APRIL 20, 1989

...And the fact that the West bore primary responsibility for the late-20th-century condition of its former colonies was virtually ignored...

...America, so recently free to languish in decadence, is undergoing "revitalization" through the awful rigors of the seemingly endless totalitarian Hell...

...They question whether an 18th century form of government could ever have resolved the uniquely 20th century crises of ecological breakdown, rising tides of violence, and ever-growing masses of economically superfluous people...

...India destroyed half of Manhattan, and we took out Bombay, Madras, and New Delhi...

...The weather could have been better...

...Students of ecology had been virtually united-at least since the publication of The Limits to Growth in 1972-on the point that the earth's ecosphere could not tolerate indefinite economic growth...

...Long a people as wealthy and spoiled as the earth had ever seen, Americans began to sense the rising anger and hatred of the so-called Third World in die 1960s, thanks in large part to American activities in the Congo, the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and assorted other "hot spots...

...It was not in our power to feed the world, but we clearly could have helped the world feed itself, even in the hard-core famine lands of the African Sahel, India, and Bangladesh...

...Only later is there a fall in the birth rate...

...Assistance which barely manages to keep people alive and hungry and without hope leaves them in just the state in which there is no incentive for family planning, thereby feeding population growth rather than checking it...

...Hannah arendt, 1964 It has been my singular good fortune to be able to study the contents of the...

...Those who made the coup understood this, and only moved (in 1985) after mass demonstrations for triage-and an end to foreign aid generally-had failed to push the President, a basically decent man, to firm action...

...Army personnel worked the mines and successfully protected some 75 percent of all rail shipments to port...

...Within the United States, of course, blacks in particular had become a serious drag on the economic system in the 1970s, since such a large proportion of them were unemployed and thus dependent upon social services largely paid for by the white majority...

...It seems that a collision between population increase and food supplies had been anticipated by most students of the subject as early as the 1960s, with the loudest chorus of alarm rising in the early 1970s...

...Anyway, my friends and I fed relatively safe from the secret police, hidden as we are deep in the Canadian wilderness...

...Triage would brook no compromise, no modifications...

...The only serious question in dispute was how close we were to the limit...

...But while world population increased by 2 percent per year, and food production increased by 2.5...

...America...

...so can they...

...This was the country whose common man sniffed anarchy in the wind and flocked to films of violence, making an actor named Clint Eastwood, a consistent portrayer of fascist types, the biggest money-maker in Hollywood...

...Of course, there are those who see a certain inevitability in all this...

...Only a million or so have died, due to the Terror and occasional assaults on the urban guerrilla strongholds...

...The embattled ghettos now differ only in size from that of Warsaw in 1940...

...This was a lesson of the 1930s, when the Left failed everywhere in Europe and the iron radical Right prevailed...

...Usually, these were countries that either had valuable resources, such 'as tin in Thailand or oil in Venezuela, or pools of literate but easily exploitable labor attractive to the then-flourishing multinational corporations,'as in South Korea and Taiwan (which enjoyed the additional advantage of being chosen as Asia's "showcases of capitalism...

...The first group was left to die outside the tent, so that the overtaxed system could provide proper treatment for those who could be saved...

...it is difficult if not impossible to seize...

...As the documents make clear, it was no accident that that retreat coincided with economic troubles in the major industrialized powers and with steadily deteriorating conditions in the poorest countries...

...The capitalist system had long relied upon growth of income at all levels as the barrier to serious class conflicts...

...the rest could not withstand the fascist momentum...

...For some reason or other, demographers could not get across to the American people that in poor agrarian countries it pad a peasant to have several children to help work the land and ultimately to support him in his old age...

...A number of food and population experts in the late 1960s and early 1970s had also advocated the idea as a solution to the growing problem of too many people and too little food...

...This last, in 1986, proved somewhat costly to the United States Indian agents assembled an atomic bomb of Hiroshima-size power in New York, secreted it in the subway system, and demanded two million tons of wheat...

...In effect, our food policy-and our foreign aid -had always been an embryonic triage, with some nations receiving much more than others...

...But capital was scarce...

...Fully one-third of the increase in demand was due to the affluent countries' growing consumption of animal protein, especially beef...

...In many countries of the Third World, the birth rates had indeed begun to drop rather sharply by the early 1970s...

