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Tuesday, August 5, 2025

1931, repeat of 1923 prohibitionism!

1923's scary 3rd Party pumpkin on the left was Jew-baiting Prohibitionist Henry Ford!

The German economic collapse of 1923 is styled "The Great Disorder" by academics bound and determined to elide consideration of economic results of prohibition laws as Crimethink. This apparently sincere article follows the pattern, but presents economic data with such precision and clarity that adding the missing facts suffices to make it obvious that sumptuary prohibition laws wrecked both the German an U.S. economies more than once.(link)

The Collet-Fohlin paper hails from Geneva, home of the League of Nations mausoleum. The first Collet-Fohlin chart on p4, Early 20s Run-up to Hyperinflation shows no Financial/Monetary event. Here are a few omitted events heavily impacting Germany's trade and production.

On 02MAY--05MAY1921, between the 13 billion marks reparations bill and London ultimatum, the Report of the Advisory Committee on Traffic in Opium (with 4 Annexes) First session, Geneva, was presented for Submission to the Assembly of the League of Nations. Chinese delegate Koo's motion that opium production be looked into for possible limitation had passed. This directly threatened 4% of all Indian revenue obtained from the Government Opium Monopoly, along with the convenient belief that eating opium and all its morphine content was somehow non-habit-forming compared to smoking--which left morphine in the ashes. Reality was already raising its ugly head.

Article 6 of the Hague Convention, called for gradual and effective supression of the manufacture of, trade in and use of prepared opium--with a loophole 7 of the 10 members exploited. NOT ONE of the important cocaine manufacturing countries deigned to respond to League requests for information on that coffee-like stimulant. In fact, none of the coca-producing nations voluntarily signed the mutated Hague convention. Many were dragged into it by the surrender demands of Versailles Treaty Article 23. This Advisory committee had no real power to dragoon governments into prohibitionist enactments, but its recommendadtions went straight to the next meeting of the entire League Assembly in Geneva scheduled for 05SEP1921. Its effect, plus that of the British bans, may be assessed by the sudden reversing of Berlin Bourse share prices from increasing to decreasing in Colet & Fohn's Median Share Price chart:

One tiny corner of their chart graphing securities prices on German stock exchanges shows an informative blip... The oscillations following 01SEP and 05-08SEP League prohibitionist pressures are quickly eclipsed by exponential inflation of German currency farther to the right of the graph.

01SEP1921: Britain revived wartime regulations into the Dangerous Drugs Act (10& 11 Geo. 5. c. 46) which tacked on penalties for barbiturates (which competed with opium) and cocaine (smuggled into India and paid for in pounds sterling).
05SEP1921: The Assembly League of Nations met September 5th. As usual, arms control was the public face of proceedings in press releases, while sumptuary prohibitionist enactments were demanded with far less publicity in the same venue. (link)

08SEP1921: Brazilian regulations established controls on the entry of "toxic substances" like opiates and cocaine past the free port of Rio de Janeiro.

Wild gyrations in securities "prices" through the distorting lens of currency devaluation make subsequent reactions in this particular chart more difficult to make out visually. There is no question that military forces invading Germany's Ruhr valley to seize coal production facilities had a huge influence, but those events took place in 1922, well after the point of inflection in stock prices visible at September 1921 on the chart. This same sort of instability manifests itself again and again in 1927, 1929, 1930 and at the crucial approach to the Limitation Convention Germany (and Japan) were bullied into endorsing 13JUL1931.

References: TRAFFIC IN OPIUM AND OTHER DANGEROUS DRUGS--REPORT BY THE GOVERNMENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA FOR THE YEAR ENDED DECEMBER 31, 1938. This cost me $30 decades ago, but contains a wealth of charts and tables showing what happens AFTER major powers bully Germany and Japan into signing the ratcheting, overreaching and ever-expanding prohibition demands pressed for by Prohibitionist America and the remains of prohibitionist China--divided in the throes of yet another civil war. It is not a pretty picture. To the League of Nations, which places restrictions on data it shares, like Francisco D'Anconia I give my assurance that, I did not work for profit—I took a loss making these newsletters. Most of the facts I offer were disclosed by the above reference, Eisenlohr, Taylor, Walker and the League Historical and Technical Study of 1931--plus what I read in the papers. There has been a sudden relaxation of online censorship, and today I was able to read several documents I've hunted for decades.

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 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–in America’s Black President 2228 by Monteiro Lobato, 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

My financial history blog, http://www.Libertrans.us, is LIBtranslator, readable at libertrans.blogspot.com

Do you need to contact a certified Translator or Interpreter?

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Background and context for the U.S.-caused 1931 Panic that raised Hitler to power in Germany

Saturday, July 26, 2025

WHY Germany Collapsed in 1923

1924 Democrat Narcotics Plank: Recognizing in narcotic addiction, especially the spreading of heroin addiction among the youth, a grave peril to America and to the human race, we pledge ourselves vigorously to take against it all legitimate and proper measures for education, for control and for suppression at home and abroad.

