A human white blood cell (CD4) being attacked by the HIV virus; an AIDS prevention advertisement by The Ministry of Education Training, Vietnam. Colour lithograph, ca. 1995. Wikicommons/Wellcome images. Some rights reserved.One of the most pervasive conspiracy theories to
have arisen during the Cold War that continues to spread until today is the
HIV-as-US-bioweapon thesis – namely, that the human immunodeficiency virus
(HIV) that causes Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) was engineered as
a biological weapon by the US Government. This conspiracy theory persists,
especially on the internet, although scientists have concluded – as many
already hypothesized in the 1980s – that HIV originated naturally in Africa
after a related virus or viruses jumped the species barrier from non-human
primates in the early 1900s.
Conspiracy as virus
As I wrote about the origins and spread of the
HIV-as-US-bioweapon conspiracy theory, I found it striking that its evolution
and diffusion in various directions paralleled that of a virus. The basic
conspiracy theory that the US government somehow stood behind the spread of
AIDS arose within the gay community in the US and was published in gay
newspapers no later than 1983. After statistics began to show that Haitians and
African-Americans were overrepresented among those infected by HIV, similar
conspiracy theories about the government’s construction of the virus began to
spread within the African-American community and to appear in print in black
newspapers by 1985.
Based on a number of studies regarding
conspiracy theories, this development should come as no surprise. In the face
of a major, new crisis or perceived threat, conspiracy theories (CTs) arise,
especially within historically marginalized or oppressed groups and communities
– i.e., among victims of real conspiracies. This helps the individuals
concerned to gain a sense of understanding and control and to rally against
perceived outside attack. Such conspiracy theories, much like HIV and other
viruses, thus appear to be ‘naturally occurring’. Or, at least, that has been
the explanation of many scholars. Because it is hard to trace the original
purveyor(s) of a given CT – perhaps even harder than finding a “patient zero”
in epidemiology – CTs often seem to spontaneously arise in such accounts.
Much scholarship, especially in psychology and
political science, has also focused on the reception of conspiracy theories –
why individuals or groups are susceptible or open to believing certain CTs or
in CTs in general. In such analyses, the people who come to believe in a given
CT or CTs are generally portrayed as passive recipients, ‘infected’ by the
given idea due to natural susceptibilities. Some scholars in the field of
“memetics”, based upon the term “meme” coined by Richard Dawkins in his classic
1976 book The Selfish Gene, have
taken a similar approach in explaining “conspiracy memes.”
Dawkins used the term “meme” to refer to any
cultural entity that replicates and spreads – e. g., fashion, melodies and
learned skills. People serve as the carriers of such memes, and because they
often reproduce them imperfectly or otherwise change them, memes can change and
evolve over time. Just like viruses, memes naturally replicate, mutate and
recombine as they spread from person to person, from brain to brain. Much of
the scholarship on the reception of conspiracy theories, just like that of the
“memeticists”, takes a “meme’s-eye-view” of the evolution and spread of
conspiracy theories. People appear to be passive recipients, and the meme or CT
often appears to be the active agent.
What
about agency in the spread of conspiracies?
Although such approaches to conspiracy theories
have been fruitful in terms of explaining the reception of CTs, they are also
problematic, especially for historians such as myself who focus on the agency
of individuals and groups. Ideas, just like viruses or organisms, do not
spontaneously generate, even if certain historical circumstances make the rise and
spread of a given idea more likely. Ideas themselves, including conspiracy
theories, are not concrete, active agents.
The history of the evolution and spread of the
HIV-as-US-bioweapon thesis serves as a useful case study of the agency of
individuals and groups in constructing, spreading, and altering conspiracy
theories to their own ends. My colleague Christopher Nehring and I have
illustrated this in our German-language study, “AIDS Conspiracy: The Ministry
of State Security and the KGB’s AIDS Disinformation Campaign.”
In our study, we conclude that the KGB adopted
and adapted the HIV-as-US-bioweapon conspiracy theory spreading in the US to
its own ends. It launched an international disinformation campaign accusing the
US of having created and weaponized the virus. The US, according to Soviet
disinformation, had thereby violated the international convention on biological
weapons. And US scientists, for their part, were guilty of scapegoating Africa
and Africans for the disease by positing its natural origins there.
