Unpopular Populus

Soylent Green, a 1973 movie starring the inimical Charlton Heston, is an adaptation of Harry Harrison's 1966 book Make Room! Make Room! Though the movie and book differ in many regards, they both depict a dystopian future where the earth's population has grown to around 7 billion people, leading to shortages of food and other basic resources, overcrowding, poverty and the general material degradation of society. In many respects neither the book nor the film are particularly remarkable as this was a time when dystopian science fiction in both literature and film was very popular. This was partly because the optimism of the 1960s had been destroyed by assassinations, ongoing war, and Richard Nixon.

Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World in the 1930s, though some people identify Zamyatin's We from 1921 as the start of this tradition. Orwell's 1984 was written in 1948 but it wasn't until the late 60s and 70s that it came to preoccupy cinema at the same time as literature. Rollerball, A Clockwork Orange, Logan's Run, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Planet of the Apes and Fahrenheit 451 are all from this period, either in their book or film incarnations, or in some cases both. Some, like Brazil, Blade Runner and Robocop weren't made until the 80s, and more recently both Children of Men and Battle Royale have been successful mainstream movies in the genre. One director who has contributed more than most to the dystopian tradition is Paul Verhoeven, who made Robocop, Total Recall and Starship Troopers since 1985, though he's something of an exception.

Dystopian fiction is very important, among the most important we have. For one thing, writers can discuss far more controversial subjects in the guise of a fictional depiction of the future than they can by reporting on the present. Deep politics, as also evidenced by the success of the X-Files series, is not a subject most media proprietors are willing to depict in anything close to a realistic manner. This doesn't make them part of a huge conspiracy, just complicit in the widespread corruption and acceptance of poor standards that allows genuine conspiracies to get away with it so much of the time.

This concern with the expansion of the human population, however, predates the 20th century dystopian tradition, indeed, predates cinema and the modern novel. In the 1700s the United Kingdom was in some respects at the forefront of the world, undergoing agricultural revolutions that privatised and enclosed land use like never before, but enabled an increase in production that fed the emerging industrial, urban working population. In 1700 the UK population was around 5 million, by 1850 it had quadrupled to 20 million. Another 150 years down the line and it is around 60 million. In 1798 Thomas Malthus published his Essay on the Principle of Population, which, like Soylent Green, was concerned with the possibility of overpopulation, resource shortage, vast poverty and ultimately a global epidemic that could wipe out the species. He saw poverty as a result not of the unequal distribution of abundant resources but of population growth and advocated control of family size and regulation of food supply (rationing) to control the population at levels where it would not be dangerous.

Earlier this week it was announced that highly respected TV presenter Sir David Attenborough has become a patron of the Optimum Population Trust, a group seeking to reduce the global population in the name of protecting wildlife. Attenborough is a smart man who has made decades of very good TV shows but I suspect he's been hoodwinked.

In a statement issued by the Optimum Population Trust he is quoted as saying: "I've never seen a problem that wouldn't be easier to solve with fewer people, or harder, and ultimately impossible, with more." - BBC

Looking through the OPT's policies they are far from the conservationists and eco-friendlies they make themselves out to be. Their stated aim, to be sure, is undramatic - to slow the growth of population by more than 50% by 2050. However, the individual policies bear some scrutiny.

Every country should act urgently to improve women's rights and education, including removing barriers to women's control over their own fertility. - OPT

While broadly agreeing with the policy, the way it is phrased suggests that fertility, pregnancy and population is an area of female responsibility and authority, as though any advancement of men's rights would only make the problem worse. The nature of this masquerade of feminism is clearer as you read on.

Fiscal incentives specifically intended to encourage women to have large families should always be opposed. Employment and taxation policies that enable women to combine careers with bringing up small families should be encouraged......Raise state and corporate pension ages in line with rises in life expectancy. - OPT

The barely-concealed implication here is that women who devote their lives to caring for children and trying to bring them up right are to be eliminated and replaced with part-time parents who are full-time wageslaves and thus taxpayers. Instead of being subservient to an essentially patriarchal household system, which in reality was probably a lot more pragmatic than many feminist revisions of history would have us believe, they are encouraged to be subservient to working long hours for low wages, a significant proportion of which will be taken off them by the supposedly benevolent and liberating state. Likewise, the later people retire, the longer they keep working and paying taxes.

