Assassination is not a joke (or why the BBC should sack David Attenborough)

Political assassination isn't a joke. This year a British Member of Parliament was, quite literally, assassinated. Jo Cox was gunned down in the street while doing her job. We were shocked, perhaps more shocked than with assassinations and attempted assassinations elsewhere in the world. Benazir Bhutto, Indira Ghandi, Yitzhak Rabin - assassinated. Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II - shot but survived.

Political assassination isn't a joke. Unless that is, you're Sir David Attenborough:

Sir David, 90, who returns to BBC screens in Planet Earth II this weekend, was quizzed on current affairs by Emily Maitlis, the Newsnight host, for Radio Times.

Asked how he would feel about America electing a President who believed that climate change is a “Chinese hoax”, Sir David buried his head in his hands.

“Well, we lived through that with earlier presidents – they’ve been equally guilty… But what alternative do we have? Do we have any control or influence over the American elections? Of course we don’t,” said Sir David.

Adopting a quieter tone, he said: “We could shoot him, it’s not a bad idea”

A giggle suggested Sir David, who was invited to the White House by President Obama to discuss the planet’s future, was not being entirely serious.

Can you imagine if some less savoury (i.e. right of centre) figure had suggested, even hinted in a humorous way, that some sainted leader of the left should be killed off? Yet Attenborough has escaped unchallenged - would Emily Maitlis have brushed aside such offensiveness had it been James Delingpole or Nigel Farage she'd been interviewing?

Now while I dislike Attenborough intensely - the values he presents to us are disgusting - I don't think he meant his comment as anything other than a crass dinner table, bien pensant, smug aside. Nor do I think he should be sacked. But if the BBC is true to its oft expressed progressive values they they should be sacking him or, at the very least, getting a suitably grovelling apology out of him.

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More from David Attenborough, eugenicist

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Today, David Attenborough has returned to his neo-malthusian, crypto-fascism. Essentially he's saying we should let those dark folk in Africa (or wherever) starve to death:

Raising the example of Ethiopia, Sir David said that the famine there was down to there being “too many people for too little piece of land”.

Speaking ahead of his new series David Attenborough's Rise of Animals, he suggested that humans are “blinding ourselves” to the problem, claiming, “We say, get the United Nations to send them bags of flour. That's barmy”.

Yes folks, this is our sainted bunnyhugger-in-chief speaking here. You lap up his gorgeous programmes about animals and give him the air to say it's OK simply to let poor people starve to death.

Leave aside Attenborough's ignorance of what caused the Ethiopian famine, this attitude - wrapped up in pseudo-science as it is - needs to be challenged. And perhaps Attenborough should be called out for the unpleasant human being that he has become?

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David Attenborough - eugenicist

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I was very tempted to title this comment "David Attenborough - fascist" but people might misunderstand my point. Others - via the fine medium of Twitter suggested: "David Attenborough - fabian" in recognition of all those social democrats and pseudo-liberals (and apologists for mass murderers) like Sidney & Beatrice Webb, G B Shaw, H G Wells and J M Keynes who were in favour of government intervention to stop the masses from breeding.

However, I thing that "David Attenborough - eugenicist" will suffice for that is what he is:

"We are a plague on the Earth. It’s coming home to roost over the next 50 years or so,” warns David Attenborough in an interview in the new issue of Radio Times magazine. “It’s not just climate change; it’s sheer space, places to grow food for this enormous horde,” says the natural history broadcaster.

And it's not us Western white folk - we're fine (or more pertinently failing to meet replacement levels meaning, but for immigration, negative population growth). It the huddled masses in Africa:

“We keep putting on programmes about famine in Ethiopia; that’s what’s happening. Too many people there. They can’t support themselves – and it’s not an inhuman thing to say. It’s the case. Until humanity manages to sort itself out and get a co-ordinated view about the planet it’s going to get worse and worse.”

 A less kind blogger might sniff a little racism there!

Now David Attenborough - along with the other posh eugenicists in organisations like Friends of the Earth and the Green Party - has a pretty loose association with actual facts about population and indeed about famine in Ethiopia - true there are food shortages most years in this country but no objective observer - or even the development industry - identifies population pressures as the cause.

The real problem for nasty eugenicists like Attenborough is that economic growth, trade and open markets - by making us richer - are the means to 'control' population. Coupled with sending women to school rather than to arranged marriages. Here are the facts that the eugenicists ignore:

...in the next few years (if it hasn't happened already) the world will reach a milestone: half of humanity will be having only enough children to replace itself. That is, the fertility rate of half the world will be 2.1 or below. This is the “replacement level of fertility”, the magic number that causes a country's population to slow down and eventually to stabilise. According to the United Nations population division, 2.9 billion people out of a total of 6.5 billion were living in countries at or below this point in 2000-05. The number will rise to 3.4 billion out of 7 billion in the early 2010s and to over 50% in the middle of the next decade. The countries include not only Russia and Japan but Brazil, Indonesia, China and even south India.

Attenborough and his posh eugenicist mates can sod off. Humankind doesn't need him to sort its population growth - getting richer and better educated is doing the job just fine.

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