See Sanjay Gandhi's forced sterilization campaign at the behest of the World Bank and IMF. Tell me that reproduction is not a freedom. Tell me that Indira and Sanjay Gandhi weren't socialists.
There was also forced sterilization in the United States. Does that make the United States a socialist country? No, of course not.
The argument form "Bob did X, and Bob is an A, therefore all As do X" is nonsense.
edit:
There was also forced sterilization in the United States. Does that make the United States a socialist country? No, of course not.
The argument form "Bob did X, and Bob is an A, therefore anyone who does X is an A" is nonsense. The argument form "Bob did X, and Bob is an A, therefore all As do X" is similarly nonsense.
It's also a very weird argument to make when you say it was done "at behest of the World Bank and IMF.", considering those are certainly not socialist organizations.
Communism, socialism, fascism, and progressivism are 20th century political systems based around technocratic managerialism — and all of them have attempted to control breeding in the population. That’s because technocratic managerialism is prone to such decisions.
Progressives in the US were behind both Great Society programs and forced sterilization — so it’s more or less accurate to say the US equivalent of socialists did also sterilize people.
> That’s because technocratic managerialism is prone to such decisions.
That's a nifty insight. Engineers want to engineer. If you place an engineer in charge of social policy they will likely try to engineer social and cultural changes.
Howard Taft was a a progressive/socialist? Interesting idea..
Eugenics were universally popular back in those days. Willson (hardly a progressive either) was a strong supporter of eugenics. Just like Theodore Roosevelt.
> more or less accurate
It would be more or less just as accurate to say that conservatives were the US equivalents of socialists following this silly logic..
Just like it's reasonable for America to worry about the group that conducted forced sterilization (Jim Crow racists) and worry about the slide back to them attaining power, it makes sense to do the same for socialists.
Ideologies that further concentrate power in the hands of a central state - in India's case, things like Hindutva nationalism and socialism - are risky, particularly in developing nations where liberty is less firmly-established, and should be given a stern eye when they appear.
And, just like "southern democrat" is a "bad word" in America for obvious reasons and doesn't imply "democrat from the south", "socialist" is a bit taboo in India.
Snobs come in all colors and parties. Jim Crow racists there were plenty, but the eugenics ideas and projects of the 1920s in the North were horrible in their own right.
> There was also forced sterilization in the United States.
Yes, in the 20s in New York State. It was quite rare by comparison to what happened in India. The point was not to say "this is what socialists do" but to say point out that they did it at the behest of capitalists, which is quite the incongruity -- an incongruity which you noticed yet you failed to make the connection that it made the Gandhis phonies. That should make you wonder how genuine they were as socialists.
specifically, The Population Bomb was the big book during the era, which was written by a Stanford professor. India's forced sterilization campaign was at the behest of the World Bank, and championed by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, all of which were strongly influenced by the book. Fun fact: the author, Mr. Erlich, is still alive (at the age of 92!) and has maintained his correctness, instead saying he was "too optimistic" when his forecasted mass starvation failed to materialize.
Malthusian predictions have two parts, one of which is proven time and time again, and the other which has yet to be proven but on the basis of which horrible things are justified:
1. population growth leads to food
production improvements which
enables more population growth,
2. catastrophic failure must result
eventually when we really run
into the planet's human carrying
capacity.
Malthusians like Paul Erlich are the boy who cried wolf. They are always wrong when they cry "wolf!", but who knows, maybe someday they might be right ("someday we will be right" is their message).
So far we've only seen the inverse of Malthusian catastrophes: population collapse.
We've seen population collapse twice in recorded history, perhaps more:
- the Roman empire
- now, almost everywhere
Malthusians like mr. Erlich might argue that the reason we're reaching population peaks (followed by collapse) is precisely due to their efforts. Perhaps. But population collapse is not all that fun either. Yet even today we have a great deal of political pressure from some quarters to do things that will speed up the collapse rather than slow it.
It’s not though. That was only the case since the 1800s. Malthus was more or less correct about the preceding periods.
> collapse twice in recorded history, perhaps more
Not perhaps. Certainly more. If you want a clear cut and well documented example look at Europe between ~1000 and the 1300s.
Massive population expansion leading to overpopulation, very high food costs and mass starvation. The Black Death interrupted that cycle and limited population growth for the next 400 years or so (which resulted in significant increase in per capita productivity across Europe).
