[jyu1]

Here is a little interesting conversation on Twitterville recently (all time local):

Former U.S. national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski tweeted to his followers at 3:59PM on July 7: “Chinese translations of my 'Strategic Vision', a NYT-bestseller, much visible at the high-level meetings in China.”

Former president of the U.S.-China Business Council Robert Kapp then replied at 9:32AM the next day: “Surely you, and your magisterial written works, don't need the validation of being seen at high-level China meetings?”

Good question from Mr. Kapp. Indeed, why did someone of Mr. Brzezinski's stature have to care so much about what the Chinese have to say about his book? Furthermore, people might find the timing of Mr. Brzezinski's tweet a little curious:

1. The book Mr. Brzezinski mentioned was published in January 2012. Why did he suddenly find the urge to sell his book on Twitter a year and a half later?
2. Mr. Brzezinski said he went to China on June 25 and came back on July 5 (if not earlier). If he had wanted to tout the visibility of his book in China, why couldn't he do it sooner?

To me, when I first saw Mr. Brzezinski's tweet on July 8 (via a re-tweet as I did not follow him on Twitter) however, I immediately sensed it was a reaction to a mistake I had made probably just a couple of hours before his original tweet. I had typed something erroneous on my computer in the afternoon of July 7. Because every word I ever keyed into my computer was monitored by the U.S. government and because Mr. Brzezinski knew I had a plan to write something that had an embarrassing connection to him, he immediately went on the offensive to counter the message that would come out in my planned writing.

Now, I doubt anyone can claim that he or she has never ever made a mistake in the course of his or her writing activities. As I said before, one thing that “horrified” me when I realized how closely my writing activities were monitored by governments was that “all the absurdities I ever typed into my computer had been leaked”. And I pleaded “I should be afforded the same opportunity as any other writer to refine, to recalibrate and to correct whatever I type into my own computer”. Which was what I did in this case -- I stood corrected no more than a few hours later, in the same afternoon as I recall. But apparently, that was not enough for the American political class, who were like sharks smelled blood in the water.

Normally, I don't think I ought to respond to something I had stood corrected during the draft phase of my writing. As I said many times, the standard I maintained with respect to my writing was that every word I ever put on the Internet was true to the best of my knowledge at the time of its publication, unless noted otherwise. It would be crazy if I had to address everything in all the draft versions of my writings. If something is not published, typically there is a reason behind it.

That said, I realized that, given all the ensuing brouhaha, the initial mistake I made might be considered a major one that was also quite uncharacteristic of my writings. So I am going to address it just this time. Besides, I was going to comment on the Egyptian situation anyways.

As I recall, I probably started writing about the Egyptian situation on July 5 or 6, after the military coup that ousted President Mohamed Mursi and the subsequent chaos there. I kept an interest in Egypt because for more than two years, I had known my draft writing of February 10, 2011, which was only published in my blogs on February 15, 2011 after I saw Mr. Obama stealing my ideas from it, had played a pivotal role in the peaceful deposing of the then Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak on February 11, 2011, potentially avoiding a huge bloodshed on Cairo streets. My plan was to make a quick correction/update about this episode and move on to discuss the economic reasons behind the Egyptian upheaval, a topic that had largely been ignored by Western mainstream media.

If you compare my writing plan with the blogs that I published in February and March of 2011 on Egypt, you will find that I really did not have many fresh insights to offer in my planned writing. Indeed, I was not that motivated going into my writing. And when I am bored, I tend to get sloppy. Which was largely why I made the mistake briefly on Sunday July 7. (Indeed, my whole summer has been pretty boring and sloppy so far. Have you noticed? I'm sure you have.)

Granted, I did read my 2011 blogs rather cursorily before I started my current writing. But frankly, even if I had spent a lot of time studying my 2011 blogs, I could never have gained a understanding of that episode as clearly as when I wrote it. Partly this is because it was a complex story with multiple actors and many twists and turns. But it is also because my understanding of the events also appeared to have evolved over the course of the episode. And the mistake I made in my current writing on July 7 was related to my “state of mind” at a particular time – a very error-prone query if one is not careful.

