Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
EUGENICS
AND
GENOCIDE
IN THE
MODERN WORLD:
the
cause of the
epidemic?
Dr Romesh Senewiratne
(MBBS, Australia, 1983)
AIDS
CONTENTS:
1. Introduction: Where did the HIV plague come from?3
2. Chronology: Immuno-warfare development and testing.23
3. The Australian Governments Response to AIDS..39
4. Foundations of the Eugenics Movement...53
5. Negative eugenics programs.82
6. Paranoia about population growth 95
7. The effect of AIDS on U.N. population estimates119
8. Imperial designs in Africa.126
9. The development of biological warfare in the Cold War148
10. Medical wars and the AIDS industry.167
11.The Macfarlane Burnet Centre on AIDS.179
12.The Burnet Institutes International Health Unit...188
13.AIDS, psychiatry and Glaxo Smith Kline..198
14.Genetic engineering and experimental chimpanzees...208
15.Biological warfare in Central Africa?...................................................219
16.Biological warfare research in Australia.231
17.Tying it all together..244
References.256
Chapter 1
QUESTIONS ABOUT THE ORIGIN OF AIDS
I began an independent, informal investigation into the cause of the epidemic of
HIV infection and AIDS in 1996. The investigation was independent because I
neither sought nor was given funding for my research. It was informal because my
work was not based at a research institution or university. I researched HIV, AIDS
and eugenics in my spare time, motivated by a combination of curiosity and
concern. Curiosity about the remarkable coincidences I was noticing between the
history of eugenics and the history of AIDS, and concern about the unfolding
epidemic and my growing knowledge of biological warfare by the Allies during,
and after, the Second World War.
The main reason I became interested in AIDS in the mid-1990s was an unusual
epidemiological pattern I noticed in the global epidemic. In America, Europe and
Australia it was affecting, apparently selectively, male homosexuals and, to a lesser
degree, heroin addicts. Yet in the Third World it was a heterosexual disease
affecting men and women equally. In the so-called developing nations those
contracting the disease were not, it was reported, drug users.
During my medical studies at the University of Queensland I learned nothing about
AIDS, other than rumours of a new disease that was affecting homosexuals in the
USA, which was being called, at that time, GRID or Gay Related Immune
Deficiency. I graduated in 1983, the year before Robert Gallo at the National
Institutes of Health announced his discovery of the virus that caused the disease,
by which time its name had been changed to AIDS Acquired Immune
Deficiency Syndrome.
Since 1997 I have been seeking evidence to confirm, or deny, the possibility that
HIV and AIDS are being used for the purpose of genocide. To do this I have had to
look at the entire history of the epidemic drawing primarily on extensive
publications on HIV and AIDS by a wide range of sources. Not having any
particular expertise in virology, immunology, or genetics I did not regard myself,
when I began my investigations, as doing work as such I was just interested in
the range of causal theories published in the alternative media, and comparing
them with my own that AIDS is the result of the implementation of a negative
eugenics program.
This theory was original I developed it by observing epidemiological patterns,
with the certain knowledge that disease can be deliberately created, and that
deliberate disease creation by the members of the medical profession did occur,
including frank (if usually covert) biological warfare.
This book presents evidence that the AIDS epidemic was created deliberately, as
part of a covert global depopulation strategy. The motive for this heinous act was
concern about overpopulation in so-called developing nations and the strategy
was orchestrated by doctors working under the auspices of the United Nations and
its health body, the World Health Organization (WHO). These doctors, many of
whom were respected professors at leading universities in the developed world,
were responsible for the genetic engineering of animal viruses to create the Human
Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and implementation of the depopulation program
through deliberate contamination of vaccines with the newly created virus. The
contaminated vaccines were seeded into carefully chosen populations though the
WHOs Global Immunization Program, first in Africa and later in the Caribbean,
Asia, the Pacific Islands, and South America (notably Brazil). In the First World,
the virus was seeded into homosexual populations and injecting drug users
(specifically heroin addicts).
I experienced several disincentives in taking my investigations into HIV and AIDS
any further than the collection of information. The few of my medical colleagues I
discussed my theory with told me to leave it alone, and that though it was a
possibility, it would be difficult to prove and likely to get me into trouble. This
advice was, at least in part, because of who I was investigating: medical research
institutions and universities, the medical profession and various professional
organizations, international medical charities, mining companies, drug companies
and Western governments, including our own I was even looking at the United
Nations and World Health Organization as potential culprits.
The theory that the AIDS virus (HIV) was deliberately created and introduced, via
infected vaccines and blood products to targeted populations will be explored in
detail in the following pages, looking specifically at the institutions in Australia
that may have been involved in such research. The Annual Reports of these
institutions are examined, to ascertain the types of research being done, and who is
funding it.
In addition, the history of biological and chemical warfare research in the 20 th
century will be discussed, in an effort to determine what illnesses in the modern
world can be attributed to the undisclosed implementation of such warfare. In
doing so, the secret history of biological and chemical warfare research programs
in Australia will be disclosed in detail for the first time. These programs, none of
which have been admitted to by the implicated authorities, include experiments in
Australia on Australians, and experiments based in, and orchestrated from,
Australia, in neighbouring parts of the world.
It will be shown that if AIDS is the result of germ warfare, or intentional genocide
of targetted races, several Australian institutions and universities and successive
Australian governments are deeply implicated in the crime. The same is the case
with several respected medical research institutions and universities in the USA,
and others in the UK, France, Japan and Belgium, along with successive
governments in these nations, and international health organizations and aid
organizations including the International Red Cross and the World Health
Organization. Other research institutions and universities implicated in such
genocide, if the AIDS epidemic is the result of biological warfare with the HIV
virus, would be located in Japan, South Africa, Canada and other nations that have
been involved in an intricate network of HIV/AIDS research collaboration.
The AIDS epidemic in Africa, and subsequently other parts of the Third World,
has showed very different demographics from the West from the start men and
women have been equally affected, and the vast majority of victims have not been
homosexual or intravenous drug users (intravenous drug use is, of course, far less
common in the Third World than in the First World). Noticing that the
preventive measures being promoted to control AIDS and HIV infection had
obvious similarities to those previously employed as a strategy to combat
population increases in Africa and elsewhere in the so-called developing world
during the years of publicly declared eugenics programs, and knowing that since
the 1960s there had been increasing paranoia in the West about overpopulation in
poor nations, especially those in Africa and Asia, I looked more closely at the
possibility that HIV was being used to control the much-vaunted problem of Third
World overpopulation.
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pigs. This is where the American drug company and the British Imperial
Chemical Industries (ICI) came in. They were interested in marketing the drug if it
proved to be safe and effective. ICI pharmaceuticals (now part of Astra-Zeneca)
markets paludrine in Australia to this day (see reports in the Age, 19.4.99 and
20.4.99 for details of these malaria tests).
The malaria experiments included testing such things as how fast the parasites
could be transmitted from one person to another when the two human guinea
pigs were connected, via intravenous lines, to each other, testing the results of
repeated transfusions of infected blood, and the effectiveness in causing infection
of specially bred mosquitoes. The drug Paludrine (proguanil) was tested both for
effectiveness and toxicity. Toxicity tests involved giving the infected subjects
bigger and bigger doses of Paludrine and observing the effects. These inhumane
experiments were only revealed by the (Fairfax) press 50 years after they occurred.
Although front-page news for two days the matter was dropped in the Australian
media after refusals from the government or the drug companies involved to
discuss compensation with the victims. The Murdoch press, typically, did not take
up the story.
The scientific and medical press did not mention the matter at all, and most people
in Australia have forgotten the incident if they were ever aware of it. Others might
suppose that because the events occurred long ago they do not have relevance to
the present. ICI clearly did not think so, though. Shortly before the malaria
experiments were made public, ICI (Imperial Chemical Industries, a British
chemical and explosives company) changed the name of its pharmaceutical
operations to Zeneca and merged with the Swedish drug company Astra
pharmaceuticals, becoming Astra-Zeneca, the current owners of the paludrine
operations.
The head office of Astra-Zeneca remains in Britain, home of the main Imperial
Chemical Industries. The Australian branch of ICI chemicals (ICI Australia)
separated from its British parent company a few months before the malaria
revelations, becoming Orica, a new Australian chemical company based in
Melbourne that is the worlds leading exporter of explosives, according to their
Annual Report 2000. The chairman of Orica, Professor B.H.Lochtenberg is also
Chairman of Melbourne University Private and a member of the University of
Melbourne Council, as well as being Chairman of the Mental Health Research
Institute!
11
12
including relevant health ministers, prime ministers and senior administrative staff
would also be guilty of crimes against humanity. Any corporations that
intentionally financed or supported the development and use of HIV as a biological
weapon (or agent for mass-murder) would also share legal responsibility for the
crime of genocide, as would those that knowingly or unknowingly profiteered
through such a man-made epidemic. This is good news, because few would
disagree that the supposed property of such individuals, institutions and
corporations should be forfeited, at the very least, in compensation for their crimes,
which have no precedents in magnitude, even when compared with the worst of
Adolf Hitlers.
Like any other murder investigation, investigating genocide requires the
identification of the scene of the crime, the motive, weapon, victims and suspects.
In the case of genocide using the HIV virus, the scene of the crime is the whole
world, but especially southern and central Africa, where most the epidemic has
already claimed millions of lives and over 30 million people are said to be infected
with HIV. These people, and the over 10 million others (outside Africa) who have
been infected constitute the obvious direct victims, but there are millions of others
including the families and friends of those who have died of AIDS, and those
who have suffered from the terror of being told they have HIV antibodies in their
blood and that this constitutes a certain death sentence.
The weapon, in this case, needs no identification: it is the human
immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Regardless of where the virus originated, and
whether it is the product of genetic engineering or natural evolution, the HIV virus
could theoretically be used for genocide. This could be done by deliberately
contaminating injections (including immunizations), heroin or condoms with the
virus, by breeding mosquitoes to carry the virus (remembering the Queensland
malaria experiments) or by enhancing its spread through other means (such as
facilitating behaviour and providing conditions conducive to the dissemination of
the virus). In other words, one would not need to prove than HIV is man made to
prove that the AIDS epidemic is the result of a genocidal eugenic program (or
several such programs).
If one could prove that the human immunodeficiency virus is the product of
biological warfare research and deliberate genetic engineering to create a killer
virus this would obviously strengthen the case regarding proving genocide,
however it is not imperative.
13
14
The media report that provoked me to research the AIDS epidemic more urgently
and seriously was a short article credited only to AAP in the medical magazine
Australian Doctor titled PNG faces AIDS epidemic. The September 1997 report
began:
Papua New Guinea is on the verge of an AIDS epidemic to rival
African countries such as Uganda, with young women as the main risk
group, health authorities have warned.
PNG has the third-highest per capita incidence of HIV infection in the
Pacific Rim region, [PNG] Health Minister Ludger Mond said while
announcing plans to develop a national HIV/AIDS strategy. (Australian
Doctor, 26.9.97, p.37)
Obviously, the PNG Health Minister had been told this and was repeating what he
had been told. Papua New Guinea does not collect and collate data from other
Pacific Rim countries regarding HIV/AIDS or any other illnesses. Mr Mond,
claimed, according to the report, that although there were only 745 reported cases
of HIV in PNG (629 of which were in the capital Port Moresby) this was likely to
15
be only the tip of the iceberg. He feared that as many as 10,000 people could
have the virus. As the article continues it becomes clear as to where the PNG
health ministers facts and figures had come from and the idea of a National
HIV/AIDS Strategy:
The WHO [World Health Organization] representative for PNG, Dr
Paul Chen, said immediate action through education programs was needed
to help arrest the epidemic. The prevalence here is higher than Australia,
higher than Fiji, higher than New Caledonia and so on, he said. From that
point of view and the rapidity of the increaseit shows that we are right in
the midst of an epidemic. And if we dont do something fast we could end
up like Uganda where you would have seen the villages abandoned, people
are dying, a whole generation missing.
What puzzled me was why, given the HIV virus behaviour elsewhere (including
Australia, just to the south of New Guinea), the HIV infection rate was highest in
young New Guinean women, rather than homosexual men, or intravenous drug
users, as it was in Australia. The article provides an explanation that young
women in New Guinea are being exploited by older New Guinean men. The
possibility of deliberate demonization of New Guinean men (as being sexually
aggressive and promiscuous) and women (as being weak and tending to
prostitution) occurred to me, but I needed more proof to satisfy myself that the
demonization was deliberate rather than unintended. The explanation reads:
The greatest HIV infection rate in PNG was among women aged 17-35,
Health Department statistics found.
Dr Timothy Pyakalyia, the departments deputy secretary, said 65% of
HIV patients younger than 26 were women.
Dr Pyakalyia blamed the high infection rate among young women on
the social disadvantages they faces in PNG and their exploitation by older
men who were carrying the virus. In developing countries, younger females
are basically being exploited by older males who are financially secure, he
said.
Are we to believe, then, that exploitation of younger women by financially
secure older men is more likely to occur in developing countries than
developed ones? Considering what is generally referred to as development
development of the mining, construction, monocrop agriculture, timber and cattle
industries, all of which have been controlled by financially over-secure male
tycoons for centuries (since their inception, in fact), it is a ridiculous insinuation
that this sort of industrial development brings emancipation to women.
16
17
marketing and advertising on drug promotion these days. From the 16.2.2001
edition:
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The recent edition of Australian Doctor, from which these advertising slogans are
taken, contains an article of particular relevance to understanding the relationship
between corporations, government and the medical profession in Australia, and
elsewhere in the Western World. Credited to Heather Ferguson, the article
features a close-up photograph of Australian Federal Health Minister Dr. Michael
Woolridges face, below which is the caption: Dr Woolridgeunder increasing
fire over appointment of Mr Clear.
The article, titled Drug industry push to join govt bodies concerns the recent
appointment to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee (PBAC), a
supposedly independent expert body that advises the Federal government on what
drugs to subsidise on the National Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), of Mr
Pat Clear, previously a senior executive at Glaxo-Wellcome (the worlds largest
drug company) and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the Australian
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19
20
Glaxo-Wellcome was said to be the biggest drug company in the world, rivalled
only by the American Merck Sharpe & Dohme, even before the recent merger with
SmithKline Beecham. In the 1980s many already huge drug companies merged
lowering their distribution and advertising costs, and allowing them to downsize.
This did not mean that drug prices came down. On the contrary, they rocketed. The
AIDS epidemic has been the biggest money spinner in the Third World, while
drug treatments for mental illness and heart disease prevention are the biggest
drains on the public purse in First World nations. This difference between the
Third and First worlds in their drug purchases reflect the radical differences in
disease patterns and drug-marketing strategies by pharmaceutical companies. The
head offices of almost all these pharmaceutical companies are located in capital
cities of one or another First World nation. Of those that sell drugs in Australia
the biggest of these drug companies are located in the USA, UK, Switzerland,
Germany, Belgium, Scandinavia (mainly Sweden and Denmark), Australia, France,
Italy and Spain in roughly that order. The same drug companies dominate the
pharmaceutical industry around the world.
Giant drug companies are often referred to as multinational or transnational
corporations. This is misleading, because although these companies certainly
operate in many nations and across national borders, they are inevitably based in
only one country, or at the most, two. It is in this country that major corporate
decisions are made, and from the head office in this country that the orders and
protocols obeyed by the whole corporation emanate.
The biggest drug companies are among the largest corporations in the world
(although they do not rival the biggest mining and oil companies or banking
corporations in size), and make bigger sales profits than any other. Drug companies
also operate across more national boundaries than any other due to the ubiquitous
need for medicines, and the monopolies held by particular companies over specific
patented drugs. The advertising budget of the large companies amounts to
billions of dollars every year, and they are able to employ the most expensive
advertising and legal experts to sell their wares. Major decisions about advertising
and promotional strategy emanate, as in the case of other large corporations, from
the head office of each drug company, as do major financial decisions (such as
takeovers and mergers with other drug companies). These are multibillion-dollar
decisions, and drug companies are eager to know what various independent
government committees know, and have advance knowledge impending scandals
or litigation risks. Thus Mr Clear, were he to retain political and social contacts
with staff of Glaxo-Wellcome or members of the Australian Pharmaceutical
21
22
POSSIBLE MOTIVES FOR USING THE HUMAN IMMUNE DEFICIENCY VIRUS (HIV) AS
A BIOLOGICAL WEAPON:
1. As a measure against Third World overpopulation.
2. Implementation of eugenics programs.
3. Drug development and experimentation.
4. Promotion of contraceptives (condoms, spermicidal gels and lubricants)
5. Drug sales (AZT/Zidovudine, other antiviral drugs, antibiotics, antifungals,
psychoactive drugs, vitamins and mineral supplements)
6. Induction and promotion of terror resulting in increased insurance sales, treatment
services (medical, psychiatric, alternative/complementary)
7. Genocide of people with native rights of ownership of land and resources
8. Genocide of targetted races and ethnic groups
9. Genocide of targetted individuals deemed to be depraved/degenerate (homosexuals,
intravenous drug-injectors)
10. Genocide of targetted religious groups and religious dissidents
11. Genocide of women of child-bearing age (in Third World)
12. Genocide of children and babies (in Third World)
13. Stigmatization of targetted ethnic, religious, political groups and dissident individuals
14. Promotion of screening, diagnostic and follow up blood tests
15. Surveillance of targetted populations and induction into chronic disease state
16. Collection of human and animal tissue for tissue banks.
17. Increased funding for drug and vaccine research
18. Promotion of hepatitis B vaccination and other vaccines
19. Increased profits for animal experimentation industry (including breeding, construction
of institutions for research, specialist equipment etc)
20. Increased public donations to charities for medical research and aid to the Third
World
21. Statistics and data collection and manipulation
22. Propaganda against selected targets for demonization
23. Propaganda glorifying relevant institutions for their fight against AIDS
24. Propaganda in Third World promoting First World drugs
25. Demonization of men in nations ravaged by AIDS (accusations of sexual violence,
promiscuity and bestiality)
26. Demonization of women in nations ravaged by AIDS (accusations of weakness and
helplessness, tendency to prostitution, ignorance)
27. Demonization of youth in First, Second and Third World Nations (as prone to drug
addiction and abuse, violence and decadence)
23
24
appointment of the Belgian microbiologist Peter Piot as head of the United Nations
peak AIDS body (UNAIDS).
1910:
Winston Churchill becomes Home Secretary of the British Empire in 1910.
Churchill was initiated as a Freemason at Studholme Lodge No.1591 in 1901.
According to his official biographer, Sir Martin Gilbert, Churchill was, at the time
in favour of the confinement, segregation and sterilization of a class of persons
contemporarily described as the feeble minded.
According to Gilbert, Churchill, a prominent and loud enthusiast of Galtons
eugenics strategies was one of the early drafters of the Mental Deficiency Act
1913. This cruel law legislated for permanent incarceration of British subjects
labelled as mental defectives graded as idiots, imbeciles or feeble minded,
moral defectives and those diagnosed as insane. He had sought legislation for
forced sterilization of these people, as was the case in several states in the USA
(notably Iowa), but this was rejected by British parliament. Churchill had been
impressed by Dr H.C. Sharps booklet The Sterilization of Degenerates when he
read it in 1910, and was, according to Sir Martin, in favour of using huge doses of
X-rays (then called Roentgen rays) to the genitals, though, he argued for surgical
sterilization of defective men and women, too.
1910:
King Edward VII dies and his younger brother George V ascends the British
throne.
1911:
Dr Francis Peyton Rous transplants cancer between chickens
and then between species, with funding by Rockefeller
Foundation (wins Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology in
1966, many years after his discovery, which was kept largely
secret till then).
1912:
First International Eugenics Conference held 24-30 July 1912 in London. Churchill
25
26
and the gas-rich Torres Strait. New Zealand gets the phosphorus-rich island of
Nauru, while France gets to keep several Pacific Islands, as well as previously
German and French colonies in South-East Asia (Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam).
The USA retains control of the Philippines, various strategic locations in the
Pacific (including some they could test their missiles at) and also gains control of
the League of Nations (and consequently the United Nations Organization when it
forms at the end of the Second World War).
1931:
Dr Cornelius P. Rhoads transplants cancer to Puerto
Ricans, under sponsorship of Rockefeller Institute.
When exposed by Puerto Rican Nationalist leader
Pedro Albizu Campos, Rhoads is transferred, and
subsequently promoted to head two chemical
warfare research projects in the 1940s. He then
established U.S. Biological Warfare facilities in
Maryland, Utah and Panama. After WWII, Rhoads
is given a seat on the U.S. Atomic Energy
Commission, where he continues human
experimentation, studying effects of nuclear
(ionising) radiation in causing cancers and other
diseases.
1934:
King George V dies and is succeeded by his oldest son, Edward VIII. Edward, who
was a Freemason, and a personal friend of Winston Churchill, abdicate the next
year to marry a divorced American heiress, and is succeeded by his younger
brother, George VI. George VI, the father of Queen Elizabeth, was a Freemason,
and led Britain as the Emperor of Great Britain and India, into the Second World
War, dying in 1952 at the age of 57.
1940s:
During Second World War extensive development of chemical, biological warfare
27
28
29
warfare.
The minutes of a 1948 meeting at Victoria Army Barracks note that Sir Frank
Macfarlane Burnet was of the opinion that if Australia undertakes work in this
field it should be on the tropical offensive side rather than the defensive.
After Burnet visited Britain to examine their chemical and biological warfare effort
in 1950, he reported to the committee that though the initiation of epidemics in
enemy populations had usually been discarded as a means of waging war
because of the danger of it rebounding on the user, that:
In a country of low sanitation the introduction of an exotic intestinal
pathogen, e.g. by water contamination, might initiate widespread
dissemination,
and that:
Introduction of yellow fever into a country with appropriate mosquito
vectors might build up into a disabling epidemic before control measures
were established.
In 1951, the subcommittee recommended that:
A panel reporting to the chemical and biological warfare subcommittee
should be authorised to report on the offensive potentiality of biological
agents likely to be effective against the local food supplies of South-East
Asia and Indonesia.
From 1950 to 1960, the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute at the University of
Melbourne, headed by Frank Macfarlane Burnet produces more published papers
on virology and immunology than any other institute in the world. In 1965, Burnet
retires and is replaced by 34-year-old microbiologist Gustav Nossal (later Professor
and Sir Gustav Nossal). Nossal, as consultant to the WHO, supervised the 1970s
Smallpox Eradication (vaccine) Program in Africa, implicated in the spread of HIV
into African populations, following its initial introduction to Belgian Congo.
Burnet continued to work at the University of Melbourne, drawing attention to the
problem of overpopulation as president of the Australian Academy of Science
until his retirement in 1978.
1950s:
CIA director Alan Dulles sets up MK Programs sometime between 1950 and 1953,
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31
introduce fragments of one virus into another, or into bacteria and other cells to
increase their virulence and change their behaviour. He was recognised for
research into bacteriophages in the 1920s, following work (1925-1927) at the
Lister Institute in London. These techniques allow engineering of infectious agents
to make them more lethal.
In the 1950s, following his secret work urging the Australian government and
defence forces to develop biological and chemical weapons, Burnet changed from
researching viruses (actually, he was collecting exotic viruses from wherever he
could, and introducing them into various species) to studying immunology. It was
then that Burnet was credited with working out details of the function of
lymphocytes (T-cells and B-cells) and the production of clonal antibodies, for
which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine/Physiology in 1960.
Understanding the stimulation or inhibition of antibody production by B-cells and
immune activity of T-cells (thymus-activated lymphocytes) allowed drugs and
viruses to be developed that killed specific tissues and organs in the body, inducing
leukaemias, lymphomas and auto-immune diseases. Leukaemia was previously
known to be causable by exposure to ionizing radiation (including gamma rays and
X-rays), especially after Marie Curie died of radiation-induced leukaemia.
Through the 1960s until his death in 1985 Burnet remained vocal about the threat
of overpopulation (in the Third World), echoing concerns of the discredited
eugenics movement and Paul and Anne Erlich at Stanford University.
Demonization of Blacks by Gadjusek and Burnet:
Also in the 1950s, Dr Carlton Gadjusek from US National
Institutes of Health investigated, with Burnet, a new epidemic
of encephalopathy in New Guinea. What was called kuru
(spongiform encephalopathy) was possibly deliberate
introduction of sheep-infection scrapie to New Guinean
highland Fore people. The investigations were done in
Melbourne Universitys Walter and Eliza Hall Institute, which
Burnet headed until 1965. The infection, described as due to first
slow or retro virus, was attributed to mortuary cannibalism
by Gadjusek and Burnet. Gadjusek won the 1976 Nobel Prize for this discovery,
sharing it with the Jewish-American discoverer of Hepatitis B, Baruch Blumberg.
Gadjusek was jailed many years later (in his old age) for sexual abuse of boys he
32
brought he adopted and brought to live with him in the USA from New Guinea
and the Pacific Islands (supposedly for their education).
Also in the 1950s, British drug company Burroughs-Wellcome pharmaceuticals
develops Azidothymidine (AZT) that destroys white blood cells, causing immune
collapse. AZT was marketed for some years as treatment for blood and other
cancers, but failed to gain support from oncologists. Wellcome pharmaceuticals
was (and still is, as part of GSK) also a major producer of opiate drugs, including
codeine, morphine and methadone (mostly derived, since the 1970s, from poppy
plantations in Tasmania).
In 1959 Sir Charles Galton Darwin (grandson of the famous evolutionary biologist)
warns of the danger of overpopulation as more serious than the threat of nuclear
war at Caltech (California Institute of Technology) urging development of a more
brutal solution than merely warfare. This was said in a speech entitled
Forecasting the Future, and was published by Unwin books in Frontiers of
Science (1959). Sir Charles was a physicist involved with the Manhattan Project
during WW II.
1960s:
World Health Organization adopts global immunization by needle as a prime
objective in promoting global health along with promotion of voluntary
sterilization of men and women, and use of condoms (to reduce population growth)
sponsoring population studies around the world based on the assumption that the
world is dangerously overpopulated. Blame for this overpopulation was placed on
people of the Third World (then usually referred to as underdeveloped nations,
later developing nations, where population increases were more rapid than in
developed nations). Sub-Saharan Africa, South America (especially Brazil), India
and South-East Asia were focussed on in WHO population control programs
(centred on promotion of contraceptives).
1969:
US biological warfare program to develop a refractory agent that causes collapse
of the immune system is approved by Senate after Donald MacArthur seeks
funding, claiming the Russians would otherwise beat them to it.
US biological warfare programs in Bethesda Maryland renamed cancer research
programs and extended to network of private universities and associated medical
research institutes, after President Richard Nixon signs treaty banning offensive
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biological warfare.
1970s:
Dr Baruch Blumberg, a Jewish-American graduate of
Columbia University, is credited with discovery of Hepatitis B
(serum hepatitis, known to be transmitted by infected blood
transfusions) though he says, in his 1976 Nobel speech that a
collaboration of scientists from many nations were responsible
for isolation of the Hepatitis B surface antigen (known as the
Australia antigen, since it was first isolated from a blood
specimen from an Australian Aborigine, according to
Blumberg).
Previous work in Surinam (formerly Dutch Guiana) in South
America in the early 1950s included testing resistance of
different human races to Filaria, a parasitic infection that causes elephantiasis in
Moengo, a remote mining village populated by expatriates of many nationalities.
Blumberg worked at the NIH from 1957 to 1964, before employment at the
Institute for Cancer Research (later Fox Chase Cancer Research Center) funded by
Fox Chase Bank (New York). In the mid-1970s he was involved in development of
the Hepatitis B vaccine which was licensed to American drug giant Merck.
Hepatitis B is transmitted by blood and sexual contact, especially anal intercourse,
and unlike Hepatitis A can cause chronic scarring of the liver (cirrhosis) and death,
many years after the infection, and is associated with considerably increased risk of
liver cancer (hepatocellular carcinoma). The likelihood of cirrhosis is increased
with alcohol consumption.
Hepatitis B was found, in the 1970s to be common in South-East Asians, Chinese
and Pacific Islanders. Blumberg is awarded Nobel Prize for discovery of Hepatitis
B in 1976, sharing the prize with Daniel Carlton Gadjusek.
The following is an extract from Baruch Blumbergs addendum to his Nobel
speech:
On 08.07.76, FCCC signed an agreement with Merck & Company, Inc.,
whose vaccine facilities were located near Philadelphia, to produce the
vaccine using the novel method we had designed. The vaccine was made
from small HBV surface antigen particles, made in the liver cells of the
34
human host guided by the surface antigen gene introduced by the virus. This
was a unique method for producing a vaccine that had never been attempted
before.
The vitally important next step was the field testing of the vaccine. For a
variety of reasons we had decided that we would not be directly involved in
the testing of the vaccine. That task was undertaken by Dr. Wolf Szmuness
and his colleagues at the New York Blood Bank. Ordinarily, vaccine field
trials involve thousands or even hundreds of thousands of individuals; for
example, 1.8 million people were involved in the testing of the Salk polio
vaccine. Dr. Szmuness's study required less than a thousand volunteers, but
the results were convincing. He showed that the vaccine was highly effective
over 90% protection rate and it appeared to have no deleterious side
effects.
The above claim of no deleterious side effects
from the Hepatitis B trials conducted by Wolf
Szmuness is strongly contested by AIDS
conspiracy theorists, including Alan Cantwell,
who gave a different account of the New York
Blood Bank Hepatitis B vaccine trials, which
specifically recruited promiscuous homosexuals.
AIDS conspiracy researchers have reported that a
large number of vaccinated men developed
HIV/AIDS in the next few years, and have
suggested that HIV was deliberately introduced
into homosexual populations via contaminated
vaccines in this Hepatitis B vaccine trial.
Paul Erlich, at Stanford University, feeds fear of
growing population by Third World (specifying
Africa, South-East Asia and India) in The
Population Bomb.
See entry above regarding Baruch Blumbergs work with Hepatitis B, and vaccine
against it.
1976:
35
Peter Piot, subsequently Executive Director of UNAIDS, codiscovers Ebola virus, a deadly haemorrhagic fever, in Zaire
(previously Belgian Congo). Piot graduated at the University of
Ghent in Belgium in 1974, and has a PhD in Microbiology from the
University of Antwerp in 1980. He was also Professor of Public
Health at the Prince Leopold Institute of Tropical Medicine in
Antwerp, and a professor at Imperial College, London. From 1991
to 1994, he was president of the International AIDS Society, and
was ennobled as a Baron by King Albert II of Belgium in 1995.
1978-79
First reports of mysterious immune deficiency disease in homosexuals in New
York (Manhattan), Los Angeles and San Francisco. The disease is typified by
opportunistic infections and high incidence of Kaposis Sarcoma, previously
largely confined to elderly Jewish men. This disease, later called AIDS was first
named GRID, or Gay Related Immune Deficiency.
Around the same time (late 1970s, early 1980s) first reports of a similar disease
affecting heterosexual men and women (and later children) in Zaire, Burundi and
Rwanda. These were all ex-Belgian colonies, the indigenous people of Zaire
having been treated with such extraordinary cruelty during the reign of King
Leopold II in what he called the Congo Free State (1880s to 1905) that he
received international condemnation and what he had claimed as a personal
possession was taken out of his hands by the Belgian Government. The grotesque
cruelty of the Belgians in the Congo included hand
hacking and decapitation of Africans who did not produce
the required quotas of rubber, and throwing their children
to crocodiles (see Wikipedia entries on Congo Free State
and Belgian Congo for an outline.
King Leopold II
of Belgium
36
37
1980s:
38
Chapter 2
THE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENTS RESPONSE TO
HIV/AIDS
In 1995, the Commonwealth Government of Australia published an evaluation of
the National HIV/AIDS Strategy, 1993-94 to 1995-96. Titled Valuing the past
39
investing in the future, the evaluation and report were commissioned by the (then)
Commonwealth Minister for Health, Dr Carmen Lawrence. Dr Lawrence, who has
a psychology degree, appointed Professor Richard Feacham (CBE, BSc, PhD, DSc,
Hon FFPHM), Dean Emeritus of the London School of Hygeine and Tropical
Medicine, as the independent evaluator. Professor Feacham wrote in the
foreword that he fully supports the reports content and conclusions, and that:
Australia is to be commended for the prompt and creative way in which
it has responded to this new and special disease. Two features of this
response have been of particular importance and must be maintained: first,
non-partisan political support, which has allowed pragmatic and effective
programs to operate; second, the partnership, which has harnessed the
energies of those groups most affected by HIV, government at several levels,
and researchers and health professionals, Australia can be proud of its
achievements in controlling the spread of HIV and in developing services to
propvide care and support for people living with HIV/AIDS. All this has
been accomplished at reasonable cost.
He adds, though, that:
There is, however, no room for complacency. With current trends, the
target of 2 new infections per 100,000 people per year by the year 2000 will
not be achieved. In particular, the unacceptably high rate of new infections
among gay men must be confronted, and the emerging epidemic among
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people calls for greatly increased
effort and resources. (emphasis added)
Is there really an emerging epidemic of AIDS among the Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islander populations, and if so, what is causing it? In what ways are the
current resources being spent? Why are the specified high risk groups so similar
to the previous targets of negative eugenics programs?
Valuing the pastinvesting in the future: evaluation of the National HIV/AIDS
Strategy 1993-94 to 1995-96 begins with an Overview, in which the problem
is summarised as:
HIV/AIDS is a new disease and, despite enormous advances in
knowledge in the past decade, it is still inadequately understood. There is no
cure and there is no vaccine, and these will probably elude us for some time.
The best estimate of the total number of people who had acquired HIV
infection in Australia by the end of 1994 is 16 000. Among the 5737 people
who had progressed to AIDS by the end of 1994, there had been 4014
deaths. HIV/AIDS is an enormous public health problem by any measure.
40
The overview continues with a false claim regarding 100% fatality from HIV
infection:
HIV/AIDS has similarities with other infections in terms of its routes
of transmission and modes of treatment and care. It remains exceptional,
though, because it presents a unique combination of characteristics: it is 100
per cent fatal (as far as we know); there is a long incubation period, during
which an HIV-positive person may be unaware of his or her infection; there
is often a long period between infection and death, during which an HIVpositive person shows no sign of ill health and is able to transmit the
infection; there is no cure; and the major modes of transmission involve
intimate and sometimes illegal behaviour, making prevention efforts difficult
and community reaction to the disease complex. Added to this is the fact that
Australia is part of a region with rapidly growing HIV epidemics. (p.2)
It was common knowledge in the mid-1990s that HIV-infection does not cause 100
percent mortality. There have been, since tests for HIV antibodies became available
(in the mid-1980s) a group of people (mainly men) who are known to have HIV
antibodies in their blood but have not developed AIDS. These are termed, by the
AIDS research establishment, long term non-progressors. Describing HIV
infection as being 100 percent fatal is a very serious error, since it would
predictably lead to hopeless and extreme pessimism in any person identified as
being HIV-positive. It would also predictably lead to a rising level of paranoia
about HIV infection and drive more people to taking potentially toxic drugs to
attempt to delay what is seen as an inevitable progression of the infection. The
main drug that has been promoted for this reason is Glaxo-Wellcomes Zidovudine,
also known as azidothymidine (AZT). AZT has been known since the 1960s, when
it was being used as a risky palliative treatment for certain serious cancers, to
cause a range of serious health problems, including damage to white blood cells
and immune suppression. Pessimism and a sense of hopelessness are also known to
have suppressive effects on the immune system, and in health, generally. These
problems will be explored in later chapters.
I first read the false claim that HIV infection is 100% fatal in 1997, by which
time I was well aware that 100 percent fatality is extremely rare in medicine. Since
I was also aware of intense medical interest in the long term non-progressors
(those who had been identified as having HIV infection in the mid-1980s) I read
the following claim, by Professor John Mills of the Macfarlane Burnet Centre, that:
There will be cases where patients have had the infection for 20 or 30
years before becoming ill. However virtually everybody infected with HIV
41
will eventually get AIDS, if they are not treated. The estimate at the moment
is about 95% but it could be 100%.
The above quote is transcribed from a public education pamphlet titled
HIV/AIDS The Whole Worlds Problem produced by the Macfarlane Burnet
Centre in Melbourne and is adapted from a talk by Professor John Mills, Director,
Macfarlane Burnet Centre for Medical Research. Professor Mills, a graduate of
Harvard University in the USA, is also the Director of the National Centre in HIV
Virology Research, and is an honourary Professor of Microbiology at the
University of Melbourne, Monash University and the Royal Melbourne Institute of
Technology. He is also adjunct Professor at the University of California in the
USA and Chairman (and inaugural President) of the Australian Association of
Medical Research Institutes. Presenting an obvious conflict of interest, Professor
Mills is also, according to the Macfarlane Burnet Centres 1997, 1998 and 1999
Annual Reports, Director of AMRAD Corporation (a Melbourne-based drug and
biotechnology company) and Rothschilds Bioinvestment Fund, a profit-motivated
branch of the massive Rothschilds Banking Corporation.
