Culture of Death Watch

The Emperor’s New Juju: African AIDS and Social Engineering

by E. Michael Jones, Ph.D.

“And another thing. I have been reading in my papers about something very modern called birth control. What is it?”

Basil explained.

“I must have a lot of that. You will see to it. Perhaps it is not a matter for an ordnance, what do you think? We must popularise it by propaganda—educate the people in sterility. We might have a little pageant in its honour. . .”

Evelyn Waugh

Black Mischief

Njeri thinks African Americans are a wildly comical group. First of all, they’re all fat, and, secondly, they all have funny names like “Tameka”—she exaggerates the last two syllables and rolls her eyes so that her companion Elizabeth laughs—and “Tyqueeeeeesha,” which, she says, “doesn’t mean anything.” Njeri is a Kikuyu, which is to say, a member of Kenya’s largest ethnic group, and she attends Strathmore University in Nairobi, Njeri, however, runs into American blacks most often when she travels to see her friends in Mombassa on the coast, where her Kikuyu buddies dress up as Masai warriors. The Masai are another ethnic group in Kenya, but unlike the Kikuyu they have clung to their tradtional nomadic culture. They can still be seen tending their flocks by the roadside, wearing their traditional red and blue plaid blankets. Having Kikuyu dress up like Masai for the tourists in Mombassa would be the African equivalent of the Irish getting dressed up in Lederhosen and Dirndlkleider, but, in this instance, she says referring to the African-American tourists, “Nobody can tell the difference anyway.”

Njeri and Elizabeth then discuss the fact that various syllables in typically Kenyan names are connected with various tribes—the Luo, the Kikuyu, the Kamba, the Kalenjin—but all of the words have meaning. Njeri is named after her grandmother, who, in turn, is named after one of the nine daughters of Mongo, the Kikuyu god. Njeri is, however, a Catholic, and she attends daily mass at the university chapel, as does Elizabeth, who then talks about the way the different ethnic groups have differing appearances. The most striking from the Kikuyu point of view seems to be the people from the Sudan, whose faces are scarred for cosmetic purposes and whose skin is strikingly dark. “I mean, like, navy blue,” Elizabeth adds.

If you’re ever in Kenya and there is an uncomfortable lull in the conversation, I suggest that you bring up the topic of ethnicity. I got the ball rolling in this instance by asking Njeri what ethnic group she belonged to. What followed was a torrent of fond memories all associated with going home at Christmas when the men of Njeri’s family would gather under the appreciative eyes of her female relatives to slaughter and dismember a goat for the holiday meal.

“It’s a male bonding thing,” she said.

Njeri then conjured up images of the bleating terrified goat having its throat slashed by her father, uncles and male siblings, and the women cheering them on. After the goat gets butchered, Njeri’s family then prepares the goat for the Christmas meal. Her features soften for a moment as if savoring the memories, whether culinary or familial. “Everything gets eaten,” she says. “Nothing goes to waste not even the eyes or the brains.” Then as if savoring another memory, she adds, “It’s wonderful.” I ask Njeri whether the animal rights groups object to her family’s Christmas meal, and she says they don’t, because they don’t exist in Kenya. “We Africans,” she continues, “know what to do with animals.”

I am at Strathmore University in Nairobi to talk about social engineering, specifically about how the current campaign against African AIDS is simply a continuation of Kenya’s failed population control campaign of the ‘70s. As the idea of social engineering crosses my mind, I can’t help but make invidious comparisons between Catholic university students in the United States and Kenya. My last significant contact with young ladies attending a Catholic college in the United States dates back to the performance of The Vagina Monologues at St. Mary’s College. There, led by a Holy Cross nun, they were all chanting the word “c**t” over and over again like the croaking chorus from The Frogs of Aristophanes. In Kenya the young Catholic ladies are soft-spoken to the point of being inaudible. During the question period following my lecture, I oftentimes had to walk the length of the hall and bend over till my ear was almost in their faces before I could hear them.

The Kenyans are not as loud and flamboyant as the Nigerians. They dress more like Englishmen, even though both countries were equally British colonies. When Hollywood did a movie about the Mau-Mau uprising, they portrayed them as bare-chested and wearing grass skirts. To be historically accurate they should have portrayed them as wearing Harris Tweed sport coats. Whenever you see an African bundled up in a bulky sweater or a tweed jacket, chances are it’s going to be a Kenyan, because much of Kenya, even though it lies astride the Equator, is a mile or more above sea level. The Kalenjin of Kenya now produce the world’s best long distance runners because their children all run to school and their schools are 3000 meters about sea level.

If the authorities at Strathmore University had allowed their Catholic students to put on a performance of The Vagina Monologues, they would have probably ended up like Njeri’s goat. Aside from the Internet, there is virtually no pornography in Kenya. The form of social engineering which the masters of the universe favor there is the condom. Kenya, like most of sub-Saharan Africa, is awash in condoms to prevent the spread of what the people there call HIV/AIDS. Trust is the brand name of the condom. You see their ads in places where grinding poverty seems like an overly optimistic statement of the peoples’ financial situation. Given the poverty one sees in Kenya, it seems difficult to imagine anyone buying condoms. As a result, virtually all of the international development agencies from USAID to UNAIDS hand them out for nothing. African AIDS may or may not be a specific disease, but thanks to massive social engineering, it has become associated with one thing in the minds of Africans, and that is the condom.

THE EMPEROR’S JUJU

As anyone who has read Evelyn Waugh’s description of the Emperor Seth’s pageant of birth control in Waugh’s 1931 novel Black Mischief could testify, condom campaigns are nothing new in Africa, nor is the African subversion of them, whether by incomprehension or conscious resistance anything new either. After renaming the site of the Anglican Cathedral in Debra-Dowa, Place Marie Stopes, Emperor Seth then launched a propaganda campaign based on a poster with two pictures side by side and “the Emperor’s juju,” otherwise known as the condom, in between. The poster, Waugh writes,

portrayed two contrasted scenes. On one side a native hut of hideous squalor, overrun with children of every age, suffering from every physical incapacity—crippled, deformed, blind spotted and insane; the father prematurely aged with paternity squatted by an empty cook-pot; through the door could be seen his wife, withered and bowed with child bearing, desperately hoeing a their inadequate crop. On the other side, a bright parlour furnished with chairs and table; the mother, young and beautiful, sat at her ease eating a huge slice of raw meat; her husband smoked a long Arab hubble-bubble (still a caste mark of leisure throughout the land), while a single, healthy child sat between them reading a newspaper. Inset between the two pictures was a detailed drawing of some up-to-date contraceptive apparatus and the words in Sakuyu: WHICH HOME DO YOU CHOOSE?

After some discussion the Azanian natives concluded 1) that the poorer wife was the ideal which they should follow because she produced so many offspring with hardly any food and 2) that “the Emperor’s juju” would “make you like that good man with eleven children.” As a result, “the peasantry began pouring into town” to attend Emperor Seth’s Pageant of Birth Control, “eagerly awaiting initiation to the fine new magic of virility and fecundity.” “So brisk,” Waugh continued, “was the demand for the Emperor’s juju that some time before the day of the carnival Mr. Youkoumian,” the Armenian merchant who ran the Azanian government, “was frantically cabling to Cairo for fresh supplies.”

