Trade Aid Monitor:
The Obama administration is embarking upon a project to ensure that pension system across the nation are “fiscally sound and sustainable.” And elderly citizens of the nation of Armenia likely will be delighted to hear the news.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) yesterday issued a presolicitation notice alerting interested contractors about the initiative, a “technical assistance” endeavor that will assist the Government of Armenia in making its new multi-pillar pension system “fiscally sound and sustainable.”
The intended outcome of the effort is “an increase in the percentage of economically active citizens who contribute to the pension resources,” according to the notice.
USAID also will help the Armenians to create an Integrated Social Services system (ISS), which will enable the Armenian Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs, in conjunction with “the private sector and civil society, to implement the pension reform and to improve social services policy, benefits, and delivery systems.”
“Also, these activities will ensure that the pension system is well-managed, regulated, and supervised according to international standards and best practices,” the notice continued.
USAID did not disclose the project’s estimated cost.
Saturday, July 21, 2012
In Pa., Farmer Smith Digs In Against Casey
By Caitlin Huey-Burns
July 19, 2012
Real Clear Politics:
SHELOCTA, Pa. -- Tom Smith was mowing wheat on his 400-acre Armstrong County farm last summer when he decided he would run for U.S. Senate.
Smith was born and raised on this stretch of land an hour's drive outside Pittsburgh where coal mines neighbor corn farms, and he remembers wondering that day how the national debt would impact his grandchildren, some of whom also live on the farm. After talking it over with his wife and his pastor, Smith changed his voter registration from Democrat to Republican, and began a bid for the Republican nomination to challenge incumbent Democrat -- and Pennsylvania brand name -- Bob Casey.
“I was raised in a time where a farm boy, just a farm boy, who knew how to work, could follow his dream and achieve it,” says Smith, who later made millions owning several coal mines close to his farm and is self-funding a substantial part of his Senate bid. “This country gave me the opportunity to come off the farm, start my own business and do reasonably well. My goodness gracious sakes alive, who wouldn’t give a part of his life to protect that for future generations? He couldn’t have a heart if he didn’t.”
Smith, 64, sounds earnest in his willingness to leave this bucolic setting for frenzied Washington. But his challenge to Casey is a long shot. The RealClearPolitics average shows the first-term senator leading Smith by 15 points. A June Quinnipiac University poll finds Smith trailing the incumbent by 17 points overall, and 14 points among independents. Smith is a relative unknown in the state, while his opponent is a former state treasurer, the son of the late, well-known and popular two-term Gov. Robert Casey Sr., and has a well-established organization behind him throughout the state.
But Casey has failed to break 50 percent in the polls, a potentially vulnerable position for an incumbent. Casey pointed this out in a fundraising letter recently, and warned of Smith’s ability to self-fund and the possibility of Karl Rove’s super PAC getting involved. Crossroads GPS has spent $2.7 million on the presidential race in the Keystone State but has not reserved airtime for the Senate contest. The Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee has been working with the Smith campaign, but it is not clear whether it will spend much time and money on this race either. It has been 50 years since a Democrat was re-elected to the Senate from Pennsylvania, but Casey faces better odds than his predecessors.
The Casey brand, combined with an expected high Democratic turnout in a presidential election year (no GOP White House contender has won the state since 1988) seems to have deterred better-known Republicans from running in this race. “Had there been a Pat Toomey warmed up in the bullpen in the Republican Party to take on Senator Casey, we would not be talking today,” Smith says, referring to the Republican senator elected in 2010.
But Smith embraces his underdog status. “I like being underestimated,” he says after finishing a lunch of grilled cheese and chili at Tina’s Log Cabin Restaurant, a diner located in the small town near his farm. A waitress comes to refill his soda, and asks if he is running for something. Smith nods, and mentions the Senate. She asks: Is it the state one or the “big one”? The U.S. Senate, he replies quietly.
An Energy Deficit?
Smith’s folksy appeal and successful business experience make him an attractive candidate in many parts of this manufacturing-based battleground state, but observers say he needs to turn up the heat to make this a competitive race.
“Honestly, they’ve got to light the fire under the candidate,” says John Brabender, a longtime Republican strategist who worked on Rick Santorum's losing 2006 Senate campaign against Casey as well as his presidential campaign. (Brabender also worked for Smith’s primary opponent, Tom Welch). “What hasn’t happened yet is people aren’t looking at and talking about that race.” Smith’s challenge, he asserts, “is that he needs to move this race into place because it’s the type of race where you can’t do that in the final weeks. The next four to five weeks may just be the most critical for Tom Smith that there are.”
Smith will likely have the money to do it. Corbett and the state GOP backed Welch, his primary opponent, but Smith spent $5 million of his own fortune on the race and hit the airwaves with ads to defeat Welch and clinch the nomination in April. Smith originally figured he would put enough money into the pot to get his run off the ground and build an organization. Last quarter, he donated $1.5 million to his campaign. He also raised $702,000 and has $2.9 million in cash. He won’t say how much of his own fortune he is willing to spend, but says “the well is not dry.” Casey raised $1.9 million last quarter and has $6.2 million in cash.
Brabender says Smith needs to not only write big checks to move the race, but to also create a more dramatic and dynamic race. “I do think the challenge for Smith is . . . to find a little more passion, and take it right to Casey.”
The campaign plans to hit the airwaves soon, and has hinted that ads will both introduce Smith to voters and show a contrast with Casey. On Wednesday, the challenger launched a website in an effort to paint Casey as an ineffective senator for not passing any legislation while in the upper chamber, though he either sponsored or co-sponsored a couple hundred bills. The campaign also released a Web video calling Casey “Senator Zero.”
Casey’s team said Smith doesn’t understand the legislative process. “Due to compromise and negotiation, bills and amendments are added to other bills, or a different version of the bill is the one that is signed into law,” spokesman Larry Smar said in a statement. “Bob Casey has a record of working with Republicans and Democrats to find commonsense solutions to problems. In the past year alone he passed a tax cut for middle-class families and legislation to help workers who lost their jobs due to unfair foreign trade.”
Smith’s strategy in Pennsylvania rests on tying Casey to President Obama, whose second term in the White House likely hinges on winning the state. Obama is currently leading Romney here, 46 percent to 39 percent, according to the Quinnipiac poll, but his approval rating is underwater, 49 percent to 45 percent. Democrats outnumber Republicans here in voter registration by a little more than 1 million. Like most Republicans in congressional races, Smith says he will focus on Casey’s support for the health care reform law, the stimulus plan and the auto rescue. Like Romney, Smith believes failing auto companies should have taken the bankruptcy route.
“With all due respect to Sen. Bob Casey, I think Pennsylvanians want us to grow the economy so they can have jobs,” Smith says. “With all due respect to Sen. Casey, he’s never done that. Maybe he doesn’t know how to do it. Whereas I’ve been doing that for a while.”
Digging Into the Business World
After his father died, Smith took over the family farm, which produces grain and corn, instead of going to college. He also managed the family’s small school bus company. After marrying wife Saundy, he went to work in the mines near his home. In 1989, Smith mortgaged his house to purchase mining permits, and worked out a rent-to-own deal with an equipment provider. Over the course of two decades, he opened and operated over 20 mines, which generated 100,000 tons of coal per month among them.
Smith sold the last of his mines two years ago and left the business. But his experience there informs how he would govern. If he was going to borrow millions of dollars to pay for equipment, he had to first figure out how to finance it over a period of time, he says, standing next to a heap of coal and soot-covered conveyer belts at the first mine he opened, a couple miles from his farm. He recalls, by name, some of the men he employed there. Market conditions caused the current owner to temporarily close this deep mine, Smith says.
In his Senate campaign, Smith will argue that Environmental Protection Agency regulations will cause other mines to close and leave workers without jobs. He hit Casey recently for opposing a GOP measure in the Senate that would weaken an EPA law regulating mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants. (One such plant is visible from Smith’s driveway.) The Obama administration, he believes, has waged a “war on coal” through these types of regulations. Coal powers roughly 40 percent of Pennsylvania’s energy.
Smith then drives his Ford F-250 to a patch of land where several rows of corn now grow. This used to be a mine, he says, and explains how he and his crew filled it back in over the course of a few months.
Smith is clearly more familiar with mining and farming than he is politics. At Tina’s Lodge, he comes and goes without introducing himself to the diners there. Asked whether he has talked with Santorum, who lost to Casey by 18 points in 2006, Smith says he ought to set up a meeting. RCP tells him he is scheduled to appear with Santorum at the opening of a Romney campaign office in Greensburg the following day. Oh, he says, I didn’t know that.
At that opening, Santorum encouraged the crowd to support Smith, whom he called “a good man.” After his speech, Santorum told RCP that Casey is a “rubber stamp” for the Obama administration, a term Casey once used to define Santorum for voting with President George W. Bush during his time in the Senate. “Casey, who said he was going to be a moderate Democrat, is equally as radical as Barack Obama, and it’s pretty sad,” Santorum said.
While reports indicate Casey has voted with his party 95 percent of the time, observers note his calm and quiet demeanor and describe him as low key. Both Casey and Smith are “two candidates who clearly need more caffeine in their lives,” says Brabender. In Casey's defense, Smar says the senator "has strong record of fighting for Pennsylvania jobs and middle-class families, but he doesn't have Tom Smith's personal coal fortune or Smith's backing from national Tea Party groups.”
Smith has also been working with the Romney campaign. He attended two fundraisers with Tagg Romney in Lancaster last week, and appeared with the presidential nominee at a spirited rally in Irwin, a working-class town outside Pittsburgh.
“Our Republican ticket, led by Governor Romney, will fight to restore our freedoms, create jobs and get our economy back on track,” Smith told the crowd before Romney spoke. “Like me, Governor Romney comes from the private sector. . . . We know how to create jobs. So we know what’s at stake this November.”
But observers say Romney’s coattails might not be long enough to carry Smith. “There’s a possibility people [will] split the ticket,” Ron Rometo, a Westmoreland County district chair, said after the Santorum-Smith event for Romney in Greensburg. “Certainly there are a lot more anti-Obama people out there than there are anti-Casey. . . . Those who follow things like this know how important it is to take the Senate.”
Smith hopes to make that case over the summer and into the fall. As for whether he expects to go to Washington in January, he answers simply: “We won’t know until we try. And we will try.”
Land That He Loves
Back at the farm, Smith drives to the top of one of the many rolling, manicured fields and parks. This is his favorite spot, he says, because you can see most of the spread from the center of it.
Even after six decades here, he still marvels at the farm’s beauty and speaks enthusiastically about mowing wheat. How could he leave this place? “I’m giving up something I love very much for something I love even more -- and that’s the future of my country, future generations.”
Caitlin Huey-Burns is a reporter for RealClearPolitics.
July 19, 2012
Real Clear Politics:
SHELOCTA, Pa. -- Tom Smith was mowing wheat on his 400-acre Armstrong County farm last summer when he decided he would run for U.S. Senate.
Smith was born and raised on this stretch of land an hour's drive outside Pittsburgh where coal mines neighbor corn farms, and he remembers wondering that day how the national debt would impact his grandchildren, some of whom also live on the farm. After talking it over with his wife and his pastor, Smith changed his voter registration from Democrat to Republican, and began a bid for the Republican nomination to challenge incumbent Democrat -- and Pennsylvania brand name -- Bob Casey.
“I was raised in a time where a farm boy, just a farm boy, who knew how to work, could follow his dream and achieve it,” says Smith, who later made millions owning several coal mines close to his farm and is self-funding a substantial part of his Senate bid. “This country gave me the opportunity to come off the farm, start my own business and do reasonably well. My goodness gracious sakes alive, who wouldn’t give a part of his life to protect that for future generations? He couldn’t have a heart if he didn’t.”
Smith, 64, sounds earnest in his willingness to leave this bucolic setting for frenzied Washington. But his challenge to Casey is a long shot. The RealClearPolitics average shows the first-term senator leading Smith by 15 points. A June Quinnipiac University poll finds Smith trailing the incumbent by 17 points overall, and 14 points among independents. Smith is a relative unknown in the state, while his opponent is a former state treasurer, the son of the late, well-known and popular two-term Gov. Robert Casey Sr., and has a well-established organization behind him throughout the state.
But Casey has failed to break 50 percent in the polls, a potentially vulnerable position for an incumbent. Casey pointed this out in a fundraising letter recently, and warned of Smith’s ability to self-fund and the possibility of Karl Rove’s super PAC getting involved. Crossroads GPS has spent $2.7 million on the presidential race in the Keystone State but has not reserved airtime for the Senate contest. The Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee has been working with the Smith campaign, but it is not clear whether it will spend much time and money on this race either. It has been 50 years since a Democrat was re-elected to the Senate from Pennsylvania, but Casey faces better odds than his predecessors.
The Casey brand, combined with an expected high Democratic turnout in a presidential election year (no GOP White House contender has won the state since 1988) seems to have deterred better-known Republicans from running in this race. “Had there been a Pat Toomey warmed up in the bullpen in the Republican Party to take on Senator Casey, we would not be talking today,” Smith says, referring to the Republican senator elected in 2010.
But Smith embraces his underdog status. “I like being underestimated,” he says after finishing a lunch of grilled cheese and chili at Tina’s Log Cabin Restaurant, a diner located in the small town near his farm. A waitress comes to refill his soda, and asks if he is running for something. Smith nods, and mentions the Senate. She asks: Is it the state one or the “big one”? The U.S. Senate, he replies quietly.
An Energy Deficit?
Smith’s folksy appeal and successful business experience make him an attractive candidate in many parts of this manufacturing-based battleground state, but observers say he needs to turn up the heat to make this a competitive race.
“Honestly, they’ve got to light the fire under the candidate,” says John Brabender, a longtime Republican strategist who worked on Rick Santorum's losing 2006 Senate campaign against Casey as well as his presidential campaign. (Brabender also worked for Smith’s primary opponent, Tom Welch). “What hasn’t happened yet is people aren’t looking at and talking about that race.” Smith’s challenge, he asserts, “is that he needs to move this race into place because it’s the type of race where you can’t do that in the final weeks. The next four to five weeks may just be the most critical for Tom Smith that there are.”
Smith will likely have the money to do it. Corbett and the state GOP backed Welch, his primary opponent, but Smith spent $5 million of his own fortune on the race and hit the airwaves with ads to defeat Welch and clinch the nomination in April. Smith originally figured he would put enough money into the pot to get his run off the ground and build an organization. Last quarter, he donated $1.5 million to his campaign. He also raised $702,000 and has $2.9 million in cash. He won’t say how much of his own fortune he is willing to spend, but says “the well is not dry.” Casey raised $1.9 million last quarter and has $6.2 million in cash.
Brabender says Smith needs to not only write big checks to move the race, but to also create a more dramatic and dynamic race. “I do think the challenge for Smith is . . . to find a little more passion, and take it right to Casey.”
The campaign plans to hit the airwaves soon, and has hinted that ads will both introduce Smith to voters and show a contrast with Casey. On Wednesday, the challenger launched a website in an effort to paint Casey as an ineffective senator for not passing any legislation while in the upper chamber, though he either sponsored or co-sponsored a couple hundred bills. The campaign also released a Web video calling Casey “Senator Zero.”
Casey’s team said Smith doesn’t understand the legislative process. “Due to compromise and negotiation, bills and amendments are added to other bills, or a different version of the bill is the one that is signed into law,” spokesman Larry Smar said in a statement. “Bob Casey has a record of working with Republicans and Democrats to find commonsense solutions to problems. In the past year alone he passed a tax cut for middle-class families and legislation to help workers who lost their jobs due to unfair foreign trade.”
Smith’s strategy in Pennsylvania rests on tying Casey to President Obama, whose second term in the White House likely hinges on winning the state. Obama is currently leading Romney here, 46 percent to 39 percent, according to the Quinnipiac poll, but his approval rating is underwater, 49 percent to 45 percent. Democrats outnumber Republicans here in voter registration by a little more than 1 million. Like most Republicans in congressional races, Smith says he will focus on Casey’s support for the health care reform law, the stimulus plan and the auto rescue. Like Romney, Smith believes failing auto companies should have taken the bankruptcy route.
“With all due respect to Sen. Bob Casey, I think Pennsylvanians want us to grow the economy so they can have jobs,” Smith says. “With all due respect to Sen. Casey, he’s never done that. Maybe he doesn’t know how to do it. Whereas I’ve been doing that for a while.”
Digging Into the Business World
After his father died, Smith took over the family farm, which produces grain and corn, instead of going to college. He also managed the family’s small school bus company. After marrying wife Saundy, he went to work in the mines near his home. In 1989, Smith mortgaged his house to purchase mining permits, and worked out a rent-to-own deal with an equipment provider. Over the course of two decades, he opened and operated over 20 mines, which generated 100,000 tons of coal per month among them.
Smith sold the last of his mines two years ago and left the business. But his experience there informs how he would govern. If he was going to borrow millions of dollars to pay for equipment, he had to first figure out how to finance it over a period of time, he says, standing next to a heap of coal and soot-covered conveyer belts at the first mine he opened, a couple miles from his farm. He recalls, by name, some of the men he employed there. Market conditions caused the current owner to temporarily close this deep mine, Smith says.
In his Senate campaign, Smith will argue that Environmental Protection Agency regulations will cause other mines to close and leave workers without jobs. He hit Casey recently for opposing a GOP measure in the Senate that would weaken an EPA law regulating mercury emissions from coal-fired power plants. (One such plant is visible from Smith’s driveway.) The Obama administration, he believes, has waged a “war on coal” through these types of regulations. Coal powers roughly 40 percent of Pennsylvania’s energy.
Smith then drives his Ford F-250 to a patch of land where several rows of corn now grow. This used to be a mine, he says, and explains how he and his crew filled it back in over the course of a few months.
Smith is clearly more familiar with mining and farming than he is politics. At Tina’s Lodge, he comes and goes without introducing himself to the diners there. Asked whether he has talked with Santorum, who lost to Casey by 18 points in 2006, Smith says he ought to set up a meeting. RCP tells him he is scheduled to appear with Santorum at the opening of a Romney campaign office in Greensburg the following day. Oh, he says, I didn’t know that.
