World dePopulation Day!

Today, according to the United Nations’ calendar, is “world population day.” The day has been named, in perfect Orwellian fashion, to bemoan the population growth of the planet; that is, the number of humans presently alive (today marks the 11th anniversary of the Cairo conference on population). It’s not a day to celebrate that there are people, but, as they believe, to mourn that there are too bloody many of them. In reality, the day should be called what the UN mandarins honestly mean to promote, depopulation. So let’s call it what they mean.

I went to the web site for Population Day 2005, and I thought I had arrived at the site for the Soviet-created International Day of Women (not that there is anything wrong with that!). Here is what appears on the main panel:

Equality Empowers

Equality benefits everyone. Where girls have equal opportunity to education, societies become more prosperous. Where women have equal access to income, assets and services, families become healthier. When both men and women are able to participate equally and exercise their full human rights, the world benefits.

I am going to leave for another day the suggestion that families are universally better off when the mother goes to work to a factory, sugar cane plantation, or whatever. Considering that the human population (I know this from my own experience but I can supply reams of hard data if required) is made up of males and females, it begs the question as to why the central focus on “population day” is on women. Not only is there no international day for men (sniff!), but even on de-population day –an evidently gender-neutral designation– women issues are at the centre.

In addition, most of the links at the web site, “areas for action,” a message from Kofi Annan (who was not that preoccupied with the depopulation of Rwanda while it was taking place a decade ago), etc., deal with “promoting gender equality.” The “related stats” and “suggested activity” links bring you to posters such as the one above in various formats and languages. And about the posters: A defiant Caucasian male figure with his nose turned up faces a serene Negro female. It’s about gender, but it’s also about race, killing more than one bird with one propaganda stone.

To be sure, I agree with J.S. Mill when he argues that happier women make a happier world, urging Victorian men to treat women better. But a likely answer to the question is also found in what economists call “unintended consequences.” It is clear to the UN apparatchiks that the global “population problem” is that there are too many humanoids. They do not entertain the notion that there is also a population problem when there are not enough humanoids in some countries or regions. Amazonian Indians are disappearing! Canada, for example, does not appear in the menu on this page, purported to be about “global reach.” Their global outreach does not include us because we have not enough folks –and that’s not a problem. Those are local issues; the population problem is a world problem, they say.

When the brainy social engineers at the UN decided that “too many people” on the planet is the root cause of so many problems (you know the ones, poverty, wars, violence, crime, scarcity of resources, terrorism, and so on), they did not anticipate that their policies to stop “the problem” would lead to the further devaluing of the dignity of women in many countries. It is a well known fact, documented by armies of sociologists, that the population control project has resulted in scores of female children being killed in and extra utero. In China, for example, the model of depopulation, there are now less females than the natural norm as a result. When people of agricultural societies were forced/urged to have fewer children, they preferred to have males. And since the preference does not directly translate to the biological world, baby girls are mistreated and undervalued when they are not aborted or killed later.

In short, the unintended consequence of the population control project has been a disaster for millions of women in many non-industrial states. But rather than to cease the originating madness (dare I say the root cause), the depopulation project has mutated, at least in part, into a new project of social engineering (not to mention of westernisation, which will also carry its consequences). It now has grown into a branch of the “women’s rights” movement. I don’t mean to mock the desire to affirm women’s dignity. I am taking aim at the depopulation policies that have in fact resulted in the erosion of women’s rights, and will likely now result in a greater backlash against the modernising western ways. I also mean to take aim at the arrogance of the UN social engineers, who, rather than admitting the disaster that they have unleashed on women, now wish to appease their shrinking consciences with a propaganda campaign that will produce newer and greater unintended consequences.

The 2005 Population Day campaign is clearly an attempt to reduce (to correct, in their language) the damaging consequences brought upon females by depopulation measures, without calling into question the policies themselves and their assumptions.

Happy Planetary dePopulation Day, everyone!

PS. If you really wanted to be counter-cultural, stay home and conceive a child or three.

Cross posted from Civitatensis