The Pageant of Birth Control arrived in Nairobi 70 years after it arrived in Azania. On October 9, 2002, Kenyan Public Health Minister Sam Ongeri appeared on-stage at a large outdoor concert at Uhuru Park with Kool and the Gang, an American band, and a local artist by the name of Paul Imbaya, “popularly known as ‘Mighty King Kong,’” to urge the locals to make copious use of the Emperor’s juju. The African AIDS condom campaign of the ‘90s was not based on “control” as the failed population control campaign of the ‘70s was. The new campaign was based on “health.” The new campaign was based on what Wilhelm Reich would call “a mass phenomenon” of the sort that he noticed broke down sexual inhibitions in Austrian women in the 1930s. It was also based on the newly evolved psychological warfare concept of “enter -educate” which had already been tried out with some success in western Africa. According to this idea, USAID would pay West African rock bands to write songs praising the use of the Emperor’s juju and other sterility producing devices. The point of the concert in Uhuru Park—at least according to the official explanation— was to denounce “the social stigma associated with HIV/AIDS that has hampered prevention efforts.” Lest that sound too vague to the average concert goer, he was informed that all he had to do to gain entrance to the concert, “which will be practically free” is “show an unused condom.”

As anyone who has read Black Mischief knows, Emperor Seth’s pageant of birth control culminates in a coup which eventually overthrows his government and leads to his death. The Oxford-educated emperor who decided to bring birth control and everything else modern to his country was in the end undone by his efforts. The same sort of thing can be seen in Kenya, if one has the eyes to see, not so much in chronic revolution, which is the fate of most of sub-Saharan Africa, but in the preliminary step to revolution, namely, pandemic crime. Kenyans live in what the people in Texas would call “gated communities,” which is to say that their houses are walled off from Nairobi at large and accessible only through heavily guarded gates. Their houses themselves are walled off from other houses in those communities as well, by seven foot high walls crowned with either razor wire or shards of broken glass embedded in cement.

Even with all these precautions, people still get robbed and killed on regular basis. Nairobi, in this regard, is like the South Side of Chicago on steroids. After Mass on Sunday, one of the parishioners at the Consolata parish in Nairobi talks about being robbed within his walled compound. The man who robbed him was in his thirties and extremely nervous, barely able to keep the gun he had trained on his victim steady by holding it with both hands. The man in question had to hand over his wallet and around 6000 Kenyan shillings ($75) while the robber’s companions robbed a woman from the same compound. The woman unfortunately lacked the man’s knowledge of how to deal with Kenyan robbers. She started screaming, which prompted the man to go over to her and shoot her three times. The woman died on the way to the hospital.

Arouse passions in a country where ethnic traditional culture has already been fatally weakened by colonialism and the arrival of totally alien and incomprehensible forms of organization and you are going to get crime. When crime gets bad enough, you are going to get a revolution, when revolution becomes common enough, you are going to have a world of perpetual violence, instability and anarchy. Since American foreign policy in Africa is based on population control, which is to say, the condom, American foreign policy is doing nothing but creating the very instability it fears. The condom campaign is doing nothing but pouring gasoline on the fire. The net result of paleo-Anglo colonization and neo-American colonization is a sub-Saharan African culture which is essentially Orwellian in its orientation. As in the west, freedom, as in sexual freedom, invariably means bondage. Health means birth control, and development means creating dependency.

Let’s begin with overpopulation, since no one talks about that anymore. The best way to understand overpopulation in Kenya is to drive out of Nairobi to the Rift Valley, a geological fault that extends from the Red Sea to Malawi. Louis Leakey, a notorious Kenyan con man, made the Rift Valley famous by finding lots of bone fragments there and claiming that they were the missing link or links. Traveling to the Rift Valley means heading northwest. It means going higher too. Nairobi is a mile high. By the time you get to the Rift Valley, the elevation is about 2000 meters, and then dramatically everything falls away and reveals a large valley which is virtually uninhabited savanna, dotted by Acacia trees. After descending into the Rift Valley we drove for roughly an hour through equally uninhabited stretches of arid grass land. The only people we saw were occasional Masai herdsmen, and at one crossroads, a collection of shacks where truck drivers stopped on the way to Kampala just long enough, according to local legend, to contract AIDS.

Kenya is a combination of overpopulated slums and underpopulated countryside. The people leave the countryside because the lack of population makes commerce of any kind impossible. They then come to the slums in the hope of getting a job in the city, and more often than not start a business in the slums selling junk after being unable to find a job.

Since the drive to the Crescent Island game preserve is a journey to the interior of Kenya, we could compare it with Conrad’s novella, The Heart of Darkness, in which Marlowe travels upstream on the Congo to find the legendary Kurtz, the white man who has gone native. Like Marlowe, I made my own journey into the wild interior, which in this instance was grassland, not jungle, full of grazing hippos, zebras and giraffes, only to find at the epicenter of the heart of darkness another white man who had gone native. Actually, it was a white woman, and going native in this regard mean that she had her light brown hair done up into a mountain of tightly woven African braids. She also had a bolt through one of her nostrils, something which I didn’t see on the African girls. She wasn’t alone. In fact, she was there with a group of Americans, all of whom were members of the Peace Corps. And what was the Peace Corps doing in Kenya? I asked. They were making sure that the Kenyans followed “the AIDS curriculum,” and what did the AIDS curriculum specify? “Condoms,” said the Peace Corps lady with the African hair do. So when you finally get to the heart of darkness in Africa these days, you find Kurtz’s great granddaughter holding up her hands to the moon and shouting not “The Horror, the Horror,” but rather “The condom, The condom.” It’s just another more polite way of saying what Kurtz wanted to say anyway, which is to say, “Exterminate the Brutes.” As the French so often say, the more things change, the more they remain the same. Africa has this attraction to a certain kind of European. They can’t stop raping Africa, and they can’t stop justifying the rape in the name of some higher good, whether it’s the white man’s burden, or population control, or, most recently and most cynically of all, African AIDS.

APRIL OF 1965: KENYA CALLS

In April of 1965, right around the same time that the Supreme Court in the United States was getting ready to hand down its Griswold v. Connecticut decision decriminalizing the sale of contraceptives, and around the same time that Hollywood decided to break the production code with the release of the film, The Pawnbroker, Kenya’s Ministry of Economic Planning and Development approached John D. Rockefeller, 3rd’s Population Council and asked for assistance in curbing that country’s birth rate. In 1965 Mr. Rockefeller was making significant progress toward his life-time goal of promoting contraception and abortion among the world’s pullulating masses. In January of that year, he had succeeded, with the help of former Secretary of State Dean Rusk, in getting Lyndon Johnson to mention population control as an issue of national concern in his state of the union address. In April of 1965, during the same month the Kenyan delegation made contact with the Population Council, Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska began a series of congressional hearings on the alleged crisis of overpopulation, at which Mr. Rockefeller would testify. In April of 1965, a group of Roman Catholic theologians which had convened at a Rockefeller-sponsored series of secret conferences at the University of Notre Dame issued a statement in which they opined that they no longer felt that Catholic teaching on contraception was persuasive. And in July of 1965, Father Theodore Hesburgh, president of the University of Notre Dame, arranged a private audience between Mr. Rockefeller and Pope Paul VI in Rome, at which meeting Mr. Rockefeller volunteered to write the pope’s birth control encyclical for him. All in all it was a good year for population control.

