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Afghanistan’s epic history starts when it was an important region of ancient India called ‘Gandhara’. One of its most frequently mentioned cities in the world today is ‘Kandahar’, made infamous by the Taliban. The earlier name of the city was ‘Quandhar’, derived from the name of the region of Gandhara. Erstwhile home to Al-Qaeda today, it was always a strategic site, being on main Persian routes to Central Asia and India. Hence, it has a long history of conquests. Kandahar was taken by Alexander in 329 B.C.E., was surrendered by the Greek to Chandragupta in 305 B.C.E., and is dignified by a rock inscription of Asoka. It fell under Arab rule in the 7th century C.E., and under the Ghaznavids in the 10th. Kandahar was destroyed by Genghis Khan and again by the Turkic conqueror Timur, after which it was held by the Mughals. Mughal Emperor Babur built 40 giant steps up a hill, cut out of the solid limestone, leading to inscriptions recording details of his proud conquests. In 1747 it became the first capital of a unified Afghanistan.Besides early reference in the Vedas, Ramayana and Mahabharata, Gandhara was the locus of ancient Indian-Persian interaction, a center of world trade and culture. It was a major Buddhist intellectual hub for centuries. The giant Buddhist statues recently destroyed by the Taliban were in Bamiyan, one of the important Buddhist cities of ancient times. Thousands of statues and stupas once dominated its landscape.Ancient GandharaGandharvas are first described in the Vedas as cosmic beings. Later literature describes them as a jati(community), and the later Natyasastra refers to their system of music as gandharva. Gupt explains1:“Gandharvas, as spoken of in Samhitas and later literature, had derived their name from a geographical people, the Gandharas… Most likely they belonged to Afghanistan (which still has a township called Kandhara)… It was perhaps at this time that the Gandharas raised the art of music to a great height. This region of the subcontinent at the time had become the locus of a great confluence of the musical traditions of the East and the Mediterranean. The very art, thus, came to be known by the name of the region and was so called by it even in the heartland of India. This name, gandharva, continued to be used for music for centuries to come. In the Vayu Purana one of the nine divisions of Bharatavarsa is called Gandharva.”During the Mahabharata period, the Gandhara region was very much culturally and politically a part of India. King Œakuni, brother of Gandhârî, fought with Pandavas in the famous epic Mahabharata. The battle was fought in Kurukshetra, in the heartland of India. Gandhârî was married to King Dhrtrastra. Exchanges between Gandhara and Hastinapur (Delhi) were well established and intense.Mehrgarh, located in this region and part of the Indus Valley civilization, is the oldest town excavated by archeologists (8000B.C.E) in the world.Gandhara was the trade crossroad and cultural meeting place between India, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Buddhist writings mention Gandhara (which included Peshawar, Swat and Kabul Valleys) as one of the 16 major states of northern India at the time. It was a province of the Persian king Darius I in the fifth century B.C.E. After conquering it in the 4th century B.C.E., Alexander encountered the vast army of the Nandas in the Punjab, and his soldiers mutinied causing him to leave India.Thereafter, Gandhara was ruled by the Maurya dynasty of India, and during the reign of the Indian emperor Ashoka (3rd century B.C.E.), Buddhism spread and became the world’s first religion across Eurasia, influencing early Christianity and East Asian civilizations. Padmasambhava, the spiritual and intellectual founder of the Indo-Tibetan Buddhism, was from Gandhara. Greek historian Pliny wrote that the Mauryans had a massive army; and yet, like all other Indian kingdoms, they made no attempt at overseas conquest.Gandhara and Sind were considered parts of India since ancient times, as historian Andre Wink explains:“From ancient times both Makran and Sind had been regarded as belonging to India… It definitely did extend beyond the present province of Sind and Makran; the whole of Baluchistan was included, a part of the Panjab, and the North-West Frontier Province.”2“The Arab geographers, in effect, commonly speak of ‘that king of al-Hind…’”3“…Sind was predominantly Indian rather than Persian, and in duration the periods that it had been politically attached to, or incorporated in, an Indian polity far outweigh Persian domination. The Maurya empire was extended to the Indus valley by Candragupta, laying the foundation of a great Buddhist urban-based civilization. Numerous Buddhist monasteries were founded in the area, and Takshashila became an important centre of Buddhist learning, especially in Ashoka’s time. Under the Kushanas, in the late first century A.D… international trade and urbanization reached unprecedented levels in the Indus valley andPurushapara (Peshawar) became the capital of a far-flung empire and Gandhara the second home of Buddhism, producing the well-known Gandhara-Buddhist art. In Purushapara, Kanishka is supposed to have convened the fourth Buddhist council and to have built the Kanishka Vihara, which remained a Buddhist pilgrimage center for centuries to come as well as a center for the dissemination of the religion to Central Asia and China… in conjunction with Hinduism, Buddhism survived in Sind until well into the tenth century.”4“Hiuen Tsang… was especially impressed by the thousand Buddhist monks who lived in the caves of Bamiyan, and the colossal stone Buddha, with a height of 53.5 m, then still decorated with gold. There is also evidence of devi cults in the same areas.”5Shaivism was also an important ancient religion in this region, with wide influence. Wink writes:“…Qandahar [modern Kandahar]…. was the religious center of the kingdom where the cult of the Shaivite god Zun was performed on a hilltop…”.6“…the god Zun or Zhun … shrine lay in Zamindawar before the arrival of Islam, set on a sacred mountain, and still existing in the later ninth century …. [The region was]… famous as a pilgrimage center devoted to Zun. In China the god’s temple became known as the temple of Su-na. …[T]he worship of Zun might be related to that of the old shrine of the sun-god Aditya at Multan. In any case, the cult of Zun was primarily Hindu, not Buddhist or Zoroastrian.”7“[A] connection of Gandhara with the polymorphic male god Shiva and the Durga Devi is now well-established. The pre-eminent character of Zun or Sun was that of a mountain god. And a connection with mountains also predominates in the composite religious configuration of Shiva, the lord of the mountain, the cosmic pivot and the ruler of time… Gandhara and the neighboring countries in fact represent a prominent background to classical Shaivism.”8From 1st century C.E., emperor Kaniska I and his Kushan successors were acknowledged as one of the four great Eurasian powers of their time (the others being China, Rome, and Parthia). The Kushans further spread Buddhism to Central Asia and China, and developed Mahayana Buddhism and the Gandhara and Mathura schools of art. The Kushans became affluent through trade, particularly with exports to Rome. Their coins and art are witness to the tolerance and syncretism in religion and art that prevailed in the region. The Gandhara school incorporated many motifs from classical Roman art, but the basic iconography remained Indian.9Ancient Taxila and PeshawarGandhara’s capital was the famous city of Takshashila. According to the Ramayana, the city was founded by Bharata, and named after his son, Taksha, its first ruler. Greek writers later shortened it to Taxila. The Mahabharata is said to have been first recited at this place. Buddhist literature, especially the jatakastories, mentions it as the capital of the Gandhara kingdom and as a great center of learning. Its ruins may be visited today in an hour’s taxi ride from Rawalpindi (Pakistan).Taxila was strategically located at the 3-way junction of the great trade routes from eastern India (described by Megasthenes, as the “Royal Highway”), from western Asia, Kashmir and Central Asia. Greek historians accompanying Alexander described Taxila as “wealthy, prosperous, and well governed”. Soon after Alexander, Taxila was absorbed into the Maurya Empire as a provincial capital, lasting for three generations.The sage Apollonius of Tyana visited Taxila in the 1st century C.E., and his biographer described it as a fortified city with a symmetrical architecture, comparable in size to the most populous city of the ancient Assyrian Empire. Even a thousand years after Buddha, Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Fa-hsien described it as a thriving center of Buddhism. But by the time Hsuan-tsang visited from China in the 7th century C.E., Taxila had been destroyed by the Huns. Taxila was renowned as a center of learning.During other times, the capital of Gandhara was Purusapura (abode of Purusha, the Hindu name for the Supreme Being), whose name was changed by Akbar to Peshawar. Near Peshawar are ruins of the largest Buddhist stupa in the subcontinent (2nd century C.E.), attesting to the enduring presence of Buddhism in the region. Purusapura is mentioned in early Sanskrit literature, in the writings of the classical historians Strabo and Arrian, and the geographer Ptolemy. Kaniska made Purusapura the capital of his Kushan empire (1st century C.E.). It was captured by the Muslims in C.E. 988.Genocide Part 1: The Conquest of SindAll this glorious past, and Asia’s civilization, changed forever with the bloody plunder of Sind by the Arabs starting in the 7th century:“In 653-4, …a force of 6000 Arabs penetrated… To the shrine of Zun. The general broke off a hand from the idol and plucked out the rubies which were its eyes… The Arabs were now able to mount frequent plunder and slave expeditions as far as Ghazna, Kabul and Bamiyan… Arab raiding continued and was aimed at exacting tribute, plunder and slaves …Slaves and beasts remained the principal booty of the raids, and these were sent to the caliphate court in a steady stream.”10Andre Wink describes that this aspiration to conquer India had existed since the time of the Prophet, as is evidenced by the sacred texts:“… in the hadith collections the prophet Muhammad himself is credited with the aspiration of conquering India. Participants in the holy war against al-Hind [the Hindus] are promised to be saved from hell-fire… Thus also an eschatological work which is called the Kitab al-Fitan (‘Book of Trials’) credits Muhammad with saying that God will forgive the sins of the members of the Muslim army which will attack al-Hind, and give them victory.”11The plunder was also achieved by an ingenious system of leaving the prosperous population alone, so that they would continue to bring donations to the temples, and then the Muslims would loot these temples. In order to save their temple from destruction, many Hindu warriors refused to fight:“An even greater part of the revenue of these rulers was derived from the gifts donated by pilgrims who came from all over Sind and Hind to the great idol (sanam) of the sun-temple at Multan… When Muhammad al-Qasim conquered Multan, he quickly discovered that it was this temple which was one of the main reasons for the great wealth of the town. He ‘made captives of the custodians of the budd, numbering 6000′ and confiscated its wealth, but not the idol itself – which was made of wood, covered with red leather and two red rubies for its eyes and wearing a crown of gold inlaid with gems –, ‘thinking it best to leave the idol where it was, but hanging a piece of cow’s flesh on its neck by way of mockery’. AI-Qasim built his mosque in the same place, in the most crowded bazaar in the center of the town. The possession of the sun-temple — rather than the mosque — is what in later times the geographers see as the reason why the local governors or rulers could hold out against the neighboring Hindu powers. Whenever an ‘infidel king’ marched against Multan and the Muslims found it difficult to offer adequate resistance, they threatened to break the idol or mutilate it, and this, allegedly, made the enemy withdraw. In the late tenth century however the Isma’ilis who occupied Multan broke the idol into pieces and killed its priests. A new mosque was then erected on its site…”12Genocide Part 2: Mahmud of GhazniThe founder of the Ghaznavid dynasty was a former Turkish slave, recognized by the Iranian Muslims as governor of Ghazni (a town near Kandahar). His son Mahmud (ruled in 998-1030) expanded the empire further into India. A devout Muslim, Mahmud converted the Ghaznavids into Islam, thus bringing Islam into the sub-continent’s local population. In the 11th century, he made Ghazni the capital of the vast empire of the Ghaznavids, Afghanistan’s first Muslim dynasty. The atrocities by Mahmud of Ghazni makes the Taliban look benign by comparison. Will Durant explains:13“The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within… For four hundred years (600-1000 A.D.) India invited conquest; and at last it came.”