By Sabin Geyman
In A Time for War, Michael Savage’s wake-up call about the Communist Chinese threat to America, the ethno-botanist-turned-radio-host serves up an absorbing story of civilization-butting intrigue. In a nutshell, the point of the story, based largely in fact, is that the Chinese Communists (Chicoms) are not so much a potential threat as they are a real, military-grade enemy that is operating now, real-time, and in the present moment.
The plot moves well and the writing is deft, though unfortunately marred by instances in which the characters use the Lord Jesus’ Name in vain. Nevertheless, as a vehicle for recommending better US national security, A Time for War hits the mark.
Whereas many Americans have been lulled to sleep by a mainstream media that is cowed by Chinese Communist investors, if not by Chicom propaganda, I am inclined to take Savage’s message about the China danger very seriously. For that reason I have chosen to analyze the book not as a novel, but as a public-policy recommendation, to crystallize the book as a warning based on the love of God, family, and country.
Michael Savage’s alter-ego, Jack Hatfield, drives the action in A Time for War, and while he has driven off jihadist threats in the past, his current preoccupation is with driving off communist threats—Hatfield, like Savage, is also a radio host in San Francisco. I have attempted to extract the juice of the book, leaving the pulp fiction at least partially discarded.
Supine Americans
Doc Matson, a veteran and a mercenary, is a close friend of Jack Hatfield, and a fellow conservative. According to Doc, hippies and Occupiers stopped America from winning wars abroad and fomented terrible division at home, effectively turning the mainstream press into a “mouthpiece for the communists.”
Jack decries the way mainstream reporters have piled on US Marines for allegedly peeing on terrorists they killed in battle, when the reporters themselves have never faced a fistfight, let alone a firefight, and hypocritically disregard the Marine heroes.
Jack’s token liberal friend, Abe Cohen, is a colorful character that is slow to catch on to the necessities of national security. Abe is shot by a Communist Chinese (“Comchi”) terrorist while boating around the Farallon Islands. Even when the Communist attacker approaches, with weapon in hand, Abe thinks he’s there to help him! The Communist hoists the dying liberal up against the boat’s railing, and still Abe thinks the Commie is going to take him below deck to tend to his wounds! Then, just when the hippie could not have gotten things any more backward, he is thrown head-first into the sea, whereupon he is devoured by sharks and his boat is exploded with C-4. This ghoulish scene provides a less-than-dainty metaphor for what could happen to liberal, globalist Americans who cannot be shaken from their love affair with the fantasy version of Communist China.
American Slide
Doc gives a powerful sociological soliloquy, lamenting the terrible effects of out-of-control multiculturalism and diversity. “The administrations sought out for admission, scholarships, hiring, promotions, those who are anything but white males,” Doc says. “Liberalism is the stereoisomer of Nazism and its obsession with racial purity. The universities prove that. They stopped gauging skill, talent, even work ethic. They fostered a generation of incompetents not seen in the history of the Republic, incompetents who created their own fields of study to justify their lack of productive scholarship in the real fields of learning. Those fertile fields which once blossomed with a flora so vibrant and diverse, reduced in size and offering to ‘women’s studies,’ ‘black studies,’ ‘Chicano studies,’ ‘lesbian studies,’ ‘gay studies,’ all non-sciences created by jingoists with tenure desperate for attention and respect and as much getting laid as they can along the way….
“It was three or four subterraneans … who destroyed all that was good in America. Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, and Bella Abzug…. Leary popularized LSD and destroyed the minds of thousands who then destroyed the thinking of millions. Ginsberg pretended to be a Jewish prophet when he was a communist pervert who preyed on young boys. Kunstler perverted the law and rode the freedom buses south to get laid. While Abzug with her pseudo-liberationist rants against men twisted tens of thousands of young women’s minds, making them into man-hating harpies.”
Doc’s character serves as an echo of Jack Hatfield, both of them giving voice to the social commentary of the real-life Michael Savage.
