Bronze-level article

Depopulation conspiracy theory

From RationalWiki
(Redirected from Depopulation conspiracy)
Jump to navigation Jump to search
Some dare call it
Conspiracy
Icon conspiracy.svg
What THEY don't want
you to know!
Sheeple wakers

Conspiracy theories about depopulation of the Earth come in a number of flavors. The general theme running through these theories is either that there is an imminent plan to reduce population using an overpopulation crisis as the pretext, or a secret eugenics plan cover-up. The elite thus need to kill off the "useless eaters" so, in the first case, they survive the crisis and, in the second, they can create either enough robots to replace them, or a new race of obedient super-humans.

"Useless eaters"[edit]

"Useless eaters" is a term often bandied about by conspiracy theorists. This is supposedly what the heads of the New World Order/Illuminati/Bilderbergs/Reptoids/whatever[1] call us in their meetings in smoke-filled rooms while they light their cigars with $100 bills. It is also sometimes used by survivalists and wrongly attributed to Henry Kissinger.[citation needed] It is also commonly ascribed to Ted Turner, Adolf Hitler, and Thomas Malthus. Apparently, the term originated in Nazi Germany during the Holocaust as "nutzlose Fresser," translating to "useless eaters."[note 1] It was first used in reference to the T4 program which targeted the terminally ill, the disabled (both physical and mental), mentally ill, and elderly people for "euthanasia".[2]

Means of execution[edit]

The genocidal depopulation plan generally involves poisoning or sterilizing people through the use of chemtrails, water fluoridation, or vaccinations secretly full of toxins. Agribusiness transnationals like Monsanto are often implicated in some sort of scheme to monopolize the world's food supply so it can be easily tainted with deadly toxins. Just about anything that can be said to involve "chemicals" can be implicated in this nefarious scheme: vaccines, alleged covert geo-engineering schemes, genetically modified food, etc.[3][4] Variants of the theory include those with an anti-abortion tinge who incorporate conspiracy theories about Planned Parenthood, and AIDS conspiracy theorists who believe AIDS was concocted in a laboratory for the purpose of reducing the population. Another variant, largely attributable to Lyndon LaRouche, has worldwide nuclear war as part of the conspirators' alleged plan along with a deliberate economic collapse and de-industrialization to force the world back into a "new dark age."

Anti-environmentalist theories[edit]

A number of these theories have an anti-environmentalist bent. They posit that environmentalists are conspiring as some kind of mass Gaia cult to kill off the useless eaters. There is a very tiny grain of truth here when it comes to the really nutty ecoterrorists, Pentti Linkola, or movements like the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which provide generous amounts of fodder for conspiracy sites to use as a means to paint the entire environmental movement as a mass conspiracy. This usually ties into some form of a global warming conspiracy theory or the idea that fears of overpopulation are being used as a tactic to implement the depopulation scheme.[5] The Club of RomeWikipedia and their book The Limits to Growth, and Paul R. Ehrlich and his book The Population Bomb are the convenient punching bags here.

Negative effects[edit]

Supporters of this theory often fail to understand the negative[note 2] effects of depopulation and low populations. Fewer people will mean a smaller work force, strengthening the hand of those remaining, resulting in friction between labour and management.[note 3] There will be fewer soldiers to have a strong military, meaning it will become harder to adequately maintain the safety of society. Above all, though, is that with fewer people, the structure of government would grow unstable, and would eventually collapse.

It's also worth noting that economically there would be consequences as well. This is provably true in places like Japan whose negative population growth is contributing to its current economic woes.[note 4]

These effects pose a big question: why would a government seek to heavily depopulate the planet when doing so is provably harmful to its interests and a healthy existence? If they really do desire this, then the answer would have to be that they're gluttons for punishment.

Arguments against depopulation conspiracy theories[edit]

Governments (intelligent ones) have implemented policies and practices to encourage population growth or discourage it. In America, for example, the more children people have, the more benefits the parents are entitled to. That makes one wonder why a government that's supposedly involved in some grand plot to depopulation is trying to get people to have more children and not fewer. Conspiracy theorists are commonly reticent in trying to explain that or wave it off saying it's some kind of cover.

