A GLIMPSE BEHIND THE MASKS OF DOW

1. A glimpse behind the masks of Dow

Dow’s ‘Human Element’ ad campaign uses stunning

photography and film to portray itself as a caring and
benevolent c o mpany, but behind the beautiful mask is a
world of horror, suffering and pain. This series of images
is my personal response to Dow’s campaign.
Dow made napalm for the Vietnam war. A US army
person said, ‘We sure are pleased with those backroom
boys at Dow. The original product wasn’t so hot - if the
gooks were quick they could scrape it off. So the boys
started adding polystyrene - now it sticks like shit to a
blanket. But if the gooks jumped under water it stopped
burning, so they started adding Willie Peter (white
p h o sphorus) so’s to make it burn better. And just one
drop is enough, it’ll keep on burning right down to the
bone so they die anyway from phosphorus poisoning.’
Clever, wicked, utterly inhuman, Dow.

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www.thetruthaboutdow.org
 A GLIMPSE BEHIND THE MASKS OF DOW

2. Kill for money, call it patriotism

Dow is a company whose history could be written in

blood. It has joined in many military adventures, from
the making of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima
and Nagasaki to supplying the US army in Vietnam with
napalm and Agent Orange. Dow claims it was its patriotic
duty to do these things, but the real motive was profit.
Take Agent Orange. A private Dow memo dated February
22, 1965 reveals that Dow knew full well that Agent
Orange was not just a herbicide, but contained deadly
dioxins that would kill people, including US troops who
were exposed to it. To use Agent Orange would be to wage
chemical warfare. Dow did not share its knowledge with
the US military lest the lucrative contract be cancelled.
US servicemen exposed to Agent Orange duly developed
cancers and other illnesses & half a million Vietnamese
children have been born with horrific deformities.

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www.thetruthaboutdow.org
 A GLIMPSE BEHIND THE MASKS OF DOW

3. An empty mask feels no remorse

Dow hired expensive film-makers and sent them to the

loveliest places on Earth to make beautiful images. It paid an
actor with a soothing voice to speak of nature, water
and life-giving oxygen. Dow talks of combining nature’s
elements to make marvellous products that benefit us
all. It wants you to believe it is a good company, doing its
best for humanity, but if you could look behind this mask
you would see mangled bodies of babies destroyed by the
lifeless chemicals Dow combined to make poisons like dioxin.
Dioxin has mingled with the DNA of 500,000 human
embryos in Vietnam, New Zealand and the USA to make
babies born with appalling injuries. Some are conjoined,
some have two heads, a child was born with two faces.
Dow does not speak of these things. Its beautiful mask
continues serene, because it sees nothing and feels nothing.
The eye holes are empty. There is no one behind the mask.

www.bhopal.net • www.bhopal.org
www.thetruthaboutdow.org
 A GLIMPSE BEHIND THE MASKS OF DOW

4. There are many ways to kill people

Vapourise them in a nuclear blast, burn their flesh off

with napalm, administer poisons like Nemagon and
Dursban to wreck their nervous systems and fill their
bodies with tumours, poison the breast milk of nursing
mothers with orga n o chlorines that can cause birth
defects, make hairsprays using a chemical propellant that
could give everyone who used it cancer. Dow has done all
of these things and more. But there is a subtler way to
kill people. Lie to them. Tell them you will never harm them,
that you will keep them and their families safe, that you
are working to assure their well being and improve their
lives. Hide the dangers of your thousand poisons, the fact
that your plants are so dangerous that they threaten
millions of lives and if something does go wrong you will
do everything to avoid responsibility, will not lift a finger
to help and will smile through your mask as they die.

www.bhopal.net • www.bhopal.org
www.thetruthaboutdow.org
 A GLIMPSE BEHIND THE MASKS OF DOW

