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History

The Men Behind the Curtain: The Council on Foreign Relations

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Authors note: This is part one in a series of deep dives into various influential clandestine organizations from the 20th and 21st centuries. This post was originally written for Badlands Media.

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Never before in American history has it been so obvious that the individuals pulling the strings in this country are not our elected leaders.

Joe Biden’s presidency is possibly the best supporting evidence we’ll ever get that American presidents are little more than vestigial figureheads of an international deep-state establishment.

The idea that powerful men conspire behind the scenes is a concept as old as time, and far more than only “fringe conspiracy theorists” have warned about clandestine powers.

Our nation’s founder, George Washington, shortly before he died, read John Robison’s book Proofs of a Conspiracy and immediately opined:

“It was not my intention to doubt that the doctrines of the Illuminati and principles of Jacobinism had not spread in the United States. On the contrary, no one is more truly satisfied of this fact than I am …”

John Robison, among many contemporary and future researchers, was adequately convinced that the machinations of a hidden group of Freemasons known as the Bavarian Illuminati had infiltrated the new world.

Proofs of a conspiracy against all the religions and governments of Europe (1798 edition) | Open Library

British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, as far back as 1856, told the House of Commons:

 “It is useless to deny, because it is impossible to conceal, that a great part of Europe—the whole of Italy and France and a great portion of [then fragmented] Germany, to say nothing of other countries—is covered with a network of these secret societies … And what are their objects? They do not attempt to conceal them. They do not want constitutional government … they want to change the tenure of land, to drive out the present owners of the soil, and to put an end to ecclesiastical establishments [churches.]”

President Woodrow Wilson, who was intimately connected to conspiratorial power, once wrote:

“Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the fields of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”

Former New York mayor John F. Hylan stated in 1922:

“The real menace of our Republic is the invisible government, which like a giant octopus sprawls its slimy length over our city, state, and nation … At the head of this octopus are the Rockefeller—Standard Oil interests and a small group of powerful banking houses generally referred to as the international bankers [who] virtually run the U.S. government for their own selfish purposes.”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was no stranger to secret societies, once said:

 “In politics, nothing happens by accident. If it happens, you can bet it was planned that way.”

Important figures from our history knew secret societies were secretly shaping world events. Did these clandestine groups simply vanish, or are their traditions carried on to this day?

For many, the term ‘secret society’ conjures up images of apron-wearing Freemasons or cloaked figures practicing ceremonial magick, but the clandestine fraternities of today have taken on a more modern appearance. This is exemplified by groups such as the Trilateral Commission, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR,) the elusive Bilderberg Group, and, of course, Klaus Schwab’s very public World Economic Forum.

For our purposes, we’ll be focusing specifically on the Council on Foreign Relations.

The Council on Foreign Relations

The council began as an outgrowth of a series of meetings conducted during World War I. Woodrow Wilson’s confidential advisor, Edward Mandell House had gathered roughly 100 of the most prominent men in the country at the time to discuss the postwar world. This group of foreign policy elite originally dubbed themselves “the Inquiry.” These men helped concoct Wilson’s famous ‘fourteen points,’ which he presented to Congress in January of 1918. The points could be seen as a globalist wish list, calling for the removal of “all economic barriers” between nations, “equality of trade conditions,” and the formation of “a general association of nations.”

The Inquiry

House described himself as a Marxist socialist, yet his actions reflected the more subversive Fabian socialism.

He penned a novel several years prior called Philip Dru: Administrator. It’s claimed that he gave a copy of this work to Woodrow Wilson to read on a trip to Bermuda. In it, House describes a clandestine effort in the United States to establish the central bank, the graduated income tax, and the control of both political parties. Within two years of publication, two of these objectives, if not all three, had already been accomplished.

By late 1918, the stalemate on the Western Front, in addition to the entry of America into the war, forced Germany and the Central Powers to accept terms for peace, paving the way for the subsequent Paris Peace Conference of 1919, which led to the Treaty of Versailles.

Attending the Paris peace conferences were President Woodrow Wilson and his closest advisors, Colonel House, international bankers Paul Warburg and Bernard Baruch and almost two dozen members of ‘the Inquiry.’

The attendees embraced Wilson’s plan for peace, including the formation of a League of Nations. However, under American law, the covenant had to be ratified by the U.S. Senate, which failed to do so, many senators being distrustful of a supranational organization.

Despite this setback, House met with both British and American peace conference delegates in Paris’s Majestic Hotel on May 30th and resolved to form an ‘Institute of International Affairs,’ with branches in both America and England. If they were to be denied their globalist League of Nations, then they would carry on their goals behind the scenes, away from public scrutiny.

The English branch became known as ‘the Royal Institute for International Affairs,’ known today as Chatham House. The US branch was incorporated on July 21st of that year as the Council on Foreign Relations, the name it still goes by today.

The Council’s primary funders included some of the world’s most powerful individuals of the early 1900s.

Oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller, who is arguably one of the most recognized men in American history, is alleged to have helped fund the organization. Other international bankers and financiers Paul Warburg, Jacob Schiff, Otto Kahn, and representatives of the family of J.P. Morgan rounded out the group’s backers.

Interestingly enough, these same funders all happened to have been intimately involved with both the panic of 1907 and the ensuing creation of the Federal Reserve.

The CFR’s founding president was J.P. Morgan Jr’s personal attorney, John W. Davis. Vice President Paul Cravath also represented Morgan properties. The council’s first chairman was Russell Leffingwell, one of Morgan’s partners and trustee of the Carnegie Corporation. Since most of the early CFR members had connections to Morgan, it’s been said that the council was heavily influenced by Morgan’s interests.

The CFR played a key role in American policy during World War II and beyond. Journalist J. Anthony Lucas noted, “From 1945 well into the sixties, Council members were in the forefront of America’s globalist activism.”

According to the CFR’s own mission statement:

The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher dedicated to being a resource for its members, government officials, business executives, journalists, educators and students, civic and religious leaders, and other interested citizens in order to help them better understand the world and the foreign policy choices facing the United States and other countries.

But critics dispute this goal, noting that the CFR has had its hand in every major twentieth-century conflict. Some researchers believe the CFR is set on world domination through multinational business, international treaties and world government. Admiral Chester Ward, retired judge advocate general of the U.S. Navy and a longtime CFR member, was quoted as saying,

“The main purpose of the Council on Foreign Relations is promoting the disarmament of U.S. sovereignty and national independence and submergence into an all-powerful, one-world government.” 

He also went on to warn,

“The most powerful clique in these elitist groups have one objective in common—they want to bring about the surrender of the sovereignty and the national independence of the United States. A second clique of international members in the CFR … comprises the Wall Street international bankers and their key agents. Primarily, they want the world banking monopoly from whatever power ends up in the control of global government”

He detailed the CFR’s methods in a 1975 book coauthored with Phyllis Schlafly titled Kissinger on the Couch:

 “Once the ruling members of the CFR have decided that the U.S. Government should adopt a particular policy, the very substantial research facilities of CFR are put to work to develop arguments, intellectual and emotional, to support the new policy, and to confound and discredit, intellectually and politically, any opposition …”

The inner workings of the CFR may be obscured from the public, but they produce a publication called ‘Foreign Affairs,’ which some believe is used to signal desired policies and future direction to those in power.

Even the Encyclopaedia Britannica admitted,

“Ideas put forward tentatively in this journal often, if well received by the Foreign Affairs community, appear later as U.S. government policy or legislation; prospective policies that fail this test usually disappear.” 

In effect, laws and government policies are not written by the people, but by the CFR for the benefit of the ruling class.

It is worth noting that every US Government administration since the Council’s inception has been packed with CFR members; the Clinton administration had over 100 Council members serving.

(Even Donald Trump’s administration wasn’t free of CFR influence.)

Gary Allen, whose book None Dare Call It Conspiracy sold more than five million copies despite being ignored by the establishment media, commented just before the 1972 national elections,

“There really was not a dime’s worth of difference [between presidential candidates]. Voters were given the choice between CFR world government advocate Nixon and CFR world government advocate Humphrey. Only the rhetoric was changed to fool the public.”

Allen echoed the dismay of many independent researchers of the time, who were suspicious of the CFR’s influence on our elections when he wrote,

“Democrats and Republicans must break the Insider control of their respective parties. The CFR-types and their flunkies and social climbing opportunist supporters must be invited to leave or else the Patriots must leave.”

The CFR’s tentacles are not limited only to presidential cabinets, but reach deep into the intelligence community as well. Almost every CIA director since Allen Dulles has been a CFR member. Researchers have alleged that the CIA, in fact, serves as a security force, not just for corporate America, but for friends, relatives and fraternity brothers of the CFR.

This arrangement seems to serve as a two-way street. According to some researchers, the CFR has long been the CIA’s principal constituency in the American public.

Article II of the CFR’s bylaws states that anyone revealing details of CFR meetings can be dropped from membership, thus qualifying the CFR as a secret society. This has caused the CFR to be the subject of a slew of conspiracies.

The CFR’s invitation-only membership, which was originally capped at 1,600 participants today numbers more than 5,000 of the most influential leaders in finance, commerce, communications and academia.

CFR Admission is an extremely discriminating and grueling process: candidates must be proposed by a current member, seconded by another member, approved by a committee, screened by a professional staff, and then, finally, must be approved by the Board of Directors.

The organization’s secrecy has been thoroughly protected by the western media. Journalist J. Anthony Lucas noted in 1971,

“Analysts of the Soviet press say the Council crops up more regularly in Pravda and Izvestia than it does in the New York Times …” 

The CFR’s Board of Directors has historically been a who’s who of globalist financiers, establishment politicians, representatives of the military-industrial complex and heads of the world’s largest corporations.

