Too Many (Other) People

Czar of the Bizarre: John Holdren, long-time militant eco-collectivist, is Barack Obama's "Science Czar." He is also on the record advocating totalitarian population control methods, including compelled abortion and mass sterilization through chemical warfare.

As a left-leaning Rutgers law professor in the early 1970s, Ruth Bader Ginsburg thought that the Roe v. Wade abortion decision was the product of “concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations we don’t want too many of,” she recalled in a recent New York Times Magazine interview.

Her expectation was that the purported right to abortion created in Roe “was going to be then set up for Medicaid funding for abortion. Which some people felt would risk coercing women into having abortions when they didn’t really want them.”

Ginsburg doesn’t specify which parts of the human population “we” should cull, or how the creation of an abortion “right” would necessarily be a prelude to creation of a system in which abortion would be required in some circumstances. She told the Times that the question was effectively rendered moot by the Supreme Court's Harris v. McRae decision, which upheld a ban on Medicaid funding of abortion. That decision, handed down in 1980, indicated that her “perception” of the issue “had been altogether wrong," Ginsburg concludes.

But this means that there was an interval of roughly seven years during which Ginsburg, a well-informed and influential academic, believed that America was creating a eugenicist system in which abortion would help reduce “undesirable” populations -- however those populations would be defined. This was what Roe had wrought, Ginsburg believed for several years, and if she ever experienced misgivings about it, she managed to keep them private.

Another question worth examining is this: Where did Ginsburg -- a rising star in academe long before being tapped to fill the Rosa Klebb seat on the Supreme Court -- get the impression that American policy-making elites were discussing the use of welfare subsidies to bring about the attrition of “undesirable” populations?

If I may be permitted a modest venture in speculation, I’d suggest that Ginsburg, sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, became at least superficially acquainted with the writings of John Holdren or of like-minded people in the most militant branch of the population control movement.

In 1977, Mr. Holdren was a young academic who helped anti-natalist guru Paul Ehrlich and his wife Anne write an arrestingly horrible book entitled Ecoscience: Population, Resources, Environment. Today, Holdren is Barack Obama’s “Science Czar,” in which capacity he counsels the president regarding the role of science in public policy. This relationship has a certain Strangelovian undercurrent, given Holdren’s enthusiasm for eugenicist and totalitarian methods of population “management.”

In a passage that reads eerily like the direct counterpoint to Ginsburg’s musings about the reduction of undesirable populations, Holdren and the Ehrlichs wrote:

“If some individuals contribute to general social deterioration by overproducing children, and if the need is compelling, they can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility – just as they can be required to exercise responsibility in their resource-consumption patterns….”

The book offers similarly casual endorsements of “Involuntary” and “coercive” fertility control,” including the mandatory implantation of a Norplant-style capsule that “might be removable, with official permission, for a limited number of births.”

The authors endorse the creation of “a Planetary regime” in charge of regulating all human economic activity and interactions with the environment and the “power to enforce the agreed limits” on human population growth through whatever means might be necessary – including compelled abortion, involuntary individual sterilization, or even mass involuntary sterilization through the infiltration of sterilizing agents into public water supplies.

That last deranged suggestion appears in several of Paul Ehrlich’s other books, including his (if you will excuse the expression) seminal 1967 alarmist tract The Population Bomb.

As someone who shared a full authorial credit on the book, Holdren bears full responsibility for the content of Ecoscience. His militantly anti-natalist views are easily as repulsive as anything promoted by white supremacist groups, albeit all the more dangerous for being more inclusive in their misanthropy. His writings would have been uncovered in the routine vetting process following his nomination, but his they never came up during his confirmation hearing.

What is genuinely unsettling, however, is this: The totalitarian prescriptions offered in Ecoscience were squarely in the mainstream of the Stygian sewer called the population control movement.

In 1967, sociologist, demographer, and population control heavyweight Kingsley Davis published an essay in Science magazine observing that “the social structure and economy must be changed before a deliberate reduction in the birthrate can be achieved” in the West. He urged governments to subsidize voluntary abortion and sterilization and restructure their tax systems to discourage both marriage and childbirth.

Davis’s recommendations apparently inspired Frederick Jaffe, Vice President of Planned Parenthood, when he composed a 1969 memorandum intended for use as a template for anti-natalist efforts.

Jaffe’s memorandum, a version of which was published in the October 1970 issue of Family Planning Perspectives, organized recommended social policies under four headings: “Social Constraints,” “Economic Deterrents/Incentives,” “Social Controls,” and “Housing Policies.”

