The eco-fascist face of population control

We import about a little under $10 billion in foodstuffs per year – mainly packaged goods - and about one third is due to reciprocal trade agreements with New Zealand and other nations.

The anti-people faction say that we are running out of food or that we will run out of food. This is blatantly false. If in a moment of madness we decided to drive our exports on to the domestic market, every man, woman and child would be required to eat about $500,000 of meat, grain and vegetables per year, every year. Bon apetite.

So why all the talk about population?

Over the last 20 years or so there has been shift in radical thinking. The hardliners in the environment movement decided the era of revolutions was over and the era of catastrophes had begun.

They took Francis Fukuyama’s book, The End of History (1992) toliterally mean the end of history rather than the end of a dialectical tussle between capitalism and communism. With the communists vanquished (although they really just resigned) the idea of progress lay dormant.

In what must still be one of the strangest pairings in modern ideological history, the now bored far left put down their highly abstruse books by French post modernist writers and joined forces with the far left of the environment movement. Their mission? To save the world. The enemy? Babies.

Their ‘meta’ thinking – of rolling psychology, sociology, biology, climate analysis, Marxist economics and mathematics in to one discipline to explain everything - is an embarrassing nonsense. Their real weapon is fear mongering.

End of the world stories make great copy for Saturday papers (and polls) as they appeal to the core news values of impact and conflict and give pictorial editors a chance to run apocalyptic pictures of Planet of the Apes, Volcano or The Day After.

While much of the anti-population thinking and ‘policy’ is little more than a dogs breakfast of news headlines and dodgy self-supporting references, they have hit on a technique to garner attention which works – at least until the press turn on them.

A time-honored strategy of cataclysmic discourse, whether performed by preachers or propagandists, is the ‘retroactive correction’. This consists of accumulating a staggering amount of horrifying news, then tempering it with a slim ray of hope. First you break down all resistance – then you offer an escape route to your stunned and relieved audience.

The crux of green asceticism is to attribute a wildly exaggerated importance to ordinary human behaviour. The appeals to fear desperately try to awaken us to alleged planetary chaos but at the same time it deaden us. If the earth is a single, enclosed system of finite resources, full of rabbits like us, why bother?

I am not greatly concerned about the anti-population movement. I think of them as I did the followers of Erik Von Daniken and his alien conspiracy theories in the early 1970s: gullible. I am more concerned with the right wing ideology buried within their systems thinking. Their instrumentalism heralds the rise of a right wing green theocracy. Ask yourself these questions: