PandeMIC: the enemy above

My wife opened her email this morning and found a recruitment ad from GCHQ - yes, really. She’s been retired for twenty years but this looks like a dream opportunity - she could ‘work from home’ simply by spying on me. For the system has become so crap and evil that it has radicalised me.

‘Crap’: all that cyber-snooping and GCHQ can’t analyse its data to see why my wife is not in the frame for a job with them! But then, how come two Russian agents were allowed to fly into the UK and wander around Salisbury in 2018 during Toxic Dagger, an annual military exercise themed around chemical warfare? And that narrative of the Skripal poisonings, which has more holes than a string vest! I thought our spooks were good at lying.

‘Evil’: it’s not just foreigners who study the technology of mass murder. The laboratory at Porton Down is less than 20 minutes’ drive away from Salisbury and has a long history of potentially lethal experiments both in-house on Service personnel and covertly on the civilian population across the country.

We have had a UN Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) since 1975, forbidding the development of such things; yet across the world, well-paid and -pensioned whitecoats are at work on them. ‘Oh, but we have to do this research, because of what the Other Lot might do,’ they will tell us. ‘This is for defence!’ But everybody can make that excuse; really, the whole lot of them ARE the Other Lot. Go back to the BWC and try harder, harder! Meanwhile, if only they could be rounded up and sent to some remote Pacific island, concocting their hellbrews in segregated valleys and constant mutual fear.

Actually, that may possibly have started already. Seven years ago the French opened a ‘biosafety laboratory’ in Tahiti, allegedly for research into mosquito-borne diseases. Oddly, the original announcement in Tahiti News has since disappeared and the laboratory is not on the main island but on a tiny two-square-mile atoll called Tetiaroa - hardly a convenient commute for the staff. Still, let’s try to believe it is what it says; at least it’s safely isolated.

There are four categories of lab biosafety precautions; Tetiaroa is equipped to NSB3 containment standard; good, but not the best. A microbiology facility in Beijing was also a Level 3, yet the SARS virus escaped from there, twice; presumably that is why China’s first NSB4 lab was constructed in Wuhan, 650 miles away and with a population a third the size of the nation’s capital.

Now the West is claiming that despite Wuhan’s top-level safety rating - the same as for the UK’s Porton Down - Covid was another lab leak. That is worrying, for as the Telegraph and Mail have reported, Imperial College conducted ‘gain of function’ research on the Covid virus last year in a lower, level 3 setting. Are our boffins definitely more safety-conscious, less fallible than the Chinese? They were combining elements of the original disease - one that is estimated to have killed 6.8 million people worldwide so far - with those of Delta and Omicron variants. What were they hoping to achieve? What if they had succeeded in breeding a new strain that was as transmissible as WuFlu but far more lethal? Was that the intention?

There are so many potential monsters of modern war under construction: biological (including genetic targeting of ethnic groups), chemical, atomic, drones, robotics, artificial intelligence… Think of all those clever people preparing a Hell on Earth, for nothing but money and power, things that they and their superiors can enjoy for only a blink of history’s eye. That is why I say the enterprise is evil: an irrational project to cause lasting harm for the sake of fleeting gains.

President Eisenhower warned us about the ‘military-industrial complex’ in 1961:

We have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. . . . This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. . . .Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. . . . In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

How much do we invest in peace research?

In this context it is very interesting to hear what Tucker Carlson of Fox News has been saying recently. Leftists often dub Carlson ‘far right’, i.e. not a revolutionary Communist; yet unlike them he can confess to being mistaken and ashamed, as on the issue of his former support for the Iraq War.

Carlson now goes further, drawing a line between the murder of JFK, the defenestration of Nixon and the derailment of Trump’s foreign policy. What have they in common?

‘Elements in the federal bureaucracy… working to undermine the American system of government… Unelected lifers in the federal agencies make the biggest decisions in American government and crush anyone who tries to rein them in and in the process, our democracy becomes a joke.’

Peace initiatives like those the three Presidents above attempted are a threat to the Masters Of War whom we must seek to oppose. Quite possibly radical change - reform - may come not from the anarchic Left, but from the decent-hearted faction among conservatives: not the money-mad globalist British Tories, not the crush-the-poor American Rightists. It will take radicals like us, not ‘woke’ but disillusioned, who see emerging from Pandora’s box the last and only real gift: Hope.