The Soviets made one minor change in the
conspiracy theories spreading in the US at the time by naming the concrete
location where the alleged weaponization of the virus had taken place: the U.S.
Army Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick,
Maryland.
This addition, by naming an actual facility
where defensive bioweapons research had taken place, strengthened the
plausibility of Soviet accusations of a US violation of the international
convention. But this adaptation did not occur ‘naturally’, as the CT spread
from person to person in the US or around the globe. On the contrary, the
Soviets deliberately modified the original conspiracy theory. Although HIV
itself was not the product of genetic engineering, the Soviet version of the
HIV-as-US-bioweapon CT, the Fort-Detrick thesis, was the product of intentional
“memetic engineering” on the part of the KGB.
Evolution of the two
major strains of the HIV-as-US-Bioweapon conspiracy theory, 1983-1985:
As the chart above shows, after the KGB’s
intervention, two strains of the HIV-as-US-bioweapon CT co-evolved in 1985-1986
as Moscow alternatively adopted elements from and polemicized with individuals
associated with US perennial presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche.
Strain one
Moscow had indirectly justified the launching of
its disinformation campaign by pointing to accusations from LaRouche’s camp
that Moscow had constructed the AIDS-virus. London venereologist John Seale,
whom LaRouche’s Executive Intelligence
Review had cited regarding “the strategic advantages of the AIDS epidemic
in the West for the Soviet Union”, picked up on the Soviet thesis regarding the
artificial origins of AIDS in late 1985.
Although Seale initially left open whether the
US or the USSR was responsible, he now claimed that the AIDS virus had been
artificially constructed by removing a gene from another known retrovirus in
sheep, the visna virus. The Soviet Union picked up on Seale’s comments and
began to spread them along with its own accusation regarding Fort Detrick.
Shortly thereafter, California doctor Robert Strecker and his brother Theodore,
partly in reaction to Seale’s comments, argued that the visna virus had been
manipulated, but through its recombination with the bovine leukemia virus. The
recombination, they suggested, may or may not have taken place at Fort Detrick,
but the responsible individuals were communist agents from Eastern Europe who
had infiltrated the US government’s National Institutes of Health (NIH).
LaRouche began to spread the Streckers’ version
of the HIV-as-US-bioweapon conspiracy theory, while Robert Strecker and Seale
both supported LaRouche’s 1986 California ballot initiative to quarantine all
HIV-infected Californians.
Strain two
Around the same time as Strecker, Soviet-East
German biologist Jakob Segal and his wife, Lilli, formulated what became the
second major strain of the HIV-as-US-bioweapon thesis in the form of a
“scientific study”. Although the exact relationship of the couple at the time
to the KGB and its East German ally, the Stasi, remains unclear, it was the
Segals’ version of the HIV-as-US-bioweapon thesis that both communist security
services subsequently sought to popularize throughout the world. Jakob Segal
wrote to Seale in 1986 that he had also come to the conclusion that the visna
virus had been altered to create HIV; however, like Strecker, he believed that
visna had been crossed with another virus, the Human T-Lymphotropic virus type
1 (HTLV-I) by US scientists at Fort Detrick. This assertion later served as the
basis for the accusation that Dr. Robert Gallo, who had discovered HTLV-I and
co-discovered HIV, had personally engineered the AIDS virus.
Political
goals
The co-evolution of the two strains of the
HIV-as-US-bioweapon conspiracy theory from 1985-1986 demonstrates the agency of
individuals and groups in constructing, changing and spreading conspiracy
theories and shows how political extremists of Left and Right can borrow
elements of CTs from each other. The co-evolution also suggests that CTs have
an (anti-?) intellectual history that can be traced and documented through
research.
At the level of individuals, psychological
motivations may indeed predominate in constructing and spreading conspiracy
theories, but such individuals often share political goals with others
promoting the same CT. LaRouche and his supporters apparently sought to rally
the public against the concomitant dangers posed to national security by
communist infiltration and “homosexuality”, as “proven” by the AIDS epidemic,
and to rally support for their 1987 California ballot initiative to quarantine
the ensuing danger. Many of the tropes in LaRouche’s campaign echoed back to
the “Red” and “Lavender” Scares in
the US in the 1950s. The KGB, for its part, had concrete geopolitical goals in
discrediting US “imperialism” – goals that the Segals as communists in good
standing also supported.
