League of Nations Conflict 18JAN1929

 

The Fourth 1929 Meeting of the League of Nations Opium Advisory Committee began the afternoon of 18JAN1929 with secret jockeying for places by the European Opium Advisory Committee and the U.S.-organized Central Opium Board. Their combined eloquence failed to convince Japan's representative that the two organizations ought to mingle their powers. Part of the problem was that the U.S.-managed 1925 Geneva Convention, did not focus on opium—the standard addictive narcotic already dealt with in ratified conventions. The American Delegation sought to extend unto Europe and Asia violent repression of derivative narcotics such as morphine, heroin... plus things known to be harmless compared to cigarettes. 

After all, before the Volstead Act became enforceable, the strongest liquor in America was 43% alcohol. Under Volsteadism, 200-proof ethanol became readily obtainable--to the surprise of dry zealots.  Beyond that, the U.S. delegation—packed with many anti-everything Volsteadists, famous for having stormed out of earlier League meetings—insisted on adding Holy Wars against non-habit-forming cocaine and even marijuana, a non-toxic, non-habituating herb dangerous to nobody outside of the cigarette industry.  Of the Monroe-indoctrinated Latin American countries, only Salvador had "freely" ratified this new prohibition pact. Surinam and Curaçao were pulled in by Netherlands adherence.  Of the marijuana/hashish using Moslem countries in which alcohol was traditionally banned only Sudan—long coveted by British Christians—had joined the 27 ratifiers of the 1925 prohibition pact.  This word-frequency ngram shows how often the words turned up in print.

The conundrum noticed by Japan's delegate hinged on the meaning of Treaty of Versailles (and League of Nations Covenant) Article 23, which was mentioned nine times during the discussions on January 18, 1929. Article 23, paragraph c, of the Covenant provided that that the members of the League would "entrust the League with the general supervision over agreements with regard to the traffic in opium and other dangerous drugs." When such verbiage was part of the 1912 Opium Convention Protocol that (in my view) caused WW1 only five signatures were affixed between 1914 and 1918. 

After the war, the surrender Treaty of Versailles' Article 23 said: Subject to and in accordance with the provisions of international conventions existing or hereafter to be agreed upon, the Members of the League: ... c. will entrust the League with the general supervision over the execution of agreements with regard to the traffic in women and children, and the traffic in opium and other dangerous drugs... The two similar Articles 23 together empowered the League to press prohibition of anything and everything American delegates could get tacked on afterward. All this was spelled out in Versailles Article 295 which forced the Hague Convention on victor and vanquished alike. To confuse matters further, ANOTHER Article 23, this one contained in the U.S.-backed 1925 Geneva Convention read:

"In order to complete the information of the Board as to the disposal of the supply of the world's raw opium, the governments of the countries where the use of raw opium is temporarily authorized shall, in a manner to be prescribed by the Board, in addition to the statistics provided for in Geneva Article 22 (production, manufacture, stocks, consumption and amounts confiscated of everything except possibly alcohol and tobacco), forward annually to the Board, within three months after the end of the year, as complete and accurate statistics as possible relative to the preceding year showing: Manufacture and consumption of prepared opium… etc… 

Japan's delegate had spied in this multiplicity of Articles 23 an opening for transferring Opium Advisory Committee statistical analysis duties to the new and officious Permanent Central Opium Board the Americans had half-shoehorned into the existing League organization chart. The combined load of largely invented statistics could be counted on to keep Yank Board snoops too busy to meddle in the delicate work of the Opium Advisory Committee—clearly a win-win situation.  

Financial and economic considerations also carried weight.  British India had for a century sold opium to China. France controlled a large opium-producing colony in what is now Vietnam, and was then the world's leading exporter of heroin. Out of Christian concern for the natives of their colonies in Java, the Dutch had gradually shut down opium production in favor of coffee and coca farming. The latter soon dwarfed all that South America could produce. Traditionally hostile to opium, the Japanese likewise recognized in coca a harm-reducing cash crop, and Formosa, today's Taiwan, became home to many coca shrubs. Dutch and Japanese delegates at League of Nations functions were naturally inclined to steer conversation away from the evils of coca, just as representatives of Arab nations were unamused by ignorant sermonizing on hemp "addicts."  European delicacy and etiquette also eschewed mention of America's violent prohibition of beer, wine and liquor. This was not made any easier by the world's first talkie, "Lights of New York" featuring bootleg murders, rum runners, hijackers and squealers being "taken for a ride."

