Letters from Vienna #203
Letter to Baron Bethell #24
A virtual guided tour of Vienna, Part 16, The Mölker Bastei III
Dear James,
“The Third Man” was filmed all over Vienna[1] and remains one of my favourite films but, sadly, it’s fundamentally a lie. It’s a lie because it portrays the British as heroes in fighting drugs whereas in reality: they have long been the villains. Of course, peddling drugs has not always been an exclusively British preserve. Alfred McCoy tells us:
“In the 1500s European merchants introduced opium smoking; in the 1700s the British East India Company became Asia’s first large scale opium smuggler, forcibly supplying an unwilling China; and in the 1800s every European colony had its official opium dens. At every stage of its development, Asia’s narcotics traffic has been shaped and formed by the rise and fall of Western empires.”
“Before the first Portuguese ships arrived in the 1500s, opium smoking and drug smuggling were almost unknown in Asia. Most of the traditional Asian states were inward-looking empires with only a marginal interest in sea trade. Their economies were self-contained, and they only ventured abroad to trade for luxury goods, rare spices, or art treasures. Asia’s large cities-such as Peking, Phnom Penh, and Mandalay-were inland ceremonial capitals. For the most part, coastal areas were considered undesirable and therefore remained relatively underpopulated. While Arab traders had introduced the opium poppy into India and some parts of southwestern China in the seventh century A.D., poppy cultivation remained limited and opium was used almost exclusively for medicinal purposes.”
“Europe’s “Age of Discovery” marked the beginning of Asia’s opium problem. Only six years after Columbus “discovered” America, Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama rounded the tip of Africa and became the first European sea captain to reach India. Later Portuguese fleets pushed onward to China and the Spice Islands of Indonesia. These early merchants were not the omnipotent conquerors of later centuries, and Asian empires had no difficulty confining them to small commercial beachheads along the unoccupied coastlines. However, from the very beginning of the Western-Eastern encounter the traders were hampered by a factor that was destined to plague these entrepreneuring European merchants down through the centuries: Europe had almost nothing to trade that the Asians were interested in acquiring, except its gold and silver specie. Unwilling to barter away the basis of their national economies, the Portuguese sea captains embarked on what one American economist has called “slash and burn colonialism.””
“Fortifying their coastal enclaves against possible reprisal attacks, the Portuguese proceeded to sortie out into the sea-lanes of the South China Sea, confiscating native cargoes and plundering rival ports. Once the competing Malay, Chinese, and Arab sea captains had been subjugated, the Portuguese took over inter-Asian maritime commerce and paid for the silks and spices with their plundered profits. Medicinal opium had been carried by Asian ships in the India-China-Spice Islands’ triangular trade, and Portuguese merchants fell heir to this commerce. Still eager for an enticing exchange commodity to barter for Chinese silks, the Portuguese imported tobacco from their Brazilian colony in the late 1500s.”
“Although the Chinese frustrated Portuguese hopes by growing their own tobacco, the tobacco pipe itself, which had been introduced by the Spanish, turned out to be the key that unlocked the gates to the Celestial Kingdom’s riches. Indian opium mixed with tobacco and smoked through a pipe was pleasing to the Chinese palate. This fad first became popular among the overseas Chinese of Southeast Asia, and Dutch merchants witnessed Chinese smoking an opium-tobacco mixture in Indonesia as early as 1617. By the early seventeenth-century the Dutch, who had preempted the Portuguese position in Southeast Asia, were reportedly pushing opium on Taiwan and making inroads into the nearby Chinese coast.”
“While the “Age of Discovery” introduced a few Chinese to opium smoking, it was Europe’s Industrial Revolution that transformed China into a nation of addicts. The expansion of Europe’s industrial might throughout the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries developed a need for new markets and raw materials. European colonies in Asia broke out of their coastal enclaves and began spreading into the interior. With their new military-industrial might, small European armies were able to overwhelm Asian levies and carve Asia into vast colonial empires. To defray the enormous expenses involved in administering and “developing” their Asian colonies, the European powers turned to the opium trade. As the vanguard of the Industrial Revolution, England emerged as the world’s most powerful colonial power and its largest opium merchant.”
