Asia's Jewish myths

[---]

Asia's Jewish myths

A CHINESE bestseller titled The Currency War describes how Jews are planning to rule the world by manipulating the international financial system. The book is reportedly read in the highest government circles. If so, this does not bode well for the international financial system, which relies on well-informed Chinese to help it recover from the present crisis.

Such conspiracy theories are not rare in Asia. Japanese readers have shown a healthy appetite over the years for books such as To Watch Jews is to See the World Clearly, The Next Ten Years: How to Get an Inside View of the Jewish Protocols and I'd Like to Apologise to the Japanese - A Jewish Elder's Confession (written by a Japanese author, of course, under the made-up name of Mordecai Mose). All these books are variations of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Russian forgery first published in 1903, which the Japanese came across after defeating the tsar's army in 1905.

The Chinese picked up many modern Western ideas from the Japanese. Perhaps this is how Jewish conspiracy theories were passed on as well. But Southeast Asians are not immune to this kind of nonsense either. Former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamed has said that "the Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them." And a recent article in a leading business magazine in The Philippines explained how Jews had always controlled the countries they lived in, including the US today.

In the case of Mahathir, a twisted kind of Muslim solidarity is probably at work. But, unlike European or Russian anti-Semitism, the Asian variety has no religious roots. No Chinese or Japanese has blamed Jews for killing their holy men or believed that their children's blood ended up in Passover matzos. In fact, few Chinese, Japanese, Malaysians, or Filipinos have ever seen a Jew, unless they have spent time abroad.

So what explains the remarkable appeal of Jewish conspiracy theories in Asia? The answer must be partly political. Conspiracy theories thrive in relatively closed societies, where free access to news is limited and freedom of inquiry curtailed. Japan is no longer such a closed society, yet even people with a short history of democracy are prone to believe that they are victims of unseen forces. Precisely because Jews are relatively unknown, therefore mysterious, and in some way associated with the West, they become an obvious fixture of anti-Western paranoia.

Such paranoia is widespread in Asia, where almost every country was at the mercy of Western powers for several hundred years. Japan was never formally colonised, but it too felt the West's dominance, at least since the 1850s, when American ships laden with heavy guns forced the country to open its borders on Western terms.

The common conflation of the US with Jews goes back to the late 19th century, when European reactionaries loathed America for being a rootless society based only on financial greed. This perfectly matched the stereotype of the rootless cosmopolitan Jewish moneygrubber. Hence the idea that Jews run America.

One of the great ironies of colonial history is the way in which colonised people adopted some of the same prejudices that justified colonial rule. Anti-Semitism arrived with a whole package of European race theories that have persisted in Asia well after they fell out of fashion in the West.

In some ways, Chinese minorities in Southeast Asia have shared some of the hostility suffered by Jews in the West. Excluded from many occupations, they too survived by clannishness and trade. They too have been persecuted for not being "sons of the soil". And they too are thought to have superhuman powers when it comes to making money. So when things go wrong, the Chinese are blamed not just for being greedy capitalists, but also, again like the Jews, for being communists, as both capitalism and communism are associated with rootlessness and cosmopolitanism.

As well as being feared, the Chinese are admired for being cleverer than everybody else. The same mixture of fear and awe is often evident in people's views of the US and, indeed, of the Jews. Japanese anti-Semitism is a particularly interesting case.

Japan was able to defeat Russia in 1905 only after a Jewish banker in New York, Jacob Schiff, helped Japan by floating bonds. So The Protocols of the Elders of Zion confirmed what the Japanese already suspected: Jews really did pull the strings of global finance. However, instead of wishing to attack them, the Japanese, being a practical people, decided they would be better off cultivating those clever, powerful Jews as friends.

As a result, during World War II, even as the Germans were asking their Japanese allies to round up Jews and hand them over, dinners were held in Japanese-occupied Manchuria to celebrate Japanese-Jewish friendship. Jewish refugees in Shanghai, though never comfortable, at least remained alive under Japanese protection.

This was good for the Jews of Shanghai. But the very ideas that helped them to survive continue to muddle the thinking of people who really ought to know better by now.

Ian Buruma's latest book is The China Lover.


http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story...51-7583,00.html

[plasticfan]

thanks nik, hmmm....no mention of the opium trade in that article.


