More than 100 years ago, the Carnegie Institute and members of the Rockefeller family set out to lower the population of the entire earth. Much of the work they financed operated under the name “eugenics,” a less-ghastly term for the various ways they suggested to reduce the number of people living on earth.
In 1904, Carnegie money created a “Eugenics Records Office” to gather information about how to weed out several ethnic groups. Then, Rockefeller money began helping early 20th Century eugenicists develop ways to plan reductions in selected population groups. The Rockefeller knowledge was transferred to Nazi Germany after Hitler rose in the 1930s. The German dictator instituted his eugenics programs as part of a desire to build the vaunted Master Race.
Perhaps the most famous of America’s early population planners was Margaret Sanger who began her desire to shrink certain segments of our nation’s population by promoting birth control. In 1931, she authored the book My Fight for Birth Control. During the 1930s while championing the race-purification efforts of Nazi Germany, Sanger led the Birth Control Federation of America. By 1939, she developed a plan for stopping the growth of the Black community in America. In 1942, she and like-minded eugenicists, racists, and birth controllers created a new organization called Planned Parenthood Federation of America. This organization, our nation’s leading provider of abortion, has annually benefitted from large amounts of federal aid. This means, of course, that the American people pay for terminating the lives of millions of unborn infants.
The war on population received a huge boost with the 1968 publication Stanford University Professor Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb. More than 20 million copies of this book have been distributed. That Ehrlich was completely wrong hasn’t seemed to matter. Among his truly dire predictions, he actually wrote: “In the 1970’s, the world will undergo famines hundreds of millions are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” That didn’t happen, but the population controllers kept up their claims about a looming population catastrophe with publications from the globalist Club of Rome and the government of the United States.
By the 1990s, population planners of many stripes had identified a common enemy. It wasn’t too many people; the real problem was people-caused global warming, water shortages, and potential famine. In the 1990s, The Club of Rome actually published a book entitled The First Global Revolution whose conclusion states, “The real enemy then is humanity itself.”
As we enter the third decade of the 21st Century, no one can deny that propaganda about overpopulation and the loosening of moral principles has already ushered in a remarkable population decline in so-called “civilized” regions such as Europe and the Americas. Population controllers, who delight in acknowledging sharply lower of birth rates, applaud propaganda about climate change and disdain for the biblical directive “increase and multiply.” People who spawn large families are no longer saluted; they are scorned.
Perhaps the most ruthlessly candid expression of the population control mindset was offered by famed oceanographer Jacques Cousteau. In the November 1991 issue of UNESCO Courier, he first targeted America as the leading damager of the earth, and then wrote:
This is a terrible thing to say. In order to stabilize world population, we must eliminate 350,000 people per day. It’s a horrible thing to say, but it’s just as bad not to say it.
Not alone in suggesting such mind-boggling goals, the now-deceased Cousteau could count University of Texas professor Eric Pianka as an ally. This advocate of drastic population control told a 2006 student audience that people are “no better than bacteria” and their number on earth should be reduced “by 90 percent.” He even suggested that AIDS is too slow to accomplish the needed reduction of humans and offered Ebola as far more efficient and speedy killer. He ended his talk by suggesting sterilization for all now living on earth. His student audience applauded what they had heard.
Population controllers do exist. They consider all but a few as mortal enemies worthy of being eliminated. Only then would they be satisfied with life among a drastically reduced number of fellow humans.
John F. McManus is president emeritus of The John Birch Society.