Post-Cold War variants
Various subtypes and recombinations of the two
major strains of the HIV-as-US-bioweapon conspiracy theory appeared especially
after the Cold War, but such reformulations resulted once again from mimetic
engineering by various individuals and groups.
One popular variant combines the
HIV-as-US-bioweapon thesis with conspiracy theories regarding the
pharmaceutical industry (“big pharma”). The resulting hybrid suggests that just
as the science behind HIV/AIDS is false, so are the prescribed treatments from
scientists and medical doctors. Quite often, the most well-known promoters of this
recombination also happen to sell unproven, alternative therapies to control or
“cure” HIV/AIDS, which profit them, if not their patients.
Another recombination, already popular during
the Cold War, was the crossing of the HIV/bioweapon thesis with other
conspiracy theories regarding planned genocides against certain populations. In
the US, the black-nationalist Nation of Islam (NOI) pioneered in this regard.
Already in the late 1980’s, Steve Cokely, the NOI’s “Minister of Health” and
advisor to Chicago mayor Eugene Sawyer, accused Jewish doctors of intentionally
infecting African-American babies with the virus. The NOI continued to spread
the accusation until the late 1990’s, and “Professor Griff” from the hip-hop
group “Public Enemy” helped to popularize it.
In the 1990s and 2000s, the NOI’s newspaper, the
Final Call, helped to popularize the
views of Boyd Graves, who accused the US government of having infected him with
the AIDS virus. According to Graves, the government had developed HIV as a
bioweapon to eliminate unwanted populations, including African-Americans, and
the alleged founder of the AIDS-virus, Robert Gallo, had also developed a cure
for AIDS. Gallo, Boyd Graves asserted, had given the cure to a Jewish rabbi,
who kept it under lock and key. Graves claimed he had found out the “natural”
cure; however, it was colloidal silver, with which he treated himself. He also accused an Israeli foundation of suppressing
knowledge about the cure and an Israeli pharmaceutical company from blocking
its production. Graves
died in 2009 after a long illness at the age of 57.
Others recombined the HIV-as-US-bioweapon thesis
with well-known conspiracy theories that had stood at the basis of the major
totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century – the first, a worldwide conspiracy of
monopoly capitalists bent on maximizing their profits at the expense of the
working class, and the second, a Jewish-Bolshevist (or simply a Jewish)
conspiracy seeking to dominate – or already dominating – the world.
In reunified, post-communist Germany, Jakob
Segal teamed up with the Maoist Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany (MLPD) in a
bid to further propagandize his version of the Fort-Detrick thesis, along with
his suggestions for alternative medications against HIV infections, especially
aspirin. A conspiracy of the pharmaceutical industry, Segal argued, sought to
suppress the truth about the powers of aspirin against HIV because it would undermine
their profits. The MLPD offered its own cure for AIDS: the destruction of the
pharma monopolies through a world communist revolution based on the Stalinist
and Maoist precepts of the MLPD. However, this proposed cure for AIDS, like so
many, has proved elusive. German author Wolfgang Eggert has apparently sought
to revive the idea of a Jewish world conspiracy à la Protocols of the Elders of
Zion, by citing the alleged intentional spreading of AIDS and other epidemic
diseases by a Jewish end-times cult.
Deadly
consequences
My examination of the HIV-as-US-bioweapon
conspiracy theory suggests that CTs multiply, spread and recombine like
viruses, but this process is not necessarily accidental.
Various individuals and groups construct, adapt
and spread conspiracy theories in the pursuit of concrete goals. This suggests
not only agency but also intention, a “memetic engineering” of conspiracy
theories. Whatever the basic intent may be for constructing and spreading
conspiracy theories, they always suggest an enemy – whether the US government,
the Jews, scientists, doctors, the pharmaceutical industry, or other actors.
Because conspiracy theories serve the purpose of discrediting or even
demonizing an “enemy,” they contribute to mistrust and hatred against the same
and can serve even to justify violence – as we see today on a daily basis.
In the case of the HIV-as-US-bioweapon thesis,
the discrediting of mainstream science has led an untold number of individuals
to ignore the warnings of the same with regard to HIV/AIDS – i.e., to engage
only in safe sex, to seek testing if at risk from HIV infection and if
infected, to accept proven treatments with anti-retroviral medications.
Ignoring the mainstream science in this case can have – and has had – deadly consequences.