Opium In China

By Thomas Keyes
Jan. 8, 2005

Arab traders introduced opium into China as a medicament during the Tang Dynasty (619-907) or Song Dynasty (960-1279) , During the Qing, or Manchu, Dynasty (1644-1912), imperial edicts, aimed at the British and Portuguese and outlawing opium and tobacco, issued in 1729, 1780, 1796 and 1800. In the 1820's, the British East India Company began exporting Indian-grown opium to China in quantity, but soon afterwards withdrew, franchising Jardine, Matheson and Co., founded in 1832 by two Scots, to handle the opium trade.

During the first decades of the 19th century, the Baghdadi Jews began arriving in India. The families that would attain prominence in Bombay and Calcutta included the Kadoories, Cohens, Ezra, Solomons, Gubbays, Eliases, and most notably, the Sassoons.

David Sassoon (1792-1864), fleeing the oppression of Daud Pasha, the governor of Baghdad, arrived in Bombay in 1832, where, borrowing 10,000 rupees, he went into business manufacturing textiles, and growing and transporting cotton, indigo and opium.

This brought David Sassoon and Co. into competition with Jardine, Matheson and Co. Incidentally, another company involved in opium, Russell and Co., included as partners Franklin Delano Roosevelt's grandfather as well as benefactors of Princeton and Columbia Universities.

In 1835, 2100 tons of opium were supplied to China's 13,000,000 addicts. By 1838, the figure had climbed to 2800 tons, and by 1853 to 3710 tons. On today's market, these tonnages would fetch billions, not millions, of dollars.

In the 1830's, Emperor Daoguang's opium commissioner, Lin Zexu, introduced measures to curtail traffic, punish smugglers and rehabilitate users. British and Jewish entrepreneurs, dismissing Lin's measures as sham piety and relying on the sophistry that selling opium from ships standing offshore did not constitute smuggling, continued their commerce. This led to the First Opium War (1839-1842) and the Treaty of Nanjing, forced on China by the victorious British. By the terms of the treaty, war reparations were paid to the British and Hong Kong was ceded to them, but opium remained illegal.

By 1850, David Sassoon and Co. was on an equal footing with Jardine, Matheson and Co.

In 1851, the Taiping Rebellion, led by Hong Xiuquan, who was inspired by Christian teachings, broke out in Guizhou and spread to the East China Sea. Though the rebellion aimed primarily at the overthrow of the non-Chinese Manchu rulers of China, one of the goals espoused by the rebels was ridding China of opium. On one front the British. perhaps at the insistence of the Jews, helped quell the rebellion, fearing the loss of their opium commerce. On another front, they actually waged war. The Second Opium War (1858- 1860) produced the Treaty of Tianjin of 1858. Enforcing the treaty prolonged the war till 1860. This treaty 'legalized' opium, that is, it did not specifically outlaw opium.

In 1864, the Taiping Rebellion, one of the bloodiest civil wars in human history, claiming as many as 30,000,000 lives, ended. It would be a misrepresentation to blame the rebellion on the British or the Jews, but it doesn't exactly redound to their credit that, during the internecine conflict, they were there profiteering in opium.

Though opium began growing on Chinese soil also at this time, the British and the Jews shipped 4800 rons in 1859. By 1880, this figure had skyrocketed to 6700 tons. David Sassoon and Co., now in the hands of his heirs and assigns, had taken over 70% of the opium trade, and a number of other Jewish companies had formed.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, Jardine, Matheson and Co. and the other British companies were forced out of the opium business by Jewish competition, and had to diversify or go belly up. By 1900, opium in China was a virtual Jewish monopoly.

Also, from 1858 on, Sassoon began to sell opium in Japan, in Nagasaki and Yokohama, where they a branch office was set up.

By 1900, there were probably at least 25,000,000 opium addicts in China. In 1907, Bengal and the United Provinces alone grew 3600 tons of opium on 1000 square miles of poppy fields for shipment to China.

The Shanghai Opium Commission, convened by Teddy Roosevelt in 1908 to address the problem, which had gained worldwide notoriety, led to the Hague International Opium Convention of 1912, but it wasn't till 1919 that the last of the chests of opium was destroyed, and the Baghdadi Jews were forced to go legitimate, having accumulated fabulous wealth.

Most Jewish sources today pass over all these machinations in silence.

http://bbs.chinadaily.com.cn/viewthread.ph...&tid=335802

[rsol]

Quote:Most Jewish sources today pass over all these machinations in silence.

was that a pun?

Quote:As well as being feared, the Chinese are admired for being cleverer than everybody else. The same mixture of fear and awe is often evident in people's views of the US and, indeed, of the Jews. Japanese anti-Semitism is a particularly interesting case.

of the US? sorry no. A kid with a pistol, but awe and wonder? having trouble with that one. importing clever people doesn't count.....