For a decade before his passing in 2016, fellow futurist Alvin Toffler and I would often meet at San Anselmo, a little Italian restaurant in Brentwood, California, to discuss the future of warfare.
At the time, we were both consultants to Andrew Marshall, director of the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment, the extremely low-profile, extremely high-powered internal strategic think tank.
And every time we got together we would talk about the rise of China. Toffler had had an unwitting effect on the Chinese in the 1980s. On a trip there, the author of Future Shock had given Premier Deng Xiaoping an autographed copy of his book on the nascent information age, The Third Wave.
Deng liked it. A lot.
He had several million copies made and distributed to everyone in the People’s Liberation Army. (Being a Communist, he didn’t pay Toffler any royalties.)
The Chinese also hijacked Toffler’s 1993 book, War and Anti-War, and distributed it to the entire PLA. (No royalties there, either.)
The result of poaching and applying Toffler’s ideas was a futuristic game plan from People’s Liberation Army Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, called Unrestricted Warfare.
Their plan called for quietly attacking the United States across the four components of national power: diplomacy, information, economics, and military, a sort of death by a thousand cuts. (They were nice enough to mention Toffler five times in their treatise; I came in second, as Liang and Xiangsu copied the sequence of my 1992 book Sats, Lies and Video-Rape: The SOFTWAR Handbook, in the first chapter of their book. Alas, no direct quotes.)
The role of finding a “useful idiot,” which led to the duping of Hunter Biden and his vice president father, was outlined in a question posed by the colonels on page 191 of Unrestricted Warfare: “Can special funds be set up to exert greater influence on another country’s government and legislature through lobbying?”
The question might well be answered: “Well, yes, we could co-opt the degenerate son of the vice president of the United States and have reflexive control over the father.”
(One has only to listen to Anthony Bobulinski’s detailed and extremely well-documented story about the greed of the Biden family to realize that until now Colonels Liang and Xiangsui must have been doing backflips of glee with the success of their plan, while their boss, Chairman Xi was probably as excited as Jeffrey Toobin on a Zoom call.)
Ironically, in the very next sentence, the colonels asked: “And could buying or gaining control of stocks be used to turn another country’s newspapers and television stations into the tools of media warfare?”
Hmmm. It might be time to ask AT&T CEO John Stankey exactly who is holding the corporation’s stock, as its mutant stepchild, CNN, continues on a path that in other times would be considered outright sedition.
Or maybe Comcast CEO Brian Roberts could be asked about his corporation’s mutant stepchild, MSNBC.
It is not without irony that Unrestricted Warfare noted:
Modern countries are affected more and more by regional or worldwide organizations, such as the European Union, ASEAN, OPEC, APEC, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the biggest of them all, the United Nations. Besides these, a large number of multinational organizations and non-state organizations of all shapes and sizes, such as multinational corporations, trade associations, peace and environmental organizations, the Olympic Committee, religious organizations, terrorist organizations, small groups of hackers . . . constitute an up and coming worldwide system of power.
And China has spent the past two decades co-opting the members of that new system of power—all of them.
Why else would the World Health Organization view China as the victim of COVID-19 rather than as the creator of it?
Why else did China spend huge amounts of money to control the management and improvement of the Panama Canal? Or provide aid to Venezuela?
And why did the Obama Administration turn a blind eye to China’s growing hegemony after Joe Biden and Hunter Biden’s visit in 2013?
The answer is easy, and it is in Unrestricted Warfare: “..technological progress has given us the means to strike at the enemy’s nerve center directly . . . the best way to achieve victory is to control, not to kill.”
Thanks a lot, Hunter.
Et tu, Big Guy?