________
Source: whale.to
by Konstandinos Kalimtgis also by David Goldman and Jeffrey Steinberg | 1978
History of Britain's First Opium Wars
Introduction
This is the setting for what follows below: narcotics are pouring in from abroad through a well-organized, efficient group of smugglers. One-fifth of the population abuses drugs, an epidemic surpassing any known since the Great Plagues. Not only the poor, but the wealthy and the children of the wealthy have succumbed. Within the nation, organized crime displays its drug profits without shame, ruling local governments, and threatening the integrity even of national government. None of their opponents is safe from assassins, not even the chief of state. Law enforcement is in shambles. The moral fiber of the nation has deteriorated past the danger point.
And one of the leading dope-traffickers writes to his superiors abroad, "As long as this country maintains its drug traffic, there is not the slightest possibility that it will ever become a military threat, since the habit saps the vitality of the nation." (1)
The description is familiar, but we are not writing of America in 1978, but China in 1838, on the eve of the first Opium War, when Great Britain landed troops to compel China to ingest the poison distributed by British merchants.
An American President lies dead of an assassin's bullet.
Corrupt members of the Cabinet cover the tracks leading to a conspiracy, including the leading narcotics mobs, ethnic-based secret societies, and a foreign government. The public does not believe that the assassin acted alone, but the weight of the cover-up, the silence of the leading press, and the deaths of witnesses blur the trail from the public's view.
Was that the death of John F. Kennedy? It was also the death of Abraham Lincoln.
During the last century, British finance protected by British guns controlled the world narcotics traffic. The names of the families and institutions are known to the history student: Matheson, Keswick, Swire, Dent, Baring, and Rothschild; Jardine Matheson, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, the Chartered Bank, the Peninsular and Orient Steam Navigation Company. Britain's array of intelligence fronts ran a worldwide assassination bureau, operating through occult secret societies: the Order of Zion, Mazzini’s Mafia, the "Triads" or Societies of Heaven in China.
Paging back over the records of the narcotics traffic and its wake of corruption and murder, the most uncanny feature of the opium-based Pax Britannica is how shamelessly, how publicly the dope-runners operated. Opium trading, for the British, was not a sordid backstreet business, but an honored instrument of state policy, the mainstay of the Exchequer, the subject of encomia from Britain's leading apostles of "Free Trade" — Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill. The poisoning of China, and later the post-Civil War United States, did not lead to prison but to peerages. Great sectors of the Far East became devoted to the growing of the opium poppy, to the exclusion of food crops, to the extent that scores of millions of people depended utterly on the growing, distribution and consumption of drugs.
The Keswicks, Dents, Swires and Barings still control the world flow of opiates from their stronghold in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. Jardine Matheson, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, and the Peninsular and Orient Steam Navigation Company still control the channels of production and distribution of the drugs from the Far East, through the British dominion of Canada, into the United States.
By an uninterrupted chain of succession, the descendants of the Triads, the Mafia, and the Order of Zion still promote drug traffic, dirty money transfers, political corruption, and an Assassination Bureau even more awesome than the conspiracy that claimed Abraham Lincoln's life. Of course, the drug revenues of this machine are no longer tallied in the published accounts of the British Exchequer. But the leading installations of the drug traffic are no more hidden than they were a hundred years ago. From the Crown Colony of Hong Kong, the "HongShang" Bank (a.k.a. Hong Kong & Shangai Bank) does what the Keswicks set it up to do: provide centralized rediscounting facilities for the financing of the drug trade. Even the surnames of senior management are the same.
Even today, the grand old names of Prohibition liquor and dope-running rouse the deep awareness of Americans: Bronfman, Kennedy, Lansky. Are the denizens of the India opium trade, of the Prohibition mob, imprisoned in the history books and behind the movie screen? Not infrequently, the observer feels a momentary lapse in time, and sees not a history book, but the morning newspaper, not the late-night movie, but the evening television newscast.
The story we have to tell happened twice. It first happened to China, and now it is happening to the United States. Emphasizing that neither the names nor the hangouts of the criminals have changed, we begin by telling how it happened the first time.
