Ralph Townsend
1899-1975

Publisher’s Preface

Then is Also Now

This book brilliantly weaves together a tapestry of anecdotes and insights to explain to the reader why, as Rudyard Kipling once put it, “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.” As the reader delves deeper into the book, one sees that the author Ralph Townsend is not merely spinning anecdotes, but is supporting profound insights about the underlying character of China. In this Preface, I wish to explain how Ralph Townsend’s frank insights remain timely, even in view of all the developments that have taken place since the book was first published in 1933.

America still lacks a wise policy that takes into account the realities that this book describes so well. Instead, America’s elite promote expedient policies that are not only the exact opposite of the classical liberal principles upon which America was founded, but also careen from one extreme to the other. One moment, they preach irresponsible forms of so-called “free trade” globalism that make quick money for narrow interests without reinvesting in America as a whole over the long term. Once their expedient policies run into serious domestic problems or create international conflicts, they suddenly put aside their internationalist, “anti-racist” campaigns and magically “discover” profound cultural, racial, and character differences. We have already seen this erratic approach applied towards the Muslim world, and now we are beginning to see American neo-conservatives target China. It seems like only yesterday when they portrayed China as a free trade Nirvana full of nothing but wonderful, hardworking people.

A wise policy recognizes profound racial and cultural differences in advance, but without hatred. True statesmanship enables Americans to maintain enough self-sufficiency and enough of a respectful distance so that we can trade with the Chinese to each other’s mutual benefit over the long run in ways that do not put our respective societies on a collision course.

America and China now appear to be on a collision course that could have tragic consequences for both countries. China has grown steadily in economic might in the last two decades, while America has been declining in the opposite direction. America has become encumbered with the loss of over 60% of its manufacturing base while at the same time it has experienced exploding consumer, corporate, and government debt.

America’s chronic balance of trade deficits tell us that we have lost a huge portion of our former capacity to produce quality tradable goods, while China’s huge trade surpluses say the exact opposite for China. Our exploding debt tells us that the real American economic pie is shrinking and Americans are raiding their savings and are borrowing ever more to make up for shortfalls. At the same time, the world is reaching peak oil, and America and China find their gigantic hungry economies competing head-to-head for increasingly scarce natural resources.

Clearly, it behooves Americans to learn more about these wily foreigners who are steadily increasing their influence over America’s destiny —and not necessarily to America’s mutual benefit. But we also need to look at insiders here in America who have promoted irresponsible and expedient globalist policies in the first place, and who have dramatically increased our vulnerability to China’s dark side.

In this Preface, I would like to add some insights to Ralph Townsend’s discussion of racial differences. I would also like to provide background on other issues. I will discuss the way Townsend was persecuted for his views by the FDR administration. I will also describe the changes brought to China by communism, the unprincipled opportunism shown by America’s elite, and lastly, how Townsend’s insights relate to America’s current manufacturing and free trade crisis with China.

Since Ralph Townsend was associated with the American Old Right, it seems appropriate to use this perspective to describe how Chinese and American relations have evolved since 1933. I will use terms such as “Old Right,” “traditional American conservatism,” and “(19th century) classical liberalism” interchangeably, since by today’s standards they are all essentially synonymous.

Townsend’s racial perspective

Ralph Townsend preferred the Japanese to the Chinese. One reason is he felt that Japanese culture more closely incorporates Western concepts of honor. He noted how segments of Japanese society absorbed the Ainu over many centuries, a people with many similarities to Caucasians. Townsend explained significant cultural and physical differences in Chapter IX “Japan and the Chinese” of this book.

Townsend was ahead of his time by suggesting a sociobiological theory for the origins of Chinese behavior, although the term “sociobiology” itself had not yet been coined in 1933. Stated succinctly, several thousands years of “man vs. man” Darwinian selection under extremely harsh, crowded, miserable conditions has produced a people whose bell-shaped curve of innate genetic traits has become heavily skewed in the direction of duplicity, collectivism, and authoritarianism. Anecdotally, Townsend offered images of Chinese who can quote the high-minded platitudes of Confucius one moment and then coolly cut ones throat the next; or who can act like canny traders one moment and then later kow tow before capricious authority.

In contrast, Europeans are relatively recent descendents of highly dispersed hunters, nomads, farmers, fishermen, warriors, and woodsmen dependent upon technological innovation to survive under harsh, quasi-Arctic “man vs. nature” conditions. Most Europeans have experienced crowding and urban life, on average, for less than a few hundred years. This different history has been relatively slow at weeding out of their gene pool people who retain a strong genetic predisposition towards individual initiative, personal expression, honesty, technological innovation, chivalry, sentimentality, and emotional and political territoriality (human rights). One can see this today on a nursery school level where European kids tend to act far more boisterous, exploratory, and individually assertive compared to Chinese children.

