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?