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By Dr. Alan Cantwell
Immediately after the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma
City in 1995 there was a media blitz blaming paranoid people and
anti-government militia groups for the violent deaths. Now with
the 9/11 bombings the media reports a “conspiracy lobby” whose
basic premise is that President Bush/the CIA/Big Oil either
planned the attacks or let them happen to secure the US oil
pipeline/ take over the Middle East/ launch a one-world
government.
In a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece (24 March, 2002), Gale
Holland claims the so-called conspiracy lobby is a tiny but
persistent subgroup spawned by the John F. Kennedy assassination
and nurtured through the CIA/assassination-plot scandals of the
following decades. To emphasise the silliness of conspiracy theory
a large photo of Bin Laden is placed next to Elvis Presley, and
captioned “Like Elvis Presley, Osama Bin Laden keeps popping up
all over, especially in Utah, where he is often seen devouring a
Big Mac.”
Predictably, Holland uses the paranoia buzzword in his final
paragraph: “Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction, but
sometimes fiction is just fiction. Getting at the truth is tough,
accepting it can be harder still. Paranoia is a lot easier. Sept.
11 may have robbed us of our sense of normalcy, but we can’t let
it upset out reason.”
What is obvious is that the major media quickly accept the
politically-correct version of an “official story” of an event, as
provided by official government sources, and dump all
politically-incorrect versions of the story into the conspiracy
theory trash bin. Waging war on “evil-doers” everywhere is
accepted; believing in conspiracy theories is unpatriotic and
borders on treason. We demand documentation as proof of
conspiracies, while incriminating documents are shredded by a team
of well-paid lawyers, accountants, and executives, as in the case
of the Enron and Arthur Andersen scandals.
Any researcher who has dug hard to find “the truth” knows that it
is rarely found in the media. After all, the speciality of the
major media is to provide new stories, not to solve the ills of
society, nor to bore people with “old news.” Reporters pride
themselves in unbiased reporting, by not taking sides or injecting
personal opinion in their stories. Few news writers have the
courage or ability tend to investigate potentially-explosive
conspiracy theories that might embarrass the government, or their
advertisers or editors – or even their readers.
Despite these shortcomings, the media seem to take pride in
dismissing people as “paranoid” who believe in conspiracy theories
of any kind.
According to Webster’s Dictionary, paranoia is a serious
psychiatric diagnosis: a psychosis characterised by systematised
delusions or persecution or grandeur usually without
hallucinations. Paranoia can also be defined as a tendency on the
part of an individual or group toward excessive and irrational
suspiciousness and distrustfulness of others. People who exhibit
such psychiatric traits are paranoid.
A definite diagnosis of paranoia requires the expertise of a
psychiatric health professional. A diagnosis is made after a
careful history and physical examination of the patient, and must
include a detailed drug history and psychiatric observation.
All this is ignored by journalists who indiscriminately label
people as paranoid. Their purpose is to discredit a person’s mind
and reasoning ability. Unfairly labelling people as paranoid is
malicious and evil; and the word can be as hateful as words like
nigger, kike, and faggot. When terms like paranoia and paranoid
are tossed around in the media, rational communication is no
longer possible.
A paranoid person is not normal because paranoia indicates a
diseased mind.
In their quest for power, politicians often portray their
perceived enemies as diseased. Hitler was a master of this. After
securing the cooperation of the German physicians, he rid the
Third Reich of thousands of mental and physical defectives by
murdering them. When this was accomplished, he turned on the Jews.
He labelled the Jews as a cancer that needed to be cut out of a
diseased Germany. Thus, the roots of the Holocaust were planted.
Labelling people as diseased is an effective way of discrediting
and silencing them.
The media overkill of paranoia is evident in Michael Kelly’s “The
Road to Paranoia,” a 13-page essay which appeared in The New
Yorker, 19 June, 1995, shortly after the Oklahoma City
bombing. According to Kelly, “There have always been radical
fringes on both the left and the right which believe that the
government conspires against the people. But lately, the two have
formed a strange alliance – fusion paranoia – that is reaching
millions of disaffected Americans.” He reviews the major
conspiracy theories, and interviews conspiracist Bob Fletcher, a
member of a political organisation called the Militia of Montana.
Not surprisingly, Kelly makes Fletcher look like a friendly
loony-bird.
As I read “The Road to Paranoia” I suddenly realised I was part of
Kelly’s story. For almost a decade I had been promoting the idea
that AIDS had originated as a genetically-engineered virus that
was deliberately seeded into the Black African population and into
the American gay male community via government-sponsored vaccine
programs and experiments conducted in the late 1970s. (For a
wealth of information on the man-made origin of AIDS, go to
www.google.com and type in
“AIDS biological warfare”. Also see,
http://aidsbiowar.com.)
