German Farmers: Freedom fighters?
Big tractors never fail to impress boys of all ages.
Many in the anti-globalist movement have a fantasy that someday, the world’s population will, at long last, wake up and rise in a collective effort to overthrow the obscure and ever elusive power that oppresses them.
They project this deep-seated desire onto any group that protests against any Western governments, for any reason. For example, they stood behind the entitled French protesters who decried Macron’s cut of outlandish socialist programs. Some of them are even, bizarrely, supporting islamo-nazis who openly call to overthrow our ‘liberal’ democracies in order to establish their Caliphate.
Their new fad is to project their fantasy of a collective global revolution against the evil globalists and their Great Reset agenda, on the German farmers who have taken over the streets of Berlin.
Big tractors never fail to impress boys of all ages.
But what are these farmers actually protesting?
Are they protesting against the Great Reset machinations of evil Neo-Marxists that occupy global institutions like Klaus Schwab, Antonio Guterres, Larry Fink, Bill Gates and their selected puppet government in Berlin?
Or are they protesting against something else entirely?
Here’s some background on what led to these protests.
During the covid mass hysteria, the German government loaned $65 billion to address the alleged health emergency.
Since said emergency never materialized, the funds sat unused.
The Neo-Marxists in power in Berlin had the brilliant idea to appropriate these funds to accelerate the United Nations’ SDGs. They used the funds to shut down cheap, reliable energy sources like nuclear power plants, while polluting their skyline with unreliable and inefficient windmills, to name a few examples.
Germany (unlike America) has strict laws constraining their federal budget and deficit. A constitutional court found that the government’s misappropriation of the funds was unconstitutional, resulting in an unlawful deficit. They had to reimburse it.
This caused a massive hole in their budget. The German far-left coalition government (that Germans call the traffic light coalition because of the colors of the 3 parties, red, yellow, and Green) announced different measures to cut costs.
One of these measures was to cut subsidies for farmers on diesel purchase and end a tax exemption on certain farm equipment.
Adding to the chaos, railroad workers are on strike, demanding a 35 hour work week, while being paid for the full week of work they used to perform.
Germany, like most other countries who indulged in the pandemic panic and the climate hysteria, is facing self-imposed inflation, high interest rates and has already entered a recession.
Purposefully hurting farmers is of course one of the favourite activities of the anti-human Malthusian globalists, as we’ve seen in Sri Lanka, Netherlands, and Canada in the last few years. These national governments, eager to implement the UN SDGs agenda, are threatening their countries' food security.
They are making it increasingly difficult to run farming operations with an ever increasing amount of regulations on the use of fertilizers or fuel, for example. The reason they attack farming activities is the same reason why they are shutting down nuclear plants: industrial farming, in their unconstrained vision, defiles their pagan Goddess Gaia, peace be upon her.
For them, this can’t be tolerated.
Industrial farming, which is of course essential to sustain human activity at scale, is at odds with their Malthusian vision: a belief, contrary to all evidence, that the earth cannot sustain human flourishing. The most extreme of the Malthusian zealots see humans as a cancer to the planet, and all human activity as defiling Gaia, peace be upon her. This is the modern day version of the age old inclination to proclaim the imminent coming of the End Times.
For over 200 years, human ingenuity, industriousness and entrepreneurship have proven the Malthusians wrong. But they are determined to bring their apocalyptic vision to reality, a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, by sabotaging human progress.
“If you want to block our subsidies, we'll block your roads.”
All of that being said, this is not what the German farmers are protesting at the moment. The farmers are protesting to keep special privileges, that are not extended to the rest of the population, for themselves. Privileges like handouts and special tax breaks.
From a classically liberal stand point, the end of special government handouts, and the end of a tax break that benefited only a favoured group (a form of bribing or vote buying) is a positive development.
I’m all for tax cuts. I am all for cutting ALL taxes. Unequal treatment and special privileges for interest groups is incompatible with a the rule of law and social justice.
Many are comparing the German Farmers’ protest to the Canadian Freedom Convoy. But they couldn’t be more different. The use of machinery that impresses boys of all ages is the only thing they have in common.
The Truckers Convoy in Canada two years ago, almost to the day, was a very peaceful and cheerful gathering to celebrate the love of freedom and demanding the end of extremist authoritarian policies from the Canadian federal government, that were heavily influenced by Marxist globalist institutions like the UN (WHO).
The Canadian protest was a gathering of people from all walks of life who just wanted to be left alone after two years of tyrannical oppression.
The farmers' protest in the Netherlands was similar in nature, protesting extremist anti-human policies from their national government, influenced by globalist institutions, to undermine their ability to grow food using fertilizer or even outright expropriate them.
The latest farmers’ protests in Germany are different in nature.
The far left coalition government, composed of socialists and Malthusian “Greens”, labeled the protestors “far-right”. This lame slandering tactic is regularly used by insecure authoritarians to discredit anyone they see as a threat to their grip on power.
But the only political organization that tried to associate itself with the protest that could be considered “far-right” is the AfD party. The AfD, despite being against subsidies and special handouts, tagged onto the protest.
But the Farmers’ leaders were quick to dissociate their protest from the AfD.
“There was some evidence of far-right support in the crowd, their slogans repeated in some of the placards, but most of the people we spoke to said they just wanted to peacefully fight for their futures.” - Sky News
There is no doubt that the German public is feeling the pinch of the economic malaise, which probably explains the popular support for the protest. Many are projecting their own grievances on these protests. Germany was, after all, the first major economy to enter a recession in 2023.
But what isn’t being discussed nearly enough, is the fact that their economic problems are entirely self-imposed. And chances are that a majority of those supporting the protests today, were also supporting the self-destructive authoritarian measures of their own government in the last few years that directly led to these problems. Lockdown, forced medical experiment (and banishment of the refuseniks), deindustrialisation, de-growth, sabotage of their cheap and reliable energy supply, and money printing to pay for that grandiose, unconstrained vision. All of this led to high inflation, supply chain disruption, high interest rates and emptier pockets for all.
The handouts and special treatment that the farmers receive are also part of the problem.
Cutting an unjust special treatment for a certain group is the principled thing to do. Just like cutting all taxes on fuel (or carbon) for EVERYBODY would be the just and principled thing to do.
But, unfortunately, this is not what the German farmers want.
Unlike the Canadian truckers, they are not fighting for the freedom to be left alone.
They are fighting for the “freedom” to be handed other people’s money, via subsidies.
This is bad news for the anti-globalist collectivists who will be disappointed when the farmers pack up to head back to their farms as soon as they get their subsidies back. That feeling of euphoria, of being part of a global collective uprising against the evil forces that control us from the shadows, will be for another day.
The global revolution will have to wait.
Sources:
https://news.sky.com/story/germanys-winter-of-discontent-disruption-from-protests-propels-far-right-afd-party-to-new-heights-13049064
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-in-protest-mode-from-farmers-to-train-drivers/a-67957380
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/01/15/germany-farmers-protests-berlin/
https://archive.is/s6ucj
https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article249529034/Bauernproteste-in-Berlin-Lindner-bei-Auftritt-vor-Bauern-ausgebuht-Ampel-kuendigt-Fahrplan-an.html
Keen observation and great analysis as usual Kate!
I kind of sense that the revocation of diesel subsidies was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back, and that the farmers are fed up with lots of things - regulations etc. Other countries in Europe have laxer environmental standards / regulations etc, as well as different rebates/levels of tax on diesel which pisses them off. My two bobs worth from down under, based on the some of the interviews with farmers here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k0UQm4s4yE . I wish them well.