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

Robert Zubrin's Merchants Of Despair Reveals Racism And Genocide Cloaked In Green Camouflage

From Charles Darwin to Margaret Sanger to Adolf Hitler: Zubrin connects the dots in Merchants of Despair 

By Larry Bell

Robert Zubrin’s “Merchants of Despair” chronicles huge and devastating influences of radical environmentalists along with associated criminal pseudo-scientists and a fatal cult of anti-humanism upon global events and society which continue today. Examples include profound ideological influences that resulted in large and long population “cleansing” campaigns through mass sterilization, abortion, and racial/ethnic genocide.

Much of the background material in this article (and some that will follow) draws upon information provided in Zubrin’s extensively-sourced research, along with supplementary information compiled through my own investigations. Here the intent is not to condemn the entire green movement or the great many extremely dedicated people who care deeply about our shared planet and ecosystems. Rather, it is to reveal how even the loftiest, best- sounding interests can be manipulated by extremely misguided ideological zealots and fully-evil and powerful propagandists who prey upon ignorance and emotion. I will mention some of them, along with horrific consequences they have wrought.

The Ugly Malthusian Legacy  

If there is one person to be attributed the title “Father of Manipulated Gloom and Doom Environmental Fright”, it must be Thomas Robert Malthus, a political economy professor at the British East India Company’s East India College who lived from 1766-1834.  His “zero-sum-gain” population and resource theories have had tremendous influence on global agendas, policies and travesties which continue unabated today.

Malthus initiated an alarmist international movement with an unsigned pamphlet titled “An Essay on the Principle of Population”  that first appeared in London bookstores in 1798. The publication forecast a terrifying world future whereby the population would increase geometrically while agriculture necessary to sustain it would increase only arithmetically.

Malthus proclaimed as “incontrovertible truths” that because of the “fixity of land”, growing families would overwhelm means to feed them. This circumstance would lead to “misery or vice”-some combination of disease, famine, foregone marriage, barbarianism and war that reduced population to a sustainable subsistence level. This, he argued, would be 

“decisive against the existence of a society, all the members of which should live in ease, happiness, and comparative leisure.”

The remedies Malthus proposed to ensure lives of “ease, happiness and comparative leisure” were draconian to say the least. For example, he argued to condemn doctors who find cures in order to reduce population …even encouraged efforts to keep wages low:

“We are bound in justice and honor 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 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 compel nature to use. Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits.”

Malthus went on to propose: 

“In our towns we should make 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 the 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.”

Even during his own time, his theories were used to justify regressive legislation against lower classes…influences that led to establishment of England’s Poor Law Act of 1834 and which motivated the British government to refuse aid during the Irish Famine of 1846.

Yet also during Malthus’s time, while England’s population was growing, the food supply was actually growing even more rapidly. Studies were soon beginning to indicate an inverse relationship between wealth and population change, where wealthier regions had lower growth rates. Then with the birth of the European Industrial Revolution, living conditions for many improved dramatically, if not by standards approaching those we enjoy today.

Darwinism: Providing an Uncivilized Basis for Racism

Although Charles Darwin was a superb naturalist who certainly contributed much to our understanding of evolutionary principles, his influential 1871 book,The Descent of Man, presented a far different view of human racial equality than civil liberal- or conservative-minded people alike can countenance today. To wit, Chapter VI states:

“At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes…will no doubt be exterminated. The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilized state, as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and the same ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.” 

Zubrin points out that while the concept of “survival of the fittest” did not originate with Darwin…being traceable back as far as Victorian philosopher Herbert Spencer’s “struggle for existence”. In any case, that survival struggle common to nature in general…and mankind  in particular…that Darwin  proposed, fit handily with  the idea of straining out “inferior” races in the face of limited resources based upon Malthusian theory. And whereas Malthusians could claim that population control through imperial rule was necessary as an unfortunate and unavoidable consequence of constraints of Earth’s bounty, many Darwinians of the time saw such horrors as a blessing which would advance humanity by weeding out “unfit” individuals and races.

Darwin made it easier for those who sought to apply that hostile and egregious philosophy by asserting that human intellectual evolution will be advanced through warfare. He wrote that tribes and individuals “who were  the most sagacious, who invented and used the best weapons or traps, and who were best able to defend themselves, would rear the greatest number of offspring”to supplant other tribes. He therefore concluded that since they succeed   mainly (but not exclusively, through arts which are products of intellect, “It is therefore, highly probable that with mankind the intellectual faculties have been mainly and gradually perfected through natural selection.”

