[Peace-discuss] Population control

[Morton K. Brussel]

I think this whole commentary by Carl, and his admired Cockburn (whom  
I sometimes praise), is a disingenuous red herring, and a distortion  
of what organizations like The Population Connection are advocating.  
Realizing the finite nature of the earth and its resources, and the  
stresses the earth and the oceans and all that lives thereon are  
under even now, it only seems blindness, or ignorance, to argue that  
human population has no relation to the use of the earth and its  
resources and the stresses upon these finite resources. That  
blindness exists in our current economic system, which relies on  
unending growth for its success. Exploitation—while you can— seems to  
be its byword. Thus, ignore global warming, ignore the end of oil,  
ignore the diminishing supplies of fish and other fauna, ignore  
sprawl, ignore pollution, ignore the tensions caused by deprived  
populations (except when they can be exploited) in their quest for  
better living conditions.

One can argue that we cannot well know when a crisis of  
overpopulation is upon us; certainly different parts of the world  
will feel the crisis at different times. The arguments usually  
produced to counter the notion of finite resources are that human  
beings are infinitely resourceful; humankind can therefore always  
find solutions to whatever problems nature confronts us with, as it  
has in the past. Scientists and non-ideological people realize,  
however, that there are ceilings that cannot be surpassed without  
incurring harsh consequences, even if it has not always been possible  
to clearly define those ceilings. Some would say that nature (God?)  
will naturally correct whatever population imbalances occur. Malthus  
recognized wars, crime, famine, disease and corruption as nature's  
agents of regulation; now we recognize that better standards of  
living, and with it education, and better access to family planning  
can regulate human reproduction tendencies. And of course, increased  
efficiency of production, from technology, forestalls dire effects  
which would exist had not such efficiencies existed.

But most reasonable people must admit these days (when wars are waged  
in the quest to control the earth's resources) that the human  
population, one way or another, cannot increase indefinitely on our  
finite earth, and not indefinitely in individual nations or regions.  
Antartctica or Greenland or the Sahara are not places humans in  
general want, or can, live. If global warming becomes much worse,  
many parts of the world, including the United States, may begin to  
resemble such inclement uninhabitable places. Los Angeles, Las Vegas,  
Phoenix, California agriculture, etc.  will be in real trouble if the  
Sierra snow pack is not sufficiently replenished. Many similar  
examples exist.

I do not talk about aesthetic aspects of overpopulation and resource  
depletion, but I can't help mentioning that the national parks and  
wilderness are under considerable stress, that sprawl and associated  
roadways are worsening eyesores all over the country, and that if the  
U.S. population reaches 500 million—now foreseeble, it will get much  
worse. I can only hope it doesn't get there.

Some say "The more the better". Growth is axiomatic for the stock  
market. However, I don't believe progress depends on more and more  
people, but on the better and more equitable utilization of human  
resources.

Carl and Cockburn associate "The Population Connection" with racism,  
confounding it with eugenics. This is a fallacious and deceptive  
association. They argue that the rich and the developed nations  
already have their populations under control. Hence, to consider  
control of populations implies the control of the poor, largely  
colored, people of the world . They do not admit that population  
planning and control does not have to be forced. They ignore, for  
example, that a better distribution of the world's wealth would do  
much to raise the living standards and health of the poor peoples of  
the world, and hence would make it less necessary to have large  
families. We in the west practice birth control; why cannot the  
people of Africa and Asia also have access to birth control? Does  
that imply the hateful "eugenics" of the Nazis or racists? It does not.

Carl talks about the invidious politics of population control.  
Strange for him to talk that way, for U.S. administration policy is  
against population control, so better to take advantage of poverty  
for the benefit of their powerful and rich clients. Bush and his ilk  
have inhibited the distribution of cheap medicines (not made by USA  
pharmaceutical giants) to prevent and control aids just as they are  
against family planning, the distribution of condoms, voluntary  
abortion, and other birth control methods by the poor,  etc. . We see  
here a curious alignment of religious dogma and voracious capitalism.

Enough for now. I'm running over… My excuses.  --mkb


On Jan 22, 2006, at 8:09 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:

> Tonight AWARE heard a proposal for a working group on
> population control.  Not to put too fine a point on it, such a
> proposal flies in the face of one of our stated purposes,
> anti-racism.  I'm suggesting, not that the motives of the
> proposer are racist, but that if we understand the real
> politics of population control, we see that it is what used to
> be called "objectively" racist.
>
> Alex Cockburn explains the context below, with reference to
> a recent comment by William Bennett, Reagan's Secretary of
> Education.
>
> I confess that I may be sensitive on this issue, not only
> because of the configuration of my own family, but also
> because one of the classic studies of the need of public
> policy to prevent the birth of undesirables was authored by a
> cousin, Arthur H. Estabrook of the Eugenics Records Office at
> Cold Spring Harbor, New York in 1916, "The Jukes in 1915."
>
> "Jukes" was a pseudonym for a family used as an example in the
> social science of a century ago to argue that there was a
> genetic disposition toward criminality. This science was used
> to advocate eugenics, or the "scientific" breeding of human
> beings, by attempting to demonstrate that social inferiority
> was heritable.  The Jukes family was described by Richard L.
> Dugdale in 1877 in "The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism,
> Disease and Heredity."
>
> A. H. Estabrook's study, a follow-up to Dugdale's, purported
> to draw its conclusions from a study of 2,820 persons,
> including 2,094 descendants of the original six Juke sisters.
> Enthusiastic readers of Estabrook's study included
>
>    (a) the liberal icon Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell
> Holmes, Jr., who wrote the opinion when the court approved
> involuntary sterilization in Buck v. Bell, 1927:
>
> "In order to prevent our being swamped with incompetents...
> society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from
> continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory
> vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian
> tubes ... It is better for all the world, if instead of
> waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let
> them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those
> who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.  Three
> generations of imbeciles are enough"; and
>
>    (b) the National Socialist German Workers' Party, who put
> into practice the social policies pioneered in America.
>
> Cf. <www.wehaitians.com/bad%20seed%20or%20bad%20science.html>.
>
> ====================
>
>   Alexander Cockburn
>   Rhetoric and reality in the business
>   of getting rid of black people
>   October 7, 2005
>
> Every year or so, some right-winger in America lets fly in
> public with a ripe salvo of racism, and the liberal watchdogs
> come tearing out of their kennels, and the neighborhood echoes
> with the barks and shouts. The right-winger says he didn't
> mean it, the president "distances himself," and the liberals
> claim they're shocked beyond all measure. Then, everyday life
> in racist America resumes its even course.
>
> This past week it's been the turn of that conservative public
> moraliser, William Bennett. He should have known better than
> to loose off a hypothetical on his radio show. Announce
> publicly that "if you wanted to reduce crime, you could abort
> every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go
> down," and many Americans reckon that's no hypothesis, that's
> a plan waiting to happen.
>
> Of course that's what Bennett did say, and he should have
> known better. Americans mostly don't understand hypotheses,
> any more than they feel at ease with irony. Particularly in
> the age of the Internet, literalism is the order of the day.
> Qualifications such as Bennett added (to the effect that this
> would be "an impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible
> thing to do") are useless.
>
> The deeper irony here is that liberals have pondered longer
> and deeper than conservatives on how exactly to carry out
> Bennett's hypothetical plan, either by sterilization or
> compulsory contraception.
>
> Before Hitler and his fellow Nazis (who said they had learned
> much from U.S. sterilization laws and immigration
> restrictions) made the discipline unfashionable, eugenics and
> the prevention of socially unworthy babies were hot topics
> among America's social cleansers.
>
> The keenest of these cleansers were not Southern crackers but
> Northern liberals. States pioneering sterilization laws
> included Robert La Follette's Wisconsin and Woodrow Wilson's
> New Jersey. Around the country, after Indiana led the way in
> 1909, eugenic sterilization was most energetically pushed by
> progressive politicians, medical experts and genteel women's
> groups. In the mid-1930s, Alabama's governor, Bibb Graves,
> vetoed a sterilization bill enthusiastically passed by the
> legislature. The populist Graves cited "the hazard to personal
> rights."
>
> Behind this sterilization drive was the Malthusian fear that
> poor people reproduce at a faster rate than rich ones or those
> endowed with a high IQ. The highly regarded biologist Garrett
> Hardin wrote in his 1949 book "Biology: Its Human
> Implications" that "Either there must be a relatively painless
> weeding out before birth or a more painful and wasteful
> elimination of individuals after birth." If we neglect a
> program of eugenics, will the production of children be
> non-selective?  By 1968, Paul Ehrlich, in his "Population
> Bomb," was urging a cutback in government programs of "death
> control," i.e., public health. Nixon cut health benefits and
> pumped money into population control.
>
> Allan Chase, in his "The Legacy of Malthus," says 63,678
> people were compulsorily sterilized in America between 1907
> and 1964 in the 30 states and one colony with such laws. But
> there were hundreds of thousands more sterilizations that were
> nominally voluntary but actually coerced. Chase quotes federal
> judge Gerhard Gesell as saying in 1974, in a suit brought on
> behalf of poor victims of involuntary sterilization, "Over the
> past few years an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 low-income
> persons have been sterilized annually by state and federal
> agencies." This rate equals that achieved in Nazi Germany.
>
> Gesell said that "an indefinite number of poor people have
> been improperly coerced into accepting a sterilization
> operation under the threat that various federally supported
> welfare benefits would be withdrawn unless they submitted to
> irreversible sterilization. Patients receiving Medicaid
> assistance at childbirth are evidently the most frequent
> targets of this pressure."
>
> Writing toward the end of the 1970s, Chase reckoned that
> probably at least 200,000 Americans per year were the victims
> of involuntary and irreversible sterilization.
>
> In the mid-1990s, liberals flourished the same basic
> hypothesis as Bennett. They said there was a cycle of poverty
> and welfare dependency that bred crime. In 1994, Arizona and
> Nebraska prohibited welfare increases for recipients who had
> additional babies while on the dole. Connecticut in the same
> year gave serious consideration to a bill providing additional
> subsidies for welfare mothers who accepted a contraceptive
> implant (called Norplant).
>
> Though race specific terms were usually avoided by
> eugenicists, who preferred words like "weak minded" or
> "imbeciles" (a favorite of that enthusiast for sterilizing,
> Oliver Wendell Holmes, a jurist much admired by liberals) the
> target was, by and large, blacks. What direct sterilization
> could not prevent, incarceration or medically justified
> confinement has also sought to achieve.
>
> Bill Bennett didn't know the half of it. He was about a
> century behind the curve.
>
> [Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St. Clair of the
> muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. He is also co-author of
> the new book "Dime's Worth of Difference: Beyond the Lesser of
> Two Evils," available through www.counterpunch.com.]
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