Thursday 15 January 2009

Population explosion myth blamed for conflict in Gaza

Fiorella Nash's Monstrous Regiment of Women highlights an article in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week that suggests (as Fiorella describes it) "the current conflict is the fault of western aid agencies for allowing Palestinians to breed".

I worry that this kind of thinking in the brave new world of Barack Obama, the most pro-abortion president in US history, will be translated into more of the kind of major international policy developments which took place in the US in 1970.

Steven Mosher, president of the Population Research Institute, writes:
"As the populations of developing countries began to grow after World War II, alarm bells sounded in the heads of many in the national security establishment ... Demographic projections, showing population spiking in the developing world, combined with falling birthrates in Europe, were viewed with foreboding. Hushed discussions in the corridors of power followed.

"When the US birthrate, robust until the early 1960s, headed south [down] a few years later, these discussions quickly took on an increasing urgency. One of the first official expressions of concern was a classified National Security Council Memorandum [NSSM 200] dated 10 August 1970. This memorandum, signed by President Richard Nixon's national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, stated that 'The US should recommend that the UN Fund for Population Activities undertake a study of world population problems and measures required to deal with them, as a top priority item in the Second Development Decade' ... The preoccupation of the US security establishment with population growth - seen as US security and economic interests - stands here revealed. At the same time, NSSM 200 is a blueprint for preserving the global economic, political, and military dominance of the United States. Believing that people mean power, and worried about the demographic decline of the West, these practitioners of realpolitik unapologetically sought to engineer a fertility decline among more prolific peoples. And they were fully prepared to deceive other countries into doing so with spurious arguments".
I recommend that you obtain a copy of Steven Mosher's seminal book Population Control - Real Costs, Illusory Benefits