Renewable Revolution

Civil War Era Russian Fleet
 
As we mark the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, commemorations of the mid-point year of that terrible conflict in 1863 are dominated by much-studied battles like Gettysburg, Vicksburg, and Chickamauga. Often forgotten are events of perhaps even greater strategic importance – the arrival of the Russian Baltic Fleet in New York City on September 24, 1863, and of the Russian Pacific Squadron in San Francisco on October 12 of the same year. The two Russian admirals carried secret sealed orders they were instructed to open only if Great Britain and France declared war on Russia and/or the United States.

Any aggression by London and Paris against the Union in support of the Confederacy would have caused the Russian Empire to enter the war on the side of Lincoln. If war had come, the secret orders told the Russian admirals to cooperate with the Union Navy in attacking Anglo-French commerce on the high seas, in the manner of the highly successful Confederate raiders like the Alabama.

Napoleon III of France and Lord John Russell, Lord Palmerston, and William Gladstone of Britain had been threatening to intervene in favor of the Confederacy since 1861. They were deterred by the pro-Lincoln policy of the Imperial Court of St. Petersburg. With the arrival of the Russian fleets, consternation in London, Paris, and their partner Madrid was great.

In the North, still traumatized by losses at Gettysburg and Chickamauga,
and by the New York City draft riots, the Russian fleets were a decisive morale booster. When a Confederate warship was feared to be approaching San Francisco, the Russian admiral cleared for action and prepared to defend the port. Russia was the only country to extend direct military support to the Lincoln government.

The Imperial Russian government had issued an ultimatum to Britain and France specifying that if those powers should intervene on the side of the Confederate States of America they would immediately find themselves at war with the Russian Empire.

Cassius Marcellus Clay of Kentucky, a cousin of the Great Compromiser who was Lincoln’s Ambassador to Russia, later claimed that he had done more than any person to save the Union by obtaining Russian help to keep the British and French out of the war. Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles summed up much Northern opinion when he observed: “God bless the Russians!” But later, Anglophilia and the Cold War helped obscure these decisive facts .

http://tarpley.net/2013/10/25/tarpleys-national-press-club-lecture-on-russian-fleets-of-1863-to-air-this-weekend-on-c-span3

Saturday, October 12, 2013
   
1993-2013: is the twenty years long "pas de deux" of Russia and the USA coming to an end? 


The latest tensions between the EU and Russia over Greenpeace's stunt in the Arctic only confirmed a fact which nobody really bothers denying anymore: Western political and financial elites absolutely hate Vladimir Putin and they are appalled at Russia's behavior, both inside Russia and on the international scene.  This tension was quite visible on the faces of Obama and Putin at the G8 summit in Lough Erne where both leaders looked absolutely disgusted with each other.  Things got even worse when Putin did something quite unheard of in the Russian diplomatic history: he publicly  said that Kerry was dishonest and even called him a liar.

 While tensions have reached some sort of climax over the Syrian issue, problems between Russia and the USA are really nothing new.  A quick look at the recent past will show that the western corporate media has been engaged in a sustained strategic campaign to identify and exploit any possible weaknesses in the Russian "political armor" and to paint Russia like a very nasty, undemocratic and authoritarian country, in other words a threat to the West.   Let me mention a few episodes of this Russia-bashing campaign (in no particular order):
•Berezovsky as a "persecuted" businessman
•Politkovskaya "murdered by KGB goons"
•Khodorkovsky jailed for his love of "liberty"
•Russia's "aggression" against Georgia
•The Russian "genocidal" wars against the Chechen people
•"**** Riot" as "prisoners of conscience"
•Litvinenko "murdered by Putin"
•Russian homosexuals "persecuted" and "mistreated" by the state
•Magnitsky and the subsequent "Magnitsky law"
•Snowden as a "traitor hiding in Russia"
•The "stolen elections" to the Duma and the Presidency
•The "White Revoluton" on the Bolotnaya square
•The "new Sakharov" - Alexei Navalnyi
•Russia's "support for Assad", the (Chemical) "Butcher of Baghdad"
•The Russian constant "intervention" in Ukrainian affairs
•The "complete control" of the Kremlin over the Russian media
This list is far from complete, but its sufficient for our purposes.  Let me also immediately add here that it is not my purpose today to debunk these allegations one by one.  I have done so in this blog many times the past, so anybody interested can look this up.  I will just state here one very important thing which I cannot prove, but of which I am absolutely certain: 90% or more of the Russian public believe that all these issues are absolute nonsense, completely overblown non-issues.  Furthermore, most Russians believe that the so-called "democratic forces" which the Western elites support in Russia (Iabloko, Parnas, Golos, etc.) are basically agents of influence for the West paid for by the CIA, MI6, Soros and exiled Jewish oligarchs.  What is certain is that besides these small liberal/democratic groups, nobody in Russia takes these accusations seriously.  Most people see them exactly for what they are: a smear campaign.

