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The Function of the Fake Binary

By Catte | OffGuardian | May 16, 2022

In his 1998 book The Common Good, Noam Chomsky describes the key role that managed disagreements play in modern politics…

The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum — even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate…”

This remains true despite the increasingly obvious fact that Chomsky himself is part of that function.

What he’s describing is the “fake binary”. The imposition of the idea that Viewpoint A is the official approved narrative and that Viewpoint B is therefore its antithesis.

Points C through Z can therefore be ignored.

The fact hidden in plain sight being that both Viewpoint A and Viewpoint B actually reinforce the overarching narrative being sold and both lead to the same place.

It’s an incredibly effective management tool.

A fake binary allows you to not just manipulate the conformist Normies who automatically obey, but also those who consider themselves to be ‘anti-establishment’, contrarians or ‘rebels’.

How are fake binaries created? They are often initially introduced by the following methods…

💢Using the legacy media to widely publicize Viewpoint B while appearing to deny, refute or ridicule it.

💢 “Leaking” allegedly confidential documents that “expose” Viewpoint B as the “hidden truth”. This is usually done through the legacy media, though it’s more effective if you can seed it through the indy media sector.

💢 Creating entities that are tagged as “anti-establishment” but given a mass following, and feeding them Viewpoint B material.

Once Viewpoint B becomes a dominant “anti-establishment” view you can afford to sit back and allow the oppositional instinct in human nature to do your work for you, and reinforce the fake binary you created without the slightest awareness this is what is happening.

It becomes widely understood that the only solution to the obvious and real evils of Viewpoint A is Viewpoint B.

The fact Viewpoint B actually concedes all the same falsehoods contained in Viewpoint A remains unnoticed and anyone pointing this out tends to be attacked by both sides.

Fake binaries are a godsend to the opinion-managers.

We’ll be talking more about this in the near future…

May 17, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment

I Read Bill Gates’ New Book (So You Don’t Have To!)

Corbett • 05/10/2022

Have you read How to Prevent the Next Pandemic by Bill Gates yet? Well, I have, and let me tell you: it’s every bit as infuriating, nauseating, ridiculous, laughable and risible as you would expect. Here are the details.

Watch on Archive / BitChute / Odysee or Download the mp4

For those with limited bandwidth, CLICK HERE to download a smaller, lower file size version of this episode.

For those interested in audio quality, CLICK HERE for the highest-quality version of this episode (WARNING: very large download).

SHOW NOTES:

How to Prevent the Next Pandemic (video)

Who Is Bill Gates?

I Read  The Great Narrative (So You Don’t Have To!)

Fact Check: Polio Vaccines, Tetanus Vaccines and the Gates Foundation

Partners in Health

A Framework for Understanding Pathogens, Explained by Sunetra Gupta

Rahm Emanuel argument

Meet the GERM team

Episode 417 – The Global Pandemic Treaty: What You Need to Know

Trump calling the Warp Speed MAGA jabs his “greatest achievement”

Trump was going to appoint RFK Jr. to head a vaccine safety panel

Bill Gates told him it was a bad idea?

Who Is Bill Gates?

WHO Cares What Celebrities Think – #PropagandaWatch

Japan logged record low number of newborns in 2021 with 842,897

The Real Anthony Fauci

A Letter to the Future

May 10, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular, Video | , , | Leave a comment

It’s Time We Get Answers About the FBI’s Involvement In the OKC Bombing

By John Kline | The Libertarian Institute | April 27, 2022

This past week marked the 27th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. As the worst terrorist act committed on U.S. soil at the time, we all know the reported facts of the horrific event well: a 27-year-old Desert Storm-vet, Timothy McVeigh, acting with minimal help from Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, detonated a 7,000-pound fertilizer bomb from a parked Ryder truck outside the federal Alfred P. Murrah building, killing 168 people, 19 of them children.

Two years later, in 1997, McVeigh was convicted of “Using a weapon of mass destruction resulting in death,” among other federal charges. For a time, he was held on the same cell block as the Unabomber and WTC-bomber Ramzi Yousef (who tried to convert him to Islam), before being put to death by lethal injection in 2001.

There is much we still don’t know about the case, however. Thanks to years of heroic work by people like Salt Lake City-based attorney Jesse Trentadue, writer and researcher J.M. Berger, and independent investigative reporter Wendy S. Painting, the American public is slowly learning more and more key (and disturbing) facts about the case. Facts involving the FBI’s possible incitement of McVeigh and the subsequent cover-up of these facts by Newsweek magazine.

FBI incitement is more topical than ever, of course. Reports of the FBI being involved in Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer’s kidnapping plot and of FBI agents and assets being involved in the January 6th events has collapsed whatever level of trust the public had with federal law enforcement, not to mention the mainstream media whose related coverage rarely digs deeper than the government’s official line.

What other crimes have been committed or conspiracies planned, the public wonders, where the initial momentum was actually created the FBI? How much have FBI infiltrators pushed constitutionally protected “heated talk” into the unlawful planning and execution of deadly crimes? To what extent has the FBI been, as the saying goes, arsonists posing as firefighters? These are especially important questions when it comes to the OKC bombing.

Operation PATCON

As most know, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies have conducted surveillance and infiltration operations against right-wing groups for decades. Chief among them being the “Patriotic Conspiracy” or “PATCON” operation. Despite its official ending in late 1993 (although some say it was carried forward in some form), PATCON only became public in 2007 thanks to a public records request.

Partly citing internal FBI documents, Painting in her explosive 2016 book about PATCON and McVeigh, describes how the former’s secret operatives and paid informers “were given license to engage in provocateur activities and instructed to make known their willingness to commit violence and advocate for the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.”1 She quotes one informer who went public about the operation, John Matthews, saying he realized that although initially told “the objective was to infiltrate and monitor,” he would later come to understand that its real objective was to “to infiltrate and incite.”2 This, says Matthews, included providing “the ideas, detailed instructions, and even live C4 explosives and automatic weapons to targeted individuals as a way of entrapping them into terrorist plots, so the FBI could capitalize on foiled and actualized plots.”3 According to Trentadue, through PATCON, the FBI was actually trying to sow a full-on rebellion.

While the FBI has indeed infiltrated hard-left and Islamic groups in the past, the extent and complete failure of the FBI’s overreach when it comes to right-wing groups (which diversely included pro-gun, ultra-libertarian, survivalist, and white racist or advocacy groups) makes this area especially alarming. For instance, there was just one minor conviction over stolen military night-vision goggles that was ever made through PATCON, and it relied on army, not FBI, intelligence. As Oklahoma City journalist J.D. Cash said about PATCON and certain precursor programs of the 1980s, “there isn’t a neo-Nazi or racist group in the country that isn’t operationally controlled by the FBI.” This seems to concur with what a former young Aryan Nation-member told Painting for her book4:

It was well known that at any Aryan Nation event, in a crowd of 300 people, there’d be at least 30 undercover federal agents in attendance to monitor us, and another third of the crowd were informants… It was rampant, just like cops at a Grateful Dead show trying to sell people LSD.

One of those assets was Vietnam War veteran John Matthews. Up until 1986, the government had been supporting U.S. civilian groups conducting operations in Nicaragua for anti-communist contra forces; a cause which Matthews chose to serve. When such efforts turned into a political scandal, however, the government broke-off ties with these groups and refused to help its members. This included people like Matthews’ fellow soldier Tom Posey who would later be indicted on weapons-smuggling charges.5 While he beat the rap, Posey felt cheated and shifted his efforts to anti-U.S. government organizing. When he revealed plans to break into a federal armory, however, Matthews contacted the FBI, establishing a relationship with law enforcement that led him to infiltrate over 20 militia, libertarian, gun-rights, and racist groups over a 20-year period.

Matthews, who has long been suffering from an Agent-Orange-related cancer, is key to what understanding we have about PATCON’s connection to the OKC bombing. In the early nineties, Matthews was assigned to attend a PATCON-infiltrated, militia-training camp in Texas. While there, he met Timothy McVeigh. After the bombing and when McVeigh was arrested, Matthews immediately recognized him and called his FBI handler, Don Jarrett, to tell him this was the same man he saw at the Texas training camp. Jarrett assured Matthews they knew this already and told him to “forget about it.”

In interviews with Painting, Matthews says he was disturbed by this for a few reasons, a major one being, she paraphrases, that “if they were watching McVeigh and friends back then, they had likely continued watching them throughout the bombing plot.”6 “I felt Don knew more about this,” he said elsewhere.

What other items he knew may have been what came out later in Trentadue’s public records suit against the FBI. Dozens of witnesses to the bombing had apparently reported to police and the FBI they had seen someone in the passenger side of McVeigh’s truck while parked outside the Murrah building. Other witnesses reported seeing McVeigh with several people at his motel the night before, including someone sitting at some point behind the wheel of the truck—And Nichols himself (who was in Kansas when the bombing took place) told journalists in 2007 that FBI provocateurs had lent their support to McVeigh’s plans.7

Also disturbingly, using a fertilizer truck to blow up a federal building had been an idea Matthews had actually heard a few times before, including from suspected FBI infiltrators. For instance, he had heard it raised by two militia members he met who later became part of a busted plot to rob a bank, but who never got arrested, let alone jailed for it.

All of this would seem to point to the OKC bombing being something like 2010’s Operation Fast and Furious, in which the FBI intentionally put guns into the hands of criminals, but failed to close the loop leading to a border agent being killed by a Mexican cartel. Was OKC a similar ‘gunwalking case gone awry’? Only one, far, far deadlier? Someone who McVeigh contacted two weeks before the bombing, Andy Strassmeir, later told a journalist it is possible the FBI was “going to arrest McVeigh at the site with the bomb in hand, but he didn’t come at the right time.” “[M]aybe he changed the time”, he said, “you never know with people who are so unreliable.”8

Newsweek’s Complicity

In 2011, wishing to tell his story before he died, Matthews was put in touch with former Associated Press-writer and then-editor of Newsweek, John Solomon. At the time, Newsweek was still foremost in the U.S. media field, coming in second in circulation only to Time magazine. It was an important and respected news source. Over months, Solomon and article-author Ross Schneiderman worked with Matthews and other sources, including former FBI officials, to confirm everything he told them about the murky workings of PATCON, including the unanswered questions about its operatives’ possible involvement in the OKC bombing.

Enter Newsweek managing editor, Tina Brown. Above the heads of Solomon and Schneiderman, Brown (who left in 2013 and has been blamed for the periodical’s collapse) took what may have been a Pulitzer-worthy piece of journalism and cut away virtually all detail that could directly or indirectly impugn the government for the fallout of its PATCON operations. In the process, she reduced the original 7,000-word draft (found here) down to a mere 4,000 words (found here). As the since-defunct Examiner detailed at the time, all of the aforementioned suspicions Matthews aired about the FBI’s hand in the OKC bombing were cut.

Brown’s puzzling decision had real consequences for Matthews. As Painting recounts in her book, the dying Matthews had taken a lot of risk by coming forward. He was now Newsweek’s cover story, but for reasons that had been omitted. Now, he was still a target but “for no good reason and he regretted coming forward.”9

More broadly, by keeping such information away from the public, Brown was confirming the existence of a state-media axis in America. While examples of such direct state-interventions into our otherwise free media system are rare (although certainly plentiful enough), media analysts like Noam Chomsky have long posited that, yes, news outlets do profit off the circulation of their stories and are thus incentivized to objectively report on events potentially embarrassing to the powerful elite. But, the big media houses still need government access and wish to maintain good relations with major power centers; hence, their occasional compliance with direct government demands—One might add the promise of future political jobs as an incentive for compliance or, in cases such as this where right-wing groups were clearly being mistreated, plain old liberal media bias (consider, for instance, the fairly widereporting on the FBI’s infiltration of Islamic extremist groups).

It seems without a doubt that the FBI did get to Brown. At the time Matthews approached Newsweek, Attorney General Eric Holder’s Operation Fast and Furious-debacle was still in the news. How could the Obama Administration handle yet another and far bigger scandal involving the FBI helping dangerous people do harm against innocent Americans?

More Alarming Questions about FBI Conduct

Elsewhere, the FBI has demonstrated a serious interest in keeping any questions about the OKC bombing firmly under wraps. When Matthews was slated to testify in Trentadue’s 2014 public records case over the release of Murrah building surveillance footage, his fear of retaliation led to the judge allowing him to testify at a secret location by video—Trentadue thought what Matthews had witnessed while a PATCON operative would help provide a motive for what had become the FBI’s ongoing, unlawful refusal to provide the footage under public records law.

And despite the judge’s precautions, Matthews’s testimony still never took place. At the last minute, Matthews was supposedly threatened with having his VA medical benefits cut off and told to “stand down” by Jarrett and another FBI agent, Adam Quirk. Such a rank case of witness tampering, in fact, led to the judge ordering the FBI to reveal what exactly they had communicated to Matthews; an investigation that has been strangely ongoing since 2015.

At the heart of Trentadue’s marathon public records case certainly has the FBI worried. Someone who did manage to testify early on in the case was an Oklahoma police officer and first responder to the OKC bombing. He told the court he witnessed the FBI actually stop the beginning of the recovery process while victims were still under piles of rubble in order to remove a surveillance camera from the Murrah building. Some believe the camera would have recorded anyone else besides McVeigh who left the truck after it was parked and, in fact, did so.

Finally, there’s the questions about the FBI’s conduct vis-à-vis Trentadue himself. Why Trentadue got involved with the OKC case is because six weeks after the bombing, his brother Kenneth, another war vet, was taken into custody after a traffic incident triggered a parole violation relating to a minor event from years previous. Soon after, he was found hanging in a cell of a federal detention center.

Photos released to Trentadue following a subsequent lawsuit against the federal Bureau of Prisons, however, showed his brother’s throat having been cut and his body covered in bruises—authorities had apparently tried to cover his wounds with make-up before releasing it to Kenneth’s family. The theory behind his death is, having shared a close resemblance with someone called Richard Guthrie, a white supremacist who the FBI thought had information about the OKC bombing, Kenneth was mistaken as Guthrie and taken in by the FBI for interrogation. McVeigh himself called and advised Trentadue of this, telling him he heard that the FBI had indeed mistaken Kenneth for Guthrie and that his death was the result of a botched interrogation session.

Adding to suspicions, the DOJ formed a special team to handle media inquiries and the Trentadue family’s immediate requests for information. It apparently obstructed and delayed the Trentadue’s right to know what happened to Kenneth in every way it could, even when it came to releasing his corpse. Who happened to be the head of this operation (dubbed internally as “the Trentadue Mission”)?10 Then-Deputy Attorney General, Eric Holder.

Finally, there are the other related and mysterious deaths. After Guthrie himself was arrested, he told the LA Times he had “a couple grand juries to talk to” about what really happened with the OKC bombing, and was also later found hanging in his cell.11

And later in 1999, a supposed inmate and witness to Kenneth’s murder, Alden Gillis Baker, threatened to come forward about what he saw. He too was later found hanging in his cell.12

Conclusion

The details surrounding the OKC bombing show it to have all the elements of a “perfect,” post-war American tragedy: Vietnam vets disrespected by the liberal-media class and tossed aside by a government they loyally served; an unhinged federal bureaucracy using its sprawling resources to violate the civil rights of poor and ignored Americans; and, a state-liberal media-axis willing to cover up for government when the “cause” was right.

And consider the following. Even if we ignore the aforementioned evidence about the FBI’s hand in the OKC bombing, remember that the twin motivations for McVeigh’s crimes were Waco and Ruby Ridge—McVeigh chose April 19 as his bombing date because it was the same day as the Waco massacre two years previous. Matthews has actually expressed the view that both massacres had PATCON fingerprints all over them. That’s certainly the case with Ruby Ridge. There, a federal agent/infiltrator pushed former Green Beret Randy Weaver into selling him an illegal sawed-off shotgun. This led to his attempted arrest and an eventual standoff, which then led to the shooting deaths of his 14-year-son by federal marshals and his unarmed wife (baby in hand) by an FBI sniper.

In public and in private correspondence, McVeigh tore into the federal government over these events, expressing fear of a state that was at war with its own citizens. Without federal law enforcement acting so heinously in these events, it’s likely McVeigh would not have carried out the crime that he did.

Further, these rank FBI abuses ironically pushed “right-wing terror groups” to become the threat we were warned about all along. As the original Newsweek article rightly said about Ruby Ridge, the FBI’s conduct “quickly galvanized the radical right like never before” with talks between “various white supremacists, Neo-Nazis and anti-government groups… about joining forces… quickly turn[ing] to action.”

And as Painting writes, even more absurd perhaps, Ruby Ridge was used by federal law enforcement as a justification for increased PATCON resources and investigatory powers.13

So, we have FBI abuses leading to organized rage and resistance, which is then given even more momentum by FBI infiltration and incitement. And with the help of a media sphere that refuses to do its job, all of this works to amp up yet more fear, anxiety and division among the public. It’s a spinning wheel which loyal, patriotic Americans never asked for and certainly want off of.

While we should certainly hope these allegations can be explained away, it’s high-time the OKC victims and the American people generally get the transparency they deserve about what really happened that fateful day.

May 9, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Deception, False Flag Terrorism, Mainstream Media, Warmongering | , | Leave a comment

Dr Coleman’s Banned Covid-19 Book Is Back

By Dr Vernon Coleman – The White Rose UK05/05/2022

In September 2020 I put together a 500 page book containing the transcripts of the ‘Old Man in a Chair’ videos I had made for YouTube – plus the articles I wrote in that period.

The book was called Covid-19: The Greatest Hoax in History. The subtitle was ‘The startling truth behind the planned world takeover’.

I wanted a paperback version of this book so that those who want to help spread the truth can share copies with those who might be influenced by the facts. It is important to understand – and remember – how this fraud unfolded. Only by remembering and understanding the past can we really understand the extent of the evil that has unfolded.

The book starts with material broadcast on April 28th 2020 (when my earlier book Coming Apocalypse had finished) and continues until September 2020.

The content is as startling and as accurate today as it was when I originally tried to publish it. It provides a blow by blow account and an analysis of how the hoax unfolded.

I tried to publish this book three times and three times it was quickly banned because the information it contained was considered too dangerous.

YouTube removed all the videos and eventually banned me. (I am now banned from accessing YouTube as well as having a YouTube channel.)

For two years, the only place the book was available as a paperback was Japan where the book is available as five volumes. I’m delighted that a publisher has agreed to publish an English language paperback and an eBook. The publisher is not based in the UK or the US.

Throughout the months to which these essays relate, the laws being brought in around the world were changing almost daily. The only consistent factors were the ever-growing power of the World Health Organisation and Bill Gates, and a complete lack of official interest in the science and the truth.

It was in that period that I devised my specially written triptych – designed according to the psy-op principles used on the British people – ‘Distrust the Government: Avoid Mass Media: Fight the Lies.’

I warned about the damage that would be done by the lockdowns (pointing out that they would kill far more people than covid-19, the demonization of cash (and its replacement with digital money) and the explosion in the number of Do Not Resuscitate notices being issued on the elderly and the infirm. I warned about tests being used to collect DNA. I warned about the way that our world was being changed to prepare us for the Great Reset.

Worried by the safety and effectiveness of the promised vaccine, I tried, unsuccessfully, to make a £100,000 bet with Dr Fauci (in the US) and Dr Whitty (in the UK) about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine.

Covid 19: the Greatest Hoax in History by Vernon Coleman is now available as a paperback and an eBook.

If you would like a copy please go to: www.korsgaardpublishing.com and press the button marked ‘Our Books’. You’ll then see Covid-19: The Greatest Hoax in History.

May 6, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , | Leave a comment

Former NATO Commander Disguises War Propaganda as Novel

By Patrick Macfarlane | The Libertarian Institute | April 26, 2022

On March 9, 2021, the former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO, Admiral James Stavridis, co-authored a fiction novel with Elliott Ackerman, another former U.S. military officer. The book, entitled 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, imagines a kinetic war between the United States and China.

Given the pedigree of its authorship, the novel provides a compelling window into the psychology of NATO’s military leadership and, correspondingly, the foreign policy establishment behind it. To those familiar with said psychology, the events of the novel will not be surprising.

It begins with a Chinese ambush of a U.S. vessel in the South China Sea; an Iranian capture of a U.S. pilot; a full scale naval battle between the U.S. and China (resulting in a total U.S. defeat); and a Russian invasion of Poland. The novel concludes with a limited nuclear exchange between the U.S. and China.

Given the last few decades’ hawkish hand wringing about Chinese and Russian cyber capabilities, the tactics employed in the novel are similarly unsurprising. A Chinese cyberattack disables U.S. hardware, allowing the naval rout. The Iranians, as allies of Russia and China, similarly disable U.S. aircraft. For their part, the Russians slice underwater communications cables leading to a complete internet blackout in the West.

To an uncritical reader, the novel appears to be a “cautionary tale” and a “warning” against global conflict. The novel’s dust jacket states:

Everything in 2034 is an imaginative extrapolation from present-day facts on the ground combined with the authors’ years working at the highest and most classified levels of national security. Sometimes it takes a brilliant work of fiction to illuminate the most dire of warnings: 2034 is all too close at hand, and this cautionary tale presents the reader a dark yet possible future that we must do all we can to avoid.

Mainstream outlets were as successful in their attempts to paint 2034 as a “warning” as their reviews were cringeworthy.

Wired, which ran a series of exclusive pre-print excerpts, had this to say:

WIRED HAS ALWAYS been a publication about the future—about the forces shaping it, and the shape we’d like it to take. Sometimes, for us, that means being wild-eyed optimists, envisioning the scenarios that excite us most. And sometimes that means taking pains to envision futures that we really, really want to avoid.

By giving clarity and definition to those nightmare trajectories, the hope is that we can give people the ability to recognize and divert from them. Almost, say, the way a vaccine teaches an immune system what to ward off. And that’s what this issue of WIRED is trying to do…

Consider this another vaccine against disaster. Fortunately, this dose won’t cause a temporary fever—and it happens to be a rippingly good read. Turns out that even cautionary tales can be exciting, when the future we’re most excited about is the one where they never come true.

The Washington Post’s review was almost worse.

This crisply written and well-paced book reads like an all-caps warning to a world shackled to the machines we carry in our pockets and place in our laps, while only vaguely understanding how the information stored in and shared by those devices can be exploited. We have grown numb to the latest data breach—was it a pollical campaign (Hillary Clinton’s), or one of the country’s biggest credit-rating firms (Equifax), or a hotel behemoth (Marriott), or a casual-sex hookup site (Adult Friend Finder), or government departments updating their networks with the SolarWinds system (U.S. Treasury and Commerce)?

In “2034,” it’s as if Ackerman and Stavridis want to grab us by our lapels, give us a slap or two, and scream: Pay attention! George Orwell’s dystopian masterpiece, “Nineteen Eighty-four: A Novel” was published 35 years before 1984. Ackerman’s and Stavridis’s book takes place in the not-so-distant future when today’s high school military recruits will just be turning 30.

Between Wired’s ham-handed COVID-19 vaccine analogy and the CIA Washington Post’s ironic Orwell reference, the mainstream marketing campaign clearly attempts to portray the novel as a cautionary tale.

It is impossible to gaze into the hearts of men, but we do have some clues. Those clues suggest that the co-authors really do seek to warn against war with China. However, in doing so, they advocate for it. Indeed, their warning is not against the folly of empire, but against a rising China.

Ultimately the co-authors’ MacBethian premonition of conflict necessitates escalatory U.S. policy.

On March 18, 2021, the pair were interviewed by NPR. Stavridis had this to say:

… a subtext in all of this [the novel] is to strike a warning bell about the rise of China and the propensity in human history going back 2,500 years almost any time a [sic] established power is challenged by a rising power, it leads to war. It’s a dangerous moment. And 15 years from now, I think, will be a moment of maximum danger because China will have advanced in its military capability and technology. Therefore, our military deterrent will somewhat decline. We’re standing in the danger, as we say in the Navy.

Ackerman embraces this view:

…and we’re not only sounding the alarm bell, but the book is also trying to situate where America is in this moment of 2034.

Further, the pair assert they do not believe in the American decline.

Interviewer (to both): “…do you believe this, that America will be the author of its own destruction?”

Stavridis: “I believe there are many in the world who do believe that. I personally do not… there are many in the world who believe our best days are somehow behind us. They would be miscalculating, in my view, to believe that.”

Ackerman: “I would add I am by no way a believer in the decline of America. And I am very much committed to the idea of the American ideal. That being said, looking back throughout our entire history, the greatest threat is us turning inward and destroying that ideal. Lincoln himself said – I’m paraphrasing, but basically said that if America is going to destroy itself, we will be the author and the finisher. And I think he says, a nation of free men will live forever or die by suicide. And I don’t think that’s Lincoln being a declinist about the United States. But I think it’s him recognizing that our divisiveness can oftentimes be the greatest threat and what leaves us the most unable to respond to challenges from outside the country.”

Indeed, a reader would be hard pressed to find any point where the co-authors suggest any strategy short of increasing military confrontation with China.

Instead, they warn that America must be more united against an outside threat. It must, by implication, build up its military force, and, oddly enough, confront Chinese technological advances with less reliance on our own technology.

Stavridis expanded on his China policy prescriptions in a June 2021 interview:

The South China Sea is a vital entry point for the United States today. It’s a massive body of water full of oil and gas as well as fisheries, and about 40 percent of global trade passes through it.

So, there are strong strategic reasons, as the United States values its alliances in Asia, to push back against Chinese claims.

It is not just the South China Sea but also the East China Sea, where the Senkaku Islands lie, that are vital to American interests as long as our allies operate there and trade flows through there.

And above all we simply as an international community cannot acquiesce to China’s preposterous claims, which have been rejected by international law.

Indeed, a number one red line would be an attack against our allies.

For example, if China attacked and tried to forcibly take the Senkaku Islands, that would be a red line for the United States. Or an attack against the Philippines, another treaty ally of the United States. An attack against any treaty allies would be the number one red line.

A second red line would be trying to attack U.S. military personnel operating in the South China Sea.

We conduct what we call “freedom of navigation patrols.” These are our warships sailing through international waters such as the South China Sea.

If China were to attack a U.S. ship to attempt to demonstrate their view that they own the South China Sea, that would be a red line. In fact, the book “2034” opens with an attack involving U.S. military personnel being killed in the South China Sea.

Stavridis believes that the U.S. must continue to devote itself to entangling alliances, against which the founding fathers warned. The U.S. must also continue to press its presence in the South China Sea.

Despite resolutely warning against a war against China, Stavridis commits the U.S. to myriad tripwires that would ignite it.

These China policy positions parallel Stavridis’ positions on Ukraine. It’s always more, more, more.

More funding, arming, and training Ukrainians, more U.S. commitment to NATO, more U.S. weaponization of Big Tech, more money to the U.S. State Department, more interagency cooperation, and more silencing dissent. These positions are escalatory. At the very least, they flirt with making Washington a direct party to the War in Ukraine. They may give Russia reason to attack U.S. and NATO forces.

Given Russia’s nuclear footing, these policies pose an existential threat to humanity itself.

Indeed, it will always be a mystery how the hawks convinced the American public that the path to peace leads through war. Perhaps those of us who survive the inevitable result of this mantra can ponder the answer while painting on the cave walls.

Patrick MacFarlane is the Justin Raimondo Fellow at the Libertarian Institute where he advocates a noninterventionist foreign policy. He is a Wisconsin attorney in private practice. He is the host of the Liberty Weekly Podcast at www.libertyweekly.net, where he seeks to expose establishment narratives with well researched documentary-style content and insightful guest interviews. His work has appeared on antiwar.com and Zerohedge. He may be reached at patrick.macfarlane@libertyweekly.net

May 5, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Militarism | , | Leave a comment

The Nation’s Top Scientists Lied

By Dr. Scott Atlas | Brownstone Institute | April 13, 2022

This adapted excerpt is from Dr. Scott W. Atlas’ bestselling book, A Plague Upon Our House, published by Bombardier. 

CDC Director Robert Redfield’s congressional testimony on September 23, 2020, immediately caught my attention. I watched in disbelief as Redfield told Congress that “more than 90 percent of the population”—more than three hundred million people in the US—remains susceptible to the illness.

The statement was based on incomplete and outdated data, as well as an apparent lack of understanding of the literature, and it struck me as one of the most erroneous and fear-inducing proclamations of any public health official to that moment. Approximately two hundred thousand Americans had already died from COVID; the last thing the public needed was an exaggeration of the future risks, implying to some that ten times that number could still die.

First of all, the numbers didn’t add up. At that point, confirmed cases in the US already totaled approximately seven million, and the CDC itself had estimated that approximately ten times the number of confirmed cases, a very conservative estimate, were likely to have had the infection. A Stanford seropositivity study back in April had shown that confirmed cases underestimated the total infections by a factor of approximately forty times. It made no sense that only 9 percent, or thirty million Americans, had been infected.

Second, the 9 percent calculation was blatantly wrong. That number came from antibody testing by the states. I looked at the CDC website myself, and sure enough, the data was based on antiquated testing from several states.

Some antibody totals were pulled from several months earlier, before many of those states had experienced a significant number of cases. It therefore grossly underestimated the number of cases that had already occurred. The data was simply not valid, but you needed to pay attention to the details.

More importantly, Redfield’s basic claim was fundamentally flawed. The conclusion that serum antibody testing revealed the entire population of those protected from COVID was counter to an entire body of published literature and contrary to fundamental knowledge of immunology, including other coronavirus infections.

It was well known that antibody tests showed one cross-section in time—they were transient—even though immune protection can last. From studies on SARS-2 and most other viruses, antibody levels change over a span of months. They typically appear in the first couple of weeks, peak in a few months, and then decrease over a span of several months.

The literature on COVID had already shown these patterns. A month before this press conference, a Nature Reviews Immunology study on COVID-19 explicitly stated, “The absence of specific antibodies in the serum does not necessarily mean an absence of immune memory,” and explained, “memory B-cells and T-cells may be maintained even if there are not measurable levels of serum antibodies.”

Japan’s study demonstrated this dramatically. In their study, antibody levels increased from 5.8 percent to 46.8 percent over the course of the summer. The most dramatic increase occurred in late June and early July, paralleling the rise in daily confirmed cases within Tokyo, which peaked on August 4.

Out of the 350 individuals who completed both offered tests, 21.4 percent of those who tested negative became positive, and 12.2 percent of initially positive participants became negative for antibodies. A striking 81.1 percent of IgM-antibody-positive cases at first testing became negative in only one month. They stated that “[antibody tests] may significantly underestimate previous COVID-19 infections.” It had also been widely reported in several major scientific journals that antibody responses are not necessarily detectable in all COVID patients, especially those with less severe forms.

But the flaws in Redfield’s estimate extended deeper. Even those familiar with first-year college biology know that other components of the immune system, memory B-cell and T-cells, provide protection from virus infections. Some T-cells kill the virus, and they also help antibodies form. T-cells develop and provide protection that lasts far longer, even after antibodies disappear—sometimes for years in other SARS viruses.

T-cells for this virus had already been documented, even in people unexposed to SARS-2, meaning that in these cases, cross-protection was present from T-cells originating in response to other coronaviruses. T-cells had also been found in individuals with completely asymptomatic SARS-2 infections.

NIH Director Francis Collins had highlighted that very data in his Director’s Blog a few weeks earlier, writing, “In fact, immune cells known as memory T cells also play an important role in the ability of our immune systems to protect us against many viral infections, including—it now appears—COVID-19.”

Scientists from some of the top research institutions in the world, like Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, San Diego’s La Jolla Institute, Duke University, Berlin, and others had published this evidence. Karolinska demonstrated T-cell immunity in both asymptomatic and mild cases of COVID—even if antibody-negative.

Singapore researchers had noted robust T-cell responses to this virus, SARS2, from seventeen-year-old SARS1 samples. Since T-cells are obviously not discovered by antibody tests, those individuals were not included in Redfield’s count. Yet he apparently had not considered this essential, indeed fundamental, point as he testified to Congress and made headlines.

