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https://corbettreport.substack.com/p/were-all-dutch-farmers-now

We're All Dutch Farmers Now

For weeks now, farmers in the Netherlands have been engaging in heated protests over their government's plan to halve the country's nitrogen and ammonia pollution by 2030. It is estimated that this plan—which will mandate emissions cuts of 95% in some provinces—will require a 30% reduction in livestock and will drive many of the nation's farmers out of business.

The protests have been remarkably heated, as tens of thousands take to the streets to block the country's highways, torch bales of hay and spread manure around politicians' homes. In one incident, Dutch police actually fired live rounds on one of the protesters as he attempted to breach the police line with his tractor.

Yes, the scenes coming out of the usually quiet Dutch countryside are shocking. But they should not be. They are just the early stages of a great worldwide battle that is shaping up between the free people of the world and the technocrats who are starting to clamp down on them in the name of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Enslavement.

Make no mistake: Whoever you are, wherever you live, whatever you do, these power-hungry elitists will be coming after your livelihood next. We are all Dutch farmers now.

This is the story of how we got here, where we're going and what it means.

THE BATTLE HAS BEGUN

Remember the Yellow Vest movement? Remember how a populist movement rose up in France in 2018, donning the gilets jaunes that drivers are required by French law to have in their car and to wear during emergency situations? Remember how they hit the streets, week after week after week in an escalating series of protests that threatened to topple the Macron government? Of course you do.

Now, do you remember why that movement started? Probably not, because the answer doesn't fit into the MSM propaganda narrative very easily. Carbon taxes. The original protests were about carbon taxes.

Specifically, France's Ministry for the Ecological Transition (which is apparently a thing that exists) decided in its infinite wisdom that the "ecology tax" on gas and diesel (which, it must also be noted, is a thing that exists) was too low, so they raised it. This sparked anger among the general public, who were already suffering from rising gas prices. And, just like that, a new nationwide (and, eventually, worldwide) protest movement was born....

....But perhaps that's the point. As the mask comes off of the green agenda and people start to see it for what it is—an attack on the lives and livelihood of the average working class citizen—more and more people will be drawn into this fight, whether they understand the true nature of that struggle or not.

As I've documented before, this great struggle between the unwashed masses and their would-be neofeudal overlords was coming to a head in late 2019 . . . but that great confrontation was averted by the scamdemic. Suddenly, millions of people who would have been out on the streets protesting the latest carbon taxes and green craziness were now locked in their homes by their governments—many of them willingly. But, now that the television isn't telling people to lock themselves in their home out of mortal fear of the corona cooties (unless you live in China), the temporary ceasefire has ended. The next shots in this war are being fired by farmers in the Netherlands.

But the battle isn't just being waged in the Netherlands, of course. In 2020, Canada committed to a similar scheme of nitrogen reduction, vowing to reduce nitrous oxide emissions from fertilizer by 30% by 2030. And we already know how the Canadian government will react to the inevitable farmer protests in Canada. Just look at what they did to the truckers.

And, as Kit Knightly points out over at Off-Guardian, "Denmark, Belgium and Germany are already considering similar [nitrogen reduction] policies" and both the UK and US have already put schemes into place to pay farmers not to farm.

As Kit rightly concludes:

Indeed, in a world beset by a shortage of fertiliser due to sanctions against Russia and Belarus, it would seem almost mad to complain about a manure surplus, let alone try to reduce it. We’re well past the point where any of this could be considered accidental, aren’t we? Put it this way—if the collective governments of the Western world were trying to impoverish and starve their own citizens, what exactly would they be doing differently?

There can be no doubt at this point: with their carbon taxes and restrictions on farming, the would-be world controllers are deliberately crashing the world economy. The flames of protest are merely the perfectly predictable result of this controlled demolition.

And as bad as all that is, we ain't seen nothin' yet. . . .

WHERE WE'RE GOING

There's a strange thing about this brewing war between the elitists and the working class: these psychopathic swindlers don't even hide the fact that they are positively gleeful at the prospect of reducing the average worker to abject serfdom.

Witness Ontario Liberal candidate Granville Anderson's recent assertion that rising gas prices actually provide a "silver lining": fewer of the minions will be able to afford to drive, forcing them to "find other modes of transportation." (In other words: "Let them eat electric cars!")

Or witness the World Economic Forum (along with numerous others) declaring that lockdowns were "quietly improving cities" by keeping people from engaging in their normal day-to-day activities. The blindingly obvious reality to the average working stiff is that the lockdowns were a weapon targeted against them, preventing them from earning a living, contributing to growing poverty, social isolation and depression, and driving many to substance abuse or, in some cases, suicide.

