Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Preface

CHAPTER ONE - Thomas Malthus, the Most Dismal Scientist

JUSTIFYING OPPRESSION

EXPORTING STARVATION TO INDIA

FOCUS SECTION: THE DATA THAT PROVES MALTHUS WRONG

CHAPTER TWO - Darwinism’s Moral Inversion

THE DESCENT OF MAN

CHAPTER THREE - The Birth of Eugenics

CHAPTER FOUR - Deutschland über Alles

WAR OF THE RACES

CHAPTER FIVE - Eugenics Comes to America

ELIMINATING THE HUDDLED MASSES

EUGENICS SPREADS AMONG THE ELITE

CHAPTER SIX - The Nazi Holocaust

MAN AGAINST MAN

BY THE LIGHT OF PERVERTED REASON

THE HOLOCAUST BEGINS

THE WORLD TURNS ITS BACK

CHAPTER SEVEN - Eugenics Reborn

REPACKAGING EUGENICS AND POPULATION CONTROL

THE ESTABLISHMENT EMBRACES POPULATION CONTROL

CHAPTER EIGHT - In Defense of Malaria

MASTERFUL PROPAGANDA

FOCUS SECTION: THE TRUTH ABOUT DDT

CHAPTER NINE - Scriptures for the Doom Cult

FOCUS SECTION: THE FALLACY OF LIMITED RESOURCES

THE AVAILABILITY OF FOOD

THE QUESTION OF FINITUDE

CHAPTER TEN - The Betrayal of the Left

CHAPTER ELEVEN - The Anti-Nuclear Crusade

FOCUS SECTION: THE TRUTH ABOUT NUCLEAR POWER

TECHNICAL CONCERNS OVER NUCLEAR POWER

CHAPTER TWELVE - Population Control: Preparing the Holocaust

BETTER DEAD THAN RED

DESTROYING THE VILLAGE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Population Control: Implementing the Holocaust

INDIA

INDONESIA

PERU

CHINA

SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA

CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Better Dead than Fed: Green Police for World Hunger

THE GREEN BIOTECH BLOCKADE

FOCUS SECTION: BIOTECHNOLOGY AND AGRICULTURAL PROGRESS

THE GREEN REVOLUTION

BIOTECHNOLOGY CASE STUDIES

CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Quenching Humanity’s Fire: Global Warming and the Madness of Crowds

THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT

IS GLOBAL WARMING REAL?

HUMAN SACRIFICE FOR WEATHER CONTROL

ENERGY STARVATION THROUGH CARTEL ACTION

THE IRRATIONALITY OF INDIRECT ANALYSIS

CREATING A GLOBAL ANTIHUMAN CULT

CHAPTER SIXTEEN - The Mind Imprisoned or the Soul Unchained

Acknowledgments

NOTES

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

INDEX

A NOTE ON THE TYPE

Copyright Page

TO THE INVENTORS AND DISCOVERERS,

BE THEY FAMOUS OR NAMELESS;

THAT COMPANY OF HEROES

WHOSE NOBLE WORK MUST EVER

CONFOUND THE ANTIHUMANISTS.

Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.

WILLIAM PITT

Speech in the House of Commons

November 18, 1783

Preface

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals. . . .

SHAKESPEARE

Hamlet, circa 1600¹

The World Has Cancer and the Cancer Is Man.

THE CLUB OF ROME

Mankind at the Turning Point, 1974²

THERE WAS A time when humanity looked in the mirror and saw something precious, worth protecting and fighting for, indeed, worth liberating. Starting with the Biblical idea of the human spirit as the image of God, taken forward by Renaissance humanists defending the dignity of man, our greatest thinkers developed a concept of civilization dedicated to human betterment and unalienable rights among which are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness, proudly asserting that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men.

But now, we are beset on all sides by propaganda promoting a radically different viewpoint. According to this idea, humans are a cancer upon the Earth, a horde of vermin whose unconstrained aspirations and appetites are endangering the natural order. This is the core idea of antihumanism. Its acceptance can only have the most pernicious consequences.

One does not provide liberty to vermin. One does not seek to advance the cause of a cancer.

Antihumanism is not environmentalism, though it sometimes masquerades as such. Environmentalism, properly conceived, is an effort to apply practical solutions to real environmental problems, such as air and water pollution, for the purpose of making the world a better place for all humans to thrive in. Antihumanism, in contrast, rejects the goal of advancing the cause of mankind. Rather, it uses instances of inadvertent human damage to the environment as points of agitation to promote its fundamental thesis that human beings are pathogens whose activities need to be suppressed in order to protect a fixed ecological order with interests that stand above those of humanity.