At that opening, Santorum encouraged the crowd to support Smith, whom he called “a good man.” After his speech, Santorum told RCP that Casey is a “rubber stamp” for the Obama administration, a term Casey once used to define Santorum for voting with President George W. Bush during his time in the Senate. “Casey, who said he was going to be a moderate Democrat, is equally as radical as Barack Obama, and it’s pretty sad,” Santorum said.
While reports indicate Casey has voted with his party 95 percent of the time, observers note his calm and quiet demeanor and describe him as low key. Both Casey and Smith are “two candidates who clearly need more caffeine in their lives,” says Brabender. In Casey's defense, Smar says the senator "has strong record of fighting for Pennsylvania jobs and middle-class families, but he doesn't have Tom Smith's personal coal fortune or Smith's backing from national Tea Party groups.”
Smith has also been working with the Romney campaign. He attended two fundraisers with Tagg Romney in Lancaster last week, and appeared with the presidential nominee at a spirited rally in Irwin, a working-class town outside Pittsburgh.
“Our Republican ticket, led by Governor Romney, will fight to restore our freedoms, create jobs and get our economy back on track,” Smith told the crowd before Romney spoke. “Like me, Governor Romney comes from the private sector. . . . We know how to create jobs. So we know what’s at stake this November.”
But observers say Romney’s coattails might not be long enough to carry Smith. “There’s a possibility people [will] split the ticket,” Ron Rometo, a Westmoreland County district chair, said after the Santorum-Smith event for Romney in Greensburg. “Certainly there are a lot more anti-Obama people out there than there are anti-Casey. . . . Those who follow things like this know how important it is to take the Senate.”
Smith hopes to make that case over the summer and into the fall. As for whether he expects to go to Washington in January, he answers simply: “We won’t know until we try. And we will try.”
Land That He Loves
Back at the farm, Smith drives to the top of one of the many rolling, manicured fields and parks. This is his favorite spot, he says, because you can see most of the spread from the center of it.
Even after six decades here, he still marvels at the farm’s beauty and speaks enthusiastically about mowing wheat. How could he leave this place? “I’m giving up something I love very much for something I love even more -- and that’s the future of my country, future generations.”
Caitlin Huey-Burns is a reporter for RealClearPolitics.
Colorado Batman shooting shows obvious signs of being staged
Friday, July 20, 2012
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com
(NaturalNews) James Holmes, the Aurora, Colorado shooter who reportedly opened fire at a Batman movie premiere, was a medical student at the University of Colorado, pursuing a PhD in neuroscience, reports ABC News.
As part of the attack, Holmes painted his hair red and referred to himself as "The Joker," one of the arch enemies in the DC Comics-inspired Batman movie series.
According to news reports, this sudden violent rampage was completely out of character for James Holmes, who was described as "shy."
The New York Times is now reporting:
Billy Kromka, a pre-med student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, worked with Mr. Holmes for three months last summer as a research assistant in a lab of at the Anschutz Medical Campus. Mr. Kromka said he was surprised to learn Mr. Holmes was the shooting suspect. "It was just shocking, because there was no way I thought he could have the capacity to do commit an atrocity like this," he said.
"He spent much of his time immersed in the computer, often participating in role-playing online games..."
There is already conjecture that James Holmes may have been involved in mind-altering neuroscience research and ended up becoming involved at a depth he never anticipated. His actions clearly show a strange detachment from reality, indicating he was not in his right mind. That can only typically be accomplished through drugs, hypnosis or trauma (and sometimes all three).
His behavior doesn't add up
His behavior already reveals stark inconsistencies that question the mainstream explanation of events. For example, he opened fire on innocent people but then calmly surrendered to police without resistance. This is not consistent with the idea of "killing everyone."
Furthermore, he then admitted to police that his apartment was booby-trapped with explosives. If you were really an evil-minded Joker trying to kill people (including cops), why would you warn them about the booby trap in advance? It doesn't add up.
"Holmes was taken into custody shortly after the shooting, police said, adding he didn't resist when he was arrested," reports a local CBS news affiliate..
"After his arrest, Holmes told police about 'possible explosives in his residence,' Oates said. When police searched his apartment, they discovered it was booby-trapped and evacuated surrounding buildings, police said. Oates said bomb technicians are determining how to disarm flammable or explosive material in the third-floor apartment. He said police could be there some time."
None of this checks out. If you're a killer bent on causing mayhem, why tell the police about your surprise bomb waiting for them back at your apartment?
Holmes was clearly provided with exotic gear
Continuing from CBS:
"He said pictures from inside the apartment are fairly disturbing and the devices look to be sophisticated, adding the booby-traps were 'something I've never seen.' One rifle, two handguns, a knife, a bullet proof vest, a ballistic helmet, a gas device, a gas mask, military SWAT clothing and unidentified explosives were also found in Holmes' car, a law enforcement source told CBS News. Oates said Holmes wore a gas mask, a ballistic helmet and vest as well as leg, groin and throat protectors during the shooting."
In other words, this guy was equipped with exotic gear by someone with connections to military equipment. SWAT clothing, explosives, complex booby-traps... c'mon, this isn't a "lone gunman." This is somebody who was selected for a mission, given equipment to carry it out, then somehow brainwashed into getting it done.
"Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates said Holmes' apartment is booby-trapped with a 'sophisticated' maze of flammable devices. It could take hours or days for authorities to disarm it," reports Yahoo News.
This is not your run-of-the-mill crime of passion. It was a carefully planned, heavily funded and technically advanced attack. Who might be behind all this? The FBI, of course, which has a long history of setting up and staging similar attacks, then stopping them right before they happen. See four documented stories on these facts:
http://www.naturalnews.com/035849_domestic_terror_plots_FBI.html
http://www.naturalnews.com/034325_FBI_entrapment_terror_plots.html
http://www.naturalnews.com/033751_FBI_terrorism.html
http://www.naturalnews.com/035757_FBI_terror_plots_false_flag.html
As you soak all this in, remember that the FBI had admitted to setting up terror plots, providing the weapons and gear, staging the location of the bombings and even driving the vehicles to pull it off! This is not a conspiracy theory, it's been admitted by the FBI right out in the open. Even the New York Times openly reports all this in stories like this one:
NYT: Terrorist Plots, Hatched by the F.B.I. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/terrorist-plots-help...)
THE United States has been narrowly saved from lethal terrorist plots in recent years -- or so it has seemed. A would-be suicide bomber was intercepted on his way to the Capitol; a scheme to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was developed by men in Newburgh, N.Y.; and a fanciful idea to fly explosive-laden model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol was hatched in Massachusetts. But all these dramas were facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. ...the F.B.I. provided a van loaded with six 55-gallon drums of “inert material,” harmless blasting caps, a detonator cord and a gallon of diesel fuel to make the van smell flammable. An undercover F.B.I. agent even did the driving...
Mystery man Holmes has no background
On top of all this, Holmes apparently has no background. "He's not on anybody's radar screen -- nothing," said a peace officer in a NYT article. "This guy is somewhat of an enigma. Nobody knows anything about him."
Mr. Holmes's only criminal history is a traffic summons, the authorities said. He earned a bachelor's degree with honors in neuroscience in 2010 from the University of California, Riverside, and was a graduate student in neurosciences at the University of Colorado at Denver's Anschutz Medical Campus... He was currently collecting unemployment...
Question: How does an unemployed medical student afford $20,000 in weapons gear?
If you start to look at the really big picture here, the obvious question arises: How does an unemployed medical student afford all the complex weapons gear, bomb-making gear, "flammable" booby trap devices, ammunition, multiple magazines, bullet-proof vest, groin protection, ballistic helmet, SWAT uniform and all the rest of it?
A decent AR-15 rifle costs $1,000 or more all by itself. The shotgun and handgun might run another $800 total. Spare mags, sights, slings, and so on will run you at least another $1,000 across three firearms. The bullet-proof vest is easily another $800, and the cost of the bomb-making gear is anybody's guess. With all the specialty body gear, ammunition, booby-trap devices and more, I'm guessing this is at least $20,000 in weapons and tactical gear, much of which is very difficult for civilians to get in the first place.
The mere manufacture of an explosive booby-trap device is, all by itself, a felony crime by the way. And remember: "Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates said Holmes' apartment is booby-trapped with a 'sophisticated' maze of flammable devices. It could take hours or days for authorities to disarm it," reported Yahoo News.
Question: Where does an unemployed, introverted medical school student get the training to deploy sophisticated booby traps, tactical body armor, weapons systems and more? Certainly not in graduate school!
All this leads to an obvious third party influence over all this. Someone else taught this guy these skills and funded the acquisition of the equipment.
Staged just in time for a vote on the UN small arms treaty?
More and more, this shooting is looking like a deliberate plot staged by the government itself much like Operation Fast and Furious pulled off by the ATF (http://www.naturalnews.com/032934_ATF_illegal_firearms.html) which helped smuggle tens of thousands of guns into Mexico for the purpose of causing "gun violence" in the USA, then blaming the Second Amendment for it.
All this looks like James Holmes completed a "mission" and then calmly ended that mission by surrendering to police and admitting everything. The mission, as we are now learning, was to cause as much terror and mayhem as possible, then to have that multiplied by the national media at exactly the right time leading up the UN vote next week on a global small arms treaty that could result in gun confiscation across America. (http://lewrockwell.com/eddlem/eddlem61.1.html)
Even Forbes.com wrote about this quite extensively, warning readers about the coming gun confiscation effort related to the UN treaty. The story was authored by Larry Bell (http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2011/06/07/u-n-agreement-should...) and says the UN treaty could "override our national sovereignty, and in the process, provide license for the federal government to assert preemptive powers over state regulatory powers guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment in addition to our Second Amendment rights."
In other words, this has all the signs of Fast & Furious, Episode II. I wouldn't be surprised to discover someone in Washington was behind it all. After all, there's no quicker way to disarm a nation and take total control over the population than to stage violence, blame it on firearms, then call for leaders to "do something!" Such calls inevitably end up resulting in gun confiscation, and it's never too long after that before government genocide really kicks in like we saw with Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao and other tyrants.
Governments routinely murder millions
Here's a short list of government mass murder carried out throughout history, almost always immediately following the disarmament of the public (and usually involving staged false flag events to justify the disarmament):
50+ million dead: Mao Ze-Dong (China, 1958-61 and 1966-69, Tibet 1949-50)
12+ million dead: Adolf Hitler (Germany, 1939-1945) - concentration camps, civilian deaths and dead Russian POWs
8+ million dead: Leopold II of Belgium (Congo, 1886-1908)
6+ million dead: Jozef Stalin (USSR, 1932-39)
5+ million dead: Hideki Tojo (Japan, 1941-44)
2+ million dead: Ismail Enver (Turkey, 1915-22)
1.7 million dead: Pol Pot (Cambodia, 1975-79)
1.6 million dead: Kim Il Sung (North Korea, 1948-94)
1.5 million dead: Menghistu (Ethiopia, 1975-78)
1 million dead: Yakubu Gowon (Biafra, 1967-1970)
900,000 dead: Leonid Brezhnev (Afghanistan, 1979-1982)
800,000 dead: Jean Kambanda (Rwanda, 1994)
See more at:
http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/dictat.html
Death by government:
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.CHAP1.HTM
http://www.infowars.com/democide-government-killed-over-260-million-i...
A "monopoly of force" in government is far more dangerous than a crazed lone shooter
So yes, James Holmes and other crazed shooters kill a number of people each year in random acts of violence. It's horrifying and wrong, but it's nothing compared to the millions of lives that governments tend to destroy when they gain total power over the populace.
The most dangerous thing in the world, it turns out, is not a crazy person with a rifle; it's a government with a "monopoly of force" over the entire population. And that's exactly what the UN spells out as its goal for the world: Stripping all power from individual citizens and handing "monopolies of force" to the governments of the world, shoring up their positions as the only "legitimate" power on the planet.
See this document entitled, "Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF)" policy paper No. 24:
http://www.naturalnews.com/files/Revisiting-the-State-Monopoly-on-the...
As this document reveals, a table entitled "Governance solutions for reasserting the state monopoly on the use of force" lists the options available to governments to re-establish "monopolies of force" against their own people:
• (Re-)establish state monopoly
- Ownership of WMDs
- Safety Inspectorates
• Prohibit business activity
- Justice and Execution
- Deadly Force?
• Regulate/limit activities
- Private defense/security services
- Control of financial transfers
- Export controls
- Transport and infrastructure safety
- Environmental impact
Interestingly, that document also describes "terrorism" in a way that perfectly matches the Aurora, Colorado "Batman" movie theater shooter:
Terrorists aim to spread panic and fear in societies in order to achieve political goals, be they based on left- or right-wing, social-revolutionary, nationalistic or religious ideologies. They are organized in a clandestine way, most often in small groups and cells... Typical tactical means include kidnapping, hostage-taking, sabotage, murder, suicide attacks, vehicle bombs and improvised explosive devices.
A global monopoly of force
This document is a goldmine of information about the globalist agenda to disarm and enslave the population. Check out page 28, which reads:
The legitimate monopoly of force should not be limited to the nation-state but should be based on the local, national, regional and the global levels.
Global Security Governance and the Monopoly of Force
At the global level no monopoly of violence exists. The UN Security Council already has a monopoly power to authorize the use of force at the global level, although the UN was never given the necessary means to exercise this authority, such as the capacity to implement sanctions, a police force and armed forces...
This deficiency in global governance acts as a bottleneck and a barrier to the creation of the democratically legitimized monopoly of violence that is globally required.
This story gets deep, doesn't it? Watch for more analysis here at NaturalNews.com, where we still fight for liberty and justice in a world that's increasingly becoming enslaved.
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com
(NaturalNews) James Holmes, the Aurora, Colorado shooter who reportedly opened fire at a Batman movie premiere, was a medical student at the University of Colorado, pursuing a PhD in neuroscience, reports ABC News.
As part of the attack, Holmes painted his hair red and referred to himself as "The Joker," one of the arch enemies in the DC Comics-inspired Batman movie series.
According to news reports, this sudden violent rampage was completely out of character for James Holmes, who was described as "shy."
The New York Times is now reporting:
Billy Kromka, a pre-med student at the University of Colorado, Boulder, worked with Mr. Holmes for three months last summer as a research assistant in a lab of at the Anschutz Medical Campus. Mr. Kromka said he was surprised to learn Mr. Holmes was the shooting suspect. "It was just shocking, because there was no way I thought he could have the capacity to do commit an atrocity like this," he said.
"He spent much of his time immersed in the computer, often participating in role-playing online games..."
There is already conjecture that James Holmes may have been involved in mind-altering neuroscience research and ended up becoming involved at a depth he never anticipated. His actions clearly show a strange detachment from reality, indicating he was not in his right mind. That can only typically be accomplished through drugs, hypnosis or trauma (and sometimes all three).
His behavior doesn't add up
His behavior already reveals stark inconsistencies that question the mainstream explanation of events. For example, he opened fire on innocent people but then calmly surrendered to police without resistance. This is not consistent with the idea of "killing everyone."
Furthermore, he then admitted to police that his apartment was booby-trapped with explosives. If you were really an evil-minded Joker trying to kill people (including cops), why would you warn them about the booby trap in advance? It doesn't add up.
"Holmes was taken into custody shortly after the shooting, police said, adding he didn't resist when he was arrested," reports a local CBS news affiliate..
"After his arrest, Holmes told police about 'possible explosives in his residence,' Oates said. When police searched his apartment, they discovered it was booby-trapped and evacuated surrounding buildings, police said. Oates said bomb technicians are determining how to disarm flammable or explosive material in the third-floor apartment. He said police could be there some time."
None of this checks out. If you're a killer bent on causing mayhem, why tell the police about your surprise bomb waiting for them back at your apartment?
Holmes was clearly provided with exotic gear
Continuing from CBS:
"He said pictures from inside the apartment are fairly disturbing and the devices look to be sophisticated, adding the booby-traps were 'something I've never seen.' One rifle, two handguns, a knife, a bullet proof vest, a ballistic helmet, a gas device, a gas mask, military SWAT clothing and unidentified explosives were also found in Holmes' car, a law enforcement source told CBS News. Oates said Holmes wore a gas mask, a ballistic helmet and vest as well as leg, groin and throat protectors during the shooting."
In other words, this guy was equipped with exotic gear by someone with connections to military equipment. SWAT clothing, explosives, complex booby-traps... c'mon, this isn't a "lone gunman." This is somebody who was selected for a mission, given equipment to carry it out, then somehow brainwashed into getting it done.
"Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates said Holmes' apartment is booby-trapped with a 'sophisticated' maze of flammable devices. It could take hours or days for authorities to disarm it," reports Yahoo News.
This is not your run-of-the-mill crime of passion. It was a carefully planned, heavily funded and technically advanced attack. Who might be behind all this? The FBI, of course, which has a long history of setting up and staging similar attacks, then stopping them right before they happen. See four documented stories on these facts:
http://www.naturalnews.com/035849_domestic_terror_plots_FBI.html
http://www.naturalnews.com/034325_FBI_entrapment_terror_plots.html
http://www.naturalnews.com/033751_FBI_terrorism.html
http://www.naturalnews.com/035757_FBI_terror_plots_false_flag.html
As you soak all this in, remember that the FBI had admitted to setting up terror plots, providing the weapons and gear, staging the location of the bombings and even driving the vehicles to pull it off! This is not a conspiracy theory, it's been admitted by the FBI right out in the open. Even the New York Times openly reports all this in stories like this one:
NYT: Terrorist Plots, Hatched by the F.B.I. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/terrorist-plots-help...)
THE United States has been narrowly saved from lethal terrorist plots in recent years -- or so it has seemed. A would-be suicide bomber was intercepted on his way to the Capitol; a scheme to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was developed by men in Newburgh, N.Y.; and a fanciful idea to fly explosive-laden model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol was hatched in Massachusetts. But all these dramas were facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. ...the F.B.I. provided a van loaded with six 55-gallon drums of “inert material,” harmless blasting caps, a detonator cord and a gallon of diesel fuel to make the van smell flammable. An undercover F.B.I. agent even did the driving...
