Finally, Pitchforks and Torches

It’s happening….Beware the peasants!
Across Europe the peasants are in revolt and it is a thing of beauty. And there has been no media coverage of this historic movement.

EU Leader: Farming Must Be Eliminated

These are countries where farmers are protesting against the left’s climate agricultural policy of the European Union, the Green Deal

France🇲🇫
Italy🇮🇹
Greece🇬🇷
Romania🇹🇩
Poland🇵🇱
Netherlands🇳🇱
Belgium🇧🇪
Germany🇩🇪
Spain🇪🇸
Portugal🇧🇫
Lithuania🇱🇹
Scotland🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿
Ireland🇮🇪

Spaniards block the border between France and Spain on the A9/AP-7 causing very significant disruptions.

Spain has been affected for two days by dozens of blockades and demonstrations. The movement goes far beyond the agricultural unions.

Farmers are organizing through… pic.twitter.com/d1zJDCS7dX

— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) February 7, 2024

Germany ,Netherlands , Ireland , France , Bulgaria and Other European Farmers and Truckers and Railroad Unions are Protesting into a Second Month…Fully Shutting Down Highways and City Infrastructure……. pic.twitter.com/NLJMdtRocl

— We the People… (@77HERCULES77) February 6, 2024

🚨🇩🇪 Berlin, Germany

Massive Farmer inspired protest with European techno beat is worth watching.

People have simply had enough. pic.twitter.com/QK3bnJJT9R

— Concerned Citizen (@BGatesIsaPyscho) February 13, 2024

🚨🚨🚨 French farmers in Draguignan, France bring out flocks of sheep to protest against the government. pic.twitter.com/A8Q5i7u4G2

— Uncensored USA 🇺🇸 (@CarlosSimancas) February 9, 2024

France now… the farmers are up in arms
Also in Germany, Holland etc pic.twitter.com/2z9oC1ZghL

— Xenia Ioannidis 🇬🇷 🇺🇸 (@xeniaioa) February 6, 2024

Farmers arrive in cork, ireland…. pic.twitter.com/bNKX6XIgNi

— Francesco (@Frances89805199) February 4, 2024

Cop shop in France buried in manure courtesy of the farmers .. 🚿🪠 pic.twitter.com/VWX83MJgMn

— Leah Rain ✝️🇺🇸🎸🏝️ (@LeahRain77) February 6, 2024

ITS HAPPENING 🚜 🚜🚜

The Welsh farmers have joined the protests against the climate agenda.

No farmers = No foodpic.twitter.com/CSwiasWrmq

— PeterSweden (@PeterSweden7) February 13, 2024

The peasants won’t go quietly

Europe ought to show them more gratitude

By: Pratinav Anil, February 13, 2024:

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Farmers hurl eggs at the European Parliament. They dump manure wherever they go. In Spain, they burn tyres. In Occitania, office buildings. Their tractors have cursed the capital of Germany with terrible traffic. As in the Holy Roman Empire circa 1524, so in the Europe of 2024: we must beware the peasant.

In parliaments and the press, the latest peasant revolt has been met with raised eyebrows, hostility even. “This class has been spoilt by decades of copious public support,” declared La Stampa, Italy’s soi-disant “progressive” newspaper. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany’s premier conservative paper, was blunter: “Pampered farmers,” read its headline. Below, the protests were quaintly described as an “impertinence”. Europe’s politicians are likewise exasperated. Germany’s home secretary, Nancy Faeser, has pinned the blame on far-Right coup-makers, accusing them of seducing the unsuspecting subalterns.

In short, peasants appear to be not only obtuse but also obsolete in our modern world of slacktivism and semiconductors. So, this is an appropriate week for the publication of the 78-year-old social historian Patrick Joyce’s deeply sympathetic swansong to the world of his parents, Remembering Peasants.

Not that the thinking classes have ever taken peasants seriously. Even Marx thought they were morons: there’s an off-hand aside about “the idiocy of rural life” in The Communist Manifesto. Factory workers were supposed to be at the vanguard of revolution. Farmhands, by contrast, stood “outside history”; not for them the whiggish march of Progress. Generally speaking, the Left has been instinctively hostile to peasant populism, with its reactionary affection for faith and family.

And yet, conservatives haven’t tended to champion them either: their general view is that peasants’ suffering is entirely self-inflicted. This perspective was summed up by the anthropologist — and later advisor to Nixon and Reagan — Edward Banfield, who in 1958 laid into the “amoral familism” of the peasants of Basilicata. Too absorbed by the complacent parochialism of family life, they were simply incapable of thinking of their salvation — which, of course, lay in the free market. Peasants, so the argument ran, weren’t good capitalist citizens.]

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As landowners, peasants are unmistakably conservatives. But they are not a rich people. As smallholders, they can be classed neither as oppressors nor as the oppressed. The peasant’s politics is a quaint admixture of Left and Right, then: the state, they feel, should be kept at arm’s length, but so, too, should the free market. Change of any kind is to be resisted — and it is here that the radicalism of the peasant comes in. “The peasant is a conservative, not a progressive,” writes Joyce. “Slow to move, but once roused, unstoppable, as in the peasant revolt, the jacquerie.”

Indeed, the history of the peasantry is a history of protest. Western Sicilians, for instance, used to greet one another with cries of “cuntrastuma”: we are resisting. But this isn’t a history that is widely known. This is a world, for the better part, shunned by trade paperbacks and Beeb documentaries. How many of us have much of an inkling about, say, the German Peasants’ War of 1524, Europe’s largest uprising before the French Revolution? And it isn’t often that we commemorate the killing of 11,000 peasants by the army and police in what Joyce calls “the last great European peasant uprising”: the 1907 Romanian rebellion. Nor, for that matter, do we recall that one of the earliest and biggest challenges to Russia’s October Revolution was the Tambov Rebellion of 1920, in which peasants launched a guerrilla war against the Red Army. Put down by the Soviets, the conflict resulted in a quarter of a million deaths.

Much of Europe scarcely remembers the peasant revolts of the 20th century, perhaps because the peasants themselves are a vanishing people. As recently as 1960, 40% lived in the countryside; that figure has now almost halved. In the EU, scarcely 4% work in agriculture. What’s more, those who do aren’t stricto sensu farmers, but rather “five o’clock farmers”, who double as miners, cleaners or factory workers. Before the turn of the century, Pierre Bourdieu lamented that you’re more likely to find peasants in theme parks than villages.
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