Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too

by Claire Berlinski

  In 2001, Bové took part in a large-scale destruction of genetically modified crops in Brazil, the land of his father’s genetic modification triumph. He popped up again in Porto Alegre for protests during the conference of the World Social Forum, and in Mexico at the end of the Zapatista March. He was sighted in India, leading an enormous demonstration against a conference on GMO plants organized by the transnationals, and spotted again in France, urinating on a bale of imported wheat. One might wonder how he found the time to farm.

  Later that year he was arrested again for destroying genetically modified rice and maize samples at CIRAD, a government-sponsored biotech research station in Montpellier. His Confédération Paysanne took crowbars and sledgehammers to a CIRAD greenhouse, then pulled up and burned a thousand genetically modified rice plants, simultaneously destroying computer files holding the company’s research data. When in response the police yanked Bové from his bed at sunrise and whisked him off to jail by helicopter, the Confédération Paysanne began issuing press releases within nanoseconds: it was outrageous, they protested, to arrest a farmer just before the morning milking.

  One of the more inexplicable aspects of Bové’s activist agenda has been his agitation on behalf of Yasser Arafat and the Palestinians. In 2002, at the height of the Second Intifada—when the random mass murder of Israelis was a near-daily occurrence—Bové was found in Ramallah, protesting the Israeli occupation. This was not his first visit to the West Bank. A June 21, 2001, story in the Independent of London described an earlier confrontation between the Israelis and Bové’s international activist colleagues: “‘No violence! No violence!’ chanted Mr. Bové and his friends. A group of Palestinians nearby took up chanting but maybe misheard the French accent as they shouted, ‘No peace! No peace!’” 5

  Throughout France, Bové’s devotees have followed his lead on this issue. Not long after Bové’s visit to Ramallah, I spent a week at a yoga clinic on a biodynamic farm in Provence run by two members of Bové’s Confédération Paysanne. Prominently displayed in the dining room, interleaved with brochures describing the farm’s organic pâté, were tracts calling for the interposition of an international police force in Occupied Palestine. The link between pâté and Palestine is at first blush unclear, but Bové explains it thus: The occupation is an agricultural issue at heart; the Israelis, he says, are “putting in place—with the support of the World Bank—a series of neoliberal measures intended to integrate the Middle East into globalized production circuits, through the exploitation of cheap Palestinian labor.”6

  It is of course difficult, by means of this ideological framework, to explain why the Israelis keep razing those Palestinian olive groves.

  THE SECOND LIFE OF JOSÉ BOVÉ

  José Bové was born again in Antwerp, less than a century after the turn of the millennium. Tanchelm of Antwerp, a failed diplomat for the county of Flanders, entered his second career as a wandering preacher and heretic in 1112. According to the Chapter of Utrecht, his eloquence was extraordinary. He began, like so many propheta of the era, by condemning corrupt clerics, then broadened his attack to the Church tout court. Churches, he said, were no better than whore-houses. Like other Bovés throughout the ages, he adroitly attached his followers’ sense of spiritual unease to their most pressing economic grievance: according to the chapter, “He easily persuaded the populace to withhold tithes from the ministers of the Church, for that is what they wanted to do.”7

  The area from which Tanchelm preached had for many years been swept by communal insurrections. From the Rhine Valley to Utrecht, from Flanders to northern France, town after town had risen up against its feudal suzerains. The historian Norman Cohn tells us that these movements were organized by the merchants, and that the merchants’ goals were more worldly than transcendental: they were particularly exercised by high dues and tariffs. When unable to achieve their aims peacefully, they organized insurrectionary societies, setting fire to cathedrals and attacking Church officials. Tanchelm’s rhetoric about priestly corruption proved quite a convenient accompaniment to this species of vandalism, much as the present-day Bové’s rhetoric about corruption quite usefully matches his followers’ frequently violent demands for protective trade barriers against foreign competition. The words the modern Bové uses to describe capitalists, elected governments, multinationals, and the World Trade Organization are from the same lexicon: Parasites. Vampires.8

  But this is not to describe the Bovés’s followers—then or now—as ideologically disingenuous. On the contrary. They were and are true believers. Tanchelm’s charisma was legendary; his flock, according to the Chapter of Utrecht, was blindly devoted, rushing to make offerings to him, throwing their jewels in his coffers.

