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The following report is based almost exclusively on the nearly 1,000-page ``Report of the International Congress for Population Science,'' which was published in 1936 as a book titled Population Questions, edited by Hans Harmsen and Franz Lohse. In every respect it is shocking to read, not simply because the several hundred population specialists who gathered in Berlin in 1935 evidently permitted Nazi racial policy to be presented without dissent. It is precisely the restrained, polite tone of the Berlin conference, where the German spokesmen, in particular, avoided any controversy, which underscores how far 20 years of the same Darwinian-Nietzschean ideology has already led us into a new barbarism of the same kind--only this time on a world scale.
What that meant was explained by the conference's honorary chairman, Reichsminister of the Interior Dr. Wilhelm Frick, in his opening address: ``In order to prevent the continuous increase of the congenitally diseased, the `Law for the Prevention of Congenitally Diseased Progeny' was promulgated in July 14, 1933.'' The decree, extensively discussed by the conference participants, prescribed compulsory sterilization not only for those with inherited illnesses, but also for schizophrenics, the mentally retarded, gypsies, the asocial, alcoholics, criminals, and those classified for other reasons as ``racially inferior.''
The National Socialist government was well represented: On the honorary committee sat seven Reichsministers, including the president of the Reichsbank directorate, Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, who also headed the Economics Ministry. Another name stands out: Dr. Roland Freisler, at that time state secretary in the Reich's Justice Ministry, who later presided over the infamous People's Court. The presiding chairman of the conference was Prof. Dr. Eugen Fischer, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Racial Biology, and Eugenics.
In the name of the Congress, Fischer sent a telegram of ``respectful greetings to Führer and Reichschancellor Adolf Hitler, whose far-seeing population policy based on racial hygiene and principles of heredity will secure the future of the German Volk.'' Hitler conveyed his thanks and wished the Congress ``full success in its momentous work in the weighty sphere of population policy and race cultivation.''
The Congress was no Nazi Party assembly, however, but rather an international gathering. Sir Charles Close of Winchester, England, president of the International Association for Population Science, delivered greetings on behalf of foreign universities, academies, and scientific organizations, and more than a third of the participants came from abroad.
The Berlin conference was essentially a continuation of the International Eugenics Conference of 1932, which had elected Prof. Dr. Ernst Rüdin, later the author of the Nuremberg race decrees, as its chairman.
Dr. Clarence Campbell of New York, honorary president of the Eugenics Research Institute, who had played a leading role at the New York eugenics conference, was a main speaker and vice-chairman at the Berlin Congress. Professor Harry H. Laughlin of Long Island, New York was another prominent figure; he reported on the status of eugenic sterilization decrees in the United States, while Campbell gave a presentation on fundamental principles, titled ``The Biological Postulates of Population Research.'' As forerunners of racial doctrine he named Polybius, Cato, Seneca, Tacitus, Gobineau, and Francis Galton. Among his contemporaries he commended Georges de Lapouge, Poletz, Ernst Rüdin, and Eugen Fischer, as well as Leonard Darwin and R.A. Fisher of Great Britain, and the Americans Charles B. Davenport, Harry H. Laughlin, Henry Fairfield Osborn, Madison Grant, and Lothrop Stoddard. Campbell continued: ``From the synthesis of the work of all these men, the Führer of the German nation, Adolf Hitler, capably assisted by Interior Minister Dr. Frick, and advised by the anthropologists, eugenicists, and social philosophers of the nation, has been able to draw forth a far-reaching racial policy of evolving and improving the population, which promises to become epochal in racial history. It presents an example which other nations and races must follow if they do not wish their racial quality, their racial performance, and their prospects for survival to be cast into the lower ranks.''