Human Immunodeficiency Virus was publicly identified as the cause of AIDS in
1984, following publication of work by the American cancer researcher Robert
Gallo. Gallo, who was Chief of the Laboratory of Tumor Cell Biology at the
National Cancer Institute, in Bethesda, Maryland, named the virus he postulated as
the cause of AIDS, which had been first described in 1978, HTLV III (Human TLymphocyte Virus, type III). Since HIV-infection has only been detectable since
the mid-1980s the claim that there will be cases where patients have had the
infection for 20 or 30 years before becoming ill is clearly speculative. The claim
that the HIV infection is fatal if not treated is also extremely misleading. No
drug treatment has been discovered that prevents people infected with HIV from
dying.
The fact that drug treatment does not prevent death from HIV is admitted, as it
turns out, in the same paper:
There are a number of ways in which people are treated, including
general supportive care and good nutrition. The associated infections and
tumours which occur can be treated to some extent. Sinve 1987 drugs have
been available for treatment AZT, Zidovudine, ddI (didanosine), ddC
(zalcitibine) and stavudine (d4T). They are reasonably effective but really
only make a two to three year difference in survival. (emphasis added)
Obviously, the more pessimistic the alleged untreated prognosis (likelihood of
42
becoming ill and dying), the more effective will appear (clinically and statistically)
any palliative drug treatment. For example, if it is predicted that a person will die
from HIV infection in 6 months and they live for two years while taking AZT, it
will appear that the drug has prolonged life by 18 months. If the prediction is that
people will die, instead, in 10 years time the same drug would be seen as having
worsened chances of survival. The same applies for predictions of 100% fatality. If
statistics are compiled based on this assumption, and extrapolations are made of
the likely incidence of HIV infection in the general population, or subgroups
within it, these will be glaringly inaccurate but consistently tending towards
exaggeration of the efficacy of drug treatment.
The fact that overly pessimistic prognoses increase the apparent effectiveness of
interventional treatments has relevance to disease states generally both physical
and mental. Of the medical specialties, psychiatry and oncology require special
mention in this regard. Pessimism is a consistent feature of the entire system of
psychiatric labels that are currently employed by health care workers around the
world. A person who has been depressed is predicted, on the basis of statistics, to
have recurrent episodes unless they take their medicine. People who have had
psychosis are likewise predicted to have further, worsening episodes of illness
unless, again, they take their tablets (or subject themselves to injections). Those
who have been diagnosed with manic-depression are told that only by taking
mood stabilisers (generally lithium) can they hope to remain sane. In each of
these cases the chronic disease state caused by pessimistic prognoses combined
with drug toxicity are routinely ignored, denied, and blamed on the mental
illness. When the roots of these pessimistic psychiatry labels are examined, the
historical trail inevitably leads to negative eugenics.
The 1995 report, Valuing the pastinvesting in the future is a publication of the
AIDS/Communicable Diseases Branch of the (Australian) Commonwealth
Department of Human Services and Health. Although the independent evaluator
appointed by the Minister for Health was the British professor Richard Feacham,
the evaluation was a group effort, organised by the Department of Health staff (the
AIDS/Communicable Diseases Branch Evaluation Team). Professor Feacham
evidently spoke to representatives of various interest groups as the main part of
his independent evaluation and was supported by an evaluation advisory
committee chaired by Peter Read, chairman of the Intergovernmental Committee
on AIDS. Members of this committee included representatives from the
Queensland Department of Health, Victorian Department of Health and Human
Services, Commonwealth Department of Human Services and Health, Australian
Federation of AIDS Organisations, Haemophilia Foundation Australia, People
43
44
45
veiled admission that, since the time of the notorious Grim Reaper ads in the
1980s, the indigenous people of Australia have been regarded, by the medical
profession, as a high risk group:
The possibility of a major outbreak of HIV infection among Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander people has been a cause for concern since the
AIDS epidemic began in Australia.
No such epidemic has occurred, but the authors continue to predict one:
So far, the information available from routine surveillance indicates that
the rates of HIV infection among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
people are similar to those in the non-indigenous populationBut it appears
that the rate of HIV diagnosis in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people
is increasing, in contrast with rates in the overall Australian HIV epidemic,
which reached a peak in the early to mid-1980s. New HIV diagnoses in
Australia between 1992 and 1994 contained only 17 per cent of cumulative
HIV notifications, whereas among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
people during the same period new HIV diagnoses constituted 50 per cent of
cumulative diagnoses (see Table 2.13). (p. 49)
Table 2.13 gives the following details. Between 1985 and 1988 there were 20
reported cases of HIV infection in people categorised as Aboriginal and Torres
Strait Islanders, out of an Australian total of 11,054 cases. Between 1989 and
1991 there were 25 new A & TSI cases (as presented in this table) compared
with 4,428 cases for Aust. The two years from 1992 to 1994 saw 45 cases in
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders out of an Australian total of 3,239 reported
new HIV infections. From these statistics it has been calculated that, since 50% of
the new cases in Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders were reported in the 199294 biennium, while in Australia as a whole only 17 percent of the total
(cumulative) number of cases were reported during this period of time, this
indicated an emerging epidemic. When the rest of the text, which will be quoted
almost in full, is carefully analysed, keeping in mind the history and doctrines of
eugenics, questions are raised more by what is omitted than what is included.
It is for this reason that the following quote is rather long, since it is intended to
serve as a reference for analysis in subsequent chapters. Continuing from the
previous quotation:
Possible biases in these data include misclassification or non-reporting
of Aboriginality and the non-uniform surveillance mechanisms for HIV
infection that are used by the States and Territories some do not include
data on Aboriginality; others have included such data only in recent years.
46
47
48
pandemic and that efforts to control its spread domestically cannot be made
in isolation from international efforts to contain the disease. It is also
testimony to Australias humanitarian commitment to help poorer nations
cope with the impact of HIV and to prevent further spread. (p.167-8)
Three government agencies are identified, in Professor Feachams report, as being
reponsible for supporting Australias international response. These are the
Australian Agency for International Development (AusAID), the Department of
Human Services and Health and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Some of these programs will be explored in subsequent chapters, particularly those
involving the International Health Unit of the Macfarlane Burnet Centre in
conjunction with AusAID. Valuing the pastinvesting in the future explains the
central role of AusAID in the second Strategy of the National HIV/AIDS program:
AusAID is identified in the second Strategy as the agency that had
provided, and would continue to provide, most of the financial support for
international HIV/AIDS programs. It spent an estimated $14.02 million in
1994-95, up from 6.14 million in 1992-93.
AusAID delivers international HIV/AIDS assistance through individual
country and regional bilateral programs, multilateral agencies, and NGOs.
Among the agencies and organisations receiving funing in 1994-95 were the
WHO Global Program on AIDS (in the process of becoming UNAIDS), the
United Nations Development Fund, the South Pacific Commission,
UNICEF, AFAO [Australian Federation of AIDS organizations], the
Australian Council for Overseas Aid, the Australian Red Cross Society,
World Vision, Community Aid Abroad, the Adventist Development and
Relief Agency and Quaker Service Australia.
The Australian governments HIV/AIDS strategy, domestically and internationally,
has, since the First Strategy, been centred on needle and syringe exchange and
the promotion of condom use. This combined strategy is frequently referred to as
harm reduction, a term that is also, and even more inappropriately, used to
describe needle and syringe distribution without reliable collection of contaminated
(used) needles. Professor Feachams evaluation of the Australian Governments
First Strategy is that Australia has been successful in containing epidemics among
injecting drug users, sex workers and heterosexuals but there is still much to be
done. Needle exchange programs are recommended strongly, which the report
claims must be a foundation of Australias prevention efforts in a third Strategy
and beyond:
Needle and syringe exchange programs were established before the
first Strategy and have continued in the second Strategy. A study of the cost-
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50
discrimination that has resulted in this problem. The risk of introducing those
imprisoned into self-injection of drugs, with attendent risk of infection with HIV
and hepatitis C is evident from what is mentioned, however:
Since nearly half of all people imprisoned in Australia report a history
of injecting drugs, and about half of these people continue to inject while in
prison, it is vital that more efforts are made to overcome barriers to the
provision of safe injecting equipment in Australian prisons [a better
alternative would surely be to release those incarcerated for political reasons,
minor crimes and victimless crimes; and abolish privately owned prisons,
which, since they profit more from more prisoners can be predicted to
contribute to a dangerously expanding imprisonment industry]. This
would also help reduce the currently high rates of hepatitis C transmission
resulting from the sharing of contaminated injecting equipment in prisons.
HIV prevention efforts in prisons would also be helped if condoms were
provided. Prisons are of central importance in HIV prevention among
Australias indigenous people because of the over-representation of these
people in prison populations. (p.3)
The Macfarlane Burnet Centre, based at the Fairfield Infectious Diseases hospital
in Melbourne, is the main NGO (non-government organization) involved in
promoting HIV harm reduction strategies in the Asia-Pacific region. Experts at
the centre advise the United Nations and the Australian government about how to
contain the AIDS epidemic. They train the trainers setting up AIDS programs in
various developing countries and inviting health workers to learn about public
health. Strangely, however, the HIV surveillance and prevention strategies they
promote are almost identical regardless of whether the at-risk population is male
homosexuals in Australian cities or remote hill-tribes in Asia: condom-use and
immunizations against viral infections, after extensive blood-collection replacing
Third World debt with Third World compensation is not on the MBC agenda,
although this would achieve much more in terms of International Health.
Homosexually active men account for the vast majority of cases of AIDS that have
been diagnosed in Australia. This has remained the case since the first diagnosed
cases of HIV infection and AIDS in Australia. The report confirms this:
The vast majority of those diagnosed cases of HIV and AIDS in
Australia for which the route of infection was reported have been in men
who became infected through homosexual contactThe numbers of
diagnosed cases of HIV infection associated with heterosexual contact, the
injection of illicit drugs, or medical procedures have been relatively small
compared with the number of cases transmitted through sexual contact
51
between men. The number and proportion of cases for which no exposure
category was reported has steadily declined as surveillance procedures have
improved [increased] nationally. The annual number of HIV diagnoses in
women has been roughly constant in the past decade, but there has been a
clear move towards a higher number of cases attributed to heterosexual
transmission (parallelled by a decline in other modes of transmission).
Because of the relatively small number of women who have acquired HIV
infection in Australia, the transmission of HIV from mother to child has been
rare. (p.32)
The reference, above, to HIV infection from medical procedures refers to
infection from blood transfusions and other blood products between 1981 and
1985, prior to which about 200 people are known to have developed AIDS from
infected blood, many of them suffering from the hereditary coagulation disorder
haemophilia (which, coincidentally, runs in the British royal family). Since
universal screening of blood donors was introduced in 1985, the risk of such
infection is said, in the report, to have substantially improved. There is another
medical procedure, however, that is not discussed as a possible risk factor in this,
or any other official text or report about HIV infection and AIDS. This is
immunization, also known as vaccination.
Since the 1970s, male homosexuals have been specified, by the NHMRC and other
medical authorities, as being at particular risk, along with Aboriginal Australians,
Torres Strait Islanders and South-East Asians (particularly Vietnamese) of
developing hepatitis B, a viral infection that can cause cirrhosis (chronic
inflammation and scarring of the liver, ultimately resulting in liver failure and
death). This was taught to me at medical school in the early 1980s, and when
hepatitis B immunization became publicly available, in the form of SmithKline
Beechams Engerix-B, it was these populations that I, and other doctors identified
as high risk groups. We also identified ourselves as being in a high risk group
and the more anxious of the young doctors had themselves immediately
immunized.
The American AIDS researcher, Dr Alan Cantwell, is one of a small number of
physicians who have publicly expressed an opinion that, firstly, the AIDS epidemic
is man-made, and secondly, that the initial inoculation of HIV into white
homosexual men in the late 1970s, was probably done through vaccination in
experimental hepatitis B vaccine trials.
Because there has not been an epidemic of HIV and AIDS among all the health
52
workers who were immunized with Engerix-B and Merck Sharp & Dohmes
alternative, H-B-Vax II, in the 1980s, the theory that HIV was unintentionally
introduced into homosexuals via hepatitis vaccines in the 1980s is not tenable.
Could it have been done intentionally by using contaminated batches of vaccine
to target male homosexuals? Certainly the medical infrastructure exists to conduct
such an act. There exist special clinics that service largely homosexual clients,
many of which are connected with STD (sexually transmitted disease) clinics via
the public hospital system.
When the officially declared high risk groups for developing HIV infection and
AIDS, and the epidemiology of the epidemic, are compared with the previous
targets of negative eugenics programs, some notable coincidences are immediately
evident. Specifically, the Nazis targetted homosexuals, drug addicts and blacks
(Negroes) as degenerate and needing of mercy killing. If one looks deeper at
the eugenics doctrines that the Nazi program was based on one finds also a morbid
preoccupation with the threat of overpopulation. This threat was seen, by
eugenists, as coming from the uncivilised masses, most of whom were darkskinned and resident in what were designated as underdeveloped countries. Far
from diminishing after the carnage of the Second World War, fears of
overpopulation expressed by a predominantly white, male, professional elite grew
in the 1950s, during the early years of the Cold War and exploded in the 1960s,
with the publication, in 1968, of The Population Bomb, by Stanford Universitys
Professor of Population Studies, Paul Ehrlich.
Chapter 3
THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE EUGENICS MOVEMENT
The word eugenics was first coined by the English psychologist Francis Galton in
1883. A few years later Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, founded, with the
evolutionary biologists son, Major Leonard Darwin, the first Society for Eugenics.
53
The stated objective of the eugenics society, and the politico-scientific movements
it spawned, was to improve the human stock by selective breeding. This was
attempted by various means, based on two complementary strategies: those of
superior stock were encouraged to have larger families, and those deemed to be
of inferior stock were prevented from having children at all. These parallel
strategies were termed, respectively, positive and negative eugenics.
This present work examines role eugenics has played in the planning and execution
of genocide, specifically exploring the theory that the global AIDS epidemic is the
result of the implementation of negative eugenic programs with the intent of
culling undesirables and reducing the threat of overpopulation.
The 1948 United Nations laws against genocide were formulated to prevent a
repeat of the horrific genocide that had occurred between 1938 and 1945 in Naziruled Europe. This, including the mass-murder of over 20 million Jews, Poles,
Russians and Gypsies ('non-Germans') had come about because of the merciless
application of negative eugenics programs by the German National Socialist
(Nazi) regime.
It is suppressed history, in Commonwealth nations, that the notorious doctrines of
eugenics did not originate in Germany and were certainly not the creation of Adolf
Hitler. Rather, they were exported to Germany from the University of Cambridge
in England in the late 19th century. Cambridge was then, and remains, one of the
most respected universities in the world, and was the mother university of
Harvard University in the USA, when it was founded back in the 1600s. The
University of Cambridge also has close links with the oldest and most prestigious
Australian Universities, including the University of Melbourne, where my coresearcher Sara obtained her education degree during the writing of this book, and
the University of Queensland, where I gained my medical degree in 1983.
When I studied medicine, from 1978 to 1983, the first reports of a new infectious
disease that affected gays in the USA was filtering through to medical students in
Australia, but it was only when I did my residency at the Royal Brisbane Hospital
that I heard that it was a viral disease, thought to be caused by a slow virus or
retrovirus, transmissible, like viral Hepatitis B, by blood and sexual contact. I
did not treat any patients with the disease myself, nor examine any, though I did
hear of an unfortunate young man who had a surgical problem that went untreated
because the surgeons at the hospital refused to operate on him, for fear of
becoming infected. I gathered that GRID or Gay Related Immune Deficiency as
it was then called, was caused by a newly discovered virus by the name of HTLV3.
54
55
in the demographics of those infected. Most cases of AIDS, though, were in socalled Pattern 2 countries. Here the infection affected men and women equally,
was not associated particularly with homosexuality or injected drug use, and was
also common in children.
In 1997 I read, in an Australian medical newspaper that a new front in the AIDS
war had developed in New Guinea, where a high infection rate had been
discovered in 17 to 25-year old women.
This rang alarm bells in my mind. New Guinea has an unfortunate colonial history,
as a colony of Germany, of Britain and of Queensland. The exploitation of New
Guinea, I knew, was centrally connected to the exploitation of its forests and the
minerals, especially gold. The same can be said for Sub-Saharan Africa, where
AIDS has claimed more lives than in the rest of the world combined.
The present work charts previously unexplored historical and medical territory
the influence of negative eugenics since the end of the Second World War, in
various areas of medicine and politics, not in Germany, but in nations of the British
Commonwealth and the USA. The modern history of eugenics can only be
understood, though, when the earlier history of the Eugenics Movement and its
founders is explored.
According to the 1974 edition of the Dorlands Medical Dictionary, the term
eugenics is derived from the Greek eu, meaning well, good, or easily and
gennan, meaning to generate, defining the word as follows:
eugenics: the study and control of procreation as a means of improving
the hereditary characteristics of a race; called also orthogenicsnegative e.,
that concerned with prevention of reproduction (procreation) by individuals
possessing inferior or undesirable traits. Positive e., that concerned with
promotion of optimal mating of individuals possessing superior or desirable
traits.
The 1976 edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary defines eugenic as, of the
production of fine (esp. human) offspring by improvement of inherited qualities.
One who practices, or advocates eugenics is called, according to this dictionary, a
eugenist. The Dorlands Medical Dictionary uses the alternative term
eugenicist.
The study of eugenics is fundamentally connected with the study of scientific and
political racism, and no study of the current causes of racism can be complete
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57
year history of eugenics came about through research into the history of medical
treatment of psychological problems, and specifically my research into psychiatric
theory and practice. This, I found, is fundamentally rooted in eugenic theories. At
the same time, it is rare for those with modern eugenic ideas to recognize the
source of their beliefs. These days eugenic doctrines are presented, more often, as
modern genetic studies, international health, population health and biological
psychiatry.
Although several prominent psychiatrists of the early twentieth century were selfdeclared eugenists, many more eugenists have not been psychiatrists. This is
because, although it has had much influence on psychiatric theory and practice,
eugenics was developed as a general anthropological theory, by an aristocratic
English general scientist with a particular fondness for statistics, good family
connections and a total idolization of his older cousin, Charles Darwin.
This was Francis Galton, who, despite never finishing his medical studies at the
University of Cambridge, went on to shape the development of academic and
institutional medicine and surgery in addition to the fields of anthropology,
sociology, psychology and politics at Cambridge and, later, around the world.
How Francis Galton came to be so influential provides a clear refutation of his
central theory: that the ruling classes occupied their exalted position in society, not
because of familial and political connections (nepotism and jobs for the boys)
but because of genetic superiority.
Like his cousin, Charles Darwin, Galton, born into a wealthy English family, was
groomed by his father to become a doctor. With his fathers assistance Galton
entered medical school at the esteemed Cambridge University in England in 1841
at the age of 18. From the time of his birth Francis lived a life of affluence and
privilege in British society. He was given opportunities that few men of his time
were afforded, these being largely arranged by his ambitious and influential father.
Professor C.P. Blacker, General Secretary of the Eugenics Society, and physician at
the infamous Bethlem Mental Hospital, wrote, in Eugenics: Galton and After
(1952):
Galtons father, ever solicitous of his sons education, arranged that the
youth should accompany Dr. Allen Miller, subsequently a great chemist and
for many years Treasurer of the Royal Society, to Giessen in order to attend
lectures on chemistry by Liebig, then the leading exponent of this subject in
Germany. (p.21)
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This followed an earlier arrangement by his father, when Galton was 16, to give his
son a direct channel to the corridors of power. Blacker writes:
When Galton was sixteen, his father arranged that he should accompany
Sir William Bowman, later eminent as an authority on diseases of the eye, on
a continental tour, partly as a holiday, partly to see medical institutions.
Galton then witnessed his first operation. He also paid a visit to a mental
hospital in ViennaOn returning to England, still aged sixteen, Galton was
sent as an indoor pupil to the Birmingham General Hospital, where he
worked in the dispensary and later in the wardsGalton then moved to
London and spent a year at Kings College where he was given less
responsibility and did less practical work than in Birmingham but enjoyed
better teaching. (p.21)
When his father died in 1845, Galton, then 23 years old, was left a large
inheritance, and, being independently wealthy, abandoned his medical studies,
becoming a gentleman of leisure and independent means. He decided, instead, to
seek his fame through travel, hoping to emulate his venerated cousin Charles, who
had made such notable discoveries when he travelled to distant lands aboard the
HMS Beagle.
When, in 1850, Galton organised a subsequently lauded (and richly rewarded)
journey to Southern Africa, he did so with the support and organizational help of
the Royal Geographical Society. The British Psychiatrist C.P. Blacker, then
General Secretary of the Eugenics Society, Adviser on Population and Medicosocial Questions to the British Ministry of Health, Honorary Secretary of the
Population Investigation Committee and previous Member of the Biological
and Medical Committee in the Royal Commission of Population (1944-49) wrote
about Galtons life 40 years after the founder of eugenics death.
In Eugenics: Galton and After (1952) Blacker writes of Galtons motives for this
trip, which was subsequently awarded by a Gold Medal from the Royal
Geographic Society and election as a Fellow of the Royal Society at the young
age of 34:
Galton was attracted to South Africa by the romance of exploration and
the prospect of shooting big game. The recent discovery of Lake Ngami did
much to shape his plans, and the reader who wishes to understand Galtons
travels would do well to have a mental picture of where this is. Lake Ngami
occupies a central position of the Southern tip of the continent. It lies about
950 miles from the East coast and about 550 miles from the West. Separating
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Lake Ngami from the colonized lands of the Cape lies the Kalahari desert.
Livingstone and Oswell had shortly before traversed this desert, thus
rendering accessible the well-watered districts of the lake to wagons from
the Cape. Galton wanted to explore this new opening, and very sensibly as
it turned out made contacts with the Royal Geographical Society. His
vague plans were then carefully discussed, given precision and
authoritatively approved. Introductions were obtained to influential persons
both in England and in the Cape, and the services secured, as travelling
companion and second in command, of Charles J. Andersson, a Swede, to
whom Galton pays many warm tributes. (p.30)
For many years prior to Galtons travels, Britain had been battling with the Dutch
and German Boers for control of Southern Africa; this conflict intensified later
with the discovery of gold and diamonds in the early 1870s, culminating in the
Boer War (1880-1902). This colonial history has relevance to the political,
academic and social environment in the areas of Africa from which HIV and AIDS
were first reported in the 1980s, specifically Sub-Saharan Africa, and the
relationship between the European nations that have led the world (along with the
USA and Russia) in biological warfare research and experimentation. These will be
discussed in chapters 11 and 12.
When Galton attempted to forge a new route for the British to the newly
discovered Lake Ngami district, in the 1850s, he was discouraged by Boer
(Afrikaaner) settlers from crossing Boer-controlled land. He made his way,
instead, by using a chain of mission stations which had been established along the
Swakop river, which flowed into Wolfisch Bay, north of the Boer-controlled
areas. Galton travelled inland about 1000 miles, with two wagons, ten Europeans
and about eighteen natives (Blacker, 1952, p.32). Professor Blacker quotes his
hero Galton, who wrote about his own behaviour towards the natives who led
him towards Lake Ngami, fame and fortune:
I had to hold a little court of justice on most days, usually followed by
corporal punishment, deftly administered. At a signal from me the culprits
legs were seized from behind, he was thrown face forward on the ground
and held while Hans applied the awarded number of whip strokes. (Galton,
quoted in Blacker, 1952, p. 32)
Hans, who applied the awarded [by Galton] number of whip strokes was
Galtons Danish companion (among ten Europeans including another
Scandinavian, Galtons deputy, Charles Andersson) during his exploration of
South-West Africa. During their attempt to find a Western approach to Lake Ngami
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(which they failed to do), they travelled through land occupied by the Bantuspeaking Damara people. These, recorded Galton, were for the most part thieving
and murderous, dirty and of a low type.
He formed a more favourable impression of the Hottentots and Bushmen, the
indigenous people of South Africa, whom he described as yellow skinned,
claiming that we became great friends with the Bushmen, and sat late into the
night hearing their stories about themselves and the recent doings of a body of
strange Namaquas coming from the south, who in the preceding year had swept
past them and onwards to lake Ngami, leaving unmistakable signs of their
expedition, and marauding as usual as they went. The Namaquas were another
tribe of black Africans, who, according to Galton, were engaged in raiding cattle
from the Damaras to the north.
Galtons fury at the insolent behaviour of the Damara people was translated into
revenge when he wrote, in his 1853 book Tropical South Africa, of the Damaras:
These savages court slavery. You engage one of them as a servant, and
you find that he considers himself as your property, and that you are, in fact,
become the owner of a slave. They have no independence about them,
generally speaking, but follow a master as a spaniel would. Their heroworship is directed to people who have wit and strength enough to ill-use
them. Revenge is a very transient passion in their character; it gives way to
admiration of the oppressor. The Damaras seem to me to love nothing; the
only strong feelings they possess, which are not utterly gross and sensual,
are those of admiration and fear. They seem to be made for slavery, and
naturally fall into its ways. (Galton quoted by Blacker, 1952, p.73)
Francis Galton was clearly not an advocate of the emancipation of slaves,
claiming, as he did, that the negro race possessed what he called a slavish
instinct making the state of slavery natural, and even desirable. Galtons
opinion of the Damaras (expanded in his judgement to savages, natives and
blacks) may have been coloured by the fact that he had formed a modus vivendi
with the Namaquan chiefs when he first arrived in South-West Africa, explaining
why the Damaraswere hostile to missionaries and [these particular] explorers
(Blacker, 1952, p.31).
Attempting to conceal the understandable suspicion and resistance shown by the
Damara people towards his party of Europeans, Galton claimed a now familiar
allegation of eugenists: that the Damaras were convulsed by tribal wars among
themselves. As for his allies, the Namaquas, they did not escape Galtons
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As a member of the Royal Society, Galton became increasingly involved with, and
influential within, a growing range of Royal Institutes. One of these was the
Anthropological Institute, where he was invited to give the second Huxley Lecture,
in 1901 (in honour of Darwins friend and supporter, Thomas Huxley). The lecture,
titled Possible Improvement of the Human Breed, reiterates Galtons
mathematics-based argument, familiar to his audience from his 1869 book
Hereditary Genius, that the upper classes were in danger of being swamped by the
degeneracy of the lower classes a fate that could only be averted by eugenic
reform.
Galtons arguments were based on a misapplication of the statistical concept of
normality as indicated by bell curves. As in Hereditary Genius, he begins his
argument with the claim that because distribution of mens height around the
median (average) height of a given population assumes the shape of a bell curve,
which is symmetrical on either side of the median line, other human
(anthropometric) features and qualities must inevitably follow the same law.
This he termed the law of normality which he held to be a universal law,
applicable with equal validity to heights as to muscular strength, physical
endurance, intelligence, or civic worth. The term civic worth was favourite of
Francis Galton, and it was on the basis of his opinions of civic worth that the
main arguments of Hereditary Genius were based. These are adapted in his 1901
lecture on The Possible Improvement of the Human Breed to a division of the
population of London into a gradation of lowest to highest classes by Charles
Booth. The following quote, from the lecture, gives an indication of Galtons style
of argument, and of his class and caste prejudices:
Let us now compare the normal classes with those into which Mr.
Charles Booth has divided the population of all London in a way that
corresponds not unfairly with the ordinary conceptions of civic worth. He
reckons them from the lowest upwards, and gives the numbers in each class
for East London. Afterwards he treats all London in a similar manner, except
that sometimes he combines two classes into one and gives the joint result.
For my present purpose, I had to couple them somewhat differently, first
disentangling them as best I could. There seemed no better way of doing this
than by assigning to the members of each couplet the same proportions that
they had in East London. Though this was certainly not accurate, it is
probably not far wrong. Mr. Booth has taken unheard of pains in this great
work of his to arrive at accurate results, but he emphatically says that his
classes cannot be separated sharply from one another. On the contrary, these
frontiers blend, and this justifies me in taking slight liberties with his figures
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[manipulating them to suit his own theory]. His class A consists of criminals,
semi-criminals, loafers and some others, who are in number at the rate of 1
per cent. in all London that is 100 per 10,000, or nearly three times as
many as the v class: they therefore include the whole of v and spread
upwards into the u [v and u were lowest categories of inferior stock
according to Galtons own classification and analysis, described later as
undesirables, together with class t, the third-lowest class]. His class B
consists of very poor persons who subsist on casual earnings, many of whom
are inevitably poor from shiftlessness, idleness or drink. The numbers in this
and the A class combined closely correspond with those in t and all below t.
Class C are supported by intermittent earnings; they are a hard-working
people, but have a very bad character for improvidence and shiftlessness. In
Class D the earnings are regular, but at the low rate of twenty-one shillings
or less a week, so none of them rise above poverty, though none are very
poor. D and C together correspond to the whole of s combined with the
lower fifth of r. The next class, E, is the largest of any, and comprises all
those with regular standard earnings of twenty-two to thirty shillings a week.
This class is the recognised field for all forms of co-operation and
combination; in short for trade unions. It corresponds to the upper four-fifths
of r combined with the lower four-fifths of R. It is therefore essentially the
mediocre class, standing as far below the highest in civic worth as it
stands above the lowest class with its criminals and semi-criminals. Next
above this large mass of mediocrity comes the honourable class F, which
consists of better paid artisans and foremen. These are able to provide
adequately for old age, and their sons become clerks and so forth. G is the
lower middle class of shopkeepers, small employers, clerks and subordinate
professional men, who as a rule are hard-working, energetic and sober. F and
G combined correspond to the upper fifth of R and the whole of S [in
Galtons classification], and are, therefore, a counterpart [in terms of a
statistical bell curve] to D and C. All above G are put together into one
class H, which corresponds to our T, U, V and above, and is the counterpart
of his two lowermost classes, A and B. So far, then, as these figures go, civic
worth is distributed in fair approximation to the normal law of frequency.
We also see that the classes t, u, v, and below are undesirables. (pp. 8-12)
Galton was trying to fit the figures of Charles Booth into his own theory, detailed
in Hereditary Genius, that when men are classified according to their natural
gifts (whether in respect to their general powers, or to special aptitudes) they
demonstrate a normal distribution, as depicted in a bell curve. While Charles
Booth divided the population into classes only on a positive axis (A, B, C, D, E
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and so on), Galton used both a positive and a negative axis, divided by a median
line, which he defined, in line with statistical theory, as the average, with classes
R, S, T, U, V above the median, and r, s, t, u, v below it.
According to his theory, half of the population, regardless of what was being
measured, belonged to the two classes closest to the median, the superior R class
(immediately above the median line) and an inferior r class. 25% belonged to R,
and 25% to r, described together as essentially the mediocre class. A
symmetrical, proportionally smaller population belonged to the adjacent classes,
the more superior S class (16%) and a more inferior s (also representing 16% of the
population). The even more superior class T contained 7% of the population
(whose sons become clerks and so forth), while the corresponding inferior class,
t, also included 7% of the population. Class t, together with the lowest classes, u
and v, were, according to Galton, undesirables: 9% of the London population,
according to his calculations. He argued that an equal number of people existed
above the median line as below it, regardless of what anthropometric parameter
was being discussed. There were just as many intelligent people above the
average (median) as there were stupid ones below it, just as many superior as
inferior and just as few desirables (such as himself) as undesirables. Such
was the over-simplicity of Galtons mathematical and anthropological theories, and
of his philosophy. The latter can be summarised by the motto, If you cant
convince them of your mathematical superiority, use simplistic mathematics to
prove your genetic superiority and theirs, that way theyll agree with you. This
was attempted in terms of his class, and also in terms of his race.
With the publication of Hereditary Genius in 1869, Galton won the adulation of
many prominent British academics, including Charles Darwin himself, who wrote,
to his younger cousin:
I do not think I have ever in all my life read anything more
interestingYou have made a convert of an opponent. I congratulate you on
producing what I am convinced will prove a memorable work. (Darwin,
1869, quoted in De Paoli, 1997, p.33)
An obvious reason for such accolades was that Galton was mathematically
proving the superiority of those who were providing the accolades, notably the
esteemed graduates and Fellows of his own university, Cambridge, and other
Fellows of the Royal Society (the fact that all the early British founders of the
Eugenics movement were Fellows of the Royal Society also suggests support by
the royalist Freemason organization for the development and promotion of the
movement, as will be seen). His argument that exceptional intellectual superiority,
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as rare as the brightest star in the night sky, is reliably measured by the man who
gained top marks in Mathematics at Cambridge (the senior wrangler) could have
been predicted to gain support among his more elitist colleagues and superiors:
There can hardly be a surer evidence of the enormous difference
between the intellectual capacity of men, than the prodigious differences in
the numbers of marks obtained by those who gain mathematical honours at
Cambridge. I therefore crave permission to speak at some length upon this
subject, although the details are dry and of little interest. There are between
400 and 450 students who take their degrees in each year, and of these, about
100 succeed in gaining honours in mathematics [coincidentally something
Galton himself attempted, but failed to achieve, while at Cambridge], and
are ranged by the examiners in strict order of merit. About the first forty of
those who take mathematical honours are distinguished by the title of
wranglers, and it is a decidedly credible thing to be even a low wrangler; it
will secure a fellowship in a small college. It must be carefully borne in
mind that the distinction of being first in this list of honours, or what is
called the senior wrangler of the year, means a vast deal more than being the
foremost mathematician of 400 or 450 men taken at hap-hazard. No doubt
the large bulk of Cambridge men are taken almost at hap-hazard [actually it
mainly depended on whether their parents could afford the university fees
and pull the necessary strings]. A boy is intended by his parents for some
profession; if that profession be either the Church or the Bar, it used to be
almost requisite, and it is still important, that he should be sent to Cambridge
or Oxford. (Hereditary Genius, 1869, p.14)
After he returned to London in 1852 Galton wrote about his travels to South and
South West Africa and was greatly honoured by the Royal Geographical Society
and allied Royal Society for his exploration. The plaque next to Galtons longtime residence in London announces, Sir Francis Galton, 1822-1911, explorer,
statistician, founder of eugenics, lived here for fifty years. His experiences with
African natives, several (perhaps all) of whom were slaves that Galton claimed
were given to him by their owners, shaped his increasingly racist views about
Negroes and the Negro race. These were scientifically rationalized at the
conclusion of his first major publication, Hereditary Genius: an Inquiry into its
Laws and Consequences. Published in 1869, this icon of the eugenics movement
argued that the mental ability of the Negro (black) race is not less than two
grades below that of the Anglo-Saxon race (which Galton, and other Anglo-Saxon
eugenists, equated with the white race):
Let us, then, compare the Negro race with the Anglo-Saxon, with
respect to those qualities alone which are capable of producing judges,
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white man, certainly not more than might be ascribed to an average actual
difference of three grades, of which one may be due to the relative demerits
of native education, and the remaining two to a difference in natural gifts.
Fourthly, the number among the negroes of those whom we should call
half-witted men is very large. Every book alluding to negro servants in
America is full of instances. I was myself much impressed by this fact
during my travels in Africa. The mistakes the negroes made in their own
matters were so childish, stupid and simpleton-like, as frequently to make
me ashamed of my own species. I do not think it an exaggeration to say, that
their c is as low as our e, which would be a difference of two grades, as
before. I have no information as to actual idiocy among the negroes I
mean, of course, of that class of idiocy which is not due to disease. (pp.3278)
Galton adds, although he never travelled to Australia:
The Australian type is at least one grade below the African negro. I
possess a few serviceable data about the natural capacity of the Australian,
but not sufficient to induce me to invite the reader to consider them. (p.328)
This rather long quote is worth examining closely, since the methodology
pioneered by Galton, and especially his application of statistical bell curves to
human psychology, sociology and anthropology led to entire schools of
experimental psychology, sociology and anthopology while also profoundly
affecting subsequent practices of biological psychiatry. Galton himself was not
interested in healing people of psychological or physical distress; his main concern
was proving his own superiority and that of his esteemed colleagues (particularly
other Fellows of the Royal Society). This is clearly evident in Hereditary Genius,
which is almost amusing when one also considers Galtons own psychology and
his social and educational experiences, together with his family connections were
it not for the huge influence his theories have had on subsequent generations.
