 |
|
Pen Points
|
|
Bush Steers Us Toward Global War
During the age of Viet Nam the nations biggest concern was in the United
States becoming the "World's Police Force" in trying to keep Communism out
of every country on earth. Lyndon Johnson effectively stepped down from
re-election in the wake of this no-win war and people from all walks of life
protested their children coming Home in body bags.
Bush's "State of Disunion" message named three nations it blames for global terrorism; Iraq, Iran and North Korea. He called them (reminiscent of Ronald Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech) an "Axis of Evil". Shades of World War II! Have we reverted to calling every Nation that is a little different than us names? I am reminded of calling every Japanese "Tojo", every German "Gerry" and every Italian...well, what the heck did we call Italian's during World War II? The point is North Korea responded to Bush's allegations by saying that it interpreted it as "an act of war". If North Korea is evil and possess weapons of mass destruction, is Bush sure enough about it to have the rest of put on the 2 million SPF sun-block for a nuclear fireworks show? The Iranian leadership called Bush's remarks stupid and wondered why anyone would think that a country already torn by two decades of wars with it's neighbors would possibly want to start another one. The history of the past 6 years has shown irrevocably that Iran hated al-Qaeda and the Taliban worse than anyone else in the world. Why would they harbor their own enemy? Then there's Iraq. Well, if Bush is so intent on eliminating the threat Hussein poses on the world why doesn't he ask Daddy why he was left in power after the world bombed them back to stone? It's simple, really. When Daddy was President there were two things to worry about; Politics and Money. At least 11 years ago there was still something of a separation of these issues. Politics dictated that Hussein be stopped from his military land grabbing. However, Money dictated that Hussein still had plenty of pull with OPEC and the Middle-Eastern Oil cartels. The fact that Hussein, even if removed from power, would continue to destabilize oil markets world-wide until the world economy looked worse than anything ENRON ever did might have something to do with it. George Dubya's scheme is a page from an old book called, Mein Kampf, by Adolph Hitler. If you own all the competitors then there is no competition. Iraq's oil capabilities are second only to Saudi Arabia (which is probably going to be next years pick for an evil empire). Iran survives only because of it's oil producing fields. North Korea drills oil off it's coastline in undisputed territorial waters and sells it to South Korea, Japan and China. Oil, oil everywhere and where there's oil you'll find Dubya lurking with a lascivious look in his eye. But controlling the world's dwindling supply of oil isn't enough for Bush. He wants to make everyone a money-grubbing sleaze-bag like he is. If you aren't of the opinion that Bush should be King of the earth, then look out! He's got John Ashcroft and the Department of Justice waiting to pluck you from society. I myself have received a telephone call from the local FBI office in Miami warning me (strongly worded as a warning) that my writing for several Internet publications is assisting the cause of terrorism and I should watch what I say. So much for the First Amendment, huh? Am I scared? Hell yes, I'm scared!
I'm scared because Americans don't care anymore about their freedoms. Bob Kunst is out there taking his life in his hands every day trying to deliver the message that our system of democracy is collapsing under the weight of conservative control that makes Nazi Germany look like a Boy Scout trying to help an old lady across the street. If I had the money to travel I'd be standing right next to him shouting to anyone who would listen. He's in danger of being shot to silence his presence. I only write and the FBI need only pull my Internet connection to silence me. I was reading one of Kunst's ravings yesterday about getting within 50 feet of Dubya in Miami and holding his sign up so Bush could appreciate that some people just never give up. Kunst wrote that Bush smiled and gave him a thumb's up sign. Why not? Bush has seized absolute power away from legitimate election process. Bush need only push a button and Kunst will be forever silent and if the government kills it's critics then who will be left to express outrage? There have been times when I shook my head at Kunst's writings and ravings, thinking to myself that he has the right idea but all the charisma of an elephant stampede in his delivery but at least he's trying to change the world. What are the rest of us doing to change things? Stephanie Donald Petrelis & Pasquarelli: A 'Venomous' Interview