At the Berlin Congress--where for tactical reasons the subject of actual racial culling was almost entirely suppressed--it was Campbell who delivered the summons to a policy of racial purity and ``homogenous blood'': ``The survival of a race is essentially a cooperative process, which is impaired by all discordance of the contributory influences.... A population with racially homogenous blood, without racially alien elements which serve to confuse, obstruct, and defeat its racial goals, will always be united in conformity with the tendency of its racial goals.... Through the unity of the racial goal, it is possible for insignificant races to become great races, and only through that unity will they remain so.''
From this, Campbell extracted the postulate of a ``selective endogamous transmission,'' the prohibition of ``race mixing,'' as it would become a fearful reality in the 1938 Nuremberg ``Laws for the Protection of the Blood.'' The entire Nazi training manual on the Nuremberg racial laws consisted of propaganda for the ``Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor,'' which banned ``mixed marriages'' with members of other ``races,'' especially Jews and gypsies. As of July 1, 1938 a certificate of legal fitness to marry had to be submitted. On page 75, the text states in explanation of the ``Law for Protection of the Blood'': ``With this law a final line is drawn beneath a fateful development, which found its first historically documented expression in the famous American Declaration of Independence in 1776, which contains the lapidary sentence: `We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.' The cast of mind emanating from this proclamation flowed into the various populations through the French Revolution of 1789 with its thesis of the alleged `equality, liberty, fraternity of all men,' and during a century and a half deranged the thinking of even the cleverest minds; it was, as is well known, used in the most adroit way by the Jewish race to gnaw away at the foundations of state, culture, and the Volk in the most dangerous way and to undermine them. National Socialism was the first to show the German people the colossal lie that is contained in this delusion of equality [all emphasis in the original].''
The organizers of the global population conference in Cairo, too, link population policy to eugenics. This was confirmed on May 10, 1994 by a certain Mayone Stycos, professor of demography and sociology at Cornell University, during a World Population Foundation conference in Stockholm. A journalist from Executive Intelligence Review magazine asked Professor Stycos whether the Cairo conference can be seen as a continuation of the 1932 eugenics conference in New York. Not the least shocked or affronted, Professor Stycos replied that the eugenics movement had accomplished important things, and in the interim ``scientific and technical breakthroughs'' were made, referring to better methods of contraception and sterilization. ``If you go to the Cairo conference, you'll find that a lot of it revolves around eugenics.''
Latterday population experts like Stycos put forth their own special ``racial criteria'': Africans and Chinese are clearly unworthy of possessing technology. For China, ``birth control is more important than economic development,'' Stycos declared in his Stockholm speech. ``It would be a catastrophe if every Chinese had a refrigerator.''
One of the most important British non-governmental organizations (NGOs) active on the perimeter of the Cairo conference is called the Marie Stopes International. Marie C. Stopes, who died in 1957, herself attended the 1935 Berlin Congress. The conference report summarizes her contribution as follows: ``Marie Stopes demanded that scientifically trained minds examine the prerequisites for human conception and give directions for regulating them from the point of view of breeding up the human stock.''
What Eastern Europe represented for the Nazis, the developing countries represent for the U.N. Population Fund today.
The U.N. Population Fund and the worldwide Malthusian propaganda apparatus deem the poor countries of the Third World ``overpopulated.'' Despite the accelerating decline in births in the developing countries since the 1970s, from 6.1 to 3.9 children per mother, it is claimed that the black, brown, and yellow people there are still far too prolific.
In the 1930s, mortality was still so high in the Third World that no one considered its demographic trends a threat; the Nazis' overpopulation propaganda was directed against the Slavs. Dr. Friedrich Burgdoerfer, director of the Reich's Statistical Office, asserted at the Berlin world population conference in solemnly objective tones, that by the year 1960 Slavs would make up over half the European population, while the proportion of Germans would shrink to one-fourth. He illustrated his speech with charts which were later reprinted in numerous Nazi propaganda documents. They show a remarkable similarity to current portrayals of the Third World's growing share of the total population of the earth.