I will use some examples to illustrate the above points.

At the beginning of my February 15, 2011 blog update, I said that I had seen Mr. Obama stealing from my then unpublished draft of February 10, 2011 during his news conference that day. But since I did not provide details in that blog update, I have no idea now what ideas Mr. Obama had stolen from me. Obviously it is much easier to recognize other people's nuts-cracking when the nuts are fresh in my mind. So even if I now re-read my own draft writing and the transcript of Mr. Obama's subsequent news conference, it would take me considerable time and energy to re-discover the details. And I certainly would not be enjoying such an endeavour. Besides, I knew every word I published then was true and nothing has since changed in this example. The point I want to make here is that even if I read my own earlier writings with substantial diligence, the level of my understanding can never exceed that when I wrote them.

Another example. I wrote in my February 10, 2011 draft that I had realized that the phrase I used in my February 8 update, “Messrs. Obama and Mubarak”, was a problem. When I read it this time though, it was not obvious to me at all how this had been the case. I had to go back to all the surrounding events to piece together my understanding then. Some people say that my thinking as reflected in my writings can be jumpy at times. This is a fair criticism. But if I have to provide every detail and logic, I don't think I could ever finish writing my story, a task that is extraordinarily difficult for me as it is. Again, the good news here is that the veracity of my published words can stand up to any scrutiny. It's just that it's extremely time-consuming for me to go back and re-do the research. Besides, I write my story as a service to truth. As you can imagine, I really don't enjoy writing all these politic stuff. That's why I write, then I forget.

The mistake I made in my writing on July 7 was also related to my “state of mind” at a specific time point in the aftermath of the commonly-called 2011 Egyptian Revolution, i.e., some two and a half years ago. I believe -- since I had already stood corrected -- that I told my computer that afternoon that, even before Mr. Obama's remarks on March 7, I was already inclined to believe that my draft writing of February 10, 2011 had played a role in Mr. Mubarak's peaceful removal from office and avoided huge potential bloodshed on Cairo streets. Obviously I had forgotten my own 2011 writing that I had reviewed -- rather cursorily or sloppily, I might add -- just a couple of days before. Because fortunately in the case, I did provide details of my own evolving thinking in my original writing in March 2011. Indeed, the question on whether my draft of February 10, 2011 had play a role in Mr. Mubarak's ousting the next day did enter into my mind after Monday February 14, 2011. But I felt that the evidence I had was not sufficient to draw such an conclusion and left my readers to judge for themselves whether drawing such a conclusion was “warranted”. Mostly this is because, as I wrote in my March 5, 2011 blog update, I only found nuts-cracking of my February 10 draft from the media on Monday February 14. If those had happened on Saturday February 12, I would have been more inclined to believe that it was “warranted”. Otherwise it was very difficult to explain the COLLECTIVE delay on the part of the media. Two days after I published that update, however, I saw on March 7 Mr. Obama uttered the word “unwarranted” in a prepared remark from the White House. It was then that I got the feeling that my original inference was indeed “warranted”. Otherwise why would Mr. Obama want to cement the doubt in my mind? It appeared to me that he was signalling to the political class not to give me the credit because he was afraid that people might find out that my words and actions – always based on the principles of humanism – had beaten out his direct meddling and instigation in Egypt and made a positive impact at a critical juncture in Egypt's transition to democracy.

Because of this brief mistake and contradiction I made in the course of my writing, you can almost feel the glee of the political class in finally seeing an opening to attack my credibility and undermine my messages. Some apparently thought that this flop of mine along was enough for them to tear me apart. For example, the Associated Press produced a report on July 11, “CIA allowed 9/11 mastermind, waterboarded 183 times, to design vacuum cleaner to stop him ‘going nuts’”. I believe that it was solely intended to send me an ominous message that I could be locked up and tortured again. Just for future reference, I will list some of the details from the AP report: (1) “Going nuts” was prominently featured in the title of the report because the last time I was locked up and tortured in a mental institution, I almost “lost it” as I mentioned before. (2) Since in my most recent online publications I had talked about how I formed my ideas on China's democratization over the years, this AP report was intended to draw a parallel between Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and me that, although both of us were creative, we are terrorists nevertheless. Indeed, since neither Mohammed’s lawyer nor the CIA could even confirm “very existence of a vacuum cleaner design” and all AP had for this story was an anonymous source, this whole report smelled what I would call voodoo journalism. It confirms again that the mainstream media are just sophisticated propaganda tools for the political class. As to how AP treats average folks, people need look no further than how their mistake had hurt the the families of the USC shooting victims, as I mentioned in a tweet on May 8, 2012. (Although I have not done the research, I don't believe they have apologized to the victim families.)

In the wake of my mistake, still others in the American political class saw fit to make an effort to undermine my potential messages. Mr. Brzezinski's tweet was but one example, which I will explain later. Here I will point to an article in the July 11th edition of the New York Times, “Sudden Improvements in Egypt Suggest a Campaign to Undermine Morsi”. I believe this article was meant to directly undermine the main message in my original plan to write about the Egyptian situation, i.e., that it was the extremely loose monetary policies of the U.S. and other developed countries that were largely responsible for the economic hardship people felt not only in Egypt, but also in many other developing countries around the world. The New York Times knew what my main message would be in my planned writing, not only because they knew my message was true, but also because they knew I had demonstrated as such in my March 15, 2011 blog update by recounting how two of their prominent columnists, Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman, had tried to actively obscure this truth during the 2011 Egyptian Revolution.

Sure, I had heard from other media reports before about elements of the old Egyptian regime working together to undermine the administration of the now deposed President Mohamed Morsi, which only exacerbated people's discontentment under his rule. But just like the debate I had with Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman in 2011, this was only a factor specific to Egypt in explaining the economic hardship there. By focusing people's mind on this and perhaps other specific or marginal factors, what the New York Times actually did was to take people's attention away from “the elephant in the room”, i.e., the fact that the central banks of various developed countries, under the leadership of the U.S. Fed, had created trillions of dollars worth of money out of thin air since the global financial crisis, much of which then flooded the rest of the world, wreaking havoc in the process. As Professor Michael Hudson commented on U.S. Fed's Quantitative Easing (QE) program: “The object of warfare is to take a country’s land, raw materials and assets, and grab them. In the past, that used to be done militarily by invading them. But today you can do it financially simply by creating credit, which is what the Federal Reserve has done.”

Some people might ask: Isn't U.S. Fed an independent institution? Doesn't it have this lofty goal of combating unemployment in the U.S.? I don't fault you if you had bought into those arguments propagandized by the political class to justify the unprecedented money printing operations of the past few years. For my part, I know that even Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman, had cracked nuts of my writings before. Just like the Fed is a private central bank essentially representing the interest of Wall Street, the chairman of the Fed is at the centre of the Wall Street-Washington cohort -- the hidden overlord of American democracy – that is solely responsible for the predatory monetary policy forced upon the rest of the world. Although Fed's QE was carried out in the name of the American people, its benefits largely went to the political class themselves. That's why there is a constant revolving door between Wall Street and the U.S. administrations, particularly the White House and the Treasury department. That's also why, having brought the global financial system to the brink of collapse, Wall Street bankers are once again pocketing astronomical bonus year after year. That's also why, as Governor Sarah Palin likes to point out, 7 of the 10 highest-income counties in America are in the Washington D.C. area.

At the same time, average folks are getting poorer in real terms because of the inflationary nature of this extreme loose monetary policy. Just in the past year, I noticed food prices have gone up quite a bit even here in Vancouver. Whereby I used to be able to buy a stalk of celery for a dollar, I now routinely have to pay up to 2 dollars. In order to pass on the inflationary pressure onto the consumers, I noticed manufacturers have resorted to adjustments in food packaging. A cartoon of orange juice used to be 1.89 litres; now it's 1.75 litres. Even canned mushroom soup has become thinner. So here is an idea for Justin Trudeau, the self-proclaimed champion of middle class: If you are really concerned about the growing income inequality in Canada, break away from your own class and stand with the people.

