Vandana Shiva is one of the most radical voices in contemporary politics. She knows what Bill Gates is really doing, and she s willing to talk about it. She believes in decentralization of power, devolution, and decentralization. She recognizes that there is a constant threat of calling people conspiracy theorists because they re speaking out against establishment power. We spoke at our live event, Community, in which she spoke about a variety of subjects, including: - Why is it so important to have a relationship with nature, land, and one another? - What happens to us spiritually and environmentally when corporations are able to own things that don t seem like they should be like them, like water and land? - How can we learn to live sustainably and sustainably in a world that is increasingly run by corporate greed and environmentalism? - Why does it matter who owns the land, the water, and the land? - What does it mean to be an environmentalist and a revolutionary? - Is it possible to be a revolutionary in the 21st century? - Is there any hope for the future of the planet and the planet? In this episode, I m joined by Vandana Shiva, and we talk about what it means to be radical, and what it looks like to be anti-colonial and anti-imperialist, and how we can make a difference in the world. in a time when corporate greed is becoming more and more powerful than ever and how it s becoming more important than ever, and more so than we can be a voice for the planet what does it really mean to change the world? This is a beautiful and powerful woman, right here in this episode? Join us in the home of truth and freedom and freedom, and let me know what that means to you can be an activist, and you can have a say in the next episode of Awakening Wonders? in this podcast? You ve got to join us in this one! . v=1MVVVANANAN SHIVAR VANDANANTHA? VANDANA SHILLA VANANNA SHILLAN SHILLAR is a world teacher, environmental activist, environmentalist, eco-activist, feminist, and human rights activist activist, philosopher, and social justice activist, philosopher, writer, and feminist, and so on and so much more. -
00:00:01.000Thanks for joining me on this voyage to truth and freedom.
00:00:03.000If you're one of the 6.5 million watching us on YouTube right now, click the link in the description and join us in the home of truth because Vandana Shiva is coming!
00:00:13.000Vandana Shiva, world teacher, Indian scholar, environmental activist, activist but from a perspective of liberating actual people,
00:00:20.000not punishing people, not penalising ordinary people while allowing centralist, globalist
00:00:43.000She believes in decentralization of power, devolution.
00:00:47.000She recognizes that there is a constant threat of calling people conspiracy theorists because they're speaking out against establishment power.
00:01:09.000Let me know in the comments if this is the first time you've seen Vandana Shiva, and let me know if, like me, you believe this is exactly the kind of voice we need in politics to change the world right now.
00:01:19.000I'm joined now by Vandana Shiva at Community.
00:01:22.000Vandana Shiva, as I usually refer to her, is, I believe, a world teacher.
00:01:28.000We're today, of course, going to talk about a variety of subjects.
00:01:31.000First, I'd like to thank you for your presence, Vandana.
00:01:51.000And then we fought it with hand spinning and hand weaving and the charkha that Gandhi brought out.
00:01:57.000But Monsanto took control of the seed and increased the cost, totally unreliable, couldn't control pests, not resilient to drought, and it kept failing.
00:02:51.000In a sense, Vandana, this piece of fabric embodies many of the principles that need to be practiced in order to overcome these gargantuan entities of domination that first dominated your nation and in the colours of national imperialism and now appear to be masked by logo.
00:03:19.000Human beings cannot have a relationship with nature, land, and one another, it seems, increasingly, without the intercedents of this corporate power.
00:03:30.000Just you describing this seemed like a minor miracle that, oh wow, seeds that, prior to the time where seeds were patented, dies prior to these processes becoming industrialized.
00:03:41.000And I'm not naive about the power of technology and the power of industry, but I am deeply concerned about the mentality behind it and the inherent disregard for nature, both human nature and nature more broadly, which I know you would say are not distinct.
00:03:55.000In this country right now, there is a lot of awareness, and I think this is true around the world in the wake of the East Palestine disaster in the United States of America, With the way that industry and industrial practices are negatively impacting the world, where I live, the River Thames is continually polluted and I can't help but think this is in part because the companies that own Thames water now are financed and owned in places like Canada and Abu Dhabi and I believe in part in China.
00:04:26.000What happens when corporations are able to own things that don't seem like they should even be primarily regarded as resources like water and nature and land?
00:04:37.000What happens to us spiritually and what happens ecologically?
