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Parallels between Covid-19 and the Opium Wars

COVID-19 is a global operation run for the benefit of the super-rich that aims to destroy the lives and the minds of the citizens of China, and the world. The current operation in China is most likely directed by private intelligence firms based in the United States, Israel, Great Britain, and also in China. Such private intelligence firms work for the rich, but pretend to be part of the government. They might be considered as “the direct descents” of the British East India Company that planned the first two opium wars. 

The British East India Company needed to destroy China in 1840 because it was the one great power that resisted integration into its global trade system controlled by the imperialists and the only great power that possessed an advanced civilization capable of competing with the Western tradition.

There are three main similarities between operation COVID 19 and the Opium Wars

Abuse of medicine for political control

Medicine was a big part of the strategy of the British to take over China in 1840. The British introduced “advanced” Western medicine to the Chinese, suggesting that Western science had produced miracle medicines which could cure any disease. Some medicines were based on real scientific advances, but most of these miracle drugs were powered by addictive opium.

Not only were the sales of these “Western” medicines brimming with opium (heroin) profitable, they also weakened the will of the Chinese, undermined traditional ideologies (including homeopathic medicine) like Confucianism, and they rendered the Chinese as consumers rather than citizens. The ultimate goal was not making Chinese healthy, but creating an apathetic, narcissistic, and indulgent ruling class.

The project was largely successful.

China’s economic independence was undermined gradually over decades as the decision making process within the Chinese government was infiltrated by British agents (mostly Chinese intellectuals who imagined themselves to be reformers). A new generation of Chinese intellectuals also came to power who were brainwashed by books and magazines to see Britain as a more civilized nation.

Chinese youth were taught by the Chinese who had studied in London that England was rich and powerful because of the high moral character of its citizens, because of its advanced systems of education and its use of the scientific method, and because of its remarkable technologies born of an enlightened civilization that the Chinese had failed to achieve. By comparison, Chinese culture was backwards and foolish.

The truth that was hidden from the Chinese seeking salvation in Western modernity was that the wealth undergirding British progress was not generated by the protestant work ethic, or the refined civilization of the upper classes. No! That wealth was the product of the ruthless slave trade wherein millions of Africans were sold to create farms in the “New World” that put ordinary farmers at home out of business and created enormous fortunes for London bankers. That wealth was also generated by the takeover of India, Bangladesh, and Arabia that allowed the British to seize the assets of those nations.

Today, Western pharmaceutical corporations market allopathic medicines in China of doubtful use, employing massive budgets to advertise such products to Chinese as “advanced” western medicine. Many of these medicines contain opium products, or artificial opiates, that are similar in function to the opium used against the Chinese in nineteenth century. Many of these Western medicines are addictive, mood altering, or both.

Chinese suffering from depression because of the brutal contradictions of a decadent capitalist society are told by their doctors that the problem is a disease and they are prescribed “Western” medicines that contain opiates. The process is quite similar to the abuse of opium in China by Western corporations in the 19th century.

The dependency on opium enforced in the 19th century also parallels the forced dependency on vaccines, that is demanded by the state in order to live a normal life in China.

Global crime syndicates like the World Health Organization use false science to undermine the health of the Chinese and to force an artificial dependency on vaccines.

Nor is the promotion of addiction among Chinese limited to pharmaceuticals. The constant push for smart phones, social media, games, and pornography in Chinese society, creating an environment in which literally all citizens have no choice but to carry a smart phone and to respond to its demands. Such actions create artificial new habits and dangerous addictions and dependencies in the Chinese people that allow for further exploitation.

The content of media is not meant to convey information or wisdom, or even to entertain in the traditional sense, but rather to slowly alter the function of the brain by inducing dependency on short-term stimulation (dopamine release) and inhibiting concentration.

Such addictions inhibit complex, three-dimensional thinking, and reduce the ability for long-term planning of the citizen. If you check social media giants like Wechat and Toutiao regularly for a few months you will no longer be capable of thinking for yourself.

The purpose of the new media in China backed by multinational investors is NOT to make Chinese more independent-minded and open to new ideas, but to render them so docile that they will accept a state of virtual confinement.

The second strategy is to destroy the authority and the legitimacy of Chinese culture by promoting as superior an artificial Western culture through images and texts which suggest that the West is attractive, authoritative, fulfilling and materially rich.

That strategy was critical to the success of Britain and other imperialist powers in China after the Opium Wars. Westerners declared that China’s civilization was, by its very nature, backwards and limited. British scholars and missionaries argued that the Chinese characters, Chinese family practices, local customs, even the core of tenets of Chinese philosophy, had to be abandoned before China could become modern and thereby could be saved.