1 - Britain's First Opium Wars
From 1715, when the British East India Company opened up its first Far East office in the Chinese port city of Canton, it has been official British Crown policy to foster mass-scale drug addiction against targeted foreign populations in order to impose a state of enforced backwardness and degradation, thereby maintaining British political control and looting rights. While the methods through which the British have conducted this Opium War policy have shifted over the intervening 250 years, the commitment to the proliferation of mind-destroying drugs has been unswerving.
It was the British Crown's categorical opposition to and hatred for scientific and technological progress that led it to adopt an Opium War policy during the last decade of the 18th century. Having stifled the development of domestic manufacturing during the previous century, the British Crown found its treasury rapidly being drained of silver reserves — the only payment the Chinese Emperor would accept in exchange for silk, tea, and other commodities Britain imported.
To reverse the silver exodus, which threatened to collapse the financial underpinnings of the British Empire, King George III mandated the East India Company to begin shipping large quantities of opium from Bengal in the British Crown Colony of India into China. The dual objective was to favorably alter the balance-of-payments deficit and to foster drug addiction among China's mandarin class. By the time of the American Revolution, East India Company opium trafficking into China was officially reported to be at a scale 20 times the absolute limit of opium required for medical and related use.
In a very direct sense, the Founding Fathers of the United States fought the American Revolution against the British Crown's opium policy.
The establishment of these trading companies — the core of Britain's Opium War infrastructure — fostered an epidemic- scale increase in opium trafficking into China. By 1830-31, the number of chests of opium brought into China increased fourfold to 18,956 chests. In 1836, the figure exceeded 30,000 chests. In financial terms, trade figures made available by both the British and Chinese governments showed that between 1829-1840, a total of 7 million silver dollars entered China, while 56 million silver dollars were sucked out by the soaring opium trade. (4)
When the Chinese Emperor, confronted by a galloping drug addiction crisis, tried to crack down on the British trading companies and their dope smugglers, the British Crown went to war.
In 1839, the Chinese Emperor appointed Lin Tse-hsu Commissioner of Canton to lead a campaign against opium. Lin launched a serious crackdown against the Triad gangs sponsored by the British trading companies to smuggle the drugs out of the "Factory" area into the pores of the communities. The Triad Society, also known as the "Society of Heaven and Earth," was a century-old feudalist religious cult that had been suppressed by the Manchu Dynasty for its often violent opposition to the government's reform programs. The Triad group in Canton was profiled and cultivated by Jesuit and Church of England missionaries and recruited into the East India Company's opium trade by the early 19th century. (5)
When Lin moved to arrest one of the British nationals employed through the opium merchant houses, Crown Commissioner Capt. Charles Elliot intervened to protect the drug smuggler with Her Majesty's fleet. And when Lin responded by laying siege to the factory warehouses holding the tea shipments about to sail for Britain until the merchants turned over their opium stockpiles, Elliot assured the British drug pushers that the Crown would take full responsibility for covering their losses.
The British Crown had its "casus belli." Matheson of the opium house Jardine Matheson joyously wrote his partner Jardine — then in London, conferring with Prime Minister Palmerston on how to pursue the pending war with China:
Palmerston's second dispatch was, in fact, modeled on a memorandum authored by Jardine dated October 26, 1839, in which the opium pusher demanded: 1) full legalization of opium trade into China; 2) compensation for the opium stockpiles confiscated by Lin to the tune of £2 million; and 3) territorial sovereignty for the British Crown over several designated off-shore islands. In a simultaneous memorandum to the Prime Minister, Jardine placed J&M's entire opium fleet at the disposal of the Crown to pursue war against China. (7)
The Chinese forces, decimated by ten years of rampant opium addiction within the Imperial Army, proved no match for the British.
The British fleet arrived in force and laid siege in June of 1840. While it encountered difficulties in Canton, its threat to the northern cities, particularly Nanking, forced the Emperor to terms. Painfully aware that any prolonged conflict would merely strengthen Britain's bargaining position, he petitioned for a treaty ending the war.
