"Children of Men": Cautionary Tale or Prophecy? Pt. 1
Are we on track to total human infertility within the next 50 years?
A very sad fact is that people, they’ve been talking about the stuff that’s been happening. People have been warning about it. Children of Men is a product of that. Children of Men is not a prophetic piece. —director Alfonso Cuarón[1]
1. Real vs. Fictional Dystopias
What is the difference between a cautionary tale and a prophecy? That’s a question that came to mind as I recently watched the film Children of Men (2006) again after a lapse of a decade or more. Director Alfonso Cuarón, as noted in the quote above, was careful to disavow any “prophetic” element to the film. It is, after all, a work of art. Still, it’s hard not to see multiple parallels with where we are now—a flu pandemic, vanishing human fertility, a refugee crisis, and the fracturing of social cohesion into countless, aggressively clashing ideological factions, with governments exploiting these crises to consolidate totalitarian powers. Of course, Children of Men is a work of dystopian fiction, so it’s important to remember not to take it too literally. In Part 2, I’ll discuss more about the distinction between cautionary tale and prophecy, and the writer’s capacity for intuitive foresight that can sometimes appear to be “prophetic.”
As the quality of our public education continues to plummet, there seems to be a lack of ability among the general public to distinguish between reality and fiction. (This line will only blur further as AI infects culture with more and more “deep fakes” and now even AI-generated books, music and films.) In part this inability is probably also due to our culture being steeped in movies and TV for most of the past century. We’ve long since moved from what was a primarily literary, print culture to a primarily film or video-based culture. This is bound to affect both our political perspectives and our critical faculties, and sadly not always for the better. While both print and film are equally absorbing, print requires an active engagement with the reader’s imagination while film asks only a passive engagement—no act of imagination is required because all the imagery is supplied for you.
For those who still haven’t seen Children of Men, here’s the film’s synopsis from IMDb (Warning: my article will contain spoilers):
In the dystopian world of 2027 London, humans have been incapable of reproducing for 18 years for an unknown reason, meaning the imminent extinction of the species. Britain is the one remaining civilized society on the planet, which has resulted in people wanting to migrate there, so it has become a police state to handle the immigrants, who are placed into refugee camps. Lowly government bureaucrat Theo Faron, once an activist, is approached by the Fishes, deemed a terrorist group, led by his ex-wife Julian Taylor, whom he hasn’t seen in almost 20 years, since their marriage disintegrated after their infant son Dylan’s death during the 2008 flu pandemic. Although the Fishes did use terrorist means in their on-going revolution against the state in the fight for immigrant rights, Julian vows that they now garner support solely by speaking to the people, and she wants Theo to use his connections to get transit papers for a young immigrant woman named Kee who needs to get to the coast. Although initially reluctant to do it because of the difficulty, Theo is able to grant Julian this favor, however with the change that he now needs to accompany Kee on her journey. As Theo and Kee progress on that journey, Theo learns more and more about what’s going on, including the reason that Kee needs to get to the coast, the fact that no one in the group knows if their end destination even exists, and that his and Kee’s lives are in greater danger than he believed when they started the journey. But Theo’s sole mission becomes to help Kee at any cost for the survival of the species.—Huggo (imdb.com)
Here are some of the incidents in the film that seem to have erupted in real life recently:
The scenes depicting “The Uprising,” a Muslim insurgency exploding from their incarceration in a British sanctuary city for refugees abandoned by the government to social chaos, poverty and violence, seem predictive of the riots in France this July. Thankfully in real life the French police and military aren’t using live fire on civilians to regain control of the situation, as in the film. However, a recent news item said French police believe they are “at war” with rioters “who now carry military-grade weaponry,”[2] just as in Children of Men. And just like the film, since at least 2015, when former German Chancellor Angela Merkel allowed a million Muslim refugees into the country in a single year, Europe has been suffering the social impacts of poorly thought out immigration policies. In the film, the situation has deteriorated to the point where refugees are rounded up like vermin, placed in holding cages and sent to sanctuary zones or camps, if not killed outright by overstressed or racist guards.
