Starvation as a form of genocide. The importance of food sovereignty.

tawasi (63)in #fascistamerica • 6 years ago

Starvation is coming to the USA. It’s difficult to imagine. In reality food deprivation has been used by the government in the USA, often to crush resistance. Whether it was unions of rail workers or indigenous people standing up to the colonization of OUR homelands, the task masters halting the delivery of food has brought the subjugated class to heal consistently through the years. Hunger keeps the poor working. It brings those who exist outside of the mainstream society into the towns and cities to shop for staple foods. Food sovereignty is no small goal.

Growing enough food to feed yourself seems like a relatively simple task, in reality it takes a full time commitment to protecting your crops from critters, drought, rot, and other people. Even though our society has effectively created systems to grow food effectively, we have utterly failed in the sense that our systems of food delivery are based purely on capitalistic gain.

This focus on profiting from food creates a situation where hunger goes unabated for a lack of money. Only those who work are entitled to eat, and those who are deemed unemployable or who cannot overcome their disabilities are more or less left out in the cold in the sense that society allows the poor to suffer.

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In the Pacific northwest during the construction of the Transcontinental rail line starvation was used to break a strike of Chinese rail workers. The people who had been building the rail line were being underpaid. The Chineses people were put in danger and given jobs which other workers were unwilling to do, whether it was tunnel work or working with explosives, the white workers didn’t want to risk their lives in this dangerous and underpaid labor.

This resulted in tens of thousands of Chinese workers building the rail lines, while being underpaid by comparison to their white counterparts. The undervaluing on Chinese labor was so severe that it led to the eventual rail strike of june 1867. The people put down their tools and returned to their camps, they refused to continue working. Eventually the strike was broken after the supply line was halted and the strikers mostly died due to starvation. Imagine that if you will, going to a job site in the middle of nowhere without the ability to get back to civilization. Finding yourself hungry and stranded by employers who care for you only so long as you keep working for slave wages.

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The importance of creating systems of food sovereignty cannot be emphasized enough. Seed banks, neighborhood garden exchange programs, community supported agriculture, rewilding, fruit forests, really any form of creating sustenance which does not have to be shipped in or purchased.

When we are empowered with our own foods, we are less reliant on the dysfunctions of our current society, we don’t contribute to the enslavement of others for our foods, and we gain self reliance while uplifting each other. In this moment our ability to create these communities around food sovereignty is essential, working together to create a brighter future for our children.

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Starvation was effectively by the Nazis, they starved out millions. One famous instance of starvation happened in Leningrad during the siege of 1941. There were an estimated 1,000,000 people who died of starvation during the 872 days long siege.

These were only a small percentage of the people starved to death during the 1930’s in Ukraine. Causing people to die of starvation took little in the way of resources, bullets and soldiers were preserved through the use of sieges. It’s difficult to imagine a million people dying of hunger in one town, yet this is a reality which the makers of war learned from and continue to use.

”This genocide by starvation was therefore a premeditated decision–a crime against humanity–not an indirect or incidental result of a siege during war. According to historian Max Hastings, Hitler consulted Professor Ernst Zigelemeyer, in charge of the Munich Institute of Nutrition—to find out how much food (and calories) the average person requires to live. Zigelemeyer informed him that the Soviet government would not be able to provide Lenigraders with more than 8.8 grams of bread daily, which wouldn’t be sufficient for the majority to survive the siege. Hitler thus concluded: “It’s not worth risking the lives of our troops. The Leningraders will die anyway. It is essential not to let a single person through our front line. The more of them that stay there, the sooner they will die, and then we will enter the city without trouble, without losing a single German soldier” (Inferno, Vintage Books, 2012). His demonic plan almost worked.”

A siege was laid against the Water Protectors camps in North Dakota. The sheriff’s office along with the national guard were searching vehicles for food and supplies and turning away anyone who was working to resupply our camps.

Local law enforcement even went as far as issuing tickets to people who were attempting to bring food to our camps. We had enormous supplies of food in our camps already though. I believe this is why the federal agencies moved to use military forces against our camps, because they couldn’t starve us out.

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The use of starvation as a form of genocide is both cruel and inhumane. It’s not something which caring individuals do. This is a tactic which cruel military tacticians use in order to preserve their resources.

I am writing about this topic now because our government is definitely moving our population in this direction. Cutting deeply at the social safety net, the federal government is kicking people off of food stamps, and rolling back funding to meals on wheels, children’s school lunches are being cut, and commodities which were delivered to tribal reservations under intergovernmental treaties are also being threatened. Bare in mind that commodity food is already unhealthy and dangerous to the people who eat it. The indigenous people who survive on commodity food have higher rates of obesity and diabetes. Meanwhile the traditional foods which these nations had survived on since the dawn of time are being contaminated with poisons, or ruined through modern agriculture and lack of regulation of pollutants which harm wild edibles.

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This reality, that hunger can kill us, needs to be directly addressed by each community in the country and the world. We need to create communities built around concepts of food sovereignty. These communities will work to educate people about the importance of fruit forests and seed exchanges. These communities will foster networks of caring and help to make government aid obsolete. When we turn our good will towards each other we can create a gift culture based on mutual aid.