Eugenics: The Bastard Malthusian Stepchild

Malthusian philosophy and population control got a huge boost from a new“science” called “eugenics” which got kicked off by Darwin’s cousin, Sir Francis Galton and his 1869 book, Hereditary Genius. According to Galton, all successes or failures in life are substantially due to the presence or absence of inbred qualities, determining beyond question that the offspring of judges, cabinet ministers and admirals were far more likely to achieve eminence than children of chimney sweeps, day laborers and rag pickers.

Galton argued that in order for human evolution to be advanced, superior people should be encouraged to have more children, and inferior people should be constrained to have fewer.  To support this plan he even established a grading system to precisely measure the eugenic “value” of each person. Superior people ranged from capital “A” (just above average) through “X” (super genius). Lower case rankings characterizing inferiors ranged from “a”(just a bit subnormal) through “g” (imbecile).

I will refrain here from elaborating the grotesquely offensive racial comparisons which Galton described, simply mentioning that he placed “the Australian type” at the bottom. Incidentally, Orientals, Jews and the Irish were all listed in the inferior category, along with Americans and Anglo-Saxon stock.

Darwinism and eugenics found a disciple in Ernst Haeckel, a tremendously influential German professor of comparative anatomy at the University of Jena who coined the word “ecology”. He was also a tremendously influential racist, anti-Catholic bigot, anti-Semite, anti-Pole, militant atheist, pro-imperialist, and Pan-German fanatic. While Darwin at least believed that all humans were ultimately members of the same species, Haeckel maintained that there were no less than twelve different human species comprised of thirty-six different races with different worth. In his 1904 book, Wonders of Life,he wrote: “Since the lower races (such as Veddas or Australian Negroes) are psychologically nearer to the mammals (apes and dogs) than to civilized Europeans, we must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives.”

Haeckel also argued that Darwinism provided the basis for an all-encompassing scientific worldview (Monism) to replace conventional Christian ethics. Popularization of the Monistic (unity) philosophy established an influential intellectual movement among German elites during the period before WWI. Principles it espoused included advocacy for infanticide of abnormal children, and mass murder of invalids to achieve racial improvement.

In his 1876 book, The History of Creation, Haeckel observed that the most “remarkable” aspect of Spartan history was their “obedience to a special law” whereby “all newly-born children were subject to careful examination or selection” and those who were “weak, sickly, or affected with any bodily infirmity were killed.” He concluded that “destruction of abnormal new-born infants” couldn’t be rationally classified as murder as it is “done in modern legal works.”

Green Death: The Ultimate Population Control

Malthusian, Eugenics and Darwinist-premised ideologies lent support to the Nazi genocide program. Haeckel’s ideas were readily applied to anti-Semitic neo-pagan philosopher Ludwig Klages who wrote in his book, Man and Earth (1913), laid the foundation for the German back-to-nature youth movement case and served as a founding document of the West German Green Party which has influenced the environmental movement ever since. These ideas were embraced by such leading Nazis as Hitler and his youth leader Baldur von Schirach. The philosophy, which became prominent through propaganda by 1939, advocated that racial cleansing was not only essential to maintain German purity, but also to save the Earth and mankind from inferior races.

Following WWII, Secretary of the Army William H. Draper, Jr., was appointed chief of the economics division of the Allied Council for Germany (1945-1947). Draper was a ranking investment banker at the firm of Dillon, Read & Company when it had underwritten Nazi Germany’s industrial development bonds during the 1930s. Once with the Allied Council he opposed the denazification process, protecting former clients on boards of Nazi concentration-camp cartels from Allied prosecution.

After being denounced by fellow officers as a Nazi sympathizer who flagrantly disregarded policies of the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, Draper was transferred back to the U.S. from Germany, only to be appointed Under Secretary of the Army. He was then in a position to push some truly horrendous racial policies.

With backing from John D. Rockefeller III, Draper was sent to occupied Japan along with a group of veteran eugenicists including Warren Thompson, Pascal K. Whelpton, Irene Taeuber and Frank Notestein to pressure the puppet government into accepting population control laws. Thompson, an official advisor to the occupation, coordinated a publicity campaign for a eugenic protection law through the Japanese media for the stated purpose of preventing “the increase of inferior descendants.”