Journalist Douglas Murray visited some of the immigration camps in various parts of Europe as well as interviewing government officials, publishing his conclusions in his book, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam. In Children of Men, the British government of 2027 uses the iron hand of the military to control the tsunami of immigrants. By contrast, in the reality of today, Murray writes of how extreme leftist ideology, through the white-shaming rhetoric of “anti-colonialism,” has advocated an open door policy but failed to provide any coherent means of integrating immigrants into their new European societies. Consequently, in the liberal countries of Scandinavia as well as parts of Britain, women no longer feel safe to walk the streets at night due to the presence of gangs of young unemployed Muslim men. These men do not necessarily share the West’s view of women’s place in society, and leaving young men without productive occupations is a recipe for violence. Yet despite the media “consensus” favouring open borders and stigmatizing anyone who calls for stricter immigration policies as “racist,” the European public isn’t so sure. Murray writes:
“At such times, the gap between what the public can see and what the politicians can conceivably say, let alone do about it, became dangerously large. An Ipsos poll published in July 2016 surveyed public attitudes towards immigration. It revealed just how few people think that immigration has had a good impact on their societies.”[3]
“A poll carried out in the Netherlands in 2013 revealed that 77 percent of respondents said that Islam does not enrich their country. Some 73 percent said that ‘a relationship exists’ between Islam and terror attacks and 68 percent responded that they thought there was ‘enough’ Islam in the Netherlands. The view was not confined to voters for any one particular party but was shared by a majority of voters from all Dutch political parties. The same views have emerged across the continent. In France in the same year—that is two years before the Paris terror attacks in 2015—73 percent of people polled said that they viewed Islam negatively and 74 percent said that they regarded Islam as intolerant. It is worth remembering that around 10 percent of the French population are Muslim.” —Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam[4]
So it’s not hard to see how public frustration with the impacts of mass immigration could boil over into the kind of militant policy depicted in Children of Men. The same chaotic situation is happening at the US-Mexico border due to President Biden’s lax immigration policies and lack of enforcement of existing laws. Tim Ballard, the real-life campaigner against global child sex trafficking depicted in the film Sound of Freedom, estimates there are up to 80,000 children per day entering the US through its porous southern border.[5] Immigration officers are totally overwhelmed and thus unable to check to see who these children’s sponsors are or even where they’re going. Many of these “sponsors” are pedophiles operating child pornography film studios or sex rings. Tens of thousands of these children go missing every year and are never accounted for, much less cared for. In that respect, the grim and cruel scenario pictured in Children of Men would be a distinct improvement over today’s reality. A world that has not heard the sound of a baby’s cry for nearly two decades would surely not allow children to be trafficked like guns or drugs. It would not be attempting to normalize pedophilia as some are doing today. One has to therefore ask: which is the worse dystopia? The real or the fictional?
Elderly hippie Jasper is played wonderfully by Michael Caine. As reviewer Drew Tinnin aptly put it, “Children of Men is the closest we’ll get to Michael Caine playing John Lennon.”[6] He’s one of the rare bright spots in this dark, gritty film—the director’s tip of the hat to the betrayed ideals of the hippie generation. Jasper hints at “the flu pandemic of 2008” as a cause of the infertility. Given the plunging rates of births post-Covid-19, this too has a prescient air to it. Even prior to the Covid-19 “pandemic,” fertility experts such as Dr. Shanna Swan were sounding the alarm that their data were showing a sharp decline in human fertility over the past 50 years—one percent per year, so that currently fertility rates are 50 percent of what they were in 1973.[7] In 2021 Dr. Swan was quoted by The Guardian as saying that “most couples may have to use assisted reproduction by 2045.”[8]
In Children of Men, the year is 2027 and humanity has been unable to conceive children already for 18 years. And while director Alfonso Cuarón wisely avoids revealing the cause, Dr. Swan cites the flooding of our environment with hormone-altering chemicals as a key factor. Although she doesn’t touch the subject for some reason, bathing the human race in microwave-frequency radiation from wireless devices and mobile phones is another likely factor. There are multiple scientific studies that suggest radiofrequency radiation (RFR) decreases male sperm count and may even induce DNA damage.[9] But then Big Telecom has a lobbying power and multi-billion dollar revenues second only to Big Pharma. So no wonder the scientific studies pile up yet nothing changes.