China's one-child policy[edit]

As for places that discourage it, theorists are more passionate in demeaning places like China, citing their policies as central to the depopulation plot. In China's case, their attempts to curtail the population were caused, rather humorously, by the government of Mao Zedong in encouraging its citizens to have as many children as possible. Their strategies often included discouraging the use of birth control to the point they banned the import of contraceptives into their country. The eventual baby boom naturally resulted in overpopulation. By the 1960s, China's food supply was struggling to maintain the influx of new children. This, together with failures in crop management, is one of the main reasons behind the infamous 1962 famine that resulted in the deaths of approximately 30 million people.

In a desperate attempt to get the population back down to a stable, healthy level that they could handle, the government began to use propaganda urging citizens to limit the number of children they had. The government, desperate to end its overpopulation problem, enacted the one-child policy to forcefully bring its population back down to a stable level.[6] This desperate move was met with very negative consequences for the population, resulting in the birth rate falling to a below stable level. Further problems emerged once the first generation born under the one-child policy came of age, such as a lack of a stable workforce and an imbalanced ratio of men to women; able to have only one child, families were likely to favor boys as future breadwinners who could provide for their parents, with girls either aborted, abandoned, or put up for adoption in the West.[7] These problems resulted in the one-child policy being revised to grant more leeway to encourage more births.[8] When this didn't work, the Chinese government at last relented and raised the maximum amount of children to an even number of two.[9] And when that didn't work either, they are now raising the number to three.[10]

This change of mind raises a question: if places like China wanted to depopulate the planet so badly, why wouldn't they remain adamant in not changing their policies? Such actions show that governments definitely do not want overpopulation or underpopulation. They need a stable population if they are to survive.

Still not convinced governments want balanced populations?[edit]

Governments have taken other extreme measures to combat low populations as well. A notable example is Russia's infamous tax on childless persons enacted during the reign of Joseph Stalin — yes, you read that right, that Stalin — to financially strong-arm people to procreate to boost its low birthrate. The government even went so far as to give medals and honorary titles to women for having large families.[11] The policy, despite its unpopularity amongst an already miserable populace, was a resounding success. It was so successful that it caused Russia's birthrate to exceed the government's initial expectations. Satisfied that the population was stable once more, the government phased out the tax, not to mention many of the benefits that came with having lots of children.[12]

The currently deteriorating conditions after the fall of the Soviet Union have caused birthrates to plunge again. The idea of bringing back the tax was again put on the table in 2006 with Vladimir Putin, adding that women should be paid more money to have a second child.[13] To the relief of the childless and childfree in the country, these plans have not been put into effect. They are in a holding pattern, however, given the still-decreasing birthrate.

Other governments have gone even further in their attempts to have stable populations. Nazi Germany began a campaign to quell the low birthrate that preceded its rise to power and which existed during its infancy. Besides giving out benefits to people who gave birth, the government banned and heavily punished abortion, homosexuality, and the use of contraception. Death was one of the most extreme punishments delivered. Women's rights were heavily curtailed in order to push them into the role of mother and homemaker, and the rights and benefits of childless people were greatly diminished, resulting in people, especially women, being legally bullied to have children. Those who did comply often got tremendous benefits, including, like in the Soviet Union, medals for raising large families.[14]

And if these past examples aren't evidence enough that governments don't want populations getting too small, the government of Iran previously encouraged people to have less children starting around 1989 to combat a boom in their population lasting from 1976-1996. The policies have until now been successful, resulting in a noticeably smaller birthrate. The government has since been cutting funding to the programs to facilitate lower birthrates to boost what they feel is a population too small for their liking. For example: vasectomies, once free, have ended due to the government cutting moneyflow.[15] The government plans to go even further, showing very keen interest in banning vasectomies altogether and making it tougher, if not near-impossible, for women to get abortions and people to use contraceptives.[16]