Lower birth rates in the northern countries lend additional impetus to the argument, as they did in the 1930s. The late French geopolitician F.O. Miksche wrote in 1991: ``Currently 5.5 billion people are living on the Earth. While in the Western industrialized states the population growth rate averages only about 0.5 percent, in the Third World countries the birth rate stands at between 2 percent and 3 percent. Only in the United States is the population growing by 3 million per year--of which more than half are, of course, non-white, and in no way suffices, together with Europe, to counterbalance Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The far higher birth rates in most countries of the Third World will mean that in the relatively short period of 30 years, out of each 100 million people on the globe, scarcely 10 to 12 will be white.'' From this Miksche derives a prophecy of ``international race war'': ``the Western nations are directly inviting their future attackers to solve their problems by means of armed force against the wealthy industrial countries.''
The comparison here which suggests itself is to Hitler's 1941 Generalplan Ost for the occupied territories of Eastern Europe. Through the use of raw materials and food production in Poland and Ukraine, as well as the exploitation of ``surplus'' labor there, the Nazis intended to make Germany ``blockade-proof'' and to ensure supplies for both the Wehrmacht and the home front. Part of this strategy was the extermination of European Jews, down to the Final Solution in the death camps. At the same time, the ``overpopulation'' in occupied Eastern Europe was to be eliminated through a systematic plan for population reduction. By means of state-sponsored birth control, abortion, deportation, calculated starvation, and mass murder, the population of Poland, the Baltic nations, Byelorussia, and western Ukraine was to be reduced by half or more.
Since 1990 at the latest, the United Nations' Population Fund's population strategy has made no secret of the goal set for the gigantic birth-control army the Cairo Action Plan would still further expand. The goal is to bring population growth in the developing nations to a halt as soon as possible, and to reduce total world population in the next 150 years to half the number of people living today. The basis, as it was in the 1930s, is an ideologically warped demographic theory which portrays all economic, social, and environmental problems as results of ``overpopulation,'' whereas conversely, ``the smaller the total population finally becomes, the more room our children and grandchildren will have.'' In other words, the elimination of ``excess people,'' the reduction of ``population pressure,'' is presented as the solution to every problem.
Birth control and abortion were part of the Nazis' depopulation arsenal, too. Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, the personal aide to Adolf Hitler, wrote to Ostminister Alfred Rosenberg on July 23, 1942: ``If girls and women in the occupied Eastern zone abort their children, that can only be to our advantage.... According to the Führer's attitude, it is even necessary to allow full-scale traffic in contraceptives in the occupied territories, because we can have no stake whatever in an increase in the non-German population.''
The racial administrator in the Reich's Eastern Territories Ministry, Erhard Wetzel, dealt extensively with this topic in his April 1942 commentary on the Generalplan Ost: ``Regarding these zones, we must conduct a deliberate policy of negative population growth. Through propaganda measures, especially by means of the press, radio, cinema, handbills, short brochures, educational statements, and the like, the population must be convinced over and over again how harmful it is to have a lot of children. The costs ought to be cited, and then what could have been bought instead. The great dangers to women's health that can arise in childbearing could be spelled out, and so forth. Along with this propaganda, large-scale propaganda must be issued for contraceptives. Neither advocacy and dissemination of contraceptives, nor abortion, should be illegal. The establishment of abortion facilities should be positively promoted. Midwives and assistant medical officers, for instance, can be trained as abortionists.... It is obvious that by systematic application of the above measures, considerable success can be achieved in weakening the racial substance of the Russian people.''
At the Berlin conference, little more than Burgdoerfer's charts and commentary could be seen or heard about all this. The international association's official policy toward the Jews still remained to be fleshed out. Only Alfred Ploetz made the disapproving remark in his speech that statistically, during wartime the ``blood toll'' of Jews contributed only about one-fourth that of the rest of the German population, ``partly because of their smaller average physical size, partly because of their disinclination toward becoming soldiers, and partly because of their frequently deficient capacity for enthusiasm toward their host population and its nation.'' But almost all the speeches dripped with the theoretical racism of a Darwin or Nietzsche, and almost everyone spoke of ``selection'' and ``counter-selection,'' about the survival of the fittest as willed by Nature, in which no irresponsible intervention to sustain the weak (``counter-selection'') can be permitted. ``There exists not only brotherly love, but love of the most remote, to use a term of Nietzsche's, and these remotest ones are our children's children, and population science teaches us to help determine their destiny,'' unctuously declared Eugen Fischer before concluding his address with ``Sieg Heil!''
