What happens
is that pseudo ideologies arise to draw in fresh meat to schemes of power.
Nationalism works as does tribalism as well as a simple hatred of elites. Steady redistribution of money and power has
weakened all this during the past few decades as well as the rise of
distributed corporate organizations that provide a superior outlet.
In the end
what is for sale is the dream of power.
Stable central
governments simply take no heed of these organizations except to occasionally
placate them with a nod and a hug. They
serve to draw the venom away from power rather than toward power. It is certainly a better solution than
allowing random anarchists.
Chinese
Triads, Japanese Black Dragons & Hidden Paths of Power
May 17, 2014
By MEHMET SABEHEDDIN
The influence of secret societies on the
history of the West is well documented in numerous books and articles.
Freemasons figured prominently in the American Revolution and the birth of the
American Republic. The French Revolution, with its notions of “Liberty,
Equality, and Fraternity,” originated in the radical Masonic lodges. Secret
societies have been connected to a range of movements that sprang up around
Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to defend people’s rights
against the abuses of royal and priestly power, and to promote freedom by any
and every means.
Secret societies are often viewed as a
largely Western phenomenon, but their roots reach deep into the ancient
civilisations of the East. While much is written about Europe’s hidden
fraternities, little attention has been given to Asia’s secret societies and
the important part they played in organising resistance to the violent
onslaught of European colonialism. As one China specialist points out, the
Chinese secret societies “were closely linked to the struggles which the
Chinese people tirelessly waged… against their internal and external
adversaries.”1
Secret societies were deeply rooted in
Chinese historical reality, and did not divide matters into the spiritual and
the mundane. The source of their power lay in their total opposition to the
established order: political and religious, social and ideological. The
secret societies relied for support primarily upon the oppressed classes of
China. They were the authentic expression of popular hostility to China’s harsh
imperial authorities and to foreign encroachment. In the words of the Sorbonne
professor Jean Chesneaux:
the secret societies constantly threatened
the imperial regime in the nineteenth century, formed a powerful part of the
tidal wave which finally overwhelmed it in 1911, and reacted strongly to
foreign penetration at the end of the nineteenth century as they did to the
Japanese invasion in the twentieth.2
Enter
the Black Dragon
Secret societies also emerged in Japan,
Korea, Vietnam, and Southeast Asia. Like the societies in China, their
mystico-political teachings combined elements of Buddhism, Taoism, and
traditional beliefs. All refused to recognise the dominant system and
resolutely opposed the humiliations inflicted by the Western powers.
By the late nineteenth century secret
society networks in Indochina were struggling against French occupation.
Tracing their origins to China, these Vietnamese brotherhoods served economic
and social purposes as well as religious ones. A sense of solidarity between
members was strengthened by initiation
rites drawn from Buddhism and Taoism, and directed by a spirit medium.
Resembling Freemasonry in some ways, their elaborate ceremonies were held at
night with the blessings of Buddhist monks. As in China these groups had
clearly defined political objectives, in this case, the ending of French
domination.
In the 1890s members of the Japanese secret
society Genyosha (the Black Ocean society) created
theTenyukyo (Society for the Celestial Salvation of the Oppressed) which
gave covert support to theTonghak, a Korean mystico-political group, espousing
equality and the dignity of human beings, opposed to Korea’s imperial Yi
dynasty.
Founded in the mid 1800s,
the Tonghak or Eastern Learning society sought to rally the Korean
people against foreign intrusion. The movement’s leader Ch’oe Che-u, after a
period of ‘aimless wandering’ reminiscent of a Taoist monk, derived the
movement’s ideology from Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism. The Tonghak greatly
contributed to the development of Korean national consciousness, one of their
leaflets proclaiming:
The people are the root of the nation. If
the root withers, the nation will be enfeebled… We cannot sit by and watch our
nation perish. The whole nation is as one, its multitudes united in their
determination to raise the righteous standard of revolt…
At the dawn of the twentieth century secret
societies were behind radical nationalist uprisings across Asia. From the
Young Turks and Young Persians of the Muslim East to Japan’s Black Ocean
society and Chinese Triads, the secret societies provided support networks for
Asia’s young revolutionaries.
