SAD personnel were inserted into Tibet in 1950 after the Chinese invaded to lead resistance fighters against the People’s Liberation Army of China; during the Vietnam War, they ran the Agency’s covert Air America program.
Wikipedia offers this description of the CIA Tibetan program:
The CIA Tibetan program was a nearly two decades long anti-Chinese covert operation focused on Tibet which consisted of “political action, propaganda, paramilitary and intelligence operations” based on U.S. Government arrangements made with brothers of the 14th Dalai Lama, who was not initially aware of them. The goal of the program was “to keep the political concept of an autonomous Tibet alive within Tibet and among several foreign nations”.
Although it was formally assigned to the CIA, it was nevertheless closely coordinated with several other U.S. government agencies such as the Department of State and the Department of Defense.
Previous operations had aimed to strengthen various isolated Tibetan resistance groups, which eventually led to the creation of a paramilitary force on the Nepalese border consisting of approximately 2,000 men. By February 1964, the projected annual cost for all CIA Tibetan operations had exceeded US$1.7 million.
The program ended after President Nixon visited China to establish closer relations in 1972. The Dalai Lama criticized this decision, saying it proved wholeheartedly that the US never did it to help the people of Tibet.
Air America was an American passenger and cargo airline established in 1946 and covertly owned by the U.S. Government and operated by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1950 to 1976:
From 1962 to 1975, Air America inserted and extracted US personnel, provided logistical support to the Royal Lao Army, the Hmong Army under command of Royal Lao Army Major General Vang Pao and combatant Thai volunteer forces, transported refugees, and flew photo reconnaissance missions that provided intelligence on Viet Cong activities. Its civilian-marked craft were frequently used, under the control of the Seventh/Thirteenth Air Force, to launch search and rescue missions for US pilots downed throughout Southeast Asia. Air America pilots were the only known private US corporate employees to operate non-Federal Aviation Administration-certified military aircraft in a combat role.
Chinese control of at least the eastern and northern parts of Tibet go back to 1720 and the Qing dynasty. Chinese rule was off and on, especially east and south, until the Communists finally took over in 1950.
For comparative purposes, the Act of Union uniting Scotland to England passed in 1707, although English control preceded that. Attempts at English control go back to the 10th Century, and were sometimes successful.
Soooo… The longer a rape goes on, the more legitimate it is? Is that what you’re saying, Bob Sykes?
Doesn’t matter how long the Chinese have been trying to dominate Tibet, or how long the English have been dominating their neighbors–They’ve no right to be there, and if they’re not wanted by the people living there, those people have a right to resist ‘em.
They can try and fail, or try and succeed, but there’s no legitimacy granted to it all by the fact that it’s been going on for a long time.
In the end, though, it boils down to one thing, and one thing only: Brute force and numbers. If you lose, you lose–Figure out how to survive and eke out an existence. Whinging about it ain’t going to help. Maybe they’ll weaken in a few generations, and you can get your sovereignty back. Or, not.
Every time a weaker and less sophisticated civilization or culture encounters another, it’s going to boil down to Barter Town rules: Two enter, one leaves. There’s no virtue or justification to either side, it’s simply a matter of weakness encountering strength and nature taking its course. Claiming legitimacy is a chump’s game; shut up, absorb the losers, and move on. Whining about it all when you lose is just another sign of weakness.
Which is why I’m really not too concerned about the current split in American culture between the left-wing and the “conservatives”. The conservatives are a bunch of loser pussies who can’t fight, and that’s why they’re going down in defeat. It’s not a matter of whether they deserve to win or lose, it’s just that they’re stupid and shitty at fighting the cultural battles they’re losing. Long run will tell if the leftoids are a more survival-oriented crew or not; there’s no real virtue to be argued in any of it.
Although, I’m pretty sure they’re going to run things into the ground at Mach speed numbers, while the “conservatives who don’t conserve” just sit on the sidelines and watch it happen. They’ve been losers all my life, and will continue to lose politically and culturally, mostly because they halfway accept the arguments of their opponents.
