The African Connection

 

The phenomenon of "lightning striking twice" should raise an eyebrow and a healthy suspicion in terms of the origins of AIDS and other emerging diseases.   For diseases like AIDS and ebola, lightning has "struck twice", so to speak,  multiple times and in multiple senses of the word.

 

The precipitation of AIDS among American gay men by hepatitis vaccine experiments is context for the similar allegations of AIDS spread among Africans  by polio and smallpox vaccination programs.

 

The book 'The River' by former BBC correspondent, Edward Hooper, devotes over 1000 pages to the subject of African AIDS origin.  He is not a "conspiracy theorist" in the sense of positing deliberation in the vaccine programs, but prefers to imagine that contamination existed and was accidental, caused by use of chimp tissues in the vaccine production.

 

Hooper is somewhat, but not entirely dismissive of biological warfare as leading to the birth of the AIDS epidemic.  The main reasons that he gives for denying biological warfare  and intentional introduction of the epidemics are 1) supposed 'early' AIDS cases, like an alleged 1959 case in Leopoldville, and 2) a 1992 "confession" by Yevgeni Primakov, the former head of Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, that the KGB had "lied" when it said that AIDS was created by Pentagon as a biological weapon.

 

In addition to missing the point about "lab creation of the virus" being a separate question from "intentional spreading of the virus", Hooper in this regard does not seem to recall the maxim, "The first casualty of war is Truth."  That truism applies whether the war is a small-scale one like Vietnam, or a large-scale one like WWII, or a biological war against "undesirable" populations that  men in power would like to see annihilated or reduced.

 

HIV as a virus both mutates quickly and degrades quickly outside the body, making retroactive diagnosis problematic, at best.  Immune suppression as a symptom can exist from other causes than simply HIV.  But even these factors are a small problem compared to the "Big Lie" technique, when it comes to judging the question of origin.  When the premise is on the order of biological warfare and genocide, anecdotal reports of "Patient Zero", "the Manchester sailor", the "1959 AIDS case in Leopoldville" and so on have no more inherent credibility than wartime media reports of civilian casualty counts.  This is not a conspiracy theorist's self-justifying convenience or laxity so much as it is an inevitable reality of how the world works.  The problem of an expert "witness for hire" exists in normal courtroom settings, much less when powerful institutions like the CIA or Pentagon are looking for shills or partisan true-believers who will say whatever is dictated and then have it trumpeted and ballyhooed by cooperating media outlets.

 

Ironically, Hooper does a good job of disputing the "remote village" mythology that is widely promoted to create the notion that AIDS has long existed and simply went unnoticed.    Hooper points how even back in the days of slavery, millions of Africans were imported from all corners of the African continent, with very little territory that was unexplored or untrampled.

 

Claims of "early AIDS" would be predictable propaganda for the very illusion that is would be "exonerating".

 

 It would also pay to wary of propaganda in subsequent denials from Russian intelligence concerning AIDS origin, contradicting their own earlier allegations.  Why should the first claim be assumed as the "lie" and the reverse claim presumed to be "the truth"?  For the media to act is if the renunciation were a "final word", to be taken at face value, is a sign of bias and agenda.

 

Primakov had been appointed by Yeltsin, who at the time was expressing the desire for a new friendship with the U.S, saying, "From now on, the relationship will be characterized by friendship and partnership founded on mutual trust and respect and a common commitment to democracy and economic freedom."

 

A bombshell of a revelation about U.S. genocide certainly would have interfered with that newfound friendship, so the pressure on Primakov to backpedal was probably significant.

 

As it turned out, Yeltsin's "reforms" turned out more to be a creation of wealthy oligarchs, and the desire for warm relations with the U.S. took an unfortunate turn when Yeltsin launched Vladimir Putin's rise to power.  There is little reason to suppose that an intelligence-world claim coming in a period of Russian friendship would necessarily be more trustworthy than a claim made during a period of Russian enmity.   An "enemy" will tell the truth about his enemy's wrongdoings, while a friend might cover this friend's back.

 

Lightning struck twice not only with the mutual vaccine connections, but with the closely timed emergence of two unprecedented diseases, AIDS and ebola.   While gay men were involved in vaccine trials the late 1970s that would later reveal AIDS to the world, the first ebola cases appeared in 1976, simultaneously in two different locations in Africa.

 

The symptoms of AIDS and ebola are dramatic.  For the first ebola outbreaks in Africa, one had a mortality rate of 53% and the other had a mortality rate of 89%.   It should seem like a common-sense conclusion that ebola did not exist "unnoticed" for a long time, unless everyone was failing to notice people vomiting blood and dying.  

 

In the pursuit of biological weapons, it is not the norm to pursue a single virus, but to research an entire "alphabet soup" of viruses.

 

In a discussion with a microbiologist concerning the African AIDS epidemic, I once offered the opinion that the epidemiology would have been different in the "accident" scenario, that the spread of AIDS would not have tracked so closely in time and place where the vaccines had been dispensed.   If a primate virus "accidentally" got into the vaccines, it would have taken more time to adapt to human tissue, would have infected only a few people at first, and spread more slowly.  It would not have spread with an efficiency as if you were mowing down victims in a hail of bullets.  To this, the microbiologist's response was simply "Bingo."

 

Black Africans are painfully aware of how their population was regarded as both a source of cheap labor, an inferior breed, and an impediment to exploitation of the natural resources of their continent.  The parallels of the African and American gay experiences are pointing in all probability to any even broader scale of genocidal intent.