The Population Bomb
4. The "population bomb"
"Eugenics" today, of course, is a taboo concept, since Hitler showed us all too clearly what could be made of it. Since the war, however, the closely related question of "population control" has been very much a part of elite agendas: e.g., the Population Council, founded by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1952; the Population Crisis Committee, founded by General Draper in 1966, which included Gen. Maxwell Taylor, McGeorge Bundy and Robert McNamara; the Office of Population Affairs, founded by Henry Kissinger in 1966 as part of the State Department.
The importance of population control to the US government is well illustrated by a secret document prepared under the direction of Henry Kissinger in 1974 called "National Security Study Memorandum 200." It was not declassified until 1989 and finally released by the National Archives in 1990 – 16 years after completion (12/10/74). The very fact that this document was classified is a good example of how fascistic the notion of "national security" has become. How could such a document endanger national security, and why shouldn't American citizens have a right to read it?
The answer is stated clearly in the document itself. The government's concern with Third World population growth might be interpreted as "imperialistic":
The US can help to minimize charges of an imperialist motivation behind its support of population activities by repeatedly asserting that such support derives from a concern with (a) the right of the individual to determine freely and responsibly their number and spacing of children...and (b) the fundamental social and economic development of poor countries..." (p. 115).
In other words, propaganda must be used to disguise the true nature of US interest in population control, and for the same reason the American people were not allowed to know what policies their "democratic" government was implementing in their name. The real government interest in population control was, and is, not humanitarian at all but political and economic:
The political consequences of current population factors in the LDCs [Less Developed Countries] – rapid growth, internal migration, high percentages of young people, slow improvement in living standards, urban concentrations, and pressures for foreign migration – are damaging to the internal stability and international relations of countries in whose advancement the US is interested, thus creating political or even national security problems for the US (p. 10).
If these [adverse socio-economic] conditions result in expropriation of foreign interests, such action, from an economic viewpoint, is not in the best interests of either the investing country or the host government (p. 11).
While specific goals in this area are difficult to state, our aim should be for the world to achieve a replacement level of fertility, (a two-child family on the average), by about the year 2000. This will require the present 2% growth rate to decline to 1.7% within a decade and to 1.1% by 2000. Compared to the UN medium projection, this goal would result in 500 million fewer people in 2000 and about 3 billion fewer in 2050. Attainment of this goal will require greatly intensified population programs. A basis for developing national population growth control targets to achieve this world target is contained in the World Population Plan of Action.
The World Population Plan of Action is not self-enforcing and will require vigorous efforts by interested countries, UN agencies and other international bodies to make it effective. US leadership is essential. The strategy must include the following elements and actions:
(a) Concentration on key countries.
Assistance for population moderation should give primary emphasis to the largest and fastest growing developing countries where there is special US political and strategic interests. Those countries are: India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia and Colombia. Together, they account for 47% of the world's current population increase. (It should be recognized that at present AID bilateral assistance to some of these countries may not be acceptable.) Bilateral [US] assistance, to the extent that funds are available, will be given to other countries, considering such factors as population growth, need for external assistance, long-term US interests and willingness to engage in self-help....At the same time, the US will look to the multilateral agencies – especially the UN Fund for Population Activities which already has projects in over 80 countries – to increase population assistance on a broader basis with increased US contributions (p. 14-15).
In other words, food and economic assistance will be used to blackmail countries the US considers overpopulated – especially the 13 "key" countries named – into reducing their population growth. Otherwise these superfluous populations might cause "interruptions of supply," since "the US economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less developed countries" (p. 43). For example,
Bangladesh is now a fairly solid supporter of Third World positions, advocating better distribution of the world's wealth and extensive trade concessions to poor nations. As its problems grow and its ability to gain assistance fails to keep pace, Bangladesh's positions on international issues likely will become radicalized, inevitably in opposition to US interests on major issues as it seeks to align itself with others to force adequate aid" (p. 80).
Heaven forbid that the starving millions in Bangladesh should become so "radicalized" as to question the right of Americans, who constitute 6% of the world population, to consume 33% of the world's goods!
The answer to this threat is not only economic blackmail but energetic assistance in family planning, though one must be careful to avoid "charges of an imperialist motivation" by emphasizing that it is all for their own good and working through national leaders and international institutions:
Beyond seeking to reach and influence national leaders, improved worldwide support for population-related efforts should be sought through increased emphasis on mass media and other population education and motivation programs by the UN, USIA and USAID. We should give higher priorities in our information programs worldwide for this area and consider expansion of collaborative arrangements with multilateral institutions in population education programs" (p. 117).
