by Robert Spalding, US Air Force, Retired.
May I include the North American non-resistant Anabaptists here with the America’s elite, for after all, who here is really “bearing arms in covert acts of death & destruction? Son Ben recently reminded me he’d encouraged me to read this 2019 book when it came out. Strange now how the events since support its premises, and more of us now possess a greater awareness of its realities. Ironic too, that I’ve been so encouraged spiritually by the GO NOW book detailing Wendell’s long term Bible underground offensive into China just completing an eight-post series from Chapter 3 “Going Deeper.”
Perhaps we anabaptists during this year of the 500th anniversary, need to re-evaluate our understanding and definition of His love that we are implementing today practically and invitationally, both here at home and around the world, as the evidence indicates we’re in DIRE need of further conversation, study and discernment, before we yawn and fall asleep again with our Bibles on our laps or playing in our ears? ” I must do the works of Him that sent me….. for the night cometh, when no man can work.” (John 9:4)
And then consider our role, both as citizens in His heavenly kingdom, but also as so-journers or transients in the USA as presented in the fifth last paragraph that is highlighted. Consider Christian nationalism, even our open antagonism. Perhaps, we do have A Work To Do, and, it’s largely first, within us! Thrift books has 6 copies available now for less than $7 ea.
INTRODUCTION: (verbatim from book)
I know something about stealth. In 1998, I began training to pilot B-2 Spirits, known far and wide as Stealth Bombers. The B-2 was at that time the high-profile new weapon in the US Air Force arsenal, a dazzling, billion-dollar, high-tech machine that looked like it had flown in from a future century. Its “continuous curvature” allowed it to avoid detection by the electromagnetic waves used by radar systems to track objects. In other words, I learned to fly a plane that achieved something every military strategist has dreamed of: being invisible.
Twenty years later—having served as chief China strategist for the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and as senior US Defense official and Defense attaché to the People’s Republic of China—I left my position as senior director for strategic planning at the White House, deeply concerned about a different stealth weapon being turned against my country. For the past forty years, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been playing a beautiful game. It is sophisticated yet simple. It is a competition to gain control and influence across the planet—and to achieve that outcome without resorting to military engagement.
Flying quietly below the radar, the CCP has been acquiring technology without paying a cent toward developing it, carefully taking control of the world’s shipping businesses, infiltrating our corporations and science laboratories, and using American investor dollars to float the cost of its own factories and companies—and then, adding insult to injury, insisting that that money stay in China.
War between nation-states in the twenty-first century looks much different than war in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Instead of bombs and bullets, it’s about ones and zeros and dollars and cents: economics, finance, data information, manufacturing, infrastructure, and communications. Control those fronts today, and you can win a war without firing a shot. It’s a simple, logical strategy. And it is one leaders in the West have been very slow to grasp.
Our political, military, corporate, and fiscal leaders have failed to recognize the subtle game the CCP has been playing. They have been operating, understandably, under the now outdated idea that war is fought only with bombs and bullets. The CCP strategy, however, is to fight in other ways, utilizing a variety of tactics. It advocates and sponsors a constant focus on theft, coercion, economic sabotage, and monopolization of infrastructure on a global level—all to increase China’s sphere of influence. Everywhere.
Like the B-2 bombers I flew, the CCP’s stealth war isn’t truly covert. It has been hiding in plain sight. How did we miss it? I’m not interested in pointing fingers at one particular party. Both Republican and Democratic elites have missed the signs—or are complicit—and as a patriot who cares about my fellow citizens, my main interest is to defend the people of this country and the ideas that have driven it since it was founded.
Perhaps nothing threatens the CCP more than the Constitution of the United States. China’s president, Xi Jinping, has stated as much, and CCP documents that I will share make clear that fundamental American concepts—the rights of free speech and freedom of religion—are threats to the authoritarian power of the CCP, which believes that these liberties must never be allowed to take root in China and must never be the rights of Chinese citizens.
The CCP’s fundamental loathing of our Bill of Rights and other legal protections should be chilling to anyone who values freedom. It is the primary reason I am writing this book. I want to alert the world to China’s stealth war and its strategy to dominate the planet by focusing on six spheres of influence: the economy, the military, global diplomacy, technology, education, and infrastructure.
China is closing in on achieving its goal of influencing the politicians and corporations of the United States. If this happens, fundamental freedoms we take for granted—the ability to criticize a politician or a policy, to publish political statements, to report on governmental abuse or inefficiency, to sing the lyrics you want, to study literally any subject under the sun, to visit any website, no matter what ideology is espoused—will come under assault.
