Despite the apparent irrationality, there is a coherence to Douglass' distortions and fabrications. They are driven by an ultra-right wing political agenda which, as research by Terry Allen of Covert Action Quarterly shows, goes back to the 1960s. Douglass, a member of the John Birch Society, ran a phone line spouting a 90-second "patriotic message." In it, he railed against the Civil Rights Movement, and denounced the National Council of Churches and three presidents as part of a "Communist conspiracy." Among the nuggets he offered callers in at least 30 U.S. cities was the likelihood "that those three civil rights workers [presumably Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman] in Mississippi were kidnapped and murdered by their own kind to drum up sympathy for their cause." In another he predicted that "The Civil Rights Act will turn America into a Fascist state practically overnight." 36
Two decades later he was blaming gays for AIDS in The Spotlight , the organ of the ultra-right Liberty Lobby, for which he wrote regularly and in which he ran advertisements for "The Douglass Protocol," his cure-all medical clinics. In 1987, he wrote, "Some have suggested that the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] is waiting for the majority of the homosexuals to die off before releasing ribavirin," a drug he was at the time promoting as a miracle cure for AIDS. Douglass, however, opposed withholding a "suppressed" cure, "although I feel very resentful of the homosexuals because of the holocaust they have brought us." 37
The political heart of AIDS: The End of Civilization is quite explicit: AIDS is part of the "entire mosaic of the current attack against western [sic] civilization." (p. 14). The term "western" is a thinly veiled way of saying "white."
Douglass sees AIDS as a diabolical plot perpetrated by WHO, which "is run by the Soviets." (p. 118). He weaves an elaborate and intricate plot for how the Communists – much like an invading virus – took over the machinery of the U.S. Army CBW labs at Ft. Detrick and the U.S. National Institutes of Health in order to use them to create and propagate AIDS.
Douglass is so deep into the tradition of the Communist bogeyman that he doesn't bother to revise this scenario for his 1992 edition – after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Nor does he explain how such an involved and extensive plot would not get exposed now that there is no Soviet loyalty and coercion to prevent past operatives from talking about it. He even goes so far as to charge that a Soviet functionary named Dr. Sergei Litivinov was the head of WHO's AIDS control program in the late 1980s. But it is a matter of indisputable record that the American Jonathan Mann, whose writings Douglass cites favorably, was the Director from the founding of the program in 1986 until 1990 – when he was replaced by another American, physician Michael Merson. 38
Historically, one important function of generating anti-Communist hysteria has been to use it as a political cover to mobilize Americans against Third World people's efforts to achieve control over their own land, labor, and resources. The Vietnam War is one of many examples. Many of us who are anti-racist are very critical of WHO because it is Western-controlled and offers such a pitifully inadequate response to the health needs of the world's majority. But self-avowed rightists like Douglass hate the UN and WHO because of the little bit of say that Third World nations have there. Rather than put this in explicitly racist terms, the issue is rationalized as "Soviet control" – even to the degree of misstating who was the director of WHO's AIDS prevention program and even after the Soviet Bloc has collapsed.
In the guise of a program against AIDS, Douglass proposes a basketful of traditional ultra-right and neo-Nazi political policies:
-- Support and strengthen the powers of local law enforcement (p. 139)
-- Make preemptive military strikes against Russia (p. 138)
-- Abolish the UN and WHO (p. 120)
-- Stop all illegal Mexican immigration into the U.S. (p. 253)
Then there are a number of other proposals more directly about AIDS:
-- Mandatory testing for HIV (p. 66)
-- Quarantine of all those with HIV (pp. 165-6)
-- Removal of HIV children from school (p. 161)
-- Incarceration, castration, and even execution to stop prostitution (p. 158)
While these may have some visceral appeal to people's fears, a wealth of public health and activist experience has shown that such repressive measures are counterproductive in practice. Discrimination and repression drive those with HIV and the risk activities underground, making people unreachable for prevention, contact notification, and care. But while completely negative in terms of public health, such proposals are very useful for furthering the right wing's police state agenda.
Douglass fans fears about casual transmission in order to promote a political platform. He argues that if we don't overcome a tradition "where civil rights are more revered than civil responsibility" hundreds of millions will die (p. 165). And here is the final appeal in his book: "[I]t appears that regulation of social behavior, as much as we hate it in an egalitarian society such as ours, may be necessary for the survival of civilization" (p. 256).
