Forum.RttP{Kill the Weak}

Pentti Linkola - ideas for after the fall of industrial civilization

Nature Cannot Sustain Democracy

.. A fundamental, devastating error is political system based on desire.
Society and life are been organized on basis of what an individual wants,
not on what is good for her.
... Just as only one out of 100,000 has the talent to be a finemechanic or an acrobat,
just the same way only a few are those truly capable of managing the matters of a nation or the mankind.
... In this time and this part of the World we are headlessly hanging on democracy
and parliamentary system. Even though these are the most mindless and desperate
experiments of the mankind.
.. In democratic coutries destruction of nature and sum of ecological disasters has accumulated most.
.. Our only hope lies in strong central government and uncompromizing control of the individual citizen.

From an article "Vuotta 2017 ei tule" ( year 2017 will never come) by Pentti Linkola in weekly 'Suomen Kuvalehti', Issue 19/1999 .

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If the present number of Earths population is preserved and is reduced only by the means of birth controll, then:
- Birthgiving is licenced. To enhance quality of population , genetically or socially unfit homes will be denied offspring. So that several birth licences can be allowed to families of quality.
- Energy production must be drastically reduced. Electricity is allowed only for the most necessary lighting and communications.
- Food: Hunting is made more efficient. Human diet will include rats and invertebrate animals.
Agriculture moves to small un-mechanized units. All human manure is used as fertilizer.
- Traffic is mostly done with bicycles and rowing boats. Private cars are confiscated. Long-distance travel is done with sparse mass transport. Trees will be planted on most roads.
- Foreign affairs: All mass immigration and most of import-export trade must stop. Cross-border travel is allowed only for small numbers of diplomats and correspondents.
- Business will mostly end . Manufacture is allowed only for well argumented needs. All major manufacturing capacity is state owned. Products will be durable and last for generations.
- Science and schooling: Education will concentrate on practical skills. All competition is rooted out. Technological research is reduced to extreme minimum. But every child will learn how to clean a fish in a way that only the big shiny bones are left over.

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Any dictatorship would be better than modern democracy. There cannot be so incompetent dictator, that he would show more stupidity than a majority of the people. Best dictatorship would be one where lots of heads would roll and government would prevent any economical growth.

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"Man can be defined in any arbitrary number of ways, but to convey his most fundamental characteristic, he could be described with two words: too much," writes the eco-pragmatist. As one who believes another world war would be a "happy occasion for the planet," Linkola likens the current global situation to a sinking ship with only one remaining lifeboat. "Those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot." while "those who love and respect life will take the ship's ax and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides of the boat," he declares.

To chop the metaphorical hands from the gunwales, this outspoken opponent of Amnesty International and the Vatican advises an end to third-world aid, the introduction of mandatory abortions, and the creation of a totalitarian state with strict environmental laws enforced by a ruthless "green police." Farming and fishing will supplant modern capitalism, a strategy which Linkola believes will effectively neutralize that which Edward Abbey called the "Earth destroying juggernaut of Industrial civilization." Philosophically, his perceptions perhaps most closely resemble those of "Unabomber" Ted Kaczinski. Both consider technology a pernicious evil and urge an atavistic return to our pre-industrial agrarian past. "Every example throughout the history of humanity shows that only deprivation and struggle create a human life worthy of the name and that material welfare leads only to despair," Linkola explains.

Despite the harshness of his rhetoric and his strident attacks against consumer culture, the notorious eco-fascist remains a continued source of national pride in his beloved Finland. As one of the nation's most esteemed authors, he enjoys a large literary following and has been awarded the coveted Eino Leino prize for excellence in non-fiction writing. Ironically, his first publishedbook displayed an uncharacteristically optimistic outlook. Swept up in the ecological consciousness that sprang from the fervent utopianism of the 1960s, the young Linkola gained positive critical attention after penning a humanistic volume entitled Dreams of a Better World. Unfortunately, when his cherished hopes failed to materialize, the distraught activist reassessed man's relationship with nature and came out in favor of the latter, if necessary, to the exclusion of the former. This newfound radicalism was exhibited in 1979, when the "deep" ecologist dedicated an anthology of his writings to Andreas Baader and Ulride Meinhof of Germany's bomb-throwing Baader-Meinhof gang.