With Japan’s military victory over Russia in
1905, Tokyo became the centre of a powerful Pan-Asian movement aimed at freeing
all the people of Asia from Western domination. One notable founding member of
the Black Ocean society was Toyama Mitsuru (1855–1944).
According to historian Richard Storry,
Mitsuru “appeared to be the opponent of all established governments in Asia,
including that of his own country. Chinese, Indian and Filipino dissidents
visiting Tokyo tended to gravitate to his home in Shibuya.” A complex,
charismatic, and controversial figure known as the “Shadow Shogun” and
“Spymaster Supreme,” Mitsuru became one of the most powerful men in Japan. A
master of traditional Japanese brush work, he lived frugally and remained a
private citizen all his life.
Hiraya Amane, another prominent leader of
the Black Ocean society and a pioneer of revolutionary Pan-Asian solidarity,
compiled the first authentic history of the Triads and other Chinese secret
societies. His book was the fruit of friendships he cultivated with Chinese
secret society leaders and militant Chinese revolutionaries. Hiraya Amane’s
writings were diligently studied by a new generation of Japanese secret society
members in the 1920s.
The Amur River Society (Kokuryukai), later
to become notorious in the West as the Black Dragon society, took over the work
and traditions of the Black Ocean society in the years leading up to the First
World War. Established in 1901 by a Black Ocean society leader and Buddhist
monk, Ryohei Uchida, the Black Dragons, with their Pan-Asian vision, had links
with the Triads and supported China’s 1911 Republican Revolution. Their agents
undertook intelligence gathering operations in China, Korea, Manchuria,
Mongolia, Siberia, and established relations with anti-colonialist circles in
the Muslim world.
Forming alliances with revolutionaries in
Indochina, India, Indonesia and the Philippines, the Black Dragons also had
close contact with several Buddhist sects. Throughout the 1920s and 30s the
Black Dragon society supported Indian independence activities, providing
political and financial assistance to Indian nationalists who looked to Japan
as the only Eastern power capable of liberating Asia from the stranglehold of European
colonialism. One such Indian nationalist was Subhas Chandra Bose (founder of
the anti-colonialist Indian National Army), a correspondent in the 1930s for
the influential German journal Geo-political Review, published by
Professor Karl Haushofer.
Major General Karl Haushofer encountered the
Pan-Asian geopolitics and Buddhist mysticism of Japan’s secret fraternities
during his time in Tokyo as the German military attaché. After the First World
War, Haushofer became Professor of Geopolitics at the University of Munich
where Rudolf Hess (later to become Hitler’s deputy) was his student assistant.
Haushofer wrote that, “the struggle of India and China for liberation from
foreign domination and capitalist pressure agrees with the secret dreams of
Central Europe.” He urged Japan to come to terms with China and the Soviet
Union, and consistently advocated an alliance between Germany and the USSR.
This would facilitate what Haushofer called the “Eurasian continental
organisation from the Rhine to the Amur and the Yangtze [rivers].”
Some researchers are convinced Haushofer,
a lifelong admirer of Oriental wisdom, was the emissary of “Unknown Superiors”
in Asia, effectively acting as a crucial link between the Eastern secret
societies and their European counterparts in the German lodges. The French
authors Pauwels and Bergier mention a rumour that Haushofer was initiated into
a secret Buddhist society and to have sworn, if he failed in his ‘mission’, to
commit suicide “in accordance with the time-honoured ceremonial.” Haushofer,
who committed suicide in 1946, is still remembered today by Russia’s Eurasian
thinkers because he never reconciled himself to Hitler’s invasion of the USSR.
Had the Nazi leadership taken note of Haushofer’s views, the Second World War
could have been avoided. No doubt conscious of Haushofer’s remarkable role in
hidden history, Anton LaVey, founder of the Church of Satan in the United
States, dedicated his infamous Satanic Bible to the German general.