5. Death among the almond blossoms

Almond trees were blossoming in the Kurdish town o f

Halabja when Saddam Hussein’s airforce bombed it with
nerve gases.It was March 1988. The gases were made
from imported pesticides, and they killed 5,000 people
by asphyxiation. In December 1988, mere months after
the massacre at Halabja, Dow Chemical sold $1.5 million
of pesticides to Iraq. Dow was not put off by the US
government’s c o n c e rn that the pesticides could be used as
chemical warfare agents. An Export-Import Bank official
reported in a memorandum that the pesticides were
“highly toxic” to humans and could cause death “by
asphyxiation”. When you see the tender images in Dow’s
‘Human Element’ advertisements, ask yourself what
sort of human beings would look at pictures of Halabja’s
dead women and children and then in cold blood sell
more chemical weapons to their murderers.

www.bhopal.net • www.bhopal.org
www.thetruthaboutdow.org
 A GLIMPSE BEHIND THE MASKS OF DOW

6. Dow and ‘the Devil’s Chemist’

Otto Ambros was in charge of Nazi production of Zyklon-

B gas which at Auschwitz turned mass murder into an
industrial process. He set up a factory near the concentration
camp to benefit from free slave labour and once ordered
that slaves should not be flogged – in front of outsiders.
At Nuremberg ‘the Devil’s Chemist’, as Ambros was
known, was found guilty of crimes against humanity,
including slavery and murder. He was released after just
eight years and was immediately hired by Dow Chemical,
which had its own use for his u n i que experience. Like
testing poisons on humans. In 1965 Dow gave dioxin to
prisoners in a Philadelphia jail without their knowledge
and waited to see if they got cancer. In 1998 Dow paid
students to eat chlorpyrifos, a pesticide now banned in
the US. (In case you’re wondering, the green leaf comes
from a Dow webpage about social responsibility.)

www.bhopal.net • www.bhopal.org
www.thetruthaboutdow.org
 A GLIMPSE BEHIND THE MASKS OF DOW

7. Noble words, rotten deeds

On July 26, 2006, Dow CEO Andrew Liveris made a

speech at the United Nations. He said, ‘Water is the single
most important chemical compound for the preservation
and flourishing of human life. More than a billion people
are in peril every day because they do not have enough
water or the water they have is unhealthy. Lack of clean
water is the single largest cause of disease in the world
and more than 4,500 children die each day because of it
. . . We are determined to win a victory over the problem
of access to clean water for every person on Earth – we
need to bring to the fight the kind of things companies
like Dow do best.’ Stirring words. But when we asked if
Dow would provide clean water to 30,000 people in
Bhopal who are poisoned by chemicals leaking from the
abandoned fa c t o ry of Dow’s subsidiary Union Carbide,
Liveris said, ‘We don’t feel this is our responsibility.’

www.bhopal.net • www.bhopal.org
www.thetruthaboutdow.org
 A GLIMPSE BEHIND THE MASKS OF DOW

8. Dow and ‘Death’s Dew’

Nemagon is a pesticide made by Dow for use in banana

plantations. Banana workers call it ‘Death’s Dew’. ‘It is
very potent,’ Alberto Corillo recalls. ‘You’d inject it and
all the little animals, the crickets, frogs, lizards and all
the insects, would die immediately.’ But Nemagon killed
humans too. It causes – well, what doesn’t it cause? –
severe pain, rashes, blisters, skin disease, sterility, mis-
carriages, birt h - d e fects, contorted limbs and joints,
headaches, fatigue, anxiety, insomnia, ruined eyesight,
digestive problems, kidney failure, tumours, cancer of
the uterus, skin and breasts and – for its grand finale –
death. In 1979 Nemagon was banned in the US. Despite
this ban and having known since the ’50s of the harm
this chemical could do, Dow continued shipping it to
Africa, Central and South America, and the Philippines,
where it duly caused havoc. Which pest needs eradicating?

www.bhopal.net • www.bhopal.org
www.thetruthaboutdow.org
 A GLIMPSE BEHIND THE MASKS OF DOW

