this Shanghai shutdown?
There are plenty of billionaires active in Shanghai with close ties to global finance who might be tempted to play the role of an Igor Kolomoisky, the billionaire who created current president of Ukraine Volodymyr Zelensky in response to American encouragement.
For example, we know that the billionaire Ma Yun (Jack Ma), who took enormous amounts of funding from Goldman Sachs and other American investment banks when he created Alibaba as a global marketing and distribution giant that rivaled Amazon, was very unhappy with Chinese policies.
Ma is popular figure among the globalists, and he is a member of the board of trustees of the World Economic Forum.
Although the details are obscure, Ma’s push for the globalist agenda in China ran afoul of state planners in Beijing, Xi Jinping included, two years ago.
Ma established the Ant Group, a financial institution intended to revolutionize finance by creating an unregulated banking system.
The story is that he delivered a speech on October 24, 2020 in which he called for sweeping changes in the banking system. As a result, the central government cracked down on his activities and he has rarely been seen in public since.
Alibaba is headquartered in Hangzhou, near Shanghai, and has its largest presence in Shanghai.
There are also American billionaires interested in using Shanghai as a way to muscle in and open up China to foreign capital. For example, Stephen Schwarzman, CEO of the private equity firm Blackstone, has bought off many intellectuals and government officials in the Chinese Communist Party with his money, especially the more than 100 million USD he gave to establish, among other things, the prestigious “Schwarzman Scholars” Program at Tsinghua University.
Another American billionaire heavily invested in China is John Thornton, founder of the John L. Thornton China Center at Brookings Institution. Thornton is a member of the International Advisory Council of the China Investment Corporation (China’s sovereign wealth fund) and he is constantly pushing to increase foreign influence over China’s financial policy.
Shanghai Lockdown and Global Economic Disruption
The economic disruption caused by the Shanghai lockdown is already being promoted in the corporate media as the reason for delays in the production and delivery of electronics, automobiles, and other household goods that are produced in, shipped through, or dependent on parts manufactured in Shanghai. Although this disruption is true, there is every reason to believe that this situation will be exploited and exaggerated to justify efforts by the super-rich to destroy the global economy further and to impoverish the Earth’s citizens.
Combining a Ukraine crisis that justifies a sudden scarcity of agricultural goods, raw materials, natural gas, and manufactured goods with a Shanghai crisis that shuts down global trade offers globalists an opportunity to explain just about any disruption.
Already plans are in place to adopt a similar zero tolerance policies in the city of Guangzhou, another major manufacturing and finance center. The resulting economic slowdowns, disruptions in supply chains, increasing inflation and shortages will be just what the doctor ordered.
The economic crisis of the Shanghai lockdown has also been employed as an argument for increasing vaccinations in China, predictably, and for introducing the first Chinese-made mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, according to China’s National Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
Differences between Russia and China
There are clear differences in the nature of the attack on Russia through Ukraine and on China through Shanghai. The United States and China, although talk of war has become a constant theme over the last decade, are also highly integrated economies that involve deep cooperation even in the midst of radical political theatre. Moreover, China has refused to respond to the efforts to goad it into military action in Taiwan, Hong Kong or the South China Sea. The attack, therefore, had to be launched in a covert and obscure manner so as to make it appear as if the Chinese Communist Party that the source of the problem because it is abusing the people of Shanghai. As of this moment, there is not a trace of the American hand anywhere in the public discourse.
Russia, by contrast never had the rapprochement with the United States that China had after President Richard Nixon’s meeting with Chairman Mao Zedong in 1972, nor are the economies of the United States and Russia that integrated. There were Russians who studied in the United States, but study in America did not have the same appeal for Russians that it had for Chinese over the last thirty years.
Thus, although there is American investment in Russia, and American interference in Russia, Russia is not so deeply integrated into the American logistics and supply chain, and American investment banks have fewer ties and fewer financial interests.
What needs to be done
The Chinese have been subject to their part of the great reset, serving as guinea pigs for social credit systems that allow for constant surveillance and for the evaluation of citizens via AI, and for the required use of digital payment systems. The globalists most likely targeted China for these experiments, before broader application in the world, because the emphasis on technological development in Chinese society, and Chinese naivety about the negative impact of technological innovation on human society, made the Chinese ready victims.
These technofascist policies are promoted by many bureaucrats in the Chinese Communist Party, but they did not originate in China. They are but a part of a global strategy for control of the world’s economy by the financial elites, cunning men who flatter the Chinese about the effectiveness of their response to COVID-19, and their potential to be innovation leaders through AI.
What is desperately needed in response to the current effort of globalists to induce needless conflicts between nation states, and within nations, through operations like the Shanghai lockdown, is an alliance of citizens in China, Russia, the United States, and other countries against the predations of multinational investment banks and corporations, an alliance that resembles the internationalist anti-fascist movements of the 1930s.
The Shanghai lockdown was designed to increase the isolation of the individual in a technological prison while also creating greater distance between Americans (Westerners) and Chinese who ought to be cooperating to respond to the threat of techno-fascism. It is time for us all to come together in response.
This urinal at a Korean nation park demands that one maintain “social distancing” to create a “circular economy” and achieve “carbon neutrality.”
The description of the reasons that this shadow government prohibits you from using the urinal below mention “COVID-19” but at the top it only has the local for “circular economy” and “carbon neutrality.” Unlike all previous such warning signs, there is no scary COVID virus image anywhere.
Circles and Squares 