Japan's birthrate reached an all-time low in 2005, prompting the creation of a ministerial bureau in the Cabinet Office to specifically address the issue. The Ministry of State for Declining Birthrate and Gender Equality believes greater gender equality in the workplace to be the most effective method of encouraging births, and promotes tax reductions and longer periods of paid leave following the birth of a child.[17]

So what does that all mean?[edit]

That isn't the kind of behavior that governments display if they are intent on depopulation. Many of the aforementioned governments specifically are infamous for being authoritarian states, yet they always strove to have stable populations rather than engage in depopulation. This brings us back full circle to the previously established fact that, without a stable population, governments will suffer. But it shows that they do have one provably real agenda going on, and that is a stable population agenda.

A depopulation plot, all things considered, doesn't seem at all likely.

Historical cases of rapid population collapse[edit]

During the years 1346 to 1353, the Black Death claimed the lives of 75 to 200 million people in Europe and the Mediterranean, reducing populations by 30-60%.[18] Such a scenario would be to the benefit of the ruling elites, right? Instead, it marked the death knell for the feudal system. The massive labor shortage caused by the plague meant that peasants had more land, craftsmen had fewer competitors, new labor-saving technologies spread to compensate for the loss of so much of the labor force, and feudal lords had to compete for peasants' loyalty lest they switch allegiance to a new lord offering a better deal, while the Roman Catholic Church faced a severe crisis in confidence as prayer seemed wholly ineffective at stopping the ravages of the plague.[19] The Europe that emerged from the Black Death was not the old one that had been dominated by the elites of the medieval era, but conversely, one with a leveled playing field where the elites' power was sharply curtailed, and where agricultural, industrial, economic, religious, and intellectual revolutions loomed around the bend.[20]

Huh… you'd think that, instead of depopulation, the elites would instead want overpopulation so as to create a world where the teeming masses are too busy fighting each other for what little scrap of the world's finite resources they can in order to put up any serious resistance to their masters… oh my God, Alex Jones has got it all wrong! The elites aren't trying to kill us, they want more of us! They want a massive pool of slave labor that competes against itself so that it can't press a united front! And they spread false conspiracy theories to blind truth-seekers and get them to swallow their agenda without realizing it! Oh my God, it's the perfect plan! Everybody, remove your blinders! Protect contraception and abortion rights! Support education, sanitation, health care, urbanization, and stability in the developing world so that families don't feel like they're forced to have ten kids in order to see two survive to adulthood! Smash the patriarchy so that women aren't treated as brood-mares and forced to pump out more slaves! Do your part to fight the NWO's overpopulation agenda, where we'll all be herded into pens like cattle and force-fed Soylent Green as our meager ration for our labor!

WAKE UP, SHEEPLE!!!!!!!!!![note 5]

But what if there's really a plan?[edit]

If there's an evil plot, then the governments involved are obviously quite happy to commit suicide. People are the greatest and most invaluable resources governments depend upon. As already established, too many or too few human beings are devastating, given the numerous ill-effects both scenarios have, which is why governments do whatever they can to ensure birthrates remain normal. Furthermore, as governments have grown in size in reflection of growing populations, lowering populations would naturally have an inverse effect. There would be less people to run the government and keep it running smoothly. Hardly the situation people in positions of authority want, considering their power diminishes too.

So even supposing they are involved in plans to enact depopulation, it's a guarantee that the nation they end up with once successful will be a damn small one lacking power and clout.

Possible origins[edit]

Fears of this sort may have been stoked by science fiction such as the 1973 film Soylent Green, the 1976 film Logan's Run, by Garrett Hardin proposing rich Western nations practice "lifeboat ethics" in refusing immigration (not a very liberal view, eh?), and by real examples of governments which put radical depopulation into practice, such as Pol Pot's Cambodia between 1975-1979. However, as a conspiracy theory, the scope of the depopulation plan is global, with various conspirators (the Rockefellers, the Club of Rome, the Jews, Henry Kissinger, British royalty) claimed to be secretly working to reduce the world population by as much as 80 percent.

