One Vast and Ecuminical Whole: the Long Shadow of Jan Smuts
Jan Smuts bequeathed to the world a political and intellectual inheritance so vast and so deep, that it simply cannot be overstated. His worldview has reached into every ruling institution, making him one of the most influential men of the 20th century. It is a totalising and all-encompassing system, the promise of universal peace, liberty and welfare through total world government, the sublimation of all political and cultural difference in a global English-language order governed by a European elect, anointed with the vanity of higher insight, to guide the whole of humanity into a future where there will be no fear, no poverty, no anxiety, no difference, no prejudice, no discomfort, no pollution, no disharmony of man and nature, and no resentment of the governing elite. His grand theory of holism has given us the modern field of ecology, the entire philosophical framework for both the modern environmentalist movement, and the governance system which responded to it. It has given us the concept of the holistic, the nation of South Africa, the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the Balfour Declaration, and the United Nations, and as a result, the contemporary understanding of human rights and national self-determination. It is also shot through with terrible hypocrisy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V9XeyBd_IuA
Ned Beatty was right. The world we have created, is one of guided corporate hegemony, no longer determined by the ruthless conflict of corporations and nations, who now reinforce each other's monopolistic interests in hypermanagerial synergy. Poverty, long thought to be the default condition of humanity has been driven to a marginal issue by the march of progress. International conflict is today an issue of the poor, underdeveloped margins. Every anointed elite agrees that all we need to do is benevolently guide the perfection of this vision by means of enlightened technocracy, extending as much generous welfare as possible, and eliminate intolerance by erasing every nation, every state. In Beatty's speech, Paddy Chayefsky articulated the voice of the new global liberal elite most fittingly. The world which has been created is, in the eyes of the anointed, nothing short of a miracle, a bureaucrat's answer to the curse of a monkey's paw.
But despite these appearances, the curse remains, and the miracle is only a debt, borrowed against the suffering (or at least the frantic ameliorative labour) of unborn generations. The material progress we have enjoyed is not the result of utopian reform, but of technological advance, and we all know that new cracks have appeared in the edifice. In China, India, Russia, Britain and America, the right and the left have all in their own way spat in the face of this enlightened order. The financial fraud of the Chinese empire threatens to wipe out generations of political and economic progress, or else enslave the world to the payment of their false promises. Europe has managed to twist the values it took up in the name of freedom and peace to dream of an oppressive and omnipresent bureaucracy and an irredentist world empire. South Africa is descending into ethnic separatism and neo-Shakaist fantasies of genocidal reconquista. And above the sound of the cracking foundations, can be heard the locking and loading of weapons so lethal and destructive that their impact can only be imagined.
How did it all go so wrong? The same way all things go wrong; hubris and hesitation. The story of Jan Smuts is that of a man whose life and philosophy evolved together in an inextricable conceptual continuity, springing back from compromises with his social environment, to embed itself in the most powerful and influential institutions in the entire world, guiding the shape of the whole of humanity from beyond the grave, according to a spiritual idealism born of circumstance and naturalist romance. It is the result of a man who could not take the leap of faith towards the heaven he imagined, but bequeathed instead a choreography for future generations, to eternally fling themselves ineffectually towards heaven instead. We were bound to fall.
A Whole made of Parts
The Mountain is not merely something externally sublime. It has a great historic and spiritual meaning for us. It stands for us as the ladder of life. Nay, more, it is the great ladder of the soul, and in a curious way the source of religion. From it came the Law, from it came the Gospel in the Sermon on the Mount. We may truly say that the highest religion is the Religion of the Mountain.
Jan Smuts was born to a small farm in the Western Cape, amid the wine and wheat of Riebeek-Wes, to a staunch Calvinist Cape Dutch family. He joined school at 12, and completed his education in just four years, attending what is now Stellenbosch University at the age of 16, graduating with first-class honours at the age of 21, winning a scholarship to study law at Cambridge and achieving a double first at 24. According to Lord Todd, "in 500 years of the College's history, of all its members, past and present, three had been truly outstanding: John Milton, Charles Darwin and Jan Smuts."