My publishing house, Aries Rising Press, had published two books
on the subject of AIDS as a man-made epidemic, which were
well-received and reviewed in the alternative press and totally
ignored in the mainstream media. In 1989 my book, AIDS & The
Doctors of Death, was offered for sale by an independent
bookseller at the International AIDS Conference in Montreal. The
presence of the book so infuriated officials of the World Health
Organisation that they demanded the book be removed from the
shelves and banned from the conference.
Despite all this I had not expected to find Aries Rising Press
included in Kelly’s list of several dozen “rapidly growing
alternative media that traffic in conspiracism.” Even the word
“traffic” suggested that my Press was somehow involved in illegal
activity, rather that bona-fide and well-documented research on
the origin of HIV.
Kelly did mention the conspiratorial belief that “AIDS is a
government plot to kill off blacks and homosexuals,” but no
further details were provided. Also mentioned was a 1990 poll of
African-Americans concluding that “a third believe that HIV was
produced by scientists and disseminated through black
neighbourhoods for the purpose of genocide.”
During the past two decades of media reports on the various
theories of AIDS origin, the theory that the disease might be
man-made is occasionally mentioned. However, the scientific
evidence supporting this theory is never mentioned, and the idea
is usually dismissed as misguided and paranoid.
Initially, the media heralded the green monkey theory of AIDS,
first proposed by Robert Gallo, the so-called discoverer of the
AIDS virus. In a just-published book entitled Science Fictions:
A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-up, and the Dark Legacy of
Robert Gallo, Chicago Tribune reporter John Crewdson
totally discredits Gallo’s discovery of HIV and claims the
scientist actually pilfered the virus from French scientists at
the Pasteur Institute. Crewdson, who first exposed the scientific
irregularities of Gallo’s AIDS research in 1989, claims the
resulting lawsuits were finally settled in 1993 and only through
the intervention of high-ranking French and US government
officials.
In addition, Gallo’s monkey theory has been replaced by the
chimpanzee theory. Currently, the new government-approved
“official story” of the origin of AIDS is that HIV began in the
African rainforest when a chimp virus “jumped species”, most
probably when a hunter cut his finger while butchering a chimp.
How a Black heterosexual epidemic in Africa could have transformed
itself into a disease exclusively found in white homosexual men in
New York City in the late 1970s has never been convincingly
explained.
Ex-New York City Health Commissioner Stephen Joseph, in his AIDS
book, Dragon Within the Gates, also dismisses without
explanation “the paranoid theories about AIDS being a deliberate
invention of biological warfare.” However, he does note “the scars
left by the Tuskegee experiment” in the Black community.
In this notorious government-sponsored syphilis experiment, public
health doctors deliberately lied to black sharecroppers in Alabama
for over 40 years. The men were never told they were infected with
syphilis, and when a penicillin cure became available in the 1940s
the doctors withheld treatment so that they could study the
devastating effect of untreated syphilis. When the men died, the
doctors rushed to get an autopsy, coaxing the family into giving
permission by having the government pick up the tab for the
funeral expenses. Under pressure from civil rights activists, this
racist experiment was finally terminated in 1972.
Joseph writes that the memory of Tuskegee “fueled a conspiratorial
theory that AIDS resulted from a biological experiment, gone awry,
performed on Africans by the United States government.”
But conspiracy theorists know that government doctors and
scientists, and the military, have conducted covert experiments on
unsuspecting civilians for decades. Recently the nation was
shocked to learn that physicians had performed dangerous radiation
experiments on unsuspecting hospitalised patients from the 1940s
up until the 1980s. After a half century of government cover-up,
the proof was finally revealed when previously classified
government documents were released by the Department of Energy.
(For details, type in “Human Radiation Experiments” at
google.com. Also see
Pulitzer Prize-winning Eileen Welsome’s The Plutonium Files;
America’s Secret Experiments in the Cold War.)
Only a fool would believe that government-sponsored conspiracies
do not exist. History has proven that the media cannot protect us
or inform us of vast government programs that hurt innocent
people.
Charges of secret and unethical experiments against helpless
citizens are not the ravings of paranoid people. On the contrary,
they are serious accusations of an informed and enlightened
citizenry.
It is time to speak out against falsely labelling people as
paranoid.
Paranoid and paranoia are acceptable terms when used in a medical
setting. But they have no place in slandering and denigrating
people who express alternative views in a democratic society.
______________________________________________________________________________
Dr. Cantwell is the author of Queer Blood, and AIDS and
the Doctors of Death, two books on the man-made origin of
AIDS. Further information can be obtained from Aries Rising Press,
PO Box 29532, Los Angeles, CA 90029 USA. Email:
alanrcan@aol.com.
Further information can be obtained by visiting
http://aidsbiowar.com.
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