A Revolutionary
Act
Commentary by Thomas Moore
Today I committed a revolutionary act. It
had nothing to do with firearms or marksmanship training. I didn’t organize a
protest march or join the Underground. In fact, it had nothing to do with
politics, except in the broadest possible sense. But it was revolutionary
nonetheless. Today I finished spring planting.
How can such a benign
activity be revolutionary, you may ask. In a sane and normal world it
wouldn’t be. People have grown their own food from the beginning of the world.
Agriculture has always been the foundation of civilization and the farmer a
benefactor of mankind. But today we don’t live in a sane and normal world. The
criminal Regime we live under is not content just to rob us of our liberty, our
money, our property, our dignity and humanity. It also seeks to control us by
controlling the food supply. It seeks to strip us of food self-sufficiency and
make us dependent, first on the central state, through food stamps, for
example; and second, on the state’s real masters, the giant agri-businesses who
determine Federal food policy. I call this process “food fascism.”
No doubt the word fascism has been abused,
like racist, sexist, and anti-Semite. We Southerners in particular are familiar
with the elites’ use of these epithets to demonize 
us.
But “fascism” is not mere name-calling. I’m using its precise and original
meaning, and on good authority – Benito Mussolini, the founder of Italian
fascism himself. He said, “Fascism should more appropriately be called ‘Corporatism’
because it is a merger of State and corporate power.”
However, there’s a significant difference
between the 1930s and today, and the difference is the key to understanding the
politics of the modern American Empire, especially food politics.
Under Hitler and Mussolini, the corporations
did the government’s bidding, but in today’s America, government does the
corporations’ bidding. Big multinationals, in this case Monsanto, ConAgra,
Cargill, and ADM, buy political influence through their lobbyists who ‘bundle’
huge campaign contributions. They contribute heavily to think tanks and universities
that influence policymaking. Their staff scientists and lawyers circulate
between corporations and key jobs in regulatory agencies. Is it any wonder
legislators make laws and regulations that benefit ‘industrialized agriculture’
instead of you and me?
One example in the news lately is HR 875,
the so-called Food Safety and
Modernization Act of 2009. If enacted, “…it would
effectively hand over control of America’s food supply to such a nefarious
giant as Monsanto and its lesser counterparts such as Tyson and Cargill,”
according to Natural News.
‘Safety’ and ‘security’ are two of the favorite ploys of government utilized to
subjugate and enslave its citizens.
Then there’s HR 759, the Food and Drug Administration Globalization
Act. It could cripple small farmers by imposing recordkeeping requirements
that currently apply to food processors, and also by requiring all farms to
become certified in “best agricultural practices.” These practices, ostensibly
aimed at controlling microbial contamination, would place a disproportionate
burden on small family farms in the name of regulating the large factory farms
where most food-safety problems originate.
HR 814 and SR 425 are supposed to prevent
the E. Coli Bacteria in spinach, meat from “downer” (diseased) cattle in school
lunches, feathers in chicken patties, and other food disasters we’ve seen all
too much of lately, but almost all of them originate on large factory farms and
CAFOs (Confined Animal Feeding Operations), the
horrors of which are too sickening to enumerate.
Extending onerous regulations to small farms
that typically are free of these problems will further undermine the
smallholder and family farmer in favor of corporate agriculture and doubtless
give us more toxin-laden and nutritional-less food. “What people don’t realize
is that if any of these bills pass, we lose. All we will have left is
industrial food,” says Deborah Stockton, executive director of the National
Independent Consumers and Farmers Association.
What people also don’t realize is that the
big business-government marriage means the corporations now have at their
disposal government force. Big agra
enriches itself at our expense; and if we refuse to bend the knee to their
worse-than-useless regulations, then they get government to sic the SWAT teams
on us. This is modern American fascism, and it rules over the whole economy,
not just agriculture and food production. Fusing big government, big money, and
big corporations creates an unlimited and unaccountable center of power. It is
the program of both major parties, of Congress, and all the major Presidential
candidates. Traditional politics can’t fix the problem; in fact, only feeds it.
