Eugenics
& Population Control
The 1935 Nazi World Population Conference,
and the 1994 UN Cairo Conference - More of the Same.
by Gabriele Liebeg
It is no exaggeration to
compare the United Nations' upcoming international conference on
population in Cairo with the 1932 International Eugenics Conference in
New York and its continuation at the 1935 International Congress for
Population Science, as the following report will prove. Only massive
suppression of published facts can explain why the present German
government on the one hand pleads ``historical reasons'' not to
intervene against Serbian genocide (referring to the Nazis' World War
II occupation of Yugoslavia), yet maintains no such scruples with
regard to the U.N.-decreed ``battle against overpopulation,'' i.e.,
the battle to reduce the numbers of non-white people in other parts of
the world. It becomes apparent that Nazi propaganda's concept of
``race'' is replaced in today's Malthusian propaganda, ranging from
government memoranda to school textbooks, by the equally omnipresent
concept of ``the environment'' or its corollary, ``sustainable
development.''
The following report is based almost exclusively on the nearly
1,000-page ``Report of the International Congress for Population
Science,'' which was published in 1936 as a book titled Population
Questions, edited by Hans Harmsen and Franz Lohse. In every
respect it is shocking to read, not simply because the several hundred
population specialists who gathered in Berlin in 1935 evidently
permitted Nazi racial policy to be presented without dissent. It is
precisely the restrained, polite tone of the Berlin conference, where
the German spokesmen, in particular, avoided any controversy, which
underscores how far 20 years of the same Darwinian-Nietzschean
ideology has already led us into a new barbarism of the same
kind--only this time on a world scale.
The
Race Scientists
The
International Congress for Population Science met from Aug. 26 to
Sept. 1, 1935 at the Friedrich Wilhelm University. Sponsors were the
German branch of the International Association for Population Science
founded in Paris in 1928; the German Society for Racial Hygiene; and
the German Statistical Society. At the second general assembly of the
International Association for Population Science in 1931 in London, it
had been resolved to hold the third general assembly in Berlin in
1934, according to the preface to the conference report. Yet ``at the
request of the executive committee'' it was postponed until 1935.
``Thereby German population science was offered the possibility ...
for experts from every nation to examine the population laws it has
devised and the government of the German Reich has put into force, as
well as to examine the results of this scientifically based population
policy, which are in part already manifest.''
What that meant was explained by the conference's honorary chairman,
Reichsminister of the Interior Dr. Wilhelm Frick, in his opening
address: ``In order to prevent the continuous increase of the
congenitally diseased, the `Law for the Prevention of Congenitally
Diseased Progeny' was promulgated in July 14, 1933.'' The decree,
extensively discussed by the conference participants, prescribed
compulsory sterilization not only for those with inherited illnesses,
but also for schizophrenics, the mentally retarded, gypsies, the
asocial, alcoholics, criminals, and those classified for other reasons
as ``racially inferior.''
The National Socialist government was well represented: On the
honorary committee sat seven Reichsministers, including the president
of the Reichsbank directorate, Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, who also headed
the Economics Ministry. Another name stands out: Dr. Roland Freisler,
at that time state secretary in the Reich's Justice Ministry, who
later presided over the infamous People's Court. The presiding
chairman of the conference was Prof. Dr. Eugen Fischer, director of
the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Racial Biology, and
Eugenics.
In the name of the Congress, Fischer sent a telegram of ``respectful
greetings to Führer and Reichschancellor Adolf Hitler, whose
far-seeing population policy based on racial hygiene and principles of
heredity will secure the future of the German Volk.'' Hitler
conveyed his thanks and wished the Congress ``full success in its
momentous work in the weighty sphere of population policy and race
cultivation.''
The Congress was no Nazi Party assembly, however, but rather an
international gathering. Sir Charles Close of Winchester, England,
president of the International Association for Population Science,
delivered greetings on behalf of foreign universities, academies, and
scientific organizations, and more than a third of the participants
came from abroad.
The Berlin conference was essentially a continuation of the
International Eugenics Conference of 1932, which had elected Prof. Dr.
Ernst Rüdin, later the author of the Nuremberg race decrees, as its
chairman.