Today, there is no turning back as the cantankerous thinker envisions forming a small band of merciless eco-terrorists to dramatically reduce the population. "By sacrificing perhaps billions [we] might possibly save a million," he remarks.

Whether one considers Linkola's unique philosophy to be the ravings of a madman or the prescient words of a bold visionary, this strident defender of his beloved planet is by far one of the more extraordinary figures within the environmental milieu. And, as the earth continues to erode with each passing day, this modern prophet of doom will continue to wage his one-man battle against the teeming masses of humanity. This means you.

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What is it that Linkola thinks that scares so many people? A good place to start is his most frequently quoted analogy for the world's overpopulation problem:

"What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and only one lifeboat? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship's axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides of the boat."

For those who are ready to take up the axes, Linkola has some suggestions-an end to Third World Aid and an end to asylum for refugees. In his new approach for a better society he suggests "Green Police", unencumbered by the "syrup of ethics" that governs human behavior today to keep things in line. He thinks "Everything we have developed over the last 100 years should be destroyed." Under the "Green Police" only "a few million" people would work as farmers and fishermen, without modern conveniences such as the automobile. A man of action, not just words, since the 1960s he has lived as a fisherman, using wood-fires for heating and travelling by bicycle or sleigh. It is only recently that he has gotten a phone and electricity and takes his fish into town for sale on the local school bus.

Taking what seems to be an idea from China, abortion would be mandatory for women who attempt to have more than two children in Linkola's new world. Linkola himself has only two children, born in the 1960s before he realized the enormity of the world overpopulation problem. And finally, Linkola thinks another World War would be "a happy occasion for the planet" and help take care of the plague of humanity-"Homo destructivus"-that is currently 2.5 times greater than the earth can support.

Linkola, who dedicated one of his books to the German Red Terrorist Baader-Meinhof gang, considers himself a sworn enemy of the pope and Amnesty International, and is not very fond of the USA. He thinks "The US symbolizes the worst ideologies in the world: growth and freedom." He also counts the present environmentalist movement as contemptuous by thinking "tenderness, love and dandelion garlands" will save the world. In his newest book he expresses his deep disappointment: "To the green movement, in which human infantilism is seen at its worst, [and] authority is a far more serious evil than the destruction of life."

It was these environmentalists that labeled him an Eco-Fascist. He disdains democracy, conventional humanism and the principle of non-violence. He hasn't killed anybody yet to help solve the overpopulation problem as random violence would just land him in jail and not solve the problem, but he says "If there were a button I could press, I would sacrifice myself without hesitating if it meant millions of people would die."

It is thoughts like Pentti Linkola's that we must concentrate and act on. Like he says: "We still have a chance to be cruel, but if we are not cruel today, all is lost".

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In the essay collection Unelmat paremmasta maailmasta ("The Dreams about a Better World") (1971) he spoke for the first time out his ecological attitudes. He has continued to speak against the modern western way of life and the overuse of natural resources, and his latest books Johdatus 1990-luvun ajatteluun ("The Introduction to the Philosophy of the 1990s") (1989) and Voisiko el?m? voittaa ("Could Life Prevail") (2004) are collections of his writings that have been published in various Finnish newspapers and magazines.

As a philosopher Linkola can be described as a biocentric empirist. He demands that man return to a smaller ecological niche and abandon modern technology and the pursuit of economic progress. Linkola considers population growth the biggest threat to life on Earth. He advocates eugenics and genocide as a means to combat overpopulation.

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Pentti Linkola is one of the few ecoradicalists who have broken past moralizing objectives.

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Humanflood

By Pentti Linkola
[Translated by Harri Heinonen and Michael Moynihan]
Introduction by Michael Moynihan.