I'm reminded most of the Aaron Russo interview with Alex Jones in which he recalled a conversation with Nick Rockefeller. Rockefeller explained to him how Women's Lib had been encouraged by the elite families to try to break up the family unit, get women into work and thus paying taxes, and get kids into schools where they could be indoctrinated. Going beyond even that, the Trust advocates:

Every country should encourage parents to voluntarily "stop at two" children. - OPT

The doublethink involved here is that an action can still be voluntary even if it is encouraged by the state and international pressure groups endorsed by celebrity scientists. At least China's one-child policy, brutal as it is, is relatively honest. People who have more than one child are overtly criminalised, leaving no room for rhetoric about encouraging voluntary action.

The OPT, along with their disciples, are trying to paint the issue as a taboo that the authorities are unwilling to discuss. A BBC article, 'Population: The Elephant in the Room', from February of this year is essentially devoted to arguing that very point. However, this is plain nonsense because it's among the most frequently discussed of the forthcoming global crises that constitute political content in the mass media these days. A search on google for 'population crisis' yields nearly 25 million results, including page after page of mainstream media coverage. The more funky but less common 'population explosion' yields 1.2 million results, many of which are from websites and articles apparently concerned with the environment. Similarly, the UK Ministry of Defence's Development, Concepts and Doctrine Centre published a 2006 report called 'Strategic Trends' which had Population and Resources as one of only four key themes. From this I'd suggest that population fanaticism is being set up as another fad phoney environmental cause, trying just as global warming PR did to portray it as a noble struggle that the bigwigs won't talk about. By attracting miscellaneous enthusiasts who want to look radical they both gain support for their agenda and ensure the same people aren't attracted to genuine causes and trying to solve real problems.

As discussed before, the whole notion of overpopulation is a nonsense. The population simply could not grow to a point where it can no longer be sustained by the available resources, as life cannot subsist on nothing. Without food and water, people die in days. When the human population reaches the maximum number possible given the resources available to support it death rates will increase to hold it at that maximum as long as we continue to reproduce in such numbers.

The crisis that advocates of population "stabilization" wish to resolve is impossible to define in demographic terms because it is a problem that has been mis-defined. In most minds, the notions of "overpopulation," "overcrowding," or "too many people" are associated with images of hungry children, unchecked disease, squalid living conditions, and awful slums. Those problems, sad to say, are all too real in the contemporary world. But the proper name for those conditions is poverty. It is a fundamental lapse in logic to assume that poverty is a "population problem" simply because it is manifest in large numbers of human beings. - Nicholas Eberstadt

For a biologist like Attenborough to not understand this rather basic point about how life interacts with an environment, a habitat, once again illustrates how scientists can be led by political ideas that have no place in proper scientific discourse.

So who is propagating this? There's evidence to suggest it comes from the highest level. For years people have been reporting that the Bilderberg Group, one of if not the leading secret society in the Anglo-American empire, plan to reduce the world's population by up to 80%. One of the most-cited documents is National Security Study Memorandum 200, signed by long-time Bilderberg member Henry Kissinger. The lengthy document essentially rehashes Malthus' philosophy of overpopulation, particularly in poorer countries ('LDCs'), saying it will lead to unrest and instability and therefore pose a security risk. Ultimately, the plan advocates 'preferential allocation of surplus food resources', i.e. starving large numbers of people to death, among other such policies to reduce the world population to 3 billion by 2050. Kissinger, like Zbigniew Brzezinski, is ultimately working for arch-globalist tyrants such as David Rockefeller, and is a member of the Trilateral Commission, the CFR and the Bilderberg Group.

