Counter-Currents
Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum Klaus Schwab (left) and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
2,236 words
In August of this year, China engaged in military exercises and heated rhetoric against Taiwan and the United States in light of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s visit to the embattled island nation. Veteran paleoconservative pundit Pat Buchanan believes that a “US-China collision somewhere in the Western Pacific appears inevitable,” with Taiwanese sovereignty as the catalyst.
On Tuesday, August 9, Taiwan conducted its own live-fire exercises along its southeastern coast to indicate that they were ready for any Chinese invasion attempts.
China decided to extend its initial exercises, and as reported on Monday, August 15, renewed its show of force after a second delegation of American lawmakers led by Senate Foreign Relations Committee member Ed Markey met with Taiwanese President Tsia Ing-wen. China has decided to cut its lines of communication with the United States on issues of defense, climate change, and other diplomatic areas in light of these visits.
North Korea was rattling sabers as well in its own bizarre way, calling United States House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “the worst destroyer of international peace and stability.” Other reports throughout the mainstream press have indicated that the North Koreans are testing nuclear triggering devices in anticipation of future nuclear tests. Leader Kim Jong Un has also pledged 100,000 volunteers to Russia in its fight against Ukraine.
According to a story in the New York Post, Russian defense pundit Igor Korotchenko said, on Russian Channel One state television, that “[t]here are reports that 100,000 North Korean volunteers are prepared to come and take part in the conflict.”
As summer draws to a close, Taiwan announced that it is slated to spend $19 billion on defense next year, a 14% increase. China, although it may not be able to quickly invade and conquer Taiwan, may impose a naval blockade. In the meantime, the United States continues to send dignitaries to Taiwan.
In an uncanny historical parallel, on August 23, 1958 China’s Communist leader, Mao Zedong, ordered the shelling of Quemoy and Matsu, two islands in the Taiwan Strait then controlled by nationalist leader Chiang Kai-Shek. This caused an international crisis; the United States responded by reinforcing its naval units in the vicinity and armed aircraft in Taiwan with air-to-air missiles. Moscow threw its weight behind Beijing and declared that an attack on the People’s Republic of China would be an attack on the Soviet Union.[1] Mao used the crisis to force his Soviet allies to bring China, which had not yet developed its own nuclear weapons, under its nuclear umbrella and heighten tensions between Moscow and Washington. He described the situation to his doctor: “The islands are two batons that keep Khrushchev and Eisenhower dancing, scurrying this way and that. Don’t you see how wonderful they are?”[2]
The true reason for shelling the islands, thereby fomenting a crisis in the Taiwan Strait, was not international relations. Mao believed the situation would accelerate collectivization domestically:
A tense situation helps to mobilize people, in particular those who are backward, those middle-of-the-roaders . . . The people’s communes should organize militias. Everyone in our country is a soldier.[3]
These seemingly disparate international events are connected. There have been numerous news stories that link international military actions to food shortages. The real reason for food shortages in the present day, however, is that it is part of a World Economic Forum (WEF)-inspired transformational change in agricultural production and all other aspects of life. Just as Mao used aggression against Taiwan in the 1950s to galvanize China into the collectivization of farms and massive industrialization projects in his ill-fated Great Leap Forward, present-day leaders in the here-and-now are engaged in similar grandiose utopian schemes. Covid-19, the war in Ukraine, and tensions between China and Taiwan have been used as justifications to usher in more state control. A catch-all term for this present-day utopian reformulation is The Great Reset. Moreover, The Great Reset is a component of the globalist push to bring about what political theorist Alexander Dugin calls Liberalism 2.0. Part of this nightmarish plan is a reform of agriculture — reminiscent of Mao’s Great Leap Forward.
