BY DANIEL JUPP

Energy and food.

These are things we just can’t do without.

The vast majority of rebellions throughout history have been about food.

‘Every society is three meals away from chaos’. It doesn’t matter that Lenin said this or that an earlier version was invented by Dumas. The Russian experience has proven that on this he was right.

Most of history’s greatest atrocities are also food related. Deliberate starvation of populations by artificial starvation kills more brutally and more effectively than either bullets or concentration camps. Millions of victims of Communism, from Russia to China, from Venezuela to Ukraine, or in Cambodia’s death fields, were (or are being) starved – victims of depopulation and deliberately planned genocides, victims of catastrophically misguided “science” (Lysenkoism) or massive social engineering projects (collectivisation, delocalisation, Chavez’ crushing of the rich and price fixing, Pol Pot’s desire to see city traders and teachers transformed into destitute peasants).

The history of civilisation is the history of the control of food production, the history of the transition from a hunter-harvest society to a sedentary agrarian society, the history of organisation and social hierarchy needed to engage in food production on a larger scale. Changes in the way we feed ourselves mark decisive turning points in our way of living and directly impact other important milestones such as the development of writing, mathematics, or religion. Major religions often include dietary rules.

In Cannibals and Kings, anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist Mervyn King makes a fascinating and, in my opinion, compelling argument about how major cultural differences, such as attitudes toward “long pig” (eating human flesh) and pork (eating pork), or the question of whether a cow is a source of delicious meat or a sacred animal never to be eaten, all depends on evolutionary imperatives shaped by climate and environment. Ideology, including religion, derives from these elements as efforts to make survival more likely.

But it is also ideology that pulls us so far away from the natural world that we will, for example, starve entire populations into submission, or believe things that result in mass starvation.

Energy is also an integral part of our lives and experience of civilisation. We used to speak of a dark age with the extinction of Roman power, and the word “darkness” was synonymous with danger, chaos, anarchy, war, and collapse of all protections of civilisation. It is as easy to assess human progress as the walk towards energy – heat and light universally available to heat our shelters, cook our food, prevent us from dying of hypothermia and increase our hours of work and leisure – than to evaluate it by any other measure.

Civilisation is largely made up of energy and food in abundance while tyranny is always the attempt to control these elements, often leading to the disastrous or deliberate mismanagement of this control, which results in millions of dead. Our moral rules through hard-fought freedoms consist of understanding that human beings have the right to food, shelter, and supply for themselves by their own efforts and in their own way, without the fruits of those efforts being arbitrarily controlled, stolen, or destroyed by others (particularly by the state or a large equivalent power).

Now think about what supposedly democratic governments and supposedly benevolent transnational bodies are doing and advocating for food and energy. In both cases, they require a radical, centralised, downward rearrangement of the current system, a rearrangement as sudden and extensive as any Soviet project or five-year plan. Even his defenders (like Bill Gates) admit that Net Zero and modern industrial nations’ abandonment of all coal, all oil, all carbon dioxide, all “harmful gases,” is the greatest project ever undertaken by civilised nations. And they do not exclude food production from this project. They’re not saying drastically changing our energy supply is already a bad thing, but drastically changing our food supply at the same time might be stupid.

They say put the meat away. They say slaughter herds, shut down dairy farms, invent genetically modified crops with unknown effects, legalise them like the UK Government did, make 3,000 Dutch farms disappear like the Netherlands did, slaughter 200,000 cows as the Irish Government pleases. Make everyone eat a noisy mush made up of half cockroaches and insect chitin, and half GMO plants.

I hope this idea is as unappealing politically as it would be on a plate, because it’s nonsense. It’s based on the insane belief that cow farts are killing the planet. And it is based on the completely sensible, yet deeply malicious, intention to control as many aspects of our lives as can be controlled or nudged. The most vital commodities you depend on for your very survival. No matter the magnitude of this change, no matter the potential disastrous consequences we’ve seen with previous communist bad science, bad morality and bad societal alterations.

Daniel Jupp is the author of A Gift for Treason: The Cultural Marxist Assault on Western Civilisation, which was published in 2019. He has had previous articles published by Spiked, The Spectator and Politicalite, and is a married father of two from Essex.