After watching this debacle on TV, I knew full well what was coming later that day. The media would latch on to this and create even more public panic. I also knew that the responsibility for clarifying this grossly erroneous statement would be mine. There was no question it would come up at the president’s press conference, and even if it did not, it still needed to be explained.

I rushed over to Derek Lyons’s office to update him and to make sure we would alert the president beforehand. A few others in the West Wing were there, so I summarized to them what had been said to Congress.

The mood ranged from amazement to dejection to frustration. An advisor to the president on legal matters warned me, with a smile on his face, “Scott, don’t just bluntly say, ‘Redfield is wrong!’ Say something softer, like ‘He misstated things.’”

I nodded, knowing that I needed to restrain my words, even though this was the same man who had tried to destroy me in the national press a few days earlier. But this wasn’t personal at all. Clarifying the facts about the pandemic and countering the unending barrage of misinformation and pseudoscience about it, in this case coming from within the administration itself, was one of my most important roles in this national crisis.

During the pre-brief in the Oval Office a few hours later, I outlined the issue to the president. It was decided, as expected, that I would answer the question when it came up. And so it did.

A reporter from ABC News directly asked me if Redfield’s statement that more than 90 percent of Americans remained susceptible to the disease was true. I took the friendly advice I had received earlier in the day.

“I think that Dr. Redfield misstated something there,” I said, and then did my best to calmly explain the problems with outdated information and the contribution of cross-reactive T-cells and T-cell protection that would not have been included in his data. I correctly stated what was widely known and factual—that the protection from the virus “is not solely determined by the percent of people who have antibodies.” During my answer, as I fended off interruptions, I tried to explain in understandable language as best I could.

I also made a serious effort to be somewhat delicate, because I felt extremely uncomfortable about having to correct the director of the CDC on the national stage.

Unfortunately, my disgust with the confrontational mood in that press room prevented me from being more diplomatic when that reporter asked, “Who are we to believe?” My reflexive answer was “You’re supposed to believe in the science, and I am telling you the science.” Then I referred him to several expert scientists by name. However, I had the strong sense that he was not really interested in the facts at all. Rather, it was another attempt to amplify discord.

After exiting the press room, I walked alongside the president. He briefly stopped to check the news coverage on the set of TV monitors outside the briefing room, as he typically chose to do. After some banter between the president and the staff standing in the area, we began walking back toward the Oval Office.

President Trump turned to me on his right, smiling wryly but with a genuinely puzzled look on his face. “Is Redfield political or just stupid?” he asked, subtly shaking his head. I looked right back at the president and hesitated. The answer was obvious to both of us.

Needless to say, the media immediately played up the disagreement between me and Redfield. It fed into their narrative of conflict between me and the other Task Force doctors, one that Redfield personally caused with his offensive and unwarranted remark that everything I said was “false.”

Later, Dr. Fauci appeared on TV and criticized my straightforward attempt to clarify important information as “extraordinarily inappropriate.” I wondered if he was more concerned with protecting his bureaucrat colleague’s reputation and undermining mine than ensuring that correct information was being told to the American public.

Martin Kulldorff, the world-renowned Harvard epidemiologist, posted his reaction on Twitter: “Scott Atlas stated the simple fact that immunity is higher than those with antibodies, whereupon Dr. Fauci criticizes him without contradicting what was actually said. Stating a simple scientific fact is not ‘extraordinarily inappropriate.’ What is going on?”

Scott W. Atlas, M.D., is the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in health care policy at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and a fellow at Hillsdale College’s Academy for Science and Freedom.

April 26, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science | , | Leave a comment

Breaking the Spell

The Holocaust: Myth and Reality, Overview of the book by Dr. Nicholas Kollerstrom

BY ANTONY C. BLACK • UNZ REVIEW • APRIL 17, 2022

Heresy In the 21st Century

Never in my long journalistic career have I ever hesitated to put pen to paper – until now. Indeed, I have delayed writing this overview of Dr. Kollerstrom’s remarkable book for going on six years.[1] Up until now no subject had been too controversial, too sensitive, too beyond the pale as to warrant more than a passing moment’s consideration of consequences. But this is different. In some sixteen countries in Europe one can be put in prison for doing what I am doing now, or even for expressing ‘holocaust denialism’ on social media. In Germany some fifteen thousand people are tried each year for Thought Crime, i.e., for so-called ‘right-wing extremism’. Here in North America it is somewhat better; one merely risks losing one’s job, friends and family – and possibly being blacklisted as a writer from virtually every venue one might have formerly been associated with. No small potatoes.

Dr. Kollerstrom, himself, stumbled rather more naively into this punitive quagmire in 2008 when, after merely reviewing a scientific paper analyzing samples taken from the walls of the alleged ‘gas chambers’ at Auschwitz, – a paper authored by one Germar Rudolf, a young scientist working at the time at the Max Planck Institute – he found himself summarily dismissed from his erstwhile position as historian and philosopher of science at University College, London (UCL), “the sole member of staff…ever to have been expelled for ideological reasons”. As he recounts,

“I became ethically damned, thrown out of polite, decent groups, banned from forums and denounced in newspapers…..I felt as if some Mark of Cain had been branded onto my forehead. I had done something so awful that we could not even discuss the matter. The Medieval crime of Heresy was back alive and well…”

Heresy, of course, implicates the notion of taboo, and what a society makes taboo is what it feels to be sacred, and what is sacred is beyond question. When dealing with the ‘Holocaust’, then, we are, Kollerstrom assures us, dealing not with historical science, but, essentially, with a religion; the Holo-religion. And as the author repeatedly points out, “There can be no science where doubt is prohibited.”

Of Soap and Lampshades

Before diving into the inky abyss of the various technical strands of argument involving documentary archives, archaeology, chemistry, etc., it behooves us first to take a bird’s eye view of the general evidentiary landscape, this both to assuage immediate curiosity, and to lend a certain clarity and coherence to the narrative.

But before even embarking on that perspectival journey, let me ask a question.

Do you, dear reader, believe that during the Second World War the Nazis plumbed the very depths of human depravity by rendering human fat into soap, of sewing human skin into lampshades and gloves and all manner of similar nightmare horrors? If you do, you would not be alone. Like many others, I believed it – and I confess, completely blindly – all of my life. But I was wrong. If you believe such, you would be wrong. It is not true. It never happened. You can take it to the bank, it is a total myth. And this conclusion is not just one reached by so-called ‘revisionist’ authors, but is rather a simple matter of documented fact admitted to and affirmed by the orthodox holo-historians themselves, e.g., the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Israel.

It is true that during the Nuremberg Trials such alleged items were displayed, but over the years they were all systematically debunked, i.e., found to be made of non-human animal materials, such that, as I say, no orthodox holo-historian maintains the validity of any of them anymore. Now, a critical mind, a curious mind is then led ineluctably to the follow-up query: To wit, if that isn’t true, then what else might not be true that I have been told, and that I have believed, all of my life? And this is where Dr. Kollerstrom – amongst others, naturally – bids us listen to the contrarian general case. But, then, what exactly is that case?

In a nutshell, the author is arguing that the Nazi concentration camps (some in Germany itself, most of the rest in Poland) were slave labour camps – though some of them were, as we’ll see, only temporary transit camps – whose unfortunate inmates were used in the grim service of the German war effort.[2]

Auschwitz, for instance, was located right next door to the large Buna-Monowitz industrial plant run by I.G. Farben, and which produced (from coal) much of the Reich’s synthetic oil and rubber, and without which the German war machine would have ground to a screeching halt – and whose labor force was sourced from the Auschwitz concentration camp itself. Some of them (the Aktion Reinhardt camps) were also part and parcel of a general policy established at the infamous Wannsee conference in January 20, 1942 for the systematic deportation ‘to the east’ of populations of ‘undesirables’ including Jews, Roma, communists and so forth, who were to be deposited east of the Urals once the Soviet Union had been, as the Germans confidently expected, quickly vanquished by the, up until then, entirely successful German war machine. Thus, the term ‘Endlosung’, which has been tendentiously interpreted by the orthodox holo-historians to mean, ‘final solution’, really means ‘end’ or ‘goal’ – in this case, deportation to the east, but which action was thwarted by the unexpected resistance to, and, of course, eventual failure of Operation Barbarossa, i.e., the German invasion of the Soviet Union.

But what these camps were not, according to Kollerstrom, were monstrous extermination factories that took in train loads of human beings and simply ground them up into human corpses. This image, he maintains, is a brutal and inhuman legacy that has come to haunt the Western imagination and form the foundation of a demented sacred myth that has, along with ancillary myths, come to underpin a society based on UnTruth – we are, he says, the The People of the Lie – and which has also expediently come to serve American and Western imperial interests in their truly monstrous culture of ‘endless war’.

None of this, of course, is to condone or fail to recognize the horror and injustice of the systematic detainment of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people in slave labor camps where typhus and other diseases ran rampant, and where, if not systematic killings, then certainly sporadic brutalities would have taken place. But, again, they were not, as we have been assured all of our lives, mere factories for processing humans into corpses.

So there you have it, the ‘case’. But what of the evidence?

To begin with there is the, strangely, well-documented fact that there is no documentary evidence whatsoever of any ‘plan’ by the Nazis to systematically exterminate millions of human beings. Thus, of the vast corpus of surviving documents from the Third Reich, there is not one scrap of evidence indicating any such plan; no proclamations, orders, radio transcripts, memos, memoirs – nothing at all. As Kollerstrom says, we are left believing that the engineering and operation of this vast conspiracy was conducted entirely through some form of “telepathy”.

Moreover, and contrary to popular understanding, the Wannsee conference made no mention of any such plan. Holo-historians have, instead, been forced to ‘interpret’ certain ‘code words’ from the conference as meaning other than their dictionary meaning. (Here Kollerstrom reminds the reader that it is not for the historian to impose meaning on the data, but rather to let the data speak for themselves.) Nor is there even a snippet of evidence of either a plan or anything at all to do with ‘extermination’ from the recently released, voluminous diaries of both Himmler and Goebbels. Additionally, the British historian, David Irving in his book, ‘Hitler’s War’, based entirely on primary source material, concluded that Hitler, himself, knew of no such plan (a conclusion, amongst others, which landed Irving in the docket and, like Kollerstrom, condemned to eternal damnation throughout Western society, media and academia.)

Then there is the dean of orthodox holo-historians, Raul Hilberg, author of the supposedly-definitive, three volume history of the Holocaust, ‘The Destruction of the European Jews’, who was forced by defense counsel at the 1985 Ernst Zundel trial to admit under oath that there was no documentary evidence – not one iota – of any alleged gassings of human beings by the Nazis! The latter fact is also backed-up, as we shall see later, by the Bad Arolsen Archives (which comprise some thirty million documents to do with the camps and are considered the pre-eminent repository on these matters) whose curators released a statement in 2007 saying that they had no evidence – not one document – that suggested any deaths by gassing.

But, then, what of the physical structure of the ‘gas chambers’ themselves? Here, according to Kollerstrom, the evidence is definitive: they could not have been ‘gas chambers’ (i.e., they really were showers) both because their structures (many parts of which have been fraudulently reconstructed post-war) are ludicrously permeable, and because chemical analysis reveals there is no hydrogen cyanide in their walls – whereas the walls of the small delousing chambers used to disinfect the inmates’ clothes, and which everyone agrees were used for this purpose (despite the obvious contradiction of such in an ‘extermination’ camp), are chocker-block full of hydrogen cyanide.

But what of the ‘six million’? Merely a longstanding symbolic meme that represented the traditional number of Jews in Europe and for which references for go back at least a half century prior to the ‘Holocaust’. There were no systematic attempts made nor scientific surveys done at Nuremberg to determine the numbers who died in the camps during the war nor could there have been in the timeframe before which the trials began. Moreover, the Auschwitz Museum itself released a statement in 1989 downgrading the ‘four million’ supposedly killed at Auschwitz to ‘one million’, but which revelation was never factored even then into the official count. Later, as we shall see, the Soviet ‘Death Books’ for Auschwitz became available following the fall of the Soviet Union showing that only some seventy thousand people (approximately half of them Jews) had died at Auschwitz – almost all from typhus – a number which, just happens to coincide with the numbers in the Arolsen Archives.

But what about all the ‘pictures’? The iconic pictures of piles of corpses shown de rigueur in every textbook are from Bergen-Belsen and are known to be victims of typhus, i.e., they were not victims of ‘gas chambers’ – but which photos continue to be paraded to this day as ‘gassing’ victims despite this transparent and matter-of-public-record falsification of documented fact. What are also never shown are the many extant photographs of hail and hearty inmates taken when the camps were liberated by Soviet and Allied forces.

But certainly the ‘eyewitness’ accounts are definitive? Hardly. Most of the core ‘autobiographies’ have been shown to be fakes, and the rest are largely derivative from these accounts and/or based on mere hearsay and rumour. Moreover, there has arisen an entire cottage industry of fake ‘eyewitness’ accounts and which are part and parcel of a much larger enterprise. Not to put too fine a point on it, but the ‘Holocaust’ is big business. Indeed, there is strong evidence, as we shall see later, that even such famous holo-biographies as that of Elie Wiesel are completely fraudulent. There are also numerous accounts, again which we will soon examine, by quite renowned individuals countering the official ‘Holocaust’ narrative but which continue to be routinely and entirely ignored and suppressed.

Okay, but what about the ‘confession’ of Rudolf Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz and the key witness for the prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials? We learn from Kollerstrom of evidence that came to light in the mid-1980s that Hoss had been “tortured for three days and nights by a British hit team” prior to his confession. And that, in any case, there are blatant contradictions in his tortured testimony that demonstrate that he was simply making up what his prosecutors / persecutors wanted to hear. Indeed, threats of either capital punishment or long prison sentences were the overarching context for the rest of the rank-and-file ‘confessions’ in a military tribunal by the victors that accepted as a pre-determined fact the reality of the ‘extermination’ thesis and denial of which could not only not be used as a defense position (a common feature, by the way, of today’s infamous international kangaroo courts / ‘war crimes tribunals’)[3] – but which legal tactic guaranteed one’s conviction! Accordingly, most defendants chose the pragmatic stance of accepting the prosecution ‘thesis’ which opened the door to a lenient plea bargain.

Anyways, enough of the cursory overview. Let’s get down to brass tacks.

The ‘Six Million’

A few months following the liberation and occupation of Auschwitz by the Soviets in January, 1945, the Soviet newspaper Pravda announced the staggering total of some four million people who had died in the camp. This figure was quickly integrated into the Nuremberg Trials without further ado. But then in 1989, the so-called ‘Death Books’ were released by Soviet President Gorbachev. These documents, which had been captured by the Soviets from Auschwitz, consisted of some 46 volumes cataloguing the individual death certificates of those who had died at Auschwitz – of some 69,000 individuals. Not four million, but sixty-nine thousand – and of whom about twenty-nine thousand were Jews, with the rest comprising a mixture of other ethnic groups and nationalities. We can only speculate as to the whys and wherefores relating to the initial, grossly exaggerated figures, though it hardly stretches the imagination to suppose that, having just lost upwards of twenty-seven million of their countrymen to the German invaders, the Soviets might not have been in a particularly objective, scientific mood, but rather in a propagandistic one.

Nevertheless, the ‘Death Books of Auschwitz’ constitute, en masse, a primary source document.

Another repository of primary source material are the Arolsen Archives, also known as the International Tracing Service, located in Bad Arolsen, in North Germany, and which are run by the International Red Cross. The latter comprises some thirty million files relating to sixteen of the camps in both Germany and Poland. These are considered the preeminent – and objective – data-base relating to the camps.

