Paranoid/Paranoia:

Media Buzzwords To Silence The Politically Incorrect

BY ALAN CANTWELL JR., M.D.

Steamshovel Press, POB 23715, St Louis, MO 63121. Fall 1995, Issue 14

Ever since the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, there has been a media blitz blaming paranoid people and anti-government militia groups for the violent deaths.

Feeling the heat are ordinary citizens who believe in such things as the New World Order. or the plot to kill Kennedy, or the existence of UFOs, or the theory that AIDS is man—made, and countless other conspiracies. The media have been quick to dismiss these conspiracies as paranoia, thereby stifling serious discussion of these Issues.

According to Webster’s Dictionary, paranoia is a serious psychiatric diagnosis: a psychosis characterized by systematized delusions of persecution or grandeur usually without hallucinations. Paranoia can also be defined as a tendency on the part of an individual or group toward excessive and irrational suspiciousness and distrustfulness of others. People who exhibit such psychological traits are paranoid.

A definite diagnosis of paranoia requires the expertise of a psychiatric health professional. A diagnosis is made after a careful history and physical examination of the patient, and must Include a detailed drug history and psychiatric observation.

All this is ignored by journalists who indiscriminately label people as paranoid. Their purpose is to discredit a person’s mind and reasoning ability. Unfairly labelling people as paranoid is malicious and evil: and the word can be as hateful as words like nigger, kike, and faggot. When terms like paranoia and paranoid are tossed around in the media, rational communication is no longer possible.

A paranoid person is not normal because paranoia indicates a diseased mind.

In their quest for power, politicians often portray their perceived enemies as diseased. Hitler was a master at this. After securing the cooperation of German physicians, he rid the Third Reid of thousands of mental and physical defectives by murdering them. When this was accomplished, he turned on the Jews. He labelled the Jews as a cancer that needed to be cut out of a diseased Germany. Thus, the roots of the Holocaust were planted.

Labelling people as diseased is an effective way of discrediting and silencing them.

The media overkill of paranoia is evident in "The Road to Paranoia," a 13—page essay by Michael Kelly appearing In The New Yorker, June 19, 1995. According to Kelly. "There have always been radical fringes on both the left and the right which believe that the government conspires against the people. But lately, the two have formed a strange alliance — fusion paranoia — that is reaching millions of disaffected Americans." He reviews the major conspiracy theories, and interviews conspiracist Bob Fletcher, a member of a political organization called the Militia of Montana.

Not surprisingly, Kelly makes Fletcher look like a friendly loony—bird. Kelly also savages Ross Perot and his "paranoid style as the first fusion—paranoia candidate for the Presidency." In the 1996 Presidential race, "paranoia already has its first truly out—of—the—closet candidate, in the pugnacious form of Pat Buchanan."

As I read ‘The Road to Paranoia" I suddenly realized I was part of Kelly’s story. For almost a decade, I had been promoting the idea that AIDS had originated as a genetically engineered virus that was deliberitely seeded into the black and gay community via vaccine programs and experiments. My publishing house, Aries Rising Press, had pubished two books on the subject of AIDS as a man-made epidemic, which were well received in the alternative press. Unfortunately. AIDS & The Doctors of Death so infuriated the World Health Organization that it was banned from sale at the International AIDS Conference in Montreal In 1989.

Despite all this I had not expected to find Aries Rising Press Included in Kelly’s list of several dozen "rapidly growing alternative media that traffic in conspiracism."

Kelly mentioned the conspiratorial belief that "AIDS is a government plot to kill off blacks and homosexuals," but no details were provided. Also mentioned was a 1990 poll of African-Americans concluding that "a third believe that HIV was produced by scientists and disseminated through black neighborhoods for the purpose of genocide."

A decade ago, the idea of AIDS as a man-made disease was considered nonsense. Now the theory is frequently mentioned in the major media, but the evidence for it is never discussed, and the idea is always dismissed as paranoid. However, a surprising number of people I have talked to in the past few years now think the theory makes more sense than the government’s African green monkey story.

Ex—New York City Health Commisioner Stephen Joseph, in his AIDS book Dragon Within the Gates, also dismisses without explanation "the paranoid theories about AIDS being a deliberate invention of biological warfare." However, he does note "the scars left by the Tuskegee experiment" in the Black community. In this notorious government—sponsored syphilis experiment, public health doctors deliberately lied to black sharecroppers in Alabama for over 40 years. The men were never told they were infected with syphilis, and when a penicillin cure became available the doctors withheld treatment so that they could study the devastating effect of untreated syphilis. When the men died, the doctors rushed to get an autopsy, coaxing the family into giving permission by having the government pick up the tab for the funeral expenses. Under pressure from civil rights activists, this racist experiment was finally terminated in 1972.

Joseph writes that the memory of Tuskegee "fuelled a conspiratorial theory among blacks that AIDS resulted from a biological experiment, gone awry, performed on Africans by the United States government."

Conspiratologists know that government doctors and scientists, and the military, have conducted covert experiments on unsuspecting civilians. Recently the nation was shocked to learn that physicians had performed dangerous radiation experiments on unsuspecting hospitalized patients from the 1950s up until the 1980s. The proof was contained in previously classified government documents released by the Department of Energy.

Charges of secret and unethical experiments against helpless American citizens are not the ravings of paranoid people. On the contrary, they are serious accusations of an informed and enlightened citizenry.

It is time to speak out against falsely labelling people as paranoid.

Paranoid and paranoia are acceptable terms when used in a medical setting. But they have no place in slandering and denigrating people who express alternative views in a democratic society.

Dr. Cantwell is the author of Queer Blood and AIDS & The Doctors of Death—two books on the man-made origin of AIDS. Further information can be obtained from Aries Rising Press, P0 Box 29532, Los Angeles, CA 90029, voice/FAX 213-462-6458.