Jasper’s comment in the movie is prescient, not because Covid-19 was so virulent as to cause an increase in stillbirths and other pregnancy complications, but because studies are showing that adverse reactions to the mRNA “vaccines” caused a sudden drop in global birth rates. (This is in addition to the sudden spike in excess death rates in all age groups also attributable to adverse reactions to these injections.) In Scotland, data for April 2023 shows a “rate of 2.8 deaths per 1,000 live births, which is well above the 1.1 rate baseline. It reached the control limit and is labelled an outlier event. The only time the rate has been anywhere near this high in the last seven years was in September 2020 when the rate was 2.4.”[10]
As revealed by the release of the Pfizer trial data compelled by a US court judge, prenatal adverse effects were observed in the trials, yet both the American and Canadian health authorities promoted them as “safe and effective” for pregnant women. We’re not talking some miniscule percentile of risk here: in Pfizer’s trials, adverse effects appeared in over 54% of cases of “maternal exposure” to the vaccine. This included 2 newborn deaths, 53 reports of spontaneous abortion, abortion or a “missed abortion,” meaning “an empty gestational sac, blighted ovum, or a fetus … without a heartbeat prior to completion of 20 weeks gestation.”[11]
According to the Pfizer reports posted by Dr. Naomi Wolf’s team at Daily Clout, “Pfizer also recorded multiple harms to babies through the milk of vaccinated mothers. According to Pfizer in the Cumulative Review, 19% (41/215) of babies in Pfizer’s records exposed to the company’s COVID mRNA vaccine via their mothers’ breast milk were recorded as suffering from 48 different categories of adverse events.” It’s thus possible that infant mortality rates will continue to increase in the wake of vaccination programs. According to Steve Kirsch, “the absolute number of stillbirths and miscarriages reports associated with the COVID vaccines is literally ‘off the charts’: 4X higher than for all other vaccines combined.”[12]
Among vaccinated children, one report claims a more than 63,000% increase in excess deaths across Europe.[13] Even if this figure is vastly overestimated, it has to be asked: When did we abandon the precautionary principle? When the 1976 swine flu vaccine caused just dozens of people to contract Guillain-Barré syndrome, the vaccine was pulled from the market.[14] This has to be the most venal, vicious thing Big Pharma has ever done, stealing kids’ tender lives away from their parents—all for money. And they’ve done some pretty venal, vicious things. Three words: Thalidomide. Vioxx. Opioids. And that’s only three of their deadly sins.
This could be the first time in history it has been socially acceptable to sacrifice children for profit. Throw that into the mix with a culture predisposed to the feminist values of career over motherhood, and the fact that already by age 30, a woman’s chances of conceiving begin to drop and miscarriage risks are higher. By age 35, a woman’s chance of conceiving drops from 25% per month in her 20s to 15%.[15] Many women’s careers are only just hitting their stride by that age. “Research has found that pregnancies that occur after age 35 are at greater risk of the following: miscarriage, preterm labour, gestational diabetes, preeclampsia, stillbirth, chromosomal abnormalities, and Caesarean section.”[16]
Add to all this the fact that birth rates in every industrialized nation are below population replacement levels, with rates showing a steady downward trend even in Africa. According to the Population Research Institute, for the 2020–2025 period there are currently 96 countries that are at birth rates approximately half the required 2.1 per couple, including India and Bangladesh. [17]
Yet even as both fertility and birth rates collapse, feminists promote their me-first philosophy, as in this article in The Guardian by Jill Filipovic: “The increased visibility and acceptance of women who choose not to have children is just one part of a social evolution away from the limited ‘traditional family’ model, and into a world where human beings with a diversity of needs can create family arrangements that work for them. That’s not just good for the child-free; it’s great for feminism—and even better for society and families.”[18] While it’s great for feminism, it’s hard to see how this logic extends to being “even better for society and families.” Filipovic’s article is now a decade old; it would be interesting to see if the hard reality-check of plummeting male fertility rates and post-Covid-vaccination damages to female fertility have changed her tune.
Is it fair to our generation of young people now graduating to burden them with anti-life ideologies—of any kind—that blight their chance at contributing to a future for humanity? Unless we start reeling in telecommunications companies that run the country like the Wild West, with microwave frequency radiation (RFR) limits thousands of times of many European countries; unless we start prosecuting companies that persist in fouling our air, water and food with hormone-altering chemicals—we are on the path to the nightmare scenario of Children of Men.
If Dr. Swan’s data are any indication, that could mean total human infertility within 50 years—today’s high school grads would live to see it. Are they indeed the Last Generation? In a moment of black humour in the film, Kee—the only human female to become pregnant in 18 years—jokes that she’s a virgin, invoking the immaculate conception of Jesus in Mary, since her baby is seen by all as the greatest hope the world has seen since the crisis began. (She eventually names her baby Dylan, after Theo and Julian’s dead son.)
In times like these, even I look to the skies, seeking a miracle. And when I see a family with babies, my heart gives a little leap of joy.
Please stay with me for Part 2—there is light at the end of the tunnel that isn’t just what James Corbett calls “hopium.”
