This article appears in the January 17, 2020 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.
The Modern Synarchist Project:
The Falun Gong
[Print version of this article]
Jan. 13—America and Europe have been inundated over the past decade with advertisements for the Falun Gong, the virulently anti-China cult, promoting their newspaper the Epoch Times and their musical extravaganza, Shen Yun. Shen Yun, which regularly tours in more than 130 countries, features a program that merges Chinese music and dance with a portrayal of Chinese officials torturing and murdering members of Falun Gong, including the cutting out of organs of members of the cult. This is also the theme of Falun Gong-sponsored organizations and conferences. The Epoch Times newspaper, which fills each daily issue with wild fabrications about China and lies about President Trump’s views and policies toward China, is published in 21 languages—every major language in Europe and Asia, including Persian. This is a multi-billion-dollar enterprise.
Through both the Epoch Times and Shen Yun, Falun Gong attempts to portray itself as the voice for humanitarianism and freedom in China. The truth is far different. The sponsors and propagandists for Falun Gong include spokesmen of the Anglo-American establishment from both the left and right of the political spectrum. What binds this strange alliance together is a hatred for both President Trump’s efforts to improve U.S.-China relations and China’s efforts to forge a policy of global economic development through the Belt and Road Initiative. This attack on China is coming from the highest levels of the British imperial establishment.
Among the Falun Gong’s enthusiasts are:
• Mark Palmer, head of the Friends of Falun Gong. He has been a leading voice in the “social democratic” side of the operation, associated with Freedom House and the National Endowment for Democracy in the U.S.
• Michael J. Horowitz, a leading speaker at Falun Gong’s annual demonstrations in the U.S. Capital. He is the director of the Hudson Institute’s Project for International Religious Liberty.
• Stephen Gregory, publisher of Falun Gong’s newspaper, the Epoch Times. He is the former head of the Leo Strauss Center at the University of Chicago, the leading “Synarchist” institution in the United States (see below).
• Stephen Bannon, collaborator of Falun Gong and its video company, New Tang Dynasty. He is the inspiration for the recent creation of The Committee on the Present Danger: China.
• The National Endowment for Democracy, which funds Falun Gong. The NED is the government-funded regime-change institution that was created to “privatize” certain CIA operations after the revelations of the Church Committee.
Mark Palmer
Mark Palmer, now deceased, was one of the first in the U.S. to go to bat for the Falun Gong. One of the earliest of the neocon warriors, Palmer was Ambassador to Hungary in the late 1980s, where he collaborated closely with George Soros (whose Foundation was later expelled from the country for overt subversion of the government). Palmer was a principal speechwriter for Henry Kissinger, Vice Chairman at Freedom House, and co-founder of the National Endowment for Democracy. Freedom House was founded in 1941. After the war, after FDR’s death, Freedom House played a pivotal role in reversing FDR’s intention to maintain cooperation with the Soviet Union, driving labor unions and “progressive” organizations into the anti-communist frenzy of the McCarthy era.
Palmer’s 2003 book, Breaking the Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World’s Last Dictators by 2025, in the words of the journal, Foreign Affairs, “challenges the prevailing scholarly wisdom about the potential for democratic change, arguing that uprisings are possible in even the most backward authoritarian states—if only the United States and its partners provided proper encouragement.” Palmer focuses especially on the Middle East “dictators” and China.
As head of the Friends of Falun Gong, Palmer spread lies of the same kind as those heard today to the effect that “China is locking up millions of Muslims and denying them the right to practice their religion,” which is a favorite cry of Falun Gong. Palmer told the John Bachelor radio show in 2003:
I mean, it’s important for people to understand that Jiang Zemin [then the President of China], in his persecution of Falun Gong has literally murdered something in the range of ten thousand women and young men. And over one hundred thousand have been in camps. Not just allowed to die, but who’ve been tortured to death, starved to death, I think in the range of ten thousand. . . . [Falun Gong is] the greatest single spiritual movement [!] in Asia today. There is nothing that begins to compare with it in courage and importance. . . . [China is] the most influential dictatorship in the world, [with] 60% of the whole population in the world that is unable to live in an environment of freedom. Among the dictators all over the world, China’s Jiang Zemin is the most notorious one.
Palmer personally organized a rally in front of the U.S. Congress in support of Falun Gong in July 2002, which became an annual affair. Six Members of Congress and 14 NGO leaders addressed the rally, while three Senators and eight members of the House sent representatives. The following day, a resolution co-sponsored by 100 Members of Congress passed by a 420-0 vote.
