Rabbi Weiss Tells It Like It Is

> I'll stick by my conclusions unless someone presents a better case against them

In a broad sense I don't know what your conclusions are other than a tendency to rehash some of Gary Allen's mythmaking. I had simply listed some of the grosser Cold War falacies because these do often influence people's judgments. There are plenty of valid criticisms to be made of the human rights record in those states that were classified as "socialist" or "peoples republic" (though never as "communist," except by conservatives). As with everything else though, including Hussein's Iraq, the propaganda machine so grossly inflates the more justified criticisms that one has to start by cutting things down to size. The famous "hundred million" claim, which is not at all consistent with either demographic records or the more documented aspects of the GULAG, seems to be a spinoff of Dostoyevsky's novel THE POSSESSED which carries several scenes that speak of "chopping off a hundred million heads."

But if one is simply going to focus on early periods without worrying too much about what emerged later, then the main point to realize is that there is absolutely no evidence to support the claim that either the Bolsheviks in 1917 or Mao in 1949 were in any way brought to power by Wall Street. The historical record clearly shows that the Whites received aid from the Allies, especially Britain, which they squandered; while Chiang Kai-Shek recieved aid from the Truman administration and General Joseph Stilwell, but the Kuomintang was too corrupt to sustain in power. There is absolutely no truth to the Right-wing assertions that either the Whites or the Kuomintang were destroyed by any type of Wall Street conspiracy. They were defeated by their own alienation from the ordinary people in Russia and China. Whatever later decisions were made by foreign powers in dealing with this fact have nothing to do with the cause of this initial defeat of the conservative forces.

Skousen's book is typical of what passes for "research" on the paleo-con Right-wing. Not only does he give primary importance to a book which lacks footnotes and citations, but he very badly misquotes it to distort some key points which Quigley was making. Quigley describes how the corruption of Chiang Kai-Shek's government made it impossible for Washington to hold it up in power. Later Quigley comments on what he characterizes as public relations efforts to get the public ready for the unavoidable overthrow of Chiang Kai-Shek. Skousen and others distort this into an alleged confession by Quigley that supposedly Mao was created by Wall Street, but that clearly is not what Quigley says:

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Chiang Kai-shek was a man of considerable ability and experience, and may not himself have been involved in the corruption of his regime, but he was deeply involved personally with cliques and gangs of persons whose chief aims were to profit from their public positions and from their close associations with Chiang and to resist, by any means, efforts to reform or strengthen China which might reduce their opportunities for corruption. These relationships, in 1945, in some cases had continued for almost twenty years. American aid and the contributions of the Chinese themselves disappeared in the network of corrupt and mutually beneficial relationships which were spread throughout the system and which made it impossible for the Chiang regime to provide a decent living for the people of China or even to defend itself against possible enemies, internal or external. Arms and supplies from abroad were dissipated, vanishing in one way or another, sometimes forever; but on other occasions they turned up subsequently in the hands of guerillas or of the Communist enemies of Chiang's regime. An enormous and incompetent army drained from the peasants, at low prices, large requisitions which were sold, usually for private profit, at high prices into urban black markets. In the two years following the defeat of Japan, $1,432 million in American assistance to China vanished in one way or another, and at the end the Chinese Army and the Chiang regime was weaker than ever.
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-- Quigley, TRAGEDY & HOPE, pp. 905-6.

So Quigley is listing some of the reasons why Washington's efforts to support Chiang were hopeless, and then he goes on to the eventual acceptance of this fact in Washington. Not exactly a confession that Mao was created by Wall Street, not by a long shot. That's a distorted misreading of what Quigley wrote which people like Skousen tried to market to their ideological audience. The fact that internal corruption was what destroyed the Kuomintang despite Washington's attempts to hold it up can be documented up and down without relying on Quigley. But just for the record, Quigley's version of events also agrees with this historical reality.

In general it's not a good idea to depend very much on a book like TRAGEDY AND HOPE. It lacks all citational references and reads in some places like disinformation of the Russo type. One of the most frequently cited phrases in Quigley's book is the claim that by end of the 19th century, the ‘far-reaching aim’ of many of the world’s leading bankers, prime among being the House of Rothschild, was to create ‘a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole.’ This famous quote is discussed in detail against the background of evidence dealing directly with events by Will Banyan:

http://www.martinfrost.ws/htmlfiles/third_section/FOSDICK_OCT_2005.html

My first impression of such phrases is that Quigley is doing the same thing done by Russo when he floated the lie that feminism was created by the Rockefellers. We all presumably know that feminism was around since at least the time of Mary Wollstonecraft, long before the Rockefeller family acquired any wealth. But it's common that once a movement has achieved some recognition it often is then retroactively claimed by the upper class and redefined to mean something different than what it originally meant. That's what Russo helps to achieve by promoting the false story that feminism was created by the Rockefeller's. Quigley's assertion about 'a world system' being planned in the 19th century also has the effect of projecting the ideas of Raymond Fosdick, which were still not accepted by John D. Rockefeller at the time of World War One, back to an earlier time as if it was planned all along. Most likely a deliberate spin by Quigley.

It has to emphasized, someone who wishes to understand how the Chinese or Russian revolutions came about should put no stock in hacks like Skousen or Allen who depend heavily on broad ideological sweeps without much detail about what actually occurred in Russia or China. It's better to just read detailed studies of the events which allow some direct reconstruction of how the Kuomintang fell.