Population migrations play greater roles in the fate of nations than do wars. Wars capture history’s headlines, but population migrations change them.
I keep running into odd places where this plays out. I suppose because wars involve shooting and sudden death they are much more sensational, death being immediate. There will always be war movies even if trying to promote peace as in All Quiet On The Western Front, however, you won’t see movies about the slow march of population and demographics changing countries. The one hearkens back to dreams of athleticism like Achilles and Hector. The other involves the almost glacial pace of babies being born, growing up, having babies of their own, and then the process repeating.
Interestingly, I was reading through Wikipedia’s entry on Rudyard Kipling when I ran across this:
Kipling argued that even before 1914, Germany’s larger economy and higher birth rate had made that country stronger than France; with much of France devastated by war and the French suffering heavy losses meant that its low birth rate would give it trouble, while Germany was mostly undamaged and still with a higher birth rate. So he reasoned that the future would bring German domination if Versailles were revised in Germany’s favour, and it was madness for Britain to press France to do so.
In this case, perhaps one could argue that it wasn’t the larger population of Germany that precipitated the war, but that did give Germany an advantage. However, in the wake of World War I, Germany struggled to feed itself. This fear of starvation may have helped to lead on a path to war. Before he was President, Herbert Hoover organized food relief programs for Germany and Russia which both had terrible times feeding their populations. Starvation has a way of focusing one's mind.
In a seemingly unrelated bit, I was watching an interview with Colonel Fletcher Prouty titled "The Real ’Mr. X.’: Colonel Fletcher Prouty Interview by EIR." Prouty was the model for Donald Sutherland’s character Mr. X in Oliver Stone’s movie JFK. Around minute 27 of the interview, Prouty alleges that in 1954 Eisenhower had strictly forbidden the military from sending in troops to Vietnam in the wake of the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu. As a workaround, the CIA and military sent just five men to South Vietnam. These five through propaganda and terrorism were able to convince about 1,100,000 North Vietnamese to relocate to South Vietnam. These refugees didn’t just wander across the border from North Vietnam. They were dumped off the docks in Saigon and wound up settling south of the city. These new refugees were angry. They had little in the way of drinking water and food. (Prouty is a controversial figure, and Communists have way of making themselves unpopular without American aid, but Operation Passage to Freedom, in which the U.S. Navy transported 310k refugees south from North Vietnam is a definite historical fact, and the French are said to have moved another half a million.)
Later, when the Vietnamese War kicked off, it was most often fought in these rice paddies south of Saigon rather than up along the border with North Vietnam. The problem clearly being caused by the great influx of population south of the city.
Our elites seem to understand this. It hearkens back to a Malthusian view of the world. If the population keeps growing, then it’s only a matter of time before the food cannot keep up with the population. Hence, the focus on getting rid of cows, having us eat crickets, and finding new ways of growing more food. Bill Gates is buying up farmland and posting weird videos online about genetically modified corn.
Gates should instead be watching Roy Beck’s gumball videos on how immigration will not really help the world’s population.
We should probably be promoting birth control in the Third World more than anything else.
In a similar vein, the elite hypocrites of Martha’s Vineyard may instinctively understand this. They want the new populations flooding into the First World to disrupt Red states, not their sacred enclaves. They also are smart enough to go on offense with lawfare by suing on behalf of illegal aliens. They sure don’t want the public to see their hypocrisy, so, they try to head it off at the start. Frame the argument.
