Russian President Vladimir Putin is telling the country's citizens to have more kids for ethnic survival.
Russia faces a demographic crunch with a shrinking population.
Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine has further exacerbated the country's labor shortage and brain drain.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is feeling the heat from a demographic crunch.
He's calling on Russians to have more babies to preserve their ethnicity, Reuters reported on Thursday.
"If
we want to survive as an ethnic group — well, or as ethnic groups
inhabiting Russia — there must be at least two children," Putin said at a
tank factory, according to the news agency.
It's
not enough just for each family to have one kid — because Russia's
population would contract, Putin said, while issuing conflicting
statements on how many kids families need to have.
"In order to expand and develop, you need at least three children," said Putin, per Reuters.
Russia was in a demographic crisis even before it invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
The country's population was 146.4 million at the beginning of 2023 — down from nearly 149 million in 1993, according to official statistics. However, this is up a low of around 143 million in the early 2010s.
An estimated 1 million people have also fled Russia during the war, deepening a brain drain and labor crunch in the country.
This is not the first time Putin has urged Russians to have more children.
In November, he extolled the virtues of large families, calling on women to have as many as eight children — if not more.
"Let
us preserve and revive these excellent traditions. Large families must
become the norm, a way of life for all of Russia's people. The family is
not just the foundation of the state and society; it is a spiritual
phenomenon, a source of morality," Putin said at the World Russian People's Council in Moscow.
Putin's call for more children echoes
that of other leaders across the world. Notably, Chinese leader Xi
Jinping said in October that women must help establish a "new trend of family"
as the country faces a demographic ticking time bomb. In May 2021,
China — which had for decades had a one-child policy — launched a new three-child policy, marking a landmark shift in the country.
Well, that's Putin. He opines, no controversy noted in U.S. mainstream media as arising among Russians in an organized or haphazard way. Just, Putin Says.
With JD, things are different (Although, if ethnicity is a factor, then as a bet, if JD gets into baby kissing it will be a white baby, even with him not saying white birth rate declines worry him more than otherwise). The Atlantic:
Invasion of the Baby-Haters
Conservatives like J. D. Vance have invented a bogeyman of childlessness, and are using actual kids as political pawns.
Desperate
times demand that America’s babies and children stand up and man the
ramparts of the culture wars. The latest recruitment effort began with a
declaration by the Ohio Senate candidate J. D. Vance, who held that the
“childless left,” exemplified, in his view, by politicians like Pete
Buttigieg, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cory Booker, and Kamala Harris, is
turning the country into a rump state of imperious cat ladies. “Let’s
give votes to all children in this country,” Vance argued, by way of
remedy, “but let’s give control over those votes to the parents of the
children … We should worry that in America, family formation, our birth
rates, a ton of indicators of family health have collapsed.” [...]
Vance’s proposal was a hit on Fox and Friends, and The Federalist’s publisher, Ben Domenech, picked up the line of thinking in another segment
that aired on the network earlier this week, arguing, inter alia, that
“woke, socialist progressives” hate babies “more than anything else,”
and that the left detests the fact that there are children, period. All
the usual suspects—radical environmentalists agitating for depopulation,
career-oriented girl bosses, critical race theorists—made their usual
appearances, each offered as evidence of a leftward political bent
that’s thoroughly anti-child.
Is
it so? Seldom has it been harder to say what huge political coalitions
like “the left” and “the right”—which, in the United States, are
primarily characterized at the moment by infighting and high-stakes
factionalism—think as corporate entities. Nor is it easy to make a
statement about politics or culture that will actually be received with
any kind of sincerity. [...]
[...] If you want to find a self-identified
progressive chastising breeders for saturating the planet with
carbon-emitting, snot-slinging vectors of pollution and disease, some
social-media site’s genius algorithm will serve such a person up to you
without delay. Now that political victories are scored in liberal tears
or conservative outrage, the incentives to pursue anything else are
fairly minimal.
With
all that being said, allow me to violate my own common sense and say
what I believe to be true: If socialist progressives are inveterate
childless baby-haters, this is news to me, my husband, and the two
children I birthed before age 30. We’re fairly fond of the critters
around here, [...] But whatever one’s beliefs about which policies most benefit
children—universal health care; paid parental leave; free child care,
pre-K, and school lunches, in my opinion—a political conversation that favors kids has to take children as its subject. This current discourse does not.
Instead, it’s concerned with adults,
and the decisions, personal or political, that cause them to opt into
or out of parenthood. This much is especially clear in Vance’s rhetoric,
which identifies the “childless left” as the source of America’s woes,
and suggests meting out more votes to parents to right those putative
wrongs. [...]
And yet, there is a
kind of pro-child politics that is focused on children themselves, as
opposed to the adults who do or do not have them [...] It involves careful tinkering with programs, such as the child tax credit, that relieve childhood poverty if administered correctly (ideally, as it turns out, not by the IRS) and designed well (without prejudice against the poorest families).
It’s stolidly focused on children and the things they need: peace, good
health, food, shelter, education and development, love, care, space and
time to learn and grow.
[...] Alas,
that is not our approach, and our children are worse off for it.
Enough. Or not? HuffPo tirelessly and methodically catalogs much JD instances of his child-using culture warfare, read it there with links, and only this image from the item:
Not ethnicity biased. It's his daughter.
However, ethnicity rears up in turn, in another image in the HuffPo item, baby and sign, and background people, lots of whites, nothing else. A Republican bias of which we already know. NewYorker, Forbes, DemocracyNow, with a can't pass up JD gem of wisdom (bias? no, wisdom, really):
JD VANCE: I worry that it
makes people more sociopathic and, ultimately, our whole country a
little bit less — less mentally stable. And, of course, you talk about
going on Twitter. Final point I’ll make is, you go on Twitter, and
almost always the people who are most deranged and most psychotic are
people who don’t have kids at home.
Cut Putin some slack? He does not impugn the mental state of the childless, it takes more of a settled, certain mind to go there. Vance did convert to Catholicism. DailyBeast expands upon that JD "defective minds" outlook toward childless folks.
Readers can search the web for more, but in closing, CNN and this Florida outlet re JD "selling out seniors," to add more capture of the venom of JD and his dogma, while NPR adds a priceless "this is JD's culture war essence" image along with its story:
Readers getting an impression Crabgrass believes JD can be a smug asshole rivaling Trump atop the ticket, well, it's not exactly a hidden viewpoint. It's there.
___________FURTHER UPDATE_____________
Data are always useful, in parsing opinions and inclinations.
Below
a few items on birth rates and demographics are listed, with the first
item being a representative search done to generate a part of the list. Readers
will have to on their own dig into the detail. Crabgrass sees a trend
suggestion that things are not dire, as JD might want people to think.
It seems his policies are more alarmists and colored by his religion
where the Vatican is not hesitant to articulate its life policy
preferences. (Including opposition to contraception as well as to abortion.)
Crabgrass believes JD and family are free to manage
their affairs as they wish, in privacy, and should respect the equal
privacy rights of others, i.e., mind your own business and you won't be
minding mine. Gentler terminology is not needed.
There are two
Russian primary text items one by Rand, shortly after the Soviet Union
collapsed, and one from later this century but before war with Ukraine.
Otherwise it is a demographic - and - birthrate buffet. (Listed links are hot links, i.e., cut/paste should not be necessary.) Possibly there are broken
links. The list is representative, not aimed to be exhaustive, and readers are ureged to
search demographics on their own.
