Posted on 03/17/2024 7:22:41 AM PDT by MtnClimber
As farmer protests against radical “green” policies continue to sweep across Europe, liberal governments risk upsetting a delicate social balance that has led to relative peace and prosperity on the continent for decades.
On February 19, hundreds of tractors rolled down the streets in Prague protesting the E.U. climate policies and high energy costs. Two days later, hundreds more tractors blocked roads in Spain. On March 6, farmers in Poland also took to the streets to oppose the E.U.’s climate agenda. Belgium, France, Italy, and Greece have all seen similar demonstrations – which are themselves an outgrowth of Dutch protests that have continued off and on for a year over proposed new nitrogen emissions policies.
While the corporate media has largely ignored the widespread demonstrations against globalist trade policies and new emissions standards being implemented by several European governments and the European Union, the unrest is nonetheless one of the most significant storylines that has developed in Europe over the last several months.
In addition to opposing trade practices that allow foreign competitors like China to dump cheap agricultural goods into Europe, European farmers are also irate over the European Union’s so-called “Green Deal.” The platform, which aims to make Europe the world’s first “climate neutral” bloc by 2050, calls for cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 55 percent by 2030 and halving pesticide use – policies which would decimate small and family-owned farms throughout Europe and make the continent completely reliant on foreign food suppliers.
The Green Deal is also expected to be followed by a “Blue Deal” which would overhaul water rights policy in Europe. Again, farmers say the plan would severely undermine their ability to remain economically viable and dramatically cut into yields.
But as the protests have developed, they have also evolved into a general backlash against the liberal establishment in Europe and a re-assertion of traditional religious and cultural traditions and customs. For many of these farmers and the citizens supporting them, the effort to defeat these attempts to “revolutionize” European society is a crusade to defend Western civilization itself.
Professor Aurelien de Lancey, who advised Republican Party candidates on agricultural policy in the 1980s and 1990s, told me that the farmer protests are an “existential” battle for the future of Europe and the European Union. “From its foundation, agriculture has been the E.U.’s second-most important economic pillar next to the energy-intensive industries like power generation and mining,” he said.
The importance of farming to modern European society began with the end of the Allied effort to rebuild Germany and Western Europe at the end of World War II. As the United States handed control of the German economy back to Germany and withdrew from the continent, farming became essential to creating stable incomes and livelihoods so as to avoid further economic turbulence and a resumption of hostilities, as was the case with the rise of Hitler after World War I.
The late conservative French Prime Minister Raymond Barre, who also served as a vice president of the European Commission, once told me in an interview that when the war ended in 1945, developing a productive and stable agricultural sector was viewed as the most effective way to make future war between France and Germany “unthinkable.”
“The idea that directed the leaders who founded the European Union,” he explained, “was to uphold citizens’ liberties while restoring the moral, spiritual, and intellectual powers that built Europe… They knew stable farming growth would fortify traditional European families, the bulwark of the continent’s defense system.”
Retired Political Science Professor Jannick Schlüsselfelder, who advised the German Christian Democratic Union in the late 1980s, told me that the heart of European society was always in the farming villages, where traditional values like family and Christianity were the most important forces in society. “Nowadays,” he said, “we see socialist attempts to sabotage farmers who still oppose progressive concepts which are now at their zenith.” He added that the E.U. Green Deal is based on the concept that nature matters more than human beings – something which is antithetical to Christian teaching.
Philippe Fabry, a historian of law and politics, told me that “Europe as a whole today is at the same stage as France was a few years before the French Revolution… It is now a struggle between proponents of the socialist mega-state and its critics.”
Indeed, seeming to confirm that analysis, a group of protestors in Spain held up a sign which read, “We are ready to defend our freedom.” Other demonstrators have also clashed with authorities as farmers become increasingly desperate to defend their livelihoods.
Alfred Bujara, the head of the National Section of Trade Employees of the Solidarnosc Polish national trade union, told the Polish Catholic daily that the E.U. policies are “the last call to fight for farming and the local food industry because the E.U.’s effort to destroy it has advanced.”
“Brussels designed the socialist control of production, stock, and retail sales – the same bureaucratic monster Solidarnosc once defeated,” Bujara said, referring to the union’s role in overthrowing Soviet rule. “Solidarnosc is convinced that Europe must restore its own spiritual identity and return to the richness of the Christian heritage, where the source of her renewal and continued well-being lies, as opposed to the socialist policies advanced today.”
However, European voters have a chance to change course at the ballot box rather than in the streets during European Parliament elections this June. Anti-Green Deal candidates are currently expected to make big gains, while parties such as the Farmer-Citizen Movement in the Netherlands have also seen major victories in recent national elections.
It may thus be the case that the socialist forces which have dominated Europe for years are due for a “greenlash” led by farmers that could help restore the traditional values which first built Western civilization.