He studied philosophy by himself at the British Museum for a year, and wrote his first treatise, on the thoughts of Walt Whitman, and it is here that he formed most of his ideas that would later coalesce into Holism and Evolution, a vast synthesis of natural science, epistemology, ethics and politics. He studied the evolution of Whitman's personality as that of any other organism, and this developmental notion, of all things in evolution towards a higher completeness, formed half of the picture of his grand theory - all parts evolved into higher forms to synthesize into greater wholes. Mineral became living tissue, became sentient life, became human culture, became civilization, and eventually, a holistic human society. This was the development of the "human personality", which found its apogee in communion with nature.
His philosophy was more comprehensive than a doff of the cap to romantic and naturalist poets like Goethe and Whitman. Smuts formed his systematic philosophy partially through correspondence with J.S. Haldane, Henri Bergson, Albert Einstein and Niels Böhr, and followed Leakey's work on the climate's effect on man, balancing Darwin's theory with Lamarckian elements. Much like Arthur Tansley, who was inspired by Freud, the influence of psychology and "personology" formed the basis of ecology from the very beginning, linking it and its twin, holism, up with human society and culture inextricably.
One of the central features of Smuts's life was botany. He would read field guides before bed every night, and spent as much as possible of his spare time wandering in the veld or hiking the mountains, sometimes naked. He believed in the notion of a vital force of nature, and believed that the spirit of nature had restorative and inspiring properties. Those in tune with the spirit of nature, could tune into it, and through communion and meditation with it, achieve higher insight. An expert on savannah grasses, Smuts pioneered the first modern nature conservation policies, and coordinated the very first botanical survey. By the time the Royal Botanical Society under Arthur Tansley and Thomas Chipp had begun to present their probative surveys, dominated by economic and agricultural interests, Smuts had already commissioned and overseen a comprehensive botanical survey of the natural flora of South Africa, directed at representing the living ecosystem rather than the grounds of economic exploitation.
His followers John Phillips and John William Bews used his ecological ideas to develop racially graded divisions of labour for maintaining order and harmony in human economic organisation, and tested these theories out in a sponsored land regeneration program aimed at combating soil erosion, and efforts to manage the tsetse fly's impact on colonial African society. Phillips came up with the notion of a "biotic community", to describe the hierarchical mechanism he saw in operation between the white masters, the black natives, and the agricultural and natural vegetative ecosystem. This biological system reflected Smuts's gradualist political program of "trusteeship", which saw the development of the communal native "personality" under white tutelage, through increasingly independent communitarian self-determination over time, towards eventual holistic union.
In his all-encompassing personal philosophy, which knit together spirituality, epistemology, morality, natural science, ethics and political philosophy, Smuts argues that all of matter tends towards complexity, all complexity towards life, and all life towards homogeneous, interconnected holism; all wholes are greater than the sum of their parts, and all wholes are destined to coalesce into greater wholes. So too with political life, which reaches its highest expression in world government, an argument emerging in the final remarks of Holism and Evolution, such that this Tower of Babel is seen as the culmination of all of creation. "The process of civilization has always been towards the League of Nations".
United but Divided
Rather than pursuing success abroad after his degree, Smuts returned home, and worked as a lawyer before turning his hand to journalism. He supported Cecil Rhodes and his ambitions for a united Africa (under colonial hegemony of course), but turned his back on the man after he orchestrated the Jameson Raid, and left the Cape to serve in Pretoria, rising rapidly through the ranks of the Kruger administration. Demonstrating extraordinary aptitude for strategy and logistics, Smuts not only coordinated much of the war effort during the Second Boer War, but also diplomacy and propaganda. After the British ground down the conventional Boer forces, Generals Smuts and Botha spearheaded a guerilla campaign, beginning with no more than 500 men, and over a two year campaign, seized the land from the Olifants river to the Orange from a British occupation force forty times their number. The British intensified their scorched-earth campaign, and exterminated tens of thousands of Boers and their African servants in concentration camps. This being too much to bear, Smuts and Botha sued for peace, and Smuts drafted the surrender with Lord Kitchener at Vereeniging, a town called "unification".
While the commision for South Africa was under Lord Milner, Smuts and all Afrikaners were political outsiders. But once the Conservatives in the British Parliament were replaced by the Liberals, Smuts sailed to England, and despite having no more standing than a lawyer who went to a good university, managed to persuade the British leadership to grant self-government to the Boer republics. Together with political allies in Pretoria, he wrote the constitution for the Transvaal. He also played a central part in the Taalbeweging which birthed Afrikaans as a formalised language. In the following years, Smuts managed to secure the political position to unify South Africa, and fiercely pushed for a unitary government, critical of the federal system of the United States, which allowed for far too much division for his taste. He single handedly wrote the constitution which would stand for fifty-one years.
