THE FIRST OPIUM WAR
"1601 -- Original Jesuit mission is established at Beijing, China. The Jesuits, having achieved positions of "unquestioned authority" at the Chinese royal court, hold the key to the opium trade. They are later followed by the Portuguese and then the Dutch.
1659 -- The Dutch now control the ancient dope trade routes. In exchange for taxes paid to the Mogul court, Dutch traders are allowed to force Indian peasants to produce dope for them.
1715 -- The British East India Company opens an office in Canton,China.
1750 -- By now the Dutch are shipping more than 100 tons of opium per year to Indonesia. Besides business advantages, the Dutch have discovered that opium is "a useful means for breaking the
moral resistance of Indonesians who opposed the introduction of their semi-servile but increasingly profitable plantation system.They deliberately spread the drug habits from the ports... to the countryside."
(How were the drug habits "deliberately spread"? The book, *Dope, Inc.*, does not exactly say. Nowadays, certain "rebellious" rock and roll songs serve as advertising jingles which help lure in potential consumers. Censorship, however, is not the answer. But be aware when you hear lyrics such as "Ritalin is in. Ritalin is in," that "somebody" might be trying to sell you something.)
1757 -- Military victories make Bengal a British colony.
1783 -- Lord Shelburne, who concluded peace negotiations with America after our Revolutionary War, is the power behind William Pitt the Younger, British Prime Minister. Shelburne is allied with the Jesuits, the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, and the East India Company. Both the British Empire and the East India Company are bankrupt. Lord Shelburne and associates take over the East India Company, and makes it "the central instrument of loot for the maintenance of the British Empire." Shelburne proposes to use "free trade" as a cover for both subverting the United States and expanding the opium trade into the Far East. Lord Shelburne is allied also with Francis Baring, an Anglo-Dutch banker.
1787 -- British Secretary of State Dundas has proposed that Britain force itself more into China so as to help augment the opium market there. The East India Company, acting in a manner reminiscent of our own American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), establishes "cut outs" -- intermediaries -- to handle the export of opium from India to China.
1830 -- Number of chests filled with opium being brought into China has increased fourfold since late 1700s: 18,956 chests. 1836 -- Number of chests filled with opium being brought into China: greater than 30,000 chests.
1839 -- China launches its own version of a "War on Drugs". Lin Tse-hsu is appointed drug czar. He cracks down on the "Society of Heaven and Earth," also known as The Triad Society, which had been recruited by the East India Company into the opium business in the early 1800s. But Lin goes too far. He tries to arrest a British national connected to the dope trade. British warships intervene. Lin responds by holding British tea for ransom, until and unless merchants turn over their opium stockpiles. Britain's Lord Palmerston, backed by the powerful British Navy, demands (1) full legalization of opium trade into China; (2) compensation for opium stockpiles confiscated by Lin; and (3) British sovereignty over several offshore islands.
June 1840 -- The British fleet arrives in force and lays siege. Chinese forces are relatively weak, due partly to drug addiction within their Imperial Army. The Chinese Emperor asks for a peace treaty.
1842 -- The Treaty of Nanking, among other things, gives Hong Kong to the British. To this day Hong Kong is said to be the capital of British drug-running." Source:http://www.textfiles.com/conspiracy/CN/cn08-33.txt
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| The Boxer Rebellion, Boxer Uprising or Yihequan Movement was a violent anti-foreign and anti-Christian uprising which took place in China towards the end of the Qing dynasty between 1899 and 1901. It was initiated by the Militia United in Righteousness (Yihetuan), known in English as the "Boxers", and was motivated by proto-nationalist sentiments and opposition to imperialist expansion and associated Christian missionary activity. An Eight-Nation Alliance invaded China to defeat the Boxers and took retribution. -WIKIPEDIA |
"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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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. . . .
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.
... 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."
Extracted from Dope inc. : Britain's opium war against the U.S You can read the whole article Online by clicking HERE.
TO BE CONTINUED
