Humans are endowed with faculties for reason that enables them to learn through their own failures and successes, through others’ failures and successes; to learn the hard way and to learn the easy way; to learn in abstract and to learn by examples. How and what they learn are both important but what they do afterwards arbitrates their path to perdition or to liberation. In this essay, we probe lessons that two distinctly different yet similar groups of people are taught regarding population control measures that entail living with the consequences of mechanizing of behaviors in one group and in reduction in numbers in the other. The US armed personnel and the Iranian people are two cases exemplified here.
First some fundamentals of human population. People are the only vital raw material for building human societies. Without people, the most elegant architectures and the most advanced infrastructures are nothing but archeological marvels waiting to be recognized. With people, a handful of sands in desolate landscapes could turn into a flourishing civilization. This simple most essential fact did not escape the attention of, nor was it dismissed so callously by any people of any generation bar those of our modern era. Historically, if a society wished to thrive and prosper on social, cultural, economic, and scientific grounds, or any other human concerns, its most rudimentary first step was to grow its population. A population that does not physically grow, stagnates and withers away. Along the same lines, if a society was deemed as an impediment to expansionists who coveted its lands and resources, the mechanism for the aggressor was rather simple: reduce that society’s population by killing as many of its people as possible if you are interested in a cross-sectional plunder. Kill or capture as many of its women of child-bearing age as possible to stop it from growing if you are determined to make your loot absolute.
In more recent times, however, something rather peculiar transpired. The societies endowed with extraordinary abundance of land and resources were not only targets of extermination by adversaries who lusted after their assets, but also themselves acquiesced, swinging from halfhearted to full-hearted participatory styles of self-reduction and self-elimination campaigns. Unprecedented population control measures from every imaginable angle began to be imposed on human populations around the globe under the guise of “development”, “health and wellbeing”, “women’s choice, freedom, and equality”, “women’s health”, “concern for scarcity of resources”, “quality over quantity”, “sustainable development”, “sound ecological planning”, “sexual freedom”, “gender equality”, and an evolving list of other pretexts. These are, of course, the more transparent ones. Cryptic measures are disguised in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the pesticide, herbicide, and GMO foods we eat, the petrochemical packaging of our foods, drinks, baby formula, toys, cosmetics, household cleaning agents, and the cellular and wireless devices we use and keep on strategic locations of our body, just to name a few.
To expose the ill-meaning intentions and menacing hands behind these programs is fine. But to decimate the arguments that are used to lure so many populations to tango to the tunes played by the grand schemers is divine. Disentangling their convoluted logic does not take complex texts in multivolume books, it only takes deep knowledge of a few laws of nature and a handful of simple facts. Let’s turn to the alphabet of life and review some of the most relevant fundamentals and simple facts that often get buried deep inside piles of made-to-look-sane-and-sound cants. Human body, be it one, one hundred, one million, one billion, or one trillion is made up of one hundred percent recyclable material. That means, if you fill the entire planet with people, and then some, every single one of them, within seconds of their death begin the process of decomposition and every tiny bit of their material structure goes back to earth and into the cycle of life. This is unless, of course, they have spare parts like tooth fillings, artificial heart valves, implants of varieties, and more installed in them that were not part of, or exact replica of, the original design and formulation.
While living, the waste produced by human bodies like fecal and urinary products, blood, sweats, tears, expiratory gasses, phlegm, and more are likewise one hundred percent compostable and recyclable. All that goes back to earth as essential nutrients. That is the magic of original design. Human soul requires a differential treatment in its proper place. The entire material universe becomes too small to hold within itself even one human soul that has realized the truth of its potential anyway. As far as recycling is concerned, as Muslims, we do not believe in soul recycling and leave that to the experts and practitioners in the field of reincarnation to argue over details amongst themselves.
So, if such is the case with human bodies, then what about this dysphemism called population explosion that is bandied about to connote a causal link between high numbers of actual people and resource depletion/waste creation beyond the planet’s carrying capacity? What sort of resources and what sort of waste are we talking about? The true answer lies not with human numbers but in human behaviors and it would be useful to examine the latest trends in human behavior.