Francis Galtons basic argument was that, just as certain physical features and
abilities are inherited, so are mental abilities and deficiencies. This he
endeavoured to prove by various mathematical means. The weight of his argument,
in establishing that genius is largely hereditary, rested on the supposition that
genius, or exceptional ability, could be reliably ascertained by social status (what
he describes as eminence) and fame, as declared by English history books,
official records, and his own personal opinion. This superiority was, according to
Galton, largely determined by racial and familial inheritance (which he generally
referred to as nature), rather than the result of social, educational and
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was overpopulated, and that this constituted the greatest threat to humanity.
Malthus, who held that dependent poverty ought to be held disgraceful argued
that the poor laws (ostensibly to assist the poor) tended to increase population
without increasing the food for its support, advocating the abolition of such laws,
incentives for agriculture (landlords) and workhouses for those in distress
(Burne, 1991, p.796).
In his 1798 Essay on the Principle of Population, the Anglican priest and
economist Thomas Malthus calculated, using a rather dubious mathematical model,
that in times of plenty population growth is inevitably bound to outstrip food
production. This, he argued, led to inevitable famines, because unchecked,
population increases in a geometrical ratio whereas any increase in food
production, he believed, could only increase in an arithmetical ratio. Citing the
example of the United States, where the population had apparently doubled in 25
years, Malthus argued that while the population might double, again, in another 25
years, food supply could only be expected, at most, to increase by a similar amount
every 25 years. The population of Europe, having increased from 66 million to 180
million less than a hundred years later, was a further indication, according to
Malthus, that population growth is the greatest threat to humanity. This fear of
global overpopulation became a preoccupation of European social scientists
and eugenists in the 19th and 20th centuries. Galton himself argues, in Hereditary
Genius, that Malthus suggestion of delaying pregnancy in women until later in life
would be eugenically catastrophic the elite, he argued, should be encouraged to
have as many children as possible. The assumption that there was a massive threat
of overpopulation by undesirables is implicit in all Galtons theories.
The other major inspiration for eugenists and Social Darwinists of the late
nineteenth century (and since) was the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, who
provided a moral justification for the amassing of wealth by capitalists, and
agriculturalists in particular, in his 1776 publication An Inquiry into the Nature and
Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Oxford-educated Smith, then professor of Moral
Philosophy at the Glasgow University, argued that economies built on self-interest
should not be constrained by the state, since, he claimed, when wealthy men are
given the freedom to advance themselves, the capital raised gives rise to jobs.
Jobs, he assumed, are of general benefit.
In 1794, few years after the seeds of modern capitalism were sewn by Adam Smith
and Thomas Malthus, Dr Erasmus Darwin, British physician and naturalist,
published Zoonomia, in which he laid the foundations of modern biological
evolutionary theory, which was later built into fundamental scientific dogma by his
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fact, as it turned out, the eugenics movement gained much support from already
established organizations of eminent racists and elitists, and of elitist racists. As
Professor Sargent correctly observed, the identification of social eminence with
genius is fallacious. This is especially so in nations and societies flawed by
nepotism, class-prejudice and selected opportunity based on class. It is obvious that
hereditary aristocracies, including those of Royal Families, will produce many
eminent persons from the same family. By Galtons measure, the current Prince
of Wales, Charles, and his mother, Queen Elizabeth of the United Kingdom, are the
possessors of genius, and likewise the current president of the USA, George W.
Bush and his father, George Bush (Sr.). Lachlan Murdoch (Ruperts son) and James
Packer (Kerrys son) would also, according to the methodology and theories of
Galton, be showing hereditary genius, as would the many affluent (and thus
influential) members of various billionaire families of the past 150 years such
as the Rothschild family, Rockefeller family, Carnegie family, Kellogg family and
Oppenheimer family all of whose empires supported subsequent eugenics-related
programs and research. Needless to say, the Darwins themselves were an
extraordinarily superior family, liberally possessed of good genes, according to
the analysis of Francis Galton.
During his long career, Francis Galton set the foundations for many subsequently
misused experimental psychology techniques, several of which subsequently
developed into distinct schools. He was the first to formally use word
association tests and also developed various intelligence tests (Intelligence
Quotient, or I.Q. tests), always seeking to prove the superiority of his own class
and kin and the inferiority and criminality of the lower classes and inferior
races. These have subsequently been recognised, in their many variants, to be
seriously biased, politically, socially and culturally. Galton also adapted the
ancient Chinese technique of identification by finger-prints, which together with
the notorious studies of the facial features of criminals by the Italian
anthropologist Cesare Lombroso, were developed as additional tools to identify
undesirables and make sure they did not breed.
Galtons preoccupying concern was the large mass of humanity that he, and his
fellow eugenists, regarded as feeble-minded. The early I.Q. tests he pioneered
were developed as a scientific way of categorising various degrees of feeblemindedness using a numerical scale (based, of course, on a bell curve). This was
seen as an improvement over the labels of idiot, imbecile and moron that
were then in common use by the medical fraternity. The term Intelligence
Quotient was first coined by the German psychologist William Stern in 1912, the
same year that the American Medico-Psychological Association (later the
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basis in 1896. Under these laws, subsequently followed by several other states,
marriage of insane people was forbidden. The first compulsory sterilization laws
in the USA were passed in 1907, in the state of Indiana, legislating for mandatory
sterilization of criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists. Eugenic laws were
subsequently introduced in 30 North American states, resulting in thousands of
sterilizations over the next 20 years (Haller, 1963, Meinsma, 1998).
Mark Hallers Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought, published
by Rutgers University Press in 1963 provides significant information about the
expansion of the Eugenics Movement in the United States of America and the early
implementation of negative eugenic sterilization programs:
American laws preceded by twenty years the sterilization laws of other
countries and were pioneering ventures watched by eugenists of other lands.
But the pioneering nature of the laws can hardly explain their early crudities.
Two of the laws, by Washington and Nevada, were not eugenic at all but
purely punitive. They permitted a judge, at the time of sentencing, to impose
sterilization whenever any person shall be adjudged guilty of carnal abuse
of a female person under the age of ten years, or of rape, or shall be
adjudged a habitual criminal. All laws passed by 1921 and many passed
thereafter applied to rapists or sexual perverts and were therefore at least
partly punitive or therapeutic in purpose. Even those that were primarily
eugenic in purpose applied sterilization to a bewildering variety of persons
with little attention to scientific classification. All applied to the
feebleminded and most to epileptics and the insane, but also included in
various laws were confirmed criminals, drunkards, drug addicts, syphilitics,
moral degenerates, and prostitutes. Doubtless the oddest bill was that
introduced by a Missouri legislator for sterilization of those convicted of
murder (not in the heat of passion), rape, highway robbery, chicken stealing,
bombing or theft of automobiles. (p.135)
In 1930 the eugenics movement in the USA attempted to gain further support for
sterilization with the publication and promotion of Sterilization for Human
Betterment by Gosney and Popenoe. Gosney and Popenoe claimed that following
6,255 sterilizations in California between 1909 and 1929 there had been only four
deaths from the operation. They claimed the program was so successful that all
persons released from the Sonoma State Home for the Feebleminded and one out
of six of all new inmates admitted to hospitals for the insane were being sterilized
in California (Haller, 1963, p.138). In 1927, legislation in the USA for sterilization
of the feeble-minded was supported by the now notorious judgement of the
eugenist judge Oliver Wendall Holmes who held that sterilization fell within the
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resulting half-breeds are inferior to either pure race). This could be a problem,
argued Leonard Darwin (who was a soldier by profession), in South Africa, where
the British were attempting to create a White colony in order to exploit the
extensive diamond and gold deposits that had been discovered there.
In a chapter titled misceganation, Leonard Darwin extrapolates directly from his
fathers theory of white and dark skin being respectively suited to cold and warm
climates, to come up with a racist theory about mulattos or mongrels (as he
later refers to people of mixed race as):
There is another purely theoretical consideration which may be worth
mentioning as a point to be held in view whilst our knowledge in regard to
misceganation is accumulating. When a cross takes place between a person
belonging to a dark race accustomed to a hot climate and a fair person
belonging to a race originating in a cold climate, the different members of
the resulting family will receive different amounts of black and white
elements of their ancestral make-up; and the same will be true of all their
subsequent descendants. Now it is natural to suppose that those persons with
the greater share of white blood in their composition would be more likely to
survive in a cold country, whilst those with the larger share of black blood
would be relatively more likely to thrive in the tropics. And if there is any
truth in this hypothesis, we should expect that a mulatto race, for example,
would become whiter and whiter in cold climates, and darker and darker
under a tropical sun, these changes taking more and more slowly as time
went on. It is also conceivable that mixed races, like certain hybrid animals,
are less fertile than either of the pure races. Whether any of these facts can
be brought forward in favour of either of these hypotheses is doubtful; but I
know of none that can rule them out altogether. And these possibilities are
worth considering in a country like South Africa; for it may be that all the
white blood which has been absorbed in misceganation is in truth all the
time slowly diminishing in quantity and may in time disappear entirely; a
possible contingency which seems to make it all the more desirable to
endeavour to maintain the purity of the white race by the avoidance of race
mixture. (p. 497)
At the end of The Need for Eugenics Reform, is a single propaganda page for the
Eugenics Education Society. Defining eugenics as the study of heredity as it
may be applied to the betterment, mental and physical, of the human race, it
provides the following list, in answer to the question How can practical results be
obtained?:
1. By educating the general public to think eugenically, and to recognize the
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2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
responsibility of parenthood.
By furthering such measures or tendencies as would prevent the diminution
of superior types or the multiplication of the inferior.
By insisting that the palpably unfit and degenerate shall not reproduce and
multiply their kind.
This may be accompanied by segregation, and ultimately, perhaps,
by sterilization, voluntary or compulsory.
By watching and recording the results of eugenical research and legislation
in other countries.
By collecting statistics and facts that may be of use for legislative and
scientific purposes in this country [Britain].
By keeping in close touch with current legislation and executive action in
order to intervene, either with objection or support, where the racial
qualities of the [British] empire may be affected.
Shortly before Major Leonard Darwin published this list of practical solutions,
Adolf Hitler wrote, in Mein Kampf:
Those who are physically and mentally unhealthy and unfit must not
perpetuate their sufferings in the bodies of their children. Through
educational means the state must teach individuals that illness is not a
disgrace but a misfortune for which people are to be pitied, yet at the same
time it is a crime and a disgrace to make this affliction the worse by passing
it on to innocent creatures out of a merely egotistical yearning. (Hitler,
1925)
Prior to Hitlers extension of negative eugenic educational, social, and medical
programs to exterminating degenerate races, the Nazi regime had, for several
years, been systematically killing those individuals unfortunate enough to be
labelled as having a serious hereditary defect, or those with seriously threatening
(to him) political and philosophical opinions. The diagnosed chronically mentally
deficient and ill, including those labelled with schizophrenia, feeblemindedness, personality disorder and manic-depression were systematically
killed, along with those suspected of being Communists or anarchists.
Homosexuals, alcoholics and drug addicts, deemed as being morally
degenerate, were also euthanased by Nazi executioners, euthanasia, or mercykilling being the euphemism they used to conceal their crime. Thus it can be seen
that the Nazi extermination campaign, also known as the Holocaust included the
mass-murder of a range of racial, religious and political targets.
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The first formal eugenics organization in Germany was founded in 1905, and the
Society for Race Hygeine was founded by Dr Alfred Ploetz in the same year. In
1907, the International Society for Racial Hygeine was founded, composed mainly
of German eugenists, and the next year all future mixed marriages in German
South-West Africa (now Namibia) were banned, while existing mixed marriages
were dissolved. At its annual meeting in 1914 the German Society for Race
Hygeine adopted a resolution on the subject of applied eugenics, arguing that the
future of the German people was at stake and that the German empire can not in
the long run maintain its true nationality and the independence of its development
if it does not begin without delay and with the greatest energy to mold its internal
and external politics as well as the whole life of the people in accordance with
eugenic principles (Popenoe, Johnson, 1920, p.163).
In 1914 Professor Morton Aldrich, professor of Industrial hygeine at the University
of Louisiana wrote of his and Winston Churchills opinion about what should be
done to men and women who are obviously unfit (those who had been labelled
idiots, insane, feeble-minded, depraved or criminal):
To men and women of these classes parenthood must be effectively and
permanently denied. In the words of Mr.Winston Churchill, they deserve all
that can be done for them by a Christian and scientific civilization now that
they are in the world, but their curse must die with them and not be
transmitted to future generations. In self-protection, society owes it to the
future to prevent these obviously unfit from bringing into the world others
like themselves. (p.304)
If Churchills ideas regarding the best eugenic approach to the feeble-minded are
combined with Galtons ideas about the inferiority of black races (which
Churchill clearly shared, from his many writings) and the definitions of feeblemindedness in the 1920s, it is easy to recognise the common rationale behind
Hitlers genocidal eugenics program and other genocidal programs against
coloured races. In Applied Eugenics (1920), Paul Popenoe (editor of the
American Journal of Heredity) and Roswell Johnson (professor at the University of
Pittsburg) defined feeble-mindedness as:
A condition in which mental development is retarded or incomplete. It is
a relative term, since an individual who would be feeble-minded in one
society might be normal or even bright in another.
If one also considers the same books definition of segregation the rationale
behind the monstrous colour bar in British and American colonies, and those in
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Chapter 4
NEGATIVE EUGENICS PROGRAMS
Today there are few people who publicly admit to being eugenicists, due to the
enduring memory and historical records of Nazi atrocities during the Second World
War. This was not the case in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth
century, when Eugenic Societies, composed of self-professed eugenists, were
established in most of the European nations, North and South America (especially
the USA and Canada), Japan, South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. These
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86
that Hitler had divulged a wish to implement this policy [medical killing] as early
as 1935 but preferred to do so in the context of war when it would be more easily
concealed from the gaze of likely critics (Bloch, 1996, p.177).
Another crime of the Nazis, that of enslavement of other races, and of political
dissidents was, like the German States euthanasia program and the mental
hygeine programs, a direct consequence of the practical application of the
theories of Francis Galton. The creator of eugenics, as we have seen, believed that
blacks (negroes) have a slavish instinct and are, as a result of this, natural
slaves. The German eugenists (who extended Galtons bigotry to include Jews),
regarding the Germans and Aryan race as the most pure, noble, and superior of
an ever-increasing hierarchy of races, predictably viewed themselves as
belonging to the Master Race. Equally predictably, British Anglo-Saxon
eugenists saw themselves as the race that was destined to rule all the others. This
had, indeed, been a central assumption of the British Imperialists that profiteered
through the trade of human cargo from Africa and Asia for two hundred years
prior to the theories of Darwin and Galton.
Turning to sub-Saharan Africa, where the AIDS epidemic is currently decimating
the black population, the Union of South Africa, formed in 1910, was a white
union power was shared between British and Afrikaaner settlers; black and
coloured races were banned from skilled jobs and had no say in government,
dissidents were incarcerated in increasingly large, crowded prison, while a colour
bar was instituted at all levels of society. Schools were segregated, marriage
between blacks and whites was forbidden by the State, and separate living areas
were designated for blacks, whites and coloureds. This was the notorious
system known in South Africa as apartheid (separate development), but was
actually a direct application of eugenic programs, as can be seen by comparing the
South African program with Major Leonard Darwins suggestions in The Need for
Eugenic Reform, in which he argued for segregation of those of degenerate stock
from Europeans of good breeding. Similar segregation and the so-called colour
bar were instituted in other British colonies in Africa, including Rhodesia
(Zimbabwe and Zambia), British East India (Kenya), Nigeria and the Gold Coast
(Ghana).
Systems of government, including legal, education and health systems were
developed in the various British, German and Belgian colonies and Protectorates
in Africa that were explicitly white supremacist. This was less obviously the case
in French colonies, which were encouraged to become part of the Frenchspeaking world. Elite Africans were selected for education in France, and allowed
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poisons
and to introduce the term dysgenics (in analogy with eupepsia and
dyspepsia) for the opposite of what the great pioneer desired. (p.30)
Dysgenics is a term used by Saleeby and his followers to refer to the result of the
breeding of inferior stocks and undesirables. It lead, according to their theory, to
degeneration of the human race, generally. Negative eugenics (at first, sterilization
and later euthanasia) was thus a practical program to prevent dysgenics. The
additional measure of preventive eugenics, ostensibly to protect worthy
parents (white, educated, professional, upper class) from the pollution of
racial poisons endemic in the lower classes and lower races, was primarily
concerned with alcoholism and venereal disease (particularly syphilis). These,
claimed Saleeby, could lead to degradation of individuals and entire races.
In fact, Dr Saleeby was correct in claiming that excess alcohol consumption can
destroy the lives of individuals and families. It can bring social and political chaos,
and it can be used deliberately for such reasons. Alcohol is the most obvious of the
natural chemical warfare agents, and, along with opium, was an integral part of
the British Empires armoury when seeking to expand their territorial
possessions by subjugating new lands. The British Empire never claimed to be
motivated by a desire to subjugate, however, although they did often use the term
exploit (which did not then have the negative connotations it has today).
Economic and history texts through till the 1960s continued to write of
exploitation of the resources of a country as a good thing. Exploitation was
synonymous with development and civilization, and included exploitation of
both natural resources (land, minerals, forests, plants, animals etc.) and human
resources people, in other words. When the British Empire expanded in the 17 th
and 18th centuries, it built a massive slave trade, in competition with those of the
Dutch, French, Spanish and Portuguese empires. African slaves were the main
human resource that was shipped to the Americas, when the New World was
claimed in the name of the various European monarchs.
Imperialism, or the building of empires, was a prime motive for the European
territorial battles over the newly discovered mineral-rich American, African and
Australian continents that eventually culminated in the First and Second World
wars. It was assumed that if they did not get control of any newly discovered, or
strategically important territory, their rivals would. Initially controlled by
aristocratic monarchies and the Churches these gained divine sanction and
clerical support from, the entire European colonial expansion assumed the
supremacy of the white race. This was the case long before the German Father
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for the most heinous crimes attributable to the implementation of negative eugenic
programs. It is my own profession that has actually decided who should be
sterilized, who should be experimented on and who should be killed. It has been
members of the medical profession that have given the actual orders, and, in the
case of surgical sterilization, done the actual mutilation (at their most militant, in
the 1930s, some American eugenists were calling for the surgical sterilization of
upto 15 million Americans it takes little imagination as to what skin-colour most
of these would have had). In the case of eugenic murder and sterilization by
chemicals, it was trained medical doctors who authorised and orchestrated the
killings. Medical doctors also gave orders for people to be killed, crippled and
sterilized by injection, but less often actually gave the injections themselves, unless
the doctors did not know that what they were ordering be injected would be likely
cause death, illness or sterility. The latter has, however, undoubtedly been the case
in most instances, especially in more recent years.
These disturbing facts have been ignored in most of the few books that have
mentioned the subject of eugenics in a positive light since the Second World War,
including the influential 1952 Mentor Books publication Heredity, Race and
Society, by the American Zoology Professors L.C. Dunn and Theodosius
Dobzhansky, both of Columbia University and both members of the American
Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Science:
More enthusiasm [than for positive eugenics] has been shown in many
places for negative eugenics, which urges elimination of undesirable genes
by discouraging or making it impossible for persons who show the effects of
such genes to have children. Since voluntary abstentation from parenthood
may be difficult, sterilization for individuals who are likely to have severe
hereditary defects is recommended. Sterilization is accomplished through a
surgical operation; the operated individuals are by no means unsexed, show
no outward signs of having undergone the treatment, but are unable to beget
children. Sterilization laws are now on the statute books in many states and
in some foreign countries. Some of them provide for sterilization only with
the consent of the persons involved or of their guardians, others make it
compulsory but controlled by the courts. (pp.85-6)
The selective re-writing of medical history had already begun. Professors Dunn
and Dobzhansky would undoubtedly have known about far more gruesome
applications of negative eugenics in the (then) very recent past. Although
reference is made in an earlier chapter to Hitler, they fail to mention that the
genocide of non-Aryans by the Nazi leader was the direct application of negative
eugenics theory. The criminal act of genocide, internationally recognised as the
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most grave of crimes against humanity, was widely recognised, in the 1950s, to be
intimately connected, historically and ideologically, with the theory and practice of
eugenics. The immediate precedent of eugenics resulting in genocide in Nazi
Germany in the 1930s and 1940s, when millions of men, women and children were
murdered after enslavement, torture (often in the guise of medical
experimentation) and dispossession, could barely have escaped the knowledge of
Professors Dunn and Dobzhansky.
The Nazi eugenic programs, as many would know, targetted races and individuals
deemed to be degenerate. The racial groups that were genocided included Jews,
Gypsies and Negroes, which were seen as threats to the purity of the superior
Aryan race they were killed in the ostensible interests of racial hygeine.
Hitlers Nazi regime conducted parallel programs of positive and negative
eugenics. The positive eugenics programs included the selective education and
political and social favouritism of those Aryan children and adults with the ideal
German features of blond hair and blue eyes. These were, according to prevailing
anthropological and eugenics doctrine, Caucasian Aryans of the (superior) Nordic
Type, who were seen as destined to rule over darker-featured Aryans (with the
notable exceptions of Hitler himself and other dark-haired, dark-eyed members of
the Nazi party).
Prior to the First World War, Britain had ambitions of creating a white colony in
control of Sub-Saharan Africa, having already gained control of the previous
white masters of the Cape, Transvaal and Natal colonies. These were the Boers
(Afrikaaners), descendants of Dutch and German settlers of the 18 th and 19th
centuries, who had surrendered to the British in 1902, concluding the Boer War,
during which over 20,000 Boer women and children perished in Britishconstructed concentration camps. The Boer surrender allowed the British South
Africa Company, headed by the diamond baron Cecil Rhodes, to control most of
Southern Africa. Rhodess main threat came from the imperial designs of Germany
and from Britains traditional enemy, France. The French had claimed much of
western and northern Africa prior to the Napoleonic wars, and also had significant
mining interests in South Africa until Rhodes bought out the French Company, in
the 1890s, with assistance from the Anglo-Jewish Rothschilds banking family. The
Rothschilds had previously financed Britains acquisition of French shares in the
Suez canal, which had been constructed by African labour under European orders
in the 1860s, and also financed other British Imperial ventures, including goldmining ventures in Australia.
When the British abolished slavery in 1830, the Anglo-Jewish Rothschild banking
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family arranged for the British Government to raise the necessary sum of 20
million pounds a vast sum of money at the time. This money was not paid to the
victims of slavery but to those who perpetrated it. Slave owners were
compensated for losing their slaves. Later, when the Rothschilds arranged
finance for the British diamond-baron Cecil Rhodes to purchase most of
Southern Africa so he could expand his gold and diamond empire north from South
Africa, a blind eye was turned to the fact that Rhodes was still using African slaves
to do the hard and dangerous work in the mines (many years after slavery was
abolished, as in the case of Leopolds Congo Free State), while white
managers and administrators lived in spendour at their expense. The same
occurred in Kenya, Ceylon, India, Australia and elsewhere in the British
Commonwealth of Nations.
The history of recent slavery is inextricably tied to the history of eugenics, not least
because the Father of Eugenics, Francis Galton, scientifically rationalised
slavery as natural for black races (Negroes). Galton, like his eminent
followers, believed that the master-slave relationship was the natural order of
things in human society and in the animal world. Natural superiority leading
to natural dominance of the white race was a central assumption of the
eugenics movement an assumption that eugenics laboratories financed by the
Rockefeller and Carnegie corporations attempted to prove using various
technological and mathematical methods. Foremost among the concerns of
eugenists was that of overpopulation in the countries with mainly yellow,
black, red and brown races Asia, Africa and South America, in other
words. Those who shouted the loudest about too many people in the world
continued to have large families themselves, and promote an obscene accumulation
of wealth among a tiny elite of white families. This was the situation in 1905
when Leonard Darwin and Francis Galton formed the first Eugenics Society in
London, and this remains the situation today.
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Chapter 5
Chapter 5
PARANOIA ABOUT POPULATION GROWTH
It has been reported in the medical literature and by the World Health Organization
(WHO) that there have been more deaths from AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa than in
the rest of the world combined: an estimated 30-40 million people. Another 30-50
million men, women and children are reported to be infected with the HIV virus in
Africa, mostly south of the Sahara desert. It is a historical fact that the epidemic is
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particularly bad in countries that were said, in the 1960s and 70s, to have an
unacceptably high rate of population growth.
With the so-called population explosion of the 1960s, cries of global
overpopulation became even more strident than before the First World War led
by the same American, British and Australian universities that had ardently
promoted eugenics and related white-supremacy policies and dogmas before the
Second World War. Despite the recognised fact that most of the worlds resources
were being consumed (and even more of the pollution produced) by the affluent
First World, blame for overpopulation was routinely allocated to the
developing nations and China. South-East Asia, South Asia, South and Central
America and Africa were specified as having a catastrophically high population
growth by population experts in the USA, such as Stanford Universitys Paul
Erlich.
Erlich has written several books about the population problem over the past 30
years, starting with The Population Bomb in 1968. In the preface to his 1990 The
Population Explosion Erlich writes about his continued obsession:
In 1968, The Population Bomb warned of impending disaster if the
population explosion was not brought under control. Then the fuse was
burning; now the population bomb has detonated. Since 1968, at least 200
million people mostly children have perished needlessly of hunger and
hunger-related diseases, despite crash programs to stretch the carrying
capacity of Earth by increasing food production. The population problem is
no longer primarily a threat for the future as it was when the Bomb was
written and there were only 3.5 billion human beings. (p.9)
Erlich continues, dramatically:
The size of the human population is now 5.3 billion, and still climbing.
In the six seconds it takes you to read this sentence, eighteen more people
will be added. Each hour there are 11,000 more mouths to feed; each year,
more than 95 million. Yet the world has hundreds of billions fewer tons of
topsoil and hundreds of trillions fewer gallons of groundwater with which to
grow crops than it had in 1968.
In 1968 the AIDS epidemic was still fifteen years away. When Paul Erlich
published Population Explosion in 1990 the epidemic was already ravaging Africa,
but the Stanford professor still warns that human populations are exploding at
record rates in Africa despite AIDS. This claim is made in a chapter titled
Population and Public Health:
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engulfed in suburbia; water scarcities in wide areas with good, fresh food
becoming available to progressively fewer people; escape from the human
hive ever more difficult, with enjoyment of nature a vanishing pleasure. The
list is long, the prospect appalling, and the worst of it is that in few places in
the world will it be possible to fare better.
At the present time, with only 7% of the world population, the United
States consumes more than one-half of the worlds raw materials. How long
will the other peoples of the world put up with such inequity when already
they suffer widespread hunger, illiteracy and the restless tides of discontent?
So critical, in fact, is the global situation becoming, that unless effective
steps to counteract it are taken immediately, there will be little hope of
saving civilization as we know it. The Congo, Southeast Asia, Latin
America, India: all are suffering pathological growing pains that are largely
of our making.
The regions which are here claimed to be suffering pathological growing pains
are now suffering from growing epidemics of HIV infection and AIDS. The Congo
(Zaire) is also the specific area of Africa in which the epidemic first broke out on
this continent. In a chapter titled A Pathology of People, Vogt writes, of Asia and
Africa:
No region, unless it be Africa, is in a more parlous plight than Asia.
Here, according to a recent United Nations estimate, various populations are
doubling in about twenty-five to twenty years [the original measure of
Thomas Malthus, when warning about the danger of overpopulation in the
USA, back in the late 1700s]; and within twenty years may be growing at a
rate to double populations again within seventeen or eighteen years! The
proportion of children who are, of course, nonproducing dependents and
therefore burdens on the parents and the economy [the over-riding concern
of Malthus], will have jumped to well over 40 per cent within the next
twenty years. The resources of CARE and UNICEF are hardly likely to
begin to meet the human demands of the next generation, a generation they
have helped to swell. If hundreds of thousands, and even millions, of
children starve it will be in part because of the good intentions of these
organizations. They have been conspicuously unwilling to do anything about
trying to reduce the birth rate. (p.90)(his emphasis)
William Vogt, and other overpopulation doomsayers, were concerned that any
efforts to reduce infant mortality (which include clean water, nutritious food and
decent houses) would result in too many mouths to feed. This is Malthuss
discredited and inhumane argument, which Vogt attempts to keep alive when
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predicting disaster for India, taking a 1959 study by the Ford Foundation as his
inspiration:
The experts who drew up the report have given India a virtual blueprint
of an agricultural revolution to be brought about in seven years time!
Should the revolution fail, a mere half-dozen years hence, we may see nearly
half a billion people in an agonizing demonstration that Malthuss theories
were basically sound. The results whether of Indian success or failure are
sure to be felt far beyond the countrys borders and the consequences could
be world-shaking. And since we, in comfortable, overstuffed America, are
part of the world, what happens during the next half-dozen years in this
subcontinent may be of fateful import to us. (p.129)
The population of India was reckoned, by Vogt, to have been 3.45 million in 1947,
increasing to 3.98 million in 1958. He claims that during this time, the first decade
following the nations independence from British rule, infant mortality fropped
from more than 130 per thousand live births to less than 100, while life expectancy
jumped more than half, from twenty-seven to forty-two years, adding, in
brackets, that It is still not a great deal over half that in the United States and
Scandinavia.
Why did life expectancy suddenly increase in India after the nation gained
independence? Why was life expectancy in India only 27 when the British left in
1947, given that the normal span of a mans life according to the English bard
William Shakespeare was 70 years (three score and ten years) back in the 1600s?
The answers to these questions may cast light on similar changes in other nations
after they gained independence from European colonial rule the so-called nations
of the developing or Third world. They may also cast light on the vexing
question of overpopulation are there too many people in the world, and if so,
where are they?
In the mid to late 1960s The Age in Melbourne and other local newspapers featured
a series of articles threatening disaster for white Australians if the population
growth of developing countries in the region was not curbed. On 20 th April 1967,
an article titled Birth Control Stand Angers quoted Professor F.J. Hird, professor
of biochemistry at the University of Melbourne. It was he who was angry:
Prof. F.J.Hird of Melbourne University, told a large audience at Kew
city hall last night that he was angered in the extreme by a religious
organisation standing in the way of population control.
The religious organisation that angered many population controllers in the 1960s
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was the Catholic Church, which forbade the use of contraception at the time,
including the use of condoms, the oral contraceptive pill and various forms of
sterilization. This opposition to control of the breeding (and thus the numbers) of
Catholics was ridiculed and denigrated in many ways by atheist and Protestant
eugenists, and had been since the earliest years of the eugenics movement. Mark
Haller wrote of this conflict between eugenists and the Catholic Church in
Eugenics (1963), a book which was manufactured with the assistance of a grant
from the Ford Foundation:
Because eugenics was nearly irreconcilable with Catholic teaching,
many Catholic clergy and laymen entered the lists against it. A prominent
Catholic physician of Philadelphia, in fact, went so far as to claim that it was
doubtful whether physical defects, disease, and degeneracy can, in a
biological sense, be transmitted from parents to offspring and that the
children of a chaste and loving couple were bound to be good.
Eugenists, aware that their creed met resistance in religious circles,
defended the compatibility of religion and eugenics. A psychologist at the
Hartford School of Religious Pedagogy, for instance, argued that salvation
of the world would eventually come through development of higher types of
individuals and noted that Christ himself demonstrated what eugenics might
accomplish, for He came from a stock of priestly and prophetic men.
This line of argument must have convinced the priests (who were among the
eminent groups according to Galtons hierarchy), because, Haller writes:
Among the clergymen themselves, the more liberal and reform-minded
tended to be most sympathetic with eugenicsSuch ministers were most
likely to be aware of recent trends in the study of crime, insanity, and
feeblemindedness and therefore most likely to support the programs of
eugenics. (p.83)
Other articles warning about overpopulation in Australia quoted the New York
Times and various American authorities about the population problem. On 15 th
August, 1967, in an article from the Australian Associated Press titled Grim vision
of the year 2000 The Age informed Australians about the worrying predictions of
the American Commission on the Year 2000, published in Daedalus, the journal of
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences: Professor Harry Kalven junior,
professor of law at the University of Chicago thought that Mans technical
inventiveness may, in terms of privacy, have turned the whole community into the
equivalent of an army barracks; Professor George Miller, Professor of Psychology
at Harvard was concerned that by 2000, the limit of mans mind to absorb
information may be reachedfor many of the less gifted among us; Professor
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population is now about 3.3 thousand million. By the year 2000 a year
beginning to appear to be as apocalyptic as 1984 once did it will more than
double itself to an estimated 7.5 thousand million. It is as though the globe is
breeding its own mirror image; food resources, already stretched thin, will
have to support this whole extra world within 33 years.
Actually, the worlds food resources were not stretched thin in 1967 because
there was not enough food to go around they were stretched artificially.
Throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s, tons of wheat and other staple foods were
deliberately dumped in the sea to keep commodity prices up, rather than give the
grain to those who were starving. Increasingly, while food resources have been
stretched so thin in some nations and localities that millions of children and
adults have died of malnutrition, in others people have been dying prematurely
because they have been consuming too much. The gap between rich and poor has
widened in every nation in the world, and the surplus of food in some homes has
grown to an obscene degree, matched only by surpluses in the same homes of
luxury items, expensive jewellery, alcoholic drinks and perfumes, antique furniture
and so on. The poorest homes continue to have none of these things, and the
poorest people continue to have no home. As was the case in the 1960s, the world
provides enough for every persons need but not every persons greed, as Mahatma
Gandhi wisely observed half a century ago.
The 1967 Advertiser article on the Worlds Baby Explosion assumes that the
increase in global population predicted by the American and Australian population
experts would not be accompanied by fundamental redistribution of wealth, or a
cessation of the practice of exploitation of the have-nots by the haves.
Emphasising the text in bold type, the grim warning (to haves) continues:
The trouble is that the food-short nations are breeding faster than
ever before, while the affluent countries are slowing down. This makes
the gap between the haves and have-nots wider than ever. One rather
frightful prediction is that by 2000 6,000 m. people will be starving
have-nots, leaving the 1.5 thousand million haves in a somewhat
precarious position.
Under the subheading Desperate the article continues:
US Agriculture Secretary Orville Freeman, an ardent anti-populationboom man, said bluntly not long ago that unless the population increase was
dramatically slowed down, by the now famous year 2000 the world would
be a world where the developed nations sacrifice compassion on the altar
of survival feeding only themselves as they huddle behind arms-and-tariff-
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protected borders. A world where the trickling food supply of the hungriest
lands runs dry before it reaches everyoneand millions succumb to
starvationa world where hopelessness breeds hostility, where the evergrowing gap between the haves and have-nots first provokes riots in the
streets, then insurrection and the toppling of Governments, then final,
desperate international aggression.
This is a somewhat prophetic prediction the worlds population has apparently
doubled, and the gap has certainly widened between rich and poor nations and
between rich and poor families and individuals. It is also true that rich nations have
sacrificed compassion not on the altar of survival, but on the twin altars of
greed and militarism. In the 1960s, and even more so today, the poverty of the
developing nations was the direct result of exploitation by the developed
nations. The most obvious economic mechanism by which worsening
impoverishment of the ex-colonial (developing) nations has been the crippling
effect of Third World Debt. The most obvious causes of deprivation of the poor
in these nations are exploitation of their resources (and themselves) by affluent
professional elites in these nations and the fact that these elites have consistently,
and increasingly, yielded to the suggestions of arms dealers to buy more weapons
and security measures.
In June 1967, the Australian ran an alarming article titled Control population or
starve, say experts. The article has no author other than from our world cable
service: Washington, and begins:
A world crisis of staggering proportions is forecast by 1985 unless the
biggest effort ever made by man is begun immediately to solve the world
food problem.
The warning is given in a report sent to President Johnson by the world
food panel of the Presidents science advisory committee. The panel says
that the solution is biologically, technically and economically possible but
may not be politically possible in the U.S. or abroad.
As in the 1980 and 1990s, the world food problem of 1967 was little different to
that of the 1940s when Mohandas Gandhi claimed that the earth provides enough
for every persons need but not every persons greed. The same is true today
there is no absolute shortage of food on Earth there is more than enough for
every man, woman and child, and a lot left over. Yet many millions go hungry,
while others die prematurely because they have consumed too much food and
drink during their lives. There is no absolute shortage of land for people to live in,
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but many billions live in over-crowded environments, and become ill as a result of
overcrowding, and lack of adequate housing. Sometimes they are kept there by
walls and barricades, sometimes they are kept there by fences which exist only in
their minds. Most often they are kept there because of economic necessity they
do not have enough money to live in decent houses, and cannot afford to escape to
a more pleasant and safe environment. The situation is all the more outrageous
because many houses remain unoccupied because poor people are unable to
afford the rent or afford a mortgage, or because they dont have a job, or
look like they may be unreliable, or because of their skin colour whilst wealthy
individuals, landowning families, affluent institutions and massive corporations
greedily accumulate more land, more houses and more slaves.
