Eugenics and Genocide in The Modern World, Part 2 by DR Romesh Arya Chakravarti (MD)

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Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

https://www.facebook.com/HolisticUniversityBrisbane
Eugenics and Genocide in the

Modern World the cause of the
AIDS Epidemic
Part 2
2007
Dr Romesh Arya Chakravarti (MD)

[email protected]
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CONTENTS:
1. Foundations of the Eugenics Movement...3
2. Negative eugenics programs.32
3. Paranoia about population growth44
4. The effect of AIDS on U.N. population estimates71
5. Imperial designs in Africa.78
6. Pieces of history..101
7. Questions about the origin of AIDS107
8. The AIDS epidemic among Indigenous Australians...127
9. Immunization, Hepatitis B and AIDS.142
10. The Macfarlane Burnet Centre and International Health.150
11. The development of hot and cold warfare...163
12. Defining chemical and biological weapons..171
13. Radiation sickness.199
14. Contributions from the mining industry207
15 Talking biological warfare.220
16. Medical wars and the AIDS industry....231
17. Macfarlane Burnet Centre on AIDS.243
18. AIDS, Psychiatry and Glaxo-Wellcome...252
19. Genetic engineering and experimental chimpanzees....262
20. Biological warfare in Central Africa?...273
21. Biological warfare research in Australia..286
22. The League of Nations and the United Nations300
23. Freemasonry, Slavery and Charity.310
24. Eugenics, slavery and genocide in Australia ....315
25. The White Australia Policy, eugenics and genocide.342
26. Legacies of a prison colony.......375
27. British prejudices in Australian institutions..395
28. Eugenics and mental hygeine....412
29. Secret police systems in Australia.....438
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30. Schizophrenia and dopamine-blockers.....461

31. A psychoanalysis of psychiatry....472
32. Private hospitals and military connections483
33. Behaviour control and social control...498
34. The Disunited Nations and warfare..535
35. Diagnosing the global economy...542
36. Born into the Cold War....573
References.
23. FREEMASONRY, SLAVERY AND CHARITY

Though the organization has played a central role in the establishment of the
Australian political system, as it did in the USA, most people do not know
much, if anything, about the Freemasons, and network of Masonic Lodges
around the country. Some associate talk of Freemasons with paranoia and
immediately associate the name with conspiracy theories. Others believe
Freemasons to be the most powerful organization in the world, manipulating
the global economy and controlling the masses. Yet others think that they
are a benign group of rich men engaging in peculiar, but harmless rituals,
and making business deals. Some think the Freemasons are a benevolent
organization of rich and poor men who leave aside politics and religion to
focus on the betterment of humanity. The latter is the perspective of
Freemasonry presented by the organizations own propaganda.
So what is the truth about Freemasonry?
Because it is a secret society, Freemasonry is difficult to investigate for any
outsider. Because it is a heirarchical organization the lower eschelons of
the Masonic Empire know little about the history or political machinations
of the secret society. However, it is generally accepted that the organization
has had a strong presence in the army, police and judiciary in Australia, as in
Britain and the USA, at least in the past.
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The public library in Richmond, an inner suburb of Melbourne contains a

large glossy hard-cover book about Freemasons published by the
organization itself. It claims that many very famous men have been belonged
to the organization, these including George Washington (1789-97), James
Madison (after whom Madison Square is named), James Monroe (of Monroe
doctrine fame) and several subsequent US presidents, including Andrew
Johnson (1865-69), Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09), Franklin D Roosevelt
(1933-45), Harry Truman (1945-53), Lyndon Johnson (1963-69), and Gerald
Ford (1974-77).
Of significance, when the US declaration of Independence was crafted by
the Founding Fathers, most of whom, including Washington, were
Freemasons, the possibility of setting black (African) slaves free was
discussed and decided against. These famous freemasons decided, in other
words, that some American men were to be slaves, while others were to be
masters.
Kent W.Hendersons World Masonic Guide, published by Macoy Publishing

& Masonic Supply Co. Inc. (of Virginia, USA) in 1984, provides details of
The Craft (as masonry is referred to by insiders) in more recent times.
Hendersons book is intended as an aid to masons travelling to other
countries and jurisdictions. He writes in his preface:
My first idea of producing a book for travelling freemasons
arose five years ago, as a result of visiting lodges in Austria and
Switzerland, where the ritual employed was somewhat removed from
my masonic experience at the time. I was subsequently struck by the
variety of masonic customs existing in the masonic world, and more
particularly, by the problems and difficulties a visiting freemason can
experience when visiting a strange lodge. It also came to my attention
that a great number of masons, largely through ignorance, fail to even
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attempt to visit when they travel outside the domain of their own
jurisdiction.
The term freemason is frequently abbreviated to mason, however the
vast majority of freemasons are not masons by trade. Neither were they
mostly masons when the United Grand Lodge of Antient, Free and
Accepted Masons of England was founded in London in 1717. Henderson
writes, of the most senior of the Grand Lodges:
The Premier Grand Lodge possesses the longest masonic history
of any jurisdiction, and the space here prevents no more than the
briefest outline. It was formed in 1717 by four Old Lodges then
meeting at various London taverns, with Anthony Sayer as first Grand
Master. The earliest years of the English Grand Lodge era proved far
from harmonious, and the eighteenth century saw six Grand Lodges
emerging at various times to claim jurisdiction over England or part of
it; in some cases as a result of schism.
However, only two of these Grand Lodges persisted with any
substantial following. These were the Premier Grand Lodge of
England (usually referred to as the Moderns Grand Lodge, or
Moderns), and the Antients or Atholl Grand Lodge (usually referred to
as the Antients). From its very beginning, the Moderns Grand Lodge
was not particularly well organised or efficient, and according to its
opponents, it introduced unacceptable changes in ritual and customs.
Certainly, it would appear that some members were less than satisfied
with its administration of the Craft.
By 1751, the Antients Grand Lodge was fully formed. It was
established originally by Irish brethren unhappy with the Premier
Grand Lodge, and subsequently many masons came to range under it.
Both these Grand Lodges developed and expanded membership over
succeeding years, and this occurred quite independently of each other.
Both Grand Lodges were rivals, often bitter rivals, and each
considered the other to be irregular. Generally, the Moderns tended to
attract more upper class members, while the Antients appeared to
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have a far broader membership base. In terms of organisation, the

Antients, unlike the Moderns, widely practised the Royal Arch
Degree; and to some extent the Chair Degree of the Installed Master.
A fair number of differences in practices developed between the two
Grand Lodges. However, except at an official level, ordinary masons
were not overly interested in this rivalry, and the bulk of membership
on both sides either ignored these divergences or paid little heed to
them.
While the political activities of the Freemasons are kept secret by the
society, several publications by masons for masons shed light on what these
activities might be. Some of these, such as C.W.Leadbeaters Freemasonry
and its Ancient Mystic Rites (1926) and J.N. Casavis The Greek Origin of
Freemasonry (1955) give an indication of the ideologies the organization
identifies with and from which the modern freemasons gained inspiration for
their rituals and government. These include the ancient city building empires
of the Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks and Hebrews, whose masons and
architects have been venerated by later freemasons for their mystical
knowledge.
The term occult (hidden) is also used, and the freemasons have always
been interested in hidden knowledge, especially that pertaining to the
construction industry. Much of their ritual invokes building metaphors,
including their main legend, that of the Hiram (of Phoenician city of Tyre)
who is said, in the Old Testament of the Bible, to have provided Solomon,
the king of Israel, with building materials for The Temple of Solomon.
Hiram was subsequently betrayed and killed, according to the Freemason
legend, after having his tongue cut out and being strangled. His abdomen
was pierced and entrails distributed in each of the four directions, according
to the Hiram legend of modern Freemasonry.
The Freemasonry organization is centred on the idea of masters and degrees.
There are said to be 33 degrees in English Freemasonry, in an organization
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structured as a pyramid with many people at the bottom and few at the top.
The men at the top of the hierarchy are given titles such as most worshipful
grand master and similar grandiosities. The top position in the organization
is apparently required to be a member of the British Royal Family, and the
original, and most powerful grand lodge is said to be in England.
For most of its existence, only white men were allowed into the Brotherhood
of Freemasons. This changed in the 1940s, when several Black Freemason
lodges were established. Interestingly, many of the African-American jazz
icons and band leaders, including Count Basie, Louis Armstrong and
Duke Ellington were black freemasons. The fact that these men were given
generous recording opportunities and active promotion by the white music
establishment while many other African-American jazz musicians were
denied opportunities to play their music suggests some of the doors that can
open to members of the fraternity.
Titles such as Count and Duke are, of course, part of the imperial
hierarchy, as are Lord, Sir, His (or Her) Majesty and so on. Some of
these titles are, in the British Imperial System, hereditary, and others are
granted by the Royal establishment. Peerages may be awarded directly
by the ruling monarch or his/her representatives to commoners regarded as
especially meritorious these are allowed to use the honorific Sir, Lord
or Dame. This was the hierarchy that established government in Australia
in the 18th century, and in North America in the 16 th century. This was also
the same hierarchy that judged and transported convicts to permanent or
temporary exile in North America before 1776 and Australia after 1778. The
British Imperial hierarchy also ruled as masters of the slave trade the
African slave trade and the Indian slave trade in particular. Most of its
wealth, however, was not obtained by selling slaves it was gained by
working them.
It is uncertain as to how many of the senior members of the early colonial
government in Australia were freemasons, but is likely, given that most of
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the American Founding Fathers belonged to the organization, that the penal
colonies and the free settlements were controlled by this elite within the
broader Imperial government. At least nine Australian Prime Ministers, and
several State Governors have been known Freemasons, including most of the
conservative PMs.
Australia's first Prime Minister, Edmund Barton, was a Mason, and so was
Australia's most famous Conservative PM, Robert Menzies (along with,
more recently, John Gorton and Billy McMahon).
It appears that being a mason is a big advantage, if one wants a University
named after one - in Victoria, George Swinburne (Swinburne University)
and John Monash (Monash University, Freeway etc) were both Masons.
Monash's British boss, Winston Churchill, was also a Mason, and this is a
point of much importance in any discussion of biological, chemical and
psychological warfare - so-called 'unconventional warfare' - in the 20 th
Century.
There is said to be strong, if not dominant, influence of freemasonry in all

sections of the armed forces and police in Australia to this day. In a rare
reference to Masonry in the mainstream press, Peter Wright, an ex-assistant
director of MI5, in his autobiography Spycatcher, claims that when he
worked for the British Secret Service in the 1950s to 1970s it was not
possible to reach the highest eschelons unless one was a Freemason.
Peter Wright, in his retirement in Australia, recounts his version of the Cold
War bugging and spying by the British, Americans and Russians, as they
continued to play the 'great game' of Empire, in the age of 'two
Superpowers'. While he states that although his father suggested he become
a Mason, he did not approve of it and never did so, the references Wright
makes to Masonry are few and far between - 3 brief references in the book.
Nevertheless, it indicates that the organizations that advise the British
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Government on matters of 'Intelligence' (including military and police

intelligence pertaining to internal and external threats were masonically
controlled until recent times.
It raises, especially, questions about the many false claims about the regime
of Saddam Hussein that were used to justify the 2002 invasion of Iraq by the
so-called 'Coalition of the Willing'. Of particular note were the Britishintelligence claims that Saddam Hussein could attack the UK with
chemical/biological weapons in 45 minutes (!) and that he continued to
stockpile and develop 'weapons of mass destruction'. These claims were
unquestioningly repeated by British PM Tony Blair, and, here in Australia,
by John Howard and his obedient ministers. It is perhaps more than
coincidence that the Australian Prime Ministers residence is known as The
Lodge.
All the top freemasons (in their hierarchy) are called Masters in a
system that developed in an environment where slaves obeyed every
masters whim under constant threat of punishment for subordination. Slaves
were not allowed to look the masters in the eye, and were not allowed to
talk back. Slaves could be tormented by masters for fun and degraded
for their pleasure. Slaves did all the dirty work they cleaned the toilets,
cooked the food, laboured in the quarries, fed the horses and groomed them
for the masters. Slaves kept the masters alive, in fact, and left them free to
play polo, cricket and tennis.
The masters went to University and got degrees or went into the military as
officers. The masters called themselves gentlemen and learned to speak
phrases of Latin and French. The slaves learned broken English and were
routinely punished for speaking any other language.
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The British Empire obtained slaves from many countries and instituted
slavery throughout their dominions, but everywhere there were masters and
slaves. The masters were not always called master (although when they
were it was a sure indicator of slavery), and the slaves were often not
described formally as such. Slaves were sometimes referred to as
servants (those who serve), coolies or boys. Francis Galton, in his
trip to Southern Africa referred to natives and blacks, who he said were
given to him by friendly chiefs.
Freemasonry may thus be seen as the nucleus of British and Commonwealth
slavery initially cargo slavery and serfdom, and subsequently slavery in
increasingly disguised forms. Freemasonry, widely accepted as the power
behind the scenes in the Australian judiciary, police, military and other parts
of the establishment, is the principal organization implicated in the
development and propagation of eugenics doctrine over the past 100 years
(and keeping it alive after the Nazi holocaust). For these reasons the
organization must stand high on the list of suspects regarding collusion with
those who would use HIV and AIDS to genocide 'useless eaters'.
Of particular note is the role of Winston Churchill as both a key eugenist
(first vice-president of the Eugenics Society founded by Francis Galton and
Leonard Darwin) and prominent Freemason. When considered in the light of
his activities as Colonial Secretary, War Minister, Munitions Minister, Prime
Minister and his subsequent contributions to the British Propaganda effort,
Winston Churchill was clearly not a friend of poor, dark-skinned people,
especially those he regarded as 'blacks', 'savages', 'natives' and 'Indians'.
Neither, for that matter was Captain James Cook, who first brought British
Freemasonry - in the form of the 'Scottish rite' - to Australia. It matters little
as to whether Captain Cook was a Freemason, since the regent-in-waiting,
the son of Mad King George III, was about to become one himself.
George IV (1762-1830) was the first British monarch to publicly accept the
the title of Grandmaster of the Modern Lodge of England - a position he
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held from 1790 to 1813, when he was crowned king and emperor of the
British Empire. He was, at this time, the Prince of Wales.
By the way, the current Prince of Wales, Charles, is not a Freemason,
although his father, Prince Phillip, is. Phillip, the Duke of Kent, and husband
of Queen Elizabeth II, is of the Greek Royal family. The current Queen's
father, George VI, was also a high-ranking Freemason before he ascended
the throne.
24. EUGENICS, SLAVERY & GENOCIDE IN AUSTRALIA

This book was initially titled Eugenics and Genocide in and from
Australia, and has been researched entirely in Australia, specifically in
Melbourne, in the southern state of Victoria. Consequently much of the
evidence that is presented of an ongoing genocidal program against
indigenous people and so-called black races, which is a central concern of
this work, has particular relevance to the Indigenous people of Australia and
the surrounding islands. These people are referred to by the Australian
Government today as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, and are
descended from those who were living in this part of the world in the late
18th century, when Australia was chosen as an appropriate site for another
penal colony by the British authorities when it became clear that they would
no longer be able to send the British Isles undesirables to America
following the American Declaration of Independence in 1776 (prior to which
an estimated 40,000 convicts were punitively transported to North America
by the British Government).
In recent years there has been increasing international attention on and
concern about human rights abuses in Australia, particularly against the
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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations, but also against refugees
and asylum-seekers, non-English-speaking migrants and inmates of prisons,
detention centres and psychiatric hospitals. It is worth remembering that the
systems of government in Australian states, including the judicial system,
immigration system, transport system, banking system, state police system
and public hospital (and health) system developed prior to the 1901
Federation, after originating as parts of a punitive British Government
operation against convicts. These systems began in Australia in the years
when New South Wales, the first area to be settled by Europeans, was a
penal colony and gradually expanded into other Australasian colonies as
these were developed.
For most of its history the Australian Federal government, under which these
systems expanded through the twentieth century, was openly white
supremacist, following the federation of seven states and territories in
1901, all of which were already governed by white supremacist regimes
(which were in turn indirectly or directly controlled by English aristocrats,
via the British Imperial government and House of Lords, Royal Society and
Royal Colleges, and other undemocratic, elitist, capitalism-oriented
organizations). By the time Australia was federated, several moderately large
mining empires, logging empires and pastoral empires (mainly wool) had
been established by rich Australian landowning families all white, of
course, and mainly Anglo-Saxon inevitably maintaining ties with the
mother country and the powerful imperial organizations mentioned. These
were the families who ran the colonial governments and especially the
economic and legal systems behind the scenes, and turned a blind eye to
the genocide of Aborigines during the decades that blacks were hunted
with guns for sport, poisoned with arsenic-laced flour and cyanide in their
drinking water, tortured and killed in groteque and depraved ways and
driven away from the most luxurious parts of Australia. These were the
families that were given convicts as slave labour to develop their mines
and plantations, to clear the forests and build roads, railways and majestic
buildings for the landowning families to live in. When convicts were no
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longer transported to Australia, these families turned to Aborigines as a

source of slaves, and, failing to capture enough natives to labour on their
plantations, turned to other sources of Commonwealth slaves India,
Melanesia, China and the Pacific Islands.
Many of these landowning families remain immensely wealthy to this day
and their members travel the world at will, owning land not only in
Australia, but in the best spots all over the world. They can afford the most
expensive houses, hotels, food, wine (and Scotch whisky) and drugs, and
take holidays at will. They can afford to send their children to the most
expensive private schools and pull strings, in necessary, to ensure that their
sons and daughters become influential doctors, lawyers, bankers and
politicians. Most of all, they groom their sons to become businessmen, and
take over the family business, thus ensuring that they, themselves, remain
well-looked-after in their old age. Their biggest enemies are probably their
own aggression, laziness and greed, having fallen victim to the capitalist
ideologies of consumption regardless of need, and profit through
aggressive competition. Despite a tendency to medical overtreatment, the
inevitable consequence of buying medical services from the most expensive
providers, they enjoy a life expectancy of 70 to 80 years.
Today, the indigenous inhabitants of this wealthy nation suffer, in contrast,
from an appalling state of health, with a life expectancy about 20 years less
than the average of the Caucasian population of Australia. The illnesses that
Aboriginal people are dying from include easily curable bacterial infectious
diseases, infectious diarrhoea, and malnutrition in a pattern of disease
common in poor nations. The Aboriginal population of Australia is also
subject to a high incidence of diabetes mellitus and hypertension, both of
which predispose to heart disease and kidney damage. These latter
conditions are also increasingly common in the descendants of African
slaves in North America. Because genetic relatives still living in Africa do
not suffer from comparable rates of hypertension and diabetes as their
relatives who were taken to America, it is clear that environmental factors
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(including dietary factors and psychological stress) rather than genetic

factors must be responsible for this increase.
In the case of Aboriginal people in Australia, most of the illness and death
currently occurring is due to curable, preventable problems which are being
aggravated at present by the environments in which Aboriginal people are
forced to live, and the food, drink and medical treatment they are provided
with and deprived of. In addition to infections and dietary deficiency
diseases, alcohol-induced chronic illness and early death have been features
of twentieth century surviving Aboriginal communities, a problem
introduced and maintained by the white-controlled alcohol industry and
abetted by Commonwealth, State and Territory government support of
alcohol promotion by this massive industry. It is historically evident that
alcohol has been used since the early days of European colonial conquest to
subjugate the populations of coveted lands, especially the indigenous people
of these lands, who obviously have the most justifiable claims to ownership
of the territories in question. In addition to causing addiction, alcohol can be
and has been used to confuse (via intoxication) various alcohol-nave
populations, and it has been known for several centuries that excessive
alcohol ingestion causes acute and chronic illness particularly damage to
the brain and nervous system and to the liver. Alcohol has thus played a key
role in biological and psychological warfare strategies for many centuries.
A further atrocity committed against Aboriginal people in Australia was the
deliberate introduction of plagues via blankets contaminated with smallpox,
measles, influenza and other infections (biological warfare), in a similar
fashion to the genocide of American Indians by British colonists in that
continent, but with equally few public records of the crime. Chemical
poisons too were used. John Pilger in A Secret Country (1989) writes of
events in the 19th Century:
Where the army could not defeat the Australians, chemicals were
used. The Sydney Monitor commented that mass poisoning by
strychnine, phosphorus and arsenic is much safer. A Queensland
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Government report described the effect: the niggers [were given]

something really startling to keep them quietthe rations contained
about as much strychnine as anything and not one of the mob
escapedmore than a hundred blacks were stretched out by this ruse
of the owner of Long Lagoon.
The principal killing fields were in Queensland, where a specially
formed colonial army, the Native Mounted Calvary, used Snider rifles
whose wide bore tore people apart. This force operated as
extermination squads of 6-12 personnel sent to pacify. Historian
Andrew Markus has likened them to Hitlers Einsatzgruppen, the elite
stormtroopers assigned to exterminate Jews in the invaded areas.
(p.26)
In a recent National Press Club debate titled White on Black, Professor
Henry Reynolds, a respected historian and author at the University of
Tasmania, described the 250-strong Queensland Native Police (comprised of
a mixed force of Aboriginal men under white command) that patrolled the
frontier region of Queensland between 1857 and 1891. At the cost of
approximately one million dollars-per-year, the Native Police were
ostensibly intented to keep the peace between whites and Aborigines,
while in practice their main activity was hunting Aborigines with guns,
according to Professor Reynolds, who quoted John Douglas, ex-head of the
Native Police as claiming, in 1880, that at the present the Native Police do
nothing but shoot them down whenever they can get at them. Professor
Reynolds pointed out that there were, at the time, no prisons for Aboriginal
people, supporting his contention that the main function of the Native Police
in Queensland was to kill, rather than police Aborigines.
Countering Professor Reynolds argument in the televised debate, was the
author Keith Windschuttle, one of several historical commentators and
historians who claims that there was not a Stolen Generation in Australia,
nor genocide, and that, on the contrary, the white governments of Australia
have treated Aboriginal people relatively well. The Native Police, claimed
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Mr Windschuttle, did quite a good job, and any reported massacres were
grossly exaggerated and based on myth. Where were the police reports
and pathology reports of the dead Aborigines? Windshuttle asked. Arguing
that most of the Aborigines died of venereal diseases (he named syphilis and
gonorrhoea specifically), Windshuttle pointed to the absence of official
records, and mass-graves, claiming that most claims of Aboriginal massacres
in Australia are based on anecdotal evidence. Such evidence was not taken
seriously by real historians such as himself.
Keith Windschuttle is one of several writers accused by the Melbourne
historian Robert Manne, of Latrobe University, of perpetrating white lies
about Australias past. Associate Professor Manne, author of the essay In
Denial: The Stolen Generations and the Right, has come under fire for his
accusation that writers and academics from the Right have systematically,
and knowingly, rewritten and reinterpreted history in an effort to minimise
the atrocities committed against Aborigines as a result of the implementation
of eugenics programs. These, Manne correctly observes, included forced
removal of Aboriginal children from their parents in an effort to breed out
the black and that this was part of a wider genocidal program. In White
Lies, an extract from his essay In Denial: The Stolen Generation and the
Right in The Age (31.3.2001) he writes:
In the final four issues of Quadrant in 2000, McGuinness [editor
of the magazine] published an article by Geoffrey Partington on the
failure of Aboriginal education; an article by Keith Windschuttle
concerning the supposed break-up of Australia that was to come as a
result of the separatist thinking in the work of Henry Reynolds and
Nugget Coombs; no fewer than five long articles celebrating, from
different angles, the Commonwealth victory in the Cubillo-Gunner
stolen generations test case; and, most astonishingly of all, three
lengthy articles by Keith Windschuttle, supposedly exploding the leftwing myth of the 19th-century frontier massacres and its
manufacture of a vastly inflated death toll.
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Within three years, under the editorship of McGuinness,

Quadrant had moved from the promise of genuine debate on
Aboriginal policy to the reality of atrocity denialism in the David
Irving mode. By their public silence, I can only assume Leonie
Kramer, David Armstrong and Les Murray are pleased.
Following the publication of the White Lies article, Robert Manne was
viciously attacked in the press by those he had accused of a Right wing
campaign to deny the stealing of children and discredit the official report
that brought these crimes of the assimilation policy (part of the White
Australia Policy) to public notice. This was the May 1997 report by Sir
Ronald Wilson and the Aboriginal elder Mick Dodson, titled Bringing them
home. This report, following a specific investigation into child removal
during the 1950s and 1960s, claimed that one in three Aboriginal people
today reported having been stolen. Professor Manne claims that, overall,
about 20,000 to 25,000 children were taken from their families to prevent
them from living in a tribal condition between 1900 and 1970, although
this could be a significant underestimate. The child removal policy was
specifically directed at half-caste children. Professor Manne writes:
The campaign against Bringing them home was not restricted
to right-wing columnists and Quadrant magazine. It was supported
enthusiastically by a formal Liberal minister for Aboriginal affairs,
Peter Howson; by the resident anthropologist at the private think-tank
the Institute of Public Affairs Ron Brunton; and by several retired
public servants and patrol officers involved in the removal policy,
Reginald Marsh, Les Penhall and Colin Macleod. Even more
importantly the campaign received encouragement from Prime
Minister John Howard and his minister for Aboriginal affairs, Senator
John Herron. During the Cubillo-Gunner stolen generations test in
Darwin, the Commonwealth legal team, led by Douglas Meagher, the
son of the minister for Aboriginal affairs in the Bolte government of
the 1960s in Victoria, argued that the Northern Territory practice of
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separating half-caste children from their mothers and communities

was not merely well-intentioned but actually worthy of high praise.
In the week following the publication of Professor Mannes White Lies
article, the Fairfax press (owners of The Age) gave opportunity to several of
those named as right wing denialists to refute the claims of the Latrobe
university academic. Peter Howson, minister for Aboriginal affairs in 1971
and 1972 wrote, in Academias sorry obsession:
One believer in the stolen generations claim, Robert Manne, has
now conceded serious errors in the report of Sir Robery Wilson,
Bringing Them Home. But Manne and others continues to promulgate
the myth without producing substantive evidence.
Contrary to the claim in Mannes new book, In Denial: The
Stolen Generations and the Right (an extract of which appeared in
Saturday Extra), no significance can be attached to the 1984
Australian Bureau of Statistics survey reporting that one in 10
Aborigines (compared with Sir Ronald Wilsons one in three) believed
they had been stolen.
The ABS survey made no checks on the authenticity of these
beliefs, a process that was demonstrated as essential in the subsequent
Williams case in NSW and Cubillo-Gunner case in the Northern
Territory. As Justice OLoughlin pointed [out] in his judgement of the
latter, mixed-race children who were removed at an early age could
not themselves have personal knowledge of what actually occurred,
and would have to rely on stories they had been told.
Peter Howson continues to claim that when tested in court, such stories
were revealed as close to fantasies. Such statements lends substance to
Professor Mannes accusation that the strange phenomenon of thousands of
Aborigines believing themselves to have been taken from their parents
unjustly was explained by the idea that almost all were in the grip of
collective hysteria, and were, like those who invented childhood sexual
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abuse or imagined abduction by aliens, suffering from a condition called

false memory syndrome.
Robert Manne presents his own overview of the crime against Indigenous
Australians in a passage that should convince any reasonable person that the
stealing of children did occur, and that it was part of a wider campaign of
genocide:
At the time of the British arrival in 1788 there were, according
to different demographic estimates, somewhere between 300,000 and
1,000,000 Aborigines living in Australia. By the 1920s, according to
the protectors censuses, about 70,000 full bloods and half castes
survived. Many had succumbed to previously unknown diseases or
died from malnutrition. Many, unable to cope with removal from their
lands and the destruction of their world, had lost the desire to
procreate. Many thousands, on the frontier, had been shot.
After the dispossession, injustices did not end. Racial
condescension was almost universal captured, for example, in the
insulting or comical names settlers unselfconsciously gave the
Aborigines and in the zoological terminology favoured by the
administrators full bloods, quadroons, octoroons and so on.
In some parts of Australia, Aborigines were driven into
penitentiary-style reserves, like Palm Island in Queensland or Moore
River in Western Australia. In other parts, Aborigines worked on cattle
stations or in the fishing industry in return for rations but no wages. In
the outback the sexual misuse of women, kidnapping of children,
arbitrary arrest for cattle theft, use of neck chains to bring prisoners
and witnesses to court, farcical trials and very long sentences in
appalling prison conditions were all routine.
The zoological terminology referred to above, comprised neologisms
created by eugenic anthropologists of the late 19 th and early 20th century.
Half caste, quadroon and octoroon were scientific names for people
who were judged as being half, quarter and one eighth Aboriginal. As we
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have seen, the objective of the British Empires eugenists was to prevent
what they called Leonard Darwin called misceganation. Professor Saleeby
had developed the related ideas of dysgenics (the opposite of eugenics)
and preventative eugenics (centred on preventing racial toxins, meaning
alcoholism and venereal disease) from entering the superior white stock. It
is historically evident that Aboriginal people is Australia have been accused
by the white medical establishment of being particlarly prone to alcoholism
and venereal disease, and that these accusations have resulted in
considerable prejudice against Aboriginal people (extending at times to all
blacks) by health care workers in hospitals and clinics, and among the
general public. It is also clear that during the decades of the White Australia
policy the assimilation of half-castes (and part-Aboriginals) was
accompanied by segregation of full bloods. It is also clear that this
segregation was government policy, regardless of whether or not it was
offically stated. It was certainly sanctioned, and in fact implemented, by all
levels of State and Federal Government that dealt with Aboriginal affairs.
When Europeans first colonised the Southern parts of the continent, most of
the Aboriginal people in Australia probably lived in this area, and in coastal
Queensland, since it is more fertile, pleasant and hospitable in these wellwatered areas than the outback. They chose to live in coastal areas with
plentiful rivers, trees and lakes because life is easier in such environments.
They were not, however, allowed to continue living in this beautiful part of
Australia because they were considered to be black and this was to be a
State for White People. Peter Murray and John Wells, in From sand,
swamp, and heatha history of Caulfield write:
Early in the growth of Melbourne, Aborigines were banned from
the town and later from its southern coastal suburbs. During the 1860s
and 1870s the remaining Aborigines were forced south where they set
up a camp at Mordialloc and survived, in part, by begging. (p.84)
The discovery of gold in Victoria in the 1840s transformed Melbourne, and
brought a flood of European bounty hunters and gold-obsessed men from
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England, Continental Europe and North America through the 1850s and
1860s. Quiet rural villages became rowdy boomtowns overnight, and
Melbourne became a sprawling city. Alan Gross writes in his biography of
Victorian Governor Charles Latrobe:
While the constitutional change was being made, the entire
conditions of Australian life were transformed. Gold was found, or,
more accurately, permitted to be found since its occurrence had been
known for a generation. Earlier reports had been hushed; excitement
of such a nature was thought to be too dangerous for a community in
which the convict element was so strong. Means were found to silence
colonists who dabbled in such geology: when a convict reported a
find, he was flogged for statements declared to be untruthful. La
Trobe had administered his province in accordance with this policy.
Although Melbourne grew into a city during the time of and based on the
finance of the Victorian gold rush, initially the city was, to the concern of
Governor La Trobe, left deserted by colonists seeking instant wealth through
the discovery of gold. Gold-fever and gold mania became common
diagnoses in the first lunatic asylums built to try and contain the situation.
Professor Eric Cunningham Dax writes in History of Psychiatry:
Following upon the development of the wool industry from 1830
to 1850, there was a turmoil created by the discovery of gold at
Bathurst in New South Wales and at Clunes in Victoria (as it was
called when obtaining its independence from New South Wales, in
1850). Men left their homes and jobs, migrants poured in, bushrangers
abounded, roads were clogged, grog shops flourished, prices soared
and fortunes were made and lost overnight. The combined population
of Victoria and New South Wales went up from 265,503 in 1850, to
886,393 in 1860There could hardly have been a period of more
rapid social change and adjustment, or such an opportunity for
sociopathic traits to be mobilized. Such was the demand upon the
mental hospital services in Victoria that in 1867 two mental hospitals
in gold mining areas, at opposite ends of the state, were opened within
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ten days of one another. A third, at Kew, admitted its first patients only
five years later, with the object of relieving Yarra Bend, the first
asylum in Melbourne.
Ironically, Yarra Bend, where the first Melbourne lunatic asylum was
constructed in 1848, was the place where John Batman had traded an
enormous area of land with a false promise he never intended keeping, in a
bogus treaty signed by three Aboriginal men whose names are recorded,
all three, as Jiga Jiga. Manning Clark, in A History of Australia writes:
That day [in May, 1835] he gave the men blankets, tomahawks,
knives, scissors, and looking-glasses and hung around the necks of
each woman and child a necklace [he also gave the men alcohol,
according to other reports this being consistent with the treaty
strategy used by the British in Africa and North America]. They
appeared highly gratified and excited. The next day he explained to
the chiefs that the object of his visit was to purchase a tract of their
country, since he intended to settle amongst them with his wife, seven
daughters, his sheep and his cattle. He proposed, he said, to employ
the people of their tribe, clothe and feed them, and pay them a
compensation for the enjoyment of the land.
Batman had acquired 600,000 acres of the most beautiful and valuable
territory in Victoria, together with the mouth of the Yarra River and the port
it ran into for a few trinkets. Or so he claimed. Actually, it was a bogus
treaty, as all such treaties were. The three Aboriginal men who signed away
their land to Batman did not own it it was not theirs to sell. Besides, it
seems most unlikely that the three men called Jiga Jiga had any idea what
they were signing. They almost certainly would not have signed their own
death warrants knowingly and even if they did they were definitely not
representing the will of their people.
Although Batman, who was born of convict parents in New South Wales,
temporarily became one of the biggest landowners in the world, it was not
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long before the area was seized by Governor La Trobe for the British Crown,
and Batman was forced to buy back some of the land from the Colonial
Government. The question of who rightfully owned and owns the land of
Australia has not been settled yet. It is worth noting that the report of a
Select Committee of the House of Commons on Aborigines, in 1837, stated:
in the recollection of many living men every part of this
territory was the property of the Aborigines
La Trobes claim of the land we now call Victoria, followed an equally
dubious ceremony, which occurred in 1802, and is described by Hunter
Rogers in The Early History of the Mornington Peninsula (1968):
On February 15th, 1802, the Lady Nelson entered the Heads and
anchored off Point Paterson (Point King, Sorrento). Here they
explored the immediate terrain and ascended Arthurs Seat, so named
by Lieut. Murray after a similar mountain on the outskirts of
Edinburgh, of which city he was a nativeA month later, on March
9th, 1802, he took formal possession of the territory by holding a
parade on the foreshore at Point King, which was renamed in honour
of the Governor, and hoisting the Union Jack. (p.14)
The discovery of the extensive forests of Gippsland and the Otway ranges
brought more white settlers armed with axes and saws to fell the forest
giants. Aborigines who lived in these areas were driven away or massacred,
sometimes with historical justifications recorded by colonial authorities.
An example of this is the Aire River massacre of Gadubanud people in 1846,
which was apparently in retaliation for the killing of a white surveyor at
nearby Blanket Bay (in what is now the Otway National Park). The killing
of a single white man was punished, in customary fashion by the massacre
of a whole family (or tribe) of Aborigines. Following the mass-murder of
the majority of the Aboriginal population in the early years of colonisation,
during the many years of the White Australia policy, most of the Aboriginal
people in Australia were contained in reserves and missions in central
and northern Australia. These were, functionally, large concentration camps.
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Several remain, along with surviving families of Aboriginal people, to this