I say ‘objective’ as the rather more infamous Yad Vashem Museum archives in Israel are considerably less objective. Many of the deaths recorded there are simply taken from deportation lists and, to boot, include deaths before, during and even after the end of the war. Moreover, anyone can simply fill out a form online claiming to be a ‘victim of the Holocaust’ – a surviving victim obviously or perhaps a relative of such – without any documentation whatsoever. There is, thus, nothing to prevent multiple or fraudulent entries, and there is, as we shall comment on further in a bit, the ulterior motivational issue of filing so as to then make a claim for compensation against the German government. As such, the ‘archives’ from Yad Vashem are considered, at least by revisionist holo-historians, to be essentially worthless.

Returning to the Arolsen Archives. In the year 1979 the curators released a figure for the casualties from fifteen of the camps, and which amounted to a total of some 271,000 individuals. Then in 1984 they released a total mortality figure for sixteen of the camps which came to 282,000. These deaths represent all of the deaths in the camps excepting those of the Aktion Reinhardt camps (which comprise Treblinka, Sobibor and Belzec), which latter were considered to be mere transit camps – but which we shall discuss later on in relation to the archaeological controversy surrounding them. Both the ‘Death Books’ and the Arolsen archives largely agree on the number of Jews who died at Auschwitz, some 30,000 in all – representing less than half the total deaths. Needless to say, these sorts of figures did not go over well in a country, Germany, that had ruled holocaust denialism to be a criminal offense. Accordingly, and as Kollerstrom relates,

“No 21st century statement has ever come out of the Arolsen Archives concerning their total figures. It would just be too risky: the criminal offense of ‘Denying the Holocaust’ in Germany includes, ‘downplaying or trivializing the crimes of National-Socialism’. That law does not specify what exactly would constitute those crimes! Not surprisingly, the Arolsen managers have not dared to make any such statement. (It may also be the case that they have received orders not to make any tallies any more…)”

Nevertheless, in 2006 the managers did release a statement relating to the numbers of those who had died of gassing: there were none, or rather, they had no records of there being any victims of gassing – at all. The ensuing controversy was enough for them to beat a hasty retreat and no further statements have been forthcoming. (We will not be so reticent, but soon discuss the matter thoroughly under the section on ‘science’.)

The official figures for total mortality in each of the camps, however, continue to fluctuate – often wildly, depending on which ‘eyewitness’ account or official pronouncement is prominent at the moment – but mostly downwardly. Thus, whereas the figures for Dachau right after the war numbered some 238,000 deaths, the total today stands at 20,600. This lowering by a factor of ten seems to be heading in the direction indicated by the primary source archives. But what then of the ‘six million’ figure? Surely the initial ‘four million’ proffered by the Soviets at Nuremberg would have played into the grand total. But why exactly ‘six’? Why not seven or eight – or five? And here the author begs us take note of a very peculiar fact: To wit, the undeniable prior existence of a longstanding meme involving precisely the ‘six million’ figure. As Kollerstrom relates,

“So, whence came that totemic number? It began in America around 1900 as a fundraising stunt, and then kept pulsing through the twentieth century like some Hellish mantra. Here are some 166 references, 1900 – 1945. They are overwhelmingly American. At the dawn of the 20th century, the ‘suffering’ of six million Jews became an argument in favour of the new Zionist project…. It helped fundraising, with the number being cited as the total number of Jews in Europe. During World War I it was always six million Jews who were starving, in need of rescue, etc.”

And thence the author dutifully lists 166 references. It is worth taking a brief gander at a few of them, just to get the feel of the matter:

  • 1906 – New York Times, 25 March 1906: “… the condition and future of Russia’s 6,000,000 Jews were made on March 12 in Berlin to the annual meeting of the Central Jewish Relief League of Germany by Dr. Paul Nathan… He left St. Petersburg with the firm conviction that the Russian Government’s studied policy for the “solution” of the Jewish question is systematic and murderous extermination.”
  • 1913 – Fort Wayne Journal Gazette (Ind.), 18 October 1913, page 4: “There are six million Jews in Russia and the government is anxious to annihilate them by methods that provoke protests from the civilized world.”
  • 1915 – New York Tribune, 14 October 1915: “What the Turks are doing to the Armenians is child’s play compared to what Russia is doing to six million Jews, her own subjects.”
  • 1918 – New York Times, 18 October 1918: “Six million Souls Will Need Help to Resume Normal Life When War Is Ended… Committee of American Jews Lays Plans for the Greatest Humanitarian Task in History… 6,000,000 Jews Need Help.”
  • 1919 – San Antonio Express, 9 April 1919, page 12: “At no other time in the history of the Jewish people has the need been so great as now. Six million of our brothers and sisters are dying of starvation. The entire race is threatened with extinction.”
  • 1921 – New York Times, 20 July 1921, page 2: “BEGS AMERICA SAVE 6,000,000 IN RUSSIA. Russia’s 6,000,000 Jews are facing extermination by massacre.”
  • 1926 – Encyclopedia Britannica, 13th Edition, Vol. 1, 1926, page 145: “While there remain in Russia and Romania over six millions of Jews who are being systematically degraded…”
  • 1931 – The Montreal Gazette, 28 December 1931, page 25: “SIX MILLION JEWS FACE STARVATION,… FEARS CRISIS AT HAND… six million Jews in Eastern Europe face starvation, and even worse, during the coming winter.”

And so on and so forth, for 166 entries.

As mentioned earlier, no attempt was made at Nuremberg to factually determine the total number of people who had died in the camps during the war. Thus, as clearly affirmed by the French historian Vincent Reynouard, “At Nuremberg, no statistical survey was ever undertaken … to determine the number of missing Jews.” What the Trials did rely on (apart from Hoss’ testimony relating to Auschwitz only) was a statement given by SS agent Wilhelm Hottl who testified, on condition of his life being spared, that he had once heard such a story from Adolf Eichmann (attesting to the ‘six million’), in August 1944, but which Eichmann later denied. As Kollerstrom remarks, “That was all! And thereby the magic number came to infest all of our minds.”

We have briefly inspected two primary source documents, namely the ‘Auschwitz Death Books’ and the Arolsen Archives, but there are more.

In the mid-1990s the British Intelligence Decrypts from Bletchley Park were released. These documents comprise the radio intercepts from Auschwitz made possible by the famous breaking of the German Enigma code. The decrypts covered the crucial thirteen-month period from January, 1942 to the end of January, 1943. They record daily arrivals and departures of inmates, shipments of coal and coke etc. Expectant hands combed these priceless archives for what, it was thought, would undoubtedly reveal prima facie evidence of the great crime. It was, however, merely a great embarrassment when no such evidence was forthcoming. Not a crumb.

What these transcripts do speak to are the daily comings and goings of inmates to the giant Buna-Monowitz industrial plant just two miles east of Auschwitz. Thus, one entry records,

“The use of prisoners for war industries on a large scale is discussed below… the largest transference is the move of Jews to AUSCHWITZ for the synthetic rubber works. Another major movement is the transference of sick prisoners to DACHAU.”

They also mention a major outbreak of typhus in the summer of 1942 and measures to contain it. Thus, this quote from the January 1943 summary about Auschwitz,

“The Bunawerk is still employing 2210 men of whom 1100 are on the actual work. Jewish watchmakers are sent to SACHSENHAUSEN where they are urgently needed. Typhus cases continue to be reported although strenuous measures have been adopted and 36 cases were found among the new batch of prisoners on 22 Jan.”

But no evidence of mass killings.

Indeed, there is a fourth primary source archive, to do with the intact coke records from Auschwitz, but one which we shall cover in the next section.

Finally, the ‘six million’ number is not completely without import, as it does register, ironically, according to the author, as roughly the number of ‘holocaust survivors’ who have sued for indemnity claims from the German government post war. In fact, some 4.3 million claims have been paid out amounting to some one hundred billion deutschmarks. It is, then, worth noting at this point that, according to most revisionist authors, the number of Jews under German control in all of the occupied territories never numbered more than 4.5 million, though Kollerstrom sets the figure somewhat lower at 3.5 million.

Now, does this mean that the number of inmates who died in the camps was a ‘mere’ 300,000 or so? Not necessarily. The records from the Aktion Reinhardt camps, being mostly transit camps, have not been preserved and there would likely have been deaths that were not recorded. To give some further perspective on this matter and, possibly, to set some sort of upper bound to the numbers, I cite here yet another revisionist author, Peter Winter, who in his book, ‘The Six Million: Fact or Fiction’[4] cites a quote by Stephen F. Pinter, who served as a lawyer for the US State Department in the occupation forces in Germany for six years after the war, and who made this statement to the Catholic magazine Our Sunday Visitor, June 14th, 1959:

“I was in Dachau for 17 months after the war, as a US War Department Attorney, and can state that there was no gas chamber at Dachau. What was shown to visitors and sightseers there and erroneously described as a gas chamber was a crematory. Nor was there a gas chamber in any of the other concentration camps in Germany… From what I was able to determine during six postwar years in Germany and Austria, there were a number of Jews killed, but the figure of a million was certainly never reached. I interviewed thousands of Jews, former inmates of concentration camps in Germany and Austria, and consider myself as well qualified as any man on the subject.”

The mention of ‘crematory’ is, just in passing, significant as most of the camps had them – just as many hospitals and prisons have them to this day. Thus, the mere fact of having crematoria does not in any way whatsoever speak to the notion of ‘gas chambers’. Indeed, for a camp like Auschwitz, situated as it was on swampy ground with a very high water-table, the few that it did have would have been indispensable in disposing of anyone who died there – but only within certain very limited bounds as we’ll see in coming to terms with how much fuel, effort and time it takes to cremate a body.

As for the total numbers, for the moment I think that we need be circumspect and say that, with our present knowledge, these likely range somewhere between 300,000 to perhaps twice that – and which figures would include, of course, all inmates, not just Jews. It would be nice as Kollerstrom points out to be able to do further research on this matter, but given that access to the relevant archives is, effectively, prohibited, and where even attempting to do so is considered a crime or invites career suicide, the prospects for such are, at present, hardly sanguine.

Also, and to lend some perspective on this ‘numbers game’, I reference my own journalistic experience in researching and writing about more modern conflicts. Thus, one of my very first essays as a young, independent journalist was for the Toronto Star in which article I discussed the ‘killing fields’ of Cambodia and in which I demolished the official figure of ‘two million’ victims – which yet stands to this day – showing that it arose from just one Italian journalist who later recanted the figure! The true numbers were more likely in the 400,000 range with US propagandists having simply lumped onto the Khmer Rouge scorecard the numbers who died from starvation due to the US ‘secret bombing of Cambodia’ itself. But, again, no one really knows for certain. Just as no one really seems to know how many died in the Korean or Vietnam Wars, or the great US-backed Indonesian massacre of 1965 (the ‘year of living dangerously’ indeed). Figures routinely cited regarding those conflicts vary, depending on the source, literally over millions of human beings!

The same is true today regarding Iraq and other very recent, Western imperial conflicts (dare we all them ‘holocausts’?). It is certainly important to attempt to establish firm figures, both as these represent individual human lives lost, and as these figures are opportunistically used for ideological purposes. But we must, at the end of the day, remain humble before the task set us and, oft as not, be willing to live with uncertainty – whilst yet continuing to press our investigations further.

With that caveat, let us continue with our present inquiry.

In the introduction to ‘Breaking the Spell’, the author reminds us that the ‘Holocaust’ represents a “triune” thesis, i.e., involving a totemic number (the ‘six million’), a diabolical ‘plan’ (to deliberately exterminate an entire ethnic group, the Jews) – and a ruthless ‘methodology’ (‘gassing’ using the infamous ‘Zyklon B’). We have addressed the first two of these sub-theses, and it is to the third that we now turn our investigative attention.

Science Goes to Auschwitz

As Kollerstrom recounts, a turning point in the history of Holocaust Revisionism came in 1985 when the Canadian, Ernst Zundel, was charged with publishing the best-selling booklet, ‘Did Six Million Really Die?’. At his trial he was fortunate, according to the author, to be assisted by the ‘maestro of modern Revisionism’, Robert Faurisson, and together they sought the assistance of the, then, dean of American execution technology, Fred Leuchter, whose especial expertise was in gas chamber design.

In February of 1988, Leuchter was dispatched by Zundel to travel to Auschwitz/Birkenau (and Majdanek) where he, first, studied the archives of the Auschwitz Museum to learn exactly where the alleged ‘gas chambers’ were located; second, inspected the structures through the lens of his own expertise on gassing; and, finally, collected (illegally) thirty or so samples from the walls of the ‘gas chambers’ and from random ancillary structures at Auschwitz, and one sample from one of the much smaller delousing chambers. These samples were then submitted, upon his return, to a firm, Alpha Analytical Laboratories (who had no knowledge of where the samples had come from and who were horrified when they eventually found out), to be analyzed for traces of iron cyanide.

The latter compound is particularly relevant here as hydrogen cyanide is normally fairly short lived on surfaces – unless it happens to bind to iron whence it becomes very long lived, and which also, over time, turns into a bright, turquoise blue, also known as ‘iron blue’. Now, what is evident even to this day throughout many of the camps is the ‘iron blue’ colouring of many of the delousing chambers which is sufficiently dense enough as to, in many cases (where these chambers are made of brick), have permeated right through to the exterior walls and are, thus, clearly visible to the untutored eye. None of the alleged ‘gas chambers’ at Auschwitz/Birkenau, however, sport this ‘iron blue’, and true to this tell-tale sign (or rather lack of), none of the samples from the ‘gas chambers’ showed anything more than residual traces of cyanide – whereas the delousing chamber sample was chocker-block full of the stuff. Leuchter also wrote up his survey of the alleged gas chambers concluding that they could not, by any stretch of the imagination, have acted as such as they were spectacularly unsuited for the purpose being clearly and ridiculously leaky to gas.

This, the ‘Leuchter Report’, was published in May of 1988, and it shone the spotlight, for the first time, on the issue of the delousing chambers. As Kollerstrom remarks, “prior to Fred’s Report the human race had merely been disinformed that Zyklon gas = human mass murder.”

The author also comments on Leuchter’s fate regarding his foray into this controversial arena,

“Leuchter should have been knighted for his service to humanity: Sir Fred. But, instead, he had his career terminated, was thrown out of various places, was ethically damned, and he ended up driving a school bus – as he informed me.”

Nevertheless, in 1991 the Report caught the eye of a brilliant young chemist, Germar Rudolf, who was, at the time studying for his PhD at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. For Rudolf, the “thorn of doubt” planted in his mind upon reading the Report led he and two colleagues to creep over to Auschwitz and purloin another thirty or so samples from both the walls of the alleged ‘gas chambers’ and from the smaller delousing chambers (and along the way photographing exactly where, how and what they did). The results matched and confirmed those of Leuchter’s, there being a two-thousand-fold differential between the samples taken from the delousing chambers versus the ‘gas chambers’. (Just to note, that there was any ferrocyanide in the walls of the showers, aka ‘gas chambers’, at all – though generally less than 1 ppm – was due to the well-documented fact that many of the camp’s other rooms and enclosures were occasionally sprayed with Zyklon B as part of routine disinfection protocols, and which samples also showed the equal, if very low, levels of cyanide.)

Here Kollerstrom, himself an historian of science, emphasizes an important methodological point. To wit,

“Both the Leuchter and Rudolph reports had their weaknesses, and it is only by integrating the two together – which we can do because their methods were identical – that one attains a firm and clear basis for rational debate.”

The ensuing sequence of events following the publication, first in 1992 of a preliminary report, and then in 1993 of his historic 120-page document, the Rudolf Report, traced the per usual arc of personal ruination that we are, by now, all too familiar with. Rudolf had his career terminated and, eventually, in 2007, found himself, bound in chains, in a German court where he was duly sentenced to four years in prison. As Kollerstom intones once again, “Science cannot exist where doubt is prohibited, let’s be clear about that.”

As a follow-up to these investigations, a chemist-engineer, Dan Desjardins subsequently retraced both Leuchter’s and Rudolf’s steps through Auschwitz so that, as Kollerstrom says, we have good ‘corroboration as regards where the samples came from.’

It is further worth noting at this juncture – and here I tag-team once again with author Peter Winter – that, “The parallels between the real delousing station and the alleged ‘human gas chambers’ are so close that it is clear the homicidal gas chamber story was developed from the real clothing delousing system.”