Antihumanism has recently enormously expanded its influence by raising hysteria about global warming. This phenomenon, by lengthening the growing season and increasing rainfall and the availability of atmospheric carbon dioxide for photosynthesis, has actually significantly enhanced the abundance of nature, to the benefit of both agriculture and the wild biosphere alike. Nevertheless, according to antihumanism, punitive measures, especially harmful to the world’s poor, are required to suppress mankind’s activity and economic growth in order to deal with this putative threat. That antihumanism should propose such global oppression as a response to an improvement in the Earth’s climate should not be surprising, since, as this book will show in horrifying detail, similar vicious antihuman solutions to fictitious problems have been repeatedly advocated and implemented by antihumanism’s followers for two centuries—that is, since long before global warming was an issue at all.

Indeed, while its use of climate defense as an agitational issue in support of an antihuman program is novel, antihumanism itself is not. Over the years, it has found other causes to ally with, ranging in diversity from militarism, imperialism, racism, and xenophobia to environmentalism, aesthetic nature appreciation, and even feminism. It has opportunistically sought and found support from political and economic philosophies ranging from laissez-faire capitalism to monarchism, socialism, Nazism, and totalitarian communism; world-views ranging from Darwinian atheism to religious zealotry; and vested interests ranging from colonial expansion to rentier-motivated economic restriction. In some cases it has worked its will through groups that can fairly be described as actual conspiracies, while in other instances it has exerted its effect through its influence on social networks, broadly based parties, or the general shaping of society’s ideas. But regardless of its ally of the moment, wherever antihumanism has established a liaison, it has served, like a demonic spirit, to transform its partner for the worse, turning well-meaning causes into pernicious ones and bad movements into catastrophes.

In this book, the ideology of antihumanism will be critically reviewed, and its brutal history thoroughly exposed. Many readers may find this account to be very disturbing, since in the course of its examination, it will become quite clear that some of today’s most fashionable political and social ideas are essentially replays of earlier ideological fads that have been continually used over the last two centuries to motivate and justify oppression, tyranny, and genocide. Nevertheless, as those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it, this history must be made known.

Furthermore, while the central lie underpinning all of antihumanism’s campaigns has always been the same, its ability to morph into apparently novel guises has allowed it to revive itself to cause new evil, even after a previous form has been defeated at great cost.

The time is long past due to put a stake in the heart of this monster. For that to occur, it needs to be dissected, so that it can be detected, debunked, and destroyed wherever, whenever, and in whatever form it reappears. For this reason, alongside this book’s historical account, I shall devote some space to examining the primary pseudoscientific arguments that the antihumanists have voiced over the past two centuries—many of which are still widely accepted—and to refuting them thoroughly. While disputes about overpopulation, racial equality, pesticides, resource limits, nuclear power, biotechnology, and global warming may appear to be about different subjects, they are ultimately but different faces of the same conflict: a fundamental debate over the worth of humankind.

It is a debate we need to win.

CHAPTER ONE

Thomas Malthus, the Most Dismal Scientist

When a population of organisms grows in a finite environment, sooner or later it will encounter a resource limit. This phenomenon, described by ecologists as reaching the carrying capacity of the environment, applies to bacteria on a culture dish, to fruit flies in a jar of agar, and to buffalo on a prairie. It must also apply to man on this finite planet.

JOHN P. HOLDREN and PAUL R. EHRLICH

Global Ecology (1971)¹

Here is the difference between the animal and the man. Both the jay-hawk and the man eat chickens, but the more jay-hawks the fewer chickens, while the more men the more chickens.

HENRY GEORGE

Progress and Poverty (1879)²

THE FOUNDING PROPHET of modern antihumanism was Thomas Malthus (1766–1834). For three decades a professor at the British East India Company’s East India College, Malthus was a political economist who famously argued that human reproduction always outruns available resources. This doctrine served to rationalize the starvation of millions caused by his employer’s policy of brutal oppression of the peasants of the Indian subcontinent. The British Empire’s colonial helots, however, were not Malthus’s only targets. Rather, his Essay on the Principle of Population (first published in 1798 and later expanded in numerous further editions) was initially penned as a direct attack on such Enlightenment revolutionaries as William Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet, who advanced the notion that human liberty, expanding knowledge, and technological progress could ultimately make possible a decent life for all mankind.

