I thought the historical perspective worthy of consideration in this read. No offense but many of you, as city folk, may not see how NAIS 'will' impact you too.

The perils of national animal ID

L.M. Schwartz

The Augusta Free Press

http://www.augustafreepress.com/stories/ storyReader$40205

Sigmund Freud defined id as the unconscious source of primitive demands for immediate satisfaction of irrational desires, aggression and sexual drives. Id, he said, is dominated by the pleasure principle - self-gratification. In healthy people, id's excesses are tempered by ego (reality) and superego (morality).

The thoughts and actions of unhealthy people - government and corporate leaders bent on hanging a National Animal Identification System yoke on America's neck - are dominated by id. With each passing day, their intent to exploit agriculture becomes more apparent.

They claim NAIS is critical to "food safety and security in the post-9-11 world"; that without NAIS the livestock industry cannot compete in the global marketplace. Only fools believe this demagoguery.

Justifications for NAIS are based on lies, and are perpetuated by apathy, greed, cowardice and an arrogant disregard for reality. Politicians, USDA/FDA bureaucrats, industry leaders and mass media have denied, ignored or ridiculed objections to NAIS, but the truth is clear: NAIS has absolutely nothing to do with national security, disease control or food safety. It is land, livestock and people registration, an industrial, inventory-tracking and control scheme, and a public-private partnership racket designed to license agriculture and bring the food supply system under the boot of centralized power.

Regulatory burdens and costs, corporate monopolism, taxation and fees, liability, and religious, property and privacy rights are serious concerns. But NAIS runs much deeper. Centralized control of agriculture is a mark of despotism. Zimbabwe's Marxist dictator, Robert Mugabe, who has nationalized 95 percent of rural land and plunged what was once Africa's leading food-producing nation into chaos, put it bluntly: "Absolute power is when a man is starving, and you are the only one able to give him food."

State massacre: 'Burying British farming?'

Since mid-March, day and night, pyres have been burning in the British countryside. Piles (some up to 130 feet high) of animal carcasses in open fields, charred by flames that fill the air with the stench of burning flesh. Foot and mouth disease, that first came to light on Feb. 19, is regarded by some as the final blow to an agricultural sector still reeling from the (BSE) catastrophe of a few years ago. Andrew O'Hagan warned, " ... it is difficult to imagine British farming surviving in any of its traditional forms ..."

At last count, some 2.7 million sheep, cows, pigs and goats, including rare breeds and household pets, have already been or will be killed. The official justification for this enormous organised massacre of healthy animals is to create a "firebreak" - three months into the epidemic, there had been only 1,593 confirmed cases.

Ironically, this factual account appeared in the May 2001 International Viewpoint, a Marxist journal. In the end, 6 million healthy animals were slaughtered without justification - British agriculture devastated. Virtually stripped of the right to own firearms and powerless against a militarized, socialistic state, farmers were unable to protect their property. Many districts were in a virtual state of martial law, a forced quarantine with farmers held prisoner on their own land. The National Farmers Union leadership abandoned members, supporting instead the insane policies of MAFF - the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.

In the same way, the American Farm Bureau Federation and National Cattlemen's Beef Association, both part of the USDA/ Ag Industry Cartel, have betrayed American agriculture by supporting NAIS. It is not too difficult to predict where industry leaders will stand when the Homeland must be defended against agriterrorism. And when the countryside is swarming with troops, when bulldozers are digging trenches and pyres are burning, who will stand with American livestock owners?

The International Viewpoint article added, "Indeed it is the compulsion to export that has dictated the handling of this disaster - not the welfare of the animals or even a long-term policy for farmers and the rural economy. ... The Conservatives, the party of God, Queen and Country, had only one refrain: Operation control of the mass culling should be removed from the Ministry of Agriculture and handed over to the Armed Forces."

Here, too, the God, Family and Country conservatives are ready to hand over agriculture.

In the March 6 issue of Veterinary Times, British veterinarian Bob Michell wrote, "In the name of veterinary disease control, we were about to embark on the greatest unnecessary slaughter of healthy animals in the history of our profession ... the unnecessary death of millions of animals and the unnecessary suffering of those on whose farms they lived, or whose livelihoods evaporated in the smoking pyres amidst our green and pleasant land. And we should explain how unpardonable it was and how unaccountable is the subsequent lack of political concern or accountability." The cost? More than ?12 billion, 60 farmer suicides and a nation further conditioned to accept the security and safety of militarized, police-state control.

What caused the outbreak? Was it the "accidental result of testing genetically-engineered vaccines?" Or was it, as some claim, a UK government dark-side bioterrorism operation? The bio-warfare research lab at Porton Down was reportedly missing a vial of foot-and-mouth virus two months before the outbreak. The June 29, 2001, Evening Chronicle reported, "Government scientists in four countries were preparing for a foot and mouth outbreak months before it swept Britain." Leaked papers from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency stated, "This exercise is the first of its kind and provides (Canada, the United States and Mexico) with a unique opportunity to apply their emergency-response plans in the event of a real disease outbreak." Simultaneously, the UK government coordinated its contingency plans. The UK's 2002 official inquiry report asserted it is unlikely the outbreak's origin "will ever be identified."

