America’s population reportedly has passed the 300 million mark. The most remarkable aspect of this landmark event is how unremarkable it really is.
“If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly, and then I’d go out in back streets and main streets and bring them all in, all the sick ... the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile me a weary thanks ...”
That was D. H. Lawrence daydreaming about population control. He was hardly alone. During the so-called Progressive Era, “enlightened” social planners were convinced that overpopulation was the gravest problem facing Western society. That’s why Lawrence gave “three cheers for the inventors of poison gas.”
George Bernard Shaw, a thoroughgoing eugenicist, believed that the “the majority of men at present in Europe have no business to be alive.” H. G. Wells smiled at the prospect that the “swarms of black and brown and dirty-white and yellow people” will “have to go.” In America, Wells’s onetime girlfriend, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, argued that birth control was essential to stem the rising tide of the unfit. Leading feminists, Progressive economists and legal theorists shared a similar vision. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who concluded in the case of Buck v. Bell that the state had the power to forcibly sterilize “defectives,” believed that forced population control was at the very heart of Progressive reform.
More Obesity Than Hunger
The Holocaust diminished the popularity of eugenics, but the panic over overpopulation endured. Paul Ehrlich, author of the scaremongering “The Population Bomb,” predicted in 1970 that between 1980 and 1989, roughly 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would starve or otherwise meet their doom in the “Great Die-Off.” Inspired by such fears, Alan Guttmacher, the former president of Planned Parenthood, was a champion of coerced birth control — i.e. “compulsory sterilization and compulsory abortion” — throughout much of the world.
Today, overpopulation anxieties pale by comparison to years past. But simply because people aren’t proposing mass murder and forced sterilizations — or predicting that twice the population of California will starve to death in a country where obesity dwarfs hunger as a health concern — hardly means current anxieties are reasonable.
These days, overpopulation is primarily a hang-up for environmentalists, though suburbanites and feminists occasionally whine about it, too. And an important part of the argument has changed. While before, Progressives were worried about the “muck” at the low end of the global population, they’re now vexed by the fat cats at the top.
'The Ultimate Resource'
Americans consume more of the earth’s resources, they complain, and produce piles more greenhouse gasses. At the environmentalist fringe, there’s even a growing movement to convince eco-friendly Americans to voluntarily reduce or eliminate their own reproduction in order to ease the strain on Mother Nature. Since the political orientation of your parents is the single best determinant of your own politics, you can expect a lot fewer environmentalists in a couple decades if this idea catches on.
What unites today’s worriers and those of yesteryear is their common allegiance to Malthusianism. The British economist Thomas Malthus argued that population will always outstrip available resources. And he was 100 percent wrong.
Because people are, in the words of Julian Simon, “the ultimate resource.” Given the right policies, intellectual and economic productivity trumps biological reproductivity. “Between 1820 and 1992,” Ronald Bailey writes in Earth Report 2000, “world population quintupled even as the world’s economies grew 40-fold.”
Plenty of Food, Land
Productivity matters more than other statistical measures because it demonstrates we’re doing more with less. That’s why, for example, starvation is a political disaster, not a natural one. There’s literally too much food in the world. There’s also plenty of land left. You could move the entire world population inside medium-sized homes and they’d all fit inside Texas, yielding a population density similar to that of Paris.
Today’s Malthusians still look askance at economic productivity, believing that it’s better to limit growth at a “sustainable” rate, which means consigning billions of poor people to lives that threaten the environment (poor people treat their environments like expendable resources rather than priceless luxuries) and, worse, threaten their own lives. It’s more enlightened than dreaming of a giant gas chamber, to be sure. But that’s got to be small solace for those trapped at the bottom.
Johah Goldberg
The Miami Herald - International Edition
Oct19.2006
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=OTdlZTVkM2Y0OWQyYzJiZWEwMzA0ZDg2OThmNjI2YjU=
Essentially another 'mindfuck.'