Malthus prescribed specific policies to keep population down by raising the death rate:

We are bound in justice and honour to disclaim the right of the poor to support. . . . [W]e should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavouring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower, crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague. In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all, we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and those benevolent, but much mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders.³

In short, Malthus argued that we should do whatever we can to encourage disease, and we should condemn doctors who try to find cures. In addition, everything should be done to keep the wages of working people as low as possible.⁴

It is ironic that today’s left, which represents itself as the advocate of the plebeian interest, has embraced Malthus. In the nineteenth century, however, virtually everyone who took a stand as a defender of the poor, social justice, or human equality—from Friedrich Engels to Charles Dickens to Florence Nightingale—clearly recognized Malthusian doctrine as obviously representing the voice of their enemy.⁵ In his 1879 book Progress and Poverty, the American reformer Henry George explained that Malthus’s theory was gaining adherents because it justified the greed of the rich and the selfishness of the powerful, and so was eminently soothing and reassuring to the classes who, wielding the power of wealth, largely dominate thought. The Malthusian doctrine, George wrote, parries the demand for reform, and shelters selfishness from question and from conscience by the interposition of an inevitable necessity . . . . For poverty, want, and starvation are by this theory not chargeable either to individual greed or to social maladjustments; they are the inevitable results of universal laws, with which, if it were not impious, it were as hopeless to quarrel with as with the law of gravitation.⁶

George also pointed out a key fallacy underlying the Malthusian ideology. Human beings are not simply the consumers of a pre-existing gift of nature; they are also the cultivators of the bounty on which they live:

If bears instead of men had been shipped from Europe to the North American continent, there would now be no more bears than in the time of Columbus . . . . But within the limits of the United States alone, there are now forty-five millions of men where then there were only a few hundred thousand; and yet there is now within that territory much more food per capita for the forty-five millions than there was then for the few hundred thousand. It is not the increase of food that has caused this increase of men, but the increase of men that has brought about the increase of food. There is more food, simply because there are more men.⁷

An even more masterful refutation of Malthus came from none other than the young Friedrich Engels, subsequently famous as the coauthor of The Communist Manifesto. In an 1844 work, Engels mocked Malthus’s vile and infamous doctrine before zeroing in on the fundamental deceit at its core: its disregard of human creativity.

Malthus . . . asserts that population constantly exerts pressure on the means of subsistence; that as production is increased, population increases in the same proportion; and that the inherent tendency of population to multiply beyond the available means of subsistence is the cause of all poverty and all vice. . . . Now the consequence of this theory is that since it is precisely the poor who constitute this surplus population, nothing ought to be done for them, except to make it as easy as possible for them to starve to death; to convince them that this state of affairs cannot be altered and that there is no salvation for their entire class other than that they should propagate as little as possible; or that if this is not practicable, it is at any rate better that a state institution for the painless killing of the children should be set up—as suggested by Marcus⁸—each working-class family being allowed two-and-a-half children, and the excess being painlessly destroyed . . . .

Malthus puts forward a calculation upon which his whole system is based. Population increases in geometric progression—1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + 16 + 32, etc. The productive power of the land increases in arithmetical progression—1 + 2 +3 + 4 + 5 + 6. The difference is obvious and horrifying—but is it correct? Where has it been proved that the productivity of the land increases in arithmetic progression? The area of the land is limited—that is perfectly true. But the labor power to be employed on this area increases together with the population; and even if we assume that the increase in output associated with this increase in labor is not always proportionate to the latter, there still remains a third element—which the economists, however, never consider as important—namely, science, the progress of which is just as limitless and at least as rapid as that of population.⁹

Engels hit the nail right on the head, as can be even more clearly seen today than in his time. All predictions based on Malthusian theory have proven false, because, again, human beings are not mere consumers of resources, or even producers from resources—but rather, we create resources by developing new technologies that find use for them. The more people there are, the greater the potential for innovation. Every human mouth comes not just with a pair of hands, but with a brain. That is why as the world’s population has increased, the standard of living has also increased, and at an accelerating rate.

The human race is not, as later Malthus admirers John Holdren (currently President Obama’s science advisor) and Paul Ehrlich sneered in 1971, so many bacteria in a culture dish, doomed to quick extinction unless our appetites can be controlled by wise overlords wielding sterilants to curb our excessive multiplication.¹⁰ Nor are we a swarm of fruit flies in an agar jar, or members of a buffalo herd in need of culling. No: we are creative inventors, and the more of us there are, the better off we are. And the freer we are, the faster we can make the inventions that can advance our condition still further.

JUSTIFYING OPPRESSION

While history has proven Malthusianism empirically false, however, it provides the ideal foundation for justifying human oppression and tyranny. The theory holds that there isn’t enough to go around, and can never be. Therefore human aspirations and liberties must be constrained, and authorities must be empowered to enforce the constraining.

