Tin-foil Hat Mode: Engaged.
So. I’ve been watching nothing but these conspiracy-nut type films for the past week. One of them (on Google Video) is a French film, ‘The World According to Monsanto’. Monsanto, for those who don’t know off it, is a company that is essentially trying to patent food and the company responsible for the world-wide rush towards growing Genetically Modified (GM) crops.
They are also the geniuses that came up with rBGH or the Bovine Growth Hormone that I’m pretty sure is in all our milk and is giving men moobs (man-boobs) and Lord knows what else. But my personal favourite bit of history about Monsanto is that they are the company that developed and produced Agent Orange, the carcinogenic herbicide the Americans dumped literally tons of all over Vietnam during the war. This led to both American soldiers getting violently ill and the Vietnamese people dealing with birth defects in generation after generation, to this day.
And now these fuckers are selling us food? And as usual, our government bends over and takes it in the name of trade-pacts, liberalisation and globalisation. “Thank you sir, may I have another?”
Indians should definitely watch this film because India is one of the world’s three biggest growers of GM crops and the film talks about the part Monsanto’s patented BT Cotton has played in the farmers’ suicides in Andhra Pradesh over the past few years. The filmmaker, Marie-Monique Robin also speaks with environmental activist Vandana Shiva, one of the biggest opponents of GM food in India, who has a really interesting point of view about the original ‘Green Revolution’.
The Green Revolution is something all the children in the Indian education system are taught about and it is interesting to see that not everyone thinks it was some sort of panacea to India’s problems.
P.S. One of REM’s best songs ‘Orange Crush’ is about Agent Orange. Michael Stipe’s father apparently served in the helicopter corps during the Vietnam war.
Hi Samreth
I don’t usually respond to blogs but you seem so wildly sane that, well, here goes. Besides, you appear to like Steely Dan. Always a good sign.
I’m a 51 year old Canadian and I was sprayed with Agent Orange – in Canada – beginning at the age of one in 1958. It’s Canada’s dirty little secret that we tested ALL of the herbicides eventually deployed on Vietnam. The spray schedules for CFB Gagetown and Vietnam are in lockstep; whatever was first sprayed on Gagetown next befell Vietnam. I’m saying that Canada fought the Vietnam War at one remove. My grand nation manufactured AO knowing its destination as well. All this was kept under wraps until 2005. The ongoing cover-up goes so deep I don’t even know where to begin.
Now I’m involved in four multi-billion dollar class actions against the government of Canada, Monsanto and Dow Chemical. We’re after blood because they participated in the largest poisoning of a nation’s own citizens in history. I estimate the number of Canadians contaminated in our most polluted province to be over a million. I further estimate the number of deaths due to this to be approaching half a million.
Yup, I’m a real, live conspiracy nut.
You would be too if you found out your own government sacrificed where you lived to an experiment with chemical weapons, I’m guessing.
Keep up the good work please. And don’t believe anything until it is officially denied.
Kelly Porter Franklin
Nanaimo, BC, Canada
Kelly_franklin@telus.net