When Elliot forwarded to Palmerston a draft Treaty of Chuenpi in 1841, the Prime Minister rejected it out of hand, replying, "After all, our naval power is so strong that we can tell the Emperor what we mean to hold, rather than what he should say he would cede." Palmerston ordered Elliot to demand "admission of opium into China as an article of lawful commerce," increased indemnity payment, and British access to several additional Chinese ports. (8)
The Treaty of Nanking, signed in 1842, brought the British Crown an incredible sum of $21 million in silver — as well as extraterritorial control over the "free port" of Hong Kong — which to this day is the capital of Britain's global drug-running.
The First Opium War defined the proliferation of and profiteering from mind-destroying drugs as a cornerstone of British Imperial policy. Anyone who doubts this fact need only consider this policy statement issued by Lord Palmerston in a January 1841 communiqué to Lord Auckland, then Governor General of India:
Not a dozen years would pass from the signing of the Treaty of Nanking before the British Crown would precipitate its second Opium War offensive against China, with similar disastrous consequences for the Chinese and with similar monumental profits for London's drug-pushers. Out of the second Opium War (1858-1860), the British merchant banks and trading companies established the Hong Kong & Shanghai Corporation, which to this day serves as the central clearinghouse for all Far Eastern financial transactions relating to the black market in opium and its heroin derivative.
Furthermore, with the joint British-French siege of Peking during October 1860, the British completed the process of opening up all of China. Lord Palmerston, the High Priest of the Scottish Rites, had returned to the Prime Ministership in June 1859 to launch the second war and thereby fulfill the "open China" policy he had outlined 20 years earlier.
Like the 1840 invasion of Canton, the second Opium War was an act of British imperial aggression — launched on the basis of the first flimsy pretext that occurred. Just prior to his ordering of a northern campaign against Peking (which permitted the British to maintain uninterrupted opium trafficking even while a state of war was underway), Lord Palmerston wrote to his close collaborator Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell (grandfather and guardian of the evil Lord Bertrand Russell).
Please go to whale.to to read the entire book or even important excerpts.
Source: whale.to
by Konstandinos Kalimtgis also by David Goldman and Jeffrey Steinberg | 1978
PART I
History of Britain's First Opium Wars
Introduction
This is the setting for what follows below: narcotics are pouring in from abroad through a well-organized, efficient group of smugglers. One-fifth of the population abuses drugs, an epidemic surpassing any known since the Great Plagues. Not only the poor, but the wealthy and the children of the wealthy have succumbed. Within the nation, organized crime displays its drug profits without shame, ruling local governments, and threatening the integrity even of national government. None of their opponents is safe from assassins, not even the chief of state. Law enforcement is in shambles. The moral fiber of the nation has deteriorated past the danger point.
And one of the leading dope-traffickers writes to his superiors abroad, "As long as this country maintains its drug traffic, there is not the slightest possibility that it will ever become a military threat, since the habit saps the vitality of the nation." (1)
The description is familiar, but we are not writing of America in 1978, but China in 1838, on the eve of the first Opium War, when Great Britain landed troops to compel China to ingest the poison distributed by British merchants.
An American President lies dead of an assassin's bullet.
Corrupt members of the Cabinet cover the tracks leading to a conspiracy, including the leading narcotics mobs, ethnic-based secret societies, and a foreign government. The public does not believe that the assassin acted alone, but the weight of the cover-up, the silence of the leading press, and the deaths of witnesses blur the trail from the public's view.
Was that the death of John F. Kennedy? It was also the death of Abraham Lincoln.
During the last century, British finance protected by British guns controlled the world narcotics traffic. The names of the families and institutions are known to the history student: Matheson, Keswick, Swire, Dent, Baring, and Rothschild; Jardine Matheson, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, the Chartered Bank, the Peninsular and Orient Steam Navigation Company. Britain's array of intelligence fronts ran a worldwide assassination bureau, operating through occult secret societies: the Order of Zion, Mazzini’s Mafia, the "Triads" or Societies of Heaven in China.