Mystery man Holmes has no background
On top of all this, Holmes apparently has no background. "He's not on anybody's radar screen -- nothing," said a peace officer in a NYT article. "This guy is somewhat of an enigma. Nobody knows anything about him."
Mr. Holmes's only criminal history is a traffic summons, the authorities said. He earned a bachelor's degree with honors in neuroscience in 2010 from the University of California, Riverside, and was a graduate student in neurosciences at the University of Colorado at Denver's Anschutz Medical Campus... He was currently collecting unemployment...
Question: How does an unemployed medical student afford $20,000 in weapons gear?
If you start to look at the really big picture here, the obvious question arises: How does an unemployed medical student afford all the complex weapons gear, bomb-making gear, "flammable" booby trap devices, ammunition, multiple magazines, bullet-proof vest, groin protection, ballistic helmet, SWAT uniform and all the rest of it?
A decent AR-15 rifle costs $1,000 or more all by itself. The shotgun and handgun might run another $800 total. Spare mags, sights, slings, and so on will run you at least another $1,000 across three firearms. The bullet-proof vest is easily another $800, and the cost of the bomb-making gear is anybody's guess. With all the specialty body gear, ammunition, booby-trap devices and more, I'm guessing this is at least $20,000 in weapons and tactical gear, much of which is very difficult for civilians to get in the first place.
The mere manufacture of an explosive booby-trap device is, all by itself, a felony crime by the way. And remember: "Aurora Police Chief Dan Oates said Holmes' apartment is booby-trapped with a 'sophisticated' maze of flammable devices. It could take hours or days for authorities to disarm it," reported Yahoo News.
Question: Where does an unemployed, introverted medical school student get the training to deploy sophisticated booby traps, tactical body armor, weapons systems and more? Certainly not in graduate school!
All this leads to an obvious third party influence over all this. Someone else taught this guy these skills and funded the acquisition of the equipment.
Staged just in time for a vote on the UN small arms treaty?
More and more, this shooting is looking like a deliberate plot staged by the government itself much like Operation Fast and Furious pulled off by the ATF (http://www.naturalnews.com/032934_ATF_illegal_firearms.html) which helped smuggle tens of thousands of guns into Mexico for the purpose of causing "gun violence" in the USA, then blaming the Second Amendment for it.
All this looks like James Holmes completed a "mission" and then calmly ended that mission by surrendering to police and admitting everything. The mission, as we are now learning, was to cause as much terror and mayhem as possible, then to have that multiplied by the national media at exactly the right time leading up the UN vote next week on a global small arms treaty that could result in gun confiscation across America. (http://lewrockwell.com/eddlem/eddlem61.1.html)
Even Forbes.com wrote about this quite extensively, warning readers about the coming gun confiscation effort related to the UN treaty. The story was authored by Larry Bell (http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2011/06/07/u-n-agreement-should...) and says the UN treaty could "override our national sovereignty, and in the process, provide license for the federal government to assert preemptive powers over state regulatory powers guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment in addition to our Second Amendment rights."
In other words, this has all the signs of Fast & Furious, Episode II. I wouldn't be surprised to discover someone in Washington was behind it all. After all, there's no quicker way to disarm a nation and take total control over the population than to stage violence, blame it on firearms, then call for leaders to "do something!" Such calls inevitably end up resulting in gun confiscation, and it's never too long after that before government genocide really kicks in like we saw with Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao and other tyrants.
Governments routinely murder millions
Here's a short list of government mass murder carried out throughout history, almost always immediately following the disarmament of the public (and usually involving staged false flag events to justify the disarmament):
50+ million dead: Mao Ze-Dong (China, 1958-61 and 1966-69, Tibet 1949-50)
12+ million dead: Adolf Hitler (Germany, 1939-1945) - concentration camps, civilian deaths and dead Russian POWs
8+ million dead: Leopold II of Belgium (Congo, 1886-1908)
6+ million dead: Jozef Stalin (USSR, 1932-39)
5+ million dead: Hideki Tojo (Japan, 1941-44)
2+ million dead: Ismail Enver (Turkey, 1915-22)
1.7 million dead: Pol Pot (Cambodia, 1975-79)
1.6 million dead: Kim Il Sung (North Korea, 1948-94)
1.5 million dead: Menghistu (Ethiopia, 1975-78)
1 million dead: Yakubu Gowon (Biafra, 1967-1970)
900,000 dead: Leonid Brezhnev (Afghanistan, 1979-1982)
800,000 dead: Jean Kambanda (Rwanda, 1994)
See more at:
http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/dictat.html
Death by government:
http://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/DBG.CHAP1.HTM
http://www.infowars.com/democide-government-killed-over-260-million-i...
A "monopoly of force" in government is far more dangerous than a crazed lone shooter
So yes, James Holmes and other crazed shooters kill a number of people each year in random acts of violence. It's horrifying and wrong, but it's nothing compared to the millions of lives that governments tend to destroy when they gain total power over the populace.
The most dangerous thing in the world, it turns out, is not a crazy person with a rifle; it's a government with a "monopoly of force" over the entire population. And that's exactly what the UN spells out as its goal for the world: Stripping all power from individual citizens and handing "monopolies of force" to the governments of the world, shoring up their positions as the only "legitimate" power on the planet.
See this document entitled, "Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF)" policy paper No. 24:
http://www.naturalnews.com/files/Revisiting-the-State-Monopoly-on-the...
As this document reveals, a table entitled "Governance solutions for reasserting the state monopoly on the use of force" lists the options available to governments to re-establish "monopolies of force" against their own people:
• (Re-)establish state monopoly
- Ownership of WMDs
- Safety Inspectorates
• Prohibit business activity
- Justice and Execution
- Deadly Force?
• Regulate/limit activities
- Private defense/security services
- Control of financial transfers
- Export controls
- Transport and infrastructure safety
- Environmental impact
Interestingly, that document also describes "terrorism" in a way that perfectly matches the Aurora, Colorado "Batman" movie theater shooter:
Terrorists aim to spread panic and fear in societies in order to achieve political goals, be they based on left- or right-wing, social-revolutionary, nationalistic or religious ideologies. They are organized in a clandestine way, most often in small groups and cells... Typical tactical means include kidnapping, hostage-taking, sabotage, murder, suicide attacks, vehicle bombs and improvised explosive devices.
A global monopoly of force
This document is a goldmine of information about the globalist agenda to disarm and enslave the population. Check out page 28, which reads:
The legitimate monopoly of force should not be limited to the nation-state but should be based on the local, national, regional and the global levels.
Global Security Governance and the Monopoly of Force
At the global level no monopoly of violence exists. The UN Security Council already has a monopoly power to authorize the use of force at the global level, although the UN was never given the necessary means to exercise this authority, such as the capacity to implement sanctions, a police force and armed forces...
This deficiency in global governance acts as a bottleneck and a barrier to the creation of the democratically legitimized monopoly of violence that is globally required.
This story gets deep, doesn't it? Watch for more analysis here at NaturalNews.com, where we still fight for liberty and justice in a world that's increasingly becoming enslaved.
“The Population Control Holocaust”
Robert Zubrin
There is a single ideological current running through a seemingly disparate collection of noxious modern political and scientific movements, ranging from militarism, imperialism, racism, xenophobia, and radical environmentalism, to socialism, Nazism, and totalitarian communism. This is the ideology of antihumanism: the belief that the human race is a horde of vermin whose unconstrained aspirations and appetites endanger the natural order, and that tyrannical measures are necessary to constrain humanity. The founding prophet of modern antihumanism is Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), who offered a pseudoscientific basis for the idea that human reproduction always outruns available resources. Following this pessimistic and inaccurate assessment of the capacity of human ingenuity to develop new resources, Malthus advocated oppressive policies that led to the starvation of millions in India and Ireland.
While Malthus’s argument that human population growth invariably leads to famine and poverty is plainly at odds with the historical evidence, which shows global living standards rising with population growth, it nonetheless persisted and even gained strength among intellectuals and political leaders in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its most pernicious manifestation in recent decades has been the doctrine of population control, famously advocated by ecologist Paul Ehrlich, whose bestselling 1968 antihumanist tract The Population Bomb has served as the bible of neo-Malthusianism. In this book, Ehrlich warned of overpopulation and advocated that the American government adopt stringent population control measures, both domestically and for the Third World countries that received American foreign aid. (Ehrlich, it should be noted, is the mentor of and frequent collaborator with John Holdren, President Obama’s science advisor.)
Until the mid-1960s, American population control programs, both at home and abroad, were largely funded and implemented by private organizations such as the Population Council and Planned Parenthood — groups with deep roots in the eugenics movement. While disposing of millions of dollars provided to them by the Rockefeller, Ford, and Milbank Foundations, among others, the resources available to support their work were meager in comparison with their vast ambitions. This situation changed radically in the mid-1960s, when the U.S. Congress, responding to the agitation of overpopulation ideologues, finally appropriated federal funds to underwrite first domestic and then foreign population control programs. Suddenly, instead of mere millions, there were hundreds of millions and eventually billions of dollars available to fund global campaigns of mass abortion and forced sterilization. The result would be human catastrophe on a worldwide scale.
Among the first to be targeted were America’s own Third World population at home — the native American Indians. Starting in 1966, Secretary of the Interior Stuart Udall began to make use of newly available Medicaid money to set up sterilization programs at federally funded Indian Health Services (IHS) hospitals. As reported by Angela Franks in her 2005 book Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy:
These sterilizations were frequently performed without adequate informed consent.... Native American physician Constance Redbird Uri estimated that up to one-quarter of Indian women of childbearing age had been sterilized by 1977; in one hospital in Oklahoma, one-fourth of the women admitted (for any reason) left sterilized.... She also gathered evidence that all the pureblood women of the Kaw tribe in Oklahoma were sterilized in the 1970s....
Unfortunately, and amazingly, problems with the Indian Health Service seem to persist ... recently [in the early 1990s], in South Dakota, IHS was again accused of not following informed-consent procedures, this time for Norplant, and apparently promoted the long-acting contraceptive to Native American women who should not use it due to contraindicating, preexisting medical conditions. The Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center reports that one woman was recently told by her doctors that they would remove the implant only if she would agree to a tubal ligation. The genocidal dreams of bureaucrats still cast their shadow on American soil.
Programs of a comparable character were also set up in clinics funded by the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity in low-income (predominantly black) neighborhoods in the United States. Meanwhile, on the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, a mass sterilization program was instigated by the Draper Fund/Population Crisis Committee and implemented with federal funds from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare through the island’s major hospitals as well as a host of smaller clinics. According to the report of a medical fact-finding mission conducted in 1975, the effort was successful in sterilizing close to one-third of Puerto Rican women of child-bearing age.
Better Dead Than Red
However, it was not at home but abroad that the heaviest artillery of the population control onslaught was directed. During the Cold War, anything from the Apollo program to public-education funding could be sold to the federal government if it could be justified as part of the global struggle against communism. Accordingly, ideologues at some of the highest levels of power and influence formulated a party line that the population of the world’s poor nations needed to be drastically cut in order to reduce the potential recruitment pool available to the communist cause. President Lyndon Johnson was provided a fraudulent study by a RAND Corporation economist that used cooked calculations to “prove” that Third World children actually had negative economic value. Thus, by allowing excessive numbers of children to be born, Asian, African, and Latin American governments were deepening the poverty of their populations, while multiplying the masses of angry proletarians ready to be led against America by the organizers of the coming World Revolution.
President Johnson bought the claptrap, including the phony math. Two months later, he declared to the United Nations that “five dollars invested in population control is worth a hundred dollars invested in economic growth.” With the Johnson administration now backing population control, Congress passed the Foreign Assistance Act in 1966, including a provision earmarking funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) for population control programs to be implemented abroad. The legislation further directed that all U.S. economic aid to foreign nations be made contingent upon their governments’ willingness to cooperate with State Department desires for the establishment of such initiatives within their own borders. In other words, for those Third World rulers willing to help sterilize their poorer subjects, there would be carrots. For the uncooperative types, there would be the stick. Given the nature of most Third World governments, such elegant simplicity of approach practically guaranteed success. The population control establishment was delighted.
An Office of Population was set up within USAID, and Dr. Reimert Thorolf Ravenholt was appointed its first director in 1966. He would hold the post until 1979, using it to create a global empire of interlocking population control organizations operating with billion-dollar budgets to suppress the existence of people considered undesirable by the U.S. Department of State.
In his devastating 2008 book Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits, author Steven Mosher provides a colorful description of Ravenholt:
Who was Dr. Ravenholt? An epidemiologist by training, he apparently looked on pregnancy as a disease, to be eradicated in the same way one eliminates smallpox or yellow fever. He was also, as it happened, a bellicose misanthrope.
He took to his work of contracepting, sterilizing, and aborting the women of the world with an aggressiveness that caused his younger colleagues to shrink back in disgust. His business cards were printed on condoms, and he delighted in handing them out to all comers. He talked incessantly about how to distribute greater quantities of birth control pills, and ensure that they were used. He advocated mass sterilization campaigns, once telling the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that one-quarter of all the fertile women in the world must be sterilized in order to meet the U.S. goals of population control and to maintain “the normal operation of U.S. commercial interests around the world.” Such rigorous measures were required, Ravenholt explained, to contain the “population explosion” which would, if left unchecked, so reduce living standards abroad that revolutions would break out “against the strong U.S. commercial presence.”...
Charming he was not. To commemorate the bicentennial of the United States in 1976, he came up with the idea of producing “stars and stripes” condoms in red, white, and blue colors for distribution around the world.... Another time, at a dinner for population researchers, Ravenholt strolled around the room making pumping motions with his fist as if he were operating a manual vacuum aspirator — a hand-held vacuum pump for performing abortions — to the horror of the other guests.
Ravenholt’s view of nonwhite people is expressed well enough in a comment he made in 2000 about slavery: “American blacks should thank their lucky stars that the institution of slavery did exist in earlier centuries; if not, these American blacks would not exist: their ancestors would have been killed by their black enemies, instead of being sold as slaves.”
As his method of operation, Ravenholt adopted the practice of distributing his funds aggressively to the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Population Council, and numerous other privately run organizations of the population control movement, enabling them to implement mass sterilization and abortion campaigns worldwide without U.S. government regulatory interference, and allowing their budgets to balloon — first tenfold, then a hundredfold, then even more. This delighted the leaders and staff of the population control establishment, who were able to embrace a luxurious lifestyle, staying in the best hotels, eating the best food, and flying first class as they jetted around the world to set up programs to eliminate the poor.
Ravenholt also had no compunction about buying up huge quantities of unproven, unapproved, defective, or banned contraceptive drugs and intrauterine devices (IUDs) and distributing them for use by his population control movement subcontractors on millions of unsuspecting Third World women, many of whom suffered or died in consequence. These included drugs and devices which had been declared unsafe by the FDA for use in America, and had faced successful lawsuits in the U.S. for their damaging results. These practices delighted the manufacturers of such equipment.
Having thus secured the unqualified support of both the population control establishment and several major pharmaceutical companies, Ravenholt was able to lobby Congress to secure ever-increasing appropriations to further expand his growing empire.
His success was remarkable. Before Ravenholt took over, USAID expenditures on population control amounted to less than 3 percent of what the agency spent on health programs in Third World nations. By 1968, Ravenholt had a budget of $36 million, compared to the USAID health programs budget of $130 million. By 1972, Ravenholt’s population control funding had grown to $120 million per year, with funds taken directly at the expense of USAID’s disease prevention and other health care initiatives, which shrank to $38 million in consequence. In just five short years, the U.S. non-military foreign aid program was transformed from a mission of mercy to an agency for human elimination.
In 1968, Robert McNamara, a staunch believer in population control, resigned his post as Secretary of Defense to assume the presidency of the World Bank. From this position he was able to dictate a new policy, making World Bank loans to Third World countries contingent upon their governments’ submission to population control, with yearly sterilization quotas set by World Bank experts. Cash-short and heavily in debt, many poor nations found this pressure very difficult to withstand. This strengthened Ravenholt’s hand immeasurably.
Destroying the Village
Upon coming into office in January 1969, the new Nixon administration sought to further advance the population control agenda. Responding to lobbying by General William H. Draper, Jr., the former under secretary of the Army and a leading overpopulation fear monger, Nixon approved U.S. government support for the establishment of the U.N. Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA). With this organization as a vehicle, vast additional American funds would be poured into the global population control effort, with their source disguised so as to ease acceptance by governments whose leaders needed to maintain a populist pose in opposition to “Yankee Imperialism.” While the United States was its primary backer, the UNFPA also served as a channel for significant additional population control funds from European nations, Canada, and Japan, collectively equal to about half the American effort.
Going still further, President Nixon in 1970 set up a special blue-ribbon Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, with longtime population control booster John D. Rockefeller III as its chairman. Reporting back in 1972, Rockefeller predictably cited the menace of U.S. population growth with alarm, and called for a large variety of population control measures to avert the putative threat of welfare-dependent, criminalistic, or other financially burdensome populations multiplying out of control. Just as predictably, the report generated scores of newspaper headlines and feature magazine articles serving to cement the population control consensus. Nixon’s politically-driven rejection of one of the commission’s recommendations — government-funded abortion on demand — only served to make Rockefeller’s Malthusian committee seem all the more “progressive.”
But Nixon’s chief interest in population control was its supposed value as a Cold War weapon. The president charged Henry Kissinger, his National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, with conducting a secret study on the role of population control measures in the fight against global communism. Kissinger pulled together a group of experts drawn from the National Security Council (NSC), the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the Department of State, USAID, and other agencies to study the question. The result was issued on December 10, 1974 in the form of the classified NSC document titled “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” The document — known as National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), or simply as the Kissinger Report — represented the encoding of Malthusian dogma as the strategic doctrine of the United States.