The propaganda campaign was successful. A government cabinet set up a Council on Population Problems; the Health and Welfare Ministry deregulated birth control clinics and approved 27 different contraceptives; and the legislature resolved that “Japan is extremely overpopulated.” By 1955, it was estimated that abortions exceeded live births by 30 to 50 percent with inevitable circumstances. A shrinking and aging workforce arrived on schedule 40 years later.

Along with his financial support to Draper and the birth control movement in Japan, John D. Rockefeller III additionally funded many other tremendously influential eugenics organizations and campaigns. One was the Conservation Foundation, which counted among its members British Eugenics Society leader Julian Huxley who played a central role in setting up UNESCO anti-population and anti-growth programs as well as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. The Conservation Foundation also helped create the World Wildlife Fund and a network of like-minded organizations.

The Conservation Foundation was established with virtually unlimited money from Rockefeller and Old Dominion (later Mellon) Foundations by Fairfield Osborn, the author of a top-selling book, Our Plundered Planet. These groups along with the Milbank Foundation and Princeton’s Office of Population Research used their vast resources to sponsor decades of television documentaries propagandizing Malthusian environmentalism and Third World studies to justify World Bank and U.N. population-reduction programs directed against those nations.

Planned Un-Parenthood

During a 1940 convention, an America Birth Control League merged with a Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau to create a new Birth Control Federation of America (BCFA). Speaking at the assembly, former American Eugenics Society president Henry Pratt Fairchild told the membership: 

“One of the outstanding features of the present conference is the practically universal acceptance of the fact that these two great movements [eugenics and birth control] have now come to such a thorough understanding and have drawn so close together as to be almost indistinguishable.”

In 1942 the BCFA changed its name to the Planned Parenthood Federation of America headed by long-term eugenics supporter Margaret Sanger. An international spin-off, the International Planned Parenthood Federation headquartered in offices of the British Eugenics Society was founded in 1952.

Margaret Sanger had previously worked through Planned Parenthood and allied organizations to advance racist population control causes for many years. As her magazine explained in a 1919 editorial,

“More children from the fit, less from the unfit – that is the chief issue of birth control.” 

In her book, The Pivot of Civilization, Sanger called for sterilization of genetically-inferior races and the“insane and feeble-minded.”

Margaret Sanger and a book, Road to Survival,written by William Vogt are credited with important influences leading wealthy Dixie Cups founder Hugh Moore to commission and distribute a 1954 pamphlet  entitled “The Population Bomb” . Moore bankrolled and participated in several population control and eugenics groups, chairing the Population Reference Bureau, serving as vice president of Sanger’s International Planned Parenthood Federation, and president of Birthright, Inc. later renamed Association for Voluntary Sterilization.

The Population Reference Bureau’s action committee mailed over a million Population Bomb copies to politicians, journalists, businessmen, professors and other people of influence. The booklet featured a cover image depicting a bomb-like globe with a crowded mass of black Africans ready to explode as soon as a fuse projecting from the North Pole was ignited unless a scissors labeled “population control”was cut in time. The publication predated by 14 years a book with the same title written by Paul Ehrlich, a professor of population studies at Stanford University.

Population as a Virus: Ehrlich, Holdren and The Club of Rome

The 1971 book, Global Ecology, authored by Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren (now Obama administration “Science Czar”) presented an unmistakable Malthusian theme: 

“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 a ‘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.” 

This was followed by a 1974 book by Paul and Anne Ehrlich, The End of Affluence: A Blueprint for Your Future, where they predict: 

“In the early 1970s, the leading edge of the age of scarcity arrived. With it came a clearer look at the future, revealing more of the nature of the Dark Age to come.”

Mankind at the Turning Point (1974), a book published by the Club of Rome, an elitist international organization, presented humankind as a disease to be eradicated. It said, 

“The World Has Cancer and the Cancer Is Man”. Another book, “The Population Bomb Revisited” written by Paul Ehrlich and his wife Anne (2009), explains: “A cancer is an uncontrolled multiplication of cells; the population explosion is an uncontrolled multiplication of people…We must shift our efforts from the treatment of symptoms to the cutting out of the cancer. The operation will demand many apparently brutal and heartless decisions. The pain may be intense.”

An earlier Ehrlich book, The Population Bomb, which followed Hugh Moore’s pamphlet of the same title in 1968, said: 

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s  hundreds of millions of people will starve to death…At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate…Nothing could be more misleading to our children than our present affluent society. They will inherit a totally different world, a world in which the standards, politics and economics of the past decade are dead.”

