zak
The Living Force
Reading your post WK, I remember the story of the elimination of grain-eating sparrows during the Mao era in China.This part also makes a lot of sense to me. Their plans for total domination and control may work for a short while, but eventually, if they keep on diminishing the numbers of the masses and weakening them, who do they expect will keep their awesome infrastructure running? Who will do the dirty work of producing food and raw materials? Who will do the brain work to produce and maintain AI or genetic engineering? Even their enforcers may at some moment figure out that there's not much point in keeping that scheme going if they themselves don't have a good enough deal. There's that lesson from chess the elites didn't learn: that without the rest of the pieces, the king is rather useless.
There is some degree of disconnect between how the Klaus Schwabb type of characters see the situation and how it really happens at grassroot levels. Suppose they want to put a chip on everyone and without it they won't be able to buy or sell anything. Suppose they are required to keep a smart phone on them on at all times, or something equivalent. Are they expecting that will apply to the Pigmies or Lacandonias living in the jungle? What will happen when your bank account is drained to almost zero and on top of that you are punished for whatever reason by not allowing you access to that same account? Surely you'll go back to basics and forget about the system entirely.
In a prodigious burst of patriotism, nests were destroyed, eggs were crushed and chicks were killed. Drums were also played to prevent sparrows from landing on crops until the birds died of exhaustion in the air. The eradication campaign was a great success. After a billion birds had been killed, the sparrow had almost disappeared from the land. So the cereals were safe!
What Mao Zedong didn't know, or had ignored, was that sparrows don't just peck at grain. They also eat a lot of insects and are particularly fond of grasshopper and locust larvae. While the eradication campaign was initially very successful, the Chinese authorities began to realise that the grasshopper and locust population was exploding in 1960. These insects have a huge appetite for crops and reproduce much faster than birds. As a fourth target in the Four Pests Campaign, communist officials urgently replaced sparrows with bugs.
DeepL.Eventually, the eradication of the sparrows and the failure of the Great Leap Forward factors led to the greatest famine caused by human folly. From 1958 to 1962, between 20 and 50 million people died of hunger. This is a dramatic toll, to which must be added a billion birds and certainly as many rodents, all exterminated to satisfy a vain urge for modernisation.
De l'éradication des moineaux à la plus grande famine connue