The Great Leap Forward, under the auspices of the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, Mao Zedong, sent China into a frenetic maelstrom of self-destruction from 1958 until 1962. Mao believed that by mobilizing the huge Chinese labor force (hundreds of millions strong), China’s economy could be modernized in record time. His Great Leap Forward not only endeavored to transform China into a Communist utopia, but it also aimed to outpace Britain’s agricultural and industrial output in just 15 years.[4] The Great Leap Forward was an unmitigated disaster; upwards of 45 million people died unnecessarily between 1958 and 1962 in the ensuing frenetic insanity. Communist state cadres brutalized the peasantry, and the people were deprived of food and beaten. Property was demolished on an unprecedented scale, animals were slaughtered, and desperate Chinese resorted to cannibalism just to survive.[5] Mao’s radicalized policies caused a great famine.
The Great Leap Forward 2.0
If we return to the present, the globalists are determined to reenact Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Farmers across the Netherlands have been protesting their government’s WEF-inspired radical climate policies since 2019. The unrest began in response to the Dutch government’s declaration of a nitrogen emission crisis. The declaration required farmers to cut their livestock by up to 50%, imposed emissions caps that would force farmers to curtail fertilizer usage, and exacerbated fears that farmers would have to cede their farms to the state.
In the summer of 2022, these protests have escalated as Prime Minister Mark Rutte refused to compromise. Dutch farmers blocked traffic, sprayed manure on government buildings and politicians’ homes, set hay bales alight, and blockaded the access roads to processing plants. The farmers are incensed that Rutte has allowed the WEF to set up shop in the Netherlands. “[T]he Netherlands will host the Global Coordinating Secretariat of the Food Innovation Hubs,” he announced last year. The Food Innovation Hubs are an initiative of the WEF’s Food Action Alliance, which aims to “bring together the international community to tackle an urgent historic challenge: to reshape the way we think, produce, supply, and consume food.”
The WEF sees family farmers in the Netherlands as the problem. Despite the Dutch being at the forefront of environmentally conscientious and innovative farming techniques, and being the second-largest agricultural exporter in the world, the WEF and its lackey, Prime Minister Rutte, have decided that their “Sustainable Development Goals” cannot be met if individual farmers are making their own decisions. As writer Chris Johnson points out, there is no room for traditional farmers in the partnerships envisioned by the WEF. The WEF is absolute in its commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and meeting its other Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). As Johnson points out, the WEF’s SDGs “. . . call for ending world hunger and ensuring sustainable food systems by 2030.” Reaching for this utopian goal will devastate individual farms and mean less farmland and fewer animals. Leaders who have bought into this WEF-globalist agriculture program, with its fertilizer bans and countless other restrictions that are aimed ostensibly at reducing greenhouse gases — all with war as the backdrop — may as well have copied Mao’s Great Leap Forward playbook and adapted it to the current year.
Moreover, similar protests are happening around the Western world as governments fall in lockstep with their globalist overlords. Irish farmers are opposing a scheme to reduce greenhouse gases, and Scott Moe, the Premier of Saskatchewan, one of Canada’s prairie provinces known for its agriculture, opposes Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s fertilizer reduction scheme, which will devastate Canadian farming.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Year America Died here.
The Wall Street Journal has reported that businesses should prepare for unrest directly related to food shortages. Their rationale is that the war in Ukraine has had a profound effect on international food production and supplies.
The utopian goal and doing anything to achieve it is the commonality; and using international events to justify it fits the plans of Mao, Trudeau, Rutte, and other globalists. If the destruction of the family farm in countries like Canada and the Netherlands is their unstated aim, what will take its place? The solution will be a Mao Zedong-like collectivisation or nationalization of all farmland in our respective countries. It will mean the destruction of livelihoods for a global Communist utopian aim that serves the interests of a select few.
In his article for the Council of European Canadians, Tim Murray states:
It is time to stop letting Communism off the hook. Analysts of present-day totalitarian states must not be reticent in using “communist” as a descriptor for contemporary corporate-Marxist hybrids which fight a class war against small business, ordinary workers, and farmers by stoking racial animosities and fostering identity politics masquerading as “social justice.”
Starvation is another golf club in the bag of a worldwide genocidal purging reminiscent of Mao’s Great Famine. As Jim Goad has pointed out, the creepy globalist elite view humanity with vicious contempt.