day.
Another example of modern-day concentration camps in Australia are socalled detention camps/centres in which foreign asylum seekers
(denigratingly termed illegal immigrants or illegals) are imprisoned on
arrival here and may be held without trial or crime (other than coming here
illegally) for months or even years. These people (currently several
thousand) are of many races: Africans, Asians, Arabs and others from what
have been designated as Third World nations. These nations are being kept
poor by the same nations that are responsible for the development and
implementation of the global market and International Health policies and
politics, so vigorously supported by successive Australian state and federal
governments, along with corporate-funded universities and right-wing
academics and publicists. Unfortunately, these policies and politics remain
tainted by the ugly racism and bigotry of eugenics.
For as long as Australia has existed as an independent member of the
Commonwealth (the past 100 years), the immigration policies of the
Federal Government have been racially discriminatory. These policies have
also discriminated against people holding particular religious and political
beliefs. They have, in addition, favoured migration of particular racial,
religious and political groups. Furthermore, those adhering to (unofficially)
proscribed beliefs were persecuted within Australia, regardless of origin or
nationality. The obvious proscibed political beliefs have been those regarded
as communist, socialist or anarchist. The main proscibed religion has
always been Islam (in direct continuation of the Crusades), while, in
contrast, immigration of Christians and Jews has been encouraged. In more
recent decades, the intensity of paranoia about Moslems has increased in
many sections of Australian society, somewhat replacing the Cold War
paranoia about Reds. Since the 1970s there have been more and more
outrageous examples of demonization of Moslem nations and people in the
Australian mass-media, accompanied by increasingly obvious persecution of
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Moslems by various Government and Non-Government organizations,

including the immigration department, which is now named the Department
of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs.
It is commonly proclaimed, these days, that Australia has a multicultural
society. The claim is often made proudly, especially by the Commonwealth
Government of Australia. What is a multicultural society, exactly, and
what government policies have been developed and implemented to control
this multicultural society we live in? How similar is the Australian
Governments idea of multiculturalism (many cultures) to the White South
African Governments idea of apartheid (separate development)? Is one
particular culture (or the currently dominant cultures) designed to continue
dominating the others in our multicultural society?
First we might define culture and society. In this case defining society
is easy everyone who lives in Australia comprises Australian society.
These people share particular cultural features, and differ in others, culture
being defined as the sum of such things as language, literature, art, social
customs and styles of dress, music and cooking styles. Culture in Australia
has never been unicultural or homogenous even before British
colonization of Australia the continent contained a multicultural society.
Hundreds of different languages were spoken, different forms of art created,
and different customs, styles of dress, foods and dances were homogenised
by British, and subsequently Australian and American anthropologists as
Aboriginal. The original people of the continent clearly coexisted, mostly
in peace, until they were set against each other by divide and rule strategies,
while, ironically, they were unified, in European eyes as Aboriginals or,
less accurately, Blacks.
The British colonists employed Aboriginal native police to pacify other
Aborigines, and, at times to massacre them. These native police were
deliberately recruited from areas other than those they were to work in
ensuring loyalty to the ruling regime. Such use of native police was
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implemented in other British colonies, and, as we have seen from the

example of Leopolds Belgian Congo, in other European colonies. Before
they worked as poorly paid policemen, however, the native police needed
to be trained. They needed to be trained in obedience to their superiors and
to respect the rule of (white) law. They also had to affirm allegiance to the
ruling, or dominant culture, and preferably demonstrate a deep sense of
inferiority to their white masters. This sense of inferiority was specifically
induced in the education that all natives received they were taught that
their own community leaders were ignorant fools, including their own
parents; they were taught about the wisdom and generosity of Christian
Churches, who would teach them the language that would help them get
ahead English, but only as a second language. English as a second
language trained people to become second class citizens in the British
Empire, seen in its extreme form in the teaching, by whites, of so-called
Pidgin-English in New Guinea and the Torres Strait Islands. Pidgin is
basically broken English a style of speech that prevents any speaker from
getting ahead in the English-speaking world. The Australian
governments English as a second language programs likewise teach a
vocabulary (booze for alcoholic drinks, for example) and style of speech
more suited to work in factories than in universities. In fact, these programs,
although themselves developed by academics in universities, direct new
migrants, even those with university degrees to the less prestigious
Technical colleges (TAFES) than the esteemed Major Universities.
A comparison between English as a first language and English as a
second language can tell much about what is currently meant by a
multicultural society in Australia, and how cultural dominance has been
maintained by the architects of Australias multicultural society. It can also
tell us about how the dominant culture has maintained political dominance
long after it has become a cultural minority. In fact, in Australia, the
politically and economically dominant culture, has always been a minority
group. A very affluent minority group, but as small one. These have spoken
good English, and gone to good Schools followed by good
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Universities. The same being the case regarding the dominant culture in the
USA, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa (until recently), this elite
group dominated the public service and the government, as well as the
educational system and the industrial world. They wrote the laws and trained
those who sat in judgement. They trained, in the universities they had
financed, men who became generals, archbishops, prime ministers and
presidents. They were the grandmasters of the old boy network. A small
cultural minority who gained peerages and honours for service to the Crown,
and made deals affecting millions of lives in Boardrooms and elite golfclubs. A small cultural minority who insisted on passing the port to the right,
and singing God Save the Queen (or King) on special occasions; who
drank the finest Scotch whisky and lived in fortress-like mansions where
slaves obeyed their every whim. Cecil Rhodes and Leopold II were idols to
these men, and it is they who ruled the government behind the
governments. Today, as it did a hundred years ago, the centres of this old
boy network are the fraternities of different Major Universities (about 20
world-wide) and associated Private Members Mens Clubs. It is interesting
that the British writer Arnold Haskell wrote in 1942, in Waltzing Matilda: A
Background to Australia that for a long time it was said that the Melbourne
Club ruled Australia. Haskell added that:
Although the seat of government has been moved to Canberra,
Melbourne still retains that atmosphere. Melbourne claims that it is
English and Sydney American. While this is only superficially true,
there is certainly not a trace of Americanism about Melbourne. (p.78)
Arnold Haskell was neither an Australian nor a historian; his book is
intended as a travelogue rather than an academic work. Indeed it is not a
scholarly work, however it functions itself as a source for present-day
historical study, since, written during the Second World War, it gives a
perspective on what the British believed, and were encouraged to believe,
about the British Empires virtues and impeccable behaviour in its colonies.
Published by Adam and Charles Black of London, the sleeve notes claims:
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Today more than ever is such understanding [as Haskells] and

sympathetic writing about a great allied Dominion of paramount
value. Also this study of a great democratic civilization is full of hope.
The author traces its evolution from a form of totalitarian brutality to
its present enlightened state and claims for it in the very near future a
commanding position in the arts and humanities.
The back cover boasts an endorsement by Lord Huntingfield, the former
Governor of Victoria, and another by the South African Cape Argus:
Australia inspired Haskell to write an extraordinarily
interesting travel book. The reviewer (who has visited Australia)
strongly recommends it to fellow Souith Africans. There is a mighty
lot the ware Afrikaner can learn from the dinkum Aussie.
At the time the Afrikaaners were developing apartheid and the Australians
has long been experts at establishing a White Colony.
The index of Waltzing Matilda: a Background to Australia contains no
references to Aborigines, Aboriginal people or Indigenous people. Haskell
makes one of his few references to natives when he describes John
Batmans treaty and the first settlers in Victoria:
On November 19th, 1834, Edward Henty became the first
permanent settler, landing at Portland with 22 head of cattle, 2
turkeys, 2 guinea-fowl and 6 dogs. The following April he occupied
the weatherboard cottage he had built.
On May 27th the following year John Batman came over from
Launceston with three servants and seven New South Wales
aboriginals to acquire a large tract of land at Port Philip, not by
squatting as the Hentys had done, but by legal possession. He was
acting on behalf of a group of citizens from Van Diemans Land
[Batman was set up for his treaty-seeking trip by a group of British
and Tasmanian businessmen who called themselves the Port Philip
Committee].
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He met the native chiefs and in exchange for tomahawks, beads

and mirrors bought 600,000 acres. As a sign of agreement the chiefs
cut their names with a tomahawk on the bark of a gum tree. In
Batmans map is written over what is now Port Melbourne and part of
South Melbourne, Reserved for a township and other public
purposes. Not a heroic phrase, but one that described quiet
confidence in a heroic purpose. (p. 82-83)
The heroic purpose Haskell referred to was the building of the city of
Melbourne, which was, he claims, one of the most important in the
Empire. Melbourne was, indeed, an important power centre in the politics
of the British Empire, and subsequently the British Commonwealth. Other
important power bases, regarding the Empires financial power and political
power in the Southern hemisphere were the other colonial capitals in
Australia Perth in Western Australia, Adelaide in South Australia, Brisbane
in Queensland, Hobart in Tasmania, Sydney in New South Wales and,
importantly, Darwin in the Northern Territory and Canberra, the relatively
small capital city of Australia. The vast majority of important political,
military and economic and legal decisions made by governments affecting
both the Indigenous and non-Indigenous inhabitants of Australia occurred in
one or other of these cities. Most of Australias population also lives in one
or other of these cities, further increasing the incentive of city-based
politicians to develop and implement policies favouring those who live in
the city over those who live in rural areas (of any skin colour).
Haskell travelled back to England from his travelogue-researching holiday in
Australia via South Africa. There he made some telling observations about
life in South African cities during the 1940s. He writes of Zulus, natives,
Indians, Jews and South Africans (by which he meant white South Africans
ignoring the racial, cultural and linguistic divide between Afrikaaners and
British immigrants, and the Boer was during which thousands of Afrikaaner
women and children were killed in British concentration camps). He writes
of the Indians and Jews in Durban and Natal:
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The Indians here look amazingly well fed and clothed. The
South African tends to praise the native and speak disparagingly about
the Indian who has committed the mortal sin of making a success, a
thing that no one with a pigmented skin should do. The people and the
press here are bristling with the most stultifying of all notions, race
consciousness [he uses a euphemism for prejudice and bigotry]. Truly,
anthropology is the one study that should be made compulsory today.
There is a black problem, and Indian problem, and Afrikaans problem,
and there is going to be a good-sized Jewish problem. The Jews have
done well by South Africa Rhodes knew their value at the same
time they have done well by themselves, an unpardonable sin. They
are there in numbers and a little more flamboyant than is advisable for
their own good. In fact there is, of course, no Jewish problem, there
never really is; it is a convenient move for the politician who is
entirely bankrupt of ideas. To declare that there is a Jewish problem is
also to declare that the Gentile has inferior capacities. It is always
difficult to reconcile this with Germanic pride of race. No one
knowing the history of South Africa and its great pioneers can admit
such a thing, though too much concentration on sport may have
weakened their descendants. This feeling of racialism, and
consequently a general interest in politics, is even to the tripper a great
and obvious contrast with Australia. What she loses in cheap labour
she gains in peace of mind and in decent thinking. (p.268)
In 1942, when his book was published, Haskell probably did not know that
the problem of the Jews was, at the time, being solved by working Jews
as slaves until they died in Germany and German-occupied Europe; those
men, women and children, that is, who were not gassed or sacrificed for
medical experiments. In fact, many of the Jews who were becoming a
problem in the eyes of racists in South Africa, were escaping from Nazi
persecution. Many more fled to Australia.
Haskell writes patronizingly of the sad fate of the athletic Zulu, relegated
to pulling rickshaws in White South Africa:
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Zulus in fantastic attire, a wonderful piece of local colour, race

along with their rickshaws, barefooted and extraordinarily graceful.
Their feet seem to skim along the ground while their shoulders are
motionless [a description that sits well with Galtons idea that the
negro falls easily into the ways of slavery]. It is said that their lives
as rickshaw boys seldom exceed four years, not through heart strain
but through lung trouble, induced by the excessive perspiration
[perspiration does not cause lung trouble, but running along roads
breathing in fumes, and working in underground mines does]. Their
clothes are picturesque but far from hygeinic, their bodies being
smothered in furs and rags.
He also refers to the problem of half-castes in South Africa, although he
admits the unpleasantness of the term, and denounces racism, stressing
that anthropologists, being scientific thinkers, are above such prejudices:
We miss the athletic Zulu who is here replaced by the Cape
coloured, caf au lait [milky coffee] unfortunates, relics of the early
days. Whether the half-caste, unpleasant word, possesses the
unfortunate traits usually ascribed to him or not no one can ever say.
The inferiority with which he is regarded is sufficient to account for
many failings. We know only of the failure of environment and not of
breeding. I cannot suggest a remedy. I do not for a moment suggest
racial inter-marriage, and it is easy for the tourist to pat himself on the
back as a broad-minded superior person. I can only say, let us beware
of words used by unscrupulous persons to make political capital,
words that are loosely strung together and that add up to no scientific
truth. The anthropologist learns to respect all races and that respect is
a greater truth than the equality talk of the sentimentalist or the caste
system of that arch moron, the racialist. There is a middle course of
conduct between kicking the houseboy and giving him in marriage to
your daughter, and not to appreciate that fact is to reflect sadly upon
the reasoning powers of the white and ruling races. In every country
inhabited by black and white, the white man forgets in his feverish cry
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of colour problem, by which he invariably means black problem,

that there is always a corresponding white problem. I would like to
hear that discussed by an intelligent native. Anyone who has travelled
on the P.& O. India-bound, will understand what I mean by the white
problem. (p.272)
The men who wrote the Australian and American Constitutions were learned
men. They had studied English, and usually Latin and perhaps Greek, at
University, and could read, write and debate fluently. They were, despite any
prejudices, callousness or hypocrisy, intelligent men when compared to the
buffoons who have reached the top jobs in recent years. If one compares
George W. Bush or Bill Clinton with Abraham Lincoln or George
Washington, this point become obvious. If one watches the debacle that
passes for parliamentary debate in Australia the tragedy that has befallen
our multicultural society becomes clearer a bunch of overstuffed,
middle-aged men arguing about banalities when they are awake, with a few
well-dressed women asking prepared dummy questions dictated by maledominated party rooms to be answered by Members of Parliament, whose
stationary proclaims them as Right and Honourable while their
behaviour, although perhaps Right wing is rarely honourable. Such
opinions might be regarded as cynical, but cynicism is a very reasonable
response to modern parliamentary debate in Australia.
It is obvious, from watching parliamentary proceedings on television, that
the people who are officially running the country are not calmly, carefully,
and thoughtfully working out solutions to the many problems Australians
face. They are not listening to each others questions and answers, and not
asking the really important questions we need to have answered. They shout
over each other so frequently that the Speaker of the House is constantly
cautioning Members of Parliament for cat-calls, insults and interruptions.
Meanwhile, Aboriginal children are driven to sniffing petrol to ward off
hunger-pains, while their parents die of curable infectious diseases, and
poisoning from alcohol, tranquillisers and cigarettes. While the Minister for
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Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, Phillip Ruddock, gives his prepared

answer about the governments Limited Humanitarian Program, 4000-odd
asylum-seekers are held in privately-controlled detention centres, where
they are subjected to cruel, degrading and punitive treatment on a systematic
basis, in what even the ex-Prime Minister and Liberal Party strongman
Malcolm Fraser has described as hell holes.
The horrific treatment of imprisoned populations in Australia is only now
coming to light, and even so, only in isolated reports in the newspapers.
Newspaper reports over the past two years in Melbourne, have provided
enough pieces of the picture to see that the most terrible abuses of the past
have been systematically denied, and that the depraved mentality that
resulted in early crimes against humanity during years as a penal colony
have persisted in the modern prisons system, and those who run it.
Tendencies towards sadism have always been favoured by those who
appoint guards over prisoners, as the historical record amply demonstrates.
Sadistic guard cultures can thus be expected to develop and propagate
themselves in any permanent institution where people are held against their
will.
In Australia, people are currently imprisoned in several different types of
institution. These include publicly and privately owned prisons, publicly
and privately owned hospitals and nursing homes and Department of
Immigration detention centres. Although officially publicly owned
several of the public prisons are managed (and staffed) by private prisons
corporations, including all of the DIMA (Department of Immigration and
Multicultural Affairs) detention centres which are managed by the
Australian subsidiary of the American Wackenhut Corrections
Corporation, based in Florida. Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, which
has over 40,000 prisoners worldwide, operates several private prisons in
Australia as well as the DIMA detention centres via its Australian subsidiary,
Australasian Corrections Management (ACM).
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Wackenhut Corrections Corporation has over 40,000 prisoners (excluding

staff members). Based at 4200 Wackenhut Drive, Palm Beach Gardens,
Florida, the companys Chief Executive Officer, Dr George C. Zoley boasts,
in the WCC All Points Bulletin (a publication by the company for
employees and their families) that:
It is a pleasure to note that WCC is not only one of the largest
correctional and specialized health services organizations in the world,
but also one which is undergoing continued growth at a healthy pace
and one which provides innovative solutions to government
challengesThe continued growth was demonstrated during the past
three months as the company initiated management of the first
privatized prison in New Zealand, the 383-bed Auckland Central
Remand Prison; and also opened the newly renovated Western Region
Detention Facility at San Diego, California with a contract to house up
to 616 detainees for the U.S. Marshals Service.
In New Zealand, a disproportionate number of prison inmates are Indigenous
people (Maoris) and Pacific Islanders, as in Australia. In the USA a
disproportionate number of prisoners in State-owned and privately-owned
prisons are classified as Black or Hispanic. The official statistical data
collected by medical, police, and military institutions and organizations in
the USA have classified the population of the USA as White, Black,
Hispanic or Others for many years. Almost all the political leaders and
business leaders in the USA are, by this classification, White, including all
the photographed bosses of Wackenhut Corrections Corporation. Dr
George C. Zoley, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and Vice Chairman of
the Board, is shown in the inside cover, next to his address to his employees
titled Professionalism the seeds for future growth, as a smiling, tanned,
middle-aged man with dark hair greying at the temples, wearing a dark
double-breasted suit, white shirt and orange tie.
He is pictured again on page 4 of the 32-paged bulletin, this time wearing a
blue tie, apparently rubbing noses while shaking hands with another man of
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very similar complexion, grey hair, and also wearing a dark suit. Next to the
small, blurred photograph is the deceptive caption:
George Zoley recently toured our facilities in Australia and had
occasion to learn a new type of introduction. He is pictured here
meeting Dan Tumahind, Chief of the Moori (the Aboriginals) and
extending the traditional Moori greeting (our version of the
handshake). Prior to leaving, Dan presented George with a patu, a
Moori hand ax.
Who is Dan Tumahind, Chief of the Moori, exactly? There is no
recognised chief of the Australian Aboriginal people, and Tumahind does
not sound like an Aboriginal name. Dan is certainly not. While the
Indigenous people of New Zealand are known as Maoris, the term Moori
is said, by Wackenhut Corrections Corporation, to mean the Aboriginals
(of Australia). Aboriginal people from Queensland refer to themselves as
Murri, while Victorian Aborigines call themselves Kooris, not Moori.
Neither the Kooris or Murris are represented by a chief called Dan
Tumahind, nor do they introduce themselves by rubbing noses (said to be a
greeting among some Inuit people and Polynesians, but not Australians). The
reference to a hand axe presented to George Zoley by the Chief of the
Moori suggests acceptance by the leader of the Australian Aboriginal
people of the American private prisons industry incarcerating the people
Dan Tumahind was said to represent. Aboriginal people are locked up at
over 10 times the general rate of incarceration of the Australian population,
and given the sensitive nature of the treatment of Australias Indigenous
people by the police and judicial system, indignation from the American, let
alone the Australian, public could be expected if it were widely known that
an American company is profiteering through these incarcerations.
If it were widely known that this company also runs all the Australian
Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs detention centres, in
addition to private prisons in Queensland (Arthur Gorrie Remand and
Reception Centre), New South Wales (Junee Correctional Centre) and
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Victoria (Fulham Correctional Centre and Melbourne Custody Centre)

indignation might turn to outrage. If it were revealed that Wackenhut
Corrections Corporation, is based in Florida, the State Governor of which is
Jed Bush, brother of George W. Bush and nephew of ex-CIA boss and expresident George Bush Senior, and that George W. Bush, as Governor of
Texas, refused mercy to all but 2 of over 200 personal pleas from death
row in his State before he became US President, what can we expect? What
are we to make of the progress of reconciliation in South Africa, when a
private prisons corporation run by white American men enters into a 25-year
contract to built and operate a 3,024-bed maximum security prison in a joint
venture with South African Custodial Services (SACS), as is proudly
announced in the Wackenhut Corrections Corporation bulletin for its
brainwashed staff?
In promoting the new maximum security prison being constructed in
South Africa, the WCC bulletin quotes CEO George Zoley:
Dr. George C. Zoley, Vice Chairman and Chief Executive
Officer, stated, This private-public partnership with the South African
Government is an important step for our company in further
expanding WCCs leadership in the international correctional services
market. We look forward to our continuing association with the South
African government and are fully committed to supporting its goals
and objectives.
Could it be that the white supremacist regime that so long tormented and
terrorised the population of Southern Africa continues to wield power behind
the scenes, despite the apparent transition to black rule? The WCC All
Points Bulletin continues:
The construction at the site was started after the execution of the
Project Development Agreement (P.D.A) in July, 1999. The P.D.A
permitted work on the project to begin while the final contract
negotiations were being completed. It is being constructed by SACSs
general contractor, CGM, a consortium of three South African
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building contractors, Concor Construction Pty.Ltd., Group 5

Construction Pty.Ltd., and Makhosi Holdings Pty.Ltd. Full contractual
closure was achieved on August 16, 2000.
Stephen Korabie, the first Managing Director of the new company that has
been formed by WCC to run the Kutama-Senthumule Maximum Security
Prison previously worked, apparently for 20 years, as the South African
Department of Corrective Services Provisional Commissioner of the
Western Cape. This means that Mr Korabie was working in a senior position
during the White Apartheid regimes atrocities against black Africans,
including several years during which Nelson Mandela was one of thousands
of political prisoners in South Africa. One might reasonably hope that
following Mr Mandelas release and ascendance to the presidency of South
Africa the need for building more prisons in a country where many were
unjustly imprisoned would decrease. Instead, the South African government
has gone into a private-public partnership with one of the worlds biggest
private prison empires WCC which claims to be fully committed to
supporting its [the South African Governments] goals and objectives,
while also being fully committed to further expanding WCCs leadership in
the international correctional services market. The latter means, of course,
building more prisons and imprisoning more people.
Private prisons corporations can increase their share of the international
correctional services market by employing several strategies, and can gain
revenue from making prisoners work and by extracting and selling
information. If more people are locked up for less reason, obviously the total
imprisoned population increases. This increases profits. If public fears about
violence, terrorism and drug-use by young men is increased by media
campaigns and police warnings, the building of more prisons is welcomed
by politicians, who can claim to be taking a tough line on crime. Of
course, the biggest criminals, those who steal billions and kill millions
remain immune to prosecution, and benefit considerably from the growing
private prisons industry. New prisons require raw materials for their
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construction thus the mining, chemical and plastics industry (which also
supply the raw materials for arms manufacture) profit. Building prisons
benefits the construction industry which also builds roads and railways,
mansions for the rich and ghettos for the poor, barracks for the army and
harbours the navy, hospitals and schools, mines and dams, skyscrapers and
nuclear silos. Among the myriad constructions being erected at the dawn of
the 21st century, the fastest growing construction industry is said to be the
prisons industry.
An expanding prisons industry also means growing profits for the arms and
security industry. Guards and wardens are provided with batons, guns,
helmets, shields and handcuffs and taught to use them. Scanning devices and
video surveillance, computers to track prisoners movements and electronic
detectors for weapons are just a few of the purchases that the public pay for
when they buy the services of private prison contractors such as Wackenhut
Corrections Corporation and the Scandinavian Group 4 corporation (which
also run prisons in Australia).
Electronic surveillance of prisoners is a particular specialty of Wackenhut
Corrections Corporation, and the US company has recently set up a
worrying new program in Britain, in a contract with the British Government
(WCC already has 5 prisons in England and one in Scotland). The All Points
Bulletin explains:
Premier Monitoring Services Ltd (PMSL) was a company
specifically created and tailored to meet the demands of the
burgeoning requirement in the UK to Electronically Monitor
Offenders. PMSL manages two of the four Monitoring Contracts let
by the UK Government. These cover a population of over 25 million
in the London, Eastern and Midlands areas of England, and all of
Wales. No other contractor is larger or busier.
The monitoring requirement consists of two tasks. Our first task
is to monitor prisoners who are released early from prison in order to
maintain control and structure in [over] their lives whilst affording
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them the opportunity to re-integrate into society. The second task is to

manage curfews given as sentences by the courts throughout our two
contract areas. We expect to monitor up to 2000 curfewees at any time
who have been released under Home Curfew Detention into our area.
We anticipate this figure rising to 4000 with the addition of courtsentenced curfews.
We are also participating in Electronic Monitoring trials work
for both the Home Office and the Scottish Office. Based upon an open
architecture organisation and IT [information technology] system,
PMSL is able to react rapidly to increased demand for its service.
Specialised electronic equipment has been developed by a company called
Premier Geografix Limited which produces both the hardware and
software for Offender Monitoring, including Personal Identity Devices
(electronic bracelets that are attached to prisoners ankles), Site Monitoring
Units (located in the ex-prisoners home or place of work that tracks his or
her movements), Monitoring Centre Software and Monitoring Officer
Transmitters. The dangers of such monitoring programs and their wider
implications are discussed further in a later chapter in which secret police
and surveillance systems are explored.
The All Points Bulletin of the Wackenhut Corrections Corporation provides a
list of 55 contracts the company has with relevant governments to run
prisons in the USA, Australia, England, Scotland, South Africa, New
Zealand and Canada. All these countries, as we have seen, were major
centres of white-supremacy eugenics in the 20th century. The bulletin also
includes the number of beds in each prison (correctional facility), referred
to as the total design capacity. These total 39,522 beds, including the
3024 beds in the new maximum-security prison in northern South Africa.
Of the remaining, 36,498 beds, 2875 are in England (distributed among 5
prisons), 548 are in Scotland (Her Majestys Prison Kilmarnock), 4668 are in
Australia (including the 6 immigration detention centres at Curtin, Perth,
Port Hedland, Maribynong, Villawood and Woomera), 383 are in New
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Zealand and the rest are in North America. Although contacts in Canada are
mentioned, all the prisons mentioned are in mainland USA, with the
exception of the Bayamon Correctional Facility in Puerto Rico, which has
500 beds. It should be noted that historically the number of beds in most
prisons has been less, often dramatically less, than the number of people
held in the prison not every prisoner has had a bed, in other words. This is
less generally the case in First World prisons, but more often than not the
situation with overcrowded prisons in the Third World, and might reasonably
be expected to become the case in the new South African prison.
Although the corporation is based in Florida, most of WCCs prisoners and
prisons in the USA are located in Texas, where the corporation has 13 jails
with a total of 7177 beds. The largest of these, the John R.Lindsey State
Jail holds 1031 prisoners. When current US President George W. Bush was
Governor of Texas more prisoners were executed in Texas than in all the
other North American States combined (over 200 people, mostly AfricanAmerican). At the same time Bush was Governor of the oil-rich state of
Texas, his brother, Jeb Bush was Governor of Florida, the location of the
Wackenhut Corrections Corporation headquarters. The Bush family made
their money in oil, and have become a dynastic power in the USA. George
Bush senior (father of George W. and Jeb) was head of the CIA before
become Vice-President under (one might say, behind) Ronald Reagan and
subsequently President before losing office to Bill Clinton. Clinton was
Governor of another Southern State, that of Arkansas, prior to his
presidency. Both Arkansas and Florida contain Wackenhut Corrections
Corporation jails, although not as many as Texas. Even allowing for the fact
that Texas is the largest state in the USA, the number of WCC jails in
George W.Bushs state was vastly disproportionate to the companys share
of the corrections market in other states. Most of the USA states do not have
any WCC jails, yet Texas has thirteen. Why should this be so?
Texas, the most southern state of the USA (with the exception of the Florida
peninsula), borders Mexico and its coastline comprises the north-western
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corner of the Gulf of Mexico. It is located in the middle of the so-called

bible belt the band of southern states, including Arizona, New Mexico,
Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and South
Carolina, that fought against the abolition of black slavery by the Northern
States. These states contain the strongholds of the Klu Klux Clan, and
several continued black-white segregation in schools and public places as
recently as the 1950s and 1960s. These are the states where blacks were
lynched by white mobs and the police took no action or took part in the
killing. These states are the stronghold of the white supremacy movement
in the United States, and also home to a range of neo-nazi groups, and the
power base of the influential American gun lobby.
As Governor of Texas, George W. Bush had the opportunity (many would
say the obligation) to stop the execution of over 200 people (mainly young,
black men) who appealed to him for clemency while on Death Row. The
man who promoted himself, during his presidential canmpaign as the
compassionate conservative turned down all but two or three appeals.
Given that few nations in the modern world continue to administer the death
penalty at all, this surely makes George W. Bush the worst serial killer in
recent American history. The worst mass-murderers, if one considers the
culpability of the Presidency as commander-in-chief of the U.S. armed
forces would have to be decided between Richard Nixon (for war crimes in
Vietnam), Ronald Reagan (for the Gulf wars support of wars in South
America and Africa), George Bush Senior (for the Gulf wars and support of
wars in South America, Africa and Asia), and Bill Clinton (for ordering the
US airforce to bomb countries whenever politically expedient). These
conclusions could be reached before considering whether AIDS is the result
of a US-based or US-supported biological warfare program. If HIV was
made in Fort Detrick laboratories and used to attack politically-selected
targets by the US government, obviously several US presidents are guilty of
complicity in the worst crime against humanity of all time the genocide of
tens of millions of people. Since the AIDS epidemic began, in Africa and the
USA, in 1984, all the US presidents since Ronald Reagan onwards are
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implicated, along with their Vice-Presidents and chiefs of staff, military and
scientific advisers and senior public health officials if the accusations of Dr
John Seale and others are correct.
On 20.4.2001 Melbournes The Age newpaper informs the reader that Oils
not well with Jeb and Dubya. The article, by Julian Borger in Washington,
says that George W. Bush is proving that to a Texan with campaign debts,
oil is thicker than blood. The oil-magnate-turned-President wants to open
up the Arctic national wildlife refuge in Alaska and parts of the Rockies to
oil exploration and, to the concern of his younger brother Jeb, has approved
the sale of 2.4 million hectares of sea-bed off the east coast of Florida for
exploration and drilling. The residents of Florida value the beauty of their
coastal areas and do not want more oil rigs there. Jeb Bush, concerned that
few other issues so completely unite Floridans, wrote a letter to his older
brother, explaining that Floridas economy is based upon tourism and other
activities that depend on a clean and healthy environment. Perhaps, after
the help Jeb Bush gave his older brother at the time George Bushs
presidency hinged on the vote recount in Florida, he thought his letter to the
Interior Department would result in the new President stopping the auction
of the Florida coastline. Maybe not he may have been making sure he was
seen to be doing something, without sincere intent. The articles author
claims that Jeb Bush has little chance of retaining his Governorship if
drilling goes ahead, such would be his unpopularity. Be that as it may,
George W. Bushs Interior Secretary, Gale Norton, has rejected the plea
and announced that the auction of 2.4 million hectares of the Florida sea-bed
would go ahead.
Not everyone in Florida is free to enjoy the clean and healthy environment
that Governor Jeb Bush referred to. Over 2000 people are locked up in the
three jails in Florida run by Wackenhut Corrections Corporation in its home
state. The prison corporation does not release a racial profile of their
prisoners to the public, but it is common knowledge that African-Americans
are seriously over-represented in all American jails, as are Indigenous
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Americans and Hispanics. This over-representation is relative to the

politically dominant racial group in the USA, and majority population group
white Anglo-Saxons of Western European and British origin. Every
American President so far has belonged to this group, and every American
president has been male. All but John F. Kennedy have been Protestant
Christians (Kennedy was a Catholic). Many have also been Freemasons, an
undisputed fact that has historical significance to the history of eugenics,
slavery and genocide in the USA and also in Australia, South Africa, South
America and Asia.
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25. THE WHITE AUSTRALIA POLICY, EUGENICS AND