Dr. Clarence Campbell of New York, honorary president of the Eugenics
Research Institute, who had played a leading role at the New York
eugenics conference, was a main speaker and vice-chairman at the
Berlin Congress. Professor Harry H. Laughlin of Long Island, New York
was another prominent figure; he reported on the status of eugenic
sterilization decrees in the United States, while Campbell gave a
presentation on fundamental principles, titled ``The Biological
Postulates of Population Research.'' As forerunners of racial doctrine
he named Polybius, Cato, Seneca, Tacitus, Gobineau, and Francis Galton.
Among his contemporaries he commended Georges de Lapouge, Poletz,
Ernst Rüdin, and Eugen Fischer, as well as Leonard Darwin and R.A.
Fisher of Great Britain, and the Americans Charles B. Davenport, Harry
H. Laughlin, Henry Fairfield Osborn, Madison Grant, and Lothrop
Stoddard. Campbell continued: ``From the synthesis of the work of all
these men, the Führer of the German nation, Adolf Hitler, capably
assisted by Interior Minister Dr. Frick, and advised by the
anthropologists, eugenicists, and social philosophers of the nation,
has been able to draw forth a far-reaching racial policy of evolving
and improving the population, which promises to become epochal in
racial history. It presents an example which other nations and races
must follow if they do not wish their racial quality, their racial
performance, and their prospects for survival to be cast into the
lower ranks.''
At the Berlin Congress--where for tactical reasons the subject of
actual racial culling was almost entirely suppressed--it was Campbell
who delivered the summons to a policy of racial purity and
``homogenous blood'': ``The survival of a race is essentially a
cooperative process, which is impaired by all discordance of the
contributory influences.... A population with racially homogenous
blood, without racially alien elements which serve to confuse,
obstruct, and defeat its racial goals, will always be united in
conformity with the tendency of its racial goals.... Through the unity
of the racial goal, it is possible for insignificant races to become
great races, and only through that unity will they remain so.''
From this, Campbell extracted the postulate of a ``selective
endogamous transmission,'' the prohibition of ``race mixing,'' as it
would become a fearful reality in the 1938 Nuremberg ``Laws for the
Protection of the Blood.'' The entire Nazi training manual on the
Nuremberg racial laws consisted of propaganda for the ``Law for the
Protection of German Blood and German Honor,'' which banned ``mixed
marriages'' with members of other ``races,'' especially Jews and
gypsies. As of July 1, 1938 a certificate of legal fitness to marry
had to be submitted. On page 75, the text states in explanation of the
``Law for Protection of the Blood'': ``With this law a final line
is drawn beneath a fateful development, which found its first
historically documented expression in the famous American
Declaration of Independence in 1776, which contains the lapidary
sentence: `We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men
are created equal.' The cast of mind emanating from this
proclamation flowed into the various populations through the French
Revolution of 1789 with its thesis of the alleged `equality, liberty,
fraternity of all men,' and during a century and a half deranged the
thinking of even the cleverest minds; it was, as is well known, used
in the most adroit way by the Jewish race to gnaw away at the
foundations of state, culture, and the Volk in the most dangerous way
and to undermine them. National Socialism was the first to show the
German people the colossal lie that is contained in this
delusion of equality [all emphasis in the original].''
Population
and Eugenics
The official
chairman of the Congress, Eugen Fischer, said in his speech:
``Numerous peoples have burning racial questions underlying their
population problem. Here too it is the racial researcher who can stand
with advice and assistance at the side of the demographic
statistician. It is the right and the sacred duty of every people to
maintain the condition of its Volk in its racially thoroughbred
quality, as it existed in its ancestral days of yore.... I believe
that this clearly expresses the fact that the investigation of human
hereditary factors stands at the center, and as the goal, of the
entire study of population.''
The organizers of the global population conference in Cairo, too, link
population policy to eugenics. This was confirmed on May 10, 1994 by a
certain Mayone Stycos, professor of demography and sociology at
Cornell University, during a World Population Foundation conference in
Stockholm. A journalist from Executive Intelligence Review
magazine asked Professor Stycos whether the Cairo conference can be
seen as a continuation of the 1932 eugenics conference in New York.
Not the least shocked or affronted, Professor Stycos replied that the
eugenics movement had accomplished important things, and in the
interim ``scientific and technical breakthroughs'' were made,
referring to better methods of contraception and sterilization. ``If
you go to the Cairo conference, you'll find that a lot of it revolves
around eugenics.''
Latterday population experts like Stycos put forth their own special
``racial criteria'': Africans and Chinese are clearly unworthy of
possessing technology. For China, ``birth control is more important
than economic development,'' Stycos declared in his Stockholm speech.
