Russell chats to the Indian scholar and environmental activist, Vandana Shiva. Recorded live at Community 2023, Russell and Vandana tackle the farmers’ fight against corporate power, how elites are flexing their control, and the chilling realities of ‘Food Fascism’. Plus, the media’s prevailing narrative advocating for the elimination of farm animals to combat climate change and the eerie resemblance between ‘Big Data’ exploitation and oil profiteering.Join us at ‘Community 2024' https://www.russellbrand.com/community/For a bit more from us join our Stay Free Community here: https://russellbrand.locals.com/NEW MERCH! https://stuff.russellbrand.com/
Thanks for joining me on this voyage to truth and freedom.
If 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!
Vandana Shiva, world teacher, Indian scholar, environmental activist, activist but from a perspective of liberating actual people,
not punishing people, not penalising ordinary people while allowing centralist, globalist
authority to continue to thrive.
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 knows what Monsanto have done. Vandana Shiva is a world teacher, a potential world
leader.
She believes in decentralization of power, devolution.
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.
You've got to join us next time.
We talked about how big business are destroying the environment, then blaming you.
We spoke about food fascism, industrialisation of our food, and why big data is the new oil.
This is a fantastic conversation.
Let 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.
I'm joined now by Vandana Shiva at Community.
Vandana Shiva, as I usually refer to her, is, I believe, a world teacher.
We're today, of course, going to talk about a variety of subjects.
First, I'd like to thank you for your presence, Vandana.
My joy.
I'm here for Community.
I'm here for you, Russell.
Thank you for coming and thank you for this beautiful gift.
Would you tell me once more how this gift was made and what this is I'm wearing?
Well, you know, cotton was a colonial fiber.
The empire was a cotton empire.
And then we fought it with hand spinning and hand weaving and the charkha that Gandhi brought out.
But Monsanto took control of the seed and increased the cost, totally unreliable, couldn't control pests, not resilient to drought, and it kept failing.
Farmers got into debt.
Indebted farmers committed suicide.
So the cotton belt, which became a Monsanto GMO cotton belt, became a belt of suicide.
So of course that hurt, you know, propelled me to act.
So I found old cotton seed, old varieties.
Help the farmers grow organic, get rid of the chemicals, get rid of the GMOs.
And then we work with the Khadi Ashrams, with the Gandhi Ashrams, where they hand-spin and hand-weave.
And this is organic cotton, hand-spun, hand-woven, and hand-dyed with vegetable dyes.
So at every step it's non-violent, and we call it the fiber of freedom.
Thank you.
In 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.
We still confront the same problem.
Human beings cannot have a relationship with nature, land, and one another, it seems, increasingly, without the intercedents of this corporate power.
Just 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.
And 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.
In 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.
What 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?
What happens to us spiritually and what happens ecologically?
Well, 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.
They 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.
So 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.
So the privatization of rivers is the extractivism out of the river, but also the dumping of the waste.
But we are sitting next to the river.
Why?
And from what I understand, the chicken farms, the chicken farms were not imagined by the peasants.
or the farmers of this area.
They have been designed by Cargill, the world's biggest grain trader,
the remotest area on an island in Philippines.
The chicken is owned by Cargill.
The feed is supplied by Cargill.
The chemicals and the antibiotics are supplied by Cargill.
And all the waste is thrown into the commons of the river.
The 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!
Who talk about, oh, the farmers.
It's all the farmers.
And this total criminalization of farmers is ethically and ecologically wrong.
First, if the drivers are the corporations, you have the guts to fight the corporations.
You don't target the victims.
The farmers are victims in this system.
And the second is, you do not pick particularly vulnerable people.
At 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.
Vandana, how is it that...
That farmers have become increasingly vilified even when there are farm protests in Sri Lanka and India and Germany and England and the Netherlands.
How 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.
Why is that happening?
And why is it happening in such a particular way, Vandana?
Why 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?
How can it be right-wing?
Even for speaking about it myself, I've been accused of peddling right-wing messaging, but it doesn't make sense to me.
I don't understand it.
I've written many papers and books on food fascism.
And fascism is, of course, how Mussolini defined it, the convergence of economic and political power.
And food fascism is the recent control over our food systems by giant corporations and the billionaires.
Because earlier the British controlled the land, but they didn't control the food.
It's with globalization and the green revolution and industrialization of food that the corporations control food.
And I remember when I was organizing protests against the GATT and WTO, we shut down WTO in Seattle.
But I remember 500,000 farmer protests in India.
And there's this sea of farmers saying, food and agriculture is too precious to be left to the greed of free trade.
It must be kept in the hands of the farmers.
So, food sovereignty came as the call, as opposite to the food dictatorship and food fascism.
And 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.
Recent 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.
Yeah?
So 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.
And separation from nature is where it begins.
But 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.
But 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.
And it's the freedom that they want to attack.
They're afraid, not just afraid of freedom, but they're challenged by it.
Because 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.
Get rid of them.
Because as long as they're farmers, we'll have food.
Oh, I see.
