GEORGE ORWELL, AIDS EXPERT

By Martin Kaufman

June 2000

"The aim of the Party was not merely to prevent men and women from forming loyalties which it might not be able to control. Its real, undeclared purpose was to remove all pleasure from the sexual act. Not love so much as eroticism was the enemy, inside marriage as well as outside it. The sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion. Desire was thoughtcrime.

"It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way [Julia] put it was: 'When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?' That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy."

-- George Orwell, "1984"

"HIV equals AIDS equals death." It's a hypothesis that has created fabulous wealth for the establishment while providing the public relations bonanza of presenting them as caring, tolerant liberals. But the HIV theory is even better than that. It also has the side benefit of making people distrust one another and of keeping them, quite literally, from connecting with one another.

Noam Chomsky has pointed out that one of the methods by which the powerful maintain their power is to "atomize" people. This is done in many ways. The basic idea is to make people suspicious of one another so that they cannot act as a unified force against the powerful who oppress and steal from them. Power does this by creating and fostering ethnic rivalries, fear of foreigners, fear of your neighbors. They bust unions and subvert grassroots organizations, invent devils and Hitlers (Saddam, Milosevic, Bin Laden, etc.) as a lightning rod for people's anger and basically do everything in their considerable power to prevent solidarity from forming among the oppressed classes, and to prevent awareness from developing as to who it is that is really oppressing them.

AIDS serves this program well. It has made people suspicious of their fellow humans to a degree rarely encountered in history. With their insistence on condoms and, more ridiculously, such paraphernalia as "dental dams" for oral sex, the AIDS establishment has succeeded in numbing sexual pleasure to perhaps 10% of its primal force. Taming the sexual force is very important, because it keeps people from achieving higher states of consciousness and enables them to believe that they are something other than animals. Alienating people from their "inner animal" is critical to maintaining illegitimate power, for if people realized that they were animals they would question all the coercive trappings of authority that keep them caged--income tax, corporate tyranny, travel restrictions, searches and seizures, the criminalization of pleasure from things like sex and marijuana and the like. Religion is key to this too, of course, as is the entire propagandistic culture. The recent revelation that the CIA covertly funded the modern art movement in order to eliminate social consciousness from art should remove all doubt that the culture is controlled in many ways.

Sex with a condom is pseudo-sex at best. The real pleasure of sex is the joy of making a genuine connection with another person. There's no connection with a condom. An act that ought to be ecstatic is reduced to being merely pleasant. Forcing condoms on poor people all over the world has real benefits to Power because it prevents people from connecting, from feeling that solidarity, that oneness, with another. Oneness--the ancient belief that we many are all really one--is the greatest threat imaginable to Power. Power wants us to believe that we are all separate and should "look out for number one" and care little about our poor and suffering fellow creatures. Oneness, on the other hand, cannot tolerate unequal distribution of wealth, influence and privilege. Oneness says we must all be equal in every way. Oneness says that to hurt another is to hurt oneself. Oneness, therefore, must be destroyed, and there's no more fundamental way to destroy it than by making people terrified of the sexual connection.

"Safe sex" is really about ensuring that those with illegitimate power remain safe from those who would, quite rightly, take it away from them. In the realms of international policy, the same idea is commonly referred to as "stability."

This is not to suggest that rich white men met in a smoke filled room and decided to invent a story that there is a sexually-transmitted demon virus out there and that "we are all at risk." Not at all. But on an unconscious level, powerful policy makers probably realized how very convenient the HIV tale might be in the bigger picture. Not just as a source of money and moral authority, but as a method of control. Doubtless Robert Gallo and the rest really believe that HIV causes AIDS, and that they are selfless moral agents helping the world--it would be difficult for them to sleep at night if they didn't believe that. It's a cliché but true that people believe what it's convenient for them to believe.

So there you have it. A childish, simple-minded theory of disease elevated to unquestionable fact by those who benefit from it. Real causes of disease such as AZT peddled at breathtaking prices as "life-saving medicines." A hopelessly indoctrinated populace taught to believe that those who are trying to enlighten them are "crackpots" and "flat-earthers," and "holocaust deniers" who should be imprisoned as punishment for their skepticism, according to Mark Wainberg, head of the International AIDS Society. A media so subservient to power that their lead organ, the New York Times, not content with libeling and ridiculing those who challenge the HIV hypothesis, falsely report that President Mbeki of South Africa has conceded that he "knows that HIV causes AIDS," and, when informed that he never said this, repeat the lie in another story. Orwell would feel quite at home in the age of AIDS.

On a related note, a couple of weeks ago, browsing in a "dollar" store, I found a bin of canvas tote bags apparently left over from some convention. They bore the logo of the "Association of Cancer Executives," and I pictured hundreds of expensively dressed businesspeople munching canapes as they pressed their Nokias to their ears and tried to decide which of the new chemotherapy products and gene treatments might best pay for their next set of his and hers Lexus convertibles. And as for the question of perhaps preventing cancer? With healthy diets and by halting the wholesale dumping of carcinogenic chemicals into the environment? Something tells me it wasn't on the Association's agenda.

Martin can be contacted at martinveg@yahoo.com