``It would be a catastrophe if every Chinese had a refrigerator.''
One of the most important British non-governmental organizations
(NGOs) active on the perimeter of the Cairo conference is called the
Marie Stopes International. Marie C. Stopes, who died in 1957, herself
attended the 1935 Berlin Congress. The conference report summarizes
her contribution as follows: ``Marie Stopes demanded that
scientifically trained minds examine the prerequisites for human
conception and give directions for regulating them from the point of
view of breeding up the human stock.''
What Eastern Europe represented for the Nazis, the developing
countries represent for the U.N. Population Fund today.
The U.N. Population Fund and the worldwide Malthusian propaganda
apparatus deem the poor countries of the Third World
``overpopulated.'' Despite the accelerating decline in births in the
developing countries since the 1970s, from 6.1 to 3.9 children per
mother, it is claimed that the black, brown, and yellow people there
are still far too prolific.
In the 1930s, mortality was still so high in the Third World that no
one considered its demographic trends a threat; the Nazis'
overpopulation propaganda was directed against the Slavs. Dr.
Friedrich Burgdoerfer, director of the Reich's Statistical Office,
asserted at the Berlin world population conference in solemnly
objective tones, that by the year 1960 Slavs would make up over half
the European population, while the proportion of Germans would shrink
to one-fourth. He illustrated his speech with charts which were later
reprinted in numerous Nazi propaganda documents. They show a
remarkable similarity to current portrayals of the Third World's
growing share of the total population of the earth.
Lower birth rates in the northern countries lend additional impetus to
the argument, as they did in the 1930s. The late French geopolitician
F.O. Miksche wrote in 1991: ``Currently 5.5 billion people are living
on the Earth. While in the Western industrialized states the
population growth rate averages only about 0.5 percent, in the Third
World countries the birth rate stands at between 2 percent and 3
percent. Only in the United States is the population growing by 3
million per year--of which more than half are, of course, non-white,
and in no way suffices, together with Europe, to counterbalance Asia,
Africa, and Latin America. The far higher birth rates in most
countries of the Third World will mean that in the relatively short
period of 30 years, out of each 100 million people on the globe,
scarcely 10 to 12 will be white.'' From this Miksche derives a
prophecy of ``international race war'': ``the Western nations are
directly inviting their future attackers to solve their problems by
means of armed force against the wealthy industrial countries.''
Kissinger
and Hitler
A secret U.S.
government document dated Dec. 10, 1974, promulgated under the
direction of then-National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and first
declassified in 1990, bears the title ``Implications of Worldwide
Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.'' The
document, National Security Study Memorandum 200, expresses the fear
that population growth in the Third World will endanger U.S. strategic
raw-materials supplies. Securing ``the smooth flow of needed
materials'' requires a ``slow or zero growth in population'' in the
raw-materials-producing nations, in the security interests of the
United States. [Further excerpts from National Security Study
Memorandum 200 can be found in ``The genocidal roots of Bush's `New
World Order,'|'' EIR Special Report, Wasington, D.C., May 1992. The
memorandum was declassified on June 6, 1990, and can be examined at
the National Archives in Washington, D.C.]
The comparison here which suggests itself is to Hitler's 1941 Generalplan
Ost for the occupied territories of Eastern Europe. Through the
use of raw materials and food production in Poland and Ukraine, as
well as the exploitation of ``surplus'' labor there, the Nazis
intended to make Germany ``blockade-proof'' and to ensure supplies for
both the Wehrmacht and the home front. Part of this strategy was the
extermination of European Jews, down to the Final Solution in the
death camps. At the same time, the ``overpopulation'' in occupied
Eastern Europe was to be eliminated through a systematic plan for
population reduction. By means of state-sponsored birth control,
abortion, deportation, calculated starvation, and mass murder, the
population of Poland, the Baltic nations, Byelorussia, and western
Ukraine was to be reduced by half or more.
Since 1990 at the latest, the United Nations' Population Fund's
population strategy has made no secret of the goal set for the
gigantic birth-control army the Cairo Action Plan would still further
expand. The goal is to bring population growth in the developing
nations to a halt as soon as possible, and to reduce total world
population in the next 150 years to half the number of people living
today. The basis, as it was in the 1930s, is an ideologically warped
demographic theory which portrays all economic, social, and
environmental problems as results of ``overpopulation,'' whereas
conversely, ``the smaller the total population finally becomes, the
more room our children and grandchildren will have.'' In other words,
the elimination of ``excess people,'' the reduction of ``population
pressure,'' is presented as the solution to every problem.