...Triage, in turn, would have yielded fascism as the only system capable of handling the resultant domestic and international conflicts and dislocations...

...The impending death of the UN was evident in the mid-Seventies to any who cared to examine the situation...

...The Nazis and the Bolsheviks can be sure that their factories of annihilation which demonstrate the swiftest solution to the problem of overpopulation, of economically superfluous and socially rootless human masses, are as much of an attraction as a warning...

...With the exception of Japan (and perhaps soon of China), that pattern conforms to racial divisions and it is a white man's world...

...Capitalism, it is true, was entering its greatest crisis...

...He only "zapped" 22 unarmed "gooks...

...mass starvation, disease, riots, and general chaos throughout the Indian subcontinent...

...The wounded were placed in three categories: those who would probably die even if treated immediately, those who would probably live even if treatment were delayed, and those who were likely to survive only if given immediate attention...

...The core idea of triage is that the mere existence of certain groups of people constitutes a danger to the rest...

...After all, starvation is not nearly as much fun to watch as jet -fighters, helicopter gunships, robot tanks, lasers, and the like...

...And so the Seventies passed, with world population growth steadily accelerating toward the 100-million-a-year mark that it reached in 1985...

...better then that millions starve in the 1970s and 1980s than billions in the 1990s...

...In any case, the radical Zaire government fell in less than four months and was replaced by one friendly to our cause...

...Troops and police were authorized to search suspicious vehicles, persons, and buildings without warrant or probable cause...

...agricultural policy: By early 1974, the United States-the food and fertilizer center of the world-was not implementing even the semblance of global food policy beyond that of maximum profits for agricutural exports, which increased from approximately $9 billion in 1972 to $22 billion in 1974...

...Child and infant mortality decreased (and with it the perceived necessity for numerous births), and accumulated social wealth relieved parents of the need for support from their children...

...As for ideology, it was held that government should be taken "out of the lives of the people...

...Millions of others who, in one way or another, opposed fascism are now in prisons or concentration camps...

...The industrial democracies quailed before the cartels' price hikes and threats of embargo...

...Of course, committing it to paper is folly, but I hold to the slender hope that the prophet George Orwell was right when he suggested that "There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad...

...was then and still is heavily dependent upon such countries as Brazil, Gabon, Jamaica, Canada, Mexico, the Philippines, South Africa, Spain, Thailand, Chile, and Zaire for our imports of critical minerals including manganese, nickel, platinum, tin, zinc, bauxite, chromium, cobalt, columbium, fluorspar, mercury, titanium, copper, and even iron ore...

...By the mid-1970s it was clear that we were drifting toward fascism, as the country struggled with stalling growth in the forms of unemployment, inflation, and attendant ills...

...Totalitarian solutions may well survive the fall of totalitarian regimes,in the form of strong temptations which will come up whenever it seems impossible to alleviate political, social, or economic misery in a manner worthy of man...

...answer: of course not) that it would do no good for anyone to reduce his beef consumption because "somebody else would eat more and cancel you out...

...All of this assumed a certain logical progression as business and government scraped the bottom of every available barrel to find the capital needed to recover the revered 4 percent growth rate that would sustain the class structure and keep revolutionaries out of business...

...The documents .confirm these recollections...

...The world began dividing itself into trading blocs...

...The John Birch Society, an early precursor, more than doubled its membership in 1974-75 alone...

...Some advocates of triage preferred to call it "lifeboat ethics," which doubtless felt better...

...No triage advocate suggested refusing food to the oil-producing countries, or to other countries that sold us critical raw materials, or to those that were strategically situated...

...Uk garrison state had at last arrived...

...IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING the August, 1985 coup (just before the crop was in) we cut off all food aid to India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and simultaneously canceled their purchases...

...In colonial times, the metropolitan powers had typically abetted colonial population growth-unwittingly, to be sure-by introducing public sanitation and the cheaper forms of modern medicine, partly to protect their own agents, soldiers, missionaries, engineers, and the like from disease, partly for humanitarian reasons...

...It is now perfectly clear that we drifted steadily in the 1970s toward triage...

...The same logic began to overtake China as well...

...In any meaningful sense, American policy in the middle and late 1970s was one of rather steady withdrawal from the problems of the underdeveloped world...

...The Business Establishment held on for dear life, begged the federal government for more help, and pleaded with everyone not to rock the boat...

