Explaining Neo-Malthusianism?
Mohan Rao Introduction Politically correct, influential people in policy making circles in the First World do not, any more, talk of the yellow peril, or use phrases such as population explosion, or metaphors like the population bomb. Nevertheless, neo-Malthusian thinking frames other policy discourses, those on welfare, immigration and the environment being prominent ones. Soon after the London riots last year, commentators were talking of the undeserving poor, whose council housing should be razed if their children had participated in the riots. The children themselves were referred to as vermin, who needed to be dealt with firmly, with real bullets. At the same time, partly due to the very reach and influence of such doomsday demographic discourses emanating from the West in the past, and the modified ones today, the elites and the middle classes in much of the Third World remain convinced that the cause of social and economic problems in their countries stem primarily, if not only, from population growth. It is also clear that there is an anxiety among elites in our country about population growth, the belief that this lies at heart of a range of social and economic problems that we face. This belief enjoys widespread appeal in the media and among middle class professionals, including of course doctors. What explains the enormous appeal of this argument? Is it propaganda over the last 50 years, initially stemming from the West, but now deeply internalized in our country?[i] Many of these beliefs are sanitised in public pronouncements, made acceptable, and yet it is undeniable they represent powerful undercurrents of thinking in an astonishingly wide range of areas. This paper, preliminary and tentative in nature, attempts to explain what seems to be inexplicable. Do these ideas stem from other atavistic anxieties, about tribe and race? This too was evident after the London riots when commentators spoke of a Caribbean culture of violence and laziness taking over the streets of London. Do they arise from their evident simplicity in explaining a deeply fractured world? Why are they such overwhelming tropes in the discourse of fundamentalisms of various sorts? Does neo-liberalism provide them with impetus? Why are they entangled with other anti-feminist discourses? How do issues of identity, currently au courant, get imbricated in this? I begin, then, with the almost irrelevant, if achingly tantalizing, question: what explains this abiding and widespread belief in neo-Malthusianism? This question, though terribly moot, is difficult to answer with any certainty, since it involves feelings, opinions and prejudices that are not always easily explicable. How does one, for example, explain racism? Or, in India, the profound hold of casteism, the hatred and distaste for the lower castes, especially dalits? Or, the recent growth of suspicion, anxiety, and indeed, hatred and fear, for anything to do with Islam? There are many and complex reasons, some inter-linked. Is it primarily about with economic factors? It is obviously not only to do with economic factors, although these are no doubt contributory. There are many more reasons, and population arguments also feed into this: the creation and hardening of prejudices, and of fear. In neo-imperial times, creation of fear is a growth industry (Lipschutz and Turcotte 2005)[ii] with sometimes utterly transparent political ends. II I begin this paper attempting to explain the neo Malthusian appeal by examining the astonishing case of Anders Behring Breveik. On the 22nd of July 2011, following the setting off of bombs in central Oslo, this young white man cold bloodedly killed 69 young men and women attending a youth camp organized by the ruling Labour Party at the island of Utoya, not far from Oslo. He wanted to draw attention to the dystopia that awaited Norway because of the appeasement of Muslims by what he called, with utterly no irony, “multi-cultural Marxists”. When the bombs went off in Oslo, the New York Times reported, and everyone assumed, that this was the handiwork of Muslim terrorists. When the terrorist was identified as a White supremacist, the explanations quickly proffered were the familiar: while not all Muslims were terrorists, most terrorists were Muslim. But of course this is equally untrue. In 2007, two out of a total of 581 terrorist attacks in Europe were carried out by Muslims; in 2008, not one of the 441 documented terrorist attacks was by a Muslim. In 2009, there were 294 terrorist attacks, out of which one was committed by a Muslim. The vast majority of terrorist attacks (237 out of 297) were perpetrated by White, non-Muslim separatist groups mainly in Spain and France ( Europol 2010).[iii] What is interesting is that Breveik, a Right wing Christian fundamentalist, has left a 1500 page manifesto entitled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, an event he was attempting to usher in by his barbaric act. The year 2083 that he chose is also symbolically interesting: it represents the 400th anniversary of the Battle of Vienna in 1683 where the invading troops of the Ottoman empire suffered a defeat, ensuring that most parts of Europe did not come under Islamic rule. It is equally interesting that a Polish king took part in that holy battle. Today of course Poland, ruled by extreme Right wing twins, is seen as the heart of pro-family values, a Catholic nation besieged in a Europe that is awash with feminists, pro-abortion and gay- rights people, together emasculating Christianity as much as the Christian male. Poland, it is believed, is the last bastion of pro-family values that will rescue Europe from demographic doom that awaits it if women refuse to breed. The 2008 World Congress of Families was held in Warsaw, where the film Demographic Winter was screened (Posner 2011).[iv] The film, echoing Mark Steyn’s bestselling book America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It, predicts the death of European civilizations and the extinctions of her races “too self absorbed to breed” as they are engulfed by tides of Muslim immigrants, leading to the transformation of Europe into Eurabia. This will, it is