“In the year 997 a Turkish chieftain by the name of Mahmud became sultan of the little state of Ghazni, in eastern Afghanistan. Mahmud knew that his throne was young and poor, and saw that India, across the border, was old and rich; the conclusion was obvious. Pretending a holy zeal for destroying Hindu idolatry across the frontier with a force inspired by a pious aspiration for booty. He met the unprepared Hindus at Bhimnagar, slaughtered them, pillaged their cities, destroyed their temples, and carried away the accumulated treasures of centuries. Returning to Ghazni he astonished the ambassadors of foreign powers by displaying “jewels and un-bored pearls and rubies shinning like sparks, or like wine congealed with ice, and emeralds like fresh sprigs of myrtle, and diamonds in size and weight like pomegranates.””“Each winter Mahmud descended into India, filled his treasure chest with spoils, and amused his men with full freedom to pillage and kill; each spring he returned to his capital richer than before. At Mathura (on the Jumna) he took from the temple its statues of gold encrusted with precious stones, and emptied it coffers of a vast quantity of gold, silver and jewelry; he expressed his admiration for the architecture of the great shrine, judged that its duplication would cost one hundred million dinars and the labor of two hundred years, and then ordered it to be soaked with naptha and burnt to the ground. Six years later he sacked another opulent city of northern India, Somnath, killed all its fifty thousand inhabitants, and dragged its wealth to Ghazni. In the end he became, perhaps, the richest king that history has ever known.”“Sometimes he spared the population of the ravaged cities, and took them home to be sold as slaves; but so great was the number of such captives that after some years no one could be found to offer more than a few schillings for a slave. Before every important engagement Mahmud knelt in prayer, and asked the blessing of God upon his arms. He reigned for a third of a century; and when he died, full of years and honors, Moslem historians ranked him greatest monarch of his time, and one of the greatest sovereigns of any age.”Genocide Part 3: Post-Ghazni Invaders.Mahmud of Ghazni set the stage for other Muslim invaders in their orgy of plunder and brutality, as Will Durant explains: 14“In 1186 the Ghuri, a Turkish tribe of Afghanistan invaded India, captured the city of Delhi destroyed its temples, confiscated its wealth, and settled down in its palaces to establish the Sultanate of Delhi — an alien despotism fastened upon northern India for three centuries, and checked only by assassination and revolt. The first of these bloody sultans, Kutb-d Din Aibak, was a normal specimen of his kind — fanatical, ferocious and merciless. His gifts as the Mohammedan historian tells us, “were bestowed by hundreds of thousands and his slaughters likewise were by hundreds of thousands.” In one victory of this warrior (who had been purchased as a slave), “fifty thousand men came under the collar of slavery, and the plain became black as pitch with Hindus.””“Another sultan, Balban, punished rebels and brigands by casting them under the feet of elephants, or removing their skins, stuffing these with straw, and hanging them from the gates of Delhi.”“When some Mongol inhabitants who had settled in Delhi, and had been converted to Islam, attempted a rising, Sultan Alau-d-din (the conquerer of Chitor) had all the males — from fifteen to thirty thousand of them — slaughtered in one day.”“Sultan Muhammad bin Tughlak acquired the throne by murdering his father, became a great scholar and an elegant writer, dabbled in mathematics, physics and Greek philosophy, surpassed his predecessors in bloodshed and brutality, fed the flesh of a rebel nephew to the rebel’s wife and children, ruined the country with reckless inflation, and laid it waste with pillage and murder till the inhabitants fled to the jungle. He killed so many Hindus that, in the words of a Moslem historian, “there was constantly in front of his royal pavilion and his Civil Court a mound of dead bodies and a heap of corpses, while the sweepers and executioners were weaned out by their work of dragging” the victims “and putting them to death in crowds.” In order to found a new capital at Daulatabad he drove every inhabitant from Delhi and left it a desert….””“Firoz Shah invaded Bengal, offered a reward for every Hindu head, paid for 180,000 of them, raided Hindu villages for slaves, and died at the ripe age or eighty. Sultan Ahmad Shah feasted for three days whenever the number of defenseless Hindus slain in his territories in one day reached twenty thousand.”“These rulers… were armed with a religion militaristic in operation… [and made] the public exercise of the Hindu religions illegal, and thereby driving them more deeply into the Hindu soul. Some of these thirsty despots had culture as well as ability; they patronized the arts, and engaged artists and artisans — usually of Hindu origin — to build for them magnificent mosques and tombs: some of them were scholars, and delighted in converse historians, poets and scientists.”“The Sultans drew from the people every rupee of tribute that could be exacted by the ancient art of taxation, as well as by straight-forward robbery…”“The usual policy of the Sultans was clearly sketched by Alau-d-din, who required his advisers to draw up “rules and regulations for grinding down the Hindus, and for depriving them of that wealth and property which fosters disaffection and rebellion.” Half of the gross produce of the soil was collected by the government; native rulers had taken one-sixth. “No Hindu,” says a Moslem historian, “could hold up his head, and in their houses no sign of gold or silver… or of any superfluity was to be seen… Blows, confinement in the stocks, imprisonment and chains, were all employed to enforce payment.””“…Timur-i-lang — a Turk who had accepted Islam as an admirable weapon… feeling the need of more gold, it dawned upon him that India was still full of infidels… Mullahs learned in the Koran decided the matter by quoting an inspiring verse: “Oh Prophet, make war upon infidels and unbelievers, and treat them with severity.” Thereupon, Timur crossed the Indus in 1398, massacred or enslaved such of the inhabitants as could not flee from him, defeated the forces of Sultan Mahmud Tughlak, occupied Delhi, slew a hundred thousand prisoners in cold blood, plundered the city of all the wealth that the Afghan dynasty had gathered there, and carried it off to Samarkand with multitude of women and slaves, leaving anarchy, famine and pestilence in his wake,”“This is the secret of the political history of modern India. Weakened by division, it succumbed to invaders; impoverished by invaders, it lost all power of resistance, and took refuge in supernatural consolations… The bitter lesson that may be drawn from this tragedy is that eternal vigilance is the price of civilization. A nation must love peace, but keep its powder dry.”During these genocides for centuries, a certain portion of the fleeing Hindus reached Europe. Today’s Roma people of Europe (popularly called the ‘gypsies’, a term that they regard as a pejorative) are of Indian origin and have lived as wanderers in Europe for nearly a thousand years. It is believed that they originated in Northwest India, in a region including Gandhara, Punjab, and Rajasthan. In Europe, they survived by being musicians and performers, because European society did not assimilate them even after a thousand years. They have accepted their plight as street people without a ‘home’ as such. Their history in Europe is filled with attempts to eradicate them in various ways.15 (There is much justified criticism of India’s caste system as a way by which diverse ethnicities dealt with each other. However, I have yet to see a comparison with the fact that Europeans dealt with non-European ethnicities using genocide (as in America), or by attempted genocide as in the case of the Roma.)Islamic Scholarship on IndiaThe Arabic, Turkish, and Persian invaders brought their historians to document their conquests of India as great achievements. Many of these historians ended up loving India and wrote excellent accounts of life in India, including about the Gandhara and Sindh regions. Their translations of Indian texts were later retranslated into European languages and hence many of the European Renaissance inputs from Islam were actually Indian contributions traveling via Islam.Many Muslim scholars showed great respect for Indian society. For instance:“The Arabic literature identifies numerous ministers, revenue officers, accountants, et cetera, in seventh- and eighth-century Sind as ‘brahmans’ and these were generally confirmed in their posts by the conquerors. Where these brahmans came from we do not know, but their presence was regarded as beneficial. Many cities had been founded by them and Sind had become ‘prosperous and populous’ under their guidance.”16“Of caste divisions very little mention is made. The stereotype social division is in professional classes rather than a ritualized caste-hierarchy: ‘priests, warriors, agriculturists, artisans, merchants’.”17Of all these Muslim scholars, Alberuni left the most detailed accounts of India’s civilization. In the introduction to his translation of Alberuni’s famous book, Indica, the Arabic scholar Edward Sachau summarizes how India was the source of considerable Arabic culture:18“The foundations of Arabic literature was laid between AD 750 and 850. It is only the tradition relating to their religion and prophet and poetry that is peculiar to the Arabs; everything else is of foreign descent… Greece, Persia, and India were taxed to help the sterility of the Arab mind… What India has contributed reached Baghdad by two different roads. Part has come directly in translations from the Sanskrit, part has traveled through Eran, having originally been translated from Sanskrit (Pali? Prakrit?) into Persian, and farther from Persian into Arabic. In this way, e.g. the fables of Kalila and Dimna have been communicated to the Arabs, and book on medicine, probably the famous Caraka.”“As Sindh was under the actual rule of Khalif Mansur (AD 753 – 774), there came embassies from that part of India to Baghdad, and among them scholars, who brought along with them two books, the Brahamsiddhanta to Brahamgupta (Sirhind), and his Khandkhdyaka (Arkanda). With the help of these pandits, Alfazari, perhaps also Yakub ibn Tarik, translated them. Both works have been largely used, and have exercised a great influence. It was on this occasion that the Arabs first became acquainted with a scientific system of astronomy. They learned from Brahamgupta earlier than from Ptolemy.”