00:04:42.000Well, I think all of nature's gifts that are vital to survival of all life, human life, as well as the life of other beings, the water, the air, the oceans, and actually till British imperialism, the land, the land was a commons.
00:05:00.000They were always held in, 1789 I think it was, Lord Corvallis says, All the soil of India is British property, and therefore the peasants of India had to pay a tax to the British, and they starved to death while Britain made $45 trillion out of the exploitation.
00:05:22.000So the reason nature herself is either treated as a mine or a dump, and rivers and water are treated as mines to take out the water, out of the flow, And dump for the waste.
00:05:38.000So the privatization of rivers is the extractivism out of the river, but also the dumping of the waste.
00:06:17.000The chemicals and the antibiotics are supplied by Cargill.
00:06:21.000And all the waste is thrown into the commons of the river.
00:06:25.000The interesting thing is for why, even though there's columns in Guardian that recognize that Cargill, the world's biggest corporation in agriculture, has a role, there are paid journalists in the Guardian!
00:06:56.000The farmers are victims in this system.
00:06:58.000And the second is, you do not pick particularly vulnerable people.
00:07:05.000At a time where we desperately need farmers to take care of the earth, to take care of the rivers, to take care of our food, to grow good food, to try and destroy the link between today and the future, between the earth and us.
00:07:24.000That farmers have become increasingly vilified even when there are farm protests in Sri Lanka and India and Germany and England and the Netherlands.
00:07:33.000How is it that there appears to be a global uprising, an activism movement in agriculture and the simultaneous, as you say, media smearing of people that Oh, farmers.
00:07:47.000And why is it happening in such a particular way, Vandana?
00:07:50.000Why are we hearing of farmers and this movement against what appears to be the increasing industrialization, centralization and globalization of agriculture as being a right-wing idea?
00:08:12.000I've written many papers and books on food fascism.
00:08:19.000And fascism is, of course, how Mussolini defined it, the convergence of economic and political power.
00:08:26.000And food fascism is the recent control over our food systems by giant corporations and the billionaires.
00:08:37.000Because earlier the British controlled the land, but they didn't control the food.
00:08:42.000It's with globalization and the green revolution and industrialization of food that the corporations control food.
00:08:50.000And I remember when I was organizing protests against the GATT and WTO, we shut down WTO in Seattle.
00:08:58.000But I remember 500,000 farmer protests in India.
00:09:02.000And there's this sea of farmers saying, food and agriculture is too precious to be left to the greed of free trade.
00:09:10.000It must be kept in the hands of the farmers.
00:09:13.000So, food sovereignty came as the call, as opposite to the food dictatorship and food fascism.
00:09:20.000And if you look now, that same system wants to industrialize further, further remove people from the land, farming without farmers, Further industrialize agriculture, put more energy.
00:09:33.000Recent calculations are showing that the footprint of this lab food that they want to push as a solution to climate change is 25 times more than conventional agriculture.
00:09:45.000So they're taking a destructive alternative, but from the beginning of colonialism, Removing the people's ability to sustain themselves and provide for themselves is the first step of the empire, first step of fascism.
00:10:03.000And separation from nature is where it begins.
00:10:06.000But destruction of the farmers who work with the land, because I have realized increasingly, you know, you want to make an automobile, you will have to go somewhere for Aluminium, somewhere else now for lithium and cobalt and all of that you'll have to travel around the world.
00:10:23.000But if I'm a peasant, or if I'm a gardener, I work with the soil, I have a little bit of seed, I give my love and my knowledge, the sun shines and does the photosynthesis, it's the only truly independent production system.
00:10:40.000And it's the freedom that they want to attack.
00:10:42.000They're afraid, not just afraid of freedom, but they're challenged by it.
00:10:47.000Because this system is so much more humane, so much more ecological, so much more light-footed, that they want to put their false solutions by saying the farmers are to blame.
00:11:05.000They have to destroy and discredit farmers by calling them fascists and right-wing and anybody who facilitates that is essentially doing the work of these globalists.
00:11:32.000And, you know, if you want to be... I mean, I call this journalist who's been used for making this language, I call him the Nescafe expert of food.
00:11:43.000You know, just like you have filter coffee that filters slowly.