Turning now to yet another primary source archive, one that I alluded to earlier, i.e., the intact coke records from Auschwitz/Birkenau (the latter camp, just by the by, and also known as Auschwitz II, being located in the immediate environs of Auschwitz I), we find that the amount of coke that would have been necessary to burn hundreds of thousands of bodies simply did not exist. Here Kollerstrom directs us to the dense tome, ‘Dissecting the Holocaust’,[5] edited by Germar Rudolf in which an essay by the meticulous investigator Carlo Mattogno reviews the matter.

Mattogno informs us that it “normally takes 88 to 110 lbs [of coke to cremate] a body.” After accounting for various factors (e.g., how many cremation furnaces are being fired together etc.) he concludes that these coke deliveries, “prove indisputably that only the bodies of the inmates who had died of natural causes could be cremated in the crematoria. Therefore, no mass murders took place in Auschwitz and Birkenau in the time from March to October 1943!”

According to Kollerstrom, Fred Leuchter’s Report also included a similar computation whilst arriving at the same conclusion. Leuchter further noted that the death count for Auschwitz peaked exactly ‘during the worst periods of the typhus epidemic in 1942 and 1943.’ The latter reference is important because it supports the argument – and all the evidence – that the infamous Zyklon B was deployed to the camps precisely to address the typhus outbreaks that began about this time. Additional argument that Zyklon B was not intended as a ‘extermination’ weapon, but merely as what the Nazis said it was for, i.e., disinfestation, is to be found in two related facts. To wit, the hydrogen cyanide concoction was sent to all of the camps, not just to those designated, today, as ‘extermination camps’ – the latter of which, by the way amount only to some six camps in total. Moreover, Zyklon B was discontinued in late 1944 to be replaced by the new-fangled delousing agent, DDT, and which, of course, no one has ever claimed was used for killing people. Kollerstrom notes additionally that microwave disinfestation technology was introduced by the Germans in the camps very late in the war – a technology which became the basis for the, now, ubiquitous microwave oven – though, to date, no ‘eyewitness’ account of being cooked to death by microwaves has been forthcoming.

To conclude this section, it is apropos to remark on the salient fact of the general reluctance by orthodox historiography to introduce such elementary forensic science to this subject. Indeed, that it is so riven with taboo testifies once more to the notion that, in dealing with the ‘Holocaust’, we are no longer in the realm of science, but of sacred myth and of religion. Nevertheless, let us continue our obdurate ways and conduct a brief review of the science as it pertains to some of the other concentration camps.

Of Archaeology, Diesel and Bonfires

In saying that there has been a decided reluctance to engage forensic science in the service of ‘proving’ the Holocaust does not mean that there have been no such attempts.

In 1999, at Treblinka, for example, a team of archaeological researchers led by Australian, Richard Krege, used ground-penetrating radar to try and locate the remains of the officially-estimated 800,000 bodies supposedly buried there. This should not have been difficult as the area in which these remains were allegedly contained covered a relatively miniscule area of just a few hectares. Instead, what the team found was – nothing at all. They found no evidence consistent with the burying of hundreds of thousands of bodies, and, indeed, no evidence of any soil disturbance whatsoever. Thus, as Krege said in a later report,

“From these scans we could clearly identify the largely undisturbed horizontal stratigraphic layering, better known as horizons, of the soil under the campsite. We know from scans of grave sites, and other sites with known soil disturbances, such as quarries, when this layering is massively disturbed or missing altogether.” He goes on to say,

“Historians say that the bodies were exhumed and cremated towards the end of the Treblinka’s camp’s use in 1943, but we found no indication that any mass graves ever existed.”

Naturally, this finding did not sit well with orthodoxy and so in 2010 another team led by Dr. Caroline Sturdy Colls from Staffordshire University conducted their own ground radar survey – and found nothing either. But that’s not what they concluded and later trumpeted to the BBC to whom they claimed to have found a few “pits”. No remains, no large-scale stratigraphic disturbance, just a few “pits”. As if not convinced by her own rhetoric on the matter, Colls returned to Treblinka in 2013 with colleague Ivar Shute where they proceeded to embarrass themselves – having had their findings broadcast on TV documentaries aired both by the BBC and by the Smithsonian channel in the US – by claiming (and here I reference Peter Winter’s work again) to have found a piece of porcelain with a Star of David on it, but which later turned out to be a ‘pierced mullet star’ that just happened to be the brand mark of a famous porcelain factory in Poland.

It is also noteworthy that these researchers, having found nothing more than a few bone fragments – which, without further ado, they claimed were part of “three mass graves” – and a few pieces from a wooden foundation, both items of which one might expect to find in a transit camp such as Treblinka was known to be, and having misidentified a ‘key piece of evidence’, were, nonetheless, given the royal treatment by the media and their work exalted as some sort of definitive proof of the case. Of course, it was nothing of the sort, but rather all puffery and nonsense. No bodies, no fragments of skeletons, no human ashes, no wood ashes and no ground irregularities whatsoever had been called forth by their investigations – investigations which, tellingly, involved no excavations at the site, as this, they lamely claimed, “would be a violation of Jewish law”.

But, then, the entire Treblinka ‘extermination’ thesis was terminally threadbare from the start. Thus, to begin with, the means proffered of killing hundreds of thousands at Treblinka was by steam (even the official account has no ‘gas chambers’ at Treblinka); they had all been ‘steamed like lobsters to their deaths’. According to Kollerstrom, “that phase of the narrative didn’t last too long, and soon the cause of death settled down to being diesel exhaust.” Now, the problem here is that it was first pointed out by Fritz Berg in 1983, and later affirmed in 1992 by Walter Luffl, the President of the Austrian Federal Chamber of Engineers, that mass murder by gassing with diesel fumes is a virtual impossibility. As such the amount of carbon monoxide in diesel fumes is very low (almost always much less than 1% and often no more than 0.1%) and that being subjected to diesel fumes in an enclosed room, even for a full hour, results, for most people, in merely a bad headache, though people with weak hearts might possibly succumb over the course of that timeframe. The key problem, however, is that all of the ‘eyewitness’ accounts – all of them – attest to the notion that death occurred within ten to twenty minutes.

The official narrative was beginning to strain at the seams, especially the failure to find any real prima facie evidence of bodies. No worries. As already mentioned, this part of the story was filled in by having all the bodies, all 800,000 of them, dug up, and burned. (One imagines this might have been a wee problem for the mere twenty or thirty SS administrative staff and one hundred or so Ukrainian guards stationed there, but perhaps they were uber-diligent.) Now it takes about 150 kg (over 300 lbs) of wood to burn just one body and a simple computation reckons the amount of wood needed to burn 800,000 bodies is, well, simply staggering. And, of course, no such wood ashes, even a remote trace of them, have ever been found at Treblinka. As Kollerstrom remarks at this point,

“Treblinka is the site of not one but two awesome Holo-miracles: the miraculous gassing of 800,000 Jews using a non-lethal gas, and then the miraculous burning of some 800,000 Jewish corpses in huge outdoor pyres, thereby igniting the Holo-caust (total-fiery) mythos with its inextinguishably hellish meaning. Dr. Caroline Sturdy Colls and her Birmingham science team were indeed treading on hallowed ground, with so many hundreds of thousands of Jews (not) buried there.”

Indeed, the same BBC program that featured Coll et al, ‘casually alluded to “Huge open burning pits of flesh” – the original Holo-hoax image!’ We will come to more such reminiscences of ‘burning and boiling blood’ in the next section. Suffice it to say for now that blood, and human bodies, do not simply burn by themselves, i.e., not without added fuel.

We could go on and look at similar holo-stories and similar demystifying encounters with science (including wildly fluctuating death counts, missing-in-action archaeological evidence, and yet ever more improbable killing methodologies) for many of the other camps including Sobibor, Chelmo, Majdanek, and Belzec. Time and space humble us however, and so we are led to the final strand of our investigation: the ever popular, always entertaining, ‘eyewitness’ testimony.

Fairy Tales From Hell

Let us begin here by reminding the reader of what was said at the outset about the infamous pictures from Bergen-Belsen – the ones that are taken as being symbolic of the entire Holocaust narrative itself; they are real, but they are, at the same time, misrepresentations.

Bergen-Belsen, located in northwestern Germany, was originally a prisoner of war camp that was turned into a concentration camp in 1943. The camp was liberated by British soldiers on April 15, 1945 who just happened to have been accompanied by a large contingent of journalists. It is likely due to the presence of these real eyewitnesses that it has never been claimed that there were ‘gas chambers’ at Bergen-Belsen. However, this did not stop subsequent Western media from portraying the pictures taken there of the thousands of emaciated bodies, of having been gassing victims. The latter’s deaths, it is pertinent to note, resulted from an outbreak of typhus in the closing stages of the war which itself was largely due to the Allied bombing that had fatally disrupted German infrastructure and which had prevented the re-supplying of both food and Zyklon B to many of the camps. [In fact, the camp was so infested with typhus that the British were eventually forced to burn it to the ground.]

Here we have the entire ‘extermination’ thesis seemingly turned on its head; a proposition that might at first blush seem outlandish did we not have yet another primary source document to support it. As Kollerstrom points out,

“Two and half million tons of US/UK bombs destroyed infrastructure and hope. The camps became death camps. We get a glimpse of the unfolding catastrophe from the Red Cross Report [published in 1948]… Thus the German authorities were at pains to relieve the dire situation as far as they were able. The Red Cross are quite explicit in stating that food supplies ceased at this time due to the Allied bombing… and in the interests of interned Jews they had protested on March 15th, 1944 against the ‘barbarous aerial warfare of the Allies’… In dealing with the Red Cross’ comprehensive three-volume Report, it is important to stress that the delegates of the International Red Cross found no evidence whatever at the camps in Axis-Europe of a deliberate policy to exterminate Jews. In all its 1,600 pages the Report never hints at any human gas chambers.”

And what I neglected to mention earlier in regard to the British Intel Decrypts was that, in August 1943, the head of the British Psychological Warfare Executive, Victor Cavendish-Bentick, sent a secret telegram from the Foreign Office to both Washington and Moscow saying, effectively, that despite the rumours they were hearing, there was not the slightest evidence to support the notion that gas chambers were being utilized to kill anyone let alone millions of people.

Also mentioned prior is the eyewitness testimony of Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Hoss, whose torture-extracted testimony was a pillar for the prosecution at Nuremberg. Apart from the later evidence attesting to his torture, many key components of his testimony were, even at the time known to be falsified – or should have been for any other than a kangaroo court – as they contradicted known, contemporary facts regarding the camps themselves. Thus, Hoss gave affidavit to the court that he had visited Treblinka in June of 1941, where, he said, 80,000 Jews had been “liquidated” in the previous six months. The problem with all this is that Treblinka did not start receiving Jews until late July, 1942. In short, his ‘eyewitness’ account is a whole year and half too early! Indeed, none of the transit camps, including Sobibor and Belzec, even started up until May of 1942. To further complicate the lives of future orthodox holo-historians was Hoss’ insistence that diesel was used as the means of killing – and which, once such methodology was later discovered to be highly improbable if not impossible, was to bedevil the official narrative ever after as abandoning it meant abandoning Hoss’ testimony in its entirety.

Then there is the esteemed Professor Paul Rassinier, a French historian, socialist and anti-Nazi who later became a resistance fighter, but who was eventually captured and imprisoned at Buchenwald. Rassinier survived the war after which he began his lifelong career of debunking the claims of gassing by fellow ‘eyewitnesses’. Kollerstrom cites a quote from one of Rassinier’s published reports which concluded:

“With regard to the gas chambers, the almost endless procession of false witnesses and of falsified documents, to which I have drawn the reader’s attention during this study, proves, nevertheless, one thing: never at any moment did the responsible authorities of the Third Reich intend to order – or in fact order – the extermination of the Jews in this or in any other manner.”

And then there is witness-for-the-defense, the distinguished pathologist, Charles Larson, “sent over by the US army in 1945 to inspect the piled-up corpses in the German labour camps at Dachau, Belsen etc., [who] steadfastly refused to declare that he had seen a pink-coloured corpse killed by cyanide.”

Did I fail to mention? There is yet one more tell-tale piece of forensic evidence attesting to the complete fallaciousness of the gassing thesis. This is the well documented fact that there are no records whatsoever – of pink corpses. It turns out that dying from hydrogen cyanide poisoning turns the body a bright pink hue – and there is no evidence of such having been seen, by anyone, ever. Apparently, none of the ‘eyewitnesses’ were pathologists.

But, then, dear reader, perhaps these are not the sort of eyewitness reports you might have been expecting. So, without further ado, let us get to those, though as the cast of characters here are legion we will have to content ourselves with but a few examples in order simply to capture the flavour of the matter.

Likely the most prominent ‘eyewitness’ account is that of Elie Wiesel whose 1958 book, Night, has sold more than ten million copies, and which eventually led to his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986. The problem with the book, apart from its patently hyperbolic narrative, is that it is almost certainly a completely fraudulent account. Thus, in 2009, a fellow Hungarian Jew, Nickolaus Gruner, after twenty years of researching the topic, issued this press release:

“Elie Wiesel A-7713 has never existed, and the man claiming himself to be ‘Elie Wiesel’ with the concentration camp number A-7713, knowing full well that this number belonged to someone else, is an imposter of the worst kind. For this statement, I, Nikolaus Gruner A-11104, have certified and written knowledge of.”

Gruner then went on to publish a book, ‘Stolen Identity A7713’, in which he provided detailed documentation obtained from the Auschwitz Museum archives which show that Lazar Wiesel, and whom Gruner knew, was the real bearer of that number. The former, according to Kollerstrom, was “born September 4, 1913, received the number and tattoo A-7713; as likewise his brother, Abraham, born Oct. 10, 1900, was given the adjacent number A-7712. That latter number is the one that Elie Wiesel claims belonged to his father Shlomo… No such registration records exist for Elie and his father: they are not there.”

Elie Wiesel refused to respond to a formal challenge by Gruner to appear before a Budapest court to combat these charges, just as he always refused to show anyone the alleged tattoo on his arms. But, then, one need only peruse some of the utterly fantastic claims in ‘Night’ to realize that something is seriously askew. As Kollerstrom relates,

“Having been written as early as 1958, Night does not feature any gas chambers! Instead of Zyklon, it has huge Moloch-type pits of burning babies… The wicked Nazis were unloading truckloads of little babies into the huge burning pits and the bodies were flammable. Human bodies are 70% water. They really don’t burn by themselves.

Here it is worth quoting from Night itself just to experience the tenor of the narrative:

“Later, I learn from a witness that, for month after month, the ground never stopped trembling; and that, from time to time, geysers of blood spurted from it.”

It is worth reminding the reader at this point that it is these sorts of utterly fantastic statements that characterize much of the ‘eyewitness’ testimonials, but whose uncritical acceptance by generations of readers is, rather, mere testimony to the credulity of the true-believer. Let us move on to our next witness.

On the title page of his memoirs (published in 1946), Simon Wiesenthal, the famous Nazi hunter, featured an illustration purporting to be three Jewish inmates shot by the Nazis at Mauthausen. The picture shows the three prisoners tied to stakes and drooping in tragic, if highly dramatic poses, as they lay slumped and dead against the stakes. Wiesenthal claimed that he had “witnessed” the shootings. The problem here is that the tableaux portrayed was clearly lifted from a photograph from the June 11th 1945 edition of Life magazine where the exact same, and very unique, poses are shown of three German prisoners who had been executed as spies – this after having been caught wearing American uniforms whilst attempting to infiltrate Allied lines during the Battle of the Bulge. Once, again, we find a supposedly impeccable ‘eyewitness’ blatantly lying and committing overt fraud, and which lends serious credibility issues to anything else he has to say.