Like Paul Ehrlich, Jaffe suggested the placement of “fertility control agents in [the] water supply”; this recommendation was filed, oddly enough, under “Social Constraints.” “Social Controls,” on the other hand, included such measures as “compulsory abortion of all out-of-wedlock pregnancies,” “compulsory sterilization of all who have two children except for a few who would be allowed three,” and the issuance of “stock certificate-type permits for children.” (Nearly every radical population control system is built around the idea of a government-issued "permit" or "license" to have children.)

These totalitarian measures were widely and unabashedly promoted in the literature of the population control movement at precisely the time that the Roe decision was (if, once again, you’ll excuse the expression) gestating in the court system.

Coercive population control advocate Garrett Hardin (left), seen here conferring with environmentalist, population control advocate, and immigration restricitonist John Tanton.

“How can we reduce reproduction?” wrote Garrett Hardin in a 1970 Science magazine article entitled “Parenthood: Right or Privilege?” “Persuasion must be tried first…. Mild coercion may soon be accepted – for example, tax rewards for reproductive non-proliferation. But in the long run, a purely voluntary system selects for its own failure: noncooperators out-breed cooperators. So what restraints shall we employ? A policeman under every bed? Jail sentences? Compulsory abortion? Infanticide?... Memories of Nazi Germany rise and obscure our vision.”

Oh, those dreadful Nazis: If only they hadn’t given totalitarian eugenics such a bad name….

Hardin was one of many anti-natalist luminaries – the list included Kingsley Davis, Margaret Mead, Paul Ehrlich, and sundry Planned Parenthood leaders – who endorsed the 1971 manifesto The Case for Compulsory Birth Control by Edgar R. Chasteen. That book offered one-stop shopping for policy-makers seeking draconian population management methods.

Chasteen was emphatic on two points : First, ruling elites had to indoctrinate the public into accepting the idea that “parenthood [is] a privilege extended by society, rather than a right”; and second, that in the interests of public relations, supporters of that totalitarian perspective needed to settle on “a name other than compulsory birth control.”

Essentially the same program was endorsed by Dr. Norman Myers, an adviser to the World Bank and various UN agencies, in his peculiar 1990 volume The Gaia Atlas of Future Worlds.

"Government population-contrrol policies using strong economic and social incentives have been effective in China and Singapore," wrote Myers, who commended China in particular for using "strong social pressure" to control its population. Myers didn't to dwell on the fact that the Chinese government employs severe punishments -- prison time, destruction of homes, retaliation against family members and co-workers -- for women who have "unauthorized" children.

Myers suggested a variation on the same concept behind the "cap-and-trade" carbon credit system employing government-issued birth permits. Under his plan, couples would "be issued with a warrant entitling them to have a single child.... This warrant might even carry commercial value, allowing individuals to decide not to have children at all and to sell their entitlements to others wanting larger families."

This will only hurt a little bit: Sir Roy Calne, British physician and advocate of universal female sterilization through an injectable virus.

Arguably the most astonishing variant on this approach was proposed in 1994, just prior to the UN's International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, Egypt.

In a book entitled Too Many People, Sir Roy Calne, a noted British physician, proposed a universal minimum childbearing age of 25, and a strict two-child quota. Those seeking the government-dispensed "privilege" of having children would have to pass a state-mandated parenting class and receive the appropriate "reproduction license." Those who violate those restrictions would lose their children and face Chinese-style economic sanctions and criminal punishments.

Calne also suggested the development of an engineered sterility pathogen -- he called it the "O virus" -- that could be administered to women world-wide as a vaccine.

These malignant proposals are not just flatulent thought-bubbles blown in languid speculation by fringe eccentrics in the academic realm: With the exception -- as far as we know -- of mass involuntary sterilization through covert chemical or biological warfare, every method of coercive population control described above has been implemented somewhere with the material aid of the United Nations and its affiliates, and the practical support of organizations such as Planned Parenthood and Marie Stopes International.

Every argument on behalf of state-imposed population control rejects the concept of individual self-ownership and assumes that human lives – individually and in the aggregate – are a resource to be managed by society’s supervisors on behalf of the “common good.” And, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg correctly intuited in 1973, the Roe vs. Wade decision was a triumph, albeit an incomplete one, for the cause of eugenicist population control.

Although it was swaddled in the language of individual empowerment, the Roe decision was a dramatic victory for collectivism: It enshrined, in what our rulers are pleased to call the “law,” the assumption that a human individual is a “person” only when that status is conferred by the government.

While Harry Blackmun’s opinion in Roe pointedly avoided the question of when “personhood” begins, it emphatically made it clear that, for purposes of “law,” that the term doesn’t apply to any human individual in his or her pre-natal stage of development. This, not the liberty to procure an abortion, is the real gravamen, or central legal finding, in the Roe decision: It put the government in charge of defining who is, and isn’t a person.

