The Intrinsic Racism of the Population Control Movement
One of the most prominent motivations of the population control movement is racism, which has diminished over time but has not disappeared. During the early history of the movement, this racist and eugenicist ideology was undisguised and was led by “progressive” intellectuals, just as prestigious “progressive” academics and celebrities lead the movement today.
The Racism behind Population Control
Lothrop Stoddard and other eugenicists of the 1920s feared that the white race was not producing enough children to keep up with the “colored” races.
Stoddard wrote his racist classic The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy in 1920. This book’s cover featured a spear-carrying African and a knife-wielding Asian menacing the “civilized” white world.[1] Two years later, he published The Revolt against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man, which featured an even more offensive cover: A mob of Molotov-cocktail throwing Africans portrayed as hairy apes.[2]
Stoddard became very popular because of his views. One of his rewards was a position on the Board of Directors of the American Birth Control League (later Planned Parenthood), which he held from March 1922 to December 1925, followed by membership in its National Council from January 1926 to March 1929.
He wrote many articles for Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review, claiming, “It is the lower elements of the population, the negroid aboriginal tribes and the Pariahs or Outcasts, who are gaining the fastest.”[3]
Stoddard also wrote in his Rising Tide of Color:
None of the colored races shows perceptible signs of declining birth‑rate, all tending to breed up to the limits of available subsistence….It can mean only one thing: A tremendous and steadily augmenting outward thrust of surplus colored men from overcrowded colored homelands….Crossings with the negro are uniformly fatal. Whites, Amerindians, or Asiatics ― all are alike vanquished by the invincible prepotency of the more primitive, generalized, and lower negro blood….In ethnic crossings, the negro strikingly displays his prepotency, for black blood, once entering a human stock, seems never really bred out again.[4]
Stoddard was one of many writers expressing their racism in The Birth Control Review. Malcolm H. Bissell wrote, “The whites will practice voluntary restriction of their numbers while ‘uncivilized’ races remain prolific, with the ultimate result of the extermination of white civilization by a ‘rising tide of color.’”[5]
The leading campaigners for birth control in the first half of the twentieth century were Margaret Sanger and Marie Stopes. The mastheads of their publications carried “progressive” themes: “Birth Control: To Create a Race of Thoroughbreds” and “Joyous and Deliberate Motherhood: A Sure Light in Our Racial Darkness.”
Sanger and Stopes were supported by Stoddard, Madison Grant, Havelock Ellis and many other racist eugenicists, who all feared “differential fertility.” This meant that the so-called “lower” races (blacks, Southern and Eastern Europeans, Jews, gypsies, etc.) multiplied prolifically, while the “higher” (Nordic) races had few children. The great fear was that this trend would lead to a “demographic cross,” with more of the “lower” races in the world than the “higher.”
This “demographic cross” has already come to pass. In 1950, Europe possessed 22% of the world’s population while Africa had only 9%. Even at that time, Africa’s population was growing rapidly while Europe’s was leveling out. In 1997, for the first time in history, Europe and Africa had the same population. By the year 2050, the two continents will have traded places; Africa will possess 22% of the world’s population while dying Europe will have only 8%. Just as importantly, by this time the average European will be 51 years old, and the average African will be only 27 years old. Europe’s population is now actually declining by one million people a year, while Africa’s is increasing by 25 million annually.[6]
Who will inherit the future ― Africa, with its huge storehouse of natural resources and large, vigorous young population, or Europe, with few resources and an aging, small and listless population? The answer is obvious. If Africa can solve its pervasive corruption problem and shake off the baleful influence of the Western population controllers, it will lead the world in just two or three decades.
The “Solution” of Population Control
The “danger” posed by Africa’s large population is becoming more and more evident. To put it crudely, the white man has one foot in the grave, and the only way to maintain his power in the world is to pull the black man into the grave with him. The best way to do this is through population control. The “developed” nations of the world had to find a way to convince the “developing” nations to hold down their populations while telling them that it was for their own good.
Widespread contraception and sterilization, always followed by abortion, fits the bill perfectly.
Until the 1960s, the population control movement was in hibernation, but then revived, spurred on by books like The Population Bomb and Silent Spring. The Nixon administration helped generate an atmosphere favorable to population control with its National Security Study Memorandum 200 (the “Kissinger Report”), which said that we have to hold down the populations of lesser-developed countries in order to have access to their natural resources. Behind this document was the naked racism of the major players in the government at the time.
President Nixon said:
They [Mexicans] don’t live like a bunch of dogs, which the Negroes do live like….A majority of people in Colorado voted for abortion, I think a majority of people in Michigan are for abortion, I think in both cases, well, certainly in Michigan they will vote for it because they think what’s going to be aborted generally are the little black bastards….As I told you ― we talked about it earlier ― that a hell of a lot of people want to control the negro bastards. You know what we are talking about ― population control.[7]
Both the domestic and international suppression of the black population have been extraordinarily successful. In the United States, 11% of the white population has been wiped out by legal abortion, compared to 31% of the black population.[8] In fact, it took 86 years (1882-1968) for the Ku Klux Klan and other racists to lynch and kill 3,500 black people ― but it takes only 86 hours to kill that many unborn black babies by abortion.[9]
Interestingly, no population control dollars were spent in the white nations of Northern or Western Europe from 1991 to 2013. But during this period the “developed” nations spent about $4 per capita on population control in Asia; about $6 in Latin America, the Middle East and Eastern Europe; and about $13 in Central America.