[1] “Children Of Men Is The Closest We'll Get To Michael Caine Playing John Lennon,” Drew Tinnin, Slashfilm.com, October 27, 2022: https://www.slashfilm.com/1065190/children-of-men-is-the-closest-well-get-to-michael-caine-playing-john-lennon/
[2] “French Police Claim They Are ‘At War’ with ‘Savage Hordes of Vermin’: Rioters Now Carry Military Grade Weaponry,” Military Watchmagazine, July 2, 2023: https://militarywatchmagazine.com/article/french-police-war-savage-hordes-vermin
[3] Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, Bloomsbury, London, 2018, p. 199.
[4] Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, Bloomsbury, London, 2018, p. 236.
[5] “The Fight Against Worldwide Child Slavery & the Sex Trade,” Dr. Jordan Peterson interviews Tim Ballard and actor Jim Caviezel:
[6] “Children Of Men Is The Closest We'll Get To Michael Caine Playing John Lennon,” Drew Tinnin, Slashfilm.com, October 27, 2022: https://www.slashfilm.com/1065190/children-of-men-is-the-closest-well-get-to-michael-caine-playing-john-lennon/
[7] https://www.shannaswan.com/countdown
[8] “Shanna Swan: “Most couples may have to use assisted reproduction by 2045,” Zoë Corbyn, The Guardian, March 28, 2021: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2021/mar/28/shanna-swan-fertility-reproduction-count-down
[9] For example: “Cell Phones and their Impact on Male Fertility: Fact or Fiction,” Alaa J. Hamada, Aspinder Singh and Ashok Agarwal, The Open Reproductive Science Journal, Volume 7, 2015: https://benthamopen.com/ABSTRACT/TORSJ-3-125; “Effect of cell phone usage on semen analysis in men attending infertility clinic: an observational study,” Ashok Agarwal, Fnu Deepinder, Rakesh K Sharma, Geetha Ranga, Jianbo Li, PubMed, May 4, 2007: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17482179/; “Genotoxic Risks to Male Reproductive Health from Radiofrequency Radiation,” Puneet Kaur, Umesh Rai, Rajeev Singh, PubMed, February 12, 2023: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36831261/
[10] “Excess Deaths & Post-Neonatal Deaths,” The Naked Emperor, Substack, July 11, 2023:
[11] “Report 69: BOMBSHELL – Pfizer and FDA Knew in Early 2021 That Pfizer mRNA COVID “Vaccine” Caused Dire Fetal and Infant Risks, Including Death. They Began an Aggressive Campaign to Vaccinate Pregnant Women Anyway,” Daily Clout Pfizer Reports database: https://dailyclout.io/bombshell-pfizer-and-the-fda-knew-in-early-2021-that-the-pfizer-mrna-covid-vaccine-caused-dire-fetal-and-infant-risks-they-began-an-aggressive-campaign-to-vaccinate-pregnant-women-anyway/
[12] “VAERS data clearly shows that the COVID vaccines are an unmitigated disaster for pregnant women,” Steve Kirsch, Substack, July 17, 2023:
[13] “63,060% increase in Child Excess Deaths across Europe Related to EMA approval of Covid vaccines,” Europe Reloaded / Exposé, June 11, 2023: https://www.europereloaded.com/63060-increase-in-child-excess-deaths-across-europe-related-to-ema-approval-of-covid-vaccines/
[14] “When the US Government Tried to Fast-Track a Flu Vaccine,” Christopher Klein, September 2, 2020, History.com: https://www.history.com/news/swine-flu-rush-vaccine-election-year-1976 Keep in mind that most historical accounts of the 1976 swine flu tend to be biased in favour of the vaccinations.
[15] “Getting Pregnant in Your 30’s: Benefits, Risks, and Advice,” Banafsheh Kashani, MD, Miracare.com: https://www.miracare.com/blog/getting-pregnant-in-your-30s/
[16] “Your Chances of Getting Pregnant at Every Age,” Holly Eagleson, Parents magazine, July 11, 2023: https://www.parents.com/getting-pregnant/trying-to-conceive/up-your-chances-of-getting-pregnant-at-every-age/#toc-chances-of-getting-pregnant-in-your-early-30s-30-to-34
[17] “Countries with Below Replacement Fertility Levels (Projected: 2020-2025),” Population Research Institute: https://www.pop.org/simple/countries-with-below-replacement-fertility-levels-projected-2020-2025/
[18] “The choice to be child-free is admirable, not selfish,” Jill Filipovic, The Guardian, August 16, 2023: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/16/choice-child-free-admirable-not-selfish
Interesting stuff. All the links attached as well for anybody wanting to dig deeper.