You may remember I wrote about China’s 19th Century Taiping Rebellion several months back. For those who think putting Trump in the White House was the most successful intelligence operation in world history: fasten your seatbelts because he was only one piece of it.
As a refresher, mid-19th century China was the target of colonial powers Britain and France trying to penetrate their market. Britain flooded China’s heartland (the Yangtze valley) with opium, rents skyrocketed, ethnic tensions escalated, private mercenary armies proliferated and a militant, nationalistic end-times bastardization of Christianity sprang up that demonized the central government. Sound familiar?
Those ingredients led to the bloodiest civil war in human history with 20-40 million dead. After the war, colonial powers sliced up and exploited pieces of China for a hundred years. It is my opinion that our geopolitical rivals, Russia and China, have been working towards a repeat of this scenario within the United States for two decades.
Let’s start with religion. The Russian Orthodox Church under the Soviet Union was co-opted by the state. Clerics were generally KGB informants. In the 1980s, Vladimir Putin was assigned to the Fifth Directorate of the KGB, which oversaw religious organizations. Kiril, the current Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, has KGB connections and is close with Putin (and probably has been since the 80s). Western missionaries went to the Soviet Union in the 90s and the Russian Orthodox Church sought protection from the state. Yeltsin signed a law in 1997 which banned religious organization which had not been in the country more than 15 years – pretty much everyone that wasn’t in the Russian Orthodox Church.
Russia faced a demographic bomb. Abortion, drug abuse, emigration and alcoholism were shrinking the population. The Russian Orthodox Church was rebuilt and expanded with hydrocarbon money to push nationalism, traditional values and Russian exceptionalism. The Russian state and church move in lockstep – repressing dissenting opinions, and building Russian cultural power. Political and religious repression of minorities and homosexuals escalated each year under Putin’s leadership.
Russia’s version of Christianity is, like all versions, influenced by local history and culture. The Tsarist imprint runs deep and God serves as a stern father, rather than a forgiving one, which happens to coincide with American evangelical Christianity. The Russian church (and state) found the right sympathetic ear, targeting Evangelical adherents in successful online and offline influence ops.
American Christian evangelical leadership succumbed to Russian influence in the same manner as the NRA – money, sex and an easily manipulated cultural inferiority complex. The Russians appealed to their racist and apocalyptic agenda, a useful tool in the kit for American self-destruction.
Russian online propaganda seeds and reinforces evangelical belief that Trump is divinely chosen to carry out God’s plan. Hong Xiuquan, leader of the Tai Ping rebellion, claimed he was Jesus Christ’s younger brother. Like Trump, Xiuquan was a lazy, lifelong underachiever. Unlike Trump, he was not head of state nor was he backed up by Russian intelligence, the folks who invented the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The goal is to literally demonize opponents to create an uptick in mass violence. Russian penetration of social media companies allows them to directly incite those who fit the profile. We can observe the results of this campaign by the right wing obsession with civil war and the extreme violence called for by so-called Christians and their preachers.
China has been quite upfront about its desire to own and control American assets from ports to pork processing, flipping the script on an ex-colonial power. China is less upfront with its involvement with opiate addiction in America’s heartland. China supplies most of the fentanyl, MDMA and synthetic cannabinoids in the United States. These drugs have killed tens of thousands of Americans. The Department of Homeland Security has considered labelling fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction. China, a surveillance state which knows the identity of every person who looks at the “tank man” photo and locks up people in possession of secret Bibles or Korans, feigns ignorance and an inability to stop this poisoning of Americans.
The profits of the drug trade, human trafficking and money stolen from home by Chinese and Russians is then laundered into U.S. assets, corrupting local politicians in much the same way colonial powers subverted the Chinese emperor’s authority in the 19th century. Mitch McConnell and his wife Elaine Chow would have fit right in colonial Shanghai – a regionalist politician selling out his country’s transportation and shipping interests to one colonial power (China), while simultaneously weakening the legitimacy of the central government by assisting another colonial power (Russia) in an attack on the electoral system. The Senate Majority leader was rewarded with millions of dollars through his Chinese shipping magnate wife, dark money contributions and an aluminum plant courtesy of a Russian oligarch. The President and his family have extensive business dealings in both China and Russia, so extensive his son admitted before the election that the lion’s share of their business came from Russia.
After 18 years of war and reliance on private military contractors, the U.S. is awash in mercenaries. Dozens of companies rent out veterans’ war-fighting skills and, like China after the opium wars, employ them to protect private business interests. Transnational organized crime groups (Russian and Chinese) round out the same kind of rogues gallery that existed in pre rebellion China. All of them profit off chaos.
Donald Trump should not expect help from his colonial masters as his regime collapses. It’s in Russian and Chinese interests that his fall be as divisive and inflammatory as possible, setting a match to the kindling they’ve prepared within our borders. An America at war with itself allows Russia and China to manage their version of international order in Eurasia and Africa without American interference. Their goal isn’t a victorious Trump, it is an America on fire.
The Republican nationalists salivating for civil war in the U.S. should take a few minutes to read up on how it turned out for the Tai Ping and, more importantly, for China. A century of chaos and exploitation by foreign interests isn’t exactly a great prize for inciting a civil war.
The United States was founded as a reaction against religious wars and despotism. The founders knew the biggest threat to our republic was a would be a tyrant with foreign backing. The protections they crafted against this insanity are the constitution, separation of church & state, and the rule of law – all of which, coincidentally, are under attack by the Trump administration.
Our enemies want us to fight each other. Be an American and don’t give them what they want. Stand up for the rule of law or you won’t have any.
Wes Clark Jr. 
Wes, that was sufficiently thought provoking and chilling. Divide and let them collapse, Chinese won’t have to swim here for that to happen. Cold War not so “won” after all.
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