Good reading: The Complete Works of Lysander Spooner, dirt cheap on Amazon Kindle, put that American libertarian polemicist at my fingertips on cellphone, tablet and PC. The conversion contains fewer than the usual number of typos and I recommend it. More info on Ahamed's Lords of Finance will follow soon. 

Cool stuff: Mellow Mood Imports has clothes 'n stuff you can dance in.(link) Charleston, North Carolina was where attorney Manly Sullivan was charged with violating the National Prohibition Act. He appealed and won on the argument that forcing him to declare and pay taxes on illegal income was a violation of the Fifth Amendment. The Charleston promptly became America's signature popular dance. This is a family-owned and operated small business in the spirit of American free enterprise. 

Get the big picture in Prohibition and The Crash on Amazon Kindle in two languages. After this you’ll be able to explain to economists exactly how fanaticism and loss of freedom wrecked the U.S. economy.

Prohibition and The Crash, on Amazon Kindle (link)

ASYLUM APPLICATION FORM i589 INSTRUCTIONS IN PORTUGUESE: INSTRUÇÕES PARA O FORMULÁRIO DE ASILO i589. What we did was make the Political Asylum 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)

Comment at Libertariantranslator or LIBtranslator, my political economy blog at https://libertrans.blogspot.com/

Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the adventures of a Rio de Janeiro man-about-town and the beautiful daughter of an elderly scientist–touting alcohol prohibition, eugenics and racial collectivism. Go to Amazon.com and look inside America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, cover art by Rene Bueno, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)

I also produce books and articles in Portuguese, using Brazilian historical sources at http://www.expatriotas.blogspot.com or www.amigra.us and in English at http://Libertariantranslator.wordpress.com (link)

My financial history blog, http://www.Libertrans.us, in Portuguese is Expatriotas for Brazilians, readable at www.expatriotas.blogspot.com (link)

Go ahead and comment. 

Do you need to contact a certified Translator or Interpreter?

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League Drug Power Play Background

 

Americans exported prohibition until collapse and war resulted, then doubled down after the disasters. 

League of Nations financials had painted a bleak picture in 1926. Drug-crop countries shoved into joining were nearly 10 million gold francs in arrears (roughly $2 million, at 5 to 1 exchange rate). By year's end they were barely $280,000 ahead. March 1927 brought the Nanking Incident (link), a UK-Soviet war scare followed in May, the month the Manly Sullivan Supreme Court decision made dope and liquor profits taxable. German markets tumbled without recovery. The French frank crashed and U.S. tourists there were importuned for police ID cards, yet French stock prices still held strong.(link) Now, January 1929, was the perfect time for U.S. prohibitionists already infiltrating the League with a Permanent Opium Board to exert unrelenting prohibitionist pressure crowding the Opium Advisory Committee to endorse deadlier laws against production and trade worldwide. 

The gap is where League pressure crippled German pharma 13JUL1931 and the drop starts at the Nanking "incident" in which Chinese attacked foreigners--especially Japanese foreigners 

By the 3rd meeting held 18JAN1929, Yanks were upping the ante. Frustrated in their designs, China and the US had stormed out of the 1925 convention, itself an admission that the Hague had balked at unlimited totalitarian repression of the sort now ratcheting up in the American Hemisphere. Warily, discussion turned to how much pressure the Central Opium Board could exert on the Opium Advisory Committee to influence the League Assembly toward coarser coercion. Italian Senator Cavazzoni--rebuffed in his effort to personally infiltrate the Opium Advisory Committee in 1926--likened the Advisory Committee to a cartel-dominated producers' lobby and launched into a tirade against the secrecy of the meeting now in progress. Japan's representative Sato Naotake thought the glare of publicity at that moment would add nothing constructive. Cavazzoni lost on a 6-2 vote in which only China's representative Wang King-ky backed him. 

Cavazzoni then went into a tirade citing League of Nations Covenant Article 23 which enlisted WW1 winners and losers alike into a Holy War on whatever Americans chose to regard as a dangerous drug. He falsely asserted that the Central Board was "a child of the League of Nations," indeed, an organ of same, before admitting that the said Sino-American entity was a creation of the 1925 "Geneva" convention. Japan's representative countered, citing the 1925 "convention" as overriding clauses of the 1912 Hague Convention. These had, after all, mutated rapidly until war resulted. The American-made League Charter inserting open-ended reference to future "conventions existing or hereafter to be agreed upon" was mirrored in the Versailles Surrender Treaty, which decreed from on high in its Article 282 that surrender meant surrender to the Hague restrictions on drugs that had started the war in the first place! 