The Australians Control population or starve article refers to a growing food
shortage (at a time when grain was being dumped in the ocean to keep commodity
prices up), and says that this (non-existent) shortage cannot be relieved without
solving the problem of population growth. Claiming that to solve the problem
that will exist at least by the turn of the century demands that programs of
population control be initiated now (1967), the expert panel quoted by The
Australian recommended that:
To avert widespread famine and violent political and social upheaval,
the rich nations must drastically increase foreign aid to poor nations for food
and population control programmes.
Here we see a clear polarization between rich and poor nations. This is the
same division that has been renamed, at different times, as between First World and
Third World nations, under-developed and developed nations, developing and
developed nations, backward and advanced nations. The search for the
politically correct terms to use to describe the deep economic divide that has
characterised international politics since the Second World War has been clearly
evident in literature emanating from the United Nations and its subsidiary
organizations, the World Health Organization (WHO) and World Bank (WB). Now,
the official terms are First and Third world but if one speaks of rich and
poor nations everyone knows which countries one is talking about. In the
apparently rich countries, however, there still remain people who live in abject
poverty and many who die prematurely due to disease and stress caused by
poverty.
In terms of the Commonwealth, the rich countries, according to most books,
include Australia, New Zealand and Canada and the poor ones include the
African nations (with the exception of white-controlled South Africa), South-East
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Asian ex-colonies (except Singapore), India, Sri Lanka, the Pacific Islands, West
Indies and other nations where the majority population was dark-skinned. Skin
colour is, in fact, the most obvious (and least mentioned) thing about the difference
between first world and third world nations as defined by the United Nations.
All the first world nations have majority populations with white or light
skin. All the third world nations are mainly populated with people having
brown, black or dark skin. Thus, when accusations have been made by first
world academics that there are too many people in the third world,
coincidentally, it has meant that white men and women have been insisting that
there were too many brown and black people in the world and not enough food to
feed them with. The racism inherent in the third world overpopulation theory is
particularly obvious in Australian newspaper reports from the 1960s onwards,
however the difference in skin colour between those calling for population
control and those they demanded be controlled is never mentioned.
So what is population control? The article quoted above, and others to follow, refer
to contraception as an important aspect of population control so obviously what
was regarded as population control included control of the breeding
(reproduction) of the population. This obviously involved influencing prospective
parents, with conscious intent to change the thinking and behaviour of the target
population (without which reproductive behaviour cannot be altered). This does
not necessarily involve literal control of young women and men, but it can and
has, at times.
In the 1960s the main methods of contraception advocated by the medical
profession were the (female) oral contraceptive pill and condoms. Other methods
of contraception promoted in the first world as well as in the third world in the
1960s and 1970s were intrauterine devices (IUDs), tubal ligations (for women) and
vasectomies (for men). It is also, however, possible to sterilise women by
performing a hysterectomy (surgical removal of the womb) and, in the 1970s
thousands of hysterectomies for the purpose of sterilization (rather than for disease
of the uterus) were also performed. Coercive hysterectomies and forced
sterilizations were a particular problem in India, where the population problem
was regarded as being the most serious according the much-publicised Population
Bomb by Stanford Universitys Paul Ehrlich. During Indira Gandhis reign in the
1980s there were several reports in the Western press of Indian women finding,
after surgery, ostensibly for different problems, that their fallopian tubes had also
been cut and tied. Such atrocities were not a feature of population control in First
World countries, nor was it common for women to be given long-lasting hormone
injections to render them temporarily infertile in the West, while depo-provera and
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included as harm reduction measures and the same lobby groups that promote
needle-exchanges also promote injecting rooms. They maintain that as drug use is
now a part of society we should try and contain the problem, particularly that of
the spreading of HIV and Hepatitis (B and C) viruses. Logically, if needles are not
shared, blood borne viruses will not be transmitted between intravenous drug users,
and if new needles and syringes are used rather than re-using the same works,
blood-borne transmission of infections can be reduced. This logic is difficult to
fault, as is the logic that if contaminated needles are returned (by exchange) for
safe disposal (by incineration or burying) the risk of accidental injury to the
public is also reduced. This is not, however, the whole story, and the policy of
needle exchange can seriously worsen problems of intravenous drug addiction in
communities, while exposing more people to risk of blood-borne viruses and
introducing the habit of self-injection to more and more young people.
The needle exchange program includes both collection of contaminated needles
and syringes and the distribution of needles and syringes. There is no doubt that
collection of contaminated needles and syringes (along with other potentially
infectious) rubbish is an important, and hygenically necessary public service. The
distribution of needles is not so obviously worthwhile. It may not be worthwhile at
all. The distribution of more syringes and needles into the community (and the
world) may well be an act of social and environmental vandalism increasing the
prevalence and extent of injecting habits, while also subjecting more of the noninjecting public to accidental infection from contaminated needles.
The vast majority of the people on Earth do not inject themselves with drugs and
have no desire to do so. Most have never injected themselves and never will. This
is because injecting oneself with heroin, amphetamines and other psycho-active
drugs is, in addition to being very dangerous, very unnatural. Unlike drinking
alcohol, or even smoking herbs, which have been part of human culture for
millenia, injecting oneself with metal needles and using plastic syringes to selfadminister administer heroin or amphetamines is an extremely unnatural and
abnormal act that has become a human habit only in the past 100 years. The
terms unnatural and abnormal are here used literally, however their use
requires some clarification.
It is obviously unnatural to inject oneself with anything but then it is also
unnatural to drive a car, or watch television. Injecting drugs is abnormal (not
normal) in that the majority of the population (and most of society within two
standard deviations on a bell curve) does not inject drugs but then, diabetics who
inject themselves with insulin are also abnormal in the same way (simply because
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most people are not insulin-dependent diabetics). In other words diabetics who
inject themselves with insulin are doing something that is unnatural and
abnormal, but obviously not something that is bad, or harmful to their health
(indeed it can be life-saving). Moreover, if they inject themselves with human
insulin, as most do nowadays, the substance they are injecting is not unnatural
(although the act of self-injection remains so). Also, while diabetics who inject
themselves with insulin are abnormal in the sense that they differ in this
behaviour from the majority (normal) population, and constitute a minority
among diabetics (most are non-insulin-dependent), their behaviour is normal for
insulin-dependent diabetics.
The need for insulin of people with diabetes mellitus has remained, for several
decades, a popular analogy used by the psychiatric profession regarding the need
for antipsychotics by schizophrenics, but the history of psychiatrists use of
insulin dates back to the early 1920s, immediately after the pancreatic hormone
was discovered in 1922. The first insulin shocks and insulin comas were performed
in the USA and Germany, as Edward Shorter reveals in A History of Psychiatry
(1997):
This story [that of coma and chemical shock therapy] begins in Berlin
with a young medical graduate of the Vienna University named Manfred
Sakel. Sakel was born in 1900 in Nadverna, Galicia (then part of Austria), of
a pious Jewish familyBy the time of his graduation in 1925, so scorching
had been the blast of Austrian anti-Semitism become that he found a job in
Berlin as assistant physician at Kurt Mendels expensive suburban private
clinic, the Lichterfelde Sanatorium. The clinic courted the actresses and
physicians who typically were at risk of morphine addiction. Yet a coldturkey withdrawal often entailed symptoms such as vomiting and diarrhoea.
In the late 1920s, Sakel discovered that such symptoms could be
successfully managed by aministering small doses of insulin, a hormone just
discovered in 1922.
Insulin had already been tried several times in psychiatry during the
1920s, as early as 1923, when the staff of the Psychopathic Hospital in Ann
Arbor, Michigan, gained the impression that insulin relieved the depression
of diabetic patients as well as their diabetes. In fact it did not. Later in the
1920s, insulin was used on patients who had lost their appetites or refused to
eat. But it occurred to no one that a coma from insulin shock might be
curative.
Sakel was probably not aware of much of this previous writing in any
event. Yet he did have to cope with the insulin comas that happened
inadvertently to several of his own patients. He noted that after the comas
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were over the patients desire for morphine had been abolished. In addition,
these previously restless and agitated patients had become tranquil and
accessible. Sakel reported this finding in 1933. At this point, he was clearly
thinking that putting patients into an insulin coma might in and of itself be a
cure for major psychiatric illness.
Evidently as a result of the Nazi takeover, Sakel returned to Vienna in
1933, getting a post at the university psychiatric clinic under Otto Poetzl,
Wagner-Jaureggs successor as the professor of psychiatry. Sakel also
became chief physician of a private clinic in a Viennese suburb. Sakel
persuaded a reluctant Poetzl to try out the dangerous-sounding therapy, and
in October 1933, Sakel began testing systematically at the university clinic
his theory that insulin shock represented a cure for schizophrenia. (p.209)
Insulin shocks do not cure schizophrenia, although, like other forms of torture,
insulin shocks can stop people talking about things that disturb others. Because
insulin, the hormone secreted by the Islets of Langerhans in the pancreas lowers
the blood glucose level, if people are injected with large amounts of insulin
suddenly, they suffer from a sudden drop in blood sugar level leading to loss of
conciousness and, often convulsions. This is the shock that Dr Sakel imagined
was a cure for schizophrenia.
The example of Dr Sakels experiments with insulin shocks and comas reveal
much about the psychiatric profession in Germany in the 1920s and 30s, but also
about the ethics and assumptions of the psychiatric profession today. Psychiatry at
the dawn of the twentyfirst century is far more closely related to psychiatry of the
early twentieth century than most people realise. A hidden thread that runs through
the past one hundred years of the profession is that of eugenics predominantly
negative eugenics and population control. In the case of psychiatry (and the
medical profession more generally), population control includes both control of
population numbers and control of the population. Population Control thus
includes control of global population (the number of people in the world) and
national population figures, while control of the population, a bigger concern for
psychiatrists, includes control of the behaviour and minds of the population and the
individuals who comprise the populace including their sexual behaviour and their
social/political behaviour. Both facets of population control involve the
application of coercion and it is in coercive population control that human rights
abuses are to be most obviously expected.
The strategies of population number controllers include much more than the
promotion of condoms or the instilling of fear of sex (for risk of disease or as an
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[untrue], and no serious side effects were observed [also untrue]. Clearly this
represents a powerful new means of safely limiting family size, though there
are of course cultural and ethical aspects to consider too. (p.19.10)
As for the safety of vaccines generally, the book has few reservations, but in
glossing over the risks of and many concerns about long-term damage to the
immune system (and other systems) from immunization, admits to some general
risks which are worth noting:
Some more of the serious complications may stem from the vaccine or
from the patient. Vaccines may be contaminated with unwanted proteins
or toxins, or even live viruses. Supposedly killed vaccines may not have
been properly killed; attenuated vaccines may revert to the wild type.
The patient may be hypersensitive to minute amounts of contaminated
protein or immunocompromised in which case any living vaccine is usually
contra-indicated. (p.19.10) (emphasis added)
The last sentence in this textbook quotation brings the entire third world
immunization strategy under question. It is common knowledge that many
children in poor countries suffer from malnutrition. It is also accepted that
malnutrition compromises the immune system, causing immunosuppression. It is
thus clearly a dangerous thing to inoculate such children with live viruses, even if
they are supposed to be attenuated. It would be even more suspect if these
children developed an epidemic of acquired immune system deficiency and
collapse of the immune sysem and no serious attempts were made by vaccinators
and epidemiologists to look for a connection between the two.
Live virus vaccines made from infected animal tissues or cell lines have been
injected into malnourished African children and babies since the 1920s (smallpox
vaccines in Rhodesia) and immunization programs using live viruses were greatly
expanded in the late 1950s (with the Salk polio vaccine). At this time and for
another two decades retroviruses (slow viruses) were not known to cause
disease in humans, but they were found to cause disease (mainly immune damage
and cancers) in several animal species. Various animal viruses had been noted, in
the 1970s, as harmless contaminants in human vaccines derived from animal
tissue cultures (such as SV-40, or simian virus 40, which was noted from Salk
polio vaccines which were manufactured from polio virus grown on sliced monkey
kidneys).
In an ongoing industry of animal virus experimentation, chimpanzees, monkeys,
dogs, cats, rabbits, goats, sheep, rats, chickens, pigeons and mice in universities
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around the world have been deliberately infected with an increasing variety of
viruses, including retroviruses (since the development of the Rous Sarcoma Virus
in 1910). New hybrid viruses have been created, and animals have been specially
bred with susceptibility to diseases (particularly cancers) from these viruses, as
well as from other causes (such as Sprague-Dawley rats, which readily develop
cancers). This is the scientific environment in which the entire virology and
immunology industries have developed, and the focus of their efforts has been to
develop new drugs, find new uses for old drugs, and develop new vaccines.
Alleviating third world debt or poverty has not been on the agenda.
Did the HIV virus develop accidentally as a result of unrestrained and careless
animal experimentation, or was it deliberately designed for the purposes of
biowarfare? Was it unintentionally spread through infected blood transfusions in
Africa, or was it a further effort at population control, following the apparent
failure of condom-promotion to prevent population increases in Africa in the
1970s, involving the deliberate inoculation of Africans with a killer-virus?
David Suzuki wrote, rather glibly, in 1990:
In 1972, then-president Richard Nixon signed the Biological Weapons
Convention, under which all research on biological weapons was stopped
and all cultures were destroyed. (Inventing the Future p.89)
Did Nixon and his administration reveal as much about American biowarfare as he
did about events in Watergate, Vietnam, the Middle East and Central America? Is it
possible to stop all research on biological warfare when it is all secret (and
therefore routinely denied) anyway? Can we expect honest answers from
governments and research institutions, when the history of biological warfare is
systematically denied and attributed to natural disasters and the susceptibility of
nave native populations to admittedly introduced, but accidentally introduced,
disease?
As seen in the previous chapter, modern political, medical and scientific concern
about overpopulation and the belief that increased population will inevitably lead
to mass starvation dates back to the influential essay by the Anglican priest and
economist Thomas Robert Malthus titled Essay on the Principle of Population.
This essay, published in England in 1798, claimed that the greatest threat to
humanity was population growth. Alarmed by a rise in the population of Europe
from 66 million in 1700 to 180 million in the 1790s, Malthus argued that
population, when unchecked, increases in a geometric ratio while subsistence
only in an arithmetical ratio. Based on this dubious supposition, the economist-
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priest claimed that rates of population growth inevitably exceed rates of increase in
food production. Citing the example of the United States of America (which
Britain had recently lost possession of Eastern North America to) Malthus argued
that since the population of the USA had doubled in 25 years, it could keep on
doubling every 25 years, while food production could only be expected to increase
by a similar amount every 25 years. The Anglican priest, applying his theories to
Europe with a callousness that makes a mockery of his claim to be a man of God,
argued that dependent poverty out to be held disgraceful because it diminishes
the power and will to save advocating workhouses for the poor and distressed.
Malthus mathematical and biological assumptions were badly flawed, and his
economic theory, in which Social Darwinism and capitalist theory is deeply rooted,
enabled economic slavery to be rationalised by the upper classes at the same time
that public opinion was making cargo slavery politically unsustainable. Although
cargo slavery was politically unpalatable and morally reprehensible the economies
of the European empires and their colonies had been built on slavery and were
deeply dependent on them. For this reason the abolition of slavery was resisted for
economic reasons (especially by land and slave owners in the colonies) long after
the moral issues had been clearly defined equality, emancipation and freedom
were recognised to be good, while any form of slavery was recognised to be evil.
The word evil was, in fact used frequently by opponents of slavery the trade in
human lives was regarded as evil and the maintenance of states of slavery also evil.
Despite this recognition, slavery continued long after Thomas Jefferson wrestled
with his conscience over his personal ownership of slaves and economic
dependence on them after publicly acknowledging that slavery was an affront to
decency; at the same time that, across the Atlantic, Thomas Malthus was arguing
that the real problem was poor people having too many children. Slavery in the
United States of America continued long after Jefferson, by then President of the
USA, banned the importation of slaves to the USA, back in 1807. It continued long
after Abraham Lincolns famous Emancipation Proclamation of 1st January 1863.
Slavery in the British colonies and Commonwealth did not end when it was
officially banned by the British Parliament in 1830, and continued in various
British colonies, dominions and protectorates, notably in Africa, but also in
the Pacific region and Asia and has not ended yet. The evils of slavery did not
disappear from the face of the Earth, or the minds of would-be masters and
owners when Allied troops released millions of slaves from concentration
camps, death camps and labour camps in German-controlled Europe in 1945
slavery, in the form of debt that exists as soon as one is born (part of inevitable
national debt) has become ubiquitous. This is compounded by the fact that few
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who are economically enslaved regard their plight as slavery. The history of
modern slavery has much pertinence to the history of genocide because, as in
Nazi Europe, slavery and genocide have often gone hand in hand.
After the Second World War, despite the loss of millions of young lives during the
1940s, the eugenicists (who were much less likely to identify themselves as such
for fear of association with Nazism) intensified their warnings about
overpopulation. In fact, because many of the lives lost during the Second World
War were those of young, white Anglo-Saxons, the eugenicists lamented that they
had lost some of their best, and thus feared, all the more, the dark hordes they
imagined existed in the backward parts of the world.
They also feared the poor, whom they recognised were becoming increasingly
critical of the political, social and legal privileges of the rich. These fears can be
seen in the ravings of the nuclear physicist Sir Charles Galton Darwin, grandson of
Charles Robert Darwin, at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Sir
Charles, who had been Director of the National (British) Physics Laboratory from
1938 to 1949 (during the Second World War and the Manhattan Project), gave a
lecture to Caltech scientists in 1956 titled Forecasting the Future, which was
later published in the 1960 Allen and Unwin book Frontiers of Science: a survey.
In it he argues for a tremendous solution to the problem of overpopulation, even
more efficient than war, and more efficient than Natures apparently simple,
brutal, control of population. His fears are based on Thomas Mathus argument
that food production can be predicted to always lag behind population growth (a
theory that has been manifestly shown to be false):
I have noticed that most people, when for the first time they face the
population problem, at once think about the possibilities of producing more
food. They first think, perhaps, of the fields we all notice here and there that
are not being properly cultivated. Then they may think of improved breeds
of plants that will produce two or three crops a year instead of only one.
Then there is the possibility of cultivating the ocean. And there is the
Chlorella, an alga which might be grown on a sort of moving belt in a
factory; it can produce proteins perhaps ten times more efficiently than the
garden vegetables do, but unfortunately at a hundred times the cost. Finally,
with the rapid progress of our knowledge of chemistry, it is not to be
excluded that one day the foodstuffs necessary for life will be synthesized in
factories from their original elements, carbon, nitogen, phosphorus and so on
[so much for the culinary arts!].
All these things are possible, and I do not doubt that some of them will
be done, but to accomplish them is no help, because of the central point
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These are not reassuring words to hear from the retired Director of the British
National Physics Laboratory, given that Sir Charles Darwin held this position
during the Manhattan Project, when the Allies were developing the atom bomb.
Shortly before Sir Charles expressed his opinion that he doubted if even an atomic
war would be tremendous enough to control population numbers, a series of
atom bombs were dropped in Australia, killing an unknown number of Aboriginal
people who lived in the region of Maralinga, in South Australia. The people who
died were not at war with the British and Australian authorities who decided that
Maralinga was a suitable site for the British nuclear testing program. The site, in
rural South Australia, was far away from the white population in the coastal cities
of Melbourne and Sydney in the South East of the continent, and far from
Canberra, the seat of Government, where the decision was made. It was even
further from England. The French decided, with similar motives, to use their
Pacific Island territories, in reality beautiful coral reef islands and atolls, to test
their bombs, as did the U.S. Government (along with other testing sites,
including some in America). In Australia, however, the bombing was more than an
act of environmental vandalism, it was an act of genocide, given the governments
then overt aim of assimilation and breeding out the black in Indigenous
populations to create a White Nation.
The Masonic Australian Prime Minister at the time, Robert Menzies, who wore his
love for the British Queen on his sleeve, along with his adulation of the Mother
Country, pleaded with the British Government to test their atom bomb in
Australia partly because he wanted to please his heroes. He also wanted to attract
business to Australia, and encourage Australias mining and military industries
(including Australias developing nuclear industry). At this time the White
Australia policy was in full force and Aboriginal people were seen, by the
government, as a problem. Previous claims that Aborigines were a dying race
were being increasingly questioned, and the terra nullius (empty land) claim by the
initial British colonists had been long-recognised as a convenient lie. Although
there has never been an officially declared genocidal policy against the indigenous
people of Australia, the dropping of the Maralinga atom bombs and other nuclear
tests in parts of the Australian mainland that were known to be populated by
unknown numbers of men, women and children are a testament to how callously
the Aboriginal people in Australia have been treated even after the Second World
War (during which several Aboriginal men fought and died for the Allies). This
will be detailed in subsequent chapters.
It is obvious, when one considers it, that estimates of global population have
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every mans need but not every mans greed, as Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi
observed, ten years before Sir Charles Galton Darwin warned his academic
colleagues that in fifty years the world would be struggling to feed a hungry four
billion unless they could come up with a tremendous solution more
tremendous than the simple brutality of Nature and more murderous than war.
Even a nuclear war, he claimed, would not be adequate to control population
numbers. Could he have been suggesting the use of biological or chemical
weapons? Could he have been that insane? Regardless, the theories of three
generations of the Darwin family, Charles Robert Darwin, Major Leonard Darwin
and Sir Charles Galton Darwin provide sound refutation of Francis Galtons
argument that genius is inherited. Despite obvious nepotism, or perhaps because
of it, the brilliance of Charles Darwin is not seen in the racist and elitist eugenics
program of his son Leonard, or the call for a tremendous, brutal solution to the
threat of overpopulation by his grandson, Sir Charles.
Chapter 6
THE EFFECT OF AIDS ON U.N. POPULATION
ESTIMATES
Although population growth rates in African nations have long been described as
among the highest in the world, actual population numbers in the huge continent
of Africa are actually very small compared with those of the Asian, European and
American continents, and the population density in even the most crowded African
nations is a fraction of the most crowded Asian and European countries. Back in
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1984, when the AIDS epidemic began in Africa, Nigeria, generally regarded as the
most overpopulated of the African countries at the time had a population density
around 96 per square kilometre. Kenya had a population density of 29 per square
kilometre, Ethiopia 28, Zaire 12.7, and Sudan only 7.7. This contrasted with much
higher densities in European nations: Switzerland 153 people per square kilometre,
Denmark 120, Italy 192, Germany (East and West combined) 219, and Britain 227.
Asian countries, also accused, along with Africa, of being especially responsible
for global overpopulation, included Indonesia with a population density of 73
people per square kilometre, China with 105, Pakistan with 106, Phillippines with
169, India with 212, and Sri Lanka with 234. Due to its small size and heavy
urbanization, Japan had a high population density on 322 per square kilometre (a
population of 120 million in 372, 000 square kilometres). At the time there was
also talk of a growing population problem in the Middle East mainly blamed on
countries with mainly Moslem populations. Iraq, in 1984, had a population density
of 32 per square kilometre, Iran had 24 and Saudi Arabia 4.4. Israels population
density was, in contrast, 197 people per square kilometre. The huge USSR had a
population density of only 12, while the population density in Australia was only
1.9 people per sqaure kilometre.
These figures have been calculated by simply taking the total population estimate
as given in a 1983 atlas and dividing it by the surface area of the nation. By such
calculation, Taiwan had a population density of 475 in 1983, and Singapore an
incredible 4262 people per square kilometre. The population density of Hong Kong
was even higher: 4888 /square km. Yet few people were starving in Hong Kong or
Singapore in 1983 and many were in Africa.
If we look at total population numbers, China has long been the most populous
nation in the world, due to its large size and relatively high population density.
China is now said to have about 2 billion residents, and the Chinese Government
has taken harsh measures over the past 3 decades to curb population growth. The
Indian Government, with about a billion people to govern, has also engaged in
aggressive measures to limit the size of the population, including coercive
sterilization, and sterilization without knowledge or consent (a practice that
became common during the rule of Indira Gandhi in the 1970s and 80s). Sri Lanka
and the Philippines were also regarded, in the 1970s as potential disaster areas
regarding population. I remember a massive condom-promotion campaign in 1973
when I was at high school in Kandy, a hill city in central Sri Lanka. Condoms were
suddenly available at every corner shop. The shops advertised them with little
purple and white signs that caught ones notice when walking down any city street.
All the signs were the same the condom company must have had a monopoly,
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assumes that the improved life expectancy over the previous 15 years would have
continued at roughly the same rate over the subsequent 5 years, thus improving
from 50.2 to 51.7. (In contrast, the life expectancy of whites in South Africa was,
at the time, over 70 years similar to the average life expectancy in Australia,
Japan and Western European nations). According to the UN projections, the life
expectancy of Africans in the nominated 29 hardest hit countries, will have
dropped to 47.5 in 1995-2000, and further to 47.4 in 2000-2005. This is contrasted
with projections of 54.1 and 56.4 without AIDS by 2000 and 2005 respectively.
In reality, the life expectancy in several African nations has, since these figures
were released (in 1998) apparently dropped to below 40 years, and even below 30
in some countries (such as Malawi).
The 1998 UN life expectancy figures for these African countries are unrealistically
optimistic given the fact that there is no known cure for AIDS or vaccine to prevent
it. After dropping to a low of 47.4 years in 2000-2005 the projection is for an
improvement to 49.4 years by 2010 and 52.6 years by
2015 (in comparison to 58.4 and 60.4 repectively without AIDS). It is these longterm predictions and projections that are particularly dubious comparisons are
made between to mathematical constructs, and neither of them is reliable. The first
is the projection of life expectancy reduction if the AIDS epidemic continues (as
it has been predicted to do). The second is the projection of life expectancy
improvement were it not for AIDS.
How falsely optimistic these projections are can be seen in Figure 2 of the UNs
1998 Revision of the World Population Estimates and Projections: a line graph
comparing Life Expectancy at Birth in the Seven Hardest Hit Countries from
1950 to the present, and showing projections to the year 2015. These countries are
Zimbabwe, Zambia, South Africa, Kenya, Namibia, Botswana and Malawi, all in
southern and eastern Africa. Each country shows a steady increase in life
expectancy (depicted as a rising gradient) from 1950 to 1985, followed by a
precipitous fall 1985 and 2000. In the case of Malawi, life expectancy apparently
increased from 36 years in 1950-55 to 45 years in 1985-90, dropping to 42 years in
1990-95 and was predicted to fall to 39 years in 1995-2000. This, according to the
UN prediction is as low as the life expectancy would fall in Malawi the
projection is for improvements to 41 years in 2000-2005, 44 years in 2005-10 and
48 years in 2010-15. Recent reports of life expectancy in Malawi have been in the
region of 27 years, contrary to these 1998 projections.
The figures for Botswana (previously Bechuanaland, a mineral and gold-rich
British Protectorate administered via the white regimes in adjacent Rhodesia and
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South Africa), show an increase in life expectancy from 42 years in 1950, rising to
63 in 1985-90, followed by a fall to 61 years over the next 5 years (the beginning
of the HIV epidemic in Botswana) and a horrifying 47 years in the following 5
years. This devastating decrease in life expectancy of 14 years is prediced to
worsen further to 41 years in 2000-2005. The accompanying text, from the UN
population division website, claims that:
In Botswana, the hardest hit country, one of every 4 adults is infected
by HIV. Life expectancy at birth is expected to drop from 61 years in 19901995 to 47 years in 1995-2000. In the absence of HIV/AIDS, it would have
been expected to reach 65 years in 1990-1995 and 67 years in 1995-2000.
Due to the impact of AIDS, life expectancy is projected to fall further to 41
years by 2000-2005.
This has obviously had a dramatic effect in decreasing the rate of population
growth, since most of those who have died of AIDS are children, women of
childbearing age and young men. The 1998 UN report says:
Mainly due to the mortality impact, population growth in Botswana has
been significantly reduced. The average annual population growth rate of 3.5
per cent per year in 1980-85 has fallen to 2.9 per cent in 1990-1995 and will
likely further fall to 1.9 per cent in 1995-2000 and 1.2 per cent in 2000-2005
(figure 3). In the absence of AIDS, Botswanas population would have
experienced growth above 2.5 throughout the 1990-2005 period. Because of
the mortality impact of AIDS, Botswanas population by 2015 is expected to
be 20 per cent smaller than it would have been in the absence of AIDS.
Nevertheless, because of high fertility, Botswanas population is still
expected to nearly double between 1995 and 2050.
The eugenists of the early 20th century and population experts of the 1960s were
aiming at Zero Population Growth (ZPG) for the worlds population as a whole.
Regarding the world as overpopulated even when there were only thought to be
2 billion people in the world, the more aggressive of the eugenists were arguing
that any increase above 2 million would spell disaster famine, warfare and death
from infectious plagues. The eugenic focus was on changing the racial mixture of
the human population that survived what they saw as an inevitable struggle for
food, living space and natural resources. The white eugenists wanted their own
descendants and race to remain the dominant group in any future society. They
did not really care what happened to the other races these had been
dehumanised and reduced to non-whites. Whether they were sterilized, enslaved
or genocided was of little concern to most of these eugenists, as long as population
growth among the uncivilised natives and irresponsible lower classes was
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controlled. The more callous amongst such eugenists could have seen the United
Nations projections of population growth and Life Expectancy at Birth in 29
African Countries With and Without AIDS as tremendous but not tremendous
enough, as Sir Charles Darwin put it in his 1959 lecture at the California Institute
of Technology a reduction of population growth rate from 3.5 per cent per year to
1.2 per cent is closer to, but not yet at, the aimed-for Zero Population Growth rate.
Could such a mentality exist in the modern world?
The 1998 Revision of the World Population Estimates and Projections of the UN
claims that despite the devastating mortality toll from HIV/AIDS the population
of Botswana is still expected to double between 1995 and 2050. This prediction is
based on the assumption that reduced life expectancy from AIDS will reach a low
point around 2000 and then steadily improve to 41 years in 2005, 44 years in
2010 and 48 years at 2015. Worsening figures regarding HIV infection and the
failure of current strategies to curtail the epidemic in the Third World bring this
prediction into considerable doubt.
If one looks at the seven hardest hit countries in Africa on a map, it is evident
that the AIDS epidemic, once localised to central Africa, is now a massive public
health problem throughout southern and eastern Africa also. The seven countries
focused on by the UN population division include 5 in southern Africa (South
Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Namibia and Botswana) and 2 in east Africa (Kenya
and Malawi). In the 1980s the epidemic was reported to be the most serious in
Zaire, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania and Uganda. Later Mozambique, on the east
coast of Africa, was identified as another focus of the epidemic. Mozambique
remains among the 34 hardest hit nations according to the UN:
Among those countries, 29 are in Sub-Sahara Africa (Benin, Botswana,
Burundi, Burkina, Faso, Cameroon, Central Republic of Africa, Chad,
Congo, Cote dIvoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Gabon,
Guinea Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia,
Nigeria, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Togo, Uganda, United
Republic of Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe), 3 in Asia (Cambodia, India and
Thailand), and 2 in Latin America and the Caribbean (Brazil and Haiti). Of
the 30 million persons in the world currently infected with HIV (UNAIDS,
1997), 26 million (85 per cent) reside in these 34 countries. In addition, 91
per cent of all AIDS deaths in the world have occurred in these 34
countries.
When one looks at the colonial history of these nations some interesting patterns
become evident. All of these countries have been ruled by European governments
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over the past one hundred years, with the exceptions of Thailand in south-east
Asia, Haiti (a possession of the USA) and Brazil (once a Portuguese colony, and
the previous destination of millions of African slaves). Looking more closely at the
nations in sub-Saharan Africa, all were colonised and ruled by British, French,
Portuguese, Dutch or Belgian white elites prior to being granted independence,
sometime between 1960 and 1980, and all were previously the sites of slavery, the
obtainment of slaves and other atrocities at the hands of European protectors.
The areas of central and southern Africa that have been the worst sites of the AIDS
epidemic coincide with the gold belt and copper belt and this part of the
continent also known to contain rich diamond and uranium deposits.
It is a matter of historical fact that Kenya, Rhodesia and South Africa were
strongholds of British Imperialism and white supremacy in Africa. It is also a
matter of historical fact that slavery of blacks by whites was instituted in other
white colonies notably in Kenya, the Belgian Congo (now Zaire) and the
various French and German colonies. Slaves were also obtained from Portuguese
colonies including Mozambique and Angola, British West African colonies
including Ghana (Gold Coast) and Nigeria and forced to work in various other
parts of Africa, in Europe, or elsewhere. In The Coburgs of Belgium (1968), Theo
Aronson wrote of King Leopolds efforts to deny the Belgian atrocities in the
Congo, which will be described shortly:
No one believed him. A less notorious personality might have got away
with it, but with the sort of reputation be enjoyed, the charges stuck all too
easily. The world already knew that he was depraved, mercenary and heardhearted; that he had betrayed his wife and ill-treated his daughters; that he
was moving heaven and earth to rob these daughters of their inheritance. If
he was capable of such behavior toward his own flesh and blood, could there
be any doubt that he was guilty of atrocities toward unknown savages?
(p.148)
In the opinion of Vernon Mallinson (a British Professor of Comparitive Education)
in Belgium (1970), Leopold was, though, behaving only as other industrial and
capitalist bosses were behaving in Africa. Allowing for Mallinsons conscious
effort to minimise the Belgian monarchs misdeeds, (in the light of this observation
being made by a British academic who previously worked for the British secret
service), this admission does not say much for the behaviour of British colonists
and capitalist bosses in Africa. Certainly, it would not have been out of character
for Leopold II to have unleashed a killer plague in the Congo if he could make
money out of it what about his followers, and other colonial (and neo-colonial)
masters?
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One important fact about the African AIDS epidemic that raises significant
questions about its origin and mode of introduction is the fact that, from the outset,
it has affected males and females roughly equally affecting heterosexual
populations rather than male homosexual populations as was the fact in so-called
Pattern 1 countries (the USA, Europe and Australia). No sensible scientist has
been able to blame either homosexuality or intravenous drug use for the spread of
AIDS in Africa. Instead, various insinuations and claims have been made about the
sexual behaviour of black Africans, as had previously been made about Haitians,
when the epidemic was first judged, by the American AIDS establishment, to have
arrived there because of voodoo practices in the Caribbean island.
Chapter 7
Chapter 7
IMPERIAL DESIGNS IN AFRICA
At the time of the first European voyages of discovery one substance in particular
was valued above all others by the ships captains and the kings and queens that
sent them in search of new lands and treasures the soft metal, gold. All other
substances were valued relative to gold, and the European monarchs who financed
the voyages were obsessed by it, as were their captains and commanders. Even the
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Churches had a more than healthy fascination for gold, and the missionaries they
sent in the wake of navigators and explorers frequently acted as middlemen
and ambassadors for those whose primary interest was obtaining gold for as little
as possible from the natives.
Although the exotic spices of the East were, in later times worth their weight in
gold, when the first Spanish and Portuguese explorers set off in their galleons
from Iberian ports in the late 1400s, they were in search of gold. When Christopher
Columbus crossed the Atlantic and discovered the ancient civilizations of
Central America he found that they had enormous amounts of gold gold
ornaments, jewellery, statues, and even gold toys for children. The amount of gold
they found literally sent the Spanish Conquistadores mad. They developed an
irrational state of mind that resulted in heinous crimes being committed in an effort
to obtain more gold what was later termed gold fever (although this term was
selectively applied to the slaves rather than the masters who actually plundered
most of the gold, and ordered the most cruel atrocities). In the 1600s, when the
French, Dutch and British sought to claim empires of their own, they, too were
obsessed by gold, and were prepared to steal, lie, betray, and murder in order to get
their hands on it. Wherever gold and diamonds were found, there followed
European territorial claims.