Similarities between Porton Down and the UK's 2001 foot- and-mouth epidemic, and Fort Dietrich/Dugway Proving Grounds and the 2001 U.S. anthrax letter attacks raise disturbing questions. Contaminated U.S. mail reached key senators who suddenly changed their minds and voted for the USA Patriot Act. In both instances, investigations amounted to shams. In both instances, the consequences were less freedom and more centralized power in free nations.

A harvest of death

The Ukrainian Republic, a fertile land with a tradition of private-property rights, was known as "he breadbasket of Europe. During two years, 1932-1933, as many as 5 million Ukrainians died from famine, related disease and genocidal murder as Joseph Stalin and his comrades forcibly collectivized Soviet agriculture.

Kulaks, a pejorative term for most successful agricultural landowners, became enemies of the state. They were liquidated as a class. Peasants who resisted were shot or deported to slave labor camps. Stalin's brutality lasted through 1937. It was meant to set an example - to crush all opposition. Because farmers were a bastion of national independence and resistance to totalitarian control, and because Stalin desperately needed agricultural exports in order to finance the Soviet military-industrial empire, exploitation of agriculture was essential. Farmers could not be allowed to own property. Soviet agriculture would be industrialized.

In December 1932, internal passports were decreed. Borders were sealed to prevent escape. "Food is a weapon," said Maxim Litvinov, Soviet commissar of foreign affairs. Even Bertram Wolfe, a founder of the Communist Party USA, was shocked. "The peasantry fought for its life with fowling pieces and pitchforks. Uprisings embraced whole regions. Villages were surrounded and laid waste. ... Districts were stripped of their stocks of grain and seed, then cordoned off to die of famine and plague."

All food and livestock were expropriated from the rural population. "Famine was quite deliberately employed as an instrument of national policy, as the last means of breaking the resistance of the peasantry to the new system where they are divorced from personal ownership of the land and obligated to work on the conditions which the state may demand from them ..." (William H. Chamberlin, British correspondent. (Emphasis added.)

Soviet Communist Party Central Committee member Khatayevich: "A ruthless struggle is going on between the peasantry and our regime. ... It took a famine to show them who is master here. It has cost millions of lives, but the collective farm system is here to stay. We've won the war." V. Vodovozov: "By destroying the peasant economy and driving the peasant from the country to the town, the famine creates a proletariat and facilitates the industrialization of the region. ..." Michael Ellman: " ... Since there was surplus rural population, killing peasants by starvation did not produce any economic losses ... it simply reduced 'unnecessary' rural consumption ... a gain from the state's point of view."

British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge commented: "On one side, millions of starving peasants, their bodies often swollen from lack of food; on the other, soldiers, members of the GPU carrying out the instructions of the dictatorship of the proletariat. They had gone over the country like a swarm of locusts and taken away everything edible; they had shot or exiled thousands of peasants, sometimes whole villages; they had reduced some of the most fertile land in the world to a melancholy desert."

"I saw ravages of the famine of 1932-1933," wrote Arthur Koestler. "Hordes of families in rags begging at the railway stations, the women lifting up to the compartment windows their starving brats, which, with drumstick limbs, big cadaverous heads and puffed bellies, looked like embryos out of alcohol bottles."

In the spring of 1933, at the height of the famine, 25,000 died each day. Gleaning the fields was a counterrevolutionary crime for which thousands were sent to Siberia. Hunger led to suicide, and for some, driven insane by hunger, cannibalism - even incidents of parents eating their children. While Ukraine starved to death, Stalin industrialized agriculture and exported its grain and butter.

As much as 50 percent of the rural population vanished, swept from the land into the gulag or the grave.

Secure in the United State of Denial

It could never happen here in America, amidst amber waves of grain, with grocery shelves overflowing with fresh, disease- free, USA-grown meat and produce; not here, where all imported food is country of origin-labeled; not here, where Tyson, Smithfield, Swift and Cargill are just four of the hundreds of small businesses competing for local markets; not here, where Klamath Basin was only a nightmare in a B- grade horror movie; never here, could 93 million acres of prime farm land sit idle in government conservation programs.

No, not here, in the land of the free, where citizens board airplanes without national ID cards; where no armed Gestapo conduct airport strip-searches; where no NKVD taps telephone calls or spies on bank accounts; and not here, where gasoline, lumber, farm tractors, textiles, TVs, machine tools, shoes, automobiles, steel, fertilizer, cameras and blue jeans are still made by Americans in American factories.

