by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
Independence, true independence, comes about through making things, growing things and doing things for ourselves (and our community).
This is more than simple self-reliance and self-sufficiency. It is total self-empowerment and brings about independence.
The Mahatma said something along those self-same lines when he was leading his beloved India to home rule.
However, modern India has lost the course and is now making goods – as slaves almost – for the West rather than the way it should be, for its own people and is, once again, importing some consumer goods from elsewhere. But I digressed.
None of us are truly free and independent, as individuals and as people, if we do not have the chances and possibilities to make things, to grow things and to do things for ourselves (our community). We are but wage slaves and slaves to the system and to governments which lord it over us.
Often those that lord it over us are not even our own governments but unelected entities in foreign lands, as in the case of the European Union, the rising fascist European superstate, where unelected bureaucrats, who are accountable to no one, decide what we may or may not do, what crops we may or may not plant, etc.
Not that the USA and its people are any better off than those in Britain or elsewhere in the European Union when it comes to government meddling in what people are permitted to do for themselves.
The people can never be free and independent unless they can produce and grow what they want and to do things for themselves and able to, thus, participate in the market and run their own lives. Production must be local and primarily for the local community first and foremost and carried out by local people.
Even, or especially, in the majority the so-called free and democratic countries, and especially in Britain and the EU and in the USA, countries that claim to be the bulwark of freedom and democracy, people are not permitted to be free and independent as they need to be and should be.
While you may be able to make and produce a variety of things when it comes to selling craftspeople, etc., find restrictions and the need for government permits and licenses (and they cost money) and this even more so for smallholders and other growers. In addition to the the latter, now, since EU regulations put in place in late Spring 2013, can also no longer grow, and that even applies to home growers who only grow produce for home consumption, what they want and must use ONLY EU approved seeds and plant materials. Old varieties are are illegal to use and possess and the saving of seeds and the exchange between friends even also falls foul of those regulations. Tell me again how free we are!?!
this means that, to all intents and purposes, government controls what we may do, make and produce, grow and sell and even eat, and as regards to doing things for ourselves.
It is basically, in most EU countries at least, illegal to even consider using force to protect yourself, your family and your property and especially if you consider using any kind of weapon for this purpose. If you, for instance, are threatened by an assailant with a knife and you beat him with a stick (which you may have carried for defensive purposes) it will be you who ends up in court charged with a crime and not the punk you attacked you.
But, relying, as you are told to do, on the police to come to your aid – after he knifed you – is also not going to work as it is no longer officially, though the people were not told, the task of the police to protect (and serve) the public but to enforce the laws laid down (by the powers-that-be). Sorry, but would you ming mentioning again how free we are?
We need to change the system, not the government (in fact, the latter needs to be abolished) if we ever, as people, want to be free and independent and not slaves.
© 2013
Worldcrunch reports a historic change in Palitana, an Indian city, which has become the first all-vegetarian city in the world.