All these 'issues' present the 'target' with cognitively dissonant 'false dilemmas' in which she/he will (probably) take a 'reactionary-' - manichaenistic stance on one level or another. The same pattern of PSYOP is found in other 'target' issues:' Middle East;War on Terror;Global Warming;Immigration;Multiculturalism;etcetera.
Posted by: ce399 | 12 June 2008 at 20:11
This information is very enlightening and reflects of what is really happening. There really is an agenda in lessening the population of the world. People who have personal interest to gain control of the world.
I hope that people will be more vigilant on these moves, and that people will be smart enough to fight these actions by equipping themselves with the proper information.
Thanks you.
Posted by: Annie Pascasio | 10 January 2009 at 01:06
Hey, I hope everyone is aware that the United Nations is a HUGE promoter of global population control..... and right now, they are selling their newest population control agenda through the environmentalist movement, in a deceptive, all-encompassing document called the "Earth Charter."
Go to the Green Agenda website, and look at what the environmentalist population control advocates at the UN believe.... there are some scary quotes by Mikhail Gorbachev, Maurice Strong, Al Gore, and others. If you go to the section on the Earth Charter, you will see that the UN means to take control of each country around the world with the Earth Charter, and will probably turn into global government...
The Earth Charter promotes "sustainable development," based on the false Malthusian theory and the "population bomb" theory... The UN is trying to convince everyone that the world cannot "sustain" the global human population as it is.... so they offer the Earth Charter as a way to get the world back to "sustainability."
From what I understand, the world population is around 7 billion. According to the UN, the "sustainable" world population is around 500,000,000. So guess what? The UN truly intends to control the world population, and they are building support for their radical population control agenda through the Earth Charter.
Posted by: Katie | 01 March 2009 at 15:00
The UN is trying to convince everyone that the world cannot "sustain" the global human population as it is...
Thanks for your comment to ce399.
The only thing the world cannot sustain 'as it is'... is capitalism and globalization; specifically over consumptive U.S lifestyles. From what I've been told, the U.S. consumes more resources than India, China and Japan combined.
This reeks of yet another case of 'blaming the victims,' which is similar to the basic operating model of large fascist corporate entities: provide shit service and products then make the consumer responsible for the repercussions of their intentionally negligent, criminal behavior.
Posted by: ce399 | 08 March 2009 at 14:58
Your examples of cruel people aside, the world is overpopulated. Its a fact, and 'productivity' will not save us from that. The earth shifts in its ability to provide for its inhabitants. Climate changes over small and larger periods of time. Ever heard of a 'bad harvest', or an 'ice age'? This really does happen, and more people make disease and world hunger more likely to happen. Although the world is large, what about sharing it with all the other animals on earth? I think making animals, plants and insects extinct so we can have 19 children each is not what God has in mind. As they say...'God helps those who help themselves'. Christian people, lets monitor ourselves...lets not assume the world is for us to plunder at will. Perhaps our example will have an effect :)
Posted by: katherinebiel | 01 September 2009 at 14:21
The world is NOT overpopulated. That is the objective truth. Capitalism and other similar methods of regressive industrial and post-industrial production force populations to amass in a central location (ie metropolis) in order to more easily exploit labour.
Another reason why families have so many children is because this is seen as a necessity for survival within capitalism.
Did you read the previous comment? the U.S. consumes more resources than India, China and Japan combined.
Additionally, the US government still pays farmers to destroy surplus crops and has also formed an alliance with big agribusiness (ie Monsanto) to destroy the small farmer and monopolize agriculture with dangerous GM crops...you know the rest...
Posted by: ce399 | 23 November 2009 at 13:19
Overpopulation is a false meme. It's a false front for eugenics and the extermination of populations deemed 'unfit' to live in the fascist machine world. ie indigenous people in Columbia or Darfur or anywhere else on the earth where there exists a synthetically created 'humanitarian crisis.'
Posted by: Dead Joe | 11 December 2009 at 20:21