"We fought in nineteen-seventeen And drove the tyrant from the scene. We're in a bigger, better war For your patriotic pastime. We don't know what we're fighting for But we didn't know the last time. So load the cannon, draw the blade, Come on, and join the Death Brigade." George and Ira Gershwin.

I was nearly two years old when the first ‘Phoney War’ began. The term 'phoney war' was coined by historians to describe the six month lull, between the declaration of war by the British government against Nazi Germany on September 3 1939, and the start of the real fighting. During that period, the British busily dug defences, stripped out iron railings to make munitions, filled sandbags, distributed gasmasks, dispatched the first infant evacuees to safer areas, and generally got ready for the serious business of repelling the invading hordes. The Americans stood on the sidelines, apparently justifying their nickname of ‘Doughboys’ - kneaded at the beginning of World War 1, but not rising until halfway through. Still, it wasn’t a fight most Americans understood, as Ira Gershwin’s lyric shows, and a sizable portion of the US population were of German origin, with understandably torn loyalties.

Forty-odd years later, the world was stampeded, this time largely by America, into another phoney war, this time against ‘HIV’, "the probable cause of AIDS". A principal difference between the two wars is that the first ‘phoney war’ was the overture to one of the bloodiest conflicts the world has seen, culminating in the revelation in 1944 of the horrors of the concentration camps and the obscenities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 before final victory. The AIDS war, by contrast, is still, some 14 years later, a phoney war, a looking glass war directed against a non-existent enemy retrovirus, ‘HIV’. It has already cost tens of billions of dollars, and shows no sign of being won. AIDS stands for Acquired (as opposed to congenital) Immunodeficiency (as judged by failure to combat normally harmless pathogens) Syndrome (a collection of diseases with a linking factor), and affects different groups of people for group specific reasons.

Who contrived this phoney AIDS war? By 1981, the US Centres for Disease Control (CDC) had not had a major epidemic to deal with since its inception following the polio epidemic in the late 40’s, and by the late 70’s, their track record stank. After the 1976 twin debacles of the wrongly predicted swine flu epidemic which left hundreds paralysed after the use of an inappropriate vaccine, and legionnaires’ disease, which was blamed on an ubiquitous bacterium found in soil and air condi-tioning units, for political reasons the CDC needed a genuine epidemic fast - by the late 70’s, there was talk of closing down the inefficient facility. Meanwhile, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) were under pressure to find the cause of an apparently new aggregation of previously barely noticed illnesses proving fatal amongst gay men and drug addicts. The National Cancer Institute, a tentacle of the NIH, also needed a boost to its flagging reputation. Very expensive labs had been set up as part of Nixon’s War on Cancer, but with the exception of claims by Dr. Robert Gallo to have found a viral cause of leukaemia, (subsequently completely debunked by Prof. Peter Duesberg), the National Cancer Institute was deemed by the early 80’s to have lost the war against cancer, and there was talk of closing, or at least mothballing some of those labs. In an uneasy alliance, the CDC and NIH, joined forces to combat a proposed AIDS ‘epidemic’, initially called GRID (Gay Related Immune Deficiency). Can anyone seriously believe that the largely homophobic staff at both agencies really cared that some gay men or drug addicts were dying of a rare pneumonia, and a form of blood vessel cancer usually associated with elderly men - the two original AIDS-defining diseases? The NIH’s interest in sick gays and drug addicts secured funding, keeping the labs working.

The first casualty in any war is truth, closely followed by common sense and rationality. The CDC-led propaganda machine was not helped by the fact that the two principal risk groups, gay men and drug addicts, were marginalised by society, and nobody cared very much what happened to them. The ‘risk groups’ were rather like the Czechs whom Hitler invaded at the start of his quest for lebensraum - the rest of Europe didn't care much, and Czechoslovakia was thought of as merely a small far away country, about which people knew little, and cared even less. How do you whip up enthusiasm and funding for a war which seemed to most middle-Americans to be fought solely on behalf of faggots and junkies, whose illness was perceived by many to be selfinflicted?