I believe the eventual goal is the
criminalization of independent farming and food self-sufficiency, including
prison terms, fines, and property confiscation for farmers who refuse to hoe
the row laid out for them by the food fascists. Does this seem like an
exaggeration? Keep in mind that Federal power always expands beyond the plain
language and original intent of any legislation.
Remember the RICO statute, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations
Act of 1970? It was supposed to be aimed only at Mafioso bosses and
organized crime. Now it’s almost never invoked against the Mafia but is used to
prosecute individuals, businesses, Right-to-Lifers, and political protest
groups – in short, almost anybody in almost any context.
Agriculture ranked high among the vital
issues considered by the First Southern National Congress in December 2008. We
passed a Remonstrance and Petition for Redress of Grievances noting, among
other things, “Since the Great Depression, Federal law and policy have waged
war against Southern agriculture, devastating Southern farmlands and
impoverishing and dispossessing farm families. Regions once famous for their
fruitfulness now lie depopulated and fallow. Instead of making it possible for
farmers to remain productive on their own acres, Government policy encourages
corporations to gobble up small farms, leaving their owners landless strangers
on the land their fathers tamed.” We petitioned the government to end the
policies that undermine independent Southern farmers and impose destructive
regulations and unsafe food upon us. But don’t hold your breath or delay your
supper waiting for the Feds to reply. You’ll surely go hungry.
The inescapable reality of the human
condition is that we have to eat. Moreover, if we want to remain healthy, we
have to eat clean, safe, wholesome, and nutritious food, but you aren’t going
to get this kind of nourishment from the food fascists. Perhaps in the future,
perhaps in a national crisis, if you don’t comply with the government’s
dictates, you might not get any food at all. History is replete with examples
of dictatorships using food as a weapon, usually against their own people.
Henry Kissinger, arch-criminal and myrmidon of the New World Order said it: “Control
the oil and you control the nations. Control the food and you control the
people.”
More than any other issue – more than guns,
more than the mass robbery of bailouts and trillions for Wall Street, more than
sound money versus fiat money -- food fascism versus food freedom illustrates
the control agenda and the true depths of evil of the Regime. For this reason,
any progress you can make toward food self-sufficiency, toward raising your own
nutritious, wholesome, and inexpensive food (and almost anyone can), is not
only ‘revolutionary’ in the broader sense of the word, it’s also the best way
to protect yourself amid the turmoil that is breaking over our heads.
One final, personal word: This account is
not just an abstract argument flowing from a sentimental tie to our Southern
agrarian past. I practice what I preach. Eventually, or perhaps sooner than the
word implies, I aim to live off what I can raise, supplemented by what I can
shoot in the hills and catch in the creek. In so doing, I’ve found another kind
of nourishment deeper than sustenance for the body, something we Southerners
once understood better than most Americans – the nourishment of the soul.
I’m recovering something precious that was
lost, knowing my labors are connected to the most basic and legitimate of
human needs. To see the dark green tops of my potato vines first poke their
heads up from their hills and see the first corn shoots appear boldly, is
to know peace and contentment instead of the frantic scurrying about overlaid
with anxiety that is the substance of modern urban life. Raising your own
food inoculates you from the confusion, rootlessness,
and alienation so rampant in today’s world. It spares you from the infantilism,
the narcissism, and the eternal obsession with things, mostly trivial and
useless things that ultimately spell death to the soul. You experience the
miraculous almost daily, and thus come to know the Great Planter Himself more
intimately. In this way too, it is a revolutionary act.
Thomas Moore is Chairman of the Southern National
Congress located in Morganton, Georgia. This article and many others are archived
at: http://southernnationalcongress.org. In Missouri, Robert L. Mills is the
chairman of the Missouri delegation for the Southern National Congress and
can be reached by calling 417-256-1926 or e-mailing him at Rockytop16@hughes.net.
