Crypto-Eugenics Population Control: Policy and Propaganda
By Terry Melanson (2009/08/09)
…they had to pursue a strategy … called “crypto-eugenics.” In essence, “You seek to fulfill the aims of eugenics without disclosing what you are really aiming at and without mentioning the word.” This is how the Eugenics Society conceived of its funding for the IPPF.
– Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 163
Zombietime, the site that documented the totalitarian proclivities of Obama’s Science Czar John P. Holdren, has a new article. It turns out that the policies advocated in Holdren’s now-legendary Ecoscience (1973) were directly influenced by The Challenge of Man’s Future (1954) by eugenicist Harrison Brown.
Harrison Brown’s book, Holdren admitted in 1986, “transformed my thinking about the world and about the sort of career I wanted to pursue.” As documented by Zombietime, the type of “thinking about the world” espoused in The Challenge of Man’s Future, includes such wisdom as:
The feeble-minded, the morons, the dull and backward, and the lower-than-average persons in our society are outbreeding the superior ones at the present time. … Is there anything that can be done to prevent the long-range degeneration of human stock? Unfortunately, at the present time there is little, other than to prevent breeding in persons who present glaring deficiencies clearly dangerous to society and which are known to be of a hereditary nature. Thus we could sterilize or in other ways discourage the mating of the feeble-minded. We could go further and systematically attempt to prune from society, by prohibiting them from breeding, persons suffering from serious inheritable forms of physical defects, such as congenital deafness, dumbness, blindness, or absence of limbs. … A broad eugenics program would have to be formulated which would aid in the establishment of policies that would encourage able and healthy persons to have several offspring and discourage the unfit from breeding at excessive rates.
The population control movement is eugenics put into action. This has never been a secret. As far back as 1921, for example, in “The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda,” Margaret Sanger wrote:
The doctrine of Birth Control is now passing through the stage of ridicule, prejudice and misunderstanding. A few years ago this new weapon of civilization and freedom was condemned as immoral, destructive, obscene. Gradually the criticisms are lessening-–understanding is taking the place of misunderstanding. The eugenic and civilizational value of Birth Control is becoming apparent to the enlightened and the intelligent.
In the limited space of the present paper, I have time only to touch upon some of the fundamental convictions that form the basis of our Birth Control propaganda, and which, as I think you must agree, indicate that the campaign for Birth Control is not merely of eugenic value, but is practically identical in ideal, with the final aims of Eugenics.
Through William N. Grigg’s recent excellent article (and history lesson) I was alerted to the importance of another anti-natalist scholar – Kingsley Davis. Grigg points out that one of Davis’ seminal papers for Science magazine in 1967 had advocated that “the social structure and economy must be changed before a deliberate reduction in the birthrate can be achieved,” while urging “governments to subsidize voluntary abortion and sterilization and restructure their tax systems to discourage both marriage and childbirth.”
Kingsley Davis was in fact listed as a member (’56 and ’74) and director (’52 to ‘55) of the American Eugenics Society. From Eugenics Watch’s Eugenics Society Directors database:
Davis, Prof. Kingsley – 1952-55; Member 1956, 1974
Personal:
b. Texas 1908; sociology, demography, social science (applied); Univ. of California at Berkeley (Prof. of Sociology 1955-70; Dept. of Sociology and Social Institutions 1956-; Chmn., International Population and Urban Research, Univ. California at Berkeley 1956-77; Chmn., Dept. of Sociology 1961-63; Ford Prof. 1970-77); University of Southern California (Distinguished Professor of Sociology 1977-); MA Sociology 1933 Harvard Univ.; Smith College 1934-36; Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts 1936-37; Pennsylvania State University (Assoc. Prof., then Chmn. of the Sociology Department 1937-42); research assoc., Office of Population Research, Princeton Univ. 1942-44; Princeton Univ. (assoc. prof. of public affairs 1944-45, assoc. prof. of anthropology and sociology 1945-48; the Department of Public Affairs supported the Office of Population Research); Columbia Univ., Director and Prof. of Sociology at the Bureau of Applied Social Research 1948-55; US representative to the Population Commission, United Nations 1954-61; Carnegie Corp. traveling fellow 1952; led a social science team sponsored by the Carnegie Corporation to ten countries; emphasized that social communication varies from society to society (propaganda must be appropriate); Center Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences, fellow 1956-57, 1980-81; American Sociology Assn. (Pres., 1959); Sociol. Research Assn. (Pres., 1960); Population Assn. of America (Pres., 1962-63); International Union for the Scientific Study of Population (Chmn., 1967-68); American Philosophical Society; Mem: Adv. Council, NASA 1977-82Publications:
1988 Below Replacement Fertility in Industrial Societies: Causes, Consequences and Policies; 1986 Contemporary Marriage: Comparative Perspectives on a Changing Institution, Russell Sage, and Basic Books; 1974 “The Migrations of Human Populations”, Scientific American, Special Population Issue, Sept.; 1972 World Urbanization 1950-70; 1965 “The Urbanization of the Human Population”, Scientific American, Sept.; 1963 “Population”, Scientific American, Sept.; 1960 Population and Welfare in Industrial Societies, 4th Annual Dorothy B. Nyswander lecture; 1958 “A Crowding Hemisphere: Population Change in the Americas” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, (March); 1954 “Institutional Patterns Favoring High Fertility in Underdeveloped Areas”, Eugenics Quarterly, v. 2, # 1; 1954 “The Demographic Foundations of National Power” in Berger et al Freedom and Control in Modern Society., New York, Van Nostrand; 1951 The Population of India and Pakistan. 1951; “Population and the Further Spread of Industrial Society”, Proc. American Philosophical Society Vol. 95, #1; 1949 Human Society. 1949 (his key work according to conventional wisdom); 1945 World Population in Transition. (Ed.), Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, January 1945Source: EN 1952-53; EQ 1954-55, 1956; Osborne list; WSWIA 1990; “Kingsley Davis” Encyclopedia Britannica 15th edition; Population and World Power. Organski and Organski, 1961, Alfred Knopf and Co.
From the bio above it is clear that Davis was at the forefront of the worldwide elite-eugenic establishment, exercising considerable sway through the Rockefeller/United Nations depopulation regime both before and after its agenda was concealed under more palatable nomenclature.
By his own admission, Davis coined the term Zero Population Growth, and, along with Holdren, had formed a clique of “No-Growth Society” enthusiasts. In a 1973 special issue of the journal Daedalus: Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (Vol. 102, No. 4), Kingsley Davis had an article titled “Zero Population Growth: The Goal and the Means.” The goal was clear, and the means were (not-surprisingly) similar to Holdren’s in Ecoscience.
For most of the essay Davis laments the fact that the “population establishment” – his fellow eugenic pontificators – are not serious enough about what sort of policy would best achieve population reduction. But “if ZPG [Zero Population Growth] were the supreme aim,” he writes, “any means would be justified.” To accomplish ZPG, then, the only viable solution is “fertility reduction,” simply because by “common consent…raising the death rate is excluded; also, reducing immigration is played down.”
But alas, there’s a big problem: the insistence that reproduction is a fundamental right! For the life of him, he can’t figure out why someone would presume to possess individual sovereignty:
What lies behind this response? When the aim is game protection, the conservationists do not proclaim each hunter’s right to shoot as much game as he wants. When the goal is clean air, the authorities do not assert each person’s right to put as many pollutants into the air as he pleases. Why, to achieve birth limitation, is it efficient to give each woman the right to have as many children as she wants?
The “dubious assumption” of reproductive rights, says Davis, is a consequence of societal mores “formed when societies could survive only with a birth rate thrice that required by a modern death rate. Built into the social order, therefore, are values, norms, and incentives that motivate people to bear and rear children. These cultural and institutional inheritances form the premises of our thinking.”
The remedy is a bit of social engineering. As Angela Franks has put it:
[…] Davis advocates reforming cultures to reflect Western antinatalism, instead of reforming population control; as a result, he advocates both cultural imperialism and the subjection of woman to a societal pressure artificially generated by population-control agitprop. The rejection of anything like real freedom is expressed elsewhere in statement he made for an IPPF newsletter in 1982, where asked: “Why does the family planning movement …. have as its slogan, ‘every woman has the right to have as many children as she wants’? We would not justify traffic control by saying that ‘every driver has the right to drive as he pleases.'”
– Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility (McFarland & Company, 2005), p. 155.