 In many ways, this is rather reminiscent of how things stood during the Cold War where the West used its immense propaganda resources to demonize the Soviet Union and to support anti-Soviet forces worldwide, including inside the USSR itself.  I would argue that these efforts were, by and large, very successful and that by 1990s the vast majority of Soviets, including Russians, were rather disgusted with their leaders.  So why the big difference today?

 To answer that question, we need to look back at the processes which took place in Russia in the last 20 years or so because only a look at what happened during these two decades will allows us to get to the root of the current problem(s) between the USA and Russia.

 When did the Soviet Union truly disappear?

 The official date of the end of the Soviet Union is 26 December 1991, the day of the adoption by the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union of the  Declaration № 142-Н which officially recognized dissolution of the Soviet Union as a state and subject of international law.  But that is a very superficial, formal, view of things.  One could argue that even though the Soviet Union had shrunk to the size of the Russian Federation it still survived within these smaller borders.  After all, the laws did not change overnight, neither did most of the bureaucracy, and even though the Communist Party itself had been banned following the August 1991 coup, the rest of the state apparatus still continued to exist.

 For Eltsin and his supporters this reality created a very difficult situation.  Having banned the CPUS and dismantled the KGB, Eltsin's  liberals still face a formidable adversary: the Supreme Soviet of the Russian Federation, the Parliament of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, elected by the Congress of People's Deputies of the Russian Federation.  Nobody had abolished this *very* Soviet institution which rapidly became the center of almost all of the anti-Eltsin and pro-Soviet forces in the country.  I cannot go in all the details of this legal nightmare, suffice to say that the Supreme Soviet presented itself as the "Russian Parliament" (which is not quite true) and that its members engaged in a systematic campaign to prevent Eltsin to implement his "reforms" (in hindsight, one could say that they tried to prevent Eltsin from ruining the country).  One could say that the "new Russia" and the "old USSR" were fighting each other for the future of the country.  Predictably, the Supreme Soviet wanted a parliamentary democracy while Eltsin and his liberals wanted a presidential democracy.  The two sides presented what appeared to be a stark contrast to most Russians:

 
 1) The Russian President Eltsin: officially he represented Russia, as opposed to the Soviet Union; he presented himself as an anti-Communist and as a democrat (nevermind that he himself had been a high ranking member of the CPSU and even a non-voting member to the Politburo!).  Eltsin was also clearly the darling of the West and he promised to integrate Russia into the western world.

 2) The Supreme Soviet: headed by Ruslan Khasbulatov with the support of the Vice-President of Russia, Alexander Rutskoi, the Supreme Soviet became the rallying point of all those who believed that the Soviet Union had been dissolved illegally (which is true) and against the will of the majority of its people (which is also true).  Most, though not all, the supporters of the Supreme Soviet were if not outright Communists, then at least socialists and anti-capitalists.  A good part of the rather disorganized Russian nationalist movement also supported the Supreme Soviet.