It’s like I told the last Republican loser who came campaigning door-to-door–All they do is roll over and capitulate to the Democrats in this state, so why should I bother to vote for them? They don’t fight, and when they do “fight” it is entirely ineffective. The symbol for the Republican party around here ought to be a naked middle-aged man in full BDSM harness, with a ball-gag in his mouth, in the submission position with his ass cheeks spread wide and exposed for the insertion of his master’s strap-on. That’s a way more accurate mascot than an elephant, which is a majestic and dignified animal worthy of respect.
The CIA makes the FBI look competent.
That’s not a compliment.
The Tibetan operation sounds like a typical CIA operation — just enough support and encouragement to get a lot of brave men killed, not enough to actually win. In 1960, at there height of the Great Leap Forward famine, there was vast disillusionment with the CCP. Had the US let the Nats on Taiwan loose, told the Tibetans and other minorities “Now’s the time!” and brought the Russians to at least neutrality, the CCP might have been overthrown. But “2,000 fighters” isn’t going to give you anything but a high-altitude Bay of Pigs, which is exactly what we got.
Contrary to a lot of Cold War propaganda from both Right and Left, the CIA always was 90% useless. Most of the regimes that they “overthrew”, even back in the glory days of the 1950′s and 1960′s, were on the brink of collapse anyway. The CIA’s methodology was to stand around looking cool, cut checks to (mostly) the wrong people, and take credit for anything good that happened. There were a few exceptions to this, oddly enough mostly in Vietnam, but not many.
Kirk: @MattBraynard
Altitude Zero,
You’re making the mistake of thinking that the US State Department and others wanted the Chinese Communists to lose.
They did not. There were dozens of important players who were working on the Communists behalf not only in terms of what they were doing for the Soviets, but also the CCP. China didn’t fall to the Communists because they were better, but because the US cut key aid due to “humanitarian abuses” by Nationalists and a bunch of other carefully managed things.
There’s a pretty well-researched book out there that I read back in the 1990s which never got the attention it deserved–Names were named, and all the actions taken by the US which sabotaged the Nationalists and helped the Communists. There was a lot of subversion going on by Communist sympathizers throughout the late 1940s and 1950s that led to where we are today.
Smartest thing we could have done at the end of WWII would have been to purge the Democrat/Communist cells from the government and State Department. They’ve taken over, to be honest. An honest history of the decline and fall of the US as a great nation will show that it didn’t fall, it was pushed into the grave by its own intellectuals.
Stephen Hunter’s book The Second Saladin is basically about this sort of thing. In this case, it is Kurdish resistance in Iraq in the 1970s. Encouraged to revolt, given just enough support to inconvenience the Baathist government, but not enough to win. This comes back to bite when a CIA trained Kurdish fighter comes to America to get some payback….
Unfortunately, this sort of thing is very common, and not unique to the U.S. Rhodesian and South African support of RENAMO, and South African support of UNITA are a couple of examples that immediately come to mind. Dropped and betrayed once their usefulness has ended.
Bruce,
He’s making all the right noises, but I don’t see anything actually effective happening.
Most of the effort made by so-called “Republican activists” can best be interpreted as spoiling actions by actual Democratic Party sympathizers or agents. That’s how they did in the Tea Party, along with the grifters that are at the head of the Republicans.
I’m really done with these assholes. They had a figure who would fight, and who wasn’t perfect, but they refused to back him. That tells you whose side they’re really on.
I think we can safely analyze this whole thing we’re going through as the final stages of an organized crime “bust-out” operation, one where the parties engaged in looting the formerly legitimate enterprise have figured out that they’ve about gotten all they can get out of it, and that the whole thing is about to collapse under the weight of all their frauds.
There may still be a country occupying the space that the United States once spanned, but it ain’t going to be the one we grew up in. Sad to see, but it’s entirely self-inflicted, and mostly due to the fact that the supposed “guardians and conservers” really were neither one. Most of them were suborned; the majority of the rest were co-opted and lacked the necessary confidence in their own beliefs and standards. Thus, no standards were ever enforced, no accountability ever called for, and we are where we are. Mostly because most of us were too felching lazy to ever look up from our comfortable ruts and see what was going on, or be bothered to do anything at all effective about it.
