Growing Resistance Throughout Europe

Uncle Joe: Well Done, Boys, Keep it up!

by Jerzy Przystawa	

Owning a small piece of a land, being able to sustain oneself, to feed and sustain one’s own family and, on top of that, to produce food for other people, being able to do all of that without any bosses or superiors has been a powerful source of freedom and dignity, of pride and independence since the dawn of history. Farmers—or perhaps the word peasant might be more appropriate— have been unique among all human professions and occupations because they were the only group which could sustain itself by living of their own labour and the fertility and richness of their own small piece of land. Everyone else had to work to get some income to buy food; only farmers could survive on their own.
It is no wonder then that peasants and farmers were always on the minds of modern social engineers, those brainy intellectuals, who derived their ideas of how to rearrange and restructure primitive societies to face the challenges of modern times. Peasants sticking to their traditional ways, their traditional faith, their hard work as the source of their pride and dignity were always a major obstacle to those who knew better than everyone else what mankind might need and how to make everybody happy.

The October Revolution and the Kulaks
The last century gave many examples of how to deal with obstacles like this and how to get rid of them. The so called Great October Revolution set an example of how social engineers were going to deal with farmers, or Kulaks, as they were called in Russian. An entire generation of farmers— around 15 millions of peasants from all over the Soviet Empire—was slaughtered in the most ruthless and horrible way imaginable. One way to annihilate the rural population was by artificially created famine, something which reduced the people in rural villages to cannibalism while at the same time it devastated and depopulated whole countries, millions of square kilometers of the most fertile land in places like the Ukraine. People were dying of starvation in the areas of artificially induced famine while at the same time being guarded by regiments of soldiers, who were instructed to shoot anyone who tried to escape.
That horrible genocide, that monstrous effort to restructure society to get rid of any source of independence and freedom, had been assisted by Western intellectuals, who happily travelled to the Soviet Union to write articles and books on how happy the new Soviet society was, while, in reality, millions were dying of famine. The Western powers came to the rescue, providing grain and meat to the Soviets as a humanitarian aid. Just enough to make the butcher’s job easier.

The Kolchoses and Sovchoses
On the graves of millions, on devastated land and deserted villages kolkhoses and sovkhoses were introduced as a higher and more modern way of food production. It was not so important that they were incapable of producing enough food: the greatest and the richest state of the world could easily buy enough food from the US, Canada or Australia, which were only too happy to oblige. The important thing was that farmers and peasants disappeared, that one major source of mutiny and rebellion had been eliminated.
When, after World War II, the communists enslaved a number of new countries, like Poland, Hungary and others; their first and major preoccupation had been of how to get rid of independent farming, of how to transform these traditional societies into their ‘modern’ equivalent. Collective farms were forcibly created everywhere, and any individual farming was forbidden.

A thorn in their side
Luckily for us they were not able to accomplish that goal completely, as they had in the Soviet Union, because the premature death of the world’s greatest social engineer, Joseph Stalin, intervened. In 1956, collective farms had to be dissolved in Poland and individual farming reintroduced in order to avoid imminent famine on a national scale. That single gesture of clemency saved Poland. Peasants were allowed to own small pieces of land again and produce food to sustain themselves and even trade with the people in towns. Nevertheless, every peasant and farm was a thorn in the side of every communist apparatchik. The peasant and his farm were a reproach to the idea of a modern society because they were something difficult to manage and control and, as a result, a permanent source of trouble and rebellion. Peasants were always exposed to ridicule; the very word itself was to sound funny and describe something backward; people from villages were supposed to feel humiliated and ashamed of their origin. They were supposed to leave their villages and move to towns, which were considered places of enlightenment and prosperity.

And now: no independent farming
The sudden collapse of the Soviet Union and of communism in general brought hope that since farming was the only free and independent sector of the nation’s economy, that independent farming – the only major private sector already existing on a large scale, encompassing nearly 40 percent of the entire population – on the fertile land of a traditionally agricultural part of Europe, would flourish.
Unfortunately, the exact opposite happened in Poland. The old-fashioned ideal of the free market – small is beautiful – is no longer considered valid. In fact, everything is being done to discourage individual farming with the result that villages of Poland are getting poorer day by day, and over 2 million hectares of farming land is left unploughed. People are trying with their all might to escape from villages to the same big cities which the communists claimed were seats of wealth and enlightement. It is as if the same grand plan of those social engineers, of the fathers of communism, was now finally being implemented.
An individual farmer, an independent producer of food, is now just as much of an obstacle to the new, modern and global ideas as he was to the communists! For city dwellers all over the world, the source of food is a supermarket, whereas farmers are nothing but a source of trouble! They constantly demand subsidies and where do the subsidies come from? From the cities, of course, from us!
Thoughts like these come to my mind when I watch the horrible pictures of millions of cattle and farm animals in the UK and other countries being slaughtered. I keep imagining Uncle Joe rubbing his hands in delight, saying, ‘Well done, boys. Keep it up! Down with the farmers, those eternal obstacles to progress and general happiness!’