Significantly, black regions have received much more population control money per person ― $39 per person in Africa, $49 per person in the Caribbean islands, and $60 in the islands of Oceania (excluding the mostly white nations of Australia and New Zealand).[10] In fact, fully 62% of the $101.4 billion total spent on population control since 1990 has targeted Africa. We might ask the question: Since 60% of the world’s population lives in Asia, why is ten times as much money spent per capita on Africans?
This work is carried out by more than one hundred major non-governmental organizations (NGOs) which are entirely or mostly focused on population control. One of these is the World Wildlife Fund (whose panda bear logo we are all familiar with). The WWF was founded by Julian Sorell Huxley, who said:
The negro mind is as different from the white mind as the negro from the white body….You have only to go to a nigger camp‑meeting to see the African mind in operation ― the shrieks, the dancing and yelling and sweating, the surrender to the most violent emotion, the ecstatic blending of the soul of the Congo with the practice of the Salvation Army….[intermarriage between the] negro and Caucasian type…gives rise to all sorts of disharmonious organisms. [11]
Men and women from India, the Philippines, China, Kenya, Nigeria and a score of other poor nations have been aborted and sterilized in assembly-line conditions we would not tolerate for cattle in our rich nations.[12]
Conclusion
It is difficult to find examples of an overtly racist and eugenicist philosophy in the modern population control movement today. Those who work for it may genuinely believe that they are “helping” the poor families of Africa, Latin America and Asia by preventing them from having children, because this is exactly how they conduct their own lives. They authentically believe that progress requires sterility.
Whatever their motivations, their methods and allocation of funds remain identical to those who sought to exterminate people of color nearly a century ago. This fact should give significant pause to well-intentioned “development” professionals.
Endnotes
[1] It is interesting to note that the electronic version of Stoddard’s book The Rising Tide of Color is still very popular on white supremacist and racist websites around the world today. For an electronic version of this book, complete with cover, e-mail Brian Clowes at bclowes@hli.org.
[2] For an electronic version of this book, complete with cover, e-mail Brian Clowes at bclowes@hli.org.
[3] Lothrop Stoddard. “Population Problems in Asia.” Birth Control Review, December 1921, page 11.
[4] Lothrop Stoddard, Ph.D. The Rising Tide of Color against White World‑Supremacy [New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons], 1921. Reprinted in 1971 by Negro Universities Press, Westport, Connecticut, pages i, 8, 9, 90, 231, 298, 301, 302, 308, and 309 in the reprinted version.
[5] Malcolm H. Bissell. Review of J.B.S. Haldane’s book Daedalus or Icarus: Is Science to Be Man’s Servant or His Master? Birth Control Review, Volume VIII, Number 10 (October 1924), pages 277 and 279.
[6] United Nations Population Information Network (POPIN). The low variant is used here because it has been the most historically accurate of the predictions made by the United Nations through time.
[7] Presidential Recording Program ― White House tape 006/02, June 29, 1971; White House Tape 697/29, March 30, 1972; and White House tape 700/10, April 3, 1972.
[8] For calculations and references, e-mail Brian Clowes at bclowes@hli.org and ask for Excel spreadsheet F-19-04, “Analysis of United States Abortion Statistics, 1967-2012.”
[9] For calculations and references, e-mail Brian Clowes at bclowes@hli.org and ask for Excel spreadsheet F-06-B, “Lynchings in the United States, by Year and Race, 1882-1964” [racist Tom Metzger has said, “Very little abortion should be tolerated among our White race, while at the same time, abortion and birth control should be promoted as a powerful weapon in the limitation of non-White birth … invest in ghetto abortion clinics. Help to raise money for free abortions in primarily non-White areas. Perhaps abortion clinic syndicates throughout North America, that primarily operate in non-White areas and receive tax support, should be promoted” [Tom Metzger, 1980 Democratic nominee to the United States House of Representatives from San Diego, former Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, and founder of the White Aryan Resistance (WAR). “What We Believe as White Racists,” downloaded from http://afgen.com/popula14.html on October 1, 2012].
[10] For year-by-year population control expenditures in the developing nations of the world, see Excel spreadsheet F-18-B, “Population Control Expenditures in the Regions and the Nations of the World, 1991-2013.” For year-by-year donations by the 24 nations that contribute to population control programs, see Excel spreadsheet F-18-05, “Population Control Donations by “First World” Nations, 1996-2013.” You can get these spreadsheets from Brian Clowes at bclowes@hli.org.
[11] “America Revisited III. The Negro Problem.” The Spectator, November 29, 1924. Downloaded from Mark Burdman. “Eugenics: Ideology of Genocide.” Downloaded from http://www.bosnet.org/archive/bosnet.w3archive/9407/msg00211.html on March 5, 2002 (no longer available). Huxley also wrote:
There is, first, the mere question of quantity of population, quantity of Americans in the world versus the quantity of Englishmen, versus the quantity of Africans, versus the quantity of Chinese. That obviously is a question of the utmost importance. If you have one race whose population is going down and another whose population is going up, there is always the possibility of race suicide. [Julian Huxley. “Towards a Higher Civilization.” Birth Control Review, Volume XIV, Number 12 (December 1930), pages 342 to 345]
[12] A good example of this attitude was given by Malcolm Potts, former Medical Director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), who said:
Certainly you or I would never think of having a vasectomy in a [Indian] railway station, but it’s actually a good place for it. Apart from blowing coal dust, there’s not much dirt and not many infections….In the West, I would tell her about the cardiovascular effects [of oral contraceptives]. I would tell her to stop smoking. I’d take her blood pressure. But if she were living in the developing world and there were no care available at delivery, I don’t think I would even do that. [Quoted in Garrett Epps. “Apostle of Abortion: Malcolm Potts, a Scientist Turned Activist.” Science, March 1982, pages 71 to 78].
What's Your Reaction?