9. Growing vaccines, glowing cancers

Lasers, fluorescent dyes, futuristic gene-sequencers are

all part of the science practised by Dow, which boasts of
being the first company to register a vaccine grown inside
a plant. It was, said, Jerome Peribere, Dow AgroSciences
CEO, ‘another example of Dow’s cutting edge approach to
bringing highly novel and differentiated solutions to the
market.’ Other examples include running advertising
claiming that its pesticide Dursban, which can brain-
damage children, was safe. For this Dow was fined $2
mill i o n in the US, where Dursban is now banned. ‘Dow’s
ads may have endangered human health,’ said New York’s
Attorney General. In India, wickedly, Dow still promotes Dursban
as safe. Dow’s ‘Human Element’ ads project a glowing
image of its contributions to humanity, but the tissue
samples of its victims around the world tell a different
s t o ry– it’s cancer cells that glow behind the mask of science.

www.bhopal.net • www.bhopal.org
www.thetruthaboutdow.org
 A GLIMPSE BEHIND THE MASKS OF DOW

10. Dow, the friendly neighbour from hell

‘We are a company of friends and neighbours,’ says Dow

CEO Liveris. I cannot read things like this without thinking
of my friend Sunil. His family were neighbours in Bhopal
of Dow’s subsidiary Union Carbide. In 1984, Sunil was
orphaned by Carbide’s gases, losing six of his family of
eight. He grew up to be a leader of the Bhopal survivors,
who’ve been asking Dow to clean up Carbide’s abandoned
fa c t o ry which is leaking cancer-causing and foetus-
deforming chemicals into their drinking water. Despite
widespread illness and premature deaths, Dow refuses
to help. Sunil despaired of ever getting justice. On July
26, the same day Dow was boasting at the UN that it
would clean the world’s drinking water, he put on a tee-
shirt that said NO MORE BHOPALS and hanged himself.
To express the horror behind Dow’s mask of friendship,
I’ve chosen LA artist X-8’s painting, ‘Suicide Siva’.

www.bhopal.net • www.bhopal.org
www.thetruthaboutdow.org
 A GLIMPSE BEHIND THE MASKS OF DOW

11. Dow and the PR of climate change

‘We believe,’ says Dow, ‘that climate change is one of the

most serious issues our society faces. We will take
aggressive action to mitigate it.’ Fine words, but until not
so long ago, Dow belonged to the Global Climate Coalition,
an industry front group which did its utmost to rubbish
scientific evidence of climate change. When it couldn’t
attack the science, it attacked the scientists. Dow and
other companies jumped ship when continued member-
ship of the GCC became too much of an embarrassment.
After Hurricane Katrina was blamed on climate change,
every corporation suddenly wanted to show how green it
was. Hence Dow’s new sentiments.
When you next see Dow’s exquisitely filmed ‘Human
Element’ commercials please remember that this company
is one of the worst air polluters in the US and that telling
a lie beautifully does not make it true.

www.bhopal.net • www.bhopal.org
www.thetruthaboutdow.org
 A GLIMPSE BEHIND THE MASKS OF DOW

12. Dow wins award for causing cancer

Back in 2002 the Louisiana chapter of The Nature

Conservancy (a charity dominated by America’s worst
polluters) gave Dow an environmental award for expand-
ing green belt wetlands around its plant at Plaquemine.
Dow in Plaquemine happens to be America’s 9th largest
source of dioxins and at the time the award was made,
the same plant was under investigation by a grand jury
for polluting Plaquemine’s drinking water with cancer-
causing vinyl chloride. Dow was later fined $2.4 million.
Vinyl chloride is a huge but little-known scandal. S i n c e
the 1950s Dow and other chemical companies conspired
to hide the truth about it. Read the story in the companies’
own documents at: www.chemicalindustryarchives/dirty
secrets/vinylchloride. As for The Nature Conservancy,
for $25,000 anyone can buy a seat on its International
Leadership Council. Dow is a member. Naturally.

