[Moltke]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars

“First Opium War”, second paragraph - American involvement.

Probably enough for revenge actions by America’s greatest current enemy.

[Moltke]

PS: In any case it does not take much to recognize that potent drugs can be used as an effective weapon, on a small scale or a large scale.

Even if individual Americans had never been involved in the old opium trade, the lesson was learned by the Chinese.

[Zhang Fei]

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_Wars

“First Opium War”, second paragraph - American involvement.

Probably enough for revenge actions by America’s greatest current enemy.

PS: In any case it does not take much to recognize that potent drugs can be used as an effective weapon, on a small scale or a large scale.

Even if individual Americans had never been involved in the old opium trade, the lesson was learned by the Chinese.]

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That’s not revenge - it’s pretext. As I pointed out, opium was consumed worldwide, including in China, prior to British opium. It was imports they had an issue with, not opium per se. The Opium War is China’s Protocols of the Elders of Zion - a blood libel against the West. The idea was that China can’t possibly have fallen behind due to the stupidity and incompetence of its elites, an extended cyclical downturn or sheer bad luck - it must have been the work of evil and conniving foreigners who succeeded in spite of their inferiority.

Now, scapegoating isn’t unique to the Chinese, but scapegoating it is. India also has its own variant. The difference is that China’s rulers, like Russia’s, believe that the country’s borders are as far as their armies can take them. That pretext provides a ready-made justification for starting large and bloody wars whose hardships a population steeped in its assumptions will put up with, for longer than one not suckled with the milk of national grievance, even if based on fiction.

Hitler did manage to get the German people to fight a war that killed 12% of Germany (even Japan surrendered after 5%) on the basis of the fiction that Jews were looking to destroy the world. His cure was to kill the world, along with every Jew, and repopulate it with Germans. Germany went along with it to the very end, the fall of Berlin.