Hating Whitey and Other Progressive Causes

by David Horowitz

  Understanding the security disaster that has befallen the United States requires an understanding that the leakage of America's secrets proceeded along two parallel tracks. One track was espionage, the other was a political-economic track through the legal commercial activities of the United States government and in particular through its political oversight of these commercial activities, which in past administrations had included formal controls of sensitive technologies that the Clinton team systematically dismantled. Political contributors to the Clinton-Gore campaigns played key roles in promoting the dismantling process.

  A central figure in the economic track of Chinese activities was the vice president and Far East area manager for the Worthen Bank, a Chinese-born American named John Huang, who was a friend of Clinton from Little Rock days. Triplett and Timperlake make a strong case that it was through the personal intervention of Hillary Clinton that in 1994 John Huang was made a top official in the Commerce Department, where he had access to all the information an agent would need to strip America of the supercomputer technologies vital to the development of advanced weapons systems. Huang has been identified by the CIA as a spy, but like Wen Ho Lee has been protected by Clinton Justice and is still free. Huang is the only person ever to have been given top security clearance in the Commerce Department, and he retained it when he left the government.

  The decision to leave the government for a position at the Democratic National Committee was made for Huang at a meeting in the Oval office attended by the President, Huang, James Riady, Riady partner and former Rose law firm head Joe Giroir, and presidential aide Bruce Lindsey. This meeting took place three days after the president had decided on a strategy to rescue his failing political fortunes which had reached a nadir following the Democrats' historic defeat in the congressional elections of1994 and Newt Gingrich's ascension to the Speakership of the House. It was the first Republican majority in the House in forty-eight years. Designed by the President's new political advisor, Dick Morris, the strategy involved a massive television advertising campaign, directed against Gingrich and the Republican House. The campaign has been directly credited with turning the political tide and ensuring the re-election in 1996 of the Clinton team. The chief fundraiser for this campaign was John Huang.

  It should be evident from these facts (and they could easily be amplified with many more) that the alliance Bill Clinton has made with the Riadys and their China network is the pivot of his political career, and the absolute key to his survival. It has had consequences for American politics and security so vast that no brief summary can begin to describe them. In 1996, to pick an illustrative example, the Long Beach City Council granted a lease on the demobilized Long Beach Naval Station to a Chinese company named COSCO, which is little more than the naval arm of the Chinese Communist Army and is a major arms supplier to dictators and terrorists. Its cargoes have included rocket fuel for Pakistan, helping to destabilize the Indian peninsula, and nuclear components for Iran, a volatile factor in the Middle East. In 1996, a COSCO ship was seized in Oakland, California by U. S. Customs agents who discovered a cargo of two thousand assault weapons intended for sale to Los Angeles street gangs.

  Why would the Long Beach City Council approve a lease to such a company, particularly if the relevant oversight officials in Washington had alerted them to the nature of the COSCO enterprise? But the relevant oversight officials in Washington did not alert Long Beach to the danger posed by COSCO. On the contrary, they encouraged the deal.

  In the 1996 election campaign, Johnny Chung — another middleman for the China network and for COSCO in particular — gave 366,000 dollars to the Democratic Party. It was subsequently returned after the campaign finance scandal surfaced and it was clear that it had come illegally from foreign sources. Among the sources was a Chinese intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel Liu Chaoying, the daughter of China's highest ranking military officer. On the eve of the 1996 elections, a White House official named Dorothy Robyn made a conference call to the Long Beach City Council and applied direct pressure on them to push the deal with COSCO through. Robyn told the Council that the "national interest would best be served if the [COSCO] plan proceeds." The chief competitor for the lease, whose application was denied by the White House pressure, was the U. S. Marine Corps.*

  Nine months before the COSCO lease was sealed, a crisis had developed in the Taiwan Strait. Elections were being held in Taiwan and the communist regime, which claims sovereignty over Taiwan, was launching intermediate range ballistic missiles with blank warheads in the direction of the island, an act of blatant intimidation. The Clinton Administration had interposed two aircraft carriers from the Seventh Fleet, ostensibly to remind the communists that Taiwan was an American ally. At that moment, an old Little Rock friend of Bill Clinton's appeared in Washington with a 460,000 dollar donation to the Presidential Legal Defense Trust that Clinton had set up to defray his legal expenses in the Paula Jones sexual harassment case. The friend also brought a message from one of China's top officials that if the United States interfered in this matter, a missile attack against Los Angeles would become a possibility. The friend also brought his own broken-English personal message: "Any negative outcomes of the US decision in the China issue will affect your administration position especially in the campaign year." The messenger was Charlie Trie, owner of the Fu Lin Restaurant in Little Rock. Trie was also a member of the "Four Seas" Triad, a billion-dollar Asian crime syndicate allied to Chinese military and intelligence agencies. Clinton's written reply to Trie's blackmail was addressed "Dear Charlie" and assured him (and his communist bosses in Beijing) that the interposition of the aircraft carriers was "not intended as a threat to the Peoples Republic of China," but as "a signal to both Taiwan and the PRC that the United States was concerned about maintaining stability in the . . . region" (emphasis added).