Subsidized, paywalled academics nowadays announce as fact that the German mark sold at 17000 to the dollar in January 1923.(link) Yet according to the December 1928 National Geographic Magazine, p. 667, the mark was at 7000 to the dollar in the first days of January, 1923. Which version do you believe? After 32 years' reading these exhortations to look away from relevant facts, I believe none of them. Instead I call attention to recorded facts all of them struggle to omit, elide, blinker, blank out and ignore. Here is a newspaper chronology of the year 1923.(link) Observe that "habit-forming" drugs are mentioned exactly once March 1st, and that a month after the Lewiston paper blurted out a story claiming a million addicts ravaged in U.S. and urging pressure on Great Britain, Turkey and Persia to limit the production of such drugs to scientific and medical requirements.(link) Omitted facts include:

08JAN1923: 4th session of League of Nations Opium Advisory Committee meets Jan 8-14, 1923; US sends Dr Blue in unofficial, consultative capacity. US interests were: to exclude narcotics from country; to prevent American nationals from engaging in the illicit international traffic. /everything called narcotics/ [3rd was to continue to help China's prohibition] (Taylor 1969 152-3)

In the 4th Session of the Opium Advisory Committee, in 1923, a resolution was passed to the effect that one of the three League assessors appointed to the Committee by the Council should be a police expert. (Eisenlohr 1934 109)

At its [4th] session in January the Opium Advisory Committee had before it 2 major subjects: 1. Possible boycott of Turkey, Persia, Switzerland & others; 2. Definition of abuse. (Taylor 1969 154-7)

In January 1923, the French army had occupied the Ruhr, the industrial heart of Germany, and the mines and the factories had closed down. By November 1923, the German mark had dropped to a rate of 4 billion to the dollar. The Deseret News, March 13, 1961 pA4=3/15 (link)

Every other meeting of officious experts is reported--whether on reparations, armaments, treaty clauses, debt funding, or you-name-it. Only the League of Nations Opium Advisory Committee meeting is purged--and not just from the Aurora paper--nor solely at that particular juncture at which enforcement transferred from The Hague to the League of Nations as part of the surrender package forced on Austria-Hungary and Germany. The original opium prohibitionism had expanded in 1912-14 to drag in innocent and non-habit-forming preparations comprising a large part of Germany's industry and economic strength. An Orwellian "gentlemen's agreement" kept newspapers from mentioning opium convention mission creep as the cause of WW1, and the governments involved in precipitating that bloody war were only too happy to keep quiet. Writers like Eisenlohr and Taylor avoided mention of gin or cigarette prohibition lest broaching either might lead to other, unmentionable, subjects.(link) Yet Taylor did confess that Turkey had offered to cut back opium production if some substitute crop, like cigarette tobacco, were to show export potential. Orwell compared such self-censoring journalism to circus dogs trained to do somersaults even when no whip is brandished.(link)

There were also the ominous circumstances surrounding the sudden death of President Harding. His companion on that fateful trip to Alaska, Herbert Hoover, related in his memoirs that the President took him aside and asked him an ominous question. "If you knew of a great scandal in our administration, would you for the good of the country and the party expose it publicly or would you bury it?" Along similar lines is Louise Elizabeth Eisenlohr's 1934 observation that even after WW1 and the Versailles ramrodding of the Geneva Convention it only secured ratification sometime in 1928: "Finally, the opposition of one or two important manufacturing groups which had opposed direct limitation since it was first proposed, gave way under repeated attacks and the very real fear that exposure of their illegal activities would follow further resistance." The result, in her view, was that the Tenth Assembly of the League of Nations, in 1929, "passed a resolution "recalling the resolutions made in conection with the Geneva Conferences of 1924-25 for the direct limitation by agreement among governments of the manufacturing countries of the amounts of such drugs manufactured..." and requesting "The Advisory Committee to prepare plans for such limitation, regard being had to world requirements for medical and scientific purposes..."

That background brings us up-to-date with the misgivings Germany had to have been experiencing long before 03JUL1931--as the foreign noose tightened about the industrial, economic and financial veins in her Aryan throat. We will return to that subject presently. *-*-*

Interesting listening: America's Retreat From Victory, The Story of George Catlett Marshall by Joseph Raymond McCarthy.(link) Hundreds of pages into The Cold War, the narrative suddenly shut off (before any consideration of Red China and Kommunist Korea) and slipped into discussion of the Berlin Blockade, the American Airlift and the Candy Bomber. This suited me, inasmuch as demolishing the fantasy that the G. Catlett Marshall Plan had been some sort of libertarian excursion into a Germanic Galt's Gulch by a Congress peopled by prohibitionist rednecks the like of Harry Anslinger and Joe McCarthy was entirely satisfying.(link) Imagine my surprise, digging through audiobooks, when Joe McCarthy's vicious personal attack on Marshall and the Marshall Plan popped into view! At UTexas I had watched propaganda footage purporting to "prove" that McCarthy's "McCarthyism" was WAY worse than Hitler's Christian National Socialism. I absolutely could not tell which blustering boob was McCarthy... they all look alike to me to this day. The single difference is that unlike Hitler, McCarthy did not pepper his phrases with New Testament mystical gibberish, but restricted his remarks to a sort of Nietzsche-Ludendorff-Teddy Roosevelt National Collectivist outlook bearing a superficial resemblance to not-very-biased observation--compared to the rest of his looter pals in Congress at the time. To this day I listen closely to what anti-libertarians have to say about one another!