How many times does it have to be said? Ignore history and you WILL end up repeating its mistakes. When we see questionable things happening today, things that were done previously in recent history, we really should wake up and take notice. But in the West, very little real history is being taught, or it is revisionist history.
What many Western nations are now doing in terms of statist assaults on farming (more on that in a moment) has all been done before – and with horrifying results. Consider the man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine known as the Holodomor in which Stalin deliberately caused the deaths of millions of Ukrainians.
Plenty of good books are available on this. I just went to my shelves and pulled down one very important 1986 volume by English historian Robert Conquest: Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (Oxford University Press).
Let me offer just two brief quotes. Early on he says this:
In 1929-1932 the Soviet Communist party under Stalin’s leadership…struck a double blow at the peasantry of the USSR as a whole: dekulakization and collectivization. Dekulakization meant the killing, or deportation to the Arctic with their families, of millions of peasants, in principle the better-off, in practice the most influential and the most recalcitrant to the Party’s plans. Collectivization meant the effective abolition of private property in land, and the concentration of the remaining peasantry in ‘collective’ farms under Party control. These two measures resulted in millions of deaths…
Then in 1932-3 came what may be described as a terror-famine inflicted on the collectivized peasants of the Ukraine and largely Ukrainian Kuban … by the methods of setting for them grain quotas far above the possible, removing every handful of food, and preventing help from outside – even from other areas of the USSR – from reaching the starving. This action, even more destructive of life than those of 1929-1932, was accompanied by a wide-ranging attack on all Ukrainian cultural and intellectual centres and leaders, and on the Ukrainian churches.
And in a later chapter on the death toll he writes: “While our figure of c. eleven million premature deaths in 1926-37 remains firm, the c. seven million share of it in famine deaths is best described as reasonable or probable. If it is correct it leaves c. four million of the deaths to dekulakization and collectivization (or those taking place before 1937).”
Now if any of this is sounding a bit familiar – the state taking over farming and so on – well, it should. We see the beginning steps of this in various places, although obviously on a smaller and less horrific scale – so far. Let me highlight just one country: Holland. I have spoken before about how, in the name of saving the planet, the Dutch government is confiscating farms and putting farmers out of work, with the obvious results of food shortages and the like.
In that piece, I quoted Dutch conservative activist and freedom fighter Eva Vlaardingerbroek: “The Dutch farmers have had enough and are courageously fighting back against the Great Reset. They deserve your full support. They certainly have mine. It’s very simple: No farmers, no food.”
The situation there continues to get worse, with the latest news being that some 3,000 Dutch farms are to be taken over and shut down by the government. One Dutch news outlet puts it this way:
The cabinet has published its plans to reduce nitrogen-based pollution in the Netherlands and, as widely leaked, they include a buy-out plan for farmers. Ministers have confirmed that 2,000 to 3,000 farms and other major polluters located close to environmentally sensitive areas will be offered a buy-out deal amounting to ‘well over’ 100% of the value of their company. The leaks had suggest the deal would be 120%, but the terms of the buy-outs have not yet been finalised by ministers. There will be no compulsory purchases as yet, but if enough farmers do not come forward, ‘with pain in the heart’ we will have to move towards compulsory purchase, nitrogen minister Christianne van der Wal told MPs on Friday. ‘There is no better offer coming.’ The farms and other businesses which need to close will be told in January and ministers will assess if enough have come forward in the autumn.
So the state will take over these farms, whether farmers like it or not. And while this media report from mainstream media in Holland does not sound all that bad, I think Australian journalist Alexandra Marshall is much closer to the truth here as she reminds us of other recent historical lessons we have managed to forget:
The Dutch Minister for Nitrogen, Christianne van der Wal, announced that 3,000 farms will be forced to sell their properties to the government for immediate closure after ‘voluntary’ measures failed. Christianne van der Wal, who incidentally is a member of the Freedom and Democracy party, does not understand that if a person is offered two choices that both end with the government snatching their farm – there’s nothing ‘voluntary’ about the outcome.
