The worldwide socialist project killed something like 100 million people over the course of the 20th century. But not all of its victims are dead.
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The socialist strongmen of the 20th century differed in important ways from their progressive admirers in the United States and the rest of the free world, but they had some fundamental things in common: “Central planning” was never an idea that was limited to economic life, and the planned in “Planned Parenthood” is very much the planned from “planned economy,” meaning that the “planning” involved was to be at the social scale rather than merely at the family scale.
Eugenics and population control were obsessions of central planners from Moscow to Washington to Beijing, and, to some extent, they still are. Deng Xiaoping gave China its “one-child policy,” which Chinese leaders are today desperately trying to reverse as a declining birth rate pulls the country toward economic and military decline. Russian ideologues linked eugenics to the creation of the “New Soviet Man.” The geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, one of the founders of modern evolutionary science, was also a committed Marxist who argued in the pages of the Daily Worker that “the dogma of human equality is no part of Communism,” and insisted that dealing with “innate human inequality” would be the real “test of the devotion of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics to science.”
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It is a superstition of democracy that to change the law is to change the world.
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At its most influential, eugenics shone with the prestige of science and commanded the loyalty of the cream of the Western intellectual world, from Sir Francis Galton to H. G. Wells to George Bernard Shaw. Malthusian cranks and fanatics such as Paul R. Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, remain fashionable in progressive intellectual circles today, and “overpopulation” remains a hot topic even as much of the world prepares to grapple with the challenges of population decline.
Forward!