NSSM 200 was declassified in 1989 and so is now available for scrutiny. Examining the document, what is apparent is the Nietzschean mindset on the part of its authors, who (implicitly embracing the communist line) clearly regarded the newborn masses of the world as America’s likely enemies, rather than her friends, and as potential obstacles to the exploitation of the world’s wealth, rather than as customers, workers, and business partners participating together with America in a grand team effort to grow and advance the world economy. The memo made the case for a population control effort that is global in scope but not traceable back to its wealthy supporters.
On November 26, 1975, NSSM 200 was formally adopted by the Ford administration. A follow-up memo issued in 1976 by the NSC called for the United States to use control of food supplies to impose population control on a global scale. It further noted the value of using dictatorial power and military force as means to coerce Third World peoples into submission to population control measures, adding: “In some cases, strong direction has involved incentives such as payment to acceptors for sterilization, or disincentives such as giving low priorities in the allocation of housing or schooling to those with larger families. Such direction is the sine qua non of an effective program.”
Without a shred of justification, but with impeccable organization, generous funding, aggressive leadership, and backing by a phalanx of established respectable opinion, the population control movement was now doctrinally enshrined as representing the core strategic interest of the world’s leading superpower. It was now positioned to wreak havoc on a global scale.
The Characteristics of Population Control Programs
Of the billions of taxpayer dollars that the U.S. government has expended on population control abroad, a portion has been directly spent by USAID on its own field activities, but the majority has been laundered through a variety of international agencies. As a result of this indirect funding scheme, all attempts to compel the population control empire to conform its activities to accepted medical, ethical, safety, or human rights norms have proven futile. Rather, in direct defiance of laws enacted by Congress to try to correct the situation, what has been and continues to be perpetrated at public expense is an atrocity on a scale so vast and varied as to almost defy description. Nevertheless, it is worth attempting to convey to readers some sense of the evil that is being done with their money. Before describing some case studies, let us consider the primary characteristics manifested by nearly all the campaigns.
First, they are top-down dictatorial. In selling the effort to Americans, USAID and its beneficiaries claim that they are providing Third World women with “choice” regarding childbirth. There is no truth to this claim. As Betsy Hartmann, a liberal feminist critic of these programs, trenchantly pointed out in her 1995 book Reproductive Rights and Wrongs, “a woman’s right to choose” must necessarily include the option of having children — precisely what the population control campaigns deny her. Rather than providing “choice” to individuals, the purpose of the campaigns is to strip entire populations of their ability to reproduce. This is done by national governments, themselves under USAID or World Bank pressure, setting quotas for sterilizations, IUD insertions, or similar procedures to be imposed by their own civil service upon the subject population. Those government employees who meet or exceed their quotas of “acceptors” are rewarded; those who fail to do so are disciplined.
Second, the programs are dishonest. It is a regular practice for government civil servants employed in population control programs to lie to their prospective targets for quota-meeting about the consequences of the operations that will be performed upon them. For example, Third World peasants are frequently told by government population control personnel that sterilization operations are reversible, when in fact they are not.
Third, the programs are coercive. As a regular practice, population control programs provide “incentives” and/or “disincentives” to compel “acceptors” into accepting their “assistance.” Among the “incentives” frequently employed is the provision or denial of cash or food aid to starving people or their children. Among the “disincentives” employed are personal harassment, dismissal from employment, destruction of homes, and denial of schooling, public housing, or medical assistance to the recalcitrant.
Fourth, the programs are medically irresponsible and negligent. As a regular practice, the programs use defective, unproven, unsafe, experimental, or unapproved gear, including equipment whose use has been banned outright in the United States. They also employ large numbers of inadequately trained personnel to perform potentially life-endangering operations, or to maintain medical equipment in a supposedly sterile or otherwise safe condition. In consequence, millions of people subjected to the ministrations of such irresponsibly run population control operations have been killed. This is particularly true in Africa, where improper reuse of hypodermic needles without sterilization in population control clinics has contributed to the rapid spread of deadly infectious diseases, including AIDS.
Fifth, the programs are cruel, callous, and abusive of human dignity and human rights. A frequent practice is the sterilization of women without their knowledge or consent, typically while they are weakened in the aftermath of childbirth. This is tantamount to government-organized rape. Forced abortions are also typical. These and other human rights abuses of the population control campaign have been widely documented, with subject populations victimized in Australia, Bangladesh, China, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Kosovo, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tibet, the United States, Venezuela, and Vietnam.
Sixth, the programs are racist. Just as the global population control program itself represents an attempt by the (white-led) governments of the United States and the former imperial powers of Europe to cut nonwhite populations in the Third World, so, within each targeted nation, the local ruling group has typically made use of the population control program to attempt to eliminate the people they despise. In India, for example, the ruling upper-caste Hindus have focused the population control effort on getting rid of lower-caste untouchables and Muslims. In Sri Lanka, the ruling Singhalese have targeted the Hindu Tamils for extermination. In Peru, the Spanish-speaking descendants of the conquistadors have directed the country’s population control program toward the goal of stemming the reproduction of the darker non-Hispanic natives. In Kosovo, the Serbs used population control against the Albanians, while in Vietnam the Communist government has targeted the population control effort against the Hmong ethnic minority, America’s former wartime allies. In China, the Tibetan and Uyghur minorities have become special targets of the government’s population control effort, with multitudes of the latter rounded up for forced abortions and sterilizations. In South Africa under apartheid, the purpose of the government-run population control program went without saying. In various black African states, whichever tribe holds the reins of power regularly directs the population campaign towards the elimination of their traditional tribal rivals. There should be nothing surprising in any of this. Malthusianism has always been closely linked to racism, because the desire for population control has as its foundation the hatred of others.
The population control agenda has now been implemented in well over a hundred countries. Although we cannot provide detailed accounts of the efforts in each of them here, let us turn now to examine three of the most important and egregious cases.
India
Since the time of Malthus, India has always been a prime target in the eyes of would-be population controllers. Both the British colonial administrators and the high-caste Brahmins who succeeded them in power following independence in 1947 looked upon the “teeming masses” of that nation’s lower classes with fear and disdain. Jawaharlal Nehru’s Congress Party (which controlled India’s national government for its first three decades without interruption) had been significantly influenced by pre-independence contacts with the pro-Malthusian British Fabian Society. Notable members of the native elite, such as the influential and formidable Lady Rama Rau, had been attracted to the ideas of eugenicist and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. Thus during the 1950s and early 1960s, the Indian government allowed organizations like the Population Council, the Ford Foundation, and the International Planned Parenthood Federation to set up shop within the country’s borders, where they could set about curbing the reproduction of the nation’s Dalits, or “untouchables.” The government did not, however, allocate public funds to these organizations, so their programs remained relatively small.
Things changed radically in 1965, when war with Pakistan threw the country’s economy into disarray, causing harvest failure and loss of revenue. When Prime Minister Indira Gandhi — Nehru’s daughter — assumed office in January 1966, India was short twenty million tons of grain and lacked money to buy replacement stock on the world market. She was left with no choice but to go to the United States, hat in hand, to beg for food aid.
There was a lot that the United States could have asked for in return from India, such as support for the Western side in the Cold War (India was non-aligned), and particularly for the war effort in nearby Vietnam, which was heating up rapidly. One of President Lyndon Johnson’s aides, Joseph Califano, suggested in a memo to the president that the United States move rapidly to commit food aid in order to secure such a pro-American tilt. In reply he got a call from Johnson that very afternoon. “Are you out of your f***ing mind?” the president exploded. He declared in no uncertain terms that he was not going to “piss away foreign aid in nations where they refuse to deal with their own population problems.”
Indira Gandhi arrived in Washington in late March and met first with Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who handed her a memo requiring “a massive effort to control population growth” as a condition for food aid. Then, on March 28, 1966, she met privately with the president. There is no record of their conversation, but it is evident that she capitulated completely. Two days later, President Johnson sent a message to Congress requesting food aid for India, noting with approval: “The Indian government believes that there can be no effective solution of the Indian food problem that does not include population control.”
In accordance with the agreement, sterilization and IUD-insertion quotas were set for each Indian state, and then within each state for each local administrative district. Every hospital in the country had a large portion of its facilities commandeered for sterilization and IUD-insertion activities. (The IUDs, which were provided to the Indian government by the Population Council, were non-sterile. In Maharashtra province, 58 percent of women surveyed who received them experienced pain, 24 percent severe pain, and 43 percent severe and excessive bleeding.) But hospitals alone did not have the capacity to meet the quotas, so hundreds of sterilization camps were set up in rural areas, manned and operated by paramedical personnel who had as little as two days of training. Minimum quotas were set for the state-salaried camp medics — they had to perform 150 vasectomies or 300 IUD insertions per month each, or their pay would be docked. Private practitioners were also recruited to assist, with pay via piecework: 10 rupees per vasectomy and 5 rupees per IUD insertion.
To acquire subjects for these ministrations, the Indian government provided each province with 11 rupees for every IUD insertion, 30 per vasectomy, and 40 per tubectomy. These funds could be divided according to the particular population control plan of each provincial government, with some going to program personnel, some spent as commission money to freelance “motivators,” some paid as incentives to the “acceptors,” and some grafted for other governmental or private use by the administrators. Typical incentives for subjects ranged from 3 to 7 rupees for an IUD insertion and 12 to 25 rupees for a sterilization. These sums may seem trivial — a 1966 rupee is equivalent to 65 cents today — but at that time, 2 to 3 rupees was a day’s pay for an Indian laborer.
When these pittances did not induce enough subjects to meet the quotas, some states adopted additional “incentives”: Madhya Pradesh, for example, denied irrigation water to villages that failed to meet their quotas. Faced with starvation, millions of impoverished people had no alternative but to submit to sterilization. As the forms of coercion employed worked most effectively on the poorest, the system also provided the eugenic bonus of doing away preferentially with untouchables.
The results were impressive. In 1961, the total number of sterilizations (vasectomies and tubectomies combined) performed in India was 105,000. In 1966-67, the yearly total shot up to 887,000, growing further to more than 1.8 million in 1967-68. No doubt LBJ was proud.
But while ruining the lives of millions of people, the steep rise in sterilization figures had little impact on the overall trajectory of India’s population growth. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich wrote in The Population Bomb, “I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self sufficient in food by 1971, if ever,” thus justifying his explicitly antihuman call that “we must allow [India] to slip down the drain.” As in so many other things, Ehrlich was wrong; India did achieve self-sufficiency in food in 1971 — not through population control, but through the improved agricultural techniques of the Green Revolution. It did not matter. The holders of the purse-strings at USAID demanded even higher quotas. They got them. By 1972-73, the number of sterilizations in India reached three million per year.
Then, in the fall of 1973, OPEC launched its oil embargo, quintupling petroleum prices virtually overnight. For rich nations like the United States, the resulting financial blow was severe. For poor countries like India, it was devastating. In 1975, conditions in India became so bad that Prime Minister Gandhi declared a state of national emergency and assumed dictatorial power. Driven once again to desperation, she found herself at the mercy of the World Bank, led by arch-Malthusian Robert S. McNamara. McNamara made it clear: if India wanted more loans, Gandhi needed to use her powers to deal more definitively with India’s supposed population problem. She agreed. Instead of incentives, force would now be used to obtain compliance. “Some personal rights have to be kept in abeyance,” she said, “for the human rights of the nation, the right to live, the right to progress.”
Gandhi put her son Sanjay personally in charge of the new population offensive. He took to his job with gusto. Overt coercion became the rule: sterilization was a condition for land allotments, water, electricity, ration cards, medical care, pay raises, and rickshaw licenses. Policemen were given quotas to nab individuals for sterilization. Demolition squads were sent into slums to bulldoze houses — sometimes whole neighborhoods — so that armed police platoons could drag off their flushed-out occupants to forced-sterilization camps. In Delhi alone, 700,000 people were driven from their homes. Many of those who escaped the immediate roundup were denied new housing until they accepted sterilization.
These attacks provoked resistance, with thousands being killed in battles with the police, who used live ammunition to deal with protesters. When it became clear that Muslim villages were also being selectively targeted, the level of violence increased still further. The village of Pipli was only brought into submission when government officials threatened locals with aerial bombardment. As the director of family planning in Maharashtra explained, “You must consider it something like a war.... Whether you like it or not, there will be a few dead people.”
The measures served their purpose. During 1976, eight million Indians were sterilized. Far from being dismayed by the massive violation of human rights committed by the campaign, its foreign sponsors expressed full support. Sweden increased its funding for Indian population control by $17 million. Reimert Ravenholt ordered 64 advanced laparoscope machines — altogether sufficient to sterilize 12,800 people per day — rushed to India to help the effort. World Bank president McNamara was absolutely delighted. In November 1976, he traveled to India to congratulate Indira Gandhi’s government for its excellent work. “At long last,” he said, “India is moving effectively to address its population problem.”
Prime Minister Gandhi got her loans. She also got the boot in 1977, when, in the largest democratic election in history, the people of India defied three decades of precedent and voted her Congress Party out of power in a landslide.
Unfortunately, in most Third World countries, people lack such an option to protect themselves against population control. Equally unfortunately, despite the fall of the Gandhi government, the financial pressure on India from the World Bank and USAID to implement population control continued. By the early 1980s, four million sterilizations were being performed every year on India’s underclasses as part of a coercive two-children-per-family policy.
Since in rural India sons are considered essential to continue the family line and provide support for parents in their old age, this limit caused many families to seek means of disposing of infant daughters, frequently through drowning, asphyxiation, abandonment in sewers or garbage dumps, or incineration on funeral pyres. More recently the primary means of eliminating the less-desirable sex has become sex-selective abortion, skewing the ratio of the sexes so that 112 boys are born for every hundred girls in India (far beyond the natural ratio of 103 to 106), with the ratio even more skewed in some locations. A sense of the scale on which these murders were and are practiced, even just in the aspect of gendercide, can be gleaned from the fact that in India today there are 37 million more men than women.
Peru
Because of their proximity to the United States, Central and South America have long been in the sights of population controllers from the American national security establishment. Since the 1960s, on the urging of USAID, brutal population control programs have been implemented in nearly every country from Mexico to Chile. In this article we shall focus on just one of them, that of Peru, because the criminal investigation of its leading perpetrators has provided some of the best documentation of the systematic abuses that have been and continue to be carried out under the cloak of population control across Central and South America.
Mountainous Peru features some of the most thinly populated regions on the planet. This fact, however, in no way deterred USAID planners from deeming these rural areas to be overpopulated, nor from funding programs designed to eliminate their people. Begun in 1966, these efforts proceeded on a comparatively low level until the 1990s, when strongman Alberto Fujimori assumed nearly dictatorial powers in the country.
In 1995, President Fujimori launched a nationwide sterilization campaign. Mobile sterilization teams were assembled in Lima and then deployed to move through the countryside to conduct week-long “ligation festivals” in one village after another. Prior to the arrival of the sterilization teams, Ministry of Health employees were sent in to harass local women into submission. Women who resisted were subjected to repeated home visits and severe verbal abuse by the government workers, who chided the native women and girls that they were no better than “cats” or “dogs” for wanting to have children. If this did not suffice, mothers were told that unless they submitted to ligation, their children would be made ineligible for government food aid.
Both the government harassment squads and the members of the sterilization units themselves operated under a quota system, striving to meet the nationwide target of 100,000 tubal ligations per year. They were paid if they met their quotas but punished if they failed to capture the designated number of women for sterilization. As a result, many women entering clinics for childbirth were sterilized without any pretext of gaining their permission. Given the limited training of the sterilization personnel (provided in many cases by imported Chinese population control experts), the unsanitary conditions prevailing during the village “ligation festivals,” and the complete lack of post-operation care, it is not surprising that many suffered severe complications and more than a few died subsequent to their mutilations.
While the government personnel performing the mass sterilizations were urbanites of Spanish derivation, the overwhelming majority of the victims were rural Quechua-speaking natives of Inca descent. This, of course, was no coincidence. When Fujimori was booted out in 2000, the new president, Alejandro Toledo, asked the Peruvian Congress to authorize an investigation into the population control campaign. Accordingly, an investigative commission known as the AQV was formed under the direction of Dr. Hector Chavez Chuchon. The AQV submitted its report to the Human Rights Commission of the Peruvian Congress on June 10, 2003.
According to the report, in the course of a five-year effort the Fujimori government had sterilized 314,605 women. Furthermore, Fujimori’s population control campaign had “carried out massive sterilizations on designated ethnic groups, benefiting other ethnic or social groups which did not suffer the scourge with the same intensity ... the action fits the definition of the crime of Genocide.” The report went on to make a “Constitutional Indictment” Fujimori and various officials of his government “for the alleged commission of crimes against Individual Liberty, against Life, Body, and Health, of Criminal Conspiracy, and Genocide.”
The primary funders of Fujimori’s genocide campaign were USAID (which ignored U.S. law and a 1998 congressional investigation to continue its financial support for the effort), the UNFPA, and the International Planned Parenthood Federation.
China
In June 1978, Song Jian, a top-level manager in charge of developing control systems for the Chinese guided-missile program, traveled to Helsinki for an international conference on control system theory and design. While in Finland, he picked up copies of The Limits to Growth and Blueprint for Survival — publications of the Club of Rome, a major source of Malthusian propaganda — and made the acquaintance of several Europeans who were promoting the reports’ method of using computerized “systems analysis” to predict and design the human future.
Fascinated by the possibilities, Song returned to China and republished the Club’s analysis under his own name (without attribution), establishing his reputation for brilliant and original thinking. Indeed, while Club of Rome computer projections of impending resource shortages, graphs showing the shortening of population-increase times, and discussions of “carrying capacities,” “natural limits,” mass extinctions, and the isolated “spaceship Earth” were all clichés in the West by 1978, in China they were fresh and striking ideas. In no time at all, Song became a scientific superstar. Seizing the moment to grasp for greater power and importance, he pulled together an elite group of mathematicians from within his department, and with the help of a powerful computer to provide the necessary special effects, issued the profoundly calculated judgment that China’s “correct” population size was 650 to 700 million people — which is to say some 280 to 330 million less than its actual 1978 population. Song’s analysis quickly found favor at top levels of the Chinese Communist Party because it purported to prove that the reason for China’s continued poverty was not thirty years of disastrous misrule, but the very existence of the Chinese people. (To make the utter falsity of Song’s argument clear, it is sufficient to note that in 1980, neighboring South Korea, with four times China’s population density, had a per capita gross national product seven times greater.) Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping and his fellows in the Central Committee were also very impressed by the pseudo-scientific computer babble Song used to dress up his theory — which, unlike its Club of Rome source documents in the West, ran unopposed in the state-controlled Chinese technical and popular media.