Is Pentti Linkola posing the most dangerous thoughts mankind has ever considered? Or is he this planet's only remaining voice of sanity? Living an ascetic existence as a fisherman in a remote rural region of his frigid homeland, the Finnish philosopher has pondered mankind's position vis-á-vis the earth it inhabits and dares to utter the unspeakable. In order for the planet to continue living, man - or homo destructivus, as Linkola names him - must be violently thinned to a mere fraction of his current global population. Linkola's metaphor for the predicament is as follows:
What to do, when a ship carrying a hundred passengers suddenly capsizes and only one lifeboat, with room for only ten people, has been launched? When the lifeboat is full, those who hate life will try to load it with more people and sink the lot. Those who love and respect life will take the ship's axe and sever the extra hands that cling to the sides of the boat.

As time creaks onward, Linkola's predictions and indictments grow more dire. He has come to realise that extreme situations demand extreme solutions:
"We still have a chance to be cruel. But if we are not cruel today, all is lost." The sworn enemy of Christians and Humanists both, Linkola knows that the fate of the earth will never be rescued by those who exalt "tenderness, love and dandelion garlands." Neither the developed nor under-developed populations of the planet deserve to survive at the expense of the biosphere as a whole. Linkola has urged that millions will starve to death or be promptly slaughtered in genocidal civil wars. Mandatory abortions should be carried out for any female who has more than two offspring. The only countries capable of initiating such draconian measures are those of the West, yet ironically they are the ones most hamstrung by debilitating notions of liberal humanism. As Linkola explains, "The United States symbolises the worst ideologies in the world: growth and freedom." The realistic solution will be found in the implementation of an eco-fascist regime where brutal battalions of "green police," having freed their consciences from the "syrup ethics," are capable of doing whatever is necessary.
In Finland, Linkola's books are best-sellers. The rest of the world clearly cannot stomach his brand of medicine, as was evidenced when the Wall Street Journal ran an article on Linkola in 1995. A stack of indignant hate-mail ensued from ostensibly turn-the-other-cheek Christians, loving mothers, and assorted do-gooders. One reader squawked, 'Sincere advocates of depopulation should set an example for all of us and begin the depopulating with themselves." Linkola's reply is far more logical: "If there were a button I could press, I would sacrifice myself without hesitating if it meant millions of people would die."
What follows is the major text of Linkola's to be translated into English. It is a chapter from his 1989 book johdatus 1990-luvun ajatteluun [Introduction to the Thought of the 1990s].
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What is man? "Oh, what art thou man?" the poets of the good old days used to wonder. Man may be defined in an arbitrary number of ways, but to convey his most fundamental characteristic, he could be described with two words: too much. I'm too much, you're too much. There's five billion of us - an absurd, astonishing number, and still increasing… The earth's biosphere could possibly support a population of five million large mammals of this size, given their food requirements and the offal they produce, in order that they might exist in their own ecological niche, living as one species among many, without discriminating against the richness of other forms of life.

What meaning is there in these masses, what use do they have? What essential new contribution is brought forth to the world by hundreds of human societies similar to one other, or by the hundreds of identical communities existing within these societies? What sense is there in the fact that every small Finnish town has the same choice of workshops and stores, a similar men's choir and a similar municipal theatre, all clogging up the earth's surface with their foundations and asphalt slabs? Would it be any loss to the biosphere - or to humanity itself - if the area of Äänekoski no longer existed, and instead in its place was an unregulated and diverse mosaic of natural landscape, containing thousands of species and tilting slopes of gnarled, primitive trees mirrored in the shimmering surface of Kuhmojärvi lake? Or would it really be a loss if a small bundle of towns disappeared from the map - Ylivieska, Kuusamo, lahti, Duisburg, Jefremov, Gloucester - and wilderness replaced them? How about Belgium?

