Franco Bandini is an Italian journalist and historian who has been in the business for almost fifty years. This article is reprinted from Il Sabato, 6 July 1991.
Among those of us who work in the media, there currently flourish Hippocratic declarations of faith in the journalist who “has the duty of telling the truth,” cost what it will. After almost fifty years in the business, permit me to suggest that the reality is quite different — even before telling the truth, one needs to know the truth. This shifts the question from a purely banal manifestation of courageous independence to the much more toilsome manifestation of personal culture.
I believe that the media are not yet capable of exercising the interpretation and necessary critique of the great flow of information which pours in every day from every corner of the earth. It is not the task of the media to disseminate information irresponsibly, but rather to perform that most delicate and splendid public service of critically evaluating all the news prior to publishing it.
For quite some time, the media have abdicated this enormous responsibility, considering themselves protected by the “reliability of their sources.” Actually, there is no such thing as a truly reliable source. Sources are even less reliable as the media’s abdication of their critical function becomes more widespread. Even one irresponsible publication on the cultural level brings about a daily flood of false and tendentious information which determines — first in the media, then in the general public all over the world — convictions and certitudes which increasingly diverge from objective reality.
Let us omit the minor “non-truths,” the errors and the blunders which daily encumber the written and the spoken word. Taken individually they make us smile, but the cumulative effect is no laughing matter because the degree of cultural autonomy enjoyed by the public has become very small.
I take, as an instructive example, the growing alarm at the overpopulation of our earth which by now — according to the usual “authoritative sources” — should have reached five billion people from the two billion which were counted in 1939. No one has yet attempted to explain how and why this explosion would have been able to take place in such a short time and predominantly (if not completely) among the peoples of the Third World, among whom the social disturbances, the frightful sanitary conditions and the raging famines constitute historical brakes which are tragically powerful when it comes to limiting demographic increase.
There is only one way to avoid this misconception, however, and that is by realizing that the [population-related] news which comes from the Third World is false, for reasons which we shall see. This is one of the key areas in which there is a complete absence of critical evaluation among the world media.
The African Paradigm
In 1939 there were 136 million inhabitants in Africa, counted fairly well by the individual European colonial administrations. In many of the African colonies, a number of medical groups had attempted to improve the sanitary standards of the local populations, but had above all studied, with growing apprehension, the unstoppable phenomenon, of demographic regression which was affecting the entire continent. As always, various explanations were advanced. The most persuasive explanation held that the population was shrinking because of a diminished vital capacity of the African races due either to their tribal diversities or to the practical impossibility of controlling a frightful legion of destructive diseases such as syphilis, tuberculosis, malaria, beri-beri and bilharzia. The possibility of eradicating these deadly attackers was not possible because of the impenetrable resistance of the population due to customary practices.
There have been no great changes either in sanitary conditions or in tribal customs. The totality of children are still affected by malaria, twenty percent of the women are still sterile and syphilis (and other venereal diseases) are still prevalent.
On the other hand, there has been a huge increase in the carnage of wars and revolutions, the large-scale deaths caused by famines and the dislocations of entire groups for political reasons. On the southeastern coast of Africa there has appeared the murderous “falciparum,” death by malaria has been replaced by death at the hands of firing squads.
So how is it possible that Africa today numbers some 800 million inhabitants, with a rate of increase which varies between four and five-fold? To what cause can one attribute this explosive reversal of the tendency toward diminution which was definitely observed in 1939?
The case of Ethiopia may serve as a perfect explanatory paradigm. While we Italians were there, from 1936 onwards, a census was carried out by that famous “touring club” which today calls itself Consociazione Turistica Italiana (CIT). Its trusty functionaries travelled every road of the empire, from Somalia to Ethiopia to Eritrea, climbed the 4,620-metre Ras Dascian, finding there people who knew nothing of the war which had just ended, and who asked the census-takers to “say hello to Menelik.” When they added up the figures, they found that in Ethiopia proper and in Eritrea there were no more than six million indigenous inhabitants. Today, in the same area, the government of Addis Abba claims 50 million inhabitants — which is a ninefold increase — notwithstanding three frightful famines, two epidemics of cerebrospinal meningitis, the interminable war with Somalia, and the equally interminable civil war with Eritrea! The comical side of this tragedy is that four years ago, the former dictator Menghistu declared that the Ethiopian growth rate “almost reached three percent” and was thus the world’s highest. If one applies this science-fiction figure to the six million with which one began, one would not reach a present-day figure of 27 million inhabitants. At a rate of two percent, one would scarcely exceed 16 million, and at a growth rate of one percent, one would not even reach ten million. The brutal fact is that Ethiopia has probably remained the size that it was when we Italians left it in 1941. Nothing has happened to enable us to believe the contrary.
In 1968, before Menghistu dethroned Haile Selassie, I asked the Minister of the Interior at Addis Abba to explain why his government continued to publish population figures which did not have the slightest relationship to any possible reality. At first he pretended not to understand me, but then, with a privy little half smile, he told me that since American aid was fixed in “dollars per head,” it was no great crime to “inflate the figures a little.” It was a policy which the Derg of Menghistu has followed — parallel, of course, to the massacre of the population.