They 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.
They're the fascists.
See, the fascists want to... The people that wrote those articles are the fascists.
And they're, you know, they're taking a thing and projecting it to the farmer.
And I think all we need to do is recognize how fascism works.
Yes.
Yeah.
And, 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.
You know, just like you have filter coffee that filters slowly.
The farmer's wisdom filters beautifully.
I've given 40 years of my life to trying to understand the food system.
Two years ago, he was on a Zoom conference with me.
And he says, well, I've received 2,000 papers, and now I'm going to start to read them.
And now I'll write a book called Regenesis.
And I said, in two years, reading a few books?
And you might remember, we had a very beautiful saint called Kabir.
I don't know if you came across him.
Kabir was a weaver.
A weaver, like, yeah?
And he had a big following in Banaras, and the Hindus came and the Muslims came to him.
He was actually a Muslim beaver.
And 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?
And you speak, and we know what that path is.
And he said something which we all need to remember.
In 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.
And I speak from my experience and in life.
And 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.
And the only caretakers in the world, everywhere, are farmers.
To try and destroy them means you really want to also create new conquests of the earth, new colonization of the earth.
It'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.
Often 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.
Almost as if there can be no intimacy, no intimacy between human beings and the land.
Almost as if nature itself can be patented, remedied, broken down and destroyed.
Thank you for helping me to understand that.
One 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.
I 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.
But, 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.
How have we found ourself in this position?
And what can we do to address it again without being regarded as?
Conspiracy 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.
If you talk about that, people say you're a conspiracy theorist.
How are these conversations being closed down?
First 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?
Well, you know, I watched Bill Gates take over the UN system with the climate summit in Paris in 2015.
And that's when I decided to write the book, Oneness vs. 1%, which I gifted you at the last community festival.
And 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?
So they became wealthy through liberalization, neoliberal liberalization, where trade was liberalized, and trade in information.
Had absolutely no taxes.
So these billionaires have paid no taxes on their trade in software.
And he got that passed in the Singapore WTO Ministerial.
That's how they got rich.
How is he controlling other sectors?
Philanthrocapitalism.
You take a little bit of money and say, here, the big seed banks of the world A million dollars.
But now I will control all the seed of the world.
And that's how he did the control over CGIAR.
On health, give a little money to WHO.
And then he controls the vaccine policy, the nutrition policy, and all the policies.
The media.
Our journalist... I'll put that down for you, will you?
You won't allow it.
Our journalist, who...
Who is being used really to create these strange caricatures of what the farmers are, what the people who stand with the farmers are.
Well, Guardian is paid for by Gates.
Every major... BBC's entire agriculture program is an advertisement for what I call the Poison Cartel.
If you look at it, Corteva comes up.
Corteva is the merger of Dow and DuPont.
And they show it as if they're covering scientific news.
But they're really doing an advertisement.
So, philanthro-capitalism is give a tiny bait and take the whole thing, but also present yourself as a philanthropist.
And the reason they control the governments is also through the philanthropy issue.
Because 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.
But before you know it, he's taken over the health sector.
He's taken over the education sector.
And he and Silicon Valley are very big players in the fake food future of farming without farmers, food without farms.
The kind of future that George Monbiot wants to build.
And of course, he's not the one who invented it.
He's just becoming a, he's using his place as a journalist To promote it.
But that Silicon Valley bank that collapsed, it was a very big promoter of startups for lab food.
Now, lab food is presented as if it'll be without land, and land will be freed up for rewilding.
Well, that's what they said about factory farming.
We'll put all the chickens together in one factory, and we'll free up the land, but they grab more land for factories.
For animal food.
They're always doing that, aren't they?
Yeah.
It's going to be great.
All the chickens can live together in one lovely chicken community.
And all of the waste will go into the River Wai and the River Thames and the rivers around the world.
And the land will be free.
Free.
And we'll use that for rewilding.
Yeah.
But even on the more quotidian and minor level of appliances in Western and Anglophonic countries, this washing machine, you'll have more time.
This dishwasher, you'll have more time.
All 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.
And not just that, running around to maintain these systems Takes all your time.
There's a friend of mine, Julie Cho, who's run a book called something about no time now.
Because it's all being taken up.
And, you know, all the indigenous cultures that I know and live with, they do their agriculture.
They come and do their spinning.
They have time for song and dance.
They have time for making music.
You know?
Where do they get time from?
Because they're not chasing.
Enslavement.
They're not chasing the enslavement through consumerism.
And of course if you look at the smart home, I can't understand how people would do that.
The smart home while you're driving from work will tell you you're on your phone, the fridge will tell you your milk is getting over.
How dumb are we getting that we can't open the door of our fridge and know our milk is getting over?
And all that is surveillance data.
All that is surveillance data.
And two little quickies for those who are putting out so much propaganda against farmers.
New studies are showing that the synthetic fur, if you get rid of the animals, which is another thing, kill the animals.
Two million cows to be killed in Ireland.
The entire Dutch fight is to get rid of the animals.