There were organized groups of like-minded people who in part, feared predictions of world famine to occur during the early 20th century, and this was expanded upon by a notable author who contrived his own evidence and applied reasoning that depicted classes of people, denoted favored qualities in the human race, and condemned workers for having too many children while the superior classes of humans, evidenced in part by their ability to attain wealth, were too few. By the early 1900's, there were many such groups. One very notable group was the American Society of Eugenics. The president of the ASE was the well known C. C. Little, who also founded a genetics lab and the predecessor to Sanger's Planned Parenthood as well as having served as president of two state's universities. The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor also existed.

One of the primary goals of Eugenics is to reduce undesirable traits in humankind, and the methods used to accomplish this come under great scrutiny, especially from those completely unaware of the existence of eugenics thinking. There is evidence that eugenics has been practiced. Within the United States, President Clinton's official apology to victims and families of one such program that resulted in the sterilization of incapacitated people held in "mental" institutions, constitutes proof of eugenics practice in our recent history. The societies of eugenics published monthly and quarterly newsletters, promoted baby contests, and conducted intense research regarding health conditions of humans and utilized their findings to influence society and laws. Some of their writing was very philosophical, as a matter of fact, but very racist and self-preserving of their own kind.

There are many books written by Eugenicists. One such book, Applied Eugenics by Popenoe, 1920, describes two human classes: inferiors and superiors. It rationalized that the superiors needed to have at least three children while the inferiors have fewer or none and then set about discussing economic and social measures that would cause this plan to come to fruition. Advancement of women in the workforce, low-paying jobs for inferiors to discourage reproduction, and high rental costs and difficulty to disrupt home ownership, combined with housing shortages and homelessness, were means to keep inferior families from forming. Measures to ensure that elderly would become a burden to their children, requiring time and care rather than passing wealth, was yet another strategy to reduce a family's capital and thereby discourage reproduction.

Many eugenics principles can be tracked to what most understand as a wartime atomic bomb planning division of the government known as the Manhattan Project. During the project, it is well documented that the USA, Italy, and other countries in Europe collaborated and conducted bioweapon research under the guise of discovering vaccinations on European passenger ships during the 1930s. The United States Department of Public Health in Manhattan was involved in caring for the infected passengers, sometimes numbering so many that the hospital set up tents on the lawn and there were documents that surfaced concerning the USDPH being notified by Italian naval officers working under Mussolini, in advance of successful release of infectious agents on the ship. Governments in Europe assisted in encouraging certain populations to travel to America for better opportunity and admittedly assisted in funneling them to certain ships, including ones launched in cooperation between Italy and the United States.

Preceding World War II, Hitler rose to power easily for denouncing eugenics that went on at the Berlin University and Hospital. The experiments on native German children became public when Koch, the father of vaccines, became famous for his discoveries that involved transferring germs to children at his pediatric practice from a rodent he kept in his backroom lab. While doctors flocked to work with Robert Koch from the United States, Hitler gained support denouncing human experiments that had been conducted on native German children by a group of scientists who had assimilated into Germany. Underlying this was the great wealth of those working in medicine compared to the great poverty of the native Germans. After winning an election, Hitler's policies were a deterrent to wealthy people who collectively removed their wealth from the country to break the German economy. When this did not work, they published a world wide boycott and declared their identity in such advertisements. This put the lower class of their race, who could not afford to leave Germany, knowingly in peril. The simmering war then turned into one more focused more on race than economy and sadly one of heinous acts of gross retaliation, in part threatened and dramatized (at first) to extinguish an ongoing world wide boycott of German goods. From here, as Hitler did not win his battles, he took eugenics to an entirely new level, beyond one that involved mentally ill people that had been occurring before native German children were utilized as test subjects for vaccine development.