Song proposed that China’s rulers set a limit of one child per family, effective immediately. Deng Xiaoping liked what Song had to say, so those who might have had the power to resist the one-child policy were quick to protect themselves by lining up in support. At the critical Chengdu population conference in December 1979, only one brave man, Liang Zhongtang, a teacher of Marxism at the Shaanxi Provincial Party School, called upon his party comrades to consider the brutality they were about to inflict: “We have made the peasants’ suffering bitter enough in the economic realm. We cannot make them suffer further.” Liang also tried to argue from a practical standpoint. If we implement this policy, he said, every working Chinese married couple will need to support four elderly grandparents, one child, and themselves — a clear impossibility. None of the children will have any brothers or sisters, or uncles or aunts. None of the parents will have any relatives of their own generation to help out in time of need. The social fabric of village life will break down completely. There will be no one to serve in the Army.
But such commonsense objections were of no avail. The word soon came down from the top: one child per family was now the policy of the infallible Party leadership, and no further disagreements would be tolerated.
Thus began the most forceful population control program since Nazi Germany. No more would the population controllers need to depend on tricks, bribes, denial of benefits, traveling ligation festivals, or slum demolition platoons to obtain their victims. They now had the organized and unrelenting power of a totalitarian state to enforce their will, holding sway over not only a massive bureaucracy, but gigantic police and military forces, secret police, vast prison facilities, total media control, and tens of millions of informers. In The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich had called for state control of human reproduction, with “compulsory birth regulation.” Now, just twelve years later, Ehrlich’s utopian dream had become a nightmare reality for one-fifth of the human race.
Qian Xinzhong, a Soviet-trained former major general in the People’s Liberation Army, was placed in charge of the campaign. He ordered that all women with one child were to have a stainless-steel IUD inserted, and to be inspected regularly to make sure that they had not tampered with it. To remove the device was deemed a criminal act. All parents with two or more children were to be sterilized. No pregnancies were legal for anyone under 23, whether married or not, and all unauthorized pregnancies were to be aborted. “Under no circumstances is the birth of a third child allowed,” Qian said.
Women who defied these injunctions were taken and sterilized by force. Babies would be aborted right through the ninth month of pregnancy, with many crying as they were being stabbed to death at the moment of birth. Those women who fled to try to save their children were hunted, and if they could not be caught, their houses were torn down and their parents thrown in prison, there to linger until a ransom of 20,000 yuan — about three years’ income for a peasant — was paid for their release. Babies born to such fugitives were declared to be “black children,” illegal non-persons in the eyes of the state, without any right to employment, public schooling, health care, or reproduction.
The leaders of the UNFPA and the International Planned Parenthood Federation were delighted, and rushed to send money (provided to them primarily by the U.S. State Department) and personnel to help support the campaign. China was so openly brutal in its methods that IPPF’s own information officer, Penny Kane, expressed alarm — not at what was being done to millions of Chinese women, girls, and infants, but at the possible public-relations disaster that could mar the IPPF’s image if Americans found out what it was doing. “Very strong measures are being taken to reduce population,” Kane wrote from China, “I think that in the not-too-distant future this will blow up into a major press story as it contains all the ingredients for sensationalism — Communism, forced family planning, murder of viable fetuses, parallels with India, etc. When it does blow up, it is going to be very difficult to defend.... We might find it extremely difficult to handle the press and the public if there were a major fuss about the Chinese methods.”
Babies born in China in spite of the one-child policy are declared “black children” and have no right to food, health care, or education. If female, they are frequently killed, either at birth, or if apprehended later, at orphanages where they are gathered. Shown above is Mei Ming, a two-year-old girl tied to a chair in a “dying room.” The bucket below her is to catch her urine and feces as she dies over the next several days from starvation and neglect. The above photo was taken by a British TV crew during their filming of the 1995 documentary exposé The Dying Rooms. The Chinese government denies the existence of dying rooms.
Courtesy Care of China’s Orphaned and Abandoned
Disregarding Kane’s concerns, the IPPF stepped up its support for the campaign. True to her worries, however, the story did begin to break in the West. On November 30, 1981, the Wall Street Journal ran an eyewitness story by Michele Vink reporting women being “handcuffed, tied with ropes, or placed in pig’s baskets” as they were being hauled off for forced abortions. According to Vink, vehicles transporting women to hospitals in Canton were “filled with wailing noises,” while unauthorized infants were being killed en masse. “Every day hundreds of fetuses arrive at the morgue,” one of Vink’s sources said.
On May 15, 1982, New York Times foreign correspondent Christopher Wren offered an even more devastating exposé. He reported on stories of thousands of Chinese women being “rounded up and forced to have abortions,” and tales of women “locked in detention cells or hauled before mass rallies and harangued into consenting to abortion,” as well as “vigilantes [who] abducted pregnant women on the streets and hauled them off, sometimes handcuffed or trussed, to abortion clinics.” He quoted one Chinese reporter who described “aborted babies which were actually crying when they were born.” The horror became so open that it could not be denied. By 1983, even Chinese newspapers themselves were running stories about the “butchering, drowning, and leaving to die of female infants and the maltreating of women who had given birth to girls.”
Unfazed by the press coverage, Qian redoubled the effort. Local Communist Party officials were given quotas for sterilizations, abortions, and IUD insertions. If they exceeded them, they could be promoted. If they failed to meet them, they would be expelled from the Party in disgrace. These measures guaranteed results. In 1983, 16 million women and 4 million men were sterilized, 18 million women had IUDs inserted, and over 14 million infants were aborted. Going forward, these figures were sustained, with combined total coerced abortions, IUD implantations, and sterilizations exceeding 30 million per year through 1985.
In celebration of Qian’s achievements, the UNFPA in 1983 gave him (together with Indira Gandhi) the first United Nations Population Award, complete with diploma, gold medal, and $25,000 cash. In a congratulatory speech at the award ceremony in New York, U.N. Secretary General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar said: “Considering the fact that China and India contain over 40 per cent of humanity, we must all record our deep appreciation of the way in which their governments have marshaled the resources necessary to implement population policies on a massive scale.” Qian stood up and promised to continue “controlling population quantity and raising population quality.” The U.N. was not alone in expressing its appreciation. The World Bank signaled its thanks in the sincerest way possible — that is to say, with cash, providing China with $22 billion in loans by 1996.
Given the supreme importance to rural Chinese families of having a son, both to take care of aging parents and to continue the line and honor family ancestors, many peasants simply could not accept a daughter as their only child. The resultant spike in female infanticide was perhaps not especially troubling to the authorities in itself, given their attitude toward related matters, but the total social breakdown it betokened was. Facing this reality, in 1988 the government in some provinces compromised just a little and agreed that couples who had a daughter as their first child would be allowed one more try to have a son — provided that there were no unauthorized births or other violations of the population policy by anyone in the couple’s village during that year. While giving a bit on the population front, this “reform” had the salutary effect — from the totalitarian point of view — of destroying peasant solidarity, which previously had acted to shield local women giving birth in hiding. Instead, hysterical group pressure was mobilized against such rebels, with everyone in the village transformed into government snoops to police their neighbors against possible infractions.
The killing of daughters, however, continued apace. During the period from 2000 to 2004, almost 1.25 boys were born for every girl born — indicating that one-fifth of all baby girls in China were either being aborted or murdered. In some provinces the fraction eliminated was as high as one-half.
The Terrible Toll
In 1991, UNFPA head Nafis Sadik went to China to congratulate the oligarchs of the People’s Republic for their excellent program, which by that time had already sterilized, implanted IUDs in, or performed abortions on some 300 million people. “China has every reason to feel proud of and pleased with its remarkable achievements made in its family planning policy and control of its population growth over the past ten years,” she said. “Now the country could offer its experiences and special experts to help other countries.... UNFPA is going to employ some of [China’s family planning experts] to work in other countries and popularize China’s experience in population growth control and family planning.”
Sadik made good on her promise. With the help of the UNFPA, the Chinese model of population control was implemented virtually in its entirety in Vietnam, and used to enhance the brutal effectiveness of the antihuman efforts in many other countries, from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka to Mexico and Peru.
Meanwhile, many other countries have similarly grim stories. The Indonesian population control program was extensive and coercive; Betsy Hartmann has recounted a case in 1990 in which “family planning workers accompanied by the police and army went from house to house and took men and women to a site where IUDs were being inserted. Women who refused had IUDs inserted at gunpoint.” The Indonesian government’s longstanding commitment to population control meant that other areas of health care were not prioritized, which is why the country’s infant mortality rate is double that of neighboring Malaysia and Thailand.
The misallocation of scarce health resources is even more apparent in sub-Saharan Africa. Health care professionals and programs that should be dedicated to fighting malaria and other deadly diseases are instead dedicated to population control. As Dr. Stephen Karanja, former secretary of the Kenyan Medical Association, wrote in 1997:
Our health sector is collapsed. Thousands of the Kenyan people will die of malaria, the treatment of which costs a few cents, in health facilities whose shelves are stocked to the ceiling with millions of dollars’ worth of pills, IUDs, Norplant, Depo-Provera, and so on, most of which are supplied with American money.... Special operating theaters fully serviced and not lacking in instruments are opened in hospitals for the sterilization of women. While in the same hospitals, emergency surgery cannot be done for lack of basic operating instruments and supplies.
In a 2000 interview, Karanja continued, “You can’t perform operations because there is no equipment, no materials. The operation theater isn’t working. But if it is for a sterilization, the theater is equipped.” Worse still, as Steven Mosher has argued in his book Population Control, there is good reason to believe that the 100 million hypodermic needles that were shipped to Africa since the 1990s for injecting contraceptive drugs have been a major cause of the continent’s horrific AIDS epidemic — which has resulted in tens of millions of deaths, with nearly two million more deaths expected this year, and next, and for years more to come.
Around the world, the population control movement has resulted in billions of lost or ruined lives. We cannot stop at merely rebutting the pseudoscience and recounting the crimes of the population controllers. We must also expose and confront the underlying antihumanist ideology. If the idea is accepted that the world’s resources are fixed with only so much to go around, then each new life is unwelcome, each unregulated act or thought is a menace, every person is fundamentally the enemy of every other person, and each race or nation is the enemy of every other race or nation. The ultimate outcome of such a worldview can only be enforced stagnation, tyranny, war, and genocide. The horrific crimes advocated or perpetrated by antihumanism’s devotees over the past two centuries prove this conclusively. Only in a world of unlimited resources can all men be brothers.
That is why we must reject antihumanism and embrace instead an ethic based on faith in the human capacity for creativity and invention. For in doing so, we make a statement that we are living not at the end of history, but at the beginning of history; that we believe in freedom and not regimentation; in progress and not stasis; in love rather than hate; in life rather than death; in hope rather than despair.
Robert Zubrin is a New Atlantis contributing editor. This essay is adapted from his new book — the latest volume in our New Atlantis Books series — Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism.
There is a single ideological current running through a seemingly disparate collection of noxious modern political and scientific movements, ranging from militarism, imperialism, racism, xenophobia, and radical environmentalism, to socialism, Nazism, and totalitarian communism. This is the ideology of antihumanism: the belief that the human race is a horde of vermin whose unconstrained aspirations and appetites endanger the natural order, and that tyrannical measures are necessary to constrain humanity. The founding prophet of modern antihumanism is Thomas Malthus (1766-1834), who offered a pseudoscientific basis for the idea that human reproduction always outruns available resources. Following this pessimistic and inaccurate assessment of the capacity of human ingenuity to develop new resources, Malthus advocated oppressive policies that led to the starvation of millions in India and Ireland.
While Malthus’s argument that human population growth invariably leads to famine and poverty is plainly at odds with the historical evidence, which shows global living standards rising with population growth, it nonetheless persisted and even gained strength among intellectuals and political leaders in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Its most pernicious manifestation in recent decades has been the doctrine of population control, famously advocated by ecologist Paul Ehrlich, whose bestselling 1968 antihumanist tract The Population Bomb has served as the bible of neo-Malthusianism. In this book, Ehrlich warned of overpopulation and advocated that the American government adopt stringent population control measures, both domestically and for the Third World countries that received American foreign aid. (Ehrlich, it should be noted, is the mentor of and frequent collaborator with John Holdren, President Obama’s science advisor.)
Until the mid-1960s, American population control programs, both at home and abroad, were largely funded and implemented by private organizations such as the Population Council and Planned Parenthood — groups with deep roots in the eugenics movement. While disposing of millions of dollars provided to them by the Rockefeller, Ford, and Milbank Foundations, among others, the resources available to support their work were meager in comparison with their vast ambitions. This situation changed radically in the mid-1960s, when the U.S. Congress, responding to the agitation of overpopulation ideologues, finally appropriated federal funds to underwrite first domestic and then foreign population control programs. Suddenly, instead of mere millions, there were hundreds of millions and eventually billions of dollars available to fund global campaigns of mass abortion and forced sterilization. The result would be human catastrophe on a worldwide scale.
Among the first to be targeted were America’s own Third World population at home — the native American Indians. Starting in 1966, Secretary of the Interior Stuart Udall began to make use of newly available Medicaid money to set up sterilization programs at federally funded Indian Health Services (IHS) hospitals. As reported by Angela Franks in her 2005 book Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy:
These sterilizations were frequently performed without adequate informed consent.... Native American physician Constance Redbird Uri estimated that up to one-quarter of Indian women of childbearing age had been sterilized by 1977; in one hospital in Oklahoma, one-fourth of the women admitted (for any reason) left sterilized.... She also gathered evidence that all the pureblood women of the Kaw tribe in Oklahoma were sterilized in the 1970s....
Unfortunately, and amazingly, problems with the Indian Health Service seem to persist ... recently [in the early 1990s], in South Dakota, IHS was again accused of not following informed-consent procedures, this time for Norplant, and apparently promoted the long-acting contraceptive to Native American women who should not use it due to contraindicating, preexisting medical conditions. The Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center reports that one woman was recently told by her doctors that they would remove the implant only if she would agree to a tubal ligation. The genocidal dreams of bureaucrats still cast their shadow on American soil.
Programs of a comparable character were also set up in clinics funded by the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity in low-income (predominantly black) neighborhoods in the United States. Meanwhile, on the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, a mass sterilization program was instigated by the Draper Fund/Population Crisis Committee and implemented with federal funds from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare through the island’s major hospitals as well as a host of smaller clinics. According to the report of a medical fact-finding mission conducted in 1975, the effort was successful in sterilizing close to one-third of Puerto Rican women of child-bearing age.
Better Dead Than Red
However, it was not at home but abroad that the heaviest artillery of the population control onslaught was directed. During the Cold War, anything from the Apollo program to public-education funding could be sold to the federal government if it could be justified as part of the global struggle against communism. Accordingly, ideologues at some of the highest levels of power and influence formulated a party line that the population of the world’s poor nations needed to be drastically cut in order to reduce the potential recruitment pool available to the communist cause. President Lyndon Johnson was provided a fraudulent study by a RAND Corporation economist that used cooked calculations to “prove” that Third World children actually had negative economic value. Thus, by allowing excessive numbers of children to be born, Asian, African, and Latin American governments were deepening the poverty of their populations, while multiplying the masses of angry proletarians ready to be led against America by the organizers of the coming World Revolution.
President Johnson bought the claptrap, including the phony math. Two months later, he declared to the United Nations that “five dollars invested in population control is worth a hundred dollars invested in economic growth.” With the Johnson administration now backing population control, Congress passed the Foreign Assistance Act in 1966, including a provision earmarking funds from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) for population control programs to be implemented abroad. The legislation further directed that all U.S. economic aid to foreign nations be made contingent upon their governments’ willingness to cooperate with State Department desires for the establishment of such initiatives within their own borders. In other words, for those Third World rulers willing to help sterilize their poorer subjects, there would be carrots. For the uncooperative types, there would be the stick. Given the nature of most Third World governments, such elegant simplicity of approach practically guaranteed success. The population control establishment was delighted.
An Office of Population was set up within USAID, and Dr. Reimert Thorolf Ravenholt was appointed its first director in 1966. He would hold the post until 1979, using it to create a global empire of interlocking population control organizations operating with billion-dollar budgets to suppress the existence of people considered undesirable by the U.S. Department of State.
In his devastating 2008 book Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits, author Steven Mosher provides a colorful description of Ravenholt:
Who was Dr. Ravenholt? An epidemiologist by training, he apparently looked on pregnancy as a disease, to be eradicated in the same way one eliminates smallpox or yellow fever. He was also, as it happened, a bellicose misanthrope.
He took to his work of contracepting, sterilizing, and aborting the women of the world with an aggressiveness that caused his younger colleagues to shrink back in disgust. His business cards were printed on condoms, and he delighted in handing them out to all comers. He talked incessantly about how to distribute greater quantities of birth control pills, and ensure that they were used. He advocated mass sterilization campaigns, once telling the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that one-quarter of all the fertile women in the world must be sterilized in order to meet the U.S. goals of population control and to maintain “the normal operation of U.S. commercial interests around the world.” Such rigorous measures were required, Ravenholt explained, to contain the “population explosion” which would, if left unchecked, so reduce living standards abroad that revolutions would break out “against the strong U.S. commercial presence.”...
Charming he was not. To commemorate the bicentennial of the United States in 1976, he came up with the idea of producing “stars and stripes” condoms in red, white, and blue colors for distribution around the world.... Another time, at a dinner for population researchers, Ravenholt strolled around the room making pumping motions with his fist as if he were operating a manual vacuum aspirator — a hand-held vacuum pump for performing abortions — to the horror of the other guests.