One particularly influential Holocaust potboiler is Philip Muller’s, ‘Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers’, (1979) in which the hero claims to have been the ‘sole survivor of the murder operations’ at Auschwitz over three years. He too describes “the burning pits in which Jews were consumed”. This prize-winning best-seller is, according to Kollerstrom, ‘required reading in many Holocaust study courses’. The problem with it, however, is that it wasn’t written by Muller, but by ghost-writer Helmut Freitag who, in turn, had plagiarized it from an equally faked account by Miklos Nyiszli entitled, ‘Auschwitz: A Doctor’s Eyewitness Account’ (1947). In that book Nyiszli blithely states that Auschwitz killed 20,000 people per day, every day, from 1940 to 1944 – which adds up to a cool 29 million dead! But, then, who’s counting? Certainly not the dean of Holo-historians, Raul Hilberg, as his supposedly authoritative, ‘The Destruction of the European Jews’, repeatedly quotes from it.

Let us finish off with one final testimonial, ‘The Diary of Anne Frank’; though let me say at the outset here that this tiny deconstruction is meant in no way to impugn Anne herself. Rather the following is testament to just how far those who believe in the philosophy of the-ends-justify-the-means are willing to go.

To critical minds the ‘Diary’ was always somewhat suspect as there are passages, specifically those detailing a brief historical and political account of the German occupation of Holland, that are clearly not from the hand of a 13-year-old girl. This scepticism would later be borne out when it was shown, first in an Amsterdam court and then by a German criminal investigation, that Otto Frank, Anne’s father, had, in fact, been the author of substantial parts of the diary, and who had used a ball point pen (not available during the war) to write them. Indeed, Otto Frank – who was treated for typhus at the hospital[6] at Auschwitz and survived the war (dying in 1980) – had, apparently, first published the book as a work of, in his own words, “fiction”, under the title, ‘The Annex: Diary Notes’. The title, ‘Diary of Anne Frank’, was given to the book by its first English publishers.

It is, finally, worth noting, and here I quote from Peter Winter,

“… that Anne Frank died of typhus and was not ‘gassed’. It is one of the horrific ironies that Anne Frank died due to a lack of Zyklon-B at Bergen-Belsen – and this lack was caused directly by the Allied bombing campaign. The real story of Anne Frank is tragic enough, but the cruel exploitation, exaggeration and faking of her diary by the Holocaust storytellers is a scandal of epic proportions.”

Virtually all of the other core ‘autobiographies’ have, as I mentioned at the outset, been shown to be fakes or gross exaggerations, and the rest of the individual testimonies are largely derivative from these accounts and/or based on mere hearsay and rumour such that when confronted in a court of law by probing inquiry the ‘witnesses’ inevitably fall back on, ‘I heard’ or ‘someone told me’ or ‘It was common knowledge’ etc. It seems Professor Rassinier knew what he was about.

Final Thoughts

In writing a critique of this sort, that is, one that strikes at the heart of such a longstanding and sacred societal myth, such cannot help but conjure at some level, and at certain moments, a measure of doubt. Questions tickle the fancy. Am I wrong? Is the author wrong? Have we all just been seduced by a good story, a coherent but unknowingly flawed argument? And, indeed, if one is an honest person, the answer to those questions must be, ‘perhaps’.

Still, having crossed this bridge many times in my undistinguished muckraking career, I have settled upon a consolatory process of simply sitting back and reviewing the fundaments of the evidence and argument, their weight and measure, all rounded off and seasoned with a certain amount of intangible instinct – and coming to a reasoned decision. In the end, as Nietzsche was so fond of pointing out, we must act – on imperfect knowledge.

But I will confess that even were the Revisionist case eventually be proved to be wrong, and Orthodoxy prevail, I could only but smile and think of Ernst Mach who once said,

“Should these concepts turn out to be true, I shall not be ashamed to be the last one to believe.”

But if the Revisionist case is true, then it is not just the tragic victims of the camps themselves who have been so cynically used in a seventy-five- year game of Western and Zionist imperial propaganda; in a game of smoke and mirrors in the service of deflecting attention from many a real holocaust[7] – like Vietnam, or Indonesia or Iraq – under cover of a fake one; in a game of cruel irony where one historical fascism has been misrepresented and harnessed in the service of a future fascism. No, it is not just they, like Anne Frank herself, who have been so cruelly misused, but it is we, all of us, who have been played like suckers in one of the greatest swindles of all time; one that has warped our minds and souls not only into believing in fairy tale horrors that corrupt our very view of what it means to be human, but that has seduced us into a malignant and fatal self-righteousness where we have arrogantly come to believe that, as Carl Jung once wrote, “All evil lies just a few miles behind enemy lines.”

I hope at this juncture then, having become acquainted with some of the primary source documents, i.e., the Arolsen Archives, the Soviet ‘Death Books’, the Leuchter and Rudolf Reports, the three-volume 1948 Red Cross Report, the British Intel Decrypts, the counter-eyewitness testimony, the origins of the ‘six million’ meme etc., that any reasonable person would now entertain, at the very least, reasonable doubt on this subject. But, of course, in many parts of the world, reasonable doubt is not allowed. In much of Europe, doubt is prohibited by law. Here in North America doubt is not allowed by custom, by ingrained prejudice, and by enforced, widespread censorship.[8]

And perhaps, after all, this is the greatest outrage, for we have been told, yes, told – what we are to believe, and what we are not to believe, and that the matter is not open for discussion – at all. Case closed. Forever. No debate for you. As Dr. Kollerstrom pointedly asks,

“Who is in control of the past? Does somebody own it? Will they put you in jail if you disagree?”

Cast unto a dark, three-quarter century enchantment, the author enjoins us to wave the wand of reason, and break the spell.

Notes

[1] For those wishing to purchase and read the book, here is the link to the Castle Hill Publishing site (and which houses dozens of Revisionist works for those interested in pursuing this subject in more depth; the publishing company is run by Germar Rudolf himself): https://shop.codoh.com/book/breaking-the-spell-en/

[2] And which likely explains why the inmates were tattooed with numbers, as this would have made little sense if the latter were simply going to be killed.

[3] For a classic example of the such kangaroo tribunals see my article, ‘Hotel Propaganda: What Really Happened in Rwanda, circa 1994’ and which subsumes a discussion on the ICTR. Yet another is the similarly compromised, ICTY (the International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia).

[4] For those wishing to read Winter’s version of matters – and which largely overlap with those found in Kollerstrom’s book – here is the link: https://thesixmillionfactorfiction.blogspot.com/ You can download this book for free as a PDF document.

[5] Here is the link to ‘Dissecting the Holocaust’, edited by Germar Rudolf (a rather weighty tome that includes a compendium of much more detailed essays by a dozen or so authors): https://shop.codoh.com/book/dissecting-the-holocaust-en/38/

[6] Not only did Auschwitz/Birkenau have a hospital with a dedicated surgical unit, but also a camp library with 45,000 volumes, six inmate orchestras, a kitchen and bakery, a theatre, a post office….and a swimming pool, the remains of which are clearly visible to this day.

[7] Indeed, there is substantive evidence that upwards of a million or so German prisoners of war died in the short few months at the end of the war at the hands of the Allies. The Canadian historian, James Bacque, investigates this in his book, ‘Other Losses’ (and which I may cover in a future essay). In particular, he proffers that in the vast open-air American prisoner of war camp alone, up to 900,000 died, and which deaths were covered up under the obscure bureaucratic heading of ‘other losses’. He further posits that, in this case, if not a ‘plan’, there is certainly evidence of a high-level policy of willful neglect that stemmed directly from Eisenhower himself.

[8] It is further worth noting here that none of these works are generally available either via conventional bookstores or through major online retailers. Indeed, Rudolph has written a small book on the subject entitled, ‘The Day Amazon Murdered History’, which recounts how, ‘in early 2017, a series of anonymous bomb threats against Jewish community centers occurred in the US fueling a campaign by Jewish groups to have all revisionist writings banned, falsely portraying them as anti-Semitic. Amazon complied and banned over a hundred works with dissenting viewpoints on the Holocaust. In April 2017 an Israeli Jew was arrested for having placed the false bomb threats, a paid “service” he had offered for years.’ Despite this revelation, the ban remains to this day.

April 18, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Fake News, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | , , | Leave a comment

Why Biden and Johnson should be treated as War Criminals

By Dr Vernon Coleman | April 16, 2022

1 – On the surface, the sanctions imposed on Russia appear to be part of a new type of warfare – designed to punish innocent Russian people. Putin and his pals aren’t going to be hurt by sanctions but ordinary people will be. Politicians and journalists complain bitterly when civilians are bombed but don’t seem to care about civilians being impoverished or starved to death.

Nor do politicians or journalists care that the sanctions were also designed to bring in a global recession that will result in billions of deaths. The sanctions brought in by leaders around the world such as Johnson and Biden have caused massive price rises for fuel and food. The sanctions will cause most damage to the very poor in Africa and Asia. Huge numbers will die in Africa and Asia as a direct result of these sanctions which were designed by mad, bad, dangerous people. Why aren’t Biden, Johnson et al being treated as war criminals?

2 – Governments have created a perfect storm for travellers. Flights have been cancelled because of the millions of people unable to work because they have colds or think they have a disease called ‘long covid’ (which good research has shown is either malingering or hypochondria). The cost of fuel has risen to the highest price ever known, and motorists are unable or unwilling to buy enough fuel to take them more than a few miles from home.

Even when motorists can afford to buy fuel there may not be any available because refineries have been shut by insane and woefully ignorant and selfish protestors who want to make people as miserable as they are and to bring about economic ruin. (Curiously, the police seem unable to move the protestors very efficiently. I don’t know whether this is because the protestors are too fat to be moved without lifting equipment or because the police have been instructed to move only those protestors who are concerned with telling the truth about the covid fraud.)

Finally, the weather is colder and more miserable than ever. Coincidentally, there have been a good many chemtrails around recently. Oh, and anyone thinking of trying to go abroad needs to have their passport already because the Passport Office is advising travellers to allow ten weeks to get a new passport.

3 – Investment in oil and gas has crashed because banks and governments are too frightened to lend money to oil companies. The result is that discoveries of oil and gas are at the lowest for 75 years. We will run out of oil and gas very quickly. The consequences are described in my book `A Bigger Problem than Climate Change: The End of Oil’.

4 – The UK and Europe are now importing liquefied natural gas from the United States. The imported gas was produced using fracking. This will doubtless delight the cultists who believe that we should all keep warm by shivering.

5 – Sunak, the UK’s Chancellor of the Exchequer has been whingeing about criticisms of his wife’s financial affairs. With astonishing cheek, he’s been turning the story round to make himself and his family the victim! Most of the mainstream media supported his whingeing.

The Times noted that reporting his wife’s tax affairs is a potential criminal offence. With any luck Sunak will quickly disappear from public life. He has been a disastrous Chancellor and will not be missed. Even in the polluted waters of public life he is a disgrace.

6 – The French Government has paid private consultants 2.4 billion euros for advice since 2018. When the French were questioned about this, their defence was that the British Government spent around £100 billion on private consultants in the same period. If the army of highly paid civil servants did some of the work they’re paid to do, the British taxpayers would save £25 billion a year.

7 – Government officials who attended parties during the lockdown included Helen MacNamara, the former deputy cabinet secretary and Whitehall ethics chief (who provided a karaoke machine for a `gathering’) and Kate Josephs, who was the director general of the covid-19 task force and who wrote the regulations that made the gatherings illegal.

We don’t know if either of them had to pay a fine but if they were then the fines would have been no more than £50 (less than a parking fine round our way). Once again we see that the privileged few are treated differently. `Ordinary’ people who attended gatherings during lockdowns, and some who had a snowball fight in a park, were fined maximum amounts of £10,000.

8 – Bitcoin mining (possibly the most useless of all human activities) uses around 0.5% of global energy consumption.

9 – There is much talk among the loony lefties about free speech on social media – specifically Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and so on. The truth, of course, is that there is no free speech on any of these sites. They are all oppressive, faux communist platforms allowing only the fettered to speak. These sites belong to the enemy.

10 – The willingness and ability to break rules is what differentiates free men from slaves. And as many have said in the past, it is the duty of every free man and woman to speak out against bad laws and injustice. In the New World Order we won’t be told what we cannot do, but what we are allowed to do. There’s all the difference in the world.

11 – The global economy has been deliberately turned upside down, inside out and back to front. Investment companies and pension companies bought $18 trillion worth of sub-zero bonds. These are bonds with a negative interest rate – so the investors and pensioners who own them are paying governments and companies for the privilege of lending them money.

12 – A number of bankers at Goldman Sachs (frequently voted one of the world’s most evil companies by me) each received $30 million bonuses this year.

April 16, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Malthusian Ideology, Phony Scarcity | | Leave a comment

The Face Mask Cult

The Daily Sceptic | April 13, 2022 

There follows a post by Hector Drummond, a former academic who worked in risk, who says when he came to research his new book The Face Mask Cult on the effectiveness of masks against COVID-19 the evidence was threadbare.

In 2021 I decided to write an FAQ on all aspects of Covid, lockdowns and non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs). I started with face masks, as they seemed to be the easiest issue to deal with, thinking that the whole mask situation could be summed up in five to six pages. After a few days work I had twenty pages of text, and another twenty pages of reminder notes on further aspects of face masks that I needed to consider and research. Those notes ballooned out in the next few weeks, and I realised that the use of face masks to prevent the spread of COVID-19 was a far bigger topic than I had appreciated, and would require substantial amounts of writing, and months of research and literature-reading.

It took until the next year before I decided I’d written enough on the topic. I had read an enormous number of scientific papers and other articles on masks, and gone through some of them with a fine-tooth comb (see Part 3 of the book, for instance). I had spent considerable time analysing, synthesising and rewriting, and my short FAQ article had become a comprehensive 400-page book that tackled all aspects of the issue, as well as a unique resource with its extensive scientific literature review section.

In all my researches I failed to come across very much in the way of convincing evidence that masks work. The papers that were supposed to show that they did all turned out to be poor pieces of science. None were randomly-controlled peer-reviewed trials. Some were observational studies, with inadequate controls for dealing with the possibility of faulty or biased recollection. Some were ‘modelling’ studies, in which a computer program was used to ‘model’ the effect of face masks on disease spread. Modelling studies are generally hopeless at providing any confirming evidence for the effectiveness of face masks as they require the modellers to make assumptions about how effective the masks are when writing their programs. Some were mannequin studies, in which a dummy in a lab with artificial breathing functions, rather than a real person in the real world, was used. Some were simply tests of the porosity of various materials in regard to salt aerosols.

Most studies ignored the issue of face mask gaps, despite it being well-known in the field that gaps around the sides of masks will let such large amounts of virions in and out that any effect that the masks do have will be completely negated. (This is why medical institutions require ‘fit tests’ for masks – not that fit tests are very reliable, as I explain in the book.)

Even these dubious studies that claimed to show an effect for masks didn’t show much of an effect. The less wild ones would typically claim that the cloth masks would stop 5% to 15% of virions, but they never presented any reason to believe the further claim that was often made that this would cause a 5% to 15% reduction in cases, or a 5% to 15% reduction in deaths. The closest such studies got to doing so was when an author would occasionally speculate, in an airy fashion, that if the disease in question’s R0 rate happened to be close to 1.0, then maybe widespread mask use (assuming masks had some small effect) would be enough to push the R0 rate below 1.0, in which case the disease would die out, although of course even if all their assumptions were true and masks did push the disease’s R0 rate below 1.0 it doesn’t follow that the disease would die out anytime soon. It could well be that the disease’s R0 rate would quickly come back over 1.0 again as soon as we stop masking, and so in order to stop the disease spreading again we would have to wear masks for years on end, or even indefinitely.

But what about all those government reports written by distinguished scientists assuring us that there were now truckloads of research proving that masks work? This is perhaps the most shocking part of the whole face mask con. The 2020 DELVE report and its updates, the 2020 Royal Society report, and the 2022 Department for Education’s Evidence Summary were disgraceful pieces of misinformation, as I show in detail in the book. Even more shocking, perhaps, is the fact that there have been so many acts of wrongdoing in the last two years that the scientific butchery committed in these reports is completely unknown to the general public. The fact, for instance, that the Royal Society’s report relied heavily upon a low-grade Chinese study, written in Chinese only, and published in an obscure Chinese journal, which reported fantastically unrealistic results, is never even going to briefly flit through the mind of the average person, because the average person will never come across any reference to this shameful affair in the mainstream media.