In the late 19th century, when Francis Galton and Leonard Darwin were espousing
the theory that negroes have a slavish instinct, both the British and Germans
had plans to ultimately subjugate and exploit the whole of the African continent (as
did the Portuguese three centuries earlier). In the late 19 th century and early 20th
century, Lord Cecil Rhodes, a British aristocrat and mining magnate, who had been
given virtually free reign to do as he pleased in his diamond empire by the
British government, expanded the British mining operations in Southern Africa in
the name of the British South Africa Company claiming as Rhodesia a vast
area of already inhabited land to the north of British-controlled white South
Africa (present day Zimbabwe and Zambia). Rhodes made public his intention to
create a colony that stretched from the Cape (Cape Colony in South Africa) to
Cairo (the capital city of Egypt).
Cecil Rhodes (1853-1902), the son of an Anglican priest, has affected global
politics and economics to an extraordinary degree since in the 1880s, when, after
obtaining a Law Degree from Oxford and making various social, financial and
political contacts in England, he returned to Durban in South Africa to make
money from the diamond mining industry. By 1887 Rhodes had control of the De
Beers Mining Company, which was rivalled in size only by the Kimberley Central
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largest province in South Africa) in July 1890 and his friend Dr Leander Starr
Jameson was made administrator of all the British South Africa Companys
territories in June 1891.
An indication of the imperial arrogance of the British Empire at the time was
evident in the fact that in July 1890, the same month that Rhodes was made prime
minister of Cape Colony, the borders of German Tanganyika were redrawn to
include the tallest mountain in Africa, the magnificent Mount Kilimanjaro, to
satisfy the request by the aging British empress, Queen Victoria, that her
grandson William II, who had become the Kaiser of Germany that year
(succeeding his father Otto von Bismarck), be given a mountain, because he had
no mountains in Africa (Burne, 1991, p.1005). At the same time the Germans
were given all the interior to the south Zanzibar in East Africa (German East
Africa, later called Tanganyika), while Britain gained the slaving island of
Zanzibar on the East Coast (adjacent to Tanganyika) and the East African interior
north of it as far as the Congo (British East Africa, now Kenya).
Queen Victorias nephew, King Leopold II of Belgium, had already claimed the
whole of the central African inland south of the Congo River, a massive 920,000
square miles of land, as his own personal possession, having abandoned the
pretense of creating a haven free from the ravages of slavery.
In 1876 Leopold had invited a collection of explorers, geographers and
philanthropists to his Royal Palace in Brussels and explained how he wanted to
open up the Dark Continent to Christian civilization, and that rather than having
egotistical motives or a desire for territorial conquest, his dream was to abolish the
slave trade and set up research stations in the heart of Africa. This was the
notorious Leopolds initial claim, when he announced the creation of the Congo
Free State after sending Henry Morton Stanley back up the Congo River to set up
research stations and get some treaties signed by the savages. To Stanley, all
the Africans he had encountered in his historic exploration of the interior of the
continent, when he travelled there in search of the British missionary-explorer
David Livingstone, were savages. Research stations were indistinguishable
from slaving stations, except that they also collected information and body parts.
The Welsh-born American explorer Henry Morton Stanley, previously a reporter
for the New York Herald, was employed by the Belgian monarch after Leopold had
recognised that here, at last, was an opportunity for the creation of a Belgian
Empire to rival those of the larger European nations. This imperialist motive was
revealed after the pretense of the Association Internationale du Congo (AIC) was
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abandoned and Leopold announced to the world, on the 1 st of August, 1885, that
His Majesty, in accord with the International Association [his own company], has
taken the title of Sovereign of the Independent State of the Congo. In doing so he
had acquired a country the size of Western Europe [on the basis of bogus
treaties], and none of the other European powers tried to stop him they had,
after all, acquired, through similar, and often considerably more brutal means, even
more territory for their own empires.
The treaties acquired by Henry Morton Stanley in the Congo were obtained by
shotgun diplomacy. Theo Aronson, in The Coburgs of Belgium (1968) admits
that after over 300 Congo chiefs had signed away their independence in
exchange for bottles of gin and cloth (although the majority of them had not the
slightest idea of what it was that they were signing) Leopold showed his true
colours when he sent Morton further east from his new base in the Congo to claim
territory as far as the Nile River, using a more violent strategy:
Ever since he had first visited Egypt over thirty years before Leopold
had dreamed of one day establishing himself on this great river. Both
strategically and commercially, it would be a splendid position: he would be
in control of the very crossroads of Central Africa and would have access to
almost unlimited supplies of ivory. And who could tell, if all went smoothly,
the Coburgs spreading northward through the Sudan toward Egypt might
yet become latter-day pharoahs.
Never, indeed, did the time seem more opportune than at present. With
General Gordon having just been killed by the Mahdists at Khartoum, the
Sudan was in a state of chaos. Emin Pasha, one of Gordons subordinates,
was still holding out at Lado on the Nile, and as Lado was exactly where
King Leopold wanted to be, he hit upon a way of turning Emins
predicament to his own advantage. He would send an expedition under
Stanley to relieve Emin and then, as a way of converting the territory around
Lado into a province of the Congo, offer Emin the job of governor.
Stanley, obliged to approach Lado [on the Nile, in Sudan] from the
Congo rather than by the easier route through East Africa, was faced with his
most difficult task to date. As usual, by a display of iron will and at the cost
of hundreds of lives, he accomplished it. He reached Lado, however, to find
that not only was Emin not interested in Leopolds offer but that he was not
even particularly pleased to be rescued. Stanley, determined to fulfill at least
one part of his mission, rescued him willy-nilly [took him hostage] and
marched him back to Bagamoyo on the East African coast. Herethe nearsighted Emin fell off a balcony and fractured his skull.
The Stanley expedition having failed to gain the Nile foothold, Leopold
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tried other methods. First he set out to convince Bismarck [the German
emperor, or Kaiser] that his presence on the Nile would help stamp out the
slave trade, and when this ruse misfired, he about-faced and tried to get
Tippo Tib, the famous Arab slaver, to establish a station there. Finally, in
desperation, he was obliged to finance an expedition of his own. In 1890, a
small army set out from the Congo. By signing treaties with such chiefs as
were amenable and by shooting down such as were not, Leopolds
expedition slowly gained control of the area. By October 1892, King
Leopold was on the Nile. It seemed as though he had made yet another of his
dreams come true. (p.108-9) (emphasis added)
General Charles George Gordon, whose subordinate Emin was rescued by
Stanley, had been sent by the British Government to lead Anglo-Egyptian forces
out of the Sudan, which was being attacked by the forces of the Moslem leader
Mohammed Ahmad. Ahmads followers hailed him as the Mahdi, or divinely
guided one, and had attempted to drive the British out of Sudan. Prior to Gordon
being sent to the Sudan the British had assembled an army of 8,000 men against
the Mahdis men (Mahdists), of whom only 300 had survived. Sudan and Egypt
were then offically under the indirect rule of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, via the
Khedive in Egypt, although, following the building of the Suez Canal, most of
the political power in the area was in the hands of the British and French (who had
financed the building of the canal in the 1860s). Egyptian soldiers served under
British officers after Britain became the principal shareholder in the Suez Canal (in
1875) and prior to this the British and French established a condominium or
joint rule in Egypt. Since Sudan was also partly under the control of the Turkish
Khedive in Egypt, this vast area came under the sphere of influence of the British.
With a long history of colonization and attempted colonization, the Egyptian
officers did rise up against the British in the early 1880s, however the response
from London was to bomb Alexandria and send forces to occupy Cairo (1882). The
war between Moslem and Christian armies intensified, and in 1885 the Mahdis
army captured and beheaded General Gordon, taking control of Khartoum and the
Sudan.
Hoping to take advantage of the battle over the Nile, the Belgian king approached
the British Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, suggesting that in exchange Britain
allowing him to lease the Sudan from the Khedive of Egypt, Leopold would
lend Britain his Sudanese subjects to do with whatsoever they pleased even to
using them in an army with which Britain could annex China (Aronson, 1968,
p.109). The British had, however, already gained the trading concessions they
desired with China, at the conclusion of the Opium Wars of the 1840s, and did not
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134
What, exactly, were these horrors? They were the almost inevitable
result of King Leopolds monopoly system. The Kings only interest in the
Congo was to make as much money out of it as quickly as he possibly could.
In 1901, when he had been due either to repay the Government loan of ten
years before or to hand the Congo to Belgium, he managed, in his usual
adroit manner, to do neither. The Government obligingly passed a bill
postponing repayment of the loan indefinitely, and King Leopold remained
in control of the Congo. Not even he, however, imagined that he would live
forever and his milking of the Congolese cow was now accelerated to
provide funds for his many unfinished projects [mainly the construction of
ostentatious buildings in Belgium].
Rubber provided the main wealth of the Congo and it was in the
collecting of rubber that the African population was forcibly engaged.
Leopold, interested in quick profits only, made no effort to conserve the
rubber vines or to plant new ones; as the supplies of wild rubber dwindled,
so did the search become more frantic. If the Africans were slow in
delivering their quota, they must be made to work faster. The easiest way to
do this was to terrorize them. And the best way to terrorize them was to kill
those guilty of not working fast enough. To prove to King Leopolds
impatient agents that a punitive raid against a dilatory village had indeed
been carried out, severed human hands were brought in as testimony. The
more hands that were brought in, the more efficiently had the punishment
been carried out and the more efficiently, presumably, would the rubber be
gathered by others in the future. Reliable witnesses saw baskets of human
hands being hauled along by Africans to a local European official for his
inspection. When the soldierswere accused of wasting too many bullets,
they would simply hack the hands off living men to make up the pile. Nor
did the atrocities stop at shootings and hand-hackings. Villages were burned,
men flogged, women mutilated, children chained in sheds as hostages or
flung into crocodile-infested rivers, whole clans wiped out. Tribes fled in
terror across the borders. Those who survived lived a nightmare existence.
Senator Picard saw a continual succession of blacks, carrying loads upon
their heads; worn-out beasts of burden, with projecting joints, wasted
features, and staring eyes, perpetually trying to keep afoot despite their
exhaustionThey totter along the road, with bent knees and protruding
bellies, crawling with vermin, a dreadful procession across hill and dale,
dying from exhaustion by the wayside It has been estimated that in
fifteen years, through massacres, through flight and through disease, the
population of the Congo fell by some three million. (pp.146-7)
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Confirmation of Leopolds atrocities in the Congo and more details of the Belgian
crimes in Africa can be found in the 1967 history textbook Europe and the World
since 1815:
In 1891 Leopold forbade the sale of ivory and rubber to European
merchants, and made it clear that all such materials were state property.
Since the commission paid by Leopolds government on these goods was
fixed, the less the native received for his rubber and ivory, the larger the
commission for the agent. This was an incentive to robbery and violence. If
the natives refused to gather the wild rubber, official were permitted to get it
as best they could. White and native soldiers were stationed in the villages to
drive the natives out to work. If the rubber did not reach the amount
required, the natives were sometimes attacked, killed or taken as slaves. If
the soldiers failed to produce the required quantity of rubber or a suitable
number of human hands or heads to show that the natives had been
punished, sometime they themselves faced death. In 1894 an English
traveller, E.J.Grave, reported: Twenty-one heads were brought to Stanley
Falls, and have been used by Captain Rom as a decoration round a flower
bed in front of his house. This system broke up family life, ruined the native
economy, and destroyed tribal law. It seems likely that within thirty years ten
million people died as a result of these activities and the consequent
disintegration of tribal life. (p.251)
Yet Professor Vernon Mallinson wrote, in Belgium (1969), that in fairness to
Leopold it must be stated that he was behaving only as other industrial and
capitalist bosses were behaving in Africa, adding that the Congo was far from
being the only place in which the workers could be said to be exploited. In
Mallinsons eyes, The charter Leopold secured from his government for the
Belgian Congo was, for the times, both forward-looking and progressive. The
Professor of Comparitive Education, who tellingly was granted the honour of
Officier de lOrdre de Leopold II, for services rendered to Belgium, after working
as a British intelligence officer in German-occupied Belgium during the Second
World War, continues with his cover-up of Leopolds atrocities, portraying the
kings behaviour in the Congo as being exemplary:
From the beginning he [Leopold] had made an appeal to Belgian
missionaries to take up work in the Congo and he had met with a ready
response. To the missionaries he had assigned the task of providing
instruction for the mass of the population, while he himself had become
responsible [although he never set foot in the Congo] for the training of
suitable African personnel for the civil service and for work in Europeanorganised enterprises. Following the explorations and the campaign against
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mind, the people as well as the land. Leopold had claimed ownership of the whole
of the Congo, which he ironically named the Congo Free State ostensibly a
refuge from slavery. Rhodes was more obvious, naming the country after himself,
and had no pretensions of being an emancipist.
When Cecil Rhodes first arrived in South Africa in the 1870s his ship docked in
Durban, the capital city of Natal. Natal, previously the Boer colony of Natalia had
been declared a British colony in 1843, forcing the Boers to move to the Orange
River Province (west) and Transvaal (north), losing their access to the coast.
Immediately adjoining Natal province are the small states of Basutoland and
Swaziland, which were landlocked and surrounded on all sides by much larger
white states Basutoland was surrounded by Orange Free State to the north,
Natal province (including Zululand in its north) to the east and Cape Province to
the South. Swaziland was surrounded by Transvaal to the north and west,
Portuguese Mozambique to the east and Natal province to the south. Basutoland
and Swaziland provided the black slaves for the surrounding white states, but these
were no longer called slaves or savages. They were called labourers,
miners, workers, porters, cleaners, and so on. They did not work for no
pay at all, as did Australian Aboriginal slaves at the time, but they did work under
duress they were, in other words, subjected to forced labour. If they did not work
in the dangerous and menial jobs they were offered they starved. This was a
different form of slavery, but an equally cruel one to that of Leopolds Congo, or
the Trans-Atlantic trade in black ivory.
The first Europeans to exploit West Africa and the gold-rich Congo were
Portuguese. In 1482 the Portuguese navigator Captain Diogo Cam kidnapped four
Africans to take back to the Portuguese King, John II, after four of his men were
held by King Nziza, the Manikongo (king of Congo). King John decided to forge
an alliance with the Manikongo, whose kingdom was said to be rich in gold and
slaves, and sent Diogo back to West Africa (present day Angola, where the Kongo
kingdom was centred) with the four kidnapped Africans trained as Portuguese
Ambassadors. These men helped the Portuguese establish trust among the
Congolese, trust that was misplaced. The main attraction for the Portuguese
imperialists was gold, at first. Later it became gold, ivory and slaves. By the time
the Dutch challenged the Portuguese claims over African territory in the 1700s
millions of slaves had already been shipped to Brazil and Central America by the
instigators of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. It is estimated that half of the cargo
(about 20 million people) died in transit.
When the Dutch, French and British joined in the so-called scamble for Africa
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all of Africa was populated, and all of it had already been claimed by the
Portuguese in their intial claim of the entire Eastern Hemisphere back in 1494.
They therefore needed to adopt a different strategy to get their hands on the gold,
ivory and slaves. This was the strategy used in other already colonised lands
they offered to defend and protect the native rulers from the barbaric Catholics
(Portuguese and Spanish), to provide them with education and medicines, to give
them weapons and fight for their freedom.
The British and Dutch governments of the 18 th and 19th centuries used a similar
strategy to gain control of intended colonies. Trading companies were formed,
such as the British South Africa Company, British East India Company,
British East Africa Company and Dutch East India Company, which were
authorised to carry arms, wage wars and sign treaties. The existing rulers of the
countries were first tempted with offers of special privileges and military
assistance. The great British/Dutch king (or queen) they represented was
portrayed as a benevolent, wise ruler who wished only to engage in mutually
beneficial trade and the enlightenment and emancipation of the masses. Hearing
such noble motives many savages signed treaties, especially when encouraged
to do so with gifts of alcohol, knives and trinkets. In those nations with knowledge
of the duplicity of European colonists, the signing of treaties required considerably
more stealth, and often considerably more expensive bribes. If such measures
failed to produce the required treaty, threats were made first threats that they
may be attacked by their neighbours, or by other imperial nations; if these failed
direct threats by the Trading Companies were resorted to. Failing direct threats,
the next measure employed for forced colonization was demonstration of might
using guns and cannons, or torture and mutilation if necessary (for example, the
amputation of the hands of competing Indian tailors when the British wanted to
establish Manchester as the textile centre of the world).
Once the paperwork was out of the way the colonists set to work implementing the
notorious divide and rule policy. Divide and rule was a strategy employed by
imperialists all over the world, and included a complex and carefully constructed
social and military policy, including an army of bureaucrats, army and navy
officers and soldiers, police, judges, propagandists and missionaries. When the
doctrines of positive and negative eugenics were promoted in the late 19 th and early
20th centuries the socio-political system through which they could be implemented
had long been in existence.
Southern Africa, because of its mineral wealth became a prize to be fought over by
European capitalists following the discovery of gold in the 1870s and diamonds in
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the 1890s, a battle eventually won by the English aristocrat Cecil Rhodes and his
British South Africa Company. Miners and prospectors from the Nederlands
(Holland), British Isles, Germany, Austria, Australia, the USA flocked in their
hundreds to seek their fortune in Southern Africa, where the British had sought to
establish a white homeland, as part of the British empire.
The British had strategic (military and political) reasons for wanting to establish
control of Southern Africa, long before it was known to contain rich mineral
deposits. Until the Suez Canal was built in the 1860s the only sea route to Asia was
around the Cape of Good Hope. Since the Moslem Ottoman Empire (Moors)
controlled much of Northern Africa and the Middle East, the overland trade route
between Europe and Asia was not accessible to the Christian European states. This
made sea routes all the more important to European trade, an importance that
continues to the present day in the case of trade in minerals, chemicals, food and
other raw materials and manufactured goods (including weapons). After the
British had claimed the Indian subcontinent as part of the British Empire in the
1700s and established direct rule in India via the British Raj, they sought to
establish control of the entire Indian ocean, excluding other European, and also
Arab, Chinese and Indian traders from trade with their colonies in Africa, Asia
and Australia.
When gold was discovered, in the 1800s, in Southern Africa, Australia and the
Americas, the same mining magnates, and the same financiers (bankers) exploited
all three continents. The discovery of gold in California, South Africa and Southern
Australia in the mid-nineteenth centuries caused gold-rushes in every new site
that was announced, and poor men flocked there as well as the idle rich, and
lawmakers from the mother country. Inevitably poor men found the first bits of
gold and had their finds taken from them by the rich, and were later forced to slave
in the increasingly deep and dangerous mines for little or no money. In South
Africa, blacks and coloureds often made the first finds, but found themselves
in chains or worse as a result, while respectable white businessmen set up
proper mining operations in the newly discovered goldfield. In Australia,
convicts were treated much as blacks and coloureds were in South Africa.
The rules in the gold-rich areas were made by the men who ran the bureaucracy
that sprang up wherever gold was found. This bureacracy, or administration
including police officers, magistrates and bankers made the rules, and the rules
dictated that gold belonged to the owners of the mines that were rapidly
constructed, and the financiers that loaned money to the mining magnates.
There has been a big difference, however, between the mining operations in South
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Africa versus those in Australia and the USA, since the times of the gold-rushes. In
Australia and the USA, most of the miners were paid (poorly, at first, but
increasingly well), and were white-skinned. In South Africa, when European
gold-mining began in the 19th century those who did the hard work were paid
minimally, if at all, and worked under the duress of starvation and the intimidation
of whips wielded by whites. The miners themselves, were, needless to say, all
black Africans. The magnates who owned the mines and owned the land
were all white.
The Portuguese had led the European navigation race, and the race for exploitation
of African gold when they began trading with the kingdom of Kongo (Congo) in
the 1500s. The Portuguese were much impressed by the Congolese kingdom, and
saw it to be rich in slaves and gold. Hoping to form a Christian (Catholic)
alliance with the African kingdom against the Moslem Ottoman Empire, the
Catholic Church and Portuguese government sent missionaries to convert the
Africans, and traders to buy gold and slaves. Having claimed Brazil in South
America as part of the Portuguese empire in 1500, there was much demand from
South America for African slaves to work in the mines and farms the Portuguese
settlers hoped to become wealthy from.
Between 1500 and 1888, (when the Brazilian government reluctantly agreed to ban
slavery in line with other nations), over 20 million Africans were shipped,
manacled and huddled together in the holds of putrid ships, from European and
African slave markets to white buyers in Brazil, coincidentally the South American
nation worst hit by AIDS. Millions died during transportation of disease and
starvation. Many millions more died prematurely due the treatment they received
as slaves. So cruel were the Brazilian slave-owners that African slaves survived, on
average, for only seven years after arrival. Brazil is, incidentally, the only exPortuguese colony in South America, the other nations in the continent having been
Spanish colonies.
The Portuguese began the transatlantic slave trade in the 1500s centred on slave
markets in Angola, Lisbon and Brazil, but their example was shortly followed by
the other sea-faring European states notably Spain, Nederlands, France and
Britain. Tens of millions of Africans were shipped from slave markets established
at ports in Liverpool, Amsterdam, Nantes (in France) and Genoa (in Spain) to
respective British, Dutch, French and Spanish colonies. Other slave markets were
established in islands on the coast of Africa, and in fortified cities on the mainland,
from which slavers could obtain their cargo, while others were established on
islands in the Caribbean sea, where American slavers could buy the best slaves
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for the cotton, tobacco and other single-crop plantations they established after the
forests had been cleared and to slave in the mines. Meanwhile, the indigenous
population of the Americas was genocided, using a combination of cannons, guns,
poisons and infections.
Bartholomew Diaz, exploring for the Portuguese empire, rounded the Cape of
Good Hope in 1488, establishing a possible sea route to India, Ceylon and the
Spice Islands in the eastern Indian Ocean. Diazs discovery was confirmed by
the famous Portuguese explorer Vasco Da Gama shortly afterwards. Da Gama
sailed around the Cape and across the Western Indian Ocean, reaching India the
centre of the spice and cotton trade at the time. Prior to the recent invention of
refrigeration salt and spices were essential for the long-term preservation of food,
and also highly valued for medicinal as well as more obvious culinary reasons.
Trade in spices had long been controlled by Arab (Moor) and Indian traders. The
Javanese empire that was later conquered and acquired by the Dutch, and
converted to the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) was actually established by an
ancient Indian civilization as early as the 5th Century AD.
Much more has been written in European history books about the Voyages of
Discovery than the Voyages of Exploitation that inevitably followed. In fact, the
voyages by now famous explorers, adventurers and navigators were
sponsored by various European monarchies and governments with an explicit
mission to discover new lands that could be exploited. Exploiting the lands
included exploiting the people, and exploiting what was on and in the actual land.
Whenever a new part of the world was discovered by the explorers of the 16 th,
17th and 18th centuries, it was immediately claimed in the name of the monarch
who sponsored the mission. The Portuguese and Spanish did this even if there
already existed established civilizations in the countries being claimed. So
grandiose were their claims that by 1500 they had claimed half the world each. The
Spanish Monarchy possessed the Western Hemisphere and the Portuguese the
Eastern Hemisphere, according to the judgement of the Roman Pope Alexander
VI in 1494.
Since the East African slave trade was controlled by the Moors, the Portuguese
obtained most of their slaves from the Congo region of West Africa until they
established control of the port of Mozambique and later the islands of Zanzibar and
Madagascar on the African coast. Zanzibar had long been a centre of the Arab and
Indian slave trades, from which Africans had been sold to Moslem merchants.
Earlier, the Portuguese had established a port on the south-eastern coast of Africa
in Angola, which came to be more highly prized when gem diamonds were
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compared with the theories, policies and programs of negative and positive
eugenics. These pieces need to be placed in a geographical context for the picture
to be understood, requiring some form of mental map of the worlds geography,
geology and ethnography. Such understanding requires for the facts provided, the
pieces of proof, to be placed also in a historical context or time frame.
Chapter 8
THE DEVELOPMENT BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS DURING
THE COLD WAR
The AIDS epidemic appeared during the Cold War. The Cold War, which included
a propaganda war between the Capitalist West and the Communist East, and an
unprecedented arms race between the so-called Superpowers, the USA and the
USSR, was characterised by the development of new cold rather than hot
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weapons, although many new explosive devices, including bombs, land-mines and
bullets were also invented by the lucrative industry of arms-manufacture. These
cold weapons included biological, chemical and psychological weapons, heinous
weapons of mass destruction that kill and maim more cheaply, and less
noticeably than bombs, missiles and guns. Cold warfare does not damage
buildings, or valuable artifacts, long-standing motivations for waging war. While
the land, air and water may be poisoned by chemical and biological warfare, the
public are less likely to blame it on warfare than on civilization itself, or the
much-spoken-of problem of overpopulation. These are only a few of the reasons
that biological, chemical and psychological warfare have proliferated over the past
50 years alongside so-called conventional warfare. Others are that they are
financially profitable to those developing and manufacturing the weapons, and that
those who research and experiment with cold weapons are able to easily disguise
themselves. Biological and chemical warfare research can easily be passed off as
medical research, and psychological warfare research (and espionage) can be
difficult to differentiate from experimental psychology. When illness and death
result from these non-explosive forms of warfare, these, even if they number in the
millions, can be attributed to natural causes, or at the most, unintentional
consequences of pollution, poverty, overcrowding, and environmental degradation.
Most of the deaths from this cold warfare have not been in the First World and
Second (Communist) World, despite these being the most visible protagonists in
the Cold War. They have been, instead, in the Third World a large group of
nations, that are apparently poor and underdeveloped. These countries have
also been called undeveloped, developing and backward in supposedly
expert, academic writing on modern global health and politics. The division of
the habitable land on the planet into First, Second and Third World was an
idea, and later an official action of the white, male, patriarchs in the First World.
Even though it maintained the prestige and wealth of many women (and
engineered the poverty and misery of many more), the creation of the fundamental
model of modern global politics comprising the industrialised First World, the
Communist Second World and the underdeveloped Third World was a construct
of rich men suffering from an unhealthy degree of Cold War paranoia and
cultural grandiosity. They were the same rich men, belonging to the same old boy
network that had fought against the freedom of black slaves, the votes of women,
and the slavery of children. They were eugenists in view and sentiment, even if
they did not recognise themselves as such. These was the much larger proportion
of eugenists, who cared little for Blumenbachs classification, or the more detailed
classifications of physical anthropologists they saw the issue in terms of
black and white. As far as the majority of undeclared eugenists and Social
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Darwinists were concerned, Darwins theory of evolution proved that the white
race is good, superior, and destined to rule (and deserving of the continued
right to rape, pillage, exploit and plunder, as long as it was done discreetly)
while the blacks (Africans, Melanesians and Aborigines) and people of colour
(Asians, Polynesians and Indigenous Americans) had been proved by the
scientific experts to be naturally inferior especially in terms of mental power
and, more insidiously, moral and rational judgement.
Blacks, and other natives were seen as being more akin to monkeys and apes
(often no distinction was made between monkeys and apes) and thus to be
naturally more wild and savage. With a deep fear and loathing of nature, these
white racists equated wildness with brutality, barbarity and violence. With the
addition of Galtons arguments the objects of their hatred could also be demonised
as drug addicts, alcoholics, mental defectives, moral degenerates and so
on. The misuse of stigmatising medical labels soon became part of colloquial
expression, including idiot, moron and imbecile, which were initially
developed as medical terms to grade degrees of feeble-mindedness. As new
labels entered the publics vocabulary, the experts (the medical profession) kept
producing more, and changed the official name of older, apparently
misunderstood terms. The creation of such labels, which function also as codewords for disease surveillance and data collection, is a full-time business for a
veritable army of staff of the American Psychiatric Association, the political
emperors of the Global Psychiatric Empire. The American Psychiatric Association,
publishers of the widely-used Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental
Disorders or DSM, will be discussed at length later in this book, but suffice to say,
the Father of American Psychiatry, according to the DSMIV, was Dr Benjamin
Rush, one of the Founding Fathers of America, and the only physician to sign
George Washingtons Declaration of Independance. Rush, in anticipation of the
eugenists, believed that slavery was necessary for the civilization of blacks, and,
owning many black slaves, taught that drapetomania (the madness of slaves
wanting freedom) should be treated by whipping. Galton, as his own records of
his travels in Africa reveal, assumed the right to whip his black slaves after a
small court of justice presided over by himself. Like Rush, Galton did not
actually do the whipping himself (or face the danger of retaliation) he delegated
that duty to his Danish mate Hans, who deftly administered the awarded
strokes.
Given such assumptions of superiority, and many other examples of racism,
xenophobia, imperialism and elitism demonstrated by medical politicians and
eugenists in the past can we be sure that racism is not still part of global health
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programs and medical academia? Is it possible that those who gave financial and
political support to the academic, University-based, eugenics movement in the
1920s, re-introduced race and class-based slavery after the Second World War,
armed with new knowledge of biological, chemical, psychological, technological
and economic warfare?
To look at these possibilities scientifically we must return to the history and
politics of the founders of the eugenics movement and their ardent, but
increasingly secretive and increasingly ruthless followers. These frequently
assumed the identity of experts in genetics, psychiatry, population control, and
family planning. Convinced by the struggle for survival of different races as
portrayed by the founders of the first Society for Eugenics, Francis Galton and
Major Leonard Darwin, the American, German and British political, military and
industrial leaders developed what they saw as practical strategies to apply Charles
Darwins theories of natural selection to win the race between the different races
of humanity. They were sure of the intellectual superiority of their own white
race, but were not as certain of their physical superiority especially their ability
to resist infection, or to survive in the tropics. Regarding the latter, in the opening
chapter of Origin of Species, Darwin mentions the earlier work of W.C. Fields:
In 1813, Dr W.C. Wells read before the Royal Society An Account of a
White female, part of whose skin resembled that of a Negro; but his paper
was not published until his famous Two Essays upon Dew and Single
Vision appeared in 1818. In this paper he distinctly recognises the principle
of natural selection, and this is the first recognition which has been
indicated; but he applies it only to the races of man, and to certain characters
alone. After remarking that negroes and mulattos enjoy an immunity from
certain tropical diseases, he observes, firstly, that agriculturists improve their
domesticated animals by selection; and then, he adds, but what is done in
this latter case by art, seems to be done with equal efficacy, though more
slowly, by nature, in the formation of varieties of man, which would occur
among the first few and scattered inhabitants of the middle regions of Africa,
some one would be better fitted than the others to bear the diseases of the
country. This race would consequently multiply, while the others would
decrease; not only from their inability to sustain the attacks of disease, but
from their incapacity of contending with their more vigorous neighbours.
The colour of this vigorous race I take for granted, from what has already
been said, would be dark. But the same disposition to form varieties still
existing, a darker and a darker race would in course of time occur; and as the
darkest would be best fitted for this climate, this would at length become the
most prevalent, if not the only race, in the particular country in which it had
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While greedy industrialists might develop a grandiose plan for global slavery and
exploitation it might be supposed, though, that the academic world would never go
along with such a nefarious scheme, and could not be bribed or coerced into
supporting a program of slavery let alone one of genocide and slavery. After the
horrors of the Second World War, surely the eugenics movement was purged of
racism, paternalism, elitism and ethnic chauvinism? Surely the medical
profession has cured itself of the megalomania that affected those who killed
millions in the name of medical treatment and racial purity?
It is commonly claimed that the Nazi genocide was ideologically-driven, in that it
was implemented for the miguided, but nevertheless, ideological reason of
achieving Aryan racial purity. This is only partly true. Much killing was done for
direct mercenary profit, and often the two acted as a combined motive for murder,
as ideology and greed have through the ages. Those who were killed by the Nazis
were robbed first. Even their dead bodies provided capital for those callous
enough to create a business out of human tissue specimens and gold fillings. The
chemical companies providing poisons and explosives for the German war effort
profited, as did the agriculturalists and industrialists who took advantage of
slave labour. The mining industry and automobile industry in Europe made a
fortune as the Second World War intensified, prompting President Roosevelt to
argue, in his historic radio broadcast to the American people that supplying arms to
Britain would be no more unneutralthan it is for Sweden, Russia, and other
nations near Germany to send steel and ore and oil and other war materials into
Germany every day (Roosevelt, 1940 quoted in Sellers, 1975, p.693). At the time,
the richest man in America was the oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller. The Scottishborn steel magnate Andrew Carnegies Carnegie Corporation, financiers of the
Eugenic Records Office, also stood to make a killing if, as Roosevelt urged, the
United States of America became the Great Arsenal of Democracy.
While this book is mainly concerned with cold weapons and cold (chemical,
biological and psychological) warfare, conventional (hot) weapons and warfare are
closely related, historically, economically and politically, with cold weapons and
warfare. The chemical industry is closely associated with the mining industry the
raw materials procured by the mining industry are processed into various
chemicals, including pharmaceutical drugs, agricultural chemicals and explosives.
This is clearly illustrated by the year 2000 Annual Report of the main Australian
manufacturers of explosives and cyanide, Orica previously the Australian
subsidiary of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI Australia).
Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) was formed in 1926, shortly before the British
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Turkey, Kazakhstan, Kyrgzstan, the United Arab Emirates, New Zealand, the
Philippines, Malaysia, China, Indonesia and Thailand.
Several of these countries are known to manufacture explosive weapons in addition
to having a developed mining industry, and to export these weapons to other
countries. These weapons include bullets, grenades, land-mines, missiles and
bombs. The mining industry, with which explosives companies obviously work
closely, also provides the metal and other raw materials for conventional (hot)
weapons, and for military hardware guns, helicopters, military planes, ships,
submarines and satellites. Do Orica and Rio Tinto also have undisclosed military
contracts or contracts with arms manufacturers? Is there any control over what
explosive chemicals are used for in the nations that buy explosives, and
accessories such as electronic detonators from Orica? Aside from this, the
pollution directly attributable to increased cyanide sales and the environmental
devastation caused around the world by the mining industry are enough implicate
Orica in crimes against nature and crimes against humanity.
The Annual Report 2000 of Orica, raises some serious questions about medical
research and university education in Australia, because the Chairman of the Board
of Orica, Dr Ben Lochtenberg (an engineer, not a medical doctor) is
simultaneously the Chairman of the Mental Health Research Institute in Parkville,
Melbourne, Australias premier psychiatry research centre, and recepient of the
largest slice of mental health research funding from the National Health and
Medical Research Council (NHMRC, the chief allocater of Commonwealth
Government Research grants in Australia). Professor Lochtenberg is also Director
of Capral Aluminium, the Australian Foundation for Science Limited and
Melbourne University Private, the spectacularly unsuccessful attempt by private
capital-holders in Melbourne to create a private campus alongside the 150-yearold public campus of Melbourne University. Could Dr Lochtenberg be faced with a
conflict of interest being simultaneously in charge of an explosives corporation, a
mining company, a major educational institution and a major health research
institute?
The Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital, next to which the new Forensic
Psychiatry Hospital is currently being built is the home of the Macfarlane Burnet
Institute, the largest AIDS research institution in Australia. The Macfarlane Burnet
Centre (MBC) is soon to be located next to the Alfred hospital in a multi-million
dollar development. The executive director of the Macfarlane Burnet Institute is
the American Harvard University graduate Professor John Mills, who is also the
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other major focus of the Macfarlane Burnet Centre, under the guise of
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what conclusions the computer will reach with all the information gathered about
young aboriginal people in urban and rural Australia, and what other purposes this
sensitive information could be used for.
The Macfarlane Burnet Centre is a keen proponent of AZT (Azidothymidine, also
called Zidovudine, and manufactured by Glaxo-Wellcome) for the treatment of
HIV infection and AIDS, and needle and condom distribution for the prevention of
sexually transmitted diseases including AIDS. They have been involved in
establishing a needle and syringe exchange program in the Indian State of
Manipur, which is the first of its kind, and is described in the previous years
annual report as follows:
The SHALOM (Society for HIV/AIDS Lifeline Operation in Manipur)
Project is a collaboration between MBC and the Emmanuel Hospitals
Association (EHA). The project was established early in 1995 as an
indigenous response to the alarming incidence of HIV infection among
young drug users in the semi-rural community of Churachandpur in Manipur
state, in far Northeast India. This community-based project aims to reduce
the transmission of HIV and the impact of AIDS in the community. Home
based care and drug detoxification together with counselling and community
education continue as major components of the program.
A needle and syringe exchange program has been established, the first
of its kind in India, thus providing leadership in the introduction of new but
acceptable strategies to reduce the transmission of HIV in south Asia. MBC
has provided technical support, assisting in the review of project activities
and in planning and design of the third phase. Further support has been
extended through training and support for investigations including a study of
impact of the epidemic on women by the community and seroprevalence of
HIV among injecting drug users.
In the next annual report, the same strategy is described as a harm reduction
approach without giving the detail that this involves the distribution of needles
and syringes.
There is a fundamental difference between swallowing a drug and self-injecting it.