Again, it is important to remember that neither these attacks on the working poor nor the angry response that they generate are the result of incompetence or lack of awareness on the part of the agenda setters. No, it's part of the plan.

Remember "Absolute Zero"? That was the title of a report by UK FIRES—"a collaboration between the universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Nottingham, Bath and Imperial College London"—that is "aiming to reveal and stimulate industrial growth in the UK compatible with a rapid transition to zero emissions." As you'll recall from my report on the subject, their plan envisions the elimination of air travel, cargo shipping, construction and basically all other productive human activity by the year 2050 in the name of this anti-human "green" agenda.

We need to be clear about something here: this is no idle threat. If the eugenicists pulling the strings of global affairs get their way, they will release their attack dogs—the bought-and-paid for minions in the UN bureaucracy and the WEF and the political mis-leaders in virtually every country—to fulfill this agenda.

That agenda involves shutting down the productive economy (in the name of saving Mother Earth, of course) and reducing the global population in the process. That the population would eventually fight back agains this economic assault is no surprise; hence the creation of the homeland security state and the biosecurity state over the course of the past two decades. We are now at the point where any protest can be deemed "insurrection" by "domestic terrorists" and can justify all manner of punishment, including locking people out of the financial system altogether.

The pressure is increasing. The dragnet has been set. The battle is about to begin in earnest. . . . So what happens next?

WHAT IT MEANS

Whether we know it or not, we are at war. And, whether we know it or not, that war is a battle between the overwhelming majority of the human population and the few at the top who seek to control (and, ultimately, reduce) that population. The battle lines may not always be so clear—there are many unwitting dupes who act to shore up the systems of technocratic control without knowing what they are doing. And there are those who still believe in the core lies of the global elitists....

But as the wheels start to fall off of the global financial system and the economic freight train begins to derail, more and more are waking up to the fundamental truth: this is a war for our livelihood. This is a war for the right to live our lives as we wish, free from the interference of these self-appointed rulers who would dare to tell us what we can eat or where we can travel or whether we can farm. This is a war for independence from the elitist parasites who are attempting to shut down the economy and usher us into an age of neofeudalism.

Given that we are engaged in this global War for Independence, Patrick Henry's famous speech to the the Second Virginia Convention seems as relevant as ever.

It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace—but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

Also as relevant to our struggle today as it was to those fighting in the American Revolution is an important observation about all such conflict: "We must all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately."

It is self-evidently true that the ruling class has invested a good deal of its time and devoted much of its considerable resources to atomizing society. The ruling class and its dupes have focused attention on every possible fault line—class, race, sex, religious creed, political allegiance and any other distinction you can think of—as part of a conscious strategy to keep the masses at each other's throats and to stop them from rising up against their real enemy: the globalists themselves. There's also no denying that these would-be world controllers have been remarkably successful at this divide and rule strategy.

The obvious implication is that the thing the globalists fear the most is a mass of people coming together to unite in opposition against their deeply unpopular nonsense. That's why the lapdogs of the establishment in the mainstream press and in academia now spend so much of their time and energy decrying the "populism" of the current era. In case you haven't figured it out by now, all of the platitudes that politicians have spouted about "freedom" and "democracy" have been just that: platitudes to get people to rally around their political agenda as needed and then discarded and recast as "crass populism" when the people reject the rulers' dictates.

Yes, it is time to throw away the stupid, artificial left/right split and other wedges that have kept us divided and ruled for so long. The idea that groups who don't see eye-to-eye can unite on the existential threat they are facing isn't pie-in-the-sky, wishful thinking. In France, the populist right and the populist left joined forces to defeat the country's COVID travel passport.

It can be done. It must be. There is no alternative. We must start building the mass movement against the 2030 Agenda before the noose tightens around our necks and we find ourselves in the clutches of this technocratic system of control. Whether or not it effects us yet, we have to understand that it will be coming after us soon enough if we don't stand up en masse now.

And that's exactly what's happening.

Across Europe, people are rising up in solidarity with the Dutch farmers. German farmers are helping Dutch farmers blockade the German-Dutch border.  Italian farmers are staging demonstrations under the rallying cry of "We are not slaves, we are farmers!" Polish farmers are rising up in Warsaw. Even the Canadians are getting in on the act, carrying "I stand with Dutch farmers" signs at their own freedom rallies.

And, just this week, a new video has emerged calling for worldwide protests in support of the Dutch farmers. Sporting the tagline "The World is Going Dutch," the video likens the current resistance movement to nonviolent resistance movements of the 20th century and calls on people around the world to stand in solidarity with farmers in the Netherlands in a worldwide day of protest on July 23rd.

