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December 21, 2023

The greatest evils in the world will not be carried out by men with guns, but by men in suits sitting behind desks.

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—C.S. Lewis 

From 1933 to 1945, Germany’s Nazis killed 17 million people, six million of them Jews.  Adolf Eichmann organized the transportation of millions of those to die at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and other concentration camps in support of the Nazis’ Final Solution (i.e., elimination of Jews from Europe), and in 1961, he was finally brought to trial in Israel. 

While most assume that Nazi leaders were twisted, psychopathic monsters, philosopher Hannah Arendt sparked controversy in her 1963 study “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil” by writing that Eichmann “was not an amoral monster.”

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Arendt covered the trial and found Eichmann “an ordinary, rather bland, bureaucrat who … was neither perverted nor sadistic, but terrifyingly normal.”  Even ten years after his trial, she wrote, “The deeds were monstrous, but [Eichmann] was quite ordinary …  neither demonic nor monstrous.”

As horrific as the Nazis were, today there is another group who seek a “final solution” even more terrifying: they want to eliminate over 7 billion people from the face of the Earth.  In a 2017 interview, Dennis Meadows, co-author of the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth, said the Earth’s population needs to be “brought back down to one billion.”  The current global population is over 8 billion.  

Their idea isn’t new; it reaches back over 200 years, to Thomas Malthus’s 1798 “Essay on the Principle of Population as It Affects the Future Improvement of Society.”  Malthus concluded that un-managed population growth would inevitably lead to a catastrophic societal collapse and advocated for limiting reproduction of “undesirables.”   

Charles Darwin credited Malthus’s essay with giving him his theory of natural selection, which influenced his cousin Sir Francis Galton’s creation of the term and concept of eugenics (“good birth”), the effort to improve the human species by selectively breeding those with good genes (the basis of the Nazis’ efforts at creating an “Aryan superman”).

The flip side of “good birth” was what to do about those with undesirable genetics — the poor, disabled, and mentally deficient.  Malthus argued against providing relief for the poor, to prevent them from breeding.  The Nazis went Malthus one better, simply eliminating in gas chambers those they deemed “undesirable” (Jews, Gypsies, Slavs, et al.) under their “racial hygiene” policy. 

In 1968, the Club of Rome was founded, proclaiming that to be “sustainable,” the Earth’s human population needed to be no more than one billion people.  To distance themselves from the eugenics associated with the Nazis, they re-framed their idea as “population control.”  Aware that their idea would face resistance, they called for global government to enable them to achieve their aims.