Jacob’s ladder of lies

September 29, 2009 by
Filed under: Politics, Pseudo-Science 

In an interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour, South African President Jacob Zuma attempted to wash away any culpability for his role in his government’s deliberate extermination of at least 300,000 (mainly ANC-supporting) AIDS sufferers. He attacked ex-president Thabo Mbeki maintaining that his insane idea that there is no link between HIV and AIDS was his own private view and not government policy.

Somehow it was Mbeki’s private affair that let his criminal, alcoholic health minister unleash her bizarre cure of onions, beetroot and garlic (with a side helping of African potatoes) for AIDS on the public health system. It was rigorously enforced; doctors were fired trying to treat their patients with anti-retroviral drugs drugs. Activists had to go to the Constitutional Court to force these murderers to allow the distribution of ARVs. They didn’t take Mbeki and Tshabalala-Msimang to court in their private capacities: they sued the government – which vigorously defended its position.

So Zuma lied that it wasn’t government policy. But worse than that, Zuma vigorously defended this disgusting policy at the time. In an address to parliament in 2000, calling on members to acquaint themselves with the AIDS-denialist literature. Then he dragged out the old straw man canard, They laughed at Galileo:

In Europe in the Seventeenth Century, the main stream scientific view was that the sun moved around the earth. An Italian scientist Galilei Galileo had a different view and believed that the earth moved around the sun. However his views were considered to be so threatening to the scientific establishment that he was forced to publicly recant. As we all know today, he was right and they were wrong.

In the history of science and in particular the history of medical science, there are other examples where solutions were found to difficult challenges as a result of robust scientific debate between conventional and alternative views.

This House, which is based on the fundamental principle of the right to differ and to express a different opinion, ought not to balk at the idea that the President is asking scientists to behave as scientists.

As Carl Sagan said: “They laughed at Galileo. They laughed at Newton. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”

In 2000 Padraig O’Malley interviewed then ANC Secretary General and current deputy-President, Kgalema Motlanthe on his views on HIV/AIDS (part 1, part 2). He toed the line that HIV does not cause AIDS, as simply a natural breakdown of the immunity system. As such the “opportunistic” diseases should be treated in their own right. He called AIDS a symbol – perhaps he hadn’t understood Mbeki’s assertion that AIDS was just a syndrome - not a disease. He then went on to blame the drug companies for fabricating the whole thing to make huge profits. And of course he had a swing at whites:

No, they are gullible. You see half of them don’t read but they regard themselves as well informed because they’re white. The reason why when you ask – you ask any of the experts whether they have seen evidence, any piece of document that says scientist so-and-so in such a country has isolated this HIV virus and photographed it and studied it’s modus vivendi under controlled conditions, they will swear at you.

They will tell you that question was answered twenty years ago, they will tell you you are giving audience to dissidents. They will not tell you because it’s not there. That’s why they become vicious because it is simply not there. They take it on authority and then it gets passed on like that but there’s no authority, it’s a lie repeated by those who are supposed to know better. The truth of the matter is that if they were to admit that indeed no such thing has happened, I mean it would cause serious reverberations across the scientific world.

Zuma can lie all he wants but we know the truth: the ANC hates its own people and was willing to let them die in their hundreds of thousands rather than confront the source of this disease and the source of the life-saving drugs. As George Annandale writes on this subject:

Perhaps the president can explain how it is possible to recall and redeploy President Mbeki for creating a nuisance and sowing division in the party, yet, when he was the driving force in the thinly veiled extermination of hundreds of thousands of HIV/Aids sufferers, this moral alliance and its moral upstanding leaders, could not stop him.

Yes Jacob, they laughed at Galileo. And we would laugh at you too if the stench of death didn’t hang around you like a vulture.

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Comments

One Comment on Jacob’s ladder of lies

  1. Boer Basher on Tue, 29th Sep 2009 2:14 pm

    2. Tim,

    I think you are a racist. Why don’t just leave SA. Since you are ‘strong’ leave us to be as weak people. You have no place in SA. We will destroy you and your white supremacist buddies AWB.

    Boerbasher

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