A great awakening is happening. The barriers between people are coming down as the realization dawns that this is a global agenda and the injustices we see being inflicted on those halfway around the world will be coming for us soon enough. Many are now realizing that a line has been drawn and the time to stand up has come.

We are all Dutch farmers now.

....

http://patricklawrence.us/patrick-lawrence-the-imaginary-war/

The Imaginary War

What were the policy cliques, “the intelligence community” and the press that serves both going to do when the kind of war in Ukraine they talked incessantly about turned out to be imaginary, a Marvel Comics of a conflict with little grounding in reality? I have wondered about this since the Russian intervention began on Feb. 24. I knew the answer would be interesting when finally we had one.

Now we have one. Taking the government-supervised New York Times as a guide, the result is a variant of what we saw as the Russiagate fiasco came unglued: Those who manufacture orthodoxies as well as consent are slithering out the side door.

I could tell you I don’t intend to single out the Times in this wild chicanery, except that I do. The once-but-no-longer newspaper of record continues to be singularly wicked in its deceits and deceptions as it imposes the official but imaginary version of the war on unsuspecting readers.

As Consortium News’s properly suspecting readers will recall, Vladimir Putin was clear when he told the world Russia’s intentions as it began its intervention. These were two: Russian forces went into Ukraine to “demilitarize and de–Nazify” it, a pair of limited, defined objectives.

An astute reader of these commentaries pointed out in a recent comment thread that the Russian president had once again proven, whatever else one may think of him, a focused statesman with an excellent grasp of history. At the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, the Allied Control Council declared its postwar purpose in Germany as “the four D’s.”  These were de–Nazification, demilitarization, democratization and decentralization.

Let’s give David Thompson, who brought this historical reference to my attention, a deserved byline here:

“Putin’s reiteration of the de–Nazification and demilitarization principles established from the Potsdam Conference is not just some quaint tip of the hat to history. He was laying down a marker to the United States and the United Kingdom that the agreement reached at Potsdam in 1945 is still relevant and valid ….”

The Russian president, whose entire argument with the West is that a just and stable order in Europe must serve the security interests of all sides, was simply restating objectives the trans–Atlantic alliance had once signed on to accomplish. In other words, he was pointing out said alliance’s gross hypocrisy as it arms the ideological descendants of German Nazis.

I dwell on this matter because the imaginary war began with the Biden regime’s and the press’s quite irresponsible misrepresentations of the Russian Federation’s aims in Ukraine. All else has flowed from it.

You remember: Russian forces were going to “conquer” the whole of the nation, wipe out the Kiev regime, install a puppet government and then drive on to Poland, the Baltic states, Transnistria and the rest of Moldova, and who could imagine what after that. De–Nazification, we can now read, is a phony Kremlin dodge. 

Next Edition

Having lied outright on this score, the next edition of the comic went onto the market. Russia is failing to achieve its imaginary objectives. Low morale, desertions, poorly trained troops with not enough to eat, logistical failures, lousy artillery, inadequate ordnance, incompetent officers: The Russians were riding for a fall on Ukrainian soil.  

The corollary here was the heroism, courage and battlefield grit of Ukrainian troops, least of all, the Azov Battalion, who were not any longer neo–Nazis.  Never mind the Times, The Guardian, the BBC and various other mainstream publications and broadcasters had earlier told us about these ideological fanatics. That was then, this is now.

The problem at this point was there were no battlefield successes to report. The defeats, indeed, had begun. In May, roughly when the Azov Battalion, heroic and democratic as it is, was forced to surrender in Mariupol, it was time for — this just had to be — Russian atrocities.

We had the theater and the maternity hospital in Mariupol, we had the infamous slaughter in Bucha, the Kiev suburb; various others have followed. Just what happened in these cases has never been established by credible, disinterested investigators; plentiful evidence that Ukrainian forces bear responsibility is dismissed out of hand. But who needs investigations and evidence when the brutal, criminal, indiscriminately ruthless Rrrrusssians, must be culpable if the imaginary war is to proceed?

My unchallenged favorites in this line come courtesy of CNN, which went long this spring on allegations — Ukrainian allegations, of course — that Russian soldiers were raping young girls and young boys right down to months-old infants. Three such specimens are here, here and here.  

The network abruptly dropped this line of inquiry after the senior Ukrainian official disseminating these allegations was removed from office because the charges are fabrications. A wise move on CNN’s part, I think: Propaganda does not have to be very subtle, as history shows, but it does have its limits. 

Just after the atrocities narrative had ripened, the Russians-are-stealing-Ukrainian-grain theme began. The BBC offered an especially wonderful account of this. Look at this video and text presentation and tell me it isn’t the cutest thing you’ve ever seen, as many holes in it as my Irish grandma’s lace curtains.