Harry Laughlin demanded a ``systematic identification of all the congenitally inferior, and an improvement in surgical techniques for female sterilization.''
Further proceedings spelled out bit by bit what was meant by ``congenitally inferior,'' that is, who was to be prevented from reproducing, with the help of the new sterilization decrees. As history was to show, the Nazis deprived many thousands of these human beings not only of the right to bear children, but of their lives.
Alfred Ploetz announced that the ``life process of the race is destroyed by counter-selection, namely, by the maintenance of individuals even though their hereditary endowments are weaker than those of the strong. This includes so much humane protection of the congenitally weak through special care that they are enabled to reproduce, for instance certain chronically ill, feeble-minded, cripples, blind persons, or deaf-mutes.''
Ernst Rüdin, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy and Demography of the German Psychiatric Research Institute in Munich, spoke on ``The Relationships Between Predictions of Heredity and Population Policy.'' What will be necessary, he said, is the ``natural or artificial elimination of members of the population who are inadequately adapted to life and the competitive struggle.'' For this purpose the science of making predictions based on heredity was to be further developed. Rüdin continued: ``We shall be able to assign all members of a population community their hereditary rank on a broad scale, with regard to the type, degree, and seriousness of congenital disease factors which they harbor.... With the construction of such a scale... we shall possess an instrument which enables us to continuously bring the measures for qualitative racial hygiene into proper relationship with the requirements of quantitative population policy. Namely: At a given necessary numerical level of population, after the lower end of the hereditary value scale has been genetically eliminated by racially hygienic artificial means, our progress toward the center of the ladder of hereditary fitness will be faster and better, the more satisfactory the actual reproductive rate turns out to be among the occupants of the upper rungs of the ladder.... The worst hereditary variables are found, for example, in parents who both suffer from serious recessive congenital disease.... Also... congenital feeble-minded, schizophrenics, epileptics, have very great predispositions to pass on hereditary disease and other defects to their children.''
Erik Essen-Moeller, lecturing on ``Reproduction By the Mentally Ill,'' found that manic-depressive individuals had almost as many children as the general population, schizophrenics fewer, and epileptics still fewer. He calculated how long it would take, at different rates of sterilization, until these patient groups were totally ``eliminated.''
K.W. Joelten and H. Reploh reported on ``Investigations of Children in Schools for the Handicapped from the Standpoint of Racial Hygiene.'' It was completely proper, they said, that in the July 14, 1933 Law for the Prevention of Congenitally Diseased Progeny, ``the feeble-minded were specified as the first priority. Further, it is proper that sterilization does not require having a serious case of feeble-mindedness. As we have seen, it is very characteristic that precisely those forms of feeble-mindedness result in infertility, while a milder case permits reproduction and congenital transmission.... Moreover, the feeble-minded offer particularly good prerequisites for prompt implementation of sterilization, insofar as almost all of them can be identified early enough in the school for the handicapped, before they reach reproductive age.''
Robert Ritter reviewed the family trees of criminals, people of partly gypsy descent, and psychopaths, building up to the demand that hereditarily predisposed acutely asocial psychopaths and criminals should also ``be excluded from reproducing.''
