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EUROPEAN COLONIALISM AND THE "OPIUM WARS" finally broke up under Western pressure. What Voltaire had once From 1757, the British had a trade agreement with the Chinese called the most advanced and enlightened form of government had Qing Dynasty which limited all trade between the two nations to the — been reduced by "Western" dum possum volo ("because I can, I harbour of Canton (Guangzhou). In the early 19th century, British want") to an ineffective puppet regime. ships were carrying millions of kilograms of Chinese tea to England, This is one facet of the evil game which was played in the 19th while bringing as return freight only silver bullion. century in East Asia. Another was the occupation of Vietnam by When declining to open the Chinese market to British industrial French forces in 1862.” products, Emperor Qianlong declared in the classic statement to King As France had no strategic interests in that part of the world at that George III: "We possess all things. I set no value on objects strange _ time, this venture had to finance itself. It was of no material eco- or ingenious, and have no use for your country's manufactures." nomic importance either, and one seriously has to wonder why Opium had long been known as an intoxicating drug in China, but —_- France started nearly 100 years of misery for an untold number of its use was forbidden by imperial decree dating back to 1729.'° The _ people on the opposite side of the globe. In order to raise the money English East India Company (EEIC) was cultivating huge poppy- required to establish a multinational crime syndicate, the new colo- fields in India’ and selling the drug illegally to nial power began to regulate the drug trade in China. So the earlier ban on the use was given the country. Until 1954, when the French added currency in 1796 by another imperial were unceremoniously "kicked out" of decree which banned the trading/sale of opium Vietnam, elements of the French Secret in China. When in 1833 the monopoly of the Service were controlling the French military EEIC was broken up (an early case of presence in Vietnam (French Indo-China). An "liberalisation"—with the usual catastrophic (effectively private) army of up to 40,000 Samped with opium fom Indi and na only Alexandre Tepon hd be financed by the deg ade the idle rich but the common man became de Tocqueville The entire French "colonial" enterprise in addicted to the drug. In late 1838, Emperor H that part of the world was a largely private Qianlong sent his emissary Lin Zexu to a described enterprise based on organised crime sanc- Canton to stop the opium trade. This regime de la terreur tioned at the highest political levels. audacious man simply held the foreign traders hostage and demanded their departure under asa methodology AMERICAN COLONIALISM AND THE "HEROIN WARS" It now seems very strange that out of a French private adventure (which had made a few French entrepreneurs very rich) could develop the American nightmare of the Vietnam War. The old colonial powers had been running the colonial charade for centuries: entire nations were pressed into service to generate vast wealth for a very small number of people who were the froth on the sociologically fermenting vats that the "mother nations" to the colonial threat of their lives. The British Trade Commissioner Charles Elliott collected all the opium from the (British) traders and handed it over to Lin Zexu, who proceeded to wash nine million Mexican silver dollars (the international currency of the time) worth of opium into the sea. The British despatched an expeditionary force, which easily won (due to modern arms and strategy) against a vastly superior number of ill-equipped soldiers, led by generals who had no idea of what mod- ern warfare was all about. states had become. With the signing of the Treaty of America had to learn that one cannot Nanjing (Nanking) on 29 August 1842, Great Britain's original goals _ break a deal with one of the oldest civilised nations, Russia, for the were fulfilled: the cohong (the Chinese trading association through simple reason that one was able to (the USA used nuclear bombs to which foreigners—effectively, British traders—had to work) was shock Japan into surrender, and the deal that Stalin and Roosevelt abolished, four more Chinese ports were opened to trade (Fuzhou, had made regarding the sharing of the territorial spoils after World Ningbo, Shanghai and Xiamen), and the island of Hong Kong was War II was "off"). The Korean War was the outcome of this broken ceded to the British. promise. What was "sold" to the unknowing populations as a clash Just as World War II effectively had its roots in the insidious of ideologies was little more than the grandstanding of intellectual Versailles Peace Treaty, the Second Opium War was an inevitable midgets: "Look! I have a bigger nuke than you!" outcome of the Nanjing agreement. When in 1856 the Arrow, a ship The Korean Peninsula was brutally separated into two halves in owned by a Hong Kong resident, was searched by a party of Chinese —_ order to achieve what had been arranged by Stalin and Roosevelt a officials looking for a notorious criminal, the British flag was taken _—_ decade earlier: a sharing of the region! While the people in the to make the masses familiar with the realities created by elites. down and this escalated from a shouting match into a shooting war. North had no political rights by law and were slaves to a "one size This is when the French joined the fray and together British and fits all" economy, the ones in the South also effectively had no French expeditionary forces threatened the capital, Peking (Beijing). "rights" and were pressed into the service of Korean and American In the dictated Peace Treaty of Tianjin, trading rights and the economic tyrants. rights to establish diplomatic representations in Peking were granted. To the average American citizen (especially in those days), the When this treaty was to be ratified the next year, the British "developing" situation in Vietnam seemed to be a continuation of delegation (some 400 men on three ships) was routed and this then _ the clash of ideologies that had gone on a decade earlier on the resulted in the forceful ingression of British and French forces into _"“other peninsula over there". Peking in 1860. The Qing Dynasty lingered on until 1911, when it Plotinus, the Alexandrian philosopher of the second century AD, Alexandre de Tocqueville __ described by elites. JUNE — JULY 2004 NEXUS * 13 EUROPEAN COLONIALISM AND THE "OPIUM WARS" régime de la terreur asa methodology to make the masses familiar with the realities created www.nexusmagazine.com