Avengers ‘Infinity War’: Teaching children that mass slaughter is okay for all the wrong reasons
I used to be a fan of Marvel comics. Not anymore. The reason is the latest edition of 18 films in Marvel studios Avengers series titled “Infinity War.” After watching the film I was very disturbed by the message. Here is a key exchange between Thanos, the alien invader/protagonist, and Dr. Strange, one of the Avengers:
Thanos: When we faced extinction I offered a solution
Dr. Stephen Strange: Genocide?
Thanos: But random, dispassion is fair for rich and poor a like. They called me a mad man. What I predict came unannounced.
Dr. Stephen Strange: Congratulations, you’re a prophet
Thanos: I’m a survivor
Dr. Stephen Strange: Who wants to murder trillions
Thanos: With all the six stones I can simply snap my fingers, they will all cease to exist. I call that… mercy.
Dr. Stephen Strange: Then what?
Thanos: [I] finally rest, watch the sunrise on an ungrateful universe. The hardest choices require the strongest will.
In the end Thanos wins and trillions of people in the universe are slaughtered. The final scene is of Thanos in a green pasture admiring his work.
The most disturbing part is that during the film Dr. Strange looks at millions of options/outcomes and determines that Thanos winning is the only way. Dr. Strange, while getting erased from the universe, says to Tony Stark, “Tony, There was no other way.” This leads to fratricide, with half of his fellow Avengers dying. Fratricide is defined as:
[O]ne that murders or kills his or her own brother or sister or an individual (such as a countryman) having a relationship like that of a brother or sister.
Hollywood has made killing one’s brothers and sisters a noble, good and merciful thing. Why?
Alexander C. R. Hammond, research assistant for HumanProgress.org published an article titled “The Avengers, Thanos and Overpopulation.” Hammond wrote:
Thanos believes that there are finite resources in the universe—an appropriately illiterate idea, considering that the universe is infinite. Thus, if population growth is left unchecked, rising demand for resources will inevitably bring ruin to everyone. Halving the population of the universe is, in Thanos’ mind, “not suffering, but salvation,” for it is intended to avoid famine and poverty. The premise is misguided, but it’s striking how many people here on Earth share it.
Thanos’ concerns are identical to those of Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich, whose influential 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb predicted that rapid population growth would result in demand on Earth’s finite resources outstripping supply, resulting in the breakdown of society. To this day Ehrlich continues to make doomsday predictions, and to this day reality continues to prove him wrong.
Population control is not new
Centralized government population control has been tried before. Hammond notes:
Less amusing are the horrific real-life policies that have been implemented because of Ehrlich’s doomsaying. To be sure, no policy has yet been on par with Thanos’ plan to directly kill half of the population, but as Chelsea Follett has noted, “Ehrlich’s jeremiad led to human rights abuses around the world, including millions of forced sterilizations in Mexico, Bolivia, Peru, Indonesia, Bangladesh and India—as well as China’s draconian ‘one child’ policy. In 1975, officials sterilized 8 million men and women in India alone…To put that in perspective, Hitler’s Germany forcibly sterilized 300,000 to 400,000 people.”
Since Ehrlich wrote The Population Bomb in 1968, the world’s population has more than doubled, from 3.5 billion to 7.5 billion. Since 1968, famines have all but disappeared outside of war zones, and daily per capita calorie consumption has increased by more than 30 percent. In Asia, the region that consumed the fewest calories and had the fastest-growing population in 1968, caloric intake has increased by 40 percent, faster than the global average. Since 1990, the overall number of hungry people in the world has decreased by 216 million, despite the fact that the population grew by more than 1.9 billion.
The Human Brain is the Ultimate Resource
University of Maryland economist Julian Simon noted in his 1981 book that the human brain is the “ultimate resource.” Humans can innovate themselves out of scarcity by becoming more efficient, increasing supply, and developing substitutes.
Hammond presents the following facts:
New technologies and improved farming methods have led humanity to use less land, while producing more food, which is then sold at a cheaper price. In 2013, the world used 26 million fewer hectares of farmland than it did at the turn of the millennium. To take cereals as an example: A hectare today produces on average 118 percent more yield than it would have 50 years ago. If all farmers could reach the productivity of an average U.S. farmer, the world could return a land mass the size of India back to nature.
As for the finite resource that our modern world depends upon, consider fossil fuels. Thanks to improved detection and drilling technology, there are now far more oil and gas reserves than ever before. Since 1980, proven oil reserves have increased by over 151 percent; for gas this figure was 163 percent. To put these data into perspective, in 2015 we used 34 billion barrels of crude oil, while we discovered another 53.2 billion barrels each year between 2010 and 2015.
We’re solving the problems of hunger, poverty, illiteracy, disease, infant mortality, food production and much more at an unprecedented rate. And instead of becoming more scarce, natural resources are actually declining in price.
Billions Have Suffered due to the Overpopulation Myth
Chelsea Follet a researcher at the Cato Institute and Managing Editor of HumanProgress.org. in an article titled “Billions Have Suffered ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ in Reverse Thanks to Overpopulation Myths” writes:
Bowdoin College’s Sarah Conly published a book claiming it is “morally permissible” for the government to limit family sizes through force.
Back at home, many prominent American environmentalists—from Johns Hopkins University bioethicist Travis Rieder to entertainer Bill Nye “The Science Guy”—support tax penalties or other state-imposed punishments for having “too many” children.
Bowdoin College’s Sarah Conly published a book in 2016 through the Oxford University Press advocating a “one-child” policy, claiming it is “morally permissible” for the government to limit family sizes through force.
Their views are chilling.
Infinity Stone is chilling indeed. Children and adults are globally being indoctrinated into believe the culling the human population is necessary to save the planet earth. Thanos is the consummate environmental protagonist.
As Eleanore Roosevelt wrote:
“One’s philosophy is not best expressed in words; it is expressed in the choices one makes… and the choices we make are ultimately our responsibility.”
Hollywood’s philosophy of mass slaughter is being expressed in its films, its choices are wrong. It is ultimately up to us to choose correctly to reject this one world order view that promote human genocide on a galactic scale.
RELATED ARTICLE: A Lot of People Agree with a Supervillain about Population
RELATED VIDEO: Out of Frame – Obviously Thanos is Evil. He’s also Wrong.
I suspect that, apart from the useful idiots (who probably make up the vast majority of leftists), would-be global oligarchs like the message that a drastic population cut is needed. It would help justify killing all those who won’t willingly submit to collectivist authoritarian rule. If a major cull is actually attempted, I very much doubt it will be random.
i think your crazy
I what way?
I think you’re crazy how you saw right to the meaning of the movie its really deep when you think about it you’re a very smart man.
I Agree on what you said about the new movie Infinity War, I am also not a fan of marvel after this.
Thanos is the antagonist of the film, not the protagonist. While his argument does have a point, it is still what the Avengers were fighting against. There will be a part 2 of Infinity War next May that will likely see the undoing of his actions is this movie.
Marvel does not put one-dimensional villains in their recent movies (see Michael Keaton in Spider-Man: Homecoming, Loki in Thor, or Michael B. Jordan in Black Panther). While they can make convincing arguments, their actions are still portrayed as wrong.
Michael,
Thanks for reading and commenting on this column.
A protagonist is defined as the leading character or one of the major characters in a drama, movie, novel, or other fictional text.
Thanos is the leading character. Thanos is also the primary antagonist in the film Infinity War. An antagonist is defined as a person who actively opposes or is hostile to someone or something; an adversary.