What use do we have with Ylivieska? The question is not ingenious, but it's relevant. And the only answer isn't that, perhaps, there is no use for these places - but rather that the people in Ylivieska town have a reason: they live there. I'm not just talking about the suffocation of life due to the population explosion, or that life and the earth's respiratory rhythm cry out for the productive, metabolic green oases they sorely need everywhere, between the areas razed by man. I also mean that humanity, by squirting and birthing all these teeming, filth-producing multitudes from out of itself, in the process also suffocates and defames its own culture - one in which individuals and communities have to spasmodically search for the "meaning of life" and create an identity for themselves through petty childish arguing.

I spent a summer once touring Poland by bicycle. It is a lovely country, one where small Catholic children, cute as buttons, almost entirely dressed in silk, turn up around every corner. I read from a travel brochure that in Poland the percentage of people who perished in the Second World War is larger than in any other country - about six million, if my memory doesn't fail me. From another part of the brochure I calculated that since the end of the war, population growth has compensated for the loss threefold in forty years… On my next trip after that, I went through the most bombed-out city in the world, Dresden. It was terrifying in its ugliness and filth, overstuffed to the point of suffocation - a smoke-filled, polluting nest where the first spontaneous impression was that another vaccination from the sky wouldn't do any harm. Who misses all those who died in the Second World War? Who misses the twenty million executed by Stalin? Who misses Hitler's six million Jews? Israel creaks with overcrowdedness; in Asia minor, overpopulation creates struggles for mere square meters of dirt. The cities throughout the world were rebuilt and filled to the brim with people long ago, their churches and monuments restored so that acid rain would have something to eat through. Who misses the unused procreation potential of those killed in the Second World War? Is the world lacking another hundred million people at the moment? Is there a shortage of books, songs, movies, porcelain dogs, vases? Are one billion embodiments of motherly love and one billion sweet silver-haired grandmothers not enough?

All species have an oversized capacity for reproduction, otherwise they would become extinct in times of crisis due to variations of circumstances. In the end it's always hunger that enforces a limit on the size of a population. A great many species have self-regulating birth control mechanisms which prevent them from constantly falling into crisis situations and suffering from hunger. In the case of man, however, such mechanisms - when found at all - are only weak and ineffective: for example, the small-scale infanticide practiced in primitive cultures. Throughout its evolutionary development, humankind has defied and outdistanced the hunger line. Man has been a conspicuously extravagant breeder, and decidedly animal-like. Mankind produces especially large litters both in cramped, distressed conditions, as well as among very prosperous segments of the population. Humans reproduce abundantly in the times of peace and particularly abundantly in the aftermath of a war, owing to a peculiar decree of nature.

It may be said that man's defensive methods are powerless against hunger controlling his population growth, but his offensive methods for pushing the hunger line out of the way of the swelling population are enormously eminent. Man is extremely expansive - fundamentally so, as a species.
In the history of mankind we witness Nature's desperate struggle against an error of her own evolution. An old and previously efficacious method of curtailment, hunger, began to increasingly lose its effectiveness as man's engineering abilities progressed. Man had wrenched himself loose from his niche and started to grab more and more resources, displacing other forms of life. Then Nature took stock of the situation, found out that she had lost the first round, and changed strategy. She brandished a weapon she hadn't been able to employ when the enemy had been scattered in numbers, but one which was all the more effective now against the densely proliferating enemy troops. With the aid of microbes - or "infectious diseases" as man calls them, in the parlance of his war propaganda - Nature fought stubbornly for two thousand years against mankind and achieved many brilliant victories. But these triumphs remained localised, and more and more ineluctably took on the flavour of rear-guard actions. Nature wasn't capable of destroying the echelon of humanity in which scientists and researchers toiled away, and in the meantime they managed to disarm Nature of her arsenal.
At this point, Nature - no longer possessed of the weapons for attaining victory, yet utterly embittered and still retaining her sense of self-esteem - decided to concede a Pyrrhic victory to man, but only in the most absolute sense of the term. During the entire war, Nature had maintained her peculiar connection to the enemy: they had both shared the same supply sources, they drank from the same springs and ate from the same fields. Regardless of the course of the war, a permanent position of constraint prevailed at this point; for just as much as the enemy had not succeeded in conquering the supply targets for himself, Nature likewise did not possess the capability to take these same targets out of the clutches of humanity. The only option left was the scorched earth policy, which Nature had already tested on a small scale during the microbe-phase of the war, and which she decided to carry through to the bitter end. Nature did not submit to defeat - she called it a draw, but at the price of self-immolation. Man wasn't, after all, an external, autonomous enemy, but rather her very own tumour. And the fate of a tumour ordains that it must always die along with its host.

