Following on from David Wood's post on Vandana Shiva's upcoming London lecture.

Paul.

>Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2002 17:30:29 -0800
>From: ZNet Commentaries <[log in to unmask]>
>Subject: Shiva / Terrorism As Cannibalism / Jan 23
>To: [log in to unmask]
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>Today's commentary:
>http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2002-01/23shiva.cfm
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>==================================
>
>ZNet Commentary
>Terrorism As Cannibalism January 23, 2002
>By Vandana Shiva
>
>Year 2001 will be etched in our memory as a year in which the
>vicious cycle of violence was unleashed worldwide. Of the Taliban
>bombing the two thousand year old images of peace, the Buddhas of
>Bamiyan.
>
>Of terrorists blowing up the W.T.C. on September 11, and attempting
>to blow up the Assembly of Jammu and Kashmir on October 1, and the
>Indian Parliament on December 13. Of a global alliance bombing out
>what remained of Afghanistan after two decades of super power
>rivalry, and civil war. Of Pakistan and India threatening to go to
>war as 2001 gave way to 2002.
>
>Why is violence engulfing us so rapidly, so totally? Why has
>violence become the dominant feature of the human species across
>cultures. Could the violence characterising human societies in the
>new millenium be linked with violent structures and institutions we
>have created to reduce society to markets and humans to consumers?
>
>Animals of any species tend to become violent when they are treated
>with violent methods.
>
>Pigs love to root in the fields, wallow in the mud, grunt to each
>other. However when denied this freedom in factory farms where they
>are confined in over crowded, steel barred crates or multiple
>stacked cages known as battery cages, pigs become bored, stressed
>and anxious. They start knawing cages, picking on each other, biting
>each otherís tails and ears and resorting to what agribusiness
>industry has called "cannibalism". (Ref. Michael Fox, Old MacDonalds
>Factory Farm)
>
>Pigs are not cannibals. When they start to display cannibalism, the
>normal question industry should be asking is why are pigs behaving
>abnormally. The organic movement and animal liberation movement has
>raised the question and found the answer in the violent methods of
>factory farming. In humane farming pigs have been liberated and
>allowed to roam and roll in the mud. Stopping violence against
>animals is the best way to stop their violent behavior.
>
>Industry has a different solution to "cannibalism" induced by the
>concentration camp conditions of factory farms. Operators of pig
>factories chop off the tails of week old piglets without any
>anaesthics to prevent other pigs from chewing them off. They also
>remove eight teeth with wire cutters. Male piglets have their
>testicles cut off to reduce their aggression in crowded areas.
>
>While removing tails and teeth is the solution offered to violent
>behavior in pigs, chicken in factory farms are debeaked, and cattle
>are dehorned.
>
>Beaks are the most important feature of chicken. When roaming in the
>open, a chicken needs its beak for eating, pecking, preening,
>cleaning, grooming. When confined in battery cages, chicken start to
>attack each other with their beaks. According to industry, chicken
>are debeaked to protect them from one another. A day old chickís
>beak is pressed against a red hot metal blade at 800oC. Often it
>injures the tongue.
>
>Chicken injured during debeaking die of starvation. What industry is
>blind to is that it is not chickens beak that is the cause of
>violent, abnormal and cannibalistic behavior among chicken, but the
>overcrowded, unnatural conditions of their living in cages.
>Free-range chicken do not kill each other with their beaks. They
>find worms and food for their own nourishment.
>
>The horns of the cow are its most distinctive feature. We adorn them
>with bells and decorations. At Muttu Pongal, the horns of cattle are
>decorated with flowers and balloons. In organic agriculture cow
>horns are used to increase the potency of compost. But in factory
>farming, cattle are dehorned because they attack each other under
>conditions of confinement.
>
>The problem, clearly, is the factory cage -- not the teeth and tails
>of pigs, the beaks of chicken, the horns of cattle. It is the cage
>that needs removing, not the tail, or beak or horn. When animals are
>denied their basic freedoms to function as a species, when they are
>held captive and confined, they turn to "cannibalism".
>
>Humans are animals. As a species we too have basic needs -- for
>meaning and identity, for community and security, for food and
>water, for freedom.
