The Secret War in Laos: The Asian Side of the French Connection [pt. 3] (my thoughts)

20:40

“According to the Seagraves, the Japanese looted massive quantities of gold from their possessions throughout World War II. This was orchestrated by Emperor Hirohito’s brother, Prince Chichibu, under an organization called Golden Lily. The idea was that if Japan lost the war on the battlefield and was forced to surrender, the Imperial elites who avoided prosecution could recover their hidden treasures across Asia and return to prominence.

Returning to Lansdale, at the end of World War II in the Philippines, his G2 team was called to Manila to interrogate the entourage of a major Japanese war criminal, General Tomoyuki Yamashita. Yamashita had led significant Japanese offensives in British Malaya, Singapore, Manchuria, and the Philippines, committing unspeakable atrocities during these campaigns. He was ordered to stand trial at the US Military Tribunal in Manila.

According to the Seagraves, G2 squads used any means necessary to extract information from captives. Filipino-American agent Seino Garcia Diaz Santo Roman, known as Santi, often carried out the interrogations, including torture, to gain information about renegade divisions or the whereabouts of missing war criminals. Santi reported directly to Edward Lansdale.

When General Yamashita was arrested and sent to trial, Lansdale and Santi began interrogating his close subordinates to uncover critical information or confirm rumors of hidden gold across the islands. It was through the interrogation of General Yamashita’s driver, Major Kojima Makashi, in October 1945 that the case was broken open. Kojima allegedly directed Lansdale and his team to over a dozen Golden Lily stashes in the mountains north of Manila.

Lansdale then traveled to Tokyo to brief General MacArthur, who subsequently informed President Truman. The White House agreed that the war loot should be recovered but kept secret. According to the Seagraves, the recovered treasure—gold, platinum, and barrels of loose gems—was combined with Axis loot from Europe to create a worldwide covert political action fund to fight communism.

Former CIA officer and whistleblower Ray Cline claimed the treasure was recovered and stored in 176 bank accounts across 42 countries, possibly managed by CIA bankers like former OSS agent and counterinsurgency mastermind Paul Helliwell. Helliwell had also been posted in East Asia with the OSS at the end of World War II.

While this story could be explored further, we must return to our main topic.”

This is something I also ponder and wrote about. While Germany stole all the gold from Europe, which was later taken by the US, the same thing happened in Asia. Japan stole all the gold from Asia, which was also later taken by the US. Indeed, in this way, the US ended up with 80% of the world’s gold and wealth, which is how the Bretton Woods system could work. The US was able to back the US dollar with gold, and all other currencies taking part in the Bretton Woods system were indirectly backed by gold. Since the US promised that those currencies would be exchangeable for dollars, and dollars were exchangeable for gold, all those currencies were indirectly backed by gold.

In the beginning, no one had a problem with the fact that the US held 80% of the world’s gold reserves. All this fell apart after the Vietnam War when people started to understand that the US was producing so many dollars that they would not have enough gold to back them. When the French sent ships to the US demanding gold in exchange for their dollars, at some point Nixon was forced to drop the gold standard because the US didn’t have enough gold to back the US dollar.

At this point, the US should have gone bankrupt, and the system should have collapsed. Basically, the US spent more than they had in collateral in the form of gold, and they cheated the world. At that point, all central banks around the world held around 50% of their monetary reserves in the USD since it was the only currency directly exchangeable for gold. After dropping the gold standard, all those banks would try to diversify their monetary reserves from dollars to different currencies since the only advantage of the dollar was removed. This would cause all dollars to flood the market, releasing them into circulation, and causing hyperinflation.

To prevent this, they created the Petrodollar to stop the diversification of monetary reserves by banks around the world and to prevent hyperinflation.

I heard a great summary by Aaron Good when they compare the fall of the British empire to the fall of US empire during one of their episodes:

“Let me point out a couple of differences between the British example and now. In the British case, they could essentially hand over the policing and protection of their internationally invested capital to the United States. That was pretty much what all the countries did that used to be great empires—they got folded into this dollar system, and the US would kind of look out for their interests and basically the interests of invested capital anywhere. That’s why the French have continued to be prosperous, partly by exploiting their area in West Africa, the way that they have, which now seems to be coming to an end. The British had their investments around the world, but the US does not look to be able to hand it off to another white hegemon that’s going to do for the US what the US did for Britain back then.

