Ron Unz's Disturbing Article On Chas Freeman

No, Unz has nothing disturbing to say about the former ambassador. He simply chronicles the man’s career—one of the most eminent diplomats in US history—cut short by the Anglo-Zionist Israel Lobby. As is typical of Unz, this is a very long article, so you need to persevere to the end to get to the disturbing part (you may think my excerpt is lengthy, but you ain’t seen nuthin’ if you don’t follow the link). That has to do with China, a country and culture with which Freeman is very familiar. Freeman, during the Trump 1.0 years, decried the Cold War against China in an address at Stanford. And then Unz adds some disturbing speculation—admittedly an Unz speciality, but with the addition of some basis in fact. Nothing proven, but in these matters that’s often the point. This may ring some bells with readers and commenters who want Trump to offer an accounting regarding Covid. See what you think.

Ambassador Chas Freeman on Our Cold War Against China

Two caveats. First, Freeman appears to be some sort of Classical Liberal. That means that he’s ideologically opposed to what he terms “mercantilism.” He sees Trump’s tariff plans—then as now—as nothing but power politics—nothing to do with safeguarding the manufacturing base that provides livelihoods for Americans. The giveaway on this is Freeman’s reference to “market-regulated comparative advantage.” I’m not an economist, but I’m sure there’s much more to be said on both sides. The point is that Freeman doesn’t present both sides. By the way, as I like to stress, this ideological framework—I would call it something like philosophy for dummies—also has important ramifications for his Freeman’s views on domestic politics, social issues. The second caveat is simply that what follows are mostly Unz’s views, not Freeman’s (although in the early going Unz is quoting from Freeman’s address at Stanford). Freeman has nothing to say about Covid—that’s all Unz.

Long time readers will recall that I was an early advocate of the theory that Covid was a result of bio-warfare research. The real question was how (accidental, deliberate?) and why it was released. I have seen no reason to change that view but I certainly haven’t gone into this with the thoroughness that Unz has done. If you want to learn more about Unz’s admittedly “controversial hypothesis”, again, follow the link, where you’ll find not only readables but also listenables and viewables.

Under Trump, America demonstrated to both China and the rest of the world that it was totally unreliable in keeping agreements that it had signed, with these wanton acts likely to have very negative long-term political consequences:

The supply chains now tying the two economies together were forged by market-regulated comparative advantage. The U.S. attempt to impose government-dictated targets for Chinese purchases of agricultural commodities, semiconductors, and the like represents a political preemption of market forces. By simultaneously walking away from the Paris climate accords, TPP, the Iran nuclear deal, and other treaties and agreements, Washington has shown that it can no longer be trusted to respect the sanctity of contracts. The U.S. government has also demonstrated that it can ignore the economic interests of its farmers and manufacturers and impose politically motivated embargoes on them. The basic lesson Chinese have taken from recent U.S. diplomacy is that no one should rely on either America’s word or its industrial and agricultural exports.

I’m not an advocate for ignoring treaty obligations, but then again I’m not an advocate for treaties and contracts as suicide pacts. Freeman’s economic views are, as always, highly debatable. I would characterize them as half cocked, but he sees them as warfare pure and simple, which is almost certainly rank over simplification based on an unquestioning acceptance of Classical Liberal received “wisdom”. Such as, that a harmonious international trade order can be constructed that runs, more or less, on autopilot—the “hidden hand.” However, that doesn’t deny his real geopolitical insights.

For these reasons, the impending trade “deal” between China and the United States – if there is one – will be at most a truce that invites further struggle. It will be a short-term expedient, not a long-term reinvigoration of the Sino-American trade and investment relationship to American advantage. No future Chinese government will allow China to become substantially dependent on imports or supply chains involving a country as fickle and hostile as Trump’s America has proven to be. China will instead develop non-American sources of foodstuffs, natural resources, and manufactures, while pursuing a greater degree of self-reliance. More limited access to the China market for U.S. factories and farmers will depress U.S. growth rates. By trying to reduce U.S. interdependence with China, the Trump administration has inadvertently made the United States the supplier of last resort to what is fast becoming the world’s largest consumer market.