Nevertheless, "some controversial, but remarkably successful, experiments in India in which financial incentives, along with other motivational devices, were used to get large numbers of men to accept vasectomies" (p. 138). In Brazil, too, extraordinary "success" has been achieved in persuading women to practice birth control, primarily with the pill and sterilization, a success many attribute to the unspoken pressures of the IMF and the World Bank. Indeed, such achievements are quite in line with the thinking of Robert McNamara, who became president of the World Bank (1968-81) after presiding over the Vietnam War as Secretary of Defense (1961-68).
On October 2, 1979, McNamara told a group of international bankers:
We can begin with the most critical problem of all, population growth. As I have pointed out elsewhere, short of nuclear war itself, it is the gravest issue that the world faces over the decades immediately ahead...If current trends continue, the world as a whole will not reach replacement-level fertility – in effect, an average of two children per family – until about the year 2020. That means that some 70 years later the world's population would finally stabilize at about 10 billion individuals compared with today's 4.3 billion.
We call it stabilized, but what kind of stability would be possible? Can we assume that the levels of poverty, hunger, stress, crowding and frustration that such a situation could cause in the developing nations – which by then would contain 9 out of every 10 human beings on earth – would be likely to assure social stability? Or political stability? Or, for that matter, military stability? It is not a world that any of us would want to live in.
Is such a world inevitable? It is not, but there are only two possible ways in which a world of 10 billion people can be averted. Either the current birth rates must come down more quickly. Or the current death rates must go up. There is no other way.
There are, of course, many ways in which the death rates can go up. In a thermonuclear age, war can accomplish it very quickly and decisively. Famine and disease are nature's ancient checks on population growth, and neither one has disappeared from the scene.
To put it simply: Excessive population growth is the greatest obstacle to the economic and social advancement of most societies of the developing world.
This Malthusian point of view is obviously deeply entrenched among the governing elite. Although "population control" sounds different from "eugenics," it amounts to the same thing. The populations that are being controlled, that supposedly need to be controlled, are not those of Europe and the United States but those of the "LDCs" – exactly the same populations that the eugenicists would consider less productive, less civilized and less worthy of proliferation.
This is of course a philosophy that dares not speak its name, hence the secrecy of documents such as NSSM 200. The facts are clear. Birth control is not sufficient to achieve the "stabilization" goals that McNamara, Kissinger et al. have set. Overpopulation remains "life-threatening," an opinion confirmed by many supposedly politically neutral organizations such as World Watch and the Club of Rome.
Since it is impolitic to speak of the "population problem" in plain words – that is, too many poor people – in recent years it has become integrated within a complex of problems called "development" and "the environment." Again, commentators are chary of formulating their thoughts on the relationship between population growth and development, and between population growth and pollution, in plain terms, but the implications are always clear.
"There is no doubt that population growth is inextricably linked to development," says the Washington Post ("Forge a Population Plan," reprinted in the International Herald Tribune, 6/8/92:6). "International efforts to help countries out of poverty founder when very high rates of population growth outstrip progress." The link, clearly, is that overpopulation causes poverty and hinders development. "But this truth, so obvious to economists and other planners, cannot be presented as a demand or used as a threat. Language matters....In fact, the debate should be framed in terms of 'family planning'..." In other words, the victims are to blame, but we shouldn't tell them that in so many words.
The poor are not only responsible for their own poverty because they reproduce too fast, they are also responsible for pollution. This logic seems compelling when we see the pictures of teeming multitudes living in squalor. There are too many of them, we think, so they are poor and forced to live in their own dirt. Herein lies the fallacy: it is their dirt, not ours.
Pollution in a global sense has little to do with poverty and everything to do wealth, but the contradictory assumption persists. In covering the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post writes that the "ranks of the have-nots continue to grow rapidly," and "UN demographers expect global population to double to more than 10 billion by the middle of the next century, with most of the increase coming in the poorest countries" ("One Summit, Differing Goals," reprinted in the International Herald Tribune 6/2/92:1). Robinson laments that "while the population boom has an impact on the whole range of environmental concerns – carbon-dioxide emissions, deforestation, water pollution, extinction of plant and animal species – the Rio summit is expected to skirt the people issue." It is the "people issue" – population growth – according to William Stevens of the New York Times, that "lies at the root of the global environmental problem" (6/15/92:2), meaning poor people, since they are the ones with the population boom, "along with rich countries' wasteful consumption patterns."