GENOCIDE
It is generally supposed that the White Australia policy was instituted in the
1860s primarily to prevent the exploitation of gold by Chinese miners (who
were also often indentured or otherwise enslaved) attracted, like the
British, to the huge finds. Another possible motive for these discriminatory
laws, though, was to prevent freed black slaves from coming to Australia
from America, where a simultaneous gold rush was occurring in California.
Basically, the British colonists who established towns, and later
states, in Australia did not like blacks, wherever they came from. They
regarded them as a whole as dirty, dishonest and otherwise inferior. This
racist legacy began before the official founding of the eugenics movement
in Australia, but provided fertile ground for the prejudiced doctrines of
survival of the richest to grow.
From Manning Clarks Sources of Australian History is a quote from the
English Captain W. Tench, who wrote in 1788 of the Aborigines at Botany
Bay and Port Jackson, after accompanying Captain Arthur Phillip in the
First Fleet:
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The only domestic animal they have is the dog, which in their
language is called Dingo, and a good deal resembles the fox dog of
England. These animals are equally shy of us, and attached to the
natives. One of them is now in the possession of the Governor, and
tolerably well reconciled to his new master. As the Indians see the
dislike of the dogs to us, they are sometimes mischievous enough to
set them on single persons whom they chance to meet in the woods. A
surly fellow was one day out shooting, when the natives attempted to
divert themselves in this manner at his expense. The man bore the
teasing and gnawing of the dog at his heels for some time, but
apprehending at length, that his patience might embolden them to use
still further liberties, he turned round and shot poor Dingo dead on the
spot: the owners of him set off with the utmost expedition. (p.92)
As for the Aboriginal people who owned the Dingos, Tench is more
interested in their skin colour than their culture, language or genuine motives
in setting their dogs on the intruders and invaders:
Their colour, Mr. Cook [Captain James Cook] is inclined to think
rather a deep chocolate, than an absolute black, though he confesses,
they have the appearance of the latter, which he attributes to the
greasy filth their skins are loaded with. Of their want of cleanliness
we have had sufficient proofs, but I am of opinion that all the washing
in the world would not render them two degrees less black than an
African negro. At some of our first interviews, we had several droll
instances of their mistaking the Africans we brought with us for their
own countrymen. (p.90)
Skin colour is, like blood group, and many physical attributes, genetically
determined, but this would not have been known by Captain Tench or
Captain Cook, since the concept of genes had not yet been elucidated,
however concepts of inherited traits that run in the blood are thousands of
years old. These have been associated with various social and political
policies in many parts of the world, in which the superior place of ruling
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elites (and elite blood lines) has been justified by arguments that they are
naturally more deserving and thus destined to dominate the lower classes.
They include the caste system in India, as well as the feudal states of
ancient China, Japan, Africa, Europe and Asia. The prejudices that lie behind
such hierarchies, although widespread and enduring, have not been a
ubiquitous feature of human society, and many people in modern as well as
ancient societies have been fundamentally unprejudiced, egalitarian, and
respectful of other lands, cultures and people.
Today there are few Aborigines living in Melbourne and the densely
populated southeast of Australia. This is because over the past two hundred
years most of the indigenous people who lived in this area have been driven
away, poisoned, hunted or locked up. Yet for thousands of years numerous
families of Aboriginal people had lived in the fertile, forested areas of what
we now call Southern Victoria. This area, part of a massive volcanic plate,
provided a bountiful supply of food, fresh water, access to the sea
(containing fish and shellfish) and other naturally occurring necessities for a
long, happy, healthy life. South-Eastern Australia and Tasmania also
contained some of the most magnificent forests in the world, containing the
worlds tallest flowering tree, the Mountain Ash (Eucalyptus Regnans). It
contained natural lakes and springs, waterfalls, rivers and caves. It also
contained many thousands of people who had lived here since time
immemorial and who nurtured and respected their homeland in a way that
contrasted dramatically with the European invaders who came here in search
of timber, gold, land and people to exploit.
The treatment of indigenous people in Australia by British colonists is well
summarised by the journalist Stuart Rintoul in the introduction of his 1993
book The Wailing: A National Black Oral History:
The twentieth century was no less brutal. After the killings of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries came more violence, more abuse,
imprisonment, humiliation, a grotesque gallery of laws which denied
indigenous people their fundamental human rights. The missionaries
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gave them a haven from the bullets of the police and the white
landowners, but usually the price required was their culture. As the
missionaries at Hermannsburg, in Central Australia, sang them Bach
cantatas, they prayed for God to change the heart of the Australian
Aborigine.
In most of Australia, indigenous people were forbidden to speak
their hundreds of beautiful languages, and pursue their culture. They
were governed by protection boards whose absolute powers
determined where and how they would live. Local protectors were
often the police and usually bigoted whites vigilantly pursuing
policies designed to breed out the black, not smoothing the pillow
of a dying race but suffocating them under it. Prisoners in neck chains
are among this countrys most forbidding historical images. Children
were snatched from their parents arms by police and welfare officers
and then sent out to work as domestic servants and labourers for little
or no money. (p.5)
An examination of the influence of eugenic theories in the systematic
genocide of the indigenous people of Australia since the late 19 th century
promises to shed light on the full implications of attempts to breed out the
black and why it was that Aborigines were considered to be a dying race.
It also shows how persistent these tendencies have been in the medical and
political policies of Australia, and why this is not a problem of Australias
past but of Australias present. An examination of the history of eugenics
and psychiatric theory and practice in Australia also shows that other races
in this nation have also been targeted by discriminatory political, social and
medical policies and treatments based on eugenic and related Social
Darwinist theories and implementation programs.
Some of these treatments have amounted to torture and mass-murder, and
have occurred in what were referred to in Nazi Germany as concentration
camps, but in Australia, are usually termed reserves, missions,
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asylums, hospitals, prisons, detention centres and aboriginal

compounds.
In A Secret Country, John Pilger describes conditions in an aboriginal
reserve named the Santa Teresa Mission in the 1960s:
About three hundred Aboriginal people lived in the camp, in dead
cars and under shelters of leaves and newspapers stiff with flies and
what flies had left. The white administrator had complete authority
over their lives. He could divide families by sending trouble makers
into the bush and children to homes in the cities from which they
would never return. As punishment he could withhold food and water
and confiscate money and personal possessions. Here Aborigines were
being phased into society by way of an iron shed, a prototype of
which was on display behind the garbage dump. Theyll be housebroken in that, said the administrator, adding ruefully that no one
wanted to live in it because it was either too hot or too cold. (p.34)
Similar conditions to those were the lot of surviving Aboriginal communities
around Australia in some they were worse. A constant harassment and
frequent murder of aborigines (especially those in police custody) by police
were additional problems which have continued throughout the twentieth
century, and became the subject of a royal commission in the 1980s. Pilger
writes, of this:
An aboriginal friend remembers his mother being tied to a veranda
post, awaiting the visits of a white man who abused her and his sister
repeatedly. No one was punished. Another friend, a lawyer,
remembers an uncle shot dead by a policeman in a railway yard. No
one was punished. Another described the decimation of his
grandparents family for cattle stealing, and the murder of an aunt at
her front door. I know of other such stories; the most common is of
violent death while in police custody.
White silence is the other component. How many white policemen,
lawyers, magistrates and ordinary citizens knew about these atrocities
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and did nothing? How many reporters knew and wrote nothing? How
many editors had an unwritten policy on Abos and would publish
nothing that cast doubt on the racial and moral superiority of the
majority?
The press, I often heard it argued, could not publish rumours.
Today these stories are no longer rumours. Aboriginal deaths in
police custody have become a public issue in Australia; and what is
finally done about it will say much about the development of
Australian civilization. At the time of writing, a Royal Commission is
enquiring into at least 105 unexplained deaths in police and prison
cells since 1980. Every few weeks yet another death is added to the
list. If white people were dying in a similar ratio, the death toll would
be 8,000 in eight years. As Australian governments of the 1980s have
claimed the moral right to censure South Africa, the rate of
imprisonment of blacks in Australia has risen to at least as high a level
as in South Africa and the rate of deaths in custody is thirteen times
higher than in South Africa. (p.43)
Pilger points out that many of these deaths are attributed by police to
suicide, when it is was clearly without motive or means. The appalling
rate of incarceration of Aboriginal people, and the trivial reasons for such
incarceration, were the cause of public outrage last year when yet another
young aborigine died in custody, this time a fifteen-year-old boy in a Darwin
prison. His crime was theft of some stationary and pens, worth, according to
the Age report of 11.2.2000, $90 dollars (later reports claimed $50.00 of
Textas and pens only). He went to jail because of mandatory sentencing
laws in place in the Northern Territory and Western Australia (that happen
to be home to the largest proportion of aborigines in Australia today). He
had five days to go before release, and was an orphan from Groote Eylandt
who spoke little English. The director of the Mitwajl Aboriginal Service, Mr
Selwyn Hausman, who had visited the boy in jail, said that the child had no
concept of the regime that incarcerated him, and that he was distressed and
wanted to leave there. The Northern Territorys Chief Minister, Denis
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Burke, however claimed that it was a lie to connect the boys death with
mandatory sentencing and, that to suggest somehow that this youth died of
mandatory sentencing is the lowest of the low. The issue, according to
Burke is the tragedy of a youth who committed suicide. However,
according to the report, ATSIC, community groups and the legal profession
attacked the laws [mandatory sentencing] as discriminatory, suggesting they
deliberately targetted juvenile Aborigines.
A few days later, with the eyes of concerned Australians on the Northern
Territory courts, another youth, aged 22, who had allegedly stolen $3.00
worth of biscuits and cordial (later reports claimed $23.00, as if that makes
much difference) from the mining compound at Groote Eyland (ironically,
on Christmas day) was sentenced to one year in jail for his crime. The jail
in Darwin is 800 kilometres from his home in the small island of Groote
Eyland, in which the sole industry is white-controlled mining. This youth is
one of many young Aborigines in jail for petty crimes (and victimless
crimes such as drug use, or non-payment of fines) in the Northern Territory
and Western Australia, where mandatory three strikes and youre in
sentencing laws were introduced in 1997 on the recommendations of Mr
Shane Stone, who appropriated the draconian laws from the more regressive
states in the USA which still apply these laws ostensibly as part of the US
governments war on drugs. Shane Stone is now the Federal President of
the Liberal Party in Australia, and was previously Chief Minister of the
Northern Territory. The Prime Minister, John Howard, has expressed
reluctance to interfere with territory matters and, the Labor Party
opposition, led by Kim Beazley, has made only weak and ineffectual
comments about the abuse. Far from condemning clearly unjust and
discriminatory laws, or acknowledging a history of mass-murder, genocide
and slavery in Australia, Kim Beazley could only muster that:
Most appropriate would be if they did the right thing and
acknowleged that there are too many inflexibilities, particularly as far
as young people are concerned.
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Nevertheless, prominent Australian legal figures have (uncharacteristically)

been vocal about the need for abolition of the mandatory sentencing laws of
the Northern Territory and Western Australia. Dr William Jonas,
Commissioner for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice at the
Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission wrote, in the Australian,
on 16.2.2000:
Regrettably, this death is not an aberration. The Royal
Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody reported in 1991 that
in the previous decade there had been an appalling 99 such deaths. In
the 1990s the figure rose to 147Regrettably, authorities in Australia
have known for years that indigenous people are vastly overrepresented in the juvenile justice and criminal justice systems. They
have known for years that the causes are systemic, rooted deep in a
history of discrimination and disadvantage, of economic deprivation
and social disruption.
The connection between race and jail has been common in
indigenous issues for some 20 years. The Royal Commission into
Aboriginal Deaths in Custody recommended that state and territory
laws and policies should offer alternatives to incarceration wherever
possible. Prison should be a last resort. The 1997 National Inquiry
into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children
from Their Families exposed the traumatic consequences of
separation. Incarceration, on the scale now experienced by our
indigenous communities, is separation under a new guise.
Mandatory sentencing, introduced in Western Australia in 1996
and in the Northern Territory in 1997, has made a bad situation worse.
The legislation is having a particularly devastating impact on
indigenous youth. Aboriginal children accounted for 80 per cent of the
three strikes cases in the Childrens Court of Western Australia from
February 1997 to May 1998. A 1999 report by the National Childrens
and Youth Law Centre found that most of those sentenced under
mandatory detention laws in the Northern Territory have been young
Aboriginal men.
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The legislation forces courts to hand down minimum sentences

for minor property offences such as theft (irrespective of the value of
the property), unlawful entry to buildings, unlawful use of a motor
vehicle (whether as passenger or driver), and receiving stolen goods
(again, regardless of value). The courts discretion to take into account
extenuating circumstances has been abolished, and there is no right of
appeal.
How does this translate into practice? A 24-year-old indigenous
mother who received a stolen can of beer worth $2.50, and an 18year-old man who stole a cigarette lighter and then obeyed his father
and admitted it to the police, were each imprisoned for 14 days. A 15year-old Aboriginal boy who broke a window after hearing about the
suicide of a close friend was sentenced under mandatory detention for
damaging property, then he attempted suicide. At some level of
culpability, the legislation translates into the latest death.
The public were given some space in letters to the editor by the Murdoch
press to express their anger at mandatory sentencing. On 16.2.2000, the
Australian contained several letters, including one from Ton-That Quynh-Du
of ACT:
While I hope that the federal Government will be persuaded to
override the NT mandatory sentencing laws, I am not holding my
breath.
Let us not forget that Mr Shane Stone, the original instigator and
prime architect of those laws, is the federal president of the Liberal
Party.
And it was Prime Minister Howard who brought him to the
federal presidency
Ian Semmel of Queensland wrote:
I wonder how many state and territory members of parliament
could stand up and honestly say that they have never stolen anything?
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Never pinched anything from a shop when they were young,

never taken pens or Textas home from the office and given them to the
kids, or never kept any money they found.
The death of Johnno in the Northern Territory was not a tragic
accident. He died as a direct result of the deliberate actions of the
Northern Territory administration. Anyone who remains silent shares
the guilt.
Barry Thomson from New South Wales wrote:
It would be a bit premature for John Howard to say sorry to the
stolen children. His mates in Darwin are still at it.
Two days later, on Friday, 18th February, more outraged letters were printed
in the Australian. Charles Herdy, of New South Wales showed a greater
awareness of Australian history than our so-called political leaders when
he wrote:
A man in the Northern Territory has been sentenced to a years
imprisonment for the theft of biscuits and cordial. There is important
legal precedent for this sentencing regime: in the 18 th century some
British subjects found themselves transported to NSW for the theft of
bread.
One interpretation might be that the greatest tenets of the
precedence-based Common Law have been enshrined in NT
legislation. Another might be that, more than 200 years on, some
jurisdictions in this country have taken on the mindless and heartless
character of the legal system that was a factor in European settlement
here
Judith Bessant of the Australian Catholic Research Centre in Melbourne
wrote:
We may well wonder whether any progress has been made since
Australia was a penal colony and dumping ground for Englands poor
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shipped to the other side of the Earth as punishment for crimes such as
stealing bread.
Con Vaitsas, of Queensland asked a rhetorical question:
If a man can be sent to jail for stealing a packet of biscuits why
are no politicians languishing in jail for misusing their travel
allowance?
David Peetz of Queensland expressed his indignation:
Unjust. Heartless. Soulless. Cynical. Opportunist. Ignorant. Some
words can describe the laws that equate a year of a mans life to a
packet of biscuits, and a childs death to a few Textas and paints. But
how will we describe our national leaders if they fail to overturn these
laws?
A few days later the Secretary-General of the United Nations, Mr Kofi
Annan was in the Northern Territory where he met the NT Chief Minister
Denis Burke, who had previously said that mandatory laws are not on the
[his] agenda when he met Annan. The public and even members of the
press predicted otherwise, but contrary to the expectations of some, the UN
chief did not raise the matter of the outrageous number of aboriginal people
in Australian jails or the number who die there, with Mr Burke (according to
subsequent press reports). He did not seek evidence to back claims that
State-sanctioned murders are routinely dismissed as suicides in Australia,
and that many others are described as accidents, heart attacks, strokes
and overdoses. Annan did not castigate Burke for presiding over continued
social and economic impoverishment of Aborigines in his State, or the
harrassment of Northern Territory aborigines by police and psychiatric
services. Mr Annan did not raise the history of genocide in Australia, or
investigate possible Australian involvement in arming militias which
ravaged East Timor before, during and after the (re-)partitioning of Timor (it
is common knowledge that Australia has, over the years, provided military
assistance to Indonesia). He could not, of course, ask questions about things
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he had not been informed about. He did not investigate claims of biological
warfare and chemical warfare originating in Australia or drug warfare being
instituted against Australian people. He did not ask uncomfortable questions
about corruption in Australian politics, medicine and law. He would have not
been given truthful answers even if he had asked such questions, but they
were not on the agenda.
Mr Annans schedule brought him to southern Australia, where he met John
Howard, the Prime Minister, who had sent Australian troops to keep the
peace in Timor, after contributing to turmoil and genocide there during
many years in office, when he, in the habit of his predecessors, supported the
military brutality of Suhartos Javanese empire. Questions about Australias
appalling human rights record and support of other nations with
reprehensible human rights records (such as Britain and the USA) were
presumably not on the agenda with Mr Howard, either. The Australian, on
19.2.2000 explained the Prime Ministers sensitivity to human rights issues
and inability to discriminate crimes against humanity from local politics.
In a page 9 article titled Dont tell us what to do, PM warns, Benjamin
Haslem reports:
The federal Government would not be dictated to by the UN when
determining its position on the mandatory sentencing of juveniles,
John Howard warned yesterday.
The Prime Minister said he would not stand for Australias human
rights reputation being tarnished internationally over a domestic
political issue.
Mr Howard is quoted as saying on ABC radio:
Weve had our blemishes and made our errorsbut Im not going to
have a situation where people are denigrating the human rights reputation of
Australia.
The human rights record of Australia is historically obvious. Routinely,
genocide, mass-murder and State-sanctioned murder of Aborigines have
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been denied by every government in the country for 200 years. Torture and
terrorism of Aborigines (or anyone else) by the various State and Federal
governments have also been denied as well as arbitrary imprisonment by
government forces (such as the police, psychiatric services and prison
system). But surely, given the well-established consequence of isolation,
solitary punishment, stigmatisation and dispossession as occurs
systematically through the process of being found guilty and sent to
prison, resulting in depression and suicide, governmental and judicial
collusion in a murderous regime should be considered. Even without the
added factors of systematic harrassment and bullying [and murder] by white
police of young black offenders, it is clear that mandatory sentencing
laws in Australia are more than deserving of international condemnation.
In addition to direct violent murder, Aboriginal people have been subject to
mass-murder by withholding readily available medical care, which was
freely available to whites at the time. An example of mass-murder by
incarceration, neglect and deprivation of medical care from the twentieth
century is given by Rintoul in the introduction of The Wailing:
There were special Aboriginal prisons, there were the infamous
lock hospitals on Dorre and Bernier islands where indigenous people
suffering from venereal diseases and other contagious conditions were
incarcerated, which the missionary Daisy Bates called the Isles of the
Dead. In the Northern Territory, Aborigines suffering from
contagious diseases were sent to Darwin where they were imprisoned
in a lock-up at the Kahlin Aboriginal Compound. Xavier Herbert
became manager of the compound in 1927. Giving evidence at the
Finniss River land claim hearing in 1980, Herbert described
conditions in the compound when he had taken over as hideous.
Women suffering from gonorrhoea were kept in an old building made
of white-washed corrugated iron, which had, ironically, once been the
chapel: This was occupied by six to ten women all fairly advanced in
agewho were chained to posts. They had iron beds and they were
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chained to posts in it by the leg and they had been there for years like
that. There was no treatment for them (p.7)
Pilger writes, of the genocide of Tasmanians:
In the island state of Tasmania, the bloodletting continued for
more than half a century. On May 3 1804 the 102 nd Regiment shot
dead fifty people at Risdon Cove, including women and children. The
Tasmanians had approached unarmed and with green boughs in their
hands, a sign of peace. The commanding officer remarked afterwards
that he did not apprehend that these people would have been any
use to the English. In 1830 martial law was declared in Tasmania and
the Black War was said to be a final solution, with 5000 Europeans
assembled to drive the remaining 2000 aborigines into the Tasman
peninsula. Twenty years later the fabric of Tasmanian Aboriginal life
had all but unravelled; and only a few survived. (p.28)
The crime of genocide of the Tasmanian Aboriginal people was
accompanied by a cruel attempt to posthumously prove their inferiority
using pseudoscientific techniques and arguments, and some acts of brutality
that defy the most morbid imagination; acts the Australian and British
Governments are still in denial of. Rintoul summarises the murder and
mutilation of the last full-blooded Tasmanian Aborigines as follows:
Oyster Cove, Tasmania: a small graveyard that brings you to
tears. It was here that the last tribal Tasmanians were brought to die,
deprived of warmth and dignity, only a generation after the arrival of
the white men. A handful of graves. In a bottle in a shed is the severed
head of a man just recovered from England, a macabre reminder of
the scientific attempts to prove the racial superiority of the white
man. In 1869, the body of William Lanne, thought to be the last fullblooded Tasmanian man, was mutilated before and after burial, his
skull removed by Dr William Crowther and replaced with a white
mans. In spite of her pleas that her remains not be violated, the body
of Truganini, the last Tasmanian, was exhumed, her skull filled with
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lead by scientists who claimed her cranium size was more like an
apes than a humans, and her articulated skeleton exhibited in the
Tasmanian Museum, not to be returned for 100 years. (p.11)
In Australian history books it is not customary to describe the camps and
missions in which aboriginal people were forced to work as slaves
concentration camps or death camps, but that is what they were. They
were also enslavement camps, from which aboriginal child slaves were
stolen from their families to work as domestic servants for rations and a
place to live. The conditions that these people were forced to endure were at
least as bad as that of African slaves in the United States, and, whereas
American slaves were able to buy their freedom at times, for the Australian
aborigine there was no freedom anywhere: their choice was slavery or death.
Most were given no choice. As Rintoul writes, the treatment of this ancient
race was indescribably brutal:
Throughout Australia, men and women and children were hunted
and murdered, raped, beheaded, dismembered, boiled down in
buckets, skinned for their cicatrice patterns, their scrotums cut off and
dried and used for tobacco pouches.
These are not events from the distant past. The ongoing direct massacre of
Aboriginal people continued well into the twentieth century, as the
chronology at the end of The Wailing: A National Black Oral History
reveals:
1926: In the Kimberley region of WA, following the killing of a
white pastoralist, a heavily armed posse, comprising two policemen,
four other whites and seven Aborigines go on a killing rampage. Many
Aborigines are shot, women and children clubbed to death. The bodies
are burned at four separate sites in what becomes known as the Forrest
River massacre. A royal commission reports that at least eleven
Aborigines were killed; the Reverend Ernest Gribble, the missionary
responsible for having brought the incident to public notice, says he
personally knew of thirty victims. Aborigines say hundreds were
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murdered. The two policemen who led the party are put on trial, to the
outrage of the white population which sets up a fund to meet their
legal costs. The police are found to have acted in self-defence,
acquitted and promoted out of the district. Gribble had first been made
aware of the murders by police and stockmen in 1922, when he was
told by Aboriginal people the country all stink from the dead
fellows. His efforts to force an inquiry by the Chief Protector,
A.O.Neville, were unsuccessful. (p.381)
The Chief Protector of Aborigines was one of several euphemisms used by
colonial Australias system of government in relation to the Indigenous
people of the continent. The fact that the Aboriginal population was
decimated from an estimated 750,000 in 1788 to 60,000 in 1920 (Rintoul,
1993) gives some indication of how deficient was the protection given
aborigines by the colonial administration. At best, missionary zeal to save
heathen souls (but not bodies or minds) was combined with supercilious
efforts to educate the natives into a civilised way of life. Not enough
education was given to the natives, however, to provide them with
professional qualifications, rights of citizenship and the most basic of human
rights. The pittance they earned in occupations destructive to their cultural
integrity and their personal wellbeing was held in trusts that were not to be
trusted the money they had earned was doled out to Aborigines by
whites, or witheld if their behaviour was inappropriate. This denied them
the free use of their own hard-earned money. Any hope of education in the
white mans languages, laws, customs, medicine and science came via
Christian missionaries who provided a worldview that denigrated their
wisdom and that of their ancient cultures and traditional beliefs. They were
viewed as backward, naughty children, incapable of adapting to inevitable
change and technological progress, yet were routinely denied opportunities
to learn more than the most rudimentary technological and scientific facts.
They were accused of laziness, but denied opportunities to work in other
than the most servile and objectionable jobs.
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Even today most Aboriginal people are trapped, mainly due to economic and
social reasons (rather than by law), within reserves, stations and
missions where they are deprived of the basic necessities for health: clean
water, fresh fruits and vegetables and safe, hygienic housing. In these
stations, reserves and missions Aboriginal people are forced to work in
conditions and for wages that few, if any, white Australians would tolerate. A
veiled admission of this also being the case 30 years ago is evident in the
commentary of Douglass Badlin and David Moore in The Dark Australians,
published in 1970:
Sad to say, the main factor preventing any solution [to the
problem of past policies regarding aborigines] is vested interest.
For, like it or not, great areas in the north of the continent are
dependent economically on the exploitation of aboriginal labor, which
in the past has been provided cheerfully and willingly for no more
reward than minimal and unhealthy rations and the use of
substandard, unhygienic shacks as shelter for their families. In more
settled areas it has been useful for farmers and others to have a pool of
unskilled casual labor, willing to undertake seasonal work for a
pittance and not requiring housing up to European standards. (p.127)
The authors of the book understate the economic and social plight that forces
families to accept sub-standard housing, wages and food. The threat of
starvation causes people all over the world to tolerate oppressive living
conditions because they are given no better alternative. These better
alternatives include fair wages, pleasant living conditions, decent clothing,
progressive education, nourishing food, clean water, good health care, and
the social stimulation and emotional support of family and friends. All of
these basic necessities have been withheld from Aboriginal people in
Australia, who were mostly driven to or dumped in the most desolate parts
of the continent several generations ago, or imprisoned in missions,
reserves and settlements often with the specific intent of divide-andrule. Separation in an effort to control dissent was a deliberate policy of the
white administrators. This meant that siblings were routinely separated, as
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were parents from children, and those sharing linguistic, geographical or

familial background were transported to different missions, especially if
judged as potential troublemakers.
The Aboriginal historian Tony Birch writes, of separation and assimilation
policies in the southern State of Victoria:
A legislatively sanctioned racial category of half-caste was
established by the Victorian Government through the 1886 Aborigines
Act. This Act sought to combat the vitality and rejuvenation of many
Koori communities [Koori is the name used by Victorian and other
south-eastern Aboriginal people to refer to themselves]. The halfcaste act legitimised the forced separation of Koori families. In
conjunction with the legislation, a discourse of contrasting real
Aborigines with the half-caste became a pre-occupation for white
Australia [and for American and British eugenists, at precisely the
same time].
New solutions, including the Commonwealths assimilation
policies, were enacted as additional Aboriginal problems arose. The
Commonwealth first took control of Aboriginal affairs in the
Northern Territory in 1911. One of its first acts was to appoint
Baldwin Spencer of the University of Melbourne as the Chief
Protector of Aborigines.
He wrote the first formal assimilation policy, outlining a
program for the state to actively intervene in the passing of the
Aborigine by removing children from their communities. Spencer
wrote, even though it may seem cruel to separate the mother and
child, it is better to do so, when the mother is living, as is usually the
case, in a native camp.
Baldwin Spencer was an anthropologist, a eugenist, and a white supremacist.
Not surprisingly, the Melbourne University Presss A Place Apart, The
University of Melbourne: Decades of Challenge (1996) mentions only
Spencers pioneering work in anthropology, and omits the decades of
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challenge he inflicted on the Aboriginal people of Australia with his

assimilation policy, which was clearly based on negative eugenic
strategies as espoused by the Eugenics Education Society headed by
Leonard Darwin in the mother country. The authors of A Place Apart,
Professor John Poynter (professor of History) and Dr Carolyn Rasmussen
(Research Associate in the Depatment of History) of the University of
Melbourne fail to mention the political activities of Baldwin Spencer at all
and the separation and dispossession of Aboriginal people is certainly a
political act. The appointment of Chief Protector of Aborigines is
obviously a political appointment, rather than an academic one. The reader
finds no clues in this history of the University of Melbourne as to the cruel
theories and practices of Sir Baldwin Spencer. Instead, we read:
By great good fortune, the early appointments of Sir Thomas
Lyle, Sir David Orme Masson and Sir Walter Baldwin Spencer had
established standards of scientific scholarship of international
quality (p.60)
When Baldwin Spencer established the first department anthropology at the
University of Melbourne, the academic system in all Australian Universities
was modelled on those at Oxford and Cambridge, but especially at
Cambridge the home of eugenics. The University of Melbourne is, in fact,
formally affiliated with Cambridge University to this day. Spencer became
President of the Melbourne University Professorial Board, a position that
made him head of the internal oligarchy of the university (Poynter,
Rasmussen, 1997, p.26). This meant that eugenics, which underpinned the
entire discipline of anthopology, rapidly gained favour among academics
at the university and associated hospitals and research institutions. As an
indication of how deeply the discipline of anthropology is rooted in
assumptions of white supremacy, it might be observed that studies of
whites was called sociology, psychology, history or politics, while studies
of blacks and Indigenous people (around the world, excluding the west)
was called anthopology. Meanwhile, the daubings of the graduates of
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high art schools hung in the National Gallery, while Aboriginal art was
relegated to museums as artifacts of a dying race.
The assimilation policy was a formally and officially accepted government
policy, and was based on the presumption that the Australian Aborigine
belonged to a dying race. The experts on race theory were anthropologists.
All the prominent anthropology professors of Baldwin Spencers time were
eugenists. Galton himself had proclaimed, in Hereditary Genius (1869) that
the intelligence of the Australian type [of black] is at least one grade
below the African negro (which the Father of Eugenics regarded as two
grades below his own). Galton wrote that the Bantu-speaking Southern
African Negroes seem to be made for slavery and naturally fall into its
ways, and that black Africans court slavery. One can easily see how such
views were translated into policies regarding a race deemed at least one
grade below the African Negro. Galtons devotee, Professor C.W. Saleeby,
wrote of the need for segregation to prevent dysgenics and Leonard
Darwin, as President of the Eugenics Education Society wrote of the dangers
of misceganation (the result, he wrote, of interbreeding between white and
blacks) and the need for compulsory sterilization of inferior stock.
Considering the assimilation policy in the light of the 1948 UN laws against
genocide, the genocidal intent of this atrocious policy is clear, since
genocidal actions against a specific group (or race) are defined as including
causing them serious injury in body or mind, or trying to destroy the group
by preventing births among its members or by transferring its children to
other groups (Coyle, 1965, p.84). Taking ones children away, and being
taken away from ones parents alone cause serious injury to ones mind, and
injury to the body predictably follows injury to the mind, since mental
distress causes a range of physical illnesses. Being prevented from
communicating in ones native language causes severe mental distress, as
does being dispossessed, being forcibly transported, ordered to work for a
pittance (or no pay) under constant threat of punishment, or being told that
ones race is primitive, backward and destined for extinction. Being trained
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to work as a domestic servant for people who look upon one with disdain
causes severe mental distress, as does being constantly bossed, denigrated
and scapegoated. Being fumigated and herded like cattle, being called
nasty names, and suspected of all manner of deception and deceit on the
basis of ones skin colour causes enormous mental distress. All these things,
and much worse, were suffered by the half-caste child victims of Sir
Baldwin Spencers assimilation policies.
In more recent decades, those Aboriginal families that have continued to
survive on the fringes of hostile white cities have been routinely treated as
second class citizens by the public service and the white (and yellow and
brown) public more generally (it must be admitted that some of the most
nasty racism towards Aboriginal people is seen among more recent
immigrants to Australia, including those with dark skin, from India and Sri
Lanka). In terms of health care, Aboriginal people have been routinely
treated with inferior drugs and operated on by careless or inexperienced
doctors in public hospitals, and government-run medical clinics. The
standard of medical care in the small, poorly staffed and equipped hospitals
in the larger Aboriginal missions, which are often staffed inexperienced
doctors fresh out of medical school, is appalling. Very few Aboriginal people
in Australia can afford private health insurance, needless to say. In addition
to these problems of deprivation the Aboriginal population continues to have
specific medical intervention policies directed towards them, including
special programs involving targetted immunization and psychiatric
treatment, both of which involve forced or coerced injections, and in the
case of the latter, often incarceration and other punishments.
Aborigines in Australia face many economic and political problems as well
as health problems, and it has been well recognised that the health problems
cannot be rectified without addressing the economic problems and political
problems at the same time, because the three are closely related. This is also
the case with other politically and economically oppressed populations
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lack of finances results in poor diet, poor living conditions (housing, water,
heating etc), psychological distress and social disharmony.
Recently we read in Victorian newspapers about a tuberculosis (TB)
outbreak in Australias largest Aboriginal Community located about 350
miles east of Darwin in the Northern Territory. This is an Aboriginal
settlement called Maningrida, where, according to the article over 45
people are being housed in a three-bedroom house with no furniture,
clean water or stove. They cook on a hot plate, when they have anything to
eat. About 2000 people live in this settlement having been lured there from
various parts of the Northern Territory with claims that they would have a
better life (away from territory that the mining industry have designs on).
The newspaper does not call this place a concentration camp it is
referred to as Maningrida, the largest Aboriginal community in Australia.
Todays newspapers and yesterdays history books do not ever refer to
concentration camps in Australia. Officially there have never been any
concentration camps in Australia, and there has never been slavery here.
It would doubtless shock many white and black Australians if they
realised how much the history of Australia has been rewritten and
deliberately falsified by white historians even those who claimed to be
free of the biases of previous generations. In fact, the construction of
Anglo-Australian history as evidenced in high school and university texts
from the decades of the White Australia Policy was as false as that of
White South Africa. A reflection of how far the Australian establishment has
come since then can be seen in the Reconciliation movement. In South
Africa they had a Truth and Reconciliation council here we are to be
reconciled without facing the truth. In fact, we are being encouraged to be
reconciled with a clearly falsified official version of past a past which is
nevertheless horrific as far as the treatment of Indigenous people is
concerned. The official history of Australia admits that the Aborigines
were regarded as a dying race and that policies of segregation were
followed by attempts at assimilation. It is officially admitted that children
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were taken away from their parents, especially if their parents were living in
a tribal condition or if they were half-castes and trained as domestic
servants.
In 1998 Parliament House in Canberra held an Exhibition about the
Aboriginal People of Victoria from the Official Records titled My Heart is
Breaking. The free brochure claimed this to be a joint exhibition by the
Public Record Office and the Koorie Heritage Trust in association with
Australian Archives and Lake Tyers Aboriginal Trust. It was made
possible by Visions of Australia (described as a Federal Government
Touring Program) and Arts Victoria (the Victorian State Government arts
fund). The brochure gives the following account of Early Official Policy:
Early official policy (1836-1849) towards the Port Philip
Aboriginal people was designed for their protection. But the
invasion period was stained dark with blood. On his expeditions into
the interior in the 1840s, Chief Protector of Aborigines George
Augustus Robinson was frequently told of atrocities even against
women and children including stories of mass poisonings [no
mention of mass-shootings and grotesque mutilations]. With regret, he
told Aboriginal informants, he could do nothing. Their evidence was
inadmissible in court.
The Aboriginal people were not passive participants in all this.
But the exclusive territories of the tribal system and the old feuds
prevented combined resistance. Even so, strong leaders emerged who
defied the trespassers with glass-tipped spears, boomerangs and clubs.
They were no match against the retaliation of determined men with
guns and horses. By the 1840s many of the remnants of the tribes,
now often disease-ridden, were reduced to begging in the streets of
Melbourne, Geelong and the new rural towns. Nor did things improve
with self-government in 1851. The colony of Victoria gave little
priority to Aboriginal Affairs. The responsibility for that was given to
the Victorian Surveyor-General.
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The Liberal Party and Federal Governments view of the Chief Protector of
Aborigines, George Augustus Robinson, is apologist, but apparently not a
good enough reason for a formal apology to Aboriginal people:
The intentions of the British Government that Aboriginal people
and Europeans were equally entitled to protection of the law were
ruined by the inability of the Protectorate to properly safeguard the
Aboriginal people. This costly failure, combined with the reluctance
of police and magistrates to take action, had a shocking human toll.
Chief Protector Robinson, perhaps sapped by his previous efforts
on behalf of Tasmanian Aboriginal people, seemed resigned to the fate
of the original inhabitants of Port Phillip. His endless correspondence
and journal-keeping presented a detached viewpoint. NSW Governor
Sir George Gipps considered Robinson was afflicted with such a love
of writing that he neglected his official duties. Much of the
Protectorate correspondence to the seat of government in Sydney after
1843 later was found to be unopened.
It is difficult to believe that Chief Protector Robinson cared, in the least,
about Aborigines. He could have written about the poisonings and massacres
to the British authorities, and ensured that those guilty of the countless
atrocities that were reported to him were pursued and prosecuted. But no, he
regretted that their evidence was inadmissible in court. It is interesting
that Robinson lost all interest in his incoming correspondence in 1843. This
was a big year for the British empire, paricularly for their chemical and
mining industries. Perhaps Robinson was wondering, along with the other
British colonists in the know, as to how the recently discovered gold
deposits in the Port Phillip colony could be exploited without creating an
uncontrollable gold-rush.
In 1843 British Empire dramatically its territorial control in Africa and Asia
when they reaped the rewards of what was termed a Forward Policy. This
developed during the Opium War with China, which had begun in 1840,
when, in retribution for the Chinese government destroying 20,000 chests of
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opium belonging to British traders, British warships of the Eastern