  The network of businessmen, agents, and gangsters that links Bill Clinton to China's communist dictatorship is interwoven with every element of the greatest security disaster in American history. It as though the Rosenbergs were in the White House, except that the. Rosenbergs were little people and naïve, and consequently the damage they were capable of accomplishing was incomparably less. It could even be said in behalf of the Rosenbergs that they did not do it for themselves, but out of loyalty to an ideal, however pathetic and misguided. Bill Clinton has no such loyalties-neither to his family, nor his party, nor his country. As is evident from the disclosures that have already come to light, the damage he has done is without precedent and will dwarf even the legacy of national embarrassment that he earned for himself in the Lewinsky affair. The wounds he has inflicted on this nation, and every individual within it, with consequences unknown for future generations, cannot be said to have been inflicted for ideological reasons or even out of some perverse dedication to a principle of evil. The destructiveness of Bill Clinton has emerged out of a need that is far more banal-to advance the cause of a self-absorbed and criminal personality.

  * * *

  *In 1998 the Republican Congress killed the COSCO deal.

  EPILOGUE

  A Political Romance

  WHEN I WAS A LITERATURE STUDENT in college my Shakespeare professor drew our attention to the way the playwright turned to romance as he grew older, writing symbolic pastorals devoted to themes of redemption. According to my professor, this was a natural human progression, and he cited examples from other writers to prove his point. Youth is characterized by a hunger for information, he told us; age distills what it knows in parables, and returns to archetypal myths.

  When Shakespeare wrote The Tempest, the most famous of his late romances and the very last of his plays, he was actually only forty-seven — more than a decade younger than I am now. Moreover, I have found my own experience to be exactly the opposite of what he predicted. Growing up in a progressive household in New York City (my parents were members of the Communist Party), I found myself enveloped in the vapors of a romantic myth not unlike that of Sha
kespeare's pastorals or the fairy tales that had been read to me as a child. In the radical romance of our political lives, the world was said to have begun in innocence, but to have fallen afterwards under an evil spell, afflicting the lives of all with great suffering and injustice. According to our myth, a happy ending beckoned, however. Through the efforts of progressives like us, the spell would one day be lifted, and mankind would be freed from its trials. In this liberated future, "social justice" would be established, peace would reign, and harmony prevail. Men and women would be utterly transformed.

  Being at the center of a heroic myth inspired passions that informed my youthful passage and guided me to the middle of my adult life. But then I was confronted by a reality so inescapable and harsh that it shattered the romance for good. A friend — the mother of three children — was brutally murdered by my political comrades, members of the very vanguard that had been appointed to redeem us all. Worse, since individuals may err, the deed was covered up by the vanguard itself who hoped, in so doing, to preserve the faith.

  If this personal tragedy had remained isolated, perhaps the romance itself could have survived. But the murder of my friend was amplified and reflected in numerous others. Most notably, the slaughter of millions of poor peasants in Southeast Asia by the "liberation fronts" my comrades and I had aided and defended, who were supposed to be the angels of progress, too. When all was said and done, there was no happy ending. If anything, in the liberated nations the injustice was even greater than before. In retrospect it was apparent to me that most of the violence in my lifetime had been directed by utopians like myself against those who would not go along with their impossible dreams. "Idealism kills," Nietzsche had warned before all the bloodshed began. But nobody listened.

  As a result of my experience, I developed, in age, an aversion to romantic myths. Instead I was seized with a hunger for information — for the facts that would reveal to me the truth about the years I was a member of a heroic vanguard. The fall of the communist empire and the opening of its secrets have fed this passion. Preserved in the decoded communications between Soviet agents in America and their contacts in the Kremlin is the record of the truths we had denied, and whose denial made our romance possible. The truths revealed that we were just what our enemies had always said we were. There were spies among us, and cold-blooded agents for a tainted cause. And all of us, it could no longer be denied, had treason in our hearts in the name of a future that would never come.

  In the battle of good and evil that formed the core of our romantic myth, we had enlisted — New Left and Old alike — on the wrong side of the historical conflict. We had set out as the proud harbingers of a progressive future. But what we had actually created were realities far worse than those we were seeking to escape. The enemies we scorned — patriots defending America-turned out to be the protectors of what was decent and pragmatically good, and had saved us from being consumed by our crimes.

  It became clear to me that the world was not going to be changed into anything very different or better from what it had been. On this earth there would be no kingdom of freedom where lions would lie down with lambs. It should have been obvious when I began. Many things change, but people do not. Otherwise how could Shakespeare, or writers more ancient, capture in their creations a reality that we recognize and that still moves us today?

  These revelations of experience had a humbling effect. They took my mind off the noble fantasies and forced me to focus on my ordinary existence. To see how common it was; how unheroic, ordinary, and unredeemed. The revelations that shattered my faith allowed me, for the first time, to look at my own mortality. I was not going to be born again in a New World; I was going to die like everyone else and be forgotten.

  And that is when I realized what our romance was about. It was not about a future that was socially just, or about a world redeemed. It was about averting our eyes from this ordinary fact. Our romance was a shield protecting us from the terror of our common human fate. And that was why we clung to our dream so fiercely, despite all the evidence that it had failed. That was why we continued to believe, despite everything we knew. For who would ever want to confront such terror, unless forced to do so by circumstances beyond their control? Who would want to hear the voice of a future that was only calling them to their own oblivion?

  And that is when I also realized that our progressive romance would go on. Some, like myself, might wake from its vapors under blows of great personal pain. But there would always be others, and in far greater number, who would not. A century of broken dreams and the slaughters they spawned would, in the end, teach nothing to those who had no reason to hear. Least of all would it cure them of their hunger for a romance that is really a desire not to know who and what we are.