Carbon Capture Refugees

Their Sunday morning worship was disrupted by gunshots. Soldiers had entered their village and said, “Get out”. Those that didn’t run fast enough were beaten. A sick eight-year-old boy was alone in his house as his mother was out getting medicine. He was burned alive when his home was set afire as they destroyed the entire village - all the homes, schools, livestock, crops, etc. Their land - much of which was given to them or their parents as a benefit for British military service in World War Two - was to now become a carbon capture forest for the international environmental elite. One of the over 20,000 dispossessed stated: “I lost my land. I’m landless. Land was my life. I have no rights. I’m not a human being.” Some of these new homeless now have jobs on the forest plantation. Their sign reads: “Towards a sustainable healthy, and environmental healthy community.” Given the bitter irony of that sign, I couldn’t help but think of the entrance sign that read: “Work Makes You Free” at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

But this all happened in far off Uganda. We are all sadly used to ghastly events in the so-called Third World, and many folks probably possess a rather smug attitude toward all this. Perhaps we are ignoring a dry run of our future. Experiments are made, and procedures perfected on those most helpless. The infamous Nazi doctors practiced on black Africans, in what is now known as Namibia, and the world didn’t seem to notice or care. A few years later, Turkish Muslems murdered one and a half million Christian Armenians. The world-wide public outcry was taken in stride by those in charge. A little more than a decade later, Europeans faced this brutality in their backyards.

This carbon capture project to save the world from a fictitious threat that benefits the few and mighty is not surprisingly blessed by the omnipotent Forestry Stewardship Council, an organization I’ve referred to in a prior Outside the Ivory Tower. One financier is the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, although they prefer to be called HSBC to distance themselves from their origins in bankrolling the opium trade to enslave the Chinese almost 200 years ago. Another backer is the World Bank, an institution many people believe is here to help. The only real environmental problem, the primitive techniques of the farmers which they could have helped improve, was nothing but another excuse for the project. But the New Forests Company, often lauded as socially and environmentally responsible, is confident that it will all work out better in the end based on statistical modeling.

Uganda long ago signed on to the UN Small Arms treaty which Obama has constantly advocated for the USA. Ugandans have no 2nd Amendment rights, so self-defense or a standoff like at the Bundy Ranch was impossible. They were branded as illegal encroachers, just like the Feds told Clive Bundy, that he suddenly had no rights to graze land his family has used for over a 100 years. And just like our veterans who are judged by de facto death panels called wait lists, the Ugandans’ benefit was a sham promise.

Our nation was largely founded by English people who had lost their grazing rights under the Enclosure Acts, and understood the relationship between land ownership and freedom. This became encapsulated into Thomas Jefferson’s concept of the yeoman farmer. Today, we take this to mean a strong middle class as the basis of freedom and social stability. But this is being stripped away, piece by piece, in a process far more subtle than in Uganda. The Wild & Scenic designation for part of the Mokelumne River is part of a much larger picture and a far more ominous future.

Copyright © 2014, Mark L. Bennett