The US Department of State is policing the population policy lockstep

Reluctance of UN agencies

Lady M: “Lockstep”? I cannot find it in the Oxford English Dictionary.

MHK: I first heard it from a US demographer who pointed out that there are no original thinkers on the US population scene and that academia, the foundations, and the UN agencies stick to the same policy, in which discussing demographic entrapment is taboo. Lockstep is a mode of marching in very close file in which the leg of each person moves with, and closely behind, the corresponding leg of the person ahead—with the result that if one person breaks step the whole squad falls over The lockstep is the practical manifestation of the hardinian taboo.

Lady M: What matters is not academia, but the policies of your UN agencies. Logically the UN should follow academia; instead, both seem to follow the interests of the US Department of State, particularly over population and food.

MHK: Indeed! Despite the fact that global per capita grain production has been falling for 15 years, the United Nations Fund for Population Activities never discusses how populations are to be fed. The Food and Agriculture Organisation avoids discussing population wherever it can. The UN's Advisory Co-ordinating Committee/Sub-Committee on Nutrition has never discussed food at the global level. As for the United Nations Development Programme, “demographic entrapment” is not even in its vocabulary.

Lady M: Incredible! I hear it whispered that a couple of continents are trapped, and that the major means of “disentrapment” has to be one child families. The demographic momentum of young populations is such that two child families are not small enough. Why do all your UN agencies and all your demographers keep their mouths shut and never discuss entrapment? You even had to invent the word disentrapment.

Demography dominated

MHK: You should understand that demography is largely a US discipline and is likely to bend itself to US political interests. Since the second world war demography has been dominated by demographers trained in the United States. Its best universities and their departments of demography are the envy of the world. Its foundations are the richest. It is the seat of the Population Council. Two decades ago there were no demographers in China. The dominance of the “English” language also plays a large part. Chomsky observed that Britain is a colonised country, intellectually.5 It is therefore a brave British demographer who stands up to his or her American colleagues. Besides, the world's senior demographers know one another—nobody wants to step out of line.

Lady M: So you are out to break up the squad. So far all you have described could be ascribed to political correctness. It is hardly “policing.”

Consent manufactured

MHK: I previously imagined that the reluctance to recognise entrapment was caused by the problems of one child families. When I read a paper analysing what went on at the 1994 Cairo population conference I understood what was happening.6 It pointed out that “the United States, the Holy See and the women's rights movement [predominantly from the United States] were the three most organised, best disciplined, and most effective participants at the conference”; that “historically the State Department has considered population in the light of US and global security”; and also that “once formed, the US position was advanced with determination and skill through every available channel.”

In Chomskian terms, consent was indeed being manufactured.7 To dominate the political process, the ordinary methods of fixing the agenda are usually enough. These need money, a firm political will, and intense participation in the prepcons (preparatory conferences) leading up to a major conference like that in Cairo. They involve measures like paying the expenses of those non-governmental organisations that support your interests, but not those of organisations that don't. More extreme measures are necessary only occasionally—as in 1994, when population politics were particularly tense. You have to understand that there are some things that the BMJ just cannot print. For these you are going to have to look on the web. I believe that the sanctions described there that were placed on a dissenter like myself merit the term “policing.”

Let me give you a milder example. In 1996 the British journal Population Studies held a symposium celebrating its 25th anniversary. Several speakers praised the success of the demographic transition theory. I got up and said that I was concerned with its failures: the failure of birth rates to fall, resulting in populations exceeding the carrying capacities of their ecosystems. I said I was going out to Uganda the following day to lecture on “disentrapment.” The US demographer Sam Preston said, in effect: “Maurice King advises ‘let sick children die’ in severely trapped countries since one more mouth to feed is less for someone else” (he was referring to my controversial first paper8) The atmosphere was electric. The lockstep squad was being kept in step.

Why has Lester Brown stopped writing about entrapment?9 What really convinces me is that, when I recount the policing of the lockstep to US nationals working in international health, they are apt to say: “Of course, what else do you expect?” Those in senior government positions maintain an embarrassed silence. The thesis that the Department of State is doing its best to keep the hardinian taboo tight is therefore more than merely plausible. Informally, in some circles, it is now banal. The Department of State is doing the policing, not the American people or Congress. Incidentally, this paper will delight many liberal Americans.

The hardinian taboo has a number of “foundations.”2 However, I contend that the active policing of the lockstep is the most important one, since it prevents the dialogue opening.

Lady M: What I fail to understand is why the United States should be so interested in maintaining the lockstep, especially since it has funded so many population activities in the past.

Equity extolled

MHK: I am sure it would like to see population growth fall However, if the South has to restrict itself to one child families, the North should control its resource consumption. If you rate equity highly, this has meaning (see www.leeds.ac.uk/demographic-disentrapment). Equity has great power in international discourse. I am sure that the United States would like to see birth rates fall, but not at the expense of having its own resource consumption questioned. With 4.6% of the world's population burning 25% of its fossil fuel, this is now an acutely sensitive issue. I believe therefore that this is why the United States is so keen to see the lockstep maintained.