This is a point exploited by the methadone lobby, long after the methadone
program had demonstrably failed to prevent an increasing number of Australians,
Americans and Europeans from becoming addicted to opiates. Other parts of the
world are not equally troubled by opiate addiction, although it is said to be a
growing problem in large cities throughout the world. The reason that methadone
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failed to decrease addiction levels in the world is obvious. It is itself an opiate, and
can cause even worse and more prolonged withdrawal if suddenly stopped, than
heroin. A fear of the pain and suffering of withdrawal, and a weakening of
resistance to refuse the drug as the symptoms worsen are recognised amongst the
many factors that contribute to this terrible problem.
Methadone (physeptone) is a synthetic opiate available in tablet and syrup form,
and sold in Australia by the same company that produce AZT, the giant
pharmaceutical company Glaxo-Wellcome, the head offices of which are based in
the US and England. Wellcome Pharmaceuticals is related to the Wellcome Trust,
Britains largest medical research trust fund, although it is claimed that the two
organizations are politically independent, and that financial, political and scientific
decisions of the Wellcome Trust are not influenced by agendas for the profit of
Wellcome Pharmaceuticals, now merged with the huge American drug company
Glaxo to form Glaxo-Wellcome. Wellcome Pharmaceuticals is the only drug
company in this part of the world to manufacture and sell azidothymidine (AZT),
now being promoted by the Macfarlane Burnet Centre as a successful treatment for
AIDS, despite much evidence to the contrary. The Centres literature also claims
that HIV antibodies in the blood signify an infection that is inevitably fatal, with or
without drug treatment, a claim that is scientifically unjustified and potentially
disastrous.
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Chapter 10
MEDICAL WARS AND THE AIDS INDUSTRY
On 2.2.2000, the Murdoch-owned Australian newspaper, contained a warning by
reporter Evan Whitton in an article titled Hard evidence a casualty in the HIV
war:
Also alarming is any initiative with war in the title. US president
Richard Nixons 1971 war on cancer garnered billions for research, but no
cure. Gerald Fords 1976 war on swine flu procured 50 million vaccinations
against a bug that may have caused one death.
And Ronald Reagans 1984 war on AIDS extracted more billions from
the public purse
The article describes the immediately disputed claim by Robert Gallo that he had
discovered the viral cause of AIDS, with Reagans health secretary at his
shoulder at a press conference on 23.4.84:
Gallo, a Californian virus hunter and veteran of the lost war on cancer,
said he had found the probable cause of AIDS and that it was a virus, later
called human immunodeficiency virus. This meant AIDS was caused by a
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bug rather than by lifestyle-stress, and that women were also in danger. My
God, how the money rolled in.
Whitton goes on to express doubt as to whether HIV causes AIDS, quoting the
Nobel prize-winning Dr Kary Mullis as writing, in 1996, that no one has ever
proved that HIV causes AIDSthere is simply no scientific evidence
demonstrating that this is true.
He gives some figures and facts about AIDS, HIV and AZT which give some
indication of the size of the AIDS industry and where significant conflicts of
interest may lie:
[Up] to 1997, US taxpayers alone had contributed $US45 billion to
the AIDS industry and it had generated 1500 HIV-related US patents,
100,000 scientific papers, blood-screening tests for evidence of HIV worth
millions and sales of AZT totalling $US2.5 billion.
AZT (Azidothymidine) is a form of chemotherapy invented by Jerome
Horwitz in the 1950s to treat cancer. It was abandoned because of its toxicity
and resurrected to attack the alleged HIV virus.
Evan Whitton gives an indication of the financial cost to those concerned if the
man-made theory turns out to be correct (another disincentive to looking for or
accepting evidence of such):
Not surprisingly, lawyers are becoming key players in the AIDS
industry: it was reported in January that a legal firm had got $200 million
for 500 Australians with medically acquired HIV.
On the other hand, if people such as Nobel prize winner Mullis and
Perths Papadopulos-Eleopulos turn out to be right about the dreaded HIV,
lawyers will see $200 million as no more than a drop in the ocean.
Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopulos is described in the article as a Perth bio-physicist
who has been studying AIDS since 1981. She is quoted as saying, There is no
proof that HIV exists; there is no proof that HIV causes AIDS.
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The difficulty which arises when one talks about proof of HIV causing AIDS, the
existence of HIV or the origin of AIDS is that there is no universal measure of
what types and quantities of evidence constitute proof. One hundred percent
proof is rare in medical science, but it does exist. Levels of certainty, however,
range from complete certainty to disproof. It has now been disproved that the earth
is flat. It has also been proved that masturbation does not cause blindness, but with
less certainty. The reason it is less certain is that, to my knowledge, no scientific
studies have been done that prove beyond doubt that people who masturbate do not
develop deterioration (or improvement) in their vision over the years (though most
unlikely). There are also, more worryingly, few studies showing that watching
television (or computer) screens does not damage vision. What is proved, in
other words, depends on what is looked for.
Viruses cannot be seen the way bacteria and other small cellular organisms can be
seen: directly, with the aid of a light microscope. The existence of viruses is mainly
inferred through serological tests (blood tests) and the clinical course of various
illnesses which behave as infectious diseases, but in which bacterial or fungal
causative organisms have not been identified. Viral infections also cause
characteristic changes in the appearance and behaviour of cells in the body, which
can be detected under a microscope. They also cause macroscopic changes, which
can be evidenced by looking at the organs and tissues of people (and animals) that
have died of the infection. The virus itself, however, is too small to be seen, even
with the most powerful light microscope, and the level of certainty allowable for
their existence is therefore necessarily less than that of bacteria (100% certainty).
The existence of viruses is, nevertheless, very close to certainty. Modern imaging
techniques, including electron microscopy, have been claimed to show what
viruses look like, but the colour enhanced, computer-enhanced pictures of virus
particles cannot be relied on with the same faith as seeing the organism oneself
under a microscope. In the case of HIV, we are forced to rely on the very institutes
who may have created the organism to tell us about it, as well as the disease it is
said to cause: acquired immunodeficiency disease (AIDS). The problem is, they
have said some very contradictory things, and said them with the authority of
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experts. They have also claimed, with certainty, things that have turned out to be
untrue.
The popular science magazine Scientific American is regarded as an authoritative
and reliable source of information about science, including medical science. In
their 1988 October edition, they featured a single-topic issue titled What
Science Knows About AIDS. In it, Robert Gallo and Luc Montagnier (of the
Pasteur Institute in Paris, who contested Gallos 1984 claim of discovery saying he
had discovered HIV first) wrote, in their first collaborative article:
As recently as a decade ago it was widely believed that infectious
disease was no longer a threat in the developed world. The remaining
challenges to public health there, it was thought, stemmed from
noninfectious conditions such as cancer, heart disease and degenerative
diseases. That confidence was shattered in the early 1980s by the advent of
AIDS. Here was a devastating disease caused by a class of infectious agents
retroviruses that had first been found in human beings only a few years
before. In spite of the startling nature of the epidemic, science responded
quickly. In the two years from mid-1982 to mid-1984 the outlines of the
epidemic were clarified, a new virus the human immunodeficiency virus
(HIV) was isolated and shown to cause the disease, a blood test was
formulated and the viruss targets in the body were established.
The article describes the discovery of the first retroviruses in animals by Howard
Temin of the University of Wisconsin and David Baltimore of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in 1970 and the decade-long search for human retroviruses:
In spite of such discoveries, by the mid-1970s no infectious retroviruses
had been found in human beings, and many investigators firmly believed no
human retrovirus would ever be found. Their skepticism had several
grounds. Many excellent scientists had tried and failed to find such a virus.
Moreover, most animal retroviruses had been fairly easy to find, because
they replicated in large quantities, and the new virus particles were readily
observed in the electron microscope; no such phenomenon had been found
in human beings. In spite of this skepticism, by 1980 a prolonged team effort
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led by one of us (Gallo) paid off in the isolation of the first human
retrovirus: human T-lymphotropic virus type I (HTLV-I).
HTLV-I infects T-lymphocytes, white blood cells that have a central role
in the immune response. The virus causes a rare, highly malignant cancer
called adult T-cell leukemia (ATL) that is endemic in parts of Japan, Africa
and the Caribbean but is spreading to other regions as well. Two years after
the discovery of HTLV-I the same group isolated its close relative, HTLV-II.
HTLV-II probably causes some cases of a disease called hairy-cell leukemia
and lymphomas of a more chronic type than those linked to HTLV-I. The
two viruses, however, share some crucial features. They are spread by blood,
by sexual intercourse and from mother to child. Both cause disease after a
long latency, and both infect T lymphocytes. When AIDS was first
recognized, these properties took on great additional significance.
More detail about Gallos discovery of HTLV-I is given in the 1994 Penguin
publication The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett (who won the Pulitzer Prize for
reporting on the Ebola Virus):
Dr. Robert Gallo and his NCI colleagues found evidence of a virus
inside the T cells of a twenty-eight-year-old African-American man who
had come to Bethesda, Maryland, in 1979 from his Alabama home for
experimental cancer treatment. The NCI group quickly found two other
individuals who suffered T-cell lymphomas and seemed to be infected with a
virus: an immigrant woman from the Caribbean and a Caucasian man who
had traveled extensively in the Caribbean and Asia.
Two years earlier Kiyoshi Takasuki, an epidemiologist with the Tokyo
Cancer Institute, had discovered groups of people living on outer Japanese
islands who apparently had cancer involving their immune systems T cells.
The Japanese researcher dubbed the disease adult T-cell leukemia or ATL.
Gallos laboratory isolated their virus and named it HTLV, or human T-cell
leukemia virus [Gallo himself describes it as T-lymphotropic virus in his
1988 article]. The Gallo group also identified the existence of an oncogene
[cancer-causing gene] in the HTLV virus that gave the microbe the ability to
produce leukemia. Attempts at collaboration between the Japanese and
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American researchers went awry and Yorio Hinuma and Mitsuaki Yoshida of
Kyoto University announced discovery of a different virus in the Japanese
leukemia patients, named ATLV, or adult T-cell leukemia virus.
Ultimately, Mitsuaki Yoshida led a Tokyo Cancer Institute study in 1980
that compared ATLV and HTLV and found them identical. They furthermore
showed that Japanese monkeys (Macaca fuscata), Indonesian rhesus
monkeys, and African green monkeys captured in Kenya and held in
captivity in Germany had antibodies to ATLV/HTLV, and that the virus or
a monkey version of the human virus could be transmitted from one cocaged animal to another. (p.229)
Could HTLV-1, HTLV-2 and HTLV-3 (later named HIV by Gallo) been serially
developed, natural (wild) or genetically engineered, cancer-causing viruses? Are
monkeys and Africans being blamed merely as convenient scapegoats? The extent
of primate research which involves intentionally infecting monkeys with fatal
viruses becomes evident from several sources, including the above passage and
from the table in Gallo and Montagniers Scientific American article, in which a
table purporting to establish evidence that HIV causes AIDS is by now as firm as
that for the causation of any other human disease claims, as evidence from
animal systems:
Several types of retroviruses can cause severe immune deficiencies in
animals. For example, the feline leukemia virus (FeLV) can cause either
immune deficiency or cancer, depending on slight genetic variations in the
virus. A virus related to HIV, the simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV), can
cause AIDS in macaque monkeys. The second AIDS virus, HIV-2, may also
cause AIDS in macaques.
The discoverers of the HIV virus do not blame animal experimentation for the
development of new viruses and viral strains, nor do they blame, or mention,
biological warfare or even the immunization programs of the preceding years in
Africa when they explain their theory on where was HIV hiding? In their answer
they present a scenario which is speculative and not supported by any specific
evidence:
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Both of us think the answer is that the virus has been present in small,
isolated groups in central Africa or elsewhere for many years. In such groups
the spread of HIV might have been quite limited and the groups themselves
may have had little contact with the outside world. As a result the virus
could have been contained for decades.
That pattern may have been altered when the way of life in central
Africa began to change. People migrating from remote areas to urban centers
no doubt brought HIV with them. Sexual mores in the city were different
from what they had been in the village, and blood transfusions were
commoner. Consequently HIV may have spread freely. Once a pool of
infected people had been established, transport networks and the generalized
exchange of blood products would have carried it to every corner of the
world. (p.31)
Gallo and Montagnier give no explanation for the almost simultaneous epidemics
affecting black heterosexual populations in central Africa and white homosexuals
in America, and although they refer to known at risk populations they fail to
specify who, exactly, these are. The discussion refers to homosexuals, who are
clearly at risk, and the end of the article implies that the drug culture is also to
blame:
All of us must learn how HIV is spread, to reduce risky behavior, to
raise our voices against acceptance of the drug culture and to avoid
stigmatizing victims of the disease.
The discoverers of HIV do not explain why women and children in Central
Africa and later in South East Asia and the Third World are also high risk
populations, although they make insinuations about villagers in Africa
undoubtedly bringing HIV with them to urban centres where sexual mores
were different. Their model for the dispersal of AIDS via contaminated African
blood transfusions following the initial infection of a local population is plausible
and undoubtedly explains some, but not all, of the spread of AIDS around Africa
(via transfusions and blood products). It is accepted that prior to screening, several
recipients of transfusions and blood products (particularly haemophiliacs)
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developed HIV antibody reactions as well as AIDS. In fact, this is included in the
proof of HIV causing AIDS provided in the Scientific American article:
A study of people who received blood transfusions in 1982-83 (when
the fraction of blood donors infected with HIV was about 1 in 2000) showed
that of 28 people who got AIDS, the virus could be found in all 28.
Furthermore, for each recipient who got AIDS an infected donor could be
found. Today most of those infected donors have also developed AIDS.
It is not exactly true that the HIV virus could be found, however, in the cases
described. It would be more accurate to say evidence of HIV exposure could be
found. The HIV infection was inferred by the presence of HIV antibodies:
evidence of the immune systems reaction against the human immunodeficiency
virus. In all the other described viral infections, and according to the fundamental
principles of immunology, antibodies are produced as part of the immune defences
their production is an indicator of a healthy, not an unhealthy, immune response.
They can, however, fail to control an infection and people can become ill from
viral infections while still producing antibodies.
After an infection has been defeated the immune system continues, for a variable
period of time (sometimes for life), to produce antibodies which protect against reinfection or subsequent infection by the specific virus. These antibodies are
transmitted to a breast-feeding infant in breast milk, protecting the baby from
infections while the immune system is developing. With no satisfying logic, this is
said not to be the case with HIV: antibodies are measured as an indicator of active
infection and the breast milk of infected (HIV antibody positive) mothers is said
to pose a risk to their babies. Or are the World Health Organizations immunization
programs the real risk?
Confusing the issue is the argument put forward by Professor Peter Duesberg, an
eminent virology professor who disagrees that HIV causes AIDS, believing instead
that recreational drug use and antiviral drugs, such as AZT, are the real culprits.
In Inventing the AIDS Virus, published in 1996, he wrote:
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Surprisingly, Duesberg does not even mention the correlation between Hepatitis B
vaccines (or any other vaccines) and the development of AIDS. He blames
malnutrition and other environmental factors for the development of
immunosuppression in Africa, and drugs for the appearance of AIDS amongst
homosexuals and intravenous drug users in the USA. He presents a complex and
detailed argument to support his view, some of which is quite convincing.
Duesberg explains that AIDS is not a specific diagnosis. It is a clinical
syndrome, which is categorised as AIDS if antibodies against HIV are detected.
If a person has tuberculosis and HIV antibodies it becomes AIDS, if such
antibodies are not detected, it is just tuberculosis. He points out that the disease
presents very differently in Africa and the United States of America (where it was
first reported), affecting different populations and causing different illnesses. He
writes:
HIV would need to perform other miracles to cause AIDS. Virtually all
diagnoses of Kaposis sarcoma are made in homosexuals, not in the other
AIDS risk groups. Intravenous drug addicts disproportionately suffer from
tuberculosis, Haitians from toxoplasmosis, and hemophiliacs from
pneumonias. African AIDS diseases are basically different, manifesting as
tuberculosis, fever, diarrhoea, and a slim disease, unlike our wasting
syndrome. A homosexual with HIV who may develop Kaposis sarcoma can
donate blood for a hemophiliac. But no hemophiliac has ever developed
Kaposis sarcoma from a blood transfusion. Instead he is more likely to
develop pneumonia, if he contracts anything at all. Only HIV is common to
both victims. (p.215)
Duesberg considers HIV to be a harmless passenger virus, similar to the simian
virus SV40 which was discovered in the late 1950s and unintentionally injected
into human populations in polio vaccination programs at the time. Although there
have been concerns about long-term disease (or risk of disease) from this virus,
Duesberg, along with most other experts, considers the viral contaminant safe in
humans. He writes of the discovery of SV40:
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humans. This would be an exception in the mammal world. He also doubts that
hepatitis B infection predisposes the sufferer to cancer, a dogma accepted by the
AIDS industry and medical profession, and promoted as a reason to increase
hepatitis-B vaccination programs.
Duesberg argues that firstly, no evidence has surfaced that liver cancer is
infectious, and secondly, most people who develop liver cancer are not infected
with viral hepatitis. This does not, however, prove that hepatitis B infection does
not predispose to cancer of the liver, although it can be safely assumed that viral
infection is not the only cause of liver cancer. If the transmission of the hepatitis-B
virus is limited to blood and sexual contact, as is generally claimed, vaccination
against hepatitis-B should be limited to those genuinely at risk of infection and
the possibility that Hepatitis-B is being introduced, itself, through infected
vaccines is a real possibility that cannot be reasonably discounted or ignored
without careful evaluation. These possibilities are not discussed by Duesberg who
does not mention biological warfare in his 700-paged thesis. He infers, however,
that disease is being intentionally created in a multi-billion-dollar terrorisation
campaign about superbugs (including HIV) to attract funds for research into new
viruses and new viral explanations for old illnesses.
Professor Duesberg also refutes, with good reason, claims of uniform fatality from
HIV infection:
The national AIDS figures fall well short of a virus with a nearly 100
percent fatality rate. But rather than abandon the hypothesis, the experts
have chosen to revise the parameters of HIV infection. The latency period
was originally calculated in 1984 on the basis of tracing sexual contacts,
finding homosexual men developing AIDS an average of ten months after
their last sexual contacts with other AIDS patients. This incubation period
has since been stretched out to ten to twelve years between HIV infection
and disease. For each year that passes without the predicted explosion in
AIDS cases, approximately one more year is added to this incubation time.
Even this is insufficient; with only 5 percent of infected Americans
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developing AIDS each year, the average latent period would have to be
revised up to some twenty years for 100 percent to become sick. (p.214)
This is indeed what Professor John Mills has done at Melbournes Macfarlane
Burnet Centre. He claims in the MBC pamphlet HIV/AIDS the whole worlds
problem that although there will be cases where patients have had the infection
for 20 or 30 years before becoming ill, virtually everybody infected with HIV
will eventually get AIDS, if they are not treated. Since HIV was first discovered
only 16 years ago, and several (the numbers are disputed) who were diagnosed as
positive at that time remain well today, it is strange that Professor Mills is so
certain about the fatality rate from HIV infection, of which he says, the estimate at
the moment is about 95% but it could be 100%.
It is obviously in the interests of drug promoters to describe the disease they are
treating as more lethal than it is. If HIV infection is said to cause death in 2 years,
and those who are given AZT live, on average for 5 years, the drug could be said to
have improved life expectancy by 3 years. If AIDS is viewed as not being so
dangerous, and causing death, on average, say, in 7 years time, the same results
(death on AZT in five years), would be recognised as a harmful treatment. If HIV
infection is not dangerous at all, as Duesberg believes, the use of the drug in
asymptomatic HIV-positive people or even established cases of AIDS would be an
inexcusable crime, since the toxicity of the drug was recognised in the 1960s
(which is why the drug was rejected as a treatment for cancer).
It is worth noting the CDCs criteria for the diagnosis of AIDS (which were
already overinclusive in the opinion of Duesberg and others) were further
broadened in 1993 to include all HIV-infected persons (those testing positive for
HIV) who have CD4 counts and T lymphocyte counts below 200 per microlitre,
even if they show no signs of illness, and people with HIV antibodies who develop
pulmonary (lung) tuberculosis, recurrent pneumonia or invasive cervical cancer
(Harrisons Principles of Medicine, 1997, p.1567). Needless to say this greatly
increases the official number of people with AIDS as opposed to
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asymptomatic HIV, and greatly increases the number of candidates for drug
treatment.
In the next chapter the work and political connections of Australias premier AIDS
research institute, the Macfarlane Burnet Centre in Melbourne will be examined in
more detail. Specifically, the promotional material from the centre on HIV/AIDS
will be looked at, along with the public pronouncements of the centres medical
director, the American microbiologist John Mills.
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During this incubation period the victim is perfectly well and capable of
working and leading a normal life, but also capable of transmitting the
infection to other people. This is one of the very real difficulties with the
HIV virus; there is absolutely no evidence, without specific laboratory
testing, that a person has it. And if youre in apparent good health, who
would think of taking such a test?
The answer to the last question is anyone who read the MBC literature and took it
seriously. Given the basic psychoimmunological and medical principle, though,
that pessimistic prognoses resulting in despair can weaken the bodys resistance to
illness, it is hard to see how this sort of claim can be justified in the interests of
health promotion:
The latent period the interval between infection and the development
of the disease averages 9 years. That means that half the people will get
AIDS before 9 years, but the other half will not get sick until later. There
will be cases where patients have had the infection for 20 or 30 years before
becoming ill. However, virtually everybody infected with HIV will
eventually get AIDS, if they are not treated. The estimate at the moment is
about 95% but it could be 100%.
The qualifying if they are not treated is very misleading: there is no treatment
which has been shown to stop people who are HIV-positive from developing
AIDS. Some authorities, including Peter Duesberg, believe that antiretroviral
drugs such as AZT actually trigger the illness via their known immunosuppressive
activity. The MBC, however, claims that these drugs make a 2 to 3 year difference
in survival, which is described as reasonably effective:
Since 1987 drugs have been available for treatment AZT, Zidovudine,
ddI (didanosine), ddC (zalcitibine) and stavudine (d4T). They are reasonably
effective but really only make a two to three year difference in survival. At
the NCHVR (National Centre for HIV/AIDS Research, located at the MBC)
and MBC one of our key tasks is to develop better therapy for HIV infection,
and there are some promising leads.
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They claim, however, that the developing world cannot afford AZT, which is
admitted to be a relatively toxic drug:
In the developing world these therapeutic agents are for the most part
not available to most people. The annual costs for AZT is about $3,000 per
person, and in many such countries the total health care budget is only a
couple of dollars per year per person. In addition, it is a relatively toxic drug
which requires sophisticated medical facilities to monitor therapy.
The pamphlet, which was apparently adapted from a talk by Professor John Mills
(director of the MBC) expands on imminent problems for developing countries:
For the most part, the biggest growth in HIV and AIDS cases has been
in developing countries, with the major risk areas being in Africa,
particularly equatorial Africa, where it is estimated there will be in excess of
6,000,000 cases by the year 2000. Other high risk areas are South America
and South East Asia. In places like Thailand, India and the Philippines we
are facing an AIDS epidemic that is going to be incredibly serious. At the
moment, large numbers of patients are asymptomatic, but as their illness
progresses there will be an appalling medical problem to cope with.
As to the origin of AIDS, Professor Mills repeats the official claim about monkeys
in Africa. He answers the question where did the virus come from?:
Probably from Central Africa, and it probably represents a virus
originally prevalent in non-human primate population monkeys, for
example which got into the human population. It has been present in
Africa for many decades [there is no reliable scientific evidence of this],
perhaps even for centuries (but probably not for thousands of years, unlike
some other viruses). The reason for the epidemic in the second half of the
twentieth century is because of the profound social and political changes
which have permitted this infection to become a pandemic, meaning that it is
a disease of world-wide distribution.
He does not expand on the precise nature of these profound social and political
changes, or the injustice of third world debt causing starvation, lack of health
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care and a worsening gap between rich and poor. He does not refer to the ongoing
wastage of arms purchases by poor nations from rich ones, or the support of
corrupt and despotic regimes by the war machine. He does not mention biological
warfare, chemical warfare or drug warfare. He does not mention the mining and
forestry industries interests in the gold, diamond, uranium, minerals and forests of
Central Africa or Australia. He does, however, paint a grim picture of the toll of
AIDS in Africa:
In Africa, where the disease is older than in other parts of the world, it is
a disaster with whole villages wiped out. There is real concern that AIDS is
now the major political threat to the economic and social future of Africa
In the central African country of Rwanda, which is heavily affected by the
AIDS epidemic, up to 30% of young Rwandan women delivering in the
obstetric ward are infected with HIV. This is a terrible problem, because
apart from the economic difficulties and the need for medical care, these
women can also pass the infection along to their children. The risk is 3050% per pregnancy and since she may be infected for many years before she
actually gets sick, there may be many children involved who will be infected
and die. Those that are not infected, or who live for years, are orphaned
when their mothers die of AIDS.
What about their fathers? Or are African children orphaned when their mothers
die because their fathers do not look after them? There are many insinuations,
subtle at times, about the morality of people in Africa and the Third World or
developing countries as the poor (colonised) nations are interchangeably referred
to, in the MBC propaganda:
In developing countries the AIDS epidemic is particularly a problem in
women and children, because women play a key role in the society of those
countries [they dont here?]. In many of those countries women form a
crucial link as care givers, food providers and part of the social network and
fabric of society, and so the epidemic amongst women in these societies will
have an effect far beyond that which would have occurred had it been
amongst men. Statistics on the prevalence of HIV amongst female sex
workers [where?] show the role that women are playing, or are being forced
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such cruelty that it became the subject of international concern in 1903, following
which his Government took over administration of the region (in 1908). This
continued until the 1960s, when Zaire and Rwanda became independent.
Rwanda has been in a state of civil war since then, with the colonial formalised
labelling of Hutus and Tutsis resulting in repeated mass-murder, constituting
genocide. Zaire and Rwanda, as well as neighbouring Uganda have also been
ravaged by AIDS, and were the areas of Central Africa where the African epidemic
was first noted.
As in the homosexual population in America, immunization programs have been
blamed, by various researchers over the past 15 years, for the introduction of AIDS
and HIV into Africa. The vaccination programs which have been most frequently
mentioned are the polio eradication program of the 1960s and the smallpox
eradication program of the 1970s. R. Ayana wrote, in 1988:
Some researchers, including Dr Douglass, have researched the smallpox
vaccination programmes conducted in Africa at that time. Strecker,
Mendelsohn, Pearce Wright, Douglass, Rifkin and others claim that the
epidemiology of AIDS corresponds precisely with the WHO smallpox
vaccination programme.
Douglass goes so far as to say that a particular vaccination programme
(referred to in a 1972 WHO report of a 1970 NIH conference) was laced
with HIVassertions that HIV was created in Fort Detrick/NIH/NCI have
been made repeatedly over the past decade and this possibility must continue
to be considered until proven incorrect.
Dr Robert Mendelsohn wrote, in 1987, about the difficulty in proving this due to
lack of followup of people who were immunized in these mass-immunization
campaigns, when often a line of children would be injected with the same needle in
unhygeinic situations:
The theory that the AIDS epidemic in Africa may have been triggered
by the smallpox vaccination program has sparked intense debate among
scientistsan urgent call for evidence to support the idea has been
demanded by the World Health Organization. This theory was discussed by
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WHO officials last Autumn (1987). No follow-up data are available from the
smallpox eradication campaign because no systematic studies of the
complications produced by the mass immunization have been done.
The practice of immunization against smallpox began in Africa as early as the
1920s, with Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia) a centre for immunization in
Southern Africa. Rhodesia, named after the British diamond baron Cecil Rhodes,
had a white supremacist regime for most of the twentieth century (and during the
time of the beginning of the smallpox vaccination program) along with
neighbouring South Africa, which also contains extensive deposits of diamonds
which were (and are still) exploited by British mining companies. Zimbabwe,
Zambia and South Africa have also been ravaged by AIDS.
Zimbabwe and Malawi (in the rift valley, also a previously British-ruled nation)
have been selected for International Health Programs in Southern Africa by the
Macfarlane Burnet Centre. Their 1997 Annual report states:
David Hipgrave conducted an assessment study and designed a primary
care project in several districts of Malawi which focussed on communitybased malaria prevention activities using insecticide-impregnated bednets [!]
Wendy Holmes, in collaboration with several NGOs, designed several
HIV/AIDS prevention and care projects in Zimbabwe which focused on care
and support for orphaned children; home-based care and support for people
and their families living with HIV/AIDS; HIV prevention among young
people; and support to the coordination of the responses to HIV/AIDS by
government, non-government, and community organisations in two
districts.
More detail is provided in the 1998 Annual Report:
The IHU [International Health Unit of the MBC] is collaborating with
the Batsirai group, a community based HIV prevention care and support
NGO in Chinhoyi, Zimbabwe, in carrying out a project which focuses on the
needs and concerns of women in relation to pregnancy and care of babies
under 12 months in the context of the HIV epidemic. It will also include an
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Chapter 12
THE BURNET INSTITUTES INTERNATIONAL HEALTH
UNIT
If HIV is being artificially spread in the Third World, the Macfarlane Burnet Centre
(now the Burnet Institute) is deeply implicated in the crime. If not, the recent
Annual Reports of the centre suggest that the International Health programs being
implemented by the centre are grossly inappropriate for the health needs of the
people at whom these programs are directed. These include certain targetted
populations in Australia (especially homosexuals, intravenous drug users and
Aboriginal people) and larger populations in rural and urban areas of Asia and
Africa.
The 1999 Annual Report of the Macfarlane Burnet Centre states that the
International Health Unit, headed by the epidemiologist Mike Toole, is active in
the following regions in addition to Australia (where the units operations are
based): the eastern islands of Indonesia and Melanesia, India, Sri Lanka, Mongolia,
Myanmar (Burma), Vietnam, Laos, Tibet (in collaboration with the Chinese
government), Nepal, Papua New Guinea, seventeen pacific island countries (Cook
Islands, Niue, Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, Solomon Islands, New Caledonia, Vanuatu,
Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Tuvalu, American Samoa, Northern Mariana
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Chinese Government want to get rid of the Tibetans and Tibet altogether? If so, the
infrastructure being set up by the Macfarlane Burnet Centre provides a clear
opportunity to implement genocide by spreading HIV among Tibetans, as the
synopsis of the centres Tibet HIV/AIDS Response Project indicates:
This project will facilitate an expanded response to HIV/AIDS in the
TAR [Tibet Autonomous Region], an area with increasing vulnerability to
HIV transmission and where prevention efforts have been limited. Technical
assistance will strengthen the skills of a Task Group on HIV and STDs
[sexually transmitted diseases] in the TPHB [Tibet Regional Public Health
Bureau]. A comprehensive situation analysis will be undertaken in Lhasa
City and San Nan and Shigatse prefectures, considered to be among the most
vulnerable areas of Tibet. A multisectoral approach will be promoted and
training will involve key sectors including education, social welfare,
transport, defence and police, as well as mass organisations representing
women, youth and the Red Cross. The situation analysis will inform the
development of a strategic plan to respond to HIV/AIDS in the Tibetan
geographic, cultural, and economic context. The first regional strategic
workshop was conducted in October 1999 for 26 participants from various
sectors and was assisted by Dr Wu Zunyou from the Ministry of Health
AIDS Prevention and Control Centre in Beijing. Generous support has been
provided by UNAIDS Beijing in the form of Chinese language training
materials.
A medical infrastructure including immunization and medication dispensing
facilities, health education programs and assistance with the provision of clean
water supplies and advice on hygeine can be of immense value to Tibetans, as to
any other impoverished population and any aid organization that helps provide
such services to the needy is to be commended. A medical infrastructure that
allows those in remote areas to access necessary medical treatments, and gain
knowledge of how to improve their health is also of undeniable value. Every
country in the world is in need of such an infrastructure, including Australia and
the United States of America. In no country has such a service been perfected, and
in every nation disparities exist regarding the quality of services provided
depending on affluence and other factors.
If a technologically complex health care system is provided to ruthless or
repressive governments, terrible things can be done to more people at less cost.
The same infrastructure that could provide rational prescription of medicines can
be used to poison people with toxic chemicals and killer viruses. A health
education intrastructure can be used to dessiminate political propaganda, or for
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Chapter 13
AIDS, PSYCHIATRY and GLAXO-WELLCOME
The connection between AIDS and medical psychiatry, and a combined drugpromotional strategy by Glaxo-Wellcome is evidenced by a continued medical
education publication sent to Australian doctors in 1998 titled HIV/AIDS: a
developing issue for general practitioners. This edition claimed to focus on GI
and psychiatric manifestations of HIV/AIDS. Actually, the focus of the
publication is on encouraging doctors to identify patients at risk, test them for
antibodies and treat them with drugs. The education program is sponsored by
Britain-based Wellcome pharmaceuticals, which advertise themselves as leaders
in antiviral therapy. Following the article on HIV/AIDS and Psychiatry in
which it is claimed that people with HIV/AIDS are at particular risk of
depression, anxiety disorders and suicide (at 21 to 66 times the rate of the
general population), a short article features under the banner HIV/AIDS News.
The news is that low dose zidovudine is cost-effective in asymptomatic HIVpositive patients and that zidovudine benefits children with advanced HIV
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health measures in Australia (for which the medical establishment, hospitals and
governments take credit), which are said to be lacking in underdeveloped
nations. There is, according to the medical establishment, no cure for AIDS or
HIV infection, but a combination of drugs is recommended to improve survival.
No immunization against AIDS is currently available, and this is one of the hopedfor outcomes of medical and immunological research, we are told. In the mean
time, vast amounts of public money have been spent on what are euphemistically
called harm reduction measures. These include safe sex (use of condoms),
needle exchange and distribution, and testing high risk groups for HIV
antibodies. The results of HIV testing are compiled into statistics and interpreted
for the world by experts.
In Australia, the main at risk groups, according to the dogma of the AIDS
establishment are men who have sex with men, intravenous drug users,
psychiatric patients and particular racial groups (Aboriginal and Torres Strait
Islanders and dark-skinned immigrants from Africa and, less vehemently, certain
Asian countries and Pacific Islands). The possibilility of stigmatising these
populations by branding them potentially diseased and infectious is obvious and
the risk becomes clearer still when one reads the public education material on
AIDS from the Macfarlane Burnet Centre, Melbournes (and Australias) premier
HIV/AIDS Research Institute:
It is a terrible disease process, terrible because many patients die but
also because many of the infections and tumours are disfiguring and socially
obvious. It is almost literally true that patients with AIDS have become
the lepers of the 20th century. (emphasis added)
The same pamphlet provides Director of MBC John Mills perspective of
injecting drug users:
Injecting drug users are frequently the bridge between the homosexual
community and the heterosexual community. They are predominantly
heterosexual, sell sex for money or directly for drugs and may not respond to
the educational messages that motivate others.
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These educational messages, of which the MBC particularly recommend the use
of condoms, are accompanied by extremely pessimistic predictions about the AIDS
epidemic and the chances of individuals surviving HIV infection. There is also a
poorly veiled condemnation of the morals of people in developing nations,
particularly in Africa:
In many African countries there is no social prohibition against
husbands having non-monagamous relationships, with the consequence that
most of the women infected are done infected [sic] by their husbands having
such relationships. We need to recognise that these women need social
power before they can deal with the AIDS epidemic. The power to tell their
husbands that polygamous relations are not appropriate behaviour. The
power to tell him to use a condom until she has evidence that his behaviour
has changed. (He does not indicate what sort of evidence is required)
Whilst implying that the problem with these cultures is that they will not behave
in a reasonable rational, socially and morally correct manner Mills does admit
something that suggests that Africans are indeed well educated about the risks of
AIDS; they are merely reluctant to use condoms and change centuries-old and
social structures and traditions, and/or cannot afford them or do not trust them:
A study done in Uganda, a country deeply affected, showed that the
level of AIDS education there is high. Over 97% of people knew that AIDS
is an infectious disease transmitted by sexual intercourse or injecting drug
use, and that it could be prevented by condom usage in sexual intercourse.
But only 10% of these people were using condoms not because they were
unavailable but because of social, economic or religious barriers to their
use.
