Voluntary Human Extinction Movement

[Rev. Rye]

I wouldn’t be worried about VHEMT until their actions to make the human race go extinct go beyond self-sterilization and choosing to not have kids. Or at least until they start building actual compounds.

Full disclosure, I’m not a member of VHEMT, but I do consider myself a sympathizer. Living a shitty childhood and becoming a devotee of Schopenhauer probably helps.

If enough of them got into power, the thought that the memory of Adolf Hitler and what the Nazis did being rehabilitated is ghastly. What, specifically, is there to "sympathize" with?

For what it's worth, the official VHEMT website has a pretty comprehensive FAQ that should quash any fears that VHEMT supports Hitler. When asked if they're pro-Hitler, they reply: "Well, if you mean the medals for motherhood and warehouse nurseries full of babies for war and industry, or if you mean outlawing abortion, or forced sterilization of undesirables, or mass murder, then the answer is simply, “No.”" Bear in mind that the flip side to the mass murder of Jews and other undesirables is the Lebensborn program, something that I'd be legit shocked if VHEMT wouldn't balk at. And from what I've seen of the alt-right, they're very much in the forced birth camp.

And, of course, the mass murder isn't something they support, either. There's a TL;DR for one question that explains "SUMMARY: Increasing human deaths will not improve population density. Many people are advocating an increase in the death rate to reduce human population numbers. However, increased death has historically increased births. Promoting reproductive freedom, economic opportunity, and education will shrink our masses faster and nicer." Even the deaths of 80 million people, well beyond any estimate for World War II (the single bloodiest event in human history) as a whole, would only knock off one year's worth of growth.

For what it's worth, they actually answer the question of what would happen if they ever ended up in power. At least for North America, members seem to most support bribing people to not have kids.

And before you ask if maybe it'd be better to solve the problems at hand rather than just hope we make ourselves extinct, I'd like to remind you that even the most optimistic estimates for global warming say that the problem requires drastic action in a very short amount of time. This might not be enough of a deal breaker on its own, but bear in mind that America (one of the biggest carbon emitters) has a major political party that has made abundantly clear that they do not care about the coming climate apocalypse and are doing everything they can to undermine any and all action to lower carbon emissions. In a world where major political leaders are saying shit like this:



Yes, I can reasonably say it's probably more feasible to expect that the human race will voluntarily choose extinction than actually make the effort to stop global warming.