Now is a good time to introduce this Italian Senator with his own words spoken at the 8th League Assembly in December of 1927 p67:  

"What was actually the aim of the League? The defence and progress of civilisation. But it was essential to know the meaning of the word "civilization", which was so often abused. Civilisation did not mean exclusively material well-being. According to the traditions of Christianity, civilisation was synonymous with morality." ... "These social evils — the drug habit, traffic in women, desertion of children, child criminality, the sale of obscene publications — were plagues which stopped at no frontier, and against which the isolated action of a single Government was very frequently insufficient. There accordingly arose a need for common action; and it was well to lay down certain principles which should indicate the road and the boundaries of the social activity of the League."

U.S. Rep Hamilton Fish couldn't help but recognize in Cavazzoni a kindred spirit. Small wonder Prohibitionist Americans wasted no time in deciding: "He's our boy!" 

Good reading: The Complete Works of Lysander Spooner, dirt cheap on Amazon Kindle, put that American libertarian polemicist at my fingertips on cellphone, tablet and PC. The conversion contains fewer than the usual number of typos and I recommend it. 

Cool stuff: Mellow Mood Imports has clothes 'n stuff you can dance in.(link) Charleston, North Carolina was where attorney Manly Sullivan was charged with violating the National Prohibition Act. He appealed and won on the argument that forcing him to declare and pay taxes on illegal income was a violation of the Fifth Amendment. The Charleston promptly became America's signature popular dance. This is a family-owned and operated small business in the spirit of American free enterprise. 

Get the big picture in Prohibition and The Crash on Amazon Kindle in two languages. After this you’ll be able to explain to economists exactly how fanaticism and loss of freedom wrecked the U.S. economy.

Prohibition and The Crash, on Amazon Kindle (link)

ASYLUM APPLICATION FORM i589 INSTRUCTIONS IN PORTUGUESE: INSTRUÇÕES PARA O FORMULÁRIO DE ASILO i589. What we did was make the Political Asylum 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)

Comment at Libertariantranslator or LIBtranslator, my political economy blog at https://libertrans.blogspot.com/

Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the adventures of a Rio de Janeiro man-about-town and the beautiful daughter of an elderly scientist–touting alcohol prohibition, eugenics and racial collectivism. Go to Amazon.com and look inside America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, cover art by Rene Bueno, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)

I also produce books and articles in Portuguese, using Brazilian historical sources at http://www.expatriotas.blogspot.com or www.amigra.us and in English at http://Libertariantranslator.wordpress.com (link)

My financial history blog, http://www.Libertrans.us, in Portuguese is Expatriotas for Brazilians, readable at www.expatriotas.blogspot.com (link)

Go ahead and comment. 

Do you need to contact a certified Translator or Interpreter?

Está procurando tradutor ou intérprete credenciado?

Americans v League of Nations, 2nd Meeting JAN1929

 

17JAN1929 marked 25days since the large seizure of addictive opiates and non-habit-forming cocaine at New York.(link) League medical experts at the 2nd Opium Advisory meeting quibbled over U.S. insistence on adding benzylmorphine to the index of drugs singled out for stringent regulation same as benzyolmorphine with the extra "o." A Swiss M.D. asserted the former was non-habit-forming. One of the U.S. allies seated on the Permanent Central Opium Committee auditing Opium Advisory Committee meetings pointed out that the concoction included more than 2% morphine. This U.S.-dominated committee had been meeting for close to two weeks already.

Already the vagueness of terms like "habit" and "addiction" were being exploited by Americans. U.S. laws back then banned sauerkraut for containing 0.5% alcohol as a result of natural fermentation. Future President Ronald Reagan--18 years old when League partisans tried to palm off certain opiates as non-habit-forming--would inherit the opposite tendency. Reagan's Republican partisans would undertake to override medical science to declare stimulating South American and Indonesian plant leaves "addictive" by political fiat--to the profit and amusement of tobacco peddlers--and whiskey peddlers by and by. 