If the average folks here in North America have become poorer in real terms, people in the developing countries – the vast majority of the world's population -- can only be described as suffering right now because a large portion of their income had to be spent on foods and they are also at the receiving end of this predatory monetary policy perpetrated by the world's most powerful countries with reserve currency status. From Egypt to India, from Turkey to Brazil, social instabilities are closely associated with high inflation around many parts of the developing world. It is this aspect of Egypt's economic hardship that the New York Times should focus on and inform their readers about in their reporting of the ongoing tumult there. Not surprisingly, I have not seen any such reporting from the Times and I doubt we are ever going to see such reporting from them.

Finally, I'm going to explain why Mr. Brzezinski's tweet on July 7 was meant to counter a potential message of mine if and when I come around to write about that “something” that has an embarrassing connection to him.

In all started at the end of 2011 or the beginning of 2012 when I stumbled on an interview of Mr. Brzezinski conducted by Caixin, a well-known financial media outlet in China, about Sino-U.S. relations. Reading the transcript of the interview, I can't help but notice the interviewer's 崇洋媚外的心態。Since I had known a thing or two about the origin of Mr. Brzezinski's view on Sino-U.S. relations, I thought this article might be a good example for me to use to help China's elite rid of their 崇洋媚外心態.

I did not get the opportunity to write about it until a couple of months ago when I was writing “The Meaning of Justice: An Addendum”. Indeed, I almost incorporated this example into my finished article that was first published on June 4. (Due to unknown problem with Facebook, people can only access this article on westca.com where I posted on June 5.) Because every move of mine was monitored by the American political class, they certainly knew everything about my writing plan as well. That's why we saw Chuck Hagel, the U.S. Secretary of Defence, defended or praised Mr. Brzezinski without prompt while being interviewed by a Chinese TV reporter at the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore between May 31 and June 2. Just like Mr. Brzezinski's tweet, I believe Mr. Hagel's comment was also a reflection of his worry about the truth that I was going to reveal.

And the truth, unbeknownst to perhaps many Chinese reporters, is that Mr. Brzezinski, while widely thought as an early advocate for the notion of G-2, not only publicized his ideas after I did, most notably, with my January 11, 2009 blog, “Global Financial Crisis and the Fate of Two Nations”, but he also heavily “borrowed” -- if not outright “stole” -- from my work. All people need as proof is to compare my blogs published before January 11, 2009 with his article, “The Group of Two that could change the world”, published on the Financial Times newspaper two days later. Some obvious nuts there included “pragmatic”, “interdependence” and “philosophically”, etc.

While writing this article, I noticed that there may be other people who want to claim credit for the concept of G-2. I don't care a bit. As I freely admitted before, when I first heard people talk about G-8 or G-20, I did not even know what the letter “G” stand for. I am not a politician and can never be. To me, what's important about an idea is in its contents, rather than its name. My purpose of writing about this is not to embarrass Mr. Brzezinski or anybody else, but to alert China's elite not surrender to the American political class intellectually. That's the real reason why Mr. Brzezinski felt the need to show that he was still held in high regard in China, as he did in his July 7 tweet.

Of course, Mr. Brzezinski is not the only one in the American political class who has stolen from my ideas. Far from it. Indeed, the most recent theft took place while I was writing the above mentioned article to commemorate the 24th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square tragedy. I wonder whether these American thieves would come clean after I post this article.

Regarding Mr. Obama's stealing from my draft writing, I had the following to say in my March 5, 2011 blog update: “I should point out Mr. Obama’s specific behaviour was unethical on several fronts. Not only had he never acknowledged me when he stole from my writings, he has also been actively preventing me from being known to the public. What’s more in this latest occurrence, he has been trying to brand me as a criminal.”

Insofar as Mr. Obama is the leader of the American political class, it looks like nothing has really changed with respect to that political class.