  Tanchelm, like so many of the Bovés, had a gift with women. Many of the millenarian sects encouraged a kind of sexual libertinism not generally associated in the modern mind with the Christian tradition; Tanchelm’s was one of them. Because he was God incarnate, Tanchelm avowed, intercourse with him was a sacred act. It appears that many women agreed. The canons of Utrecht were powerless to put an end to his agitation and troublemaking, so great was his influence, until, at some time around 1115, Tanchelm was helpfully killed by a priest.

  Messiahs of this kind, Cohn observes, typically arose in Europe not among the poor as such, but among those in the lower strata of society who faced a challenge to their agrarian way of life, and who had lost their faith in traditional values. Europe experienced just such a social crisis in the late eleventh century, and from this moment, we see Bovés born everywhere; indeed, in the Valley of the Rhine there is an unbroken tradition of revolutionary millenarianism until well into the sixteenth century. The circumstances in which the Bovés thrived appear to have been quite uniform: They arose in areas where economic and social change was rapid, and where living circumstances had come to differ significantly from Europe’s customary, settled agricultural life. As the population grew throughout the Middle Ages, so did the cities. The newly urbanized, particularly the displaced peasants, found themselves bewildered by the demands of the primitive capitalism of the town, and disoriented by the loss of their traditional social and kinship networks. To them, the Bovés were irresistible. For these people, Cohn observes, “Any disturbing, frightening, or exciting event—any kind of revolt or revolution, a summons to a crusade, an interregnum, a famine, anything in fact which disrupted the normal routine of social life—acted on the people with peculiar sharpness and called forth reactions of peculiar violence.”9

  Then and now, the Bovés’s followers came from the same class, and as the present Bové has remarked, the current movement is “understandable, given all the agricultural and workplace traumas that are happening.” 10

  Salvationist cults, led by charismatic, messianic prophets, gave these lost souls a sense of belonging and a mission—a mission, no less, of transcendent, global significance: the total transformation of society into a utopia based on a mythic Christian past.

  They still do.

  THE MODERN PROPHET OF CROP WORSHIP

  I should put my cards on the table: I am not unsympathetic to José Bové. The questions he raises about modern agriculture are not trivial or easily dismissed. I cannot disagree with him when he argues that we know too little about the long-term environmental and health effects of GMO crops to permit the corporations that manufacture them— and stand to profit enormously from them—to be the chief arbiters of their safety.

  Nor am I sure that I trust our governments to make these judgments, either. I lived in England during the Thatcher era, when worried consumers first began to fear a link between mad cow disease and its human analogue, the deadly and ghastly variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob. I distinctly remember the British agriculture minister appearing on television, shoveling a burger into his bewildered four-year-old daughter’s mouth. See? It’s safe. Several years later, a British health secretary announced the probable link between cattle and the human form of the illness.

  I am sy
mpathetic, too, to Bové’s indignation about the cruelty and inhumanity of modern factory and battery farming, and to his charge that mass agricultural production techniques endanger both our health and the environment. The mad cow epidemic appears to have been the direct consequence of the grotesque practice of feeding unsanitary animal remains to herbivores. Animals’ immune systems, Bové holds, are weakened when farmers rely overmuch on antibiotics and growth hormones; disease is easily spread among overcrowded animals. Epidemics are the inevitable consequence. The British were forced to torch more than a million farm animals during the 2001 hoof-and-mouth crisis. It was a revolting spectacle. Bové says he is against that, and I am against that, too. Nor can I disagree with him when he says that mass-produced junk food does not make for an optimal human diet.