Paging back over the records of the narcotics traffic and its wake of corruption and murder, the most uncanny feature of the opium-based Pax Britannica is how shamelessly, how publicly the dope-runners operated. Opium trading, for the British, was not a sordid backstreet business, but an honored instrument of state policy, the mainstay of the Exchequer, the subject of encomia from Britain's leading apostles of "Free Trade" — Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, James Mill, and John Stuart Mill. The poisoning of China, and later the post-Civil War United States, did not lead to prison but to peerages. Great sectors of the Far East became devoted to the growing of the opium poppy, to the exclusion of food crops, to the extent that scores of millions of people depended utterly on the growing, distribution and consumption of drugs.
The Keswicks, Dents, Swires and Barings still control the world flow of opiates from their stronghold in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong. Jardine Matheson, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, and the Peninsular and Orient Steam Navigation Company still control the channels of production and distribution of the drugs from the Far East, through the British dominion of Canada, into the United States.
By an uninterrupted chain of succession, the descendants of the Triads, the Mafia, and the Order of Zion still promote drug traffic, dirty money transfers, political corruption, and an Assassination Bureau even more awesome than the conspiracy that claimed Abraham Lincoln's life. Of course, the drug revenues of this machine are no longer tallied in the published accounts of the British Exchequer. But the leading installations of the drug traffic are no more hidden than they were a hundred years ago. From the Crown Colony of Hong Kong, the "HongShang" Bank (a.k.a. Hong Kong & Shangai Bank) does what the Keswicks set it up to do: provide centralized rediscounting facilities for the financing of the drug trade. Even the surnames of senior management are the same.
Even today, the grand old names of Prohibition liquor and dope-running rouse the deep awareness of Americans: Bronfman, Kennedy, Lansky. Are the denizens of the India opium trade, of the Prohibition mob, imprisoned in the history books and behind the movie screen? Not infrequently, the observer feels a momentary lapse in time, and sees not a history book, but the morning newspaper, not the late-night movie, but the evening television newscast.
The story we have to tell happened twice. It first happened to China, and now it is happening to the United States. Emphasizing that neither the names nor the hangouts of the criminals have changed, we begin by telling how it happened the first time.
1 - Britain's First Opium Wars
From 1715, when the British East India Company opened up its first Far East office in the Chinese port city of Canton, it has been official British Crown policy to foster mass-scale drug addiction against targeted foreign populations in order to impose a state of enforced backwardness and degradation, thereby maintaining British political control and looting rights. While the methods through which the British have conducted this Opium War policy have shifted over the intervening 250 years, the commitment to the proliferation of mind-destroying drugs has been unswerving.
It was the British Crown's categorical opposition to and hatred for scientific and technological progress that led it to adopt an Opium War policy during the last decade of the 18th century. Having stifled the development of domestic manufacturing during the previous century, the British Crown found its treasury rapidly being drained of silver reserves — the only payment the Chinese Emperor would accept in exchange for silk, tea, and other commodities Britain imported.
To reverse the silver exodus, which threatened to collapse the financial underpinnings of the British Empire, King George III mandated the East India Company to begin shipping large quantities of opium from Bengal in the British Crown Colony of India into China. The dual objective was to favorably alter the balance-of-payments deficit and to foster drug addiction among China's mandarin class. By the time of the American Revolution, East India Company opium trafficking into China was officially reported to be at a scale 20 times the absolute limit of opium required for medical and related use.
In a very direct sense, the Founding Fathers of the United States fought the American Revolution against the British Crown's opium policy.
• East India Company intelligence operative Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations spelled out the colonial looting policy against which the Founding Fathers rebelled. In that same document — as part of the same scheme to defend the Empire — Smith advocated a massive increase of East India Company opium exporting into China. (2)After the American Revolution, Smith's call for a dramatic increase in opium exporting into China was enacted with a vengeance. From 1801 to 1820, official British figures placed the opium trade at approximately 5,000 chests per year. By the late 1820s, a network of trading companies operating under overall East India Company "market control" was founded to facilitate the trade. Some of these British opium houses, including the biggest, Jardine Matheson & Co. Ltd., maintain an active hand in Far East heroin trafficking to this day.