Angela Franks’ assessment is correct. Again quoting from “Zero Population Growth: The Goal and the Means”:
If ZPG is the goal, “existing values” are not a help but a hindrance, for they are pronatalist in character, and measures entirely conforming to them will not bring ZPG. For that reason measures to stop population growth cannot be found which can be guaranteed in advance to be acceptable. […] “voluntarism” … if consistently advocated, would be unacceptable. A regime of complete freedom in reproduction would be anarchy. It would dissolve social mechanisms ensuring parental responsibility, eliminate rules against incest, rape, child abuse, and desertion, and wipe out obligations based on kinship and marriage, thus making a mockery of “family planning.” The tenet of the family-planning approach – “to extend to women and men the freedom and means to determine the number of children. . . .” – is not a prescription for any social control, much less population control. […] If a new order capable of providing population control under conditions of low mortality is to be forged, it will come in no other way than by social regulation of rights and obligations with respect to childbearing. […] When people themselves are the problem, the solution is always difficult, because subject and object are one and the same.
“Why … are people so concerned with freedom in connection with reproduction?” Davis again complains:
Freedom has always been denied to murderers, rapists, and armed thieves. If having too many children were considered as great a crime against humanity as murder, rape, and thievery, we would have no qualms about “taking freedom away.” Indeed, it would be defined the other way around: a person having four or more children would be regarded as violating the freedom of those other citizens who must help pay for rearing, educating, and feeding the excess children. The reason why reproductive freedom is still regarded as “a basic human right” regardless of circumstances is of course that it accords with traditional sentiments and established institutions.
If traditional sentiments of sovereignty and freedom can be overcome, the solution to the human (population) problem is simple:
If people want to control population, it can be done with knowledge already available. As with other social problems, the solution is easy as long as one pays no attention to what must be given up. For instance, a nation seeking ZPG could shut off immigration and permit each couple a maximum of two children, with possible state license for a third. Accidental pregnancies beyond the limit would be interrupted by abortion. If a third child were born without license, or a fourth, the mother would be sterilized and the child given to a sterile couple.
Pop-culture was (and is) an integral part of the conditioning:
The widespread popularisation of the [population] issue was continued by Paul Ehrlich’s melodramatic account of The Population Bomb (1968) and a series of extrapolations based on mathematical models, The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind (1972), by D. H. Meadows and others. A pressure group calling for Zero Population Growth was established in the United States; early attempts to popularise its aims included a futuristic film, Z.P.G. (1971; novelised by the screenwriter, Max Ehrlich, as The Edict) and an anthology of science fiction stories edited by Rob Sauer, Voyages: Scenarios for a Ship Called Earth (1971). Other overpopulation dystopias published in 1971 included T. J. Bass’s Half Past Human, Gordon R. Dickson’s Sleepwalker’s World, and Robert Silverberg’s The World Inside. Silverberg’s “Going”, also published that year, was a rare account of future moral restraint, undermined by dark irony; Philip Jose Farmer’s “Seventy Years of Decpop” (1972) was similarly ironic. Other notable accounts of overpopulation and its Draconian amelioration from the 1970s included William Earls’ “Traffic Problem” (1970), Leonard C. Lewin’s Triage (1972), Michael Elder’s Nowhere on Earth (1972), Michael G. Coney’s Friends Come in Boxes (1973), John Hersey’s My Petition for More Space (1974), Junanita Coulson’s Unto the Last Generation (1975), and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Time of the Fourth Dimension (1976).
– Brian Stableford, Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia (Routledge, 2006), p.398.
Population control guru Paul Ehrlich was of course the co-author of Ecoscience with John Holdren, but who is Max Ehrlich?
The IMDb says that he was indeed the screenwriter for Z.P.G. but that he was also its producer. Given the theme of the movie and its obvious propagandistic nature, I would find it near impossible to believe that Max Ehrlich is not somehow related to Paul Ehrlich.
Likewise, what are the chances the other science fiction writers mentioned above had ulterior motives and/or were working for the population-control agitprop?
Great write-up Terry! It’s too bad that those who are turning our world into a prison planet as a result of their own neurotic fears don’t regard such as a symptom of feeble-mindedness or some other mental malady worthy of EPS (elimination from the population via sterilization)!
Thanks! Much appreciated it.