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| Click image to enlargify From Picture Post Magazine, July 13, 1940, pp 24-25 |
They gave the peasantry a new name -- "the aristocracy of blood and soil." They broke up their unions and gave them a Nazi organisation instead -- The Reich Food Board. They gave them a new law - the Erbhof law.
Men with spectacles and suitcases came out to see the farmers. They said: "Prove your pure Ayran descent back to 1800, prove you are a good Nazi, and we'll make you a Erbhofbauer, an aristocrat of the soil. We'll have your farm entailed for you, it can't be sold or mortgaged. We'll get you special privileges. It's the same as if you were a count or a prince," they said. "It's a great thing to be an Erbhofbauer, an aristocrat of the soil," they said. "Dr. Ley is an Erbhofbauer, and Julius Streicher. And so is Dr. Goebbels." Dr. Goebbels, who couldn't even weed a front-garden, let alone plough a field.
Naturally, if proof of breeding and opinion is not forthcoming, that is too bad, as the two million small farmers who were unable to to claim this "honour" have discovered. For, deprived of the paltry privileges imparted by the Erbhof Law, they are completely under the heel of the Reich Food Board, a gigantic bureaucratic growth which polices the peasant at every turn.
Darré, Minister of Food, Minister of Agriculture and Führer of Farming, works hand in hand with Himmler and the Gestapo to see that the small farmer toes the line.
Each village has its overseer, each village has its spies. The Reich Food Board is constantly inquiring about the state of crops or livestock, constantly checking up on harvests and deliveries, constantly regulating prices, forbidding purchases and sales, commandeering foodstuffs in the name of this or that. No longer may the farmer sell his eggs, his milk, direct to the customer in town, as he always has done. Now he must take it to the Reich Food Board, which pays him a cut-price rate and fixes its own retail price at a handsome margin of profit. Just before the war, the Reich Food Board in some areas was buying milk from the farmer for 11 to 13 pfennigs a litre and selling it in tow for 25 to 30 pfennigs.
Small wonder that the disappointment and discontent of the peasantry is growing. Small wonder that in "Der Bundschuh," the illegal peasant paper which has circulated in Southern Germany since 1938, a writer remarks: "Our Brown Rulers are guilty. They want everything for themselves. The milk--give it! Eggs--hand them over! Grain--deliver it! The cattle, the land, the children, the farm--they want more and more from us. They want it all!"
So splendid farming talent is misdirected and abused. So the small farmers themselves must pay for their masters' attempts at world domination.
(continued on WWAFF post 13)
Jay's thoughts: These days the EU decides for Britons which land can be ploughed and seeded and which lands must remain fallow. EU and British laws dictate what farmers can grow (GM versus non-GM), where they can sell their produce, whom they can sell it to, and so on. We're not quite at the Nazi Germany stage of total control of farms, but we're not so far removed from it. A lot has changed in Britain since 1940. We've had remarkable advances in food safety. Yet we've seen the small farmer squeezed out of business -- not just from industrial farming businesses, but by excessive and unnecessary legislation.
In any case, the above should be treated as a cautionary tale of what is to come when Public Health finally gets its filthy mitts on the farming industry. Right now they're focused on "Big Food" and pretending they're looking out for the small farmers. Nothing could be farther from the truth. If Public Health manages to overpower the Big Food industries by way of treating them just like tobacco companies, and if the Big Food corporations submit to the whims of Public Health, it could lead to Public Health in total control of our food supply.
And really, do you want Public Health telling you what you can eat, what farmers are allowed to grow? No, you probably don't. I know that I don't. So again, I ask you, are you really in control of your own businesses and lives, or are the unelected EU technocrats and sympathetic UK politicians in control of you?
Bonus comic:
(kind of reminds me of this image, and this image, from my Black Seoul Days post last year)