• The dirty money culled from that opium trade made up a sizable portion of the war chest that financed Britain's deployment of Hessian mercenaries into North America to attempt to crush the rebellion.
• The "Secret Committee" of the East India Company — under the direction of Lord Shelburne and company chairman George Baring — coordinated British secret intelligence's campaign of subversion and economic warfare against the newly constituted American republic even before the ink had dried on the Treaty of Paris (1783). (3)
The establishment of these trading companies — the core of Britain's Opium War infrastructure — fostered an epidemic- scale increase in opium trafficking into China. By 1830-31, the number of chests of opium brought into China increased fourfold to 18,956 chests. In 1836, the figure exceeded 30,000 chests. In financial terms, trade figures made available by both the British and Chinese governments showed that between 1829-1840, a total of 7 million silver dollars entered China, while 56 million silver dollars were sucked out by the soaring opium trade. (4)
When the Chinese Emperor, confronted by a galloping drug addiction crisis, tried to crack down on the British trading companies and their dope smugglers, the British Crown went to war.
In 1839, the Chinese Emperor appointed Lin Tse-hsu Commissioner of Canton to lead a campaign against opium. Lin launched a serious crackdown against the Triad gangs sponsored by the British trading companies to smuggle the drugs out of the "Factory" area into the pores of the communities. The Triad Society, also known as the "Society of Heaven and Earth," was a century-old feudalist religious cult that had been suppressed by the Manchu Dynasty for its often violent opposition to the government's reform programs. The Triad group in Canton was profiled and cultivated by Jesuit and Church of England missionaries and recruited into the East India Company's opium trade by the early 19th century. (5)
When Lin moved to arrest one of the British nationals employed through the opium merchant houses, Crown Commissioner Capt. Charles Elliot intervened to protect the drug smuggler with Her Majesty's fleet. And when Lin responded by laying siege to the factory warehouses holding the tea shipments about to sail for Britain until the merchants turned over their opium stockpiles, Elliot assured the British drug pushers that the Crown would take full responsibility for covering their losses.
The British Crown had its "casus belli." Matheson of the opium house Jardine Matheson joyously wrote his partner Jardine — then in London, conferring with Prime Minister Palmerston on how to pursue the pending war with China:
. . . the Chinese have fallen into the snare of rendering themselves directly liable to the Crown. To a close observer, it would seem as if the whole of Elliot's career was expressly designed to lead on the Chinese to commit themselves, and produce a collision. Matheson concluded the correspondence: "I suppose war with China will be the next step." (6)Indeed, on October 13, 1839, Palmerston sent a secret dispatch to Elliot in Canton informing him that an expeditionary force proceeding from India could be expected to reach Canton by March, 1840. In a follow-up secret dispatch dated November 23, Palmerston provided detailed instructions on how Elliot was to proceed with negotiations with the Chinese — once they had been defeated by the British fleet.
Palmerston's second dispatch was, in fact, modeled on a memorandum authored by Jardine dated October 26, 1839, in which the opium pusher demanded: 1) full legalization of opium trade into China; 2) compensation for the opium stockpiles confiscated by Lin to the tune of £2 million; and 3) territorial sovereignty for the British Crown over several designated off-shore islands. In a simultaneous memorandum to the Prime Minister, Jardine placed J&M's entire opium fleet at the disposal of the Crown to pursue war against China. (7)
The Chinese forces, decimated by ten years of rampant opium addiction within the Imperial Army, proved no match for the British.
The British fleet arrived in force and laid siege in June of 1840. While it encountered difficulties in Canton, its threat to the northern cities, particularly Nanking, forced the Emperor to terms. Painfully aware that any prolonged conflict would merely strengthen Britain's bargaining position, he petitioned for a treaty ending the war.
