5. AIDS as genocide?
McNamara spoke to his fellow bankers in 1979 of a world populated by 10 billion people by the year 2090 as "not a world that any of us would want to live in." If this is a horror vision, what must he think in 1992, when the projections are considerably more alarming? "UN demographers expect global population to double to more than 10 billion by the middle of the next century, with most of the increase coming in the poorest countries," says Eugene Robinson (op. cit.). McNamara's unliveable world is only 58 years away! This leaves us with the last of the Malthusian alternatives to nuclear war: disease.
Enter AIDS, in the same year (1979) that McNamara was describing Third World population growth as the greatest threat to mankind "short of nuclear war itself" and four years after the secret Kissinger study described it as a national security threat.
Technology, in the form of modern medicine, has the troublingly "unnatural" tendency to keep more people alive longer than was possible in Malthus' day, but AIDS, almost miraculously, has solved the problem. Provided a cure remains elusive for another decade or so, the population bomb will be at least partially defused. For the elite, given the choice between an "unliveable world" of 10 billion people and AIDS, the latter must come as a godsend.
In other words, AIDS may solve the "population problem." Not only will the "death rates" rise significantly, but they will rise in the right places, namely in the Third World. Since the populations being decimated by AIDS are the same ones suffering most from overpopulation, it is hard to see how anyone who considers the latter the "gravest issue" facing mankind "short of nuclear war itself" could be unhappy about AIDS. Obviously, no one is going to admit this publicly – unless he is as stupid as Prince Philip, who said in 1988 that if he were reborn he would like to return as a deadly virus in order to help solve the population problem – but the logic, if unspeakable, is inescapable.
The logic has not escaped those who are directly affected, as Steven Thomas' research showed. The New York Times, however, finds it "bizarre" that blacks think AIDS is a form of genocide ("AIDS and Black America," reprinted in the IHT, 5/13/92:6). According to the polls they quote, 35% of blacks think AIDS is a form of genocide, 10% believe it was created in a laboratory deliberately to infect blacks, and 20% think it might have been. This is "paranoia," says the NYT, based on "pernicious and dispiriting rumors" which "black leaders and public figures with high credibility like Magic Johnson could do much to discredit."
Dispiriting, yes, but why pernicious? Whom do they threaten? Who is the NYT protecting? The words "paranoia" and "rumor" presume that the rumors are unfounded, but what is the basis of this presumption? The only theories of the origin of AIDS that have proven to be unfounded, though they still circulate in the press, are the ones about green monkeys and isolated African villages. The NYT quotes a black health worker who testified to the National Commission on AIDS that "until it was proved otherwise she considered AIDS a man-made disease." This is not paranoia, but common sense. The best explanation for the known facts can be considered true until a better explanation comes along.
What are the facts? Here are five, as I see them:
1. No socially transmitted disease has ever appeared so suddenly and spread so rapidly as AIDS.
2. It is possible to create pathogenic viruses by genetic engineering. The crucial, and as yet unanswered, questions are: a) is it possible to create HIV this way now; b) if so, exactly when did this become possible; c) when did the first case of AIDS in fact appear?
3. Plausible scientific arguments have been made to support various theories of an artificial origin of AIDS, though these arguments have been suppressed in both the mainstream press and in scientific literature.
4. The Pentagon thought it possible and wanted to create an AIDS-like virus in 1969 and asked Congress for the money to do so (MacArthur's testimony before the House Subcommittee, July 9, 1969).
5. Neither the government nor the press nor the scientific community has made any effort to bring the above facts to the attention of the public, much less investigate their possible significance.
Given these facts, it demands a huge leap of faith not to suspect the worst. I don't recall anyone calling Anita Bryant and the clean-thinking crowd paranoid because it occurred to them that AIDS was God's scourge upon the wicked. Why is it paranoid to suspect human beings of genocide, but not to suspect God? Why blame God? God has never been convicted of persecuting or killing blacks, homosexuals, drug addicts or prostitutes. Human beings have. We have a rich historical record to demonstrate the horrors which man is quite able and willing to inflict on his fellow man. AIDS could be another one.
It is not difficult to imagine that if our worst suspicions are correct, those responsible have convinced themselves that they are doing God's work. If one accepts the Malthusian premise, AIDS may appear to be the only feasible way to keep the world from becoming unlivable, which would make its inventor a hero! Is it not worth sacrificing a few billion lives to disease, if it means saving the human species as a whole and preserving the earth as a "liveable place"? Are these not exactly the same grandiose strategic terms, the same philosophy, that our rulers use to justify all the wars they force us to endure? The relative few must be sacrificed for the greater good. A few million to save South Vietnam, a few billion to save the world.
Of course, the catch is that the "relative few" are always the relatively poor and powerless. It is the underclass who are the grunts in the AIDS war, just as they were in Vietnam and in all wars. Naturally, a portion of the middle class, and perhaps even a tiny fraction of the upper class, get caught under the wheels too, but this is a numbers game. And the numbers speak for themselves. They tell us that in the industrialized countries, it is non-whites, homosexuals, drug addicts and prostitutes who are getting hit disproportionately by AIDS. The NYT says more than half the AIDS cases are non-whites (31% blacks, according to the MacNeil-Lehrer report quoted above), and more than half the cases in women and children are blacks. Given the rate of spread of the disease in Africa and Asia, the percentage of non-whites who will be killed worldwide is much higher.
This does not necessarily add up to genocide, to an artificial origin of the AIDS virus. It does add up to a lot of questions which, despite the New York Times, are neither "bizarre" nor "paranoid," and are not being asked.
The answers, as in the other cases we have discussed, may not be forthcoming, in our lifetime or ever, but if we do not ask the questions, we have no one to blame for the consequences but ourselves.
In the end, it is we who are the enemy.