“Another influx of Hindu learning took place under Harun, AD 786 – 808. The ministerial family Barmak, then at the zenith of their power, had come with the ruling dynasty from Balkh, where an ancestor of theirs had been an official in the Buddhistic temple Naubehar, i.e. nava vihara = the new temple (or monastery). The name Barmak is said to be of Indian descent, meaning paramaka i.e. the superior (abbot of the vihara).”“Induced by family traditions, they sent scholars to India, there to study medicine and pharmacology. Besides, they engaged Hindu scholars to come to Baghdad, made them the chief physicians of their hospitals, and ordered them to translate from Sanskrit into Arabic books on medicine, pharmacology, toxicology, philosophy, astrology, and other subjects. Still in later centuries Muslim scholars sometimes traveled for the same purposes as the emissaries of the Barmak, e.g. Almuwakkuf not long before Alberuni’s time…”“Many Arab authors took up the subjects communicated to them by the Hindus and worked them out in original compositions, commentaries and extracts. A favorite subject of theirs was Indian mathematics, the knowledge of which became far spread by the publications of Alkindi and many others.”Alberuni leaves no doubt as to the origin of the so-called Arabic system of numbers:“The numerical signs which we use are derived from the finest forms of the Hindu signs… The Arabs, too, stop with the thousand, which is certainly the most correct and the most natural thing to do… Those, however, who go beyond the thousand in their numeral system are the Hindus, at least in their arithmetical technical terms, which have been either freely invented or derived according to certain etymologies, whilst in others both methods are blended together. They extend the names of the orders of numbers until the 18th order for religious reasons, the mathematicians being assisted by the grammarians with all kinds of etymologies.”In Islamic Spain, European scholars acknowledged India very positively, as evidenced by an important and rare 11th century book on world science commissioned by the ruler of Spain19. Its author, Said al-Andalusi focused on India as a major center for science, mathematics and culture. Some excerpts:“The first nation (to have cultivated science) is India. This is a powerful nation having a large population, and a rich kingdom. India is known for the wisdom of its people. Over many centuries, all the kings of the past have recognized the ability of the Indians in all the branches of knowledge.”“The Indians, as known to all nations for many centuries, are the metal (essence) of wisdom, the source of fairness and objectivity. They are peoples of sublime pensiveness, universal apologues, and useful and rare inventions.”“To their credit, the Indians have made great strides in the study of numbers and of geometry. They have acquired immense information and reached the zenith in their knowledge of the movements of the stars (astronomy) and the secrets of the skies (astrology) as well as other mathematical studies. After all that, they have surpassed all the other peoples in their knowledge of medical science and the strengths of various drugs, the characteristics of compounds and the peculiarities of substances [chemistry].”“Their kings are known for their good moral principles, their wise decisions, and their perfect methods of exercising authority.”“What has reached us from the work of the Indians in music is the book… [that] contains the fundamentals of modes and the basics in the construction of melodies.”“That which has reached us from the discoveries of their clear thinking and the marvels of their inventions is the (game) of chess. The Indians have, in the construction of its cells, its double numbers, its symbols and secrets, reached the forefront of knowledge. They have extracted its mysteries from supernatural forces. While the game is being played and its pieces are being maneuvered, there appear the beauty of structure and the greatness of harmony. It demonstrates the manifestation of high intentions and noble deeds, as it provides various forms of warnings from enemies and points out ruses as well as ways to avoid dangers. And in this, there is considerable gain and useful profit.”Even as late as the 12th century C.E., al-Idrîsî (1100-1166), a geographer and scholar from Spain and Sicily, included the Gandhara region, including Kabul, with India20. The region was famous for the export of its three local products: indigo, cotton, and iron.21The Lessons of HistoryIs the history of Islam in Afghanistan repeating itself a thousand years later? The Arab and Turk atrocities in India, done in the name of Islam a thousand years ago, may be compared to the past ten years in Afghanistan: In the times of Mahmud of Ghazni, India was, relative to other countries, as rich as the United States is today, and hence a comparable target. The Taliban dress code is what earlier Muslim plunderers also enforced in India. The same interpretation of the Koranic verses was used then as is now taught in thousands of madrassas in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. The main plunderers then were not indigenous to Afghanistan, but were largely Arabs/Turks; today, again, they are not mainly Afghanis, but tens of thousands of Pakistanis and Arabs with their own agendas.Where does all this history lead us today? First of all, I emphatically believe that history should not be the burden of contemporary society, and this means that South Asian Muslims are not to be blamed for the past, in which they, too, were victims. Germans are taught about Nazism without being made to feel guilty. U.S. schools teach slavery with black and white kids together in class. Suppressing the past evils from history would be irresponsible, and an invitation to unscrupulous political forces to exploit ignorant people.More importantly, Indianized Islam is probably the most sophisticated and liberal Islam in the world, because of its prolonged nurturing in the Indian soil. Islam needs the same kind of Reformation as Christianity underwent in the past few centuries. India, with its long experience of Islam co-existing with other religions, its large Muslim population, and its Hindu-Buddhist experience, is the ideal environment for Islamic liberalization. Islamic majority nations lack the experience of pluralism, democracy, and the Hinduism-Buddhism environment. Western countries have too small a Muslim population, and too recent an encounter, to be incubators. India is the ideal climate for a breakthrough.In the big picture, the struggle is not against Islam, but is about the kind of Islam that emerges. It is also about conflicting identities within Pakistan: Arabization versus Indianization. For lasting peace in the region, Afghanistan should once again become a buffer between Arabic-Persian and Indic civilizations. Pakistan has always been unstable, sandwiched between the two very ancient civilizations of India and Arabia-Persia, and obsessed by the need to differentiate itself from both. What Macaulayism is to elitist Indians, Arabization of identity is to Pakistanis, the difference being that in the latter case it pervades all tiers of society. Pakistan’s complexes, due to its lack of heritage and sense of identity, drive much of its insecure behavior.One would like that the hundreds of media personnel covering the war would be better equipped to explain the history of the region. That they do not know even the fundamentals is not surprising. But what is disturbing is the way SAJA (South Asian Journalists Association), a 500-member association of Indian journalists in North America, has failed to play any role in educating the American public about this region. Is it ignorance, or is it the complex of being seen as too ‘Indian’?Over the past fifteen years, governmental, academic, and private funding agencies sponsored research on South Asia that focused on caste, cows, exotica, sati, and Hindu revolts against Proselytizers, thereby propagating the stereotype of the “Evil/Primitive Hindus”. In the process, they completely ignored vital topics such as Wahhabi Islam and other movements spawned by the ISI. Consequently, few South Asian experts seem to have even rudimentary knowledge of the 39,000 madrassas of Pakistan, some of which were the breeding grounds of the Taliban, or the related religious movements that are the genesis of today’s crisis. These events are about religion, when seen from the perspective of those engaged in terrorism and their vast network of sympathizers worldwide. Yet the academy is ill-equipped to perform its mission to interpret these events and to educate the world about them. After September 11, I wrote privately to the professional association of scholars called RISA (Religions In South Asia), since Afghanistan and Pakistan fall under their definition of South Asia, to suggest that at their November annual conference, they should have a major discussion on Wahhabism-Talibanism in South Asia. Despite being the world’s premier association of scholars who objectively study South Asian religions, they failed to include this topic. Instead, they had a whole panel on how Hinduism textbooks and web sites ignore Islam!Scholars and the media seem afraid to explain that the soil of Afghanistan is historically sacred to Buddhists and Hindus, in the same manner as Jerusalem is to Jews and the Kaaba is to Muslims. Today’s infamous caves were once home to thousands of Buddhist monks and Hindu rishis, who did their meditation and attained enlightenment there. How such sacred geography ended up in evil hands is something I am still trying to come to terms with.Source - How ‘Gandhara’ Became ‘Kandahar’

I don’t know why Michael Knowles believes this. But, from its inception, the agenda surrounding the theory of catastrophic anthropogenic global warming has been led primarily by politicos, particularly from the UN.For many CAGW alarmists- UN officials, globalists, leftist politicians, greedy and unscrupulous bankers and other investors, radical environmentalists, and avowed socialists/communists, the theory of CAGW is not really about climate change. Rather it is about changing the political and economic systems of the world. Specifically, it is about instituting one world government, replacing capitalism and democracy with global authoritarian socialism, and markedly reducing global population (see proof of this below).