When Afrikaner separatists attempted to claw back the Traansvaal, Smuts and Botha dutifully put them down. Unity, even under dominion of the British, was paramount. The nation which he produced has been characterised by long-running dominant-party systems based on political philosophies which exist outside of the binary European political spectrum. To this day, the one issue all politicians concern themselves with, is Unity, a goal Smuts pursued asymmetrically, unequally, pragmatically, forcefully, and at the cost of his own Liberal moral convictions.
Separate but Equal
The fact is that no one in politics has any effective conception of how to combine all the diverse populations of South Africa into a single unity, nor even whether such a combination should be sought. General Smuts must have some systematic ideas on the subject because he is a philosopher. But his ideas do not find any place in his programme. On the all important colour question he has never risen above the merest opportunism. The result is that when he enters the political field, he leaves behind him the chief part of what differentiates him from his mole-like fellow-creatures. This third-class performance by a first-class mind is a curious and, from a public standpoint, distressing thing. - "Gallio", January 1929
Jan Smuts believed, contrary to the easy caricatures we South Africans are painted with, that the races did not have any real differences, and that acculturation was all that was required to bring black Africa into the modern world; the development of their human "personality". But he was firm in his belief that Africa was underdeveloped, and needed a white aristocracy to guide them. As to integration, he was rather reluctant to meet the challenge, and unwilling to face the reality of sharing power with black South Africa, who vastly outnumbered white settlers even then, were almost entirely illiterate, shared little common culture with white South Africa, and had deep blood feuds to settle with men who had spent the prior three centuries crossing swords and muskets with them. More immediately, he faced intransigent resistance from ordinary whites, and the consensus was that the races could not share a political space. So he kicked the can down the road.
As Prime Minister, and head of the South African Party, Smuts ruthlessly put down the South African Communist Party and their white unions' campaign for a white South Africa, defending the urbanisation of the black population, while compromising with the conservatives by offering them segregation. These policies, as well as what seemed to be excessive appeasement of the British, resulted in him losing his office, but in true South African style, the two parties formed a grand national coalition (to avoid broedertwis, or strife between Afrikaners), and Smuts was almost continually in government in some form or other from 1910 until 1948. This uneasy alliance, intended to keep unity among the Afrikaners, required the passing of several laws to limit the disruption of white communities by the urban influx, and to make peace with Afrikaners who were outraged by their role in fighting for the British in WWI.
Like other Western governments, Smuts gave the franchise to working men and to women, as a means of pacifying the working classes. But this created a racial asymmetry in what was until that point, a "fair system" - the non-racial Cape Franchise. By offering the vote to all whites, but only a tiny minority of Coloured, Indian and Black voters, the coalition government was forced to acknowledge a different game. Whereas before, big men like John X Merriman and Smuts himself had favoured a gradualist approach to eventual racial integration, by handing the vote to all whites, they created difficult political choice - embrace racial equality on the ballot, and immediate dissolution of the political order, or compromise by offering separate development. The 1936 Natives Land Act and Native Representation Act appeased the Afrikaans right by stripping the franchise and property rights from non-whites in most of the country's area, offering a limited local political autonomy in the "homelands". He authored these bills himself.
Smuts had a close follower in Jan-Hendrik Hofmeyr, a man of extraordinary capacity, whose academic achievements matched Smuts's own, but for one ingredient: imagination. Hofmeyr was the nephew of his namesake, who spearheaded the Afrikaans language movement. Related by marriage to Smuts, he formed a formidable attachment to the man. His talents at administration and public speaking made him Smuts's right-hand man, consumed by a passionate belief in Smuts's Liberal universalism, by the light of an unshakeable Christian virtue. He took Smuts more seriously by his word than Smuts did his own, and when the voting rights of non-white citizens were stripped away, he was the only elected official to vote against the measures. Hofmeyr was dead set on uniting South Africa, and like Merriman before him, saw the Cape Franchise (which gave voting rights to all propertied men, regardless of race) as a means to slowly induct the whole nation into a Christian brotherhood through colonial trusteeship. He even attempted to break down the racial barriers through the use of united church conferences. But while his attempt to use Christianity to unite the country provided the first ecstatic experiences of national unity our broken bastard nation ever tasted, it was a false hope of familial love which dissipated like the warmth of mother at the school gates as the curtains of segregation descended on the infant nation.