 We all know what eventually happened: Eltsin crushed the opposition in a huge bloodbath, far worse than what was reported in the Western (or even Russian) media.  I write that with a high degree of confidence because I have personally received this information from a very good source: it so happens that I was in Moscow during those tragic days and that and I was in constant contact with a Colonel of a rather secretive special forces unit of the KGB called "Vympel" (more about that below) who told me that the internal KGB estimate of the number of people killed in the Moscow Oblast was close to 3'000 people.  I can also personally attest that the combats lasted for far longer than the official narrative clams: I witnessed a very sustained machine gun battle right under my windows a full 5 days after the Supreme Soviet had surrendered.  I want to stress this here because I think that this illustrates an often overlooked reality: the so-called "constitutional crisis of 1993" was really a mini civil war for the fate of the Soviet Union and only by the end of this crisis did the Soviet Union really truly disappear.

Full story here:

http://vineyardsaker.blogspot.com/2013/10/1993-2013-is-twenty-years-long-pas-de.html

Key Historical Events; That you may have NEVER HEARD OF.

The Great Dissenter: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Ninety four years ago, on November 7, 1919, as federal agents launched a nationwide raid on the homes and meeting halls of Russian immigrants, three members of the United States Supreme Court visted Holmes at his home a few blocks from the White House. Unlike the agents sent by J. Edgar Hoover, the justices were not hunting for communists. They were there to call on their colleague Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Boston Brahmin, Civil War veteran, and sage of the common law. But their visit, unusual and unexpected, was linked to the larger mission being carried out that day, and, to the justices at least, it was every bit as important. ¹

Holmes was a learned man with more than ten thousand volumes packed on his bookshelves. They included mostly law, philosophy, and history, but also the occasional detective story or racy French novel.¹  Do you think he might have had a Sherlock HOLMES novel? The Hound of the Baskervilles  was published in 1901"hailed as "the greatest mystery novel of all time  and The Valley of Fear in 1914 (a fresh murder scene that leads Holmes to solve a long-forgotten mystery) so it is possible.

I would bet on it because of this little nugget of history I dug up:

Originally, Doyle named his detective Sherrinford Holmes, after Oliver Wendell Holmes - and named Holmes's sidekick Ormand Sacker. But during the three weeks it took to write the story, Doyle renamed the characters Sherlock Holmes, after a cricket player he had once played against, and Thomas John H. Watson, after Patrick Watson, a colleague of Dr. Bell's.

Oliver Wendell Holmes was a famous doctor.² He was the father of our Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.!   How about that! England had a fictional Holmes solving cases while the real Holmes' son was actually involved with law and order as a judge in the USA!

So why am I going on about something seemingly unrelated to the high court Dissents of Holmes in general and the one the three other high court judges just mentioned are "concerned" with? Because I have read Sherlock Holmes and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle always attacked greedy people and unethical, predatory business practices in his writings through Holmes and Dr. Watson. Although it is speculative, I suspect some of that rubbed off Holmes. You DON'T have books of fiction, being a jurist, in your library just because the author gave Sherlock the "Holmes" handle to honor your daddy. A fictional book pushes a philosophy, not just a good story. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a Liberal (he had stood unsuccesfully as a Liberal Unionist parliamentary candidate in 1900 and 1906,).³ 

I think Holmes, unlike many industrialists and fellow jurist stuffed shirts, saw though the self serving "conservative" view that the government's job was to let employers run ragged over the common man in order to exact a higher profit, regardless of the toll in human misery. Nevertheless, I believe this type of logical thinking was a work in progress for him throughout his life. He was NOT considered a sentimental person. 

Back to the 1919. That was a significant year in American History. That year Franklin D. Roosevelt was caught having an affair with a Miss Mercer by Eleanor. Eleanor offered to divorce him. Franklin's mother promised to cut him off from the family money if he divorced Eleanor. Franklin D saw "reason" and the rest is history. He was lucky he did. Imagine being married to his new wife a little over a year later when he was struck with polio. Do you think Lady Mercer had the stuffing to insert a glass tube in his **** and give him an enema EVERY DAY due to his paralysis?⁴ I doubt it.