  The man is charming, I’ll give you that. “The first thing you notice about José are his eyes—a luminous blue, full of warmth. His smile is never far away—the lines around his eyes always seem to herald it,”11 gushes Gilles Luneau. There is that charisma. All the women have a crush on him. He recently left his wife of more than thirty years for a younger woman. (Before then, the media was much taken by the strength of the couple’s bond and their long-standing shared passion for activist causes. Now she denounces him as a dangerous demagogue. Journalists have been inclined to ignore this awkward development.)

  I am not at all sympathetic, however, to Bové’s stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nor to his enthusiasm for the unfortunately named Kongra-Gel, the newly reconstituted PKK, a loathsome rabble of Kurdish separatists who constitute one of the world’s most disgusting terrorist groups, and I say this in full awareness that the competition for claim to this title is stiff. The members of Kongra-Gel are child killers and beheaders with the best of them. Bové recently declared his intention to join Kongra-Gel as a protest against its inclusion on the EU’s list of terrorist organizations. Nor have I much sympathy with Bové’s clichéd, thoughtless opposition to U.S. military policy in Afghanistan and Iraq, which involves the inevitable wearying collection of neo-Marxist claims. I don’t need to spell them out— you’ve heard them all before.

  But it is not through any reasoned position—certainly not on these issues—that Bové has achieved his celebrity. As Eric Hoffer rightly remarks in The True Believer, a rising mass movement attracts a following “not by its doctrines and promises but by the refuge it offers from the anxieties, barrenness and meaninglessness of an individual existence.”12 Just so. The real source of Bové’s popularity is this: He has managed to transform a scientific question—What is the best and safest way to produce food?—into a quasi-spiritual one. Bové is the modern prophet of crop worship.

  Bové is, in fact, a neo-Christian heretic, just like all the Bovés before him.

  A PERENNIAL EUROPEAN PERSONALITY

  In the popular imagination of farmers in the developing world, Bové looms large, to be sure, but larger still looms the figure of Norman Borlaug. His name is unknown in the developed world, though he is the greatest hero of the poor in all of human history. Borlaug was the father of the Green Revolution, which dramatically increased agricultural yields in the 1960s and 1970s. In Mexico, India, China, and beyond, Borlaug is credited with saving more than a billion people from starvation. For this, he won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize.

  Borlaug, who is now in his nineties, views GMOs as the future of the Green Revolution, essential to boosting crop production as the world’s population—projected to be more than 8 billion by 2025— increases. Without GMOs, he believes, starvation will ensue. He is intensely contemptuous of Bové and his associates, whom he holds to be pampered European imbeciles who know nothing about hunger. According to Borlaug, and to many of Bové’s critics, there is so far very little evidence that GMOs are dangerous and much evidence that they are not. Indeed, the development of pest-resistant crop varieties appears to be beneficial to the environment inasmuch as it reduces the need for chemical spraying.

  Who knows? I certainly don’t. This much is clear, though: As a direct consequence of Bové’s activism, France in 1998 pronounced a two-year moratorium on certain types of transgenic plant research and production. The producers of GMO crops have lost the enormous European market, and it has cost them a fortune. The repeated destruction of their experimental plants has left them hesitant to continue their research. The effect of Bové’s campaign has been to delay significantly the development of genetically improved crop varieties. Because of the publicity Bové has generated, consumers in the Third World are intensely fearful of GMOs. Some states of Brazil have forbidden their import. In 2002, as 6 million Zimbabweans faced famine, their government rejected an American donation of 10,000 metric tons of whole-grain corn because the shipment might have contained genetically modified grain.28 Farmers throughout Africa are reluctant to plant GMO crops because they cannot be exported to European markets. Bové’s critics charge that he has therefore already doomed many in the developing world to hunger and death, and I am not sure they are wrong.

  My point here is not to resolve the question. My point is that Bové is an ancient historic figure, a perennial European personality, who has adapted himself splendidly to this modern debate. In this sense, he is much more (and much less) than he seems.

