Bruna Frascolla
Malthusian culture is a problem Anglo-Saxons don't want to correct, writes Bruna Frascolla.
It's funny that demographer Emmanuel Todd is celebrated after his predictions are confirmed; after all, his assessment of countries' failure or success is independent of the events that confirm his predictions. Todd predicts a country's collapse based on declining birth rates and life expectancy. Indeed, for both Todd and common sense, if people in a country stop having children and life expectancy falls, that country does not have a promising future. Nevertheless, the First World actively worked to encourage people to have fewer children and is now working to encourage them to die earlier through euthanasia. The decline in birth rates and reduced life expectancy are seen as a good thing by the mainstream.
Certainly, the United States, since Kissinger (see the 1974 NSSM-200), has viewed population growth in several countries as a threat to its own national security, and strives to reduce these populations through intermediaries who promote sterilizations and abortions abroad. However, the United States also strives to reduce its own domestic population (especially that of blacks). Kissinger's plans for global castration stem from domestic problems within U.S. democracy: if WASPs (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) have few children, it is necessary to ensure that blacks and Catholics also have few children-otherwise, this will have electoral consequences in the medium and long term. It was not possible to dispense with this population and create a pure WASP nation, since someone had to do the low-paid work. A formally racist system would greatly damage the country's self-image and, even more so, its image among the people it sought to dominate. Thus, to remain a WASP-dominated democracy, a propaganda effort was necessary to manipulate non-WASPs and reduce their birthrate. Israel's efforts to control Arab demographics (including Arab-Israeli demographics) have this precedent in U.S. democracy.
We can therefore say that Malthusian culture is a problem Anglo-Saxons don't want to correct. Instead, realizing they are outnumbered, they strive to reduce the numbers of others. And since their culture is genuinely Malthusian, it's not difficult for them to find arguments to use in their propaganda: fewer children means children with more resources per capita; childlessness means more time and money for oneself-a woman's challenge to patriarchy!-and shorter lifespans mean better quality of life-and who doesn't want quality of life?
The fact is that Anglo-Saxons have a peculiar and counterintuitive attitude toward demographics. As we' ve seen, since the High Middle Ages, when the Angles merged with the Saxons upon invading Britain, they distinguished themselves from other barbarians by expelling native peasants from their lands, rather than ruling and mingling with them. In the Late Middle Ages, we saw that they continued the practice of ethnic cleansing and even emptied a French city (Calais) during the Hundred Years' War to fill it with colonists recruited from England. Now, let's continue with the Hundred Years' War: it was there that the Anglo-Saxons developed a taste for empty lands and conceived of the state as a profit-driven oligarchy.
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The Hundred Years' War began with Edward III of England, Plantagenet, claiming the French throne after King Charles IV died without a son, leaving a messy succession. Edward III felt entitled to the throne because his mother was the daughter of the French king Philip the Fair; however, the French had already decided that women had no right to the throne-and if they did, the little daughter Charles IV left behind would be queen. Grandson of the cunning Philip the Fair, the Englishman wanted to seize the crown, and his adversary was the dead king's cousin, the less-than-skilled Philip of Valois. However, no one in France wanted an English king-and even less so for his mother, the Frenchwoman who had ruled England with her lover, to become queen of France.
In England, Parliament already existed, a highly unusual institution that could both dethrone and recognize kings. When the war began, Parliament was unicameral and composed of nobles. Thus, all war campaigns led by the King of England had to be endorsed by the nobility in Parliament. Initially, the nobility was isolationist, disliking war expenditures. Nevertheless, they eventually agreed to the idea of the Crown borrowing from Italian bankers to finance its war investment. Significant funds would be needed, as the Hundred Years' War would long be a war fought by mercenaries.
Where would England's money come from, which would alleviate fears of default? Wool. In the words of historian Georges Minois, "England possesses a great source of wealth: wool, whose role in the national economy can be compared to that of crude oil in the modern world. The country is the main supplier of raw materials for the Flemish textile industry. [...] Grouped into societies that can be called capitalist, [the merchants] buy export licenses from the king, and their wealth allows them to play an increasingly important social and political role: they buy land and mansions, become creditors of the monarchy, and can influence its decisions" (The Hundred Years' War, p. 11, Brazilian edition).
