In a speech on June 25, NSC Director Robert O’Brien gave a blood-curdling speech at the Arizona Commerce Conference Center in which he compared Chinese President Xi Jinping to Joseph Stalin. The speech is one of four that are planned, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Attorney General William Barr, and FBI Director Christopher Wray giving the follow-ups at some point in the near future. Inside China, these are viewed as part of the Trump re-election bid, making the theme “China, China, China,” as the Republican Congressional Committee advised weeks ago.
Deputy National Security Adviser Matthew Pottinger is said to have had a role in the speech, but O’Brien also refers to John Garnaut, an Australian journalist formerly with the Sydney Morning Herald, who has come to play a role in the Australian government. “The CCP,” O’Brien said, “is together with the North Korean Workers’ Party the only Communist Parties which have not distanced themselves from Joseph Stalin.” There is thus a direct line,” he said from Stalin, to Mao, to Xi". Then he went through the crimes of Stalin, followed by the CCP’s supposed “camps” in Xinjiang, its suppression of the press, and its total monitoring of the population. “But this is not just the concern of the Chinese people, but also of you,” he said. Because the CCP, he claimed, is also monitoring your calls, looking at your Facebook pages, and keeping track of your goings-on, essentially listing what is done as a matter of course by the NSA, but putting instead a “Chinese” hand to it. He also warns that the CCP is also intent upon instituting their control over the whole world, namely, in their “community of shared destiny.”