Chairman Mao did a similar thing in China during his ‘Great Leap Forward’ and it ended with citizens eating their children. His regime forced collectivised farming across China, promising that it was ‘fairer’ and more ‘community-minded’ than all that self-interested private agriculture. Learning nothing from the deaths of 45 million Chinese, the Dutch Minister for Nitrogen moved closer to the limelight and allure of giddy, climate-worshipping reporters.
“For agricultural entrepreneurs, there will be a stopping scheme that will be as attractive as possible.” This is the villainous conclusion to the Dutch Net Zero scandal that forms part of an approaching global food shortage manufactured entirely by the United Nations and its unsustainable ‘sustainability goals’. Other victims include Net Zero poster child Sri Lanka which collapsed earlier this year and was all-but erased from the Climate Cult hive mind.
In addition to the Dutch government demanding 30 per cent of livestock in the Netherlands to be (literally – not figuratively) burned at the stake of Net Zero, Christianne van der Wal went on to offer ‘peak polluters’ a future involving a torture chamber of tailor-made permits and taxes.
She goes on to quote professor Ralph Schoellhammer of Webster University:
The Dutch are doing to their agricultural sector what the Germans did to their energy sector – and we all saw the consequences there. We get the promises that ‘Oh, this is not going to be a problem… we can move to alternative modes of production!’ and in the end they never work. In Germany, it is even more insane. They want 30 per cent of their agriculture to go organic, which means that they would turn from a net exporter of agriculture to a net importer of agriculture. During times of global food insecurity, it is complete insanity. The Dutch are doing the same thing. These 3,000 farms are just the beginning – and the Dutch government is saying this.
He also said that this is a “war against humanity.” See the video on this here.
And it is not just Holland but much of Europe that is being impacted by all this. And the bureaucrats in the EU are not helping much. As another report states:
Brussels has come up with a rescue plan to ensure European farmers can obtain fertilizers needed to grow food for a world on the brink of a full-blown hunger crisis. Only it seems no one — apart from the Commission itself — thinks the plan will actually work. “This new communication simply [fails] to provide concrete answers to the shortcomings faced by European farmers,” the EU’s largest farmers and agri-cooperatives lobbying alliance Copa & Cogeca said in a statement. “I haven’t seen anything in this communication that gives us predictability,” said Svein Tore Holsether, CEO of Yara International, the world’s largest fertilizer manufacturer, referring to the highly volatile prices of natural gas required to produce them.
Nor is it just Europe that is impacted by this – the whole world is. One writer looks at how places like Africa need MORE fertilizer, not less:
No innovation contributed more to the dramatic growth in crop production in the second half of the 20th century than synthetic fertilizer, which liberated farmers from depending on naturally occurring nitrogen in soil and animal manure. Increased fertilizer use has been largely responsible for crop yield increases in developing countries in Asia since the 1960s, leading to higher labor productivity and higher incomes. Growing staple crop yields can shift labor from agriculture to other sectors, ultimately increasing GDP per capita. The agriculture sector in much of Africa continues to be characterized by low fertilizer use—and low crop yields….
Scaling up fertilizer production is a key step in strengthening regional input and agricultural value chains so that African countries can become more food-secure. In the long term, investing in production facilities, local and regional suppliers, and natural gas infrastructure would reduce dependence on imported fertilizers from Russia, China, and elsewhere—making the continent more resilient to a crisis like the one it now faces.
The truth is, whenever you have the state coming in to tell us mere mortals that they can do things much better than we can, you should always be very worried indeed. As Ronald Reagan once rightly put it: “The most terrifying words in the English language are: ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help’.”
But don’t say you have not been warned. As our supermarkets get more and more empty, and as food prices continue to skyrocket, we know the reason why. And none of this should surprise us: many of those most mouthing off about ‘saving the planet’ are the same ones claiming we are overpopulated and we must act now to radically lower our numbers.
