The Best Way To Kill A People

…is to stop them from having children.

“But it is still possible for the human breeding strategy to cause population losses, as well as population gains. This will happen when a community is reduced to such despair that the average opinion of the ideal size of family puts it close to zero. Or, if hope yet allows some couples to start families, then the conditions of the people are so desperate that they cannot succeed. A single generation of desperation can remove a whole community for good.

It is to this possibility of near total failure of the breeding effort, not to massacres of adults, that we must look for the decline for of populations in history. Elimination of adults by disease is possible, and no one doubts the killing power of the Black Death in medieval Europe or of small pox for American Indians. But elimination of populations by war or massacre is much less easily believed. The German death camps and Einsatzkommandos of the Second World War showed how extremely difficult it is to kill off whole populations[actually it showed how hard it was for the Jews to kill us off in this manner]. Even with modern technology, Hitler’s Germans found that processing to death was hard work, and work for which even the most brutal were apt to lose their taste. The elimination of conquered populations with no better instruments than swords or spears is close to incredible. But people would just as effectively eliminated from the pages of history if they failed to breed. The only death that waste the population then are the result of old age.

Slavery is a more plausible cause of population loss than deliberate killing, because people in the harsher kinds of slavery may fail to rear replacement families. Slaves might not care to raise children at all, or the chances of the child dying before being old enough to breed may be very high. So a conquered people can be removed by enslaving them tightly for twenty years.

Even more starkly, a conquered people may be removed if they are forced out of their traditional lands. A conquering army can force people to walk away as refugees far more easily than it can rid itself of the nuisance of their presence by killing them. The vanquished are ‘driven out,’ which gives an impression that people are forced to move ‘over there,’ not a nice place, perhaps, but still somewhere. Yet an ecologist must ask in what circumstances an “over there” can actually exist. Another country, yes, indeed. But if the people who are driven out are to live in the other country they must find it empty when they get there. In the real world, it will not be empty but full of people living at whatever density that other country can support. The newcomers, perhaps after fighting, might be able to eke out a subsistence ‘over there,’ but finding resources to raise the traditional number of children is quite another matter.”

from “The Fates of Nations: A Biological Theory Of History” by Paul Colinvaux