The first task was to make the public aware of AIDS as a general threat to the population at large. When haemophiliacs started to show signs of immune suppression, as well as recipients of blood transfusions, the CDC stressed that here were cases of the mysterious plague outside the original risk groups; some people may remember the clumsy description by Princess Anne of the ‘innocent victims of AIDS’. The impression was fostered that gay men and drug addicts had donated their blood and plasma to hospitals and the manufacturers of haemophiliac clotting factors, and infected innocent bystanders. No-one mentioned that the blood products were made from commercially acquired plasma, including imports from countries like Haiti, Senegal, Brazil, Belize and Zaire, as well as from drug addicts in America. I couldn't find any evidence that gays were in the habit of selling their blood or plasma, but the propaganda machine made no mention of that. The CDC played on popular fears and terror, and soon the world was convinced we were in for a deadly plague which would wipe out millions by the end of the century.

Gallo and his colleagues claimed a transmissible agent, probably a virus, was involved, and started to rummage in the 'retroviral' ragbag established in 1970 when Temin and his team revealed the phenomenon of reverse transcription. Virologists in other countries were also fashionably hunting for a viral cause of the new immune suppression syndrome, and very soon laboratories in France, Britain, America, Sweden, and Germany claimed to have come up with variants of the indirect markers that would come to be known as ‘HIV’ in co-cultures of cells from the tissues of patients, mostly gay men suffering from lymphadenopathy and irregularities in their T-cell subsets.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the word ‘epiphenomenon’ thus: "Secondary symptom, mere concomitant of something else not regarded as its cause or result" - a perfect description of ‘HIV’, as the last fourteen years have shown. That claims of detection of variants of ‘HIV’ should be made almost simultaneously in several labs world-wide seemed like confirmation that scientists were on the right track. However, this was not the first time that different experts came to the same wrong conclusion, as the history of diseases like beri beri, pellagra and smon shows. I try to put myself in their place, given a first class ticket to ride the AIDS War gravy train. If I were the first to realise that train was steaming in the wrong direction, would I have had the guts to pull the communication cord? When Margaret Heckler’s announcement in 1984 that the ‘probable’ cause of AIDS had been found was welcomed unquestioningly by an anxious world, the enemy had been identified, and war could be declared. No-one asked why human retroviruses had waited for thousands of years until some seven years after Temin’s discovery of reverse transcription to start to cause diseases.

After an assay to detect alleged ‘HIV antibodies’ was patented, the CDC and NIH cast their net wider, and started to test blood samples in the Third World, Africa, South America etc. and sure enough they struck gold. The non-specific tests reacted in some members of all these populations, and AIDS went global. The discovery that ‘HIV antibody positivity’ was distributed world-wide finally guaranteed enormous funding for a global anti-‘HIV’ war. The World Health Organisation joined the fray, and by the late 80’s, was predicting 20 million people infected with 'HIV' by the year 2000, and 6 million AIDS cases. AIDS was being touted  as an even bigger threat to the world than the Black Death which had wiped out a third of Europe's population in the middle ages. By comparison with AIDS, we were assured, the Black Death would seem a minor blip in health history.

From the outset, not everyone was happy about the proposal of an HIV=AIDS=death scenario. Dr. Joe Sonnabend had been treating immune suppressed gay men in New York for a plethora of STD’s all through the 70’s, and he was convinced that AIDS was the result of an antigenic overload. The same patients who had continually come back to him for antibiotic and other treatments for a whole raft of herpes, hepatitis, syphilis and other STD’s then were among those who first came down with AIDS-defining conditions in the early 80’s. They had ignored his warnings that they were permanently undermining their health. The complacent belief in the efficacy and low-to-no risk of antibiotics had led most gay men to regard STD’s and their treatment as a mere recreational  hazard. Today, however, we are continually being told that antibiotics are losing the fight against such diseases as tuberculosis, and even in the 70’s there was a known strain of gonorrhoea allegedly brought back from Vietnam, and known as Saigon Rose, which was highly resistant to treatment. Sonnabend founded a journal called AIDS Research, to publish original research into feasible causes of AIDS that could not find publication in orthodox scientific journals. The magazine was soon taken out of his hands, re-funded by Burroughs Wellcome, and retitled AIDS Research and Human Retroviruses. Such is the neurosis of the propaganda machine during a war that even one small enquiring journal had to be  silenced, and converted to yet another cog in the disinformation machine. One of the most powerful weapons in any war is censorship.