Today, the debate over euthanasia and the demand for cost-cutting in medical care have made us familiar with such arguments. With the help of current ``discussions'' in the mass media, a scale could already be drawn up on which some lives are ``unworthy to be lived,'' according to public opinion, legal statute, and medical guidelines, because they are judged too expensive to sustain. Thus eugenic abortion is commonplace everywhere, while Germany's Peter Singer, author of The New Ethics, propagandizes for the eugenic murder of children as well. Sterilization of the mentally ill proceeds while the degree of their capacity to make decisions is disputed. Many consider it a waste of money to keep comatose patients alive, although recovery is frequent even after long periods of unconsciousness. In England and elsewhere, in cases of expensive treatment, calculations are made according to the ``Quality Life Years'' (QALY) criterion, to determine whether the treatment would still ``pay'' when the life expectancy is multiplied by the patient's anticipated ``quality of life.'' The elderly and the acutely ill thus have the least chance of achieving a rating at which life will be sustained. Thus are the weakest sifted out. Euthanasia propaganda, meanwhile, propels the patient forward on the scale of candidates for death, up to the ranks of the chronically ill and those who are tired of living.
Herman Lundborg, director of the State Institute for Racial Biology in Uppsala, Sweden, attacked not only industrialization, but society's higher cultural development as a whole: ``Coinciding with a society's increase in prosperity, diminution of mortality, and prolongation of the average lifespan, is the threat of racial degeneration. The race's strength becomes obliterated: an all-too-costly sacrifice for the advantages provided by highly sublimated and intellectual culture.''
The Berlin attorney Ludwig Fluegge elaborated these thoughts into an attack against creative genius and against highly gifted people in general. ``Great talent is associated with defects or weaknesses in other organs.... Where no actual pathology is the co-determinant of exceptional advantages, the latter are nevertheless associated with such lability or weakness that a slight external stimulus can easily trigger a pathological condition.... I call these persons `superiority-afflicted.' They are the bearers of the initial impulse in world history. The rise of religion, political order, and higher culture, capital formation, intellectual, technical, moral, and aesthetic progress, these are their work.''
Precisely for this reason, the ``superiority-afflicted'' are ``dangerous,'' and to admire them is a ``fateful error. The victory and the intrinsic superiority of the Third Reich are associated with this fact being instinctively or consciously recognized and dealt with.... Exceptional natures disturb the conditions essential to the life of average healthy people.... In the Third Reich, the average healthy person's defense reflex becomes more strongly manifest. Without this, the influence of the superiority-afflicted and the death instinct would have had a stronger effect. The wheel of history would have rolled more quickly, perhaps it would already have come to a stop. This defensive struggle is necessary, even when sentimentality would like to revolt against it.... Thus it very often occurs that the defense instinct persecutes, opposes, or silences the groundbreakers for intellectual, political, or even technological progress; the organization of their friends and their influence on youth are hindered, and their well-intentioned teachings are ignored.... Above all, however, natural inertia and passive resistance are very important weapons of the average healthy person.''
Logically enough, Fluegge ended his lecture with a demand for ``confinement of the superiority-afflicted to a small number'' who must be expunged from all populations ``energetically, but with tact, wisdom and moderation.''
In the setting of a population conference, this call for culling out the overabundant creative individuals who ``from superior forces and from necessity become far more dangerous than they ever became in a thousand years of culture,'' is already remarkable. Pol Pot and the Chinese Cultural Revolution's Gang of Four must have had similar thoughts before they persecuted and murdered the intellectual elite, entirely without tact and moderation, thereby breaking the survivors of the habit of thinking. In the Third Reich this form of argument became crucial to the persecution of German Jews, who in large part belonged to the intellectual elite.
Fluegge's demand to ``curtail the creative ones'' is a fundamental principle of the oligarchic theory of rule, skillfully carried out today through a cult of mediocrity. Reaching that goal requires, not killer gangs, but merely the appropriately stupefying cultural and educational policy.
Those deceived by the terminology think ``sustainable development'' means development that is actually sustainable in the long run, in the sense that it can proceed uninterruptedly for the benefit of humanity and without damage to the human environment. Such development of human society is only possible through constant further creative development, in which new scientific discoveries and their technological application define totally new raw materials and raise the productivity of human labor by orders of magnitude. But it is in order to prevent this that the concept of ``sustainable development'' was concocted.