Which is another way of saying that it was a bad year for Kenya and the rest of the world where birth rates exceeded what Mr. Rockefeller thought they should be. The reason the request for aid came from Kenya’s Ministry of Economic Planning and Development and not from its Ministry of Health was very simple. First of all, as of 1965, no one associated population control with health. Secondly, the Ministry of Economic Planning and Development wanted to borrow money, and they knew that population control programs would enhance their credit rating at places like the World Bank. The Ministry of Economic Planning may or may not have believed that Kenya was overpopulated, but it was interested in the financial benefits which it could gain from supporting population control programs of the sort Mr. Rockefeller favored.

One member of the team of four Americans which eventually arrived in Kenya in 1966 was the Princeton University demographer by the name of Ansley Coale, co-author with Edgar M. Hoover of a 1958 book which argued that population growth existed in inverse proportion to development. In other words, according to what came to be known as the Coale-Hoover thesis, children required money in order to raise them to adults, and as long as money was being used to feed them, buy them shoes, etc., it would not be used for things like hydroelectric power plants, superhighways, etc. etc. The Coale-Hoover thesis ignored the fact that children invariably grew up to be income-producing adults, but given the history of population control this is not surprising, because the history of population control involves a constant, ever-shifting parade of rationalizations to drive the birth rate down in places where the Rockefellers did not want people to have children. At this moment in time and for the next ten years, from 1966 to 1976, the main excuse to get Africans to use condoms was overpopulation. Over the years, as we shall see, the goal would remain the same—condom use as a way of driving down the birth rate—but the means to attain that end would change dramatically each time one form of social engineering was discovered by the people who were supposed to be engineered.

Once the Population Council’s program for driving down Kenya’s birthrate got put in place, dramatic results followed almost immediately. As the Ministry of Economic Planning and Development had hoped, Kenya’s ability to borrow money improved dramatically.

“Announcement of the new policy,” according to Donald P. Warwick, “immediately raised Kenya's credit rating among international donors, who saw such action as eminently ‘responsible’ and as a model for other African countries.” The other immediate result was that Kenyans began to object to what they perceived as the racist or even genocidal intent of the Population Council’s Program. Just one year after the program had been adopted, Kenyan author Grace Ogot announced at a seminar on the topic that “it would not be difficult to interpret the foreign experts’ enthusiasm as a kind of neocolonialist trick to keep the African population down.” Oginga Odinga, an opposition leader in Parliament, claimed that black people were already being eliminated from a sparsely populated continent and that birth control would only speed up this process. Kenyan President Jomo Kenyatta remained persistently silent on the topic and as a result doomed the Population Council’s program of lowering Kenya’s birth rate to a slow death.

In their 1966 report, the Population Council team made it clear that family planning, even when it did not involve sterilization and abortion, was essentially an attack on “traditional attitudes and values,” which Coale and Co. saw as “a hindrance to family planning in Kenya for some time.” The problems which the Population Council’s program for Kenya encountered could most probably not have been remedied by better public relations because the problems revolved around the term “control” itself. Population control, the Population Council would have to learn the hard way, was a flawed concept from the beginning because as soon as the notion of control was introduced, the people who were to be controlled invariably objected. “Depicting population policy as an instrument of control,” according to Warwick, “brought on a torrent of criticism. The policy's detractors credibly linked it to genocide, neocolonialism, tribal scheming, and other atrocities.” Even if it was not seen as Rockefeller-inspired contraceptive imperialism (which it was), it was seen as a form of ethnic warfare in which some tribes subjugated others by driving down their birth rate.

A FORM OF CONTROL

Population control, in other words, brought about its very undoing primarily because it portrayed itself as a form of control. The year 1972 could be seen, in many ways, as the high water mark of the population control approach to driving down birth rates in third world countries. By then the U.S. government was in the birth control business in the name of fostering “development,” and the Agency for International Development or AID was sponsoring projects like the famous flights over India during which AID workers literally tossed condoms by the shovelful out of airplanes as a way of promoting “development” in that country. What followed were the worst excesses of the Rockefeller-inspired American population control programs according to which poor illiterate Indians were offered cheap transistor radios in exchange for getting themselves sterilized. Since the operations were normally performed under unsanitary conditions, many of these beneficiaries of international development eventually died. The reaction to that program brought down the Indira Ghandi government in 1976 and may have led to her assassination. Population control programs had the same effect on other countries where their leaders promoted them aggressively. The Shah of Iran was driven from office by a mob of militant Muslims who then went on to sack the Teheran branch of Planned Parenthood to vent their anger. Imelda Marcos, another fervent devotee of population control, was driven from office along with her husband not long afterward. The same thing happened to Anwar Sadat. What each of these leaders had in common was a desire to implement population control because of the financial benefits it brought to the country’s elites through things like World Bank loans. What they also had in common was learning too late that these financial benefits brought with them political consequences, most notably, the anger and outrage those population control programs created among the local population, which eventually drove them from office.

BUCHAREST, 1974

In January 1974, John D. Rockefeller, 3rd was getting ready to attend the world population conference in Bucharest with the deep sense of self-satisfaction that comes to the few people in the course of human history who have changed the world by their own efforts. Instead of being celebrated for his efforts in spreading contraception and abortion throughout the world, Rockefeller was in for an unpleasant surprise when the Vatican, the Soviet Bloc, and the Third World teamed up to reject his proposals. Bringing the Vatican and the Communists together on an issue was no small accomplishment, and John D. Rockefeller had done it virtually single-handedly. But having become accustomed to molding public opinion to suit his desires, Rockefeller was not going to be deterred from setting birth quotas throughout the world just because the world didn’t want them. Instead, he turned to the United States government, confident that it would accomplish by stealth what he had failed to do by persuasion.

The reaction of the United States government was predictable in this regard. As soon as it became apparent that a reaction to population control was growing throughout the world, the United States government made population control a pillar of its foreign policy. On April 24, 1974, Henry A. Kissinger inaugurated that new era of subjugation abroad by sending to the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Deputy Secretary of State, and the Administrator of the Agency for International Development, with a copy to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a memorandum titled “Implications of Worldwide Population Growth for U.S. Security and Overseas Interests.” That study came to be known subsequently as National Security Study Memorandum 200 or NSSM 200. That memo stated: “The President has directed a study of the impact of world population growth on U.S. security and overseas interests. The study should look forward at least until the year 2000, and use several alternative reasonable projections of population growth.”

Immediate occasion for NSSM 200 was the defeat the United States plan for establishing birth quotas for the world had just suffered at the United Nations-sponsored population conference in Bucharest. There the Holy See along with Communist and Third World countries, led by Algeria denounced the United States and the West for practicing what they called “contraceptive imperialism.” John D. Rockefeller, 3rd seems to have taken the rebuff personally and spent the last few years of his life engaging in soul-searching about the population-control enterprise, but by then his ideology had become the cornerstone of this country’s foreign policy and beyond his power to revoke. NSSM 200 was reaffirmed as the cornerstone of the United States population policies on November 26, 1975 in a separate memo, National Security Decision Memorandum 314 (NSDM 314), which endorsed both the policy recommendations in the study and those additional points proposed by Kissinger. It was signed by Brent Scowcroft, and, in spite of being declassified in the late ‘80s, is still in force.

