Crackpot Vs Crackpot

ONE OF THE FEW PLEASURES of watching the AIDS denialist conspiracy movement in action is seeing the different factions slugging it out with their equally stupid but mutually contradictory claims.

Best known, of course, is the dispute between the Perth Group (and their supporters) who claim that HIV does not exist has not been proven to exist, and Peter Duesberg's supporters who are unable to deny the existence of HIV, but claim that it's a "harmless passenger virus" and that the real cause of progressive depletion of CD4+ cell mediated immune function in AIDS is illicit drug use.

Or AZT if you have never taken illicit drugs.

Or malnutrition if neither of the above apply.

Or something-or-other that's non-infectious in factor VIII if you are a well-nourished haemophiliac who's never taken AZT.

Or their latest "theory" - AIDS is just a manifestation of  a mysterious condition called Gay Bowel Syndrome . This designation apparently applies to people with HIV/AIDS who (a) happen to be gay and (b) have a bowel.

But for sheer wackiness it's hard to go past the third main school of thought within the denialist/conspiracist movement - the AIDS is a bioweapon developed by the US government theory, propounded all over some of the more weirdass corners of the internet (eg youtube).

Now, from a military standpoint, a bioweapon that takes a median of ten years or so to cause serious illness in adults seems to Snout to have rather limited usefulness in a conflict situation. This is especially so given that HIV is only transmissible in a limited range of... well... fairly specific ways. Presumably the intention was to deploy it on the battlefield in conjunction with the infamous Gay Bomb, by which "enemies would left helpless by mass gay orgies, as soldiers were irresistibly attracted to one another."

In reality, the story behind the AIDS is a bioweapon developed by the US government theory is almost as strange as the theory itself. It has its origins in the murky depths of 1980s-era cold war disinformation campaigns, in which both the US and Soviet bloc tried to outdo each other spreading rumors in each other's spheres of influence hoping to destabilise popular support for the respective enemy governments. The AIDS-bioweapon theory was a well-documented initiative of the Soviet KGB and the East German Stasi, and was eventually so successful that it has managed to outlast the communist eastern bloc itself by a couple of decades.

Foremost among its promoters in the US have been the deliciously crazy Lenny Horowitz, and the now-deceased lawyer Boyd Graves, who died of AIDS in 2009.

But here's the best bit: Horowitz not only accuses Robert Gallo of engineering this Crime Against Humanity (Gallo is of course the AntiChrist Incarnate for all denialist whackjobs), but he also points the finger at Peter Duesberg. As his INDICTMENT OF SPECIAL VIRUS CANCER PROGRAM VIROLOGIST DR PETER DUESBERG attests:

"I, Dr. Leonard G. Horowitz, respecting and representing thousands of scientists and physicians worldwide whose voices have been neglected and silenced; as a Diplomat for the World Organization for Natural Medicine; as a representative of God, Knighted emissary for the Sovereign Orthodox Order of Knights Hospitaller of St. John of Jerusalem, and as a Levitical priest in the bloodlines of Moses and YaHShuaH, the Messiah, I hereby INDICT YOU, Dr. Peter Duesberg, FOR THE DEATHS OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WORLDWIDE, THROUGH YOUR ROLES IN THE CREATION OF AIDS AS WELL AS THE DISINFORMATION THAT SUSTAINS THIS AND RELATED MEDICAL GENOCIDES."    [shouting in original]

Now Duesberg is of course a famous belligerent loon in his own right. So it's only with the slightest touch of schadenfreude that Snout records that Duesberg has managed to attract a belligerently loony parasite of his very own. Or as Irish essayist and poet Jonathan Swift noted in 1733:

"So, naturalists observe, a flea
Hath smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite 'em,
And so proceed ad infinitum."