The Congress is equally mindless today, having passed a resolution supporting the Jacobin anarchists in Hong Kong, called the “Stand with Hong Kong Resolution,” in both Houses, with only one “No” vote between them; and the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act of 2019, demanding an end to the non-existent “arbitrary detention, torture, and harassment of these communities inside and outside China,” which passed with the same single vote against, that of Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY).
Michael J. Horowitz
Michael J. Horowitz is a senior fellow and director of the Project for International Religious Liberty at the Hudson Institute, a cold-war think tank that counts among its expert advisors the anti-China ideologue Michael Pillsbury. Vice President Pence chose the Hudson Institute as the location for a raging diatribe against China in October 2018, which the New York Times described with glee as the “Portent of a ‘New Cold War.’” Pillsbury, a collaborator of Henry Kissinger and, together with Palmer, an originator of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), has had access to President Trump as an adviser on China policy.
In 2001, Horowitz promoted the Global Internet Freedom Consortium (GIFC), “run mainly by practitioners of Falun Gong,” according to the Washington Post, in an effort to break through internet firewalls in China. He mobilized a consortium of human rights groups, political figures, and media, including the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, as well as neo-con Senators such as Sam Brownback, among others, finally succeeding in getting Congress to allocate $5 million to the group in 2009 and $30 million in 2010.
Horowitz spoke at several of the annual rallies at the U.S. Capitol, supporting Falun Gong. Among his words there were these:
Because the great issue for the twenty-first century—far more important than even Muslim terrorism—is the question of whether China will become a democratic country. . . . You are the pathfinders for democracy in China and therefore keepers of the hope for the world and for the 21st century.
Stephen Gregory
The most important of these Synarchist sponsors of Falun Gong is Stephen Gregory, the publisher of its newspaper, Epoch Times. Gregory is the former head of the Leo Strauss Center at the University of Chicago. Strauss was the valued protégé of Carl Schmitt, the Nazi jurist for Adolf Hitler and the leading proponent of the concept of the “unitary executive,” a euphemism for dictatorship. Schmitt provided the “theory” behind Hitler’s “Enabling Act” in 1933—the declaration following the Reichstag Fire (set by the Nazis but blamed on “communists”) that Hitler would rule absolutely without interference from the Reichstag.
Although Strauss was Jewish, the Nazi anti-Semite Carl Schmitt helped his friend Strauss obtain a Rockefeller Foundation grant to come to the United States after a stop in the UK, and the two corresponded well into the era of Nazi genocide.
Strauss believed in the necessity of a totalitarian system run by “philosophers,” who rejected the existence of universal principles or natural law. To achieve an ideal society, he argued, the ruler must be willing to lie in order to deceive the foolish “populist” masses, using both religion and politics as a means of disseminating myths that keep the general population in clueless servitude.
The students of Leo Strauss compose a gallery of neocon fanatics who gave us perpetual warfare, which has imposed genocidal hell across Southwest Asia following the war on Iraq under George W. Bush and Tony Blair, and the Obama support for the Muslim Brotherhood’s “Arab Spring.” These “Straussians” include Paul Wolfowitz, Irving Kristol, Abram Shulsky, and others in the cabal around Dick Cheney who launched the war on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, correctly described by President Trump as the greatest strategic mistake in American history.
Gregory, the foremost “Straussian” in the U.S., immediately took up the cause of the Falun Gong when it set up operations in the U.S. in 2000. Speaking at a rally in Chicago in 2001, while still heading the Leo Strauss Center, Gregory retailed the line there were “10,000 practitioners detained in Chinese labor camps.” Describing the mystical cult as a “spiritual movement,” Gregory now promotes Epoch Times as the alternative to the “fake news press” regularly attacked, with justification, by President Trump.
But his purpose is never hidden—it is to mobilize Trump’s base to support the disgusting ideological China-bashing, even by people within the Trump Administration, against Trump’s effort to establish close ties with China. These include Vice President Pence (whom Trump cannot fire), Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, FBI chief Christopher Wray, Trade Director Peter Navarro, and others. Epoch Times also peddles the extreme conspiracy theories regarding the “deep state” from the likes of QAnon.
MSNBC, with the intention of equating the psychotic ravings of Falun Gong and Epoch Times with the policies of Donald Trump, issued a report in August 2019 correctly identifying the teachings of Falun Gong’s founder Li Hongzhi as promoting the idea that “sickness is a symptom of evil that can only be truly cured with meditation and devotion, and that aliens from undiscovered dimensions have invaded the minds and bodies of humans, bringing corruption and inventions such as computers and airplanes.” MSNBC noted that Li lives with many of his cult followers in a “400-acre compound in upstate New York” near Dragon Springs, which “houses temples, private schools and quarters where performers for the organization’s dance troupe, Shen Yun, live and rehearse.”
