By Steven Yates
January 23, 2024
What we can learn from the German farmers, including what we aren’t supposed to infer about what is possible.
For much of this first month of the new year, protesting farmers have practically shut down Germany. They’ve used trucks and tractors to block major highways in and out of Berlin and several other major German cities. They’ve received massive popular support and been joined by others in “low tech” professions (electricians, rail workers, etc.). Additional support has come from their counterparts in The Netherlands who have been fighting this same battle for over a year now, and from Poland and the Czech Republic.
American media only began noticing the protests after they had been going on a couple of weeks. You’d think the world’s largest protest movement shutting down Europe’s largest economy would be an international story on every home page. You’d have been wrong. I think American media began covering what’s been happening in Germany because they had to know alternative media was on it, and that the truth was going to get out one way or the other. If anything, American corporate media outlets (CNN, MSNBC, the rest) ignoring something like this hurts their credibility even more than it’s been hurt already.
What we’re seeing amounts to a mass revolt against planned budget cuts aimed directly at farmers announced near the end of December by the (pro-globalist) Olaf Scholz government that took the reins in Germany last year. The cuts were to include subsidies for diesel fuel and tax exemptions for tractors and other farm equipment.
These cuts — equivalent to massive tax hikes — would cost farmers thousands more euros per year to operate. Their contention is that this would cost them their livelihoods.
The mass protest has all but shut down Berlin and other major cities. In what coverage we have, one sees signs, mostly in German but a few in English reading, “No farming, no food!” and “No farmers, no future!”
Another reads, “When farmers are ruined, food has to be imported.”
In a few cases the revolt has led to calls for new elections, deeming the coalition Scholz leads “incompetent.”
It might be worth noting that these people have been outdoors, sometimes for days at a time, enduring brutally cold weather with subfreezing temperatures. It’s clear: they mean business. We’re seeing people who don’t think they have anything to lose, revolting against “their” government.
The backdrop here is that Germany’s economy is in catastrophically bad shape. Official numbers show that it contracted last year. German citizens have seen huge spikes in energy costs, higher taxes, and massive inflation. A lot of this is due to what happened to Nordstrom last year. Germany’s budget for 2024 made these cuts to absorb tens of billions of suddenly-unavailable euros after the German constitutional court ruled against a proposal reallocating unused emergency covid-19 funds to agricultural and related sectors. That was in November.
In the wake of the present outrage the Scholz administration has backed down a little, retaining tax exemptions for farming vehicles and announcing that subsidies for diesel fuel would be curtailed little by little instead of eliminated all at once as was the original plan.
To the farmers, this was not good enough. They’ve continued the protest.
Joachim Rukwied, president of the German farmers union, stated:
Agricultural policy is being made from an unworldly, urban bubble and against farming families and rural areas. We demand the complete withdrawal of these tax increases without ifs and buts.
The Urban-Rural Divide.
Among the elements in play here is a divide paralleling the one in the U.S: urban versus rural. The former look down their noses at the latter. The latter see the former as clueless about where their food comes from and what it producing it involves.
The latter’s fear is palpable: “right wing” parties such as the Alternative for Germany (AfD), already gaining in popularity, will capitalize on this.
It is important to note that the farmers themselves deny being right wing. “We are not right-wing extremists!” said one. They are just trying to survive in an environment that is increasingly hostile to their interests.
Nevertheless, we’ve seen a reaction not unlike the borderline-violence of the Justin Trudeau regime in Canada against the Canadian Trucker Convoy back in 2022. Those truckers were protesting an unprecedented covid-19 vaccine mandate. Most were, as is usually the case with patriotic groups, peaceful. A few got out of hand. Someone vandalized a memorial statue. The Canadian government and media treated these outliers as the norm. This is typical of corporate media generally.
Remember (Young Global Leader) Justin Trudeau’s words, having slandered the Trucker Convoy in his country as full of “far right white supremacists”:
“Freedom of expression, assembly and association are cornerstones of democracy, but Nazi symbolism, racist imagery and desecration of war memorials are not.”