News items that day in 1929 included reports of a brand-new investigation of the Ku-Klux Klan. That Christian denomination was best-known for violent insistence that  Americans of African descent were a much graver menace to the social fabric than the drugs and alcohol supposed by Klan congregants to make make the "race problem" even worse. NY Governor Al Smith--whose "wet" 1928 candidacy had caused the Ku-klux Klan to bolt to the Republican party--pleaded in radio broadcasts for donations for the Democrats. A new plan for collecting German war debts and reparations payments was under discussion--including a debt holiday or moratorium. The most unsettling of recent news stories was coverage of a Senate move to disclose tax returns of those seeking refunds. Next to that, a war involving Bolivia and the abdication of an Afghan king after three days in office were small potatoes. 

Seventy-nine years later, in January of 2008, big news items were Citi posts $10 billion loss, cuts 4200 jobs... Bank of America cutting 650 jobs to revamp economy... Dow-Jones industrials falling... Prohibition enforcement buffs were calling for expansion and tougher enforcement of anti-money "laundering" laws passed in 2006. We'll be comparing the run-ups to the 1929 and 2008 Crashes, so stay tuned.  Here is how discussions of pot houses (DEA and Methodist White Terror term) and grow houses (libertarian term) hit the media before and during the Bush faith-based asset-forfeiture crash of 2008 brought about by a law passed in 2006. 

This Google ngram is the graphic textual effect of faith-based asset forfeiture prohibition looting gone wild. Equity destroyed, the economy in collapse and Christian National Socialism defeated in elections by a more internationalist looter faction. 

Good Reading: Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner mentioned Lords of Finance by Liaquat Ahamed. Though good with gossip about the Lords of Creation between the China boycott and WW2, the author seems totally unaware that Germany led the world in chemicals and pharma products in 1914, 1931 and 1939. The book reads as if opium had not yet been discovered and the League of Nations existed for the sole purpose of blaming Germany for WW1. In actuality, the League was organized with American help for the sole purpose of replacing the Hague as lead-car vehicle for violent prohibitionism. This is set forth in Article 23 of the Versailles surrender treaty and of the League Charter--the articles NONE of the Crash explainers notice. "...entrust the League with the general supervision over agreements with regard to the traffic in opium and other dangerous drugs."   I'll report back, but so far the book seems another hack job published specifically to troll red herrings across any possible connection between the GW Bush Faith-Based Asset-Forfeiture "sharing" programs urging State and local police to confiscate mortgaged marijuana grow houses and the mortgage-backed derivatives Crash. All evidence indicates that once asset forfeiture losses surpassed burglaries in terms of dollar amounts, the bottom fell out of the mortgage-backed derivatives market PRECISELY because of those uncollectable mortgages. That landslide triggered the avalanche that wrecked the national economy in 2008--the year the book was written--perhaps to memory-hole or explain away any such causal relations. 

Notice to Microsoft: Your software makes repeated demands that I let it have access to my Apple photos. If (and this is merely an illustrative hypothetical) those photos were to include compromising images resembling a Microsoft founder or major stockholder at Epstein's Fantasy Island, I'm confident you would understand why I am not inviting Windows to rummage through the files. Kindly quit insisting as I have no plans to end up like McAfee or Epstein. I already have Linux installed on another machine and 2 Macs running.

Get the big picture in Prohibition and The Crash on Amazon Kindle in two languages. After this you’ll be able to explain to economists exactly how fanaticism and loss of freedom wrecked the U.S. economy.

Prohibition and The Crash, on Amazon Kindle (link)

ASYLUM APPLICATION FORM i589 INSTRUCTIONS IN PORTUGUESE: INSTRUÇÕES PARA O FORMULÁRIO DE ASILO i589. What we did was make the Political Asylum 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)

Comment at Libertariantranslator or LIBtranslator, my political economy blog at https://libertrans.blogspot.com/

Brazilian Sci-fi from 1926 featuring the adventures of a Rio de Janeiro man-about-town and the beautiful daughter of an elderly scientist–touting alcohol prohibition, eugenics and racial collectivism. Go to Amazon.com and look inside America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, cover art by Rene Bueno, translated by J Henry Phillips (link)

I also produce books and articles in Portuguese, using Brazilian historical sources at http://www.expatriotas.blogspot.com or www.amigra.us and in English at http://Libertariantranslator.wordpress.com (link)

My financial history blog, http://www.Libertrans.us, in Portuguese is Expatriotas for Brazilians, readable at www.expatriotas.blogspot.com (link)

Go ahead and comment. 

Do you need to contact a certified Translator or Interpreter?

Está procurando tradutor ou intérprete credenciado?