Current board members include BlackRock CEO Larry Fink, Emerson Collective founder and Ghislaine Maxwell confidant Laurene Powell Jobs and senior vice president and CFO of Alphabet and Google Ruth Porat, to name a few. The general CFR membership is composed of Wall Street types, international bankers, executives of powerful foundations, members of various think tanks and other tax-exempt foundations. There are also ambassadors, past and present presidents of the United States, secretaries of state, lobbyists, media conglomerate owners, university presidents and professors. Even federal and Supreme Court judges have joined the ranks, along with members of the military from both NATO and the Pentagon.

The running theme is power.

In addition to individual membership, the CFR also offers a corporate membership program, through which subscribing companies are provided a twice-a-year dinner briefing by government officials like the Treasury Secretary or the CIA director.

Some of the major corporate members include Apple, Bank of America, BlackRock, Chevron, Citi, ExxonMobil, Goldman Sachs, Google, Meta, PepsiCo, Nasdaq, and Morgan Stanley. This list is by no means comprehensive; in fact, it barely scratches the surface.

Though it is impossible to know the inner workings of the CFR, it is safe to say that the group’s influence is palpable.

Maybe the CFR is exactly what it claims to be, maybe it’s not.

Are these prestigious individuals merely part of some fancy club? Or are they the archetypal ‘men behind the curtain?’

When it comes to modern secret societies, our enduring uncertainty seems to be the only constant.

Jane Roe: The True Story of the Woman Behind America’s Abortion Precedent

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Ryan DeLarme,
June 27th, 2022

A surprising percentage of younger, modern abortion activists are unaware that Roe v Wade is considered a Supreme Court ruling which established a precedent, not an actual law. Even more still are unaware of the true history behind the court ruling, and the implications that weighed heavily on a single woman.

Norma McCorvey, better known as “Jane Roe”, is a little-known name with a marginalized voice, but her pseudonym is synonymous with abortion access in the United States.

McCorvey was 22 years old when she appeared as a plaintiff in the landmark 1973 case that enshrined a woman’s right to get an abortion. In a reversal that shocked many at the time, McCorvey became a fierce opponent of Roe v Wade, and soon after was all but forgotten by the media.

In 1969 the legendary “Jane Roe” was pregnant for the third time living in the largely conservative south. Her first daughter, whom she birthed as a teenager, was primarily raised by her parents, and the second was put up for adoption.

McCorvey was briefly married at the age of 16 and recalled how her mother beat her when she came out as a lesbian. In addition to her familial crises, McCorvey had a drinking problem and not a penny to her name.

After the birth of her first child, she “quickly realized that she was not fit to be a mother,” nor did she want to be. This is according to author and journalist Joshua Prager, who wrote the book “The Family Roe”.

Faced with the possibility of a third child, McCorvey began to consider abortion. The only problem was that in Texas, the state where she lived at the time, abortion was illegal. In those days, solutions for unwanted pregnancies included secret clinics or traveling to a state that authorized abortion, but at the time McCorvey “simply could not afford it”.

It was at this time that McCorvey was referred to attorneys Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee. The young lawyers had purportedly been seeking a pregnant plaintiff with whom they could take abortion all the way to the Supreme Court. They found exactly what they were looking for in Norma McCorvey and thus “Jane Roe” was born.

The lawyers achieved their goal, the historic decision set the precedent for women to receive abortions, but the ruling came several years later, meaning that the woman credited with setting the precedent for legal abortion never received her abortion. She gave birth to the third child, colloquially referred to as “Baby Roe”, and gave the child up for adoption.

Although initially not involved in the abortion rights movement, McCorvey came out of the shadows in the late 1980s, doing multiple interviews, participating in demonstrations, and even writing the bestseller “I Am Roe.”

Finally seeking the limelight, she fell somewhat short, however, with the feminist movement little inclined to let her speak. “She was not very educated. And they really marginalized her, they pushed her away,” Prager said, explaining that the rejection came as a slap in the face.

Eventually, in the mid-1990s, after years spent defending access to abortion and having even worked in a clinic herself, McCorvey declared that she was opposed to the procedure. The turnaround came shortly after meeting evangelical pastor Flip Benham.

McCorvey became an active Protestant, growing ever more evangelical, before later converting to Catholicism — strongly defending her new convictions along the way.

 “My lawyers did not tell me that I would later come to deeply regret that I was partially responsible for killing 40 to 50 million human beings,” she said during a 2005 congressional hearing.

In one of the saga’s great ironies, Dallas County prosecutor Henry Wade, who argued in the opposite camp before the Supreme Court, was privately in favor of abortion, according to Prager.

It is difficult to know the true feelings of McCorvey, who died in 2017. Prager said that at the end or her life, she told him she was in favor of abortion through the first trimester.

Her oldest daughter, Melissa Mills, expressed outrage at the Supreme Court’s possible reversal of the Roe decision, revealed in a leaked draft opinion in early May. 

“I think mom would be turning in her grave because she was always pro-woman,” Mills told USA Today. Shelley Thornton, McCorvey’s third child also known as “Baby Roe,” never met her birth mother.