Rockefeller had changed the world in the nick of time too. The Bucharest conference took place just months before population bombers like Paul Ehrlich had predicted that world-wide famine would begin as the result of overpopulation. In addition to books like Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb and the less famous but even more dire book by the Paddocks Famine 1975, then President of the World Bank, Robert S. McNamara, stepped to the podium at Notre Dame University before the graduating class of 1969 and announced in the direst terms that “the usual date predicted for the beginning of the local famines is 1975-1980.”[i] In making this statement, McNamara was simply following the lead of people like Paul Ehrlich, who wrote in the Population Bomb: “I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient by 1971, if ever.”[ii] By September 1977, which is to say two years after famine was supposed to have devastated India, the Indian grain reserve stood at about 22 million tons, and India began to be faced with the problem of how to store the stocks “that overflowed warehouses and caused mounting storage costs” so that they would not be ruined by rain or eaten by predators.”[iii]

By the mid-’70s India began exporting food, but not before they had their own experience of population control at the hands of people like Robert McNamara, who announced to the Notre Dame graduates in 1969 that “the food-population collision will duly occur. The attempts to prevent it, or meliorate it, will be too feeble. Famine will take charge in many countries. It may become, by the end of the period, endemic famine. There will be suffering and desperation on a scale as yet unknown.”[iv]

There was suffering in India all right, but it wasn’t caused by lack of food. It was caused rather by people like Robert McNamara. As his solution to the problem of “overpopulation,” Mr. McNamara announced that “family planning is going to have to be undertaken on a humane but massive scale.” Well, Mr. McNamara got it half right in India; family planning programs there were certainly massive, but they were hardly humane. The record of mass sterilization’s done without consent or knowledge to hapless peasants who received a transistor radio in exchange for not having children and then perhaps died of an infection is one of the darkest chapters of the eugenic movement, which is hardly this century’s noblest social movement to begin with. Between mid-1975 when Indira Gandhi declared the “population emergency” and when it ended in 1977 with the fall of the Gandhi government, 6.5 million men were given vasectomies, mostly against their will, and a total of 1,774 men died as a result of the operations.[v] During the height of this mayhem, McNamara flew to India to cheer on the ministry of health and family planning in November 1976, praising the Indian government for its “political will and determination” in attempting to solve what he continued to refer to as the population problem.

“CONTRACEPTIVE IMPERIALISM”

According to Kissinger’s memo, motivation is a key component to the United States population control program. Key congressional supporters need to be stroked "to reinforce the positive attitudes of those in Congress who presently support U.S. activity in the population field and to enlist their support in persuading others.”[vi] Another key aspect is the role of multilateral institutions like the UN, whose involvement as a conduit of U.S. aid money forestalls accusations of "contraceptive imperialism." The study notes, for example, that of the thirteen countries targeted for contraceptive intervention (India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nigeria, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil, the Philippines, Thailand, Egypt, Turkey, Ethiopia and Colombia), some have already become “receptive to assistance” for population activities. In other high-priority countries, however—India and Egypt, for example—“U.S. assistance is limited by the nature of political or diplomatic relations or—in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Mexico, and Brazil—by the lack of strong government interest in population reduction programs.[vii] In such cases, external technical and financial assistance, if desired by the countries, would have to come from other donors and/or from private and international organizations (many of which receive contributions from AID).”[viii] The document states that the “[U.S. Department of] State and AID played an important role in establishing the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) to spearhead a multilateral effort in population as a complement to the bilateral actions of AID and other donor countries.”[ix] It notes repeatedly the need for the indirect approach to population control in the developing world, and advises, for instance: “There is also the danger that some LDC leaders will see developed country pressures for family planning as a form of economic or racial imperialism; this could well create a serious backlash.”[x] It acknowledges that the use of multilaterals to achieve U.S. population objectives would require that additional amounts of money be provided to those institutions until such time as population assistance becomes accepted by Less Developed Country leaders. But the use of multilateral agencies to achieve the U.S. foreign policy objectives serves an additional purpose: “It is vital that the effort to develop and strengthen a commitment on the part of the LDC leaders not be seen by them as an industrialized country policy to keep their strength down or to reserve resources for use by the ‘rich’ countries. Development of such a perception could create a serious backlash adverse to the cause of population stability.”[xi] The last sentence gives away the purpose of population control, namely, the effort on the part of the industrialized countries with low birthrates to hold onto world hegemony by nullifying the demographic advantage of countries where the birth-rate is high.

By 1976 the tide had turned against population control in Kenya, where it was seen as colonialism in economic clothing. Once the government’s population control program became recognized for what it was, namely, a donor (i.e., Rockefeller, USAID, etc.) driven campaign to drive the Kenyan birth rate down, domestic opposition began to mount. Local critics, according to Warwick, “soon charged that Kenya's efforts at population control were colonialism in economic clothing and might even have genocidal intent. The Catholic archbishop of Nairobi claimed that there was no population problem in Kenya, for there were vast lands yet to be inhabited. . . .Yusuf Eraj, a gynecologist active in establishing private family planning services, charged that too much attention was being paid to population when the real issue for Kenya was a poor distribution of resources.” According to Warwick, “The paramount problem of the Kenyan program was that it was seen as foreign in inspiration and out of tune with national values on fertility. The early emphasis on population control proved disastrous, as it conjured up images of a white plot to limit African numbers or a Kikuyu design to consolidate power.”

In order to deal with the mounting criticism of their population control program, Kenyan officials and their foreign backers had to resort to subterfuge:

Caught between their intentions and their rhetoric, government officials began to divorce public proclamation from program action. They insisted ever more loudly that the purpose of family planning programs was individual and family welfare rather than population control. At the same time, program administrators went on acting as they had all along, and they sometimes moved even closer to outright control.

What eventually emerged as the official response to domestic criticism in Kenya could only be described as a doctrine of two truths when it came to explanations of population control. Publicly, these officials “stated that its aim was to promote the health of mothers and children,” but “privately they recognized that the main purpose of the program and the reason that it was so generously funded by foreign donors was to bring down the birth rate.” Health, in other words, had emerged as the best disguise for population control.

In other words, even at the high water mark of population control in the mid-’70s, Rockefeller operatives like Henry Kissinger were quite cognizant of the fact that population control depended on stealth and a deliberate misrepresentation of its goal of driving the birth rate down. Because of the failure of population control in places like Kenya, a consensus was emerging. The best way to sell population control to a wary population was to disguise it as concern for “health.” When it was done out in the open, the term “control” created a reaction that doomed the program of driving down birth rates. As a result of their disastrous showing at the World Population Conference meeting in Bucharest in 1974, groups like AID, to use Warwick’s words, “came under pressure to integrate population and other development activities.” AID’s director at the time was a man by the name of Reimert T. Ravenholt, and Ravenholt felt that the dilution of AID’s activities or any diversion from the straight forward population control approach which AID had already embarked on would be a “disastrous” diversion of scarce resources.

