Demographic-war narratives frame birth itself as the engine of civilizational collapse

Evidence

And the fourth wave, famine. Two months, my friend, and five million dead already! … Then the wave we call flood, stripping the country, destroying the crops, laying waste the land for five long years. And another one, off in the distance, the wave of war. More famine in its wake, more millions dead. And another, still nearer the storm, the wave of shame. The shame of those days when the West was master of our land … But through it all, through wave after wave, these people of ours, rubbing bellies for all they’re worth, to their bodies’ and souls’ content, to bring more millions into the world to die … — Sarah Bracke and Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar, “They Love Death as We Love Life”, 156

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: how the fertility-rate panic in contemporary nationalist discourse inherits its causal logic almost word-for-word from 1970s French catastrophe fiction.