A Specter and its Shadow: Civil Disobedience in Cuba and Hong Kong

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Ryan DeLarme,
August 16th, 2021

The difference between the communist system and the capitalist one is that both kick you in the ass, but in the communist one they kick you and you have to applaud, while in the capitalist one they kick you and you can scream. I came here to scream.

— Reinaldo Arenas, Antes Que Anochezca

It’s easy to understand why people are emotionally drawn to the ideals of Communism, Socialism, or what we perceive as the intentions of “the left”, because they at least seem to draw their fundamental motivational source from a place of compassion. Today, well-meaning young Americans see socialism as a chic new system, promising equality and fairness. These are admirable things to want for the world. The unfortunate truth is that this game is not new, it’s more than 100 years old, and whether it’s the rigid, murderous version of socialism put in place by the Soviet Union, or today’s nightmare scenarios in Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Zimbabwe and North Korea, it’s an idea that has never delivered equality, more opportunity, or better lives.

To me, there’s nothing wrong with wanting everything provided for everyone, though obviously, some conservatives would disagree. The real reason we can’t have nice things isn’t that these economic systems don’t allow for it, it’s because some of the 3-5% of the population who exhibit sociopathic tendencies have long exploited the compassion that is present in most human beings. In short, all the good intentions in the world will equate to nothing when there are maniacs at the wheel.

Another glaring problem with this everlasting argument is that young people, myself included, tend to know very little about American history, in particular, the history of the radical left. How would we know? It feels eerily by design that we were never really taught about it, so why would we be concerned? It’s not mind-boggling that some would yearn for something besides an economic system in which businesses thrive not as a result of free enterprise (as originally intended), but rather as a return on money amassed through collusion between the business class and the political class. What I just described is called “crony capitalism” and it can certainly be seen as a negatively polarized usage of the free market system.

Communism and Socialism, however, despite the utopian light they are painted in, have historically been the source of untold death and suffering. The trauma that ALL of these systems have inflicted globally still haunts large portions of the human family. Here in the first world, we cry about crony capitalism (which has caused great suffering in more subtle ways) but we are at least still free to denounce a system that, for the time being, allows us the freedom to have a dissenting opinion.

Like many, I’ve wondered about potential socialist utopias; ways it could go right assuming you somehow had pure altruists controlling the state. But it’s hard to envision positive socialist futures when all we have to draw from in the past are the nightmares of Nazi Germany, Mao’s China, the Marxism-Leninism of the Soviet Union, and Maduro’s Venezuela.  We can, however, learn much about modern socialism/communism, so long as we are willing, from the nearby island nation of Cuba.

Cuba

Cuba’s history has always been deeply intertwined with America’s. It was one of the last of the Spanish colonies in the Americas to declare independence, not actually becoming a Republic until 1902. Cuba enjoyed real freedom for roughly half a century, many consider this time period to be Cuba’s golden age. By and large, Cuba enjoyed a high standard of living for a long time, so much so that people were actually immigrating from Spain to Cuba. The 1950s saw Cuba’s first dictatorship by a man named Fulgencio Batista (who is rumored to have been backed by members of our own military-industrial complex).

Cuba eventually underwent a “revolution” and was labeled a soviet satellite state in the late 1950s and early 1960s. What was propped up as a revolution was simply a new brand of dictatorship devouring the old. Around this time the appearance of Cubans escaping in boats became a common sight off the coast of Florida.

Fidel Castro ruled uncontested for decades and was eventually replaced by the kinder face of Raul Castro, whose reign lasted until Donald Trump was approximately halfway through his time in office. Some had hoped that once the Castro regime ended, everything would revert back to the glory days of half a century prior. This hope was unfortunately a naive fairy tale.

The Cuban State is a monolithic system, and it did not just go away once the seat of power was vacated. Now that Cuba has one Miguel Diaz Canal at the wheel, who rose through the communist party ranks and assumed the position as the Cuban Head of State, business continues as usual.

Let’s dive into the reality of what has been touted as a “very successful socialist experiment”.

Very little exists outside of the state in Cuba, especially in the business sector. There’s a little bit of free enterprise here and there; some sole proprietors and Air Bnb’s, but aside from that everything else is run by the state, forcing Cubans to make their money abroad. Cubans do not have their own private checking accounts and most of the business has been nationalized. In the words of a Cuban immigrant:

“The Image you have of North Korea is not far off from the State of Cuba.”

A young Cuban-American girl recently took to TikTok and shared her truth about the state of Cuba. She claimed that there are no coffins, that when somebody dies in Cuba they wrap them in a sheet and take notes then leave the body to whomever they can find to claim it. In some cases, bodies would simply be tossed into backyards and left to decompose naturally in the Caribbean heat. She claims that electricity and water are cut as soon as the sun goes down each night and that if you dare to speak ill of the Communist party you run the risk of becoming a desaparecido (missing person by way of political suppression). Despite all that looming danger, the people have finally reached a boiling point and are actively protesting against their failed government.

How did these protests start?