When Elliot forwarded to Palmerston a draft Treaty of Chuenpi in 1841, the Prime Minister rejected it out of hand, replying, "After all, our naval power is so strong that we can tell the Emperor what we mean to hold, rather than what he should say he would cede." Palmerston ordered Elliot to demand "admission of opium into China as an article of lawful commerce," increased indemnity payment, and British access to several additional Chinese ports. (8)
The Treaty of Nanking, signed in 1842, brought the British Crown an incredible sum of $21 million in silver — as well as extraterritorial control over the "free port" of Hong Kong — which to this day is the capital of Britain's global drug-running.
The First Opium War defined the proliferation of and profiteering from mind-destroying drugs as a cornerstone of British Imperial policy. Anyone who doubts this fact need only consider this policy statement issued by Lord Palmerston in a January 1841 communiqué to Lord Auckland, then Governor General of India:
The rivalship of European manufactures is fast excluding our productions from the markets of Europe, and we must unremittingly endeavor to find in other parts of the world new vents for our industry (i.e., opium — ed.). . . If we succeed in our China expedition, Abyssina, Arabia, the countries of the Indus and the new markets of China will at no distant period give us a most important extension to the range of our foreign commerce. . . . (9)It is appropriate to conclude this summary profile of Britain's first Opium War by quoting from the 15th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, published in 1977. What the brief biographical sketch of Lin Tse-hsu — the leader of the Chinese Emperor's fight to defeat British drugging of the Chinese population — makes clear to the intelligent reader is that British policy to this day has not changed one degree:
... he (Lin—ed.) did not comprehend the significance of the British demands for free trade and international equality, which were based on their concept of a commercial empire. This concept was a radical challenge to the Chinese world order, which knew only an empire and subject peoples.Britain's opium diplomacy
... In a famous letter to Queen Victoria, written when he arrived in Canton, Lin asked if she would allow the importation of such a poisonous substance into her own country, and requested her to forbid her subjects to bring it into his. Lin relied on aggressive moral tone; meanwhile proceeding relentlessly against British merchants, in a manner that could only insult their government.
Not a dozen years would pass from the signing of the Treaty of Nanking before the British Crown would precipitate its second Opium War offensive against China, with similar disastrous consequences for the Chinese and with similar monumental profits for London's drug-pushers. Out of the second Opium War (1858-1860), the British merchant banks and trading companies established the Hong Kong & Shanghai Corporation, which to this day serves as the central clearinghouse for all Far Eastern financial transactions relating to the black market in opium and its heroin derivative.
Furthermore, with the joint British-French siege of Peking during October 1860, the British completed the process of opening up all of China. Lord Palmerston, the High Priest of the Scottish Rites, had returned to the Prime Ministership in June 1859 to launch the second war and thereby fulfill the "open China" policy he had outlined 20 years earlier.
Like the 1840 invasion of Canton, the second Opium War was an act of British imperial aggression — launched on the basis of the first flimsy pretext that occurred. Just prior to his ordering of a northern campaign against Peking (which permitted the British to maintain uninterrupted opium trafficking even while a state of war was underway), Lord Palmerston wrote to his close collaborator Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell (grandfather and guardian of the evil Lord Bertrand Russell).
Please go to whale.to to read the entire book or even important excerpts.
________
Jeffrey Steinberg on the Recent Reprint of Dope, Inc.
Published on 10 Sept 2014
LPACTV interviews senior Executive Intelligence Review (EIR) editor Jeffrey Steinberg about the recent publication of the 4th edition of the underground best-seller, Dope, Inc. He discusses the implications of the bankruptcy of the Inter-Alpha Group of Banks for the international drug trade. The 320-page paperback, subtitled "Britain's Opium War Against the World," includes reprints from the 1992 Third Edition, and in-depth studies from Executive Intelligence Review magazine, analyzing the scope and size of the international illegal drug-trafficking empire known as Dope, Inc. To obtain a copy, call EIR at 1-800-278-3135, or visit larouchepub.com for details. Originally published November 27th, 2010.
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