written October 4, 2001
for the third edition of
How the Chronicle Invented AIDS
(posted at www.whatisaids.com)

The best ally any brainwashing campaign ever has, be it for a disease or for a war, is a body count, the bigger and more vivid the better.

Until the AIDS campaign had AZT, the body count had to be conjured in the public imagination with phony statistics, scare projections, and with a raucous mass-media celebration of the death of Rock Hudson. The Gulf-War-CNN campaign was body-count deficient in its early days, and this might account for that war's mercifully short duration. As a curiously well-timed motion picture called Pearl Harbor recently reminded us, the campaign for World War II had no such deficiency. Unfortunately, the same goes for a campaign on the WWII model not yet officially called World War III.

When one dares to challenge the AIDS orthodoxy, the most vehement backlash comes from the believer who shrieks, "But how can you say that? My boyfriend (or whoever) died of AIDS!" as if the fact of death alone closed all inquiry.

Brainwashing experts say that a traumatized subject is the most susceptible. Funeral directors know this, and so do those who exploit the AIDS diagnosee. The media practitioners who sell us war are giddy with delight when they can exercise their mass psychology on a traumatized and grieving public. As if the 911 body count were not terrifying enough, the 911 campaigners follow up by conjuring in the public imagination future casualties of this latest war in the megadeath range. Compare those AIDS projections that we are fed every day.

official truth
On September 11 the media presented a traumatized and susceptible public with an explanation, a story. Despite the suspicious alacrity with which the suicidal-Arab-terrorist-hijacker explanation was broadcast, it was promptly cast in stone as the conclusive Official Truth, this in the absence of any supporting evidence whatsoever. (Compare the government, in the person of Dr, Gallo, with his 1981 official pronouncement that HIV was conclusively the cause of AIDS, also in the absence of any proof whatsoever, which is still the case today.) On 911, all information issued from a few officials in the Administration. If a reporter dared to ask at a press conference exactly how the official has obtained this critical information, the answer was that it was “classified.” In such a void, any disinformation can be established and become unanswerable to any of the standard tests of truth.

In this vacuum of information, free minds are invited to speculate on what really happened. Some interesting counter-explanations will no doubt be articulated outside of mass-media land.

By comparison with the events of September 11, Rock Hudson’s death was just a little pseudo-event. Yet, in its wake, the Chron’s headlines report the following AIDS-war mobilizations:

U.S. Okays Boost in Spending on AIDS (10/3/85), Celebrities Vow to Fight AIDS in Rock Hudson’s Memory (10/3), Acting SF School Chief to Seek AIDS Screening for Workers (10/8), Researchers Accelerate Human Tests of AIDS Treatments (10/8), Major SF Arts Orgs Raise $350,000 for AIDS Services (10/13), Defense Dept. to Screen all Military Personnel for AIDS (10/13), NY Gov Urges Ban on Bathhouse Sex (10/25).

Throwing money, mobilizing celebrities, instituting new restrictions and repressions: sound familiar?

Crisis. Reaction. Solution. And look out for those solutions. As with the war on AIDS, the solution is another deadly cure called the War on Terror.

The pressure of an agenda lurks behind these solutions. When the awaited crisis materializes, that pressure is released in a burst, as if on cue. There is a scripted feel to the whole process. The solutions fit well-known agendas too conveniently. In the mobilization for war, familiar campaigns are abetted. It begins to feel as if the crisis were brought into existence simply to provoke the reactions that permit the solutions. Issues of opportunism, of prior knowledge, collusion, and even outright contrivance of the precipitating event, begin to loom as the smoke clears and the critical consciousness recovers from the initial shock.

“There are two reasons for doing anything,” said J.P. Morgan, “the real reason and the one that shows.”

In retrospect we can now see how the collective consciousness had been primed in the news for the precipitating event of September 11, how the nebulous word “terrorist” had been established in the daily vocabulary, how the Arab-Palestinian suicide-bomber model had been cranked up in Israel by deliberate provocations. As with the “sick gay men,” the media imprints in the consciousness, by endless repetition, the words, the definitions, and the imagery. The language is prepared that will enable the brainwash. As with “AIDS,” the definition of “terrorist” intends to expand to encircle ever more high-risk groups.

As with AIDSpeak, the language of the official 911 story quickly becomes embedded in the culture. Even war protestors, for lack of an alternative terminology, may echo the official vocabulary, inadvertently buttressing the propaganda.

AIDS' brave future
Surprise. Awakening from the September 11 fear trance, we find that, in the name of the latest emergency, our right to freely travel has been de-facto restricted, a new level of surveillance of the citizenry has been certified, new standards of detention and of secret evidence. All this in just a few days of body counting.

If the WWIII salesmen are allowed to succeed in their campaign, the aging AIDS-scare campaign may recede into the background, obscured by the newly escalated level of ambient terror. But AIDS by now is so well established, so solidly institutionalized into the culture that it may no longer need much more scare campaigning.

Will AIDS try to find new reinforcement in the emerging war machine? It has already been hinted that the new national identity card could have as a prerequisite a combo of vaccinations including one for so-called AIDS. The CDC would flourish in a germ-warfare-scare environment. All established AIDS bureaucracies could find new teeth to sink into sexual nonconformists and into AIDS-dissident “terrorists.” *

After all, what is the purpose of a war if not to advance (for as long as the salesmen can make that war last) the more ruthless and murderous powers of rule?

- GT 10/4/01

* The first political activist to be jailed as a terrorist was an AIDS dissident, ACT-Up SF founder, David Pasquerelli.