According to Cuban American Author and entrepreneur Antonio Garcia-Martinez, the whole thing began when a bunch of disgruntled citizens decided to start yelling at a Communist Party headquarters. The protestors were apparently chanting pro-freedom sentiments and criticizing the State while waving American flags. According to actual Cuban citizens, there is a multitude of reasons for the current public uprising, but the mainstream media would have us believe the unrest is solely due to the people’s desire for better access to COVID pokes. Cuba has had a pretty rough economic situation for a long time, but the human rights violations were what pushed the general public over the edge. Despite their often praised healthcare system, poor access to medical treatment has been a symptom of the root problem, for the Cuban Government.

The people of Cuba are starting to mobilize for the first time in decades, the last time there were coordinated major demonstrations like this was nearly 30 years ago in 1994. When videos of the original protest began surfacing across the internet others were inspired to take action. It must have dawned on the State that allowing the citizens to continue having access to the internet was going to be a problem, so they did what any single party dictatorship worth their salt would do. They cut the internet, creating what in military jargon is called a communications blackout.

Sounds shocking, right? Consider this, it wasn’t actually until about 2008 that Cubans were even allowed to own cell phones, in fact, you could go to jail just for having one in your possession. Eventually, smartphones were permitted, but the internet works a little differently in Cuba. The kind of connection we enjoy here in America doesn’t really exist in Cuba; there are no private internet providers, and the State has the monopoly. To access the internet you can either go to these public access areas (which tend to be expensive and the quality of the connection is quite poor) or you can buy the popular but illegal el Paquete, which is the equivalent of putting a weeks worth of news, music, videos, etc on USB drives and selling them. In essence, it’s like viewing a tiny curated portion of the internet without actually being online. This will cost you 5 CUC (Cuban convertible peso) which in Cuba’s economy takes up a big chunk of the average citizen’s weekly earnings.

Back to the protests, which seemed to pop up, get heated, and then disappear just as suddenly as they came…  at least from our first-world perspective. The truth is that the protests are still ongoing, our Media has simply stopped reporting on them. Another factor that had a major damping effect was the State starting to really crackdown on the protestors, making arrests and even firing people from their jobs. Is any of this starting to sound familiar? On top of all that, the regime has the ability to just shut off the internet, one of the benefits of having everything centralized and controlled by the State.

Then you have BLM; one of several Marxist proxy armies, unironically blasting the United States for what’s happening in Cuba while completely ignoring the failed communist state they seem to love so much. Lest there be any doubt remaining that the Black Lives Matter crew has nothing to do with actual racial justice in America, look no further than their reaction to Cuba’s protests. The group put out a statement, not to condemn the authoritarian regime in Cuba for violently suppressing its people, but to berate the United States for its long-existing sanctions on the Communist state.

“Black Lives Matter condemns the U.S. federal government’s inhumane treatment of Cubans, and urges it to immediately lift the economic embargo,”

BLM said.()

“This cruel and inhumane policy, instituted with the explicit intention of destabilizing the country and undermining Cubans’ right to choose their own government, is at the heart of Cuba’s current crisis.”

The statement is, of course, exactly backward. The US sanctions Cuba precisely because its Communist dictators prevent the Cuban people from “the right to choose their own government.”

Reporter/commentator Nicole Hannah-Jones, who authored the 1619 project and is a staff writer at the New York Times, claims that equality in Cuba is because of socialism. Cuban American Antonio Garcia-Martinez laughs at this statement and quips, “Sure, if you make everyone poor then indeed inequality would be lower”. But even the Washington Post recently ran an article about the plight of Blacks in Cuba. Nicole Hannah-Jones and BLM are by far not the only ones singing the praises of the Cuban government for their own personal benefits. In addition, the likes of Maxine Waters and Sheila Jackson-Lee have previously praised the Castro regime.

The usual pop-culture politicians like Bernie Sanders and AOC hail Cuba as a highly successful example of the “socialist experiment”, citing their amazing healthcare system and literacy program. Apparently, the healthcare system isn’t as great as touted since that is one of the many things the protestors are criticizing, and as far as the literacy program being some great socialist achievement, Antonio Garcia-Martinez claims that Cuba has had a higher literacy rate since well before the revolution.

The rhetoric coming from BLM and the left is that Trump’s trade embargo is the sole cause for all of the troubles in Cuba, this is actually just simple propaganda, but let’s go there for a moment. According to Antonio Garcia-Martinez, virtually none of the protesters on the ground have mentioned nor seem to care about the embargo. Cuba can trade freely with the rest of the world and avoiding trade with the US isn’t considered some new catastrophic thing, but for a short period during the Obama era, this has been standard Cuban/US relations.

Of course, you see the shameless partisan hacks in DC virtue signaling and “standing in solidarity” with the Cuban people by acting to remove the embargo, an embargo that was placed specifically to hinder the very same communist party the Cuban people are now actively protesting against. If you wanted to actually “Stand in Solidarity” and not just stand on the backs of a silenced and oppressed people, then you would try to bring more awareness to the human rights violations instead of warping a tragedy to fit your agenda. While Cuban Americans may claim that changing the Embargo isn’t going to do very much for the people,  it would, however, greatly benefit the State.

