Where Are the Fantastical 'Mother-Goddess, Eco-topic, Unicornlands'? When Regime-Change Operations Succeed, Kill, and Depopulate Nations

The first round of U.S.-British airstrikes on Baghdad on March 3, 2003, marking the beginning of the 2003 U.S. war on Iraq.

How soon will we start hearing the likes of Extinction Rebellion, and other neo-Malthusianists, echoing the infamous words of former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright who said that the 500,000 Iraqi children killed by U.S. sanctions was "worth it"? It's only a matter of time that they will, and we should not put it past them to do so. Just a few months leading up to the U.S.-backed right-wing coup in Bolivia, they were already making calls to oust Evo Morales and were, amongst all things, blaming him for the Amazon forest fires (even though he was actively helping to put them out) and using them as a pretext for imperialist intervention. According to modern-day, vacuous, and 'woke' eco-Malthusianists, independent sovereign nations (i.e. Cuba, Syria, the DPRK, and Nicaragua), who dare to defy the global dictatorship of the United States, need to have all their economic development and progressive gains to be gutted and that they need to be bombed back into primitive backwardness. They will tell you it was all for their vision of some fantastical eco-topic 'matriarchal' commune; a new and 'green' hippy veneer for the infiltration of U.S. capital interests, if anything. 

When the 78-day illegal NATO air-bombing of Yugoslavia took place in 1999 -- with Serbia suffering the most catastrophic damage because it was at the centre of the demonization campaigns -- no such figment of an anarcho-primitivist's wet dream came to fruition in the aftermath of the destruction; the Serbian people can tell us that much. We can go through the laundry list of long-term effects of the dismantling of Yugoslavia as Serbia received its Neoliberal "shock therapy", but the impact of material economic conditions on the lives of people do not matter to eco-doomsday Malthusianists who are anti-development and who worship poverty as if it were a virtue (despite many of them being First World middle or upper class, college-educated 'social justice warriors'). This essentially echoes the infamous if not borderline sadomasochistic words of Mother Teresa: "There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ's passion. The world gains much from their suffering," And indeed the imperialists gained much from the Serbs' suffering -- which was by no means "beautiful" -- as unemployment skyrocketed, wages were gutted, and forced emigration causing a "brain drain" in addition to depopulating the country. But of course, drastic depopulation is a cause for celebration (albeit a macabre celebration) for neo-Malthusianists, who could not care less about the increased mortality rates and falling birth rates that stemmed from the collapsed and privatized healthcare system; or the fact that the effects of 1999 events are still felt to this day, in terms of health, because of the highly poisonous, radioactive uranium projectiles used in the bombings. 

The 1990's were not too kind to Iraq either, because the infamous 'Highway of Death' and the crippling sanctions helped to pave way for the 2003 U.S. invasion. Just before that, Saddam made the mistake of giving up Iraq's most devastating weapons which were supposed to be the country's deterrents. Of course, he only did it out of desperation because of the sanctions, as well as an attempt to appease the United States in the hopes that it would not attack Iraq -- but to no avail. And much like Serbia, Iraq continues to feel the hazardous impacts of depleted uranium, with children being the hardest hit as many are born with severe deformities. As an article from the American Herald Tribune reports, 

"In the years following 2003, the U.S. military dotted Iraq with over 500 military bases, many of them close to Iraqi cities. These cities suffered the impacts of bombs, bullets, chemical and other weapons, but also the environmental damage of open burn pits on U.S. bases, abandoned tanks and trucks, and the storage of weapons on U.S. bases, including depleted uranium weapons."

Of course, neo-Malthusianists will probably ask, "Why are those Iraqis being so stupid and selfish by choosing to have children anyway? Why can't they just do the world a favour and sterilize themselves instead of breeding like rabbits? Don't they know how bad it is for the environment?" Such remarks completely ignore the fact that the U.S. military is the #1 polluter and the most environmentally destructive force in the world and that they created the health and environmental crises in Iraq and Serbia. Not to mention, such remarks fail to take into consideration that perhaps Iraqis want to preserve their population as much as possible -- as well as to have a future generation that will be there to help the elderly as the population ages -- because they know that wars do take a toll and they know that such drastic reductions in their populations will only increase the nation's vulnerability. These remarks are also tantamount to saying that Iraqi children being born into Third World-level poverty are the cause of the environmental damage and the economic crisis, as opposed to the U.S. presence in the country. Nevermind the increase in infant mortality rates, which make the supposed need to drastically depopulate a moot point. And clearly, depopulation has done nothing to change Iraq and Serbia into anything that resembles the 'mother-goddess, eco-topic, unicornland' vision of anarcho-primitivists' wet dreams, for no amount of drastically reducing the population will rid the two countries of the depleted uranium. 

Now, keep in mind, the wars on Yugoslavia and Iraq were justified in the name of "human rights" or the "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P). 'Green imperialism' was not yet a pretext during those events. But with the increasing and disturbing presence of Extinction Rebellion in mainstream media, as well as the resurgence in the poisonous ideology of neo-Malthusianism, "green" imperialism may very well soon be incorporated into the R2P doctrine. As the fictitious "Bosnian genocide" and "Weapons of Mass Destruction"-narratives have been used against Yugoslavia and Iraq respectively, very soon accusations of "overpopulation" will be used as pretexts for waging wars against the Global South, but especially against nations that refuse the global dictatorship of the United States.

Every time we repeat the lies that "humans are a cancerous tumor eating up the world's resources" and that "we need to drastically reduce the human population", we allow the capitalist-imperialists to continue to divide and conquer the world.