In addition, while there was a crisis at the end of the Bretton Woods system, the US actually had a strong material foundation to be able to stage one of the great coups in human history: rolling the old Bretton Woods system, which had some restraints like the gold peg, and establishing this new petrodollar system. They did this essentially by telling Saudi Arabia and others to take US dollars, and only US dollars, for oil and buy Treasury bonds in secret auctions—or, you know, face dire consequences. That’s how Michael Hudson describes it, and I think that’s probably about right.

Additionally, in that time period, they took all of those petrodollars and loaned them out to third-world countries. Then, when the Volcker shock came, these countries fell into terrible debt. This allowed the IMF and other Western institutions to emerge as tools for capital, enabling the West to capitalize on these debt crises. The US was actually stronger than ever under Reagan—so strong that they could essentially bring about the end of the Soviet Union and become the unipolar power.

The difference now is that I don’t see that the US has this underlying power. We don’t have client regimes in all the oil-rich states in the world anymore. Quite the opposite—Venezuela, Iran, and Russia are our big enemies. We don’t have, for example, a secret gold mine in Indonesia that the US was basically able to steal by murdering maybe a million or more Indonesians in 1965. Americans don’t even know about that. But when the gold price exploded, what did that do to the fortunes of the oligarchs who made off with that fortune, which we’re still benefiting from through the Freeport-McMoRan mine in West Papua? It’s the biggest gold mine in human history, and we stole it.

At this point, I believe the US doesn’t have the material resources to come up with some sort of new gambit like we did with the petrodollar system, or whatever we want to call it. This, I think, is the most profound crisis not just of the US, but of Western imperialism, because the rest of the nonwhite world—the non-Western world—has never been so strong, organized, and unified against their enemy, the enemy of the global majority, which is this regime that we live under.”

59:18

“At the beginning of this video, I stated that ZM was not only the chosen ruler of the United States but specifically the hand-picked ruler of US intelligence. Personally, I find this MSU case study fascinating as an example of the symbiosis of intelligence work and academia. As I have shown here, academic backing gave a convincing veil of cover to potential spies in foreign countries engaging in activities that were maybe less than acceptable under international law.

This specific example of the MSU in Vietnam reminds me particularly of the case of Pinochet’s Chile in the early 1970s, where CIA-backed economists from the University of Chicago, titled the Chicago Boys, filled Pinochet’s regime’s early administration following the CIA-backed coup in Santiago in 1973. There, they worked to shape the country of Chile to Uncle Sam’s preference.

In South Vietnam, this academic spycraft took on a different dimension, focusing on bolstering Diem and his brother Nhu’s policing capabilities and essentially giving them the tools necessary to undertake the CIA’s narco-funding plan, as we know now.”

I would like to summarize by saying this: just look at how many things people don’t know. Japan’s gold after WWII, Western atrocities in Indonesia, the biggest gold mine in the world in Indonesia, the CIA’s connection to organized crime and the drug trade, the fascist coup attempt in the US in 1933 by JP Morgan, and many more things. People know nothing about such important events, yet they still think they understand the world.

I have one colleague at work who claims I am pushing Russian propaganda, and whenever I prove, for example, the CIA’s involvement with organized crime, his response is simply to say, “The Soviets did it too,” without providing any proof.

I am astonished by how blindly and strongly people believe the US and the West are the “good guys” while not understanding anything about the world or history. No matter how much evidence you provide, Russia is still considered the bad guy, and Putin is compared to Hitler, while we in the West are seen as the land of freedom and prosperity.

PS:

I’m probably just being paranoid, but since last week, I haven’t been able to access the Duran forum using my cell network. This is just as I started to explain how they control and manipulate people using philosophy and psychology. Anyway, what we know for sure is that you’re not silenced for lying; they only silence you when you tell the truth, as we see with examples like Snowden and Assange. So, I guess the Duran was getting too close to the truth.

Does anyone else have similar problems accessing this forum?

If I’m the only one facing this issue, then maybe they’re after me. In that case, it was nice knowing you all.