How long can these first-world pundits use Cuba as a shining example of a socialist experiment when you can now see (for the moment) videos of Cubans being beaten and arrested in the streets for dissention? Hundreds of Cubans are facing charges of inciting unrest, their families are worried about trials being held without due process, and a lot of these protestors (mostly young people) cannot get independent defense lawyers. The Communist party has released Rapid Reaction Brigades to police and squash all dissent, and while these brigades are carrying out actual government-sanctioned police brutality, BLM doesn’t bat an eye because it’s such a “successful Socialist experiment”.

Suffice to say that the Cuban government is not the biggest advocate for open communication. In a nation where the government limits internet access to control the flow of information, there is no telling how much deeper the abuses run. Cuban dictator Miguel Díaz-Canel openly called for violence when instructing his followers that “the order to combat has been given. Revolutionaries need to be on the streets.” Should the pro-freedom protesters escape a beatdown by unruly communists, they certainly cannot expect fair treatment, competent media exposure, and a trial by a jury once they have been arrested. Yet, they do what they can to make their voices heard just the same.

Many Americans believe the pro-freedom uprising in Cuba is a microcosm of everything we see happening in America today. As politicians and bureaucrats seek to tighten their grip on power, the everyday joe schmoes are stepping up to make their voices heard. Pockets of concerned citizens are fighting back against the onslaught of socialism as it covertly wraps its slimy tendrils around what’s left of the foundations of our constitutional Republic.

What can we do to help, both short term and long term, outside of self-aggrandizing social media posts?

There are documents circulating on the internet that list the names and details surrounding the growing number of desaparecidos, keeping the data centralized and alive. Continuing to share this sort of content keeps the reality fresh in the minds of those who care and is another example of how internet access has shaken things up in Cuba. Ron Desantis, the Governor of Florida, has written an open letter to the Biden Administration saying that the federal government should help restore internet access to the people of Cuba. FCC commissioner Brenden Carr echoed this sentiment and explained how we have the technology to easily override this. The internet, open communication, and freedom of speech are the most disruptful things that exist in a single-party dictatorship, so I believe enabling those three things is key.

Loon LLC, which exists under Sergey Brin’s big-tech umbrella company Alphabet, once used balloons to get WIFI to Puerto Rico when they were going through Hurricane Maria. It sounds wacky but a lot of different private companies have R&D teams working on new ways to transmit WIFI long distance. Facebook was working on a way to use satellites to beam the internet all across the planet, but these supposedly “woke” tech companies would have to actually choose to do this, which will hopefully happen as soon as it benefits them to do so. These are all things that will help but will require compliance of big business and big tech. We can, at the very least, continue to apply pressure and keep the fight alive by writing letters and joining demonstrations here on US soil to raise awareness.

Why Should Americans even care?

What is happening in Cuba is a symptom of a many decades-long push for a global centralized government. If Americans care about freedom and democracy at home and abroad then they should care about the 10 million people living under the yolk of Communism just 90 miles away from US territory. There’s a huge Cuban exile community in Florida who take voting far more seriously than your average young American, and from a strictly political standpoint, people in power should want to help for that reason alone. The real big one though, the crown reason for wanting to help the Cuban people, is simply because it is the right thing to do. I personally cannot imagine an argument where anyone could successfully defend why the Cuban people shouldn’t have free access to the internet and the freedom of open communication with the rest of the world.

The perfectly timed flood of immigrants across the southern border into blue states and federally funded sanctuary cities, creating an easily launderable multi-billion dollar racket is all fine and good, yet the DHS director under Joe Biden recently decided that he didn’t want Cubans coming over. It’s as if they’re saying “Oh, we only want these immigrants over here that benefit us, not those immigrants”.

Despite the poor treatment from the current administration, the Cuban people still wave the American flag and call for freedom. Regardless of whoever is in office at the time, our flag stands for what America could and should be. To those who have been conditioned to hate the country they live in and are the stewards of, I invite you to try living in Cuba for a while.

Hong Kong

A lot of westerners don’t realize that Britain controlled Hong Kong for over a hundred and fifty years, besides a brief Japanese occupation during the second world war, and did not fully return to Chinese rule until 1997. It was ceded to Britain after the First Opium War, becoming a British colony or territory. It wasn’t until the 1970s and 1980s that conversations even began between the Chinese and the British over the future of Hong Kong.

The agreement made in 1997 was that Hong Kong would be allowed to maintain the high degree of autonomy it had enjoyed while under British rule, with all the freedom and basic rights that people in mainland China could only dream of, though Hong Kong would once again belong to China. The agreement stated that for 50 years things would remain unchanged in Hong Kong, this was ratified by the UN and supported by the US. Fifty years of democratic life, 50 years of autonomy. The relevant slogan was “One country, two systems.” Hong Kong would be the little exception in vast, Communist-ruled China. Today, however, the Joint Declaration, which was meant to protect the freedoms and autonomy of Hong Kong, has been eroded, broken, and is worth less than the paper it was printed on.