Ravenholt’s view of nonwhite people is expressed well enough in a comment he made in 2000 about slavery: “American blacks should thank their lucky stars that the institution of slavery did exist in earlier centuries; if not, these American blacks would not exist: their ancestors would have been killed by their black enemies, instead of being sold as slaves.”
As his method of operation, Ravenholt adopted the practice of distributing his funds aggressively to the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the Population Council, and numerous other privately run organizations of the population control movement, enabling them to implement mass sterilization and abortion campaigns worldwide without U.S. government regulatory interference, and allowing their budgets to balloon — first tenfold, then a hundredfold, then even more. This delighted the leaders and staff of the population control establishment, who were able to embrace a luxurious lifestyle, staying in the best hotels, eating the best food, and flying first class as they jetted around the world to set up programs to eliminate the poor.
Ravenholt also had no compunction about buying up huge quantities of unproven, unapproved, defective, or banned contraceptive drugs and intrauterine devices (IUDs) and distributing them for use by his population control movement subcontractors on millions of unsuspecting Third World women, many of whom suffered or died in consequence. These included drugs and devices which had been declared unsafe by the FDA for use in America, and had faced successful lawsuits in the U.S. for their damaging results. These practices delighted the manufacturers of such equipment.
Having thus secured the unqualified support of both the population control establishment and several major pharmaceutical companies, Ravenholt was able to lobby Congress to secure ever-increasing appropriations to further expand his growing empire.
His success was remarkable. Before Ravenholt took over, USAID expenditures on population control amounted to less than 3 percent of what the agency spent on health programs in Third World nations. By 1968, Ravenholt had a budget of $36 million, compared to the USAID health programs budget of $130 million. By 1972, Ravenholt’s population control funding had grown to $120 million per year, with funds taken directly at the expense of USAID’s disease prevention and other health care initiatives, which shrank to $38 million in consequence. In just five short years, the U.S. non-military foreign aid program was transformed from a mission of mercy to an agency for human elimination.
In 1968, Robert McNamara, a staunch believer in population control, resigned his post as Secretary of Defense to assume the presidency of the World Bank. From this position he was able to dictate a new policy, making World Bank loans to Third World countries contingent upon their governments’ submission to population control, with yearly sterilization quotas set by World Bank experts. Cash-short and heavily in debt, many poor nations found this pressure very difficult to withstand. This strengthened Ravenholt’s hand immeasurably.
Destroying the Village
Upon coming into office in January 1969, the new Nixon administration sought to further advance the population control agenda. Responding to lobbying by General William H. Draper, Jr., the former under secretary of the Army and a leading overpopulation fear monger, Nixon approved U.S. government support for the establishment of the U.N. Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA). With this organization as a vehicle, vast additional American funds would be poured into the global population control effort, with their source disguised so as to ease acceptance by governments whose leaders needed to maintain a populist pose in opposition to “Yankee Imperialism.” While the United States was its primary backer, the UNFPA also served as a channel for significant additional population control funds from European nations, Canada, and Japan, collectively equal to about half the American effort.
Going still further, President Nixon in 1970 set up a special blue-ribbon Commission on Population Growth and the American Future, with longtime population control booster John D. Rockefeller III as its chairman. Reporting back in 1972, Rockefeller predictably cited the menace of U.S. population growth with alarm, and called for a large variety of population control measures to avert the putative threat of welfare-dependent, criminalistic, or other financially burdensome populations multiplying out of control. Just as predictably, the report generated scores of newspaper headlines and feature magazine articles serving to cement the population control consensus. Nixon’s politically-driven rejection of one of the commission’s recommendations — government-funded abortion on demand — only served to make Rockefeller’s Malthusian committee seem all the more “progressive.”
But Nixon’s chief interest in population control was its supposed value as a Cold War weapon. The president charged Henry Kissinger, his National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, with conducting a secret study on the role of population control measures in the fight against global communism. Kissinger pulled together a group of experts drawn from the National Security Council (NSC), the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the Department of State, USAID, and other agencies to study the question. The result was issued on December 10, 1974 in the form of the classified NSC document titled “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” The document — known as National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), or simply as the Kissinger Report — represented the encoding of Malthusian dogma as the strategic doctrine of the United States.
NSSM 200 was declassified in 1989 and so is now available for scrutiny. Examining the document, what is apparent is the Nietzschean mindset on the part of its authors, who (implicitly embracing the communist line) clearly regarded the newborn masses of the world as America’s likely enemies, rather than her friends, and as potential obstacles to the exploitation of the world’s wealth, rather than as customers, workers, and business partners participating together with America in a grand team effort to grow and advance the world economy. The memo made the case for a population control effort that is global in scope but not traceable back to its wealthy supporters.
On November 26, 1975, NSSM 200 was formally adopted by the Ford administration. A follow-up memo issued in 1976 by the NSC called for the United States to use control of food supplies to impose population control on a global scale. It further noted the value of using dictatorial power and military force as means to coerce Third World peoples into submission to population control measures, adding: “In some cases, strong direction has involved incentives such as payment to acceptors for sterilization, or disincentives such as giving low priorities in the allocation of housing or schooling to those with larger families. Such direction is the sine qua non of an effective program.”
Without a shred of justification, but with impeccable organization, generous funding, aggressive leadership, and backing by a phalanx of established respectable opinion, the population control movement was now doctrinally enshrined as representing the core strategic interest of the world’s leading superpower. It was now positioned to wreak havoc on a global scale.
The Characteristics of Population Control Programs
Of the billions of taxpayer dollars that the U.S. government has expended on population control abroad, a portion has been directly spent by USAID on its own field activities, but the majority has been laundered through a variety of international agencies. As a result of this indirect funding scheme, all attempts to compel the population control empire to conform its activities to accepted medical, ethical, safety, or human rights norms have proven futile. Rather, in direct defiance of laws enacted by Congress to try to correct the situation, what has been and continues to be perpetrated at public expense is an atrocity on a scale so vast and varied as to almost defy description. Nevertheless, it is worth attempting to convey to readers some sense of the evil that is being done with their money. Before describing some case studies, let us consider the primary characteristics manifested by nearly all the campaigns.
First, they are top-down dictatorial. In selling the effort to Americans, USAID and its beneficiaries claim that they are providing Third World women with “choice” regarding childbirth. There is no truth to this claim. As Betsy Hartmann, a liberal feminist critic of these programs, trenchantly pointed out in her 1995 book Reproductive Rights and Wrongs, “a woman’s right to choose” must necessarily include the option of having children — precisely what the population control campaigns deny her. Rather than providing “choice” to individuals, the purpose of the campaigns is to strip entire populations of their ability to reproduce. This is done by national governments, themselves under USAID or World Bank pressure, setting quotas for sterilizations, IUD insertions, or similar procedures to be imposed by their own civil service upon the subject population. Those government employees who meet or exceed their quotas of “acceptors” are rewarded; those who fail to do so are disciplined.
Second, the programs are dishonest. It is a regular practice for government civil servants employed in population control programs to lie to their prospective targets for quota-meeting about the consequences of the operations that will be performed upon them. For example, Third World peasants are frequently told by government population control personnel that sterilization operations are reversible, when in fact they are not.
Third, the programs are coercive. As a regular practice, population control programs provide “incentives” and/or “disincentives” to compel “acceptors” into accepting their “assistance.” Among the “incentives” frequently employed is the provision or denial of cash or food aid to starving people or their children. Among the “disincentives” employed are personal harassment, dismissal from employment, destruction of homes, and denial of schooling, public housing, or medical assistance to the recalcitrant.
Fourth, the programs are medically irresponsible and negligent. As a regular practice, the programs use defective, unproven, unsafe, experimental, or unapproved gear, including equipment whose use has been banned outright in the United States. They also employ large numbers of inadequately trained personnel to perform potentially life-endangering operations, or to maintain medical equipment in a supposedly sterile or otherwise safe condition. In consequence, millions of people subjected to the ministrations of such irresponsibly run population control operations have been killed. This is particularly true in Africa, where improper reuse of hypodermic needles without sterilization in population control clinics has contributed to the rapid spread of deadly infectious diseases, including AIDS.
Fifth, the programs are cruel, callous, and abusive of human dignity and human rights. A frequent practice is the sterilization of women without their knowledge or consent, typically while they are weakened in the aftermath of childbirth. This is tantamount to government-organized rape. Forced abortions are also typical. These and other human rights abuses of the population control campaign have been widely documented, with subject populations victimized in Australia, Bangladesh, China, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Kosovo, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Tibet, the United States, Venezuela, and Vietnam.
Sixth, the programs are racist. Just as the global population control program itself represents an attempt by the (white-led) governments of the United States and the former imperial powers of Europe to cut nonwhite populations in the Third World, so, within each targeted nation, the local ruling group has typically made use of the population control program to attempt to eliminate the people they despise. In India, for example, the ruling upper-caste Hindus have focused the population control effort on getting rid of lower-caste untouchables and Muslims. In Sri Lanka, the ruling Singhalese have targeted the Hindu Tamils for extermination. In Peru, the Spanish-speaking descendants of the conquistadors have directed the country’s population control program toward the goal of stemming the reproduction of the darker non-Hispanic natives. In Kosovo, the Serbs used population control against the Albanians, while in Vietnam the Communist government has targeted the population control effort against the Hmong ethnic minority, America’s former wartime allies. In China, the Tibetan and Uyghur minorities have become special targets of the government’s population control effort, with multitudes of the latter rounded up for forced abortions and sterilizations. In South Africa under apartheid, the purpose of the government-run population control program went without saying. In various black African states, whichever tribe holds the reins of power regularly directs the population campaign towards the elimination of their traditional tribal rivals. There should be nothing surprising in any of this. Malthusianism has always been closely linked to racism, because the desire for population control has as its foundation the hatred of others.
The population control agenda has now been implemented in well over a hundred countries. Although we cannot provide detailed accounts of the efforts in each of them here, let us turn now to examine three of the most important and egregious cases.
India
Since the time of Malthus, India has always been a prime target in the eyes of would-be population controllers. Both the British colonial administrators and the high-caste Brahmins who succeeded them in power following independence in 1947 looked upon the “teeming masses” of that nation’s lower classes with fear and disdain. Jawaharlal Nehru’s Congress Party (which controlled India’s national government for its first three decades without interruption) had been significantly influenced by pre-independence contacts with the pro-Malthusian British Fabian Society. Notable members of the native elite, such as the influential and formidable Lady Rama Rau, had been attracted to the ideas of eugenicist and Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. Thus during the 1950s and early 1960s, the Indian government allowed organizations like the Population Council, the Ford Foundation, and the International Planned Parenthood Federation to set up shop within the country’s borders, where they could set about curbing the reproduction of the nation’s Dalits, or “untouchables.” The government did not, however, allocate public funds to these organizations, so their programs remained relatively small.
There was a lot that the United States could have asked for in return from India, such as support for the Western side in the Cold War (India was non-aligned), and particularly for the war effort in nearby Vietnam, which was heating up rapidly. One of President Lyndon Johnson’s aides, Joseph Califano, suggested in a memo to the president that the United States move rapidly to commit food aid in order to secure such a pro-American tilt. In reply he got a call from Johnson that very afternoon. “Are you out of your f***ing mind?” the president exploded. He declared in no uncertain terms that he was not going to “piss away foreign aid in nations where they refuse to deal with their own population problems.”
Indira Gandhi arrived in Washington in late March and met first with Secretary of State Dean Rusk, who handed her a memo requiring “a massive effort to control population growth” as a condition for food aid. Then, on March 28, 1966, she met privately with the president. There is no record of their conversation, but it is evident that she capitulated completely. Two days later, President Johnson sent a message to Congress requesting food aid for India, noting with approval: “The Indian government believes that there can be no effective solution of the Indian food problem that does not include population control.”
In accordance with the agreement, sterilization and IUD-insertion quotas were set for each Indian state, and then within each state for each local administrative district. Every hospital in the country had a large portion of its facilities commandeered for sterilization and IUD-insertion activities. (The IUDs, which were provided to the Indian government by the Population Council, were non-sterile. In Maharashtra province, 58 percent of women surveyed who received them experienced pain, 24 percent severe pain, and 43 percent severe and excessive bleeding.) But hospitals alone did not have the capacity to meet the quotas, so hundreds of sterilization camps were set up in rural areas, manned and operated by paramedical personnel who had as little as two days of training. Minimum quotas were set for the state-salaried camp medics — they had to perform 150 vasectomies or 300 IUD insertions per month each, or their pay would be docked. Private practitioners were also recruited to assist, with pay via piecework: 10 rupees per vasectomy and 5 rupees per IUD insertion.
To acquire subjects for these ministrations, the Indian government provided each province with 11 rupees for every IUD insertion, 30 per vasectomy, and 40 per tubectomy. These funds could be divided according to the particular population control plan of each provincial government, with some going to program personnel, some spent as commission money to freelance “motivators,” some paid as incentives to the “acceptors,” and some grafted for other governmental or private use by the administrators. Typical incentives for subjects ranged from 3 to 7 rupees for an IUD insertion and 12 to 25 rupees for a sterilization. These sums may seem trivial — a 1966 rupee is equivalent to 65 cents today — but at that time, 2 to 3 rupees was a day’s pay for an Indian laborer.
When these pittances did not induce enough subjects to meet the quotas, some states adopted additional “incentives”: Madhya Pradesh, for example, denied irrigation water to villages that failed to meet their quotas. Faced with starvation, millions of impoverished people had no alternative but to submit to sterilization. As the forms of coercion employed worked most effectively on the poorest, the system also provided the eugenic bonus of doing away preferentially with untouchables.
The results were impressive. In 1961, the total number of sterilizations (vasectomies and tubectomies combined) performed in India was 105,000. In 1966-67, the yearly total shot up to 887,000, growing further to more than 1.8 million in 1967-68. No doubt LBJ was proud.
But while ruining the lives of millions of people, the steep rise in sterilization figures had little impact on the overall trajectory of India’s population growth. In 1968, Paul Ehrlich wrote in The Population Bomb, “I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self sufficient in food by 1971, if ever,” thus justifying his explicitly antihuman call that “we must allow [India] to slip down the drain.” As in so many other things, Ehrlich was wrong; India did achieve self-sufficiency in food in 1971 — not through population control, but through the improved agricultural techniques of the Green Revolution. It did not matter. The holders of the purse-strings at USAID demanded even higher quotas. They got them. By 1972-73, the number of sterilizations in India reached three million per year.
Then, in the fall of 1973, OPEC launched its oil embargo, quintupling petroleum prices virtually overnight. For rich nations like the United States, the resulting financial blow was severe. For poor countries like India, it was devastating. In 1975, conditions in India became so bad that Prime Minister Gandhi declared a state of national emergency and assumed dictatorial power. Driven once again to desperation, she found herself at the mercy of the World Bank, led by arch-Malthusian Robert S. McNamara. McNamara made it clear: if India wanted more loans, Gandhi needed to use her powers to deal more definitively with India’s supposed population problem. She agreed. Instead of incentives, force would now be used to obtain compliance. “Some personal rights have to be kept in abeyance,” she said, “for the human rights of the nation, the right to live, the right to progress.”
Gandhi put her son Sanjay personally in charge of the new population offensive. He took to his job with gusto. Overt coercion became the rule: sterilization was a condition for land allotments, water, electricity, ration cards, medical care, pay raises, and rickshaw licenses. Policemen were given quotas to nab individuals for sterilization. Demolition squads were sent into slums to bulldoze houses — sometimes whole neighborhoods — so that armed police platoons could drag off their flushed-out occupants to forced-sterilization camps. In Delhi alone, 700,000 people were driven from their homes. Many of those who escaped the immediate roundup were denied new housing until they accepted sterilization.
These attacks provoked resistance, with thousands being killed in battles with the police, who used live ammunition to deal with protesters. When it became clear that Muslim villages were also being selectively targeted, the level of violence increased still further. The village of Pipli was only brought into submission when government officials threatened locals with aerial bombardment. As the director of family planning in Maharashtra explained, “You must consider it something like a war.... Whether you like it or not, there will be a few dead people.”
The measures served their purpose. During 1976, eight million Indians were sterilized. Far from being dismayed by the massive violation of human rights committed by the campaign, its foreign sponsors expressed full support. Sweden increased its funding for Indian population control by $17 million. Reimert Ravenholt ordered 64 advanced laparoscope machines — altogether sufficient to sterilize 12,800 people per day — rushed to India to help the effort. World Bank president McNamara was absolutely delighted. In November 1976, he traveled to India to congratulate Indira Gandhi’s government for its excellent work. “At long last,” he said, “India is moving effectively to address its population problem.”
Prime Minister Gandhi got her loans. She also got the boot in 1977, when, in the largest democratic election in history, the people of India defied three decades of precedent and voted her Congress Party out of power in a landslide.
Unfortunately, in most Third World countries, people lack such an option to protect themselves against population control. Equally unfortunately, despite the fall of the Gandhi government, the financial pressure on India from the World Bank and USAID to implement population control continued. By the early 1980s, four million sterilizations were being performed every year on India’s underclasses as part of a coercive two-children-per-family policy.
Since in rural India sons are considered essential to continue the family line and provide support for parents in their old age, this limit caused many families to seek means of disposing of infant daughters, frequently through drowning, asphyxiation, abandonment in sewers or garbage dumps, or incineration on funeral pyres. More recently the primary means of eliminating the less-desirable sex has become sex-selective abortion, skewing the ratio of the sexes so that 112 boys are born for every hundred girls in India (far beyond the natural ratio of 103 to 106), with the ratio even more skewed in some locations. A sense of the scale on which these murders were and are practiced, even just in the aspect of gendercide, can be gleaned from the fact that in India today there are 37 million more men than women.
Peru
Because of their proximity to the United States, Central and South America have long been in the sights of population controllers from the American national security establishment. Since the 1960s, on the urging of USAID, brutal population control programs have been implemented in nearly every country from Mexico to Chile. In this article we shall focus on just one of them, that of Peru, because the criminal investigation of its leading perpetrators has provided some of the best documentation of the systematic abuses that have been and continue to be carried out under the cloak of population control across Central and South America.
