weird how quick fascists went from “the world is overpopulated. close your legs. stop having kids.” to “pop out 3 babies right now. you have no choice. you have to. it’s your duty and your only purpose.” when they realized they might not have enough vulnerable individuals to exploit in the labor force if the birth rate continues declining
spoiler alert: these two ideals still exist and pervade fascist spaces. and they coexist. what they mean by “the world is overpopulated” they mean there’s too many brown people. what they mean by “pop out more kids” is that they want more white people.
it’s important to view things outside of a white lense.
and outside of the just-world fallacious lens of “there must be a non-malicious rationale that I can understand”. People want there to be a reason, they seek meaning and understanding, so they look at something that does just really intend harm and go “no one would be that evil, there must be a way I can understand this and give it consistency”. And the reason really can be that there’s a quiet part not getting said out loud and it is exactly as awful as what they’re assuming it can’t be.
Fascists were never in favor of birthrates going down overall.
Fascists were ALWAYS in favor of denying birth control to everyone, coercing everyone into marriage and children, increasing the population forever–
and then using the most vulnerable of that population (as decided by their racism) as sweatshop labor and customers for the cheap products of that labor–
while blaming them for having too many kids and not being able to afford better.
“Overpopulation is a problem” has sometimes been pretty reasonably used to mean,
1. The only way a population of this size can be sustainable is if the rich fascists stop using that population in this particular way
2. And that’s a good goal, but it’s less within our reach than the goal of making birth control widely available
3. which will improve people’s lives individually, and also probably reduce the population to a level that can no longer be used in this destructive capitalist way– because people who get to choose how many kids to have tend to choose a reasonably small number, on average.
Fascists, of course, eagerly grabbed onto the “overpopulation is a problem” rhetoric to talk about the groups they don’t like… while still– in general– promoting population growth across all groups, with their stances on birth control and abortion.
I say “in general” because of course it’s not that simple – they do often really try to reduce populations they’re racist against, through forced sterilization and so on.
They aren’t always consistent, or in agreement with each other. And they generally do not care about keeping large families of kids alive and healthy after birth, if they aren’t rich white families– they generally expect that a percentage of those kids will die, they will do nothing to stop it, and they’ll of course blame the parents.
But the presence of large, vulnerable populations who can be manipulated into labor, and forced to buy the products of that labor, absolutely benefits the fascist and corporate agenda. And the widely available, totally voluntary use of birth control– the likeliest way a population could be reduced– absolutely threatens that system.
…Which is why I sometimes feel as if framing overpopulation as a fascist talking point is at least partly an attempt to turn everyone else against each other, to the benefit of the fascists.