Look at all the alumni associations that have been paying for all the BS the academic communities have spewed forth upon the cultural commons. Any of those assholes ever bothered to do anything effective about that issue…? Nope; first time someone calls them a racist or intolerant, they wee in their panties and go hide somewhere to cry it out. Ball-less cowards, all of them.
You don’t win these sorts of contests by acquiescing to the enemy from the outset, which is what most of your classical “conservatives” have been doing since day one. They’re the same ones who rolled over for Wilson, the Southern asshole who brought back effective slavery and segregated the government. None of these people had the courage of their convictions, and here we are.
There will be something here after its all over with, but I’ve no idea what it will look like. I’m of a mind that the “conservative” movement was actually a straw-man created in order to rob vitality and strength from those opposing the progressives, because they sure as hell haven’t done anything at all effective to counter the assholes since the beginning of this whole nightmare back in the late 19th Century.
It’s a lot like what happened in Weimar Germany–The Nazis managed to suborn and co-opt actual conservative elements in German society, dragging them into the morass due to effective use of the Communists and Spartacists as scarecrow issues. And, because of that, the “right” has been tarred forevermore as being effectively Nazis. Nice trick, and an indicator of what’s likely to happen when all of this is over.
There really are no real “conservatives”, just fellow-travelers that exist solely to make the grift a little easier, a little more convincing. Do note how they keep asking for money, and then do nothing at all effective with it–That’s what you can call a “tell”. Think of the Conservative movement as being that accountant in the bust-out that keeps telling the investors and the people extending credit that it’s all cool, everything is fine, and they’ll get their money back…
If the bastards were honest, they’d be telling us the truth, and refusing to participate in it all. But, they get the sweet, sweet luchre too, so they’re going along to get along, just like the rest of the crooks.
How many children and family members of Republican Party congressmen and senators are getting do-nothing jobs from Ukrainian energy companies just like Hunter Biden? How many Chinese shell companies are paying off family members of Republican and Democrat political figures?
Hell, let’s look really, really carefully at just where the money is going from Pakistani military aid, that which isn’t going to pay for Taliban terrorists to kill American soldiers and Afghani government troops…
On that last one, there really isn’t any other credible answer for why we’re fighting a guerrilla war where we haven’t taken steps to isolate the battlefield and deny the insurgents safe harbor and support. F**k me, at least in Vietnam, they were smart enough to bankrupt the Soviets by making them pay for it. We’re so felching stupid that we’re paying for our own people to be killed, and bankrupting ourselves. Grand strategy? WTF is that?
Kirk and Bruce,
“He’s making all the right noises, but I don’t see anything actually effective happening…”
I see a lot of libertarian commentators in the UK complaining very loudly about Boris Johnson. He was sound on BREXIT, and made all the right noises on campaign, but in actuality, now that he is in power, he is adopting most of the nanny state government programs he was elected NOT to….
This is also how the U.S. got Trump. As I patiently told lots of people, he is a symptom. For years the working class was told to vote Republican if they wanted Obamacare gone and illegal immigration stopped. They would reliably do so, only to be told “We need both House and Senate to get it done, vote for us more”. So they did, only to be told “We need the executive too in order to do this, vote for us more.” So they did, and watched the GOP not even try to deliver early in Trump’s first term. After the midterms, having failed to deliver, it was back to lamenting and caving….If the voter tries to create a new movement, it gets killed my the establishment GOP or co-opted (viz. the Tea Party).
The GOP is owned by the same lobbyists and business interests (both foreign and domestic), that owns the Dems, and everyone with half a brain knows it. They don’t even actually want to govern half the time, easier to lament their lack of power while cashing their checks and “reaching across the aisle”.
We have the same problem up here in Canada. The so called conservative party is anything but, chasing the middle, which they will never get, and alienating their core support on the basis that they have no alternative to turn to…
The only solution is for the inherent contradictions within both parties to fragment and destroy them both, but at the moment, that does not seem likely as only a minority really cares, and the majority are distracted by the panem et circenses of modern social media. And even if it does happen, the result will not be what is needed, but a variety of more of the same.