Advocates of burning wood as an energy source, for instance, such as Dennis Meadows, a leading ``sustainable development'' propagandist, have good intentions neither toward humanity nor toward the environment. Because of these self-contradictions, the advocates of ``sustainable development'' seldom say precisely what they mean by it. It in fact requires a permanent depression in the industrialized nations of the North and an enforced backwardness in the developing nations, under the U.N. triumvirate of GATT, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank.
For the Malthusians, this also resolves a painful paradox, the fact that Malthus has been decisively refuted by industrialization and technologically advanced agriculture. ``Sustainable development'' in the Third World, i.e. non-development, guarantees that there, at least, Malthus's iron law of population will once more go into effect, and Malthus's Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse--famine, pestilence, plague, and war--will accompany modern artificial birth control.
Berlin Congress Chairman Eugen Fischer offered a summary at the end of the conference, emphasizing two concepts which indeed defined the conference: ``race'' and ``eugenics'': ``In the thinking of the men of the fourth decade of our century, one concept has taken the focal point of attention, the concept of `race.' Whether discussed in a purely scientific fashion, or passionately demanded as a guiding star for spiritual attitudes or political discipline, or just as passionately fought against and opposed as the blueprint for all sorts of things, the concept is there, and every individual and every nation must and will come to terms with it.... The second star which shone above our meeting was the idea of eugenics''; in that regard, ``the question of sterilization has apparently found the greatest interest.... The National Socialist Führer-principle has made it possible for one man to solve a problem in the full consciousness of his own personal responsibility, whereas otherwise it would have occupied special commissions or parliamentary committees for years.... It is a turning point in the spiritual and intellectual history of mankind, that today scientific medical knowledge is no longer applied merely on an individual level, according to the desire or intent to maintain the life of particular persons, but rather is put in the hand of the statesman as a weapon and guideline for the well- being of his people, with beneficent compulsion.'' (Fischer spoke as if he knew that the policy would not stop at sterilization, and the euthanasia plan was already on the desk.)
For the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, the governing concepts are not ``race'' and ``sterilization'' but ``sustainable development'' and ``family planning.'' Sterilization, however, is perfectly applicable, since it is the most heavily applied instrument of birth control or ``family planning'' in the developing sector. In Brazil, a 1986 investigation found that 44 percent of women of child-bearing age had been sterilized.
The Cairo action plan envisions an intensified contraceptive campaign, in order to increase the ratio of couples using contraceptives from the current 55 percent worldwide to 69 percent. In the coming decades, fertility in the developing sector is supposed to be reduced below the reproduction level so that the total number of human beings begins to decline, and by the year 2150, at 2.5 billion, is cut in half.
Based on purely reproductive demographics, this calculation does not take into account the victims of starvation, epidemics, and war. Apparently the Cairo conference's Malthusian strategists have thought through the consequences of their actions as little as the genocidal Nazis had done in the past. Wetzel wrote in his commentary on Generalplan Ost: ``Our goal in implementing these measures is only to weaken the Russian race to the extent that it can no longer overrun us with its huge numbers of men. When we have converted the mass of the Russian people to belief in the one- or two-child system, we shall have arrived at the goal we stipulated.''
The Nazi policy brought disaster not only to the subjugated populations, but also to Germany. In the same way, the policies of the Cairo conference will inflict ruin on the developing nations and the nations of the ``rich North,'' whose governments think they are compelled to join in upholding this action plan for reasons of national security. We call upon these governments in all urgency to reconsider the consequences of their conduct while there is still time, and to mount immediate opposition to the depopulation policy of the U.N. leadership. If the German government cannot resolve to do that, Interior Minister Kanther should at least withdraw the German delegation from participating in this monstrous conference, ``for historical reasons.''
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