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("Quid coniuratio est?")
THE SECOND OPIUM WAR AND THE AMERICAN BEACHHEAD
(Source for the following is Dope, Inc. by the Editors of Executive Intelligence Review. I neither necessarily agree nor disagree with all or portions of the following.)
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1816 -- John Jacob Astor imports, among other products, opium into China. Astor is a "pioneer" in the introduction of opium into China. Astor invests his opium profits in Manhattan real estate.
One strange fact: East India Company has a de facto monopoly on the dope trade into China. Yet Astor is allowed to participate. Is this a payoff by the Brits in return for Astor serving as an intelligence operative? Aaron Burr, British intelligence agent, was provided funds with which to escape the U.S. by Astor, after Burr had killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel.
Besides Astor and associates in New York City, the East India Company develops similar networks in Philadelphia and Boston. British bank Baring Brothers becomes linked by business and intermarriage with prominent families in Philadelphia.
1832 -- The East India Company monopoly on the dope trade into China expires. Now too, the Astor family is no longer a major player. The Forbes family of Boston achieves notoriety in the dope traffic into China.
1833 -- The British discontinue the slave trade because it has become unprofitable. It is picked up by the Perkins and Forbes families, among others, operating through Russell and Company. Other families involved: Cabot, Lodge, Bacon, Russell, Coolidge.
1846 -- 117,000 "coolies" -- indentured servants -- are brought into the U.S. With them comes 230,000 pounds of gum opium and over 53,000 pounds of prepared (smoking) opium.
Circa 1850s -- British firms bring cotton from the southern U.S. to Liverpool. This cotton then goes to the mills in the north of England where, under Dickensian conditions, it is spun into cloth by the workers -- many of them children. Finished goods are exported to India, incidentally destroying India's existing cloth industry. India must pay for its imported cloth with its Bengali opium exports to China.
"Without the 'final demand' of Chinese opium sales, the entire world structure of British trade would have collapsed."
While all this was going on, the "secret ideology of international finance... aimed at eventual rule over all the world by the British Government" was seething at a perceived affront to its plans as promulgated in the Monroe Doctrine. The Monroe Doctrine, "America for the Americans," was in conflict with British plans to maintain and advance the worldwide British empire. But at the time of its inception during the 1820s, the British were then preoccupied with problems in the Mohammedan world. By 1856, however, Great Britain turned its attention to America. A close business connection existed between cotton manufacturing England and the cotton aristocracy of the American South. The southern states "were swarming with British agents." These agents acted upon the business connection between the South and Great Britain to help foment rebellion. The British also provided indirect aid to the Confederacy which "brought the fortunes of the North to a very low ebb; and every indication at this stage was that Britain was preparing to enter the war." "In December, 1861, a large British, French and Spanish expeditionary force was landed at Vera Cruz [Mexico] in defiance of the Monroe Doctrine." Things looked bad for the Union. However the North itself received timely assistance from Russia and that, combined with other factors, resulted in eventual Union victory.
(The question arises as to whether John Wilkes Booth, a known agent of the Confederacy, really was a "lone nut" when he assassinated the victorious Abraham Lincoln. This editor does not believe that it was Booth who perished on or about April 26, 1865 at the Garret barn in Virginia. Support for this opinion can be found in, among several works, Escape and Suicide of John Wilkes Booth by Finis L. Bates. Memphis: Pilcher Printing Co., 1907)
Pre- American Civil War -- British pharmaceutical houses begin commercial production of morphine. They misleadingly claim it is "nonaddictive" and even say it will cure opium addiction.
June 1859 -- Lord Palmerston returns to the post of Prime Minister of Great Britain. He continues his push for an "open China" policy.
1858-1860 -- The British Crown precipitates the Second Opium War, against China. One consequence is the founding of the Hongkong and Shanghai Corporation.
Britain establishes its method of control over the opium trade:
(1) Sponsorship of mass-scale opium addiction of targeted colonial and neo-colonial populations as the way to sap the vitality of the nation;
(2) Willingness of Her Majesty's government to deploy Britain's national military forces to protect the opium trade; and
(3) Use of the gigantic profits reaped from the trade to fund allied terrorist and organized criminal infrastructure within the targeted nation to carry out the trade and to act as a fifth column of British interests.
1860 -- Opium exports from India to China: 58,681 chests.
1862 -- Abraham Lincoln outlaws the coolie trade. But black marketeering in coolie labor nonetheless continues, in fact it escalates, through the end of the century. With the coolies comes opium; they are a ready market for the drug.
1866 -- William Hathaway Forbes joins the board of directors of the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank -- a.k.a. the HongShang Bank.
1880 -- Opium exports from India to China: 105,508 chests.
1905 -- The Anglo-Chinese agreement calls for the Chinese to reduce domestic opium production and for the British to reduce their exports to China from British India. But the British evade their end of the deal by merely sending their opium to Hong Kong. The agreement is also evaded by British-sponsored underground crime networks in China that redouble their smuggling efforts.
1911 -- An international conference at The Hague agrees to regulate the narcotics trade.
Also in 1911, Britain issues a huge loan to Persia. The collateral? Persia's opium revenues.
1921 -- In India, Gandhi and followers begin agitating against opium. They are arrested on charges of "undermining the revenue."
1924 -- In the U.S., heroin is outlawed as a prescription drug. (Heroin, by the way, had been originally touted as a cure for morphine addiction.)
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