By the start of the Second World War agents
of Japanese secret societies, all lumped together by Western intelligence
agencies under the name Black Dragons, were operating worldwide from North
Africa to the United States. One successful Black Dragon agent in America was
Satohata Takahashi. Sent to the US in 1929, Takahashi formed a
mystico-political movement called the Society for the Development of Our Own,
recruiting several thousand members to his Pan-Asian cause, most of them of
African-American, Filipino, or East Asian descent. The “Five Guiding
Principles” of the group were “Freedom, Justice, Equality, Liberty, and
Honour.”
Through Takahashi the Black Dragon society
channelled financial aid to Black Muslim groups in the US. The Moorish Science
Temple, founded by Noble Drew Ali in 1913, taught the true origin of Black
Americans was “Asiatic.” Another Muslim teacher, Master Wallace D. Fard, the
mysterious leader of the Allah Temple of Islam declared, “I’m an Asiatic black
man. I have come to America to save my long lost uncle [the Black Americans].”
Fard’s chief disciple the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, prophet of the Nation of
Islam, told his followers, “It is Japan’s duty to save you; they have been
given the power by the Asiatic nation to save you in the West.” Another
organisation to enjoy Takahashi’s patronage was the Pacific Movement of the
Eastern World, which campaigned for the US to stay out of the war and promoted
the Pan-Asian agenda among non-white Americans.
Based on intelligence reports from their
agents around the globe, the Black Dragon leadership in Tokyo concluded in 1941
that the United States had secretly started preparing to enter the war against
Germany, Italy and Japan. Fearing a surprise American attack on Japanese
forces, the Black Dragons urged Japan’s military hierarchy to launch a
pre-emptive strike on the US. “The signal for war in the Pacific was given on
August 26, 1941, at a session of the Black Dragon Society in Tokyo,” an
American author noted in 1944. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor the
espionage and sabotage operations carried out by the Black Dragons became
legendary.
However, the society’s original
mystico-political vision of Pan-Asian solidarity and anti-colonialism had been
subsumed in the pre-war years by Japanese ultra-nationalism and militarism. Many
Black Dragon members were part of Japan’s industry and government, holding key
diplomatic and military posts. With the Japanese surrender in 1945 some Black
Dragons in government were charged as war criminals. But the Allied victory in
Asia could not extinguish the dream of freedom. Japan had shattered the myth of
the military invincibility of Western colonialism. The seeds sown by the secret
societies flourished in a new wave of national liberation movements that led
the peoples of Asia to independence in the years immediately following the end
of the war.
Political Intrigues of Secret Societies in
the Modern World
A century and a half ago, the British
politician Benjamin Disraeli commented that, “the world is governed by very
different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the
scenes.” In our twenty-first century most people, mesmerised by the electronic
media, are conditioned to dismiss the notion that secret societies may be
tied-up with political intrigue. Yet Western intelligence agencies frequently
rely on clandestine conspiratorial networks in their subversion of foreign
governments. British intelligence services have a long history of involvement
with underground ‘Muslim’ brotherhood groups actively opposed to the Arab
nationalist states of the Middle East. The roots of the recent bloody conflict
in the Russian republic of Chechnya can be traced to British intelligence
service support of secretive ‘Muslim’ sects in the Caucasus. Many believe the
American CIA is currently using a range of quasi-religious cults in clandestine
operations aimed at destabilising the People’s Republic of China.
“The history of the world is the history of
the warfare between secret societies,” said the African American poet Ishmael
Reed. Has world history been shaped by conspiratorial groups employing secret
knowledge? Are the Anglo-American secret societies engaged in a titanic
struggle with Eastern adepts and their allies?
At a time when a shadowy global “war on
terror” is used to justify increased government control and the serious erosion
of personal freedom, we’d do well to recall the admonition of the Roman poet
Ovid: “It is one’s duty to learn from the enemy.” The counterculture novelist
William S. Burroughs once suggested the form of the Chinese secret society
served as the perfect mode of organisation for marginal groups. Indeed, when
the State becomes the oppressor of its own citizens, the only alternative is to
disconnect and seek autonomy by any means necessary. The hidden history of
secret societies may still have a lot to teach us.
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