Mountainous Peru features some of the most thinly populated regions on the planet. This fact, however, in no way deterred USAID planners from deeming these rural areas to be overpopulated, nor from funding programs designed to eliminate their people. Begun in 1966, these efforts proceeded on a comparatively low level until the 1990s, when strongman Alberto Fujimori assumed nearly dictatorial powers in the country.
In 1995, President Fujimori launched a nationwide sterilization campaign. Mobile sterilization teams were assembled in Lima and then deployed to move through the countryside to conduct week-long “ligation festivals” in one village after another. Prior to the arrival of the sterilization teams, Ministry of Health employees were sent in to harass local women into submission. Women who resisted were subjected to repeated home visits and severe verbal abuse by the government workers, who chided the native women and girls that they were no better than “cats” or “dogs” for wanting to have children. If this did not suffice, mothers were told that unless they submitted to ligation, their children would be made ineligible for government food aid.
Both the government harassment squads and the members of the sterilization units themselves operated under a quota system, striving to meet the nationwide target of 100,000 tubal ligations per year. They were paid if they met their quotas but punished if they failed to capture the designated number of women for sterilization. As a result, many women entering clinics for childbirth were sterilized without any pretext of gaining their permission. Given the limited training of the sterilization personnel (provided in many cases by imported Chinese population control experts), the unsanitary conditions prevailing during the village “ligation festivals,” and the complete lack of post-operation care, it is not surprising that many suffered severe complications and more than a few died subsequent to their mutilations.
While the government personnel performing the mass sterilizations were urbanites of Spanish derivation, the overwhelming majority of the victims were rural Quechua-speaking natives of Inca descent. This, of course, was no coincidence. When Fujimori was booted out in 2000, the new president, Alejandro Toledo, asked the Peruvian Congress to authorize an investigation into the population control campaign. Accordingly, an investigative commission known as the AQV was formed under the direction of Dr. Hector Chavez Chuchon. The AQV submitted its report to the Human Rights Commission of the Peruvian Congress on June 10, 2003.
According to the report, in the course of a five-year effort the Fujimori government had sterilized 314,605 women. Furthermore, Fujimori’s population control campaign had “carried out massive sterilizations on designated ethnic groups, benefiting other ethnic or social groups which did not suffer the scourge with the same intensity ... the action fits the definition of the crime of Genocide.” The report went on to make a “Constitutional Indictment” Fujimori and various officials of his government “for the alleged commission of crimes against Individual Liberty, against Life, Body, and Health, of Criminal Conspiracy, and Genocide.”
The primary funders of Fujimori’s genocide campaign were USAID (which ignored U.S. law and a 1998 congressional investigation to continue its financial support for the effort), the UNFPA, and the International Planned Parenthood Federation.
China
In June 1978, Song Jian, a top-level manager in charge of developing control systems for the Chinese guided-missile program, traveled to Helsinki for an international conference on control system theory and design. While in Finland, he picked up copies of The Limits to Growth and Blueprint for Survival — publications of the Club of Rome, a major source of Malthusian propaganda — and made the acquaintance of several Europeans who were promoting the reports’ method of using computerized “systems analysis” to predict and design the human future.
Fascinated by the possibilities, Song returned to China and republished the Club’s analysis under his own name (without attribution), establishing his reputation for brilliant and original thinking. Indeed, while Club of Rome computer projections of impending resource shortages, graphs showing the shortening of population-increase times, and discussions of “carrying capacities,” “natural limits,” mass extinctions, and the isolated “spaceship Earth” were all clichés in the West by 1978, in China they were fresh and striking ideas. In no time at all, Song became a scientific superstar. Seizing the moment to grasp for greater power and importance, he pulled together an elite group of mathematicians from within his department, and with the help of a powerful computer to provide the necessary special effects, issued the profoundly calculated judgment that China’s “correct” population size was 650 to 700 million people — which is to say some 280 to 330 million less than its actual 1978 population. Song’s analysis quickly found favor at top levels of the Chinese Communist Party because it purported to prove that the reason for China’s continued poverty was not thirty years of disastrous misrule, but the very existence of the Chinese people. (To make the utter falsity of Song’s argument clear, it is sufficient to note that in 1980, neighboring South Korea, with four times China’s population density, had a per capita gross national product seven times greater.) Paramount Leader Deng Xiaoping and his fellows in the Central Committee were also very impressed by the pseudo-scientific computer babble Song used to dress up his theory — which, unlike its Club of Rome source documents in the West, ran unopposed in the state-controlled Chinese technical and popular media.
Song proposed that China’s rulers set a limit of one child per family, effective immediately. Deng Xiaoping liked what Song had to say, so those who might have had the power to resist the one-child policy were quick to protect themselves by lining up in support. At the critical Chengdu population conference in December 1979, only one brave man, Liang Zhongtang, a teacher of Marxism at the Shaanxi Provincial Party School, called upon his party comrades to consider the brutality they were about to inflict: “We have made the peasants’ suffering bitter enough in the economic realm. We cannot make them suffer further.” Liang also tried to argue from a practical standpoint. If we implement this policy, he said, every working Chinese married couple will need to support four elderly grandparents, one child, and themselves — a clear impossibility. None of the children will have any brothers or sisters, or uncles or aunts. None of the parents will have any relatives of their own generation to help out in time of need. The social fabric of village life will break down completely. There will be no one to serve in the Army.
But such commonsense objections were of no avail. The word soon came down from the top: one child per family was now the policy of the infallible Party leadership, and no further disagreements would be tolerated.
Thus began the most forceful population control program since Nazi Germany. No more would the population controllers need to depend on tricks, bribes, denial of benefits, traveling ligation festivals, or slum demolition platoons to obtain their victims. They now had the organized and unrelenting power of a totalitarian state to enforce their will, holding sway over not only a massive bureaucracy, but gigantic police and military forces, secret police, vast prison facilities, total media control, and tens of millions of informers. In The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich had called for state control of human reproduction, with “compulsory birth regulation.” Now, just twelve years later, Ehrlich’s utopian dream had become a nightmare reality for one-fifth of the human race.
Qian Xinzhong, a Soviet-trained former major general in the People’s Liberation Army, was placed in charge of the campaign. He ordered that all women with one child were to have a stainless-steel IUD inserted, and to be inspected regularly to make sure that they had not tampered with it. To remove the device was deemed a criminal act. All parents with two or more children were to be sterilized. No pregnancies were legal for anyone under 23, whether married or not, and all unauthorized pregnancies were to be aborted. “Under no circumstances is the birth of a third child allowed,” Qian said.
Women who defied these injunctions were taken and sterilized by force. Babies would be aborted right through the ninth month of pregnancy, with many crying as they were being stabbed to death at the moment of birth. Those women who fled to try to save their children were hunted, and if they could not be caught, their houses were torn down and their parents thrown in prison, there to linger until a ransom of 20,000 yuan — about three years’ income for a peasant — was paid for their release. Babies born to such fugitives were declared to be “black children,” illegal non-persons in the eyes of the state, without any right to employment, public schooling, health care, or reproduction.
The leaders of the UNFPA and the International Planned Parenthood Federation were delighted, and rushed to send money (provided to them primarily by the U.S. State Department) and personnel to help support the campaign. China was so openly brutal in its methods that IPPF’s own information officer, Penny Kane, expressed alarm — not at what was being done to millions of Chinese women, girls, and infants, but at the possible public-relations disaster that could mar the IPPF’s image if Americans found out what it was doing. “Very strong measures are being taken to reduce population,” Kane wrote from China, “I think that in the not-too-distant future this will blow up into a major press story as it contains all the ingredients for sensationalism — Communism, forced family planning, murder of viable fetuses, parallels with India, etc. When it does blow up, it is going to be very difficult to defend.... We might find it extremely difficult to handle the press and the public if there were a major fuss about the Chinese methods.”
Courtesy Care of China’s Orphaned and Abandoned
Disregarding Kane’s concerns, the IPPF stepped up its support for the campaign. True to her worries, however, the story did begin to break in the West. On November 30, 1981, the Wall Street Journal ran an eyewitness story by Michele Vink reporting women being “handcuffed, tied with ropes, or placed in pig’s baskets” as they were being hauled off for forced abortions. According to Vink, vehicles transporting women to hospitals in Canton were “filled with wailing noises,” while unauthorized infants were being killed en masse. “Every day hundreds of fetuses arrive at the morgue,” one of Vink’s sources said.
On May 15, 1982, New York Times foreign correspondent Christopher Wren offered an even more devastating exposé. He reported on stories of thousands of Chinese women being “rounded up and forced to have abortions,” and tales of women “locked in detention cells or hauled before mass rallies and harangued into consenting to abortion,” as well as “vigilantes [who] abducted pregnant women on the streets and hauled them off, sometimes handcuffed or trussed, to abortion clinics.” He quoted one Chinese reporter who described “aborted babies which were actually crying when they were born.” The horror became so open that it could not be denied. By 1983, even Chinese newspapers themselves were running stories about the “butchering, drowning, and leaving to die of female infants and the maltreating of women who had given birth to girls.”
Unfazed by the press coverage, Qian redoubled the effort. Local Communist Party officials were given quotas for sterilizations, abortions, and IUD insertions. If they exceeded them, they could be promoted. If they failed to meet them, they would be expelled from the Party in disgrace. These measures guaranteed results. In 1983, 16 million women and 4 million men were sterilized, 18 million women had IUDs inserted, and over 14 million infants were aborted. Going forward, these figures were sustained, with combined total coerced abortions, IUD implantations, and sterilizations exceeding 30 million per year through 1985.
In celebration of Qian’s achievements, the UNFPA in 1983 gave him (together with Indira Gandhi) the first United Nations Population Award, complete with diploma, gold medal, and $25,000 cash. In a congratulatory speech at the award ceremony in New York, U.N. Secretary General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar said: “Considering the fact that China and India contain over 40 per cent of humanity, we must all record our deep appreciation of the way in which their governments have marshaled the resources necessary to implement population policies on a massive scale.” Qian stood up and promised to continue “controlling population quantity and raising population quality.” The U.N. was not alone in expressing its appreciation. The World Bank signaled its thanks in the sincerest way possible — that is to say, with cash, providing China with $22 billion in loans by 1996.
Given the supreme importance to rural Chinese families of having a son, both to take care of aging parents and to continue the line and honor family ancestors, many peasants simply could not accept a daughter as their only child. The resultant spike in female infanticide was perhaps not especially troubling to the authorities in itself, given their attitude toward related matters, but the total social breakdown it betokened was. Facing this reality, in 1988 the government in some provinces compromised just a little and agreed that couples who had a daughter as their first child would be allowed one more try to have a son — provided that there were no unauthorized births or other violations of the population policy by anyone in the couple’s village during that year. While giving a bit on the population front, this “reform” had the salutary effect — from the totalitarian point of view — of destroying peasant solidarity, which previously had acted to shield local women giving birth in hiding. Instead, hysterical group pressure was mobilized against such rebels, with everyone in the village transformed into government snoops to police their neighbors against possible infractions.
The killing of daughters, however, continued apace. During the period from 2000 to 2004, almost 1.25 boys were born for every girl born — indicating that one-fifth of all baby girls in China were either being aborted or murdered. In some provinces the fraction eliminated was as high as one-half.
The Terrible Toll
In 1991, UNFPA head Nafis Sadik went to China to congratulate the oligarchs of the People’s Republic for their excellent program, which by that time had already sterilized, implanted IUDs in, or performed abortions on some 300 million people. “China has every reason to feel proud of and pleased with its remarkable achievements made in its family planning policy and control of its population growth over the past ten years,” she said. “Now the country could offer its experiences and special experts to help other countries.... UNFPA is going to employ some of [China’s family planning experts] to work in other countries and popularize China’s experience in population growth control and family planning.”
Sadik made good on her promise. With the help of the UNFPA, the Chinese model of population control was implemented virtually in its entirety in Vietnam, and used to enhance the brutal effectiveness of the antihuman efforts in many other countries, from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka to Mexico and Peru.
Meanwhile, many other countries have similarly grim stories. The Indonesian population control program was extensive and coercive; Betsy Hartmann has recounted a case in 1990 in which “family planning workers accompanied by the police and army went from house to house and took men and women to a site where IUDs were being inserted. Women who refused had IUDs inserted at gunpoint.” The Indonesian government’s longstanding commitment to population control meant that other areas of health care were not prioritized, which is why the country’s infant mortality rate is double that of neighboring Malaysia and Thailand.
The misallocation of scarce health resources is even more apparent in sub-Saharan Africa. Health care professionals and programs that should be dedicated to fighting malaria and other deadly diseases are instead dedicated to population control. As Dr. Stephen Karanja, former secretary of the Kenyan Medical Association, wrote in 1997:
Our health sector is collapsed. Thousands of the Kenyan people will die of malaria, the treatment of which costs a few cents, in health facilities whose shelves are stocked to the ceiling with millions of dollars’ worth of pills, IUDs, Norplant, Depo-Provera, and so on, most of which are supplied with American money.... Special operating theaters fully serviced and not lacking in instruments are opened in hospitals for the sterilization of women. While in the same hospitals, emergency surgery cannot be done for lack of basic operating instruments and supplies.
In a 2000 interview, Karanja continued, “You can’t perform operations because there is no equipment, no materials. The operation theater isn’t working. But if it is for a sterilization, the theater is equipped.” Worse still, as Steven Mosher has argued in his book Population Control, there is good reason to believe that the 100 million hypodermic needles that were shipped to Africa since the 1990s for injecting contraceptive drugs have been a major cause of the continent’s horrific AIDS epidemic — which has resulted in tens of millions of deaths, with nearly two million more deaths expected this year, and next, and for years more to come.
Around the world, the population control movement has resulted in billions of lost or ruined lives. We cannot stop at merely rebutting the pseudoscience and recounting the crimes of the population controllers. We must also expose and confront the underlying antihumanist ideology. If the idea is accepted that the world’s resources are fixed with only so much to go around, then each new life is unwelcome, each unregulated act or thought is a menace, every person is fundamentally the enemy of every other person, and each race or nation is the enemy of every other race or nation. The ultimate outcome of such a worldview can only be enforced stagnation, tyranny, war, and genocide. The horrific crimes advocated or perpetrated by antihumanism’s devotees over the past two centuries prove this conclusively. Only in a world of unlimited resources can all men be brothers.
That is why we must reject antihumanism and embrace instead an ethic based on faith in the human capacity for creativity and invention. For in doing so, we make a statement that we are living not at the end of history, but at the beginning of history; that we believe in freedom and not regimentation; in progress and not stasis; in love rather than hate; in life rather than death; in hope rather than despair.
Robert Zubrin is a New Atlantis contributing editor. This essay is adapted from his new book — the latest volume in our New Atlantis Books series — Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism.
Soetoro’s 2012 election contingency
Robust agenda of change
Doug Hagmann
Saturday, July 21, 2012
Canadian Free Press:
It was a conversation with my source inside the DHS that I did not want to have, but was not totally unexpected. “I’m not sure how long I can continue to provide you with information.” he stated. I was unable to tell if he made his statement with relief or sadness, or perhaps a mixture of both. “I could be wrong, but I don’t think there’s much time left, if I am interpreting certain information and actions correctly.”
Previous Insider Columns
The planned re-election of Obama, revolutionary style
More from DHS Insider
Obviously intrigued, I asked what information and actions he was talking about, and whether he was in any trouble from the information he’s passed to me and I’ve published. “No, it’s not that. I wish that’s what it was, I could deal with that. It’s worse. Things might be… it might not matter in a few more months.” This was one of the only times I’ve ever sensed a level of defeat in his voice and demeanor.
Who’s in the White House?
My source looked at me and posed a question I did not expect: Do you know who is in the White House?” I was uncertain if he meant who was present there now, or if he was talking in a more general sense knowing that he has followed my research on Barry Soetoro (a/k/a Barack Hussein Obama II), so I asked him for clarification. I thought it was a fair request. With that, he became visibly agitated and had a look in his eyes I’ve never seen before. “You can’t answer that [expletive deleted] question. Trust me, few can, and those who can won’t, because they’re either part of the ‘royal round table’ or they’re gutless [expletive deleted].”
Based on his agitated state, I was careful with what I said next. I told him that we’ve covered this matter very comprehensively, adding that Obama’s dog’s papers are more valid than Obama. I told him that he was correct in that we both know that we do not know Obama’s legal name or his actual parental lineage I began to verbally list the various inconsistencies with his identify, at which point he stopped me with a raise of his hand.
“Enough,” he stated and apologized for his previous outburst. “We both know the guy is a an imposter, a ‘Manchurian Candidate,’ and he’s there to do a job, implement a very specific agenda. And he’s not planning to leave until that job is done, the agenda completed,” stated my source. “It’s no accident, his lack of history, lack of bona fides. It’s all about his lack of allegiance to our country and the Constitution that ‘43’ called just a ‘G-d damned piece of paper. And Bush was an American President, at least on paper. Where does Obama call home?” Where does his allegiance lie? That’s what the eligibility brouhaha is all about and why it’s so important, but hardly ‘anybody gets it.’ When he said he was a citizen of the world, those were not just words, but an admission of sorts. And fundamental change and transformation, that’s what it’s all about.”
What’s the agenda?
Our conversation turned to the agenda of the person in the White House. Short on time, my source stated that the current resident of the White House has been tasked to implement a “robust agenda of change” using the agencies and government infrastructure previously created for him.
“He’s been instructed to fully remove ‘God, guns and guts’ from America and Americans, to neuter our military, bankrupt our country, and force everyone into dependency through a well-planned economic disaster that was crafted long before he stepped foot into the Oval Office. The financial crash of September 2008 was one such well planned economic terrorist attack. It had the blessing of many bankers and politicians in the U.S. and now I’m finding, some overseas. It was an important part of the framework given to Obama to ‘grease the wheels’ for a complete financial collapse. And I’m sad to say that a lot of people I once thought were on our side played an important role in setting us up - all of us.”