As judges like to say, the matter of reducing "undesirable" populations is reaching "ripeness" now. Barack Obama's administration is eagerly expanding the government-dependent population and preparing to impose centralized "universal" health care on our society. And while all of this is going on, John Holdren, unabashed advocate of totalitarian population control, is in a position to whisper unthinkable thoughts into Obama's ear.

A quick note on sources:

This essay was unusually light on links because much of the material used herein isn't available on-line. Specific references are available, however, in a chapter of a book I wrote in 1994 entitled Freedom on the Altar. Those who are interested in receiving a copy of that chapter, complete with endnotes, should contact me at WNGrigg@msn.com.

Don't forget to tune in for Pro Libertate Radio at 6:00-7:00 Central on the Liberty News Radio Network.

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Beware William Tell's Second Arrow

That was indeed a man: William Tell, seen here immortalized in bronze next to a likeness of his son, is a hero not just to Swiss patriots, but to all those in whom the desire for freedom is irrepressible.







"You Swiss are so proud of your 500,000-man citizen militia.... But what will you do if a 1,000,000-man German Army comes marching across your border?"



"That's easy. Each of us will shoot twice, and go home." --



A reported conversation between a German and a Swiss diplomat, circa 1939.





Seven hundred years ago, when Switzerland was under the domination of the Hapsburgs, a dissolute colonial overlord named Hermann Gessler sought to humiliate the residents of Altdorf, the capital of the central Swiss canton of Uri.





Gessler instructed his minions to erect a tall pole in the town square, at the top of which would be displayed his cap. Every Swiss man who entered the square would be required to pay fealty to Gessler, and the foreign imperial power he represented, by bowing before his cap.





One local resident was a man who distinguished himself by both his virtuosity with a crossbow and his contemptuous hostility toward bullies. Trying to force him to genuflect before another man, let alone his empty cap, would be a bit like trying to relocate the Matterhorn one shovel-full at a time. So while others prostrated themselves before Gessler's headwear, William Tell stood erect, burly arms folded across his broad chest, slowly shaking his head as his derisive laughter echoed through the town square.





Tell's defiance became known to Gessler, as did his reputation as a marksman. The Hapsburg stooge was worried about the possibility of Tell's rebellion becoming contagious. Endowed with the vicious creativity that so often replaces character in creatures of his kind, Gessler abducted Tell's young son, forcing William to leave his mountain home and stand before him.







Gessler told Tell that his son would be placed in the town square with an apple atop his head. Tell was placed at a considerable distance from his son and told that he was to shoot the apple from his child's head; failure to do so on his first shot would bring about the death of his son at the hands of Gessler's soldiers.







According to the legend, Tell hesitated not at all in fitting an arrow to his crossbow and letting fly, cleaving the apple without harming his child.





Tell's feat, and the composure with which he carried it off, were sufficient to impress even the porcine, self-enraptured Gessler.





As Tell collected his son and turned to leave, a second arrow fell from his coat. Noticing this, a puzzled Gessler asked Tell why he'd bothered to grab a second arrow, since the first shot would either have succeeded or brought about the death of his son.





Fixing the despot with an unflinching stare, Tell replied: "That second arrow was for you, if the first had wounded my boy."





Not long afterward, Tell's second arrow found its intended destination as Tell and his countrymen rose up against the foreign occupation, leading to the eventual creation of the Swiss Confederacy in the late 13th Century.





A true citizens' militia and its leader: Henri Guisan, appointed commander-in-chief of the Swiss militia during WWII, inspects the troops. Thanks to Guisan's leadership and strategic vision, Switzerland deterred a planned Axis invasion and was able to remain independent during the European bloodletting.



Owing to its tradition of resolute individualism, the unexcelled marksmanship of its citizen militia, and its decentralized political system, the Swiss have managed to avoid entanglement in the affairs of other nations and preserve their independence from foreign domination.







Efforts have been made to break Switzerland to the saddle of "internationalism": In 1798, the French revolutionary army invaded and occupied Switzerland, inflicting on it a centralized "Helvetic Republic" that lasted five years.





In 1939, as recounted in Stephen P. Halbrook's book Target: Switzerland, the German military drew up plans to invade and occupy Switzerland in the mistaken belief that its citizen militia would be no match for the Wehrmacht.





Under the leadership of Colonel Henri Guisan (at the time, it was the tradition that no officer would be appointed "general" unless the country actually went to war), the militia prepared a strategy called the "national redoubt": In the event of a German invasion, the militia would retreat into a series of fortified installations in the Alps and wage unremitting guerrilla war for as long as it took to drive the invaders from their land.





Confronting the prospect of fighting an entire country under arms, and horrified by the price that would be paid to pry the Swiss militia from its Alpine redoubts, the German High Command decided to leave Switzerland alone. What this means, of course, is that Switzerland actually won its war without suffering the hideous losses inflicted on any of the combatant nations.