One of the the first scientists to stick his head above the parapet and state his disbelief in what was by then officially called HIV as the cause of AIDS was Dr. Peter Duesberg, the world’s foremost retrovirologist. He was commissioned to write a paper for Cancer Research about the role of human retroviruses in disease, the expectation and the reality, and in an elegant work published on March 1 1987, he demolished not only the Gallo theory that HTLV1 was the cause of Adult T-Cell Leukaemia, but stated in the last third of the paper that from the available evidence ‘HIV’ could not be the cause of AIDS. His paper was a bombshell, and swiftly earned him the condemnation of the fat cats in the AIDS War - he was treated as a fifth columnist or saboteur because he had dared to break ranks and tell the truth as he saw it. The subsequent list of such ‘saboteurs’ reads like an Honour Roll -Kary Mullis, Nobel prizewinner for the invention of polymerase chain reaction; Prof. Walter Gilbert, Nobel prizewinner for his work on bacteriophages; Prof. Harry Rubin, winner of the p r e s t i g i o u s Lasker Award for his work in virology; Prof. Serge Lange, the greatest mathematician in the USA; and Britain’s Prof. Gordon Stewart, who has repeatedly been refused publication of letters to  leading medical journals, despite the fact that his predictions of the numbers of AIDS cases have been consistently and uncannily accurate. All these prominent scientists and doctors, and numerous others, expressed their unease about the premature consensus which labelled ‘HIV’ the sole cause of ‘AIDS’.

The fact is that once the ‘HIV’-AIDS war machine was rolling, no-one on board wanted to dismantle it and lose not only credibility but all the money and prestige that being an AIDS ‘expert’ generate. For example, The Boston Globe reported as recently as April 18 1998:

"Two scientists who have fought bitterly over discovery rights to the virus that causes AIDS will share a $ 100,000 prize for their joint achievements. Dr. Robert Gallo of the University of Maryland and Dr. Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in Paris and Queens College in New York are scheduled to share a podium at Boston’s Four Seasons hotel on April 30 to accept the 10th annual Warren Alpert Foundation Award."

The booty may console Gallo for the fact that even now, the US Government is thinking seriously whether or not to extend funding to his posh new institute in Baltimore, due to end officially on June 30th. (Nature Medicine, p.541, May 1998).

For some time, evidence has been growing that there are efforts afoot to ‘downsize’ or even call off the AIDS War. By the end of the 80’s, the propaganda department at the CDC were having to duck and dive to maintain the AIDS panic. Even by finagling the estimated ‘HIV’ positivity figures, which see-sawed up and down from 1 million constant for several years, to a low of 600,000, and adding new diseases into the syndrome, the US AIDS cases failed to live up to their inflated predictions. Still it dawned on no-one that if the estimated, or even real, numbers of 'HIV'-positives never reflect the actual numbers of AIDS cases, they had the wrong presumed bug in their gunsights. AIDS was the first recorded example of a virgin-soil epidemic in which the numbers of people supposed to be infected by an exponentially spreading pathogen were remaining stable or even diminishing.

I remember being puzzled when Margaret Thatcher cut off £350,000 funding for the projected Medical Research Council HIV positivity survey planned for 1993. This was designed to try to estimate the number of ‘HIV’ infectees in Britain. Had she been told by one of those secret, black and midnight Think Tanks who advise governments, that there was no heterosexual AIDS epidemic, and that the money would be wasted? Many people had been pointing out since the late ’80’s that the t h r e a t e n e d h e t e r o s e x u a l epidemic had not materialised, and that all the g o v e r n m e n t advisers had been totally wrong about projected AIDS figures. They were roundly denounced as homophobes, out of touch with reality. As it transpired, the AIDS War free loaders, speculators, profiteers, spivs, hangers on and camp followers in 1993 needn’t have worried. Wellcome came to the rescue with a sack of gold to fund the study - when you make anti-‘HIV’ drugs, you need punters, so they paid for the MRC to find them. There weren't many.

By the mid 90’s, it seemed most people were beginning to treat the AIDS War rather like one of those desultory, incomprehensible little civil wars rumbling on in the Balkans or the former satellite states of the dead USSR - self-absorbed and self-inflicted, hardly worth a glance as you turn the pages of the newspaper to find the footie results. The WHO, realising that AIDS had passed its panic-by date in Europe, but still trumpeting a worst-case scenario for AIDS in the 3rd World, nevertheless gave the boot to 750 workers in the Global AIDS Programme in April 1995. After all, if AIDS cases in the West are falling, even in the absence of a cure or a vaccine, then AIDS cannot be an infectious epidemic at all.

