“Like bees calmed by honey, a class gorged on figs is soon ready to listen.”
Ronald & Adamchak [1] P13
The day after the King’s Coronation (at which his service to the Natural World was extolled (1:13:38)) the Prince of Wales delivered a brief speech on his father. He also spoke of his father’s commitment to service to the Natural World, long before it became popular. I write to testify…
I’d become skilled on the issues related to GM crops, as a volunteer community researcher. One afternoon, maybe 12 or 13 years ago, I got a telephone call. There was to be a push-back against a new GM PR offensive threatening organic agriculture, and I was told the push-back had the support of (then) Prince Charles. The Prince, himself an organic farmer, was the Royal Patron of the UK’s Soil Association, an organization committed to organic principles.
A pro-GM book [1] had been published seeking to “marry” GM crops to their staunchest resisters - organic farmers and adherents. It had been widely promoted by Bill Gates who described the book as incredible and brilliant (from 4:30) and the authors as deeply sincere. I knew the book. It was a manipulative, dissembling text.
The caller offered me the task of writing a letter to Bill Gates, essentially to show him where the book was misleading and how he had been deceived. The letter was to be put into his hands. I was also to do a review of the book which would go on a permanent website. I accepted the tasks, delighted that the future King supported the health of people and planet on this issue.
But I failed on both. There was almost no science in the book - very little for me to answer, rebut or demystify. It wasn’t that kind of book.
I need to give you my experience of this text… I would be reading, and would find myself lulled, thinking “GM crops sound nice”, before another part of my brain watching from the corner would call out “WTF are you thinking, Madeleine?”. I seemed to be almost hypnotised.
I contacted academics in English and Linguistics to find out how the book was playing with my mind, without luck. I sought other academics, finally receiving a key from Professor Richard Hindmarsh at Griffith University that unlocked the puzzle. He had written his own book on the GM push in Australia and had a research background in environmental politics and policy, science and technology. He said it sounded like the book was employing “rhetorical strategies”. I had no idea what that meant.
I suspect every student of advertising or marketing could have instantly instructed me on the engineering of the text, but I had a science/mathematics/actuarial background and knew nothing of the dark arts of written persuasion. I went to second hand bookshops buying up books on persuasive writing and rhetorical techniques. I became familiar with the devices in Wikipedia’s List of Fallacies, and learned about Edward Bernays, pioneer of PR and propaganda. I typed out every word of the book (over 62,000) in an effort to get some control over the text and a handle on the many rhetorical devices employed. But all this took time and the battle moment was lost.
With the recent Coronation reminding me of my failure, 12 or 13 years later, I’m going to have another try at writing this short letter to Bill Gates, just for closure. But here I want to bring forward two devices that exerted power over me, as ‘warnings for young players’.
Relaxation Scripts
The book used relaxation scripts that moved me into a pre-hypnotic space. It made very frequent calls to the senses – sight, sound, touch, smell and taste. The first chapter opened with a walk through a rice paddy:
“The flooded field was drained last week.
Today, I trudge through the mud, feeling the cool, wet clay pass between my naked toes; my straw hat shades my face from the hot sun of the typical Davis summer day.
The dark mud pulls strongly at my heel, releasing my foot with a loud sucking noise just in time for the next step.
Because my shoes have been lost before in these fields, I have left them behind.
A great blue heron flies nearby; her squawking frightens a flock of small white egrets, which lifts up in a panic. “ [1] P3
My senses were engaged, and when “pungent scents from the surrounding dried grass” emerged a few paragraphs later most of my critical mind disappeared. I was with the author walking through the mud ready to go wherever she led, believing whatever she said. Only that little bit of Madeleine in the back corner kept watching.
Or take this script, the author cynically squeezing every sense into these few lines…
“Left alone to lounge in the sun, I walk to the edge of the lake and with my hands cupped, draw the water to my mouth; its purity and sweetness are unmatched.
This taste is as much a part of my childhood as are the scent of the pine trees and the rough texture of the granite.
As I listen to the delighted cries of the children encountering the wildness and beauty here…” [1] P106
These appeals to the senses appear throughout the book, and this line best betrays the process:
“Like bees calmed by honey, a class gorged on figs is soon ready to listen.” [1] P13
Dissembling
Dissembling synonyms: ambiguous, vague, deceptive, devious, misleading, false, lying, sly, unclear.
The authors had placed a photograph of flourishing rice in their first chapter. Yet it wasn’t until my rigorous fourth reading that I realized it did NOT, in fact, represent evidence of a GM rice success, but rather a success of conventional breeding. Their stunted GM rice had suffered pleiotropic effects from their crude ectopic genetic engineering techniques, as reported in their study Xu et al [2].
It seems the authors wanted to create an impression that GM crops could be useful for organic farmers and adherents – people beyond the pesticide industry. Yet over a decade later, in the latest figures released by the GM industry (2019) 100% of GM crop acres were still dedicated to pesticide-related traits - 43% resist herbicides, 12% produce their own genetically engineered insecticides, and the other 45% do both of these things.
I won’t detail the full architecture of deceit here. It was audacious. In short, the muddy paddy relaxation script that opened the first chapter foreshadowed the “muddying of the waters” that was to come. And by the end of the chapter the authors “once again” seemed to own their process:
“…once again, humans have muddied the lines that separate the traditional and the modern; the farmers of the past with those of today; the organic and the genetically engineered.” [1] P9
The UK’s former chief scientist Professor Sir David King was also lauding this conventionally bred rice as a GM success, demystified here by the Soil Association’s policy director, Peter Melchett (dec).
As someone whose life has been oriented towards representing the truth I hadn’t anticipated that others could be shamelessly arranging information to deceive.
A Prayer
We make errors in projecting our own values onto others, often completely oblivious to their true modus operandi.
Self-aware writers of epic fiction project this human trait onto their villains as an Achilles heel…. In Lord of the Rings, Tolkien’s Sauron was destroyed because he failed to conceive that his enemies would seek to destroy his ring of power rather than use it. In the Harry Potter series, Rowling’s orphaned Voldemort failed to dispose of Harry because he had no capacity to comprehend the powerful magic of a mother’s love.
I wonder how many of the vaccine injured & deceased people projected their faith and trust onto the purveyors of the highly risky covid injections… people who hadn’t experienced or couldn’t imagine the tyranny of government, malfeasance of regulators, fraudulence of the pharmaceutical companies, and the dark objectives of the world’s strongest and richest powers.
I’m not sure how to close this out, but with a prayer: May I not again be drawn or confused by the persuasive arts of profiteers and provocateurs, nor of their servants, and may my critical mind always be strong and clear. Amen.
[1] Tomorrow’s Table; Pamela C Ronald & Raoul W Adamchak; ISBN978-0-19-530175-5
[2] Xu et al; Sub1A is an ethylene-response-factor-like gene that confers submergence tolerance to rice; Nature Vol 442, 10 August 2006, doi:10.1038/nature04920,
PDF full text: scholarship.org/content/qt32v0k1pq/qt32v0k1pq.pdf