Tag: Henry Kissinger

Five weeks before I was born, a handful of blocks away from my parents’ apartment on Conneticut Avenue in Northwest Washington D.C., terrorists detonated a car bomb.  The bomb killed Chilean national Orlando Letelier and his assistant, American Ronni Moffitt.  This act of terrorism was a part of Operation Condor, a campaign of political repression carried out jointly by the military and intelligence services of eight South American nations, which took place with support by the United States.  No one is certain of the total number of victims of the campaign, but all estimates confirm that thousands were killed.

In 1948 George Kennan, who at the time was a senior US State Department planning official, wrote:

We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population. This disparity is particularly great as between ourselves and the peoples of Asia. In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security.

To do so, we will have to dispense with all sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives. We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world-benefaction.

Later on, in April of 1974 President Gerald Ford, who had replaced Nixon, issued National Security Study Memorandum 200. The title was Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for US Security and Overseas Interests. President Ford signed an Executive Order making NSSM 200 official US Government Policy. It dealt with food policy, population growth and strategic raw materials. The NSSM was the work of Henry Kissinger and was secret at the time it was issued.

F. William Engdahl, has written an excellent, though somewhat obscure, book with the title Seeds of Destruction. This diary is based largely on Engdahl’s book. Quotes are from his book unless noted otherwise.

National Security Study Memo 200, issued in 1974, promoted population control in raw materials-rich developing countries. Thirteen developing countries were named as being threats to future US exploitation of their resources unless drastic measures were taken to reduce their population growth. In the NSSM Kissinger put it this way:

The world is increasingly dependent on mineral supplies from developing countries, and if rapid population growth frustrates their prospects for economic development and social progress, the resulting instability may undermine the conditions for expanded output and sustained flows of resources…