Now you get rid of the animals, the only way you recycle organic matter.
Yeah?
They eat the straw or grass and then what they gift us back is fertilizer.
So you can either have that fertilizer or you can have the fossil fuel fertilizer.
Which 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.
And fertilizers are emitting more greenhouse gases than all the aviation.
Fertilizers are emitting more greenhouse gases than all aviation.
If you take the full cycle of manufacturing.
The full cycle of manufacturing, when the full cycle of manufacturing is accounted for.
Thank you.
And 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.
But data needs to be processed.
And all this heavy data needs to be processed with big servers.
Just the tiny bits of enslavement we are getting into is 4% of the greenhouse gases, which is, again, more than the aviation sector.
But if every farmer had to turn to his smartphone to say, should I turn right or left?
When do I spray?
When do I do this?
Can you imagine the processing that'll have to be done if every person is running their entire home?
Yes.
On smart machines, to open their door, to open their fridge, now it's time to go to bed.
Not only is it a very foolish kind of slavery, it's a huge ecological footprint on the planet and we can't afford it.
So we have to learn to walk lightly again.
It 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.
Now I see this becoming absolutely materialized, that you surrender yourself to some externalized system of surveillance and data capture and management and organization.
I see that this is what happens when you prioritize materialism over spirituality.
I see that this is what happens when rationality and logistics pervade all things and subjugate the difficult to quantify,
impossible to quantify, sublime nature of things.
This desacralization, a word that I learned and thought of because of you, because of a conversation we once had,
this desacralization is increasing at great pace it seems to me.
And 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...
Under why?
How do you feel about the increasing control of censorship, the inhibition of free speech,
the ability of the media machine to shut down conversation where someone like you, if I may say,
an Indian woman can face being called a right-wing fascist, which just seems implausible if you sort of break down
what right-wing fascist is supposed to mean in terms of sort of genocidal ideology, corporatism.
How are we to ensure that we're able to have free conversations?
It seems to me that because the scale of the problem we're facing is so vast,
the solution has to be similarly vast.
I don't mean complex, but I do mean vast because I think it nothing less than a global response
to this global movement will do.
Absolute freedom of conversation, absolute freedom to run your own community,
absolute freedom to control your own food source, absolute freedom to trade when necessary
and however you want to.
(laughs)
I mean, I basically asked you how to solve all the world's problems
in one question there, Vandana, which seems pretty hefty.
But let's just, if we could, focus on the idea of the curtailing of communication and censorship.
Do 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?
You know, a system of total control, but a system of total control which turns the control into the next source of profits.
And that's new.
There's always been control.
But the surveillance capitalist, based on as Susanna Zuboff has written, is turning human beings into raw material.
That our data is extracted.
That is the capital of today.
Big data is the new oil.
And then it's used to manipulate us.
But that also means any system that allows you the awareness of your real freedom must be censored.
And it's not the first time it's happening.
I mean, nine million people were killed in Europe for the witch hunts.
It was people with freedom to know how to relate to nature, find their spirituality.
And at that time, of course, the centralized structure was the church.
Basically, the market and corporations and the billionaires are trying to be the new church.
And the censorship is the new witch hunting.
Yes.
We are the witches!
It'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.
Like, 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.
Take 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.
The removal of valid and valuable data.
All of this was advanced as giving us freedom.
How 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.
You remember George Orwell wrote a book, 1984, and he talked about doublespeak.
Yeah.
How every word will mean the opposite.
Now 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.
And they, therefore, have to use the doublespeak of calling those who are living and seeking freedom as the right wing.
And they have to present those who are speaking truth as a conspiracy theorist.
How many brilliant doctors who actually heal people and who are now having an opportunity to talk were censored?
And I think if you want to understand the destruction of freedom in our age, looking at the last two years...
It's a very important time.
Looking at the farmers and agriculture and food is important.
But for every citizen to know that there are three things you cannot give up if you want to stay free.
Yeah, we do want to stay free.
First, your ability to know and distinguish between truth and untruth.
Right.
And not allow post-truth to be projected as truth and the truth speakers to be projected as conspirators.
The second is our ability to relate to each other without the intervention of a state and surveillance corporation.
And third, because food is what makes us.
It becomes our blood, our cells, our brain.
To not allow the totalitarian takeover of food, to make it fake food and push it as the next liberation.
So the contest today is around these issues.
Speak freely, tell the truth, communicate freely, grow your own food.
Don't eat things grown in labs, don't eat bugs.
And don't listen to people who want to promote it.
Don't listen to them.
The minute they talk fake food, say...
He wants to destroy the world.
Ah, you want to destroy the world.
I understand what it is.
But you found a way of making yourself feel good while doing that.
The feel-good destroyer.
While being sort of polite and liberal.
Cool.
The liberator who is actually making the new prisons.
Thank you so much, Vandana Shiva, world teacher.
Vandana, thank you once again.
Thank you for joining us.
I'm so honoured and grateful that you came.
Thank you for this beautiful gift.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Thank you very much for watching our conversation with Vandana Shiva.