“The objective, or the agenda, is much bigger than I think anyone can comprehend,” stated my source. “It’s global in nature, and it involves other governments, communist governments,” he added. It’s evil in its simplicity. It’s to destroy our country from within and take away our ability to fight what’s coming. It’s to change our way of life, and he’s got the people in place to do it, at least for the most part. And forget about the Republicans versus the Democrats, because nearly all of them are all playing for the same team. Both sides have helped to get us to this point. They’ve allowed Communists to enter every government institution inside the beltway, and just about everyone let it happen, helped it happen or watched it happen.”
“But O- I cannot even bring myself to call him by name anymore, and as we talked before, we’re not even sure what his real name is, made some serious mistakes, or became lazy and began enjoying his lifestyle a little too much. Not sure which, maybe both. His international handlers have been upset with him because it set the whole timetable back. And this is where I can offer you information about what’s going on at DHS, because it’s DHS that is tasked to be the enforcers. It’s like the old military saying, ‘hurry up and wait,’” said my source.
The Plan
“Look,” stated my source, “I’ve been told that the people with the real power are using the guy in the White House to implement the whole globalist power structure thing. They made certain that they had someone in the White House to go along and implement certain things by executive order, appointments, and other methods to bring about the deconstruction of the U.S., and making our Constitution irrelevant, or at least subservient to international law. I can’t say I know this for sure because it’s all second hand, but it makes sense from my perspective at DHS,” he added.
“Remember when I told you about DHS planning a response for chaos, civil war, rioting, insurrection or whatever you want to call it? Well, that’s not happening fast enough, and there are people who don’t think it can be accomplished in one term. That’s why a second term is critical, and that’s why there’s desperation sinking in. Napolitano is corresponding a lot with the White House, to Valerie Jarrett, to the Secret Service, and to others I won’t name. But there is some plan in place to assure the reelection of this guy so he can finish the job he was given,” he said.
“We’re talking about something taking place to make sure that Obama stays in office. I’ve been privy to ‘contingency plans’ ordered by Jarrett for one that defines the protocol for DHS response to the ‘temporary suspension of U.S. elections due to international and domestic crisis.’ It’s a real document, ordered by Jarrett and contains plans for travel restrictions, gun possession ban by citizens, and in general, ‘martial law.’”
“You know, I heard rumors about the same thing under Bush and laughed, calling it conspiracy nonsense. Now I’m not so sure, and think that maybe it was just too early and the wrong person. Anyway, I’m not laughing anymore.”
“Also, there are some mid-level people beginning to question the orders they are receiving. There’s a lot of talk, questions being asked now by a few people in key DHS positions about what is taking place, and that’s making Napolitano and the White House very nervous. Anyone who questions the ‘militarization’ going on is either transferred out or given [expletive deleted] assignments.”
Disturbances
I asked if the plans could be disrupted, changed or if anything posed a valid threat to the agenda.
My source responded: “The Arpaio investigation hit on something critical. I don’t know what it is, and maybe they’re holding something back, whatever happened in the last 2 or 3 months really upset things, got some people scrambling. The White House, and again, Jarrett, ordered ‘Justice’ to turn up the heat against Sheriff Arpaio.”
“It’s interesting how the media has laid down and not reported on this investigation. There have been threats made, and not so subtle ones, either.”
“Also, ‘Fast and Furious’ is huge and leads right to the White House and ‘State,’ but according to my sources, won’t be an issue because the politicians in charge of the investigations have been compromised and threatened. Napolitano knows everything about Fast and Furious and is working with Holder to impede the investigations. She’s using her political clout. But damage control had taken time and a toll,” added my source.
In the end, though, I don’t think there’s enough to stop a second term. And should there be any hint of it, well, I told you, there are contingency plans for 2012.
Doug Hagmann
Saturday, July 21, 2012
Canadian Free Press:
It was a conversation with my source inside the DHS that I did not want to have, but was not totally unexpected. “I’m not sure how long I can continue to provide you with information.” he stated. I was unable to tell if he made his statement with relief or sadness, or perhaps a mixture of both. “I could be wrong, but I don’t think there’s much time left, if I am interpreting certain information and actions correctly.”
Previous Insider Columns
The planned re-election of Obama, revolutionary style
More from DHS Insider
Obviously intrigued, I asked what information and actions he was talking about, and whether he was in any trouble from the information he’s passed to me and I’ve published. “No, it’s not that. I wish that’s what it was, I could deal with that. It’s worse. Things might be… it might not matter in a few more months.” This was one of the only times I’ve ever sensed a level of defeat in his voice and demeanor.
Who’s in the White House?
My source looked at me and posed a question I did not expect: Do you know who is in the White House?” I was uncertain if he meant who was present there now, or if he was talking in a more general sense knowing that he has followed my research on Barry Soetoro (a/k/a Barack Hussein Obama II), so I asked him for clarification. I thought it was a fair request. With that, he became visibly agitated and had a look in his eyes I’ve never seen before. “You can’t answer that [expletive deleted] question. Trust me, few can, and those who can won’t, because they’re either part of the ‘royal round table’ or they’re gutless [expletive deleted].”
Based on his agitated state, I was careful with what I said next. I told him that we’ve covered this matter very comprehensively, adding that Obama’s dog’s papers are more valid than Obama. I told him that he was correct in that we both know that we do not know Obama’s legal name or his actual parental lineage I began to verbally list the various inconsistencies with his identify, at which point he stopped me with a raise of his hand.
“Enough,” he stated and apologized for his previous outburst. “We both know the guy is a an imposter, a ‘Manchurian Candidate,’ and he’s there to do a job, implement a very specific agenda. And he’s not planning to leave until that job is done, the agenda completed,” stated my source. “It’s no accident, his lack of history, lack of bona fides. It’s all about his lack of allegiance to our country and the Constitution that ‘43’ called just a ‘G-d damned piece of paper. And Bush was an American President, at least on paper. Where does Obama call home?” Where does his allegiance lie? That’s what the eligibility brouhaha is all about and why it’s so important, but hardly ‘anybody gets it.’ When he said he was a citizen of the world, those were not just words, but an admission of sorts. And fundamental change and transformation, that’s what it’s all about.”
What’s the agenda?
Our conversation turned to the agenda of the person in the White House. Short on time, my source stated that the current resident of the White House has been tasked to implement a “robust agenda of change” using the agencies and government infrastructure previously created for him.
“He’s been instructed to fully remove ‘God, guns and guts’ from America and Americans, to neuter our military, bankrupt our country, and force everyone into dependency through a well-planned economic disaster that was crafted long before he stepped foot into the Oval Office. The financial crash of September 2008 was one such well planned economic terrorist attack. It had the blessing of many bankers and politicians in the U.S. and now I’m finding, some overseas. It was an important part of the framework given to Obama to ‘grease the wheels’ for a complete financial collapse. And I’m sad to say that a lot of people I once thought were on our side played an important role in setting us up - all of us.”
“The objective, or the agenda, is much bigger than I think anyone can comprehend,” stated my source. “It’s global in nature, and it involves other governments, communist governments,” he added. It’s evil in its simplicity. It’s to destroy our country from within and take away our ability to fight what’s coming. It’s to change our way of life, and he’s got the people in place to do it, at least for the most part. And forget about the Republicans versus the Democrats, because nearly all of them are all playing for the same team. Both sides have helped to get us to this point. They’ve allowed Communists to enter every government institution inside the beltway, and just about everyone let it happen, helped it happen or watched it happen.”
“But O- I cannot even bring myself to call him by name anymore, and as we talked before, we’re not even sure what his real name is, made some serious mistakes, or became lazy and began enjoying his lifestyle a little too much. Not sure which, maybe both. His international handlers have been upset with him because it set the whole timetable back. And this is where I can offer you information about what’s going on at DHS, because it’s DHS that is tasked to be the enforcers. It’s like the old military saying, ‘hurry up and wait,’” said my source.
The Plan
“Look,” stated my source, “I’ve been told that the people with the real power are using the guy in the White House to implement the whole globalist power structure thing. They made certain that they had someone in the White House to go along and implement certain things by executive order, appointments, and other methods to bring about the deconstruction of the U.S., and making our Constitution irrelevant, or at least subservient to international law. I can’t say I know this for sure because it’s all second hand, but it makes sense from my perspective at DHS,” he added.
“Remember when I told you about DHS planning a response for chaos, civil war, rioting, insurrection or whatever you want to call it? Well, that’s not happening fast enough, and there are people who don’t think it can be accomplished in one term. That’s why a second term is critical, and that’s why there’s desperation sinking in. Napolitano is corresponding a lot with the White House, to Valerie Jarrett, to the Secret Service, and to others I won’t name. But there is some plan in place to assure the reelection of this guy so he can finish the job he was given,” he said.
“We’re talking about something taking place to make sure that Obama stays in office. I’ve been privy to ‘contingency plans’ ordered by Jarrett for one that defines the protocol for DHS response to the ‘temporary suspension of U.S. elections due to international and domestic crisis.’ It’s a real document, ordered by Jarrett and contains plans for travel restrictions, gun possession ban by citizens, and in general, ‘martial law.’”
“You know, I heard rumors about the same thing under Bush and laughed, calling it conspiracy nonsense. Now I’m not so sure, and think that maybe it was just too early and the wrong person. Anyway, I’m not laughing anymore.”
“Also, there are some mid-level people beginning to question the orders they are receiving. There’s a lot of talk, questions being asked now by a few people in key DHS positions about what is taking place, and that’s making Napolitano and the White House very nervous. Anyone who questions the ‘militarization’ going on is either transferred out or given [expletive deleted] assignments.”
Disturbances
I asked if the plans could be disrupted, changed or if anything posed a valid threat to the agenda.
My source responded: “The Arpaio investigation hit on something critical. I don’t know what it is, and maybe they’re holding something back, whatever happened in the last 2 or 3 months really upset things, got some people scrambling. The White House, and again, Jarrett, ordered ‘Justice’ to turn up the heat against Sheriff Arpaio.”
“It’s interesting how the media has laid down and not reported on this investigation. There have been threats made, and not so subtle ones, either.”
“Also, ‘Fast and Furious’ is huge and leads right to the White House and ‘State,’ but according to my sources, won’t be an issue because the politicians in charge of the investigations have been compromised and threatened. Napolitano knows everything about Fast and Furious and is working with Holder to impede the investigations. She’s using her political clout. But damage control had taken time and a toll,” added my source.
In the end, though, I don’t think there’s enough to stop a second term. And should there be any hint of it, well, I told you, there are contingency plans for 2012.
All Three Branches of Government Are Acting Above the Law
What do we do about it?
Andrew Napolitano
July 19, 2012
The greatest distinguishing factor between countries in which there is some freedom and those where authoritarian governments manage personal behavior is the Rule of Law. The idea that the very laws that the government is charged with enforcing could restrain the government itself is uniquely Western and was accepted with near unanimity at the time of the creation of the American Republic. Without that concept underlying the exercise of governmental power, there is little hope for freedom.
The Rule of Law is a three-legged stool on which freedom sits. The first leg requires that all laws be enacted in advance of the behavior they seek to regulate and be crafted and promulgated in public by a legitimate authority. The goal of all laws must be the preservation of individual freedom. A law is not legitimate if it is written by an evil genius in secret or if it punishes behavior that was lawful when the behavior took place or if its goal is to solidify the strength of those in power. It also is not legitimate if it is written by the president instead of Congress.
The second leg is that no one is above the law and no one is beneath it. Thus, the law's restraints on force and fraud need to restrain everyone equally, and the law's protections against force and fraud must protect everyone equally. This leg removes from the discretion of those who enforce the law the ability to enforce it or to afford its protections selectively. This principle also requires that the law enforcers enforce the law against themselves. Of course, this was not always the case. In 1628, the British Parliament spent days debating the question "Is the king above the Rule of Law, or is the Rule of Law above the king?" Thankfully, the king lost -- but only by 10 votes out of several hundred cast.
The third leg of the Rule of Law requires that the structures that promulgate, enforce and interpret law be so fundamental -- Congress writes the laws, the president enforces the laws, the courts interpret the laws -- that they cannot be changed retroactively or overnight by the folks who administer them. Stated differently, this leg mandates that only a broad consensus can change the goals or values or structures used to implement the laws; they cannot be changed by atrophy or neglect or crisis.
The values in America are set forth in the Declaration of Independence, and the governmental structures in America are set forth in the Constitution. The former -- that our rights are inalienable and come from our Creator and not from the government -- is not merely a recitation of Thomas Jefferson's musings. The Declaration is the articulation of our values then and now, and it, too, is the law of the land.
The Constitution was written -- largely by James Madison -- to define and to limit the federal government, and it was quickly amended by adding the Bill of Rights so as to be sure that natural rights would be respected by the government. This tension between the power of the majority -- at the ballot box or in Congress -- and the rights of the minority -- whether a discrete class of persons or a minority of one -- is known as the Madisonian dilemma. Stated differently, the Constitution provides for protection against the tyranny of the majority.
In our system, the power to resolve the dilemma is reposed into the hands of the judiciary, and those who have that power are to resolve it without regard to popularity or politics. Their oath is to the Constitution. They have the final say on what the laws mean. If they follow the Rule of Law, they will invalidate that which the government has done and which is properly challenged before them and which is not authorized by the Constitution. Their very purpose is to be anti- democratic, lest the popular majority takes whatever lives, liberties or property it covets. In return for life tenure, we expect judicial modesty, and we demand constitutional fidelity -- not political compromise.
In our era, the violations of the Rule of Law have become most troublesome when the government breaks its own laws. Prosecute Roger Clemens for lying to Congress? What about all the lies Congress tells? Prosecute John Edwards for cheating? What about all the cheating in Congress when it enacts laws it hasn't read? Bring the troops home from the Middle East? What about all the innocents killed secretly by the president using CIA drones? Can't find a way to justify Obamacare under the Constitution? Why not call it what its proponents insisted it isn't -- a tax?
We live in perilous times. The president acts above the Rule of Law and fights his own wars. Congress acts below the Rule of Law by letting the president do whatever he can get away with. And this summer, the Supreme Court rewrote the Rule of Law.
What do we do about it?
Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written six books on the U.S. Constitution. The most recent is "It Is Dangerous To Be Right When the Government Is Wrong: The Case for Personal Freedom."
Andrew Napolitano
July 19, 2012
The greatest distinguishing factor between countries in which there is some freedom and those where authoritarian governments manage personal behavior is the Rule of Law. The idea that the very laws that the government is charged with enforcing could restrain the government itself is uniquely Western and was accepted with near unanimity at the time of the creation of the American Republic. Without that concept underlying the exercise of governmental power, there is little hope for freedom.
The Rule of Law is a three-legged stool on which freedom sits. The first leg requires that all laws be enacted in advance of the behavior they seek to regulate and be crafted and promulgated in public by a legitimate authority. The goal of all laws must be the preservation of individual freedom. A law is not legitimate if it is written by an evil genius in secret or if it punishes behavior that was lawful when the behavior took place or if its goal is to solidify the strength of those in power. It also is not legitimate if it is written by the president instead of Congress.
The second leg is that no one is above the law and no one is beneath it. Thus, the law's restraints on force and fraud need to restrain everyone equally, and the law's protections against force and fraud must protect everyone equally. This leg removes from the discretion of those who enforce the law the ability to enforce it or to afford its protections selectively. This principle also requires that the law enforcers enforce the law against themselves. Of course, this was not always the case. In 1628, the British Parliament spent days debating the question "Is the king above the Rule of Law, or is the Rule of Law above the king?" Thankfully, the king lost -- but only by 10 votes out of several hundred cast.
The third leg of the Rule of Law requires that the structures that promulgate, enforce and interpret law be so fundamental -- Congress writes the laws, the president enforces the laws, the courts interpret the laws -- that they cannot be changed retroactively or overnight by the folks who administer them. Stated differently, this leg mandates that only a broad consensus can change the goals or values or structures used to implement the laws; they cannot be changed by atrophy or neglect or crisis.
The values in America are set forth in the Declaration of Independence, and the governmental structures in America are set forth in the Constitution. The former -- that our rights are inalienable and come from our Creator and not from the government -- is not merely a recitation of Thomas Jefferson's musings. The Declaration is the articulation of our values then and now, and it, too, is the law of the land.
The Constitution was written -- largely by James Madison -- to define and to limit the federal government, and it was quickly amended by adding the Bill of Rights so as to be sure that natural rights would be respected by the government. This tension between the power of the majority -- at the ballot box or in Congress -- and the rights of the minority -- whether a discrete class of persons or a minority of one -- is known as the Madisonian dilemma. Stated differently, the Constitution provides for protection against the tyranny of the majority.
In our system, the power to resolve the dilemma is reposed into the hands of the judiciary, and those who have that power are to resolve it without regard to popularity or politics. Their oath is to the Constitution. They have the final say on what the laws mean. If they follow the Rule of Law, they will invalidate that which the government has done and which is properly challenged before them and which is not authorized by the Constitution. Their very purpose is to be anti- democratic, lest the popular majority takes whatever lives, liberties or property it covets. In return for life tenure, we expect judicial modesty, and we demand constitutional fidelity -- not political compromise.
In our era, the violations of the Rule of Law have become most troublesome when the government breaks its own laws. Prosecute Roger Clemens for lying to Congress? What about all the lies Congress tells? Prosecute John Edwards for cheating? What about all the cheating in Congress when it enacts laws it hasn't read? Bring the troops home from the Middle East? What about all the innocents killed secretly by the president using CIA drones? Can't find a way to justify Obamacare under the Constitution? Why not call it what its proponents insisted it isn't -- a tax?
We live in perilous times. The president acts above the Rule of Law and fights his own wars. Congress acts below the Rule of Law by letting the president do whatever he can get away with. And this summer, the Supreme Court rewrote the Rule of Law.
What do we do about it?
Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel. Judge Napolitano has written six books on the U.S. Constitution. The most recent is "It Is Dangerous To Be Right When the Government Is Wrong: The Case for Personal Freedom."
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