But I continue to digress. Sorry, but I want you to get the picture of how things were in late 1919. World War I was over. A lot of people were dying from the Influenza Pandemic that came in three waves (1918 and throughout 1919). ⁵



In 1918, life expectancy for men was only 53 years. Women’s life expectancy at 54 was only marginally better.⁶

Sure, there were people enjoying a better standard of living and moving around more in their Model T "Tin Lizzie" Fords but these were still the privileged few in American life. Most Americans had no toilet and ignorance of proper sanitary habits caused a lot of dysentery. Oliver Wendel Holmes Jr. had almost died of dystentery during the Civil War.¹ I'm sure seeing all the sickness around moved him to be more sympathetic to the plight of the common people. He was, above all, a no nonsense, honest man.

The three justices explained the reason for their visit. The day before, Holmes had circulated a DISSENTING opinion in a case the Court had heard two weeks earlier. It was an important case testing the government’s power to punish the so-called anarchists and agitators who had spoken out against the recent war. For most members of the Court, elitist to the hilt, it was an easy case. The high court judges were members of an American elite that certainly did NOT consider the common man equal to them, or to the government, as far as rights of any sort. They automatically and unthinkingly accepted the right of the government to punish such "troublemakers". Freedom of speech was not absolute (to put it mildly), and if the defendants had intended to disrupt the war, that was tantamount to "criminal" (anti-establishment) activity so they deserved to be treated as criminals. ¹ It's amazing how little has changed in 2013

The majority of the Court, and anyone who followed its decisions, might have expected Holmes to agree. After all, just nine months earlier he had written three opinions for the Court saying pretty much the same thing. One of those cases was an appeal by Eugene V. Debs, the leader of the Socialist Party and a frequent candidate for president, who had been sentenced to ten years in prison for a speech he had given in the summer of 1918.¹

Even though he said nothing that explicitly urged interference with the war, he did praise party members who had opposed the draft. For Holmes, an old Civil War Soldier, that had been enough. In a short and dismissive opinion, he had accepted the jury’s verdict that Debs meant to illegally obstruct military recruiting and had affirmed his conviction.¹ Holmes was doing his DUTY as a member of the US elite to defend the war effort, regardless of how the people felt about it. He was certainly not a pacifist.

So when the Court heard arguments in the anarchists’ case, few people expected Holmes to side with the defendants.

But something had changed. Instead of voting with the majority, Holmes said the convictions should be reversed.

The defendants had no intent to undermine the fight against Germany,

he explained.

They were merely upset with President Wilson’s decision to intervene in the Russian Revolution..

¹ Check that word, "merely", in regard to the actions of a U.S. President! That's a rather significant adjective to me for a jurist that hitherto mostly towed the establishment "line".
Besides, he argued, their speech was protected by the First Amendment. ¹To us in modern times, that sounds like a no-brainer bit of boiler plate. However, as you will see, it was a rather revolutionary statement.

Many of us on the internet have repeated over an over that the Constitution had a lot of fancy rhetoric that applied to such a narrow slice of the nation that, for all practical purposes, it was a propaganda tour de force. It looked great on paper but the common person didn't have any chance whatsoever to demand the rights clearly written on it. THAT was the reality in the USA.
The brief bit of jurisprudent sanity the Civil War produced with the 12th, 13th and 14th Constitutional Amendments was noble legislation. But it was quickly renedered as toothless as the rest of the Constitution for the average American in general (and freed slaves, for whom the Amendments were mainly written, in particular ⁷).

In spite of the high sounding Constitutional rhetoric about “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech” the First Amendment at that time was a nice piece of pretty wording (like "all men are created equal" STILL is). It was a toothless bit of inspiring rhetoric, nothing more. ¹ And you thought that was a modern problem?

The High Court itself had never ruled in favor of a free speech claim, and lower courts had approved all manner of speech restrictions, including the censorship of books and films, the prohibition of street corner speeches, and assorted bans on labor protests, profanity, and commercial advertising. Even criticism of government officials could be punished, the courts had ruled, if it threatened public order and morality ¹(and you know how the "threat" is in the eye of the cop or official that wants to jail you).

