To get our heads around the staggering reality that the United States is now openly attempting to destroy the European Union, we might start with the Opium War. It was launched to force a highly addictive drug on a country that was trying to stop the damage it was doing to its society.

It tells us some important things about how far a superpower that has been captured by the pushers of lucrative toxins will go to further their interests. All resemblances to living people are very much intended.

The First Opium War, fought between 1839 and 1842, was really a series of massacres. Britain unleashed its vastly superior firepower on imperial China. It did so solely because the Chinese had the temerity to try to prevent the new western empire from flooding the old eastern empire with opium. The assault was driven by a fusion – very like that in Trumpworld now – of public and private interests.

The public concern was (again with loud echoes in the present) with the balance of trade. Britain imported huge quantities of tea from China, leading to a very large fiscal deficit. To correct this imbalance, the British forced millions of Indian farmers to grow nothing but opium, which it then pushed on the Chinese.

The private concern was the leading drug cartel, Jardine Matheson. One of its two founders, William Jardine, bribed English newspapers to........

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