Rather than respond to these facts, Gregory simply asserted that Epoch Times is not controlled by Falun Gong, but is defending Trump against the “deep state” accusations about Russian collusion while telling the truth about the evil of China.
Stephen Bannon
And then there is the ubiquitous Steve Bannon. Bannon, a former Goldman Sachs executive, Hollywood movie producer, and co-founder of the right-wing website Breitbart News, spent seven months in the Trump administration before being unceremoniously dumped. He then went on to help restore the moribund “Committee on the Present Danger,” with many of the original cabal of aging neocons who created the original anti-Soviet think tank to promote war against the “commies.” The new incarnation is called “Committee on the Present Danger: China.”
Bannon joined forces with the Falun Gong movie outfit, the New Tang Dynasty, to produce a film titled, Claws of the Red Dragon, which portrays a Chinese IT giant, openly modeled on Huawei, in an intricate plot to subvert America. In an interview with New Tang Dynasty, Bannon, who has many connections in Hong Kong, said: “If there is another Tiananmen in Hong Kong, the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) will collapse.” He praises Falun Gong’s Epoch Times for its promotion of precisely such an upheaval in Hong Kong: “This is the power of the Epoch Times,” he said, “and I think that is why you are one of the rising and most influential voices in the United States and the world on issues related to China.”
To capture the Synarchist imperial pedigree of Steve Bannon, the EIR Special Report, End the McCarthyite Witch Hunt Against China and President Trump, included the following:
Bannon is also serving the British Empire at a level that would have earned him a title of nobility did he not want to pretend to be an American. He has served as one of five sponsors of DHI (Dignatis Humanae Institute—The Institute for Human Dignity), a City of London (financial center) influence group. The other four co-sponsors were Archduke Otto von Habsburg, successor to the throne of the defunct Habsburg Empire; His Royal Highness Charles of Bourbon-Two Sicilies and Duke of Castro, a leading figure in the anti-Renaissance wing of European nobility; Field Marshal the Lord Guthrie GCB (Knight of the Grand Cross), LVO (Lieutenant of the Victorian Order), OBE (Order of the British Empire); and Father Matthew Festing [Prince and Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta]. . . . It’s Chaplain, Father Michael Sneed, has been very active in bringing Anglicans, notably former Prime Minister Tony Blair, into the pro-Feudalist clique of the Catholic Church.
Bannon continues to lie about his influence on President Trump. As the attempted coup against Trump continues with an impeachment trial, in tandem with the threat of a global military confrontation over Iran (which, as Helga Zepp-LaRouche has explained, can only be resolved by coordinated actions among Trump, Putin, and Xi Jinping), Bannon is shamelessly campaigning to sabotage that indispensable great power alliance by flaunting the title of “Chief Strategist,” which Trump removed from him.
On January 12, appearing on Fox News with the neo-con Maria Bartiromo, Bannon, contrary to everything Trump has said about his relationship with China and Xi Jinping, breathlessly boasted that Trump’s new trade deal with China is not for peace and prosperity, but is “economic warfare” against China, coupled with the uprisings in Hong Kong and Taiwan, which Bannon described as “Trump’s policy.” Bannon repeatedly referred to Trump, an outspoken opponent of the globalist British Empire and its never-ending wars, as “the Churchill” in this situation.
Digging Deeper: the Synarchist Agenda
The outlook which binds together this anti-China, anti-Trump left/right alliance is known as Synarchism. A term little known today, Synarchism was identified by American intelligence experts under the Franklin Roosevelt administration before and during World War II in Europe. It identified the merging of left and right ideologies to oppose sovereign nation states, in favor of a single European union of nations based on the Roman and Napoleonic imperial models.
The post-World War I Synarchist movement was launched by Count Coudenhove-Kalergi in 1922 in Vienna, under the title of the Pan European Union. While particularly targeting the “Bolshevist menace” after the Russian Revolution in 1917, the Synarchists opposed all nation states, insisting that only such a unified European state, under the control of financial and corporate interests, could counter the Soviet Union. It was this movement that became the core of the fascist movements in France (becoming the Vichy government), the German Nazi Party, and Mussolini’s Fascist party. We recommend the reader consult the article “Synarchism: The Fascist Roots of the Wolfowitz Cabal,” EIR, May 30, 2003 for a more in-depth treatment of this subject. Both Hitler and Mussolini were socialists before the creation of their fascist parties.
