by Philip Giraldi, The Unz Review:

Back in the summer of 2018, I launched my American Pravda series in earnest, deciding to finally present some of the extremely controversial material that I’d gradually uncovered during the previous five or ten years.

One of my earliest articles focused upon the Jewish role in the Bolshevik Revolution and the resulting ideological aftershocks in America and other Western countries. This was obviously an ultra-touchy subject, including as it did a close examination of Henry Ford’s The International Jew and the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and I was naturally quite a bit skittish about my candid analysis. I therefore adopted a strategy of deflection, opening my article with a few paragraphs of important but almost totally unrelated material regarding Chinese society.

TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/

As I wrote in late July 2018:

Although I always had a great interest in history, I naively believed what I read in my textbooks, and therefore regarded American history as just too bland and boring to study.

By contrast, one land I found especially fascinating was China, the world’s most populous country and its oldest continuous civilization, with a tangled modern history of revolutionary upheaval, then suddenly reopened to the West during the Nixon Administration and under Deng’s economic reforms starting to reverse decades of Maoist economic failure.

In 1978 I took a UCLA graduate seminar on the rural Chinese political economy, and probably read thirty or forty books during that semester. E.O. Wilson’s seminal Sociobiology: The New Synthesis had just been published a couple of years earlier, reviving that field after decades of harsh ideological suppression, and with his ideas in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help noticing the obvious implications of the material I was reading. The Chinese had always seemed a very smart people, and the structure of China’s traditional rural peasant economy produced Social Darwinist selective pressure so thick that you could cut it with a knife, thus providing a very elegant explanation of how the Chinese got that way. A couple of years later in college, I wrote up my theory while studying under Wilson, and then decades afterward dug it out again, finally publishing my analysis as How Social Darwinism Made Modern China.

With the Chinese people clearly having such tremendous inherent talent and their potential already demonstrated on a much smaller scale in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, I believed there was an excellent chance that Deng’s reforms would unleash enormous economic growth, and sure enough, that was exactly what happened. In the late 1970s, China was poorer than Haiti, but I always told my friends that it might come to dominate the world economically within a couple of generations, and although most of them were initially quite skeptical of such an outrageous claim, every few years they became a little less so. For years The Economist had been my favorite magazine, and in 1986 they published an especially long letter of mine emphasizing the tremendous rising potential of China and urging them to expand their coverage with a new Asia Section; the following year, they did exactly that.

These days I feel tremendous humiliation for having spent most of my life being so totally wrong about so many things for so long, and I cling to China as a very welcome exception. I can’t think of a single development during the last forty years that I wouldn’t have generally expected back in the late 1970s, with the only surprise having been the total lack of surprises.

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