Monday, December 3, 2012

Population control: "Destroying the Village"

Another installment from Robert Zubrin's must-read essay in The New Atlantis on the population control holocaust:

Destroying the Village

Upon coming into office in January 1969, the new Nixon administration sought to further advance the population control agenda. Responding to lobbying by General William H. Draper, Jr., the former under secretary of the Army and a leading overpopulation fear monger, Nixon approved U.S. government support for the establishment of the U.N. Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA). With this organization as a vehicle, vast additional American funds would be poured into the global population control effort, with their source disguised so as to ease acceptance by governments whose leaders needed to maintain a populist pose in opposition to “Yankee Imperialism.” While the United States was its primary backer, the UNFPA also served as a channel for significant additional population control funds from European nations, Canada, and Japan, collectively equal to about half the American effort.
Going still further, President Nixon in 1970 set up a special blue-ribbon Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, with longtime population control booster John D. Rockefeller III as its chairman. Reporting back in 1972, Rockefeller predictably cited the menace of U.S. population growth with alarm, and called for a large variety of population control measures to avert the putative threat of welfare-dependent, criminalistic, or other financially burdensome populations multiplying out of control. Just as predictably, the report generated scores of newspaper headlines and feature magazine articles serving to cement the population control consensus. Nixon’s politically-driven rejection of one of the commission’s recommendations — government-funded abortion on demand — only served to make Rockefeller’s Malthusian committee seem all the more “progressive.”
But Nixon’s chief interest in population control was its supposed value as a Cold War weapon. The president charged Henry Kissinger, his National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, with conducting a secret study on the role of population control measures in the fight against global communism. Kissinger pulled together a group of experts drawn from the National Security Council (NSC), the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the Department of State, USAID, and other agencies to study the question. The result was issued on December 10, 1974 in the form of the classified NSC document titled “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” The document — known as National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), or simply as the Kissinger Report — represented the encoding of Malthusian dogma as the strategic doctrine of the United States.
NSSM 200 was declassified in 1989 and so is now available for scrutiny. Examining the document, what is apparent is the Nietzschean mindset on the part of its authors, who (implicitly embracing the communist line) clearly regarded the newborn masses of the world as America’s likely enemies, rather than her friends, and as potential obstacles to the exploitation of the world’s wealth, rather than as customers, workers, and business partners participating together with America in a grand team effort to grow and advance the world economy. The memo made the case for a population control effort that is global in scope but not traceable back to its wealthy supporters.
On November 26, 1975, NSSM 200 was formally adopted by the Ford administration. A follow-up memo issued in 1976 by the NSC called for the United States to use control of food supplies to impose population control on a global scale. It further noted the value of using dictatorial power and military force as means to coerce Third World peoples into submission to population control measures, adding: “In some cases, strong direction has involved incentives such as payment to acceptors for sterilization, or disincentives such as giving low priorities in the allocation of housing or schooling to those with larger families. Such direction is the sine qua non of an effective program.”
Without a shred of justification, but with impeccable organization, generous funding, aggressive leadership, and backing by a phalanx of established respectable opinion, the population control movement was now doctrinally enshrined as representing the core strategic interest of the world’s leading superpower. It was now positioned to wreak havoc on a global scale.

The 'overpopulation' hoax has legs, and during the late 20th century this crude junk science was not merely the desiderata of deluded third-rate scientists with totalitarian urges but was a predicate for American national defense policy.

It is hard to come to grips with the fact that American policy was to use control of food supplies as well as control of housing and education to force compliance with population control. Simply put, we told desperately poor people in the Third World that if they wanted to eat and have housing and education, they had to accept sterilization and contraception and abortion. And we did it for strategic as well as ideological reasons-- we saw nations with growing numbers of young people as vulnerable to communist ideology, and we imposed measures-- blackmail really-- to reduce the population of the young.

To fight totalitarians, we emulated totalitarians. The American policy of geopolitically-motivated suppression of births in the Third World was simply genocide.

The people who did this-- that includes our own government officials as well as a host of private advocacy groups-- committed crimes against humanity.

Will we have the courage and the integrity to face this, and to hold these people to ideological account, even if we regrettably can't hold them to legal account? 

16 comments:

  1. I propose a version of the Buffett Rule.

    If you've not heard of the Buffett Rule, it's a proposed regulation requiring that that Warren Buffett refrain from publicly advocating higher taxes on anyone (including his competitors) until he settles his own delinquent tax bill ($366M) with the US government. (NYT Dealbook, 3/26/12).

    A similar Rule could apply to population mavens... Let's call it the Ehrlich Rule.

