True Left

President Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine is causing major changes back home. Hundreds of thousands of Russian men are being mobilized to fight and tens of thousands have already been killed or injured. Meanwhile, many Russians have left their country and millions of Ukrainians are thought to have arrived.

What impact will these changes have on the Russian population? And could the public response lead to Putin’s downfall? We discuss these questions and more with UCLA’s Oleg Itskhoki in this DW Business Special.

Russia already had a huge gender imbalance before the Ukraine invasion, dating back to massive battlefield losses in World War II, Paul Goble writes at Eurasia Daily Monitor. Results from the 2021 census are expected to show that Russia has 10.5 million more women than men, almost the same disparity as a decade ago — the double blow being that Russian men at "prime child-bearing age" are dying in Ukraine or fleeing Putin's draft, which will "further depress the already low birthrates in the Russian Federation and put the country's demographic future, already troubled, at even greater risk."

"The mobilization is upending families at perhaps the most fraught moment ever for Russian demographics, with the number of women of childbearing age down by about a third in the past decade" amid the country's broader population decline, Bloomberg reports. "While demographic traumas usually play out over decades, the fallout of the invasion is making the worst scenarios more likely — and much sooner than expected."

Continuing with the Ukraine war and mobilization efforts until the end of next spring would be "catastrophic" for Russia, Moscow demographer Igor Efremov tells Bloomberg. It would likely bring birth rates down to 1 million between mid-2023 and mid-2024, dropping the fertility rate to 1.2 children per woman, a low mark Russia hit only once, in the 1999-2000 period.

Might there be a Russian post-war baby boom?

It's possible. Sometimes wars "lead to higher fertility," as when "sudden bursts of conception" occur as men deploy for battle, Goble writes at Eurasia Daily Monitor. "For example, monthly birth data from the 1940s clearly shows that U.S. baby boom began not as the G.I.'s returned from war, but as they were leaving for war." After the fighting stops, he adds, "wars may trigger a surge of nationalist ideas making people susceptible to pro-natal ideas and policies, even as so-called 'replacement fertility' often leads families to 'respond' to high-casualty events by having 'replacement' children.'"

And in the meantime, "downloads of dating apps have significantly increased in the countries to which Russian men fled," the Times reports, noting sharp rises in downloads in Armenia, Georgia, Turkey, and Kazakhstan.

Elon Musk claims 'Japan will eventually cease to exist' because of its declining birth rate
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According to the article, Japan's population dropped by a record 644,000 people to just over 125.5 million in 2021, which saw 831,000 births and 1.44 million deaths. The East Asian country’s population decline is now in its 11th consecutive year.

Master, thank you for raising the issue.

What advocates of our people should focus on is birth control in the Third World, especially Africa. In 2018, the average cost of a victorious Congressional run was over two million dollars; winning senators spent an average of 15.7 million dollars. That’s to say that having 30 Paul Gosars in Congress would cost 60 million dollars every two years. Those 30 Congressmen could create a “Patriotic Immigration Reform” caucus that would be stymied by the Republican mainstream and the entire Democrat Party over and over again. This caucus would not increase white birthrates, nor would it lower non-white birth rates. And again, actually sending this caucus to office — even at that steep cost — would be a political miracle.

Those 60 million dollars could be much better spent. Consider the average cost of an abortion in the US: $320 to $500 at ten weeks, $500 to $700 at 16 weeks, and $1,000 to $2,000 at 20 weeks or later — and 88% of abortions are carried out before week 13. In America, for every one white woman who aborts, six non-white women do. With that in mind, I would happily forfeit Marjorie Taylor Greene’s Congressional seat to any Democrat in exchange for a new abortion clinic in Los Angeles. Don’t like abortion? No problem. Condoms, IUDs, and oral contraceptives are all even cheaper options. Making them readily available to teenagers and the poor today will do more to improve the quality of your grandchildren’s high school than a President Trump, Jr. ever will.

But while expanded access to “family planning” is needed both at home and across the pond, we need to go further. Sub-Saharan Africa is the biggest demographic threat the world faces. In 2015, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán spoke clearly about this in the European context:

The countries of North Africa once functioned as a defence zone protecting Europe, absorbing the masses of people coming from Africa’s interior. And the real threat is not from the war zones, Ladies and Gentlemen, but from the heart of Africa. With the disintegration of North African states this line of defence has been spectacularly breached, and North Africa is no longer able to protect Europe from a vast flood of people. As a result, a problem has developed on a truly unimaginable scale. I agree with former President Sarkozy, who said on French television just the other day that the current wave of mass migration is only the beginning. There are one point one billion people in Africa today, more than half of them under the age of twenty-five. According to Mr. Sarkozy, before long hundreds of millions of people will have nowhere to live, and insufficient food and water. Following in the footsteps of today’s migrants, these people will leave their homelands. In other words, what is at stake today is Europe and the European way of life, the survival or extinction of European values and nations — or, to be more precise, their transformation beyond all recognition. The question now is not merely what kind of Europe we Hungarians would like to live in, but whether Europe as we now know it will survive at all.
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No member of the Trump family or the Republican Party can do much about these fertility differentials and what they portend for the West. But abortion, reliable condoms, and “the pill” could make quite the impact. Let’s stop wasting so much of our time and resources on domestic politics and instead focus on something more concretely productive: lowering Africa’s fertility rate.

I'm actually shocked it took humans this long to destroy our futures.  Oh well, RIP humankind, it was a good run.  PS the animals left in the world after we are gone thank you for leaving before killing off the rest of them first.