www.bhopal.net • www.bhopal.org
www.thetruthaboutdow.org
 A GLIMPSE BEHIND THE MASKS OF DOW

13. A cynical contempt for the law

‘Our success depends entirely on maintaining the highest

ethical and moral standards around the world. As a vital
measure of integrity, we will ensure the health and safety
of our communities, and protect the environment in all
we do.’ So says Dow. The truth is otherwise. When people
from Bhopal took samples of soil and water poisoned by
Dow’s subsidiary Union Carbide to the company’s Indian
HQ in Mumbai, they were promised by the Finance
Director ‘that action should be taken to alleviate the
plight of ga s - a ffected people in Bhopal.’ Instead, Dow filed
a lawsuit against the survivors’ leaders in the Mumbai
High Court and demanded $10,000 damages – ten years
income – from each one. Meanwhile Dow subsidiary Union
Carbide continues to ignore the summons of the Indian
court where it is charged with the culpable homicide of
20,000 people.

www.bhopal.net • www.bhopal.org
www.thetruthaboutdow.org
 A GLIMPSE BEHIND THE MASKS OF DOW

14. Dow’s vision of zero, mine of ghosts

‘Our Vision of Zero’, says Dow, ‘translates to zero incidents,

injuries, accidents & zero environmental h a rm.’ This is
Dowspeak. The Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, derelict
and contaminated, still looms over the neighbourhoods
where 25 years ago it killed thousands in a night. I cannot
look at its decaying structures without seeing in my
mind the faces of those who died. Winds bang in falling
down towers and sing in rusting pipes. People say the
place is full of ghosts who cry for justice. The factory was
never cleaned and leaks poisons, spreading illness, birth
defects and death. To the dead and to all who are ill
today, I dedicate these artworks. I can never forg i ve the
wicked people who prolong the suffering by refusing even
now to clean up their poisons. In any human tongue, Dow’s
Vision of Zero translates to zero truth, zero conscience,
zero responsibility, zero action and zero humanity.

www.bhopal.net • www.bhopal.org
www.thetruthaboutdow.org
 A GLIMPSE BEHIND THE MASKS OF DOW

15. To those who sold their humanity to Dow

Dow’s executives concluded that the greatest threat to

their business came from the corporation’s perceived
lack of humanity. So Dow resolved to acquire some
humanity. It went out and bought a couple of hundred
million’s worth of the stuff. To those who allowed their
faces to be used in Dow’s ‘Human Element’ campaign we
ask – did you already know about Dow’s Nazi connections,
napalm, Agent Orange, nemagon, vinyl chloride, dursban,
Bhopal and selling chemicals to Saddam? If not, please
publicly dissociate yourself from Dow. To those who made
Dow’s images and wrote its words: there is no honour,
truth or power in your work. To get it seen took millions
of dollars. Our images will circulate the globe without
costing a cent. They’ll pass from friend to friend until
everyone knows the truth about Dow – and Dow will
learn that humanity is not a thing that can be bought.

www.bhopal.net • www.bhopal.org
www.thetruthaboutdow.org
 A GLIMPSE BEHIND THE MASKS OF DOW

16. Why Dow’s ‘Human Element’ campaign will fail

No matter how many hundred million Dow spends on

the beautiful masks of the ‘Human Element’, it will never
be able to buy the humanity it so spectacularly lacks.
However glossy its lies, people will see straight through
them to the reality behind, which is poison and death. I
have made this series of images to help that reality break
through. You can help by distributing the images and
text as widely as possible. Please post them on websites
around the world and share the links with friends. Use
them as e-cards to email to friends. You can do this from
www.bhopal.net/cards. Print them out for schools, colleges
and offices. Send them to magazines and newspapers.
Send them to Dow. Dow is powerful, but we, the people of
the world, are far stronger. We can be voices, not victims.
We can choose the world we want to live in, and if most of
us have our way it will be a world without Dow.

www.bhopal.net • www.bhopal.org
www.thetruthaboutdow.org