Expedition bombarded Chinese cities. The opium that was being used to
deliberate the Chinese was being grown, under brutal coercion, by the
British Raj in India and Burma, and sold to Chinese traders. In India the
villagers were being forced to replace their rice fields and vegetable crops
with fields of opium poppies and facing starvation as a result. Even worse
atrocities occurred as a result of the British desire to make Manchester the
textile capital of the world. Indian tailors, who provided competition for
the British cotton-weaving industry, had their hands cut off. Australian
Aborigines and Africans who stood in the way of British gold-lust suffered
even worse cruelties.
In 1842 British Parliament passed the Mines Act in London. The Mines
Act applied only to coalmines in Britain, but give some indication of the
mine-owners attitude towards humanity. According to the new 1842 law,
women, girls and children under ten were no longer allowed to work
underground in coal mines. Prior to this, according to Penguins Chronicle
of the World (1991), children as young a five years old were employed to
haul trucks in passages too narrow for men, while women and girls were
harnessed like horses and made to pull coal trucks. The resulting
unemployment problem, from implementation of the Mines Act, was
dealt with by the (male) British authorities by getting the girls and women to
sew but for this they needed more cotton, and less competition from Indian
tailors. Hence the chopping of tailors hands in India, and the expansion of
cotton plantations in America. Following official abolition of the African
slave trade by the British Government in 1830, the various White British
colonists looked to Asia for slaves, although these were not officially termed
slaves. Instead they were called coolies or bonded (indentured)
labourers. Transportation of Indian coolies to Australia, the British
Pacific Islands, Ceylon, Mauritius, and the Caribbean began immediately
after the transportation of Africans for forced labour was banned in England
in 1930 (and before it was banned by the USA, Portugal or Brazil).
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In 1843, the British, claiming that Blacks were being maltreated by the
Dutch (Boers) in Natal, took control of the eastern South African colony,
adding to their control of the Cape Colony, and cutting the Boers off from
the Indian Ocean. The Boers were forced to move inland to Orange River
and Transvaal which were subsequently claimed as part of the British
Empire, too. The Chinese surrendered the Opium War in 1842 under
threat of bombardment by British warships of the populous city of Nanjing
on the Yangtse (Yellow) River. Under the ensuing Treaty of Nanjing,
signed on 29th August 1842, the Chinese were to pay $21,000,000 in
compensation for the destroyed British opium, and the island of Hong Kong
was ceded in perpetuity to Her Britannic Majesty, her heirs and successors
(Byrne, 1991, p.887). In addition, the British were to have special trading
rights in the Chinese ports of Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningbo and
Shanghai. Immediately after the Nanjing treaty the Americans, who shared
the China opium trade with Britain demanded similar trade concessions
from the Chinese Government threatening that to fail to do so would be seen
as a hostile act (a diplomatic threat of attack). The British and American
public were not, however, told that this was a war about the right to addict
Chinese to opium on the contrary, they were told that it was about the
Right to Free Trade.
Free trade was also the reason presented by the Belgian King Leopold II in
the late 19th Century for the formation of the Congo Free State which later
became his personal possession and in which he instituted one of the most
cruel systems of slavery Africa has seen. It is evident that Free Trade was
only intended to favour the already free and inevitably worsened the plight
of those that were enslaved.
The history of Aboriginal People in Victoria as promoted by the Public
Record Office and Australian Federal Government does not mention the
enslavement of Aborigines in Australia, nor does it explain why, after the
Port Philip Colony was granted self-government in 1851 (as the colony
Victoria) responsibility for Aboriginal Affairs was given to the Victorian
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Surveyor-General. The latter can be most easily explained by what the main
interest of British surveyors was, at the time: gold.
Since ancient times, the beaches of the mythical Southern Land were said to
be awash with gold. It was reported that gold had been discovered by the
British in Australia as early as 1788, the year the first shipment of convicts
and guards landed in Botany Bay, under the authority of Captain Arthur
Phillip, although the first record of gold in Australia by a public official
did not occur until the report of James McBrien (a surveyor) in 1823
(Blainey, 1993, p.6). The discovery of gold in Victoria was kept secret by the
authorities, however, until 1851 the year Victoria was established as a
colony independent of New South Wales (Victoria, previously called the
Port Phillip Colony, was under administration from NSW before then).
Captain Arthur Phillip, who became the first Governor of the first British
colony at Botany Bay in what came to be called New South Wales, professed
that he wanted to reconcile the Aborigines to live amongst the Europeans
meaning to live among the Europeans as black (native) slaves. In 1788 the
right to establish slavery of natives was assumed by all the European
colonial regimes. The forgotton history of slavery in Australia is not limited
to the enslavement of natives, however. Slaves were sent to Australia from
all around the expanding British Empire, including Ireland, China,
Polynesia, Melanesia and India. Some were called convicts others were
called indentured labourers, coolies, kanakas or just blacks.
If you ask a primary school child in Australia today as to who discovered
Australia they will, more likely than not, answer Captain Cook. This is
simply because the falsified British account of Australian history continues
to be taught in our schools even though every credible historian knows this
version of history to be a carefully constructed lie. This lie was
deliberately constructed to legitimise an illegal territorial claim, even
according to the laws of the time. Firstly, new territorial claims could not be
made unless land was unoccupied (hence the terra nullius lie); secondly, a
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protectorate could not be declared unless the protecting government had

been invited by the natives to assume such a role (although in practice this
rarely occurred without coercion); and thirdly, Australia had already been
claimed by the Portuguese (as part of the Eastern Hemisphere), the
Spanish (as Austrialia de Spiritos Santos, or Southern Land of the Holy
Spirit), and by the Dutch (as New Holland). The Dutch had discovered
Australia in the early 1600s, and the Dutch Captain Willem Jansz had
mapped, quite accurately, most of the Australian coastline including most
of the northern Australian coast, the whole Western coast and much of the
southern coast. Abel Tasman, another Dutch captain, charted the coast of the
well-populated island of Tasmania, naming it Van Diemans Land, and
claiming it for Holland in 1642. Prior to this the Dutch East India Company
had developed an effective monopoly of the South-East Asian spice trade
after taking control of the ancient city of Jakarta in Java, converting it into
the fortified city of Batavia, from which the Dutch hoped to develop control
of the surrounding spice islands and the gold-rich Southern Land. They
also hoped to use Batavia as a base from which they could attack their
political and religious enemies and mercantile competitors: initially the
Portuguese and Spanish and later the French, Germans and British.
The British entered the race for Australian gold later than the Portuguese or
Dutch, but with considerably more success in the long run. In 1768 Captain
James Cook was sent on a secret mission by the British Royal Society to
observe the Passage of the Planet Venus over the Disk of the Sun on the 3 rd
of June 1769 in Tahiti, and there to open a further letter from the Royal
Society containing the real secret mission: to discover (and claim for
Britain) the Southern Continent. Thus Captain Cook was sent to discover
the Southern Continent which had already been named New Holland by
the Dutch! The Dutch had not, however, charted the eastern coast of
Australia, at least that is what later history books suggest, and this is where
Cook headed for before claiming the continent for the British Empire in
1770. This undiscovered continent had, ironically, been the inspiration for
for Johnathan Swifts famous Gullivers Travels (1726), based on the
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extraordinary tales of the Englishman William Dampier, who had visited

Australia in 1688, almost a century before Cook discovered it. Dampier
wrote, in A New Voyage Round the World (1698):
New Holland [Australia] is a very large tract of Land. It is not yet
determined whether it is an Island or a main Continent; but I am
certain that it joyns neither to Asia, Africa, nor America. This part of it
that we saw is all low even Land, with sandy Banks against the Sea,
only the points are rocky, and so are some of the Islands in this Bay.
(Dampier, 1698, quoted in Clark, 1957)
Dampier, who was a buccaneer (British pirate), continues his account with
a description of the Indigenous people of northern Australia, which gives
some indication of the demonisation of Aborigines that shaped British
opinions long before Captain Cook arrived here, and two centuries before
the eugenics movement found support in Australia for its more racist plans:
The Inhabitants of this Country are the miserablest People in the
world. The Hodmadods of Monamatapa [in Africa] though a nasty
People, yet for Wealth are Gentlemen to these; who have no Houses
and Skin Garments, Sheep, Poultry, and Fruits of the Earth, Ostrich
Eggs, &c. as the Hodmadods have: and setting aside their humane
shape, they differ but little from Brutes. They are tall, strait bodied,
and thin, with small long Limbs. They have great Heads, round
Foreheads, and great Brows. Their Eye-lids are always half closed, to
keep the Flies out of their Eyes: they being so troublesome here, that
no fanning will keep them from coming to ones Face; and without the
assistance of both hands to keep them off, they will creep into ones
Nostrils; and Mouth too, if the Lips are not shut very close. So that
from their Infancy being thus annoyed with these Insects, they do
never open their Eyes, as other People: and therefore they cannot see
far
They have great Bottle noses, pretty full lips, and wide mouths.
The two fore-teeth of their upper Jaw are wanting in all of them, men
and women, old and young: whether they draw them out, I know not:
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Neither have they any Beards. They have long visages, and of a very
unpleasing aspect; having no one graceful feature in their faces. Their
Hair is black, short and curld, like that of the Negroes: and not long
and lank like the common Indians. The colour of their skins, both of
their faces and the rest of their body, is coal black, like that of the
Negroes of Guinea. (Dampier, 1698, quoted in Clark, 1957, p.25)
Since long before the Dutch claimed the Southern Continent as New
Holland, and added it to Nova Guinea (New Guinea) as a part of its
colonial empire, the Indigenous people of northern Australia had been
trading ochres (pigments and paints), seafood and friendship with Asian
merchants and Melanesian traders from the numerous islands to the
immediate north of Australia. These islands were subsequently fought over
by the Portuguese, Dutch, Germans, British, Spanish and French. They all
wanted control of the spice trade, and any gold that might be found. They
also wanted control of trade-routes and ports, and, most of all, wanted to
keep their European enemies from gaining more valuable territory. In the
17th century the European territorial wars were centred on the battle between
Protestant and Catholic empires; thus the Dutch, Scandinavians and British
became Protestant allies against the Spanish, Portuguese and French
Catholics. Catholic territorial claims were not accepted by Protestant
monarchies, and free reign was given, by the British authorities, for British
and Scandinavian pirates to raid Spanish and Portuguese ships. William
Dampier was such as man a buccaneer, as was Sir Walter Raleigh and
several other British explorers and adventurers. These men were also
slavers, when they so desired it, and they regularly desired it when they
discovered new lands. Thus William Dampier tried to lure Aborigines with
trinkets in the hope of kidnapping some, apparently without success. The
Dutch captain Willem Jansz, who shot at some Aborigines when in
command of the Duyfken in 1606 reported them to be wild, cruel, dark
barbarians but was unable to bring any back alive. The Spanish captain
Luis Vaes de Torres, in whose honour the Torres Strait is named, had more
success, and kidnapped twenty persons of different peoples in the same
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year, taking them to the Philippines, where the Spanish had established the
centre of their Pacific empire. In 1623 the Dutch captain Jan Cartensz tried
a new strategy he offered his men ten coins for each Aboriginal person
they captured for him. His men, thus motivated, baited the Aborigines with
presents and, in the words of Alan Tucker, then betrayed their trust,
capturing several individuals and dragging them back to the ship by ropes
tied around their neck (Tucker, 1994, p.10).
The hideous practice of kidnapping blacks from the Melanesian and
Polynesian islands became an enduring habit in Australia, one that continued
long after slavery was officially abolished in the 19th century. It was even
given a colloquial euphemism in Australia: blackbirding, which continued
into the twentieth century (although officially banned in 1874).
Blackbirding meant kidnapping blacks by any ruse that could be thought
of. In the same way that a timid blackbird might be reassured with
demonstrations of kindness and generosity, the blacks were lured with
trinkets and presents and then set upon with nets, ropes, and swords.
Those who tried to escape were shot. Historical records of blackbirders
reveal such atrocities as injured natives being tied up and thrown overboard
to drown, heavy chains being dropped onto canoes bearing friendly
natives (followed by nets), and extermination orders for mutinies by
kidnapped Torres Strait Islanders (Oliver, 1991).
Penguins Chronicle of the World, mentions Ross Lewin, the greatest
blackbirder of them all, importing the first 67 South Sea Islanders in 1863
on the schooner Black Dog; later advertising that he could sell, for 7 pounds
a head, the best and most serviceable natives to be had in the islands. The
rationale for using such black labour in the tropics is also mentioned in
the Chronicle, although it is incorrectly claimed that blackbirding ceased
when it was banned in 1874:
Planters like Robert Towns argued that the Kanakas were well
suited to the work and that he was avoiding the inhumanity of driving
to the exposed labour of field work the less tropically hardy European
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women and children. Public opinion and the lawstopped the trade
[in 1874]. (p.967)
Myra Willards The History of the White Australia Policy to 1920, the first
book published by Melbourne University Press (in 1923), was reprinted in
1967 with some corrections. The preface to the First Edition claims that
the book is a result of a years research work undertaken in connection with
the Sydney University; it is thus an official version of history as
promoted during the time of the White Australia Policy. The History of the
White Australia Policy to 1920 does not mention Aboriginal people at all
as far as Myra Willard is concerned, the White Australia Policy was an
immigration policy that was primarily directed at stopping Chinese from
exploiting Australian goldfields in the 1860s. She writes:
The White Australia policy was formed during the second half
of the nineteenth century [which coincides with the expansion of
eugenics in Europe, America and Australia]. At the beginning of this
period, Asiatics came in such numbers that it was found necessary to
check their inflow. The measures taken for this purpose were at first
restrictive. But they became more and more stringent till by the
beginning of the twentieth century [coinciding with the Federation
and creation of the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901] they were
given a prohibitive character. And for specific legislation, a measure
of a universal character was substituted.
Looking at the policy for the present as referring to Asiatic
immigration only, there seem to have been four distinct stages in its
development :- (a) Isolated and temporary action with the object of
checking Chinese immigration in the time of the gold rush; (b)
attempted concerted action in the early eighties; (c) the adoption of
fairly uniform restrictive measures by the Colonies in 1888; (d) the
adoption of the White Australia policy by the Commonwealth. During
the first three periods the colonists had to consider the question of
Chinese immigration only. But within a decade thereafter, the policy
had widened so as to include all peoples whose civilisation and
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standards of life at that time differed fundamentally from those of

Australians. (p.17)
If one compares the development of the White Australia Policy with the
development of eugenics in England (and America) the connections between
the two are clearly evident, although Myra Willard does not mention
eugenics, or the fact that, in the 1920s both the University of Melbourne and
University of Sydney were prominent academic centres that embraced the
doctrines of Galton and Leonard Darwin, the founders of the eugenics
movement. It is evident that racist ideas centred on assumptions of white
superiority shaped the Federation of the Commonwealth of Australia
itself. When the colonies of Queensland, Western Australia, South
Australia, Victoria and New South Wales were federated to form the
Commonwealth of Australia (by a British Act of Parliament) in 1901, one
of the primary motives was, in fact, to create a White Nation a haven for
the white race in a largely black, yellow and brown Southern
Hemisphere. Other British Commonwealth nations that shared such
distinction were New Zealand, South Africa and Rhodesia. In all these
white colonies the indigenous population (which was dark-skinned) were
seen, predictably, as a problem. In each, measures were taken to prevent
blacks from other countries entering the white nation unless these could
be used to maintain control over any remaining dark-skinned residents.
According to Myra Willard in The History of the White Australia Policy to
1920 there were two failed attempts to introduce Asian labour to Australia
prior to the introduction of Kanaka labour. These experiments, of Indian
indentured labour and Chinese coolies occurred in the 1830s and were
based on the assumption that Europeans were not suited to hard labour in the
tropics. The concern that led to the banning of Asian labour in 1839 was
not so much that the labour was inherently coercive, but that a racially and
culturally different (non-European) subclass might develop through such
systems as it apparently had in America. Also, as Willard wrote in 1923, a
system that had any feature remotely resembling slavery aroused indignation
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at this time in Britain. Despite this ban, the importation of black slaves
from the Pacific Islands and Torres Strait Islands to work in Queensland
cotton and sugarcane plantations continued for several decades, and was
orchestrated by prominent and respected men, including Captain Robert
Towns (after whom the Queensland city of Townsville is named). Willard
writes:
But perhaps the chief factor which contributed to the
discontinuance of this labour in New South Wales was the disfavour
with which the colonists viewed the large stream of unsought Chinese
flowing rapidly to the goldfields after the middle of the century.
Since the Government stood aloof from this contract
immigration, there is no complete record of the number of Chinese
brought. It must have been fairly large, however, for the British
Consul at Amoy wrote in 1852 that 2666 Chinese had been taken from
there to Australia, and of these 1438 left [were sent back] in 1851. As
early as 1849, 270 had been brought. Captain Towns seems to have
been the chief promoter of this Chinese immigration to New South
Wales. He was responsible for seven or eight shipments of about 300
each. This colonist stands pre-eminent in experimental labour
immigration into Australia. He it was who brought Macarthurs
emigrant families in the Brothers in 1836 perhaps the finest
example of the bounty system of emigration as it was meant to be,
under private enterprise. In 1844 one finds him importing Indian
labour. And he first brought and used Kanaka labour in Queensland
for cotton growing (1863). (pp.12-13)
As in Fiji and other British Commonwealth nations in the Pacific region,
the indigenous people of Australia were regarded by the white colonists as
too lazy to work. The truth was that most were too intelligent to work as
slaves when they could enjoy life in relative freedom if they kept as far away
from the colonists as possible. Indentured Indian and Chinese labourers
had no such choice escape was almost impossible and they did not know
how to survive in the Australian wilderness, unlike Aboriginal people.
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In A New History of Australia (1974), written after the White Australia

Policy was officially abandoned, Professor Frank Crowley of the University
of New South Wales writes of racialism in the 1860s and the assumption
by British colonists who were obtaining Asiatic indentured labour that
Chinese and South Sea Islanders were racially inferior and that this
racialism was institutionalized, along with racism against Aborigines:
In fact by 1860 racialism in Australia was institutionalized, and
violence against racial minorities had become a cultural fact. The
Chinese posed a more direct threat than the Aborigines to covert
notions of British racial supremacy but relationships with the
Aborigines also were approached in racialist terms. None of the
colonial governments had seriously attempted to treat them as British
citizens [as was the official position], nor to police the frontier regions
effectively. When the Aborigines resisted white occupation of their
tribal lands, and when some engaged in sporadic guerilla warfare, they
were easily dispersed or exterminated. The obvious failure of the
policy of assimilation before the middle of the nineteenth century led
to a policy of protection, which meant that the Aborigines became
second-class citizens. Whether in special settlements, as cheap
pastoral labour, or as fringe-dwellers, the Aborigines had become an
inferior caste. Yet there was no sign of general concern about this and
no liberal warnings that the future ideal society was endangered.
In Queensland, where the economy was dominated still by the
large landowners and squatters, there was even less liberal concern
about race relations. The new colonys frontier conditions led to many
clashes between European settlers and Aborigines, the worst being the
massacre in 1861 of nineteen whites and subsequently of 170
Aborigines in the Midway Ranges. At the same time, there were
demands for cheap, coloured labour that would submit to being
indentured. The squatters and large landowners at first relied on
government efforts to introduce coolies from India, but in 1863
Captain Robert Towns began a brisk trade in South Sea Islanders for
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the sugar plantations. In the next five years two thousand Islanders
were indentured. They were regarded as racially inferior, and treated
with callousness and often brutality. (p.152)
Indentured or bonded labourers were not officially slaves, but they
were treated basically as slaves. While they were promised wages
(eventually stipulated as at least 6 pounds sterling per year of labour), many
were denied payment, which was due only at the end of their term of
voluntary imprisonment. Instead, when payment was due, many
Melanesians (and perhaps Indians) were abandoned on various Pacific
Islands when their bond expired or forced to continue working because
they were denied a passage home. It has been documented that many such
unwanted blacks were killed by the residents of islands they were
deposited in, sometimes selected precisely because they were known to
contain cannibals little effort was made to send them back to the islands
they had been recruited (or kidnapped) from.
Since often no records were kept of where the blackbirds were captured,
this is hardly surprising. The same was the case with Aboriginal people who
were herded into missions, settlements and reserves they were taken
from all parts of Australia and sent to distant cities, where they would be
unlikely to escape and could thus be civilised by working for whites
as domestic servants and labourers, while minimal records of this nefarious
activity were kept. Even less records were kept of hundreds, perhaps
thousands, of massacres of Aboriginal people by settlers in collaboration
with police and civil militias, simply because they were illegal massmurder of innocent men, women and children always has been.
While the unofficial genocide of full-blooded adults was going on halfcaste children, in particular, were taken from Aboriginal camps and
settlements and placed in institutions, where they could be tamed before
being given to good, Christian homes. This policy began long before
Federation (in 1901), and continued as the official assimilation policy,
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which assumed that the Aborigines were a dying race, and were destined
for extinction due to their inability to compete with the white race in the
endless struggle for survival between races. There may have been no
official policy of genocide, but there can be no doubt about the genocidal
intent of the assimilation policy. The half-white children would, it was
assumed, soon forget about their parents and families, and accept that they
were (an inferior) part of White Australian Society. They were taught
English history and about the discovery of Australia by the great Captain
Cook. They were taught to count and pay their taxes, and to song hymns and
Christmas carols. They were taught about the infallibility of the English
Bible, and given English names. They were banned from speaking their
languages, and told their families had abandoned them. Meanwhile the fullblooded Aborigines experienced perhaps the most monstrous campaign of
genocide the world has seen.
When the 1901 Australian Constitution was written, it contained only two
references to Aboriginal people. These were section 51 and section 127,
which read as follows:
Section 51: The parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power
to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the
Commonwealth with respect to (xxvi) the people of any race, other than the
aboriginal race in any State, for whom it is deemed necessary to make
special laws.
Section 127: In reckoning the numbers of people of the Commonwealth,
or of a State or other part of the commonwealth, aboriginal natives shall not
be counted.
The 1967 book by Justice Percy Joske, Australian Federal Government
(published by Butterworth), written prior to the 1967 referendum about these
clauses in the Australian Constitution, admits that restricting Chinese and
Kanaka labour throughout Australia was one of the motivating causes of
federation:
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This provision [section 51 (xxvi)] originally intended as a

protection for aborigines against racial discrimination has become
controversial, and has been regarded as discriminating against
aborigines, on the basis that legislation can be passed with respect to
the people of other races and aborigines are excluded from the benefit
of any such legislation, it being assumed that the legislation would
confer benefits on the members of the race to which it applies. The
assumption that legislation with respect to the people of a particular
race would be to give them benefits may well be erroneous since the
historical reason for including the provision in the constitution was to
give the Commonwealth authority to deal with the problem of Chinese
and Kanaka labour, the restriction of which was one of the motivating
causes of federation. (p.225)
It is evident, from earlier chapters, that immigration was a central concern of
white-supremacist eugenists from the 1880s onwards, including Charles
Darwins son, Major Leonard Darwin, who supported segregation of
inferior races and types and stringest immigration and emigration
policies made according to eugenic considerations. This meant, basically,
England sending its undesirables out of the country (although official
banishment and transportation were no longer legal, or internationally
acceptable, and therefore systematically denied), and prevention of
coloured races entering whites-only territories (although official racial
discrimination was, again, denied). The history of Australia is inextricably
connected with British emigration and transportation laws and policies, of
course, since the British colonization of Australia began with the punitive
transportation of large numbers of convicts, combined with the voluntary
migration of much smaller numbers of guards, soldiers and free settlers.
These free settlers were given authority to enslave the convicts until the
end of their sentence, and drive the natives away from land they had been
granted by colonial authorities.
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In the 1920s, when Aboriginal numbers were officially at an all-time low,

Professor Saleeby, chairman of the British Eugenics Society, wrote about
racial poisons alcoholism and venereal disease, both problems afflicting
indigenous populations around the world as threats to racial purity. He
also wrote, in the early twentieth century, about the dangers of dysgenics,
the apparent opposite of eugenics. Dysgenics could be prevented by
negative eugenics and preventive eugenics, according to Saleeby
meaning sterilization, segregation and restrictive immigration policies. In the
1920s eugenics was popular among prominent academics in Australia, and
our major universities eagerly purchased books by American and British
eugenists. Australian universities were among those selected by the Carnegie
corporation for eugenics funding, and eugenic research programs were
established to prove Francis Galtons racist theories. The Australian
government, having long viewed people of colour as being a problem,
incorporated the doctrines of eugenics across the board. Immigration
policies aiming at a White Australia used now notorious language tests
whereby potential immigrants were obliged to pass examinations in English
(or, later, other European languages, at the discretion of immigration
department officials). People with dark skin were not absolutely banned
from entering Australia, however. Even during the years of the White
Australia Policy, certain non-whites were allowed to come and live here
if they were viewed by the government as being of potential value in
maintaining control of the populace or if they were very rich (regardless of
how they may have come by their wealth).
The adoption of eugenics theories by the medical profession and political
system in Australia resulted in further systematisation of existing racist
policies regarding both indigenous people and immigrants (including
European immigrants). Galtons hierarchy of races assumed that AngloSaxon white races were superior to black races, but also that some
black races were superior to others. His theories also claimed that poor
whites might be inferior to rich blacks although these rich blacks were
inevitably inferior to rich whites. Galtons hierarchy was centred on how
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much money a man earned those who earned more were, according to
Galton and the so-called Social Darwinists, superior to those who earned
less. Morality had nothing to do with it. Actually, the Social Darwinists
insinuated, or stated explicitly, that poverty was the consequence of
intellectual and moral inferiority, and thus the rich were both intellectually
and morally superior to the working classes. By the same token, according
to the eugenists, dominant (rich) races were both intellectually and
morally superior to dominated (poor) races, families and individuals.
Translated into policy, the doctrines of negative eugenics produced a series
of atrocities against Indigenous people and successive waves of migrants
into Australia, throughout the twentieth century. Migrants into Australia,
actually include two distinct groups of people those who migrated to
Australia voluntarily and those who were brought here against their will.
Those who migrated voluntarily include a significant number who were
lured here with false promises, including many who ended up as poorly-paid
second-class citizens. Both groups of migrants (voluntary and involuntary)
suffered as a result of Anglo-centric and Anglo-supremacist political and
social practices in Australia. They suffered discrimination, most obviously,
on the basis of how they spoke English including their accent, vocabulary
and what they spoke about. Those who did not speak English at all were
treated as though they were stupid, by government departments, and the
more racist sections of the community. According to the intelligence tests
pioneered by Francis Galton and developed by other English-speaking
eugenists, intellectual superiority was defined largely on the basis of how
well one spoke English, and by what ones profession was. Such thinking
became a noticeable feature of Australian politics and psychology
following the early work of British and American eugenists, and is readily
apparent today in the behaviour of the Australian Federal Government
Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs and that of the
Department of Health, especially in the area of Mental Health. These
will be elaborated on in the following chapters.
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26. LEGACIES OF A PRISON COLONY

When the first large asylum was built in Australia, at Tarban Creek in New
South Wales, the Superintendent made a requisition that hints at the
treatment the inmates were to receive when the lunatic asylum opened:
63 iron bedsteads, six chairs for violent cases, 16 cribs of wood
for dirty cases, 12 pairs of leather hobbles of various sizes for males
and females, 12 hard belts of strong leather and iron cuffs attached to
them with straps, 12 cuffs and belts for the hands in less violent
[cases] (Dax, 1975)
The Tarban Creek Asylum was opened in 1838, and it accepted patients from
Victoria who were transported there by ship from Melbourne. The state of
Victoria had not yet been founded, and the area was still administered by the
British colonists from New South Wales. Prior to this a smaller asylum had
been opened in 1811 in New South Wales, before which the insane were
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kept in jails. The close connection between the prisons system and the
psychiatric system has persisted to the present.
The next asylum was built in Tasmania (Van Diemans Land) which was
then a prison colony along with Norfolk Island, to the east of Tasmania. This
occurred in 1829 and was followed by an additional larger asylum at Port
Arthur in 1842. The Australian psychiatrist Professor Eric Cunningham Dax
wrote of Port Arthur in A World History of Psychiatry (1975):
In 1842 an asylum was opened at Port Arthur. There were four
dormitories, a central hall, 24 cells, and a padded room. One patient
spent long hours in a cage. Port Arthur then had an evil reputation,
and Britain, in a wave of belated guilt, ordered the penal settlement to
be abandoned, so that by 1879 only 64 prisoners, 126 paupers
(presumably housed in the invalid block), and 69 lunatics remained.
They were called imperial lunatics!
Another matter of psychiatric interest at Port Arthur was an
adjacent establishment at Point Puer which contained up to 730
delinquent boys, mostly aged 9 to 18. Some were transported for
trivial offences. It appears that Governor Arthur made a real attempt to
educate and train them as stonemasons, sawyers, and in other trades.
(p.707)
The training and retraining of young people was one of the many agendas of
psychiatrists and mental hygienists, but they had to compete for the minds of
the young with the Churches, which had a longer history of both teaching
children and looking after the poor and disadvantaged. It was the Anglican
Church and the Roman Catholic Church in Australia that controlled most of
the primary and high school education in these areas in Australian schools,
but this was to change, according to the plans of the mental hygiene
movement and medical profession.
One way in which the psychiatric profession formed an unholy alliance with
the Anglican and Catholic Churches, was by providing the initial
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incarceration, enforcement of compliance (obedience) and drug treatment

of young people and collaborating with Church organizations in their
subsequent training in menial occupations, whilst providing on-going
supervision and enforcement of drug treatment. Cunningham Dax refers to
such programs in From Asylum to Community, and continued developments
of this alliance are evident in an examination of todays youth-training
programs and psychiatric treatment and followup programs. Dax wrote, of
the then new system in the late 1950s:
Prior to 1954 there were no full-time chaplains within the mental
hospitals. Since that time the Anglican Church have appointed five
and the Presbyterians one, and it is hoped that three other full-time
chaplains from the Catholic and the Methodist churches and another
Anglican will be engaged before long. They are jointly appointed by
the Church and the Mental Hygiene Department. There is a chaplains
advisory committee which discusses the terms and the conditions of
appointment, and the training. Opportunities are available for the
chaplains of the various denominations to discuss their work together
and a series of successful seminars have been held which have
extended from a single day up to a full residential week. Three
Anglican chaplains have been abroad for training. (p.34)
Dax does not say which countries the chaplains were trained in but it was
undoubtedly Britain or America. Dax, who was born in Britain and
graduated in medicine at the University of London in 1935, is Anglocentric
in his perspective, and, along with common medical views of British and
British trained psychiatrists had fundamental belief in physical treatments
and drug treatment over talk therapies and psychotherapy of a more gentle
nature. This has been a feature of Australian psychiatry since the time of
Cunningham Dax, especially in the public hospital system, where the only
treatment is drugs and electric shocks. Psychotherapy is generally held to
not work for serious mental illness, and psychoanalysis, by which is
usually meant Freudian analysis, is suspected (with good reason) to confuse
the psychotic further. Dax does not mention psychoanalysis, or Freud, and
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makes only passing references to psychotherapy, which he says the

psychologists employed by the Mental Hygiene Authority and public
hospitals were actively discouraged from doing. He writes:
Neither the psychologists nor the social workers are encouraged
to do psychotherapy as it is felt that they are more usefully used in
their own special fields. On the other hand, it is hoped to extend the
group activities for both these associates within their own specialties
(p.34)
In territorial fashion he defines what he sees the role of psychologists to be
in this new empire controlled and dominated by psychiatrists:
Nine years ago there was an establishment of seven
psychologists; now there are nineteen. They have not as yet been
widely used in the mental hospitals, but more within the clinics and
particularly in those for children. The ways in which they have been
occupied within the Department are therefore as follows:
Intellectual Deficiency Here the psychologists are particularly
concerned with assessing the intellectual abilities of the patient and
his capacity for development. They give remedial teaching, so the
child may develop to the maximum of his ability. They supervise the
patients activities so as to direct them towards gaining a therapeutic
benefit. They are able to guide the patients into appropriate
occupations or activities towards training them to live in the
community.
Children In child guidance clinics some of the psychologists are used
for play therapy or counselling, but the practice varies. Intellectual
and vocational testing, educational assessment and advice on
overcoming difficulties, and remedial educational therapy are
regarded as some of the psychologists functions in this field. They do
valuable work in the instruction of the staffs of institutions for
adolescents and children, especially through group activities. Also
they usefully undertake the management of parents; group discussions
for remedial training.
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Adults In this field the psychologists undertake the intelligence,

educational, vocational and projective testing, and they direct the
junction with the occupational therapists. They can set out patients
records in such a way that they will supply the needed data for
statistical records. Similarly they can prepare and plan controlled
psychiatric experiments in a way capable of statistical analysis.
Research They carry out research into the various aspects of human
behaviour and the best means by which patients, in all the psychiatric
fields can be taught fully to use their abilities and skills. (p.34)
As far as spiritual needs of his patients, and of the Australian population
generally, Dax assumes that the Church can provide this:
Chaplains functions within the hospitals relate to the patients
spiritual needs and welfare and to their way of life, and therefore the
duties of the chaplain may be defined as follows:
To see whether each patient admitted wants, or is likely to want, his
spiritual help, and always to be available at a definite time for patients
to visit him.
To arrange for prayers, services and religious observance for the
patients of his own denomination.
To supervise the care of the hospital chapel.
To co-operate with the chaplains of the other denominations for the
welfare of the patients.
To act as educational officer in the hospital and so to interest himself
in such items as the library, debates, drama, English lessons,
recreations, current affair discussions, choral societies, music, and the
patients magazine.
To be available to see patients relatives and to communicate, as needs
be, with their clergy.
To participate with the other medical associates in the treatment,
resocialization and rehabilitation of the patients.
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To further the understanding between the mental hospitals and the