Birth control and abortion were part of the Nazis' depopulation
arsenal, too. Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, the personal aide to Adolf
Hitler, wrote to Ostminister Alfred Rosenberg on July 23, 1942: ``If
girls and women in the occupied Eastern zone abort their children,
that can only be to our advantage.... According to the Führer's
attitude, it is even necessary to allow full-scale traffic in
contraceptives in the occupied territories, because we can have no
stake whatever in an increase in the non-German population.''
The racial administrator in the Reich's Eastern Territories Ministry,
Erhard Wetzel, dealt extensively with this topic in his April 1942
commentary on the Generalplan Ost: ``Regarding these zones, we
must conduct a deliberate policy of negative population growth.
Through propaganda measures, especially by means of the press, radio,
cinema, handbills, short brochures, educational statements, and the
like, the population must be convinced over and over again how harmful
it is to have a lot of children. The costs ought to be cited, and then
what could have been bought instead. The great dangers to women's
health that can arise in childbearing could be spelled out, and so
forth. Along with this propaganda, large-scale propaganda must be
issued for contraceptives. Neither advocacy and dissemination of
contraceptives, nor abortion, should be illegal. The establishment of
abortion facilities should be positively promoted. Midwives and
assistant medical officers, for instance, can be trained as
abortionists.... It is obvious that by systematic application of the
above measures, considerable success can be achieved in weakening the
racial substance of the Russian people.''
At the Berlin conference, little more than Burgdoerfer's charts and
commentary could be seen or heard about all this. The international
association's official policy toward the Jews still remained to be
fleshed out. Only Alfred Ploetz made the disapproving remark in his
speech that statistically, during wartime the ``blood toll'' of Jews
contributed only about one-fourth that of the rest of the German
population, ``partly because of their smaller average physical size,
partly because of their disinclination toward becoming soldiers, and
partly because of their frequently deficient capacity for enthusiasm
toward their host population and its nation.'' But almost all the
speeches dripped with the theoretical racism of a Darwin or Nietzsche,
and almost everyone spoke of ``selection'' and ``counter-selection,''
about the survival of the fittest as willed by Nature, in which no
irresponsible intervention to sustain the weak (``counter-selection'')
can be permitted. ``There exists not only brotherly love, but love of
the most remote, to use a term of Nietzsche's, and these remotest ones
are our children's children, and population science teaches us to help
determine their destiny,'' unctuously declared Eugen Fischer before
concluding his address with ``Sieg Heil!''
Burgdoerfer's
Model
The
statistician Burgdoerfer showed a diagram designed to illustrate what
happens when the ``superior'' half of a population ``reproduces itself
according to the two-child principle, while at the same time, however,
the inferior or below-average reproduce according to the four-child
system.'' The result of this crude model, which in fact expressed
nothing but the eugenicists' axiom that human beings are determined by
their heredity: After 150 years, no one is left but the ``inferior.''
Harry Laughlin demanded a ``systematic identification of all the
congenitally inferior, and an improvement in surgical techniques for
female sterilization.''
Further proceedings spelled out bit by bit what was meant by
``congenitally inferior,'' that is, who was to be prevented from
reproducing, with the help of the new sterilization decrees. As
history was to show, the Nazis deprived many thousands of these human
beings not only of the right to bear children, but of their lives.
Alfred Ploetz announced that the ``life process of the race is
destroyed by counter-selection, namely, by the maintenance of
individuals even though their hereditary endowments are weaker than
those of the strong. This includes so much humane protection of the
congenitally weak through special care that they are enabled to
reproduce, for instance certain chronically ill, feeble-minded,
cripples, blind persons, or deaf-mutes.''