But now, with the country gripped by fear (i.e. scaremongering propaganda in the service of capitalism) of the communist threat, Holmes was proposing something radical: an interpretation (rather than the hitherto "interpretation"    that basically ignored the wording) of the First Amendment that would protect all but the most immediately dangerous speech.

His opinion was passionate and powerful, especially the long concluding paragraph. The delivery was masterful. He actually began the opinion sounding like he was making the case against free speech, not for it:¹

Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power and want a certain result with all your heart you naturally express your wishes in law and sweep away all opposition. To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care whole heartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises—

¹

Up to now he sounds like a hard core elitist bigot (as in, By God I'm RIGHT and I will NOT ALLOW foolish and irrelevant dissent!). But that's not it at all. As you will see, his point is that there is a CLEAR DIFFERENCE between obstructionist speech uttered with the purpose of sowing discord and what he will now mention. In other words,  it's perfectly correct, logical and lawful to censor mendacious or duplicitous propaganda. HOWEVAH...

But when men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out.

That at any rate is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment. Every year if not every day we have to wager our salvation upon some prophecy based upon imperfect knowledge. While that experiment is part of our system I think that we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threaten immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country.

¹

Agelbert NOTE: Unfortunately, some phrases in the above wisdom were subsequently hijacked and turned upside down for the benefit of predatory, consciense free capitalism:

1. "Free Trade" in ideas - There is no such thing when money rules the media by elite power over government regulation or the lack of it - e.g. selectve enforcement, etc. 

2. "Accepted in the Competition of the Market" in regard to TRUTH is an idealistic bit of fantasy when there is NO free market competition of ideas or truth - i.e. a "level playing field" for publishing and media access that looks more like an alpine slope! - BECAUSE elite power controls who gets to operate with impunity and who gets crushed through selective enforcement. 

IOW, in the USA we have a RIGGED market and a RIGGED media and, OF COURSE, those doing the RIGGING insist it is a FREE market and a FREE press. Cui Bono?  )


Back to Holmes' Historical Dissent

Holmes understood exactly where the rhetorical rubber meets the road as far as freedom of speech. He was very much at home with the populist notion, though he was not much of populist, that unchecked government power meant tyranny.

It's clear to me that he had a problem with his fellow judges wanting to give government unrestrained power over the people in regard to freedom of speech.

The court he was on was an absolute travesty for the working man and a great friend of predatory capitalism's abominal working conditions including slave prison labor in mines (mostly blacks picked up in the South on "vagrancy" or other trumped up charges - Then it was dangerous to be black. Now it's still dangerous but being white and smoking pot has been added to the "business" model) and child labor abuses. We had the number one industrial accident rate in the WORLD while that court (and a few before it) presided over our "laws". 


1908 bottle Factory. Note the child labor⁹

Recent race riots, labor strikes were making the elite nervous. And a bomb had exploded on the attorney general’s doorstep—the opening strike, the papers warned, in a grand Bolshevik plot.¹ WE KNOW today those race riots and strikes were a cry for justice. We also know that our government officials in general, and Mr J. Edgar Hoover in particular, knew exactly how to get people stirred up by blaming a bomb on x, y or z scapegoat target in order to get more funding for his growing FBI empire.

I don't know who placed that bomb. But looking at it from today's revelations, I think it was an inside job. Like 9/11 today, they needed a pretext to crack down. If it didn't just happen, I'm sure J. Edgar was up to the task of rigging a bomb and blaming it on the commies, anarchists or whatever pejorative name the establishment had for people who wanted justice and weren't afraid to make their voices heard.