As for our economy, it will continue to erode, as the CCP arranges to use our own capital against our own best interests. Trade terms will be less favorable. Chinese-owned and -manufactured products will flood our markets, creating a further trade imbalance that will favor the CCP’s interests. The job market and average wages will continue to stagnate. Our best and brightest will be recruited by Chinese-owned companies—which are, as we’ll see, ultimately property of the CCP.
American politicians who attempt to counter pro-CCP rivals will find themselves fighting against operatives who are bought and paid for, as the CCP uses its limitless cash to influence policies in Washington, DC.
Equally frightening, if not more so, the CCP is also using its authoritarian power to reshape, rewrite, and airbrush historical truths—earning the nation a joke moniker among academics who study the disturbing manipulation of historical fact: The People’s Republic of Amnesia. The era of digitization makes editing history and creating national amnesia a matter of just cutting, pasting, and deleting. A fascinating study by Glenn Tiffert, “Peering Down the Memory Hole,” documents how past issues of China’s leading law journals were published on Chinese digital platforms for academic research, but without specific articles within them that revealed attacks on the concept of rule of law. Those attacks presented an inconvenient truth now that China seeks to portray itself as law-abiding and just. So they were banished. “Simply put,” writes Tiffert, “the Chinese government is leveraging technology to quietly export its domestic censorship regime abroad and, by manipulating how observers everywhere comprehend its past, present, and future, it is enlisting them without their consent in an alarming project to sanitize the historical record and globalize its own competing narratives.”
The end result, if China succeeds in all its goals, will be a United States of America that is devoid of the principles that shaped our nation.
These are the dystopian outcomes that loom before us. It is not a question of if. It is a question of when, unless we take preventative measures. The strategies the CCP deploys across the globe have been in effect for decades. And under its current power-hungry leader Xi Jinping, it is trying to accelerate influencing operations by attempting to become the world’s technology leader, corner the telecommunications market, and export totalitarian social controls to the leaders in developing nations.
This book does not aim to just sound an alarm. It is meant as a call to arms, one that details how the United States and the rest of the free world can combat—and break up—China’s stealth war. In doing so, I hope we can save the very thing that has driven our nation—and the world—forward for nearly 250 years, a shared value of what Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill termed the four essential liberties in the Atlantic Charter: freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.
So consider this book a primer on how the CCP has conducted its war, a point-by-point how-to manual for stopping its march toward control of the West, and, yes, a terrifying warning. If we fail to respond immediately and decisively to protect our economy, our security, our institutions, and our free society, we will descend, as much of China already has, into a nightmarish dystopian society. A foreign totalitarian state will monitor our lives, our thoughts, who we see, and what we say. And if it doesn’t like what we do or think or say, it will take action against us.
Some cynics will accuse me of being alarmist or sensationalist. These people are afflicted with the same blind spot I once had. I have examined why I was so oblivious to CCP aggression and why the rest of the world still has a similar blind spot. I now attribute it in part to hubris—our cocksure confidence in ourselves and our system. Our belief that America’s socioeconomic model, its war machine, and its political model are the best in the world has helped fuel a profound confidence that we can overcome any challenge. That confidence has proven shortsighted. The blind spot remains in place—and has increased in size—because the CCP are professional liars who have had exquisite training.
Blinded by our own greed and the dream of globalization, we’ve been convinced that free trade automatically unlocks the shackles of authoritarianism and paves the way to democracy. The promise of cheap labor, inexpensive goods, and soaring stock prices has been spellbinding, but by giving up our manufacturing expertise and dominance, we have given up our independence and sold out our own citizens by stripping them of work. And we’ve been duped: investing in an authoritarian nation that insists the money never leave the country is basically allowing our pockets to be picked—or, rather, allowing our treasury to be raided.
America, other Western nations, and all democratic countries now face our biggest challenge since World War II—one with dire implications for the United States and the world at large. I hope this book—and the much-needed response I pray it spurs—is not too late to stop the authoritarian juggernaut, the stealth war, that is being waged against us.
NEXT UP: Today a trusted and valued friend who was part of the Istog Kosovo dairy project, who now also with his AC church has a dairy presence in Haiti, who I recently invited to visit Panama since I just left the premier dairy county in OH and 6 months after being in Panama discovered I now live in the premier dairy province where most of Panama’s 400,000 dairy cows reside, who just happened to text me inviting me to check out his friend and blogger Steve Endress at “gritandlove.org” which I immediately did reading several of his personally written posts. I concentrated on his Sept 15 post titled “Influence explained” since it follows up rather well on my introduction above about anabaptists being at the crossroads, I felt compelled to share it with you thinking some of you may well wish to check the site weekly for his depth of wisdom. Enjoy.