>
>Could terrorism be the human equivalent of the abnormal behavior of
>"cannibalism" in animals exhibit under factory conditions?
>
>Humans are of course, not being confined to iron cages (though in
>the U.S, in Australia, a large percentage of blacks and aborigines
>are behind bars). Human society is being caged and controlled
>through complex laws and policies, through violent economic and
>political structures which are enclosing of their spaces --
>spiritual, ecological, political and economic.
>
>Humans are experiencing their religious spaces enclosed when
>militaries occupy sacred lands as in the Mid East. Humans are
>experiencing enclosure through occupation as in Palestine. The
>children in affluent America are also experiencing a closing of
>their lives, and are turning to mindless violence as in the case of
>shooting at St. Columbines. And across the world, ecological,
>economic and political spaces are being enclosed through
>privatisation, liberalisation and globalisation.
>
>These multiple processes are breeding new insecurities, new
>anxieties, new stresses. Cultural security, economic security,
>ecological security, political security are all being rapidly eroded.
>
>Could the violence being unleashed by humans against humans be
>similar to the violence pigs, chicken and cattle express when denied
>their freedom to roll in the mud, peck for worms, and roam outside
>the confines of animal factories?
>
>Could the coercive imposition of a consumer culture worldwide, with
>its concomitant destruction of values, cultural diversity,
>livelihoods, and the environment be the invisible cages against
>which people are rebelling, some violently, most non-violently.
>
>Could the "war against terrorism" be equivalent to the detoothing,
>debeaking, dehorning of pigs chickens and cattle by agribusiness
>industry because they are turning violent when kept under violent
>conditions? Could the lasting solution to violence induced by the
>violence of captivity and enslavement for humans be the same as that
>for other animals -- giving them back their space for spiritual
>freedom, ecological freedom, for psychological freedom and for
>economic freedom.
>
>The cages that humans are feeling tapped in are the new enclosures
>which are robbing communities of their cultural spaces and
>identities, and their ecological and economic spaces for survival.
>Globalisation is the overaching name for this enclosure.
>
>Greed and appropriation of other peopleís share of the planeís
>precious resources are at the root of conflicts, and the root of
>terrorism. When President Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair
>announced that the goal of the global war on terrorism is for the
>defense of he American and European "way of life", they are
>declaring a war against the planet-its oil, its water, its
>biodiversity.
>
>A way of life for the 20 percent of the earthís people who use 80
>percent of the planetís resources will dispossess 80 percent of its
>people of their jus share of resources and eventually destroy the
>planet. We cannot survive as a species if greed is privileged and
>protected and he economics of the greedy set the rules for how we
>live and die.
>
>If the past enclosures have already precipitated so much violence,
>what will be the human costs of new enclosures being carved out for
>privatisation of living resources and water resources, the very
>basis of our species survival. Intellectual property laws and water
>privatisation are new invisible cages trapping humanity.
>
>IPR laws are denying farmers the basic freedom of saving and
>exchanging seed. They are, in effect, enclosing the genetic commons,
>creating new scarcities in a biologically rich world, transforming
>fundamental freedoms into criminal acts punishable with fines and
>jail sentences.
>
>Water privatisation policies are enclosing the water commons,
>transforming water into a commodity to be bought and sold for
>profit, creating water scarcity in a water abundant world.
>
>Percy Schmeiser, a Canadian farmer had been using his own seeds for
>the past fifty years. His Canola seed was genetically polluted with
>Monsantoís GM Canola through wind and pollination. Instead of Percy
>being paid compensation in accordance with the polluter pay
>principle, the courts fined Percy on the basis of Monsantoís IPR
>case which argued that since the genes were Monsantoís property
>their being found in Percyís field made him a thief irrespective of
>how they came to be there.
>
>The violator becomes the violated, the violated becomes the violator
>in the perverse world of patents on genes, seeds and living
>material. Such perverse laws are transforming agriculture into
>police states and farmers into criminals. They are the invisible
>cages which are holding humans captive to market processes and
>corporate rule.
>
>The Privatisation of water is another threat to human freedom.
