A long time ago…
The Opium Wars were two armed conflicts fought in China in the mid-19th century between the forces of Western countries and the Qing dynasty. The first Opium War was fought between China and Great Britain from 1839 to 1842, triggered by the Chinese government's campaign to enforce its prohibition of opium, which included destroying opium stocks owned by British merchants and the British East India Company.
The
second Opium War, also known as the Arrow War or the Anglo-French War in China,
was fought by Great Britain and France against China from 1856 to 1860. China,
technologically behind Europe, lost both wars and the foreign powers gained
commercial privileges and legal and territorial concessions in China under
unequal treaties due to gunboat diplomacy.
Due
to the problem of the trade deficit Britain had with China, the British were
smuggling opium from their Indian colonies into Chinese ports against the
wishes of the Chinese government to help pay for the large amounts of Chinese
tea that they were importing. Hong Kong became a British colony through the
Treaty of Nanjing in 1842; Kowloon in 1860; and Hong Kong was leased for 99
years from 1898. It only devolved to China in 1997. Treaty ports were increased
where Britain could trade and reside, from one to five, including Shanghai.
China’s
problem was the resultant importation of a product that had no possibility of
compensating for the cultivation of tea, but instead created widespread addiction
and social and economic disruption.
And
now…
The
US external debt is the largest in the world, 123% of GDP, with 33% of public
debt held by foreigners: $33 trillion
(33 with 12 zeros afterwards) at the time of writing. China, with over 4,000
times the US population, has $2.5 trillion of external debt), 14% of its GDP.
While debt is not necessarily a bad thing in a capitalist system, if it becomes
impossible to service countries can find themselves in dire straits.
Switzerland, for example, has a low debt to GDP ratio of 48%. Post Bretton
Woods, the US has maintained a constant deficit, providing itself with a high
standard of living, facilitated by the dollar’s position as the only
international currency. As the world turns potentially multi-polar, coupled
with a cloud economy, in which China’s WeChat platform seamlessly integrates
digital currency transactions, the dollar’s hegemony is seriously threatened
and the USA is pushed to endless wars to stave off the day of reckoning as
concerns its balance sheet, threatening any nation that moves towards
international trade in non-dollar currency.
The
USA is currently spending half of its tax dollars on military spending (and in
addition there is much spending, for example R&D, that is military in
intention, but not included directly in the official figures); and is spending
almost as much on servicing its debt. The plethora of wars it is fomenting and selling
weapons for is better understood as a last-ditch attempt to maintain the
dollar’s hegemony, while the country itself is crumbling from within, border
towns inundated by immigrants fleeing hardship in those countries that the Western
elites decided to trash, immigrants that will do the low-paid jobs that
maintain inflation under control, but which exert downward pressure on
blue-collar salaries all over the country, creating misery for the entire
working class. As Julian Assange famously explained, Western governments are better understood as nothing more than the
instrument used to create endless war, itself the mechanism to remove public
funds and give them to private elites, or in other words to steal the labour of
the masses and syphon it upwards into a few hands. There is no transparency in
“defence” spending – the Pentagon is utterly incapable of passing an audit, and
yet receives more money every budget.
Currently in the US there are around 80,000 opioid deaths per year (out of a total of some 110,000 drug deaths), according to the CDC, a figure that does not fully reflect the social and economic decay caused by addition. Drugs are killing 324 people out of a million. The European situation is better, but still horrible: in Sweden, for example, 81 drug-induced deaths per million; and an average of 15 per million among 15-64 year-olds. In England and Wales, there were 80 deaths per million due to drug poisoning in 2020, nearly a 4% increase on the 2019 figure, an increase possibly due to lockdown policy. In Wales there was almost a 10% increase on the 2019 figure in 2020.
Social
problems caused by drug addiction are not evenly spread out, meaning that
severely deprived areas bear the burden of many problems, including drug addiction,
which in itself causes a vicious circle of lowered economic prospects, bad
parenting, crime…
The illegal Contra-backing by the US government of Ronald Reagan against the left-leaning Sandinista government in Nicaragua back in 1984, which was designed to circumvent Congress’ decision not to finance the Contras, was funded by the drug trade, as the CIA used flights out of Nicaragua to bring drugs out and send cash back in. Inner cities, especially those with significant black populations, were flooded with crack cocaine so that, while Ronald Reagan’s political discourse was extremely anti-drugs, his government’s policy resulted in massive drug-related crime and misery.
In Western countries drugs and
prostitution are included in official GDP figures. The EU made the inclusion official
in all member states in 2014, and the UK’s GDP, as an example, leapt £50 billion, 4%,
according to the UK government’s information!
In
the EU today, policy is generally known to be set out by NATO. US wars are
invariably seconded by the UK and the EU. Constant military spending, although
good for the industrial military complex – and the third of the US Congress
that invariably invests in the stock market at precisely the right time –, is
bad for the people who pay for the arms manufacturers’ bonanza, either with
life and limb or with plummeting social perspectives, constant austerity,
reduced healthcare, vanishing pension schemes, and crumbling schools and
infrastructure. As inflation and taxation make us poorer, as the “You will own
nothing” mantra is imposed (apparently not even our own bodies as they become, with
constant mRNA boosters, yet another subscription service), as the corollary
“and be happy” has not come to pass, democracy becomes more elusive as the
obscenely rich buy access to political and economic power. Our simulacrum of
democracy, our periodic excitement as we choose Team Red or Team Blue, hides
the reality that we live in a liberal oligarchy.
“The
expense of a war could be paid in time; but the expense of opium, when once the
habit is formed, will only increase with time” (Townsend Harris, 1804-1878)
So
what goes around comes around. And this time it’s a reckoning for the West.