As Aaron Clary (AKA Captain Capitalism) is so fond of saying “enjoy the decline”.
Paul,
I see this as going down one of two paths: The first, which the oligarchy would prefer, will result in general apathy and ennui, allowing them to do as they like. The second, and more likely path, is that they’re basically painting over the pressure gauges, jimmying the relief valves so they don’t work, and generally doing everything that will result in the boiler going “BOOM” at some point in the likely-not-so-distant-future.
It’s basically like the idjits in the old Soviet bloc that ignored all the warning signs, and kept on keeping on what worked for them. Then, one day, they woke up and realized that they’d reached the outer limits of Abraham Lincoln’s homily about fooling all of the people some of the time… And the Soviet Union was no nay, nah more.
They’re in serious danger of doing that across the entire Western world, as well as China. I think that what may come in the latter half of the 21st Century is some great clarifying crisis that they’re not going to be able to cope with, akin to WWI politically or something “natural” like another Little Ice Age, and we’re going to see the Great Discrediting of the elites take its final form, one that will result in most of them being helped into extinction.
I can’t wait to watch Biden/Harris try to deal with a real crisis, like Taiwan being taken by China, or the eruption of the volcanoes in Iceland resulting in a Year Without a Summer. Can you say “Entertaining as hell, but I don’t want to live there…?”.
John Ringo’s book The Last Centurion may have been a lot more prescient than any of us would like to think possible. I shudder to think what this crew of wastrel idiots would do with a real pandemic situation, one where the disease agent was actually as lethal as, say, Ebola or Justinian’s Plague. Couple that with something like the Indonesian or Icelandic volcanoes popping their tops, and the Grand Solar Minimum we have going… LOL.
It’sa gonna geet ooooglie, folks. As in, eat your neighbors ugly. I don’t think that the state of modern society will weather that sort of stress, except in very isolated and small communities, separated from the major cities. If you’re living in a major city reef structure, i.e. a “metroplex”, you’re dead meat. Hell, you’re probably dead meat if you’re within a day’s drive of such a conglomeration of evil.
Kirk: “most R efforts are spoiling actions by D”
Yes, certainly. Matt Braynard is a rare exception.
“They had a figure who would fight, who wasn’t perfect, they refused to back him”
Braynard backed Trump, and he’s doing the hard work running down election frauds, and he’s building an organization:
https://twitter.com/LookAheadOrg.
Do you refuse to back him?
Bruce,
What’s there to back? Another iteration of failure theater?
Show me some actual, y’know… Effects, beyond ineffectual donation-mongering. You’ll know that someone is effectively countering the oligarchy by the fact that they’re going after them hammer and tongs, the way they did Trump. So far, Mr. Braynard ain’t garnering much attention–Which should tell you something.
At this point, I’m afraid I’ve lost all trust in any of these people. It’s like I told the last jackass “Republican Conservative” that showed up at my doorstep campaigning for office–Yeah, nice try, and you’re mouthing all the right words. Now, go do something, something that actually works.
I’ve been watching these assholes all my adult life. The vast majority are grifters, and the ones who don’t show evidence of that fact before heading off to DC demonstrate an admirable faculty for picking all the necessary skills and attributes before their first term is up.
What was Reagans watchword? “Trust, but verify…”.
That’s my attitude, in a nutshell. Before I get all hyped up and enthused about the latest and greatest, I want to make sure it’s not yet another iteration of the local hack that co-opted the Tea Party around here. Who, upon examination, actually turned out to be a major ass-clown who’d been hanging around on the periphery of things for years before making himself useful as an anodyne for the Democrats.
Kirk, I get that you don’t want to support the next John McCain or Bush or Romney. Matt Braynard isn’t like that. Reasonably sensible lawyer, doing the hard work of tracing 2020 election fraud while stressing that the D get-out-the-vote effort was more important, building a political organization that can have a shot for next time.
Opposed to D importing ringers. And he is opposed to the establishment consensus for lower wages through higher immigration or by any means. necessary.