During Malthus’s own time, his theory was used to justify regressive legislation directed against England’s lower classes, most notably the Poor Law Act of 1834, which forced hundreds of thousands of poor Britons into virtual slavery.¹¹ However, a far more horrifying example of the impact of Malthusianism was to occur a few years later, when the doctrine motivated the British government’s refusal to provide relief during the great Irish famine of 1846.

In a letter to economist David Ricardo, Malthus laid out the basis for this policy: The land in Ireland is infinitely more peopled than in England; and to give full effect to the natural resources of the country, a great part of the population should be swept from the soil.¹²

For the last century and a half, the Irish famine has been cited by Malthusians as proof of their theory of overpopulation, so a few words are in order here to set the record straight.¹³ Ireland was certainly not overpopulated in 1846. In fact, based on census data from 1841 and 1851, the Emerald Isle boasted a mere 7.5 million people in 1846, less than half of England’s 15.8 million, living on a land mass about two-thirds that of England and of similar quality. So compared to England, Ireland before the famine was if anything somewhat underpopulated.¹⁴ Nor, as is sometimes said, was the famine caused by a foolish decision of the Irish to confine their diet to potatoes, thereby exposing themselves to starvation when a blight destroyed their only crop. In fact, in 1846 alone, at the height of the famine, Ireland exported over 730,000 cattle and other livestock, and over 3 million quarts of corn and grain flour to Great Britain.¹⁵ The Irish diet was confined to potatoes because—having had their land expropriated, having been forced to endure merciless rack-rents and taxes, and having been denied any opportunity to acquire income through manufactures or other means—tubers were the only food the Irish could afford. So when the potato crop failed, there was nothing for the Irish themselves to eat, despite the fact that throughout the famine, their homeland continued to export massive amounts of grain, butter, cheese, and meat for foreign consumption. As English reformer William Cobbett noted in his Political Register:

Hundreds of thousands of living hogs, thousands upon thousands of sheep and oxen alive; thousands upon thousands of barrels of beef, pork, and butter; thousands upon thousands of sides of bacon; and thousands and thousands of hams; shiploads and boats coming daily and hourly from Ireland to feed the west of Scotland; to feed a million and a half people in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and in Lancashire; to feed London and its vicinity; and to fill the country shops in the southern counties of England; we beheld all this, while famine raged in Ireland amongst the raisers of this very food.¹⁶

The population should be swept from the soil.

Evicted from their homes, millions of Irish men, women, and children starved to death or died of exposure.

(Contemporary drawings from Illustrated London News.)

In the face of the catastrophe, the British government headed by Lord John Russell refused to provide any effective aid. According to one biographer, Russell was motivated by a Malthusian fear about the long-term effect of relief, while the government’s representative in Ireland, Lord Clarendon, argued that doling out food merely to keep people alive would do nobody any permanent good.¹⁷

Accordingly, Russell gave authority for managing the famine to Charles Trevelyan, who had been indoctrinated by Malthus personally while he received his education at the East India College.¹⁸ Trevelyan elevated his Malthusianism to cult status, explaining that the famine was a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence.¹⁹

According to Trevelyan, the famine was simply God’s way of redressing an imbalance between population and resources. Posterity will trace up to that Famine the commencement of a salutary revolution in the habits of a nation long singularly unfortunate, and will acknowledge that on this, as on many other occasions, Supreme Wisdom has educed permanent good out of transient evil.²⁰

Trevelyan’s claim of divine sanction for his policy of starving a nation shocked the Catholic church. Archbishop John Hughes of New York declaimed:

They call it God’s famine! No! No! God’s famine is known by the general scarcity of food, of which it is the consequence; there is no general scarcity, there has been no general scarcity of food in Ireland, either the present, or the past year, except in one species of vegetable. The soil has produced its usual tribute for the support of those by whom it has been cultivated; but political economy found the Irish people too poor to pay for the harvest of their own labor, and has exported it to a better market, leaving them to die of famine, or to live on alms; and this same political economy authorizes the provision merchant, even amidst the desolation, to keep his doors locked, and his sacks of corn tied up within, waiting for a better price.²¹

But it did no good. In the face of massive international criticism, the Malthusian ideologues ruling the British cabinet stuck resolutely to their merciless course. In the course of three years, in scenes of incredible horror the like of which would not be matched in Europe for another century, over one million Irish were starved to death or, weakened by malnutrition, died of rampant disease.²²

EXPORTING STARVATION TO INDIA

Three decades later, the death count inflicted on the British Empire’s subjects by Malthusian ideology soared into the many millions during another famine, this time on the other side of the globe. From 1876 to 1879, a terrible drought reduced the crop yields in many parts of India, but as in Ireland in the 1840s, there ought to have been plenty left to feed the Indians themselves.²³ Indian grain exports in 1876 were more than double those of the pre-famine year of 1875, and in 1877 they doubled again—hardly a shortage of food. But uncontrolled grain speculation and exports by the colonial pooh-bahs, in addition to rising taxation and a depreciation of the rupee against the new gold standard, combined with natural causes to make it impossible for Indian peasants to obtain food for subsistence.²⁴