Bruno, an Italian restaurateur in San Francisco’s North Beach district, laments how the Communist media have been party to the financial, mental, and spiritual bankrupting of America. The clothing stores are full of “crap from China” and those who are bankrupting the country think the Bible—once the standard for what is good and right—is an anachronism, an embarrassment. Doc recommends the Ten Commandments, the exhortations of Job, and the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, poking fun at the ultraliberal New York Times: “One power-mad psychopath after another paraded throughout, with all the details of his or her personal wealth displayed so as to render the averagely successful reader impotent and hopeless by the time [he reaches] the sports page….”
Against this background of a weakened America, Savage explores Chinese bellicosity in A Time for War.
Chinese Mindset
Sammo Yang, one of the Chinese terrorists in the story, had a portable electromagnetic-pulse weapon up his sleeve: “It made him feel important, powerful, godlike, this knowledge that he alone possessed: that he was going to change their lives [at Travis Air Force Base], in some cases end them.” Sammo was the first part of a planned 1-2 punch against the denizens of San Francisco—the second punch was to be the release of pneumonic plague bacteria underneath Chinatown in old smuggling tunnels.
Savage details some of the underbelly of Chinese-American culture. It is important to know that after all the Buddhist and Confucian posturing, after all the Chinese “nobles” enshrined in places like Seattle’s Wing Luke Museum, there is the sobering reality of bad-old-fashioned Chinese ruthlessness: where goo-goo-eyed diversity dreaming meets a Communist, God-hating wall of humanly forged steel. From 1848 to perhaps the 1950’s, Savage notes, Chinese merchant seamen prostituted their own young women—either dishing them off to the Chinese merchants of the Barbary Coast or bringing them to San Francisco. An especially flagrant aspect of this Chinese sex trade is the fact that some of the women were Protestants who had been criminalized for their faith by the Daoguang Emperor (reigned 1820-1850). In effect, virtuous Chinese women looking for freedom were brutalized by their own who no doubt put on Buddhist or Confucian airs in public.
After the Great Fire of 1906, Savage notes, tunnels were built under Chinatown, ostensibly as escape routes in the event that something like the Great Fire were to erupt again. But in practice, the tunnels were used for smuggling young Chinese girls from ships to brothels, where they would be kept as indentured prostitutes. By 1912, with the fall of the Manchu Qing dynasty and the onset of the Republic of China under Sun Yat-sen, young Chinese women fled China to America to get away from the attacks of soldiers, even though they knew full well that they might be raped by sailors during the voyage.
While Boeing hosted Chinese dictator Jiang Zemin at its airplane manufacturing facility in 1993 (as part of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) and Microsoft boss Bill Gates hosted Chinese dictator Hu Jintao at his Bellevue, Washington, home in April 2006, Chinese brutes and elites alike were callously enjoying the ivory tusks of slaughtered African elephants, the supposedly aphrodisiac qualities of tiger penises, and the bile from bear gall bladders. As Savage noted in A Time for War, “[I]n China there are farms where bears are caged, lying on their backs with no room to move, with tubes in their abdomens to collect bile for so-called medicines. Some of the bears have actually committed suicide by starving themselves to death. And multiple smuggling operations are carrying the bear bile along with body parts from tigers and other endangered animals out of China to the rest of the world.”
Chinese Tactics
There is one sentence in A Time for War that the reader should note: “Distraction—followed by an attack that would collapse a nation.” That well sums up what the Communists may have in mind, and it is a principle in keeping with basic warfighting tactics as laid out in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and Shi Nai’an’s (or Luo Guanzhong’s) Outlaws of the Marsh (a Ming-dynasty tale of deception and bloodlust involving 108 outlaws or hao han).
Whether through cyber-attacks followed by conventional attack, or smuggled-in plagues followed by conventional attack, the Chinese Communists, according to Savage, are “equal in purpose and resolve … and [they] move as an unstoppable mass.”
Speaking of “unstoppable masses,” there is a prophecy in Revelation which would require an army that arguably only Communist China could field: “And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand: and I heard the number of them. And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and them that sat on them, having breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone: and the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions; and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone. By these three was the third part of men killed, by the fire, and by the smoke, and by the brimstone, which issued out of their mouths” (Revelation 9:16-18 KJV).