“After annexing much of northern India in the late eighteenth century, English bureaucrats established a monopoly over Indian poppy cultivation in Bengal and began exporting thousands of chests of smoker’s opium to China. The average annual British India opium exports grew to 270 tons in 1821 and leaped to over 2,400 tons by 1838.”
“As opium addiction spread through the imperial bureaucracy and the army, Chinese officials became extremely concerned about the social and economic costs of opium smoking. The emperor had banned opium imports in 1800, but British merchant captains ignored the imperial edict. When the British refused to desist despite repeated requests, Chinese officials threw several thousand kilos of British opium into Canton harbor in a gesture of defiance rather similar to another nation’s Boston Tea Party. Britain reacted to protect her interests: from 1839 until 1842 her warships blasted the Chinese coast, winning a decisive victory in what Chinese historians call “the Opium War.” Although China was forced to open treaty ports to European merchants and thereby to opium imports, she steadfastly refused to legalize the opium trade.”[2]
Dope
In 1978 the remarkable book “Dope Inc.” asked: “How is the $200 billion monstrosity of world drug revenues hidden? In the most important way, it is not. The flow of narcotics and dirty money is conducted in the full light of day, the same way rum-running was conducted during Prohibition. Only misdirection prevents the public from understanding who the enemy is. Massive crimes are not hidden under cover of darkness, but under the cover of an effective lie. The operative lie in this case is “Free Enterprise.””
“When Sam Bronfman sold his rotgut to American mobsters, supplied by the old British distillers and financed by the old British banks, it was a matter of free enterprise: what the mob did with it after it crossed the American border was of no concern to him. When Meyer Lansky made his first heroin connection with Britain's dope-trading Keswick family in Shanghai in 1920, the sale was legal and in the light of day; what the mob did with the heroin later was not the responsibility of Britain’s Far East traders.”
“Now, when the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank “launders” the $10 billion annual flow of narcotics money through Hong Kong, is it anything but a matter of “free enterprise” where their deposits come from and their loans go? When the Bronfmans in Canada and the Jacobs family of Buffalo finance organized crime, is it anything more than a “free enterprise” business relationship? The entire army of the enemy was built, and functions, under the open view of the public. In fact, the chain of interlocking “free enterprise” relationships that describes the flow of drugs and dirty money in and out of the United States only masks the type of conspiracies that Americans see not in pulp thrillers, but in nightmares.”[3]
In 2009 Dennis Small proclaimed: “The British Empire is wielding Dope, Inc., today, just as it waged its Opium War against China in the 19th Century, with an eye towards menticide and the bestialization of the entire planet’s population.”
“That coming Dark Age can already be seen in the shocking way Afghanistan has been transformed into a giant opium-and heroin-producing machine, with production soaring 280% over the last four years—a dynamic not seen, according to one frightening UN report, since the Opium War.”
“It can be seen in the horrific violence which the drug gangs have unleashed in Mexico, including more than 5,000 people murdered in 2008, and countless cases of bestial beheadings and ritual torture of competing narcos and of anti-drug police chiefs and army generals alike.”
“It can be seen in the fact that millions of peasants in drug-producing countries, such as Afghanistan or Bolivia, have become de facto work slaves of the cartels, since the collapsing world economy provides them and their families no source of simple survival, other than the drug economy.”[4]
I shan’t continue any longer as you will, as a dutiful historian, wish to research the question yourself.
It’s a beautiful day in Vienna, I intend to go swimming and heartily wish to leave such awful themes behind.
Best,
Michael
[1] https://www.visitingvienna.com/songsfilms/third-man-locations/
[2] pp.43-44 The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Alfred W. McCoy
[3] pp.3-4 Dope, Inc. Britain’s Opium War Against the U.S., Kalimtgis Konstandinos, David Goldman & Jeffrey Steinberg
[4] p.4 Britain’s Dope, Inc. Marker for Humanity’s New Dark Age, Dennis Small