THE OLD APPROACH

No one epitomized the old population control approach to driving down birth rates better than Ravenholt, who became head of the United State’s Agency for International Development in 1966. Ravenholt’s views on population control were nothing if not straight forward. Three years after all but universal local opposition to population control had become apparent at the Bucharest Population Conference, Ravenholt was quoted as saying in a Dublin newspaper that “population control . . . is needed to maintain the normal operation of U. S. commercial interests around the world.” The Dublin Evening Press went on to say that “the U.S. is seeking to provide the means to sterilize a quarter of all Third World women, in part to protect the interests of American business overseas.” The man responsible for carrying out those orders was Reimert T. Ravenholt, who told Warwick that “I’m very strongly opposed to poor people sort of willy nilly producing beyond their capacity and then turning to their neighbors and saying, ‘you have to take care these offspring because I can’t.’” As some indication that his views hadn’t changed in the 25 years since he spoke with Dublin’s Evening News, Ravenholt told me in a phone interview in October 2002 that the world was suffering from a “global humanosis epidemic.” Then, hesitating as if he had overstated his case, he revised his formulation. “I mean a humanosis pandemic,” he said correcting himself.

Views this frank about something as sinister and coercive as population control were all but guaranteed to generate a violent reaction, and Ravenholt, because of his frankness, was going to be a lightning rod for the reaction once it arrived. Shortly after Ravenholt’s remarks became public in 1977, Washington University Chancellor William Danforth sent a written complaint to then Secretary of State Cyrus Vance wondering “how he would feel if a foreign country took upon itself the lofty task of reducing the population of the United States for its own economic benefit.” Soon Ravenholt would pay the price for his outspokenness. On July 2, 1979 he was demoted from his job as head of the Office of Population to the lower rank of population advisor. Ravenholt appealed the decision, but after it became clear that his appeals were going nowhere, he resigned from AID, and in late 1980, he took a job, interestingly enough, with the Center for Disease Control.

Ravenholt now claims that he was the victim of a Catholic conspiracy that began when then Presidential Candidate Jimmy Carter met with the nation’s Catholic bishops at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington on August 31, 1976 and asked what he had to do to gain their support in that year’s presidential election. Evidently the Vatican’s stand at the 1974 Bucharest conference was still fresh in the bishops’ minds because their answer had to do with defunding population control. As an expression of gratitude for Catholic support, Carter appointed John Sullivan, a former aid to Congressman Clement Zablocki and, in Ravenholt’s words, “a zealous anti-birth control Catholic,” to replace him at AID.

John Sharpless, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and an expert on the history of birth control in America, disagrees with Ravenholt’s assessment of his demise at AID. By the late ‘70s, Ravenholt, according to Sharpless, had become “the dinosaur of the population control era.” Ravenholt was not the victim of a Catholic-Jimmy Carter conspiracy. He had to go because the language of population control had changed. “Ravenholt had to go,” according to Sharpless, “because you couldn’t use the word ‘control’ anymore. The language of population control had changed in response to feminist and conservative [i.e., Catholic] protest. The Christian Right had exploited that issue during the Reagan administration.” Because “the language of population control had changed,” most certainly by the time of Ravenholt’s demise at AID, “fertility control” had to be “embedded in the language of women’s health.” As a result, population control was no longer in competition with disease eradication. The fact that Ravenholt disagreed and felt that the two were in competition meant that he had to go. As a result of AID’s overreaching and its promotion of essentially invasive and coercive policies in the ‘70s, “population control programs had to be continued indirectly.” In Sharpless’s words, “it had to be embedded in health.”

The best symbol of this paradigm shift in the field of birth suppression is the fact that when Ray Ravenholt left AID in late 1980, he began work for the Center for Disease Control in early 1981. Ravenholt was not alone in migrating from population control to the CDC. Once the Carter administration decided to degrade its population control programs, many other birth controllers would leave as well, following the money trail to whichever federal agency was being favored at the time. Eventually, there would be a large scale cross-pollination between agencies which promoted “health” and those which promoted birth control. Ravenholt was himself an epidemiologist by trade who got involved in population control when the government began to promote it, and got out of it when the government shifted its emphasis from population control to “health.” He mentions Peter Piot as another example of someone who went from the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the CDC to the United Nations’ World Health Organization. Piot then went from WHO to being head of UNAIDS, where he is now hawking condoms under the guise of an AIDS program. According to Ravenholt, there was quite a lot of cross-pollination between CDC and AID. “They worked together on smallpox eradication,” Ravenholt said, “and there was a lot of joint action on HIV.” That joint action on HIV included the African AIDS campaign which was, in Ravenholt’s words, “a combination of both the work of the CDC and AID. Both agencies were strongly involved.”

Another indication of the crossover between “health” and population control, was AIDSCAP, a large USAID-funded "Behavior Change Communication" program run by Family Health International from 1991 to 1997. AIDSCAP simultaneously offered STD treatment and HIV testing in African clinics. But its prevention guidelines for health workers mainly encouraged them to talk about condom use and treatment of other STDs that make people more vulnerable to HIV.

The same approach was still in effect five years after AIDSCAP ended, which is to say, until the present day. On May 24, 2002, Secretary-General Kofi Annan appointed former United Nations Population Fund Activity’s head Nafis Sadik as his special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Asia. Under Sadik’s direction, UNFPA was the world’s largest supplier of condoms, and UNFPA’s AIDS-prevention program focused on the promotion of condom use. “It is unclear,” the news report announcing her appointment concluded, “how Sadik will integrate the conclusions of the Population Division report into her new initiative [against AIDS].” The shortest way to clear up that lack of clarity in the reporter’s mind would be to point to the joint UN-USAID campaign against African AIDS, but in order to understand how that melding of population control and “health” works, we need a little more historical background.

If population control as of 1979 had to be embedded in health in order to continue, an opportunity would soon present itself. In fact, one of, if not, the biggest public health crusades of the 20th century would emerge at the CDC in 1981, precisely the year of Ravenholt’s transition from AID. At around the same time that Ravenholt went to work for the CDC, doctors in places like San Francisco and New York were puzzled by the emergence of what looked like a new disease among their homosexual patients. At first it was called Gay Bowel Syndrome, in honor of the locus of the disease and the sexual preferences of its victims. Then, when the term GBS was driven off the market because the estate of George Bernard Shaw threatened to sue, it was replaced by the term GRID, which stood for Gay Related Immune Deficiency. What all of the early definitions of this new disease had in common was their association of the disease with homosexual behavior. The new disease, as the first clinical descriptions of it make clear, was a syndrome that was clearly associated with homosexual behavior, a subculture of bathhouses, bars, and behaviors that the average person as of 1981 knew nothing about. Bizarre and unsanitary sexual practices had resulted in epidemics of venereal diseases, which were followed in turn by massive and often prophylactic use of antibiotics, as well as massive use of recreational drugs that the average person had never heard of, vasodilators like amyl nitrite or poppers, for example, that allowed the homosexual to engage in his perverse and dangerous form of sexual activity long after the normal body would have called it quits. In 1983, a study of 170 homosexual males who had visited sexual disease clinics revealed that

96 percent were regular users of nitrite inhalants, 35-50 percent of ethylchloride inhalants, 50-60 percent had used cocaine, 50 - 70 percent methamphetamines, 40 percent phenylcycladine, 40-60 percent LSD, 40 percent Quaaludes, 25 percent barbiturates, 90 percent marijuana and 10 percent heroin. This lifestyle meant that about 80 percent of these men had or still had gonorrhea, 40-70 percent had syphilis, 15 percent mononucleosis, 50 percent hepatitis and 30 percent parasitic diarrhea.