Sell-Out Industrialists
Richard Hawke, the industrialist-nemesis of Jack Hatfield, developed the “squarebeam” technology that could shut down electronics-based craft or infrastructure. “Ideals,” says Hawke, “lack any connection with reality, any use in an evolving society.” Hawke’s overinflated pride led him to put a holographic image of himself, life-sized, in the lobby of his company’s research facility; such pompous and short-term thinking also led him to sell his squarebeam technology to the Communist Chinese.
US-China Equation
I applaud Michael Savage for his vigilance on the issue of Chinese Communist duplicity and predation. He rightly asserts some of the verifiable strengths of the West in general, and of the USA in particular. “I don’t care whether it’s lawn-mowing or car repair or running a small business. Make a person feel useful, instead of like a beaten dog who can’t or won’t come out from under the bed, and you’ve got a prosperous nation of eager, happy capitalists. The other way? The Pink way? That’s not for the people. That’s for the megalomania of the puppet masters who are running the show, the Stalins and Mao Zedongs and Barack Obamas [“power-mad Leninists”].
It’s true that capitalist economies hinging on a Judeo-Christian polity work rather well. “Without [ideals]—a Bill of Rights or a church, for example—nations crumble,” says Jack Hatfield. “We drove, we flew, we telephoned, we split the atom, we went to the moon, we invented PCs and wired the world…. The Chinese can’t beat us unless they break our spirit. So they play corrosive games…. To them, a psychological victory is more important than a tactical or logistical one. Even when we discovered and rooted out their cyber-attacks, exposed their artificial currency deflation, they withdrew and looked for another way in…. The only way they can catch up is by making us doubt ourselves, by causing us to undermine ourselves.”
I suppose my analysis is somewhat less optimistic than that of Savage. If our capitalist economy is no longer based firmly on a Judeo-Christian polity, and if Americans have gone after false idols with a chortling, secular vengeance, then we Americans must be very concerned about the cautions of the prophet Hosea: “Set the trumpet to thy mouth. He shall come as an eagle against the house of the LORD, because they have transgressed [M]y covenant, and trespassed against [M]y laws…. They have set up kings, but not by [M]e: they have made princes, and I knew [it] not: of their silver and their gold have they made them idols, that they may be cut off…. [T]hey shall reap the whirlwind…. Israel is swallowed up: now shall they be among the Gentiles as a vessel wherein is no pleasure…. Ephraim hath made many altars to sin…. I have written to him the great things of [M]y law, but they were counted as a strange thing…. For Israel hath forgotten his Maker, and buildeth temples; and Judah hath multiplied fenced cities: but I will send a fire upon his cities, and it shall devour the palaces thereof….” (Hosea 8:1, 4, 7a, 8, 11a, 12, 14 KJV). In Hosea 9, we even learn that Ephraim will bring his children to the murderer!
When one thinks of the ideal-less sell-out Richard Hawke in A Time for War, or when we consider the sell-out behavior of Boeing, Microsoft, Loral, and others, we can perceive some fulfillment of Krushchev’s ominous warning that they (the Communists) would hang us with a rope that we sold them.
Hosea even notes the unwise strategies that Ephraim would employ: “Ephraim feedeth on wind, and followeth after the east wind: he daily increaseth lies and desolation; and they do make a covenant with the Assyrians, and oil is carried into Egypt” (Hosea 12:1 KJV).
In any case, Savage gets the US-China equation in more ways than one. He captures China’s growing belligerence and naked aggression: “[T]he game changer,” according to Jack Hatfield, “is that an important threshold has been reached. The Chinese have achieved a level of technological advancement that has caused us to target their satellites and for them to retaliate, decisively, with wide-scale carnage on the ground. The China-America dynamic is no longer one of forbearance or diplomatic finger-wagging or sanctions the way it is with other wacko regimes like North Korea and Iran. Beijing and Washington are in a slow-motion, low-impact shooting war.”
In my own view, much of the take-away from Savage’s A Time for War can be summed up in this memorable line: “Beijing is full of vampire politicians who act like aristocrats then drain our blood when we’re not looking.”
A graduate of UC Berkeley and longtime denizen of Taiwan, Sabin Geyman is the author of a book of Christian apologetics, Testing the Spirits: Exposing Dark Sayings & Embracing the Light of Jesus. In addition to rebutting pagan strains in modern society, Testing the Spirits contains important discussions on US national security, Bible prophecy, China, and Israel.