To be fair, a lot of folks were skeptical from the beginning that a single country could maintain two separate systems, especially when one system is communist and the other is to be pseudo-democratic, free-market capitalist. Actually, Hong Kong was never fully democratic. From 1982 to 1997, Hong Kong went from having no form of an elected government to having a fully elected Legislative Council (though not entirely by geographical constituencies). Under Chinese sovereignty after the 1st of July 1997, Hong Kong had regressed to its pre-democracy days as a result of establishing appointed provisional bodies in place of the elected ones.

There was still freedom of the Press, freedom of speech, freedom to a fair trial, and the freedom of assembly… all of which ran quite contrary to mainland China. These factors, which largely led to Hong Kong becoming a prime financial hub for international business, are nonexistent today. Hong Kong is actually an unprecedented situation, never before have we seen a city or state (of 7 million+ people) have their rights stripped away in such a remarkably short period of time. Hong Kong was promised 50 years of autonomy and received less than half of that.

Vivian Wang and Alexandra Stevenson of the New York Times filed a dispatch from Hong Kong in June of 2021. The subheading for their dispatch read, “Neighbors are urged to report on one another. Children are taught to look for traitors. Officials are pressed to pledge their loyalty.” Here was one detail, among many — not the most horrifying by a long shot, but striking all the same:

“Police officers have been trained to goose-step in the Chinese military fashion, replacing decades of British-style marching.”

If you are unfamiliar with the goose step, take a quick detour to IMG search in your preferred search engines to really get the full ambiance of the picture they’re trying to paint.

The pro-democracy movement is a political camp in Hong Kong that supports increased democracy, namely the universal suffrage of the Chief Executive and the Legislative Council as given by the Hong Kong Basic Law under the “One Country, Two Systems” framework. The movement has been around since before the 1997 handover and typically receives about 55-60% of the vote in each election. The pro-democracy activists emerged from the youth movements in the 1970s and began to take part in electoral politics as the colonial government introduced representative democracy in the mid-1980s. Samuel Chu, Managing Director of the Hong Kong Democracy Council, has been a part of the movement for years and has seen firsthand how China has crippled the movement.

“The pro-democracy movement has been so central and vital for the 30+ years in Hong Kong, (it is) a movement that my father was a leader in, a movement that I have participated in for years, and now, today, all of those leaders of the pro-democracy movement are either in jail, under house arrest, living in exile, or just stripped of their rights to speak out.”

-Samuel Chu

So how did this happen? China was supposed to give Hong Kong 50 years of autonomy but little by little the CCP began seizing more and more control. There wasn’t much that the people could do about it, when China wants to control something it’s going to control it, and the country is historically unapologetic about its’ strong-arm tactics.

Within the aforementioned 50-year deal, it was promised that steps would be taken to ensure universal voting rights to its citizens by 2010. There was an unease among people in the movement as to whether or not even the status quo would remain intact for very long, let alone if China would allow all of Hong Kong’s citizens the right to elect their own Chief Executive and Legislative Council. Instead, by 2010 China had actually reversed its stand, deciding not to go through with the promised democratization. This reversal spurred what was known as the Umbrella Movement and the Hong Kong Democracy Protests of 2014. These protests would prove to be the largest act of civil disobedience in Hong Kong’s history up to that point.

Hong Kong Protests

In the fall of 2014, hundreds of thousands of Hong Kongers took to the streets. For 79 days they took over the financial district and made their discontent known, claiming China had broken its promise to the people. China responded by explaining that to them the agreement was no more than a historic document and was worth nothing. Many members of the Pro-Democracy movement were prosecuted for the peaceful protest in 2014, by the time they were sentenced in 2018 China had proposed a new law giving the CCP the ability to extradite Hong Kong citizens to the mainland to be tried in what is thought of as a highly corrupt and unfair Judicial System.

This is what led to the rise of the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill Movement and their subsequent protests in 2019. Two million Hong Kongers once again took to the streets to voice their distrust toward the CCP and to state as loudly as possible that they did not want their citizens extradited. Samuel Chu, whose father was tried in Hong Kong for organizing the peaceful protests in 2014, claims that the two-year sentence he received from the Hong Kong courts would have been for life if he had been tried on the mainland.

Since that time, in response to the protests on the ground and overseas efforts, China implemented what is called the “National Security Law”. Within this law is article 38, which clearly states that anyone, anywhere, whether or not they be a Hong Kong or Chinese citizen, can be charged under the National Security law for saying or doing anything deemed threatening to the CCP Samuel Chu is no stranger to article 38. Even though he has been an American citizen since 1996 and is really only guilty of advocating for Basic Law in Hong Kong, he has still found himself on a list of fugitives wanted by the CCP.