Today, Young Chinese are bombarded with images of Starbucks, Adidas, Chanel, and Louis Vuitton which are designed to make it seem as if Western people (Americans) are rich and self-confident, that they legitimately get pleasure from wasting money on food and drinks.

The lives of privileged people who live in big houses, drive fancy automobiles, are cold and aloof, are presented as something to be envied, as a model for youth. This destructive ideological campaign is not merely an effort to expand market share. It is an operation intended to undermine Chinese cultural authority so that a debased and decadent consumer culture (created in Hollywood with corporate funding) can be fed directly to the people.

Corporate advertising in Qingdao encouraging a narcissistic culture of the privileged

A similar strategy was pursued by imperialist powers in China during the 19th century. Chinese civilization in 1840 was complex and sustainable, as sophisticated in its art, its literature, its learning and its government administration as any nation on earth. The number of books published, the number of educated people, in China was without match in the world.

Ironically, British explicitly imitated the Chinese civil service system in the 1870s when setting up its own civil service system to manage the empire—but only after destroying the Chinese government from within.

The promotion of trains, telegraph lines, postal systems, and electric lights in the 19th century served to undermine the sovereignty of China and to destroy the ability of the Chinese to govern themselves by making accepted practices seem outdated and backwards and demanding that foreign experts (or Chinese trained abroad) to take over large sections of the decision-making process in government. China lost control of its culture, its educational system, and ultimately of its government over the fifty years following the humiliations of the Opium Wars.

If we look at the current ecological crisis, and the decay of human civilization, we cannot help but question whether any of that modernization ideology was founded in scientific truth.

A similar process is taking place today in China whereby technology, in the form of on-line purchasing, geo-fencing, the use of QR codes, the promotion of 5G and a variety of applications controlled by unseen corporate powers are being implemented everywhere in the name of modernity. There is no transparency in China as to how policy decisions are made.

The problem stems not from the authoritarian Communist Party of China, but rather from the privatization of local government resulting from the push for automation and digitalization that is promoted by multinationals like Cisco, SAP, and Amazon.

Store shut down in Changsha by obscure COVID-19 directives and demand for QR codes for use of facilities.

China is not an inscrutable Fu Man-Chu power deviously plotting to take over the world, but rather a victim of multinational corporations determined to destroy any resistance to a neo-liberal consensus in China.

Just as the Qing Dynasty was blamed for the covert attacks of the British East India Company and others, including the horrific crypto-Christian Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864) that nearly toppled the dynasty, now the Communist Party of China is blamed for a totalitarian nightmare that was developed by foreign multinational corporations.

This devious scheme to blame the Chinese for the orchestrated controlled demolition of Chinese society is precisely the strategy employed by the British Empire in the Opium Wars.

Of course there are plenty of corrupt members of the CPC up to their elbows in profits from this criminal takeover, but the ultimate power is not the Chinese government.

Many educated Chinese now want to move abroad because of the oppressive “zero-covid” geo-fencing and contact tracing that is being implemented and that is turning Shanghai and Chengdu into the Gaza Strip using the know-how of Israeli subcontractors.  Few indeed are able to grasp the true nature of the transformation of China.

The third step in the British assault on China in the nineteenth century was the integration of China into a global trade and finance system that London controlled for the benefit of the few.

China wisely avoided large-scale foreign trade during the Ming and Qing dynasties because of legitimate concerns with food security, economic independence, and the preservation of local economies. The British not only forced trade agreements “unequal treaties” on China, as did other colonial powers, after the Opium Wars, they also cultivated a new crop of Chinese intellectuals in cities like Shanghai who argued that Chinese participation in global trade and finance was the only way to become “advanced.”

A significant group of the wealthy in major Chinese cities see their class interests as aligned with the globalists. They promote AI education that dulls the mind, argue for smart cities that enforce a prison planet culture they embrace an on-line environment that renders the Chinese dependent on foreign IT contractors, and opens the doors wide to foreign manufacturers of drones and robots who intend to further the “Gaza Strip transformation” of China.

Parasitic figures like Warren Buffett are trotted in the Chinese media occupied by the globalists and presented to the public as economic geniuses. Chinese universities, under pressure from corporations demanding “modernization,” have abandoned the economic analysis of class struggle and parasitic global finance that was once standard in favor of misleading globalist growth doctrine.

The intentional flattery of the Chinese by members of the billionaire class like Jim Rogers or John Thornton, and also by professors at Harvard or Stanford, is key to this assault. Chinese are told by corporate media at home and abroad that they will soon overtake the West, that China leads in technology. Huawei and Xiaomi are praised by select Western experts, implying that China offers the world hope for future development.