Ernst Rüdin, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy
and Demography of the German Psychiatric Research Institute in Munich,
spoke on ``The Relationships Between Predictions of Heredity and
Population Policy.'' What will be necessary, he said, is the ``natural
or artificial elimination of members of the population who are
inadequately adapted to life and the competitive struggle.'' For this
purpose the science of making predictions based on heredity was to be
further developed. Rüdin continued: ``We shall be able to assign all
members of a population community their hereditary rank on a broad
scale, with regard to the type, degree, and seriousness of congenital
disease factors which they harbor.... With the construction of such a
scale... we shall possess an instrument which enables us to
continuously bring the measures for qualitative racial hygiene into
proper relationship with the requirements of quantitative population
policy. Namely: At a given necessary numerical level of population,
after the lower end of the hereditary value scale has been genetically
eliminated by racially hygienic artificial means, our progress toward
the center of the ladder of hereditary fitness will be faster and
better, the more satisfactory the actual reproductive rate turns out
to be among the occupants of the upper rungs of the ladder.... The
worst hereditary variables are found, for example, in parents who both
suffer from serious recessive congenital disease.... Also...
congenital feeble-minded, schizophrenics, epileptics, have very great
predispositions to pass on hereditary disease and other defects to
their children.''
Erik Essen-Moeller, lecturing on ``Reproduction By the Mentally Ill,''
found that manic-depressive individuals had almost as many children as
the general population, schizophrenics fewer, and epileptics still
fewer. He calculated how long it would take, at different rates of
sterilization, until these patient groups were totally ``eliminated.''
K.W. Joelten and H. Reploh reported on ``Investigations of Children in
Schools for the Handicapped from the Standpoint of Racial Hygiene.''
It was completely proper, they said, that in the July 14, 1933 Law for
the Prevention of Congenitally Diseased Progeny, ``the feeble-minded
were specified as the first priority. Further, it is proper that
sterilization does not require having a serious case of
feeble-mindedness. As we have seen, it is very characteristic that
precisely those forms of feeble-mindedness result in infertility,
while a milder case permits reproduction and congenital
transmission.... Moreover, the feeble-minded offer particularly good
prerequisites for prompt implementation of sterilization, insofar as
almost all of them can be identified early enough in the school for
the handicapped, before they reach reproductive age.''
Robert Ritter reviewed the family trees of criminals, people of partly
gypsy descent, and psychopaths, building up to the demand that
hereditarily predisposed acutely asocial psychopaths and criminals
should also ``be excluded from reproducing.''
Cost-Effectiveness
The
cost-effectiveness argument had to be included as well. Felix Boesler
calculated how many Reichsmarks per person were spent on the care of
the mentally ill, deaf-mutes, the blind, and ``cripples.'' Certainly
race-policy measures should not be justified solely in terms of
``savings in outlays on social service burdens,'' he said, but
``nevertheless the fiscal standpoint merits consideration.''
Today, the debate over euthanasia and the demand for cost-cutting in
medical care have made us familiar with such arguments. With the help
of current ``discussions'' in the mass media, a scale could already be
drawn up on which some lives are ``unworthy to be lived,'' according
to public opinion, legal statute, and medical guidelines, because they
are judged too expensive to sustain. Thus eugenic abortion is
commonplace everywhere, while Germany's Peter Singer, author of The
New Ethics, propagandizes for the eugenic murder of children as
well. Sterilization of the mentally ill proceeds while the degree of
their capacity to make decisions is disputed. Many consider it a waste
of money to keep comatose patients alive, although recovery is
frequent even after long periods of unconsciousness. In England and
elsewhere, in cases of expensive treatment, calculations are made
according to the ``Quality Life Years'' (QALY) criterion, to determine
whether the treatment would still ``pay'' when the life expectancy is
multiplied by the patient's anticipated ``quality of life.'' The
elderly and the acutely ill thus have the least chance of achieving a
rating at which life will be sustained. Thus are the weakest sifted
out. Euthanasia propaganda, meanwhile, propels the patient forward on
the scale of candidates for death, up to the ranks of the chronically
ill and those who are tired of living.
Targeting
the "Superiority Afflicted"
A grotesque
speech was delivered in Berlin by Captain Gustav Loeson von Horn of
Sweden on ``The Gothic Northern Race as Victim of Urbanization and
Industrialization,'' along the lines of today's anti-technology New
Age. ``This fair-skinned, blond-haired, blue-eyed race, once the
flower of the European population, rose up through the elimination of
unfit types. I simply wish to recall that in primitive times, as soon
as children were withdrawn from the mother's breast, they received
nothing but the same food as adults, namely, meat, fish, blood, and
water. That the weaker would perish under these conditions is clear to
all.... The strong preserve themselves, the weak go under.'' According
to von Horn, civilization undid this strong northern race: ``What war
and plagues could not accomplish was carried out by an alien culture
and the industrialization associated with it.... Already after a few
generations in the air of large cities, the family perishes.... Does
anyone believe that in primitive times there existed poor relief,
pensions, or anything of the sort, while our race was still waging a
victorious struggle for existence in the thick ancient forests? Is
there now no salvation? Yes, as far as the northern race is concerned,
salvation is to be sought in a return to Nature and to the conditions
in which the race flourishes.''