“…the global warming rubric has provided an ideal platform to accomplish exactly what [former socialist Venezuelan president] Chavez has in mind…to enable the U.N. to advance large transformational visions of socialism, wealth redistribution, and ultimately, global governance.” The U.N.'s Global Warming War On Capitalism: An Important History Lesson“So-called Climate Change, aka Global Warming, is a neo-malthusian deindustrialization agenda originally developed by circles around the Rockefeller family in the early 1970’s to prevent rise of independent industrial rivals.” The Dark Story Behind Global Warming aka Climate ChangeThe UN and many of its globalist, socialist and environmentalist members and advisors, particularly oil billionaires Maurice Strong and David Rockefeller, along with Rockefeller’s Club of Rome, initially developed much of this scheme. It was formalized at the 1992 Rio Climate Conference (organized by Strong) as UN Agenda 21 or the Sustainable Development Agenda: “Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced; a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level … Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice … The provision of decent dwellings and healthy conditions for the people can only be achieved if land is used in the interest of the society as a whole.” David J.C. Shearman – No B-S here (I hope)Lest you believe this is just conspiracy theory (as so many alarmists try desperately to make us believe), read what many alarmists have admitted:Gus Hall, former leader of the Communist Party USA: “Human society cannot basically stop the destruction of the environment under capitalism. Socialism is the only structure that makes it possible.”UN Commission on Global Governance: "The concept of national sovereignty has been immutable, indeed a sacred principle of international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the new imperatives of global environmental cooperation.""This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution." . Referring to a new international treaty environmentalists hope will be adopted at the Paris climate change conference later this year, she added: "This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model for the first time in human history." - Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate ChangeFormer U.S. democrat Senator Timothy Wirth (D-CO), then representing the Clinton-Gore administration as U.S undersecretary of state for global issues, joined Maurice Strong in addressing the 1992 Climate Summit audience: “We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.” (Wirth is now president of the U.N. Foundation which lobbies for $hundreds of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to help underdeveloped countries "fight" climate change.) The U.N.'s Global Warming War On Capitalism: An Important History LessonChristine Stewart, then Canadian Minister of the Environment, speaking before editors and reporters of the Calgary Herald in 1998, said, “No matter if the science of global warming is all phony…climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_StewartDavid Brower, a founder of the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth: “The goal now is a socialist, redistributionist society, which is nature’s proper steward and society’s only hope.”Judi Bari, Principal organizer of Earth First! - "If we don't overthrow capitalism, we don't have a chance of saving the world ecologically. I think it is possible to have an ecologically sound society under socialism. I don't think it is possible under capitalism.” Reported in the New American March 7th, 2013 and "Starting from the very reasonable, but unfortunately revolutionary concept that social practices which threaten the continuation of life on Earth must be changed, we need a theory of revolutionary ecology that will encompass social and biological issues, class struggle, and a recognition of the role of global corporate capitalism in the oppression of peoples and the destruction of nature." Starting from the very reasonable, but unfortunately revolutionary conceptHelen Caldicott, an Australian physician and a leading member of the leftist political organization Union of Concerned Scientists: “Free Enterprise really means rich people get richer. They have the freedom to exploit and psychologically rape their fellow human beings in the process…Capitalism is destroying the earth.”(By the way, according to the reference below, the Union of Concerned Scientists is a left-wing advocacy organization that spreads unscientific alarmism about environmental and energy topics. It is not a scientific organization although it is treated as one by the press and others ignorant of its true political agendas. It began as a leftist anti-Vietnam War group and now promotes catastrophic CO2 global warming, anti-nuclear energy, anti-GMO, radical environmental stances, and other left-wing agendas. Apparently anyone can join for $25 to become a “concerned scientist”. Though founded in 1969 by faculty and students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, UCS’ mission from the beginning has never been the pursuit of knowledge through scientific discovery. It has instead pursued left-wing advocacy on technology, environmental, and energy issues—regardless of what the scientific data have shown. Union of Concerned Scientists - Left Exposed Its president is not a scientist but a lifelong political activist. He is close to Al Gore and former democrat senator and CO2 global warming alarmist, Tim Wirth, who commented about the theory of CAGW this way: "we've got to ride the global-warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing — in terms of economic policy and environmental policy." (Not surprisingly, after Wirth left the Senate and the Clinton administration he ended up at the United Nations as president of the UN Foundation. National Review: Climate Change Hypocrisy Also see: https://www.quora.com/Do-you-think-that-the-Trump-administration-is-actively-censoring-data-about-climate-change/answer/Charles-Holley-10/comment/104179721Club of Rome: “Now is the time to draw up a master plan for sustainable growth and world development based on global allocation of all resources and a new global economic system. Ten or twenty years from today it will probably be too late.”David Rockefeller, billionaire founding member Club of Rome and close friend of Maurice Strong: “We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis…”(Many of the above quotes from: C3: Global Warming Quotes & Climate Change Quotes: Human-Caused Global Warming Advocates/Supporters)"Current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the affluent middle class- involving high meat intake, use of fossil fuels, appliances, air-conditioning, and suburban housing- are not sustainable."- Maurice Strong, Canadian oil billionaire socialist, close friend of David Rockefeller, organizer of the Rio Earth Summit and the UN Foundation The Green AgendaOne of the most ardent supporters of CAGW, socialist author Naomi Klein: “…most leftists have yet to realize that climate science has handed them the most powerful argument against capitalism since William Blake’s ‘dark Satanic Mills’…The deniers did not decide that climate change is a left-wing conspiracy by uncovering some covert socialist plot. They arrived at this analysis by taking a hard look at what it would take to lower global emissions as drastically and as rapidly as climate science demands. They have concluded that this can be done only by radically reordering our economic and political systems in ways antithetical to their “free market” belief system. As British blogger and Heartland regular James Delingpole has pointed out, 'Modern environmentalism successfully advances many of the causes dear to the left: redistribution of wealth, higher taxes, greater government intervention, regulation.' Heartland’s Bast puts it even more bluntly: For the left, 'Climate change is the perfect thing…. It’s the reason why we should do everything [the left] wanted to do anyway.' Here’s my inconvenient truth: they aren’t wrong... arriving at these new systems is going to require shredding the free-market ideology that has dominated the global economy for more than three decades. What follows is a quick-and-dirty look at what a serious climate agenda would mean in the following six arenas: public infrastructure, economic planning, corporate regulation, international trade, consumption and taxation." Capitalism vs. the ClimateClub of Rome, environmental think-tank and consultants to the United Nations. "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill....All these dangers are caused by human intervention....and thus the “real enemy, then, is humanity itself...humans need a common motivation, namely a common adversary, to organize and act together in the vacuum; such a motivation must be found to bring the divided nations together to face an outside enemy, either a real one or else one invented for the purpose… Democracy is not a panacea. It cannot organize everything and it is unaware of its own limits. Sacrilegious though this may sound, democracy is no longer well suited for the tasks ahead. The complexity and the technical nature of many of today’s problems do not always allow elected representatives to make competent decisions at the right time…Democracy has failed us, a new system of global governance, based on environmental imperatives, must be implemented quickly...A radical change from the current trajectory is required, a complete reordering of global society..." From their book “The First Global Revolution”. The First Global Revolution For more COR quotes see: The Green AgendaAustralians Professor David Shearman and ecologist Joseph Wayne Smith published The Climate Change Challenge and the Failure of Democracy. Amazon’s blurb says, “This provocative book presents compelling evidence that the fundamental problem behind environmental destruction―and climate change in particular―is the operation of liberal democracy.” Originally a research tract, the abstract says the authors conclude that an authoritarian form of government is necessary, but this will be governance by experts and not by those who seek power. [Good luck with that!] David J.C. Shearman – No B-S here (I hope)"Government in the future will be based upon . . . a supreme office of the biosphere. The office will comprise specially trained philosopher/ecologists. These guardians will either rule themselves or advise an authoritarian government of policies based on their ecological training and philosophical sensitivities." David Shearman, an IPCC Assessor for 3rd and 4th climate change reports Inconvenient Quotes (For Climate Alarmists) (Al Gore, enemy, global warming, ethical) and https://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/warmist-yearns-for-the-freedom-of-a-dictatorship/news-story/c3f37af24d1ad137dde65fac558c95f0Quotes from an article about a recent UN study: “Meeting current or growing levels of energy need in the next few decades with low-carbon solutions (i.e., renewables) will be extremely difficult, if not impossible. The economic transition must involve efforts to lower total energy use.…international freight transport and aviation cannot continue to grow at current rates.…dairy and meat should make way for largely plant-based diets. But capitalist markets will not be capable of facilitating the required changes – governments will need to step up, and institutions (i.e., globalist elitist groups) will need to actively shape markets to fit the goals of human survival. It can’t happen without considerable reframing of economic-political thinking, however.” This is how UN scientists are preparing for the end of capitalismDr. John Holdren, Obama’s Science Czar - “A transnational “Planetary Regime” should assume control of the global economy and also dictate the most intimate details of Americans’ lives... using an armed international police force. The first step necessarily involves partial surrender of sovereignty to an international organization". (His book, “Ecoscience” co-authored with Paul Ehrlich in 1977) and “A massive campaign must be launched to restore a high-quality environment in North America and to de-develop the United States...De-development means bringing our economic system (especially patterns of consumption) into line with the realities of ecology and the global resource situation...Redistribution of wealth both within and among nations is absolutely essential, if a decent life is to be provided for every human being." Inconvenient Quotes (For Climate Alarmists) (Al Gore, enemy, global warming, ethical) and https://antioligarch.wordpress.c...Former Soviet Union President Mikhail Gorbachev recognizing the importance of using climate alarmism to advance global socialist/Marxist objectives, stated in 1996: “The threat of environmental crisis will be the international disaster key to unlock the New World Order.” The U.N.'s Global Warming War On Capitalism: An Important History LessonEvo Morales, the socialist president of Bolivia at the 20th Conference of the Parties (COP-20) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change: "The origin of global warming lies in capitalism… If we could end capitalism then we would have a solution.” 