What the Malthusians Say

The shocking adoption of an official (if secret) policy by the United States, of defining its own national security in terms of the reduction of population of other, poorer nations, represents the predominant influence, but not yet the core worldview, of the neo-Malthusians. Their policies are represented to governments in terms of economic or strategic coercion, the exercise of raw power of empires or superpowers to stop the development of other, competitor nations. But their core objective is sheer racial and class hatred, a desire to eliminate as many brown, black, yellow, or poor human beings as possible. Malthus himself, as a paid writer for the British East India Company, was an out-and-out petty thief, who plagiarized the bulk of his work from eighteenth century Venetian Giammaria Ortes. Using Ortes’s assertion that the Earth has a finite “carrying capacity,” Malthus wrote in order to abolish the poor laws in the British Isles, causing the death of poor children, and in order to justify a massive increase of looting of India, which led to the famines, drug wars, and population collapse of the nineteenth century on the Indian subcontinent.

Thomas Malthus

“We are bound in justice and honour formally to disdain the Right of the poor to support. “To this end, I should propose a regulation to be made, declaring that no child born from any marriage taking place after the expiration of a year from the date of the law, and no illegitimate child born two years from the same date, should ever be entitled to parish assistance…. “The infant is, comparatively speaking, of little value to society, as others will immediately supply its place.” –Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population

“All children who are born, beyond what would be required to keep up the population to a desired level, must necessarily perish, unless room be made for them by the death of grown persons…. Therefore … we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. “Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlement in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and restrain those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they are doing a service to mankind by protecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders.” –Malthus, ibid.

Bertrand Russell

“The white population of the world will soon cease to increase. The Asiatic races will be longer, and the negroes still longer, before their birth rate falls sufficiently to make their numbers stable without help of war and pestilence. Until that happens, the benefits aimed at by socialism can only be partially realized, and the less prolific races will have to defend themselves by methods which are disgusting even if they are necessary.” –Bertrand Russell

“I have already spoken of the population problem, but a few words must be added about its political aspect. …. It will be impossible to feel that the world is in a satisfactory state until there is a certain degree of equality, and a certain acquiescence everywhere in the power of the World Government, and this will not be possible until the poorer nations of the world have become … more or less stationary in population. The conclusion to which we are driven by the facts that we have been considering is that, while great wars cannot be avoided until there is a World Government, a World Government cannot be stable until every important country has nearly stationary population.” –Bertrand Russell

Prince Philip, … of Great Britain

“You cannot keep a bigger flock of sheep than you are capable of feeding. In other words conservation may involve culling in order to keep a balance between the relative numbers in each species within any particular habitat. I realize this is a very touchy subject, but the fact remains that mankind is part of the living world…. Every new acre brought into cultivation means another acre denied to wild species.” –Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, consort of Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain

“In the event I am reborn, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation.” –Prince Philip, quoted in Deutsche Presse Agentur, August 1988

Paul Ehrlich

“A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people…. We must shift our efforts from the treatment of the symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions.” –Paul Ehrlich, The Population Bomb

Michael Soverstein, president, Environmental Economics

“If necessary, nations of the Third World must be forced to remain poor if their development threatens resources on which all life depends.” –Michael Soverstein, president, Environmental Economics

Dr. Arne Schiotz, World Wildlife Fund Director of Conservation

“Malthus has been vindicated, reality is finally catching up with Malthus. The Third World is overpopulated, it’s an economic mess, and there’s no way they could get out of it with this fast-growing population. Our philosophy is: back to the village.” –Dr. Arne Schiotz, World Wildlife Fund Director of Conservation, 1984

Thomas Lovejoy, World Wildlife Fund

“The biggest problems are the damn national sectors of these developing countries. These countries think that they have the right to develop their resources as they see fit. They want to become powers.” –Thomas Lovejoy, vice president, World Wildlife Fund U.S.A., 1984

Sir Peter Scott, World Wildlife Fund

“If we look at things causally, the bigger problem in the world is population. We must set a ceiling to human numbers. All development aid should be made dependent on the existence of strong family planning programs.” –Sir Peter Scott, chairman, World Wildlife Fund U.K., 1984

Fritz Leutwiler, Bank for International Settlements

“It means the reduction of real income in countries where the majority of the population is already living at the minimum existence level or even under it. That is difficult, but one cannot spare the highly indebted countries this difficult path. It is unavoidable.” –Fritz Leutwiler, chairman, Bank for International Settlements, 1982

“Fritz speaks with his guts. If he had his way, he would kill them all, in the Third World, except a few raw materials producers, of course.” –One of Leutwiler’s fellow Geneva bankers

William Paddock, US State Department

“If you do anything to increase food production through more agricultural technology, all you are doing is increasing future suffering, because there will be more people, population will expand to absorb that food, and the results will be a greater disaster…. Mexico simply can’t handle 60 million people … think how prosperous Mexico would be today if it had the population of 1933, 18 million.” –William Paddock, U.S. State Department agronomist and co-author, Famine 1975! America’s Decision, Who Will Survive?, in remarks in 1980

Julian Blackwelder, The Environmental Fund

“[In Bangladesh] if you go and feed people whose problem is that their numbers are forever getting greater, all you can possibly do is incubate catastrophe; you keep enlarging the number of people that you know absolutely have to perish in a very unfortunate way sometime in the future, and reasonably soon…. I think any humanitarian would like to see the population of Mexico reduced in a humane way. Otherwise it will be reduced in an inhumane way.” –Julian Blackwelder, director, The Environmental Fund, 1980

Thomas Ferguson, State Department Office of Population Affairs

“There is a single theme behind all our work–we must reduce population levels. Either governments do it our way, through nice clean methods, or they will get the kinds of mess that we have in El Salvador, or in Iran or in Beirut. Population is a political problem. Once population is out of control, it requires authoritarian government, even fascism, to reduce it…. “Our program in El Salvador didn’t work. The infrastructure was not there to support it. There were just too goddamned many people…. To really reduce population, quickly, you have to pull all the males into the fighting and you have to kill significant numbers of fertile age females…. “The quickest way to reduce population is through famine, like in Africa, or through disease like the Black Death….” –Thomas Ferguson, State Department Office of Population Affairs, Latin American Desk, February 1981 interview

Michael Novak

“…Every newborn child lowers the average per capita income.” –Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

The Club of Rome

“In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill…. But in designating them as the enemy, we fall into the trap of mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention and it is only through changed attitudes and behavior that they can be overcome. The real enemy, then, is humanity itself.” –Club of Rome, The First Global Revolution, 1991

William Paddock, State Department

“The Mexican population must be reduced by half. Seal the border and watch them scream.” And, asked how this population reduction would be accomplished, the speaker replied: “By the usual means: famine, war, and pestilence.” –William Paddock, State Department consultant, 1975 interview

Robert McNamara, World Bank

“Overpopulation and rapid demographic growth of Mexico is already today one of the major threats to the national security of the United States.” Unless the U.S.-Mexico border is sealed, “we will be up to our necks in Mexicans for whom we cannot find jobs.” –Robert McNamara, then-World Bank president, March 19, 1982

“…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 single obstacle to the economic and social advancement of most of the societies in the developing world.” –Robert McNamara, Oct. 2, 1979

Published in The American Almanac, 1994