In private writings, Smuts acknowledged that grand segregation was impractical, and black urbanisation was irresistible. When the notorious Fagan Report came out in 1948, and trumpeted this fact from the rooftops, Smuts confirmed his recognition of it, and fell into public ignominy with his people. Already raging at the betrayal of voluntarily serving the British in the Second World War, having suspected the nature of his dual loyalties for decades, Smuts was thoroughly trounced in the 1948 elections by the new and fiery Nationalist party, chaired by a man from his tiny hometown, Francois Malan. Far from promoting harmony and a holistic co-evolution, dragging all South African peoples towards ever closer unity, Smuts's compromises guaranteed the arrival of grand apartheid. His choices in 1936 formed the basis of Verwoerd's dirty compromise, between the baasskap model, which saw white men as eternal custodians of their colonial wards, and the purist model, which saw total separation into separate states. He tried to achieve both, and as history has shown, failed miserably at each.
Imperial, but not an Empire
In the First World War, Smuts's military acumen was recognised by a sufficiently large portion of the British elite that he was placed on the War council for the Empire. In 1917, Smuts spoke as a guest to a banquet held at the British Parliament. In the address, Smuts insisted that an Empire was not what the nations of the dominion were. He disliked the term, and smacked to him of the violent outward aggression of the Germans. "Germanism", it seemed to him, threatened the very foundations of civilisation with its uncompromising outward expansionism. He referred to the colonies and dependencies as being different from the Dominions, whom he saw as a community of nations, independent in character and government, yet somehow part of a greater whole, a society of shared values, whose common interests necessitate monarchy and a common foreign policy.
Smuts introduced for the first time the phrase "the British Commonwealth", to describe the self-governing Dominions (Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, Great Britain), and sent a comprehensive memorandum to Secretary of State Amery in 1921, who immediately wrote back that he vigorously agreed to every point. Smuts's repudiation of the Empire in favour of the Commonwealth, and his belief in free, self-determined parts contributing towards an organic whole created the necessity of allowing "mature" nations their own freedom. For this reason, Smuts intervened in the Irish war of independence. While the government of Lloyd-George insisted on smashing the Irish, many significant people, from Robert Cecil to King George V, and the general public, found the policy too harsh, and longed for a settlement.
The view of the free-associating commonwealth of nations, as opposed to a centrally governed Empire made Smuts attractive to Irish negotiators, and he was invited to advise and intercede by both the British authorities, and the Irish Free State. He spoke privately to the King, and drafted an address to the Belfast parliament. He then wrote to Lloyd-George, telling him bluntly that the forcible suppression of Irish autonomy would run counter to all British governing principles, and would undo the empire. As Churchill wrote later, 'no British government in modern times has ever appeared to make so complete and sudden a reversal of policy.' Smuts became the intermediary between Eamon de Valera and the Crown, convincing the highly suspicious and radical de Valera that it would destroy his diplomatic reputation to decline negotiations, and even convinced him to drop Ulster from the claim of independence.
The plan which hit Amery's desk in 1921 laid out almost every key proposition for what would become the Balfour Declaration of 1926, including (as Smuts was an enthusiastic Zionist) the notion of a Jewish nation-state, though his proposal of a codified Commonwealth constitution did not make the final cut. The significance of this impact is particular, since two years prior to Balfour, Smuts was voted out of office, and in his place, the truculent nationalist Barry Hertzog was in charge, who favoured the dissolution of the Empire. Smuts foresaw a gradual promotion of all British colonial possessions to the same status as they became civilised and modernised by the British elite, and indeed, as the Empire wilted in the heat of German fire, the Commonwealth braced to afford equal status to all nations who wished for independence. He saw the greater mission of this Commonwealth to be greater freedom and self-development. He saw in this commonwealth the "nucleus for the world-government of the future", the "true league of nations".
Self-determination, by Force
Again you see a problem in holism. Where there should have been a united family of nations we saw the elements drifting apart, we saw disunity and disruption, and we saw in the end the greatest crash in the history of the world. When the Great War ended there was the same problem in Holism. I think the League of Nations is a genuine effort in reconstructing the broken front of European civilisation, of once more reforming unity out of division and discord.