It could never happen here, because newspapers, radio and TV have exposed the globalist nomenklatura and corporate robber barons who are pimping animal ID for the World Trade Organization, World Animal Health Organization, International Standards Organization, UN World Health Organization, UN Food and Agriculture Organization and Codex Alimentarius Commission (created by FAO and WHO) - all part of the animal ID plan; not in America, safe from the UN's madmen, corruption, depravity, betrayals and genocides; not here, because our president, Congress, and courts would never allow America to be sacrificed to a scheme concocted by a globalist elite.

They have a plan

But alas, dear reader, you cannot understand the plan of disordered minds because you have been deluded by the world's greatest con-artists. After all, they succeed in deluding themselves!

In 1934, Assistant Secretary of Agriculture Rexford Tugwell declared, "(Our) future is becoming visible in Russia." His plan: private agricultural land controlled "to whatever extent is found necessary for maintaining continuous productivity. ... We could probably raise all the farm products we need with half our present farmers." The Constitution, he said, was archaic and would have to be radically overhauled to conform to the Soviet model, using "an enlarged and nationalized police power for enforcement."

In September 1995, Catherine Bertini, executive director of the United Nations World Food Program, and former U.S. assistant secretary of agriculture, explained the plan at the UN's fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing. "Food is power," she said. "We use it to change behavior. Some may call that bribery. We do not apologize." Litvinov, too, had a plan: "Food is a weapon."

Agriculture Commissar Johanns has a plan: "(NAIS) represents one of the largest systematic changes ever faced by the livestock industry. ... The plan we are releasing today will guide our efforts as we continue to work with our state and industry partners to implement a nationwide system."

NCBA has a plan: "A dynamic and profitable beef industry, which concentrates resources around a unified plan." AFBF has a plan: "We support the establishment and implementation of a mandatory national animal identification system."

On Jan. 30, 2004, President Bush signed Homeland Security Presidential Directive-9, "to defend the agriculture and food system against terrorist attacks, major disasters, and other emergencies." USDA's Jeremy Stump says, "It's from farm to fork." The order covers animals and crops - the entire food- supply chain - and includes shared operations with the CIA. According to Stump, Homeland Security would be in overall charge of the agricultural response. White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said the initiative "crosses over agencies" and lets Homeland Security take charge of a "peacetime outbreak" of a major disease.

From farm to fork, they have a plan for us. Does the plan protect the rights and independence of farmers and ranchers? Does the plan ensure competitive, free markets and a safe, abundant food supply for America? No doubt the mayhem and corruption of the Katrina emergency response has been a reassuring example of how their plan will be carried out. Cradled in their benevolent and protective arms, America sleeps well.

Victor Kravchenko, a Soviet official assigned to Ukraine, who later defected to America, wrote, "Anger lashed my mind as I drove back to the village. Butter sent abroad in the midst of the famine! In London, Berlin, Paris I could see ... people eating butter stamped with a Soviet trade mark. Driving through the fields, I did not hear the lovely Ukrainian songs so dear to my heart. These people have forgotten how to sing! I could only hear the groans of the dying and the lip-smacking of the fat foreigners enjoying our butter."

Stalin, too, had his plan. And as it was for Stalin and his comrades, so, too, is it for Commissar Johanns and his Ag Industry Cartel. Ann Venneman, J. Patrick Boyle, Cargill, Tyson, Smithfield - they have all been part of the plan. Exports to the fat, lip-smacking foreigners means profits for the cartel! Imports of cheap meat mean profits for the Cartel! Industrialization - vertical integration - means profits for the cartel!

In 1983, Malcolm Muggeridge recalled, "What made it so diabolical is that it was the deliberate creation of a bureaucratic mind ... without any consideration whatever of the consequences in human suffering."

Will the coming bioterrorist attack frighten enough sheep? Will they beg to be numbered in exchange for the security of an iron fist? The exercises have been practiced. The plans are in place for earth-moving equipment to bury thousands of carcasses. FEMA officials are ready: "We are certainly treating it like it's a probable likelihood." Voluntary premises registration is lagging. Opposition mounts to NAIS. History portends the time is ripe for manufactured terror. Yet America's gutless morons grovel and insist, "NAIS is coming, like it or not. We'll need it to compete in the global marketplace."

Here, in America, in our green and pleasant land, a ruthless struggle is also taking place. Who will be master here, Comrade Khatayevich? As the unleashed id of a diabolical partnership between bureaucracy and corporate greed laughs at human suffering, who will be master here?

And so, too, Mr. and Mrs. Farmer and Rancher - you American Kulaks - you stand in their way. As dolts, you will argue about data collection or maintaining the privacy of the database; as jackasses, you will bicker over subsidies for RFID tags and scanners; and as simpletons, you will squabble about exemptions for Susie's 4H lamb.

And Commissar Johanns will declare, "We have numbered you, your land and your animals. We've won the war. The collective farm system is here to stay. We are master here."

And that which hitherto could only be imagined now confronts us as grim reality.

LM Schwartz is the chair of the McDowell-based Virginia Land Rights Coalition. The views expressed by op-ed writers do not necessarily reflect those of management of The Augusta Free Press.

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(Published 07-25-06)