He then invoked Canada’s rarely used Emergency Powers Act in order to quash the protest by brute force. Banks proceeded with a chilling move: freezing the accounts of those associated with the protest, indicating the degree of private sector cooperation with government (a hallmark of corporatism, the polite term for the merging of governmental and corporate power global elites have furthered).
Returning to the situation in Germany: like other Western governments, the German government has sent money to Ukraine, and like other Western governments, Germany’s Establishment has funneled resources into so-called green initiatives for what some call a “green transition” to fight “man-made climate change.” Such official narratives are taken for granted in corporate media. The first continues to demonize Russia without recognizing that sanctions against Russia have backfired and hurt millions of common people, especially farmers for whom the cost of fertilizer (which comes from Russia) has skyrocketed to near-unaffordability.
The latter continues to smack of invocations of The Science that were seen during plan-demic years to justify authoritarianism. I’ll return to this point.
If Rural Populations Are Moving “Rightward,” Is It Hard to See Why?
Suppose we grant, for the sake of argument, that rural populations worldwide are indeed moving “rightward.”
Why would they do so?
Because “the left,” which long ago defended the interests of working people against those in power, no longer does. It has instead allied itself with globalism and become part of the urban money-and-power structure. Leftists do not seem bright enough to realize that those at the very top of this structure couldn’t care less about the fetishes that drive much of “the left” today (e.g., gender-bending).
In other words, working peoples the world over are turning, at least somewhat, to “right wing populism” because self-identified leftists dropped the ball. They joined the enemy. In most cases, they became the enemy. Parties like the AfD in Germany, Marine Le Pen’s National Front in France, Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom in The Netherlands; and obviously the Trump-led Republican Party on our side of the Atlantic (also figures like Jair Bolsonaro who is now persona non grata in Brazil courtesy of that nation’s leftist Establishment) have picked it up.
The mass protest in Germany suggests just how despised the urban elites are, even by those who don’t know the behind-the-scenes players. German farmers aren’t further a political agenda of their own. They’re too busy trying to survive. All they want is to be able to sustain their businesses, feed their families, and pass their legacy on to their children.
Or as I’ve said in articles past; what they want is to do their work, deal with those in their orbit peacefully, and otherwise be left alone. They’re up against people and forces that don’t gain power and profit from leaving them alone. Subsidies? It’s hardly their fault that structural factors have made such practices necessary in the West’s increasingly neofeudal brand of elite-controlled hyper-capitalism.
There is good reason to believe that globalists want to do a slow controlled demolition of farming as an industry.
Why on Earth would they want to do that?
Because farming — family farming, not factory farming — enables independence, for the farmers themselves, their families, and local and national economies. It enables health; it enables freedom. Globalists don’t want either one. They don’t want independent commoners, or thriving local or national economies. They want a single, globally seamless, mass consumption “marketplace” (including processed foods and other things they’ve specified) under the control of their corporate leviathans. They are wealthy enough to also control governments who decide such things as subsidies, and also set immigration policies able to dilute the voices of native populations.
The long and the short of it: they want serfs, of whatever nationality and ethnicity, who will depend on them for the necessities of life, including food, which means believing what they are told to believe and doing what they are told to do, and it all be legal.
Very likely, they want fewer of these serfs. Enter the covid-19 shots on top of decades of unhealthy food, diminished economic standing of entire populations, readily available illegal drugs, all leading to hopelessness and a rising suicide rate on top of whatever damage the others are doing. You have a recipe for eventual depopulation.
Liberals and lefties who don’t know any better — they aren’t the brightest lights in the harbor! — are either in denial or are going along with this scheme.
But What About the Climate?
But what about the climate? will scream some of these latter. Burning diesel fuel harms the planet!
