Also at Expo Milano 2015, as per ancient customs of corruption of civilizations and customs, ‘PECUNIA NON OLET’. This is demonstrated by the private university of the Milan drinking business, which has just introduced itself into the palm debate to offer a sleazy ‘academic imprimatur’ – if one can speak of academia – to the positions that the criminals of ‘land grabbing’ have shared with the global ‘food & drink’ giants and, poor them, even with some large Italian industries.
In peeping at this global anthropogenic tragedy – as it is caused by systematic acts of physical violence on local indigenous communities (so-called land grabbing) and tropical ecosystems (so-called Ecocide), Dr. Antonella Mori takes care to intervene in the debate to ‘not demonize’ palm production. Are you kidding me?
“Instead of stigmatizing the product and demanding that we stop consuming it altogether, it is necessary to question the ways in which each individual production is done,” reads the Bocconi press release, tag #Expoblog and ‘Department of Policy Analysis and Public Management.
It is a miserable attempt at disinformation that can be traced back to the so-called Goebbels method, that is, overturning the logic of responsibility and burden of proof by assuming the innocence of criminal operations as a basic axiom. As an example, if one were to apply this same criterion to another expression of neo-colonialist exploitation, that of the ‘conflict diamonds’, one should not ‘stigmatize’ the phenomenon of illegal diamond trafficking that has financed the soldier-child wars for years but merely observe whether or not each individual batch of stones bears traces of puerile blood.
Dr. Mori acknowledges that ‘there is documentation’ associating ‘some plantations’ of palm with orangutan housing problems in Borneo, as well as issues to be resolved about logging and child labor in Guatemala. A misrepresentation of reality that would amount, in the case of ‘blood diamonds,’ to acknowledging the problem of tax evasion on the sale of diamonds. For the express purpose of distracting public opinion from the international crimes at hand, the brutal robbery of land in the case of palm, the horrors of war in that of diamonds.
He thus continues in the carefully prepared monologue, “It should not be said that because there are experiences where palm oil has had negative effects then we stop consuming and producing palm oil and stop producing and consuming goods that use palm oil, which would, moreover, be impossible since the usage is widespread” (!). As if to say, we cannot give up diamonds coming in from conflict zones or even jewelry where they are set, because … they are so widespread! Are we crazy???
‘Controlling the masses without the masses noticing’ was the motto of Edward L. Bernays, the ‘Father of Persuasion’ remembered both as the great inspirer of Josef Goebbels, Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister, and as the deus ex machina of the extraordinary spread of female smoking in the U.S. and around the world (1), and various other services to the Evil Empire.
NOT IN OUR NAMES! is GIFT’s clear and strong message to its readers and the consumAtors of the planet. Stop! being made a fool of! Palm is first cause of international crimes against the rights of populations that are driven ‘manu militari’ from their lands, and not surprisingly then seek safety on migration routes. It is the leading cause of deforestation of the few green lungs of a planet everywhere else already ravaged by unbridled overbuilding and urbanization. What’s more, it’ s bad for your health. Since it is as easy to do without as it was at the time to introduce it, Enough!
(Dario Dongo)
(1) In 1929 Bernays organized, in the New York Easter Procession, the ‘Torchlight Parade of the Freedom Brigade,’ a parade of women smoking as a sign of liberation. The great media coverage of the event, thanks in part to the ‘invisible hand’ of Philip Morris, meant that from then on women felt proud to fight their lungs in public, no less than their Marlboro men. Bernays then developed with the AMA (American Medical Association) an advertising model held up for half a century, in which implicitly cigarettes were also given a positive value for the well-being and health of consumers. Just look at the advertisements in Life or Time around the middle of the last century. Cf. http://www.rense.com/general12/believe.htm