The result of this massive assault on the body’s immune system was immune system collapse on a massive scale in the homosexual demimonde.

Even before the emergence of HIV etiology, the disease which would eventually come to be known as AIDS was simply the appropriation and renaming of diseases that had already been associated with the behavior of certain subcultures. John Lauritsen notes that “for a hundred years, the classic profile of a chronic heroin user has been emaciation and lung disease. Heroin is bad for the health and bad for the immune system; on top of that, it suppresses the respiratory system. The consequences are tuberculosis or one or another form of pneumonia, emaciation and lung disease.” When the British epidemiologist Gordon Stewart studied heroin addicts a decade before the first AIDS case had been reported he discovered that “they were often extremely emaciated, suffering from wasting diseases, various weird blood-born infections with skin bacteria, Candida and Cryptococci, which would not ordinarily be regarded as pathogenic in their own right. . .We didn’t find Kaposi’s sarcoma and we didn’t find Pneumocystis (carinii pneumonia) but, then we weren’t looking for it.” Lauritsen concludes that drug addicts were “getting sick in 1995 in the same ways and for the same reasons they were getting sick 86 years ago. The only difference is that now their illnesses are called ‘AIDS.’”

NO NEW HYPOTHESIS NEEDED

Like Laplace when asked by Napoleon where God fit into his system, the epidemiologists confronted with the new homosexual epidemic needed no new hypothesis to explain what was going on. They could have explained why homosexuals were dying based on what they knew about the consequences of bad hygiene, misuse of antibiotics and rampant drug use, but that would also have meant that behavior caused the disease, and that would have meant condemning certain forms of behavior as risky for your health, and this they were evidently unwilling to do.

Just as doctors on the scene were getting a handle on the health risks associated with homosexual behavior, politics intervened into medicine once again and derailed whatever possibilities might have existed for finding a cure (or prevention) by inventing a cause that would ultimately prove to be nonexistent. On April 23, 1984, Margaret Heckler, then Secretary of Health and Human Services under President Ronald Reagan, announced that “the probable cause of AIDS has been found.” The cause of AIDS, according to Heckler, was not the dangers associated with the homosexual lifestyle, but rather “a variant of a known human cancer virus,” for which “a vaccine should be ready for testing within two years.” Heckler indicated indirectly that she had been under significant pressure to come up with a cure when she added that “those who have said we weren’t doing enough have not understood how sound, solid, significant medical science proceeds.”

Heckler failed to mention that she was also pressured by the fact that an article announcing the discovery of this new virus had appeared on the previous day in the New York Times, forcing her hand in making the announcement. Rather than tracing disease to behavior, the public health establishment in concert with the media, the homosexual intelligentsia and their heterosexual liberationist fellow travelers, decided to blame the disease on a microbe instead. The reasons for doing this are not difficult to understand and have been stated by a number of people. According to Rapcewicz, “Most of the gay intelligentsia and their sympathizers realized that a lifestyle cause of AIDS would take away the acceptance they had worked so hard to achieve. They couldn’t come to terms with it. A microbial cause of AIDS would mean ‘we’re all in this together.’ So Gallo, Marx, and Groopman gave them a microbe but couldn’t give them a drug or vaccine that would kill it and thereby cure their patients. They never will because HIV has never been proven to exist.”

None of this was apparent at the time. The discovery of the Human Immune Deficiency Virus or HIV was, in Heckler’s words, “another miracle” in “the long honor role of American medicine and science.”

Like most miracles, it would have to be accepted on faith. The year 1986 came and went, and no vaccine was forthcoming. In fact, not only did the cure begin to recede like an always visible but never reachable horizon, the very existence of the virus, as well as its etiological relationship to AIDS, began to be called into question as well.

REVERSE TRANSCRIPTASE

In 1970 microbiologists discovered a new enzyme or biological catalyst which was capable of converting a molecule of RNA into DNA. Because it was previously thought that DNA could become RNA but not vice versa, the new process was known as reverse transcriptase. Since a virus is little more than DNA surrounded by an envelope of protein, the production of DNA by reverse transcriptase was seen by some as the replication of viruses. These new viruses became known as retroviruses, and since virus research was flagging at the time, some enterprising scientists began suggesting that retroviruses might be the cause of cancer.

One of those enterprising scientists was Dr. Robert Gallo, the man whom Margaret Heckler credited with discovering HIV, human immunodeficiency virus. What Ms. Heckler failed to tell the audience at her press conference in 1984 is that previous to getting involved in AIDS research, Gallo had also claimed to have found a virus which caused adult T-cell leukemia. That theory went up in smoke when the antibodies to his “virus” were found to have no correlation to the disease. Gallo later discovered another human retrovirus, which on closer inspection was found to be a mixture of three monkey viruses. Gallo posited HIV as the cause of AIDS when he and colleagues found virus-like particles in the blood of their AIDS patients, before it was mixed in the cultures. As John Austgen has noted, “Gallo had apparently forgotten that virus-like particles can be found in the blood and lymph nodes in individuals who are not infected with disease-causing viruses,” even though he himself had reported this very phenomenon in 1976.

Gallo had received the cultures which contained the alleged virus from Dr. Luc Montagnier, but when he tried to “isolate” the virus directly from the blood of patients he could do so in less than half of the patients. In 1997, Montagnier admitted on camera to a French television journalist that he could not perform true isolation of the virus from his patients, nor could he obtain the virus by centrifugation.

GALLO’S “VIRUS”

The more that scientists attempted to isolate and then replicate Gallo’s “virus” the more anomalies they discovered. Peter Duesberg, a virologist from the University of California at Berkeley who would eventually go on to claim that AIDS patients were actually dying from drug abuse, noticed that scientists could not correlate the titer (amount of virus present) with disease progression from initial infection to full-blown AIDS. This meant that from a strictly scientific view, HIV, if it in fact existed, did not cause AIDS. Soon the anomalies proving this fact became common knowledge. There were many people who were HIV positive who never came down with AIDS, Magic Johnson being the most famous example. There were also many people who had AIDS and were dying from it who were not HIV positive. Progress in combating AIDS hit a brick wall when HIV was officially proclaimed as the cause of the disease.

This is because Gallo made a very big mistake, and all subsequent research, at least what got funded by the government, was based on this mistake. What he claimed to be a new “virus” was in fact evidence of reverse transcriptase activity, something which can be artificially stimulated in cell cultures, but something which takes place in all normal cells as well. Whenever Gallo found evidence of reverse transcriptase activity, he assumed that retroviruses were at work. This turned out to be a grave error because it was later found that these enzymes occurred in all living matter, proving that reverse transcriptase had nothing to do with retroviruses per se. In the mixture of cell cultures and stressed human cells, RNA and reverse transcriptase come to be produced in large amounts, because the cells have been specially selected and treated to do this. The RNA is transcribed into DNA by reverse transcriptase and long pieces of DNA are produced which are said to be viral DNA. In fact they are composed of unrelated pieces of expressed cellular RNA, transcribed into DNA and linked together by a process of “template switching” (a well-characterized property of reverse transcriptase.) This misleads ordinary researchers into believing that they have actually produced viral DNA.