Some may recall the arrest of free-press advocate Jimmy Lai, which proved that even the head of a multi-million dollar company could not stand against the Chinese Communist Party. Jimmy Lai had been overtly vocal about the CCP’s dealings worldwide, slamming the Catholic Church for signing a treaty or “Provisional Agreement” with the CCP to further the parties’ control over religious freedoms, and slammed Joe Biden prior to the election for kowtowing to party leader Xi Jinping. It didn’t take long for the CCP to completely annihilate Lai’s free press.

Apple Daily was Hong Kong’s largest independent paper for over twenty years and was arguably one of the biggest critics of the CCP still in print, that is until the aforementioned National Security law was used to destroy the entire company. Apple Daily was raided twice by Hong Kong police, once on August 10, 2020, and again on June 17, 2021. These raids and subsequent freeze of capital forced the 26-year-old newspaper to close its doors in June 2021.  As for Jimmy Lai, he has been in jail since last December without any substantial convictions, and will likely remain there indefinitely.

Despite all the slant and spin coming from Fortune 500 news outlets, this story is relevant as we see the behavior of the American mainstream media and Big-Tech platforms beginning to eerily mirror what has been commonplace in both Hong Kong and Cuba. It doesn’t bode well that we have a President who by all accounts appears to be at least in bed if not subservient to the Chinese Communist Party, and has completely neglected the plight of the Cuban people. If the systemic throttling of the free flow of information is allowed to continue unchallenged in America, chances are this type of crackdown could spread worldwide.

Should the US and the UK be more active in trying to help Hong Kong?

Xi Jinping is presiding over what has been called the nastiest and most oppressive period in China’s history since Mao’s cultural revolution. Samuel Chu believes that the US and the UK, who were instrumental in working with China to draw up the foundation for Hong Kong’s short-lived autonomy, should come back to the table and help uphold the promises made to Hong Kong. In many cases concerning the average American citizen, there seems to be a bipartisan desire to stand with the people of Hong Kong, but when it comes to elected officials or to those with the means to do something, the buck has been passed.

As Human Rights Watch noted in a recent report, the Chinese government is now pressing residents to pledge public loyalty to the government in Beijing. It is turning the police and courts into “tools of Chinese state control rather than independent and impartial enforcers of the rule of law.” Candidates considered insufficiently loyal to China have been barred from running for Hong Kong’s electoral council. Academic freedom is under attack. Websites have been blocked, museums harassed, films canceled, political slogans banned, and school curricula rewritten. Sound familiar? Rather than helping Hong Kong stop the death of democracy at the hands of a totalitarian regime, it’s starting to look as though we are copying their playbook instead.

Despite American intervention potentially being a conflict of interest for our current administration, the debate continues as to whether or not the US should do anything. Richard Haass, the former director of policy planning for the U.S. State Department under George W. Bush, has voiced the stance of the western elite:

“We don’t have the luxury of building a foreign policy that is centered on promoting the rule of democracy and human rights, so our influence is limited… We can vent, but we should have no illusions that it’ll change the situation on the ground in Hong Kong. That may seem cruel, but it’s a fact of life.”

Many have interpreted this to mean that what is occurring in Hong Kong is desirable for the international foreign policy elite. Remember, this statement is coming from a man who is now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, a globalist hotbed and arguably the most influential think-tank on the planet.

In contrast to Richard Haas’ pessimism or complete disinterest toward the United States in helping the people of Hong Kong, Samuel Chu’s argument sounds a little more optimistic. Chu claims there is actually a lot that could be done: helping fight censorship and circumvent the coming internet firewall, helping activists get out of the country when China comes after them, working to strengthen the civil society groups, and pressuring businesses in Hong Kong not to go along with the repression are just a few examples. Despite Chu’s optimism, the Biden administration doesn’t seem interested in upholding the right to free speech in its own country let alone in a far-off city.

It is hard to say what’s in store for America, as it stands now the general population seems to be going for each other’s throats in a tribalist partisan pissing contest, one in which neither side would care much about a totalitarian regime in the United States, as long as their team wins. So with the figurative caution signs sounding off all around us,  we can now see that the warnings from Cuba and Hong Kong are falling on deaf ears.  Perhaps even worse, they are being intentionally ignored.

 

SOURCES:

https://justthenews.com/world/latin-america/five-high-ranking-cuban-military-leaders-die-10-day-span?utm_source=justthenews.com&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=external-news-aggregators
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-megyn-kelly-show/id1532976305?i=1000529621052&utm_source=JangoMail&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=Good+News+Friday+July+23+(342711841)&utm_content=

Click to access 4338924-42.Young.pdf

https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/07/hong-kong-snuffed-out/#slide-1

Click to access wang_2013.pdf

https://nypost.com/2020/07/07/chinas-security-law-for-hong-kong-aims-to-block-global-criticism/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Daily_raids_and_arrests

https://www.hrw.org/feature/2021/06/25/dismantling-free-society/hong-kong-one-year-after-national-security-law

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2021-06-30/china-hong-kong-national-security-law