Needless to say, theories that AIDS was introduced to Africa in immunization
programs or for genocidal reasons are not included in the official HIV/AIDS
education in Australia or in Africa. The educational message is basically: get
tested for HIV, take drugs at the earliest medically recommended opportunity
(prescribed drugs, that is) and use a condom for anal or vaginal sex. The
Melbourne AIDS researchers are particularly interested in anal sex, as their
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research and publications demonstrate. In Australia, the focus of the AIDS research
establishment is on discovering patterns of risk-taking behaviour among
young people (especially young Aboriginal and Vietnamese people). This research
includes the collection of blood specimens (to test for venereal diseases),
questionnaires and personal interrogation (described as interviews). In these often
involuntary interviews the most intrusive details about the young persons sex life
are sought, with an enthusiasm that suggests more than an element of voyeurism.
These research projects involve a close collaboration of the hospital-based
psychiatric system and the AIDS research institutions (of which there is really only
one of note the MBC). Both collect data and the integrated results are analysed
together. Somehow the result of creating a stigmatised and drug-addicted sub-class
of society has been ignored, while the research results clearly point to this as a
feature of AIDS and HIV infection in Australia.
In 1997 the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry published the
results of such a collaboration in an article titled HIV risk behaviour and HIV
testing of psychiatric patients in Melbourne, involving several authors, including
(lead author) Sandra Thompson, Gill Checkley, Jane Hocking and Nick Crofts of
the Epidemiology and Social Research Unit of the Macfarlane Burnet Centre. Nick
Crofts is described as the projects biostatistician. The study involved the
Department of Psychiatry of the University of Melbourne and the Alfred Hospital
in Prahran, and aimed to, according to the stated objectives, determine the
prevalence of risk behaviours associated with HIV transmission and factors
associated with HIV testing in psychiatric patients in Melbourne.
While lumping all psychiatric patients into a high risk group, the study
involved 145 people of whom 55.2% had schizophrenia. Most psychiatric
patients are not labelled with schizophrenia, although many who are subjected to
psychiatric treatment at the Alfred Hospital are given this diagnosis. The results
of this study reflect this and also that people who are subjected to psychiatric
treatment at the hospital develop both a fear of AIDS and a tendency to drug
addiction. This is not surprising, since the hospital forces them to take drugs,
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Although MBC advises on the treatment of people of many races, most of whom
are impoverished and dark-skinned, the Members of the MBC Board are all
white, with the exception of Ms Sharon Firebrace, who is one of two female
board members and is described as an active member of several committees
concerned with Aboriginal and general community affairs over 18 years, and
director of [a] private consultancy specializing in public relations and economic
and business development of Aboriginal and wider communities (including the
mining industry).
Despite the best efforts of Ms Firebrace to represent the interests of aborigines (and
women), her views could easily be over-ridden by the commercial interests of the
11 middle-aged men who sit on the 13-member Board. They included, in 1998, the
Executive Director, Professor John Mills (also director of AMRAD
pharmaceuticals and the Rothschilds Biosciences Investment Trust), Sir Roderick
Carnegie (Chairman of Hudson Conway, Newcrest Mining, Valiant Consolidated
Limited and John Fairfax Holdings Limited) and Raymond Williams (Chairman
and CEO of HIH Winterthur insurance and director of The Insurance Council of
Australia and Australian Motor Insurers Limited). The Board of MBC also
included at the time, Peter Ivany (CEO of the Hoyts Group), Douglas Rathbone
(Director of Gibson Chemicals and other corporate industrial positions), Graeme
Hannan (Chairman of Hannan corporate finance), and Michael Roux (director of
the Local Authorities Superannuation Board and advisor to the Deutsche Bank
Group in Australia).
It is of relevance that the most generous corporate sponsors of the Macfarlane
Burnet Centre, according to their 1997 and 1998 Annual Reports were HIH
Winterthur Insurance, Rio Tinto Mining, SmithKline Beecham (pharmaceuticals
and vaccines) and BHP. It is easy to recognise the vested interests that all these
companies could have in disease-creation. The insurance industry benefits from
concern about illness generally, and there have been few illnesses that generated
the public and governmental panic that AIDS generated in the 1980s, with active
assistance from public terrorization campaigns such as the notorious Grim
Reaper ads on Australian television. The mining industry profits from the sale and
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distribution of metal needles, plastic syringes and drugs but also could perceive a
political benefit in genociding indigenous populations in areas where they have
mining interests. SmithKline Beecham obviously profits from the promotion of
immunizations, being one of the worlds biggest vaccine manufacturers.
SmithKline Beecham is also one of the many transnational drug companies that
have profited financially from the treatment of people with AIDS (who, if they can
afford it, are routinely prescribed multiple drugs). In addition to these, the medical
diagnostics industry (which now includes branches of SmithKline Beecham and
Nestle), have obviously profited financially from paranoia about HIV/AIDS. Of
course, these industries (and the pharmaceutical and medical treatment industries)
are mutually supportive, and, while competing with other for power and money,
also co-operate with other to a degree.
SmithKline Beecham (which has recently merged with Glaxo-Wellcome), is a
massive British drug company that promotes the SSRI drug Aropax for panic
disorder and depression and markets several vaccines, including vaccines
against hepatitis A, hepatitis B, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, influenza, measles,
mumps, rubella, neisseria meningitidis, polio and typhoid. They, together with the
Commonwealth Serum Laboratories (CSL) and the American Mercke Sharpe &
Dohme (MSD) are Australias biggest vaccine marketers. Staff at SmithKline
Beecham International informed me when I was researching vaccine manufacture
that all the vaccines used in the Australian region are manufactured in and
distributed from Rixensart in Belgium, which has been the centre of SKB
biologicals for many years (a rather extraordinary coincidence, given the fact that
the African epidemic seems to have begun in the Belgian ex-colonies of Zaire,
Rwanda and Burundi; and rather alarming in view of previous Belgian treatment of
blacks in Central Africa). The corporate decisions of the company, however, are
generated from Britain, where the head office of SmithKline Beecham is located.
The company is on the British and American (but not the Australian or European)
stockmarkets. SmithKline Beecham has recently amalgamated with GlaxoWellcome, the manufacturers of AZT (Zidovudine), methadone and, according to
the new companys promotional material, 25% of the worlds pharmaceutical
opiates (narcotics).
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The public relations department of SKB Australia, which informed me that all SKB
vaccines are manufactured by SKB Biologicals in Belgium, was unable to
discover how long this has been the case, explaining that the company is divided
into consumer, pharmaceutical and biological sections. Biologicals is
centred in Belgium, where a factory employing 2000 people has produced
700,000,000 vaccines used in 158 countries since 1956, when they produced their
first injectable polio Salk vaccine.
According to the official SKB promotion, this was followed by the following
vaccines: Sabin polio (oral) vaccine in 1961, live attenuated rubella vaccine in
1969, measles vaccine (1976), meningococcal vaccine (1978), chicken pox (1984),
(the worlds first) genetically engineered hepatitis B vaccine (1986), influenza
vaccine (1991), hepatitis A vaccine (1992), DVP (triple antigen with acellular
pertussis, in 1995), haemophilus influenzae (1996), measles, mumps rubella
vaccine (1998) and typhoid vaccine (1998). This is only a summary, and, for
example, earlier non-genetically engineered hepatitis B vaccines are not mentioned
in the official immunization highlights.
SmithKline Beecham was formed by the amalgamation of the American Smith
Kline & French pharmaceuticals with the British Beecham laboratories, which
occurred in the 1980s. Maybe it could be described as a takeover by Beecham of
Smith Kline & French, since the corporate decisions of the company now emanate
from Britain, although this may change again with the recent amalgamation of
SmithKline Beecham and Glaxo-Wellcome. It was Smith Kline & French that first
marketed the crippling chemical chlorpromazine as an antipsychotic back in the
1950s, after its initial discovery and testing by the French drug company RhonePoulenc (which had tested the drug in French Africa, France, and Montreal,
Canada). The Canadian medical historian Edward Shorter wrote, in A History of
Psychiatry (1997), about momentous pharmaceutical events in 1953:
The scene shifts to the United States, toughest market of all to crack
because of the predominance of psychoanalysis and its predilection for
getting to the real causes of the illness. Here an ambitious young drug
house named Smith Kline & French enters the picture. The company was a
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maker of patent medicines, and its new president, Francis Boyer, wanted to
upgrade it to a manufacturer of ethicals, meaning drugs prescribed by the
medical profession. Aware that Rhone-Poulenc had a hot new potentiator
going but unaware that it might have psychiatric uses in the spring of
1952 Boyer went to FranceWhen Boyer signed the licensing agreement,
he thought he was buying an antiemetic (anti-vomiting drug). Having
virtually no research budget, Smith Kline was not prepared to undertake
extensive trials. Said Boyer, Lets get this thing on the market as an
antiemetic and well worry about the rest of that stuff later. The company
brought it out as Thorazine. (p.254)
Thorazine was the American trade name for chlorpromazine, which was, and still
is, marketed in Australia by the original French discoverers of the drug, RhonePoulenc, as Largactil. Thousands of people in Australia, and millions of people
worldwide have been slowly crippled and killed by injections of this drug, often
given to them against their will for treatment of schizophrenia and mania in
public hospitals, clinics and prisons. This has occurred continuously over the past
forty years, and still goes on today, although there is widespread recognition that
far safer alternatives exist to injections, or ingestion of this drug. Chlorpromazine
is a direct neurotoxin, damaging the brain and nervous system from the time of
initial ingestion rendering a state of emotional and intellectual dullness, muscular
stiffness and pain, lethargy and drowsiness. More seriously, the drug, and related
dopamine-blockers, frequently cause Parkinsonism, characterised by tremor,
difficulty initiating movement (including that required for speech), depression and
fatigue. The worst of the drugs neurotoxic effects, however, is probably the
chronic disease only known to occur through the use of this class of drug
(dopamine-blockers): tardive dyskinesia.
Tardive dyskinesia, which can develop following the use of any and all dopamineblockers, including Stelazine, the dopamine-blocker currently sold in Australia by
SmithKline Beecham, is incurable and usually worsens with time, being a direct
result of damage to the brain by constant dopamine-blockade. It is characterised by
bizarre, uncontrollable movements, predominantly affecting the head and face,
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such as repeated protrusion of the tongue, grimaces of the face, puckering of the
lips and puffing of the cheeks. The spasms may also affect the upper and lower
limbs, accompanied by strange writhing movements of the hands, and difficulty
walking. It is difficult to conceive a more stigmatising collection of movement
disorders, and they give an appearance of strange behaviour, in people whose
mental state may be quite normal. Suffering from tardive dyskinesia is truly to
experience a living hell.
Despite these well-recognised problems with chlorpromazine, Edward Shorter is
unqualified in his praise of the drug:
Chlorpromazine initiated a revolution in psychiatry, comparable to the
introduction of penicillin in general medicine. While it did not cure the
diseases causing psychosis, it did abolish their cardinal symptoms so that
patients with underlying schizophrenia could lead relatively normal lives
and not be confined to institutions. (p.255)
It is difficult to see how a drug which frequently causes a crippling state of
illhealth can be compared with antibiotics, which effect a permanent cure from
bacterial infections. This sort of blind support for anti-psychotics and other
psychiatric drugs is not uncommon, however, among academic promoters of
medical and psychiatric history and the history of the pharmaceutical industry.
These writers generally ignore biological warfare, chemical warfare or drug
warfare and the connection between the biotechnology and medical industries
(including the psychiatric industry) and the global war machine. References to
psychological warfare are also noticeably absent from modern psychiatric texts,
although this aspect of warfare has been central to every major conflict since
ancient times.
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Chapter 14
207
done in humans was resolved by the 1931 Puerto Rico Cancer Experiment, again
conducted by the Rockefeller institute, this time under the supervision of Chief
Pathologist Cornelius Rhoades. During these experiments, Dr Rhoades infected
Puerto Ricans (people from the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico, which was
annexed by the USA in 1898), whom he regarded as the dirtiest, laziest, most
degenerate and thievish race of men ever inhabiting this sphere, with
transplanted cancer, killing at least thirteen people (Vankin and Whalen, 1995,
p.297). Rhoades was later placed in charge of two large chemical warfare projects
and rewarded with a seat on the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s.
With the discovery of the structure of DNA by James Watson and Francis Crick in
1956, the ability to genetically engineer viruses on a molecular level became
theoretically possible. Working in Francis Cricks laboratory at Cambridge
University (London) Watson and Crick integrated existing knowledge about the
molecule and worked out its physical and chemical structure, winning a Nobel
Prize for this achievement in 1962. Since then, increasing focus on genetics has
resulted in billions of dollars and countless hours being spent on the human
genome project and various aspects of genetic engineering.
Genetic engineering is inextricably connected with the ancient practice of selective
breeding to develop desired characteristics. Even though the term had not then
been coined, animal breeders and agriculturists were engaged in macroscopic
genetic engineering 5000 years ago, when particular wild species of plant and
animal were altered, through selected breeding, to maximise their value to the
humans that owned them. This value included aesthetic value, nutritive value,
commercial value and utility in hunting and war. Thus the eugenics-obsessed
breeders of different varieties of rose, dog, rabbit, horse and pigeon in the British
Royal Society and associated universities on both sides of the Atlantic, and the
breeders clubs and planters societies distributed around the British
Commonwealth, had the background knowledge and experience, and the
technological infrastructure necessary to augment their strategies of selective
breeding of plants, animals and humans with detailed knowledge of what was
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occurring on a cellular and molecular level, when this became widely available in
the 1960s.
With the development of knowledge in the field of medical and genetics, came
opportunities for more scientists to specialise in different subspecialty areas
molecular genetics, plant genetics, invertebrate genetics, medical genetics,
psychiatric genetics and genetic engineering. Medical doctors and general
scientists who wished to study genetics had a choice of one or other sub-speciality
area there was minimal integration, and little communication between different
sub-specialities and with other areas of science. When the importance of DNA to
all cellular life was discovered, many institutions and scientists focussed on
discovering new genes and patenting the knowledge if they thought it was of
potential commercial benefit. Vast amounts of money were poured into existing
and newly established genetics research establishments, with spectacular results
the genetic defects involved in several inherited diseases were discovered (such as
haemophilia), and the underlying chromosomal abnormalities in others (such as
Downs syndrome). Of relevance to our present discussion, a huge revolution
occurred, as a direct result of Watson and Cricks discovery, in the fields of
microbiology and virology.
The invention of the light microscope and the first description of bacteria by the
Dutch amateur microscope builder Anton van Leeuwenhoek in the 17 th century
heralded the birth of modern microbiology the scientific study of microbes. Van
Leeuwenhoek, who had made his own simple hand-held microscope, sent drawings
of the wee animalcules he had observed to the British Royal Society in 1684.
These were later named bacteria tiny single-celled animals that cover the surface
of the earth, and even our own skin. Bacteria are truly ubiquitous they are found
deep in the ocean and in the suphurous waters of volcanic springs, they cover every
terrestrial surface and thrive even in the digestive tract of insects, cows and human
beings. Bacteria and algae (single celled plants) are the most simple forms of
cellular life. While some bacteria are harmless and others are necessary for health
(those in the large bowel help provide the body with vitamins, for example),
several types of bacteria can cause serious human infectious disease. The actual
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infecting them with viral and bacterial infections (sometimes to observe the effect
of disease, sometimes to test drugs and vaccines).
Fifteen years later, scientists at the University of Alabama had been invited to test
old tissue samples from the only chimp in the Airforce colony to have tested
positive for HIV, according to Frederic Goldens article in Time magazine
Marilyn. Her tissue had been stored in a freezer at the National Cancer Institute
(located, it has been reported elsewhere, at Fort Detrick, in Bethesda, Maryland,
the previous location of the U.S.Armys main biological warfare centre, this having
been converted to the National Cancer Institutes Frederick Cancer Research
Facility in 1969). The researchers from the University of Alabama took tissue
samples of Marilyns spleen and using, in the words of Golden, the sort of genetic
wizardry unavailable during the animals lifetime, had set about amplifying,
sequencing and analysing Marilyns virus (Golden, 1999, p.44).
Frederic Goldens Time magazine article promises much more than it delivers:
In this weeks Nature, researchers at the University of Alabama in
Birmingham report that Marilyns frozen tissue, carefully preserved all these
years, may have solved a pair of lingering medical mysteries: where the
dominant form of the AIDS virus originated in the animal world, and how it
made the deadly leap to humans. More than brilliant scientific detective
work, the Alabama research, if it turns out to be correct, could lead to new
treatments and possibly even a cure for a fatal disease that afflicts more than
35 million people around the globe. (p.44)
The brilliant scientific detective work involves some leaps in logic that are
simply not supported by reliable evidence. The argument that has apparently
allowed scientists to zero in on the source of the AIDS virus reads as follows:
Except in the rarest cases, chimps like the sooty mangabeys never
show AIDS-like symptoms. Even so, when the researchers compared the
viral DNA with the three known types of SIV (simian immunodeficiency
virus), they found it had a substantially different genetic makeup. And when
they compared Marilyns genetic makeup with that of other chimps, they
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determined that she belonged to a different subspecies than the chimps that
harbor the other SIV strains; those kindred chimps live further east in the
equatorial African rain forest. More important, Marilyns virus closely
matched the three major groupings of the HIV-1 strains, whereas the other
simian viruses appeared only remotely like the human virus.
To the researchers, this suggested that the chimp virus had mutated and
crossed over to humans on at least three separate occasions, each time
finding man a more congenial host than ape. The momentous leaps, Hahn
[Dr Beatrice Hahn, the University of Alabama who led the research team,
which included her husband George Shaw] speculates, could have occurred
when hunters came into contact with infected blood while butchering chimps
for food, a common practice in Africa. As it happens, the first documented
case of AIDS goes back to 1959, when a man living in Kinshasa, just across
the Congo River from Gabon, home of Marilyns kin, died of the disease.
The above quote is confusing from the very first sentence. Chimpanzees are apes
(as are humans), while sooty mangabeys are monkeys (simians). The initial
sentence should read, with commas:
Except in the rarest cases chimps, like sooty mangabeys, never show
AIDS-like symptoms.
Allowing for the typographical error, is this true? How common are the rarest
cases when chimpanzees do show such symptoms? It has been publicly admitted
that chimpanzees have been used for medical experimentation with a range of
viruses over several decades. Today chimpanzees continue to be injected with HIV,
hepatitis B and other human viruses in medical (animal) research institutions in the
USA, Europe and elsewhere. Demonstrating the presence of HIV in the tissues of a
chimpanzee that had lived and died in captivity at the hands of the U.S. Airforce
and military research establishment is hardly proof that the virus originated in the
Congo. It does tell us, however, that the U.S. National Institute of Healths
National Cancer Institute is in possession of HIV-infected tissue samples and also
the expertise and technological means of amplifying, sequencing and analysing
killer viruses. In fact, this capability is held by several universities and virology
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research insitutions in the USA and a smaller number in other parts of the world.
The Principal Office of Time Incorporated, the publisher of Time magazine, is
located in the Rockefeller Centre in New York. The Rockefeller Institute was
involved in the first discovery of cancer-causing viruses in animals, and the Puerto
Rico Cancer Experiments. Several Rockefeller-owned and controlled institutions
have had the scientific and technological capacity to engineer HIV from previously
known animal viruses since such technology was first developed. Is Frederic
Goldens article influenced by these facts in any way? Is it true that the first
documented case of AIDS goes back to 1959? Golden claims that a man living in
Kinshasa died of AIDS in 1959, although the disease was only described for the
first time in 1978 (and then as Gay Related Immune Deficiency or GRID) and
the virus HIV only in 1984. The diagnosis of the man from Kinshasa was a
retrospective one based on very dubious evidence, as will be seen.
The Time magazine article is misleadingly titled The First Chimpanzee and
draws the reader to its content with an endearing photograph of the face of a baby
chimpanzee gazing intently at the camera. A small map captioned Where the
Chimps Are shows the apparent location, marked in red, of wild chimpanzees in
West Africa an area including the whole of Gabon and Equatorial Guinea,
according to the map, extending into northern parts of the Republic of Congo and
the southern regions of the Central African Republic and Cameroon. Golden claims
that chimpanzees are increasingly threatened in the wild, blaming not the
relentless deforestation of the region but butchering chimps for food which is
claimed as a common practice in Africa. The possibility of demonising Africans
as chimp murderers responsible for the extinction of our closest primate relatives
is obvious. This butchering claim is unjustifiable, however, given that
chimpanzees are not commonly hunted or eaten even in the limited areas of West
Africa where they still survive. If concerted efforts are made to save their
remaining forest habitat there is no reason why chimpanzees will not survive, and
indeed thrive, in the wild. Golden, however, uncritically presents the convoluted
arguments of the University of Alabama researchers that by improving their
status through becoming valuable medical subjects, chimps might be saved
from extinction (but not imprisonment and torture, it seems):
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The findings are more than a historical footnote in the battle against
AIDS. Because chimps are much closer to humans than sooty mangabeys
they share more than 98% of our genome animals infected with an HIVlike virus could prove to be ideal test subjects for establishing what it is
about them that, as Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases, puts it, allows the chimp to become
infected but not get sick.
The chimps also stand to gain. Increasingly threatened in the wild, they
may find new status and protection as medical subjects. Says Hahn, All
theyd need to do is give a pint of blood every so often. That certainly beats
being rocketed into space or extinction.
I am still haunted by a happy face I saw on television a few months ago. It was the
smiling face of a chimpanzee. He was being visited by a friend he had not seen for
16 years, and was obviously very happy at first. The man who visited him had
taught the chimpanzee sign language, and had not expected the victim of cruel
medical experimentation to recognise him. The chimpanzee did, and was obviously
thrilled to see him. He grinned from ear to ear, and started signing frantically
calling the man by an old nick-name, playing games and fooling around from
behind the bars of his prison. He extended his hand out of the cage and held that of
the friend he trusted the friend who had taught him to speak with human sign
language, even though no one had thought it possible. They thought the chimp
would not be able to learn sign language, not because chimpanzees cannot learn to
sign (they can), but because, as an infant, the two halves of this chimpanzees brain
had been surgically severed because, said the program, it was thought that he
may have had epilepsy. The program also admitted that researchers were very
interested in split-brain experiments at the time.
This chimpanzee had been used for medical experiments all his life for almost
two decades he had been subjected to injections, infections, operations and the
most cruel abuses. This showed, as plain as day, on his face. Yet the researchers
who had injected this unfortunate chimpanzee with the hepatitis B virus and
hundreds of others with Hepatitis B and HIV were unconvinced that animals have
emotions or that animals suffer. They remained unconvinced because they chose
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not to consider the matter deeply, or look at evidence they did not want to believe.
These same researchers claimed that, although unpleasant, medical
experimentation using chimpanzees is necessary and valuable. This is not true. The
crime against our closest primate relatives is not a medical necessity or, in fact, of
scientific value. It is also morally reprehensible and a truly repulsive legacy of the
time when chimpanzees, gorillas and other apes were regarded as just animals
unthinking automatons that could be tortured and killed at the will of scientists and
industrialists. Today the claim that apes do not suffer is not taken seriously and not
usually made. The argument that is consistently used instead is that the sacrifice
of these animals is a medical necessity to test out experimental vaccines, in
particular. This is the central claim, and it is false. The claim that chimpanzees
must be used because humans cannot, is also false. In fact, human experimentation
with trial vaccines is even more commonplace than that involving chimpanzees.
The chimpanzee whose old friend came to visit him had been deliberately infected,
not with a trial vaccine, but with a live virus. The television program, titled
Chimpanzees on Death Row, revealed that over 200 chimpanzees have been
infected with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) mainly by injecting them
with blood from people suffering from AIDS. Hundreds more have been infected
with various strains of the hepatitis virus. The progress of the diseases created by
researchers is monitored by repeated blood tests and liver biopsies. The
experimental animals, which are now presumed infectious, are held in solitary
confinement while they slowly die of man made diseases and emotional
deprivation. This may take many years. Some experimental chimpanzees survive
for 40 or 50 years.
Infecting chimpanzees and other creatures with human viruses carries a serious risk
of increasing the range of mutant strains of killer viruses. Once these have become
established in an experimental animal reservoir they can escape into the human
population or the wild population of the species concerned (or other species).
Injecting animals with viruses has been done in a grossly irresponsible way over
the past 50 years, and we have seen, along with this mindless obsession with
creating human diseases in experimental animals, the emergence of several new
viral plagues notably that of AIDS (but also Marburg, Ebola, Lassa viruses and
many others). Where are these new viruses appearing from the jungles of the
Third World, or the laboratories of the First World?
The disturbing television program Chimpanzees on Death Row did not raise this
concern, nor did it note the relationship between the demographics of hepatitis B
vaccination trials (in humans) and the first appearance of HIV infection and AIDS
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in male homosexuals in the United States (in the early 1980s). It was, instead,
focused on revealing the suffering of the experimental subjects, and this was
achieved poignantly. The old footage of struggling chimpanzees being strapped
into crash pods by the U.S. Airforce (which had established a breeding colony
for this reason the products of which were subsequently sold for medical
research) is deeply etched in my mind. The grimacing face and writhing head of a
chimpanzee in obvious pain and electrical wires attached to his brain are difficult
to forget. The hardest thing to forget, though, will be the face of the tortured
chimpanzee whose old friend had betrayed him. After visiting the chimpanzee, the
man who had taught him sign language turned a blind eye to his pleas for freedom
and told him he had to go. The chimpanzee did not look surprised just very, very
sad.
The dehumanization that occurs when our fellow creatures are seen as legitimate
experimental subjects is familiar to me from personal experience. Without such
dehumanization I would not have been able to dissect and experiment with
different injectable drugs on a living (anaesthetised) cat and then kill it with a
lethobarb injection, as I, and all the other medical students in my year were
obliged to do when we studied medicine at the University of Queensland in the
early 1980s. This dehumanization extended to my interactions with patients
when, as a medical student, we were sent onto the hospital wards with a list of
patients who had been selected by our tutors as having interesting signs. For
example we might be told to examine the liver of Mr Jones in bed 13, or the heart
of Mrs Smith in bed 18, the kidneys of Mr Brown in bed 25 and the feet of Mrs
White. These patients were generous and understanding towards the white-coated
medical students who prodded and poked them as a rule, and I did try to be polite
and friendly, however I did not really try to understand the whole of the person
whose liver I was examining or heart I was listening to with my stethoscope.
When I worked as a junior resident doctor in the psychiatric unit of the Royal
Brisbane Hospital in 1984 the patients, especially those in the locked ward, seemed
less human to me than normal people. I assumed, as I was taught to, that
psychiatric patients tend to overreact, imagine things, exaggerate and lie. I believed
that those who claimed they were sane and did not need to be in hospital were
suffering from lack of insight. I thought the glazed expression on the faces of
patients on major tranquillisers (as modern-day antipsychotics were then
called) was caused by schizophrenia rather than the drugs the hospital was
forcing on them. I did not learn the error of my thinking and the extent of my own
medical dehumanization, intellectual blinkering, and emotional disconnection from
the suffering of others until I myself had been subjected to such treatment. I
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shuddered when the presenters of the program said that the men who ran the
chimpanzee research program were considering euthanasia as a population control
measure for (infected) chimpanzees. I shuddered because, unlike most doctors, I
have made a careful study of negative eugenics, and realise how the term
euthanasia has been used as a euphemism in the past. The past doctrines of
eugenics continue to pose a grave danger to modern genetics and the application of
virology, immunology and biotechnology knowledge. This danger is a huge threat
to humanity and all large mammals. Infecting chimpanzees is not far from
infecting humans. Those who think it permissible to give chimpanzees AIDS,
hepatitis, and other infections and then euthanase them to control population
numbers may not see it as harmful to euthanase Africans and Asians because
they fear the world is overpopulated, or euthanase homosexuals and drug
addicts because they fear degeneracy or because they despise those that have
been demonized.
One way that medicine has become dehumanized is through the reduction of
human beings to labels and statistics. Often the statistics that are compiled are
themselves derived from labels the incidence of different diagnoses is
measured and compared in different parts of the world, different parts of an
individual country and different social, racial and ethnic groups within a country
or group of countries. This is an important aspect of global health monitoring and
epidemiology, however it can easily lead to dehumanization and lack of empathy
by those institutions and doctors that become more familiar with people in terms of
statistics than as individuals. In the case of mental health statistics, from which
predictions have been made by the UN that mental illness will increase
substantially over the next 20 years, these are usually compiled according to the
number of people who are given psychiatric labels by mental health professionals
or are given psychiatric treatment by medical doctors in various clinics and
hospitals. How fallacious such statistics can be will be explored in subsequent
chapters, and the labels themselves were analysed in detail in my previous book
The Politics of Schizophrenia. The modern global strategies regarding mental
health, harm minimization (from drugs and venereal diseases) and safer sex
are fundamentally connected with each other and all became global during the
Cold War when more and more medical and social programs based on
dehumanised statistical analyses and misapplied bell-curves were developed. These
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Chapter 15
BIOLOGICAL WARFARE IN CENTRAL AFRICA?
The claim, by University of Alabama and National Cancer Institute researchers and
Time magazine, that HIV originated in and spread to humans from wild
chimpanzees in the Congo constitutes a significant revision of the official theory
of the 1980s and 1990s that Human Immunodeficiency Virus was probably
endemic in African monkeys, probably African Green Monkeys (Cercopithecus
aethiops), and probably entered the human population in Central Africa through a
monkey-bite or some other blood to blood contact between Africans and monkeys.
After entering the human reservoir, the official theory went, it somehow spread to
the United States, targetting (mainly white) male homosexuals in New York, Los
Angeles and California and causing the epidemic that was initially termed GRID
(Gay Related Immune Deficiency) and later termed AIDS (Acquired Immune
Deficiency Syndrome). Simultaneously, the same virus, according to the official
theory, was causing a much more serious epidemic in the Third World, and
especially in Central, Eastern and Southern Africa which were being collectively
referred to as sub-Saharan Africa. This was the theory I accepted for many years
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until I looked at the epidemiology and history of the AIDS epidemic more
closely.
The theory that Human Immunodeficiency Virus was introduced into humans via
contaminated vaccines does not necessarily imply conspiracy or intentional
genocide. Some investigators have suggested that, because of the epidemiology of
the AIDS epidemic in Africa, the virus may have been unintentionally released in
polio or smallpox immunization campaigns during the 1960s and 1970s. A few,
notably the University of California virologist and oncogene (cancer-causing
gene) researcher Peter Duesberg, have claimed that AIDS is not caused by the
Human Immunodeficiency Virus at all. Professor Duesbergs theories and those of
various conspiracy theorists were debunked in the science writer Laurie Garretts
1994 best-seller The Coming Plague. Having researched the Coming Plague as a
Fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, Garrett presents the American
medical establishments claim that HIV is the result of accidental cross-infection
from simian (monkey) viruses that have been in Africa for very long time, as the
most credible explanation for the origin of the virus. In support of this theory she
quotes Joseph McCormick, head of special pathogens at the United States
Centers for Disease Control, and self-proclaimed virus hunter, as saying, in
1987:
Simian viruses have evolved in simians in parallel with human
viruses, and the [HIV] virus in humans has been around for a very long time.
For quite a long time, I believe, in Africa. And I believe a whole family of
these viruses have co-evolved. (p. 384)
Laurie Garrett specifically ridicules the theory that HIV was created by the US
military or CIA, mentioning the anti-vivisectionist Dr Robert Strecker, who
gained a large following in 1987 by again claiming, on the basis of a supposed
BLV (bovine leukaemia virus) connection, that the CIA made the AIDS virus
(Garrett, 1994, p.382). Dr Streckers accusation followed the first public accusation
that HIV was the result of genetic engineering by a senior Western academic.
This was in 1985 and made by the British physician Dr John Seale, who stated,
with certainty, that HIV was the deliberate outcome of biological weaponry
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The British physician, John Seale, would not have suspected Fort Detrick scientists
merely because the Eastern bloc made this accusation. It would have been
relatively common knowledge among older doctors in England (and those with
memories that go further) that Fort Detrick used to house the main American
Biological Warfare laboratory, changing its name to the Frederick Cancer
Research Facility of the National Cancer Institute during the Vietnam war (when
there was growing concern in the USA about chemical and biological weapons).
This name change occurred in 1969 (Vankin, Whalen, 1997), three years before the
international treaty banning the development, stockpiling and use of biological and
toxin weapons was ratified by most members of the United Nations, including the
USA, UK and Australia, in 1972. According to this new International Law, which
supposedly came into force in 1975, biological and toxin weapons were defined as
weapons of mass-destruction and were banned: existing stockpiles were to be
destroyed and all research and development programs abandoned.
It is obvious, though, that it is easier for an institution to change its name than to
change what it does. To achieve the latter the entire infrastructure needs to be
changed. Programs for staff training and expensive equipment become redundant,
or even illegal. Changing what an institution does requires new goals and
ambitions, new ideas, and a whole new culture. A simple name change is cheaper,
and remarkably effective at fooling the public.
In the 1980s concerns were raised by several researchers about the disproportionate
number of homosexual men in the United States of America who later developed
HIV infections and AIDS after being vaccinated with an experimental hepatitis B
vaccine in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Dr Alan Cantwell refers to this in a 1998
article titled, AIDS: a doctors note on the man-made theory:
Conveniently lost in the history of AIDS is the gay Hepatitis-B
vaccine experiment that immediately preceded the decimation of gay
Americans. A cohort of over a thousand young gays was injected with the
vaccine at the New York Blood Center in Manhattan during the period
November 1978 to October 1979. Similar gay experiments were conducted
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227
In reading Joseph McCormicks adventures and those of his wife Susan FisherHoch (who co-authors Level 4: Virus Hunters of the CDC) it becomes evident that
the American military also have had an active interest in haemorrhagic fevers, and
collaborated regularly with the CDC. Both organizations have been collecting
blood specimens and viruses from people around the world, including Africa, since
the 1950s and before. Prior to that a range of private laboratories, notably those
sponsored by the Rockefeller corporation, have been collecting blood and other
human and animal tissue specimens since the early 1900s. Senior staff from the
CDC, and various private American laboratories and elite universities have
subsequently been employed in the USAMRIID (United States Army Medical
Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, based, again, at Fort Detrick, Maryland).
In fact, it was from experiments on infected monkeys at the US military research
centre that McCormick got the idea of trying out ribavirin on humans with Lassa
Fever:
Karl [Dr Karl Johnson, then chief of Special Pathogens at CDC] told me
that he was already testing the drug against Lassa virus in tissue cultures,
adding that similar experiments were being conducted by Peter Jahrling at
USAMRIID. Peter was infecting monkeys with Lassa virus and treating
them with ribavirin. There was good safety data on the drug, including
human use data, because it had already been used successfully as a treatment
for acute viral pneumonia in infants [especially pneumonia caused by
respiratory syncitial virus, or RSV, a virus that is coincidentally a specialty
of the Harvard-trained MBC head Professor John Mills]. (p.99)
Karl Johnson was head of Special Pathogens at the CDC (and McCormicks
boss) during the late 1970s, when the first cases of AIDS were reported (but before
Robert Gallos announcement that he had discovered the HIV virus), and went
from there to work at the USAMRIID in 1982, leaving three years later, shortly
after Gallos announcement (in 1984). It was Johnson who first sent McCormick to
Africa in 1976 in search of Ebola Virus.
Level 4: Virus Hunters of the CDC (1996) is a personal account of McCormicks
adventures in search of killer viruses in Africa during the 1970s and 1980s and
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gives an indication of some of the unofficial and official alliances that occur in the
dangerous world of viral epidemic research. McCormick tells his story in graphic
detail, concentrating more on presenting an entertaining narrative than providing
solutions to the problem of viral plagues. He portrays himself as the intrepid hero:
venturing into the darkest Africa in search of the source of Lassa Fever, Ebola
virus, Marburg virus and other haemorrhagic fevers. These are potentially lethal
viruses, but McCormick, in telling a dramatic narrative exaggerates the drama.
Writing about pricking his finger with a possibly infected needle, he writes:
How could I have been so careless? I had bled over three hundred
victims of Lassa Fever and never come close to pricking myself. My first
instinct was to pull off my glove and cry out, but what good would that have
done? Though I rinsed off the glove with disinfectant, I knew the damage
had been done. So the only thing I could do was finish bleeding the woman
and continue with my work. I cant say that I was calm, but I wasnt in a
panic, either. Still, I had a nauseating feeling. I knew, more than most
people, that when you get stuck by a potentially contaminated needle in the
midst of a deadly epidemic like the one Id earlier investigated in Zaire
the odds for survival arent very good.
Actually, Id have to say that the fatality rate was about 100 percent.
