Genocide, Small Pox Blankets, and Malthus

[Protagoras]

(warning, stream of conscious discussion ahead)

In another thread recently someone noted that it was *paraphrased* Tin Foil Hatish to think the government would engineer designer virus's to kill off or control populations. I paused at that for a moment because, while I had never been one to accept HIV as a *conspiracy*, the statement, and concept behind it just didn't settle right in my head.

So I began asking myself about the question: Do I believe it's possible or (more directly) likely that our government...or any major government would try and control population through killing off people? Do I believe they can be or...ARE...capable or willing to engage in such acts? Would they use disease to do so? Does it matter if it's a disease?

The more I thought about it the more I started remembering some things from college back in the day...I remembered Malthus. I looked him back up and found this nice page that talks about him http://desip.igc.org/malthus/principles.html

-Food is necessary for human existence.
-Human population, if not checked, tends to grow faster than the power in the earth to produce subsistence.
-The effects of these two unequal powers must be kept equal.
-Misery is the mechanism that balances human requirements and available resources.
-Nature's requirement that the imbalance between demand and supply be resolved forms the "strongest obstacle in the way of any very great improvement of society," and thus makes "the perfectibility of man and society" a theoretical and practical impossibility.
-The Principle of Population, i.e., the inevitability of misery due to the power of population to overwhelm resources, provides the mainspring behind the advance of human civilization by creating incentives for progress.

Interesting, I remembered him advancing biological theories...didn't actually remember the immediate connection to him being an economist...when I started thinking of his population models as economics...tying it to money, profit, and the associated greed...a lot of things I was ready to dismiss became a lot more likely. This is especially true of a culture or government that (like the neocons) bases it's notions of virtue and advancement almost entirely around wealth (and power) production and acquisition.

I also began remembering a brief bit of our human history. Mostly in the US, but also around the world. Frankly, I don't see much in the history of our species that convinces me that our societies have a big problem with genocide...or at least massive kill offs.

Perhaps it is misdirected to use the term genocide, because we tend to think of that in terms of race, rather than portions of population. Although, I do believe that most major human kill-off efforts have used race as the main focal point, I begin to doubt that racial purity is the root issue...class and resource competition seem like an equally likely possibility in many cases. More on this in a minute. As the recent movie Hotel Rwanda so amazingly described...the conflict was between two artifically created divisions in the population (no thank you Belgium).

But lets look back, just over the last couple hundred years. We began acquiring this big land of ours via a pretty nasty little trick...on both coasts, on multiple occassions as I understand it, our soldiers distributed small pox blankets to the native population in order to "pacify" them. Nice side effect to that was...they were all dead and we got their land without much of a fight. If I remember my Claude Levi-Strauss right, this idea worked so well that it was repeated in this century in places like Brazil.

I've also read that we've experimented on our own people multiple times with disease...with no clear positive reason associated. Think about the Tuskegee study in 1932...

Or the open air testing in and around Dugway Utah..."sorry for your sheep and your children..we just wanted to figure *something* out"

We've used prisoners and patients to test LSD...McGill University seems to have lived that down finally...untill some ass like me brings it back up.

And shall we talk about the downwinders? (ok not technically a disease...just a willingness to let people die for a scientific experiment). A lot more claims of similar actions abound out on the net...can't speak for the veracity of all of them but seems like pages like this http://www.chemtrailcentral.com/forum/thread1044-30.html are trying to catalogue them.

And that doesn't touch what we've been willing to do to each other as humans all over the world just in the last 100 years.

http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/dictat.html

You know...Stalin, Pol Pot, Hitler, Amin, and dozens more...(don't forget to add the US in a few of those)

Reading these things and reflecting on them I really began to realize that it doesn't take a tinfoil hat to believe that we're not just capable but LIKELY to try and kill off members of the herd that become inconvenient. In fact, likely to do it en mass. And the more social policy becomes based on economic theory rather than virtue and justice...the more likely it is that we humans will accept the resulting carnage. We'll be able to reduce it or deny it or number ourselves to it, because, as Stalin sayd "One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic."

We've proven time and time again that we don't have a problem killing off our brothers and sisters...especially if we can depersonalize him a bit by a name or a race or a class. If he's not productive to us...if he's easy to identify...if he's distant enough that it won't mess up our front yard...then if he has want we want...killing him in order to take it, appears to be deeply set in the fabric of our being. It cuts across cultures, because it has clearly happened in most eras and most cultures...in Asia, Europe, Africa...and YES...here in the Americas.

I'm terrified by these thoughts, because they make me much more likely to accept that WE...the Country I live in...are capable, at the highest levels, of consciously planning and executing these attrocities. Do I now believe that our government would effect a program to spread a disease that would kill off the poorest of the poor? I begin to wonder...how far is that from simply stripping away their medical access and sanitary living conditions? Maybe it doesn't even take a lab...just remove the social supports..pollute their environment...and the upper classes can protect themselves from the risk by buying organic food and paying their HMO bills. How are cancer rates in your area? Why is Erin Brockovich an underground hero to many?

So perhaps we have refined the process a bit...maybe we don't have to go to great lengths to engineer a new microbe...but then again how often do the powermongers leave much to chance? Why not do both and double your pleasure? Regardless, we have a thousand ways of spreading small pox blankets these days...some are missles, or assassinations, or the removal of economic supporters...the denial of aid or healthcare...

But in the end...it all begins, to me, to look like a pretty deliberate effort to cull the herd. To keep those who produce and help the profit working as the disposable units they are...and to cast off those that can't produce. Maybe we don't need to be as crude or as sciencefictiony (like my word?) as many speculate...but I think Malthus' economic principles are more consciously guiding the hands of our leaders than most would ever want to believe. And the result is the deliberate decision to enact policies that dehumanize and kill off people on massive scales.