Northern European societies in particular, going back to prehistoric times, always had a large middle class of armed, self-sufficient men and always tended to have a smaller underclass or peasantry compared to most other societies. All this becomes very evident whether one reads the ancient Greek and Roman and histories or the Norse sagas and ancient Celtic lore. For that matter, one can read The Winning of the West by Theodore Roosevelt to get a vivid sense about how much of America was built by self-reliant communities of Northern European-descended pioneers and backwoodsmen. In contrast, Chinese and other Asian societies have tended to be very pyramidal in their social structure, with incredibly large “masses” of people at the bottom.

As a caveat, I will observe that since we are comparing populations, we are really dealing with statistical distributions, not individualized certainties. Even if Townsend is correct, some Chinese on a far side of their bell-shaped statistical distribution curve are more individualistic and expressive than the average Westerner. However, when comparing the averages of both population curves, we see that the average Westerner is more individualistic than the average Chinese person.

Caucasian strengths can also be their weaknesses. They are relatively good at comprehending people who think the way they do, that is, by ordering the world in ways that are relatively logical, coherent, factual, and straight according to their relatively simple code of honor. Paradoxically, many whites seem to have serious problems comprehending alien peoples who routinely engage in a high level of dissimilation and deception. Townsend discusses this anomaly at some length in his chapters about Christian missionaries who repeatedly get taken for a ride in China.

Why Civilizations Self-Destruct by the American population expert Dr. Elmer Pendell provides another important alternative perspective to Ways That Are Dark. Dr. Pendell described how civilizations tend to sow the seeds of their own demise on a genetic level. According to Dr. Pendell, civilizations create niches that allow the unfit to reproduce at a faster rate than the fit, thereby reversing evolution. Civilizations go into decline when innately nonproductive people begin to outnumber producers. This drags down the overall level of social competence and efficiency.

I think that Townsend caught on to another important dimension, namely that when civilizations suffer the forms of overcrowding and stagnation described by Pendell, increasing percentages of crooked people rise to the top, thereby further degrading the tone of the society and accelerating the speed in which civilizations fossilize. This can stack long-term Darwinian selective factors even more against traditional Western values that include honesty, free expression, and individual rights.

Many Chinese view Caucasians as childish, boisterous, upstart barbarians. In their view, the greater Chinese capacity for subtlety and dissimilation may reflect a greater form of realism. It may also reflect the superior refinement of a people with a longer perpetual tenure in civilized surroundings.

Actually the view that the Chinese have the oldest civilization is not quite accurate, given the early origin of Sumer created by Indo-Europeans, and evidence of advanced implements now being discovered in Northern Europe. However, as Dr. Pendell pointed out, Indo-Europeans tended to create the massive monuments of congested civilizations outside of their indigenous quasi-Arctic habitats after they migrated southward to easier climates, whereas the Chinese of today are descended from people who have endured their congested civilization for thousands of years in the same place.

One might argue that like parts of Europe and the Middle East, China also experienced the impact of peoples who migrated southward from harder northlands. These peoples included the Mongols and the Hun. Environmental theories of history based on learning cannot explain why the Chinese built the Great Wall of China facing the relatively desolate northern lands. If the continual advancement of major world civilizations depended solely on the accumulation of learning and experience, then the Chinese should have built their Great Wall on their southern border facing the remains of very ancient civilizations ranging from Indo-China to India. Only genetic theory can explain why the Chinese feared the peoples of the north rather than the south. In the northlands, the cruel winters sculptured human gene pools in the direction of greater physical robustness required to battle the cold. These lands also required a greater innate capacity for technological problem-solving to create winter survival equipment.

I think that we should not emphasize biological theories to the point that we overly stereotype or underestimate the Chinese. They have surprised Westerners with their ability to introduce free market reforms in the last two decades. They have also made impressive gains in advanced technology research. In fact, a number of American conservatives have remarked bitterly that some parts of the Chinese economy now appear to be more deregulated and laissez faire than the U.S. economy. The brilliant libertarian writer Dr. Paul Craig Roberts has observed that America now has more prisoners per capita than any other country in the world, including presumably China.