Gallo and his team claimed to have isolated a virus, when in fact all they did was demonstrate the presence of reverse transcriptase activity and virus-like particles which they assumed caused AIDS. They then compounded the situation by publishing photographs of cellular particles, claiming that those particles were the virus which caused AIDS. Only after its viral proteins and nucleic acid components have been identified is it possible to speak of the identification of a new virus. Eighteen years after Margaret Heckler’s dramatic press conference, that information has yet to be produced. No one since that time has ever published a picture of crystallized HIV particles, nor have any of its proteins or nucleic acids been identified.

In 1993 a group of scientists from Perth, Australia led by Dr. Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopolus published an article on HIV testing (“Is a Positive Western Blot Proof of HIV Infection?” Bio/Technology, vol. 11, 696 [1993]) which proved in Virologist Stefan Lanka’s words that “no AIDS test could ever work because HIV has never been isolated nor even shown to exist.” According to Lanka’s reading of the Perth Group’s study, “particles which look like viruses but aren’t” are found “always in placentas and very frequently in the artificial environment of laboratory cell cultures.” (Lanka’s discovery about the presence of the “virus” in the placenta was largely ignored, but the unreliability of HIV testing would have serious consequences for pregnant women in Africa, especially Uganda, which passed a law requiring mandatory antiviral treatment for single mothers.) Particles of this sort, according to Lanka, are invariably seen as evidence of HIV. The Perth group followed up its article on the Western Blot test with another article in 1996 (“The Isolation of HIV: Has it Really been Achieved? The Case Against,” Eleni Papadopulos-Eleopolus, Valendar F. Turner, John M. Papadimitriou, David Causer, Continuum, Vol. 4, No. 3, September/October 1996.). In this article Papadopulous et al. reassert their claim that “the definite existence of any virus, including a retrovirus, can be proven only by isolating it.” They go on to say that “nobody has fulfilled even the first step in the only scientifically valid method for retroviral isolation, that is, electron microscopic demonstration of particles with the morphological characteristics of retroviruses banding in sucrose density gradients at the density of 1.16 gm/ml.” In addition, “HIV” can only be “isolated” form a minority of individuals who have a positive antibody test.”

AIDS researchers have come up with ingenious ways of getting around this problem. Since strains of a virus would all have to be the same size in order to be the same virus, some scientists have taken to assembling “collages” of DNA of the same size by discarding pieces too big or too small. “All maps,” writes Lanka, “purporting to represent a whole virus, including HIV, are always compilations, many bits and pieces cobbled together by their authors to the best of their beliefs. They are collages. No complete retrovirus nor its RNA in its entirety has been proven to exist either in vivo or in vitro. ... No particle of HIV has ever been obtained pure, free of contaminants; nor has a complete piece of HIV RNA (or the transcribed DNA) ever been proved to exist.”

SPECIFIC ETIOLOGY

The decision to link the new homosexual disease with a specific etiology based on a virus which had yet to be isolated would have serious consequences, especially for the homosexual population, which was lulled into thinking that some magical substance out there—the viral equivalent to penicillin—would kill the microbe that was killing them. Since the same Robert Gallo who claimed that HIV was causing AIDS had also claimed that a virus caused leukemia, it was only logical to look to chemotherapy as the cure for AIDS. Again, the explanation goes back to Gallo’s misreading of reverse transcriptase activity as evidence that a virus was at work. If the virus spread through the system by replicating DNA, then a drug which prevented DNA replication would also prevent the spread of the disease.

In 1985 the British pharmaceutical firm Burroughs Wellcome came up with its version of the magic bullet, the viral equivalent to penicillin. AZT (azidothymidine) is an anti‑cancer drug developed over 40 years ago to kill white blood cells that have become cancerous in adult T‑cell leukemia. In animal studies the drug killed all of the mice it was being tested on and the drug was withdrawn as being too toxic for human use. AZT is a DNA terminator, which means that it stops cell replication by putting a chemical cap on the bond that allows DNA molecules to join other DNA molecules. If the normal DNA molecule has two arms, AZT is a counterfeit DNA look-alike that fools DNA into bonding with a substance that lacks a left arm. That means that AZT stops cell replication. To the medically informed, cessation of cell replication means death. The logic behind AZT therapy for leukemia was to starve the cancer cells to death before the rest of the body’s cells died as well. Medical consensus soon began to see that the race was too close to call, and the drug was never allowed on the market. But AIDS and the political pressure to find a magic bullet that would kill the “virus” that was causing it would change all that.

Once specific etiology based on a virus which was transmitted by white blood cells took hold in the mind of the medical community, AZT got fast‑track clearance by the FDA for experimental use in HIV positive persons. Two similar DNA terminators, ddC and ddI were also allowed to be used. In 1986, Margaret Fischl, a doctor from Miami, led a study which seemed to show that AIDS patients benefited from taking AZT by a ratio of 19 to 1. Fischl’s study was fatally compromised by contamination of the control groups, and she herself was suspected of being “on the take” from Burroughs Wellcome (now Glaxo Smith Kline), the company which manufactured AZT, but the FDA, pressured by homosexual activists who sat in at their offices and chanted “we want AZT,” approved the drug nonetheless. As a result, thousands of people died as a result of taking the “cure.”

Kimberly Bergalis was one of the innocent victims of political medicine. After hearing that her dentist had died of AIDS, Bergalis had herself tested and found that she was HIV positive. Her doctor as a result prescribed AZT as treatment, and the AZT killed her, although the official cause of death was listed as AIDS. The same thing happened to tennis star Arthur Ashe and a young hemophiliac from Kokomo, Indiana by the name of Ryan White. Medical authorities rationalized the use of a highly toxic substance as medicine by claiming that HIV killed everyone infected by it within three years anyway. As a way of forestalling this all but certain horrible death, doctors prescribed 1,500 mg of this toxic substance as the daily dosage, a dosage which, in the words of Dr. John Austgen, would have killed Rasputin. AZT was soon followed by protease inhibitors, which were in turn followed by a “cocktail” of AZT (in smaller doses) and protease inhibitors. The new treatments killed patients just as effectively as AZT alone did.

Egged on by the CDC and government grants, the medical establishment plunged ahead with work based on the virus theory and specific etiology. The unacknowledged model for AIDS became syphilis. It was a small bug—this time a virus instead of a bacterium— which could be isolated and then killed by a vaccine. The syphilis model allowed another transformation in the history of the disease to take place. AIDS was now recognized as a sexually transmitted disease. Since sexuality had always been an important weapon in the arsenal of social engineering, any AIDS campaign could now also function as a platform for social engineering. This is, of course, precisely what happened.