The recently independent African states announce population figures which are totally and completely invented. They do this because numbers are power, because foreign aid is proportionate to numbers, because admitting the truth would also be admitting the sanitary and civil failures of their regimes. And since they do not allow any checks or controls, the world organizations of the United Nations are forced to accept their declarations, naturally ignoring in silence what is, in fact, the credibility of the declarations themselves. The confirmation of this is the fact that wherever the colonial powers made a greater impression in the areas of health and sanitation, and where outside statistical checks and controls are less difficult, there are either no increases in the population, or the measured increases practically never exceed a redoubling of the population in a fifty-year period. The sole arguable exception is Egypt, which would have increased from its 16 million in 1937 to the 45 million which it claims today — declaring, however, a 2.7% coefficient of increase which is not only unrealistic but which cannot even be reconciled with the final figure.
We are, in other words, confronted by a new phenomenon: a mask which conceals the true realities for which we are called upon to provide relief. There are around 400 million Africans alive today, with all that the term “around” or “more or less” may signify in the not-too-distant future. If the African populations are diminishing, that is one situation. If they are stable, it is another matter. And if they are increasing, then that is something else again. And this is precisely why the media must necessarily assume a function of critical evaluation. Upon the false statements of African potentates there has been constructed a chamber of horrors which ranges from the number of infants who starve to death daily, to the plans for assistance and relief which every nation is called upon to initiate; from the dreaded invasion of Europe by Africans to the ultimate destiny, which some fear for our continent — that it be “submerged,” as we are assured, by an emerging Third World.
The China Model
For almost the same “African” reasons, China presents an identical picture, aggravated by the fact that the falsehood is based upon a much larger number of persons. In 1953 Mao had a census taken, from which emerged a figure precise to the point of paranoia — 582,603,417 sons of the Heavenly Empire. It took almost a year of labor and almost a million canvassers, but still many areas had to be counted by visual estimates. Afterwards, it was established that the rate of growth was twelve per thousand, according to which in 1982 the number of Chinese would have to have risen to 834 million. But the number actually announced was one billion, three million, i.e., some 170 million too many — and that without anyone having taken the trouble to clarify which of the two figures was wrong. And nobody explained how to reconcile this doubling in size within thirty years with the failures of the “hundred flowers” and the Maoist agrarian policies.
The truth is that the Chinese population, rated by European statistical agencies at 318 million inhabitants in 1916, still hovered around this figure in 1939, although the lowest estimates had placed the population at a mere 250 million. So there was no reason to accept almost a doubling between 1939 and 1953, the more so because it would have occurred during a destructive war marked by famines, by the Japanese invasion and by most serious domestic disturbances. Mao deliberately falsified his first census as part of his power politics, a fact which he expressed in lapidary fashion a few years later by saying that for the Chinese, the atomic bomb was a paper tiger. “Even if 300 million Chinese had been killed,” the rubicund dictator explained, “400 million of them would still have survived.”
Fluctuating Populations
According to statistical demography, China and India belong to a group of peoples which fluctuates greatly. They increase for a while, and then they diminish, to grow larger again and to shrink once more, always remaining in the neighborhood of a median which is proportionate to their territory, and which for the two populations, can be estimated at around 500 to 600 million people, perhaps even less. Take the case of Tibet, a region whose inhabitants are so sparse as to render unthinkable any statistical trickery. In 1953 there were 1,273,989 people, in 1982 there were 1,892,393 — but after the immigration of 600,000 Chinese.
The statistical misadventures of the Soviet Union are by now sufficiently well known to recognize that here, too, figures were used by the Kremlin like a defensive or offensive weapon in relation to a number of different objectives, the first of which was doubtless that of concealing for decades the serious loss of human lives associated with the civil war, the forced collectivism of the farms, the permanent purges and finally the Second World War and all its consequences. The Soviet Union was the only great nation to postpone its census until 1959, announcing in that year a figure of 208,827,000 inhabitants. That number was nearly equal, taking into account the enormous postwar annexations, to the figure of 170 million given for the 1939 census. Today we know, however, that in 1939 at least 25 million “phantom citizens” were added, under the table, to the real data. And, in fact, the government declared the census of 1936 null and void — after first executing the entire census-taking committee — precisely because the divergence between the estimates and reality was so large as to be visible to the naked eye. These few figures and the demographic declaration which Russia itself is announcing today, tell us that extremely complicated games must have been played with numbers in an effort to conceal the “demographic catastrophe” of real socialism.
Extending such critical considerations to all of the world’s population leads to the conclusion that the world total has been over-estimated by at least one billion persons; that among the peoples of the Third World (save for a few exceptions) the coefficients of growth are probably close to zero, if not in actual recession; that the great and recurring alarms about the “biological bomb” of humanity are the fruits of new situations over which it is impossible to exercise control; and finally that it is impossible to establish the truth in a credible way except by recourse to the critical responsibility of the world media.
But, at least for now, there is no sign that responsibility will be met.