But at this point, problems. Russian forces, with their desertions, antiquated guns, and dumb generals, were taking one city after another in eastern Ukraine. These were not — the fly in the ointment — imaginary victories.

Out with the war-is-going-well theme and in with the brutal Russians’ indiscriminate use of artillery. This was a “primitive strategy,” the Times wanted us to know. In the awfulness of war, you simply don’t shell an enemy position as a preliminary to taking it. Medieval.

Lately, there’s another problem for the conjurors of imaginary war. This is the death toll. The U.N. Human Rights Monitoring Mission reported May 10 that the casualty count to date was in excess of 3,380 civilian fatalities, bumped up in June to 4,509, and 3,680 civilians injured. (And both sides shoot and kill in a war.)

Goddamn it, they exclaimed on Eighth Avenue.  That is nowhere near enough in the imaginary war. Desperate for a gruesomely high death toll, the Times, on June 18, published “Death in Ukraine: A Special Report.” What a read. There is nothing in it other than innuendo and weightless surmise. But the imaginary war must grind on.

The Times’s “special report”— dum-da-da-dum — rests on phrases such as “witness testimony and other evidence” and “the thousands believed killed.” The evidence, to be noted, derives almost entirely from Ukrainian officials — as does an inordinate amount of what the Times publishes. 

There is a great quotation:  “People are killed indiscriminately or suddenly or without rhyme or reason.” Wow. Is this damning or what?

But another problem. This observation comes from one Richard Kohn, who is emeritus at the University of North Carolina. I hope the professor is having a good summer down in Chapel Hill.

In late June, Sievierodonetsk fell — or rose, depending on your point of view — and in short order so did Lysychansk and the whole of Luhansk province. Now come the ’fessing up stories, here and there. The Ukrainian forces are so discombobulated they are shooting one another, we read. They can’t operate their radios and — an artful back flip here — they are running out of food and ammunition and morale. Untrained soldiers who signed up to patrol their neighborhoods are deserting the front lines.  

Holdouts

There are the holdouts. The Times reported last week that the Ukrainians, done for in Luhansk, are planning a counteroffensive in the south to reclaim lost territory. We all need our dreams, I suppose.

To the surprise of many, Patrick Lang, the ordinarily astute observer of military matters, published “Unable to even fix its own tanks, Russia’s humiliation is now complete” on his Turcopolier last Friday. The retired colonel predicts the Russians are in for “a sudden reversal of fortunes.” No, I’m not holding my breath.

Have you had enough of the imaginary war? I have. I read this junk daily as a professional obligation. Some of it I find amusing, but in the main it sickens when I think of what the American press has done to itself and to its readers.

For the record, it is hard to tell exactly what occurs on Ukraine’s tragic fields of war. As noted previously in this space, we have very little coverage from professional, properly disinterested correspondents. But I offer here my surmise, and it is nothing more.

This war has proceeded, more or less inexorably, in one direction: In the real war, the Ukrainians have been on a slow march to defeat from the first. They are too corrupt, too mesmerized by their fanatical Russophobia to organize an effective force or even to see straight.

This is not a grinding war of attrition, as we are supposed to think. It has proceeded slowly because Russian forces appear to be taking care to limit casualties — their own and among Ukrainian civilians. I put more faith in the U.N.’s numbers than in that silly, nothing-in-it “special report” the Times just published.

I do not know why Russian forces approached the outskirts of Kiev from the north early in the conflict and then withdrew, but there is no indication they intended to take the capital. There were battles, but they were certainly not “beaten back.” That is sheer nonsense.

I await proper investigations — admittedly unlikely — of the atrocities that have certainly occurred but without, so far, any conclusive indication of culpability.

Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence, remarked recently Russia’s objective remains to take most of Ukraine. In a speech at the end of June in Ashgabat, the Turkmenistan capital, Putin appeared notably at ease and asserted, “Everything is going according to plan. Nothing has changed.” The objective, he said, remained “to liberate Donbass, to protect these people, and to create conditions that would guarantee the safety of Russia itself. That’s it.”

Putting these two statements side by side, there is vastly more evidence supporting Putin’s than there is for Haines.

Intentionally or otherwise — and I often have the impression the Times does not grasp the implications of what it publishes — the paper put out a story Sunday headlined, “Ukraine and the Contest of Global Stamina.” The outcome of this conflict, it reported, now depends on “whether the United States and its allies can maintain their military, political and financial commitments to holding off Russia.”

Can they possibly not understand down on Eighth Avenue that they have just described Ukraine as a basket-case client? Do they know they have just announced that the imaginary war they have waged these past four and some months is ending in defeat, given there is no one in Ukraine to win it?