Paranoid? Moi?

Paranoid/Paranoia
Media Buzzwords to Silence the Politically-Incorrect

By Dr. Alan Cantwell

Immediately after the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995 there was a media blitz blaming paranoid people and anti-government militia groups for the violent deaths. Now with the 9/11 bombings the media reports a “conspiracy lobby” whose basic premise is that President Bush/the CIA/Big Oil either planned the attacks or let them happen to secure the US oil pipeline/ take over the Middle East/ launch a one-world government.

In a Los Angeles Times op-ed piece (24 March, 2002), Gale Holland claims the so-called conspiracy lobby is a tiny but persistent subgroup spawned by the John F. Kennedy assassination and nurtured through the CIA/assassination-plot scandals of the following decades. To emphasise the silliness of conspiracy theory a large photo of Bin Laden is placed next to Elvis Presley, and captioned “Like Elvis Presley, Osama Bin Laden keeps popping up all over, especially in Utah, where he is often seen devouring a Big Mac.”

Predictably, Holland uses the paranoia buzzword in his final paragraph: “Sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction, but sometimes fiction is just fiction. Getting at the truth is tough, accepting it can be harder still. Paranoia is a lot easier. Sept. 11 may have robbed us of our sense of normalcy, but we can’t let it upset out reason.”

What is obvious is that the major media quickly accept the politically-correct version of an “official story” of an event, as provided by official government sources, and dump all politically-incorrect versions of the story into the conspiracy theory trash bin. Waging war on “evil-doers” everywhere is accepted; believing in conspiracy theories is unpatriotic and borders on treason. We demand documentation as proof of conspiracies, while incriminating documents are shredded by a team of well-paid lawyers, accountants, and executives, as in the case of the Enron and Arthur Andersen scandals.

Any researcher who has dug hard to find “the truth” knows that it is rarely found in the media. After all, the speciality of the major media is to provide new stories, not to solve the ills of society, nor to bore people with “old news.” Reporters pride themselves in unbiased reporting, by not taking sides or injecting personal opinion in their stories. Few news writers have the courage or ability tend to investigate potentially-explosive conspiracy theories that might embarrass the government, or their advertisers or editors – or even their readers.

Despite these shortcomings, the media seem to take pride in dismissing people as “paranoid” who believe in conspiracy theories of any kind.

According to Webster’s Dictionary, paranoia is a serious psychiatric diagnosis: a psychosis characterised by systematised delusions or persecution or grandeur usually without hallucinations. Paranoia can also be defined as a tendency on the part of an individual or group toward excessive and irrational suspiciousness and distrustfulness of others. People who exhibit such psychiatric traits are paranoid.

A definite diagnosis of paranoia requires the expertise of a psychiatric health professional. A diagnosis is made after a careful history and physical examination of the patient, and must include a detailed drug history and psychiatric observation.

All this is ignored by journalists who indiscriminately label people as paranoid. Their purpose is to discredit a person’s mind and reasoning ability. Unfairly labelling people as paranoid is malicious and evil; and the word can be as hateful as words like nigger, kike, and faggot. When terms like paranoia and paranoid are tossed around in the media, rational communication is no longer possible.

A paranoid person is not normal because paranoia indicates a diseased mind.

In their quest for power, politicians often portray their perceived enemies as diseased. Hitler was a master of this. After securing the cooperation of the German physicians, he rid the Third Reich of thousands of mental and physical defectives by murdering them. When this was accomplished, he turned on the Jews. He labelled the Jews as a cancer that needed to be cut out of a diseased Germany. Thus, the roots of the Holocaust were planted.

Labelling people as diseased is an effective way of discrediting and silencing them.

The media overkill of paranoia is evident in Michael Kelly’s “The Road to Paranoia,” a 13-page essay which appeared in The New Yorker, 19 June, 1995, shortly after the Oklahoma City bombing. According to Kelly, “There have always been radical fringes on both the left and the right which believe that the government conspires against the people. But lately, the two have formed a strange alliance – fusion paranoia – that is reaching millions of disaffected Americans.” He reviews the major conspiracy theories, and interviews conspiracist Bob Fletcher, a member of a political organisation called the Militia of Montana. Not surprisingly, Kelly makes Fletcher look like a friendly loony-bird.

As I read “The Road to Paranoia” I suddenly realised I was part of Kelly’s story. For almost a decade I had been promoting the idea that AIDS had originated as a genetically-engineered virus that was deliberately seeded into the Black African population and into the American gay male community via government-sponsored vaccine programs and experiments conducted in the late 1970s. (For a wealth of information on the man-made origin of AIDS, go to www.google.com and type in “AIDS biological warfare”. Also see, http://aidsbiowar.com.)