And our extremely aggressive military behavior was likely to eventually produce a reciprocal response:

The U.S. Navy and Air Force patrol China’s coasts and test its defenses on a daily basis. U.S. strategy in the event of war with China – for example, over Taiwan – depends on overcoming those defenses so as to be able to strike deep into the Chinese homeland. The United States has just withdrawn from the treaty on intermediate nuclear forces in part to be able to deploy nuclear weapons to the Chinese periphery. In the short term, there is increasing danger of a war by accident, triggered by a mishap in the South China Sea, the Senkaku Archipelago, or by efforts by Taiwanese politicians to push the envelope of mainland tolerance of their island’s unsettled political status quo. These threats are driving growth in China’s defense budget and its development of capabilities to deny the United States continued military primacy in its adjacent seas.

In the long term, U.S. efforts to dominate China’s periphery invite a Chinese military response on America’s periphery like that formerly mounted by the Soviet Union. Moscow actively patrolled both U.S. coasts, stationed missile-launching submarines just off them, supported anti-American regimes in the Western Hemisphere, and relied on its ability to devastate the American homeland with nuclear weapons to deter war with the United States. On what basis does Washington imagine that Beijing cannot and will not eventually reciprocate the threat the U.S. forces surrounding China appear to pose to it?

• On Hostile Coexistence with China
  Remarks to the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies China Program, Stanford University
  Chas W. Freeman Jr. • May 3, 2019 • 5,000 Words

I fully concurred with his warnings about the extremely reckless and counter-productive actions that our government was taking against China. But one of the early paragraphs in his long speech might have held certain very important implications, although I doubt that he himself recognized their significance either at the time or even long afterward.

Freeman had served in government for nearly half a century, sometimes at a very high level, so his assessment of the nature and behavior of the Trump Administration should be taken very seriously:

There is no longer an orderly policy process in Washington to coordinate, moderate, or control policy formulation or implementation. Instead, a populist president has effectively declared open season on China. This permits everyone in his administration to go after China as they wish. Every internationally engaged department and agency – the U.S. Special Trade Representative, the Departments of State, Treasury, Justice, Commerce, Defense, and Homeland Security – is doing its own thing about China. The president has unleashed an undisciplined onslaught. Evidently, he calculates that this will increase pressure on China to capitulate to his protectionist and mercantilist demands. That would give him something to boast about as he seeks reelection in 2020.

OK. I can accept that there does need to be coordination of foreign policy. That’s not the same thing as empowering The Interagency with a veto over policy shifts. I’m not in a position now to judge whether there was “no longer an orderly policy process in Washington” during the Trump 1.0 years. For argument’s sake, Freeman’s complaint may reflect Interagency grievances at seeing their own policies ignored.

So, all the above was Freeman. Now we get to Unz. I have added links when I thought they’d be useful.

That characterization of the Trump Administration was made at Stanford University in early May 2019, but unbeknownst to both Freeman and his entire audience, our government at that point was already half-way through a secret, large-scale defensive exercise that lasted from January to August. Crimson Contagion was intended to prepare our federal and state officials for the hypothetical possible appearance of a dangerous respiratory virus in China. Then around late October 2019, just a few weeks after the conclusion of that exercise, exactly such a mysterious virus suddenly appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan.

Freeman described a Trump Administration that was completely undisciplined and lacked any proper controls but that had strongly encouraged anti-China actions across all its different departments. These factors may have been very germane to the global Covid outbreak.

Beginning in April 2020, I began publishing a long series of articles that repeatedly emphasized exactly that sort of connection, and I’ve stood almost alone on the Internet in being willing to publicly advocate that controversial hypothesis.

Not to be nit-picky, but if Unz’s hypothesis had been widely accepted on the Internet, well, it wouldn’t have been controversial. In what follows, note that Unz somehow fails to mention that Robert Kadlec really was highly involved in the Trump 1.0 biowarfare planning as well as with the whole Covid Regime—so that his presence goes well beyond mere coincidence. It’s not proof of the hypothesis, but it could lead in that direction. Kadlec claimed to be concerned over a disease outbreak in China, but his speciality was in biowarfare. That’s a bit of a red flag. Note that Kadlec’s work strongly focused on China. Not, say, Africa, where actual disease outbreaks have occurred. Also that the US biowarfare research was certainly far more advanced than China’s.