00:12:30.000And the people said, how is it that, you know, the mullahs in the mosques and the priests in the temples don't convince us of the path to God?
00:12:41.000And you speak, and we know what that path is.
00:12:46.000And he said something which we all need to remember.
00:12:50.000In Hindi, he said, They speak from the word they have read, often the propaganda word fed by the corporations who want to get rid of the farmer.
00:13:03.000And I speak from my experience and in life.
00:13:09.000And so, those of us who are defending the earth and farmers, and the earth will not be defended without those who will take care of her.
00:13:19.000And the only caretakers in the world, everywhere, are farmers.
00:13:24.000To try and destroy them means you really want to also create new conquests of the earth, new colonization of the earth.
00:13:32.000It's beautiful how you've described it and defined it and helped me to understand it as a, in a sense, a project of colonisation to smear farmers as fascists, to disempower them, to break the link between people and the land so this too can become colonised, industrialised, globalised and centralised.
00:13:52.000Often when I think of globalism, I think of it as being vast and all-encompassing, which of course it is, but also it's tiny and it intercedes in the tiny relationships between human beings and the relationships between people who work with the soil and the soil itself.
00:14:07.000Almost as if there can be no intimacy, no intimacy between human beings and the land.
00:14:13.000Almost as if nature itself can be patented, remedied, broken down and destroyed.
00:14:18.000Thank you for helping me to understand that.
00:14:20.000One of the things you've helped me to understand also is that our models of colonialism and imperialism have migrated from recognizably models that are underwritten by nationalism, identifiable figures of empire, the crown, the flag, into rather more diffuse and difficult to map monoliths.
00:14:43.000I understand now, because it's 20 or so years since the names have become familiar to us, thanks in no small part to your great work in spreading this message, the power of companies like Monsanto, the havoc that they have wreaked.
00:14:59.000But, even now, to talk of someone like Bill Gates, and the, it's odd to say billionaire class, because you need a few more people to create a class, and it's such a tiny cadre of individuals, are able to exert, it seems to me at least, a disproportionate, extraordinarily high amount of power on agriculture, on world health, not least through the World Health Organization, and have Have had an ability historically and and recently that they have the capacity to direct policy in areas That's very very surprising.
00:15:34.000How have we found ourself in this position?
00:15:36.000And what can we do to address it again without being regarded as?
00:15:41.000Conspiracy theories because I know even the subjects that we're discussing already the smearing of farmers That's right-wing and fascist to to speak about the rights of farmers and to stand up for their causes and now when you speak about Billionaires, what might be the sort of centripetal force of this globalism.
00:15:58.000If you talk about that, people say you're a conspiracy theorist.
00:16:00.000How are these conversations being closed down?
00:16:02.000First of all, I suppose I'm asking you, what is the role of, let's take for example Bill Gates, because he seems like the best example, and how can we speak about it plainly and with facts so that it's not regarded as conspiratorial or crackpot?
00:16:15.000Well, you know, I watched Bill Gates take over the UN system with the climate summit in Paris in 2015.
00:16:23.000And that's when I decided to write the book, Oneness vs. 1%, which I gifted you at the last community festival.
00:16:30.000And in the book we've analyzed how did people like Bill Gates become as wealthy as they are, and how are they controlling so much?
00:16:39.000So they became wealthy through liberalization, neoliberal liberalization, where trade was liberalized, and trade in information.
00:18:12.000Corteva is the merger of Dow and DuPont.
00:18:15.000And they show it as if they're covering scientific news.
00:18:18.000But they're really doing an advertisement.
00:18:23.000So, philanthro-capitalism is give a tiny bait and take the whole thing, but also present yourself as a philanthropist.
00:18:34.000And the reason they control the governments is also through the philanthropy issue.
00:18:37.000Because when they enter and say, this is the recipe to save your children, as philanthropy, the governments who've been made desperate for money because of indebtedness by the World Bank and IMF, they cling to every piece.
00:18:52.000But before you know it, he's taken over the health sector.
00:20:04.000But even on the more quotidian and minor level of appliances in Western and Anglophonic countries, this washing machine, you'll have more time.
00:20:13.000This dishwasher, you'll have more time.
00:20:16.000All of these artifacts and objects are built on an imagined promise of an imagined future that we're never going to arrive at because when you get there, you'll find it doesn't belong to you, it belongs to them.