Although there is some truth mixed in these flattering words, the purpose is devious. Chinese are subject to a propaganda campaign arguing that they must accept Western standards for success (growth, consumption, exports, and digitalization) that will render citizens passive and indulgent, that demand a high level of energy consumption, and that increase reliance on trade and logistics systems controlled by the globalists—if they want to be the great power of the 21st century.

The promotion of endless growth as the ultimate goal of the economy, a policy that lacks any scientific basis, merely increases the use of fossil fuels and demands harmful overproduction in China. Throw-away plastics pollute the ground and the oceans, thousands of unneeded automobiles and computers are produced to meet growth goal set by Westerners.

Marxist Economic Analysis

The plenary session of the 20th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China held on October 23 was distinctive in its clear affirmation of the centrality of Marxist economic theory for the People’s Republic of China. The corporate media immediately attacked President Xi Jinping for being a backwards socialist running against the tide of history. How could it be that China would embrace the discredited and bankrupt ideology of the ruined Soviet Union, Communism?

Recently, Winston Smith argued that the entire World Economic Forum bid to seize control of the global economy is the product of “Communism” in his essay “The Left’s Grasp.” Somehow a viable alternative to control by the globalists is discredited as a puppet of those globalists.

But the consultants for multinational banks had no trouble assessing the threat of this move in China to return to “Marxist economics”.

If China manages to start applying Marxist economic analysis in research, in media analysis, and in economic policy, highlighting class warfare, ideological manipulation, and the misuse of capital and the abuse of overproduction, it would become the only nation in the world to do so, and would do so at precisely the historical moment when such an approach is desperately needed.

The globalists cannot allow China to use Marxism in its analysis because that could make China the a powerful nation not only in an economic sense, but in an intellectual sense as well.

Another danger posed is the centrality of science, and the scientific method of rigorous analysis, to Marxist thought—drawing on the foundations of modern science in the epistemology of Kant and Hegel.

The COVID-19 campaign, whether in China or the United States, was made possible by degrading science, by making hospitals and medical experts puppets of global finance, and by bribing doctors to endorse unscientific policies. In many cases, appeal to the scientific method has become a crime.

COVID-19 is not science at all but rather “sciencism,” the false ideology wherein the authority of the ruling class is disguised as “science.” The ability of the citizen to confirm scientific truth through independent action has been prohibited.

The billionaires are terrified by the potential unleashed by the 20th plenary. Although the globalization, consumption narcissism, and technology fetishism used by globalists to control Chinese remains in place, the relative value of modernization has been weakened. Moreover, the exclusion of Li Keqiang from the Central Committee, a long-time supporter of the globalists, suggested a struggle in the CPC to move away from a globalist vision and restore the Marxist tradition.

Marxism has its clear weaknesses. But compared with the drivel that billionaires pay Harvard Business School professors to teach their students, Marxist economics is an advanced science. If China leads a global Marxist movement based in scientific analysis of the contradictions of the economy and ideology, that will have mass appeal in every country in the world.

Finding a real solution

The ultimate plan of the billionaires behind the current third opium war is to make all citizens of the world, starting with China, dependent on global banks for money, on multinational corporations for food and employment, on IT firms for interaction with others, and confined to their homes where they will be rendered irrelevant through automation.

The only solution to this war on humanity is to give up the entire dangerous developmental growth model that has been promoted by neo-imperialists after the Second World War, to create local cooperatives for agriculture and production, and to create a culture wherein the value of actions is assessed in terms of wisdom, virtue, and sustainability–and not in terms of money.

A return to a truly sustainable civilization that promotes the best for all of humanity for the next thousand years, and that rejects the creation of a slave society through bio-fascism, technology authoritarian, or of genocide.  Chinese Confucian and Daoist thought, or even Chinese interpretations of Marx like those of Mao Zedong could offer a real alterative.

The solution to this attack is an alliance between Americans and Chinese against the techno-fascism that has infected those two nations and which is being exported out to the entire world through the American control of ideology and finance and the Chinese control of manufacturing and distribution.

Yet such a powerful alliance of Chinese and Americans against techno-fascism is made impossible by the current “new Cold War” campaigns that make any interaction between the two countries suspect.

The current Third Opium War can only be stopped in its tracks if an alliance between Americans and Chinese of conscience can be assembled that oppose the dark alliance of global finance and IT tyranny that has woven the two countries together in a horrific death pact, a “Frankenstein Alliance.” The time has come to start precisely such a movement.

Chinese version of the article available at this link.

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This article was originally published on Fear No Evil.

Emanuel Pastreich served as the president of the Asia Institute, a think tank with offices in Washington DC, Seoul, Tokyo and Hanoi. Pastreich also serves as director general of the Institute for Future Urban Environments. Pastreich declared his candidacy for president of the United States as an independent in February, 2020.

He is a regular contributor to Global Research.

All images in this article are from Fear No Evil