'The origin of global warming lies in capitalism'Former socialist President of Venezuela, Hugo Chavez, at the 2010 UN Mexico Climate Conference: “Our revolution seeks to help all people…Socialism,... that’s the way to save the planet; capitalism is the road to hell…Let’s fight against capitalism..." The U.N.'s Global Warming War On Capitalism: An Important History Lesson (He received a standing ovation from the huge crowd of attendees!)The latest United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report led Eric Holthaus, a Grist (environmental magazine based in Seattle) writer, to tweet enthusiastically in 2018, “The world’s top scientists just gave rigorous backing to systematically dismantle capitalism as a key requirement to maintaining civilization and a habitable planet.” U.N. Climate Report Merely a Blueprint for Destroying the World Economy“A massive campaign must be launched to de-develop the United States.” - Paul Ehrlich, Stanford Professor of Population Studies and author of “The Population Bomb” (1968) and co-author of “Ecoscience” (1977) with John Holdren http://green-agenda.com/index.htmlRichard Benedick - former US Deputy Assistant of State, headed the policy divisions of the U.S. State Department: “A global warming treaty [Kyoto] must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the greenhouse effect.” from the 1990 book “Trashing the Planet” Inconvenient Quotes (For Climate Alarmists) (Al Gore, enemy, global warming, ethical)Former French President Jacques Chirac, supporting the Kyoto Protocol: “For the first time, humanity is instituting a genuine instrument of global governance, one that should find a place within the World Environmental Organization which France and the European Union would like to see established.” https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2013/01/22/the-u-n-s-global-warming-war-on-capitalism-an-important-history-lesson-2/#116f7bca29be"The objective, clearly enunciated by the leaders of the UN Conference on Environment and Development (Rio Climate Conference) is to bring about a change in the present system of independent nations. The future is to be World Government with central planning by the United Nations. Fear of environmental crises - whether real or not - is expected to lead to – compliance” -Dixy Lee Ray, PhD Biology Stanford, former Democrat governor of State of Washington, U.S. https://www.azquotes.com/author/12122-Dixie_Lee_RaySaikat Chakrabarti, US Congresswoman and avowed socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's former chief of staff-“The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all. Do you guys think of it as a climate thing? Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/magazine/wp/2019/07/10/feature/how-saikat-chakrabarti-became-aocs-chief-of-change/?utm_term=.b996d5303802For additional similar quotes, see: John Walker's answer to Could someone please provide a printable copy of the "global warming agenda” by “the globalists” who are said to push it?Frequently alarmists will try to discredit the above quotes by fallaciously claiming they are taken out of context. But whenever available, I have included the entire context and/or the reference from which quotes were taken. One can look and see for themselves that the quotes express exactly what is indicated. No amount of spin will change that.For a deeper understanding of the political ideology driving the CAGW scam, it is imperative to look briefly at history. WWII devastated the infrastructure and economies of Europe and Japan. The US developed the Marshall Plan (the Foreign Assistance Act of 1948) with help from the left-of-center think tank, the Brookings Institute as requested by then Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, Arthur Vandenberg. Although a Republican, Vandenberg rejected nationalism and embraced “internationalism”. He strongly supported FDR’s founding of the United Nations.Internationalism is an important component of socialist political theory, based on the principle that working-class people of all countries must unite across national boundaries and actively oppose nationalism and war in order to overthrow capitalism…Internationalism (politics) - Wikipedia The ideal for many internationalists is to create democratic socialist globalization and a one-world government.Ironically, the Marshall Plan was initially developed as a foreign aid plan to the devastated European nations in part to deter the advance of Soviet communism. The US sent the current equivalent of $100 billion to these nations, which was meant to cease once they had recovered. But in 1951, the Marshall Plan was replaced by the Mutual Security Act of 1951, which was replaced by the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, which continued $billions in economic aid to portions of Europe along with parts of Asia and South/Central America.Of course, economic aid continues today and has expanded to numerous other countries even though the Cold War ended decades ago. Many of these nations were allowed to raise tariffs against American products while the US usually did not reciprocate. While aid to wealthy western nations has essentially ceased (except for the $billions in military protection the US continues to provide), many of these nations have maintained tariffs on American imports. Thus, since WWII, America has already been redistributing much of its wealth to scores of nations around the world. Again, ironically, many conservatives supported foreign aid to prevent the spread of communism, while much of the drive for this continued wealth redistribution from leftists and globalists was based upon the desire to “fundamentally transform” American exceptionalism and nationalism into internationalism by the redistribution of American wealth and power (anyone recall that phrase, “fundamentally transform”, from Obama’s speeches?).So this is the historical link between the UN goal of internationalism and its goal for the redistribution of American wealth/power to other nations via its fraudulent CAGW campaign. But instead of $billions, it is now $trillions. (It is also simple to comprehend one of the primary reasons the left/socialists/globalist elites loathe Trump and his reciprocal tariffs meant to diminish the flow of jobs and wealth to foreign nations! He is the first president to attempt this since 1948, and the left is trying desperately to make him fail and remove him from office by any means in order to keep him from pursuing his goal of keeping America a sovereign, highly successful capitalist nation and world leader. To them the ends justify their Machiavellian means.)So the CAGW agenda has been led primarily by the UN, particularly the IPCC, and leftist politicians, radical leftist environmentalists, and other socialists. But over the years, wealthy bankers, greedy politicians and other investors have realized that the “green agenda” is a potential gold mine. Certainly Al Gore has cashed in on it. When running for president in 1999, he reported a net worth of $1.7 million. Since then, he has been involved in multiple lucrative climate-related business ventures and served on the boards of numerous high-profile companies like Google and Apple, often because of his public image as a savior of the planet from CAGW. As of 2013, his fortune was estimated at $200 million, a good chunk of which was derived from climate change-related business.Gore was one of the early promoters of the Chicago Climate Exchange (along with Enron!) He, President Obama, and others lobbied feverishly to have CO2 “Cap-and-Trade” legislation passed by Congress, which would have mandated all industries that produced CO2 to either limit their production of CO2 or purchase carbon credit “off-sets” from companies that started with excess credits or which lowered their production enough to sell their excess supply of CO2 credits, all via transactions through the Chicago Climate (commodities) Exchange! In essence, CO2 emissions could initially remain the same, or even increase, for companies willing to pay the additional cost. However, over time, CO2 emission levels were to be sequentially lowered, which would have driven the price of carbon credits (and the Exchange’s stock price) higher and higher. At its founding, it was estimated that the size of the Exchange’s carbon trading market could reach $500 billion. That estimate ballooned over the years to $10 trillion! R.I.P.: Al Gore’s Chicago Climate Exchange Has Died | National ReviewOf course, huge commissions would have been made in the buying and selling process, just like any other commodities trading. And lots of big investors (including Gore and other CAGW promoters) wanted to get in on the action. Goldman-Sachs was the largest shareholder owning 18% of the Exchange. Al Gore, with three former Goldman Sachs bankers, together made up the fifth largest. According to figures released by the Federal Election Commission, Goldman Sachs was also heavily invested in the Obama presidency. Goldman's PAC and individual Goldman contributors made up the campaign's second-largest donation, nearly $1 million.But without the needed legislation (which was never passed by republican congressional majorities), the Exchange could not generate the huge profits envisioned by its wealthy investors. In 2010 it was bought by Intercontinental Exchange (a publicly-traded commodities exchange company). Included in the sale was the European Climate Exchange (still quite profitable because of all of the global warming legislation passed across the EU) for over $600 million. Obviously the original investors made a chunk of change from the sale.“Unlike most real markets, the carbon market was created by banks and governments so that new investment opportunities could seamlessly dovetail with specific government policies. It’s a fantasy casino based on a doctrine of pure science fiction…Placed in its proper historical context, we can see that the man-made global warming movement was a classic merger of radical Collectivist ideas and huge financial opportunities… Never has the world seen a more stunning collusion between government (include the UN here) and big business” - The Great Collapse of the Chicago Climate Exchange - 21st Century Wire“A $16.3 trillion public investment [i.e., increased federal taxes] is necessary to make those [climate change] goals a reality, which falls in line with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who said any viable climate change plan needed to come with a $10 trillion price tag – at least– in order to ‘have a shot’.” Bernie Sanders Unveils Massive $16 Trillion Green New Deal PlanIn the end, the public (consumers and taxpayers) pay the $trillions that the CAGW scam is costing, with $billions of that money going into the pockets of “green” investors and businesses, all pushing the CAGW theory.Bernie Sanders Is Open To A ‘Meat Tax’ To Combat Climate Change(Guess who’s voting for Bernie):“Al Gore is standing to rake in $millions from a World Resources Institute meat consumption reduction report, one that will certainly help boost profits for the meat substitute manufacturers – in which Gore just happens to be a big stakeholder! Gore, partner and advisor to Kleiner Perkins, Beyond Meat’s big investor, stands to haul in $millions, should governments move to restrict real meat consumption” (Or institute a meat tax!) Climate Hustler, Partner At ‘Beyond Meat’ Largest Investor, Al Gore Moves To Profit Big From Anti-Meat DriveBut Gore is small potatoes compared to others hoping to rake in $trillions, who are also fervently pushing the CAGW agenda, albeit behind the scenes of course:“A key player in the linking of world financial institutions with the Green Agenda is outgoing Bank of England head Mark Carney. In December 2015, the [globalist] Bank for International Settlements’ Financial Stability Board (FSB), chaired then by Carney, created the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosure (TCFD), to advise ‘investors, lenders and insurance about climate related risks.’ That was certainly a bizarre focus for world central bankers.“In 2016 the TCFD along with the City of London Corporation [the financial center of England] and the UK Government initiated the Green Finance Initiative, aiming to channel trillions of dollars to ‘green’ investments. The central bankers of the FSB nominated 31 people to form the TCFD. Chaired by billionaire Michael Bloomberg of the Financial Wire, it includes key people from JP MorganChase; from BlackRock–one of the world’s biggest asset managers with almost $7 trillion; Barclays Bank; HSBC, the London-Hong Kong bank repeatedly fined for laundering drug and other black funds; Swiss Re, the world’s second largest reinsurance; China’s ICBC bank; Tata Steel, ENI oil, Dow Chemical, mining giant BHP Billington and David Blood of Al Gore’s Generation Investment LLC. In effect it seems the foxes are writing the rules for the new Green Hen House.“Bank of England’s Carney was also a key actor in efforts to make the City of London into the financial center of global Green Finance. The outgoing UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, in July 2019 released a White Paper, ‘Green Finance Strategy: Transforming Finance for a Greener Future.’ The paper states, ‘One of the most influential initiatives to emerge is the Financial Stability Board’s private sector Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), supported by Mark Carney and chaired by Michael Bloomberg [2020 US democratic presidential primary candidate]. This has been endorsed by institutions representing $118 trillion of assets globally.’ There seems to be a plan here. The plan is the financialization of the entire world economy using fear of an end of world scenario to reach arbitrary aims such as ‘net-zero greenhouse gas emissions.’“The links between the world’s largest financial groups, central banks and global corporations to the current push for a radical climate strategy to abandon the fossil fuel economy in favor of a vague, unexplained Green economy, it seems, is less about genuine concern to make our planet a clean and healthy environment to live. Rather it is an agenda, intimately tied to the UN Agenda 2030 for ‘sustainable’ economy, and to developing literally trillions of dollars in new wealth for the global banks and financial giants who constitute the real powers that be.“In February 2019 following a speech to the EU Commission in Brussels by Greta Thunberg, then-EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, after gallantly kissing Greta’s hand, appeared to be moved to real action. He told Greta and the press that the EU should spend hundreds of billions of euros combating climate change during the next 10 years. Juncker proposed that between 2021 to 2027, ‘every fourth euro spent within the EU budget go toward action to mitigate climate change.’ What the sly Juncker did not say was that the decision had nothing to do with the young Swedish activist’s plea. It had been made in conjunction with the World Bank a full year before in September 26, 2018 at the One Planet Summit, along with the World Bank, Bloomberg Foundations, the World Economic Forum and others. Juncker had cleverly used the media attention given the young Swede to promote his climate agenda.“On October 17, 2018, days following the EU agreement at the One Planet Summit, Juncker’s EU signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Breakthrough Energy-Europe in which member corporations of Breakthrough Energy-Europe will have preferential access to any funding.“The members of Breakthrough Energy include Virgin Air’s Richard Branson, Bill Gates, Alibaba’s Jack Ma, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, HRH Prince Al-waleed bin Talal, Bridgewater Associates’ Ray Dalio; Julian Robertson of hedge fund giant, Tiger Management; David Rubenstein, founder Carlyle Group; George Soros, Chairman Soros Fund Management LLC; Masayoshi Son, founder Softbank, Japan.“Make no mistake. When the most influential multinational corporations, the world’s largest institutional investors including BlackRock and Goldman Sachs, the UN, the World Bank, the Bank of England and other central banks of the BIS line up behind the financing of a so-called green Agenda, call it Green New Deal or what, it is time to look behind the surface of public climate activist campaigns to the actual agenda. The picture that emerges is the attempted financial reorganization of the world economy using climate, something the sun and its energy have orders of magnitude more to do with than mankind ever could—to try to convince us ordinary folk to make untold sacrifice to ‘save our planet.’” [while making themselves richer than God!] https://www.globalresearch.ca/climate-money-trail/5690209Yes, there are many climate scientists who are very outspoken about CAGW, such as James Hansen and Michael Mann. But the real power behind the “green agenda” lies in the UN, politicians, wealthy elitists, investors and bankers, radical environmentalists, globalists and socialists. It’s a reprehensible and sinister money-making plot and scam on the entire world’s population. But feel free to obey and hand over your financial assets and constantly increasing tax payments to these greedy charlatans and mendacious politicians.

What follows is the first part of a family history that I'm currently writing. There are lots of stories contained here, but it focuses on the years 1946 to 1948.My father was born on August 8, 1932, second child and eldest son of the historian Guo Tingyi (Kuo Ting-yee as he romanized it) and his wife, Li Xinyan (Li Hsin-yen). He was given the name Guo Kai, though later he would change it to Guo Jingkai, adding the generational character Jing that both his younger brothers had in their names. To this day he answers to both, and his childhood friends still call him Guo Kai.He was born in Henan province’s ancient capital, Kaifeng. Eight centuries earlier, in 1127, that city—then the capital of the Song dynasty—fell to nomadic Jurchen horsemen from the steppe lands north of the Great Wall. In the prosperous years of the Northern Song (AD 960-1125), Kaifeng had been a bustling metropolis crisscrossed by canals, the commercial and cultural center of Asia and quite probably the most populous city in the world. Sacked by the Jurchen and later by the Mongols, the city’s fortunes had risen and fallen. By the time of my father’s birth, most of its famous canals had long since silted over, and though Kaifeng was still one of Henan’s major cities, it had become something of a backwater.Henan province itself, ancient heartland of China, cradle of Chinese civilization on the fertile floodplain of the Yellow River, was crowded, impoverished and largely untouched by modernity. It, too, had become something of a backwater—the quintessential “hinterland province,” infamous today for fake goods and the hordes of migrant workers it exports to China’s richer coastal cities, its people the butt of many cruel jokes.My father’s first home was on Tiaojing Hutong, literally “Pick-out-the-Tendon Alley,” and it lay at the center of a neighborhood of Kaifeng peopled by a sect long assumed to be a type of Chinese Muslims, or Hui. But the “Hui that picked the tendon” from their beef and mutton, however assimilated they had become, were in fact Jews. They even had in their places of worship some interesting texts—prayer books in Chinese, and a Hebrew bible—that are now in Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. These days, people from that Kaifeng neighborhood do their best to capitalize on their ancient ties to Israel: in recent years, a Chinese man wearing a vaguely Rabbinical hat, sporting peyot sideburn curls and a long beard would hand out a business card to foreign visitors to the historic Kaifeng Jewish quarter reading “Moishe Zhang, Jewish Diaspora.”My family wasn’t originally from Kaifeng, or indeed even from Henan, and was almost certainly not Jewish. In fact, five generations ago, some time in the first half of the 17th century during the declining days of the Ming dynasty, my great-great-great-great-grandfather came to Henan from another province—Shanxi, to the north of Henan, from a county called Hongtong. He and some of his brothers settled in southern Henan in Wuyang County, on the banks of the Luo River in a little town of a few hundred souls called Jiangdianjie.The county seat of Wuyang wasn’t much larger. In the summer of 1946, when my father visited our ancestral home for the first time, the town wasn’t much more than a crossroads with a few markets, a handful of government offices, and the courtyards of some of the wealthier families from the surrounding villages. My family owned such a courtyard in Wuyang, but the family’s real compound was the home in Jiangdianjie, a two hour ride along rutted, muddy roads by mule cart from Wuyang.It was here that my grandfather, Guo Tingyi, grew up. The summer that my father first visited Jiangdianjie, the long war at last over, is etched deeply in my father’s mind. While he’ll sometimes recall only a handful of clear memories from some whole years of his life, and while much more of his childhood was spent in Chongqing, in Nanjing, and in Taipei, when my father tells stories from his youth they’re drawn as often as not from that summer in Wuyang County.My grandfather was to take back up his post that fall at Southeastern University in Nanjing. They had spent the war years in Chongqing, fleeing inland with Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government ahead of the Japanese advance in 1937. Now, some nine months after the Japanese surrender, they were at last leaving the Nationalists’ hilly wartime capital and were returning east to Nanjing. My grandfather, grandmother, and four children rode a steamship down the Yangtze to Wuhan, and from there took a train north to Luohe, the nearest city to our ancestral home. Luohe, my father recalls, was a surprisingly westernized city, but the man who came to meet them was decidedly not so. My great-grandfather, Guo Pingfu, was there at the station. He was youngest of the three brothers who were the nucleus of the Guo family in Jiangdianjie. Everyone called him Sanye: “Third Grandfather,” and his brothers were Daye, the eldest, and Erye, the second. He was wiry and even at 67, his age at the time, he was strong. He had a weathered face, a broad smile, and a bristly crew cut. It’s said that my brother Jay looks like Sanye. My great-grandfather was quite tall for a man of his time and place: My father puts his height at about five feet, nine inches.He was also illiterate, like most men in rural China at the time. A story in my family says that when he left Henan for the first time to visit his son, my grandfather, in Nanjing, he tried to blow out an electric lightbulb. But he had a prodigious memory and verbal skills that dazzled my father and was legendary among the people of Jiangdianjie. He would listen to the storytellers in the teahouse down in Wuyang and memorize their stories almost verbatim, leaving out no details in the retelling.He’d brought two old cart mule carts to the station in Luohe—no seats, just flat, rough-hewn wooden platforms on two wheels, drawn by teams of three mules—on which passengers would sit with their feet dangling. My father, then 13, climbed aboard excitedly. His grandfather refused to board. Instead, he jogged alongside the cart where my father and his parents sat, grinning broadly, for the entire two hour ride to Jiangdianjie. As the party approached Jiangdianjie, he would sweep his arms at the surrounding farmland and say “This is all our land!”Today, Jiangdianjie’s main street is lined with two-story buildings—little shops on the ground floors with the quarters of their proprietors above them, with windows covered in peeling blue film and exterior walls tiled in cheap-looking white ceramic, a look ubiquitous in lower-tier cities and towns