In the case of man - who sits atop the food chain, yet nevertheless ominously lacks the ability to sufficiently restrain his own population growth - it might appear that salvation would lie in the propensity for killing his fellow man. The characteristically human institution of war, with its wholesale massacre of fellow humanoids, would seem to contain a basis for desirable population control - that is, if it hadn't been portentously thwarted, since there is no human culture where young females take part in war. Thus, even a large decrease in population as a result of war affects only males, and lasts only a very short time in a given generation. The very next generation is up to strength, and by the natural law of the "baby boom" even becomes oversized, as the females are fertilised through the resilience of just a very small number of males. In reality, the evolution of war, while erratic, has actually been even more negative: in the early stages of its development there were more wars of a type that swept away a moderate amount of civilians as well. But by a twist of man's tragicomic fate, at the very point when the institution of war appeared capable of taking out truly significant shares of fertile females - as was intimated by the bombings of civilians in the Second World War - military technology advanced in such a way that large-scale wars, those with the ability to make substantial demographic impact, became impossible.

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"The composition of the Greens seems to be the same as that of the population in general – mainly pieces of drifting wood, people who never think".

"A minority can never have any other effective means to influence the course of matters but the use of violence".

"Alternative movements and groups are a welcome relief and a present for the society of economic growth".

"We will have to study the structures of our society with Osmo Soininvaara?s (a Finnish green politician) accuracy and learn from the history of revolutionary movements – the national socialists, the Finnish Stalinists, from the many stages of the Russian revolution, from the methods of the Red Brigades – and forget our narcistic selves".

You must learn from the Nazis. "We will have to form a very tight and disciplined organization with clearly outlined and obliging policy, and preferably with uniform external tokens". The member "has to learn to harden his own heart when necessary. He will have to learn to ignore minor interests for the sake of bigger interests. He will have to learn to be feared and hated". "The word 'soft' has to be erased from the Green’s vocabulary once and for all". "A tight elite with a strong leader figure" is needed. Among other things "centralized governance, strict birth control and radical reduction of education and cultural institutions" will be part of the policy of the new Fascist Party. Linkola suggested that a part of the movement should murder corporation executives and other major criminals.

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Many Greens do not know the origin of their party. It may come as a bit of a surprise to them that the founder of the present-day Green party is non-other than August Haussleiter: a National Socialist of the old school, a veteran who stood by Hitler's side during the beer-hall putsch in Munich, at the start of Hitler's political career.

Haussleiter formed the Green party in 1974, organised it, was the first chairman, imbued it with the principles it now embraces - and was then booted out for his troubles due to his "Nazi past"! He was replaced by left-wing extremists and ex-Communists of the Joschka Fischer type.

National Socialists were indeed the ultimate Greens. Their animal legislation, protecting animal rights, was the most advanced in the world. Hitler was a vegetarian since he could not bear the thought of slaughtered hens and cows. All those who knew him intimately or worked closely with him testify to this truth. He was a non-smoker and a teetotaller. A fanatic for the preservation of the countryside, a mere cottage spoiling a skyline or a valley would upset him.

Rosenberg, the party ideologue, was undoubtedly the world’s first “Green,” writing about the long-term effects on the race of increasing mechanisation and even skyscrapers! He advocated the de-industrialisation of Germany by concentrating industry in clearly defined and limited areas. He was first to tackle the problems of pollution and its effect on future generations – this in the early 1920s!

In 1944-45 Germany stood alone against the whole world. Bombed mercilessly by thousands of allied planes, its industry and economy crumbling, National Socialists still doggedly refused to send German women to work in factories - as the Americans and the British did. Germans had a noble, mystical view of womanhood; that of bearers of the race. They would not envisage German women performing a simple, mechanical operation for thousands of times a day. National Socialism was indeed the ultimate Green party.