In the aftermath of the war, the National Socialists of Germany on trial for their war crimes, implicated the United States government for being at least complicit to similar behavior in their own country. The founding of Family Planning began under new leadership of Sanger in the United States after C.C. Little moved on to other projects. True to eugenics principles, Family Planning directed their services toward low-income and black communities. This direction continued after the landmark case that legalized abortion and most recently as a result of the decision by the US Supreme Court, Dobbs vs Jackson. Objecting Congressional members and other politicians as well as news media condemn the decision on the basis that it will disproportionately affect lower-income and black women, ironically due to the strategy of abortion clinic locations by Planned Parenthood in neighborhoods comprised primarily of low-income and black populations.

There have been other well-known fertility reduction strategies utilized in the USA since WWII aside from birth control contraceptives and education of young people. Evidence strongly suggests that fluoridation does alter hormones that control sexual and reproductive function. Compiled with 75 years of leaded gasoline that spewed lead filled exhaust all over, but especially lower income, congested urban traffic ways, fluoride served to increase blood levels of lead from previous environmental exposure that eventually moves into bone. Lead is mistaken for calcium by the body and hence deposits where calcium should have. Fluoride elevates hormones that cause bone pitting to elevate serum calcium, often inappropriately, causing re-circulation of lead in the blood. Elevated levels of serum lead reduce male testosterone and impair male fertility. Fluoride and lead in pregnant women are a leading cause of early miscarriage. That the United States Surgeon General approved leaded gasoline in 1924, despite the entire Europe and Scandinavian countries having outlawed use of lead, banning women from any necessary trade that required lead, and implicated lead in human deformity, cognition, and reproduction — during a worldwide convention that the United State responded to, in 1911 — implicates some type of motivation that was not in the best interest of the population, especially in congested areas. It took over 75 years for Congress to ban tetraethyl-lead (TEL) and 50 years to reduce water fluoridation from 4 ppm to 1 ppm. In the US, lead paint on window sills was the official cause of urban lead toxicity in children, and despite banning lead paint in the 1970s for home application, the lead remains elevated in soils near roadways and is especially high in urban communities and driveways where cars warmed and children play. Further, the lead industry expanded into plumbing during the 20th century as an inexpensive means to secure water soaked junctions. While this toxic practice is being remediated during the 21st century by the Federal Government as a mistaken practice, the Aqueduct in Rome was well known to have caused lead toxicity throughout modern history.

While these chemicals do not confirm that eugenics has been practiced in the United States on a somewhat covert level, the malice for government officials to allow certain practices and toxins to legally exist, gives rise to the particular conspiracy theory that there exists a coordinated effort to depopulate the United States, perpetrated by the wealthier class of the population. The government participated in conferences with the rest of the world who banned lead approximately a decade before they allowed the oil industry to replace safe ethanol for engine knock with tetraethyllead, while knowing vehicle exhaust was prone to distributing it into the air and surfaces it landed on. Rockefeller, Standard Oil, Dupont, Kettering, and other GMC executives became the wealthiest people in the world. Approval of fluoridated water, well known to cause harm as evidenced by FDA investigations, including for fluoride in beer served to military troops, created countless medical health problems that drove both the medical industry and the pharmaceutical industry participants from a reputation of being no better than "snake-oil salesmen" to the richest members of upper-middle class who, today, are the largest influence on US Congressional decisions. Further, by studies conducted by John Hopkins University Medical College in 2016 that only utilized and investigated medical coding records, determined that over 251,000 deaths occur annually in the US for no other reason than medical error, accident, negligence, or malpractice. These cases were often found to have been falsified by attending physicians regarding cause of death on death certificates, and the majority of these deaths have become categorized as accidental death. In light of the fact that this falls behind heart disease and cancer, and medical research indicates by statistics that a cancer patient's longevity is longer without treatment, that fluoride contributes to arteriosclerosis and lead toxicity to high blood pressure, one cannot help but wonder about all medical health fatalities. The reason for fluoridating water was given as one for dental health. Instead of a reduction in the dental industry, the dental industry has grown to astronomical levels. And, finally, disregarding offspring not conceived or carried to term due to contraception initially targeted for use by lower income women, the legality of abortion as contraception, from 1973 to 2022, resulted in the abortion of 800,000 potential Americans, who were primarily from lower-income or black families. As a result, the United States' population today is less an estimated 39-70 million people under 49 years of age, primarily from these classes.