A decade ago, another campaign -- this one more subtle than threats of military occupation -- was mounted to destroy Swiss independence. Beginning in 1997, Switzerland, which rescued tens of thousands of Jews from the Holocaust, was besieged by spurious claims that its renowned banking system was hoarding gold stolen from victims of the Nazis.

Stories were put into circulation describing the cynical heartlessness of banking officials in turning away aging survivors of Nazi cruelty; those stories invariably proved to be as substantial as cotton candy and as reliable as Jim Cramer's investment advice.

Nonetheless, a global campaign of defamation and invective, spearheaded by the coprogenetic Edgar Bronfman Sr. and eagerly abetted by the Clinton administration, indelibly branded the Swiss as Holocaust profiteers, thereby setting the stage for a shake-down that continues to this day.

No matter that on three prior occasions -- in 1946, as a result of the post-WWII Washington Accord; in the mid-1950s; and in 1962 -- the Swiss banking industry had conducted comprehensive, diligent, and transparent investigations regarding its wartime gold holdings.

Nor did it matter that the Clinton administration's inquiry actually exonerated the Swiss of claims that they had hoarded "victim gold" stolen from Jews who suffered and perished at the hands of the Nazis. The defamation campaign succeeded in prying some $14 billion worth of gold from the Swiss treasury and -- more importantly -- inducing the Swiss electorate to enact a new constitution that (among other dreadful features) repudiated the link between the Swiss franc and gold.

The Imperial Regime in Washington apparently believes it has reduced the heroic Swiss to a state of subservience, because its most recent demands savor of the same arrogant, unwarranted self-assurance that led Herr Gessler to place his hat atop the pole in Altdorf's town square.



This is the ugliest spot in Switzerland. I'm kidding, sort of.



Last year, Washington tried to impose a $780 million fine on the Swiss for their refusal to enforce U.S. tax laws within their own country.



Next week, the Regime intends to press its claims in court -- that is, in its own courts -- in the hope of forcing the Swiss to turn over confidential information on some 52,000 Americans who have private accounts protected by Swiss law.

To their eternal credit, and the benefit of those who cherish freedom everywhere, the Swiss are responding to Washington's imperial bullying with the equivalent of William Tell's laughter, augmented by an upraised middle digit.





Earlier this year, the Swiss People's Party (SVP) began a campaign urging their fellow citizens and elected leaders to resist Washington's imperial blackmail. After the Swiss government capitulated in late February to Washington's demand to pay a $780 million fine and disgorge the names of Americans who had opened private banking accounts, the SVP -- the nation's largest political party, which combines tradtionalist populism with enticing hints of libertarianism -- angrily demanded the repatriation of Swiss gold stored in the Swiss National Bank in the U.S.





The party also demanded a ban on the sale of U.S. commercial and government bonds in Switzerland (a sound proposal, if only because the sale of fraudulent financial instruments is a crime), an end to the Swiss government's role as a diplomatic intermediary between Washington and various national governments disinclined to act as U.S. colonies, and a refusal by Geneva to help Washington free itself from the tarbaby it created at Gitmo by taking in detainees freed from the detention facility.





Not everything about the SVP is entirely commendable, but in mounting this pressure campaign it was acting squarely in the noble tradition of William Tell and Henri Guisan. And the party's efforts may have helped the Swiss political class regain its backbone and virility: The Swiss government has announced that it will forbid UBS AG to comply with any order from the US central government requiring it to surrender confidential banking information -- and that Swiss authorities would seize that information, if necessary.





Already, major Swiss banks have announced that, of necessity, they will no longer accept American clients because of disclosure and paperwork requirements being pressed on them by Washington's commissars for international wealth extraction.





These extraordinary measures, notes Bill Bonner, are being undertaken by Swiss officials in order to preserve their country's traditional role "as a protector of foreigners' money." To that end, as well as the protection of its own citizenry and their economic interests, the Swiss are "sharpening their knives and tightening their borders," Bonner writes. That is to say, they seem to be recovering a hint of the intransigent patriotism that led them to evict the Hapsburgs, throw off Bonaparte's yoke, and stare down the Wehrmacht.





Washington, the focus of evil in the modern world, is displaying the behavior we would expect terminally corrupt collectivist kleptocracy: It needs revenue to satisfy its retinue of parasitic constituencies, has the power to seize it in defiance of the law, and believes that all people everywhere should genuflect before its demands. It is behaving pretty much the way Gessler did before he was brought down by Tell's second arrow.





Wouldn't it be delicious if Switzerland's resistance proved to be the precipitating event that brought down Washington's wretched empire of debt and deceit?



Video Extra:



From about twenty years ago, a Canadian comedy troupe anticipates the anti-Swiss defamation campaign:









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Dum spiro, pugno!