    The Eherlich Rule would require that aspiring mass murderers remain publicly silent about their plans until they have sacrificed themselves according to the requirements of their particular plan (e.g., malaria, euthanasia, cholera, etc). Post-sacrifice, a posthumous account of their nobility and highmindedness can be published and distributed, thus allowing them the opportunity for moral preening without the concomitant danger of royalty-induced greed and avarice.

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  2. This post relates to the thing I was talking about before with the Native American women being strong-armed into sterilization. It was one of the quote-unquote voluntary birth control initiatives.

    I expected more comments on this post.

    JQ

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  3. Black helicopter population-controlling abortionist puppy-raping Darwinist atheistDecember 3, 2012 at 2:03 PM

    Oh look, Michael Egnor forgot his tin foil hat. Again.

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    1. Egnor posted thoughtful commentary on an article he read that was factual and documented. And you dismiss it as tin foil hat stuff.

      Pooh-poohing is not going to work here. The US government has done some pretty horrible things. I bet you'd believe every word of this essay if it had been written by Noam Chomsky.

      JQ

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    2. Egnor posted thoughtful commentary on an article he read that was factual and documented.

      Actually, he posted a ludicrous screed about and article that was itself a ludicrous screed. But don't let that get in your way.

      Delete
    3. Go ahead and debunk this mindless drivel. It's so baseless it will quickly unravel.

      You have the strongest confirmation bias of any person I have ever encountered, Anonymous. Everything that confirms what you already believe is a reliable source, beyond question. Everything that contradicts what you believe is to be dismissed, not to be taken seriously, because after all, they're on the other side and therefore not to be trusted. Every person has a slight confirmation bias but yours is abnormally strong.

      If you can't change your mind, are you sure you still have one?

      JQ

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    4. JQ, I know giving advice to a stranger is presumptuous, but don't bother arguing with the trolls. I don't know you, but I do know them. They've been around almost three decades and were the single ruination of Usenet, a place that once had some serious online discussion.

      However, Troll Mocking is fine sport, and it benefits the troll by providing accurate feedback. It's fun to do in the cold season or bad weather anytime.

      Delete
    5. Go ahead and debunk this mindless drivel.

      Easily. The contortions that one has to go through to call voluntary programs "involuntary" are so ludicrous that they make the entirety of both Zubrin's piece and Egnor's drooling commentary on it complete idiocy.

      But because it aligns with your ideological biases, you didn't notice this.

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    6. Confirmation bias. Ha. That's exactly what I would call Anonymous' predicament. He believes only what he already thinks to be true and laughs off the rest. A reliable source is one that tells him he is right. An unreliable source is one that tells him he is wrong. He can dismiss this entire essay with the wave of a hand because he doesn't care to believe it.

      TRISH

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  4. Nixon wasn't particularly conservative. He is the father of the EPA, the Endangered Species List, and federal affirmative action programs. But it's silly to get into the left-versus-right blame game. This sort of eugenic nightmare is wrong, no matter who does it.

    Last week there was a rousing debate on this blog about population control programs. A certain segment of commenters seemed to think they were fine as long as they were voluntary.

    If you really examine how these programs are carried out in practice you will see that voluntary means that the targeted population succumbs to bribes and coercion. That kind of voluntary population control isn't really voluntary at all.

    JQ

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  5. That kind of voluntary population control isn't really voluntary at all.

    So, working to get money is something you don't do voluntarily?

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  6. I work voluntarily to support myself.

    Good point though. I guess we can go around sterilizing native women on reservations with threats that if they don't comply their welfare will be taken from them, and that's voluntary.

    JQ

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  7. When you do something in exchange for money or benefits, it is voluntary. But when someone else does something in exchange for money or benefits it isn't.

    Nice double standard you have there regarding "voluntary". perhaps it is because you are trying to engage in contorted pretzel logic to define what were voluntary programs involuntary because that suits the ideological screed you prefer.

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  8. Replies
    1. Francisca,

      Thanks. A great reference.

      Delete
    2. Francisca,

      Journalists might get things wrong, or even make things up? Hardly surprising.

      Actually, as has been previously noted, she hadn't been denied a termination. She had a spontaneous abortion, which started off as a threatened abortion, which then became inevitable and finally became a septic abortion, which eventually was the cause of death.

      What she was denied was an early D & C, to remove the products of conception, including the fetus, early. Which wasn't absolutely necessary, until it became septic.

      Women have been having spontaneous abortions, without complications and without surgery, for many, many years. And surgery does have complications, including intrauterine adhesions, complicating future pregnancies.

      Two added points; medical records may not actually be 100% complete. We'd like them to be, but it's not a 'given'. The notes don't indicate that the patient requested a certain line of treatment, but it doesn't exclude it. Secondly, people's memories of what they're told is often unreliable. The doctors and nurses managing the medical care might have told the patient's husband one thing, and under the stress and worry, he might have heard and remembered something completely different.

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