general public by interpreting the hospitals functions to the
community (p.35)
In other words, the mental hygiene movement seconded the Christian
Churches, starting with the Anglican Church, as public relations agents for
the treatments, diagnoses and propaganda provided by the psychiatric
profession, which controlled the mental hospitals, despite the fact that
what they were doing and teaching were the very antithesis of what Jesus of
Nazareth did and taught. They also seconded the psychology profession,
which competes with the psychiatry profession, to implement psychiatristdesigned treatment programs, administer psychiatrist-approved intelligence
tests and personality tests for psychiatric diagnoses made by the
psychiatrists (not the psychologists), and process statistics which could be
used by the medical and psychiatric profession, and, it turns out, the
pharmaceutical industry.
The care of intellectually deficient children was already a self-appointed
responsibility of the Christian Churches in Australia, and the conditions in
which these children were kept from the earliest days of British colonization
is a national disgrace. Although Dax does not write about mistreatment of
psychiatric patients during his own years of office, his description of the
conditions at the Kew Cottages in the 1950s gives some indication of how
unwanted children were treated in Melbourne:
There were open drains, children caught worms by drinking the
water, there was little storage accomodation, the paint was drab and
peeling. The childrens clothing was awful; the small boys had
unlaced boots, long moleskin trousers turned up at the bottom, adult
football jerseys which had been given to the cottages by a football
club with old army jackets on top and whatever hats they could
collect. They were dirty and had very little washing accomodation
indeed. Many played in a shed during the day in a half-nude state,
there was a battery of lavatories with eight or ten adjoining seats but
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there was no way of swilling the excreta out of the trough except by
walking thirty yards for water. They passed urine into the open drains.
The patients ate from tins with their fingers, slept on straw mattresses
and the place smelt of stale food and excreta and unsatisfactory
drainage. (p.125)
Although there were improvements in the cosmetic appearance of many of
the metropolitan institutions in the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s, the abusive
treatment of young people in Australia, including forced labour, separation
from families, and arbitrary punishment were to continue under the joint
supervision of the Mental Hygiene/Health Authority (and its successors) and
Church Organizations, later accompanied by bigger and bigger doses and
combinations of crippling drugs. Dax explains:
The intellectual deficiency colonies are partly under the care of
the Mental Hygiene Authority and partly of several voluntary
organizations. One of the latter is really a day-centre, organized on a
residential basis because it is in the middle of a sparsely populated
district, where the pupils cannot come by transport each day, in other
ways it is similar to the retarded childrens day-centres. There are
eighteen boarders there who go home for holidays and frequently for
weekends. A few day-children are taken. The other two voluntary
residential colonies are run by the Catholic Church. Marillac House
for retarded children from 6 to 16 was opened in 1943 by the
Daughters of Charity of St Vincent de Paul. In 1961, there were
ninety-six girls, of a higher intellectual level than the children in the
retarded childrens centres and mostly of about special school
standard.
The Brothers of St John of God opened an institution in New
South Wales in 1947 for the training of intellectually handicapped
boys, and another in 1953 in Victoria. The children in the main
training centre are at the special school level, but a lodge adjoining
was later opened for those who were no more than the day-centre
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level. In 1957 they opened a farm colony and there are now 95 boys in
the residential unit, and 40 in the farm colony. (p.124)
The Church directly sold out to the corporate interests of the chemical
industry and psychiatric profession by selling Churches for conversion into
psychiatric treatment centres, where the treatments were inevitably
chemicals, combined, at times, with surgical mutilation and electric shocks,
physical restraint and solitary confinement, forced labour and brainwashing.
Dax writes:
The Clarendon Clinic [in East Melbourne] was formed by
redesigning a church, its vestry, a church hall and an adjacent house.
The body of the church has been converted into a therapeutic
workshop and the vestry into four consulting rooms. The church hall
has been made into a cloak-room, sitting- and dining-room, and a hall
for the rooms, offices and staff rooms and a female toilet block.
The clinic was designed to supply the needs of those patients who
had been many years in hospital, had been rehabilitated there by the
new methods used, and were now fit for community care. However
many of them were unable to earn a living at first or to find
accomodation except by the use, at least on a temporary basis, of one
of the departmental hostels. Moreover, many of them still needed
some medical care, and were therefore followed up by their own
medical staff who could visit the Clarendon Clinic to see them.
The new methods used are inadequately described by Dax, but included
insulin comas, chemical shock using cardiazol, injected and ingested
tranquillisers, electric shocks (an older treatment) and brain mutilation by
psychosurgery. He explains of the upgrading of Larundel receiving
house into a major treatment centre, which it remains today:
Larundel has a residential early-treatment unit and a short-term
rehabilitation hospital attached. At Mont Park [the adjoining hospital]
there is a longer term treatment hospital with a long-term
rehabilitation hospital attached; this has a subdivision consisting of
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the general, medical and the surgical services and the neurosurgical
unit, together with a geriatric hospital. Opposite to Larundel is a
repatriation hospital for psychiatric cases attributable to war service.
Within two miles is the old private hospital which is being used for
geriatric patients but which may be converted later into a short-term
alcoholism treatment centre (p.177)
As they plotted to convert a general hospital for the elderly to an
alcoholism treatment centre, the Mental Hygiene Authority and associated
hospitals explored new treatments for their captives and converts with the
aid of the then new Mental Health Research Institute in Parkville,
Melbourne. Dax writes:
In 1954 the Chief Clinical Officer, Dr Alan Stoller, was
appointed, but much of his time in that year was spent in an Australiawide survey of mental health needs and facilities, so he did not take
up his position until 1955. Shortly after this the Mental Health
Research Institute was built and officially opened by the late Sir Ian
Clunies-Ross.
In 1955 a Mental Health Research Fund was founded consisting
of an annual grant by the Victorian government to the University of
MelbourneWithin the first year the University Department of
Anatomy was able to demonstrate its work on the neuro-anatomical
basis of emotion and growth on mongoloid children. The Departments
of Physiology and Pharmacology were working on cerebral sedatives
and analeptics while the Department of Pathology was doing research
on cerebral arteriosclerosis.
By the beginning of 1956 the Mental Health Research Institute
was able to give demonstrations of the work proceeding in the
Department on the incidence of schizophrenia, Huntingtons Chorea,
juvenile delinquency, the clinical effects of tranquilizing drugs,
electro-encephalographic studies of brain-damaged children and the
results of infero-medial leucotomy [psychosurgery]. Studies had also
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been made on the treatment of excitement with lithium and its effects
were being tried out at several hospitals. (p.139)
The passage above reveals the connection between the mental hygiene
movement, the University of Melbourne, the Mental Health Research
Institute in Parkville and the public hospitals, including Royal Park Hospital,
also in Parkville. In all these institutions the main focus was on drug
treatments, although Dax was also enthusiastic about brain surgery for the
treatment of psychological problems. At Royal Park Hospital, Larundel and
other psychiatric hospitals electric shocks to the brain were also used for
various conditions, the names of which have been changed over the past
forty years. Electric shocks to the brain, usually called ECT in Australia, are
used against peoples wishes in dozens of hospitals in Australia, today. The
use of electrical shocks in Australia dates back to the 19 th century, and it has
been an unchanging feature of Australian psychiatry over the past century,
although the discovery of ECT is usually attributed to Cerletti in Italy in
the 1940s. Such is the nature of psychiatric diagnosis and treatment
terminology as well as history: it is subject to frequent changes. Thus
electric shocks to the brain have been called electroconvulsive therapy or
ECT, shock treatment, electroshock, electroplexy and electrotherapy. The same class of drugs have been called analeptics,
neuroleptics,
anti-psychotics,
major
tranquillisers
and
psychotropics. The use of lithium was experimented with, in Daxs
terminology, for excitement (a suspect indication, indeed), but now it is
used for mania and bipolar affective disorder. Previously bipolar
affective disorder (BAD) was called manic depression.
Lithium was first used on psychiatric patients by the then 39 year old
superintendent of Bundoora repatriation hospital in Victoria, Dr John Cade.
This occurred in the 1940s, and since then the Victorian and Australian
psychiatric hospitals have been avid dispensers of lithium, often referred to
as a mood stabiliser. Although it may indeed prevent fluctuations in mood,
the ingestion of lithium is accompanied by a range of unpleasant and
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dangerous side-effects and is extremely toxic in overdose. Lithium is toxic

to the kidneys and thyroid in particular, and, since the toxicity margin is
recognised to be low, regular blood tests to check lithium levels (also used to
check compliance with drug-taking) are necessary if this drug is prescribed,
as it often is done in Australia. It also dulls emotional reactions generally
and produces a range of unpleasant mental side-effects in many who are
forced to take the drug under threat of incarceration if they fail to comply
with treatment.
The medical education system in Australia has, since its inception, like the
military, been rigidly hierarchical, with professors at the top and medical
students at the bottom, and the ladder is climbed by the acquisition of
degrees and publications, together with less easily identified factors, which
come into operation in the mysterious upper echelons of the academic
world, an area where global politics plays a greater role than most people
realise.
The Mental Health Research Institute in Parkville, Melbourne is Victorias
biggest psychiatry research institution and is affiliated with the University of
Melbourne, the citys oldest university. The Institute was initially set up at
Royal Park psychiatric hospital in the 1950s, shortly after, as was revealed in
the press recently, several Nazi scientists were smuggled into Melbourne.
The previous medical director of Royal Park Hospital, the psychiatrist
Norman James, was, after the closure of Royal Park, appointed Chief
Psychiatrist of Victoria by Victorian Premier Jeff Kennett, (a government
appointment), replacing the Sri Lankan psychiatrist Carlyle Perera who held
the position for many years. Norman James, a small bespectacled man in his
60s, is one of the most politically powerful people in Australia, however,
like other senior psychiatrists is hardly known outside the medical
profession, police and judicial system. James wrote the opening chapter in
the undergraduate textbook Foundations of Clinical Psychiatry (1994) titled
A Historical Context.
In it he wrote:
It was in the asylums that the first widely available and effective
biological treatments were developed. Freud himself trained in
neurology and recognised that the severely mentally ill required
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organic forms of treatment. The discovery of electroconvulsive

therapy (ECT) by Cerletti and Bini who worked in a mental hospital
in Rome in 1938 led to a simple and readily applied treatment for
those who suffered from severe depressive illness and related
disorders. Despite the advent of World War II, ECT was rapidly
adopted as a treatment internationally.
The discovery of lithium in 1949 as a treatment for mania and as
a prophylaxis for bipolar disorder (manic depression) was made by Dr
John Cade, a distinguished Australian Psychiatrist. This was soon
followed by the development of major tranquillisers, the neuroleptics,
by Delay and Deniker in Paris in 1952, although the initial idea of
their application in psychiatry occurred in a general hospital when it
was noted that they were effective tranquillisers for patients
undergoing surgery. Shortly after this Nathan Kline made the
discovery that a drug being tested for its effect in tuberculous patients
had an antidepressant action and thus the first specific antidepressants
were discovered, again in a large mental hospital and this time in
Orangeburg, New York.
Professor Edward Shorter, in A History of Psychiatry (1997) gives more
details of John Cades less than exacting methodology in his rapturous
description of the medical discovery of lithium:
The story began in 1949 with John Cade, the 37-year-old
superintendent of the Repatriation Mental Hospital in Bundoora,
Australia [Victoria]. Cade, like Neil Macleod in late-nineteenthcentury Shanghai, had not lost his scientific curiosity despite his
provincial isolation. He was determined to see if the cause of mania
was some toxic product manufactured by the body itself, analogous to
thyrotoxicosis from the thyroid. Not having any idea what, exactly, he
might be searching for, he began taking urine from his manic patients
and, in a disused hospital kitchen, injecting it into the bellies of guinea
pigs. Sure enough, the guinea pigs died, as they did when injected
with the urine of controls. Cade began investigating the various
components of urine urea, uric acid and so forth and realized that
to make urine soluble for purposes of injection he would have to mix
it with lithium, an element that had been used medically since the
nineteenth century (in the mistaken belief that it could serve as a
solvent of uric acid in the treatment of gout).
Then Cade, on a whim, tried injecting the guinea pigs with
lithium alone, just to see what would happen. The guinea pigs became
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very lethargic. Those who have experimented with guinea pigs, he

wrote, know to what degree a ready startle reaction is part of their
makeup. It was thus even more startling to the experimenter that after
the injection of a solution of lithium carbonate they could be turned on
their backs and that, instead of their usual frantic righting reflex
behavior, they merely lay there and gazed placidly back at him.
Cade had stumbled into a discovery of staggering importance, yet
he was able to develop it only because of his resoluteness in taking the
next step. He decided to inject manic patients with lithium he
injected 10 of his manic patients, 6 schizophrenics, and 3 chronic
psychotic depressives. The lithium produced no impact on the
depressed patients; it calmed somewhat the restlessness of the
schizophrenics. But its effect on the manic patients was flamboyant:
All ten of them improved, though several discontinued the medication
and were still in hospital at the time Cade wrote his article late in
1949. Five were discharged well, though on maintenance doses of
lithium. (p.256)
No mention is made in this book, or in Professor James account, of the
toxicity and risks associated with swallowing (or injecting lithium), which
are, in particular damage to the kidneys and thyroid. So dangerous is this
drug, that regular blood tests must be done to guard against acute and
chronic toxicity. According to the MIMS Annual (1993), its adverse
reactions, better described as dangers and toxicity, are briefly described
as follows:
Administration of lithium carbonate may precipitate goitre
requiring treatment with thyroxine, but this regresses when treatment
is discontinued. The ECG [electrocardiograph] may show flattening of
the T wave. Hypercalcaemia, hypermagnesaemia, weight gain and
oedema may occur, and skin conditions may be aggravated. The toxic
symptoms are referable to the gastrointestinal tract and the central
nervous system. These must be known by the patient and his or her
nurses and relatives. Those referable to the gastrointestinal tract are
anorexia, nausea, vomiting, severe abdominal discomfort and
diarrhoea. Those referable to the central nervous system are lassitude,
ataxia, slurred speech, tremor (marked) and agitation. If none of these
are present, the patient is not intoxicated. Patients suffering from
lithium toxicity look sick, pale, grey, drawn and asthenic. It is vital to
bear in mind that lithium can be fatal, if prescribed or ingested in
excessAt serum lithium levels above 2 to 3 mmol/L, increasing
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disorientation and loss of consciousness may be followed by seizures,

coma and death.
Heralding the discovery of lithium by Cade by a Victorian psychiatrist as a
great moment in medical science, the Victorian medical establishment,
including Professor Norman James, has long been insistent on the treatment
of manic and even hypomanic people with lithium. This is despite the
known risks and toxicity of the drug.
Lithium is said, by Australian psychiatrists, to stabilise the mood, and it is
assumed that people who have had even brief episodes of elevation or
abnormal excitement need long term mood stabilization with the drug.
This includes single episodes of hypomania, which is described in the
American Psychiatric Associations DSM IV as follows:
A Hypomanic Episode is defined as a distinct period during
which there is an abnormally and persistently elevated, expansive, or
irritable mood that lasts for at least 4 days (Criterion A). This period
of abnormal mood must be accompanied by at least three additional
symptoms from a list that includes inflated self-esteem or grandiosity
(nondelusional), decreased need for sleep, pressure of speech, flight of
ideas, distractibility, increased involvement in goal-directed activities
or psychomotor retardation, and excessive involvement in pleasurable
activities that have a high potential for painful consequences
(Criterion B). (p.335)
As if it makes the diagnostic criteria precise and specific, the DSM adds
that:
If the mood is irritable rather than elevated or expansive [which
are not further defined in the DSM IV], at least four of the above
symptoms must be present.
It is incredible that increased goal directed activities and non-delusional
increase in self-esteem could be cited as evidence of mental illhealth rather
than an indication of improved health. Furthermore DSM IV adds that:
The change in functioning for some individuals may take the form
of a marked increase in efficiency, accomplishments or creativity.
(p.335)
It is strange that this mental state should be viewed as an abnormal one,
but at least the American Psychiatric Association (unlike the Australian
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psychiatric establishment) does not advocate incarceration or forced

drugging for hypomania. The reference manual says:
In contrast to a Manic Episode, a Hypomanic Episode is not
severe enough to cause marked impairment in social or occupational
functioning or to require hospitalization, and there are no psychotic
features.
The University of Melbournes Foundations of Clinical Psychiatry is not as
clear in their distinction between hypomania and mania and
hypomania has only two references to it, one relating to diagnosis and one
relating to treatment. Under Abnormal states of mood elevation is written:
Far less commonly [than depression], a persistent elevated mood
occurs. Similarly, a continuum of severity if found with the mild states
difficult to distinguish from normality. Moderate severity Hypomania,
or severe state Mania, are obvious, the patients behaviour having
serious consequences if treatment is not swiftly initiated. Most manic
patients also experience depressive swings, and this condition is
therefore referred to as Bipolar Mood Disorder. (p129)
The recommended treatment is described under management of elevated
mood states:
The assessment and treatment of the patient suffering from acute
hypomania or mania is essentially the management of the acutely
psychotic patient. Organic conditions, including drug-induced states,
need to be excluded. For reasons of safety, most patients need
hospitalisation which, because of the lack of insight, may need to be
recommended. The mainstay of pharmacotherapy are the neuroleptics,
such as Haloperidol or Chlorpromazine. Although lithium carbonate is
an effective antimanic agent at relatively high concentrations risks of
toxicity discourage its use. Occasionally, for particularly severe cases,
ECT is needed. (p.144)
The drugs recommended for the treatment of hypomania and mania turn
out to be the same ones recommended for schizophrenia and ECT is
electroconvulsive treatment (shock treatment), which is used for
depression as well as its opposite, mania and also for severe or
intractable psychosis (including that supposedly due to schizophrenia or
schizoaffective disorder). Unlike many other parts of the world, where
ECT has been banned or seriously restricted, in Australia the use of electrical
shocks has increased in recent years and is used more widely (in more
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centres and for more reasons). Most of the psychiatric hospitals in Australian
cities give patients ECT, often against their will.
Involuntary ECT in the State of Victoria is said to be restricted to
emergency cases, but it is left to the individual psychiatrist to define what
constitutes an emergency. The systems of appeal open to the protesting
patient are very limited. They can appeal to the Chief Psychiatrist, Norman
James, who has the authority to stop the abusive use of drugs or ECT. It is
most unlikely that he would, however. James, who was previously head of
psychiatry at the Royal Park Hospital is a keen advocate of both ECT and
the use of neuroleptic drugs. It is he who wrote the opening chapter of
Foundations of Clinical Psychiatry. In it, he wrote an intriguing passage:
The asylums inaugurated as a result of humanistic urges soon
became grossly overcrowded, despite the fact that some were among
the largest and most expensive buildings erected by the governments
of the day. Numerous difficulties beset them. As a result of their
isolation they became large, impersonal, human warehouses. Patients
had few if any rights and were completely at the mercy of their carer
a largely untrained workforce from which has arisen the modern
profession of psychiatric nursing. There was a total lack of any
specific physical treatment for mental illness until the advent of ECT
[so much for walking in gardens, music and warm baths]. Those who
did improve did so largely by the passage of time and the happy
advent of a spontaneous remission [not recovery]. These conditions
led to a cycle of scandals, public inquiries, usually some temporary
improvement and then a relapse into previous conditions or worse.
(p.9)
It could be time for another public inquiry.
In psychiatric wards and Mental Health Review Board hearings the
psychiatric patient is judged guilty unless proven innocent. Unfortunately
innocence (of mental illness or personality disorder) cannot actually be
proved according to prevailing psychiatric theory which does not view
humans in terms of guilty or innocent. All psychiatric patients are
officially innocent, just unfortunately inflicted with an (invisible)
illness. One which unfortunately tends to run in families. Thus entire
families are stigmatised without laying blame on any individual. It is not the
fault of the family or the individual to be afflicted with illness: it is just one
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of those things. Maybe genetics plays a role. That way individuals in the
family can scan their relatives (and in-laws) for evidence of insanity.
As for the diagnosed patient, regardless of whether he or she is called a
mental patient, schizophrenic, nutcase, client or consumer there is
no escape from the judgement of defective and the accompanying stigma.
Even if no evidence can be found at a particular time of mental illness, the
patient can be accused of masking (hiding) their madness or be in
remission.
In August 1999 I appeared on public radio in Melbourne warning about the

dangers of dopamine-blockers, lithium and other drugs currently being
forced into people against their will in Melbourne and Australia and drawing
attention to human rights abuses in Victoria and elsewhere by the mental
health system. Two weeks later I was myself abducted from my residence
(not for the first time) by police and psychiatric workers (CAT team from the
Alfred Hospital) who broke into my home, handcuffed me and took me
away for treatment at the Adult Psychiatry Unit of the Alfred Hospital, in the
inner eastern suburb of Prahran, in Melbourne. Discussion occurred there
between psychiatrists as to whether to try and force me to take lithium (with
accompanying blood tests), but it was decided to inject me with dopamineblocking depot (long-acting) tranquillisers instead. Several drugs were
injected into me while I was kept in solitary confinement for three days
during the time of the Victorian State election and Republic referendum.
After three separate abductions over a period of 2 months and a total
incarceration of 5 weeks, I was allowed home again, but placed on a
Community Treatment Order which made me an involuntary patient of the
Victorian Psychiatric Services, and authorised repeated injections of longacting tranquillisers at two-weekly intervals, a treatment decided by the
English psychiatrist nominated to treat me at the Alfred Hospital.
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Whilst incarcerated, I was diagnosed as possibly suffering from several

serious mental illnesses, including Bipolar Affective Disorder and
Schizophrenia. Finally it was decided that I had Schizo-affective
disorder and regular injections were instituted with the depot antipsychotic Zuclopenthixol. On one occasion, within minutes of my arrival in
the seclusion room of the hospital I was injected with two injections, which I
was later told were Accuphase (another preparation of Zuclopenthixol)
and Droperidol (another dopamine-blocking major tranquilliser).
A formal presentation to senior psychiatrists by the psychiatric registrar, a
Dr Tejpal Singh, was organised at the hospital, in which he presented a
motley collection of fact and fiction about me to an unknown (to me) group
of doctors who diagnosed me in my absence as probably suffering from
Bipolar Affective Disorder.
The case presentation reads as follows:
Presenting Romesh Sinewiratne, a 39 years old, currently de-registered
General Practitioner, divorced father of one 7 years old daughter living alone
in a rented house in Caulfield.
Referred to the CAT team by a medical colleague and recommended under
MHA because of:
Grandiose & Persecutory delusions
Decreased need to sleep
Elevated affect
Increased agitation & irritability
These symptoms were said to have been demonstrated for 1-2 weeks,
however, the report is mostly fictional, and merely crafted to fit the
diagnosis. Dr Singh, who constructed the Case Presentation, had worked
in the area of psychiatry for only a few months, while he awaited Australian
qualification as an ophthalmic surgeon. He was hesitant in his speech in
English, but capable of doing complex eye surgery, a skill much needed by
Australians, particularly Aboriginal Australians. Yet he was being denied an
opportunity to work in this area in Australia, despite working for several
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years as an ophthalmologist in his native India. In Australia he was required

to work within the public hospital system as a junior registrar in the area of
psychiatry, about which he knew and cared next to nothing, and where his
main role was writing forms, making phone-calls and arranging treatment
with tablets and injections for people who did not want or need such
treatment.
He was a polite man, who seemed somewhat embarassed at having to treat a
colleague in this way, but he still did what he thought he was required to,
and presented a case study conforming to psychiatric expectations, and
those of his superiors. In it he repeated verbatim, extracts from a previous
discharge summary from Royal Park Hospital in 1995, which was itself
hearsay and not supported by fact. As a history of present illness he wrote:
His first contact with psychiatric services began in 1995 when he
was practicing as a GP in the Dandenong area. At that time he had
begun to neglect his medical practice, abolished regular hours and
appointments in his practice, and claimed to be able to diagnose
patients problems instantly on sight, without the need for proper
history and examination. He failed to pay his employees in the weeks
leading to the admission and omitted to pay his rent, taxation and
superannuation commitments. He was spending uncharacteristically
large amounts of money on books. He was referred to the Inner South
CMHC and CAT by family.
This historical evidence of mental illness is repeated as fact by Dr Singh
and is copied from a discharge summary he had access to, which was issued
by another hospital, the now demolished Royal Park Hospital. He had
access, through the State Psychiatric System, to previous misinformation
provided to, and accepted by psychiatrists at the Royal Park Hospital back in
1995. The discharge summary from the hospital claims:
Approximately 4 months prior to admission, Romesh developed a
decreased need for sleep, elevated affect and frenetic activity. At this
time he began neglecting his medical practice. He stated to relatives
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that he had a revelation like Buddha in which he became aware of

the oneness of all living things and began haranguing friends and
relatives about this incessantly. He referred to a complex series of
ideas which he referred to as the Bioblos [the 4-dimensional
bioblob, a biological theory, not originally one of my own] and the
Chaotic theory of time [chaos theory] which made no sense to
relatives. He abolished regular hours and appointments in his practice
[untrue], and claimed to be able to diagnose patients problems
instantly on sight, without the need for a proper history and
examination [also untrue]. He attempted to give away his practice
gratis to his locum [untrue]. He failed to pay his employees in the
weeks leading to his admission [untrue] and had omitted to pay his
rent, taxation and superannuation commitments [partly true]. He was
spending uncharacteristically large amounts of money on books [$600
on medical and psychological textbooks for my research]Referred
to Inner South CMHC and CATT by family. Refused community Rx.
The irony escaped Dr Singh and his colleagues that even worse than
diagnosing people on sight, must be diagnosing people based on hearsay and
defamatory documents in their absence. Not that there is a necessity for
locking up and injecting people for failing to pay their superannuation and
spending uncharacteristically on books.
Dr Singh, and the consultant psychiatrist, Kym Jenkins, had interviewed me
while I was held in seclusion, but their description of my mental state was
no more accurate than the claim in the case study that I had a strict
catholic upbringing (I actually went to two Anglican private boys schools
and came from a protestant family). After describing my premorbid
personality as schizo-typal dependant personality disorder, is a report of
my Mental State Examination which reads as follows:
General appearance & behaviour- Well groomed, suspicious,
hostile, verbally aggressive
Speech- Pressured, coherent
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Mood & Affect- Elevated, anxious, angry, irritable

Thinking Stream of thought Rapid
Form of thought flight of ideas
Content of thought Delusional beliefs that he is persecuted
by a Jewish mafia. Believes that Mr Kennet & Mr Howard have
him locked up before elections. Says that he is being threatened
with political incarceration, character assassination and
attempts on his life. The reason for this related to the
independent political, medical and scientific research that he
has been carrying outDelusional belief that the hospital staff
are involved in spreading AIDS to third world countries like
East Timor.
Perceptions Not elicitable
Cognition Conscious state conscious
Concentration poor
Orientation in T, P, P orientated
Registration poor
Short term memory poor
Long term memory poor
Insight & judgement Impaired
Rapport difficult to establish
Under treatment and progress Dr Singh reveals the miraculous nature of
modern psychiatry, in the cure of one so clearly moribund:
Currently receiving:
Risperidone 2 mg nocte
PRN medications Injection Droperidol 5-10 IM [intramuscular inj.]
Midezaolam [Midazolam] 5-10 mg IM
Diazepam [Valium] 10 mg PO
Settled down remarkably with treatment
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The valium was, in actual fact, only offered and not forced (and therefore
not taken) and Dr Singh fails to mention the Accuphase injections, or the
solitary confinement, let alone my actual political, medical and scientific
work. Following the normal sleeping patterns and speech patterns observed
on the ward, the diagnosis had to be changed, but the sentence increased:
long term injections and a potentially fatal psychotic illness: probably
either schizophrenia or schizo-affective disorder. Drs Singh and Jenkins
refused point blank to discuss human rights abuses, eugenics, medical ethics
or disease-mongering and actively avoided conversations with me while I
was held at the Alfred Hospital. They insisted, however, that I was very ill
and needed my medication.
The first time efforts were made to force me to take lithium occurred in
February 1995, when two men, one of whom said he was a doctor arrived at
my home in St Kilda and asked me to take lithium and clonazepam (a
benzodiazepine tranquilliser). I was very surprised. I agreed, however to
walk down Fitzroy street later that week to visit a psychiatrist called Rajan
Thomas, whom I had been told was an expert in autism.
I was reading Oliver Sacks Anthropologist on Mars at the time, and had
become fascinated by this psychiatric diagnosis of children. I was
particularly moved by the amazing drawings in the book said to be done by
idiot savants, children diagnosed as autistic but with brilliant intuitive
musical and/or artistic skills. Interested in psychology generally and the
brains development as well, I expected an interesting discussion with a
colleague with expertise in childrens brain development, but that is not what
was waiting for me at the Junction Psychiatric Clinic, where I had been lured
under false pretences. Dr Thomas knew next to nothing about children or
their mental development and was more interested in diagnosing me than
discussing neurology or even psychiatry with me. His provisional
diagnosis was hypomania, I believe, but he never told me this himself.
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I discovered that I had been diagnosed as hypomanic when I had been

taken by police and CAT team workers to Royal Park Hospital in April 1995,
and the diagnosis was officially confirmed by Norman James, then
Psychiatric Director of Royal Park Hospital, and now the Chief Psychiatrist
of Victoria. During the three weeks I was held in one of two locked wards at
Royal Park Hospital, I only saw Norman James once, and have a poor
recollection of the meeting, since I was heavily drugged at the time (with
haloperidol syrup). I think I just begged him to let me go home. He said next
to nothing.
My second meeting with Norman James I recall very clearly. I had just
returned from Brisbane, Queensland, where I had been locked up for six
weeks after I escaped from Royal Park in May 1995. Since I had not shown
evidence of mania or even hypomania, the diagnosis at the Prince Charles
Hospital had been changed to a presumed paranoid psychosis for which I
had been injected with a terrible drug called flupenthixol. Flupenthixol is a
dopamine-blocker, but was then said to be new and improved. It gave me
severe akathesia, Parkinsonism and a rash on my face. These all resolved
within a few weeks of the two injections I was given of the drug in 1995.
Norman James ordered the second of these himself after asking me to leave
the room and making a phone call to the Prince Charles Hospital. He then
ordered me to return to see him a week later, reminding me that I was still an
involuntary patient of the hospital. A week later, he discharged me from the
hospital on a Community Treatment Order (CTO). This was my first
introduction to the modern development of eugenics in Australia. At this
stage, however, I had not even heard of eugenics.
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27.
BRITISH
INSTITUTIONS
PREJUDICES
IN
AUSTRALIAN
The English colonists who decided on Australia as an ideal site for a penal
colony were not unprejudiced men, as their own records and transcripts of
their speeches demonstrate. In 1779, when Joseph Banks recommended
Botany Bay as a site for a convict colony, he is recorded in the Journals of
the House of Commons as suggesting:
In case it should be thought expedient to establish a Colony of
convicted Felons in any distant Part of the Globe, from whence their
Escape might be difficult, and where, from the Fertility of the Soil,
they might be enabled to maintain themselves, after the First Year,
with little or no Aid from the Mother Country, to give his Opinion
what Place would be most eligible for such Settlement? informed your
Committee, That the Place which appeared to him best adapted for
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such a Purpose, was Botany Bay, on the Coast of New Holland, in the
Indian Ocean, which was about Seven Months Voyage from England;
that he apprehended there would be little Probability of any
Opposition from the Natives, as, during his Stay there, in the year
1770, he saw very few, and did not think there were above Fifty in all
the Neighbourhood, and had Reason to believe the Country was very
thinly peopled ; those he saw were naked, treacherous, and armed
with Lances, but extremely cowardly, and constantly retired from our
People when they made the least Appearance of Resistance (p.61,
Sources of Australian History, Manning C. Clark, 1957)
The British plan to make Australia into a penal colony was based on several
factors about the large island previously known as New Holland, after the
discovery of the island continent by Dutch sailors and merchants in the
1600s. The main reasons that Australia was chosen were that it was far
away and relatively unpopulated. The extraordinary beauty of the land
was largely unappreciated by the European colonists whose primary motive
was exploitation of resources, including both natural resources and
human resources, but, until the discovery of gold in Victoria and New
South Wales in the 1850s and subsequently extensive mineral deposits in
many other areas, Australia was considered a useless piece of land by all the
Europeans nations that visited. This included the Dutch, Spanish, French and
English and probably also the Portuguese, Chinese and Indians, all of whom
explored the area now called Indonesia prior to the 1800s. As the early
historical records show, another important motive by the English for
colonizing Australia was to prevent their arch-enemies, the French, from
taking possession of the continent.
As the historian Manning C Clark explains:
External causes also contributed to the occupation of more
territory. Fear of the French, a chronic mental disease of the English
over the whole period, led to the abortive settlements at Western Port
(Victoria) in 1826, and to a military settlement using convict labour at
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King Georges Sound (Western Australia) in the same year. The

prospect of capturing some of the trade with Indonesia led to the
creation of a convict settlement at Port Essington in 1826. Fear of the
French played a part, too, in the decision to create a new colony on the
Swan River (p.143)
In World History of Psychiatry Professor Dax, who presided over the
reforms in mental health care in the state of Victoria that occurred in the
1950s and 1960s only hints at the abusive treatment of early psychiatric
inmates in Australia:
there is little record of any special treatment other than the usual
purging, bleeding, blisters, and setons. The electrical machine at
Lachlan Park in Tasmania has already been noted, and an ominous
sounding acid to the spine
The electrical machine Professor Dax refers to was a torture device, to
which immobilised lunatics would be strapped down and electrocuted for
upto half an hour daily (p.709). This cruel piece of what was then very
modern technology was used as early as 1851 according to records from the
Lachlan Park hospital in Tasmania, which was then administered by the
Commonwealth of Britain as a prison colony.
Britain had, at the time, a horrible history regarding institutional treatment of
those deemed insane by the medical profession and other authorities.
Bethlem Hospital, the first modern asylum, was renovated in 1676, and
was considered one of the finest buildings in London, resembling the
Tuilleries, a French royal palace, from the outside. This was a
consequence of petty rivalry between the King of England and the King of
France, and Louis XIV of France was said to have been displeased with
what he saw as a deliberate slight against himself and the French Empire.
As it turned out, though, George III, the mad King of England, who
reigned when Britain lost America and claimed Australia was himself
treated by the medical experts of the time, who for some reason thought that
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he was even madder than other members of the British aristocracy. King
George III was subject to bleeding, blistering, scarifying, purging, emetics
and solitary confinement when he went mad recurrently during his reign,
concluding with a final breakdown at the age of 82, according to Professor
John Howells who wrote the chapter on Great Britain in the same book.
Howells elaborates on the less harsh treatment given to inmates of British
asylums in the late 1700s and early 1800s:
regulations provided for periodical inspections of chained
patients, to make sure that the circulation of the blood was not
impeded. Blood-letting was the usual remedy for manic patients, who
were also calmed with warm baths, tartar emetic, and purgatives;
melancholic patients were given similar treatment, but they were
immersed in cold water. Sores were artificially produced, as it was
believed that they provided an outlet for bad humours.(p.192)
Despite the high ideals professed by the carers of the mentally ill in England,
a public scandal resulting in a Parliamentary Enquiry occurred when in
1814, a Mr William Norris who was suffering from tuberculosis (which used
to be called consumption) was discovered in a dark damp cell in Bethlem,
having been kept there in chains for 10 years. He died a year after being
removed from the place, but Professor Howells, who recounts the story in
World History of Psychiatry does not explain how, exactly, he died. It is not
unreasonable to wonder, given the public scandal surrounding his case,
whether the doctors who supervised his treatment in Bethlem had anything
to do with his treatment after he left the hospital.
Bethlem Hospital, from which the word bedlam is derived, was acquired
by the City of London in 1547 and remained a city-run asylum until 1948,
although it also housed private patients, some of whom were young women
whom Dr John Haslam, the physician of Bethlem in 1809, lamented had
been subject to a brutal operation termed spouting. The torturous
mutilation, which included removal of the front teeth of upper and lower jaw
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was intended to let the madness out through the mouth, since, at the time,
madness and mental derangement were still thought to be caused by bad
humours.
Later in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was also believed that
madness was caused by abnormalities of blood flow to the brain, a theory
favoured by American psychiatrists such as Benjamin Rush and others. This
was used to rationalise the practice of bleeding and other physical
treatments, which were used on people who were physically bound,
chained and imprisoned. Flogging was a common punishment, and other
treatments, following the industrial revolution, included technological
wizardry such as spinning chairs and beds, and Rushs own Tranquilliser
Chair which prevented all movement and vision.
British psychiatry, which developed during the era of official British slavery
and imperialism has been punitive from the outset. It has also been
characterised by double standards based on class and race. What was
shrugged off as eccentricity in the upper classes was punished as
insanity in the lower classes, later called the working classes. The ruling
aristocracy and monarchy (royal family), after whom several Australian and
British hospitals are still named were allowed to behave in ways and believe
things which were not tolerated in commoners as they referred to their
subjects. In Australia today, several people (mainly men) remain
incarcerated indefinitely in forensic psychiatry hospitals without having
been found guilty of any crime. These people, who have been deemed
criminally insane are held at her Majestys pleasure. Queen Elizabeth of
England has, of course, never met any of the people who are imprisoned for
life at her pleasure.
The treatments given to psychiatric patients in Australian Hospitals and
asylums closely followed those in England in important respects, but the
level of experimentation with cruel new treatments in Australia exceeded
that of the mother country of Australian psychiatry. Because most of the
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biggest hospitals and universities in Australia were built using British