My publishing house, Aries Rising Press, had published two books on the subject of AIDS as a man-made epidemic, which were well-received and reviewed in the alternative press and totally ignored in the mainstream media. In 1989 my book, AIDS & The Doctors of Death, was offered for sale by an independent bookseller at the International AIDS Conference in Montreal. The presence of the book so infuriated officials of the World Health Organisation that they demanded the book be removed from the shelves and banned from the conference.

Despite all this I had not expected to find Aries Rising Press included in Kelly’s list of several dozen “rapidly growing alternative media that traffic in conspiracism.” Even the word “traffic” suggested that my Press was somehow involved in illegal activity, rather that bona-fide and well-documented research on the origin of HIV.

Kelly did mention the conspiratorial belief that “AIDS is a government plot to kill off blacks and homosexuals,” but no further details were provided. Also mentioned was a 1990 poll of African-Americans concluding that “a third believe that HIV was produced by scientists and disseminated through black neighbourhoods for the purpose of genocide.”

During the past two decades of media reports on the various theories of AIDS origin, the theory that the disease might be man-made is occasionally mentioned. However, the scientific evidence supporting this theory is never mentioned, and the idea is usually dismissed as misguided and paranoid.

Initially, the media heralded the green monkey theory of AIDS, first proposed by Robert Gallo, the so-called discoverer of the AIDS virus. In a just-published book entitled Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-up, and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo, Chicago Tribune reporter John Crewdson totally discredits Gallo’s discovery of HIV and claims the scientist actually pilfered the virus from French scientists at the Pasteur Institute. Crewdson, who first exposed the scientific irregularities of Gallo’s AIDS research in 1989, claims the resulting lawsuits were finally settled in 1993 and only through the intervention of high-ranking French and US government officials.

In addition, Gallo’s monkey theory has been replaced by the chimpanzee theory. Currently, the new government-approved “official story” of the origin of AIDS is that HIV began in the African rainforest when a chimp virus “jumped species”, most probably when a hunter cut his finger while butchering a chimp. How a Black heterosexual epidemic in Africa could have transformed itself into a disease exclusively found in white homosexual men in New York City in the late 1970s has never been convincingly explained.

Ex-New York City Health Commissioner Stephen Joseph, in his AIDS book, Dragon Within the Gates, also dismisses without explanation “the paranoid theories about AIDS being a deliberate invention of biological warfare.” However, he does note “the scars left by the Tuskegee experiment” in the Black community.

In this notorious government-sponsored syphilis experiment, public health doctors deliberately lied to black sharecroppers in Alabama for over 40 years. The men were never told they were infected with syphilis, and when a penicillin cure became available in the 1940s the doctors withheld treatment so that they could study the devastating effect of untreated syphilis. When the men died, the doctors rushed to get an autopsy, coaxing the family into giving permission by having the government pick up the tab for the funeral expenses. Under pressure from civil rights activists, this racist experiment was finally terminated in 1972.

Joseph writes that the memory of Tuskegee “fueled a conspiratorial theory that AIDS resulted from a biological experiment, gone awry, performed on Africans by the United States government.”

But conspiracy theorists know that government doctors and scientists, and the military, have conducted covert experiments on unsuspecting civilians for decades. Recently the nation was shocked to learn that physicians had performed dangerous radiation experiments on unsuspecting hospitalised patients from the 1940s up until the 1980s. After a half century of government cover-up, the proof was finally revealed when previously classified government documents were released by the Department of Energy. (For details, type in “Human Radiation Experiments” at google.com. Also see Pulitzer Prize-winning Eileen Welsome’s The Plutonium Files; America’s Secret Experiments in the Cold War.)

Only a fool would believe that government-sponsored conspiracies do not exist. History has proven that the media cannot protect us or inform us of vast government programs that hurt innocent people.

Charges of secret and unethical experiments against helpless citizens are not the ravings of paranoid people. On the contrary, they are serious accusations of an informed and enlightened citizenry.

It is time to speak out against falsely labelling people as paranoid.

Paranoid and paranoia are acceptable terms when used in a medical setting. But they have no place in slandering and denigrating people who express alternative views in a democratic society.

Alan Cantwell MD is a retired physician and cancer researcher who believes cancer is caused by bacteria and AIDS is man-made. There is probably no other physician on the planet whose publications are as controversial. Dr. Cantwell is a frequent contributor to New Dawn, and his various articles on AIDS and cancer can be found on the New Dawn website www.newdawnmagazine.com. Much of his research can be found on google.com, and thirty of his published papers can be accessed at www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed/ (type in Cantwell AR). He is the author of two books on the man-made epidemic of AIDS: AIDS and the Doctors of Death, and Queer Blood, and a book on the microbiology of cancer, The Cancer Microbe. Dr. Cantwell is now happily retired from the clinical practice of dermatology for 10 years, and lives in Hollywood, California. Email: alancantwell@sbcglobal.net.

The above article appeared in
New Dawn No. 72 (May-June 2002)
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