When the ashes of the European conflagration settled, Smuts was placed ideally. His powers of personal persuasion were strong enough to gain the ear of Woodrow Wilson, and subsequently the authority to draft what would be the outlines of the legal powers of the League of Nations, with the explicit intention of liquidating and replacing the nations of Europe with a new holistic dispensation. "If this advance is not made" he predicted, "this war will, from the most essential point of view, have been fought in vain. And more calamities will follow." He wrote the first draft of the Covenant himself, and in the notes of his initial outline, he proposes not just collective security, justice and conflict resolution, but an irresistible penetration into every aspect of the life of the states which make it up.
Smuts's draft proposals to global unity and eternal peace had a powerful effect on the Treaty of Versailles. His advice was the the dissolution of the Central Powers, and a combination of nationalisation direct oversight mechanisms to repress German industry and military powers, Wilson's most favoured proposals. He also prescribed the membership of stateless nations such as the Jews and other ethnic minorities, and asserted the right of self-determination of nations, making annexation an "illegality". Hannah Arendt sharply observed that rights with nobody to enforce them are of little value, and once Germany decided the League was a paper tiger, the stateless national councils were of little consequence. This echoes the situation in South Africa only too clearly.
The evil of Empire, as he saw it, was in its character of overgrown nationalism. So, the gradual sublimation of nationality into global citizenship was conceived as a solution to all the bitterness of blood endemic to man. This logic, of an evolution of all peoples in a managed way towards union in a stable holistic human society, mirrored his concepts of nature, and his attempts to implement them in South Africa. This logic made him deeply antithetical in spirit to the rise of fascism, which he treated with unrestrained bile. I quote from Peder Anker's fascinating book Imperial Ecology:
Smuts had no sympathy for or contact with German national socialists who may have been inspired by holism, ecology, or other “green” views. Instead it is remarkable that Smuts noted as early as April 1933 that “Hitler with his ruthless barbarism... [and with] his baiting of the Jews” would carry Europe “back to the Middle Ages” and may cause an “orgy of racial politics” in South Africa. There is not one line of support of Nazism in his public speeches or private correspondence (nor did his constituency support Hitler, who had greater sympathy among Nationalists). Moreover, Smuts gave qualified support to the Spanish coalition government in their civil war because they were fighting the impending danger of a fascist regime. Smuts’s firm rejection of fascist and Nazi regimes did not imply any support of socialist ideas, nor did Soviet and other Marxist intellectuals support holism. In the late 1930s he was still critical of all kinds of socialists, particularly H. G. Wells, whom he saw as a leading socialist promoter of “the general trend against our fundamental human rights.”
This prescient view, and his prior influence allowed him tremendous influence later, when the opportunity arose to present the preamble to the United Nations Charter, the document which outlines the values upon which the entire edifice of the current global governance system was founded. But it came through in his political writings, and Holism and Evolution was banned in Nazi Germany.
The War for Peace
'We find, instead of hostility which is felt in life, that this is a friendly universe. We are all inter-related. The one helps the other. It is an idea that gives strength and peace and is bound to give a more wholesome view of life and nature than we have had so far." "...organized tolerant co-existence is the rule, and destructive warfare the exception, resorted to only when the balance of Nature is seriously disturbed"
When WWII broke out, Smuts was appointed Field Marshall in the British Army. His choice to enter the war on the side of the British was an outrage at home, but he pursued it because he believed that Hitler was evil, and above all, a threat to the vision of a united global peace. Like his position in the war rooms of the Great War, Smuts's position at the forefront of the British Imperial war strategy placed him directly in the centre of the peace negotiations.
The meeting of America, Britain, China and Russia at Dumbarton Oaks to discuss a new, more comprehensive League of Nations resulted in bitter argument, and little more than vague gestures towards universal values. The role and contribution of Smuts was the same he played in formulating the Union of South Africa, the League of Nations, and the British Commonwealth. He would stroll in, while all parties were in the process of agreeing on broad principles, and present a comprehensive, fully drafted plan. The Atlantic Charter which preceded these negotiations did not even mention human rights, and the Dumbarton Oaks draft mentioned human rights only once, as a throwaway line in the midst of a discussion of an economic council.