Do I have some hope through all this? Yes. I cling to some. I believe that we can change the course of our murderous nature by rejecting economic calculations as the measure of a good society. I think we can, but it takes a lot of awareness. It takes first admitting what we are and have been doing. It takes people saying OMG, that's unacceptable. It takes the suffering moving from the TV screen into the living room so that people recognize that they are a part of the system that supports and advances it.

It takes a different kind of awareness. Maybe it begins here...with a thousand small voices on a place like DU. At least I hope so.

Peace,

Prot.

[bloom]

1. I think it will take more people realizing they are NOT protected...

"Maybe it doesn't even take a lab...just remove the social supports..pollute their environment...and the upper classes can protect themselves from the risk by buying organic food and paying their HMO bills."



Tuna Steaks/Swordfish/Shark is a good example. These seem like "upper class" foods - now it is realized that since they are at the top of the chain that they have the MOST mercury.

And I think a lot of "upper class" people are getting more air and water pollution than they realize. Yes - it is worse on the "poor" side of town. Yes - it helps when you can get filtered everything/organic everything.

I think there is too much to keep up with even if you knew everything - plus there is the curse of awareness. The more you know - the more depressing it is. Prozac for everybody. :(

[Warpy]

2. Malthus was wrong

because he assumed that the patriarchal order which kept women as near livestock to be used only for breeding purposes was the only possible way to organize a society.

We've seen in the last century that the education of women, the acceptance of women into the world of paid work, and the rise in expectations beyond being mere animated flowerpots into which a male sows his seed will dramatically lower birth rates, even when there is a superabundance of food. It's why women in America don't produce the same ten to twelve offspring as their sisters in unenlightened parts of the world. It's why the birthrate plummets in all countries where women are accorded nearly full citizen status.

If Malthus had been right, we'd have a present population in the US that would equal that in China. We don't. He was wrong.

[Protagoras]

3. The claim isn't that Malthus was right...

It was that his economic view either contributes too or is symptomatic of our thinking about our fellow man...by reducing them to numbers in a calculation...and measuring him by production and consumption...we're able to dehumanize people and treat think of them in a disposable manner.

That's why his name is on the same line with Genocide and Smallpox Blankets.

Right or wrong...I'm not here to defend the validity of the man's theories...just try and understand their impact on the thinking of our leaders and our culture.

[misanthrope]

7. I would think...

...that the birth rates would be more indicative of infant mortality and standard of living, with education also being a side-product of an elevated standard of living.

Being so anthropomorphic, we have a tendency to forget that we're merely carriers for the double helix. We tend to adopt the model that best insures genetic viability, first and foremost.

[Stanchetalarooni]

4. Crack Cocaine + Genetic Predisposition = GENOCIDE

Coke doesn't affect everybody in the same way. Neither does alcohol or other dopamine specific drugs. A persons neurology, in large part, determines ones "drug of choice".

[whistle]

5. Uhmmm, well it seems that it is all about theories and which....

...theories are right and which are wrong. A theory which proves correct becomes law. Those that are wrong either are abandoned or sink back into the shadows of scholarly pursuit until such time as either social, economic or political circumstances require that they be resurrected and reintroduced into the common dialog. Thomas Malthus' theories on the general relationship between population growth and the ability of the world's resources to sustain that growth, seem to fall into that later group of failed social theories with an eternal half life.

<snip>
Malthusian catastrophe
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

A Malthusian catastrophe, sometimes known as a Malthusian check, is a return to subsistence-level conditions as a result of agricultural (or, in later formulations, economic) production being eventually outstripped by growth in population. Theories of Malthusian catastrophe are very similar to the subsistence theory of wages. The main difference is that the Malthusian theories predict over several generations or centuries whereas the subsistence theory of wages predicts over years and decades.

<more>
<link> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe

The way I see it, Malthus is always used to justify the status quo of those at the highest levels of the economic strata and those who have power and are reluctant to let that power base erode in any way, in other words the conservatives in society. The haves will always use the theories of Malthus to justify their own excesses while condemning even the most minuscule requests from the have-nots to share more equitably in the production of their labors. It was not a coincidence that the writings of Karl Marx on class struggle followed on the heels of widespread acceptance and application of the theories of Thomas Malthus.

[undeterred]

6. kick!

[Protagoras]

8. So the question returns to...

do people believe that governments (our government) is or would use social engineering up to and including massive kill offs to support or maintain their theoretical views about balance and economic sustainability?

Whether it's a engineered microbe or a deliberate war...are we willing to posit that some of these things were done precisely because of the impact on population? Not just oil...not just money...but calculating in the idea that killing off X number of people here will enrich them there by Y amount? Or that the number X could not or does not reach into the millions or higher?

I suspect that if Ford was willing to do it with the Pinto...Bushco is willing to do it with just about anything.

(wearing my tinfoil today)

[kineneb]

9. I see what you are getting at - cuts in services to poor...

equals extra deaths of those the Cons view as "not of the elect."
So is sending off the poor to fight in distant wars, not caring about the rate of casualties. Being near the bottom of this economy, I can see the cuts coming to health-care and other services, somehow in the hopes that folks like us will "disappear."

[bloom]

10. I think it's possible

I also think - like everything else - they would think that they could predict the outcome and they would suppose that it would be all good for them.

And I think they would be wrong.

[Karenina]

11. At this late date

For "people (to) recognize that they are a part of the system that supports and advances it" BILLIONS will lose their lives. So, I'm a pessimist...