The first consequence of turning HIV into the cause of AIDS was an almost immediate rehabilitation of homosexuality. Instead of people in the grips of a sexual compulsion which had serious consequences for public health, homosexuals were now victims of an impersonal bug. The specific etiology associated with a virus also meant that the entire population was at risk. That general medical threat meant more money for research and prevention than if the disease were simply a function of the behavior of a group which comprised between one and two percent of the population. If a group of people were making themselves sick by pertinaciously engaging in disgusting and unsanitary behavior, then the general public could hardly be expected to feel sympathy for their plight, much less to approve billions of dollars to find a cure for their disease, when all that group had to do to regain health was to stop engaging in its disgusting sexual practices. All of that would change, however, if it could be shown that this group had just come down with an illness that was threatening to break out of the homosexual demimonde into the general population, both male and female. In order to make this threat credible, the people who could benefit from AIDS money financially had to find AIDS in the general population.

Unfortunately, the facts militated against this conclusion. By the early ‘90s, it had become overwhelmingly clear that the average American ran no risk of contracting AIDS. In order to convince the average taxpayer that the risk still existed, the disease lobby had to look elsewhere for a credible threat, preferably far away, preferably a place full of already threatening diseases. In many ways, it was inevitable that once AIDS was recognized as confined to easily identifiable populations in America, it would have to be seen as threatening the general population some place else. If AIDS did not pose a threat to the general population anywhere, it was a medically insignificant event not worthy of government-funded research. Since the CDC and the rest of the medical establishment which fed at the government trough could not make a credible case that this was about to happen in America, they needed to make the case that it was happening someplace else if funding was to be saved.

THE CREATION OF AFRICAN AIDS

In October 1985, an official for the CDC by the name of Joseph McCormick organized a meeting in the city of Bangui in the Central African Republic on the topic of AIDS. In America and Europe, AIDS had come to be defined as an AIDS defining disease plus testing HIV positive. That meant that AIDS was defined as an already existing disease confirmed by the results of an HIV test. In Africa, it was between difficult and impossible to administer even the notoriously unreliable ELISA or Western Blot tests, and so McCormick and his friends decided that from then on African AIDS would be defined according to clinical criteria alone. That meant, to get specific, that anyone who suffered from “prolonged fevers, weight loss of 10 percent and prolonged diarrhea,” could now be diagnosed as having AIDS. In a country where poverty, malnutrition, unclean water, poor sanitation and lack of medical care were rampant, it didn’t take a Lister to realize that AIDS would soon be a pandemic in Africa, given the loose way in which the disease was now defined. Africa held out other advantages to the AIDS lobby as well. McCormick noted that “there’s a one to one sex ratio of AIDS cases in Zaire.” This meant that AIDS had broken out into the general population, and since now everyone was at risk, the government could be pressured into pouring money into research to find a cure.

By the 1980s sub-Saharan Africa was in a state of economic decline, much of it caused by the “structural readjustment” which the World Bank had forced on those countries in order to ensure that their first priority was repaying the loans the World Bank had made as a result of their acquiescence to population control programs. Economic decline causes poverty; poverty in turn causes malnutrition, and malnutrition and disease form a vicious cycle. As Rapcewicz has noted,

An individual is prone to infection when he is malnourished; infectious diseases, themselves have a negative effect on the nutritional state of the individual, further disposing him to infection. Indeed, “an adequate diet is the most effective ‘vaccine’ against most diarrheal, respiratory and other common infections,” infection which in a malnourished individual are often deadly. The role played by general sanitation with respect to water, sewage and food (in particular, milk) is to minimize exposure to infection.

As one commentator notes, “If one were to draw a map of Africa, shading in the countries where HIV infection and AIDS are said to be exploding, one would effectively be showing the countries where malaria, sleeping sickness leishmaniasis and mycobacteria are endemic and where the refugee camps with their unsanitary condition and malnutrition are located.” Once HIV testing became possible in African countries, usually at prenatal clinics, the results were a foregone conclusion because virtually all of the traditional poverty related diseases in Africa also registered positive on the ELISA and Western Blot tests. That meant that “malaria and TB . . . are capable of producing HIV positivity.” In addition to that, “Chloroquine, the most widely used anti-malarial drug, has been used to suppress the immune system in patients with rheumatoid arthritis to alleviate the arthritis. Tuberculosis, by itself and uncontrolled, produces severe immunodeficiency. Many of the anti-parasite drugs used in Africa, Haiti and in gay health clinics are also immunosuppressive.” The same is true of mycobacterial infections like leprosy. Each of these tradtional African poverty-related diseases could cause a person to test HIV positive.

The fact which the CDC’s McCormick seized upon—that “there’s a one to one sex ratio of AIDS in Zaire”—means that we are talking about two different diseases. Homosexuals are dying of one disease in places like San Francisco and New York, and Africans of both sexes are dying from something else. That is the only medically credible conclusion warranted by the facts. Two of the most characteristic diseases among homosexual AIDS victims in America—pneumocysistis and candidiasis—are not found among African AIDS patients, even though the microbes which cause them are found in every human being. African AIDS, according to HIV skeptics in Europe and America, is all of the traditional poverty related African diseases simply redefined without even the benefit of the notoriously unreliable ELISA or Western Blot tests as AIDS.

Therefore, it is not surprising to learn that Uganda has been defined as the “epicentre of AIDS” in Africa. This is unsurprising because for 20 years, from 1966 to 1986, Uganda, a land which Churchill called “the pearl of Africa,” had been wracked with the consequences of two political dictatorships, including the regime of the infamous Idi Amin. Political disruption led to economic decline, and economic decline led to malnutrition and poverty, which in turn led to diseases like tuberculosis, which in the wake of the Bangui conference could now be defined as AIDS. And once AIDS could be established as a threat for the general population, both male and female, money could be demanded to fund research to make sure that Americans didn’t contract the disease from their less fortunate African brothers.

VENEREAL DISEASE

Dr. Stephen K. Karanja is an obstetrician and gynecologist who also teaches Natural Family Planning to his patients in Nairobi. Dr. Karanja is convinced that African AIDS is a venereal disease that has nothing to do with poverty. He bases this on his experience in watching patients die over the past 16 years, the time since he began noticing the outbreak of the new disease. According to Karanja, a typical case of the disease begins with an outbreak of Herpes Zostra, which then disappears. Patients with herpes zostra, according to Karanja, invariably test HIV positive. ELISA is the test in Kenya. There is no Western Blot test there. After that, the patient begins to exhibit other symptoms. He comes down with malaria, which he can’t shake. He comes down with opportunistic infections that he might otherwise have resisted. He begins to have gastrointestinal troubles, diarrhea, etc. After a year or so, the patient become so weak he can’t function, and within three to five years of the herpes attack the patient is dead. Karanja, in other words, is convinced that African AIDS is a deadly disease which is either a venereal disease itself or transmitted by other venereal diseases. He is just as convinced that the current government-sponsored condom campaign will do nothing to stop the spread of the disease, and may in fact encourage its spread. This is so because 1) a virus to too small to be stopped by a condom and 2) the venereal diseases in question are spread by lesions which are not covered by the condom. Another doctor I spoke to who was an internist said that most of the patients he saw with AIDS showed symptoms of tuberculosis. When I asked whether the disease was in fact TB, he replied by saying that they all tested HIV positive, without any recognition of the fact that TB causes a false positive on the ELISA test. Another doctor from Nigeria said pretty much the same thing when he indicated that the