>
>Perhaps the most famous tale of corporate greed over water is the
>story of Cochabamba, Bolivia. In this semi-desert region, water is
>scarce and precious. In 1999, the World bank recommended
>privatization of Cochabambaís municipal water supply company
>(SEMAPA) through a concession to International Water, a subsidiary
>of Bechtel. On October 1999, the Drinking Water and Sanitation Law
>was passed, ending government subsidies and allowing privatization.
>
>In a city where the minimum wage is less than $100 a month, water
>bills reached $20 a month, nearly the cost of feeding a family of
>five for two weeks. In January 2000, a citizensí alliance called La
>Coodination de efensa del Agua y de la Vida (The Coalition in
>Defence of Water and Life) was formed.
>
>The alliance shut down the city for four days through mass
>mobilization. Within a month, millions of Bolivians marched to
>Cochabamba, held a general strike, and stopped all transportation.
>At the gathering, the protesters issued the Cochabamba Declaration,
>calling for the protection of universal water rights.
>
>The government promised to reverse the price hike but never did. In
>February 2000, La Coordinadora organized a peaceful march demanding
>the repeal of the Drinking Water and Sanitation Law, the annulment
>of ordinances allowing privatization, the termination of the water
>contract, and the participation of citizens in drafting a water
>resource law.
>
>The citizenís demands, which drove a stake through the heart of
>corporate interests, were violently rejected. Coordinadoraís
>fundamental critique was directed at the negation of water as a
>community property. Protesters used slogans like `Water is Godís
>Gift and Not A Merchandiseí and `Water is Lifeí.
>
>In April 2000, the government tried to silence the water protests
>through market law. Activists were arrested, protesters killed, and
>the media censored. Finally on April 10, 2000, the people won. Aguas
>del Tunari and Bechtel left Bolivia and the government was forced to
>revoke its hated water privatization legislation.
>
>The water company Servicio Municipal del Agua Potable Alcantarillado
>(SEMAPA) and its debts were handed over to the workers and the
>people. In the summer of 2000, La Coordinadora organized public
>hearings to establish democratic planning and management. The people
>have taken on the challenge to establish a water democracy, but the
>water dictators are trying their best to subvert the process.
>Bechtel is suing Bolivia, and the Bolivian government is harassing
>and threatening activists of La Coordinadora.
>
>By reclaiming water from corporations and the market, the citizens
>of Bolivia have illustrated that privatization is not inevitable and
>that corporate takeover o vital resources can be prevented by
>peopleís democratic will.
>
>The resource hunger of a corporate driven consumer culture is
>attempting to enslave own and control every plant, every seed, every
>drop of water.
>
>The suicides of farmers are one aspect of violence engendered by a
>violent world order based on markets, profits, consumerism. Suicide
>bombers are another aspect. One is directed towards the `selfí. The
>other is directed towards the `otherí. And in a fragmenting and
>disintegrating world, where everyone feels caged, everyone has
>potential to become the dangerous ëotherí. Like animals in factory
>cages, we are attacking ourselves or each other.
>
>Animals have the animal liberation movement to speak for them and
>set them free when the industry which has held them captive under
>violent conditions perpetrates further violence to deal with the
>cannibalism that captivity is causing.
>
>What is needed is an animal liberation movement for humans -- a
>movement sensitive to the captivity of consumer culture and global
>markets, a movement compassionate enough to sense the deep
>violations humanity is experiencing, a movement that recognises that
>it is not the teeth of pigs, beaks of birds, horns of cows that need
>to be removed, but the cages.
>
>The multicoloured, diversity based movement against the structural
>violence of global markets and the consumer culture has elements
>that could grow to liberate the human spirit from the degradations
>and deprivations of corporate globalisation. Reclaiming our freedoms
>and spaces from the new enclosures is as essential to us as it is to
>other animals.
>
>Animals were not designed to live imprisoned in cages. Humans were
>not designed to live imprisoned in markets, or live wasted and
>disposable if they cannot be consumers in the global market.
>
>Our deepening dehumanisation is at the roots of growing violence.
>Reclaiming our humanity in inclusive, compassionate way is the first
>step to peace.
>
>Peace will not be created through weapons and wars, bombs and
>barbarism. Violence will not be contained by spreading it. Violence
>has become a luxury the human species cannot afford if we are to
>survive. Non-violence has become a survival imperative.
>
>