What I interpret as the winding down of the AIDS war, much akin to America’s slinking out of Vietnam, is reflected in an article in The National Journal, May 9, 1998, Pg. 1062; Vol. 30, No. 19. Entitled The AIDS Initiative, One Year Later, by Garance Franke Ruta, it is worth quoting at length:

This smacks of rats, sinking ships, and dodging the poisoned chalice. To head the department which doesn’t come up with a vaccine against ‘HIV’ won’t look good on anyone’s CV.

The growing dissatisfaction amongst gay men in particular with the way in which AIDS funding is administered by AIDS charities has become even more marked since this article by Erin McCormick appeared last year in the San Francisco Examiner (26.4.97). British AIDS charities should take note:

A more recent piece posted on the Rethinking AIDS website (16.4.98) from Tom Hudson concerns the huge funding for Gay Men’s’ Health Crisis, the original AIDS self-help group in New York.

Nearer home, a letter to Pink Paper from Pete Forest (May 15,1998) commented on the 3 directors of the Terrence Higgins Trust (THT) on £43,000 a year and the secret salary of the Chief Executive Nick Partridge. On May 19, a very concerned Susie Parsons, Chief Executive of the London Lighthouse, was inter-viewed on BBC TV news about the threat to close the ‘flagship hospice’ She was obviously deeply distressed and who wouldn’t be at the thought of losing her Director’s salary reported to be £60,000. That’s a lot of moolah for dispensing tea and sympathy. If nothing else, the AIDS war has certainly inflated the price of altruism. For as long as diamond studded vivandieres like Liz Taylor, Elton John and the late Princess Diana could guarantee that the donations rolled in, the AIDS charities were awash with money and could fulfil their function as the AIDS War’s deluxe equivalent of the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) but when the phoney war finally peters out, once the party’s over, who’ll take care of these overpaid caterers? All the hands-on work with PWAs is done by dedicated, unpaid volunteers or low paid workers, so we need feel no sympathy for the executive greedies. Partridge worked hard for the Troops Out of Ireland movement before cashing in at the THT, so perhaps he’ll be quite philosophical about being demobbed.

The world is getting ready for the biennial AIDS conference in Geneva, where the nostrum floggers will be out in force, glossy brochures at the ready. I wonder if they will spare a thought for the ultimate fate of the 1500 chimpanzees, bred specifically for AIDS research, and now regarded as surplus to requirement, but costing the US Government $7.3 million a year to house and feed. All those people currently earning unjustifiably fat salaries on the backs of PWA’s would do well to monitor just what happens to their primate cousins. Perhaps they could get jobs looking after the chimps in the sanctuaries proposed by Newt Gingrich to the US House of Representatives on May 5th.

It would be nice to think the real war against the AIDS phenomena could begin once the phoney war against ‘HIV’ has been exposed for the grotesque con trick it is, but I’m not hopeful: Phil Johnson of Rethinking AIDS posted an article from the San Francisco Weekly (May 13 1998) by Tara Shioya dealing with the wave of ‘Circuit Parties’ sweeping the gay scene in the USA. She describes the parties on a circuit which takes in Palm Springs, Fire Island, Miami, Atlanta, New Orleans and Montreal, where up to 7000 gorgeous young men party non stop for three days :

This list of drugs is highly reminiscent of that described by Larry Kramer in his novel Faggots in the late 70’s, just before the appearance of the first gay AIDS cases, as well as the list given by John Lauritsen in the Meditel/Channel 4 documentary The AIDS Catch in 1990. The different combinations of these drugs, accompanied by repeated infections with - is it? - eight different herpes viruses, who knows how many hepatitises, and bacterial STD’s, plus the mass of antibiotics used to treat them, are going to make a lot, if not all, the sad young men very sick. When Michael Callen described the identical lifestyle he led in the late 70’s, before subsequently developing various AIDS-defining illnesses, he was honest enough to admit that this was the cause of his illness. As he said to me, the wonder was that he had the strength to crawl to Joe Sonnabend’s surgery for treatment. Shioya’s article mentions the reservations of "AIDS experts" who ".... fear the prevalence of drug use on the Circuit - particularly, crystal - leads to dangerous sexual practices that will increase the spread of HIV." Wearing a condom as thick as a wellington boot will not save anyone who repeatedly turns their body into a toxic battlefield or sticks a loaded gun to his head and pulls the trigger? Could it be that the CDC and NIH now know they can never win the War against AIDS by fighting ‘HIV’ and are preparing to make gays the scapegoats for their failure?