Depopulation: Are the World's Elites Planning to Kill Us?

Nits make Lice (Oliver Cromwell)

Merely mentioning something often leads people to assume that you are in favor of it. But, as you may imagine, those who may be actually planning to exterminate most of humankind won’t write about that on a public blog. So, this post is not about blaming anyone, making predictions, or recommending specific actions. It is a survey with the idea of using past trends to figure out what the future could be, the same approach I used in my Exterminations book. I admit that this post is a little gloomy, but it is also true that the future always surprises us. (Picture: Bridget O’Donnel, a victim of the Irish famine of 1848-1852)

Depopulation: the Discussion

You surely noticed how fashionable it is nowadays to speak about “depopulation” in social media (at least of a certain kind). The idea that’s proposed is that there exist powers who are actively plotting to exterminate a large fraction of humankind using devilish means such as chemtrails, poisoning, genetic weapons, or something like that. These evil entities may be, for instance, Bill Gates, the WEF, the Gnomes of Zurich, or “The Elites” in general.

It is not a novelty; the discussion goes back to when “overpopulation” started being noted and discussed, with the rapid growth of the world’s population after the end of WWII. In the image below, from Google “Ngrams,” you see the peak of interest in the 1960s. Note how it went together with the interest in “population control,” at the time described as obtainable by birth control.

As it often happens in complex systems (and the human social sphere is one), the emergence of a new concept (a “meme,” if you like) generates a counter-reaction (a “counter-meme”). In this case, those who were worried about overpopulation were accused of not just proposing to reduce birth rates, but also to be planning large-scale exterminations.

The case of the Club of Rome is emblematic. You would think there is a certain distance between presenting the hypothetical scenarios of “The Limits to Growth” report (1972) and being an evil secret group planning the elimination of the world’s “darker races.” (Lyndon Larouche wrote that in 1983). But that’s what the Club was accused of, and this accusation still lingers on the Web. Remarkably, if the Club started planning the extermination of humankind more than 50 years ago, maybe it is time for them to switch to Plan B.

In our times, the concept of “depopulation” has been growing together with the idea that our global elites are evil. Again, Google Ngrams can help us to see the trend.

Of course, the fact that the interest in an idea is growing doesn’t mean the idea has anything to do with reality (try searching “chemtrails” on Google Ngrams). Yet, it is also true that human history is full of exterminations and genocides.

So, is it possible that someone could be planning a large-scale elimination of what they consider an excess human population? Of course, if it were true, you wouldn’t read about that in blogs or social media; those who plan don’t speak, and those who speak do not plan. Yet, we can examine historical cases to see if we can detect some ongoing trends.

The Case of Ireland

As I describe in my book, most past exterminations were large-scale robberies carried out to steal land or assets from people who couldn’t offer significant resistance. “Depopulation” is a different thing, akin to “culling” or “pest control” (or “pruning” in agriculture). It is not carried out to gain something but to prevent a loss.

The ancients didn’t have an overpopulation problem, and the only example of depopulation I could find in ancient times was the campaign waged by the Romans against the Germanic tribes during the time of Emperor Tiberius from AD 14 to 16. Tacitus tells us in his “Annales” that the Roman soldiers were ordered to spare no one, including the elderly, the women, and the children. The Romans had no plan to occupy the land they cleared of its inhabitants; they just saw the expedition as revenge against the massacre of their legions at the battle of Teutoburg in 9 AD. But it was an exceptional case; the Romans rarely engaged in large-scale exterminations.

To find a clear example of depopulation, we must move forward in time to the conquest of Ireland by an English army led by Oliver Cromwell in 1649–1653. The conquest was accompanied by the massacre of a large number of Irish civilians, including women and children. The exterminators justified their actions with the saying, “Nits make lice,” attributed to Cromwell himself.

It was a considerable population culling, but the Irish were not completely exterminated; about 80% of them survived. The English didn’t replace the Irish because the poor peasants in England had no interest in becoming even poorer peasants in Ireland; they had much better emigration prospects in the New World. So, the English preferred to keep the surviving Irish peasants as a low-cost workforce while they moved in to rule Ireland as landlords.

After Cromwell’s culling, Ireland’s population restarted growing, and that was a problem for the English. The Irish tried several times to rebel; they were always unsuccessful, but a large Irish population could make the problem serious. We don’t know if someone in Britain was thinking about a new Cromwell to restart a “nits make lice” policy in Ireland using swords and muskets, but there was no need for that.

The next culling of the Irish population came because the Irish were forced by their English overlords into a situation of extreme poverty: all the profits of Ireland’s exports went to the landlords, nothing went to the peasants. They survived almost exclusively on potatoes, the only kind of food they could afford. But relying on a monoculture is dangerous, and in 1848, a fungal infection destroyed the potato crops in Ireland, an event repeated for a few consecutive years. It was “The Great Famine” or the “An Gorta Mor” in Gaelic. The result was a population collapse caused by the combined effects of starvation, epidemics, and emigration. You can see the data in the figure below (note the “Seneca Shape” of the curve). In comparison, Oliver Cromwell was Mr. Nice Guy.

Was the disaster engineered by the evil British? Obviously, we can’t imagine that the British scientists of the time could create a fungal infection specifically designed to starve the Irish. It was a natural pathogen that struck potato crops all over Europe. But the European governments mostly reacted by providing relief for their citizens. The British, instead, did nothing, apart from some half-hearted attempts at the beginning.

