Henry Kissinger, 1978: “U.S. policy toward the third world should be one of depopulation”

Bertrand Russell, The Impact Of Science On Society 1953 “I do not pretend that birth control is the only way in which population can be kept from increasing… War… has hitherto been disappointing in this respect, but perhaps bacteriological war may prove more effective. If a Black Death could be spread throughout the world once in every generation survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full… The state of affairs might be somewhat unpleasant, but what of that? Really high-minded people are indifferent to happiness, especially other people’s… There are three ways of securing a society that shall be stable as regards population. The first is that of birth control, the second that of infanticide or really destructive wars, and the third that of general misery except for a powerful minority…”

Mikhail Gorbachev: “We must speak more clearly about sexuality, contraception, about abortion, about values that control population, because the ecological crisis, in short, is the population crisis. Cut the population by 90% and there aren’t enough people left to do a great deal of ecological damage.”

Jacques Cousteau UNESCO Courier 1991: “In order to save the planet it would be necessary to kill 350,000 people per day.”

UN Biodiversity Treaty UN Global Biological Assessment Sustainable Human Populations: “Population growth has exceeded the capacity of the biosphere” (i.e. the earth) “It is estimated that an ‘agricultural world’ in which most human beings are peasants should be able to support 5 to 7 billion people.”

food for thought

Global epidemic: A plague waiting to happen

...The 1918 “Spanish” flu epidemic ...killed between 50 million and 100 million people, around four to seven per cent of the world population and many more than were killed in the Great War. The mortality rate was between five and seven per cent, and the virus was easily transmissible....

If a virus like this were to emerge today, what would happen? On the positive side, .... A vaccine would be developed eventually, and antiviral drugs would be distributed, doubtless saving many lives. In the 1918 outbreak, millions died from secondary bacterial infections, which we now treat with antibiotics.

But, in many ways, we would be in an even worse position than the war-ravaged world of 1918 to deal with such an epidemic. Back then, few people moved much beyond their local communities and intercontinental travel took weeks. Today, a million humans are in the air at any one time and an aggressive, transmissible influenza (with an incubation period typically of a few days) could be on every continent within 36 hours.

Our cities are far bigger, and tens of millions more people live in proximity to each other than in 1918, maximising the ability of the infection to spread.

The Achilles heel of modern society is its complexity. In 1918, a lot of people lived in the countryside, grew their own food and were able to maintain what machines they had. Today, we are dependent on a complex web of supply chains and technologies that few individuals can master or even understand. It is easy to imagine the mass panic if something like the “Spanish” flu strain were to emerge. .....