"Overpopulation Crisis" Crisis

There is no overpopulation crisis. Let me repeat that: there is no overpopulation crisis. It's nonsense. The idea is rooted in eugenicist propaganda from before The Great War, the kind of propaganda that inspired Adolf Hitler...

With so many mass shootings in America it's easy to forget that sometimes they do happen in other parts of the world. Let me take you back to 15 March 2019, when a self-proclaimed eco-fascist butchered more than 50 people in two shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. He shot Muslims because, hey, it's not the white Christians that are causing the destruction of climate and environment, it's all those black and brown people who breed like rabbits, right? There's too many of them, right? The shooter wrote a manifesto titled... here it comes... "The Great Replacement." In it he referenced the "white genocide" conspiracy theory and described himself as an "eco-fascist," an "ethno-nationalist" and a "kebab removalist."

Later that year Naomi Klein commented on this heinous act:

"I think, the only thing scarier than a far right racist movement that denies the reality of climate change, is a far right racist movement that doesn't deny the reality of climate change. That actually says this is happening, there are going to be many millions of people on the move, and we are going to use this abhorrent ideology that ranks the relative value of human life, that puts white Christians at the top of the hierarchy, that animalizes and otherizes everyone else, as the justification for allowing those people to die." - Naomi Klein

Eugenicists have always shifted blame for the world's problems to the poor. When Thomas Robert Malthus published "An Essay on the Principle of Population" in 1798, he criticized the English "Poor Laws" aimed at helping the poor; he said that these laws promoted vice, interfered with the need for poor people to practice self-discipline. He said that poor people, assisted by government allowances, would keep having babies. In 1916 American Eugenicist Madison Grant published a book titled "The Passing of the Great Race," expounding a theory of the superiority of the "Nordic race." The theory and the book were praised by Hitler and other Nazis; if you've ever wondered why the Viking-aesthetic and symbolism is so popular among modern white nationalists, look no further than this theory.

Combine Malthus' mistaken theory on the quantity of the population with Grant's mistaken theory on the quality of the population, and you get the toxic mixture of lies that inspires white nationalist eco-fascists like the Christchurch shooter. Sure, the focus has shifted from food shortages in Mathus' time to the environment and greenhouse-gasses in our time, but we still blame the poor, as they are overwhelmingly non-whites and neatly concentrated in the Global South. And we want them to stay there, right? We don't want them here, and we don't want their numbers to impede our ability to have an over-sized carbon footprint. So we build walls and barb-wired fences and erect militarized border-patrols. When climate change, which will hit the poor in the Global South first and hardest, causes mass-displacement of large black and brown populations, we'll make sure those borders are hermetically sealed; if you thought you live in a police- and surveillance-state now, you ain't seen nothing yet.

And the sad truth is that there is no overpopulation crisis!! None. There's a crisis of profit-induced waste. Nordic waste. We've let a tiny group of (predominantly white male) individuals shape an economic constellation that serves nothing but their own greed for wealth and power. Much, if not most, of the waste is caused by an economic system of ever growing profits that demands eternal growing consumption, and what better way to make customers keep coming back than to make products that don't last. We intentionally make products that need to be constantly replaced; there's the "Replacement Theory" that's really destroying the planet. It's easy to fall for the overpopulation theory if you live in a city, as most do in the First World. Just don't. Don't fall for it, it's nonsense. And it's rooted in some of the most toxic pseudo-scientific garbage ever.

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