Task and Purpose has a video discussing the flow of fentanyl from China (thru Mexican drug cartels) which is killing thousands of Americans. Is this China’s revenge for the American involvement in the Opium Wars? Below I suggest that revenge is, at best, a manufactured justification to excuse bad behavior.
While it is surely interesting and helpful to study history (see this Reddit thread), the revenge motivation is probably only hypothetical. Insofar as it is employed by the Chinese government, it serves as a pretext for whatever China wants to do. Righting historical wrongs? Or merely to bolster claims it wishes to assert in the current context? E.g. the Chinese claims over much of the South China Sea rely on selective historical pickings, creative map re-drawing, and aggressive bullying to enforce these claims. See Bill Hayton’s book, The South China Sea.
Controlled Distribution: Propaganda and Fentanyl
Who controls (or at least polices) public sentiment in China? Any vast anger in China over the past grievances of colonial grasping for wealth is surely a product of the Chinese Communist Party’s effort to prejudice the populace against the West. And the story might work also to make gullible Westerners believe that some kind of social justice is being pursued by the CCP in its striving against the Free(er) World.
Since the Chinese Communists manufacture narratives and “correct-think” as assiduously as they manufacture fentanyl, and they do control discourse much more than they could control distribution of fentanyl, if they so chose to do so, it is more likely that revenge is a narrative to suit an agenda, rather than the motivation for the agenda.
It is interesting to note that national revenge for something that happened a century earlier is similar to other calls for collective guilt and collective victimhood. That’s a trope we’ve heard a lot of lately. It flies in the face of the concepts of individualism and progress, or even of an accurate description of the ever shifting and evolving groupings of the people of Earth. As Louis C.K. remarked about the pioneers who ventured West in America, “you would be a whole different group of people by the time you got there.”