advice, British designs and British systems of hierarchy, administration and
organization, the political and cultural links between Australian medicine
(including psychiatry) have always been deep, although in recent years there
has been an increasing influence from American psychiatry in the style of
the APA, whose DSM is accepted as an authoritative source by Australian
courts and public hospital psychiatrists.
Unlike American psychiatry, which was strongly influenced by Freudian
psychoanalysis, Australian and British psychiatrists have traditionally been
more focused and often exclusively focused on drug treatments and
physical treatments (such as electric shocks, chemical shocks and brain
mutilation). The drugs used in Australia and Britain are largely the same, and
prescribed for the same diagnoses, although the doses used in Australia are
usually higher, and they are often prescribed in combinations, with some
patients receiving three, four or five drugs at the same time. Many of the
large drug and chemical companies in Australia, including SmithKline
Beecham and Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) are based in England.
Likewise many mining companies.
This is a pattern repeated in other Commonwealth countries including
Canada, South Africa and New Zealand, in which universities and hospitals
were also built during the reign of the British Empire. These countries were
the white colonies, but universities and hospitals, administered initially by
white colonists, were also built in other British colonies, which are now
considered to be part of the Third World. These include India, Sri Lanka,
Singapore, Hong Kong, Fiji, Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe and Zambia), Ghana
(in Western Africa, previously called the Gold Coast), Kenya (in East
Africa) and several islands in the Caribbean Sea (the West Indies). During
the colonial era, a divide and rule policy was employed by the British,
where minority elites were established to rule over the majority population
through a British-controlled public service and colonial administration. This
strategy has had disastrous effects in nations around the world, resulting in
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prolonged civil wars in many countries after they were granted

independence in the tumultuous years following the Second World War.
The universities founded by the British taught British-style psychiatry,
complete with schizophrenia, manic-depression and personality
disorders as well as the drugs favoured for their treatment. British
psychiatry was itself strongly influenced by Western European psychiatry,
especially that of the professors in German, Austrian and Swiss universities.
Then and now, universities were closely associated with hospitals and
asylums which treated the poor and disadvantaged. In these hospitals, in
which young doctors were trained and old doctors established empires,
various therapeutic interventions were attempted to cure or control the
mad, some more cruel than others.
The focus of treatment of the insane has always been on control of
behaviour, rather than cure of psychological distress and the diagnoses
favoured were also based on outward evidence of abnormal behaviour
rather than the more subtle attempts by European and particularly Jewish
European doctors (including Freud) to understand the intricacies of the
human mind through psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, which was largely
based on Freuds prejudiced and confused ideas about sexuality became very
popular in the United States of America after the Second World War, but
never gained a foothold in the more conservative British universities and
hospitals. The same was and remains the case in Australia: psychoanalysis
and also psychotherapy based on words (talk therapies) are generally
thought as ineffective in the management of serious mental illness in line
with a similar belief prevalent amongst British psychiatrists.
The connection between British and Australian psychiatry (and other
medical specialties) is more than a historical one. Today the entire system
of medical qualification and specialist recognition as well as most of the
postgraduate (and much of the undergraduate) medical education is
controlled by the so-called Royal Colleges. These shadowy remnants of
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British Imperialism (and possibly Freemasonry) were instituted during the

age of slavery and were centred in London, and the old British Universities:
the Universities of London, Oxford and Cambridge. These institutions were
initially the only ones which could confer academic qualifications in the
British Empire, including degrees, fellowships and professorial
positions.
In the British academic hierarchy, which was exported to the colonies and
instituted in colonial universities, the heads of each department or faculty
were called professor and they had authority over the more junior
academic staff. This junior staff included tutors and lecturers, who were
graded as junior lecturers and senior lecturers. It took many years to
climb the academic hierarchy, which was (and is) centred in the universities.
This academic ladder could be climbed in several ways, but was largely
available only for those born into privileged families (and who went to the
right schools). One way to climb the ladder was simply by staying in the
same institution, and waiting ones turn to be professor. It could be a long
and futile wait. Professorial positions were few, and jealously guarded. The
Royal Colleges, dominated by old men from private schools and with good
connections had control over professional qualifications generally, and
this included who could call themselves professor. This hierarchy was
instituted in all the fields of science, as well as in the arts.
The British tertiary education system divided all knowledge into science
or arts. Politics, history and philosophy became faculties of the arts, while
medicine, surgery, geology, biology and astronomy were considered, along
with some other disciplines, to constitute the sciences. Progress in the
lower grades of the academic hierarchy could only be by passing tests and
examinations devised, controlled and judged by senior academic staff,
most of whom were, and still are, male.
The medical sciences were, in the British and European academic systems,
fundamentally divided into medicine and surgery the politics of which
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were controlled by the London-based Royal College of Physicians and

Royal College of Surgeons. In Australia, these became the Royal
Australasian College of Physicians (RACP) and the Royal Australasian
College of Surgeons (RACS). These patriarchal, authoritarian bodies confer
higher qualifications (post-graduate qualifications) to medical graduates
who continue in training positions within the public hospital system.
Senior members of these colleges were (and are) made, according to
changing and inconsistent rules, into fellows of the college, who were
more highly qualified than ordinary members or unspecialised
doctors. They were allowed, according to the rules of academia, to write
FRCP or FRCS after their names and call themselves physicians or
surgeons.
Over the past one hundred years, new Australian colleges have been founded
based on a similar model and with intricate political connections with the
older colleges. These include the Royal Australian College of General
Practitioners (RACGP) and the Royal Australian and New Zealand College
of Psychiatry (RANZCP). They too confer fellowships according to obscure
and secretive rules and rites of passage. These are not democratic
organizations. Old boys are given honorary degrees for doing favours for
other old boys (or the Royal tradition). This is a world still dominated by old
school ties. It is rigidly hierarchical, authoritarian and patriarchal. Women
who are allowed to climb to the professorial top of the academic ladder are
obliged to accept misogynist traditions and behaviour from the middle-aged
men who control all these colleges.
The diagnostic model favoured by British psychiatrists who taught in the
teaching hospitals and universities in England and Australia was developed
initially by German and Swiss lunatic asylum psychiatrists such as
Professors Emil Kraepelin and Eugen Bleuler, who described, for the first
time, so-called organic mental illnesses such as manic depression and
schizophrenia. Developed in a background of Protestant Christianity, the
ideas and views which were held to be irrational, bizarre, odd,
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grandiose and in other ways indicative of psychosis and mental illness

were based on a fundamentally Judao-Christian paradigm. It was thus
considered indicative of mental abnormality if one had unconventional
beliefs concerning God, good and evil, Satan, the Devil, angels,
saints, messiahs, spirits, reincarnation or possession. These
delusional beliefs included any of many personal experiences with the
divine or supernatural, which were included in the psychiatric symptom of
religiosity, indicative of schizophrenia and mania. Serious mental
illness would also be suspected in young people who suddenly changed their
religious and/or political beliefs. A conversion to Buddhism, Hinduism or
Islam, an embracing of Indigenous American or Shamanic religions were
all to be suspected, and words were developed to describe the core beliefs of
non-Christian religious beliefs as schizophrenic. This is reflected today in
the World Health Organizations Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS)
which suggests that unusual thoughts can be elicited by asking, Do you
have a special relationship with God? The BPRS explains that delusions are
to be suspected on the basis of preoccupation with unusual beliefs in
psychic powers, spirits, UFOs or unrealistic beliefs in ones own abilities.
New Age ideas can also be diagnosed as schizophrenic, as I have
elaborated on in a previous book, Psychiatric Tales and Words about Life.
The treatment for these conditions was (and is) forced treatment in a
secure environment. Secure environments have provision for treatment
in locked rooms, solitary confinement and physical restraint while the
treatment (usually initially in the form of tranquillising injections) is
commenced. The diagnosis is one for life. A schizophrenic can never be
healed he or she can only go into remission. In other words further
episodes of madness and chronic mental deterioration are likely. Ironically
the seeing of visions, hearing of Gods voice, visitations by angels
and battles with demons which feature so prominently in the Christian
Bible all became evidence of mental derangement in the fundamentally
atheistic blend of Psychiatry, Capitalism and Protestant Christian moralism
which evolved over the twentieth century and was implemented in mental
hygeine programs throughout the Commonwealth.
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This Protestant Christian psychiatry involved the Anglican Church in

fundamental ways in Australia as well as England. The Church determined
what were orthodox and conventional thus acceptable and normal
interpretations of the Bible and Theology, as well as being directly involved
in the rehabilitation of mental patients and the care of the chronically ill.
A belief that one was possessed by evil spirits or Satan was treated with
chemical or electrical shocks at first, and later by injections and tablets of
dopamine-blockers. A belief that one heard the voice of God,
communicated with angels (or extra-terrestrials) or was the (or a)
messiah was treated the same way. A refusal to renounce the delusional
(heretical) belief was diagnosed as chronic mental illness and refusal to
accept such an interpretation of ones religious beliefs was called lack of
insight. The same criteria for diagnosis and the same treatments (with
minor variations) have been employed in both Australian and British
psychiatric hospitals. Australian psychiatry has also come under an
increasing influence, however, from the American Psychiatric Association
(APA) over the past fifty years.
In every Australian University and Psychiatric hospital will be found at least
one copy of the American Psychiatric Associations Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM, now into its fourth edition
which was published, with much fanfare in 1994). The seal of the American
Psychiatric Association portrays the American Father of Psychiatry,
Benjamin Rush, the most famous American physician of his time (and place)
and a highly placed officer in George Washingtons military forces during
the American War of Independence (1776-1783). Rush, who was the only
doctor to sign the Declaration of Independence, was a keen proponent of
bloodletting, in line with his theory that all mental illness is caused by
derangement of blood flow in the brain. He also developed other methods of
torture including the gyrator chair as well as the tranquilliser chair.
Flogging, too, was employed in Rushs hospitals, not regarded as
punishment, but for therapeutic reasons.
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Rush had another theory that is not mentioned in the DSM or other current
psychiatric texts, which are generally omissive regarding historical detail,
especially about the more unpleasant aspects of the past, as far as psychiatric
treatment and theory are concerned. Rushs theory regarding black people
was that they are affected by a disease (negritude) which causes both their
abnormal skin color as well as their abnormal behavior and beliefs. This
was inline with his avid support of slavery of Africans by naturally
superior white people.
The acknowledgement of Rush as the official Father of Psychiatry
followed an actual formal declaration by the American Psychiatric
Association, in 1965, according to the Canadian historian Professor Edward
Shorter who admits that the venerated physician was more a propagandist
than a promoter of health. In A History of Psychiatry (1997) he writes:
Rushs partisans have argued that his occasional musings on
moral suasion anticipated later psychological therapies. Yet,
psychological sensitivity is difficult to detect in his practice. As one
visitor to the Pennsylvania Hospital in 1787 recounted of Rushs
rounds, we next took a view of the maniacs. Their cells are about 10
feet square, and made as strong as a prisonIn each door is a hole,
large enough to give them food etc., which is closed with a little door
secured with strong bolts. Most of the patients were lying on straw.
Some of them were extremely fierce and raving, nearly or quite
naked.
Rush, however claimed differently when he wrote his textbook, published in
1812, lying that his patients, now taste the blessings of air, and light, and
motion, in pleasant shaded walks in summerhave recovered the human
figure, and with it, their long forgotten relationship to their friends and the
public (Shorter,1997). The father of American psychiatry had a scientific
theory that rationalised his practice of bleeding patients until their
overactivity decreased, and their mad ravings were quietened (as
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happens with acute blood loss, prior to loss of consciousness and death if the
blood loss continues). This was his bizarrely reductionist and simplistic
theory that the cause of madness is seated primarily in the blood-vessels of
the brain, and it depends upon the same kind of morbid and irregular actions
that continues other arterial diseases (Shorter, 1997). In truth, however, this
is no more stupid than the numerous equally simplistic explanations of
madness (including chemical imbalance theories) that have followed his
reductionist line of thinking.
Bizarre mechanistic models of the body, brain and mind have existed in
many areas of medicine, but the most grotesque, prejudiced and outrageous
ideas have originated in the minds of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts,
whose destructive theoretical assumptions are shared, although the two
schools of thought have been at odds with each other regarding the place of
drug therapy versus psychoanalytical psychotherapy for the treatment of
mental disorders. The shared assumptions (with notable dissidents) are that
mental illness is underdiagnosed and thus undertreated and that serious
mental illness is incurable and very difficult to treat. This is predictable
since it is they who get paid for the diagnosis and treatment of sick
individuals, as well as for advice and teaching about how mentally ill
people should be treated in the future. Euphemistically the mechanistic
drug promoters in modern psychiatry are referred to in the psychiatric
literature as biological psychiatrists and their chemical-oriented eugenics
theories are referred to as biological psychiatry.
Professor Shorter, professor of the History of Medicine in Toronto, Canada,
describes the false paradox that has him confused:
Psychiatry has always been torn between two visions of mental
illness. One vision stresses the neurosciences, with their interest in
brain chemistry, brain anatomy, and medication, seeing the origin of
psychic distress in the biology of the cerebral cortex. The other vision
stresses the psychosocial side of patients lives, attributing their
symptoms to social problems or past personal stresses to which people
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may adjust imperfectlyThe neuroscience version is usually called

biological psychiatry; the social stress version makes great virtue of
the biopsychosocial model of illness. Yet even though psychiatrists
may share both perspectives, when it comes to treating individual
patients, the perspectives themselves really are polar opposites, in that
both cannot be true at the same time. Either ones depression is due to
a biologically influenced imbalance in ones neurotransmitters,
perhaps activated by stress, or it stems from some psychodynamic
process in ones unconscious mind. It is thus of great importance
which vision has the upper hand within psychiatry at any given
moment. (p.27)
Shorter is confused in believing that biological psychiatry and the biopsycho-social model (of which there are many) have irreconcilable
differences. They are, in fact, in their present form, closely related. The
recognition that stress can cause mental illness and that psychosocial
factors influence both stress and mental illness are obvious. The focus on
stress and mental illness or on neurotransmitters is not conducive,
however to the promotion of mental health. Genuine scientific biology is
also a far cry from biological psychiatry which shares more common
ground with biological warfare than the objective, logical study of living
things.
Biological warfare and military medicine (including military psychiatry) are
intrinsically related. Both thrive on the preparation for and existence of
warfare. During the Second World War, during which there was massive
expansion of the propaganda industry and the chemical industry, the
objective of the military psychiatrists was to train soldiers, and return shellshocked soldiers to the frontline. To do this they used brainwashing
techniques, drugs and electric shocks.
This was the case for all sides of the war. The American psychiatrists taught
patriotism to America, capitalism, the Constitution and the Founding
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Fathers, the British psychiatrists programmed their patients with

patriotism for the Empire, love of King and Country and hatred of the
enemy. During the Second World War, the enemy included Germans
(whose psychiatrists trained soldiers to fight for the Fatherland), Italians
(likewise, but for the Fascists), Japanese, Communists and traitors (those
who would not support the war effort).
Owing to the subservience of the Australian political, military, medical and
social systems to the old country the war effort and war propaganda in
and from Britain produced jingoistic war fever combined with patriotism
not for Australia (and her very different needs) but for England, Britain and
the British Empire. The medical profession, Red Cross and Church leaders
all contributed to creating and maintaining this war fever. While Nazi
doctors were engineering and implementing eugenic theories with death
camps, gas chambers and medical experiments on unwilling subjects, the
Allies instituted internment camps for Germans, Italians and Japanese
unfortunate enough to be living in Australia at the time, and gas chambers
(they were actually termed as such) in Northern Queensland to test the
effects of mustard gas on young Australian volunteers from the army. These
young people, who were sworn to secrecy and told they were helping the
war effort, discovered that mustard gas causes horrific burns and
permanent health problems following even brief exposure. At the same time,
Jewish refugees, interred Italians and wounded Australian soldiers were
deliberately infected with malaria (also in Northern Queensland) to test antimalarial drugs, also ostensibly for the war effort. Of shame to this
charity, the Red Cross was directly involved in the malaria experiments,
providing the infected blood for transfusion into the victims.
During the bombing of Yugoslavia two years ago, several references were
made in the Australian media to the Allies, meaning those nations which
were considered the Allied Forces in the Second World War, with minor
differences. The historical reasons for this identification with American and
British military objectives as consistent with our own are understandable,
but dangerous, since evidence that has surfaced in recent years that proves
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beyond doubt that the Allies have repeatedly betrayed Australia and the
Australian people in numerous ways including involving this nation in wars
that need not have cost Australian lives. Australia could, if it had strong
pacifist leadership at the time, have contributed significantly to the cessation
of hostilities in the region. This is the case now as well, and has been since
the establishment of defence forces in Australia and New Zealand by the
British Government over the past two centuries.
The names of the Royal Australian Army, Navy and Airforce alone testify to
the historical connection between the Australian armed forces and the British
Monarchy (and Government). Australia remains to this day a constitutional
monarchy although there is discussion of a new constitution and a
presidential system of Government. Interestingly, three important words
have been routinely omitted from the constitutional debate: freedom,
independence and democracy. Some might suppose that these are already
widespread in Australia, and others that they are ideals which cannot, and
have never been achieved in the past, in Australia, or anywhere else. Whilst
both arguments have some validity, the first can be criticised as being nave
and the second as unnecessarily pessimistic and defeatist.
The evidence suggests that Australia contains a marked difference between
individuals and groups of people regarding freedom and independence, and
that true democracy has never existed in Australia, although most of the
governments of the world, including those of Australia, have declared
themselves democratically elected and thus ruling by mandate (and will)
of the people. In reality, the fact that social and financial inequities exist in
extremes in Australia (and elsewhere) result in some people having far more
influence over government policy than others. It is also a well-accepted fact
that large corporations, educational institutions, research institutions,
religious organizations, charity organizations and other non-democratic
bodies have the ear of Government policy makers and implementers, and
presumably have an influence on decisions that are made. If several of these
voices repeat the same thing this is likely to have an even more convincing
effect on the minds of politicians and other government employees. If
similar things are said by recognised experts with professional
qualifications, the beliefs in the minds of politicians and others becomes
more firmly cemented. Some of these beliefs are core philosophical beliefs,
including ones relating to friends, allies and enemies.
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Allies are not necessarily friends, but may be allied against a common
enemy. Thus England and France, which were previously considered
traditional enemies witnessed by the Napoleonic and other wars, became
allied against German military expansion in the 1930s. Australia, which
had previously suffered the fate of losing many young lives in Gallipoli
(Turkey) less than 20 years earlier, was called upon to support the Allied
effort, rather than work out for itself who were its friends and who were its
enemies. The immediate threat to Australia in the 1940s came not from
Germany, but from Japan and the United States of America, and these came
to the Southern Continent in the form of military craft: submarines, ships
and aircraft, and also human beings hostile to the interests and needs of the
Australian people and land. It is often mentioned in records of the Second
World War in Australia, that the Japanese bombed Darwin, with an inference
that this was the beginning of an attempt to destroy or colonise Australia and
the Australian people. Thus it is assumed that had not Australia fought with
the Allies we would have been ruled by Japanese masters and accepted
that whilst tragic, the nuclear bombs which were dropped on the Japanese
cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unavoidable and overall in the best
interests of peace, since after these bombs were dropped the Japanese
surrendered. Likewise the loss of thousands of young Australian lives in
various parts of Asia were, and still are, regretted as terrible, but necessary
for preservation of the freedom and democratic way of life we enjoy today.
The facts are that we have never enjoyed a truly democratic way of life in
Australia and our personal and national freedom is being constantly eroded
by the nations that credit themselves with winning the Second World War:
the United States of America and United Kingdom. The psychiatric system
in operation in Australia is one of the ways in which this erosion of freedom
is occurring, and political changes that have occurred in the name of
globalization has created a disastrous situation where the worst abusers of
human rights and freedoms are in positions where they can directly advise
on the interpretation of human rights laws and the development and
implementation of social policy, including the making of new laws.
Each State in Australia has different mental health laws, which is one of the
confusing things about human rights in Australia. Australia also lacks any
national human rights laws, and as the recent high court ruling confirms,
does not even have national laws precluding genocide. In Victoria the
current Mental Health Act was passed in 1986, with significant, but largely
unnoticed amendments in 1995, which greatly expanded the criteria for
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which people could be incarcerated and forcibly treated in this State. The
changes were centred on subtle changes to the wording of the act including
the addition of the term mental disorder to include the term mental
illness in the 1986 Act.
The reason for the addition of the term mental disorder was claimed, at the
time, to provide for the forced treatment of a small number of selfmutilating people who, suffering from what is psychiatrically termed a
personality disorder rather than a mental illness are excluded from
forced treatment under the existing law. However events in the psychiatric
literature at the time and since suggest far greater possibilities for application
of this new reason for involuntary treatment. One is Attention
Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, another is Conduct Disorder and yet
another, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, all new mental disorders
announced in the 1994 edition of the American Psychiatric Associations
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM IV).
The American Psychiatric Association is not a democratic organization, nor
has it a history of supporting freedom, independence, human rights or
friendship. The head on the emblem of the APA seal is that of the white
supremacist and medical charlatan Benjamin Rush, who is regarded by the
APA as the founding father of American Psychiatry. In addition to a
legendary obsession with self-promotion, Rush had theories that black skin
is caused by disease and all mental illness is caused by abnormality in
blood vessels of the brain. Based on his simplistic theory, Rush advocated
blood letting as the treatment necessary for a range of mental illnesses
and also devised or implemented several torture devises such as spinning
chairs and beds, immobilization chairs and other cruel punishments and then
justified their use with scientific-sounding reasons. None of this is
mentioned in the DSM IV, which does not mention Rush other than the
words Benjamin Rush 1844 under the portrait of this infamous man.
The DSM does, however have a brief section titled Historical Background,
which gives some indication of the perspective the organization would like
to give of itself and psychiatry:
The need for a classification of mental disorders has been clear
throughout the history of medicine, but there has been little agreement
on which disorders should be included and the optimal method for
their organization. The many nomenclatures that have been developed
during the past two millennia have differed in their relative emphasis
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on phenomenology, etiology and course as defining features. Some

systems have included only a handful of diagnostic categories; others
have included thousands. Moreover, the various systems for
categorizing mental disorders have differed with respect to whether
their principle objective was for use in clinical, research, or statistical
settings. Because the history of classification is too extensive to be
summarized here, we focus briefly only on those aspects that have led
directly to the development of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
of Mental Disorders (DSM) and to the Mental Disorders sections in
the various editions of the International Classification of Diseases
(ICD).
In the United States, the initial impetus for developing a
classification of mental disorders was the need to collect statistical
information. What might be considered the first official attempt to
gather information about mental illness in the United States was the
recording of the frequency of one category idiocy/insanity in the
1840 census. By the 1880 census, seven categories of mental illness
were distinguished mania, melancholia, monomania, paresis,
dementia, dipsomania, and epilepsy. In 1917, the Committee on
Statistics of the American Psychiatric Association (at that time called
the American Medico-Psychological Association [the name was
changed in 1921]), together with the National Commission on Mental
Hygeine, formulated a plan that was adopted by the Bureau of the
Census for gathering uniform statistics across mental hospitals.
Although this system devoted more attention to clinical utility than
did previous systems, it was still primarily a statistical classification.
The American Psychiatric Association subsequently collaborated with
the New York Academy of Medicine to develop a nationally
acceptable psychiatric nomenclature that would be incorporated
within the first edition of the American Medical Associations
Standard Classified Nomenclature of Disease. This nomenclature was
designed primarily for diagnosing inpatients with severe psychiatric
and neurological disorders.
A much broader nomenclature was later developed by the U.S.
Army (and modified by the Veterans Administration) in order to better
incorporate the outpatient presentations of World War II servicemen
and veterans (e.g., psychophysiological, personality, and acute
disorders). Contemporaneously, the World Health Organization
(WHO) published the sixth edition of ICD, which, for the first time,
included a section for mental disorders. ICD-6 was heavily influenced
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by the Veterans Administration nomenclature and included 10

categories for psychoses, 9 for psychoneuroses, and 7 for disorders of
character, behavior, and intelligence. (p.xvii)
It is evident, then that the military (defence forces) have always been closely
involved in the development and application of psychiatric labels and
physical treatments of nervous disorders. This involvement is more
sinister than most would imagine, and has caused more distress to the public
than would initially appear possible. This distress has been caused by much
more than misapplied labels of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (a label
directly adapted from the old label of shell-shock). The militarisation of
the USA and Australia have resulted in panic, depression, suicide, psychosis
and drug addiction in these nations, as it is bound to in any nations that
promote terror and horror on television screens at the same time as handing
out addictive tranquillisers in hospitals and clinics to calm the nerves and
giving free reign to alcohol merchants to use all the tricks of modern
technology and advertising in developing new markets. When one also
realises how closely militarisation is associated with privatization,
globalization and establishment of a white-controlled New World Order,
more of the disaster that has befallen modern society might be recognised.
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28. EUGENICS AND MENTAL HYGIENE

It may be worth briefly reviewing the eugenic doctrines that shaped
Australian psychiatry in the 20th century. Eugenics is a scientific theory
concerned with breeding better human beings, and consists of
positive eugenics(encouraging people with selected gene pools to have
more children) and negative eugenics(preventing the breeding of
undesirables). The theory was directly developed by blood relatives of
the English aristocrat and evolutionist Charles Robert Darwin, who
founded the first society for eugenics in the 1890s, not long after the
official abolition of slavery in the United States of America. The
Englishmen who developed a human racial hierarchy for the
implementation of their genocidal plans placed themselves, their
families and friends at the top of the list of favoured blood lines, and
attempted, by various means to prove their genetic superiority over the
majority of the human population. Darwin considered himself to belong
to a family well-endowed with geniuses, which included himself and
his cousin Francis Galton, who founded the first Society for Eugenics in
England, shortly after writing Hereditary Genius in 1869. In it he
hypothesised that mental qualities are biologically inherited, that the
white race is biologically shaped to dominate and that, among the
white race, the English are the most superior.
Darwin followed in 1871 with Descent of Man in which he argued:
The variability or diversity of the mental faculties in men of the
same race, not to mention the greater differences between the men of
distinct races, is so notorious that not a word need here be said.
So in regard to mental qualities, their transmission is manifest in
our dogs, horses, and other domestic animals. Besides special tastes
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and habits, general intelligence, courage, bad and good temper &c.,
are certainly transmitted. With man we see similar facts in almost
every family; and we now know, through the admirable labours of
Mr.Galton, that geniustends to be inherited; and, on the other hand,
it is too certain that insanity, and deteriorated mental powers likewise
run in families.
Darwin (1809-1882), who had travelled as a scientific observer on the HMS
Beagle in the 1850s, developed the theory of evolution of species by natural
selection following detailed observation of animal species (birds, in
particular) and, to the outrage of biblical creationists, presented evidence
that man was descended from apes in Descent of Man. Although he himself
was parodied in cartoons at the time as being part-ape, his followers
seriously embarked on a scientific quest to discover which races were
closest to apes, and which were the most evolved with several false
assumptions already clouding their judgement.
Murray and Wells wrote, in From sand, swamp and heath:
From the mid-1800s the evolutionary theories of Darwin and the
geological principles of Sir Charles Lyell began to take hold of
European thinking. Darwins ideas were applied to the Australian
native, and reduced him to the embodiment of primeval man. Thomas
Huxley drew comparisons between the Aboriginal skull and that of
Neanderthal man and Schoetensack even suggested that man
originated in Australia. By 1900 the Aborigine was regarded as a
simple, habitual being, incapable of adapting to change. (p.83)
Racism inherent in supposedly anthropological analysis of the indigenous
people of Australia has been repeated in numerous ways over the past 150
years, ranging from scientific papers and texts to school atlases. From the
1940s publication by the Adelaide Advertiser, The Modern Pictorial World
Atlas is taken the following description of The Stone-Age Men of
Australia:
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Australia, it has been remarked, is the asylum of many quaint

creatures, like the duck-billed platypus, who have ages since
disappeared from the rest of the world. It is also the home of one of
the most primitive of human peoples the Aborigines, the Stone-Age
men in the twentieth century.
They live in the arid, semi-desert lands of Central Australia. With
increasing white penetration of their inhospitable bush, their numbers
have rapidly dwindled. In thirty years at the beginning of the century
the Arunta tribe diminished from about 2000 to about three to four
hundred souls.
Their skins are of a dark chocolate colour, but well smeared with
ochre and decorated with coloured designs. They are, on the whole, a
little shorter than the average white Australian, but fairly well built,
and they carry themselves with a graceful, erect carriage. Through
work and child-bearing, the women grow old and hideously ugly by
the time they are thirty.
Very early man probably had a face resembling that of the
Australian aborigine in his heavy, overhanging brows and receding
forehead. (p.78)
An obsession in skull size and shapes which apparently indicated mental
attributes was a particular feature of the nineteenth century scientific racists,
who developed pseudosciences named craniometry and phrenology to
prove such things as the inferiority of blacks, the criminality of half-breeds
and the mental weakness of women. The famous neurologist Paul Broca, a
keen craniometrist, asserted:
In general, the brain is larger in men than in women, in eminent
men than in men of mediocre talent, in superior races than in inferior
races. Other things equal, there is a remarkable relationship between
the development of intelligence and the volume of the brain.
Steven Jay Gould, the popular scientific writer and evolutionary biologist
from Harvard University, from whose 1983 collection of essays titled The
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Pandas Thumb the above quote is borrowed, points out the biases that were
demonstrated in the efforts of craniometrists to prove their own superiority:
In an outrageous example of data selected to conform with a
priori prejudice, he [E.A.Spitzka, an American craniometrist]
arranged, in order, a large brain from an eminent white male, a
bushwoman from Africa, and a gorilla. (He could easily have reversed
the first two by choosing a larger black and a smaller white.) Spitzka
concluded, again invoking the shade of Georges Cuvier: The jump
from a Cuvier or a Thackeray to a Zulu or a Bushman is no greater
than from the latter to the gorilla or the orang.
Such overt racism is no longer common among scientists, and I
trust that no one would now try to rank races or sexes by the average
size of their brains. Yet our fascination with the physical basis of
intelligence persists (as it should), and the nave hope remains in some
quarters that size or some other unambiguous external feature might
capture the subtlety within. Indeed, the crassest form of more-is-better
using an easily measured quantity to assess improperly a far more
subtle and easily measured quality is still with usThis essay was
inspired by recent reports on the whereabouts of Einsteins brain. Yes,
Einsteins brain was removed for study, but a quarter century after his
death, the results have not been published. The remaining pieces
others were farmed out to various specialists now rest in a Mason jar
packed in a cardboard box marked Costa Cider and housed in an
office in Wichita, Kansas. Nothing has been published because
nothing unusual has been found. So far its fallen within normal
limits for his age, remarked the owner of the Mason jar. (p.125-6)
The craniometrists used as their yardstick for big-headed, white geniuses the
skull of the French biologist Baron Georges Cuvier, who died in 1832.
Gould writes, with characteristic wit:
Cuviers contemporaries marveled at his massive head. One
admirer affirmed that it gave to his entire person an undeniable
cachet of majesty and to his face an expression of profound
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meditation. Thus, when Cuvier died, his colleagues, in the interests

of science and curiosity, decided to open the great skull. On Tuesday,
May 15, 1832, at seven oclock in the morning, a group of the greatest
doctors and biologists of France gathered to dissect the body of
Georges Cuvier. They began with the internal organs and, finding
nothing very remarkable, switched their attention to Cuviers skull.
Thus, wrote the physician in charge, we were about to contemplate
the instrument of this powerful intelligence. And their expectations
were rewarded. The brain of Georges Cuvier weighed 1,830 grams,
more than 400 grams above average and 200 grams larger than any
non-diseased brain previously weighed. (p.122)
These attempts at proving the superiority of white men occurred prior to
Darwins theories, but with the acceptance that men were related to apes
additional prejudices became apparent as the efforts to prove which race was
superior gathered momentum. They reached new depths with the
development of eugenic theories which recommended the sterilization and
later, the mass-murder, of defective and degenerate individuals and
races, amongst which were the previously enslaved Africans, as well as Jews
and Gypsies (another much maligned and persecuted people). The Nazi
regime in Germany and Europe also murdered communists, political
dissidents, deformed and disabled children and adults, and mentally ill
people in their misguided efforts to create a pure, white Aryan super-race.
Unknown to many in the modern world, however, the eugenic theories and
policies which gave rise to the genocide of the 1940s were not an isolated
aberration of Nazi madmen. The theories, which originated in England, not
Germany, were the predominant socio-medico-anthropological beliefs in
Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa of the
time, and had been for many decades. The first eugenic sterilization laws,
legislating for the castration of feeble-minded boys were enacted in the
United States in the early 1900s, and centres for eugenic study and policy
development were established in association with major universities in
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Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and other Australian universities, which

shared ideas and attitudes with American, British and Canadian Universities,
including those at Oxford and Cambridge. In the 1920s large amounts of
money were spent by the Carnegie foundation and other American eugenics
supporters to develop the philosophy in what was still intended to be a
White Australia.
A similar corporate support for white supremacy eugenics in psychiatry and
the medical sciences is evident from the historical account of South African
Psychiatry in A World History of Psychiatry as described by Professor Lewis
Hurst, professor of psychological medicine at Johannesburg, although he
does not describe it as such:
In 1926 the number of mental defectives in South Africa was
estimated at 300,000. When in 1927 the president of the Carnegie
Corporation visited South Africa, the Dutch Reformed Church
requested his assistance in investigating the matter. The Carnegie
Corporation gave substantial financial assistance and provided the
services of C.W.Coulter and K.L.Butterfield to assist in research.
(p.616)
This quote is taken from the pro-psychiatry World History of Psychiatry,
which was published in 1975, when the racist apartheid regime continued
white rule in South Africa. The injustices of racial segregation and denial of
civil rights to the African and coloured population of South Africa are not
considered important enough to mention in the professors account of
psychiatry, but they are evident in the limited statistics presented of patients
accomodation in institutions for mental defectives. Two, named as those
at Alexandra and Umgeni Waterfall contained only whites: treating 879
and 445 patients respectively. Some contained both whites and nonwhites, including institutions at Komani (1,498 patients), Oranje (1,636),
Valkenberg (1,911) and Weskoppies (2,122). The largest institution (or most
crowded) contained only non-white inmates, one at Bophelong, the
patient accomodation of which is listed as 2,500.
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What does not become clear from Professor Hursts account of psychiatry in
South Africa is what constituted mental defectiveness and what type of
treatment was given to the people thus diagnosed. It is easy to deduce these
things, however, by examining psychiatric trends and treatments in other
nations that have come under the influence of the eugenics movement, white
supremacy movement and Mental Hygiene Movement, including Australia
and New Zealand. Hurst refers to this movement under the subtitle National
Societies:
Passing reference has already been made to the role played by the
National Society for the Care of the Feebleminded in the case of
mental defect or subnormality. The mental health movement
originated in the United States, and came out of the experience of
Clifford Beers. As a result of his endeavors in this direction, the
National Committee for Mental Hygiene of the United States came
into being on February 19, 1909, followed by the creation of local
bodies in various cities, a pattern followed in South Africa and many
other countries (p.618)
Clifford Beers was an ex-psychiatric patient who wrote an influential book
describing his illness, hospitalisation and recovery titled A Mind that Found
Itself in 1908, following which he was involved in the foundation of the
National Committee for Mental Hygeine, together with the American
psychiatrists Adolf Meyer and William James. While the mental hygiene
movement urged some reforms in the treatment of the inmates of psychiatric
hospitals, based on Beers experiences which were degrading and
unpleasant in the extreme, their main agenda was an expansion of
psychiatric and eugenic influence and policies into the wider community. In
this matter, accounts of various historians differ. The psychiatric apologist
Professor Edward Shorter writes, in his 1997 book, A History of Psychiatry:
Psychiatry further reached out with the founding in 1909 of the
National Committee for Mental Hygiene. A book by ex-psychiatric
patient Clifford Beers, A Mind That Found Itself (published in 1908),
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prompted a number of prominent figures such as Meyer and William