...It also had the considerable advantage of being the cheapest of all possible solutions: simply to withdraw all food aid from the largest and poorest nations (chief among them India and Bangladesh) and dispense it in other countries more likely to develop their agricultural potential...

...and nearly 7 billion were seriously expected by the year 2000...

...they still give us good coverage of the fighting...

...Politics became polarized almost everywhere...

...bobert alan cook, a former civil-rights lawyer in Washington, and African development specialist, teaches at John Abbott College, Ste...

...A grossly inordinate share of the unemployment burden was thrust upon the blacks, who suffered twice the national average and whose ghettos descended into the long night that still persists, with ghetto unemployment ranging from 40 percent to 60 percent in the middle Seventies...

...Western Europe and Japan, of course, fell into line with us early in the game...

...Somewhat cynically, we pleaded incapacity...

...Of course, barely enough was found to sustain growth (at somewhat less than 4 percent)-and we continued to ignore the underdeveloped countries-since inflation persisted with a vengeance throughout the Seventies and early Eighties, mainly driven, according to many economists, by incessantly growing world demand for food, fuel, and raw materials...

...America was ripe for triage...

...YET, WHILE all this was well understood, scarcely anyone in the West would assent to a simple proposition: that since we had in fact financed our own demographic transition in substantial part with the natural wealth and cheap labor of the Third and Fourth Worlds over a century and a half of colonialism and neocolonialism, perhaps a debt was implied...

...Some til the following descriptions of the recent past are drawn from memory, particularly as to the years succeeding 1976, for Which only the official "histories" are available...

...It went so far as to argue in a 1975 pamphlet, "Is the World Facing Starvation...

...a nation that attempts the one must be capable of the other...

...Their liquidation follows as a matter of course...

...And, of course, what made triage especially appealing to fascists was its implicit racism...

...At home, the economy had continued to bump along at a level little better than stagnation...

...The people were sick of "give-aways" and wanted draconian measures...

...For the present, their plight can be alleviated only by food aid, as required...

...Every barrel, that is, except for the defense budget, which was logical, since our policies ensured that in the end we would need the weapons...

...The total situation varies Considerably from Orwell's scenario, in that we have no great-power enemies capable of sophisticated military technology...

...Thus far, however, the government has not set out to exterminate the race...

...What this formulation purposely ignored was that curtailment of social services would drive more of the poor to crime, in which occupation government got very much into their lives...

...No, the alliance follows the rather logical pattern of rich against poor...

...Rising standards typically yield a coherent pattern...

...The FBI and the Army launched the Terror with their roundup of thousands of dissidents and "subversives...

...Forms of foreign aid that could have helped cut the birth rate included education for women and construction of rural health clinics to reduce infant and child mortality...

...For God's sake, don't anyone start a movement...

...United States food aid in fiscal year 1974 amounted to less than 40 percent of the average volume provided in the late 1960s and early 1970s...

...The average Bengali consumed 1800...

...In the mid-1970s there was much talk of the "commodity power" of small nations, and for a time this appeared to be a serious threat...

...At about the same time, Dr...

...The government, it seems, had long since constructed a small number of concentration camps, pursuant to the 19S0 Emergency Detention Act...

...Nona of these strictures has inhibited our approach to the supply of metals and oil...

...All of this' and more heartened America's enemies to the point of vehement castigation and defiance in the United Nations...

...Nor were the poorest countries able to reduce their birth rates significantly...

...Having once been acquainted with some of the materials, I have no reason to doubt this...

...could not survive the ecological crisis and move to a state of non-growth, because it could not in such a condition satisfy the economic and social demands of its lower classes without substantially reducing the share of the total wealth held by the upper-income groups...

...First, a drought in the Midwest at almost anytime in the late 1970s or early 1980s would have pushed even a democratic government into triage, for grain reserves had never been replenished to the pre-1972 level, largely because of the economic and political pressures to sell...

...For the U.S., that was only the beginning...

...Triage was a system devised in World War I for sorting the wounded when they overwhelmed field medical facilities...

...In 1986 the regime extended triage to the African Sahel nations, and Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Central America...

...infiltration, and internal bickering over tactics...

...A partial effort, such as minimal food aid, alone, is probably counterproductive...

...government did not plan for crises...

...That was America's attitude toward one-tenth of its own population in the fat Sixties...

...In short, massive assistance to agriculture and birth control, both directly and indirectly, was desperately needed...

...Cool acknowledges the ideas and criticism of Dr...

...This was America in the 1970s...

...hopelessly inadequate assistance from the rich nations...

...We are now in the fourth year of the Terror, and with millions already dead, it shows no sign of abating...

...Heilbroner demonstrated that capitalism...

...I doubt that even Richard Nixon could have handled it -at least not on the old ground rules...

...The U.S...

...Thus, to extrapolate from Heilbroner's analysis, a stationary American economy could survive only by taking one of two routes: either a general redistribution of wealth (in other words, all-out socialism) or totalitarian fascist repression...

...An economist and social critic, Robert Heilbroner, put an end to the debate in a dismally accurate forecast, An Inquiry into the Human Prospect, published in 1974...

...But, for a variety of rather ad hoc reasons, the organized "Far Right" failed to carry a majority of the country...

...The U.S...

...But the government appears to be content to practice genocide on the "budget plan," i.e., just enough to maintain world population stability...

...Through starvation, disease, and war we have killed about four hundred million people over the past four years (according to official reports), for an annual average nearly double the total killed in the six years of World War II...

...Emphasis supplied...

...More profoundly, however, her population growth continued to press against agricultural development, maintaining a marginal dependency upon North American grain supplies...

...But apparently no one had counted on the awesome finality with which a totalitarian state that happened to be the world's largest food producer would wield the new "food power...

...The "automated battlefield" (predicted by General Westmoreland in 1974) proved another ace in the hole for American fascism...

...Without reliable documentation on the later years, I can only speculate...

...None of these nations will suffer from famine so long as it is in America's power to prevent it...

...In 1975, James P. Grant, President of the Overseas Development Council, summed up the U.S...

...inefficiency in the agriculture-of the underdeveloped world and widespread governmental corruption...

...But by the time the Vietnam war was over, the anger was more general in the sense that it was expressed as the natural rage of poor against rich, of exploited against exploiters...

...and finally, India's abortive attempt to force a transfer of food via nuclear blackmail...

...A terrorist organization that remained anonymous might plant a bomb -or perhaps several bombs simultaneously in a number of cities...

...Confrontation became the order of the day...

...The Navy set up a blockade of the Indian subcontinent to prevent smuggling of food and to search outgoing vessels for nuclear weapons and parts...

...As last resort, however, we keep our cyanide capsules within easy reach...

...There were no demonstrations in protest against any of these measures after the initial agitations against triage had been met with machine guns...

...by 1985 it was approaching 5 billion...

...How we did in fact come to triage and fascism is almost a matter of indifference today...

...Still, responsible studies showed that despite the fears raised by the minifamines of the early 1970s, the world's available arable land could support a population many times larger than even the year-2000 estimate...

...Total cost to the American taxpayers: $60 million, roughly the price of three jet fighters...

...There was more negotiation and rhetoric...

...With these states, our relationship has become one of barter: their metals and oil for our food and weapons, and often our assistance in keeping down rebel movements and foreign invasions...

...Without protest, they have assisted our efforts toward "stabilization" in Africa and Asia...

...These countries simply did not have the wealth to provide anything like social security or pensions...

...First comes a rapid increase in population growth-as occurred in 19th-century Europe, which was able to dump its excess numbers on...

...And the inevitable wage-price spiral that followed upon this pull drove otherwise sober thinkers to suggest that perhaps economic pluralism had outlived its utility...

...To the contrary, the candid then-Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz told the United Nations' 1974 Food Conference in Rome that food-was "a tool in the kit of American diplomacy...

...speed limit in their 400-botse-power cars, might have behaved with less callous indifference-as might also have the automobile manufacturers...

...Which was probably no surprise to most delegates...

...In conditions of scarce supplies, equipment, and staff, only the third group received immediate care...

...There was an even more drastic cutback in fertilizer shipments from the United States under the aid program...

...There were three possible routes...

...But, for the longer term, the decision must be either to make a truly all-out effort to assist those areas to attain self-sufficiency or to abstain...

...Philip Handler, President of the National Academy of Sciences, added his voice to those of food and population experts everywhere, sounding a clear warning: It seems imperative that the situation in the "Fourth World" be understood as thoroughly as possible by our policy makers, those of the other developed nations, and those who control the accumulating capital of the oil exporting nations...

...time capsule" over these past few months, in time for the 100th anniversary of Hitler's birthday...

...in 1987...

...And, as might have been expected, all appeals to Americans to reduce their standard of living in the interest of global distributive justice aroused nothing but bemused incredulity...

...It is, in fact, the ultimate act of modern technological government, with antecedents firmly rooted in the Third Reich and its technological "Final Solution to the Jewish Question...

...The government-controllel media have spared us mis vicarious agony...

...Computerized human detection systems with automatic fire-control mechanisms kept the mines, railroad, and port facilities under constant surveillance, backed up by helicopter gunships armed with the latest in laser cannon...

...Of course, it had to be tempered by attention to American national interest...

...This country raised itself by its own-bootstraps...

...There remained more serious prospects...

...American, European, and Japanese squandering of vegetable protein on grain-fed beef...

...percent world demand for food was expanding at 3 percent, or 30 million tons of grain, per year--nearly equivalent to the combined grain exports of Canada, Australia, and Argentina...

...Americans, happily ignoring the 55-m.p.h...

...More fundamentally, the earth's nations began to align themselves according to their respective roles in the world economy: the manufacturers of goods, the raw materials suppliers, and the paupers who had nothing to sell (the "Fourth World...

...Finally, there was the possibility-which became the reality-of a coup d'etat...

...American grains, next to weapons our most valuable export and thus a critical factor in the nation's balance of payments, had always been sold first to our friends and allies, second to those others who could afford them, and lastly given to those who needed them most...

...But in countries not so favored by Nature or American largesse, the all-important second half of the demographic transition could not take place...

...As for the American Left, so magnificent in the days of Vietnam, it had ceased, for all serious purposes, to exist after a decade of police brutality, F.B.I...

...It is an iron policy that depends upon consistent application over several years in order to be optimally successful...

...The true power of the Right in times of crisis has always been its appeal to the near-universal preference for order over anarchy...

...As I remember the 1970s, the people at large had no sense of the impending cataclysm...

...The meager offer did manage to evoke the desired response: division of the Third and Fourth Worlds' common front...

...In 1975 the world population stood at 4 billion...

...According to reports that followed (biased, no doubt, but probably correct on the main points), U.S...

...In this process there seemed to be a Critical point such that when the death rate fell below this figure (found by the ecologist Barry Commoner to be about 20 deaths per 1JXX) persons), the birth rate began to drop dramatically...

...I have also drawn some logical, indeed often obvious, deductions from information that was available well before 1976...

...Rumor has it, actually, that they may yet join our proposed "Alliance for a Stable Population" (ASP...

...approximately one-half of that greatly reduced total went to Indochina...

...Even political and business leaders went well out of their way during democracy's last decade to avoid facing the most basic issues...

...Perhaps the world sensed the danger that America would seize upon violence as a substitute for real power, and shrank back from the prospect...

...As in the Vietnam war, "experts" professed to see the ubiquitous "light at the end of the tunnel...

...Less than 48 hours after Zaire's announcement, an American Strike Force based on islands in the Indian Ocean seized the mines...

...The government stationed troops at every nuclear power plant and experimental center in the country...

...At the same time, the Department of Agriculture perceived its function as one of protecting the interests of American farmers and cattlemen...

...Calcutta was considered a disaster in its normal condition and so was permitted to continue to starve...

...Why should it be different for the hungry (and mostly non-white) half of the world's population in the lean Seventies...

...This was precisely the level that American aid reached and never exceeded...

...A greatly expanded F.B.I...

...Meanwhile, the Soviet Union, self-sufficient in resources, highly industrialized, yet locked into a growing dependency upon America for grains and sophisticated technology, gradually assumed a posture of neutrality in the supplier-consumer confrontations...

...As was typical with democracies, the U.S...

...In this situation, the simple power to feed or starve many well become the "ultimate weapon...

...The story the documents tell is simply incredible-that while America was moving so inexorably toward the colossal slaughter to come, the sense of danger scarcely touched any but a handful of intellectuals...

...In these circumstances, democracy could never have survived triage, if only because of television...

...Above all, we were plagued by inflation and unemployment...

...A deal between resource suppliers and the industrialized nations seemed possible, but relations were strained, to say the least...

...Indeed, by the mid-1970s the average American was consuming the equivalent of 10,000 cereal calories per day...

...What confluence of political groupings and forces would support what would have amounted to a substantial transfer of wealth to the beggared nations, with a concomitant reduction of the American standard of living...

...Even worse for the blacks and other "disadvantaged" groups, government at all levels began taking the line that it would have to cut back social services in order to balance budgets, fight inflation, and fend off municipal bankruptcy...

...Pro-bably these scattered wars will never end since our government, a la Orwell's 1984, seems to perceive them as a good part of its raison d'etre...

...Unlike metals, nothing can be substituted for food...

...The price of this evasion, of this exercise of the constitutional right to ignorance, has been the Terror...

...These include intellectuals, politicians (both liberal and conservative), ecologists, black and other minority leaders, lawyers, teachers, union leaders, liberal business people, and several other "dangerous types...

...It must have been this move to near-total triage that brought the return to military conscription, since several of our client states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America suddenly faced the prospect of invasion from the starving countries...

...Note that this calculation took into account neither the needs of the Third and Fourth Worlds nor the staggering $500 billion need of the energy industry to capitalize "Project Independence" (national independence from foreign energy sources by 1985), a figure that represented double the rate of capitalization of the industry over the preceding twenty years...

...APRIL 20,1989 ROBERT ALAN COOK Fascism comes to the United States The danger . . . is that today, with populations and homelessness everywhere on the increase, masses of people are continuously rendered superfluous if we continue to think oi our world in utilitarian terms...

...Now it was America's turn, offering the connoisseur a wide range, from the chrome-plated violence of "A Clockwork Orange" and the Manson "Family" to the penultimate gray steel of Attica Prison and Kent State...

...Despite these measures, we lost some of Los Angeles to terrorists just last year, but things have been quiet since then...

...Which is just as well...

...Such assistance is merely part of the high price of food and raw materials...

...It was not forthcoming...

...Several such groups existed and gained strength rather steadily in the middle and late Seventies, and on into the Eighties...

...He is writing a book on the political implications of the ecological crisis, tentatively titled Hitler Centennial, from which this article is excerpted...

...Let 'em starve...

...More than anything else, underdeveloped agriculture needed capital-intensive inputs, primarily fertilizers and' water supply Systems...

...It should not be difficult, actually, since all blacks, Puerto Ricans, and Chicanos have been barred from military and police service since 1986, doubtless because they would likely prove unreliable in "pacifying" their own people...

...It takes ten pounds of vegetable protein to produce one pound of beef protein...

...When the question was translated into matters political and social, as it was in the energy crisis, it began to appear to many that the world had already overshot its capacity for control...

...Completely modernizing the backward agriculture of what used to be called "developing" countries would have cost hundreds of billions of dollars...

...The most probable candidates of 15 years ago, China and the Soviet Union, have come to depend more upon the rest of the industrialized world than upon the old ideological affiances...

...Obeying the same liberal instincts that had prevailed in the 1960s-namely, to offer a few extra crumbs when it appeared that the poor might turn to theft and extortion-the Ford administration, via its "Super-Secretary" Henry Kissinger, offered the Third and Fourth Worlds a package deal in a UN Special Session in September, 1975...

...In 1975, the New York Stock Exchange, con-sidefing only the-needs of the domestic economy to maintain a "normal" growth rate, projected a capital shortage over the next ten years of $650 billion...

...The hard-pressed middle classes looked to their own defenses against exponentially rising crime, taxes, and prices...

...We had to defend our resource base...

...Triage is a harsh principle, but sensible and appropriate to the battlefield...

...Canada, dependent as ever on American good will and fearful of invasion if she demurred, reluctantly followed suit...

...Many new camps were now hastily built to accommodate die flood of inmates...

...Political, social, and economic events everywhere are in a silent conspiracy with totalitarian instruments devised for making men superfluous...

...This last was fastened upon by Americans to rationalize their unabated taste for beef: "If they don't want to stop having kids, then to hell with 'em...

...and American ornamental usage of fertilizer (as much on our lawns, cemeteries, and golf courses in the mid-1970s-a time of shortage-as India could procure for all her agriculture...

...But America did not seem to see it that way...

...For this, democratic society was inadequately organized...

...But such vast amounts of natural wealth were transferred to Europe, and later to the United States, that conditions favoring birth-rate reduction- literacy and a higher standard of living generally-could never arise in most newly independent nations...

...To defend not their lives but their standard of living, Americans were prepared to kill by the millions...

...Such was the case of Zaire's attempt to embargo exports of cobalt to the U.S...

...Robot tanks with 30-foot chain saws, five abreast, cleared "free-fire" lanes on both sides of the tracks...

...How, in these circumstances, could anyone expect the United States to provide the money, technology, and equipment on the massive scale needed to improve Third and Fourth World agriculture dramatically...

...In retrospect, it is clear that liberal democracy was incapable of imposing the triage solution-and making it stick-for in the end it meant a global race war...

...Truly, with soaring violence, alcoholism, gambling, and public indebtedness, drug addiction, inflation, unemployment suburban sprawl, racial tension, and rotting cities, the American scene could only be described as a state of siege...

...A few pluses were registered, though: fertilizer production was expanded (not nearly enough, of course, thanks in large part to the capital shortage...

...Jon Alexander of Carleton University in the preparation of this essay...

...Our oil bill was too high...

...The race war, of course, rages on intermittently in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, moderated only by the compliance of various regimes with our mineral resource needs...

...Well, that about sums it up...

...Coups and civil wars in such places as India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Angola drained vital energies, left countless dead, and installed iron dictatorships throughout the underdeveloped world, all of them heavily armed...

...Obviously, this was neither necessary nor probable, but immensely expensive...

...As an interim policy, we could have provided significant food aid from our surplus grains...

...Such was the "pure" theory of triage...

...Furthermore, the documents agree on enough specific and voluminous data that a government-authored hoax seems most unlikely...

...Still, rumors persist that the Army and the secret police battalions will soon sweep up all 30 million blacks and feed them to the ovens in a domestic exercise of social triage...

...Harvard population expert Roger Revelle, for example, calculated that if all the world's' arable land were cultivated with the techniques, equipment, irrigation, and fertilizer used on most American farm lands in the early 1970s, the world could support some 30 to 40 billions...

...A few decades earlier, the Nazis had thorougly understood, and capitalized upon, the powerful attraction of violence...

...Perhaps the dead are the more fortunate, for rumors abound of torture and hideous conditions in the prisons and camps...

...That too happened in Europe, Japan,'and America in the mid-20th century...

...A central contradiction between triage and liberal democracy arose from the fact that the latter functioned through a plural system of elites, each responsible to its own power base and prepared to compromise on most issues...

...And the danger of illegal immigrants from hungry lands dealt the final coup de grace to American liberty: a rigorously enforced internal passport system (which the Immigration Service had actually recommended in the early 1970s...

...our indifference rendered it all but inevitable...

...No one suggested that we curtail shipments to Western Europe or Japan (who together had so far outstripped their agricultural potential that they imported some 30 million tons of grain a year in the early 1970s- as opposed to the 11/2 million tons that India could barely afford...

...The only mystery was why the United States did not go under to fascism much earlier than it did...

...Success in such a venture would also have depended upon the availability of petroleum for mechanized equipment, irrigation pumping, fertilizer manufacture, and transport of food to urban areas...

...government spurned this revisitation of Munich and countered with the threat of powerful but unspecified retaliation if the bomb should detonate...

...Organized labor, long ago looked to as America's hope for economic justice, was scrambling to hold its share of a near-stagnant pie...

...For, by the late 1970s, two decades of malignant neglect had brought the food-population problem to the predictable point of intractable crisis, so that triage may well have become the only feasible policy...

...In the early and middle Seventies American power was ebbing quite visibly: debacle in Vietnam, a despicably petty show of force in Cambodia, impotence in the face of the oil cartel, a debilitating struggle between Congress and the Executive over a variety of issues, continuing racial tension and violence, and running throughout a deteriorating economy...

...Still, I think the documents show that as of the middle 1970s there was a chance that we would come to our senses in time...

...Could we as a people have borne watching unending years of mass starvation in our living rooms...

...The case, it appears, was not very different from white America's approach to its own racial question: by all means, let the blacks go to the same movies with whites, eat in the same restaurants, and even attend the same schools-so long as the whites participating in integration were themselves mostly of the lower classes- but no back pay, no "affirmative action," to redress the deeper grievances stemming from three centuries of slavery and oppression...

