AIDS: Don't Be Fooled by Al `Adolf' Gore
by Scott Thompson
On Jan. 10, U.S. Vice President Al Gore presided over a special session of the United Nations Security Council, devoted to the catastrophic threat to Africa posed by the unchecked AIDS pandemic. That the Clinton administration chose to devote the month of January, with U.S. Ambassador to the UN Richard Holbrooke chairing the Security Council, to the crisis in Africa, is commendable, as is the administration's commitment to push Congress to put up $150-350 million for emergency aid to countries in Africa and South Asia that are overwhelmed by the spread of HIV.
But the fact that Vice President and Presidential pre-candidate Al Gore was given the chance to chair the special session on AIDS, is a case of hypocrisy run wild.
Not only was Gore caught red-handed last year blocking the delivery of cheaper drugs to fight AIDS to South Africa. But he is also on record, particularly in his 1992 book Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit, advocating radical population reduction—even if it means the spreading of pandemic killer diseases such as AIDS to achieve that reduction.
Al's drug-lobby antics
Gore, as head of the Gore-Mbeki Binational Commission, had issued threats and levied economic sanctions against South Africa under then-Vice President Thabo Mbeki, because the latter insisted that in a "national emergency," South Africa had the right to produce affordable, generic HIV-AIDS drugs.
Gore only let up on his threats in September 1999, after South Africa had agreed to pay its pound of flesh for patent rights to the pharmaceutical cartels, which were funding Gore's campaign. So, no one should be fooled into thinking that he has suddenly become a friend of Mbeki—now South Africa's President—or that Gore is really concerned that the number of HIV/AIDS-infected people in Sub-Saharan Africa has reached 20 million—of whom 14 million have died, at a rate of more than 5,000 per day.
In fact, Gore is on record not only as proclaiming that Africa as a whole is "overpopulated," but also as endorsing the view that the AIDS holocaust there—which is occurring on a scale greater than that dreamt of by Adolf Hitler—is a direct result of such "overpopulation."
Sources report that Gore's appearance as Acting President of the UN Security Council to deliver his self-serving speech, was organized in part by Ambassador Holbrooke, who viewed it as a favor that might win him the Secretary of State post in a Gore administration. The Vice President needs all the help he can get in courting African-American voters, given the widespread, and correct, impression that he is a racist.
The genocidalist club
Also helping to facilitate Gore's grandstanding were UN Deputy Secretary General Maurice Strong and World Bank President Sir James Wolfensohn, who share Gore's genocidalist views on the problem of "global overpopulation."
As the ultimate in cynical hypocrisy, during his speech, Gore announced that the fight against AIDS is at the center of the "security agenda," because "we now know that the number of people who will die of AIDS in the first decade of the 21st century will rival the number that died in all the wars in all the decades of the 20th century." But, as careful readers of such Gore books as Earth in the Balance know, the Vice President, like the evil Lord Bertrand Russell in his book Impact of Science on Society (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1953), believes that all the wars in all the decades of the 20th century have killed too few people.
Russell wrote, "At present the population of the world is increasing at about 58,000 per diem. War, so far, has had no very great effect on this increase, which continued throughout each of the world wars. War has hitherto been disappointing in this respect ... but perhaps bacteriological war may prove effective. If a Black Death could spread throughout the world once every generation, survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full. The state of affairs might be unpleasant, but what of it?"
If this sounds outlandish in respect to Gore, consider the assertions of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (with whom Gore has met and been in correspondence in regard to "deep ecology" issues). Philip has said on more than one occasion: "In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, in order to contribute something to solve overpopulation."
Gore has been a leading purveyor of the viewpoint spelled out in Henry Kissinger's genocidal National Security Study Memorandum 200 on the so-called threat to U.S. security from "overpopulation." NSSM 200 targets the darker-skinned populations for early extinction.
Gore wrote the introduction to Paul and Anne Ehrlich's book The Population Explosion: From Global Warming to Rain Forest Destruction, Famine and Air and Water Pollution—Why Overpopulation Is Our #1 Environmental Problem (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990). In it, Gore thoroughly endorsed the Ehrlichs' demand for radical population reduction measures in the world's poorest countries. The Ehrlichs lie that AIDS is merely the latest of numerous pandemic diseases that have resulted from overpopulation, in places such as Africa, where they argue AIDS originated.
In The Population Explosion, the Ehrlichs, like Prince Philip, sound almost disappointed that AIDS has not done enough to reduce human population: "Computer projections suggest that, even in Africa, mortality from the disease alone (as opposed to social breakdown or economic effects) is unlikely to bring an end to population growth. While AIDS could turn out to be the global epidemic that brutally controls the population explosion by raising death rates, the strains of the virus that have so far been observed seem not to have that capacity. In truth, it is impossible at the moment to predict what will happen."
The Ehrlichs deride as "fringe groups" those who call for the quarantine of AIDS victims, which would ensure that the contagion's spread is contained and that the sick receive the most advanced treatment available.
Gore in Unbalance
That Al Gore truly believes these genocidalist nightmares is demonstrated by his ravings about African "overpopulation" posing a danger to "Mother Earth." In Earth in the Balance, he wrote: "Kenya ... Egypt ... Nigeria ... all three countries are already putting great strains on their ecological systems, so it is truly frightening to imagine the impact of doubling or tripling their numbers—not to mention the pitiful quality of life these extra scores of millions can expect."
He claimed that "growth rates like these threaten to cause the breakdown of social order in many of the fastest growing countries, which in turn raises the prospect of wars being fought over scarce natural resouces."
This record of statements should make crystal clear just how rank is Al Gore's hypocrisy, in taking the Acting Presidency of the UN Security Council to call for a crash program against HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere in the world.
Don't be fooled by the fox offering to guard the hen house, no matter what arguments he makes.
