Government shills setting us up for destruction of freedom using avian influenza hysteria

November 30, 2005

Government shills setting us up for destruction of freedom using avian influenza hysteria http://www.thenewamerican.com/artman/publish/printer_2713.shtml Health / Health Care Last Updated: Nov 29th, 2005 - 15:11:43 Bird Flu (Excerpt)by William Norman GriggDecember 12, 2005The Bush administration has been creating irrational fear about the dangers of avian influenza just so that they can "save" us from it through restrictive governmental powers. The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed [and hence clamorous to be led to safety] by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. -- H.L. Mencken Though the H5N1 virus, better known as Avian Influenza or the bird flu, is a tangible reality and a potential threat, conjuring the prospect of the disease mutating into a planet-menacing pandemic involves a considerable amount of imagination. At present,

roughly 60 people out of a global population of more than six billion have succumbed to the bird flu, and nearly all of them have contracted it under conditions very difficult to duplicate. No evidence has emerged to indicate that the virus can be transmitted from one human being to another -- although it's possible that such a dire mutation could occur. Nonetheless, the Bush administration and the UN's World Health Organization are prepared to spend billions of dollars to regiment human society just in case this isolated and relatively obscure affliction somehow morphs into a global plague. Their actions are rooted in a version of the "precautionary principle" encoded into UN-aligned radical environmentalism: supposedly to avoid a catastrophe, people are expected to live with the same privations and impositions that would occur had the envisioned catastrophe actually taken place. Apocalypse Now? Modern politics is built on the cult of the all-powerful, all-benevolent state. Unlike the modest and limited entity envisioned by the Framers of our Constitution, which was intended to protect individual rights and property, the contemporary state is depicted, by those who worship it, as a secular savior endowed with the power to rectify all injustices and protect its subjects from every conceivable hardship or danger. Adherents of the state-cult thus constantly seek to convince a critical portion of the public that at least three of the apocalyptic horsemen are saddled up and digging spurs into their mounts, while the fourth is getting his riding tack in order. The preferred apocalyptic scenarios generally involve large-scale disasters, such as

global environmental collapse or universal nuclear annihilation. Since 9/11, mass terrorism has been added to that list. These potential crises, however, tend to be too abstract to generate the required panic. Environmental scare scenarios dissipate quickly when exposed to rational science. During the Cold War, the vision of global nuclear holocaust was a potent mobilizing force, but that threat has lost much of its potency since the apparent collapse of communism. Post 9/11, that threat has recovered some of its urgency in the form of exploitable fears of mass terrorism involving weapons of mass destruction, as the Bush administration's success in deceiving our nation into the Iraq war illustrates. But 9/11, horrific and destructive as it was, actually illustrates the limited usefulness of terrorism as a foil for authoritarian reforms. While the Black Tuesday attacks killed thousands and inflicted billions of dollars in

damage to our economy, it was hardly a civilization-threatening event affecting the interests and well-being of most Americans. This is why plague-related scenarios, particularly those involving bioterrorism, are so promising to those seeking to scare the public into submission. Most people find it difficult to imagine the collapse of the biosphere, or a cataclysmic nuclear assault. But everybody knows what it's like to be sick, vulnerable, and helpless. And since influenza is a seasonal affliction experienced by millions, the conceptual link between one's sniffles and aching joints and a global pandemic seems more plausible. Thus the potential threat of unseen microbes....To continue reading the complete article, place an online order for a PDF version of the December 12th issue of The New American, and get instant access to the full-text of this article along with the full-text of all the other articles in the same issue. Similarly, if you place an online order for one or more copies of the print version of the December 12th issue, you'll receive a complimentary link to the PDF version of that issue, also giving you instant access to the full-text of the "Bird Flu" article and all of the other articles in that

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