The chairman of the Bilderberg Group is Viscount Etienne Davignon. He is a banker, a former European Commissioner, a director of Italian motor company Fiat and a former advisor to the Carlyle Group, and sits on the board of directors for the law firm Kissinger and Associates, who used to employ Timothy Geithner, the man Obama has put in charge of the US Treasury during the economic 'crisis'. Geithner is likewise a Bilderberg, CFR and Trilateral Commission member. Aside from Kissinger, possibly the most pragmatic person on earth, another of Geithner's guides in his formative years was Larry Summers, a Bilderberger, and who while chief economist at the World Bank wrote a memo suggesting that pollution be outsourced to poor countries because their people were going to die younger anyway. Summers is now Director of the National Economic Council.

So the very men Obama has brought in to manage the recession and restore confidence in the US (and therefore global) economy are part of a secret society that believes a Malthusian philosophy where less people make for an easier world to manage and considers such policies as shipping pollutants to the poorest countries where the least wealth will be lost by wiping out local populations. No doubt these people would tell you that any suggestion of them being involved in an economically and political strategic genocide is ridiculous and that there is no grand scheme being perpetrated via groups such as Bilderberg. In 2005, the BBC interviewed Eitienne Davignon as part of some very brief coverage of Bilderberg and similar organisations.

What can come out of our meetings is that it is wrong not to try to deal with a problem. But a real consensus, an action plan containing points 1, 2 and 3? The answer is no. People are much too sensible to believe they can do that...

...Bilderberg does not try to reach conclusions - it does not try to say 'what we should do'. Everyone goes away with their own feeling and that allows the debate to be completely open, quite frank - and to see what the differences are. - Davignon, BBC

However, whether or not a consensus is reached is irrelevant. It is demonstrable that the Bilderberg group, as a whole or just through factions that are loyal to the group leadership, have a very real influence on the world. In a recent interview where Davignon 'predicted' large changes to the EU as a result of the financial 'crisis' the role of Bilderberg came up.

A meeting in June in Europe of the Bilderberg Group - an informal club of leading politicians, businessmen and thinkers chaired by Mr Davignon - could also "improve understanding" on future action, in the same way it helped create the euro in the 1990s, he said.

"When we were having debates on the euro, people [at Bilderberg events] could explain why it was worth taking risks and the others, for whom the formal policy was not to believe in it, were not obliged not to listen and had to stand up and come up with real arguments." - EU Observer

So, far from everyone just having their own opinions and discussing them freely, those who weren't going along with Bilderberg policy due to their positions in national governments (or other institutions) with particular interests that conflicted with the policy, they were challenged and couldn't rely on their status to enable them to ignore criticism. You may be the Foreign Minister of France, or a Japanese media mogul, but in the presence of Queen Beatrix, Henry Kissinger and David Rockefeller you are somewhat small-fry, I imagine. Just another billionaire.

In much the same way literacy was taught to the masses by the state under the guise of liberating them and preventing social destruction due to ignorance, the new technologies of manipulation will be initially sold as liberation and eventually declared necessary and inevitable. Take the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Microsoft, for example. Bill Gates is ostensibly the world's richest man, Melinda Gates a Bilderberg attendee. The Xbox (and its reincarnation, the 360) are effectively console versions of desktop PCs, an area Microsoft has dominated almost since its inception. The content of the adverts for these consoles is even sicker than the subliminal messaging in the average Disney movie.

This early Xbox commercial was banned due its unpleasant content, whereby a woman gives birth to a baby which is fired out of her body, through the hospital window, into the sky where it begins to grow up, mature, become a man, get old and eventually begins to die whereupon the trajectory curves back towards the earth and the body ends up crashing into a prepared grave, the whole process taking a little over 30 seconds. The strapline? 'Life is short, play more'. The philosophy here is that rather than use mortality as a stimulus to trying to do something good with your life you should try to forget about through the virtual world of computer games. The brutality of the image of a baby turning into a man and then ageing and dying in half a minute aside, it has echoes of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, in which the drug soma is prescribed as a means of dulling any unpleasant emotions. Rather than confront social and psychological problems, a system of control seeks firstly to distract people from them.