I felt vindicated as I put the finishing touches to the book when several prominent advocates of masks, such as Trish Greenhalgh, Jeremy Howard and many others, started to admit that cloth masks were useless. Not that they wanted us to stop wearing masks – they now wanted us to move onto medical-grade respirator masks, like N95s and FFP2s, as Germany required. Needless to say, these mask fanatics didn’t bother to mention that Germany’s stringent mask policy has been a complete failure.

The book I finished up with is a serious corrective to the endless propaganda we have been fed about masks. It lays out the case against masks in detail, considers the harms done by mask-wearing (harms which are usually ignored by scientists and governments), closely examines many claims made about masks by both sides, and backs it all up with an enormous number of references to the scientific literature. Whenever anyone who wants you to wear a mask says, “Follow the Science”, just show them this book and say, “I already did”.

You can buy the book here in paperback and on Kindle.

April 15, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | | Leave a comment

Testing Mania: Illogical and Harmful

BROWNSTONE INSTITUTE | APRIL 12, 2022

This adapted excerpt is from Dr. Scott W. Atlas’ bestselling book, A Plague Upon Our House, published by Bombardier. 

By the time I arrived at the end of July 2020, the administration had already developed a massive testing capacity from scratch. Nearly a million tests per day were being conducted. The effort was led by Admiral Giroir, who was assigned the thankless task of overseeing that project.

I understood why the VP was so excited when he had displayed that simplistic chart on my first visit. And over the next weeks the administration continued to successfully facilitate and distribute tens of millions of point-of-care PCR tests and, later, rapid antigen tests. This was a significant accomplishment, but it was clear from the beginning that the White House did not understand how or when to use testing. To my thinking, it was a response to political pressure more than anything else.

From my very first meeting in the Oval Office back in July and again over subsequent meetings, President Trump expressed great frustration about testing. It was easy to see why. You could not turn on the news, even the most superficial talk show, without the lead story admonishing the administration for “the lack of testing.” For months, the country had been inundated with that message—not just from public health types who had now become household names, but from every pundit, talk show host, and news anchor. It became pure groupthink. Celebrities who had no understanding or expertise at all were now stridently opining about the unquestionable urgency of massive, widespread, on-demand testing.

Reminiscent of stock market frenzies, esoteric technical terms that had formerly been unknown to the public like “contact tracing” now became common parlance. Testing for this virus had turned into a national, indeed, international obsession. And to me, that obsession was not just misguided, it was harmful, creating more fear, more frenzy, more irrational policies. Yes, testing was an essential tool in the pandemic. And yes, months before I was involved in any way in Washington, there had been a failure to develop and deliver enough tests when they were needed the most. But by the time I came to DC at the end of July, a massive capacity to test had been quickly developed. The problem now was that it was not being leveraged to save lives. Schools and businesses were closed; people were cowering in their homes. Meanwhile, older people kept dying by the thousands.

Criticizing the administration about testing was more than a natural extension of that obsessive mindset. It was low-hanging fruit for the president’s political opponents. There had been almost no preexisting testing capacity from the outset, so naturally it would take some time to meet the challenge. The obsessive demand for testing rapidly escalated into a hyperpartisan issue. I remembered Pelosi’s mantra—“test, test, test; trace, trace, trace!”—as if she, or any politician for that matter, had any understanding of the appropriate testing policy. She was not alone, though. That mantra was echoed on every news network, regardless of political leaning. No dissenting opinion was even visible to most Americans.

That political heat provoked the expected reaction in the White House. Long before my arrival, testing became Priority Number One. Beyond an important public health policy question, it was an election season, and a contentious one at that. This environment elevated testing into the priority of the president’s closest counselors, his political advisors at the highest levels, and operationally, therefore, the vice president’s Task Force. Presumably, like all politicians, the president was politically motivated, too.

The conflict, the misjudgment about issues like testing and other advice coming out of the Task Force, occurred when the president was swayed too much by his political advisors instead of believing in his own common sense. That advice matched the message of the Task Force, especially that coming from Redfield and Birx, whose decision-making background was tied almost exclusively to testing. That was one of the many problems stemming from the HIV backgrounds of Birx and Redfield. SARS2 had already spread to millions, and it spread by breathing in close proximity; the role and practical application of testing in a virus like HIV couldn’t have been more different. In the end, it was easy to see how the advice to the president was to focus on testing.

Understandable for everyone, that is, except the president. He never agreed, because to him it made no sense. He couldn’t understand why we would test people who were not sick. It was as simple as that. President Trump talked to me privately in the Oval Office about many different things, but almost always, our discussions came back to the subject of testing. The president spoke very bluntly and resorted to common sense rather than any data. He knew nothing specific about the medical rationale for testing. He went with his gut feeling and placed no filter on stating his opinions.

“Why are we testing healthy, younger people? Why don’t we just test sick people?” he would ask.

“And if we test more, we find more cases. But those people aren’t sick!” he would point out, exasperated, echoing what he said many times to the press.

And that seemed rather straightforward, on its face. His point was simple logic—test and you shall discover “cases,” especially with COVID, since a large number, maybe half or more, of infections were asymptomatic. He was also correct that in clinical medicine, the definition of a “case”—a patient—is not generally based on a test seeking out something in a healthy, asymptomatic person.

That is not how medicine is practiced, a point I tried to explain time and again to the Task Force troika of doctors. I had that perspective, because I am a doctor who has been an expert for decades on the significance of diagnostic tests showing abnormalities without symptoms. And wasn’t it also important to consider that the overwhelming majority of people did not have a serious illness, even when symptomatic? As for mildly ill patients with COVID, “standard of care” for them was strict isolation, with or without testing. 

Testing, though, was the way—the only way—to find infected people who had no symptoms. In high-risk settings, contagious people with asymptomatic infections would be critical to find, no doubt. But the goal, the rationale for testing, became a key point of confusion and disagreement. We needed to protect high-risk people, absolutely. The question was how. We knew who was at risk, so there were two alternatives: 1) indirectly protecting the “vulnerable” by confining and locking down everyone else, or 2) doing everything to protect high-risk people directly.

By the time I set foot in the White House, the nation, with few exceptions, had already been using the Birx-Fauci lockdown restrictions—the indirect strategy—for months. Why was there no admission that the lockdown strategy did not work? It undeniably failed to protect the elderly. Nursing home deaths were piling up, comprising up to 80 percent of total deaths in some states—and in the meantime the lockdown policy was destroying everyone and everything else. Einstein may or may not have said it, but everyone knew it: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”

Yet the strategy was to continue doubling down on the failed lockdowns that were devastating to so many, especially those outside the “elite.” Reality was being denied, and that remains the case today. Regardless, the answer to the failure, the available tool for those all-in on stopping all cases, was more testing!

Unbeknownst to the White House, several top epidemiologists and infectious disease experts had opined that massive testing of healthy people in settings that were not high-risk was not appropriate at this stage of a pandemic. That was apparent to me from months of lengthy discussions with leading epidemiologists at Stanford and elsewhere. There were already tens of millions of Americans who had been infected; even the CDC estimated a tenfold larger number compared to the confirmed number, as verified by early studies on SARS2 antibodies.

Contact tracing was also “futile” at this point, as Dr. Bhattacharya later wrote in a paper I distributed at a Task Force meeting. Contact tracing was a tool for newly emerging pandemics, new outbreaks perhaps. Oxford’s Sunetra Gupta, a world-renowned epidemiologist, repeatedly stressed the lack of logic in mass testing at this stage and the irrationality of focusing on cases by positive tests. Moreover, PCR tests were detecting virus fragments or dead virus in people who were not even contagious. Yet no one in the Task Force would even entertain this discussion.

The question about the role of testing was fundamental. It wasn’t simply surveillance for the purpose of knowledge—testing was the key to a strategic policy. It was not enough to consider testing through the limited prism of an epidemiologist, the way Birx and Fauci did (even though they, like me, are not epidemiologists). In medical practice, if you referred a patient with low back pain to a neurosurgeon, the most likely outcome was surgery. That’s exactly why I always referred patients to neurologists first—they had more perspective. Some might think of the adage “to someone with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” Testing was the main tool in the epidemiology toolbox, their only tool, really. That was very limiting in defining its role in overall policymaking.

At this juncture, the testing was not being done to yield statistically valid surveillance information—a legitimate use of testing in the midst of a pandemic. This was diagnostic testing, with broad-reaching policy aims. In this pandemic, a positive test was a major driver of the policy of quarantining and isolating healthy people with low-risk profiles—shuttering businesses, closing schools— in short, a key to locking down the country. That’s why health policy experts like myself with a broader scope of expertise than that of epidemiologists and basic scientists are needed. Because no one with a medical science background who also considered the impacts of the policies was advising the White House. That lack of perspective was the main source of the tunnel-vision focus on preventing the spread of infections to the exclusion of all other considerations.

It was baffling to me, an incomprehensible error of whoever assembled the Task Force, that there were zero public health policy experts and no experts with medical knowledge who also analyzed economic, social, and other broad public health impacts other than the infection itself. Shockingly, the broad public health perspective was never part of the discussion among the Task Force health advisors other than when I brought it up. Even more bizarre was that no one seemed to notice.

The president clearly understood that testing healthy people for a disease that did not make them sick made little sense and would only lead to confining them. I agreed with that common sense view, although with important exceptions, and sitting in the Oval Office I explained the absurd extension of the logic of “test, test, test.” What was the “necessary” number, anyway? One million per day? Not even close. One hundred million per day? Nope. How about everyone in the country—330 million per day, every day.

Even if you could accomplish that goal, the tests themselves were only a snapshot in time. Seconds later, any given person could become infected. So 330 million per day, every fifteen minutes—maybe that would satisfy the testing mania! No matter how many tests were performed, there would never be enough.

The need for increased testing, but in a smarter, more targeted way, still needed to be explained to the president. And I did just that, repeatedly, whenever I had a chance—in concise, short doses. As always, he listened intently. But he had no time or patience for a detailed presentation. That is one reason why we got along well. I was capable of speaking succinctly, articulating the bottom line. More importantly, he knew I spoke directly, no BS.

From day one, I always reminded myself—if, and whenever, the president of the United States asks for my opinion, I am going to give it.

No holds barred—otherwise, what was I there for? Even on my very first visit to the Oval Office, when he complained about wide-spread testing, I bluntly told him, “You are a hamster on a wheel,” knowing that others in the room would probably recoil at hearing that. But President Trump knew it, even repeating the phrase later himself.

There was, I explained, a more nuanced approach to the policy of testing. There were serious reasons to test, important reasons to actually increase testing, but in a strategic way. The question was how to leverage that testing capability to have the most impact—to save the most lives and to facilitate reopening the country, which was the right goal from both a health perspective and the president’s stated policy.

I thought my approach was obvious. This was simple logic, and it reiterated exactly what I had written months before: let’s focus testing on where it really mattered, and increase it. High-risk environments, where high-risk people lived and worked. Nursing homes, a tinderbox of risk for its elderly, frail residents, were an obvious target. Knowing that cases were brought in by the staff, they needed to be tested, and tested far more frequently, perhaps every day. I also pushed for more point-of-care tests in places independent-living seniors frequented, like senior centers; visiting nurses taking care of seniors at home; and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), where high-risk faculty members were more concentrated.

While the president understood and fully supported this, he remained frustrated, as did I, because his most trusted advisors didn’t fully sign on to a strategic approach to testing. At one point he offhandedly remarked, “You’ll have to convince my son-in-law of that.” Naturally, Kushner and everyone else had been deferring to Fauci and Birx on all things medical. To make matters worse, the Fauci-Birx testing strategy was not merely unfocused; their strategy bizarrely prioritized more testing in the lowest-risk people and the lowest-risk environments—students and schools—while letting the deaths continue in nursing homes and assisted living facilities, where a once-per-week schedule was assumed to be effective.

Politics seemed to be the main driver of those in the inner circle advising the president—that was their job. But the politics were irrelevant to me. The frenzy about testing everyone, everywhere, at all times, including low-risk people in low-risk settings, was incorrect, illogical, and harmful.

The funny thing was that while almost everyone assumed the president was only making excuses, somehow covering up for an “inadequate” testing capacity, there were valid reasons to use testing very differently in order to maximize its benefits. Despite the clamor of the “experts” in the public sphere, and almost the entire media narrative pushing the opposite view, the president happened to be correct. Instead of massively testing everyone on demand, testing should be leveraged to do what everything should have been geared toward in the first place—protecting the high-risk, saving lives, and opening society up as soon as possible.

What was most remarkable to me from the inside was that even though the president expressed his points about testing very clearly, and many top epidemiology experts agreed, the COVID Huddles and other strategic operations were run in a different world. The messaging, the public events, the operational strategy, and the communications team pushed ahead with a focus on producing and delivering more testing to low-risk environments, schools, and communities. Reminiscent of Catch-22, when 150 million antigen tests became available weeks later, I was asked by several people in the COVID Huddle, “Well, now that we have these tests, what do we do with them?”

Scott W. Atlas, M.D., is the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in health care policy at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and a fellow at Hillsdale College’s Academy for Science and Freedom.

April 13, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , | Leave a comment

How the Medical Establishment Covers Up the Harms of Adding Fluoride to Drinking Water

By Robert Carnaghan | The Daily Sceptic | April 1, 2022 

The addition of a fluoride, such as hexafluorosilicic acid or disodium hexafluorosilicate, to public water supplies has been recommended in a joint statement by the four Chief Medical Officers of the U.K. The Government’s Health and Care Bill, which has reached its final stages in Parliament, includes a small section to facilitate water fluoridation, which is now expected to be spread throughout the U.K.

Although water is already fluoridated in a few parts of the U.K. (mainly Birmingham), for nearly forty years no new schemes have been implemented since local opposition has managed to defeat them all. The Government is now determined to impose its wishes.

A recent press release said that “higher levels of fluoride are associated with improved dental health outcomes”, and that the “Health and Care Bill will cut bureaucracy and make it simpler to expand water fluoridation schemes”. The Bill’s explanatory notes state: “Research shows that water fluoridation is an effective public health intervention to improve oral health for both children and adults and reduces oral health inequalities.”

For about 70 years it has been claimed that fluoridation reduces dental decay, and that it is safe. Although there is abundant evidence showing that in fact it is neither effective nor safe, the proponents of fluoridation have long had the advantage of far greater funding than that available to sceptics.

Trials of fluoridation started in 1945 in the U.S. and Canada but, before any had been completed, and without any comprehensive health studies, fluoridation was endorsed as safe and effective by the U.S. Public Health Service. The American Dental and Medical Associations soon added their approval, as later did their equivalents in the U.K.

The original trials were studied by Dr. Philip Sutton in Australia who graduated with honours in Dental Science. Asked to examine them, he found they were of low quality, full of errors and omissions.

In Austria, Rudolf Ziegelbecker also studied the original fluoridation trials and found they did not show what had been claimed. Professor Erich Naumann, Director of the German Federal Health Office, said of him: “Your results have been accepted everywhere in Germany with the greatest interest and have increased the grave doubts against drinking water fluoridation.” Prof. Naumann added: “It is regrettable that the existing data on water fluoridation had not been examined earlier using mathematical-statistical methods. Otherwise the myth of drinking water fluoridation would have already dissolved into air long ago.”

In the U.K., pilot schemes started in the mid-1950s in four areas, all of which sooner or later abandoned the practice: Andover (1955-58), part of Anglesey (1955-92), Kilmarnock (1956-62), and Watford (1956-89). In 1957, Dr. Geoffrey Dobbs wrote in New Scientist that they “are now officially described as demonstrations of the benefits of fluoridation, not experiments, so the results are a foregone conclusion” and their purpose quite openly “promotional”. He added that the studies would gain enormously in value if those responsible were willing to submit them to impartial scientific assessment.

When the UK pilot studies started, it was officially stated that they should include “full medical and dental examinations at all ages”, but no medical examinations were done, and neither short-term nor long-term possible harms were explored. This lack of concern continues, with a general failure in fluoridated countries to monitor fluoride exposure or side effects.