One might wonder if the Chinese are simply copying external libertarian forms from us while retaining a very different internal substance. Even today, one comes across articles such as “What Taiwanese Fear” by antiwar.com columnist Sascha Matuszak (posted Aug 23, 2002). This kind of article reinforces Ralph Townsend’s character studies.

The persecution of Ralph Townsend and other rightists by the Franklin D. Roosevelt Administration

Ralph Townsend served as a Vice Consul in the U.S. Foreign Service in Shanghai, Montreal, and the State Department in Washington before he resigned in 1933 to pursue public relations work in New York and San Francisco. During the late 1930’s he became well connected with Japanese governmental and commercial agents on the West Coast, and published books such as Asia Answers, The High Costs of Hate, America Has No Enemies in Asia, and Seeking Foreign Trouble. He created enemies in the FDR administration because of his efforts to tell the Japanese side of the story in its war with China.

After Pearl Harbor, anyone who had anything to do with the Japanese became extremely unpopular, particularly in the Western United States where FDR sent 120,000 Japanese-Americans to concentration camps. According to a March 27, 1942 San Francisco News story, Ralph Townsend was one of six individuals who were indicted as agents of the Japanese Government.

Later, President Roosevelt invoked the peacetime Smith Act of June 28, 1940 and the Espionage Act of 1917. The Smith Act was originally intended to curb communist-inspired insubordination in the Armed Forces. As is often the case with laws, they have unintended consequences, and ironically these supposedly anti-Red laws were now being used against American rightists. Townsend and forty-one other Americans were indicted for “sedition,” of whom thirty went to trial. Townsend himself spent a year in federal prison while undergoing trial.

According to Lawrence Dennis, one of the defendants, FDR’s real purpose was intimidation. Rather than indict the most famous America First leaders, such as Charles Lindbergh, the Reverend Charles Coughlin, Henry Ford, and a number of nationalist Congressman, FDR chose to pick on the more vulnerable next tier down. FDR’s targets included not only Ralph Townsend, but also Elizabeth Dilling, a socially prominent matron from the Chicago area who made enemies authoring books such as The Plot Against Christianity and The Roosevelt Red Record and Its Background. FDR also picked on an eighty two year old man of meager means who put out a small circulation newsletter. Dennis himself was a former diplomat, author, and advisor to prominent congressional critics. About the only thing that Dennis, Townsend, Dilling, and the other defendants had in common is that they all despised FDR and his policies.

The “Great Sedition Trial,” as it was named in the book A Trial on Trial by defendant Lawrence Dennis and his attorney Maximilian St. George, quickly degenerated into a farce. The U.S. Government charged the 30 trial defendants with being part of some kind of fantastic co-conspiracy with Adolf Hitler to spread Nazi propaganda and undermine American military morale in wartime. The court case commenced in 1944 and dragged on until November 22, 1946, when a judge finally dismissed all charges against the defendants stating that allowing the case to continue would be “a travesty of justice.”

According to the Barnes Review, “Well-known names did come to Townsend’s defense during his dark days in prison. Among them included such nationalist giants of the U.S. Senate as Robert A. Taft, Burton Wheeler, Gerald Nye, and Rush Holt. These senators informed Roosevelt that unless Townsend was freed they would personally take his case to the floor of the Senate and use it as a springboard to expose the administrations `political purge’ for what it really was: an attempt to silence America First critics of Roosevelt’s war policy. The charges against Townsend and the others were dropped and he and his so-called `co-conspirators’ (none of whom he had ever met) were freed.”

The Barnes Review also notes that Townsend remained active in public affairs in the post war years. During that period, he befriended numerous historical revisionist scholars. He passed away in 1975 at age 76.

We know today from the Venona Papers, released KGB archives, and other records that FDR’s administration was indeed thick with real Reds. They included FDR’s close advisor Alger Hiss, a proven Moscow agent. We can also look at the genocidal Morganthal Plan against Germans promulgated by Roosevelt’s Jewish Secretary of the Treasury as evidence of extreme bias within his administration.

Today, we can also see how underhanded efforts by the FDR administration and its national media confederates to stymie the broader America First political agenda has impacted America. We see how imperial overstretch, runaway government, massive illegal alien immigration, and blank-check support for Zionism have all contributed towards the ruin America faces today. The defendants in the Sedition Trial are becoming increasingly vindicated with the passage of time.