Smuts saw that what was missing was a statement of religious intent. The religion was that of human rights, over which the war was supposedly fought, and which only a firm philosophical commitment could address. His statement of the new doctrine was laid out in the language of a global materialist faith. While Sir Charles Webster was tasked with writing the British proposal, he lost his copy during the conference, and took a copy of Smuts's. While he made some stylistic changes, it remained mostly Smuts's work; he even managed to sneak in references to his notion of the "development of the human personality". The Americans added a couple of flourishes of their own, and reverting back to Smut's opening line, "we, the people of the United Nations". But it is to Smuts's April draft that we can commend this extraordinarily utopian political promise:
We believe in the enlargement of freedom and the promotion of social progress, and in raising the standards of life, so that there may be freedom of thought and expression and religion, as well as freedom from want and fear for all.
As the United Nations Conference on International Organisations opened, Smuts feverishly spent his time running between committees working to shape various legal aspects of the UN Charter, including strengthened economic frameworks and stronger security provisions. Being the only still living signatory of the Treaty of Versailles, and a personal friend of Winston Churchill, Smuts made waves, and he was listened to.
As fluffy and insignificant as a philosophical declaration of values may appear to the common, legalistic mind, it has in fact had unbelievably far reaching consequences for the formulation of global policymaking, no more so than at the end of the Cold War, when the world was being remade anew. The phrase "freedom from fear and want" was not forgotten. Five decades later, the UN Development Program quoted it as the essential purpose for their comprehensive targeted governing scheme, which knit together aspects from every sphere of human life under the single umbrella of "human security". They quote the American Secretary of state in June 1945:
The battle of peace has to be fought on two fronts. The first is the security front where victory spells freedom from fear. The second is the economic and social front where victory means freedom from want. Only victory on both fronts can assure the world of an enduring peace....No provisions that can be written into the Charter will enable the Security Council to make the world secure from war if men and women have no security in their homes and their jobs.
The origins of their comprehensive development program is found in the 1972 Stockholm Conference, where the use of the term "comprehensive security" - placing the economic interests of humanity on par with the existential threats from war, and tying these to the core duties of the UN - first appeared. This curious development, whereby the UN took on the goals of the Socialist International as a categorical imperative, resulted from developments in the United States the previous year, when a policy program developed by the Environmental Protection Agency, used Malthusian arguments of a human catastrophe proceeding from the abuse of the environment to create and fund a holistic ecological management program. This gained traction with the military, who had already begun expanding their notion of "national security" to include every measurable aspect of human, animal and plant life, air, water and soil. As Bill McSweeney put it, it was “a political decision in search of a theoretical foundation.” In the UNDP's post-Soviet policy framework, it was transformed into the UN's current mandate for "human security", transforming wealth redistribution into a human right.
Remembering to Forget
Today Smuts is barely remembered, and where he is, as in the Fallist protests at UCT, his portrait was burned and his bust painted red. His family have preserved his house, and commissioned a tin-eared old-fashioned documentary on his life. But as much as they try, his memory will not be redeemed. His grand unified theory is esteemed by neither science nor philosophy, and his life's work is esteemed by few historians. But he shaped every institution he touched, and left a long, strange, and misunderstood legacy. Irony of ironies, Jan Smuts found that his ideals came back to bite him. His promotion of universal liberal idealism was overshadowed by the iconic reputation as the man who jailed Mahatma Gandhi, and became the architect of apartheid (though that epithet is usually reserved for Hendrik Verwoerd). What is more, the human rights doctrine of the United Nations became the very mechanism by which South Africa was condemned on the international stage, and the philosophical grounds for the new constitution of 1996, which promoted all forms of positive human rights enshrined in the preamble to the UN Charter written so many years before, ratified by a black parliament in Cape Town and a black president in Pretoria.
In the next episode, I will deal with the manner in which ecology and the United Nations mandate of universal positive rights became the vehicle for the creation of a global bureaucratic management policy, which has come to influence all aspects of human life across the developed world, with the notable exceptions of China and Russia. This comprehensive form of human control, borrowing as it did from British Imperialism, Soviet Socialism, American national security jingoism and ecological holism, was nurtured in the United States, and delivered to the world through the byzantine legal corpus of the United Nations. It has come to form the backbone of a strategy of global control through treaties and NGOs, choking small farmers, fishers and rural communities into extinction, and accelerating the global process of urbanisation, state domination and mega-corporate globalisation. The agenda set by the UN, through several institutions, will form the focal point for the greatest struggle of our times, and for the most essential aspects of human freedom. And like this story, it begins and ends with Dutch farmers.