It may be true that overpopulation causes pollution, but it is the ranks of the haves, not of the have-nots, who are the problem. The same IHT article just quoted (6/2/92:1) acknowledges that "23% of the world's people receive 85% of its income." This same fifth of the population constitutes the industrialized world, which, as we can also read in the IHT, produces 80% of the pollution that (probably) causes global warming (5/21/92:3). The same is true of deforestation, water pollution, and species extinction. The rain forest is not being cut down to feed or house the indigenous population, but to satisfy the consumer demands and capitalist greed of the First World. As Paul Ehrlich said in a Newsweek interview, "the most serious population problem is in the United States" (5/25/92:56, international edition). The real threat to the environment is posed not by the poor but by the rich, as "a product of population and per-capita consumption."
Why are these facts consistently turned on their head? Because the burgeoning ranks of the poor threaten not the environment but the wealth, power, and "national security" of the ruling elite. The real problem, for the haves, is that too many have-nots leads to political instability, as NSSM 200 makes clear.
The propaganda is designed to disguise this truth. Who does not say to himself, seeing the pictures on TV of starving multitudes, "If only there weren't so many of them!" Who stops to think that they could say the same thing, with more justification, about us? Who is reminded that a fraction of the energy and funds our governments spend on weaponry could feed and house the entire world? The conclusion is taken for granted, though it is false: there's not enough to go around; there are too many people; we can't help them all without hurting ourselves; they want what we've got. Thomas Malthus elevated these principles of greed to economic "law": The population will always outgrow its ability to feed itself; therefore, control by war and natural catastrophe (famine, disease) is not only natural but necessary. We can assuage our consciences by donating to the Red Cross, but the poor bastards, most of them, will die anyway. It's in the nature of things. Nothing can be done.
Darwin contributed the doctrine of the survival of the fittest to this view of "natural order." If white Europeans survive at the expense of black Africans, if the rich survive at the expense of the poor, it's only "natural." Wars, too, are "natural." Men fight because only the fittest are destined to survive. Let the best men win. Death in battle is quicker and less painful, after all, than death by disease, starvation or natural catastrophe, which are the only alternatives for the "less fit" populations of the planet.
Malthus wrote at the beginning of the 19th century and Darwin somewhat later. Neither could have foreseen the technological achievements that have been made since. Few of us realize, either, the full potential of these achievements. When someone like Buckminster Fuller comes along and tells us we have the technological capability of providing the basic necessities of life to every human being on earth, with plenty of room to spare, we call him an eccentric, a hopeless dreamer, without bothering to find out if he is correct. Our view of reality has been conditioned by elite spokesmen like Robert McNamara, who envision a world of 10 billion people as unliveable, a horror second only to nuclear holocaust. We do not stop to calculate that even with 10 billion people, the average population density worldwide would be less than one-third that of former West Germany.
The greatest fallacy in the elitist Malthusian scenario, however, is the assumption that overpopulation causes poverty. The reverse is true: poverty causes overpopulation. Poverty can be reduced, of course, by reducing the number of poor people, which is what we really mean by "population control." It can also be reduced, however, by development, that is, by humane development, designed to eliminate rather than exploit poverty, which automatically reduces population growth. This is another much-disguised fact, but we need only look around us to see the proof. The most developed countries, and the ones with the highest level of equality in the distribution of wealth, are the ones whose populations have stabilized (Scandinavia, Germany). This is "natural," if anything is. Reproducing in quantity has always been the peasant's way of surviving from one generation to the next. It is nature's way of compensating the poor and oppressed.
And they know it! As Steven Thomas says, it is part of their "subconscious history." Of course "family planning" is doomed to fail when their subconscious history warns them to beware of "those who come into their communities offering help." The logic of having fewer children so as to be able to take better care of them doesn't work with them. They have nothing, so what can they give to two children that they cannot give to ten or twenty? The two would probably die, but of ten or twenty some would survive and perhaps improve their lot. This is the logic of the poor, learned and confirmed throughout history and applied instinctively.