Now Holmes' dissent was serious feather ruffling for the elites. Was he now going to give "comfort to the enemy"?¹

What did his fellow judges do? They pulled the old "National Security" trick on Holmes to "get him to see reason". The nation’s security was at stake!¹, they told Holmes. He was urged to close ranks and set aside his personal views. They weren't belligerent. He was, after all, one of them and they respected him. Holmes listened thoughtfully. He had always respected the institution of the Court and more than once had suppressed his own beliefs for the sake of unanimity. ¹

But this time he felt a duty to speak his mind. He told his colleagues he regretted he could not join them, and they left without pressing him further.¹
Three days later, Holmes read his dissent in Abrams v. United States from the bench. As expected, it caused a sensation. Conservatives  denounced it as dangerous and extreme. (Another thing those CONS had in common with the ones in 2013 ). ][img width=3= height=30]http://www.createaforum.com/gallery/renewablerevolution/3-141113183729.png[/img]Progressives hailed it as a monument to liberty. ¹

Free speech stopped being a Constitutional rhetorical flourish to be used as an elite fig leaf to claim OUR elites were "different" from the elites in other countries (until 9/11, of course).

Agelbert NOTE: Admittedly, the Constitution DID do away with landed gentry and titles. Of course, humans being clever rascals, new forms of wealth hogging dynasty tricks accomplished the same thing without titles. But that's another story. 

The justices’ visit to Holmes isn't just a remarkable piece of Constitutional history. Going to a judge's house to disuade him from a dissenting opnion just wasn't done. ¹ That these judges were involved in such intrigue smacks of industrialists strong arming them to make sure the "rabble was kept in check". War profiteering magnates had already made fortunes on the war and they did not want anyhting upsetting theAmerican race to empire though profitable wars (The predators are always thinking ahead).

There is no known High Court History of such a personal appeal to one justice by a group of his colleagues. That it took place in the privacy of Holmes’s study, in the presence of his wife (the justices sought her help with their appeal!) only heightens the intrigue.¹

Second Half of OWH Jr. Article

Thanks for researching and writing this. Upon reading this, what occurs is that we have some very quaint ideas about the law. The law is, after all, only what a judge says it is. The light you have shone upon the Supreme Court in Holmes' time showed me details I was not aware of as well.

In many ways apparently, the fix has always been in.

This was a rewarding read. thanks for strolling through some dusty archivds to dredge this one up.

Your correspondent,
A Thick-Fingered Clown

http://tarpley.net/world-crisis-radio/

Don't miss this November 23, 2013 audio program that discusses philosophical history. He analyses various recognized assassinations, assassination attempts that served to force presidents to tow the elite corrupt line and the death of FDR as, not a natural death, but the culmination of sevearal efforts to get him out of the White House by the elite.

As to Kennedy, he explains the dynamic of JFK's attempt to rebuild a strong, populist presidency as a threat to Wall Street. This was, according to Tarpley, what produced his assassination.

Many hard historical facts you may be unacquainted with behind the killing of Garfield, Lincoln and others. The bottom line is that the elite did not wish to allow the USA to ever become an actual democracy. They also DID NOT want an overly optimistic populace because that would breed intolerance for an oligarchic, financial elite. Yes, these evil oligarchs plan ahead. It seems they never let go of that post Civil War Calvinist message sent to the "Christian" preachers, "The people must be kept poor so they will remain obedient".

Kennedy was going to fire our head racist Nazi gestapo chief, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover, as you know if you have read about his " commie/anarchist" chasing police state empire building moves from as far back as 1918, KNEW who his REAL boss was (The Wall Street Predatory Capitalist Oligarchy). I'm certain that Hoover knew he would be fired and eagerly joined with the CIA to "take care of business".

What I found significant about this talk is NOT more analysis of the Kennedy assassination; it's the CLEAR thread of covert action and reaction by the American Elite to Prevent Democracy in this country at least as far back as the 1840s!

Whatever you think of Webster Tarpley, he presents here a fascinating summary of the REASONS for the various elite funded and fostered Democracy inhibiting acts of Violence.

There were MULTIPILE assassination attempts on FDR from as early as 1933. I am NOT talking about the Coup that failed because of the Retired Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler the elite (Bush's relative among them) tried to buy.

During the 1960s, the very same general who proposed Operation Northwoods went on to be NATO head in Europe and un Operation Gladio. There are many other historical gems in this talk.