Herman Lundborg, director of the State Institute for Racial Biology in
Uppsala, Sweden, attacked not only industrialization, but society's
higher cultural development as a whole: ``Coinciding with a society's
increase in prosperity, diminution of mortality, and prolongation of
the average lifespan, is the threat of racial degeneration. The race's
strength becomes obliterated: an all-too-costly sacrifice for the
advantages provided by highly sublimated and intellectual culture.''
The Berlin attorney Ludwig Fluegge elaborated these thoughts into an
attack against creative genius and against highly gifted people in
general. ``Great talent is associated with defects or weaknesses in
other organs.... Where no actual pathology is the co-determinant of
exceptional advantages, the latter are nevertheless associated with
such lability or weakness that a slight external stimulus can easily
trigger a pathological condition.... I call these persons
`superiority-afflicted.' They are the bearers of the initial impulse
in world history. The rise of religion, political order, and higher
culture, capital formation, intellectual, technical, moral, and
aesthetic progress, these are their work.''
Precisely for this reason, the ``superiority-afflicted'' are
``dangerous,'' and to admire them is a ``fateful error. The victory
and the intrinsic superiority of the Third Reich are associated with
this fact being instinctively or consciously recognized and dealt
with.... Exceptional natures disturb the conditions essential to the
life of average healthy people.... In the Third Reich, the average
healthy person's defense reflex becomes more strongly manifest.
Without this, the influence of the superiority-afflicted and the death
instinct would have had a stronger effect. The wheel of history would
have rolled more quickly, perhaps it would already have come to a
stop. This defensive struggle is necessary, even when sentimentality
would like to revolt against it.... Thus it very often occurs that the
defense instinct persecutes, opposes, or silences the groundbreakers
for intellectual, political, or even technological progress; the
organization of their friends and their influence on youth are
hindered, and their well-intentioned teachings are ignored.... Above
all, however, natural inertia and passive resistance are very
important weapons of the average healthy person.''
Logically enough, Fluegge ended his lecture with a demand for
``confinement of the superiority-afflicted to a small number'' who
must be expunged from all populations ``energetically, but with tact,
wisdom and moderation.''
In the setting of a population conference, this call for culling out
the overabundant creative individuals who ``from superior forces and
from necessity become far more dangerous than they ever became in a
thousand years of culture,'' is already remarkable. Pol Pot and the
Chinese Cultural Revolution's Gang of Four must have had similar
thoughts before they persecuted and murdered the intellectual elite,
entirely without tact and moderation, thereby breaking the survivors
of the habit of thinking. In the Third Reich this form of argument
became crucial to the persecution of German Jews, who in large part
belonged to the intellectual elite.
Fluegge's demand to ``curtail the creative ones'' is a fundamental
principle of the oligarchic theory of rule, skillfully carried out
today through a cult of mediocrity. Reaching that goal requires, not
killer gangs, but merely the appropriately stupefying cultural and
educational policy.
"Spaceship
Earth"
Where the
Nazis' overpopulation propaganda spoke of Lebensraum, today's
Malthusians talk about ``Spaceship Earth.'' And while the Nazis
carried out their barbaric population policy in the name of ``race,''
the U.N. depopulation lobby has created a new idol called ``the
environment,'' which exacts mandatory sacrifices. As in the Third
Reich, all economic considerations, especially in the occupied Eastern
zones, were subordinated to ``racial considerations,'' the pre-eminent
standard for economic policy today, especially toward the developing
sector, is ``environmental considerations.'' From this the concept of
``sustainable development'' was contrived, a concept just as
oligarchic, irrational, and barbaric as the idea of a ``sustainable''
maximum number of intellectually distinguished creative individuals.
Those deceived by the terminology think ``sustainable development''
means development that is actually sustainable in the long run, in the
sense that it can proceed uninterruptedly for the benefit of humanity
and without damage to the human environment. Such development of human
society is only possible through constant further creative
development, in which new scientific discoveries and their
technological application define totally new raw materials and raise
the productivity of human labor by orders of magnitude. But it is in
order to prevent this that the concept of ``sustainable development''
was concocted.