I’m not an authority on so-called climate science, which is why I’ve not written about it very much. But Malaysian astrophysicist and engineer turned climate skeptic Dr. Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon is, and maybe we should listen to him when he denies that anyone has established a solid causal connection between the use of so-called fossil fuels generating carbon dioxide, and rising average global temperatures.
It is past time to ensure that alternative points of view have a place at the table versus what has become another dominant narrative, another domain of The Science, which is that human activity, including farming activity, is killing the planet — so we either rein it in or else.
Unfortunately, climate change has become another of those issues, like race and sexuality, about which open and rational international dialogue and debate have become all but impossible because one side insists it has Absolute Truth (“Settled Science”) on its side, and cites another mantra, false equivalence, to shout down critics.
Call me an amateur climate skeptic if you want, but it’s clear to anyone who looks into the history: efforts by globalists to use environmental concerns as a path to power go back at least to the early 1970s. Remember the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth? Or the predictions of biologist Paul Ehrlich in works such as The Population Bomb? These efforts made numerous predictions which have proven groundless.
Lessons for Americans the Globalist Elites Don’t Want You to Learn.
There are important lessons here for Americans, depending on what transpires this year and could interfere with Election 2024 being free and open. Within these lessons are the reasons American corporate media don’t want you paying the plight of German farmers any attention.
The lessons are about how to have an effective and mostly spontaneous mass protest that is peaceful. It is peaceful because its leaders and participants don’t want to hurt anybody. Again: they just want to conduct their business and otherwise be left alone. A peaceful mass protest will be effective if it shuts down society to the point where those in power have no choice except to listen.
Our situation doesn’t directly involve agriculture — yet!*
It involves ensuring free and fair elections. It involves we the people, not courts or elites, deciding who will be on ballots in November, and whether we’ll even have an election if it looks as though Trump might win or if the global elites will orchestrate another emergency, fake or real.
I don’t think it likely that the Supreme Court will kick Donald Trump off primary ballots nationally or allow any individual states to do so — especially with the clear support he has (he won resoundingly in Iowa).
Having said that, I don’t think the odds of a ruling favorable to Trump rise to one hundred percent.
The GOP base has to be prepared to take to the highways of America in a fashion identical to that of German farmers, shutting down major thoroughfares wherever possible (leaving lanes open for deliveries and emergency vehicles as the Germans did), should Trump be removed from ballots against people’s will. Such a movement has to be prepared to weather media hostility and possible violence from leftists as well as from authorities themselves.
As I’ve stated multiple times: those who got their power back on January 21, 2021, are likely to do anything to keep Trump 2.0 from happening. They have plenty of cards left to play. Some we’ve probably not seen yet.
Germany’s farmers have shown Americans what to do, and how to do it peacefully.
This includes policing themselves with a few simple rules: no violent rhetoric! No calls for violence against any federal or state officials, or against police! Trump’s legal team has warned of “chaos and bedlam” if we see election interference coming from Democrats or the Democrat-controlled legal system or others with real power. Corporate media have interpreted this as calls for violence. Naturally.
What this means the necessity of keeping the hotheads on their leashes. A handful got out of control and broke windows or fought with police on January 6, 2021. Now, over a thousand Jan-6ers are in prison, their lives ruined. More to follow.
Those professing conservatism should police themselves above all else. If there is violence, let leftists start it. Today’s smartphone technology is able to record and upload confrontations to the Internet instantly. This promises transparency which corporate media only discredits itself further by disputing, or by describing as “baseless conspiracy theories” or “white supremacy” when it is nothing of the sort.
The harsh reality remains: none of us will have corporate media on our side or backing moneyed interests (e.g., Big Tech) on our side — any more than the German farmers do. But like the farmers, we have truth on our side. In the long run, the one that counts truth always has a way of coming out.
*This said, it does seem reasonably to wonder what Bill Gates wants with all that farm land he’s bought up.
© 2023 Steven Yates – All Rights Reserved
E-Mail Steven Yates: freeyourmindinsc@yahoo.com
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