It is clear that Kingston has long since lost - if he ever had - any degree of fairness towards Pasquarelli, Petrelis, the current membership of ACT UP San Francisco or their activities. It is equally clear that any responsible news publication would immediately take him off the story of the Pasquarelli/Petrelis cases and assign another reporter who might actually be able to report the story with fairness and balance (as Liz Highleyman has been able to do for the Bay Area Reporter - and has got her own threatening phone calls and e-mails from people on Kingston's and Nichols' side of this issue for doing so). I don't want to cherry-pick the whole interview for its outrages against common decency and common sense - though the whole actually reminded me of those documents that came out a few months ago purporting to be minutes of the Chinese Communist leadership in 1989 discussing how to react to the protests at Tienanmen Square, with Nichols in the role of a more moderate Politburo member suggesting a limited degree of tolerance for the protests and Kingston as a hard-liner calling for their complete and total suppression. I'll just mention two examples. Nichols' proud boast that "I've ignored the anti-HIV tirades that David Pasquarelli has been sending GayToday and other news outlets" seems to me diametrically opposed to the spirit of curiosity that underlies all good journalism. If Nichols is going to cover this story at all he has an obligation not only to study the material but to analyze it objectively and at least entertain the possibility that the critique of the HIV/AIDS model might be accurate. One can readily imagine a white journalist in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955 writing just about the same thing as Nichols did: "I've ignored the outrageous suggestion of Rev. Martin Luther King and his fellow ministers that Blacks could possibly be equal to whites," as part of a tirade against them for having the effrontery to disrupt the city's public transportation system. Kingston's dismissal of Pasquarelli's and Petrelis' concerns about the CDC's Model State Emergency Health Act as "quite simply an added-on fig leaf to justify their latest antics" is not only journalistically irresponsible but politically dangerous. Has Kingston even bothered to read the Model Act? I have - it's readily available as a PDF file at www.publichealthlaw.net - and I've also read the commentary in the November 4, 2001 Los Angeles Times co-written by Lawrence Gostin (the principal author of the Model Act) that makes it clear not only that he fully intends the Act to be used as a tool for quarantine and isolation of people with HIV and AIDS but that he feels that from the get-go the government's response to AIDS was too concerned with individual liberties and not enough with "aggressive" public-health measures. To quote from Gostin's Times article: "AIDS activists battled successfully for public-policy responses that intruded minimally on personal autonomy and privacy. The AIDS paradigm for coping with a public health crisis treated government as more of a threat than a solution." Anyone who remembers the campaigns for the AIDS initiatives sponsored by Lyndon LaRouche and William Dannemeyer in 1986 and 1988 will remember these as exactly the same arguments LaRouche and Dannemeyer were making then. We in the Queer and AIDS activist communities thought the spectre of an AIDS/HIV quarantine was pretty firmly laid to rest with the overwhelming defeat of those initiatives - but the aftermath of September 11, the passage of the viciously antilibertarian "Patriot Act" and the introduction of its equivalent in the health sphere, the Model State Emergency Health Act should lead us to conclude that we can take nothing for granted and quarantines of people who have AIDS or HIV, or who disagree with the conventional wisdom about AIDS or HIV (since the Model Act does not require that those quarantined or isolated actually have a disease!), are a very real possibility in the current political climate.
Mark Gabrish Conlan GayToday's Editor Replies to the Editor of Zenger's Newsmagazine Unfortunately, before you went off as you did in your e-mail (above), you failed to see what kind of treatment GayToday (and myself as its editor) have given the entire issue. Here following is a series of GayToday articles which take the other side of the issue and which have accompanied the interview with Mr. Kingston throughout the past month of January--and beforehand:
1. The Impulse to Prosecute: The Petrelis-Pasquarelli Affair http://gaytoday.badpuppy.com/garchive/penpoints/121001pp.htm 2. Free Michael Petrelis & David Pasquarelli http://gaytoday.badpuppy.com/garchive/people/122401pe.htm 3. If Liberty Means Anything at All http://gaytoday.badpuppy.com/garchive/penpoints/010702pp.htm 4. In Defense of San Francisco's Pasquarelli & Petrelis http://gaytoday.badpuppy.com/garchive/people/011402pe.htm 5. Jailed AIDS Dissidents Publish Ad in San Francisco Examiner http://gaytoday.badpuppy.com/garchive/world/120701wo.htm 6. Michael Petrelis: Pioneer of AIDS Activism (Interview by Jack Nichols) http://gaytoday.badpuppy.com/garchive/interview/100200in.htm When GayToday published #5 above, Tim Kingston sent me a furious email in December that rivaled yours as insulting. Therefore, I'm afraid, I view both of you, though on opposite sides of the question, as two peas in a pod. I hope you both find each other some day.
