An honorable member of the Coffee Shop Has Just Posted the Following:
He who sacrifices his conscience to ambition burns a picture to obtain the ashes. Chinese Proverb
For over a century, Western nations trafficked in opium on a scale that dwarfs any modern Colombian multi billion dollar drug empire, yet today we Westerners know little about it. We don't learn about it in high school history--or even college, for that matter. I had an American professor in Xiamen tell me that he thought the war was fought to keep China from exporting opium.
Most Westerners by far opposed the trade. Even the British opposed it. The entire British parliament opposed the 2nd Opium War--and was dissolved. In the 1880s, when the U.S. made it illegal for Americans to engage in the opium trade, a Chinese leader said, "This is the first time that I've seen a Christian nation act like a Christian country." But the trafficking continued until, by the 1920s, fully half of Europe’s Asian profits derived from opium. While only asmall minority benefited from the trade, that minority controlled the fate of half the world's population in China and India, and dictated Western policy as well
Warren Hastings, India’s first governor-general, wrested control of the Dutch opium trade, rapidly expanded poppy production, and dispatched two opium-laden ships to Canton on a trial run. One was shipwrecked, but the other evaded Chinese officials and sold 200,000 pounds of opium in Huangbo.
After an English census of China revealed 300 million potential “clients,” the Crown awarded the Honorable East India Company a monopoly on the ‘trade,’ carefully avoiding the use of the word ‘opium’—a face-saving subterfuge employed right into the 20th century. (For the record, the majority of British merchants and missionaries protested against Britain’s foray into drug trafficking, but to little avail).
http://www.amoymagic.com/OpiumWar.htm
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26-01-2016, 10:30 AM
Guess the race: World biggest drug traffickers in Human History
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