China’s Maoist chapter

The photo on the front page of this ebook shows a stone-faced Chou En-Lai, Chairman Mao Tse-Tung’s right hand man, in the background observing Chairman Mao Tse-Tung make a point with U.S. Secretary of State Dr. Henry Kissinger. To certain modern liberals, this picture might reflect a crowning glory of enlightened diplomacy. To traditional American conservatives, this may instead reflect an ominous continuation of the dark themes of Townsend’s work. An appropriate caption might be: “Dark Lord of the East edifies Dark Lord of the West.”

According to Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, at the time of the photo in 1972, Chou En-Lai had cancer, but Mao Tse-Tung would not allow him to receive treatment for fear that Chou might outlive him. Nice guy.

Chang and Halliday point out that the Red Emperor was hardly benevolent in other ways. “Mao caused the greatest famine in history by exporting food to Russia to buy nuclear and arms industries: 38 million people were starved and slave-driven to death in 1958-61. Mao knew exactly what was happening, saying: `half of China may well have to die.’" The authors claim that Mao succeeded in becoming the greatest mass murderer in history, with somewhere over 70 million victims.

While Chinese Communists are often credited with eradicating the terrible scourge of opium that Townsend wrote about, even here there is a twist. According to Chang and Halliday, Mao himself grew opium on a large scale.

America’s Zionist chapter

Dr. Henry Kissinger has a special talent for hitting the nerves of traditional American conservatives with quotes such as: “Military men are dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns for foreign policy,” “The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer,” and “Today Americans would be outraged if U. N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow they will be grateful!”

Aligned with Rothschild and other elite Zionist interests, multinational Trilateralists, “Bilderberg” globalists, central bankers, and other shadowy “New World Order” entities, Dr. Henry Kissinger is not exactly an object of adoration by most traditional American conservatives. In fact, he has been in league with forces that have pushed America in the exact opposite direction over the last hundred years from what was advocated by its Founding Fathers. He also seems to symbolize all the ways in which American involvement with China has gone wrong since World War II.

Michael Collins Piper’s landmark work Final Judgment: The Missing Link in the JFK Assassination Conspiracy, provides important contextual background on the real Chinese connection to America’s hidden elite. Mr. Piper describes how Israeli scientists worked cooperatively with the Red Chinese behind the scenes in the early 1960’s to help each other get the atomic bomb. Israeli writer Uri Dan stated that it was “the dream” of Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion to forge ties with the Chinese and to “bring two of the world’s most ancient people’s together” (Final Judgment, p. 407, 6th edition).

According to Mr. Piper, President John F. Kennedy not only sought to block Israeli bomb development, but was also planning a military strike to knock out Red Chinese nuclear facilities. As a consequence, Israel’s Mossad, segments of America’s CIA, and mobsters controlled by America’s Jewish organized crime boss Meyer Lansky, all worked together to assassinate John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Red China tested its first atomic bomb in October 1964.

By the time of the Kissinger - Mao Tse Tung - Chou En-Lai photograph, America’s national media continued its cover up not only of the real culprits behind the JFK assassination, but also Israel’s deliberate attack on the U.S.S. Liberty in 1967. In fact, as Wilmot Robertson documented in his brilliant book The Dispossessed Majority, these people continued to act against the interests of America’s declining white middle class on many different levels.

According to the former publication The Spotlight (later reincarnated as The American Free Press), in the era following Kissinger’s “détente,” Israel continued to make big money by selling U.S. armaments to Red China behind the scenes, and even had the audacity to transport them in the hulls of visiting U.S. Navy ships. According to Michael Collins Piper, Israel has remained a major arms supplier to Red China.

China and the American manufacturing crisis

Fast-forwarding to the present, I agree with Eamonn Fingleton’s thesis in his excellent book In Praise of Hard Industries: Why Manufacturing, Not the Information Economy, the Key to Future Prosperity that a nation’s manufacturing infrastructure comprises the bedrock of its service sector job creation and its capacity for long term automation innovation and productive reinvestment. Mr. Fingleton explains the vital strategic importance of the manufacturing sector, given its ability to infinitely scale up productivity growth through the continuing automation revolution, combined with its superior ability to raise wages and create jobs relative to capital costs.

In a healthy society, manufacturing infrastructure should never fall below roughly a third of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Furthermore, sustainable mutual prosperity in foreign trade is not some kind of zero sum game in which sending a portion of ones manufacturing base overseas requires accepting a higher percentage of service jobs within the domestic economy. Rather, it is a case where all countries that aspire to be a part of the First World must strive to maintain a manufacturing base that is at least one third of GDP. Profitability may seem more sluggish at times with this policy compared to unfettered free trade that promotes the immediate export of jobs and industry wherever they can score quick bucks, but in the long run a policy that encourages continual reinvestment and innovation in domestic hard industries does far more to create real wealth for everyone.

