Sarajevo: anarchy is war

A 2014 movie Das Attentat, americanized in translation as Sarajevo, tells a fictionalized version of the routine murder of a government big-shot by youthful dupes enthralled with communist anarchism. Why routine? Hardly a week went by without some collectivist or other trying to murder a mercantilist, politician or royalty.  The German-language movie on Netflix and Youtube seeks to convince the viewer that The Accursed Hun plotted and paid for the assassination for the payoff in railroad stocks for a rail line through Serbia/Servia.

Omitted from mention were the two time bombs hidden under the table at which the Archduke and Duchess Sophia were to have lunch–had not an anarchist bomb and gunshots intervened. Bombs in the chimney at another nearby eatery were also left out, along with the seven being smuggled by a woman in the neighborhood.(link) But the entire region had seen nothing but violence for the past four years.

Political violence was unremarkable for the opium-farming region of Bosnia at the time, and socialists and mercantilists routinely killed each other. But the important detail was that the Chinese revolt of 1911 had blocked dumping of morphine there. This meant that unshipped opium grown in the Balkans and refined in Austro-Hungary, Germany, Prussia, France, Italy and Holland began to accumulate in a heroin and morphine glut. The Balkan States promptly attacked their competitor, Turkey, then flew at each other’s throats with 240,000 killed amid looting, rapine, arson, starvation, disease, mutilation and religious genocide until August 10, 1913.

Glut: cheap morphine was a commodity additive

Another unmentioned detail was the Hague Opium Convention. This had been building since 1909 in a U.S.-led effort to stop the dumping of morphine in China and other Asian and African nations formalized . The Final Protocol of the Third International Opium Conference was signed at the Hague June 25, 1914 by former U.S. Minister to China, former Philippine commissioner and then-current Consul General at Vienna, Austria, Mr. Charles Denby, and also by M.A.A. de Jongh, former inspector general, head of the opium monopoly in the Dutch Indies (at the time also a major source of cocaine).

Read the original document (Link)

This June signing began the ninth inning of years of signature-gathering.  At a series of meetings beginning June 15, Conference attendees resolved that the Convention would come into force between all the signatory powers as soon as existing signatory powers and enough others had ratified it. Enforcement was expected to begin by December 31st, 1914. Instead, the Austrian Archduke and consort were assassinated three days after the preliminary signings, on June 28th, 1914.

Opium producers and refiners were thus saved by the bell when “former” anarchist Gabrinovic and his buddies carried out the assassinations.  Sir Edward Gray proposed a convention on problems in the Balkans, and on Black Saturday, July 25, all European securities markets crashed. Three days later President Woodrow Wilson decreed that under the newly-enacted income tax, returns filed by corporations would be public records open to inspection by State revenue agents of States with an income tax. U.S. stock markets immediately crashed and were shut down. They did not reopen for a long time because Austria also chose that very day to attack Serbia/Servia.

Word War I is also on the list of reasons voters are not attracted by anarchists. It is among the myriad reasons adding anarcho- to libertarian or capitalist (a 1972 smear tactic) does nothing but convince voters we are a band of bomb-hurling communists, just like every other anarchist that has ever made the news in any language.

Why not delve into the failure of Prohibitionism that caused the 1929 Crash? Prohibition and The Crash–Cause and Effect in 1929 does exactly that, matching newspaper accounts against stock market reactions and competing theories. It is live on Amazon Kindle for the price of a pint.

My other-language blog is amigra.us

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Income Tax, Manifesto Plank 2, 1913

America’s third income tax arrived, armed and dangerous, in 1913. Here’s how it was received at the time.
Boston Evening Transcript April 15, 1913
INCOME TAX ABSURDITIES  [From the Baltimore Star Rep.]
No matter what may be the Individual attitude toward the income tax as a simple proposition, the section of the new tariff bill which embodies this employment of a war-time measure in the midst of peace is full of absurdities which, it is to be hoped, will be eliminated before the bill reaches the White House.

The requirement that employers shall withhold from employees the proportion of salaries required to be paid as income tax, and thus become responsible for their employees’ compliance with the law, is open to great objection. It infers (implies) that the employee is not himself sufficiently honest or responsible to take care of his own relation to the taxing power, and thus does serious injustice to a large class of salaried people. The man who is capable of earning as a salaried employee more than $4000 a year is usually a man of principle and responsibility, quite as capable of dealing fairly with the Government as the man who draws his income from stocks and bonds or a personal share in a business.

This human necessity of providing for the investigation of questionable returns shows how much of an invasion of private affairs this tax will allow. Its enforcement will be a source of scandal and annoyance and doubtless of much unfairness. It will encourage evasion and subterfuge and the withdrawal of funds from healthy enterprises to take advantage of the special classes of investment which are exempted. In its train will come many evils of a serious nature. It involves a more serious menace to the party assessing it than any other governmental measure in contemplation. ***

SO what was going on in the world as the US government fastened this vampire tax on citizens? 

China–desperate to rid the nation of foreign dumping of poppy sap chemicals–had completely dismantled and replaced its government in 1911, and repercussions fanned outward. Republican President Yuan called the poppy the “all-destroying weed!”  In January of 1912, an election year, Congress overrode President Taft’s veto to make it a federal felony to transport alcoholic beverages into ku-klux-dry territory (as most of the Southern states had enacted prohibition).  Corn Products Refining, flagship of The Glucose Trust–doing for America’s home distillation what the British East India Company did for opium addicts in China–was named in a criminal information in an Illinois district court. A ban on “foreign” alcohol provided protection from competition for corn sugar, the ethanol precursor chemical.

Persia, on signing the Hague Opium Convention, signed with reservations about helping to enforce Chinese opium prohibition. This growing Hague Convention was a direct threat to France, Great Britain, and to the Prussia-Austria-Germany axis refining morphine from opium produced in the Balkans. That entire region was already breaking out in scattered warfare–and a naval arms race between Germany and England gained momentum. Montenegro declared war on the opium-producing Ottoman Empire in the fall, so a global opium war became inevitable. In 1912 an assassin tried to shoot the King of Italy, and another shot and wounded former President Theodore Roosevelt. These things were almost routine.

George Orwell’s father, Richard Walmesley Blair retired to the safety of England after earning promotion to Sub-Deputy Opium Agent, first grade. England had given in to Pressure for the Hague Opium Convention, leaving Germany as the recalcitrant holdout. Germany also manufactured a stimulant, cocaine, which Americans–especially William Jennings Bryan–feared (and Europeans craved) as some sort of sex drug liable to drive down the price of coffee. German pharmaceutical companies were dismayed when–by British suggestion–cocaine was bundled into the Hague Convention as though it had anything in common with opium. Italy pressed for and got the inclusion of Indian hemp drugs. Hemp would only be effectively banned in These States after the legalization of heavily taxed beer and liquor failed to generate enough revenue to satiate the greed of politicians.

Such was the atmosphere as Woodrow Wilson–like T.R. a friend of prohibitionism, also opposed to “private and selfish purposes”–became President. Congress prepared to implement another income tax lifted straight out of the Communist Manifesto of 1848 in anticipation of a global opium war it then knew to be inevitable and imminent.

Get the details in Prohibition and The Crash, on Amazon Kindle.

Prohibition and The Crash, on Amazon Kindle

If you favor legalization of safer enjoyable drugs as harm-reducing competition to weaken the black market in addictive narcotics, consider volunteering or making a donation to your friendly neighborhood Libertarian Party.  The LP is as old today as JFK was when gunned down, and our votes change bad laws.

Need a financial translation? Visit BrazilianTranslated.com

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