James to promote the concept of mental hygiene. In subsequent
years, the mental hygiene movement involved psychiatrists in
numerous plans to improve the mental health of Americans through
various well-meaning efforts. (p.161)
Bruce Wiseman, in Psychiatry, the Ultimate Betrayal (1995), presents a
different view, and provides more detail to support it:
The genesis of the Mental Hygiene movement is usually told as
follows: In 1908, Clifford Beers, a former mental patient, wrote the
sordid story of his incarceration in a book entitled A Mind That Found
Itself. The book was so well received that Beers went on to found the
National Committee for Mental Hygiene, an organization formed to
assist the cause of the mentally disturbed as well as promote the
prevention of mental illness.
But there is more to the story. Before Beers published the book,
he sent the manuscript to the Father of American Psychology, William
James. James endorsed it wholeheartedly. And, armed with William
James support, he went to talk to psychiatrists, neurologists, social
workers and social-minded laymen.
In September, 1907, he took the manuscript to well-known
psychiatrist Adolf Meyer. A member of the Eugenics Society, Meyer
had been a student of Alfred Hoche, co-author of The Release of the
Destruction of Life Devoid of Value, the book promoting the killing of
mental defectives. He also studied under Swiss psychiatrist August
Forel, whose influence on the young student was great, according to
one biographer. An example of Forels views: Even for their own
good the blacks must be treated as what they are, an absolutely
subordinate, inferior, lower type of men, incapable themselves of
culture. (p.71)
In customary fashion, the medical apologist historians accounts omit any
reference to racist theories by eminent psychiatrists. Michael Stone,
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Professor of Psychiatry at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons,

writes of Forel, in Healing the Mind (1998):
Swiss physician August Forel had been influenced by the Nancy
hypnotists, Liebault and Bernheim, as had Krafft-Ebing and Freud.
Forel (1905) wrote on the topic of female sexuality, including themes
popular at the time, such as that of femme fatale and the flirt. He
also addressed the general topics of sadism, masochism,
exhibitionism, fetishism, and homosexuality in men and women.
Turning toward forensic matters, his 1905 Die Sexuelle Frage [The
Sexual Question] included case histories of mothers who had
strangled their babies. (p.146)
Edward Shorter has yet another perspective of Forel:
A more dyed-in-the-wool organicist than August Forel, Zurich
psychiatry professor between 1879 and 1898, would be hard to
imagine. Forel spent much of his time doing neuroanatomy, and his
correspondence with colleagues reflects far greater interest in frog
brains than in clinical psychiatry. Yet Forel was a master hypnotist. So
great was his reputation that one colleague referred to him a woman
whom another hypnotist had put into an evil hypnotic trance, with the
request that Forel lift the trance. Later in life, Forel even went beyond
hypnotism to talk of love and intimate knowledge of patients
lives. Thus for Forel, there was no contradiction between a
neuroscientific view of psychiatry and psychotherapy. (p.139)
When describing Adolf Meyer in glowing terms, Shorter fails to mention his
views on race either; likewise Stone, who describes the once president of the
American Psychiatry Association thus:
Adolf Meyer (1866-1950) exerted enormous influence on
psychiatry in America, not just in the 1920s, though this decade offers
a convenient time frame to discuss his work. Like Jung, he was the
son of a Swiss pastor. He studied under August Forel in Zurich, then
worked in France with Dejerine, and later in England, where he was
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impressed with the work of Hughlings-Jackson, from whom he

derived his ideas about the layers of brain organization and the
organisms adaptation to the environment.
Meyer came to the United States in 1893, working first as a
neurologist. His interest in psychopathology was stimulated by
William James. He established a friendship with another prominent
psychologist, John Dewey. In 1907 Meyer met Clifford Beers and,
joining hands with this former mental patient, now reformer of
hospitals, started a mental-hygiene movement in America. Meyer also
had an illustrious teaching career; he taught at New York State
Psychiatric Institute, later at John Hopkins and the Henry Phipps
Psychiatric Clinic, both in Baltimore. In 1927 he was president of the
American Psychiatric Association (p.153)
Bruce Wiseman provides more of the picture:
In 1909, the National Committee for Mental Hygiene was formed,
with Beers as its head. Adolf Meyer and William James were among
the original twelve charter members.
James role was not small. In a biography by Clarence Karier we
are told: James was not only a theoretical conceptualizer of the
therapeutic society but also an active historical actor, helping to shape
its development. Late in life (1909), as an executive committee
member of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, he wrote to
John D. Rockefeller and begged him for a million dollars to support
the efforts of the National Committee for Mental HygieneShortly
thereafter, the foundations under Rockefellers influence began to
pour millions of dollars into the mental hygiene movement, into the
development and construction of psychopathic hospitals, and into the
training of psychiatrists, psychologists, and mental health workers in a
variety of institutions across the countryThe Mental Hygiene
movement expanded rapidly around the globe, setting up groups in the
1920s in Canada, France, Belgium, England, Bulgaria, Denmark,
Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Russia, Germany, Austria,
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Switzerland, and Australia. Twenty-four countries had Mental

Hygiene Associations by 1930. (p74)
According to Raymond Fosdicks The Story of the Rockfeller Foundation
(1952) the Rockefellers were centrally involved in this expansion of global
Mental Hygeine Associations:
In 1913, shortly after its creation, the Foundation began a cooperative relationship with the National Committee for Mental
Hygeine, and for many years supported its activities and studies of the
institutional treatment of mental diseases. It was during the early part
of this period that Dr.Thomas W. Salmon was engaged by the
Foundation as its adviser in matters relating to mental hygeine, his
services being placed at the disposal of the National Committee.
Under this arrangement the work continued to expand, with emphasis
increasingly on the problem of the individual. Out of Dr.Salmons
recommendation that all criminals sentenced to state prisons should
first be sent to psychiatric clinics for classification [labelling] grew the
clinic established at Sing Sing in 1916, the first of its kind in America.
Dr. Salmon resigned from the Foundation in 1921 to take the
professorship of psychiatry at Columbia University, but the
Foundations contributions to the general expenses of the National
Committee for Mental Hygeine and for its successor organization, the
National Mental Health Foundation, have continued up to the present
time. During this period, the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial
became interested in psychiatry and in the related subjects of child
psychology and industrial psychology, both in Canada and the United
States. The most ambitious undertaking of the Memorial in this field
led to the creation of the Institute of Human Relations at Yale. Over
the years, the various Rockefeller boards contributed very substantial
sums to this Institute, and while even a broad definition of psychiatry
would not cover all that was done there, the major part of the support
was for use in this field.
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The activities which the Foundation began in 1933, however,

were launched on a far more comprehensive scale. Officially, the
programme in psychiatry was initiated by a report made by Dr. David
L. Edsall, Dean of the Harvard Medical School, who was also a
trustee of the Foundation. (p.146-7)
At the same time, the Rockefeller Foundation funded numerous eugenics
programs in the USA and Europe (as well as Australia and South Africa).
Fosdick writes:
But the classical field which has received the largest measure of
support is genetics [eugenics]. An accounting in 1950 showed that
assistance had been given to fify-three universities and other
institutions, and the training of forty-six geneticists [eugenists] had
been aided directly through National Research fellowships.
Altogether, up to that time, approximately two and three-quarter
million dollars had been contributed to genetics research through the
National Sciences DivisionIn England, Foundation grants have
supported projects in mathematical genetics at London University and
the University of Birmingham. In France, aid has gone to the genetics
laboratory of the Rothschild Foundation at Paris and the recently
established French Institute of Genetics at Gif. But, to a greater extent
than in any other biological science, the bulk of the appropriations for
genetics went to American research workers. The research-team idea
has found its finest embodiment in the United States, and the
Foundation is proud to have been a co-worker with such groups as the
Muller-Sonneborn-Cleland trimvirate at Indiana University, the DunnDobzhansky group at Columbia, and the Morgan-Sturtevant-Beadle
succession at the California Institute of Technology. (p.183)
Professors Dunn and Dobzhanskys views on eugenics are described in an
earlier chapter. Professor Sturtevant of the California Institute of Technology
was quoted regarding his opinions on genetic damage to subsequent
generations from nuclear fallout and X-rays, which was contained in the
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1958 Allen and Unwin publication Frontiers of Science, in which the

esteemed Charles Robert Darwins less esteemed grandson, the physicist Sir
Charles Galton Darwin called for a tremendous solution to the problem
of overpopulation that was more brutal than war, and more murderous than
nuclear bombs. George W.Beadle, Chairman of the Biology Division of the
California Institute of Technology (Caltech) since 1946, was Professor of
Biology at Stanford University during the Second World War a noted expert
in the bread mould Neurospora. Professor Beadle authored the introduction
to the Biological Sciences section of Frontiers of Science, in which he
gave a typically eugenist perspective of the mind:
The Mind. Through knowledge of science man is capable of freeing
himself of the limitations of mutation and natural selection in his future
evolution. Achievement of this freedom will not be easy. It will require
wisdom, courage, and faith far beyond anything man has so far displayed.
All this is possible because of the mind. What is the mind and how
does it work? We are only beginning to make progress in this enormously
complex and difficult field. The most elaborate computing machine that
can be imagined is nothing beside the mind of man. The mind can invent
the machine, but the machine can do only what the information fed into it
orders. And the mind of man must formulate the information and must
tell the machine what to do with it.
Through a series of ingenious and delicate experiments on the brains
of fish, frogs, salamanders, rats, cats, and monkeys, Professor Roger
Sperry and Doctor John Stamm give us a tiny glimpse of what the
psychobiologist of the future might be able to learn about this mind
which makes man unique among all living things and can give him
mastery of himself, the world, and all the vast space that lies beyond.
Cultural inheritance is not separable from biological inheritance. The
first cannot exist without the second. It follows that, while man is
nurturing his cultural inheritance, he must not let his biological
inheritance regress [what Saleeby called dysgenics]. And this it will
surely do if care is not taken. Relaxation of natural selection, or
natural selection for the wrong characteristics, can lead to a
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degeneration of the biological capacity for continued cultural

inheritance. (p.16) (emphasis added)
Roger Sperry, who had previously held a joint appointment at the
University of Chicago and the National Institutes of Health at Bethesda,
Maryland before his appointment at Caltech in 1954, was a pioneer in
animal and human split brain experiments. His ingenious and delicate
experiments on the brains of animals are described in his chapter in
Frontiers of Science on Brain Mechanisms in Behavior. These included
connecting the cutting the nerves from the eyes of frogs (optic nerves) and
connecting them to opposite sides of the brain (under these conditions, the
animals respond thereafter as if everything is seen through one eye were
being viewed through the opposite eye), and cutting out various parts of the
brain of animals (cats, monkeys) to study their effects on behaviour.
Sperry was the first to perform split-brain experiments in humans, ostensibly
as a possible cure for epilepsy, but equally out of scientific curiosity. This is
evident from his comments on split-brain experiments in 1958 (he did most
of his human experiments in the 1960s):
It has been somewhat embarrassing to our concepts of brain
organization that complete surgical section of this largest fiber tract
[the corpus callosum, the tract of white matter connecting the left and
right hemispheres of the brain] has consistently failed in human
patients to produce any clear-cut functional symptoms. In checking
this observation in animal experiments, however, we have been able
in recent years to demonstrate definite integrative functions for this
structure.
In these experiments, carried out mainly in cats, we first section
all crossed optic fibres at the chiasma, in order to restrict the input
from each eye to the same side of the brain. The animal is then taught
a few simple visual discriminations with a mask covering one eye.
After the habit has been stabilized by overtraining, the mask is shifted
to the other eyeWithout the callosum, such animals apparently have
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no recollection with one eye of what they have been doing with the
other eye. (p.57)
A primary technique used by Sperry was comparisons of the effect of brain
mutilation between different species. Writing of split-brain experiments on
monkeys, which preceded his more extensive work on human epileptics,
the famous neuroscientist continues:
At the present time we are investigating the functional capacities
of small islands of cerebral cortex. In these studies we put to use the
above-mentioned functional independence of the two hemispheres in
what we have come to call the split-brain preparation. This is an
animal in which the brain has been split down the middle by
sectioning the corpus callosum, hippocampal commissure [part of the
limbic system], and the optic chiasma and, frequently also, some of
the lower-level connecting systems. To casual examination, these
split-brain animals after recovery are indistinguishable from normal in
their general cage behavior. (p.59)
It is not normal for animals to live in a cage; thus their general cage
behaviour is already on of an imprisoned, suffering animal. Comparing
animals with different degrees of brain mutilation prepares the ground for
similar experiments on humans and indeed these were being done at the
same time, most notoriously by the ice-pick lobotomist Walter Freeman.
Melbournes psychiatry reformer, Eric Cunningham Dax was also a
proponent of lobotomies for difficult patients during the 1950s and 1960s,
at the time Walter Freeman was touring the Western world conducting
lobotomies (over 100,000 such operations were apparently done during this
time). Asylum to Community is Professor Eric Cunningham Daxs version of
the development of the mental hygiene service in Victoria, Australia, over
which he presided, after he emigrated from England in 1952, as head of the
Mental Hygiene Authority (later called Mental Health Authority). The book
was published in 1961 by F.W Cheshire for the world federation for mental
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health. Despite the fact that the book was written during the days of the
official White Australia Policy, or perhaps because of it, aborigines and the
treatment or even the existence of Aboriginal people in Australia is not
mentioned at all. The focus of the book is on new hospitals and clinics which
were built with public support (following newspaper support) of reforms for
the care of the mentally afflicted white residents and immigrants (some of
whom were not strictly speaking white-skinned), describing in detail
training programs and construction programs, as well as details of
administration and the complex network of institutions involved in the
reform of the mental health services which occurred after the Second World
War in the State of Victoria.
These institutions are listed in the appendix as clinics, hostels, social
clubs, day hospitals, early-treatment hospitals, mental rehabilitation
hospitals, intellectual deficiency services and other clinics. The focus is
on early diagnosis and treatment, although cure of mental illness is
considered beyond the possibility of even successful treatment, which
remains poorly defined throughout the book. It appears on close examination
of the book that the types of treatment instituted in the network of
psychiatric hospitals and clinics would be difficult to recover from,
especially the surgical treatments like leucotomy when areas of the
brain were deliberately destroyed in the hope of improving behaviour.
Only one institution is listed in the appendix under other clinics: Pentridge
Prison. The Mental Hygeine Authority took over the medical staffing of
Melbournes main jail in 1959. Under the subtitle sociopaths, Dax writes:
For many years the country prisons at Beechworth and Ballarat
have been supplied with medical care by the staff of the local mental
hospitals. Previously the Chief Government Medical Officer and his
assistant looked after Pentridge (which is the male prison in
Melbourne) though when a new psychiatric clinic was opened there in
1959, the Mental Hygiene Department undertook the medical staffing
of this unit and also of the prison. (p.133)
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He continues to explain how closely the psychiatric system is involved with

the courts and prisons systems, painting a rosy picture of the prisoners
liberties in what he admits are rather grim surroundings:
most of them are occupied with industrial work, and there is
some individual therapy there and a most interesting programme of
psycho-drama. The patients organize their entertainments and have an
active library and education section. Group therapy is highly
organized and most productive. This same medical staff looks after
the Alexandra Parade Clinic, since the sociopaths at Pentridge and the
alcoholics overlap appreciably. When patients are remanded on bond
by the courts for medical examination the reports are made at the
Alexandra Parade Clinic, when they are remanded in custody the
reports are made at Pentridge. Sociopaths who have spent a short time
in the prison psychiatric unit may be in need of more treatment when
they are discharged, and they will then attend the Alexandra Parade
Clinic to see their doctors. For this reason the staff of the clinic work
in close conjunction with the probation officers and one of these
officers regularly attends the Alexandra Parade Clinic and sees
patients there when they have their appointments for psychiatric
treatment. (p.133)
Although he does not explain treatment in other than the most vague ways in
the text, a few comments do give an indication of what was being offered to
the Australian people in the way of health promotion. In his final chapter,
titled the future, Dax writes:
Within the past forty years vast strides have been taken, in two
eras of psychiatric treatment. First the physical treatments were used,
malaria for general paralysis [syphilis], prolonged sleep, insulin
comas, cardiazol and electroplexy, leucotomy, abreaction, and the use
of barbiturates. Next the advent of social psychiatry, industrial
occupation, group activities and therapies, rehabilitation,
resocialization and the tranquilizing drugs brought in a new phase of
treatment.
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Now we are on the edge of a more fundamental change. Even in

our lifetime we shall see psychiatry move into the community and a
new attitude emerge to mental illness, its prevention and its treatment.
Perhaps this is the most exciting phase of all, for with support,
tolerance and group understanding we may together learn to carry
more of the stresses of civilization within our new community
structure. (p.205)
Dax does not mention the word eugenics in his book, nor admit to the
connection between the eugenics movement and the mental hygeine
movement, but he does include in another appendix a list of drugs being
studied under the auspices of the Mental Hygeine Authority, some of
which are still used today, but all of which can cause acute toxicity and
chronic illness themselves. These drugs include Chlorpromazine (Largactil),
Reserpine, Melleril, Tofranil, Stelazine, Librium, Parnate, Bromides and
Mono-amine oxidases. Chlorpromazine, Melleril and Stelazine are crippling
dopamine-blocking major tranquillisers notorious for causing tardive
dyskinesia and other forms of chronic brain and nervous system damage.
These and other toxic chemicals, including lithium and benzodiazepines (the
first of which was Librium) have been forced into people of all races and
ages in Australia via the public hospitals and community psychiatric
services, over the past fifty years, and especially in the past five.
Dax is best known in Melbourne, to which he returned from Tasmania in
1984, for the Cunningham Dax Collection of Psychiatric Art which
includes over 6,000 works of art by (often imprisoned) psychiatric patients
and is administered by the Mental Health Research Institute at Parkville. The
collection is used as a means to teach high school and university students in
Melbourne how to diagnose mental illness from peoples art. Professor Dax
began this collection, he told me last year, in 1947, when he was working as
a psychiatrist in Surrey, England, and continued to build a large collection in
Victoria since the 1950s, after he emigrated to Australia (largely by
acquiring the art of inmates of the Royal Park Hospital, several of whom are
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now dead, unlike Dr Cunningham Dax). The ownership of the 80 or so

paintings he first appropriated was disputed by the British hospitals he had
taken them from, and he says, he took 80 pictures back to France in 1952,
and assumed they had gone back to the hospitals. Dax is now 91 years
old, and refused to comment on problems in local or international psychiatry,
saying his views were out of date. He said he still goes in, twice a week, to
keep an eye on his collection.
Is the collection really his, though? He certainly collected them, but the
majority of the people who did the art were prisoners of the system he
headed, and are not even personally acknowledged for their often amazing
work. They become schizophrenics, manic depressives and
psychotics. Their art becomes evidence of mental illness demonstrating
psychopathology rather than creative genius. Their art was taken without
payment or recognition, and they were able to produce brilliant works of art
despite forced treatment which robbed them of their freedom, dignity and
physical health. They were truly tortured artists.
This tradition of forced slave labour in the guise of occupational therapy
has a long history in the mental health system, and still, every year, the
Mental Health System and allied organizations pathologise creative activity
by young people in Australia, while collecting their art, for free. One of the
most influential of these organizations, which often masquerade as
independent non-government organizations (NGOs), is the Mental Health
Foundation.
According to the self promotional literature of the Mental Health Foundation
of 1997, the Foundation was established in 1930 as the Victorian
Association for Mental Hygiene, however, the next year, they were
claiming something different:
The Foundation was established in 1981 by a group of mental
health & business entrepreneurs in response to awareness that
governments could not permanently fund voluntary organisations.
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The chairman of the Mental Health Foundation is Professor Graham

Burrows, who heads a Board of Directors which, according to their
promotional literature, has a National Scientific Advisory Board which
comprises key resource people and leaders in mental health opinion &
policy development around Australia and a National Organisation which
comprises organisations, individual & corporate members throughout
Australia. The 1998 pamphlet continues with the claim that these include
consumers and carers with experience of mental illness; members attracted
by the mental health promotion & education programmes, professionals
attracted by the Partnership programs; and, others are the corporate
supporters & sponsors. These corporate sponsors include drug
companies, and the Mental Health Foundation avidly supports drug
treatment for a wide range of mental illnesses, and have provided a
plethora of mental health education literature which promote both mental
illness diagnoses and drugs to treat them. This is despite claims that the aims
of the Foundation are to raise funds to promote mental health & wellbeing,
public involvement in mental health, removal of the stigma linked with
mental illness, research on mental health issues, effective prevention
programmes and mental health education.
An example of mental health education by the Foundation is witnessed in
a pamphlet titled Break down the barriers of mental illness, sponsored by
Eli Lilly, manufacturers and promoters of the SSRI antidepressant Prozac. It
begins with a most contentious claim:
One person in four in Australia right now is suffering a mental
health problem or mental illness severe enough to significantly affect
their daily lives.
What, exactly, these mental health problems and mental illnesses are is
not explained in the pamphlet, which is vague about this, in the extreme:
These can range from long term, but intermittent severe illnesses,
to short term stress related disorders.
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Mental health problems and illness affect people from all cultural
backgrounds in rural and remote areas as well as the cities.
All are treatable, and with care and treatment, people usually do
recover.
After recovery, people with a mental illness usually want to
continue to live their lives as they did prior to their illness, as we all
expect following a physical illness to return to work or school, to
have fun, to care for, and be loved by friends, while continuing to
receive treatment and medication for their illnesses.
Yet anyone who experiences a mental health problem or
illness will suffer, in addition to their illness, the pain caused by
stigma and its related discrimination and isolation.
The irony that the psychiatric profession should be exhorting the public to be
aware of stigma whilst actively creating prejudice, drug addiction, social
isolation and suicide clearly escapes the authors of the pamphlet. The extent
of discrimination (including governmental discrimination) against people
who have been diagnosed with serious mental illnesses such as
schizophrenia and bipolar affective disorder is listed in the pamphlet:
It is harder to get and keep work
Some government legislation discriminates against the mentally ill
It is harder to join sporting and recreation groups
Exclusion from membership of Boards of community associations or
companies
Insurance companies often refuse to insure mentally ill people or raise
premiums for superannuation, health cover, travel and life insurances,
amongst others
Some travel companies and airlines may refuse to carry people
experiencing a mental illness
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People with a mental illness who may look or act strangely or possibly
cry in the street, shopping centres, public transport are avoided or ignored
instead of being comforted by others
Children whose parents have a mental illness find their friends at school
may drift away or ostracise them
There is even a popular misconception that people with a mental illness
have a developmental disability rather than an illness
This perspective on stigma is far from the reality of psychiatric survivors
in Australia and it fails to explain the genuine causes of stigma and prejudice
against people who have been tortured as psychiatric patients,
euphemistically referred to, in recent mental health propaganda as
consumers. The injections of dopamine-blocking anti-psychotics that
people deemed to be seriously mentally ill are routinely subjected to
themselves cause the appearance to strangeness. They cause a distressing
range of movement disorders, including akathesia (difficulty staying still and
an urge to pace), Parkinsonism (tremor, rigidity and slowed movements) and
tardive dyskinesia (involuntary spasms and grimaces of the face and limbs).
Combined with the social isolation that results from weeks, months or years
of imprisonment, paranoia instilled in family members and friends regarding
a relapse of mental illness, media demonisation of psychopaths and
systematic disinformation connecting mental illness with drug addiction and
violence, people who have been treated for mental illness in the Australian
public hospital psychiatric system can claim to have survived chemical and
psychological torture.
The Mental Health Foundation, however, claims that this stigma and
isolation is caused by myth and misunderstanding of mental illness. In
claiming to be dispelling such myths, the Foundation reinforces the view
that drug compliance is of paramount importance in the treatment of mental
illness, and denies the extensive human rights abuses occurring in Australian
hospitals and psychiatric treatment clinics and centres. The Foundation
described its directly supported projects as:
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Stress Management Programs for corporate, community & rural sectors

National Depression Awareness Campaign
Towards a Gentler Society Campaign (TAGS)
Quiet Crisis Campaign
Partnership Programme for GPs & Pharmacists
Mental Health Lecture Series
OPTIONS (Schools) addressing bullying
OPTIONS (Community) addressing suicide
Multimedia Information & Resources Project
Mood Disorders Group
G-LINE Problem Gambling Service
The Foundation claims that it enjoys a reputation built on its success in
collaboration, support, auspice & sponsorship, and that others to benefit
include the Addiction Research Institute, Association of Relatives &
Friends of the Mentally Ill, Alzheimers Diseases & Related Disorders
Society, Anorexia & Bulimia Nervosa Education Campaign, Childrens
Protection Week, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Foundation and
States Mental Health Foundations. The Mental Health Foundation claims
to enjoy collaborative and support alliances with many national, state and
international agencies including:
Addiction Research Institute
Alzheimers Association Australia
Australian Medical Association
Australian National Association for Mental Health
Australian Red Cross
Australian Federation of Deaf Societies
Australian Society of Hypnosis
Council on Aging (Australia)
East-West Centre on Mental Health
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Family Services Australia

Federation of Australian Jewish Welfare Societies
National Council of YMCA Australia
National Mental Health Council
Pharmaceutical Society of Australia
Royal Australian New Zealand College of Psychiatrists
Royal Australian College of General Practitioners
Many Church Social Justice Committees
American Psychiatric Association
International Society of Hypnosis
International Society for Stress
World Federation for Mental Health
World Psychiatric Association
The gold-embossed pamphlet, does not admit to an author, however, the
activities of the Mental Health Foundation are controlled by Professor
Graham Burrows, Director of Psychological Medicine (Psychiatry) at the
Austin Hospital in Heidelberg, Melbourne and senior Professor of
Psychiatry at the University of Melbourne. Professor Burrows, who is also
on the honorary editorial board of the drug-promoting MIMS publishing
company and directs many of the organisations mentioned in the pamphlet,
was mentioned in Ray Moynihans expose of disease-mongering by the
medical profession in Australia. In Too Much Medicine, the journalist wrote,
in 1998:
In a series on depression in the Medical Journal of Australia
(MJA) in 1997, Professor Graham Burrows and colleagues wrote that
up to one in five people who visit a GP in this country will be
suffering from depressive or anxiety disordersThree weeks later, in
the same MJA series, another psychiatrist Professor Philip Mitchell
gave these endorsements to the role of drugs in the treatment of
depression. Most patients do best with a combination of
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antidepressant medications and some form of psychological therapy

the vast majority of depressed patients seen in the general practice
setting have mild to moderate depression, for which the new
antidepressants are as effective as the old
Associate Professor Mitchell is with the School of Psychiatry at
the University of New South Wales, and is the Administrative Director
of the Mood Disorders Unit at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Sydney.
When questioned about the strong endorsement of drug therapy, even
for mild to moderately depressed patients, Professor Mitchell said the
wording could have been clearer
Moynihan tends to understate the impact of disease creation through the
suggestion of mental illness and the promotion of diagnoses such as
depression, and does not mention chemical, drug or biological warfare,
nor eugenics, but he does make some pertinent points about conflict of
interest:
After reading the first MJA article on the prevalence of these
disorders and the second on treatment, the reader might be forgiven
for forming the strong impression that up to 20 percent of the
Australians who visit a GP could benefit from treatment with the new
antidepressants: the medication of a nation on an unprecedented scale
[subsequently exceeded by cholesterol lowering drugs]. The other
clear message is that depression and related disorders are greatly
under-diagnosed. This assumption has been at the centre of the
company-sponsored depression-awareness campaigns in Australia as
each company promoted its new antidepressant through the 1990s.
But are things really as bad as that?
Professor Burrows article stated, A general practitioner who sees
40 patients a day can expect that eight will require support or
treatment for anxiety or depression and thats not counting those
whose disorders go unrecognised. Yet at almost the same time a
major report on the treatment of depression prepared in Britain, while
not ruling out that the prevalence might be higher, referred to a
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prevalence in general practice of about 5 per cent for neurotic and

depressive illness
Discrepancies like these are hard to explain. Clearly the larger the
prevalence of a disease, the bigger the potential market for those
selling drugs. In such a situation it seems reasonable to expect that
any relationship between those making the estimates of disease
prevalence and the companies selling drugs should be made clear.
(p.144)
One of the dominant activities of the Mental Health Foundation is
fundraising, and even in death one is exhorted to support their vital work.
In a grotesque appeal for Wills and Bequests the Foundation has produced
a tear-off glossy Form of Bequest which allows the dying to leave money
and possessions to be used by the Mental Health Foundation of Australia in
its work of promoting good mental health to all Australians.
The smiling face of Professor Graham Burrows explains:
About one in every five Australians more than three million
people are suffering mental illness severe enough to significantly
affect their lives.
One person in ten will be hospitalised for mental illness at some
time during their lives.
Mental illness costs at least $3 billion per year for hospital
admissions, doctors fees and invalid pensions.
Added to this are the human penalties: marriage breakdown,
family disruption and child abuse.
Stress caused by the economic recession alone is already having
an impact on the mental health of millions of Australians.
Young people especially are at risk with long-term unemployment
and homelessness in danger of setting behaviour patterns for a
lifetime.
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There is a desperate need to act now to provide people of all ages

with the support they need to face the future with hope, confidence
and peace of mind.
We need to make good mental health a vital part of the Australian
lifestyle.
Professor Burrows does not make it clear as to what, exactly, good mental
health is, or how he plans to promote it for all Australians but he does
make clear that he is prepared to accept anything of value:
Your bequest may specify the activity you want to support
children, adolescents, corporate stress, aged care, etc. or become a
general bequest. You may specify the gift of a part of your estate, or a
parcel of shares, debentures or bonds, or a house or other real estate,
works of art, antiques or anything of value.
If in doubt about such a course of action the Mental Health Foundation
explains, further, that:
The Mental Health Foundation of Australia has appointed Trust
Company of Australia as trustees of the Mental Health Foundation of
Australia Charitable Fund. We would be happy to arrange a meeting
with a senior manager if you would like to discuss your will.
The G-Line is a joint project of the Mental Health Foundation of Victoria,
Vic Health and Liberty Victoria. Liberty Victoria is the government
sponsored Human Rights Organisation of Victoria, previously called the
Victorian Council for Civil Liberties. G-Line is one of the Mental Health
Foundations OPTIONS projects. Graham Burrows is described in their
promotional literature as being qualified with AO, KSJ, MD, ChB, BSc,
DPM, FRANZCP, FRCPsych, MRACMA, Dip.M.Hlth.Sc (Clinical
Hypnosis) being, in addition to other things, Professor of Psychiatry,
University of Melbourne and Director of the Psychiatry and Psychology
Service Unit of the Austin and Repatriation Medical Centre. He is
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Chairman of the Options Project, which claims to be promoting mental

health and human rights in the community.
In 1998, the options project produced an advertising pamphlet, with tear-off
order form for a 59-paged book titled Your Guide to Responsible
Gambling, priced at $6 per copy. The book is heralded with the grandiose
claim, splashed in red letters above small photos of its two smiling authors:
This book is a must for everyone! Those who gamble, who know
someone who gambles, those who feel they have a gambling problem
and everyone with an interest in gambling and its effects.
The book is authored by Graham Burrows and a psychologist called Greg
Coman. Greg Comans stated qualification is a humble MSc. He is said to
be a psychologist specialising in habit disorders, particularly problem
gambling. He apparently was instrumental in setting up G-Line,
Australias 24-hr gambling telephone counselling service and is currently
researching the potential for telephone counselling as a treatment approach
for gambling and other psychological problems. He is described also as
Treasurer of the National Association for Gambling Studies. It is likely
that he did most of the hard work in writing the book.
It is ironic that the OPTIONS project claims to be promoting mental health
and human rights in the community is jointly sponsored by institutions with
a long history of atrocious human rights abuses: the psychiatric treatment
industry and State Government of Victoria (which controls the Police Force
and public hospital system). Added to the irony of this alliance for human
rights is the collaboration of Liberty Victoria in the options projects. Their
name appears at the bottom of the pamphlet advertising Graham Burrows
new book alongside the logo of VicHealth, but it is unclear as to what their
role in the project is.
In 1996 and 1997 two workers from the Victorian Council of Civil Liberties,
Konstandinos Karapanagiotidis and Steafan Kilkeary undertook an
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investigation into official complaint mechanisms for aggrieved psychiatric