(p.17)
This is not actually true, and Dr McCormick should know it not to be true. A
needle-prick with even a definitely infected needle does not guarantee infection:
the risk of this is small even with the most deadly viruses. Nevertheless, Ebola
virus, which potentially contaminated the needle with which he accidentally
pricked himself, is a horrific micro-organism. The 1980 edition of Harrisons
Principles of Internal Medicine describes the terrible mortality that this viral
infection caused in early cases (all from Central Africa):
Between July and November 1976 simultaneous outbreaks of an acute
febrile hemorrhagic disease occurred in Southern Sudan and Northern Zaire.
Secondary and tertiary spread of infection, particularly among hospital
staff, was noted. In the Sudan over 300 cases with 151 deaths and in Zaire
237 cases with 211 fatalities were reported. In one Sudanese hospital, 76
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members of a staff of 230 were infected and 41 died. The virus isolated from
patients in the Sudan and Zaire was morphologically similar to the Marburg
agent but was antigenically distinct. The name Ebola virus, after the river in
Zaire located near the epidemic, has been proposed. (p.822)
The textbook describes the typical course of an Ebola virus infection:
Clinically, the disease is similar to Marburg virus disease. The
incubation period ranges from 4 to 6 days. Patients usually present on the
fifth day of illness with a history of abrupt onset of headache, malaise,
myalgias [muscle pains], high fever, diarrhea, abdominal pain, dehydration,
and lethargy. Pleuritic chest pain, a dry hacking cough and a pronounced
pharyngitis [throat inflammation] were also noted. A maculopapular eruption
[skin rash] develops between days 5 to 7 of illness. On black skins the rash
is often faint and not recognised until desquamation [loss of surface layers of
skin] occurs. Hematemesis [vomiting blood], melena [passage of blood in
faeces], and bleeding from the nose, gums and vagina are common. Abortion
and massive metrorrhagia [uterine haemorrhage] was a frequent
complication among pregnant women. Death usually occurs in the second
week of illness and is preceded by severe blood loss and shock. (p.823)
The illness caused by Ebola Virus is similar to that of Marburg virus, named after
the German town where the first cases of the new haemorrhagic viral infection
occurred, in 1967. All the initial cases of human infection were in people working
in German and Yugoslavian medical laboratories where they were exposed to
African Green Monkeys, according to Harrisons Principles of Internal Medicine
(1980). The textbook gives an overview of the epidemiological basis on which the
monkeys were implicated:
The initial outbreaks affected 31 patients in Marburg and Frankfurt,
Germany, and Belgrade, Yugoslavia, and was epidemiologically linked to
monkeys imported from the same source in Uganda. Virus was isolated from
the blood and tissue of these monkeys. Of the 25 primary infections, there
were seven deaths. Six secondary cases, involving two physicians, one
nurse, a postmortem attendant, and the wife of a veterinarian occurred.
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doing so requires the use of a muzzle system attached to the face of guinea
pigs and monkeys, which delivers a large dose under pressure. (p.284)
Lassa fever, for which Joe McCormick experimented with ribavirin in the 1970s, is
a less dangerous haemorrhagic fever than that caused by Ebola virus or Marburg
virus, and most people who are infected with Lassa fever survive. The 1980 edition
of the authoritative textbook Harrisons Principles of Internal Medicine gave the
official mortality figures for what is described in the book as a new virus disease:
The mortality rates in Jos [in Nigeria, where an outbreak occurred in
1970] and Zorzor [in Liberia, where an outbreak occurred in 1972] were 52
percent and 36 percent, respectively, while in Sierra Leone the rate was 8
percent.
These mortality figures are based on small samples, since the number of people
who became ill and died was only 10 (out of 32 suspected cases) in Nigeria and 4
(out of 10 suspected cases) in Liberia. More cases of the haemorrhagic fever were
reported between 1970 and 1972 from Sierra Leone, but still only 63 cases were
reported. The mortality rate amongst the suspected cases in Sierra Leone was
significantly lower than in Nigeria and Liberia, with a death rate of 8 percent
reported in Harrisons Principles of Internal Medicine. The textbook also gives
statistics which suggest that Lassa Fever is not usually a killer virus:
In Sierra Leone 6 percent of the population surveyed had complementfixing antibody against Lassa Virus, while only 0.2 percent had recognised
disease, suggesting mild disease or inapparent infection. In Liberia 10
percent of hospital personnel had antibodies. (p.843)
In the dramatic tale of how he discovered the value of intravenous ribavirin (an
anti-viral drug) for the treatment of early infection with Lassa Fever in Sierra
Leone, however, McCormick gives different figures for untreated versus treated
Lassa Fever:
We went on to treat more than 1,500 patients with laboratory-confirmed
Lassa Fever. From over 16 percent, mortality dropped dramatically to less
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than 5 percent. As time went on, the new treatment became famous
throughout the district (p.107)
The figure of a reduction from 16% mortality to 5%, which was attributed to
treatment with ribavirin, can be explained in other ways. The studies in the healthy
population of Sierra Leone and Liberia indicate that a much larger proportion of
the population have Lassa Fever antibodies than actually develop symptoms of the
disease, let alone die from it. By doing widespread and earlier testing for
antibodies, a sizeable number of mildly infected people (who would recover
without treatment anyway) could have been treated with the drug, resulting in
apparently lowered mortality rates by use of the drug. It is accepted by McCormick
that serious cases did not recover, even with use of the drug, and that his previous
trials of oral ribavirin were of doubtful value.
These trials, described in a chapter titled magic bullets, occurred in 1979, and
involved comparing oral ribavirin with injections of plasma taken from people who
had recovered from Lassa Fever. After returning to CDC headquarters in Atlanta,
McCormick analysed the results of the treatment with the help of computer
technology:
The first analysis suggested that neither treatment was effective. Looked
at as cold, hard numbers, even the ribavirin seemed to have little effect.
Yet I could not let go so easily. The more I thought about it, the more I
began to wonder whether there might not be another way of looking at the
results [to suggest efficacy of the drug]. I went back and reanalyzed the data.
This time, I decided, we would take a different tack. I started to break down
the patients into two basic categories those who were in the early stages of
illness on the day we began treatment, and those who were in the late stages.
In our first analysis, we took no account of the timing of the admission:
When did the patient become ill, and when did he actually go to the hospital
for help? Now I took into account how much time had passed from the onset
of illness to the day wed started ribavirin.
No matter how we looked at the data for immune plasma, the result was
the same. In every case, the plasma failed to work. It didnt matter how early
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in the disease we treated, the patients continued to die at the same rate as
before. But with the ribavirin I detected a glimmer of success, the faint glow,
perhaps, of at least a fraction of the miracle we sought. If a patient was
admitted in the first six or seven days of his illness, ribavirin improved
prospects for survival. If the patient had been sick for more than a week, the
capsules had less effect. We were onto something.
The faint glow of a fraction of a miracle, provided by a drug which was always too
expensive for Sierra Leone, Nigeria or Liberia to afford for their impoverished
citizens. The same applies for azidothymidine (AZT/Zidovudine): apart from
debatable benefits from the drug, it is too expensive for most of the people with
AIDS in the world today. Furthermore, it may shorten, rather than lengthen, life
expectancy, as will be seen.
Returning to Dr Alan Cantwells and Dr John Seales accusations, the possibility
that AIDS has been introduced into the human population through vaccinations,
whether accidentally or intentionally, is so serious that it cannot be easily
dismissed as unprovable or unlikely. If unintentional it is a medical blunder of
unprecedented scale, which warrants an immediate re-evaluation of medical
immunization strategies and public health programs worldwide. If intentional,
which is a possibility raised by several researchers, it is an act of brutal genocide
and mass-murder even worse than the Nazi atrocities of the Second World War, and
the perpetrators should be held accountable. Lest those would determine the truth
about this matter wait for a confession from those responsible or proof of written
orders to commit genocide, though, Cantwell makes the important point that all
biological warfare research in the US is secret and hidden from public view. The
same applies to biological warfare research in other countries, including Australia
and Britain.
Chapter 16
BIOLOGICAL WARFARE RESEARCH IN AUSTRALIA
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The history, demographics and epidemiology of AIDS in the modern world are
simply inconsistent with the theory, promoted by the medical and pharmaceutical
industries, and the governments in Britain, Europe, America and Australia, that the
infection, now called Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV), spread to humans
from wild monkeys (or chimpanzees) in Central Africa during the 1960s or 1970s.
It clearly does not explain a simultaneous explosion of HIV and AIDS in white
homosexuals in America, and black heterosexual men and women as well as
children in Africa, or the subsequent rapid spread of the virus to mineral-rich areas
of Asia, South America, Melanesia and Polynesia. The American physician and
AIDS researcher Dr Alan Cantwell wrote, in 1998:
Where did HIV originate? Prominent cancer virologists and
government epidemiologists have theorised that HIV originated in African
green monkeys. Purportedly the monkey virus jumped species and entered
the black population. From there it migrated to Haiti and Manhattan. After
the virus entered the black heterosexual population in the late 1970s, it
rapidly spread to millions of blacks because of transfusions with HIVinfected blood, dirty needles, promiscuity and genital ulcers or so the
experts said.
Not all scientists believe the official monkey story, although it is rare to
find people who express this view publicly. One persistent underground
rumor is that AIDS is biological warfare. Proponents of the AIDS conspiracy
theory believe that AIDS has nothing to do with green monkeys,
homosexuality, drug addiction, genital ulcerations, anal sex or promiscuity,
but that it has to do with scientists experimenting on blacks and gays: in
short, AIDS is genocide. Most African-Americans have heard the story that
HIV is a manufactured virus genetically-engineered to kill off the black race.
Thirty percent of New York City blacks polled by The New York Times
(October 29, 1990) actually believe AIDS is an ethno-specific bioweapon
designed in a laboratory to infect black people.
Despite the general acceptance that HIV came from monkeys and the
rain forest, there is no scientific evidence to prove that HIV and AIDS
originated in Africa. What is true is that the first AIDS cases were uncovered
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in the U.S. in 1979, around the same time that AIDS cases were discovered
in Africa. In addition, no stored African tissue from the 1970s tests positive
for HIV [this is corrected in Cantwells 1999 article]. And scientists have a
hard time explaining how a black heterosexual epidemic centered in Africa
could have quickly transformed itself into a white homosexual epidemic in
Manhattan. (p.25)
Dr Cantwell does not mention, in these articles, several additional scientific and
historical facts and trends which might shed more light on the subject of
motivation for a genocidal use of the HIV virus as a biological weapon. These
include concern about Global Overpopulation (the population explosion)
blamed on Third World Overpopulation among First World scientists,
politicians and international health experts (including those advising the WHO
and the WHO itself), pre-existing white supremacist regimes, eugenic theories and
programs, drug promotion interests and the corporate promotion of needles and
condoms, as well as the financial interests of the insurance industry, mining
industry and chemical industry, the medical treatment industry and the
international aid industry. Specifically, it is difficult to ignore the fact that the
populations worst decimated by AIDS: homosexuals, intravenous drug-injecters
and blacks have been the targets of genocidal eugenic programs in the past, the
most notorious of which were the Nazi euthanasia programs.
A direct connection between these Nazi programs and the development of
Australia-based biowarfare and chemical warfare programs becomes more likely
with the recent revelations that many Nazi scientists were given asylum and
employment in Australia after the Second World War, given the prevailing
enthusiasm in medical and scientific academia for eugenics and so-called racial
hygeine during the years of an openly declared White Australia Policy. Nazi
administrators, scientists and senior military espionage officers were also
employed by the American military after the war, and were involved in the
development of the CIA and Cold War against communism, according to recent
exposes (Vankin and Whalen, 1997).
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The possibility that the importation of Nazi scientists adversely influenced the
development of science in Australia is ridiculed by Guy Nolch, in the September
1999 editorial of Australasian Science, in which he deplores the naming of several
Nazi scientists by the Melbourne Age newspaper:
Last month the public image of science was turned back more than 50
years when The Age reported that Australia had smuggled 127 former
German scientists into Australia soon after World War II. The rationale for
this was to bolster Australias fledgling scientific effort. Our allies also
wished to keep military knowledge out of Soviet hands.
The Age named 41 of the scientists who had been members of the Nazi
Party, and used this fact to stir up a frenzy. Whether they were ardent Nazis
or had joined the party under duress was unclear, and irrelevant as far as The
Age was concerned. These were war criminals!
What was not revealed by The Age or Australasian Science is what medical and
health science industries former Nazis and Nazi-sympathisers were employed in,
and in what government, academic and public service positions they were given
employment when they came to Australia. This is important knowledge for the
Australian people, and would help clarify the State and Commonwealth
Governments attitude to Nazi philosophy, which may well have been one of
sympathy (not forgetting that the Allies hero Winston Churchill was a prominent
eugenist and past vice-president of the British Eugenics Society). It may also help
Australians gain a more complete picture of Australian and Australia-based
biowarfare programs of the 20th century, and elucidate the history of eugenic
abuses in this country. It is clearly necessary to identify abuses of science in the
past to stop further use of scientific knowledge, including chemical,
anthropological and biological knowledge to create disease, famine and pestilence
in the future.
In the same edition of Australasian Science is an article on modern biowarfare
written by Jacinta Kerin of the Murdoch Institute in Melbourne. In the article, titled
Biological weapons from genetic research she writes:
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from the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC), Australias
main federal government medical research funding body. Others to receive such
funding include the Baker research institute (cardiovascular research) at the Alfred
Hospital and the Mental Health Research Institute in Parkville, Melbourne (which
is adjacent to and was closely associated with the Royal Melbourne Hospital and
the University of Melbourne).
All these institutes are involved in drug-oriented research and several are looking
for genetic causes of illness. All share a history deeply embedded in eugenics.
Among genetics researchers with a background in eugenics, the Mental Health
Research Institute is currently conducting a genetic study of schizophrenia,
funded by the NHMRC and Network for Brain Research into Mental DisordersGenetic Linkage Consortium. The Murdoch Institute has, according to their 1996
Annual Report, been engaged in studies seeking to find, of all things, genetic
markers for schizophrenia in Southern African Bantu-speaking families. It is
unclear as to what criteria were used to diagnose schizophrenia in Africans
whose language, beliefs, cultural norms and attitudes are predictably different from
the European psychiatrists who developed criteria for diagnosis of
schizophrenia. Eurocentric and Christian Church-based ideas of what constitutes
normal beliefs, attitudes and behaviour cannot reasonably be inflicted on
African, Asian, American or Australian people, who are of diverse racial, religious
and cultural backgrounds without serious human rights abuses occurring.
The Annual Report of the Murdoch Institute does not elaborate on these
schizophrenia studies, as it does about some of its more worthwhile projects, but
the section at the end of the 1996 Annual Report, titled List of Publications
mentions four schizophrenia studies, all involving the Scandinavian director of the
institute, and Professor of Medical Genetics at the University of Melbourne, Dr
Robert (Bob) Williamson. These include one paper titled No evidence for linkage
of chromosome 22 markers to schizophrenia in Southern African Bantu-speaking
families which was published in the American Journal of Medical Genetics and
three papers published in Psychiatric Genetics: Non-parametric analysis of
chromosome 6p24-22 marker data and schizophrenia in Southern African Bantu-
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production, but instead killed the mices T-cells. Stimulating antibody production
would be a most unusual objective for scientists seeking to stop the breeding of
mice unless they hoped to control their breeding by releasing killer-viruses into
the pest animal population. Given the past examples of myxomatosis introduced
into rabbits and cane-toads introduced into the Queensland cane-fields, the latter is
not impossible, by any means, however the most obvious application of the
scientific discovery by the CSIRO and ANU researchers is for the development of
more lethal biological warfare agents. Could this have been the initial intention?
Also, why was the work kept secret for over 2 years? Why was it publicised at the
particular time that it was? Given that the Defence Department were apparently
involved in the decision to go public, was the department also involved in the
research? Is the whole story being told? What other research of this nature is being
conducted in Australia? If they had nothing to hide, why were the researchers
involved being shielded from the media in a darkened room, with the centres
boss fielding questions from media around the world?
In August 1999, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research
Organization (CSIRO) published an article titled Will we ever beat AIDS in the
science organizations Helix magazine (the magazine of the CSIROs helix science
club). This article, the magazines cover story, claimed that:
An experimental vaccine for AIDS thats receiving international
attention has been made in Australia. Using a virus that infects chickens,
called fowl pox, CSIRO Animal Health researcher Dr David Boyle,
Australian National University researcher Dr Ian Ramshaw and Dr Stephen
Kent from the Macfarlane Burnet Centre for Medical Research have
constructed as kind of taxi that can carry part of the HIV virus into people
without causing infection. The taxi is made of the modified fowl pox virus.
Like all vaccinations, the experimental approach works on the fact that
the immune system, though rather slow to gear up on first meeting a germ,
has a lifelong memory and responds much faster a second time. If a person
can be given parts of the HIV virus without infection, theyll respond very
quickly to the real virus in the future and, with luck, eliminate it from their
bodies as soon as it arrives and before it has time to enter T lymphocytes.
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Simplified for young members of the CSIRO science club, this explanation of how
the experimental approach works does not stand up to close scientific scrutiny.
One might say that this experimental approach relies on such immunological
reactions to work. There is much danger, though, in injecting bits of the HIV virus
into humans using fowl pox virus as a taxi. New, lethal strains might be created.
Hybrid viruses producing the worst features of fowl pox combined with the worst
HIV features could result. This worst case scenario is not mentioned in the
CSIRO magazine report, nor is the possibility of accidentally introducing other
animal (in this case avian) viruses into the human population. Noting that Professor
John Mills, director of the Macfarlane Burnet Centre has recently advocated the
injection of live attenuated HIV as vaccines into nations with a high incidence of
AIDS (including southern Africa and Thailand, but excluding Australia, Europe
and his native USA), it is interesting that 18 months earlier the CSIRO regarded
such action as too dangerous. Roger Beckmanns article continues:
Unfortunately, HIV is a fast-changing virus and we need bits of it that
are constant to induce immunity. The best bits for doing this, and for
stimulating the body to fight it even when its in cells, are its internal
molecules. To give these to people would require giving the actual virus in
its entirety, and this even if we used a killed form of it is too dangerous.
So the researchers have constructed an HIV gene-containing fowl pox
virus to use in the vaccine instead. Onve in the body, the foreign proteins of
the fowl pox virus, which cannot cause disease in humans [has it been tested
for this?], alert the immune system. Then the systems cells also spot the
HIV genes inside the fowl pox and develop a memory for them. The person
is thereby immunised against HIV.
The last paragraph reveals the financial connection, and that trials on humans were
just about to begin:
Early results are promising, and small amounts of the experimental
vaccine have now been manufactured by the Australian National University
and the Australian company Virax. But before the vaccine can be put on the
market, it needs thorough testing to ensure that its safe. Medical centres in
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Biological warfare has been mentioned many times on television, on the radio and
in major newspapers over the past two years, especially at the time of the Gulf
War, when Saddam Husseins Government in Iraq was accused of having
biological weapons and/or the potential to develop them. Iraq was also accused of
having chemical weapons and claims were made, mainly by European and
American media sources, that Husseins military-controlled government had used
these weapons against racial minority groups (Kurdish people, specifically) in Iraq
in an act, or several acts, of genocide. If these accusations are true (and they appear
likely) Saddam Hussein and commanding officers in his army are guilty of a
heinous crime against humanity, and are guilty of both mass-murder and genocide,
since literal genocide involves mass-murder.
The biological and chemical weapons that Iraq was said to possess were described
by the Australian United Nations weapons inspector Richard Butler as weapons
of mass destruction, the development and use of which is prohibited, as they
should be, by International Law. It is the legal and ethical responsibility of the
United Nations to enforce these laws, as the organisation has the financial power,
political power and military power to do. Of course, it is the United Nations
organisation (UN) that made these laws in the first place, but not the first to
conceive the concept of Universal, and Global Laws. Universal Laws and Global
Laws are not the same thing, although colloquially the words Universal and Global
are often used interchangeably and this is the case in the naming of the (1948)
Universal Declaration of Human Rights. These laws refer to the human rights of
every human being in the Universe. There can be no exceptions if such a law is to
be just. It cannot be applied with double standards, favouring one individual or
regime over another. It is also not possible to ignore Universal Human Rights laws
infringements in some countries and punish others for less serious crimes by
attacking the nations with other weapons of mass destruction, and expect nobody
to notice inconsistency in the response.
The following radio reports were heard in Melbourne on 17.4.99, containing
carefully edited coverage of the American and British military strikes against
Baghdad:
American military voice:
their mission is to attack Iraqs nuclear, chemical and biological weapons
programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbours. Their purpose is to
protect the national interest of the United States and indeed the interests of people
throughout the Middle East and around the world.
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248
Chapter 17
249
250
first people who arrived here did so in the unimaginably distant past. These were
the people the White Nation that called itself Australia (Southern Land) now refers
to as Aborigines. This term is, of course, not a specific one. During the era of
colonization the dark-skinned natives of all the discovered continents were
called Aborigines. Roughly the same populations were also described, in
historical records and texts as natives, savages and blacks. Often these terms
were used interchangeably and had been since the earliest days of cargo slavery by
the architects of the Age of Discovery, as the Western history textbooks refer to
the period of history from 1490 to 1600, when the monarchies of Western Europe
discovered millions of people to enslave and exploit.
The Age of Imperialism
Imperialism, the building of empires, was a fundamental objective of the voyages
of discovery by Magellan, Bartholomew Dias, Vasco Da Gama, Columbus and the
other great navigators of the late 15th and early 16th Centuries. Their voyages
were financed by the wealthy, and rapidly expanding kingdoms of Portugal and
Spain directly. The monarchies of these nations directly financed the voyages,
and immediately claimed all discovered territories for themselves. The Catholic
Church sanctioned these possessions and immediately sent missionaries to convert
the natives. This was done at the same time that soldiers, armed with guns and
cannons established colonies at various strategic locations around the globe.
Each site was chosen with care. Strategic importance was paramount, in terms of
strategy in the war between the various colonising (European) nations, and the war
against the people resisting enslavement, for colonization always brought
enslavement.
The role of, initially, the Catholic Church, and later the Protestant Churches in
aiding, abetting and sanctioning the expansion of various European empires,
despite the fact that it was a vehicle for slavery and exploitation, must be
acknowledged if one is to understand the history of genocide in the modern world.
In 1494 Pope Alexander VI gave divine sanction for the division of all new lands
between the monarchies of Spain and Portugal. King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella
of Spain, who had financed Christopher Columbus were given the hemisphere
(half-globe) West of the Azores islands in the Atlantic Ocean (North, South and
Central America), and the King of Portugal, John II, was granted any discoveries
in the Eastern Hemisphere (Africa and Asia), since he had financed Bartholomew
Dias, who had first sailed around the southern tip of Africa, discovering a sea
route to the Indian Ocean and thus to the valuable spice islands the East Indies.
251
When the monarchies of Holland, England and France developed sufficient naval
power to challenge the Spanish and Portuguese fleets, they took little notice of the
papal decree of Alexander, and claimed the support of their rival Protestant
Churches in their rival territorial claims. Inevitably the desired divine sanction
was given without requiring demands or executions of the clergy, although under
Henry VIII, who arranged for the (his) British Parliament to appoint him head of
the English Church in 1534. Ironically, Thomas Cromwell, Henrys First Minister,
who had convinced Parliament of the merits of this dubious act, was one of
Henrys many friends, enemies and wives the despot had executed when their
utility was no longer evident to him. Another friend that Henry VIII had executed
was the writer and philosopher Thomas More, who had written the satirical classic
Utopia in 1516 and was regarded as one of Britains leading intellectuals. Thomas
More had spoken publicly against Henry being made head of the English Church,
resulting in his execution in 1535 after 15 months imprisonment in the Tower of
London. John Fisher, the bishop of Rochester was executed on Henrys orders, also
in 1535, for the same reason.
Henry VIII ascended the British throne at the age of 18 and ruled the British
Empire until his death in the year 1547 at the age of 56. During this time he
squandered much wealth in wars against his French and Spanish rivals. To
replendish the Royal coffers he seized, with the assistance of his First Minister,
Thomas Cromwell, the lands and property of the Catholic Church in Britain. This
occurred after his break with the papacy due to the refusal of the pontiff, Pope
Clement VII to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, the Spanish princess
he had married in 1508. Catherine, who was previously Henrys sister-in-law (she
was the widow of Henrys older brother Arthur), was the daughter of King
Ferdinand of Spain, who had been granted the Western Hemisphere with his wife
Queen Isabella by the Spanish-born Pope Alexanders papal decree of 1494.
Henry VIIIs main foe during the many years he waged war against the French was
King Francis, who died, aged 53, on the 31st of March in 1547, only two months
after Henry. Francis had waged war, for many years, against the Habsburg emperor
Charles V, for control of the European mainland and the newly discovered
territories in the Americas. Charles, the son of Philip the Fair and Joanna the
Mad, was the grandson of Ferdinand II of Aragon, the husband of Queen Isabella
of Castile. Ferdinand and Isabella had united their kingdoms in 1479, ten years
after their marriage, resulting in a shared empire centred in Spain. At the time, the
main threat to Spanish territorial ambitions came from the neighbouring monarchy
of Portugal, which, after a four-year war (1475-1479) was granted, by the Spanish
monarchy, a monopoly of trade and navigation along the entire West African coast.
252
253
At present the Queen of England, Elizabeth II, is the official monarch of Australia,
and thus the owner of Crown lands in Australia, according to the Australian
constitution. On 20th November 1926, the present Queens grandfather, George V,
declared that the British Empire would henceforth be known as the British
Commonwealth of Nations, of which Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South
Africa and Newfoundland should have equal status with Britain as members
(Burne, 1991, p.1088). King George assumed the title George V, by the Grace of
God, of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas, King,
Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India.
The faith that George and his armies defended (and attacked with) was the
Anglican religion, as defined and ordained by the Church of England (Anglican
Church). This religion had been founded by the notorious King Henry VIII, who
arranged for himself to be appoined head of the new English Church when broke
from the Catholic Church because the Roman Pope refused to annul his marriage
to Catherine of Aragon, so he could marry again. Henry VIII had been granted the
title Defender of the Faith by an earlier pope because of his military support
against the Vaticans enemies. The title Emperor of India shows clearly that
George V regarded himself as the owner of this ancient land, and of his various
dominions. It was thus not really a common-wealth it was a system of
Imperialism under a new name and a new organizational structure. The white
colonies and dominions (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa and
Newfoundland) could aspire to being equal members in the British
Commonwealth, but those in the colonies and protectorates mainly populated
by people of colour were to continue as inferior members.
During the Second World War (1939-1945) the political concept of a
Commonwealth was exploited to full effect by the British Imperial armed forces.
Commonwealth partners from around the British Empire were recruited to fight
for the kings forces and Allies, against the unholy alliance between the
Germans, Italians, Spanish and Japanese, as the American President Franklin D.
Roosevelt described the Axis alliance in his presidential address to the nation in
December, 1940. It was during this radio broadcast that Roosevelt urged
Americans that the United States of America must urgently become the great
arsenal of democracy:
As planes and ships and guns and shells are produced, your
Government, with its defense experts, can then determine how best to use
them to defend this hemisphere. The decision as to how much shall be sent
abroad and how much shall remain at home must be made on the basis of
our over-all military necessities.
254
255
256
the whole of Ceylon. They never developed cultural control, although for many
years they tried. This was done by setting up systems of government and education
along the lines of other colonies. Ceylon was then regarded as the pearl of the
Indian Ocean a rich, fertile island in the centre of the trade routes between
Europe, Africa and the far East. For many centuries the kings of Ceylon had
exported spices and precious stones to Arab and Chinese traders, and later with
Portuguese and Dutch ones. The Portuguese were the first to try and take control of
the island. This was in the 1600s, and the Portuguese, with their guns and cannons
were able to take control of the coastal kingdoms in the south of Ceylon. The
Portuguese, French and British had already established armed fortresses along the
coast of eastern and western coasts of India, during the 1600s and 1700s. The
Dutch, however, had control of the East Indies now called Indonesia, and then
also known as the Spice Islands or Moluccas. The Dutch took control of the
ancient cities of Java, creating a Dutch-speaking capital of the Dutch East Indies,
which they named Batavia (now Jakarta). The Spanish controlled most of the
South and Central American mainland, with the exception of Brazil, which was a
Portuguese colony. The Spanish also controlled, during the age of cargo slavery,
the south-east Pacific islands still called the Philippines. In 1898, the United
States of America took control of the Philippines, along with Cuba, Puerto Rico
and Guam in a treaty with the Spanish, which was signed in France (the Paris
Treaty of 10.12.1898).
When the British and Dutch developed their own navies, in the 1600s and 1700s,
they predictably challenged the Portuguese and Spanish claims. Pointing to the
considerable atrocities being committed by the Iberian soldiers, the Protestant
English and Dutch explained to the natives that they hoped to exploit, that the
Spanish and Portuguese were cruel Catholics who had misunderstood the true word
of God. This, claimed the Protestant missionaries from England and the
Nederlands, was to be found in the King James Version of the Bible which was
duly translated into hundreds of languages. The British and Dutch colonists did not
approach established civilizations with guns in the first instance; they used,
instead, flattery and bribery, and, failing that, threats. Although their ships were
armed with cannons and carried soldiers with guns and swords, the British and
Dutch governments and monarchies kept their hands clean by having the dirty
work of betrayal, bribery and slavery to be organized and implemented by trading
companies. The British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company,
two such companies that were given authority to kill, exploit and enslave in the
name of their respective monarchs, are of special relevance to events in Africa
during the Second World War that may point to the cause of the current epidemic
of AIDS in South Africa.
257
The League of Nations, the predecessor of the United Nations, was formed in
1919, at the conclusion of the First World War, with the stated aim of preventing
further wars between rival European states. This political organization between 27
nations including Britain and several of its dominions, France, and other victorious
European nations was instigated by the US President Woodrow Wilson, who had
presented his famous 14 point peace plan in 1914.
In 1919, President Wilsons plan was adapted by the Allies at the Versailles Peace
conference in Paris, at which the formal suurender of the Germans and the
formation of the League of Nations, was negotiated. According to the Versailles
Treaty, Germany was stripped of its colonial possessions, and much of its
territory, and was to pay 20 billion gold marks in reparations. Germany was to be
demilitarised and surrender territory lived in by 7 million people. The separate
states of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary were formed from the fragments of
the once huge Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg Empire, which had, in its heyday as the
Holy Roman Empire, controlled much of Europe and Iberia, and much of the
Americas. The Scandinavian states, Poland, Belgium, and France gained territory
from Germany in Europe in the Versailles Treaty, as did Romania, Italy, Greece
and the newly formed state of Yugoslavia.
The following year the allocation of Germanys colonies was decided by the
victorious Allies. This is where the real wealth of the German Empire lay.
According to the League of Nations mandate of 10 August 1920, the German
territories in East Africa (Tanganika and Uganda) was mandated to the British,
along with German South-West Africa mandated to the white-supremacist Union of
South Africa. These areas were known to be extremely rich in diamond deposits,
especially the coast of Namibia in South West Africa. They also contained rich
deposits of gold, uranium and other precious minerals. The mandate thus gave
British mining companies access to extraordinary mineral riches in Southern and
Eastern Africa. The 1920 League of Nations Mandate also added territory to
British and French possessions in West Africa. The small East African states of
Burundi and Rwanda, centres of the 1984 African AIDS epidemic were added, by
the League of Nations, to the Belgian possessions in central Africa. Since the
1890s, King Leopold II of Belgium had claimed all of the Congo as his personal
property, instituting a system of cruel tyranny and slavery by white Belgian
authorities over a black population divided between privileged Tutsis and
subjugated Hutus. The atrocities being committed by the Belgians in the Congo
were publicised by the British, in particular, in the early 1900s, resulting in the
Belgian government taking over administration of the territory from King Leopold,
258
in 1908.
The Congo, now the independent African nation of Zaire, is where the AIDS
epidemic in Africa is said to have begun, and was the worst hit of the African
countries in the 1980s. Zaire, like Southern Africa, is rich in minerals, and also
contains the last large remnants of the tropical rainforest that once covered so
much of Africa. It is also the last remaining home of our closest primate relatives,
chimpanzees, which are, like many rainforest animals, threatened with extinction at
the hands of mankind.
Other than Australia, the central focus of this book is on Africa, a continent I have
only visited on a single occasion, in 1990. At this time I briefly visited Zimbabwe,
Kenya and Tanzania. Knowing little about the history of Africa, I was amazed
when we visited the Great Zimbabwe Ruins that Cecil Rhodes refused to believe
could have been built by any people other than whites despite overwheming
evidence to the contrary. These are the remains of a Southern African civilization
dating back centuries before Bartholomew Diaz sailed around the Cape of Good
Hope, encouraging his sponsor, the king of Portugal to claim, for himself and his
family, the whole of Africa. The Spanish, however, disputed the Portuguese claim,
and the warring monarchs sought the decision of the religious leader of their
people and the remnants of the Roman Empire the Roman Pope, head of the
Catholic Church. The Pope decreed in the 1490s that the Portuguese King John II
could have the Eastern Hemisphere (east of the Azores Islands in the Atlantic
Ocean, and thus Africa and Asia) while Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand of
Spain could have the Western Hemisphere (the newly-discovered Americas, hence
the term New World various European history books).
The kingdom of Kongo (Congo) was approached by the Portuguese, in the 1500s,
as a possible ally against the Moslem Empire of the Ottoman Turks, against who
the Crusades had raged for many centuries. The Moslem Moors, allied with the
Ottomans, had ruled the southern Iberian peninsula (Spain and Portugal) until the
1300s, and the Catholic empires of Southern Europe were eager for revenge
against their traditional enemies the Moslems. The Congo kingdom, which was
ruled by the slave-trading and owning King, became the primary source of African
(negro) slaves for the Portuguese.
In Southern Africa, where the Germans fought against the British and Belgians for
control of the diamond-rich coast of South-West Africa, and where Galton made
his name, the AIDS epidemic is out of control. Over one thousand people in South
Africa alone are said to be infected with HIV every day. These are all predicted to
259
die within the next 15 years by Australias premier AIDS advisory and research
centre, the Macfarlane Burnet Centre in Melbourne.
Frank Macfarlane Burnet, after whom the Macfarlane Burnet Centre, Australias
premier virology institute is named, was a eugenist. In fact, he was still
promoting eugenics in the 1970s when it was not a popular subject for public
discussion. He admits this in his 1978 book Endurance of Life, when he also writes
about the eugenic value of selective infanticide. The Burnet Institute presently
claims, in its promotional literature, that Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet was very
concerned about overpopulation. They fail to mention that inherent in the muchvoiced fear of overpopulation has always been the ugly combination of racism
and xenophobia.
Closely related to the history of genocide is the dreadful use of chemical and
biological weapons and warfare. The deliberate creation of disease in targetted
populations has a long history, dating back to at least the Middle Ages, when
bodies of people who had died from the bubonic plague were thrown over the
walls of beseiged cities to infect the surrounding enemy (with the additional
objective of avoiding disease from the dead bodies).
The dispossession of indigenous people around the world was justified by
Europeans with imperialist designs in similar ways in the Americas, in Africa and
in Australia, and in all three alcohol was used as a means of attacking native
populations. Describing indigenous populations as uncivilised savages in need of
protection from morally and intellectually superior (white) masters was a widelyused justification for enslavement of these black, red and brown people it
was claimed as necessary for the development of backward races, or at least
better than their previous state of barbarity. Alongside this development and a
central means of its implementation was the stealing and brainwashing of children
in various Church-run educational institutions. It was seen as a divinelysanctioned obligation to save the souls of pagan or heathen races, by force if
necessary. This resulted in what has been subsequently defined by International
Law as cultural genocide.
This book has been more concerned with physical genocide than cultural genocide,
although the two are clearly related. Physical genocide results in cultural genocide
and destroying the culture of a targeted population results in the premature illness
and death of members of the culture concerned. Generally, and in the case of
Aboriginal people in Australia, physical genocide and cultural genocide have been
employed as parallel strategies.
260
In this book I have explored the possibility that an active eugenics conspiracy has
existed behind the scenes for at least the past 130 years, and that genocide has been
occurring in Australia and Africa, in particular, for over 200 years. I have
assembled some pieces of a complex puzzle, one often confused by euphemisms
and medical jargon, and there is much more work in this area to be done. Whether
or not AIDS is the result of a eugenics program, I have no doubt that disease
creation is a massive problem in the modern world and that medical graduates such
as myself have a responsibility to look critically at our own knowledge and
mistakes. I hope others will join me in the search for the true history of medical
science, so that we can use biological knowledge for health. For all people.
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