It goes on: 

“Our position requires that we take immediate action at home and promote effective action worldwide. We must have population control at home, hopefully through changes in our value system, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail. Americans must also change their way of living so as to minimize their impact on the world’s resources and environment.”

In his book, Ehrlich proposed that a 

“Federal Bureau of Population and Environment should be set up to determine the optimum population size for the United States, and devise measures to establish it.” One suggestion was that the bureau might add “temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food. Doses of the antidote would be carefully rationed by the government to produce the desired population size.”

Anticipating some political opposition to such a strategy, Ehrlich suggested a backup plan that involved revising the U.S. tax code: 

“On top of the tax change, luxury taxes could be placed on layettes, cribs, diapers, diaper services, expensive toys…There would, of course, have to be considerable experimenting on the level of financial pressure necessary to achieve the population goals. To the penalties could be added some incentives.”

For example, he suggested that 

“A government ‘first marriage grant’ could be awarded each couple in which the age of both partners was 25 or more. ‘Responsibility prizes’ could be given to each couple for each five years of childless marriage, or to each man who accepted irreversible sterilization [vasectomy] before having more than two children. Or special lotteries might be held – tickets going only to the childless.”

With help from television, radio and newspaper publicity organized by the Sierra Club, The Population Bomb was a best seller.

In June, 1978, Song Jian, a top-level manager in charge of developing control systems for the Chinese guided missile program presented the premise regarding limited “carrying capacities” presented in the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth” and “Blueprint for Survival” to Deng Xiaoping and other leaders of the Communist Party. The idea resonated as an argument to blame poverty on population rather than 30 years of misrule. Song then had an instrumental role in preparing a 100 year plan, with a one child per family policy to take effect immediately. Ehrlich’s dream of compulsory birth control had finally been put into practice.

In a 1967 speech at a University of Texas symposium (quoted in “The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism”),  Ehrlich called for the U.S. to shift research from “short-sighted” medical programs aimed at keeping people alive, to population regulation…and in particular, let an overcrowded Indian population “slip down the drain”… requiring sterilization of men with three or more children in India as a condition for food aid: 

“We should change the pattern of federal support of biomedical research so that a majority of it goes into broad areas of population regulation, environmental sciences, behavioral sciences, and related areas, rather than short-sighted programs on death control. “It is absurd to be preoccupied with the medical quality of life until and unless the problem of the quantity of life is solved…India, where population growth is colossal, agriculture hopelessly antiquated, and the government incompetent, will be one of those we must allow to slip down the drain.”

President Eisenhower had patently rejected the U.S. funded or mandated international population control, stating at a December 2, 1959 press conference: 

“I cannot imagine anything more emphatically a subject that is not a proper political or government activity or function or responsibility…That is not our business.” 

 Then-Senator John F. Kennedy, who was running for president at the time, opposed such programs as well… a stand that drew stinging attacks from his Democrat party challengers who accused him of trying to impose his Catholic values.

Planned Parenthood leader Margaret Sanger declared that she would leave the country if Kennedy was elected in 1960. (He was…she didn’t.) In 1961 her Planned Parenthood Federation merged with Moore’s World Population Emergency Campaign to form the Planned Parenthood-World Population Society.

Yet after President Kennedy’s assassination this anti-population control stance would change, and by the mid-1960s a new government policy doctrine was official. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) not only provided population control assistance to Third World countries, but the Johnson administration pointedly refused to provide famine relief to India following 1966 crop failures unless its government agreed to impose forced sterilization programs upon its rural peasantry.

Faced with mass starvation the requirement was implemented…and having participated in promoting this policy, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara who served under Kennedy and Johnson, left the administration to head the World Bank.

As Robert Zubrin notes: 

“ Collectively, these entities – the Population Council, the Draper Fund/Population Crisis Committee, [Sanger’s] International Planned Parenthood Federation, USAID, the World Bank, and the UN Fund for Population Activities (largely funded by USAID) – together with a host of smaller outfits funded by them (including the Population Reference Bureau, the Association for Voluntary Sterilization, the Pathfinder Fund, and many others, would come to form the imposing and influential population control establishment.”

And that control establishment’s disciple and Ehrlich colleague, John Holdren, would ultimately come to be selected out of all of our nation’s countless possibilities to become President Obama’s Science Czar.