Perhaps the most influential of these pioneers was scientist Ernst Haeckel. Considered by many to be the father of modern environmentalism, this fierce German nationalist and avowed social Darwinist is credited with introducing the term "ecology" into public discourse. In 1866, he defined this new field of study as "the science of relations between organisms and their environment."

Haeckel published a number of books articulating his Darwinist view that humans were intrinsically tied to the soil. His ideas resonated beyond his borders and years; the celebrated British author D. H. Lawrence would consider Haeckel an early influence on his thematic development and naturalistic prose style.

Haeckel was highly critical of Christianity for exalting people above wildlife. He reverently believed that the magnificent forests of his beloved Germany provided an ethereal bridge to a higher state of awareness. Yet his contribution to environmental consciousness cannot be dismissed. In her remarkable work Ecology in the 20th Century, Dr. Anna Bramwell declares that the well-known naturalist "enabled ecology to become a viable political creed."

"There's no way to preserve a species that's programmed to kill the planet," explains the manifesto of today's extreme Greens, represented by the Finn Pentti Linkola. He advocates involuntary sterilisation, and likened the planet's population to a sinking ship clumsily attempting to seat 100 passengers on a lifeboat built for 10. "Those who hate life try to pull more people on board and drown everybody. Those who love and respect life use axes to chop off the extra hands hanging on the gunwale," he ruthlessly advises.

To wield the axes, the onetime pacifist envisions the rise of a ruthless "Green Police" patrolling the wilderness, undeterred by what he derisively termed the "syrup of ethics." The fierce opponent of both Amnesty International and the Vatican advocates an end to economic aid for starving Third World nations and an immediate reversal of open-door immigration policies -- specifically so that millions might perish.

Of course, this would constitute a mountain of human corpses unseen since World War II Europe, Mao's People's Republic of China, or Stalin's Soviet Union. But to Linkola, a few million deaths are of little importance when the entire planet is at stake. "We still have a chance to be cruel, but if we are not cruel today, all is lost," he admonishes.

Linkola outlines the central tenets of his credo: an unyielding scepticism of egalitarian democracy and an unwavering belief that unchecked overpopulation will kill our once-bountiful planet.

The latter contention is not without merit. Recent estimates by the United Nations Population Division project a growth of over 3 billion people within the next 50 years. If the acceleration of births continues at its current pace, by the year 2150 an additional 6 billion inhabitants will threaten our imperiled ecosystem and obviously limited resources. Therefore, Linkola would shed few tears if several billion of us were to meet a quick demise. In the name of conservation, he consigns democracy, conventional humanism, and the principle of non-violence to the waste bin.

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I like that fact that Linkola seems to go beyond either left and right politics, and while he's been accused of endorsing nazi-style sterilization/eugenic ideas, at the same time dedicated one of his books to the Baader Meinhof. I definitely agree with him that we need to free ourselves from the "syrup of ethics" before any real change will come about.
-- MICHAEL MOYNIHAN

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This can easily be illustrated with the example of a fish. The fish is happily swimming around in its natural environment in the ocean. If, however, the fish is lifted to the land it will not be happy. Take it on a trip around the world. But no matter what material arrangements you make for the poor fish it will remain unhappy, until it is permitted to return to its natural surroundings.

Author Pentti Linkola expresses thought in the same vein in his book “Dreams of a better world”. And although he writes on human adjustment to urban environments the sentiments are equally applicable when speaking of the spirit soul’s position in this world. Says Linkola: “It is pointless to speak about ‘adjustment problems’ since adjustment always means problems, psychological disturbances. Feelings of comfort and happiness can exist only when an individual does not have to adjust to unnatural circumstances.”

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"Another world war would be a happy occasion for the planet... If there were a button I could press, I would sacrifice myself willingly if it meant millions would die." -- Pentti Linkola, Wall Street Journal (May 20, 1994)