The Versailles Prohibition Treaty

 

The Versailles pact was the successful outcome of China using the USA to ban plant products

Go ahead and ask Google: "What did the Versailles treaty do?" The corporate answers are dissembling lies. Americans, who mostly have never read the treaty or its Siamese-Twin corollary, the Charter of the League of Nations, are surprised, shocked, to learn the conflict is rooted in events of 1836.  Americans are vaguely aware there was a "Panic" in 1837, with financial crashes, a severe economic depression and considerable violence in the streets. 

Stories cobbled to explain away the whole thing abound. Democrats urge readers to accept Andrew Jackson's suspicion of a central bank as the sole and ultimate cause. Republicans smugly add that charging payment in gold for government (meaning Indian) land caused a liquidity crunch. None of the stories mention that Mexico was China's trading partner, or that Texas was at war with Mexico in 1836. Nor will the reader see reference to worries besetting British opium merchants in March of 1836. When did you hear of the Chinese government's November warnings against poisonous opium smoke and the evils of bringing "young boys for the foreigners to seduce"... This is Imperial China in 1836, not Trump's Republican party in 2023!

The simple fact that China ordered East India Company dope traders to pack and leave meant an expensive war would be waged to force China to repeal its prohibitions on opium imports. If this meant selling off British investment in American municipal and improvements bonds, or real estate, that in turn HAD to imply a quick depreciation in land values, bond defaults, bankruptcies as securities were dumped and gold exported. The Panic, Depression and Charles Dickens' "Hungry Forties" followed. War is expensive, and there is no discount available for believing the war is "just" or "on drugs." 

Yet all of that is prosperity compared to what befell China from 1840 through 1911. Defeated by England, defeated by Japan in 1894, then exploited by those victors--now allied to Great Britain still in need of markets for Indian opium... Who can blame the Chinese for putting economic pressure on the USA to come to the aid of a fellow prohibitionist in distress?  In the following posts we examine how appeasing China with Pure Food and Drug laws led to Panic, Depression, instability, revolution and the blossoming of a sort of religious faith in government coercion and global, centrally planned economy. This leads past the Volstead era already covered and into Germany's 1931-1939 attempts to rid itself of Versailles Treaty & League of Nations Charter proscriptions on drug production and trade: (link)

"Those of the High Contracting Parties who have not yet signed, or who have signed but not yet ratified, the Opium Convention signed at The Hague on January 23, 1912/2 agree to bring the said Convention into force, and for this purpose to enact the necessary legislation without delay and in any case within a period of twelve months from the coming into force of the present Treaty."

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Good Reading: The Woman Who Smashed Codes (link) revisits the New Jersey-New York Atlantic Highlands substance smuggling syndicate raids of 16OCT1929. In those, several banks were indicted for financing smuggling rings right before the Crash!  Prohibition on the North Jersey Shore covered this ground somewhat, but only from a New Jersey standpoint.(link) Across the mouth of the Hudson all the way out Long Island to Montauk Point, similar raids were conducted and illegal entrepreneurs haled into different courts. Defendants in the multistate 1928 Illinois Alcohol busts were still being tried and sentenced five years later as FDR inherited the economy reduced to ruin by prohibition enforcement. Those 1929 Atlantic Highlands cases were still being tried, continued and delayed as Germany was dragged kicking and screaming into the League of Nations Narcotics Limitation Convention in June and July of 1931. These twisted threads of different brands of  at-gunpoint prohibitionism as eugenics for a sound economy lead in every case to corruption, violence, panics, crashes, recessions, depressions and war. This prohibition and repression stuff must be pretty addictive, because government recidivism makes the deadly cycle repeat over and over and over again.

Find out the juicy details behind the mother of all economic collapses. Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 is available in two languages on Amazon Kindle, as cheap as a pint of craft beer.

Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the Hollywood-style beautiful daughter of a scientist touting prohibition and racial collectivism in America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)

Brazilian blog… Expatriotas

American blog… Libertariantranslator, with contact form

Tagged: prohibition, confiscation, asset forfeiture, initiation of force, blackouts, energy crisis, liquidation, liquidity, bankruptcy, Crash, Depression, communism, inviting attack, treason, economic collapse,

Tags: asset forfeiture, bankruptcy, blackouts, communism, confiscation, Crash, Depression, economic collapse, energy crisis, initiation of force, inviting attack, liquidation, liquidity, prohibition, panics, fractional reserve banking,