Some Background Data
- ZenPupDog
Ben Aris in Berlin and Duncan Campbell in Washington Saturday September 25, 2004:
How Bush's Grandfather Helped Hitler's Rise to Power
"Rumors of a link between the US first family and the Nazi war machine have circulated for decades. Now the Guardian can reveal how repercussions of events that culminated in action under the Trading with the Enemy Act are still being felt by today's president. George Bush's grandfather, the late US senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany.
The Newspaper Article
Confirmation from newly discovered files in the US National Archives that a firm of which Prescott Bush was a director was involved with the financial architects of Nazism. His business dealings, which continued until his company's assets were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act, has led more than 60 years later to a civil action for damages being brought in Germany against the Bush family by two former slave labourers at Auschwitz and to a hum of pre-election controversy.
The evidence has also prompted one former US Nazi war crimes prosecutor to argue that the late senator's action should have been grounds for prosecution for giving aid and comfort to the enemy. ..." [complete in link]
They're not going back far enough though ... and everyone forgets how Big Crime and Richard M. Nixon links up with the Bush family.
The WikiPedia's History of Opium
The image of the poppy capsule was an attribute of deities, long before opium was extracted from its milky latex. At the Metropolitan Museum's Assyrian relief gallery, a winged deity in a bas-relief from the palace of Ashurnasirpal II at Nimrud, dedicated in 879 BCE, bears a bouquet of poppy capsules (prudishly described by the museum as pomegranates).
Opium has been a major item of trade for centuries, and has long been used as a painkiller and sedative. It was well known to the ancient Greeks, who named it ''opion'' ("poppy juice"), from which the present name - a Latinisation - is derived. Many patent medicines of the 19th century were based around laudanum (known as "tincture of opium", a solution of opium in alcohol). Opium can also be smoked, sometimes in combination with tobacco. Opium smoking was often associated with immigrant Chinese communities around the world, with "opium dens" becoming notorious fixtures of many Chinatowns.
In the 19th century, the smuggling of opium to China from India, particularly by the British, was the cause of the Opium Wars. It led to Britain seizing Hong Kong and to what the Chinese term the "century of shame". This illegal trade became one of the world's most valuable single commodity trades and was described by the eminent Harvard University historian John K. Fairbank as "the most long continued and systematic international crime of modern times."
There were no legal restrictions on the importation or use of opium in the United States until the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act of 1914. Medicines often contained opium without any warning label. Today, there are numerous national and international laws governing the production and distribution of narcotic substances. Its pharmaceutical use is strictly controlled worldwide and non-pharmaceutical uses are generally prohibited. Opium was grown in back yards of Chinese People during the Wang Chung Dynasty.