Having helped precipitate this catastrophe, the British government refused to provide any form of effective succor. Rather, as in Ireland, the imperial government used Malthusian reasoning to help justify its oppressive policy. In 1877, British Viceroy Robert Bulwer-Lytton told the Legislative Council that the Indian population has a tendency to increase more rapidly than the food it raises from the soil. This line was backed up by Sir Evelyn Baring, the future Lord Cromer, who told Parliament that every benevolent attempt made to mitigate the effects of famine and defective sanitation serves but to enhance the evils resulting from overpopulation.²⁵

As Indian peasants, driven from their land by taxation, a collapsing currency, and crop failure, began to roam the country searching for food, Lytton’s government rounded them up and placed them in relief camps where they were subjected to hard labor and limited to rations of one pound of rice per day, with no meat, fish, fruit, or vegetables. This daily dole of 1,630 calories was actually less than the 1,750 calories per day provided by the Nazis to the inmates of the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1944–45 , and it produced similar results.²⁶ According to the medical commissioner for the city of Madras (now known as Chennai), monthly mortality in the camps was equivalent to an annual death rate of 94 percent, with postmortem examination showing the chief cause of death to be extreme wasting of the tissue and destruction of the lining membrane of the lower bowel—that is to say, starvation—with full-grown men reduced to less than sixty pounds in weight prior to expiration.²⁷ Indeed, in looking today at photographs of the living, dying, and dead human skeletons taken by British and American missionaries visiting the relief camps in 1877, the modern viewer can only be struck by their similarity to the images taken by the liberators of the Nazi death camps in 1945.

Indian Famine Victims, 1876–1879.

As one junior government official later described the scene:

The dead and dying were lying about on all sides . . . for shelter some had crawled to the graves of an adjoining cemetery and had lain themselves down between two graves as supports for their wearied limbs; the crows were hovering over bodies that still had a spark of life in them. . . . The place seemed tenanted by none but the dead and the dying. In a few minutes I picked up five bodies; one being that of an infant which its dying mother had firmly clasped, ignorant of the child being no more; the cholera patients were lying about unheeded by those around; some poor children were crying piteously for water within the hearing of the cooks, who never stirred to wet the lips of the poor things that were in extremis.²⁸

As the above testimony suggests, Viceroy Lytton’s Malthusian policies were by no means in accord with the traditional sensibilities of Englishmen. There were many who actively rejected the policies born of overpopulation dogma, but their efforts were in vain. For example, outraged by the death-camp horrors, the British community in Madras, under the leadership of the philanthropic Duke of Buckingham, attempted to raise private funds to save the Indians from starvation—but Lytton stopped the plan dead in its tracks.²⁹ In a series of searing articles denouncing the viceroy for creating a hideous record of human suffering and destruction such as the world has never seen before, Red Cross founder Florence Nightingale called on her nation’s government to suspend its merciless taxation policy.³⁰ She was likewise rebuffed by Lytton. As British officer B. H. Baden-Powell put it, reducing the taxes on the Indian peasantry would only encourage further overpopulation.³¹

Within three years, between 6 and 10 million people died. In 1896–1902, the experience was repeated, this time with as many as 19 million victims in the subcontinent.³² Similar events would transpire elsewhere in the empire, a truly grim legacy for the ideas of Malthus. But even worse ideas were yet to come.

FOCUS SECTION: THE DATA THAT PROVES MALTHUS WRONG

The theory of Thomas Malthus has provided the scientific pretext for brutal antihuman policies from his own time down to the present. But is it true? On the surface, the idea that the more people there are, the less there will be to go around appears to make sense. It therefore follows that if we get rid of some—especially those we don’t like anyway—we’ll all be better off. Thus, those interested in eliminating Indians, Irish, Jews, Slavs, Africans, or any other race have argued that their policies, while harsh, are simply necessary to make the world a better place.³³

In this section, we will examine this claim critically by looking at historic data that allows us to analyze directly the real relationships between population growth and living standards. It will be shown that the theory of Malthus is completely at variance with the facts.

We begin with Figure 1.1, which shows data for world population, global gross domestic product (GDP), and GDP per capita from the year A . D . 1 down to the year 2000.³⁴

In looking at this graph, we can see that while human population has certainly increased over time, GDP has increased even more, and the key metric of average human