across Asia. The streets today are paved; not one was in 1946. When I visited Jiangdianjie with my family in 2009, I was anxious to see the family compound I’d heard so much about as a boy. I had imagined it as a miniature fortress: a sturdy redoubt from which my ancestors had withstood sieges by brigands and Japanese soldiers. We saw instead a very modest structure, mostly rebuilt, that was largely indistinguishable from the unprepossessing structures around it. It serves as a local family planning center.This was not, however, what my father saw as the carts arrived at the gate of the walled family compound. Sanye launched into those same heroic yarns from the war years that my father would later tell me. He pointed to the bullet holes that pockmarked the mud-covered brick walls, at the gun emplacements on the second and third floors. He had fought bandits—mostly deserters from the Nationalist army, but also demobilized soldiers, and even regular Guomindang troops too. These last were mostly soldiers who had been defeated and fled the battlefield, and had descended into banditry. “They were worse than the Japanese,” Sanye told his grandson. He had 40 or 50 firearms in his possession, and slept with a favorite carbine under his pillow. They were mostly old rifles, some from the 19th century, and there were some prized German Luger pistols, too—about 10 of them, which the Chinese called hezipao or “box cannons” for the shape of the magazine. Sanye had led the local militia, a Guo family private army, really. When the bandits or the Japanese would come, people of Jiangdianjie would crowd into the family compound for protection. Sanye and his brothers fed them. Some would stay on for weeks.Once, Sanye told my father, they killed two Japanese soldiers, and threw their bodies down a deep well. In the summer of 1946 the villagers would tie their watermelons to ropes and lower them down all the other wells to chill them. But not in the well where the dead Japanese soldiers had been thrown.In my father’s youth, the real head of the clan was his great uncle, who he called Daye. Daye was literate, and was the only one of his siblings who had received an education. He had taken the old Confucian Civil Service Examinations in the hope he might join the scholar-gentry who formed China’s ruling class before the end of the Qing dynasty in 1912. Though he failed, he was still held in high regard. He was the man who made plans and took charge, my father told me. He was the man who resolved disputes within the clan and among other villagers. Daye was a man of some means, too: a landowner, who operated an oil press for sesame and sometimes soybean oil, and later, a treadle-powered cigarette rolling machine that proved immensely profitable.He was strong, like Sanye, though already 70 years old. And he was, my father says, a somewhat aloof man who did not suffer fools. During that summer my father watched his Daye pick up a stick and beat one of my father’s distant cousins, a relation of Erye. The recipient of this beating, who was 19 or 20 years old at the time, was a good-for-nothing, my father recalls being told, who evidently cheated people, and brought shame to the family by mistreating some of the neighbors.Astonishingly, my father’s great-grandfather was still alive and well that summer. He was, my father told me, the only person in the family who he couldn’t understand—not for his dialect, but because he had lost all of his teeth. “Early in the morning I would go out with the tenant farmers and he would hook up a mule to plow the fields. The mule, when it could be coaxed into moving, moved fast, and the farmers had to walk fast to keep up. “My great-grandfather was nearly 100 years old but he could keep up that pace, better than I’d be able to now,” my father said. “I was 13 years old, and even though I was in great shape and could run for hours after all the running up and down mountains in Chongqing, it took some effort to keep up with Daye. He was basically jogging alongside the mule.” His great-grandfather didn’t tire as he paced quickly, making sure that the furrows were deep and straight.Some generations before, the family had been quite wealthy, but had fallen into relative poverty and were considered poor peasants by the time the three brothers of my great-grandfather’s generation—Daye, Erye, and Sanye—came of age. Their father had been the pampered son of a fairly wealthy family, it was said. Their patrilineal ancestors had come from Shanxi province, from a family with ties to the Ming court that had come to southern Henan in the late-18th century. But before my great-great-grandfather had come of age, in the 1860s, his family had fallen into relative poverty, their lands having been sold, or divided and redivided, until this branch of the Guo family had only 40 mu—about seven acres—to its name.Fortunately, the three brothers worked together closely, and cooperated well. Daye had the intellect, the perspicacity, the ability to identify opportunities. Erye had a well-ordered mind and was likewise skilled at organization. And Sanye though he lacked book learning, was shrewd and bold, a skillful fighter who was also highly charismatic.At first the three Guo brothers raised hogs, and shipped them to Hankou, a city on the Yangtze now part of Wuhan, to the south. They would move them, just a few pigs at a time at first, by river barge down the Luohe and the Shahe, and walked overland for hundreds of kilometers to the lucrative markets of Hankou. They sold the hogs for some modest profit, with which they then bought more hogs. And they repeated this process, year in, year out. Their next successful business venture was the sesame oil press, then the cigarette rolling machine, the proceeds of which all went to land. By the time my father rode in that mule cart while Sanye jogged along pointing out the family’s landholdings, the Guo clan of Jiangdianjie boasted nearly 30,000 mu, or 5000 acres. Later, there would be more lucrative places to put their money than land.In the summer of 1946, the family still operated the oil press. It was very primitive, my father recalled: hardwood planks that were squeezed together by means of steel wedges. Laborers—a half dozen of them, standing stark naked and pouring sweat in the combined heat of a Henan summer and a huge wok in which the sesame seeds were heated before pressing—would pound the wedges into place with a large mallet. My father, on seeing this, recalls thinking that he would some day invent an oil press. He could see, even at his age, that this was something that would be done far more efficiently with a machine.The cigarette rolling machine was still operating ceaselessly, too. It was a foot-pedaled contraption with which a skilled operator could roll three cigarettes a second, nearly two hundred a minute. Every few months, all through the war while my father and his parents were living in Chongqing, a boatload of cigarettes would arrive there, shipped by the family’s zhangfang—a sort of accountant-cum-major domo surnamed Zhang. Their agents would deliver the cigarettes and take payment in gold, and then they would come to my grandfather’s house on the Nankai University campus with a box of gold ingots. My father, who had even as a boy a sense for the weight of gold, says that there was well over a kilogram, sometimes close to two, from each boat. My father would watch as his mother would decline to take the gold. It made him itch with frustration, as he envisioned the food it could buy, and the daily hardships from which the family, with all that specie, might avoid. But his mother never relented.Not everyone in the family was quite so high-minded as my grandmother, Li Xinyan. Sanye’s third son, my father’s “third uncle” Sanshu, lived in the county town of Wuyang, where he kept the family’s courtyard home. All along the walls of the courtyard, two and three rows high and two deep, were large ceramic barrels—hundreds of them, each he guesses at 40 gallons—filled, my father’s uncle said, with opium. This, he said, was the family’s real wealth. My father knew full well that this was both illegal and immoral. My father knew what opium could do to people: His own mother, who came from Wuyang’s county seat, had watched her own family fall from relatively genteel wealth into poverty because of opium, selling all of their possessions, and finally, all the bricks in the courtyard house they once kept in Wuyang. My father confronted his uncle, accusing him of peddling poison, but Sanshu just dismissed him as a mere child who knew nothing of grown-up matters.Years later, in 1975 as the Cultural Revolution was winding down, my father made his first visit to the mainland since leaving in 1948. Like many others who had left the mainland for Taiwan and then went on to the United States to further their education, my father was sympathetic to the revolution and persuaded by its vision of egalitarianism. During that stay, with the help of the Beijing officials who had invited him to China, he reestablished contact first with his father’s youngest brother, Guo Huiyi, who was living in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province. The government arranged for Sishu—“fourth uncle,” as my father called him—to travel to Shanghai, where he spent a week with my father.My father learned much to his astonishment that Sanshu, the third uncle, was working as a professor in Hohhot, in Inner Mongolia. He hadn’t been imprisoned or killed for being a drug dealer, not during the fervor of the Communist seizure of power, not during the Anti-Rightist Campaign of the late 1950s, and not even during the Cultural Revolution. This was in marked contrast to the fate of others who were clearly “counterrevolutionary” in less flagrant ways. A village headman called the baozhang who oversaw the section of Jiangdianjie where the family lived, for instance, had been much hated. He was corrupt, scheming, and vindictive, and would use his connections with KMT officials to intimidate and bully other villagers. There was an old yellow dog the family kept on the compound who they called baozhang, and whenever the headman was around, they’d call to the dog to infuriate the local petty tyrant. He got his comeuppance, Sishu had told him: the baozhang was executed during the Cultural Revolution. “When Sishu told me that Sanshu was doing well, and that he was teaching at a university in Hohhot,” my father told me, recalling his naive admiration for the Communist Party, “I thought, wow, the communists have really done a good thing, turning a criminal into a professor.”Though they had spoken by phone a few times during subsequent visits my parents made to China in the 1980s, it was only in the sumer of 1991 that my father found out what in fact his Sanshu had been getting up to with all that opium. That year, I was with my parents when they visited Sanshu in Hohhot. He reminded me very much of my grandfather; the family resemblance was unmistakable. He was still teaching animal husbandry—in fact, had become a dean at the Inner Mongolia Animal Husbandry Institute—and was regarded as one of the leading experts in raising chickens. Forty-five years after my father had first confronted him in Wuyang over the courtyard lined with opium barrels, Sanshu explained that he was, throughout the war and during the civil war that followed, a member of the Communist Party underground. He had been funding their anti-Japanese, and later their anti-Guomindang, activities.The family’s wealth made my great-grandfather nervous for the safety of my father, who as zhangsun or eldest son of the family in his generation, would be a likely target for kidnappers. Daye had no sons, and Erye’s boys were all younger than my grandfather. Everywhere they went together, Sanye would go armed, sometimes even accompanied by armed guards. When they’d ride through the family’s lands, every half an hour or so Sanye would fire his rifle, as