In 2000, a major report by the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination at the University of York concluded that, despite many studies over 50 years, “We were unable to discover any reliable good-quality evidence in the fluoridation literature world-wide”. Even among the 26 better studies on fluoridation and tooth decay, not one was evaluated as “high quality, with bias unlikely”.

In 2015, a Cochrane review added: “There is very little contemporary evidence, meeting the review’s inclusion criteria, that has evaluated the effectiveness of water fluoridation for the prevention of caries.”

When Israel ended fluoridation in 2014-15, partly because of health concerns, its Ministry of Health pointed out that WHO data indicated no significant difference in the level of tooth decay between countries that fluoridate and those that do not fluoridate.

A trial in Hastings in New Zealand was apparently so successful that it was widely reported as a classic case of the benefit of fluoridation, with tooth decay reduced by at least half. However, when New Zealand passed freedom-of-information legislation, two university researchers were able to access the original records, which revealed that the published results were fraudulent. One of those involved in running the trials was asked for an explanation but he did not even try to justify the published results.

Not only is there a great absence of good quality evidence that fluoridation significantly reduces tooth decay, there has, especially in recent years, been growing evidence that it is harmful.

In 2006, a major report by the U.S. National Research Council said that fluoride exposure is plausibly associated with neurotoxicity, gastrointestinal problems, endocrine problems and other ailments. It was also unable to rule out an increased risk of cancer and of Down’s syndrome in children.

In 2017, a team of experts in Chile, supported by the Medical College of Chile, concluded that fluoridation is ineffectual and harmful.

Fluoride occurs naturally in a few water supplies, but so does arsenic. A recent study from Sweden shows an increased prevalence of hip fracture in post-menopausal women associated with long-term exposure to natural fluoride at levels in water in the same range as used in some parts of the U.K. for artificial fluoridation.

About half a century passed before the declassification of hundreds of U.S. Government documents provided clues to the real reason for fluoridation. Much meticulous research by an award-winning investigative journalist, Christopher Bryson, resulted in his thoroughly documented book, The Fluoride Deception, showing beyond doubt the extensive fraud involved.

Bryson’s research revealed the strong connection between fluoridation and the Manhattan Project to create the first atomic bombs. Huge amounts of fluorine were used to extract the isotope of uranium needed. Workers suffered hundreds of chemical injuries, mostly from the gas uranium hexafluoride.

In 1943 and 1944, farmers reported workers made ill, crops blighted and livestock injured, with some cows so crippled they could not stand. When the war was over, farmers in New Jersey sued DuPont and the Manhattan Project for fluoride damage. In response the Government mobilised officials and scientists to defeat the farmers.

In 1946, the United States had begun full-scale production of atomic bombs, and the New Jersey farmers’ legal action was seen as a threat, because of the potential for enormous damages and a public relations problem, with more trouble likely if they won. The farmers’ legal action was blocked by the Government’s refusal to reveal how much hydrogen fluoride DuPont had vented into the atmosphere.

Dr. Harold Hodge defended the nuclear programme against the legal threat from farmers. He had the idea of calming the public’s fears by talking about the usefulness of fluorine in tooth health. In January 1944, a secret conference on fluoride metabolism took place in New York. Organised by President Roosevelt’s science adviser, James Conant, documents from it are among the first that connect the atomic bomb programme to water fluoridation and to the Public Health Service.

Manhattan Project scientists were ordered to help the contractors. They also played a prominent role in the fluoridation of the public water supply in Newburgh, New York, an experiment that began in May 1945. In 1947 the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission took over from the Manhattan Project.

Dr. Harold Hodge, the Project’s senior wartime toxicologist, became the leading promoter of fluoridation. He announced it was so safe that it would take a massive dose of fluoride to cause harm. (Some 25 years later, in 1979, he quietly admitted in an obscure paper that he had been wrong.)

A Committee to Protect Our Children’s Teeth was formed, with powerful links to U.S. military-industrial interests and their determined effort to escape liability for fluoride pollution. The aim was to transform the public image of fluoride from that of a dangerous pollutant to a beneficial prophylactic medicine.

This aim was achieved with the help of Edward Bernays, an expert in the use of psychological techniques to achieve “manipulation of the organised habits and opinions of the masses” and “the engineering of consent”. Bernays advised the avoidance of debate: fluoridation was to be presented as indisputably beneficial; only the ignorant could object to it.

Reviews of Bryson’s book included one in the scientific journal Nature, noting that he “raises the stakes by reporting a great deal of relevant and often alarming research”, and describing the book as “thought-provoking and worthwhile”.

Publishers Weekly wrote: “Bryson marshals an impressive amount of research to demonstrate fluoride’s harmfulness, the ties between leading fluoride researchers and the corporations who funded and benefited from their research, and what he says is the duplicity with which fluoridation was sold to the people.”

Chemical & Engineering News stated: “We are left with compelling evidence that powerful interests with high financial stakes have colluded to prematurely close honest discussion and investigation into fluoride toxicity.”

Bryson found that, while the American Dental Association had previously opposed fluoridation, it changed its tune after receiving a large donation from an industrialist with a stake in the commercial use of fluoride.

A study of workers at a chemical company in Cleveland was used to promote the idea that fluoride reduces tooth decay. It said workers exposed to fluoride had fewer cavities than those not exposed to it. The report helped to shift public opinion. The secret version of the report, discovered decades later, stated that most of the men had few or no teeth, and that corrosion affected such teeth as they had.

As early as 1951 a confidential gathering of State Dental Directors in the U.S. was advised by Dr. Frank Bull, “We have told the public it works, so we can’t go back on that”. If it was difficult then, it must be very difficult now for prestigious dental and medical organisations to admit that the assurances of effectiveness and safety they have given for so long were at best mistaken and at worst fraudulent.

Among the various methods used to suppress adverse evidence and dissent have been mocking, silencing, sacking and denigration of scientists who threatened the official story. One of the earliest to suffer was Dr. George Waldbott, an eminent U.S. physician who was viciously maligned after reporting fifty cases of people made ill by fluoridated water, as established by double-blind tests.

Dr. John Colquhoun, a former supporter of fluoridation in New Zealand, was Chief Dental Officer for Auckland when he discovered and reported that fluoride was damaging children’s teeth. This was not what the authorities wanted to hear and he was sacked.

Dr. William Marcus was Senior Science Adviser in the Office of Drinking Water in the Environmental Protection Agency. He was sacked when he warned that research by the famous Battelle Institute showed that some forms of cancer could be caused by fluoride.

Dr. Phyllis Mullenix was the Chief Toxicologist at the prestigious Forsyth Dental Center, who discovered that fluoride is a neurotoxin that can adversely affect the brain. Following publication of her peer-reviewed study, U.S. Government pressure resulted in her being sacked and the institute’s toxicology department closed.

Often those whose research gave results unfavourable to fluoridation found that medical journals were hostile. Dr. Albert Schatz was a co-discoverer of streptomycin, the first effective drug for tuberculosis. When he found that infants in Chile had much higher death rates in fluoridated areas he sent a report in 1965 to the editor of the Journal of the American Dental Association who returned it unread.

The reluctance of many medical journals to publish adverse findings on fluoride resulted in the foundation of the International Society for Fluoride Research and its quarterly journal Fluoride. However, MEDLINE, the bibliographic database published by the U.S. National Library of Medicine, declined to index the peer-reviewed journal’s contents.

Dr. Richard Foulkes chaired a committee that recommended fluoridation in British Columbia. Later, a friend urged him to do his own research, after which he changed his mind and said: “My initial belief was based on information given to me by those in authority rather than on the basis of my examination of the facts.”

Dr. Hardy Limeback was Head of Preventive Dentistry at the University of Toronto when in 1999 he apologised for having promoted fluoridation. “I did not realise the toxicity of fluoride,” he said. “I had taken the word of the public health dentists, the public health physicians, the USPHS, the USCDC, the ADA, the CDA that fluoride was safe and effective without actually investigating it myself”.

It used to be claimed that fluoride works on the teeth from within and therefore that pregnant mothers should take fluoride for the sake of unborn children’s teeth. Now it is said that fluoride’s main effect is from the outside (topical, not systemic). Therefore, there is no need to imbibe it.

Water fluoridation is a blunderbuss that hits far more than the intended target. About a third to a half of fluoride that is ingested remains in the body where it accumulates, not only in the teeth and bones but also in the kidneyspineal gland and the cardiovascular system. Kidney patients are particularly at risk from fluoridation.

The dose of fluoride a person gets in water is haphazard since people consume widely differing amounts. Bottle-fed babies get very much more fluoride than breast-fed ones, and the American Dental Association conceded in 2006, with little publicity, that “using water that has no or low levels of fluoride” should be considered when preparing formula milk for infants. However, neither an ordinary water filter nor boiling can remove fluoride.

Recent research also finds that fluoride damages children’s brains. For example, studies show a loss of IQ and increased symptoms of ADHD in offspring when pregnant women are exposed to fluoride at doses commonly experienced in fluoridated communities in Canada.

Leading scientists concerned about fluoride’s toxicity, and willing to speak out, include Dr. Philippe Grandjean (Harvard University: “Fluoride is causing a greater overall loss of IQ points today than lead, arsenic or mercury”); Dr. Kathleen Thiessen (“The principal hazard at issue from exposure to fluoridation chemicals is IQ loss”); Professor David Bellinger (Harvard Medical School: “It’s actually very similar to the effect size that’s seen with childhood exposure to lead”); Professor Bruce Lanphear (“Fluoride exposure during early brain development diminishes the intellectual abilities in young children”); and Dr. Howard Hu (“Fluoride is a developmental neurotoxicant at levels of exposure seen in the general population in water-fluoridated communities”).

No less important is the fact that fluoridation is treatment without consent. People without the resources needed to obtain alternative supplies of water for drinking and cooking are chemically treated, in effect compulsorily.

For more information see Fluoride Free Alliance U.K.Fluoride Action Network and Stop Fluoridation U.K.

April 2, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Civil Liberties, Deception, Environmentalism, Militarism, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | , , , | Leave a comment

A Damning Opinion Piece in the British Medical Journal on the Illusion of Evidence Based Medicine

How medicine has been corrupted by corporate interests

The Naked Emperor’s Newsletter | March 23, 2022

A reader sent me this opinion piece published in the British Medical Journal last week. The authors argue that evidence based medicine (EBM) has been corrupted by corporate interests, failed regulation and commercialisation of academia.

The article begins by discussing how EBM was meant to improve medicine but as pharmaceutical documents have been released we realise that this remains an illusion.

The advent of evidence based medicine was a paradigm shift intended to provide a solid scientific foundation for medicine. The validity of this new paradigm, however, depends on reliable data from clinical trials, most of which are conducted by the pharmaceutical industry and reported in the names of senior academics. The release into the public domain of previously confidential pharmaceutical industry documents has given the medical community valuable insight into the degree to which industry sponsored clinical trials are misrepresented. Until this problem is corrected, evidence based medicine will remain an illusion.

They then look at how large corporations have dominated the market and in doing so have slowed scientific progress by supressing information and data and failing to report adverse events.

The philosophy of critical rationalism, advanced by the philosopher Karl Popper, famously advocated for the integrity of science and its role in an open, democratic society. A science of real integrity would be one in which practitioners are careful not to cling to cherished hypotheses and take seriously the outcome of the most stringent experiments.5 This ideal is, however, threatened by corporations, in which financial interests trump the common good. Medicine is largely dominated by a small number of very large pharmaceutical companies that compete for market share, but are effectively united in their efforts to expanding that market. The short term stimulus to biomedical research because of privatisation has been celebrated by free market champions, but the unintended, long term consequences for medicine have been severe. Scientific progress is thwarted by the ownership of data and knowledge because industry suppresses negative trial results, fails to report adverse events, and does not share raw data with the academic research community. Patients die because of the adverse impact of commercial interests on the research agenda, universities, and regulators.

Universities were once respected institutions but by seeking funding from the pharmaceutical industry, they have become corrupted.

The pharmaceutical industry’s responsibility to its shareholders means that priority must be given to their hierarchical power structures, product loyalty, and public relations propaganda over scientific integrity. Although universities have always been elite institutions prone to influence through endowments, they have long laid claim to being guardians of truth and the moral conscience of society. But in the face of inadequate government funding, they have adopted a neo-liberal market approach, actively seeking pharmaceutical funding on commercial terms. As a result, university departments become instruments of industry: through company control of the research agenda and ghostwriting of medical journal articles and continuing medical education, academics become agents for the promotion of commercial products.6 When scandals involving industry-academe partnership are exposed in the mainstream media, trust in academic institutions is weakened and the vision of an open society is betrayed.

Academics no longer succeed because of their achievements but because of what they can offer to the pharmaceutical industry.

The corporate university also compromises the concept of academic leadership. Deans who reached their leadership positions by virtue of distinguished contributions to their disciplines have in places been replaced with fundraisers and academic managers, who are forced to demonstrate their profitability or show how they can attract corporate sponsors. In medicine, those who succeed in academia are likely to be key opinion leaders (KOLs in marketing parlance), whose careers can be advanced through the opportunities provided by industry. Potential KOLs are selected based on a complex array of profiling activities carried out by companies, for example, physicians are selected based on their influence on prescribing habits of other physicians. KOLs are sought out by industry for this influence and for the prestige that their university affiliation brings to the branding of the company’s products. As well paid members of pharmaceutical advisory boards and speakers’ bureaus, KOLs present results of industry trials at medical conferences and in continuing medical education. Instead of acting as independent, disinterested scientists and critically evaluating a drug’s performance, they become what marketing executives refer to as “product champions.”

Ironically, industry sponsored KOLs appear to enjoy many of the advantages of academic freedom, supported as they are by their universities, the industry, and journal editors for expressing their views, even when those views are incongruent with the real evidence. While universities fail to correct misrepresentations of the science from such collaborations, critics of industry face rejections from journals, legal threats, and the potential destruction of their careers. This uneven playing field is exactly what concerned Popper when he wrote about suppression and control of the means of science communication. The preservation of institutions designed to further scientific objectivity and impartiality (i.e., public laboratories, independent scientific periodicals and congresses) is entirely at the mercy of political and commercial power; vested interest will always override the rationality of evidence.

They discuss how the regulators have been captured without any questions raised by governments.

Regulators receive funding from industry and use industry funded and performed trials to approve drugs, without in most cases seeing the raw data. What confidence do we have in a system in which drug companies are permitted to “mark their own homework” rather than having their products tested by independent experts as part of a public regulatory system? Unconcerned governments and captured regulators are unlikely to initiate necessary change to remove research from industry altogether and clean up publishing models that depend on reprint revenue, advertising, and sponsorship revenue.

Their suggested reforms are probably what most naïve people already think happens but unfortunately doesn’t.

Our proposals for reforms include: liberation of regulators from drug company funding; taxation imposed on pharmaceutical companies to allow public funding of independent trials; and, perhaps most importantly, anonymised individual patient level trial data posted, along with study protocols, on suitably accessible websites so that third parties, self-nominated or commissioned by health technology agencies, could rigorously evaluate the methodology and trial results. With the necessary changes to trial consent forms, participants could require trialists to make the data freely available. The open and transparent publication of data are in keeping with our moral obligation to trial participants—real people who have been involved in risky treatment and have a right to expect that the results of their participation will be used in keeping with principles of scientific rigour. Industry concerns about privacy and intellectual property rights should not hold sway.

Overall, a scathing opinion piece which highlights some truths which many of us recognise but which the majority would call you crazy for suggesting. Whenever I have tried to discuss how the pharmaceutical companies “mark their own homework”, the common response I get is “rubbish, the regulators conduct their own trials to see how safe and effective the vaccines are”.

If more people understood how the system worked then we wouldn’t be in the situation we are today. However, that is easier said than done when governments and the media have also been captured along with the regulators and academia.

The authors have published a book called The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the crisis of credibility in clinical research and is available here.

March 23, 2022 Posted by | Book Review, Corruption, Deception, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Leave a comment