Canada has seen an alarming rise in the number of people using food banks. In 2022, the Daily Bread Food Bank, located in Toronto, recorded 171,631 people using its services, compared to 65,000 in June 2019. The common refrain amongst those visiting is that the cost of living is outpacing their incomes thanks to skyrocketing inflation. Another organization, Food Banks Canada, which has operations throughout the country, has reported the highest number of visits in 40 years. “You’ve got more people coming through the doors because they aren’t able to put food on the table for their families, you’ve got fewer people in the community who are in a position to give — they might not need a food bank but their budgets are stretched,” said Kirstin Beardsley, the charity’s chief operating officer (CEO).
According to researchers at the University of Toronto, approximately 5.8 million people in Canada experienced some form of food insecurity in 2021. In the province of Ontario, for instance, 259,000 households experienced what the study calls “severe food insecurity,” which is characterized by family members skipping meals, reducing their food intake, or going days without eating because they did not have the money to buy groceries.
The same can be said for the United States: terrible inflation and fuel costs have driven increasing numbers of Americans to use food banks. “We’ve had an over 20% increase in families for our statewide mobile service in the past 12 months,” said Matt Burns, CEO of Feeding South Dakota.
Governments across the Western world who have decided to implement WEF-inspired fertilizer restrictions and other regulatory pressures against their own farmers are disproportionately to blame for food scarcity. It is convenient to blame inflation, fuel costs, and food shortages on foreign actors and international events like Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine, or China’s ongoing intimidation of Taiwan. Mao Zedong used a similar tactic during the Great Leap Forward: He blamed famine conditions on external factors rather than condemn his own disastrous collectivization policies and Communist agricultural theories.[6]
In another example of using international events to enhance state power and control, Justin Trudeau decided to mandate travel restrictions on internal and international travel in the summer of 2021. A recent lawsuit in Canada has revealed that there was no scientific basis for the restrictions. It was merely a way to score political points right before calling an election. Despite the ploy, Trudeau failed to win his majority. It was also a way to consolidate power and restrict the free movement of citizens. This is reminiscent of Communist regimes of the past that placed strictures on freedom of movement.
All aspects of life are subject to control by Communist forces in the new authoritarian era. Take popular social media platforms like TikTok and its parent company Byte Dance: 300 current employees of the companies once worked for Chinese state media.
These seemingly unconnected events involving the Communist superstate are all interrelated. There is no question that the outsourcing of vital manufacturing to the Chinese has not led to the outcome foreseen by those in the West who believed China would inevitably democratize. The rest of the world has become subjected to colossal amounts of influence as the Chinese work tirelessly to export their brand of Communist authoritarianism across the globe.
They have found more than enough useful idiots who are lured by the promise of unprecedented wealth and power. Boris Johnson, Joe Biden, the Trudeau family, and countless prominent figures have been lured by the promise of opulence. Unfortunately for the average citizen, the devastation of our once prosperous countries is being accelerated by these ideologues’ malign influence. Most of the world quite rightly does not care about what happens in countries like the Netherlands and Canada, with good reason; but the agricultural transformations in both countries are interesting case studies or a testbed for the future of Communism made manifest in the Western world by Chinese and globalist influence. It may be nominally called stakeholder capitalism or environmentalism, but it is Communist at its hardened core.
Our authoritarian future is here. Mao would be proud.
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Notes
[1] Frank Dikötter, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-1962 (London: Bloomsbury, 2010), 45. Hereafter Mao’s Great Famine.
[2] Mao’s Great Famine, 45; Dikötter cites Li Zhisui, The Private Life of Chairman Mao: The Memoirs of Mao’s Personal Physician (New York: Random House, 1994), 270.
[3] Mao’s Great Famine, 45; Dikötter cites Zhonggong Zhongyang wenxian yanjiushi (eds), Mao Zedong waijiao wenxuan (Selection of Writings on Foreign Affairs by Mao Zedong) (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1994), 344 & 347.
[4] Mao’s Great Famine, xi.
[5] Mao’s Great Famine, xiii.
[6] Mao’s Great Famine, 84.