a warning to anyone that they were armed. He told my father never to run off without protection, saying that if he were taken by bandits, they would put a chain through his collar bone—a vision that horrified my father. That summer he loved to go off with his grandfather, watching the clever and methodical way he did things, and listening to his marvelously entertaining stories. My father learned to swim with the old man in the Shahe, the “Sand River,” its shallow, waist-deep water so clear you could easily see its sandy bed. Two or three nights a week, they would go off to the granary and sleep on the threshing floor, where the old man would tell his tales late into the night.By the time of his 14th birthday, my father recalls, he felt like he was king of the world. “I thought I knew everything, and thought I could do anything. I was supremely self-confident. Anything you put in front of me, I could do. I could drive the mule to plow the fields. I could train horses or mules, could drive the mule cart and crack the whip smartly—something I loved to do. I really admired my grandfather. He was treated like royalty wherever we went. He was powerful, so physically strong—and of course, he was also rich.” After some very lean years in Chongqing, the abundance of the food in Henan was staggering. Young Guo Kai was especially fond of chao tongziji—wok-fried meat of young roosters, who were rarely allowed to reach maturity. “We had four dishes at every meal, which was incredible,” he told me. “If I wanted lamb, we had lamb. If I wanted rabbit, they served rabbit. I was, after all, the zhangsun.”My father would soon learn that he wasn’t invulnerable, however. He nearly died in Jiangdianjie. He contracted typhoid fever, and was ill for nearly two months—about half the duration of his stay in Wuyang. During much of this time he could barely eat, and couldn’t walk—something particularly frustrating for a usually vigorous young man eager to roam the countryside or roll into Wuyan’g county seat with his grandfather. His illness postponed the family’s departure for Nanjing. At the time, typhoid killed most people who contracted it, and things were looking dire for him. With no doctors in the village, my father was given a dog’s breakfast of traditional medicines, and was subjected to the strangest of folk remedies. At one point someone brought a turtle’s shell the breadth of a man’s hand and as my father watched, first cooked it over a fire in a wok full of salt, heating it until the shell was completely desiccated. They then plunged the hot shell into a bowl of vinegar, and the shell disintegrated, melting into the vinegar. My father then had to down the stuff. This was repeated another three or four times over the next few days. To stop his diarrhea, he was given opium ash; opium was a vice that Daye occasionally indulged in, as did some of the older women in the family. Another time, they went into a dark room that the family used as storage. They moved trunks and old chests around, looking for a particular insect found in such areas. They caught a dozen or so of these beetle-like bugs, then squeezed their white-colored innards into boiling water, which my father then dutifully drank.Whether it was one of these concoctions or his own iron constitution, he recovered. It wasn’t the last time in his youth that he would survive serious illness; at only six months old, before the family left Nanjing ahead of the Japanese advance, he had even contracted smallpox. Now, with September drawing to an end, he was still weak, but well enough to travel. They were ready to head back to Nanjing. My grandfather had already left Wuyang County headed to Nanjing to prepare for the fall term. Already, the United Front against the now-defeated Japanese, very tenuous and punctuated by intermittent fighting, had fully collapsed in the spring of 1946, and by the time the family left, fighting was extensive.With my grandfather already in Nanjing, my grandmother had to take her three children on the long journey from Wuyang to Nanjing. They would first ride by mule cart once again back to Luohe, where they boarded a train to Zhengzhou, an important rail junction. At Zhengzhou they would take another train to Kaifeng, where my father was born, and from there to Xuzhou in northern Jiangsu province before finally traveling the last leg to Nanjing. All along the route, Nationalist and Communist forces were fighting. The stretch from Luohe to Zhengzhou, a distance of perhaps 150 kilometers, was easy going. At Zhengzhou, however, they found themselves with no available accommodations and were forced to improvise. They found an abandoned warehouse not far from the train station, and they spent two nights on the warehouse’s dirt floor waiting for a train to Kaifeng. The children were fine: for them, it was all a grand adventure. But it was another hardship, another mental burden, for my grandmother.Fighting along the rail line was heavy and did not look to be letting up. Finally, she decided that she had to do something, and so she contacted a friend of my grandfather’s, a subordinate of the Nationalist general Hu Zongnan. This officer, whose name my father can no longer recall, apparently had some pull. He met my grandmother and her children at the station, treated them to a sumptuous meal, and put them along with three or four other stranded travelers onto a Canadian flatbed truck headed for Kaifeng. The road would be dangerous, he said: they would have to traverse areas of escalating fighting between the communists and nationalists. But my grandmother insisted that they had no choice.“One thing that I remember was that we had to cross the Yellow River at one point,” my father recalled. “There was no road bridge across, but we had to cross, and so they decided to cross across on the railway bridge. I was watching everything the driver did. The truck’s axle was just the same width as the railroad, and we were worried of course that there would be a train coming. It was very slow going. We were lucky; it was very bumpy whenever the wheels would slip off the rail, and the truck would just drive over the ties.”It wasn’t far from Zhengzhou to Kaifeng. And on arrival in Kaifeng, things were really different. Hu Zongnan’s people had let people in Kaifeng know that my grandmother and her children were coming. The truck delivered them to a handsome mansion, with a palatial facade and a very comfortably appointed interior. They stayed in Kaifeng for three or four days, and my father, who by then had fully recovered, remembered dining in restaurants and feeling safe at last.Then the all-clear was given for the Longhai railroad from Kaifeng to Xuzhou in northern Jiangsu province. The train would roll for a couple of miles, then stop abruptly as scouts were sent ahead to make sure the lines were clear and no fighting would imperil their progress. The scouts rolled out on the kind of two-man hand-pumped cars that you see in old cartoons. Eventually, they reached Xuzhou, and from there continued southward toward Nanjing. This was all territory still firmly in Nationalist hands. At Bangpu, on the northern side of the Yangtze, they stopped to buy a fuliji—the famous local take on roast chicken.My father’s older sister, who in 1946 was already in high school, already leaned to the left. But my father, still only 14, was neither interested in or particularly knowledgable about politics. “At the time I had no real concept of who the communists were,” my father told me. “We were in the KMT-controlled area, so naturally most of what we heard was bad. But because of my father, I was close to many college students, and what they said was very different. Most of them hated the KMT, and they pinned their hopes on the communists. When I would tell them about the communists bombarding the railways around Kaifeng, they refused to listen.”When they arrived in Nanjing, they had to wait for many hours for a boat to cross the Yangtze into the city and by the time they finally crossed it was late in the evening. My father said that he remembered his mother bargaining with a buggy driver to take them to Central University campus—the school once called Southeastern University. They had not managed to get word to my grandfather ahead of time, and no arrangements had been made to meet them, so my grandmother gamely led her three children through the city to the university.Nanjing had been the Nationalist capital from 1928 until the Japanese took the city in late 1937—a period called the Nanjing Decade. By the time my grandmother made it back there with her children, the city had already recovered some of its relative wealth and cosmopolitanism. He saw new model Fords and Buicks in the street. “I had never seen such nice cars before,” he said. People were still trickling back into the city after the long war, making their way along pleasant avenues lined with tung trees. My grandfather had taken up residence in a dormitory meant for single professors. It was only three small rooms. One they used as a kitchen and for storage, and the other two as bedrooms.The education system was something of a mess, and it was catch as catch can for students returning to Nanjing. My grandfather sent my father to the boarding school attached to Central University—considered one of the best schools—but because it was already October and school had already been in session for over a month, he was held back in 8th grade instead of 9th.“Nanjing at the time was prosperous,” my father recalled. “It was the first time that I had ever used a telephone. I had never gone to a movie theater before, and I was able to see movies, including some American movies. Of course we could go eat in restaurants, which was something we never did during the war years. For more than a year in Nanjing, life was good, and very interesting. My classmates at the time were also very interesting, and we talked about things I’d never talked about before, like movies, and girls.“The second year, things got worse.”Hyperinflation set in and the KMT lost control of the economy. “Everyone was ordered to go to the central bank to change their gold and silver for jinyuanjuan, or gold certificates,” my father said. “Zhou Hongjing and my father and two of his other friends were all talking about it, and one day, they all gave me their gold pieces: nuggets and ingots and small bars. I put it all in my pocket. I rode my bike, with the very heavy gold in my pocket, and went to the bank, and after a long wait I came back with a stack of jinyuanjuan and some old pre-war silver coins: Yuan Shikai dollars and some smaller coins. My father and his professor friends were all very much law-abiding. It wasn’t long at all before the gold certificates had become nearly worthless. By that time, in late 1947, no one even bothered to count it. They just stamped more zeros, and bound them in stacks, and pretty soon you were handing out stacks. I had to take a foot-high stack to buy a few shaobing”—a flaky, baked sesame-seed roll—and nobody even bothered to count it. I just threw it."One day my father and mother handed over a hefty pile of gold certificates to a textile merchant to buy a bolt of cloth. “We couldn’t carry it, so we asked the store to hold onto it for us,” said my father. “We never got it: They sold it for a hundred times the price we paid, only days later.”History and statecraft have always been intimately related in China, and historians have, throughout China’s long history have orbited close to state power. My grandfather Guo Tingyi, who rates as one of the most eminent Chinese historians of the 20th century, was no exception. He had followed the Nationalist government inland from Nanjing to Chongqing, advised some of the most senior government and military leaders during the war, followed them back to their capital in Nanjing in 1946, and later, with their defeat on the mainland an inevitability, would follow the Guomindang to Taiwan.