...Politicians in such systems were rarely able or willing to alert the masses to impending trouble...

...But throughout this period the main causes, of food shortage persisted: forced Third and Fourth World dependancy upon cash crops, such as coffee and sugar, tying down vast tracts of good land (much of it owned by the multinational corporations...

...In the case of Japan, we have had to make our peace with an obvious inconsistency in our racial ideology, but then the Germans had had little trouble with the same problem in the 1940s...

...it simply staggered into them...

...And the best part of it is that most of these were children, who from the technical point of view were the most dangerous members of the target populations, since they might otherwise have reproduced themselves...

...While these ruminations are largely academic to the situation of the present world population, stabilized at 41/2 billion, they at least serve to make the point that the .actual tide of events could have been different if the American people had had the will to make it so...

...The argument was that inevitably many would starve...

...These systems, however, probably could not have prevented longer-distance guerrilla action, such as mortar and rocket fire...

...there was no real progress...

...Political "leaders" were in truth followers of public opinion polls, and had neither time, energy, nor incentive to initiate future-oriented action...

...feudally stratified societies and systems of land tenure, often protected by American money and power...

...Most of what followed could have been foreseen by anyone possessing a modicum of common sense: rancorous sessions in the "United Nations of the Third World" (the truncated successor to the UN, which dissolved in 1978...

...In some cases, we have fed and protected other client states that have no resources, but whose geographic positions render them strategically valuable for protective activity...

...From all this to fascism was not a large step...

...That is to say, who would suggest that we cut back on defense budgets, or on our standard of living, or move to redistribute wealth...

...in effect now a secret police force) undertook surveillance of all persons of Asiatic descent...

...And, as more and more of them were driven to crime, they became a further drag on the social system...

...Triage is genocide...

...Fortunately, few of them are heavily populated, and in any case, all of them are now police states that experience little difficulty in maintaining order in times of shortage...

...It was hardly a secret that most, if not all, of those who would starve under triage were black, brown, and yellow people...

...And so, assistance to the underdeveloped countries (which should have been called "back pay") failed by many orders of magnitude to approach the level necessary to reverse the deadly trend...

...Only the wealthy nations could provide the eapital...

...At the same time, American aid to the poor nations steadily diminished as a percentage of America's gross national product, from one-half of 1 percent in 1965 to two-tenths of 1 percent in 1975...

...Simpler techniques would suffice to ensnare the odd remaining skeptic and keep the torture cells occupied...

...This was the land where there were as many privately owned guns as there were homes, where psychopathic assassins lurked for political leaders, where a Vietnam war criminal named William Calley walked free after 40 months of house arrest...

...Of course, I cannot relate the way in which the documents came into my possession, for fear of endangering others...

...India's short-lived invasion of Burma, turned back by joint U.S.-Chinese intervention...

...I can only surmise that systematic genocide served as an ancillary tactic in neighboring districts...

...This must be the case, for we could surely have liquidated our enemies by now, if only with racial-specific microbiological weapons...

...Revolutionary fervor watted as industrialization increasingly occupied her attentions and as her interests began to coincide with those of other industrial powers...

...Inflation has already driven Britain, Italy, and Japan to fascism ahead of us...

...Population experts knew that nations pass through a "demographic transition" from high to low birth rates in response to improvement in the standard of living...

...Perhaps the traditions of democracy and liberty were stronger than I, for one, had given credence...

...Anne de Bellevue, Quebec, Canada...

...whereas the Left typically sought disorder by striking at society's weakest points...

...Triage, I must report, is working admirably...

...we were spared serious draught...

...Similarly, there was always the danger that a resource supplier might embargo us out of ideological or racial sympathy with nations "triaged out...

...But let this not be taken as historical accident, for the coup could never have succeeded without widespread support...

...Still, throughout the 1970s China remained the champion of the Third and Fourth Worlds...

...Australia and New Zealand likewise opted for triage...

...it is difficult to stockpile (impossible without expensive facilities and then only for rather short duration...

...the "Green Revolution" developed- a few new varieties of high-yield grains...

...The second possibility was that a fascist movement might come to power by democratic means, much as the Nazis had done in 1933, preaching triage as the panacea for America's multitudinous woes...

...Suffice it, then, that the capsule's inscription showed that it was buried in Boston during the 1976 Bicentennial of the First Republic...