Advocates of burning wood as an energy source, for instance, such as
Dennis Meadows, a leading ``sustainable development'' propagandist,
have good intentions neither toward humanity nor toward the
environment. Because of these self-contradictions, the advocates of
``sustainable development'' seldom say precisely what they mean by it.
It in fact requires a permanent depression in the industrialized
nations of the North and an enforced backwardness in the developing
nations, under the U.N. triumvirate of GATT, the International
Monetary Fund, and the World Bank.
For the Malthusians, this also resolves a painful paradox, the fact
that Malthus has been decisively refuted by industrialization and
technologically advanced agriculture. ``Sustainable development'' in
the Third World, i.e. non-development, guarantees that there, at
least, Malthus's iron law of population will once more go into effect,
and Malthus's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse--famine, pestilence,
plague, and war--will accompany modern artificial birth control.
Berlin Congress Chairman Eugen Fischer offered a summary at the end of
the conference, emphasizing two concepts which indeed defined the
conference: ``race'' and ``eugenics'': ``In the thinking of the men of
the fourth decade of our century, one concept has taken the
focal point of attention, the concept of `race.' Whether discussed in
a purely scientific fashion, or passionately demanded as a guiding
star for spiritual attitudes or political discipline, or just as
passionately fought against and opposed as the blueprint for all sorts
of things, the concept is there, and every individual and every nation
must and will come to terms with it.... The second star which shone
above our meeting was the idea of eugenics''; in that regard, ``the
question of sterilization has apparently found the greatest
interest.... The National Socialist Führer-principle has made it
possible for one man to solve a problem in the full consciousness of
his own personal responsibility, whereas otherwise it would have
occupied special commissions or parliamentary committees for years....
It is a turning point in the spiritual and intellectual history of
mankind, that today scientific medical knowledge is no longer applied
merely on an individual level, according to the desire or intent to
maintain the life of particular persons, but rather is put in the hand
of the statesman as a weapon and guideline for the well- being of his
people, with beneficent compulsion.'' (Fischer spoke as if he knew
that the policy would not stop at sterilization, and the euthanasia
plan was already on the desk.)
For the International Conference on Population and Development in
Cairo, the governing concepts are not ``race'' and ``sterilization''
but ``sustainable development'' and ``family planning.''
Sterilization, however, is perfectly applicable, since it is the most
heavily applied instrument of birth control or ``family planning'' in
the developing sector. In Brazil, a 1986 investigation found that 44
percent of women of child-bearing age had been sterilized.
New
and Old "Techniques"
Mayone Stycos views the
entire Cairo conference under the rubric of eugenics, and praises the
progress in new techniques which the Nazi population planners had been
hoping for. At Auschwitz, Nazi doctors carried out experiments on
human subjects for the purpose of developing a cheap, non-surgical
sterilization procedure. Adolf Eichmann had great expectations for
these experiments.
The Cairo action plan envisions an intensified contraceptive campaign,
in order to increase the ratio of couples using contraceptives from
the current 55 percent worldwide to 69 percent. In the coming decades,
fertility in the developing sector is supposed to be reduced below the
reproduction level so that the total number of human beings begins to
decline, and by the year 2150, at 2.5 billion, is cut in half.
Based on purely reproductive demographics, this calculation does not
take into account the victims of starvation, epidemics, and war.
Apparently the Cairo conference's Malthusian strategists have thought
through the consequences of their actions as little as the genocidal
Nazis had done in the past. Wetzel wrote in his commentary on Generalplan
Ost: ``Our goal in implementing these measures is only to weaken
the Russian race to the extent that it can no longer overrun us with
its huge numbers of men. When we have converted the mass of the
Russian people to belief in the one- or two-child system, we shall
have arrived at the goal we stipulated.''
The Nazi policy brought disaster not only to the subjugated
populations, but also to Germany. In the same way, the policies of the
Cairo conference will inflict ruin on the developing nations and
the nations of the ``rich North,'' whose governments think they are
compelled to join in upholding this action plan for reasons of
national security. We call upon these governments in all urgency to
reconsider the consequences of their conduct while there is still
time, and to mount immediate opposition to the depopulation policy of
the U.N. leadership. If the German government cannot resolve to do
that, Interior Minister Kanther should at least withdraw the German
delegation from participating in this monstrous conference, ``for
historical reasons.''
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