Some of my most dramatic conclusions can be summarized in just a few paragraphs:

For example, in 2017 Trump brought in Robert Kadlec, who since the 1990s had been one of America’s leading biowarfare advocates. The following year in 2018 a mysterious viral epidemic hit China’s poultry industry and in 2019, another mysterious viral epidemic devastated China’s pork industry…

From the earliest days of the administration, leading Trump officials had regarded China as America’s most formidable geopolitical adversary, and orchestrated a policy of confrontation. Then from January to August 2019, Kadlec’s department ran the “Crimson Contagion” simulation exercise, involving the hypothetical outbreak of a dangerous respiratory viral disease in China, which eventually spreads into the United States, with the participants focusing on the necessary measures to control it in this country. As one of America’s foremost biowarfare experts, Kadlec had emphasized the unique effectiveness of bioweapons as far back as the late 1990s and we must commend him for his considerable prescience in having organized a major viral epidemic exercise in 2019 that was so remarkably similar to what actually began in the real world just a few months later.

With leading Trump officials greatly enamored of biowarfare, fiercely hostile to China, and running large-scale 2019 simulations on the consequences of a mysterious viral outbreak in that country, it seems entirely unreasonable to completely disregard the possibility that such extremely reckless plans may have been privately discussed and eventually implemented, though probably without presidential authorization.

Note Unz’s caveat regarding “presidential authorization”. That’s important and, considering some of the other actions that occurred during Trump 1.0 without “presidential authorization,” it’s plausible enough.

But with the horrific consequences of our own later governmental inaction being obvious, elements within our intelligence agencies have sought to demonstrate that they were not the ones asleep at the switch. Earlier this month, an ABC News story cited four separate government sources to reveal that as far back as late November, a special medical intelligence unit within our Defense Intelligence Agency had produced a report warning that an out-of-control disease epidemic was occurring in the Wuhan area of China, and widely distributed that document throughout the top ranks of our government, warning that steps should be taken to protect US forces based in Asia. After the story aired, a Pentagon spokesman officially denied the existence of that November report, while various other top level government and intelligence officials refused to comment. But a few days later, Israeli television mentioned that in November American intelligence had indeed shared such a report on the Wuhan disease outbreak with its NATO and Israeli allies, thus seeming to independently confirm the complete accuracy of the original ABC News story and its several government sources.

It therefore appears that elements of the Defense Intelligence Agency were aware of the deadly viral outbreak in Wuhan more than a month before any officials in the Chinese government itself. Unless our intelligence agencies have pioneered the technology of precognition, I think this may have happened for the same reason that arsonists have the earliest knowledge of future fires.

Read the next paragraphs carefully. Of particular importance is that air travel—which would normally account for global spread of a respiratory virus—is actually quite minimal between China and Iran. Compared, notably, to travel between China, America, and the rest of the West. Yet Iran became an early epicenter of Covid. Weird. Or not.

According to these multiply-sourced mainstream media accounts, by “the second week of November” our Defense Intelligence Agency was already preparing a secret report warning of a “cataclysmic” disease outbreak taking place in Wuhan. Yet at that point, probably no more than a couple of dozen individuals had been infected in that city of 11 million, with few of those yet having any serious symptoms. The implications are rather obvious. Furthermore:

As the coronavirus gradually began to spread beyond China’s own borders, another development occurred that greatly multiplied my suspicions. Most of these early cases had occurred exactly where one might expect, among the East Asian countries bordering China. But by late February Iran had become the second epicenter of the global outbreak. Even more surprisingly, its political elites had been especially hard-hit, with a full 10% of the entire Iranian parliament soon infected and at least a dozen of its officials and politicians dying of the disease, including some who were quite senior. Indeed, Neocon activists on Twitter began gleefully noting that their hated Iranian enemies were now dropping like flies.

Let us consider the implications of these facts. Across the entire world the only political elites that have yet suffered any significant human losses have been those of Iran, and they died at a very early stage, before significant outbreaks had even occurred almost anywhere else in the world outside China. Thus, we have America assassinating Iran’s top military commander on Jan. 2nd and then just a few weeks later large portions of the Iranian ruling elites became infected by a mysterious and deadly new virus, with many of them soon dying as a consequence. Could any rational individual possibly regard this as a mere coincidence?

The Iranians themselves were well aware of these facts, and their top political and military leaders publicly accused America of an illegal biowarfare attack against their own country and China, with their former president even filing an official protest with the United Nations. But although these explosive charges were widely reported in the Iranian press, they were completely ignored by the American media so that almost no Americans ever became aware of them.

• Covid/Biowarfare Series
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • April 2020-December 2021 • 60,000 Words

These same ideas were also presented in a series of my podcast interviews, originally released on Rumble, but now available on YouTube as well.

So, there you are. Disturbing—but not easily dismissed, give all we’ve learned about the Deep State.