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AGENDA & WHOLESALE 11/2/2013 9:01:38 AM
As of January 1, 2014, this Newsletter or Blog (I call it an Opt-Ed Column) will no longer be free or offered gratis 52 times a year as it has since 2000.
It will now cost $40 a year on a subscription basis. There are currently more than 10,000 individuals who have submitted their email addresses to receive the Newsletters/Blogs each Saturday (52 X), and you will continue from December 5 thru the New Year; if you will send your check or money order for $40 to Robert Mills, 4444 Derwent Dr NE, Roswell GA 30075-1986. Be sure to include your EMAIL ADDRESS!
Your check or money order for $40 will cover you from Dec 31, 2013 until Dec 31, 2014.
Robert A. Mills
Copyright. 2013, all rights reserved
(not published until Nov 2)
Ever hear of Morris Cohen?
In November 1947, the United Nations was considering the creation of a Jewish state in parts of Western Palestine and a new Arab state in the other parts.
The hopes of the Jews rested in large part on China, of all places, but not so surprising when you stop and think how the hopes of most of the world rest in large part on China. The five-member Security Council had to approve putting the resolution before the General Assembly, but the Chinese was threatening to veto it.
The hero of the Chinese campaign against the Japanese empire a few years earlier approached the head of the Chinese delegation. His name was Morris Cohen, and during the global conflict he was a man, a European, who had been a general and senior adviser to President Sun Yat-sen.
The general persuaded the delegation in 1947 to abstain from voting on the new Jewish state, and consequently, the Security Council voted approval and the Partition Resolution was sent to the General Assembly — where it passed! Modern Israel finally came into existence, at long last!
The general who persuaded the Chinese not to oppose the resolution was not Chinese himself — but was, in fact, a Jew born in Poland in 1887.
His parents had brought Morris Abraham Cohen, when he was still a toddler, to London from Poland, and he grew up in the impoverished East End of town. By the time he was twelve, however, he had become a skilled boxer and a notorious pickpocket. He quickly got himself a police arrest record and his family sent him to reform school until he was sixteen.
Once released, he was sent to Canada to work on a farm in rural Saskatchewan, near an Indian reservation. Farming, however, bored him; he preferred working as a carnival barker and con man. This got him arrested yet again, and he did some serious jail time (five years.).
While wandering the Canadian West he became friendly with the local Chinese. Cohen liked Chinese cuisine (what Jew does not?) and he also appreciated the Chinese philosophy, particularly their outlook on life.
One day Cohen wandered into a Chinese eatery and saw the owner was being robbed. Cohen, being a skilled boxer, beat the robber to a pulp. The Chinese were so appreciative of the young man, they embraced Cohen as one of their own.
He joined the local chapter of nationalist leader Sun Yat-sen’s political movement and started to pick up some basic Chinese vocabulary. Cohen raised funds for Sun’s movement and helped procure much-needed arms.
After serving in World War I as a Canadian soldier, Cohen headed off in 1922 to China with plans to work as a railroad developer. But once in Shanghai, he found work instead as a writer on the English-language newspaper associated with Sun Yat-sen’s movement.
The Chinese called him Ma Kun (clenched fist), which was as close as they could get to Morris Cohen’s real name. He procured arms for a warlord of Canton in the 1920s and was an adviser to Wu Tiecheng, the Canton police chief who later became mayor of Shanghai.
Cohen began to serve as part of Sun’s guard force, and eventually commanded the entire 250-man presidential bodyguard unit.
Always armed, Cohen managed to defend Sun from more than one assassination attempt. After Cohen was wounded while driving off a group of assassins, he started carrying a second pistol and local Westerners immediately dubbed him Two-Gun Cohen, the nickname he carried with pride for the rest of his life.
Eventually he was appointed head of the Chinese secret service. His sidekick was another Jew, an anti-Soviet Russian named Moses Schwartzberg, who had been part of a plot to assassinate Lenin in 1918.
Because of the importance of the Schwartzberg-Cohen alliance, Yiddish became one of the three languages of the Chinese secret service, after Mandarin and English. Schwartzberg would later organize a regiment of 1,200 Jewish volunteers to fight for Israel in its War of Independence.
After Sun Yat-sen died, Two-Gun Cohen was named commander of the Chinese 19th field army. He worked for a while for Chinese President Chiang Kai-shek. He led Nationalist troops in fighting against both the Japanese and the Chinese communists. And he was the only European ever to serve as a Chinese general.
When the Japanese invaded China in the 1930s, Cohen worked for British Intelligence. Just after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese invaded Hong Kong. Two-Gun got Sun Yat-sen’s widow out safely on one of the last planes to escape. Cohen himself was captured by the Japanese and thrown into the Stanley Prison Camp, where he was beaten and mistreated.
After the war he moved again to Canada, where he helped the Zionists obtain arms for Israel’s War of Independence. He eventually returned to England, where he died in 1970, at the age of 85. On his tombstone in Manchester, by the way, his name appears in English, Hebrew, and Chinese characters.
Representatives attended his funeral from both Chinas, which were still at war with each another. Paying homage to Two-Gun Cohen was the only thing in the world on which they could apparently agree.
There is a special entry about Two-Gun in the Spy Museum in Washington, which I visited in 1998. Two books have been published about Two-Gun’s life; both are in my library. I have heard through the grapevine that Rob Reiner is working on a movie about this unusual Jew, and it is under contract to star Michael Douglas.
Two-Gun’s cousin, a journalist named Marion Dreyfus lives in New York City, and tells me her family still has many scrolls and silks that Two-Gun sent them from China. She found a plaque on the wall of a Shanghai synagogue commemorating Two-Gun as one of the ten most important Jews in Chinese history.
A final note: When Cohen returned to Manchester after the war, he and his cousins went into the raincoat business, the weather in England being ideal for such a venture; he is reported to have come up with name Burberry..
Two pistols and a Chinese generalship notwithstanding, Two-Gun was a proud Jew — and he could even get you a raincoat for wholesale — a phrase he is said to have invented.