Microsoft would go further in its following adverts, this time echoing Michael Chrichton's The Terminal Man, published in 1972 and made into a movie a couple of years later. In the story, a man suffering from a form of epilepsy suffers blackouts in which he sometimes commits violent attacks on random people. He is given an operation to implant electrodes and a minicomputer in his brain. The computer recognises when the brain is approaching a seizure, and stimulates the relevant parts of the brain to prevent it from happening. Throughout the book there is argument among the characters that all the operation does is prevent seizures and goes no way to actually solving the personality disorder causing them. In the latest batch of Xbox adverts various young people are shown with a happy, dreamlike expression on their faces. The camera then pans round the right hand side of their head to show the back of the head cut away, and a depiction of a movie or a computer game or whatever else one might play on an Xbox.

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'Download movies to your head'? While many people will make the connection with The Matrix (a pretty weak dystopian parable in my view, but very much within these traditions), I think The Terminal Man is a more accurate and revealing comparison. In that story, the patient becomes locked in a cycle of trying to provoke seizures precisely so he can feel the pleasure of the electrodes making them subside, which drives him crazier than he was before, ultimately leading to him being shot dead. A means of diversion as a system of control only works so well, and can produce the exact opposite effect. Much as we might feel fleeting delight at the prospect of plugging our brains directly into entertainment technology, we'd be losing so much. Not only the privacy of our own thoughts and feelings, but the capacity to grow and adapt emotionally, to struggle against problems and succeed.

Of course, there won't be a single point when we decide whether or not this is going to happen, as technology improves incrementally and it takes time to convince large enough number of people. Just as it will take time to reduce the world's population on a massive scale, though the Gates Foundation is providing considerable support to this movement, presumably in the hope of speeding up the whole process.

• The German Foundation for World Population (Deutsche Stiftung Weltbevolkerung) received a $545,000 grant to help bring about “a humane decline in world population growth.”11
• Population Communications International also benefited from a grant, and went on to produce a video called “Jam Packed,” a pessimistic commentary on world population. Gates may like American grocery stores but in “Jam Packed” they are a symbol of American decadence.12
• The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) affiliate in the Dominican Republic, PROFAMILIA, has received Gates funding. Cardinal Nicolas Lopez Rodriguez, the Archbishop of Santo Domingo, recently compared PROFAMILIA's sterilization campaign against local women to the work of “death squads.”
• The Peruvian Institute of Responsible Fatherhood, INPARRES for short, has received a grant. The organization, another IPPF affiliate, has collaborated with the Peruvian government's coercive sterilization campaign, in which women were sterilized in unhygienic conditions under a quota system.
• Tanzania's state family planning organization, UMATI, has also received funding from the Gates Foundation. Tanzanian women complain that UMATI routinely violates human rights, injecting contraceptives such as Depo–Provera and Norplant without informed consent, and has performed forced abortions and sterilizations. - lifeissues.net

Along similar lines Warren Buffet, a friend of Bill Gates and likewise an exorbitantly wealthy man, who is himself a Bilderberg attendee has helped fund research into abortion pills, again something sold to women as liberating them from unwanted children. For over a century the Rockefeller Institute has been a bastion of eugenics and using science to give authority to mandatory vaccination programs.

What Harry Harrison envisioned in the 1960s will probably never actually happen, because life can only continue to exist while there are resources to support it. However, the vision in his book and the film adapted from is compelling enough that it is being used by lobbying groups, along with celebrity scientific endorsement, to enact policies determined at the highest tier of international government. This fear is unwarranted, a mischaracterisation of the massive poverty which constitutes a real problem for the world in many different ways, and a misunderstanding of elementary biology. The much more likely dystopia is not mass overpopulation, but severe depopulation, genocide brought about by the ruling class not because of a lack of resources, but because such huge numbers of people are hard to control. In such a world, those that remain will likely be encouraged to forget about the slaughter they have witnessed through a combination of drugs and electronic stimulation so that they can continue the work needed to keep the powerful where they are. And that's the good news, that many of the mechanisms used as systems of control could well provide the means to create a much better world than the one we have now, if only we want that badly enough to wrest control of these mechanisms away from the likes of the Bilderberg Group.