Imagine if President Bush had appointed as a high adviser, a man who had once advocated eugenic forced abortion and the sterilization of people in developing countries. Congress would have held angry hearings! The press would have been at his house every morning demanding answers! The front page headlines in the New York Times would have been so vivid they would have broken the presses. But that–and more–is precisely what Obama science adviser John Holdren advocated–and the sound of crickets from the uninterested MSM echoes across the land.
But my colleague Michael Egnor at the Discovery Institute has noticed and written an eloquent open letter to President Obama that demands greater publicity. From the letter:
In 1977 Dr. Holdren and his colleagues Paul and Anne Ehrlich published the book Ecoscience. In it, Holdren and his co-authors endorse the serious consideration of radical measures to reduce the human population, particularly third world populations, such as India, China and Africa. The measures include:
• People who “contribute to social deterioration” (i.e. undesirables) “can be required by law to exercise reproductive responsibility”…
• Women — particularly women of insufficient means due to poverty, nationality, marital status, or youth — could be forced to abort their children and undergo sterilization.
• Implementation of a system of “involuntary birth control”…
• Undesirable populations could be sterilized by infertility drugs intentionally put into drinking water or in food.
• Single mothers and teen mothers who managed to have their children despite measures to prevent fertility should have their babies seized from them and given away to others to raise.
• A transnational “Planetary Regime” and a transnational police force should be assembled to enforce population control.
Although Dr. Holdren recently has asserted that he does not support coercive measures to reduce population, he has continued to champion population control ‘science’ and he includes his book “Ecoscience” prominently on his CV, without disclaimer. In other words, Dr. Holdren dissembles. He insists, despite the record, that he no longer believes what he ‘didn’t believe’ then. Evidently you accept his denial…No one who holds that view, or has held that view, or who has publicly endorsed serious consideration of that view, should be in a position of influence in our government.
There is a deep and disturbing irony in your appointment of Dr. Holdren as Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. The irony, sir, is this: Dr. Holdren endorsed the serious consideration of radical measures — including involuntary sterilization and abortion — to cull mankind. And he was not an equal-opportunity culler. He betrayed a particular animus to children conceived of third world parentage to young mothers of limited means. He asserted that they were a burden that we dare not bear — for the sake of humanity and for the sake of the Earth. He implored us to ensure that these children were never given life.
He meant you.
I am so sick of the double standards in this society. What Holdren advocated was evil. No Republican would dare appoint such a man to high office regardless of his current beliefs. We deserve to know precisely, and in detail, what Holdren thinks today. After all, he has the ear of the most powerful man in the world.
July 31st, 2009 | 5:31 pm
This is something of an education for me. The fact that this hasn’t yet scandalized the nation and forced Holdren to resign says something about the gulf between my perspective and that of a good percentage of the population — many of whom must surely be my dear friends. It is as though one were to discover that his best friend were a member of the KKK and that the friend saw nothing wrong with it.
July 31st, 2009 | 8:11 pm
The reason it doesn’t shock more people is because that kind of totalitarian population control fascism was de rigeur in the 1970′s. Ehrlich & Co. were considered intellectually respectable. Like eugenics in the 1930′s, the “save the planet” population control frenzy in the 1970′s wasn’t something anybody was ashamed of. It was considered hot and progressive. And President Obama is, as we already knew, under the influence of exactly that sort of 70′s radical–like his “weather underground” buddy. Holdren is just another example.
Being a 60-70′s left-wing wacko means never having to say you’re sorry.
July 31st, 2009 | 9:39 pm
I see. Child of the 80′s I am. I admit it’s a little hard to take in the wonderful diversity of thought out there. But who am I to judge potentially genocidal practices. To each his own, I suppose.
August 1st, 2009 | 5:28 am
That is profoundly disgusting. That will be on my website for sure.
August 1st, 2009 | 10:34 am
The wrong thinking of the 50′s became grounds for national repentance–sometimes even overblown and exaggerated national repentance. And its evil became part of our national mythos (e.g., the evil of racism). The horrible thinking of the 60′s and 70′s just got toned down and prettied up for a while until it could come out again in its true colors.
August 1st, 2009 | 11:51 am
>>The wrong thinking of the 50’s became grounds for national repentance>>
Wrong thinking of the 50′s???
Could you clarify?
August 1st, 2009 | 1:07 pm
I reckon she has in mind the assumptions about the appropriateness of racial segregation, which many in that era took as a matter of course. Possibly, she has in mind some of the attitudes about the role of women in society, as well.
August 1st, 2009 | 5:12 pm
Yes, I meant Jim Crow and all that. Not women. I’m a square on that. But of course all the feminist stuff about the evils of the 50′s is also now part of our national mythos. I suppose part of what I was (gently) getting at (gently so as not to provoke a thread-jacking outcry from liberal readers) is that the 50′s problems weren’t _nearly_ as bad as the horrors outlined in Holdren and the Ehrlichs’ book. Yet nonetheless, the horrifying totalitarianism advocated by Ehrlich & Co. has largely dropped down the memory hole and is certainly nothing anyone is being asked to go back and disavow, while America is apparently never supposed to be done beating its collective breast for racism, etc.
August 1st, 2009 | 10:53 pm
Linkback from missmarprelate.blogspot.com
Exposing once again the extreme right-wing bias of the mainstream media. Remind me why neo-Nazi types are, by definition, considered right wing extremists again?
August 2nd, 2009 | 8:38 am
Tell me Wesley, did you ever have a harebrained idea forty years ago? And would you like to be totally identified by it now, as if you never had another thought in the intervening years? There’s a joke about this kind of thing, but since it’s obscene I’m not going to be able to tell you the story of Pierre …..