Another very relevant difference between the skittish English nobility and the French nobility was the territorial issue. While the French dominated large contiguous tracts of land, "the great [English] nobility does not identify with a territory. The barons' holdings are dispersed, they do not form a provincial bloc [...]. [The counts] do not identify with a territory, but they are wealthy and frequented by an important clientele. They have their own administration [...] and efficient management of their domains" (op. cit. p. 14-15). Thus, while the French nobles were attached to the land, jealous of their independence from the crown, and lacking in esprit de corps, the English nobles could concentrate in London, form a kind of union, and discuss joint actions with the king while living off their income.
Well, for these nobles, the Hundred Years' War was a great opportunity for business (otherwise, they would not have consented to it). Always in concert with the king, the practice of using the treasury to pay mercenaries to invade France, plunder, and take hostages was adopted. When the Crown's coffers proved insufficient, it turned to Italian bankers and even caused bankruptcies. The profits from the looting went to everyone: the Crown, the nobles, the mercenaries, and the common people-even English women received personal belongings stolen from French women as gifts.
The war started well for the English because they innovated by hiring a professional army. In the medieval world, the nobility was typically called upon by the king to fight in the event of war. No one in France was prepared to fight a professional army.
This English innovation was capitalist in nature, more advanced than feudal warfare. I quote Minois once again: "The army is at the origin of the rise of private enterprise in England. From the beginning of the conflict, faced with a French monarchy that insisted on resorting to the ban and the arrière ban, the English king preferentially mobilized Italian bankers, whose credits allowed him to recruit troops through commercial contracts. The nobles maintained a 'retention,' a few dozen or a few hundred soldiers, whose services they rented to the sovereign through an indenture contract, for a set period and amount. In reality, the English army is made up of a professional workforce employed by war contractors in accordance with the laws of the market. These are private corps, private companies that, from a military point of view, offer advantages [...], in particular corporatism, favored by the habit of fighting together, while the feudal army only occasionally brings together men who do not know each other" (pp. 441-2).
How did France escape this? By strengthening the state, after a thousand and one misfortunes. The French even imitated the English, but discovered that periods of peace were a terrible problem, because mercenaries became unemployed and turned into bands of raiders. The solution found by the last French king to fight the Hundred Years' War, Charles VII the Victorious, was a reform of the state. He created a permanent royal tax, without the nobility's consent, and was able to have a standing army-in addition to purchasing the latest military innovation, cannons. "At the end of the Hundred Years' War," says Minois, "one can say that France had a 'national' army in the sense that all armed forces depended on the state, even if they included many foreigners, while England used private armies under contract" (p. 442). And we can add here: France's victory was yet another historical event that demonstrates the victory of the national state focused on the common good over the liberal state focused on the profits of the corporations that comprise it (a topic previously discussed here). The world imitated France.
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Let's finally look at desertification. By invading France, Edward II, in the words of Minois, "behaved not as the sovereign of the French people, but as an enemy" (p. 90). The armies plundered the French with the aim of enriching those participating in the venture; and, furthermore, followed the normal wartime practice of destroying crops to leave the enemy undersupplied. In a letter, the Black Prince, Edward II's son who led cavalcades through the French countryside dressed in black armor, wrote to his father: "We have devastated and destroyed this region [of Bordeaux], which caused great satisfaction to the subjects of Our Lord, the king" (op. cit., p. 122).
In addition to the war, there was also famine-which predated the war-and the plague. The result was that after the end of the war, both France and England lost 40% of their populations.
Indeed, for France, the death of the peasants led to fallow land, food shortages, and sheer poverty. The government scrambled to repopulate the fallow land. For the English, the death of the peasants meant replacing food crops with more space for wool, which was England's main source of wealth. Thus, if the general rule is that population decline leads to poverty, the English case was an exception. Fewer people meant more wealth for the landowners.