Significant sums of money are spent to make people behave mechanically in predictable and calculable[1] ways. Serious efforts are made to cultivate breeds of humans who act without volition in response to externally induced and remotely-controlled stimuli; to make them act on command with push of a button, presence of cues. To eat, starve, die, kill, dress, undress, speak, listen, shop and drop all on command. The cues, painstakingly developed and lavishly financed, may come in the form of texts with only a few lines, embedded hums in songs, collages of vain counter narratives affixed to assemblies of truly false and/or falsely true images, color-coordinated emotions, avatar intellectuals with thought implants, and more. The goal, in short, is to make humans behave like robots, thoughtless and amenable to manipulation.
At the same time, massive funds have been diverted to design and develop machines that could receive information from their ambient environment, process it, and produce seemingly appropriate and thoughtful responses.[2] The type of machines that could interact with the world around them exhibiting high degrees of ostensible autonomy. Machines that give an impression as if they possessed feelings, emotions, and intellect. The goal, in short, is to make robots act like ideal humans, intelligent, thoughtful, and autonomous.
Merely juxtaposing the two enterprises and leaving it at that might serve only as an interesting food for philosophical thought, or an amusing case of irony, or a fit subject around which to develop new theories of the absurd. A more responsible thing to do, however, is to take a dive into deeper layers of the analogous algorithms formulated to regress humans into machines and to progress machines into humans through reverse engineering. Barely submerged underneath are some truly sinister plans to subjugate and some revealing insights into human creation and spirit for Ulul-Albaab[3], those who possess intellect, thought, reason, wisdom, insight, and all that which gives them immunity against subjugation.
It is time to crack open a small window into the application of the above mentioned algorithms on the two groups named in the first paragraph: the US armed personnel, as a suitable representative of a gruelingly trained armed personnel in the West; and the Iranian people as prime targets of population reduction and behavior modification. As odd and implausible as it may appear at a cursory glance, they do have a couple of common attributes. They are both humans after all and as such they are equally endowed with a Fitrat Ilaahi, or Godly soul, essence, and core. Furthermore, both have been the subjects of failed attempts to be made into thoughtless, mindless, and amenable to manipulation machines. The failures, however, have manifested themselves in two very distinctly different ways in the two groups. After repeated field tests, the former has ended up withering away and self-destructing; the latter has strengthened and thrived. We shall see how.
In a dynamic system, anywhere we begin is a good beginning. The simplest is to begin with the usual and customary essentials of the circumstance, the 5W+H (what, where, when, who, and why + how). Almost the entire bulk of funding in the areas of population behavior manipulation and artificial intelligence comes directly and indirectly from specific military and intelligence entities (mostly in the US and UK) to meet distinct offensive and exploitative goals. Funding from alternative sources (benevolent or malevolent) and for non-exploitative goals is so insignificant and sparse in comparison that it could be considered negligible.
There is not enough evidence yet to judge whether or not the main powers behind the above implicated entities have enough wits about them to recognize or to even care about the real tragedy behind their programs beyond their goals of aggression. Ever increasing number of studies[4,5,6] looking into statistics in mental health issues, suicide and homicide rates in this particular group though are drawing extremely cruel pictures. The Congressional Research Service has stopped releasing regular updates on US military casualty statistics. However, in their last report (2016), they stated that more than 300,000 troops suffered traumatic brain injuries and suicides had become one of the most urgent problems among the veterans of the post-9/11 wars. There were more than 6,000 veteran suicides each year from 2008-2016[7]. That is about 17 persons a day. For various reasons which is beyond the scope of this essay to get into, this number is a gross underestimation. Even so, if we extrapolate based on that number, from 2002 to 2019, the rough number of suicides would be more than 105,400 soldiers so far.
It is quite evident that the soldiers trained to kill like a robot without hesitation or thought, sooner or later, have to return to their human fitrat and face, in their deepest and most obscure corners of their souls, what they have done to their fellow human beings in the field. Like ticking bombs, they live in hell, self-destruct into a more lasting hell, and take a few of their own along with them. Those who have died cannot speak but direct quotes[8] from in depth interviews conducted with returning combatants who are on suicide watch are often more cogent than any paraphrasing. Their training is depicted like this:
“Like I said, the military spends an awful lot of time and resources on this; trying to desensitize you before you go in. We were exposed to videos, horrendous videos, absolutely horrendous videos, that I would never want anybody to see. Yeah. Nothing compares to actually seeing a lifeless human being. Something that used to breathe and had a value to somebody somewhere. It’s just lying there.”