Lyndon LaRouche wrote in the Aug. 8, 2003 EIR, “A Short Definition of Synarchism”:
“Synarchism” is a name adopted during the Twentieth Century for an occult freemasonic sect, known as the Martinists, based on worship of the tradition of the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte. During the interval from the early 1920s through 1945, it was officially classed by U.S.A. and other nations’ intelligence services under the file name of “Synarchism: Nazi/Communist,” so defined because of its deploying simultaneously both ostensibly opposing pro-communist and extreme right-wing forces for encirclement of a targeted government. Twentieth-Century and later fascist movements, like most terrorist movements, are all Synarchist creations. . . .
Today’s manifestation of Synarchism has created the strange bedfellows of hard core right-wing cold-warriors and leftist dupes of the Hollywood and San Francisco variety joining together to support a British geopolitical agenda of overthrowing governments and attacking national sovereignty, all in the name of “democracy” and “human rights.” The primary target of this British imperial operation is China. The intention is to sabotage President Trump’s insistence that the United States must be friends with Russia and China, and to ensure that the geopolitical division of the world into hostile, irreconcilable blocs of East and West continues.
The Cult Known as Falun Gong
Falun Gong pretends to be simply a movement of Tai-Chi practitioners, the ancient exercises practiced widely in China for centuries. Its founder, Li Hongzhi, started the organization in 1992 based on an anti-science mystical ideology that demanded belief in his magical powers, and by the end of the 1990s had a wide following.
In April 1999, exactly ten years after the 1989 occupation of Tiananmen Square by thousands of youth threatening a “regime change” collapse of government, Li Hongzhi deployed about 10,000 of his followers to occupy the area in front of Zhongnanhai, the headquarters of the Communist Party of China, which is on one side of Tiananmen Square. After the 1989 events, George Soros was wisely declared persona non grata. After the 1999 Falun Gong event, the cult was banned, and Li fled to the United States.
As reported in the EIR report, End the McCarthyite Witch Hunt Against China and President Trump, Li Hongzhi’s psychotic “teachings,” contained in his Zhuan Fulan, claim that the only means for humankind to escape its sorry state at “one dimension, at a low plane of the universe,” is to accept the “true Way” of a super-human master. He rejects science as a pursuit, followed only “after people have pushed out the divine and abandoned moral codes.” Li asserts that human beings, because of their past transgressions, “were meant to be . . ., as divine beings see it, destroyed.” His role as a “divine being” is to show compassion for humans and try to reform them through “spiritual practice.”
The Zhuan Falun never addresses human creative capabilities. Following his practice, Li claims, might bring about dramatic changes in the “practitioner” including: “skin becoming soft and fair, with a rosy glow, and a lessening of wrinkles. . . . Older women will have their menstrual period return, since there is an essential energy involved in this blood that’s needed in mind-body practice.” Li describes his method: “You develop a falun at the position of your lower abdomen, and I personally bestow it during our classes.” The falun “draws in energy from the universe, transforms it for you, and delivers it to whatever parts of your body may need this energy for development.” He writes that this can provide the practitioner with “special powers” including levitation and the ability to “project energy” at will.
Defeating Synarchism
What we see here is a multifaceted, interconnected apparatus deployed from the highest levels of British and American oligarchical intelligence networks to control the foreign policies of the United States in the interests of the globalist imperial financier faction. For the oligarchy, the crime of President Trump is his passionate commitment against globalism and for the American System principle of defense of the Sovereign nation-state.
President Trump, at the United Nations on September 24, 2019, stated the following:
The future does not belong to globalists. The future belongs to patriots. The future belongs to sovereign and independent nations who protect their citizens, respect their neighbors and honor the differences that make each country special and unique.
The unstated fear of the British Empire-directed Synarchist operation, is that President Trump, in his defense of the right of every nation to defend the general welfare of its population and collaborate as equals with other nations for peace and prosperity, will adopt the policy defined as the “Four Powers Agreement” by Lyndon LaRouche—the U.S., China, Russia and India joining forces with other like-minded nations in the spirit of the Hamiltonian principles of the “American System,” and in the spirit of the New Silk Road imbedded in the Belt and Road Initiative of Xi Jinping. It is our task to equip the population to see behind the veil of Synarchist myths and master the principles required to secure the future for ourselves and our posterity.
Exposing and defeating the McCarthyite attacks on China and President Trump will clear the way for this “win-win” peace and development process to move forward.