Sincerely, Zenger Newsmagazine's Editor Replies to GayToday's Editor Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I will concede one point: I am as convinced that HIV is NOT (and cannot be) the cause of AIDS as Tim Kingston is convinced that it is. I am equally as convinced that David Pasquarelli and Michael Petrelis are community heroes (despite their sometimes bizarre tactics - I'm still trying to figure out why they thought making late-night obscene phone calls to bureaucrats and reporters, the one accusation against them thus far supported with any real evidence, was going to accomplish for their cause) as Mr. Kingston is that they are community villains.
(Incidentally my path and Mr. Kingston's have crossed before. When I wrote a previous article about ACT UP San Francisco in Zenger's he wrote me a letter to the editor stating that I had misstated the reasons for the original split between ACT UP San Francisco and ACT UP Golden Gate - and since he had been at the relevant meetings personally while I was reporting them from hearsay, I decided he was most likely correct and published his letter.) What I specifically objected to about your participation in the interview was your boast that you have "ignored the anti-HIV tirades that David Pasquarelli has been sending GayToday and other news outlets." It would be one thing if you had fairly and honestly studied the arguments against HIV as the cause of AIDS and concluded, based on some form of rational analysis, that they were wrong. It's quite another thing for you to be so proud of the fact that you've never considered the anti-HIV arguments and have refused to read them when they were made available to you. After I received your e-mail I opened all six of your links and they confirmed to me that you are willing to report both sides of the question, "Is the prosecution of Michael Petrelis and David Pasquarelli reasonable and proportionate to the charges against them?" You are NOT willing to report both sides of the question, "Is David Pasquarelli right when he says HIV is not the cause - or at least not the sole cause - of AIDS?" The fact that you have interviewed Petrelis but not Pasquarelli confirms my analysis of the limitations of your conception of fairness and balance in this matter. On the other hand, I DO want to compliment you for showing as much balance as you have. In particular, I want to say that the #4 link in your e-mail - Michael Bellefountaine's article "In Defense of Pasquarelli and Petrelis," which I downloaded off a different site under the title "Eternal Vigilance" - was precisely the piece I selected to send to the e-mail list monitor who sent me your interview with Kingston as something he should post to balance his coverage. I am pleased that you have already done so.
Sincerely,
Final Reply to Zenger Newsmagazine's Editor You write me: "You are NOT willing to report both sides of the question, "Is David Pasquarelli right when he says HIV is not the cause - or at least not the sole cause - of AIDS?" The fact that you have interviewed Petrelis but not Pasquarelli confirms my analysis of the limitations of your conception of fairness and balance in this matter." Here are some of GayToday's earliest reports telling about the birth of the anti-HIVcontroversy--from both sides of the question. Please note the title of the first entry: AIDS Realism vs the HIV Hypothesis http://gaytoday.badpuppy.com/garchive/viewpoint/052200vi.htm Act Up Dissidents Emerge in San Francisco and Los Angeles http://gaytoday.badpuppy.com/garchive/events/040400ev.htm Larry Kramer says: 'Denial of HIV by Groups is Psychopathic' http://gaytoday.badpuppy.com/garchive/world/062100wo.htm Finally, you insist that I should not have honestly admitted in the interview that I'd been ignoring Pasquarelli's endless e-mails to me. But it wasn't because I didn't first study the things he'd been writing. I did study his emails, and I could not for the life of me take his 'expertise' in any way seriously. Later in the (Kingston) interview I call his communications "clumsy avalanches of e-mails" and I say that Pasquarelli, in my opinion, lacks credibility. That is why I ignored his emails after reading enough of them to satisfy me that he's merely a zealot, not a thinker. You, you True Believer, admit mystification as to why your 2 heroes would call people at night with whom they disagreed, showering them with obscenities. I surmise its probably because they lacked confidence in their own views and in the case of Pasquarelli, this must account for why his e-mails to me fast became so very annoying. As a life-long student of the psychology of conversion, and a movement activist since 1961, I can fast spot a zealot when he materializes. You hold me accountable for not accepting this street activist's anti-HIV theory. Petrelis doesn't accept Pasquarelli's anti-HIV theory either. So why should I? Five-thousand doctors attending the South African AIDS conference denounced it over a year ago. Given this fact, I am astonished that Pasquarelli, whose home city is here in Florida, can inspire in you such full confidence in his intellectual faculties. I'm afraid that they haven't inspired such confidence in me. GayToday ran a picture of a SF ACT Up member carrying a sign that says: "AIDS is Over" I don't believe that either. If you do believe AIDS is over, I would regard you as badly misinformed, if not gullible.
I wish you peace. |
AIDS Denialist David Pasquarelli 
© 1997-2002 BEI