August 2nd, 2009 | 8:41 am
“Remind me why neo-Nazi types are, by definition, considered right wing extremists again?” Seriously? You need to be reminded? Did you think Hitler was a liberal?
August 2nd, 2009 | 11:17 am
You can tell when you look at them. Look at his picture. You can tell. Frankly I’m not against eugenics when it comes to this crew. They are the undesireables, and they know it, and they want to keep their place in the cafeteria line knowing full well that they don’t deserve it.
The way to stop him having the ear of the most powerful man in the world is to get Obama out of office. Everyone keeps talking as if it’s a given that he’s going to complete this term. He has GOT to be impeached. I don’t allow anyone who has told me that they voted for him into my house. Only yesterday I was thinking of putting a little sign to that effect by the doorbell. I may put a message to that effect on the lawn or on a banner on the house. Isn’t anyone else doing likewise? There were plenty of similar steps taken re Bush, who did value life, by the same crew. Time to turn the tables on them before it’s too late now.
August 2nd, 2009 | 1:03 pm
Hmm. National Socialist German Workers’ Party…That really has a conservative ring to it, no?
August 2nd, 2009 | 2:36 pm
Seriously? You need to be reminded? Did you think Hitler was a liberal?
HistoryWriter, I think wonder if you aren’t being a little disingenuous, here. Surely you are aware of the current argument among American conservatives (especially) that Hitler was, in a very real sense, a man of the Left — not a liberal by any stretch, but of the Left, in that Socialism was always treated as an essential part of National Socialism. You may not find those arguments persuasive. I do. But I find it hard to believe that you would choose the pseudonym “HistoryWriter” (and also frequent good neo-con blogs like First Things) without having come across this challenge.
August 3rd, 2009 | 6:59 am
The fundamental problem begins in that we have accepted the lies that all men are not equal… including the unborn.
We have accepted the lies that the women’s liberation movement was right. We need to back up a little and praise women for being mothers. We need to see that population control and “reproductive health” have always been pointed at eugenics. (Consider looking at Life Dynamics new DVD Maafa 21).
Ironically Obama bought himself some “racial” press with the Gates incident. Race was not the issue… he made it so…. Is there not some sort of problem with resisting the police? Where will the children learn to respect authority? Who will be the authority?
August 3rd, 2009 | 9:29 am
Ianthe: What, exactly, would you have President Obama impeached FOR? What are his offenses that rise to the level of “high crimes and misdemeanors”? Come on, you’re an attorney. Where’s the beef? Or are you just another frustrated loser of his/her 2008 election bets?
About hanging a banner across the front of one’s house, that’s certainly anybody’s right. Heck, I’d have done the same thing if Sarah Palin had been elected VP, and probably with far greater justification.
August 3rd, 2009 | 6:49 pm
HistoryWriter, describing the views in question as “hare-brained ideas” is a little weak, don’t you think? Forced sterilizations and abortions, slipping things into the drinking water, state-managed kidnappings? And Wesley didn’t assume, as you imply, that this guy is to be “identified” with what he thought forty-odd years ago. He said, quite sensibly, that we need to know what he thinks now, given that he endorsed and advocated such atrocious positions in the past. Granted, he probably doesn’t, even in private, think all the same things he thought then. You can give him the benefit of the doubt: he got caught up in the Ehrlich-type hysteria. But why did he get caught up in it? Why wasn’t he repulsed by it? And why has he changed his mind? For pragmatic reasons, or because he realized something fundamentally wrong with those views?
August 3rd, 2009 | 8:44 pm
Please read H.R. 3200, page 430, lines 11-15. This is the part that says the govt will decide what level of care you receive at end of life.
Now read all the rest of page 430, that is, lines 11 thru 24. Now read carefully lines 23-24, in the context of being covered under lines 11-15.
What does it mean ????
It means at end of life, or when you are otherwise not cost-effective as a patient, the government can/will let you die in a coma in your hospital bed, by withholding nutrition and hydration.
Just like happened to Ms. Schiavo. Scary.
August 4th, 2009 | 9:59 am
HW: I said I went to law school, not that I’m an attorney. Obama’s agenda is a high crime and misdemeanor. His being obviously out of his depth and the unprecedented number of his executive orders, his destructive disheartening words which constitute the opposite of leadership, and the number of people who are outraged over his behavior and of those who feel now that they were duped, the existence of the flourishing tea party movement — these are all evidence that the country was defrauded in his election and that is high crime and misdemeanor enough. Besides, it may not even be impeachment that is in order; his lack of standing in terms of his not fulfilling the requirements of both parents being citizens is enough to have him simply removed from office; the vice president would then take over pro tem and a new election be conducted, this time with the electorate’s eyes open wider than they were in 2008. We’ve got a crisis, all right. And he’s it. Of course you’d be entitled to put up a banner if Palin had been elected. But why say “probably” with greater justification? Aren’t you sure?
Mark: A version of that already happened to my mother, right here in western New York State. And they said she was in a coma, but she wasn’t, nor did they ever tell me that she was. She died aware that she was being murdered.
August 19th, 2009 | 10:53 am
Ianthe, I agree with you somewhat in principle, but I’m not sure they were defrauded. I think it was more like being so infatuated that you can’t see a person’s faults. It was apparent to me all along — although I underestimated the potential damage — and my answer to the buyer’s remorse is, “Honestly, what were you expecting?” If you sign a contract without reading it aren’t you still liable for its terms?
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