Lady M: If the premise of equity is accepted, just about everything in your world has to change. To start with, if any community is to be counselled to have one child families to avoid starvation and slaughter, then you all should. In UN terms, the official admission of the need for any community to have one child families is an admission of the ultimate inevitability of a UN programme for a one child world.

You have two great problems: global warming and population. It seems that some political dynamite is needed to release the present log jam in human affairs. What is missing is not merely “opening up the dialogue,” it is the means of making “one hell of a row” politically In the jargon of disentrapment, “benign uproar”; lots of it. “Benign” in that uproar is better than starvation and slaughter.

One hell of a row

MHK: Indeed. Unfortunately, the public has been dumbed down by the media.

Lady M: Population has its tensions that are expressed in the hardinian taboo. Global warming is a recent phenomenon, and it too has its taboo. Why don't you link them? Oil extraction rates are expected to fall after 2010,10 so there won't be enough cheap energy for the South to develop, certainly not to the consumption levels of California. The result is that the few people who currently understand this will taboo the unhappy thought. I suggest that you do all you can to get the hardinian taboo ended, and then trust that arguments based on equity will divert some of the emotional energy that is released towards the behavioural change that is needed to stall global warming. You humans have got to realise that by burning precious fossil fuel, when you drive your cars or travel by plane, you not only heat up your world but also deny your fellow humans the opportunity to develop Science might provide you with a new form of clean cheap energy Or it might not.

Your next obstacle, once the dialogue is opened and the lockstep broken, is the human rights movement, which is again largely a US phenomenon Although it has done you wonderful service in such matters as the abolition of torture, its legalistic ramblings are now a major obfuscation in the way of disentrapment. The human rights movement has never debated the legitimate incentives and disincentives for one child families under conditions of entrapment. It now provides a dense legalistic thicket to obstruct the acceptance one child families.

To what extent do you think that the human rights movement is driven by US political objectives?

MHK: That is something I would dearly like to know.

Increasing greed scientifically engineered

Lady M: What most troubles you about this alarming picture?

MHK: I am most worried by advertising. As an instrument of the market economy it seeks to scientifically manipulate the behaviour of us humans so that we continually want to consume more, and thus pollute more, in an increasingly unsustainable and inequitable way In short, it is the scientifically engineered increase of greed. I look on the control of the media as the most urgent task facing public health, and indeed humanity, in the new millennium—“the media as disease agent.”11

Naming it for what it is

Lady M: What's all this about overpowering evil?

MHK: Population is an important component, often the critical one, in all our major human problems—poverty, malnutrition, deforestation, loss of biodiversity, global warming, street children, and increasing global inequality, to name only a few. They would be much easier to solve if our numbers were less and some communities did not grow so fast. Suppressing the discussion of entrapment and policing the lockstep is hindering the resolution of all these problems. The scale and consequences of doing this are such that it can only be thought of as overpowering evil. It is mostly the evil “in the system,” since the individual is apt to argue, often wrongly, that he or she is powerless. In defence of many of those who presently enforce the lockstep, it must be said that they know not what they do.

If you still have any doubts, listen to this. Here in 1948 is George Kennan, head of the Department of State planning staff, in a document recently released under the 50 year rule: “We have 50% of the world's wealth but only 6.3% of its population … In this situation we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will commit us to maintain this position of disparity without possible detriment to our ultimate security. To do this we will have to dispense with sentimentality and day-dreaming, and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We had better not deceive ourselves that we can afford … the luxury of altruism and world benefaction … The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts. The less we are hampered by idealistic slogans the better.”12 If even this does not convince you, read Who Paid the Piper?, which is about the way the United States manipulated Western intelligentsia during the cold war.13 Its present manipulation of the lockstep is fully in line with that.

Lady M: By actually exposing overpowering evil for what it is, you have broken its spell. The United States dominates your United Nations system. It also dominates your world intellectually, culturally, militarily, economically, scientifically, linguistically, informatically, and medically. However, it may well be that its dominance is to be most regretted in policing the lockstep in your population policies. The whole rotten edifice of US population politics will now crash to the ground with a resounding squelch. Health is politics, and politics is health. Here you have both on a colossal scale. I would remind you, however, that you are exposing a hitherto unimaginable degree of corruption—the abuse of power for personal gain. Those who do this have to be prepared to pay the price. I will follow your cortège, tearfully.

The hardinian taboo and the enforcing of the lockstep has been an oppression. Huge creative oppor-tunity will follow its release. Future historians are going to look on a couple of world wars as mere tribal squab-bles, compared with what happened to your population during the 20th century, and what little you did about it—thanks in large measure to the activities of the US Department of State.