  THE THIRD LIFE OF JOSÉ BOVÉ

  José Bové was born again sometime in the first half of the thirteenth century as Jacob, a renegade monk from Hungary. Preaching in Picardy, the Master of Hungary led the Crusade of the Shepherds, the first of the century’s great anarchic movements. By all accounts he was a prepossessing and vastly eloquent figure. He declared that God was displeased with the vanity and ostentation of the French nobility and had chosen the shepherds, instead, to carry out his work. (Bovés throughout history have had an affinity for sheep.) Peasants rushed to convene under the Master’s banner; soon they were joined by a motley assortment of criminals and rabble-rousers. Together they became known as the Pastoureaux—the original Confédération Paysanne; the word means the same thing. They marched, armed with pitchforks and pikes, into the villages of France, intimidating local authorities. When they ran short of provisions, they resorted to pillaging, but often the locals put all their possessions at the crusaders’ disposition, for they were much admired. The French singer Francis Cabrel has described the current Bové as “one of the last courageous, natural, honest voices left in a world where the rest are tarnished by compromise,” and this is exactly how the Master of Hungary and his disciples were perceived. 13

  Much of the Master’s vitriol was directed against the merchant capitalists in the towns. We see now the emergence of a kind of class consciousness the current antiglobalists would readily recognize, particularly in its agricultural angst. Among proverbs and miracle plays written by the poor, we find sentiments that would not have been out of place in Millau or Porto Alegre: “Magistrates, provosts, beadles, mayors—nearly all live by robbery. . . . They all batten on the poor, they all want to despoil them. . . . They pluck them alive. The stronger robs the weaker.” “Good working men make the wheaten bread but they will never chew it; no, all they get is the siftings from the corn, and from good wine they get the dregs and from good cloth nothing but the chaff.”14 From the contemporary Bové, we learn something similar: “The multinationals are taking over, denying large numbers of farming families access to the land and the possibility of feeding themselves.”15

  One might wonder if the rhetoric is not the same because the conditions are the same: Is it not the case that then, as now, the poor are exploited by the rich? Not quite. In India and Pakistan—thanks to the same free market and the Green Revolution that Bové deplores— GNP has in fact been rising steadily—by as much as an order of magnitude—since the formation of the World Trade Organization’s progenitor, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), as have per capita income, living standards, and life expectancy. Hunger has markedly diminished. So has infant mortality. If the industries mentioned by Bové are suffering,
many more are thriving. In fact, I’ll just get this out of my system right now: The free market is the only economic system in history that has ever succeeded in providing basic standards of living for large populations, at least without herding the bulk of them into forced labor camps. If in doubt about this point, consult footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Notice in which direction the people are running. No, Bové’s complaint is not about fact; it is about ancient—and I do mean ancient— force of habit.

  The Master of Hungary preached against the clergy, attacking them for their hypocrisy and greed. He promised his crusaders they would be received with miracles when they reached the Holy Land. His bands marched through Paris and Tours and Orléans, putting clerics to the sword and drowning them, all to the enthusiastic approval of the watching crowds.

  At Bourges, the Master of Hungary preached against the Jews and sent his men to destroy the Torah scrolls. In this regard, he was typical of Bovés throughout the ages; they have traditionally been anti-Semites. In the eyes of the crusading pauperes, the final battle against the Prince of Evil—believed to be soon at hand—was to commence with the smiting of the Jews. The popular imagination of the Middle Ages cast Jews as terrifying demons, perverted ingrates who refused to admit the divinity of Christ, inheritors of the monstrous guilt of his murder. Inevitably, then as now, Jews were associated with trade, capitalism, and usury. A particularly venomous and unremitting hatred of the Jew gripped the imagination of the millenarian masses at the time of the first crusades; the eschatology of the Second Coming associated Jews with the Antichrist himself, with the peoples of Gog and Magog, who fed on human flesh and corpses. In popular art Jews were portrayed as lustful torturers who castrated children for sport and ripped babies from their mothers’ wombs to drink their blood. Their power was held to be growing, their sins and sorceries more and more untrammeled, more and more outrageous. This was to be expected, for the End was nigh. In the next half century, nearly all the Jews in the southwest of France were to be massacred.