Currently the Caterpillar Corporation is an example of a U.S. company that has chosen to keep investing heavily in American factories and workers. It remains the global leader in its industry, delivering higher quality at lower costs. In contrast, both General Motors and Ford are examples of companies that have failed to adequately invest at home. Both GM and Ford have been experiencing rising risks of financial distress.

Heedless of the need to invest in America, short-sighted American executives have exported 60% of America’s manufacturing base overseas in an effort to immediately exploit cheap labor. This has dropped domestic manufacturing to below 14% of GDP. Much of our manufacturing base has gone to China. Fingleton points out that as part of their free trade religion, American executives have even ignored Chinese who have freely pirated American software, patents, and anything else that is not nailed down.

Meanwhile, the innovativeness, flexibility, and quality of America’s management has deteriorated further as a consequence of affirmative action programs, excessive regulation, and other forms of leftist government intervention, adding even more pressure to outsource jobs overseas. This vicious circle has resulted in an implosion in well-paying jobs in America and a very serious decline in net national assets and the real average standard of living.

Delusional old wine in new bottles

While the export of America’s manufacturing base to China was not an issue when Townsend completed Ways That Are Dark in 1933, on a more abstract conceptual level, he did in fact address old wine that has been poured into new bottles. He describes at great length how Chinese repeatedly took ruthless advantage of Western Christian missionaries, and how these true believers kept repeating the same mistakes over and over again.

Simply substitute “Christian missionary” with “American multinational corporate executive,” and then substitute “Christianity” with “modern liberalism and unfettered globalist free trade ideology” and you arrive at almost identical patterns of denial and other delusional behavior.

Some very serious rude awakenings may lie ahead. In 2005, Chinese General Zhu Chenghu said that he believed that his government was under internal pressure to change its “no first use” policy. In other words, China might consider using nukes to defend its claim on Taiwan. This kind of warning hardly soothes the nerves of anyone worried about a possible military showdown between America and China, not to mention a possible confiscation of American assets on the Chinese mainland.

Meanwhile, American “leaders” have allowed the Chinese, Japanese, and other Asians to hold such massive levels of American debt and foreign exchange that they could easily sink the dollar by dumping their reserves. This could force a massive increase in import prices. When or if the Chinese, Japanese, and other foreigners decide to hold back on buying American new debt issues, they can force America’s central bankers to create ever more dollars out of thin air to cover the short falls. This in turn can spiral America into hyperinflation.

Why traditional American values can provide a framework to get along with the Chinese on a long term, sustainable basis

I genuinely wish that American leaders could develop realistic policies that would enable us to work with the Chinese in ways that are mutually respectful and beneficial over the long run. I believe that 19th century classical liberal principles, which once produced an excellent economic track record in America, could provide a frame of reference.

Many 19th century classical liberals promoted white racial nationalism and other forms of “charity begins at home” white self-determination and group survival without hatred. They sought foreign trade and encouraged humanitarian aid, but without imperialistic foreign entanglements, without growth of government that threatens human liberty, and without compromise of domestic economic self-sufficiency. They focused on hard scientific, technological, and manufacturing progress as a substitute for such evils as waging aggressive war or creating a casino society focused on financial speculation. Classical liberals sought to deal with others through enough strength, with enough self-sufficiency, and with enough of a margin for error so that they could go through life without exposing themselves to other people’s dark sides.

In contrast, so-called modern liberals have rejected all the common sense cautions of classical liberals. By preaching unrealistic concepts of racial equality, by denigrating white self-sufficiency, by encouraging reckless multi-cultural diversity, and by promoting completely open borders, big government interventionist crusades, and unfettered free trade, “modern” liberals have paradoxically distorted the American economy and made us more vulnerable to the dark sides of alien peoples. This is likely to create far more hatred, hardship, and bloodshed in the long run than if we had remained true to the classical liberal principles upon which America was founded.

Put another way, I believe that over the long run “modern” liberalism will prove to be just as bad for the Chinese as for Americans. In fact, as a final paradox, in many ways this book has helped me to better appreciate recent Chinese government efforts at pragmatic reform. Although China’s leaders are involved in many things that I vigorously oppose here in the U.S., such as Internet censorship, this book has helped me better understand how Chinese problems are much deeper, more complex, and more difficult than most Americans realize.

		William B. Fox Publisher America First Books
Feb 19, 2006 Vancouver, WA
...............................................................................................................................