In an instant, the trained transmutates from a human being into a fictional character:
“If you’re in a firefight and civilian casualties occur, it might be easier to rationalize because the whole fog of war and whatnot. When you’re sitting hundreds of miles away and you’re watching a feed of it, and your life isn’t in danger, I feel like the calculus is different. I feel like you can’t write off these terrible decisions due to adrenalin, or stress, or unfamiliarity because your life wasn’t in danger at the time. To me, I don’t mean to be humorous, but I felt like we were the Empire in Star Wars, the entire time I was there.”
But how the conflicts within manifest themselves is quite noteworthy:
“Something else that I noticed was that I started doing more and more risky stuff while I was there. I volunteered to take flights to bases that got hit with a lot of artillery just to be over there for it. I started going on the roof to fix wires while we were taking artillery. I started just spending more time outside not under cover. I just remember thinking that I didn’t have a death wish per se but I wanted to put myself in those situations because I just felt like if I was to be killed it would make things more even. I know that sounds so weird but . . . it’s how I was feeling at the time. I felt like I deserved to have something happen to me at least. Even if I wasn’t killed I probably deserved to take some shrapnel in the back or something. That’s how I was thinking.”
Or, how they cannot be talked out of their sense of regret:
“Looking at it now in a different light, it’s easy for therapists and chaplains to say, ‘Well you didn’t have much of a choice. You couldn’t stop the war on your own, blah blah blah.’ It doesn’t change the level of personal responsibility that you feel. Even though you’re not the one pulling the trigger, you’re still a cog in the machine and you’re complicit in it. You’re protecting those who are pulling the trigger. I wanted to get conscientious objector status while I was out there actually, because it was bothering me so much. I let myself get talked out of it and I didn’t pursue it again. That’s something that I still regret to this day.”
Hell, I suppose, is the point we reach when we could take an unveiled look at what we are as opposed to what we could have been and not being able to do a single thing about it. It is critical to remember though that the deadline to change and do something is not reached until the moment we arrive at our death.
The case of the Iranian people has been slightly different. The people of Iran have had the great honor of being a focus of especially adverse and hostile attention of the US/UK for many generations. Regularly scheduled programs on behavior change by any means, be it military, economic, political, and more, and on population reduction by any means be it hot war, assassination, famine, genocide, and more have been a routine practice in the bilateral relationship between Iran and the West. Between 1917 and 1919, from 9 to 10 million Iranians died due to engineered famine of Persia by the allied forces, especially the British.[9] That event alone was the greatest undeclared genocide in the twentieth century as it reduced the Iranian population (then called Persia) from 20 million down to 10.5 to 11 million in a span of less than two years.
After 1953 Iranian coup d’état, a collaborative work by US, UK against the Iranian people, forced-voluntary population reduction plans, euphemized as “Family Planning”, became a top priority of the US and the UK regimes. Officially, the first population control program in Iran began in 1957 in a few localized areas and then was made a national priority, by Shah’s regime, in 1969[10]. But what made the Iranian people a target in the first place? The most straight forward and clear cut answer perhaps is found in the 1974 National Security Study Memorandum (NSSM 200) titled “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests” also known as “The Kissinger Report” which was declassified and released in 1989.[11] Four groups of nations became a priority target: 1) Nations that were endowed with good amount of oil, mineral, and other natural resources; 2) Nations that were geo-strategically located (e.g., near maritime choke points); 3) Nations that were predominantly Muslim; 4) Nations that were considered a potential obstacle in the expansion of Israel. Any one of the four conditions qualified a nation to become the target. Iranians met all four conditions. Therefore, a prime target.
For now, as the West continues to covet Iran’s resources and tries to find ways[12] to “outwill” the Iranians and shake their resolves, and as the Zionists desperately knock door to door to find their modern day Xerxes to “Estherify” and pull another pre-Purim to celebrate, the Iranian people have a few options on and under the table they need to keep and increase. Meanwhile, we will hold on tightly and wisely to our natural resources, protect our territorial integrity (air, land, and water, especially the Strait of Hormuz), strengthen and purify our belief in God, Quran, and Islam, and remain steadfast against the Zionist regime. One more thing, increase our population, انشاءالله.