The most effective method of birth control, therefore, is to fight poverty. The better off people are, the less they reproduce. As the standard of living improves, the birth rate decreases. This is confirmed by history and observation of the world around us. Malthus and Darwin's contemporaries did not have the technological means for doing this, but we do. We have the means to produce and distribute the necessities of life for every person on the planet, without anyone having to give up his TV set, car, house, etc. I suspect the Rockefellers and the Harrimans and the DuPonts could even keep their billions. I don't have the figures to prove it, but I'm sure one could produce them. The idea only seems so crazy because we have absorbed the propaganda to the contrary so thoroughly.
The rich, who disseminate the propaganda, are not interested in fighting poverty because they fear a redistribution of wealth. But they are in part victims of their own propaganda. Their fears are exaggerated: there is enough to go around. The world could remain as undemocratic as it is, with the same class differences, but the underclass could be lifted to a considerably less miserable state. This would also be a safer world for the privileged, because the ranks of the have-nots, having a little more, would be less prone to revolt. The rich would still have their slaves – to fight their wars, run their factories, build their roads, make their Porsches and Lear jets and yachts and Rolexes, etc. – but they would be happier slaves.
Unfortunately, I doubt that this attitude is widespread on Wall Street or among the Fortune 500 or Social Register types. As I said, in part they are victims of their own propaganda. It wouldn't work, they would say. They would have to sacrifice too much. And who said happy slaves are good slaves? Give an inch, they'll take a mile. Feed, clothe and house them, and pretty soon they'll want leisure time. The idle mind being the devil's workshop, they'll soon start thinking, and then we'll really be in trouble. But the more important point, quite simply, is why should the rich and powerful give a hoot about the poor? Why should they care more than the rest of us? Given the choice – and we do have the choice – of letting the poor die off or eliminating poverty, the former solution is by far the easier and more practical one.
Still, it is not all that simple to let Malthus' and Darwin's "nature" take its course, because "nature" is not what it was a hundred years ago. Modern technology and medicine have changed things. The poor do not die fast enough anymore. There are not enough natural disasters, fewer fatal diseases. Nuclear war, as McNamara said, would solve the problem, but it is impractical. Family planning isn't effective enough. Mandatory birth control, as in China, is incompatible with the tenets of a democratic society. Famine is not effective in the long run, because societies that like to think of themselves as humane cannot tolerate pictures of starving babies forever. That leaves conventional warfare and disease as "natural" inhibitors of population growth.
War has always been an effective agent for population reduction in the Third World, but it is dangerous. Proxy wars have an insidious tendency to involve their sponsors, in one way or another. There is always the danger of their getting out of hand, especially with more and more nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in the hands of poor countries. There is the threat to Third World resources, such as oil, on which the rest of the world depends. Finally, there is the danger that the rich countries may get directly involved in the fighting – as in Vietnam.
Limited warfare (an oxymoron) is a compromise solution. It is true that nine years of war in Vietnam reduced the population of Southeast Asia by several million people, and the underclass population of the US also by tens of thousands. The point is made with unusual clarity in an early, excellent film about the JFK assassination called Executive Action (1973). In the film, Big Oil (Will Geer) pulls the strings from the top, and Burt Lancaster plays the role equivalent to General Y (Lansdale) in Oliver Stone's JFK, i.e. the operational head of the assassination project. Another character, played by Robert Ryan, is the middleman, apparently a media mogul (shown a number of times in what appears to be a television studio). Big Oil and his cohorts are greatly troubled by the test ban treaty, Kennedy's support of the civil rights movement, etc., and finally gives the go-ahead for the assassination when the White House announces the withdrawal plan on Oct. 2, 1963. This much is in line with the Stone movie, but the following brief dialogue between Ryan and Lancaster introduces a further dimension:
Ryan: The real problem is this, James. In two decades there'll be 7 billion human beings on this planet, most of them brown, yellow or black, all of them hungry, all of them determined to love and swarm out of their breeding grounds into Europe and North America. Hence Vietnam. An all-out effort there will give us control of south Asia for decades to come, and with proper planning we can reduce the population to 550 million by the end of the century. I know, I've seen the data.
Lancaster: We sound rather like gods reading the Doomsday Book, don't we?
Ryan: Well, someone has to do it. Not only will the nations affected be better off, but the techniques developed there can be used to reduce our own excess population – blacks, Puerto Ricans, Mexican-Americans, poverty-prone whites, and so forth.
But eventually, as Vietnam demonstrated, people get tired of war. Furthermore, conventional warfare does not kill enough people to make a significant difference in the population figures. What's a few million here, a few million there? These figures don't make a dent in the projections of population growth that have the power elite so worried.