Plus Ça Change

As I've said, it was Turner's The Men Who Killed Kennedy that I saw in November 1988 that turned my head around, but not long after that, in January 1989, I saw another TV documentary, also on WDR, called AIDS - Die Afrikalegende (AIDS - The Africa Legend) that caused further neck-wrenching. You can still see this (in German) on YouTube. It caused a lot of controversy (which I only learned about later) because it included Jakob Segal's theory" that HIV was created at Ft. Detrick and released accidentally into the public in 1979. You can read now in many places that this theory has been "discredited" and supposedly shown to be a KGB and/or Stasi (Staatssicherheitsdienst, the East German intelligence service) concoction (e.g., here). Neither of these "facts" was clear to me then, nor are they clear to me now. Erhard Geißler, who seems to have insider knowledge of the intelligence connections in those days, says Segal acted independently and maintained his scientific opinions until his death in 1995, although the KGB and the Stasi disavowed them early on.

I do not know, to this day, whether Segal was right or wrong, or whether Robert Strecker, Alan Cantwell and others were right or wrong about the origin of HIV. Nor do I trust Wikipedia as anything more than "received opinion" (see here and here) on politically sensitive subjects. What I offer here is simply a case history of one lay person's attempt to form an opinion on what should be a scientific subject - the origin of the AIDS virus. That person is me, of course, and the subject is highly relevant today because exactly the same discussion is now going on about the origin of coronavirus.

If you have Looking for the Enemy you can skip the rest of this because it is almost identical with Chapter 4 of that book. It appeared on the internet (e.g. here) in 1994 but I have cleaned up the formatting to make it easier to read.

I would not change my conclusion ("Science stops where politics begins"), but I don't want to be discouraging. Corona hasn't (yet) caused as many deaths as AIDS (ca. 5.4 million vs 27.2 million-47.8 million), but the economic impact has been much greater, and most importantly, there are a lot more scientists engaged in the question of origin now than there were (and are) in the case with AIDS. Even the mainstream media have been forced to cover it, instead of covering it up. (See the many articles at U.S. Right to Know.) The internet and social media have made a big difference, e.g., just yesterday (Dec. 22) the Jimmy Dore show quoting from a recent Newsweek article, and Robert Kennedy's bestselling book The Real Anthony Fauci. I don't know how long it will last, but it seems that the mass media - intelligence forces are going to have a lot more trouble deep-sixing the origin question this time (see "Primary and Secondary Spook-Speak").

Time will tell. Even if science stops where politics begins, that's no reason to give up, especially when it's de'jà vu over and over again, as Yogi Berra said. It just means that when science reaches this point it has to be accompanied by political struggle. In what follows, just think "Covid-19" when you see "AIDS" and "SARS-Cov-2" when you see "HIV."