German, U.S. Spoiler parties, May 1931

 

Herbert Hoover was inaugurated 2 days after beer was made a felony–while the League of Nations unfolded a worldwide war on drugs. Small wonder that the resulting Great Depression triggered a search for replacement parties here, there and everywhere…

Germany had troubles too. Losing the 1914 war against the Hague opium conventions had burdened the nation with war reparations to the Allies and loan debts to the (NOT an Ally) U.S. By 1930, League plans to throttle German pharma–Germany’s largest industry–had intensified. The U.S. now financially backed these international prohibitionists and packed the Geneva committee with her own delegates. Naturally, the search was on for new politicians. Adolf Hitler’s name began appearing in the news.(link)

The League of Nations Opium Advisory Committee spent nearly all of May 1931 working on the new Drug Convention they’d planned throughout 1930. German participants kept their government dutifully apprised of plans amounting--in the committee’s own words--to a planned economy.(link) Participants, nearly all from producing nations, lobbied for bans on non-toxic and non-addictive drugs to cripple potential competition for their own products and to muddy up the waters with mission creep. South American coca and African khat--both of them stimulants and the exact opposite of narcotics--were scheduled for banning by corporate experts who argued that their own codeine was not addictive. After all, hadn’t Herbert Hoover himself argued that laissez-faire liberalism meant dog-eat-dog? Besides, the League Covenant and Treaty of Versailles, in their respective article 23, entrusted the League of Nations “with the general supervision over agreements with regard to the traffic in opium and other dangerous drugs.” “Other” all of a sudden meant cocaine, marijuana, alcohol, cigarettes, cacti–whatever you could get the League to say was dangerous. “Supervision over agreements” still meant the initiation of deadly force.

Armed with that ambiguity, America’s anti-dog-eat-dog President had Secretary of State Henry Stimson instruct cash-laden American envoys to the convention that “the draft convention proposes to extend certain of the provisions of the convention to other drugs not covered by the Geneva Convention.”(link) If this juggernaut came to be, Germany’s drug-producing competitors could use it to throttle her sales while bleeding the nation into bankruptcy with reparations demands under the Versailles treaty. Since the fix was already in for the antidope convention, national survival required getting rid of the reparations levies. Stories about German demands for a moratorium hit the papers as soon as the drug cartel delegates took their seats.(link) Alert readers will notice the Hitler story a few inches lower in the same column.

Germany stood threatened with confiscation, extradition, income tax liability in the U.S., crippling of primary industries and renewed expropriations as in 1923. The Bank of United States and Al Capone stories in every paper served notice that Americans gleefully used tax laws to prosecute their own to death for dope shipments. The shipment of opiates industrially packaged into “woolens from Northern Germany” just intercepted in New York made those liabilities all the more ominous. Hyperinflation had failed in 1923. Germany needed a political party that was truculent, xenophobic and eager for revenge; Adolf Hitler was the handiest counterthreat to rattle back with. An alternative threat would be to form a customs union with Austria, thereby eliminating local customs barriers.(link) The possibility was aired May 10, and a panicky run on Austria’s Kreditanstalt bank took hold immediately, for reasons completely unclear.

WHAT WAS CLEAR was the perfect correlation between religious fanatics, Comstockist book-burning, bans on contraceptives and desperate missions to outlaw Evolution, beer, wine, drugs, movies and Sunday baseball at all costs–and not just in Pennsylvania.

Tennessee’s Monkey Law had tried and convicted a schoolteacher for heresy in 1927--and the appeals court let it stand in 1931. Quaker President Herbert Clark Hoover thanked the Southern Baptist Convention on Law Enforcement for its role in building a new race via deadly force on May 16. Communists--multiplying geometrically since the 1929 Crash--tended to side with whomever zealots singled out for prosecution. Spanish socialists were keenly alert to the opposition; anti-religious sentiment there pulled no punches. As if to rebuke Pres. Hoover, Christian National Socialists won a sensational victory in the federal state elections at Oldenburg. U.S. papers even tried tried equivocation–announcing on May 18 that Adolf Hitler’s NATIONALIST party scored notably in Danzig Free State elections.(link) There were battle lines being drawn…

Good reading: HERETIC, Jesus Christ and the Other Sons of God, by Catherine Nixey.(link) Yes this is the same spellbinding wordsmith who crafted The Darkening Age. And yes, it is also available with audio interpretation by that best of all voice actresses Lalla Ward. This ought to be must reading for anyone with pretentions at writing ability. I personally feel crushed by her every page. Nowhere is there an awkward moment–and bear in mind that the source material comes from the most awkward languages and dialects. “Apocryphal stories” pops up in Milton Friedman lectures, but Nixey leads down the path to genuine apocrypha--stories that, like Beatles albums or Erskine Caldwell novels--simply had to be put to the torch for your own protection from inconvenient facts of reality.

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

ASYLUM APPLICATION FORM i589 INSTRUCTIONS IN PORTUGUESE: INSTRUÇÕES PARA O FORMULÁRIO DE ASILO i589. What we did was make the instructions accessible to and understandable by people accustomed to thinking in Portuguese. This costs one dollar ($1) and you can read it on a cellphone with the Kindle app.(link)