Ghosts at the Olympics

As fabulous as the Olympics were--the opening and closing spectaculars especially--I couldn't help but feel the death. The death of millions and millions of Chinese citizens by government slaughter, starvation, relocation and reeducation and untold millions more through abortion and infanticide (family planning). In the 20th century, no government was responsible for more deaths than Communist China and its Mao led hysteria. But in this country we fell for a lot of the same nonsense and misinformation. Remember Paul Ehrlich?

In 1967, Stanford entomologist Paul Ehrlich began a magazine article by writing that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over.” He predicted that “in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now” to feed them. His article eventually became a book called The Population Explosion, one of the most influential books of the last 40 years.

None of Ehrlich’s dire predictions came true. People did die, but they died as a result of population-control efforts that were spurred by Ehrlich’s imaginary “population explosion.”

In the face of such a so-called “threat,” human dignity gave way. If people did not “voluntarily” limit family size, then coercion and deception stepped in. In India, for example, millions of men and women were sterilized against their will.

This story is told in a new book, Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits, by Steven Mosher. Read review at Chuck Colson’s column.

And so millions more will die as we rush head long into our anthropogenic global warming hysteria to add to the millions killed with the DDT ban brought on by Rachel Carson's book.