That doesn’t mean that the British Government consciously chose to exterminate the Irish by letting them starve. It was, mostly, a case of not looking at what one doesn’t want to see. In Britain, the Irish were considered a degraded race incapable of self-management. We can read in the press of the time, for instance in “The Times,” that the Irish had called the famine upon themselves by their own actions and that measures to fight it would not be appreciated by the Irish and lead to financial ruin for Britain. The famine, The Times said, was an occasion for Ireland to "pay for its own improvement" in the sense of making efforts to improve their own social, economic, and agricultural conditions. No doubt that the Irish paid dearly because of the famine, but not in the sense that “The Times” implied. Today, the Irish population is still below the levels of before the Great Famine.

Recent Depopulations

Moving onward in history, we saw plenty of exterminations during the 20th century, but none resembled the Irish depopulation. However, the world came close to that in two cases, both related to WWII: the Ostplan that the Germans prepared for Ukraine and Russia, and the Morgenthau plan that the Americans prepared for Germany.

The Germans understood that they didn’t have a sufficiently large population to replace the Slavs in the lands they expected to conquer in Russia and Ukraine, so the idea was that they would kill or deport most of the inhabitants but let a certain number of them survive as peasants and servants. The Germans, the “Herrenvolk” (the master race), would move in as rulers. It was the same thing the British had done in Ireland at the time of Cromwell. It was implicit in the plan that the German overlords would have controlled the Slavic population, using depopulation techniques when necessary.

The Morgenthau Plan developed in the US for Germany was similar, although working in a different way. After defeating Germany, the Americans didn’t plan to exterminate the surviving Germans, but they wanted to make sure that Germany would never become a military threat again. So, the idea was to destroy the German industrial infrastructure and turn the Germans into peasants at a technological level similar to that of the Middle Ages. However, low-tech agriculture couldn’t have fed the German population at the time, and the results would have necessarily been the same as those of the Great Famine in Ireland.

Fortunately, neither the Ostplan nor the Morgenthau plan were put into practice, even though during the first years of Allied occupation, a large but unknown number of Germans died of starvation. After the end of World War II, the nuclear balance put a stop to the active confrontation between the major powers, and, up to now, we haven’t seen a new major depopulation crisis comparable to the Irish one. Still, what happened once can always happen again.

Depopulation Scenarios

Let’s now try a little scenario-building exercise based on history and the wise rule used in engineering: " Always plan for the worst-case hypothesis.”

A possible future depopulation scenario involves a global “Irish-like” crisis. Let’s imagine a major collapse of agricultural production due to a combination of climate change, lack of artificial fertilizers, soil erosion, and wars that stop global food delivery. Our global elites could decide to behave exactly like the British elites did in the 19th century: they would do nothing and prepare to rule the survivors as benevolent (?) overlords. If the parallel with the Irish famine holds, the world could see its population halve in a few decades. Calling this a “drastic culling” is comparable to calling nuclear warheads “large 1st of July fireworks.”

It is not impossible, but I would see it as more probable that local famines could cause depopulation in limited areas of the world. Again, the world elites could decide that they have no intention of acting to relieve the famines of populations they consider inferior or dangerous. It may be worth reminding how, a few years ago, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo threatened Iran with starvation if they wouldn’t comply with US requests.

Iran is at risk because of its large population (nearly 90 million people) and its need to rely on imports for a substantial portion of its food needs. But Western Europe could be in an even more dangerous situation. It has several points in common with Germany at the time of the Morgenthau Plan in the 1940s. Today, Western Europe is not self-sufficient in terms of food production nor in terms of mineral resources. It is engaged in a war it is losing, and its industrial system is being dismantled. As the British press said about the Irish famine, it would be a good occasion for Europe to "pay for its own improvement." But it would be a tremendously high cost to pay.

But could it be that the Elites are more proactive and are actively plotting to depopulate the world without waiting for the third horseman (famine) to do the job for them? It would be fun to spend time debunking the many fantasies and legends about mass extermination weapons created by mad scientists. Let me just mention that the famed SARS-CoV-2 virus was often said to be a genetic weapon. But, if that was the case, it wasn’t more effective than the Polish cavalry against German tanks in 1939. (I know it is a myth, but it is a good metaphor)

In practice, we have no evidence that the world’s elites are actively planning nefarious actions against humankind. They are basically risk-averse; they may ride an ongoing disaster, but they won’t risk creating one from scratch: it would be extremely dangerous for the planners if they are discovered. There are plenty of ongoing or probable future disasters, enough for the evilest elites to be satisfied.

Now, for a different kind of scenario, why are we so worried about violent depopulation when there is one already ongoing, just not involving direct violence? It is the fertility decline that’s ongoing everywhere in the world. Look at these data (from a recent paper by Aitken):

The fall in fertility rate shows the typical shape of a “Seneca Cliff.” The most likely culprit is pollution degrading the human reproductive system, although social and cultural factors are at play as well. Whatever the reasons for the decline, as things stand, the concept of “overpopulation” may soon become as obsolete as the steam engine. But that won’t happen tomorrow; we may need decades to see an evident population crash. That would leave plenty of space in the near future for new wars, famines, and exterminations — which is exactly what we are seeing nowadays. Maybe the development of precision fermentation will avoid large-scale famines, but we can’t say if it will be the miracle that some say it is.

The future is always full of possibilities, and the only sure thing about it is that it will surprise us — as it usually does.