00:20:26.000And not just that, running around to maintain these systems Takes all your time.
00:20:34.000There's a friend of mine, Julie Cho, who's run a book called something about no time now.
00:21:56.000They eat the straw or grass and then what they gift us back is fertilizer.
00:22:03.000So you can either have that fertilizer or you can have the fossil fuel fertilizer.
00:22:09.000Which gives you climate change, which gives you pollution of the rivers, dead zones in the rivers, and it gives you dead soils because it kills all the life.
00:22:18.000And fertilizers are emitting more greenhouse gases than all the aviation.
00:22:27.000Fertilizers are emitting more greenhouse gases than all aviation.
00:22:31.000If you take the full cycle of manufacturing.
00:22:33.000The full cycle of manufacturing, when the full cycle of manufacturing is accounted for.
00:22:37.000And with the tiny bits of digitalization that has happened because the surveillance economy they want to create is basically an economy that is driven by data.
00:23:25.000On smart machines, to open their door, to open their fridge, now it's time to go to bed.
00:23:31.000Not only is it a very foolish kind of slavery, it's a huge ecological footprint on the planet and we can't afford it.
00:23:39.000So we have to learn to walk lightly again.
00:23:44.000It feels like we're being extracted from our own lives and our own reality in the manner that would once only have been plausible through the model of imagining total surrender to God, as if one oneself is merely a node, a reflection, a cipher and tunnel of some divine light.
00:24:07.000Now I see this becoming absolutely materialized, that you surrender yourself to some externalized system of surveillance and data capture and management and organization.
00:24:18.000I see that this is what happens when you prioritize materialism over spirituality.
00:24:25.000I see that this is what happens when rationality and logistics pervade all things and subjugate the difficult to quantify,
00:24:35.000impossible to quantify, sublime nature of things.
00:24:39.000This desacralization, a word that I learned and thought of because of you, because of a conversation we once had,
00:24:47.000this desacralization is increasing at great pace it seems to me.
00:24:53.000And what once seemed implausible, impossible, perhaps because it was the idea that we could be extracted from our own lives, that we could be dominated centrally, now seems to be...
00:26:07.000I mean, I basically asked you how to solve all the world's problems
00:26:09.000in one question there, Vandana, which seems pretty hefty.
00:26:11.000But let's just, if we could, focus on the idea of the curtailing of communication and censorship.
00:26:16.000Do you think that the prohibition of free communication is a significant part of this project to globalise and centrally control all things, this surveillance state that you tell us about?
00:26:29.000You know, a system of total control, but a system of total control which turns the control into the next source of profits.
00:27:48.000It's extraordinary that the veil for this discourse, for this new and emergent system of centralisation, is sort of all gilded with the linguistics of freedom and respect and honour.
00:28:02.000Like, the conversations that we find ourselves having in the media space, our organisation, such as we are, Stay Free Media, What we have to be cautious about is being labelled right-wing, being labelled conspiracy theorists, and what's used to, as I understand, underwrite it, is the idea that somehow they are protecting people, that someone is being protected by this.
00:28:26.000Take Bill Gates, take the surveillance state, take the capture of our data, take what happened in the last three years, the lockdowns, the shutting down of free speech, the closing down of expert opinion.
00:28:38.000The removal of valid and valuable data.
00:28:41.000All of this was advanced as giving us freedom.
00:28:44.000How is it and why is it that we're being told that all of this is for our safety and security, when plainly elsewhere, excuse me, plainly elsewhere, you can see that their motivation is so seldom about altruism and kindness.
00:29:00.000You remember George Orwell wrote a book, 1984, and he talked about doublespeak.
00:29:08.000How every word will mean the opposite.
00:29:10.000Now the fascists who want to control every element of our food, our breath, our thinking, our communication, are the ones who are actually institutionalizing the next stage of fascism now through technology, which should be a tool and a means and has been elevated to a god.
00:29:31.000And they, therefore, have to use the doublespeak of calling those who are living and seeking freedom as the right wing.
00:29:42.000And they have to present those who are speaking truth as a conspiracy theorist.
00:29:49.000How many brilliant doctors who actually heal people and who are now having an opportunity to talk were censored?
00:29:59.000And I think if you want to understand the destruction of freedom in our age, looking at the last two years...