Kill the Poor

In capitalist ideology poverty is thought of as an ethnic trait rather than social or economic. For instance, the disgusting term “welfare queens” is always associated with African-American single mothers. And what about Katrina? Remember how people were accusing the power elites for using Katrina as a cover to get rid of the poor? Perhaps they were on to something there.

The desire to eliminate poverty is one of the fundamental fantasies of capitalism. This desire, however, inevitably becomes the desire to get rid of the poor. Naturally, this desire is also disingenuous because the poor cannot be eliminated or gotten rid of. This, of course, can never be admitted. To do so would be to give up the fantasy of creating an utopia of a capitalism beyond capitalism where today’s underclass ‘exceptions’ – the homeless, the ghettoized, the permanently underemployed – doesn’t exist. So the poor are airbrushed out of the picture or carefully tucked away in sweatshops, hidden from the law and public. Well, at least they used to be.

This photo is from the August 2008 issue of Indian Vogue. The man, toothless and barefooted, is holding a Burberry umbrella worth $200 (it’s just an umbrella for fuck’s sake!). Other photos in the series are of similar nature. They are shamelessly made to display how unbelievably exploited they are. There’s an added bonus, too. Nameless and poor means way cheaper than hiring Kate Moss. Also, ever notice how big fashion magazines lavishly use backdrops from ‘exotic’ third world countries? Nearly always a typically white model is seen wearing ridiculously expensive clothing while the poor ‘natives’ are strategically posed in the best angle possible to capture a gorgeous picture that will be viewed by an audience who also tucks away their Mexican or Filipino maids in abusive households. It’s all there, the blatant exploitation, for all to see. There is no shame. None whatsoever. Not particularly useful to capitalism, you see. And the fact that these photos do not conform to the usual practice of airbrushing is precisely why they are shocking. The message is clear: these people are genetically destined to fail, so might as well squeeze whatever we can get out of them. Or in the case of Africa and Iraq, kill them off. Literally kill.

In 1968, environmentalist Dr. Paul Ehrlich published The Population Bomb, which sold about 20 million copies and greatly influenced policy makers. According to him immediate radical action was required to deal with the problem of global overpopulation.

Our position requires that we take immediate action at home and promote effective action worldwide. We must have population control at home, hopefully through a system of incentives and penalties, but by compulsion if voluntary methods fail. We can no longer afford merely to treat the symptoms of the cancer of population growth; the cancer itself must be cut out.

He goes on to say that compulsory birth control could be imposed by governments by means of “temporary sterilants to water supplies or staple food”.

Any moral human being would be horrified by these methods of depopulation advocated by Ehrlich. But not the US government.

In December 1974, the US National Security Council completed a classified 200 page study called “National Security Study Memorandum 200: Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests (NSSM)”. This study explained that the US needed to control populations in third world countries in order to maintain access to certain resources:

The location of known reserves of higher-grade ores of most minerals favors increasing dependence of all industrialized regions on imports from less-developed countries. The US economy will require large and increasing amounts of minerals from abroad, especially from less-developed countries. That fact gives the US enhanced interest in the political, economic, and social stability of the supplying countries. Wherever a lessening of population pressures through reduced birth rates can increase the prospects for such stability, population policy becomes relevant to resource supplies and to the economic interests of the United States.

In 1988 the Pentagon released a report entitled “Global Demographic Trends to the Year 2010: Implications for US Security” which stressed that “population planning be given the status of weapons development”.

Another report reprinted in the 1991 edition of Foreign Affairs as “Population Change and National Security,” warned that current population trends could create an “international environment even more menacing to the security prospects of the Western alliance than was the Cold War for the past generation”.

Faced with global population growth posing as a national security threat, the US government decided that the only viable solution was forced depopulation- in other words, genocide.

So AIDS was introduced to Africa. The cure, they were told, was sex with a virgin. Thousands of women, infants and little girls are raped as a result of deliberate misinformation. And throughout Africa, in war zones, nursing mothers had their breasts cut off and pregnant women had their abdomen cut open, the fetuses yanked out and kicked like footballs before slaughtering them. The idea was that without women and children, a certain race will cease to be. This is still common practice today in places like Darfur.

Similarly, the genocide unfolding before our eyes in Iraq has been carefully engineered for years. Between 1991 and 1998, half a million Iraqi children under the age of five died as a result of the sanctions. If the years between 1999-2003 are included in, the number would likely be closer to 1 million. Also, since the 2003 invasion, the US hasn’t done much to rebuild Iraq’s civilian infrastructure. In July 2004, the White House released a report stating that the US government has spent only 2% of an $18.4 billion aid package that Congress approved in October 2003! Even then nothing from the package has been spent on health care, sanitation, human rights, education, construction and water projects. And lets not forget the the effects of DU munitions, which has a half-life of 4.5 billion years. Essentially the US has eliminated Iraqis from the healthy human gene pool. Gives a whole different meaning to genetically destined to fail, doesn’t it?

-F