This is a keeper and will explain such strange behavior we saw from Clinton like the time he went to hit golf balls for several hours in the middle of the night in D.C. with the Secret Service in tow.

U.S. Presidents are groomed to the position. If they start forgetting the Wall Street "SCORE" they get a few reminders and if that doesn't work they are impeached with some trumped up scandal  or they get the "lone nut" treatment. Nothing has changed.

All that said, Webster Tarpley believes that democracy can be restored (restored?) to the USA with a flanking populist attack of grass roots communication and activism. I hope so.

Mission of discovery, led by ancient maps

By Mike Peters ( China Daily )Updated: 2014-01-12 13:59:21

Charlotte Harris Rees is the author of Did Ancient Chinese Explore America.

Charlotte Harris Rees understands that it's hard for many to believe that Chinese could have come to the Americas before Columbus.

She didn't believe her own father.

"For many years I was a skeptic," she says during a recent visit to Beijing. "It wasn't anything personal against my father - it was just that the idea seemed far-fetched and I was too busy with my own life to be bothered."

In 1972, Hendon Harris Jr, a third-generation Baptist missionary living in South Korea, found an ancient Asian world map in an antiques shop, and soon he found others. Stimulated to research what ancients knew about "imaginary" places beyond China, Japan and South Korea, he became entranced by the Shan Hai Jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas), which has been quoted as folklore in China for centuries. Henriette Mertz, a Chicago attorney, had earlier been similarly intrigued, and in 1953 wrote Pale Ink, a book contending that there were 4,000-year-old Chinese trails that could be traced in the Americas.

After the 2003 publication of Gavin Menzies' 1421, in which the retired submarine navigator makes the case for other Chinese exploration of what we now know as the Americas, Rees and her siblings got curious about the maps their late father had collected and the books he had written - which they'd stashed under a bed and largely forgotten.

Could Dad have been right after all?

In her retirement, Rees has been on a 10-year mission of discovery, hoping to find out. Her most recent book, Did Ancient Chinese Explore America?, is "my own journey through the Rocky Mountains to find answers", she says.

Sixty years ago, Mertz had relied on historical records to plot the inland journeys she believed early Chinese had made - without making those treks herself. "Taking the Shang Hai Jing and modern topographical maps," says Rees, "Mertz drew sketches of four separate journeys that she said the Chinese covered in North America. She claimed that the descriptions fit nowhere else on Earth." Both Mertz and Rees' father believed that such speculative trips would explain oddly specific details about the West coast of "Fu Sang," a land mass on ancient maps where North America sits on modern versions.


From among the four routes that Mertz outlined, Rees and her husband, Dave, chose the route along the Rockies because it was closest to their Virginia home and because "it is probably most like it was long ago", Rees says. "Much of that area is now national parks and nature conservancies. Some of the specified mountains are more than 14,000 feet high, and many wild and dangerous animals live there." Wary of the latter, the couple traveled in winter, specifically because rattlesnakes lie dormant in cold weather.

The Reeses' journey explained some things that had seemed inexplicable. A reference to "bamboo" growing in arid West Texas suddenly became plausible after discussion at a local museum. It could have been river cane, which grew near Chinati Peak - just as Mertz had described. References in Shan Hai Jing to gods with human bodies and dragon heads, the author now believes, could be explained by Native American rituals involving frightful masks or the anthropomorphic art - found both in China and the Americas - in which animals take on human characteristics.

"In addition to correctly telling how the rivers flowed, what the mountains looked like, and which minerals were in each location," Rees concludes, her "Shan Hai Jing journey" correctly placed a dozen plants and animals endemic North America, and two locations where plants of Chinese origin (white mulberry and ailanthus) are found.

During her recent lecture tour in China, she says, students at Peking University were amazed that Rees' 1,770-kilometer trip might validate the notion that the Shan Hai Jing was an actual journey.

But that's just the beginning of the story, Rees says: In those epic old stories, the Chinese explorers didn't stop at Fu Sang. They traveled all over the world.

http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/life/2014-01/12/content_17231055.htm