Ben Solis is the pen name of an international affairs journalist, historian, and researcher.
The farmers are protesting against the assault on freedom by government bureaucrats.
That is the whole goal.
Why the governments want to destroy the very thing that put them into existence is beyond me.
The deception of the devil is staggering.
Keep poking the bear.......
Nitrogen emissions? What? Now nitrogen is a “greenhouse gas”??? Absolute insanity!!!! Do they REALLY want to mess with food and risk mass starvation?
Do these idiots realize the massive effort it takes every day to keep the population fed? From producing the food on a farm, to collecting it, packaging it, shipping it to countless supermarkets??
Just ONE announcement of a problem in the supply chain would empty supermarkets in a day and if that delay continued, people like the elderly, disabled who couldn’t get to the supermarket fast enough, the poor who don’t have a stocked fridge would beging to starve.
This is going to happen, I know it because diesel is incredibly important in that process and you know these jackasses are going regulate/limit it’s use. Here come the bread lines.
The garbage establishment of the West has decided that they are now global citizens along with the other ultra-rich non-western countries and ow they hate the people they rule and want them dead. Perhaps we should return the favor.
“was to uphold citizens’ liberties while restoring the moral, spiritual, and intellectual powers that built Europe”
They sure blew that one.
These so-called WEF elites would rather rule in a flame-shot hell of desperation and starvation than to leave ordinary people alone to live their lives. It is the natural outcome of a soulless, existential despair. Slaughter and human sacrifice is their ultimate unholy sacrament.
Make the gallows and heads on pikes great again.
Been saying a starvation event may be in order.
Let natural law take care of mobs of usless and often dangerous human trash - living off others and hobbling society.
Survivors can have snacks and laugh while watching blue shitholians eat each other.
—> Do they REALLY want to mess with food and risk mass starvation?
Yes.
Mass starvation, Covid, war, are all tools to eliminate “useless eaters” and conquer the world.
They are evil.
They know that how “going Green” is really going RED!
The Highland Clearances (Scottish Gaelic: Fuadaichean nan Gàidheal [ˈfuət̪ɪçən nəŋ ˈɡɛː.əl̪ˠ], the “eviction of the Gaels”) were the forced evictions of a significant number of tenants in the Scottish Highlands and Islands, mostly in two phases from 1750 to 1860.
The first phase resulted from agricultural improvement, driven by the need for landlords to increase their income – many had substantial debts, with actual or potential bankruptcy being a large part of the story of the clearances. This involved the enclosure of the open fields managed on the run rig system and shared grazing. These were usually replaced with large-scale pastoral farms on which much higher rents were paid. They literally stole the common land from them and many were forced to immigrate to America.
The second phase involved overcrowded crofting communities from the first phase that had lost the means to support themselves, through famine and/or collapse of industries that they had relied on. This is when “assisted passages” were common, when landowners paid the fares for their tenants to emigrate. Tenants who were selected for this had, in practical terms, little choice but to emigrate. The Highland Potato Famine struck towards the end of this period, giving greater urgency to the process.
The eviction of tenants went against dùthchas, the principle that clan members had an inalienable right to rent land in the clan territory. This was never recognised in Scottish law. It was gradually abandoned by clan chiefs as they began to think of themselves simply as commercial landlords, rather than as patriarchs of their people—a process that arguably started with the Statutes of Iona of 1609. The clan members continued to rely on dùthchas. This difference in viewpoints was an inevitable source of grievance. The actions of landlords varied. Some did try to delay or limit evictions, often to their financial cost.[a] The Countess of Sutherland genuinely believed her plans were advantageous for those resettled in crofting communities and could not understand why tenants complained. However, a few landlords displayed complete lack of concern for evicted tenants.
Make no mistake, Western governments and the billionaires that control them have decided there's too many of us but, since there is nowhere to send us in a full world, they plan to genocide us.
My wife and I read some of the European press, in German and French mostly. The editorial slants of these mostly “captured” entities has been “green,” and now the editorial writers are trying to twist their minds and prose around the basic fact that “workers” — to use the Marxist sense — and “entrepreneurs” — in the better capitalist sense — are all twigging on to the idiocy of the “green” governance, as prices rise and energy gouges them. It is said that a conservative is a liberal who was mugged. The agony in the European press that “populism” and “nationalism” are allowing Europeans to think about their own prosperity and concerns as it is essentially attacked by green ideologues. We side, of course, with the individuals who will NOT be ruled by the Greens.
Sad but true.
What the attraction is to some people to feel the need to control the lives of those they never met is beyond me.
It can only be demonic in nature.
Isn’t it amazing how, when governments and leaders make decisions that kill and impoverish millions of their people usually end up dead?
Shouldn’t the apostrophe be AFTER the “S”, or is only one farmer protesting?
The farmers better be out for more than themselves. They better recognize the devil hiding in plain sight within the EU. ISLAM.
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