Though none of these problems can be positively linked to eugenics efforts to depopulate, they have contributed to depopulation. Today, the population growth rate of the United States in less than 0.42, which is indicative of a negative population growth rate or declining population. In terms of animals, this statistic would qualify US humans for the Endangered Species List. The average age of the US population has risen to nearly 40 years old. And the effect of the toxins used during the full life of the baby-boom generation will contribute to rapid health degeneration as they age due to age-related bone degeneration that, by releasing the toxins from bone into blood, will cause a myriad of health conditions that lead to earlier-than-normal death. Perhaps the worst effect of all, regardless of whether these toxins and policies were or were not meant to depopulate, their effects have been concealed and the effects do cause cognitive deficits. The arguments coming from both sides — whether some problem is a conspiracy or some problem has foundation in truth, between uneducated populations who are trying to rationalize their comprehension of what media and public education has told them to think, are only more pitiful because both sides fail to recognize the impact certain policies have had directly upon their own lives and the lives of those they love.

See also[edit]

  • Genocide conspiracy: A variation claiming that depopulation is being targeted at specific racial/ethnic groups that They see as a threat.
  • Georgia Guidestones: A mysterious monument calling for, among other things, the world population to fall below 500,000,000 people.
  • HIV/AIDS denialism: There is some overlap between depopulation conspiracy believers and people who believe AIDS is a government-created mechanism for depopulation.
  • Pacte de famine: The idea's French predecessor.

External links[edit]

Notes[edit]

  1. See here. The German verb for "to eat" is essen when concerning humans and fressen (primarily) when concerning animals. Nutzlose Fresser derives from the latter, giving the phrase highly dehumanizing connotations that are not conveyed by the English translation.
  2. Or positive, depending on your point of view and the particular context — see next note.
  3. An example of this was Europe in the aftermath of The Black Death where population decline resulted in a weakening of feudalism as peasants' and serfs' bargaining power vis-a-vis the aristocracy increased, which is probably only a bad thing if you happen to be an aristocrat or a neoreactionary.
  4. The United Nations is concerned with Japan's low population. Ironic, considering how many depopulation conspiracy theorists believe the UN to be either a part of or the main instigator of the conspiracy.
  5. Sarcasm over... or is it?

References[edit]

  1. The Depopulation Conspiracy articles, Whale.to (Scopie's Law in effect here)
  2. http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/714411/T4-Program
  3. Geo-Engineering: Killing Off the Useless Eaters, Alex Jones
  4. Depopulation by Vaccines, Respectful Insolence
  5. Global Warming Provides Cover for Depopulating the Earth, The "Truth" Seeker
  6. Time - A Brief History of China's One-Child Policy
  7. All Things Considered: "How China's One-Child Policy Transformed U.S. Attitudes On Adoption." NPR, 30 October 2015 (recovered 9 December 2016).
  8. CNBC - China economy to ride on changes to one-child policy
  9. - CNN - China one-child policy to end
  10. China allows three children in major policy shift, BBC
  11. http://soviet-awards.com/medals26.htm
  12. Russia Profile - Childfree at a Price
  13. Pravada.ru - Childless Russian families to pay taxes for their social inaction
  14. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Honour_of_the_German_Mother
  15. http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2014/0515/Iran-ends-free-vasectomies-with-maximum-baby-push
  16. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/15/iran-ban-vasectomies-birthrate
  17. http://www.dijtokyo.org/publications/WP0604-%20Schad.pdf
  18. Benedictow, Ole J. "The Black Death: The Greatest Catastrophe Ever." History Today, Volume 55 Issue 3 March 2005 (recovered 20 January 2017).
  19. "Social and Economic Effects of the Plague." Decameron Web (recovered 20 January 2017).
  20. "Economic history: Plagued by dear labour." The Economist, 21 October 2013 (recovered 20 January 2017).