patients in the State of Victoria. Their findings, after a one year investigation
including taped interviews and numerous personal interviews for the
Seeking Justice Project, confirmed, in addition to a complete failure of
these complaint mechanisms, extensive human and civil rights abuses of the
most appalling nature occurring in Victoria. This included punitive
treatment, heavy drugging, misdiagnosis, unnecessary incarceration, and
sexual abuse by psychiatrists. They give examples of women who had been
raped or otherwise sexually assaulted being disbelieved and punitively
diagnosed and treated by the psychiatric profession and hospital system:
A woman screaming saying that she had been gang raped by 5
men while on day leave and that she was pregnant as a result of this
abuse was not believed by anyone in the psychiatric hospital in which
she was a patient. The workers punished her for telling lies by not
allowing her to see a doctor. It was not until the woman was
discovered in a pool of blood, having miscarried, that the workers
finally believed her.
The report, which the Liberty Victoria attempted to prevent the release of,
quotes Fran Quigley of the Geelong Rape Crisis Centre who says:
Women in the psychiatric system are treated in an appalling
manner. They are often caught up in the system for a long timeoften
do not have a mental illness. At one stage they are told they have
schizophrenia then it suddenly becomes a personality disorder.
Clearly they are not being assessed properly.
The report says:
The sad fact is that the dominant medical model of mental health
dictates the way the mental health industry is run. It imposes a
biological, victim-blaming approach that diminishes the individuals
capacity for self-understanding and self-fulfilment. By instead
concentrating on those damaging and dangerous labels of mental
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illnessthis results in practices which cause rather than cure

distress.
The investigation of the Seeking Justice Project was focused on complaint
mechanisms, specifically about complainants experiences in dealing with
the Office of the Public Advocate, Community Visitors Program,
Mental Health Legal Centre, Victorian Mental Illness Awareness
Council, Health Services Commissioner, Chief Psychiatrist and State
Ombudsman. The authors list several fundamental failures of the existing
system, including, lack of independence in which they quote Isabel
Collins, Executive Officer of the Victorian Mental Illness Awareness
Council as saying, There does not exist in the state of Victoria a single
independent body where a consumer can take their complaint and have it
dealt with objectively and fairly. In the same section they write:
advocates from The Office of the Public Advocate appear
before the Guardianship and Administration Board and actively speak
against the wishes of those individuals for whom they are supposed to
be advocating. One such example was where the hearsay evidence of
an advocate led to an individual having his freedom of movement
curtailed.
Of betrayal by supposed advocates they give several examples:
in 1996 we witnessed a Community Visitor in Footscray
Psychiatric Hospital advocating against an involuntary patient, while
pretending to her that he was on her side. What he was trying to do,
without her knowledge or approval, was to have her children
permanently placed in the custody of her estranged husband.
They add:
It is really disappointing that the statutory complaints
mechanisms, all of which have sweeping legislative powers to act
against abusive and negligent mental health workers, steadfastly
refuse to do so. Particularly when it is understood that lethargy, as
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Keith Jackson from the Health Services Commissioner put it, is met
with ridicule and contempt by workers against whom complaints are
made. He stated that psychiatrists for one in Victoria operate as a law
unto themselves. Laughing off even such serious allegations as the
sexual assault of a patient. The Ombudsman too, retains the power to
initiate investigations on its own behalf, and to name negligent service
providers in Parliament. It however remains silent, neutered.
Referring to a Climate of Fear in the Victorian Mental Health System,
Karapanagiotidis and Kilkeary, who left Liberty Victoria after the human
rights organization had refused to release the report, write:
almost every mental health worker encountered during the
SEEKING JUSTICE Project made some reference to the climate of
fear. With the exception of Dr Carlyle Perera [the State Governmentappointed Chief Psychiatrist], who conversely stated that individuals
in Victoria now live in a climate of openness.
A great deal has been written and said about the climate of fear in
the mental health industry. Indeed, it was one of the key reasons why
Mr Brian Burdekin, then Human Rights and Equal Opportunity
Commissioner, reconvened his inquiry into human rights and mental
health in Victoria in 1994. It had been stated to Mr Burdekin that any
worker who spoke out against the mental health system would be
persecuted. Usually by her or his job.
The human rights workers summarise treatment in the public hospital
system:
from first contact with the mental health industry the
individuals experience can be typified and normalised by the use of
excessive force, copious amounts of mind-stultifying medication, and
treatments such as solitary confinement, shock therapy, and stimulus
aversion. Treatments which tend to exacerbate rather than alleviate
situations of mental unwellness.
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In the brief conclusion of the report, the authors quote a response from Dr
Carlisle Perera, who has since been replaced as the head of State Psychiatric
Services by Professor Norman James, previously head of Royal Park
(Psychiatric) Hospital in Parkville. They write:
Dr Carlyle Perera stated that do-gooders from organisations
such as Liberty Victoria just wanted to rush out there and give
themtheir rights. That this would cause them distress and would
alienate them from the people who really cared about them (the
workers in the mental health industry). This is, at best, a dodgy line of
reasoning.The bottom line is that when do-gooders such as us talk
about human rights, we are talking about everyones right to live free
from abuse. What came out of the Seeking Justice Project and the
Know Your Rights Workshops was that many individuals felt that
their rights were being sorely trampled on in Victoria. And that there
was nowhere to go to either evince justice, and/or to prevent further
abuse.
29. SECRET POLICE SYSTEMS IN AUSTRALIA

The mental health system in Australia grew out of the asylums of the
nineteenth century, and involved the slavery of people who were diagnosed
as mentally ill or mentally defective. The general mental defectiveness
label was applied to people who were also denigrated as lunatics,
criminals, degenerates, imbeciles, idiots and feeble-minded people.
Masturbation was viewed as evidence of feeble-mindedness, and
disobedience as a sign of degeneracy. The inmates of asylums were forced to
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work in menial jobs, while the institutions that held them profited from their
forced labour. Torture, including flogging, water torture, chaining, and
electrical shocks, was routinely administered in these asylums under the
guise of treatment.
To orchestrate their widespread slavery program and to control behaviour of
the masses as their empire expanded, the British developed extensive
policing systems, espionage systems and assassination programs. These
were connected with secret police and military organisations, constituting an
intricate Commonwealth spy program involving people of many
nationalities united by loyalty to the British Empire. Numerous secret
societies, often masquerading as charity organisations, missionary
outposts and mens clubs were instituted during the time of open slavery,
and continued their nefarious activities after African slavery was officially
abolished. The public opposition to African slavery that resulted in the
cessation of this cruel trade grew over the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, culminating in the official banning of the slave trade and release
of slaves from bondage in the 1830s to 1860s.
The Commonwealth slavers were not to be so easily stopped, however, as by
an International Ban on African slavery. As Myra Willard wrote, in The
White Australia Policy to 1920:
The stringent enforcement of the international treaties which
aimed at the extinction of the African slave trade caused many in
tropical lands who had become dependent on this form of labour to
look to Asia for a substitute.
This substitute included Chinese and Indian coolie labour, according to
Willard, but the whole story of the evolution of British and Australian
Commonwealth slave theory and practice has been far more complex and
persistent than Willards book reveals. In fact, the British Commonwealths
system of slavery included all the countries in the British Empire, including
Australia. Not all the Empires countries were treated as harshly as Australia
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was, however. And this harsh treatment of Australia and its residents by
agents of the British Commonwealth in Australia has continued to this day.
Involved in this abuse of the Australian population are the numerous secret
police organisations currently active in Australia, several of which have
direct links with the British Commonwealth.
The centre of the British Empire was London, and this was also the centre of
the British slave trade. The concept of the Commonwealth was devised by
social theorists, politicians and academics at the University of London and
also at the Oxford and Cambridge Universities. These Universities became
an essential part of British foreign policy during the time of open slavery, as
well as in the times of disguised slavery which followed. Brainwashing,
involving indoctrination into the academic system of doctors, degrees,
honours and other titles were bestowed on students of the system creating
a persistent and highly authoritarian academic hierarchy. This system was
exported to the colonies, where an uninterrupted tradition has continued to
the present day.
In the academic system, as in the police system and military, obedience to
the chain of command was ensured by a hierarchical system of titles. In the
University and hospital system this hierarchy was headed by professors,
who had authority over associate professors. These had authority over
senior lecturers, who could pull rank on lecturers. Lecturers were above
tutors and tutors had superior rank to students. Senior students were
viewed as superior to junior students in this system, which also encouraged
the entire academic institution to compete with and look either up to or
down at other academic institutions. A similar mentality was encouraged in
Church owned high schools in England and the British colonies, in which
schools and universities were built by the British which repeated the same
hierarchical system, often with individual perversions of the British model.
The secret police systems devised by the colonial system in Australia
involved a poorly integrated system of police departments and health
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departments, together with departments designed for the protection of

natives and military departments. The police departments included officers
whose duties were to keep the peace amongst the Australian immigrants and
convicts as well as native police. The immigrants included free men and
women who emigrated to Australia from England, Scotland and other
white nations, and also a smaller number from China. The police had to
keep the peace between Chinese and European immigrants on several
occasions, especially during the scramble for exploitation of Australias gold
deposits which occurred in the 1860s.
The colonial police, who were given ranks of constable, sargeant,
commissioner and the like also were responsible, together with the navy, for
patrolling the oceans that surround Australia, and preventing aliens from
entering the country. They also prevented people from leaving the country
without authority, since many of the people who initially came to Australia
from England, Scotland and Ireland did so against their wills. They were
sent here as convicts, as a punishment. Once they arrived here, men, women
and children were forced by the British colonists into slavery, sometimes for
the colonial administration and sometimes for wealthy (free) families and
individuals. They were forced to work for these families and suffer arbitrary
punishment from them for the terms of their sentences. It is important to
note that many of these sentences were for trivial offences, the result of
poverty and repression in Britain and Ireland.
In the navy, airforce and army, the titles given were different, but the system
of authority in titles the same. Here commanders, generals and other senior
officers ruled, often with extreme cruelty and callousness, an army of men
and women, who were initially slaves who were conscripted to fight and
die for the British Empire. These slaves were not able to aspire to senior
(safe) positions in the armed forces by virtue of their birth (including class
and nationality).
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The navy, like the army and airforce were officially the Royal Australian
Armed Forces, with emphasis on Royal. The chain of command of the
Australian armed forces began not in Australia, but in England, home of the
British Royalty and the originating point of royal directives. The British
monarchy had, and continue to have, a unique authority over the system of
titles which maintains Commonwealth authority. The monarch is able to
confer titles on whoever he or she likes. These titles include Knights who
are allowed to use the title Sir as well as lords and barons. The latter
are usually reserved from Englishmen of noble birth. It is difficult to see
how such a system can be maintained in any nation that aspires to
democracy, or calls itself democratic.
Psychiatry, being the medical specialty discipline that controls the

development and implementation of national and international mental
health strategies has a pervasive influence on modern Australian society.
This influence is largely unrecognised, but psychiatric theory and practice
influence education at all levels as well as prominent media stories, movies,
and magazine articles. Even the few stories that are critical of the treatment
that psychiatric patients receive tend to validate the stereotypes and
diagnoses of psychiatrists (such as schizophrenia).
The psychiatry profession, with their access to sensitive, private and
potentially revolutionary information about dissidents in society has also
traditionally played a prominent role in the shadowy area of surveillance and
control of dangerous elements in society. Of course, how dangerous the
citizens of a country are viewed as and for what reasons, depends on the
paranoia or otherwise of the governments and public institutions that control
the police, military and judicial systems as well as the psychiatric systems of
the country concerned. The colonial history of Australia and specifically the
fact that convicts and other undesirables were sent by the British Crown to
Australia is pertinent to the development of punitive and repressive attitudes
towards the mentally ill by Governments as well as by treatment centres
and the public generally. This is a complex area beneath which lurks a
terrible series of atrocities.
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Although Mental Health Acts differ between the States, every State in
Australia does have laws prohibiting politically motivated incarcerations, as
have occurred in recent years in the Soviet Union, South Africa and other
politically repressed nations. Such incarceration is anyway prohibited by
International Laws declared in the 1940s following the discovery of the
extent of and reasons behind the Nazi Holocaust. The reasons behind the
Holocaust are complex, but even the most ardent apologist for psychiatric
abuses, would agree that the eugenics policies that determined who would be
killed, and who would be encouraged to breed in an effort to create an Aryan
super-race, were developed and implemented by men who called
themselves scientists, academics, physicians and psychiatrists. Many of the
most influential eugenicists were professors in the most respected
Universities and Hospitals in Germany, such as Professor Karl Schneider,
who was head of psychiatry at the University of Heidelberg in the 1930s.
Professor Sidney Bloch, a senior professor of psychiatry at the University of
Melbourne, in the edited transcript of his 1996 Beattie Lecture at the
University, described Professor Schneiders horrible acts as follows, when
warning of the dangers of misused psychiatric theory:
Karl Schneider held an even more prestigious post as chairman of
psychiatry at Heidelberg. Alongside his celebrated academic activities,
Schneider contributed energetically to the euthanasia program. A party
stalwart from 1932, he became imbued with the Nazi vision,
particularly racial hygeine. Ironically he was able to pursue two
contradictory pathways. On the one hand he elaborated progressive
measures of rehabilitation for the chronically ill and, on the other,
participated actively in both the sterilisations and the medical killings.
Moreover, he developed a grand plan to establish a research institute
dedicated to biological anthropology, launching his studies with the
examination of brains derived from the victims of Aktion T4 (other
eminent academics also snatched the opportunity to examine the
hundreds of available brains).
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The criteria for death were remarkably straightforward: a

diagnosis of schizophrenia, epilepsy, senile disorder, intellectual
retardation and the like; hospitalisation for 5 or more years; an
incapacity to work productively in the mental hospital setting; or not
being of German race and nationality (all Jewish patients were killed).
The 70 000 patients who met these criteria were shunted off to transit
centres in specially disguised buses and thence to one of six special
hospitals. Mercy killing was merciless killing. Naked patients were
herded into chambers, camouflaged as showers, and gassed with
carbon monoxide by hospital staff. Relatives were subsequently
informed of the patients unfortunate death from a medical condition
and commiserated with. Killing by gas ended in August 1941, only in
the wake of a hard-hitting sermon by Bishop Clemens Von Galen of
Munster, a solitary dissenting voice in the Church. (p.177)
Following the allied victory in the Second World War, a radical
restructuring of world politics occurred, including the formation of a number
of new nations with independent constitutions and governments as well as
the United Nations and related bodies, which grew out of the League of
Nations, a confederacy of European colonial powers formed after the First
World War. Here the term independent refers to the ostensible political
autonomy granted to many of the countries previously ruled as properties
owned by European nations (and often specifically, European monarchies)
that had attacked and exploited these lands and people who lived in them,
over the preceding 500 or so years. The fundamental abhorrence of such
actions is obvious now, as it was to the more enlightened members of all
societies over the thousands of years that slavery has occurred, in one form
or another.
The master-slave relationship is such that the slave must do whatever he
or she is told (ordered) to do, and is usually punished for disobedience.
Historically, this punishment has ranged from verbal censure to the harshest
and most cruel tortures and killings imaginable. Colonial atrocities are the
history of every country, and virtually every country has been subject to
colonisation or attempts at colonisation by other, usually larger and more
aggressive nations. Of course, within these nations, many, indeed the
majority, of the population may have disagreed with the principle and
practices of the military-backed colonial expansions that the governments
and monarchies that ruled them embarked on, but then, as now, voices
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calling for equality, peace and friendship were drowned out by the amplified
rhetoric of war-mongers, profiteers and enslavers.
It is important to realise that the early implementation of eugenics programs
was actively supported by distinguished psychiatrists and other doctors in
respected academic institutions as well as politicians and social policy
developers (including Church leaders) in several nations outside Germany.
Australia was one of these nations, along with many others, including the
United Kingdom, the United States of America, Canada, Switzerland,
Austria, Sweden, Norway, South Africa and Japan. In each country there
were differences in the hierarchy proposed, along which lines humans were
to be classified and either encouraged to breed or prevented from breeding.
There was also a variation in the methods used to prevent young men and
women (or children) from parenting children later in life, ranging from the
relatively painless to the most cruel forms of mutilation. These included
literal castration of young boys diagnosed as feeble-minded or morally
depraved, often for petty crimes of poverty or resistance to discipline.
In the first three decades of this century thousands of boys and men were
mutilated in this way according to the guidelines of North American
eugenics laws, described earlier.
The Nazi atrocities were carefully planned and executed, with an elaborate
disguise of the mercy killings as well as denial, at first, of what was
occurring, and, when the evidence was incontrovertible, denial that what
they did was morally wrong, or evil. This denial of guilt was repeatedly seen
during the Nuremberg Trials, when some of the Nazi war criminals were
tried for crimes against humanity. Many who were executed remained
defiant to the end, justifying or denying their crime.
It is common knowledge that several senior Nazi scientists, including
military scientists and medical scientists were not committed for trial despite
devising and orchestrating the murderous euthanasia program and military
aggression that the German government embarked on in the early 1930s and
continued until the end of the second world war over a decade later. These
scientists were given asylum by the British, American and Russian victors of
the war, and given safe passage to, and often new identities in, a number of
countries, including Canada and Australia. Others were said to have been
provided with a safe haven in South America, and some in Southern Africa.
The asylum of war criminals in Australia is not rumour, however. It is now
officially accepted historical fact (although denied for several decades).
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Many might suppose that the wickedness of Nazi philosophy became a

discredited and cruel aberration of the past, and that Neo-Nazis are just an
inconsequential bunch of skinhead football hooligans in Europe or drunken
rednecks in America. This is not the case.
In 1998, the Age newspaper ran a headline story about revelations of State
secret police files and activities in the Australian State of Victoria. Secret
police systems have been in operation in Australia for a long time. In fact,
over the past 200 years, several secret police systems have developed
alongside each other in Australia, with varying levels of cooperation and
communication between different secret police systems. In this book, the
secret police systems currently in operation in Australia will be examined in
the hope that this will shed light on similar systems in operation elsewhere,
and draw attention to how such police systems are contributing to global
warfare and human rights abuses. In particular, similar systems which are
closely connected with the Australian secret police systems exist in Canada
and New Zealand, as well as in South Africa and other nations with a history
of being part of the British Empire. The secret police systems were actually
set up in the first place by British Commonwealth agents in the British
colonies as part of the colonial governments in these nations. Australia is a
good example of a nation with a history inextricably connected with British
penal and judicial policies and thus an active police and secret police system
is to be expected in a close examination of Australian legal and social
history.
The federation of separate British colonies into the nation of Australia
occurred only one hundred years ago. This is not as long as the State of New
South Wales existed as a separate colony. The State of Victoria, named after
Queen Victoria (of England and the British Empire), was founded in 1851,
many decades after Captain James Cook claimed Botany Bay and the
surrounding land for the British Crown (1788). Of course, the British
Crown is something of an abstract entity, and heads wearing British crowns
have rarely been seen in Australia. Representatives of the British Crown
have, however, played a huge role in the history of Australia over the past
two hundred years, including the establishment and management of several
secret police systems in Australia. These systems include military
intelligence systems (such as ASIO), federal police investigation systems
(such as the NCA), state based criminal investigation systems (such as CIB)
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and psychiatric diagnosis and treatment systems (such as CAT teams). These
parallel systems are poorly integrated and have very different ideas about
what is right and what is wrong, as well as what is legal and what is illegal.
They also have very different ideas about what should be legal and what
should not. They also target different populations for surveillance and
containment and use very different techniques to gather information and
extract it under duress if this is thought to be necessary.
Secret police systems are fuelled by paranoia and xenophobia. Foreigners
are routinely targeted. In Australia, fear about communists, Asians,
Moslems, radicals and others have historically obvious associations
with secret police activities since the Second World War, however fear of
these alien populations far predates the 1930s and 1940s. Fear that the
Russians are coming, although worked into a frenzy in the 1950s and
1960s with Macarthyism, was used to terrify Victorian men, women and
children in the 1800s, when the lure for the Russians and Chinese was said
to be gold.
Gold mania (also called gold fever) was, alongside dipsomania
(alcoholism), the main diagnosis used to incarcerate Victorians in the 1860s
and 1870s, according to psychiatrist Eric Cunningham Dax in his 1961
book, Asylum to Community. On page 14 he wrote:
Victorias first mental hospital was opened in 1848 at Yarra Bend,
in Melbourne, and designed on the lines of a gaol, but afterwards
some prefabricated wooden buildings, imported from England, were
erected on the spot to increase the accomodation.
The gold-rush began in 1851, but by the middle sixties it was
trailing off, as much of the surface gold had been mined so there were
large numbers of restless, disturbed and often drunken individuals
who must have been a considerable problem to the government. Partly
because of the needs of the population, and perhaps mainly because of
the unemployment, two new mental hospitals were put up at that time,
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one in the western part of the state on the goldfields at Ararat and the
other in a rich gold-mining district at Beechworth in the north-east.
Lust for gold has played a major role in the development of social policy in
Australia, and Victoria in particular. The White Australia Policy, that
embarrassing legacy of British colonial racism, was itself devised in the
1860s to prevent Chinese exploitation of the newly discovered gold in
Australia, among several reasons, all racially and culturally discriminatory.
The indigenous people of Australia were not even recognised as human by
the first English colonists who declared Australia to be Terra Nullius. This is
despite over two hundred years of prior European knowledge that the
Southern Land was indeed populated with a race of dark-skinned people
who spoke several different languages. More recently, it has become evident
that they spoke several hundred different languages. From the English point
of view, however, it did not matter what or how many languages they spoke:
they were all just natives, who were equated with savages.
The treatment of those deemed to be savages was indeed savage.
Genocide through several techniques resulting in the mass murder of
hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of men, women and children of all
ages. Some were taken as slaves, but most were killed mercilessly, mostly
through poisoning (chemical warfare) and infections (biological warfare).
Infants and young children were taken forcibly from their families and
biological parents to be brought up in orphanages and foster homes, or
enslaved as domestic servants. Their parents were subjected to arbitrary
arrest and arrest for crimes of poverty. Alcohol was used by the colonists
to stupefy natives in many lands, including Australia. These natives
included aboriginal people as well as native Australians of European
ancestry. Alcoholism is still rife in Australia generally and it is of note that
the early psychiatric hospitals were full of people with alcohol-related
problems. It is also of note that alcohol was the first British currency in
Australia.
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In Australia, alcohol was used as a direct weapon for genocide of the

aboriginal population by the British in a similar way to that in which opium
was used in the opium wars against China and India. In these wars, which
occurred in the early and mid 1800s, Indian, Burmese and Bengali farmers
were forced to dig up their rice fields by British colonial rulers and plant
their homelands with opium poppies. The opium was then pushed into
Chinese society with the intent of addicting and subduing the Chinese
population. When the Chinese Government attempted, in the 1840s, to halt
the opium trade, the British threatened to attack Chinese cities with
battleships poised outside Chinese ports. Hong Kong was ceded to the
British for the period of 150 years after this shameful act of international
terrorism and drug warfare. Shortly afterwards, and in the wake of the
British success, the USA demanded similar trade concessions to the British
from China and maintenance of their own opium export industry to the most
populous nation on earth. It is of note that enforcement of free trade was
the justification the British Government gave to its people, for what later
became known as the opium wars.
The activities of the secret police systems in Australia are centred on the
issue of drugs. The matter is clouded by confusion about what is a drug
and legal versus illegal drugs. Some drugs are prohibited under
International Drug Laws, including narcotics such as heroin and other
opiates. Narco means sleep, and narcotics cause sleepiness when
ingested or injected. The effects of alcohol are narcotic at high doses, but
excitatory at low doses. Alcohol, however, is not usually considered a
narcotic, since, although it causes a great deal of human illness and misery,
alcohol, like tobacco, is considered a legal drug.
Opiate narcotics are derivatives of opium, which can be smoked, ingested or
injected. Opium is a potent analgesic (pain killer) and has effects on the
mind which are pleasant at times, which contributes to the problem of opium
addiction. Opiate addiction includes much more than psychological
addiction, however; they can also cause physical addiction and painful,
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debilitating withdrawal suffering when levels of the drug in the body

decrease. They are also toxic in overdose, causing vomiting, coma and
respiratory depression, which can be fatal. Heroin overdoses are claiming
more and more lives in Australia and around the world, and this trend has
been worsening over the past century (since heroin was invented by the
European drug company Bayer pharmaceuticals), corresponding with an
expansion of secret police activities. It has been suggested that secret police
activities and military activities are, at least in part, to blame for the scourge
of heroin and other illegal drugs in the modern world.
The prohibition of heroin and other hard drugs has resulted in a situation
where thousands of young people around the world are presently
incarcerated in prisons and psychiatric hospitals due to their addiction, while
those who push the addiction on these young people are not behind bars.
Compounding the problem, the accompanying prohibition of products of the
Cannabis Sativa plant (Marijuana and hashish) have resulted in a massive
black market trade in illegal drugs, whilst making these drugs more
fashionable in some circles. They have also become associated with crime in
a direct way, since the selling and use of illegal drugs is considered to be a
serious crime, punishable by jail sentences and heavy fines. Yet,
hypocritically the Australian Government and governments around the world
continue to profiteer from legal drug sales including the legal opiate trade,
as well as from tobacco and alcohol. Cannabis Sativa plantations also bring
revenue to the Government, since this ancient crop is grown in Australia
under Government control, for the production of hemp.
Unknown to most in the modern world, heroin was invented by the
pharmaceutical industry and used extensively as a medical (and psychiatric)
drug long before it became a street drug. It is made from opium poppies
and is chemically related to other narcotic opiates such as morphine, which
was also used as a pharmaceutical drug and continues to be so today. In
Australia, morphine is manufactured and marketed by several large drug
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companies including Glaxo-Wellcome, Mundipharma and Fawns & Mc

Allen.
The medical indication for the prescription of morphine is severe intractable
pain, and morphine is an effective pain-killer. It is also, like heroin,
extremely addictive. Pethidine, codeine, oxycodone and methadone are other
addictive opiates widely prescribed in Australia. Codeine preparations are,
unlike in most other countries, available over the counter at pharmacies in
Australia. Methadone syrup is used as a heroin replacement and prescribed
by specially authorised clinics and doctors for heroin addicts ostensibly to
prevent injection of opiates whilst preventing withdrawal. Unfortunately,
methadone syrup can itself be injected, is highly addictive and has other
dangers. It is also possible to combine methadone ingestion with injections
of heroin and other drugs. It is of note the Glaxo-Wellcome, who sell
morphine as well as AZT (Zidovudine) are also the manufacturers and
promoters of methadone. This drug company, the largest in the world, also
markets codeine preparations in Australia (Dymadon forte).
The medical professions attempts to combat drug addiction generally and
heroin addiction specifically have been a dismal failure. Throughout the
world, the incidence of self-injection of drugs has increased alarmingly over
the past four decades. This scourge has mainly affected young people, and
young men in particular. The drugs which are most often self-injected are
heroin and amphetamines in Australia, but other drugs, including codeine
and methadone are also being injected with disastrous consequences. The
medical professions strategies have included the provision of more drugs,
including addictive benzodiadepines such as valium and serepax, other
opiates such as methadone and the provision of free needles through needle
exchange programs. These strategies have succeeded in worsening an
already huge problem, for obvious reasons.
One reason is the huge propaganda machine behind the needle exchange
program and methadone program, sponsored by the mining industry,
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pharmaceutical industry, and insurance industries with support from the

Commonwealth and State Governments in Australia. These industries
finance a plethora of non-government organizations (NGOs) which have a
subtle or unsubtle drug pushing agenda. This can be witnessed in the Spring
1997 newsletter of the Drug Reform Foundation titled Drug Reform
News. In the front page article, Dr Alex Wodak wrote:
Will the moral conservatives turn on practices such as methadone
maintenance and needle exchange? This is a growing concern among
drug experts. Theres been a very alarming deterioration over the last
six months, the dinosaurs have been let out of their cages and the very
impressive record of achievement that Australia has clocked up in this
area since 1985 is now at risk.
One of our supreme achievements during that time was keeping
HIV under control among injecting drug users and therefore
protecting the Australian population.
This was a delicate balancing act that involved Commonwealth
and State Governments working together and also politicians from all
parties accepting that this was an area that they shouldnt score points
off each other. This is breaking down with the kind of decision that
was made on Black Tuesday.
The black Tuesday event Dr Wodak is referring to is the decision by the
Federal Government made on Tuesday 19th August 1997 to scuttle the
heroin trial. Dr Wodak, who was head of the drug and alcohol services at
St Vincents Hospital in Sydney is described in the newsletter as President
of the Australian Drug Reform Foundation. The article quoted above is
from an adapted version of an interview he had with ABC Radios Life
Matters program. In it he abandons all common sense, logic and
experiential wisdom as well as sound scientific principles in his answer to
the question Is it harder to break a methadone program compared to
heroin? His answer reads as follows:
Its certainly street mythology that methadone is harder to get off
than heroin. Theres only been one study where this has actually been
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examined and the differences were marginal and yes, methadone was
marginally more difficult to get off than heroin but to a very
insignificant extent.
But it is street mythology and it comes from the fact that drug
users, people using heroin, are usually deeply ambivalent about their
heroin use, they love all the attractive things about using heroin and
they also hate a lot of the negative things about using heroin.
When they switch from heroin to methadone they keep on with all
the negativity but theres very little to be positive about, as far as they
see it, about the drug side of the methadone program and so this spills
out into all sorts of urban myths.
In the same newsletter, Dr Nick Crofts, who is described as President of
the Victorian Drug Reform Foundation and Deputy Director of
Macfarlane Burnet Centre for Medical Research where he is Director of
Epidemiology and Social Research authored an article titled The
consequences of our drug policies in Asia. In it, he wrote, from Bangkok:
The UN Joint Programme on AIDS is trying to stem the tide of
HIV infection among injecting drug users in Asia. And what a tide it
is, with more than 90% of drug users infected or developing AIDS in
places along the trafficking trails of the Golden Triangle.
It has been a bumper year for heroin production in Burma. Now
China is both producing heroin and consuming increasing amounts,
and beginning its own drug war which will out-do that of the US in
ferocity and foolishness. And amphetamines are flooding into
Thailand from factories in China and Burma.
This situation cries out for explanation. Why is there so much
drug use here? Why is there so much drug production? Why is HIV
spreading so rapidly? It is not hard to make the connections between
the drug policies we espouse in the west and these tragic
consequences in Asia.
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Because we have generated such a profitable black market with

our prohibition, and because we export our drug wars to regional
governments dependent on foreign aid, we have created a nightmare.
Dr Crofts is correct in claiming that drug policies in the West have created
a nightmare in Asia, and that drug wars have been exported to Asia,
however his article is noticeably short on solutions. He tirades against
prohibition, but the Drug Reform Foundations and Macfarlane Burnet
Centres support of heroin trials in Australia and needle distribution
programs in Asia are not necessarily a step in the right direction. It is with
good reason that the Prime Minister John Howard and others have objected
to attempts such as shooting galleries at dealing with the drug problem.
However, they too have not come up with satisfactory solutions to the
worsening problem of world-wide drug addiction.
More recently, the Age newspaper, on 18.12.99, ran a front page headline
story titled Federal lawyers reject Howard line on heroin. The article, by
Meaghan Shaw, claims:
The Prime Ministers opposition to Victorias plan for heroin
injecting rooms has been undermined by advice from the AttorneyGenerals Department that it might not breach international treaty
obligations.
The advice, given to the Victorian Government in September, is
also at odds with warnings from the United Nations International
Narcotics Control Board that the plan could breach a treaty and
imperil Australias $150 million-a-year legal opiates industry.
Mr Howard referred to the advice yesterday to demonstrate that
his Government had warned of the potential breach in September, well
before he wrote to the Premiers of Victoria and New South Wales this
week urging them not to proceed until the Commonwealth could
consider all the implications of their plans.
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The full implications of the States plans can only be appreciated with a
background knowledge of eugenics theory and practice in Australia and
awareness of drug policing in Australia.
Eugenics, referring to the science of breeding better human beings, has a
long tradition in Australia and is deeply embedded in university and hospital
doctrines and culture in Australia, particularly in the mental health sciences
and the area of public health policy. This is because eugenics was actively
supported by Governments in Australia before the Second World War, with
financial support from American and British eugenic societies and wealthy
individuals and families, such a the Carnegie family in the US. Other
notorious supporters of eugenics were the Rockefellers and Kelloggs.
In Australia eugenic social policy was formulated by academics from the
oldest Universities, such as the University of Melbourne and University of
Sydney, in collaboration with business leaders (mainly industrialists) and
Commonwealth advisers. The policies paralleled eugenic programs in Nazi
Germany, with which it shared foundations. These foundations were
inescapably racist and hierarchical, based on assumptions of racial and
cultural superiority of the eugenists. Thus the eugenics movement in Japan
placed Japanese blood lines at the top of their hierarchy. The Germans
placed Northern Aryan blood lines at the top of theirs. In Australia, the
situation was more complicated, since eugenics was introduced into the
country by races and groups with different ideas about who was at the top of
the hierarchy. They agreed, however, on who was at the bottom of the ladder
they created: Aboriginal people and those from the Torres Strait Islands.
Accompanying indigenous people at the bottom of the eugenic hierarchy,
were (and are) drug addicts, alcoholics and the mentally ill. These
people were also inevitably from the poorer sections of society, and the
eugenics movement was very much a club for the rich. Rich men were the
only people involved in the inner circle of eugenic policy devisers, and
many of them were highly respected (at the time) doctors and professors.
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These men turned a blind eye to their own failings and diagnosed a range of
other races, cultures, classes and individuals as defective, constructing
names, such as schizophrenic to identify them and euthanase them.
Euthanasia was the name given by eugenists (eugenicists) for the many cruel
methods of mercy killing employed to rid the world of defective and
degenerate individuals and races.
Eugenic theory first developed in the last years of legal slavery by
European Imperial Nations. Nations involved in the slave trade of African
people included Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Belgium and Holland
(Nederlands) in Europe which exported slaves to North and South America
(especially Brazil) as well as the West Indies, Cuba and elsewhere. The
Governments and monarchies of these countries fought an ongoing war with
each other over slaves from what they later termed the Third World. Each
government sanctioned the taking of children, women and men of all ages
forcibly to another country where they were subjected to cruel abuses as
well as being compelled to work in captivity. The above nations, all of
whom obtained slaves from Africa, also were involved in genocide of people
in the colonised country. The purpose of this genocide was to rid the land
of indigenous people and populate it with people loyal to the colonising
country. This military and political strategy became notorious as the British
divide and rule policy, which might better have been termed genocide
and rule.
In this policy, minority groups and individuals with loyalty to England and
the British Empire were placed in positions of power and authority over
the majority population. They were then encouraged to engage in nepotism
and also to follow ongoing instructions from London. Later a middle class
of professionally trained people from other Commonwealth countries was
placed in administrative positions in different countries, again in the hope
that they would maintain loyalty to the anglophile institutions that trained
them, as well as the British Crown and British national interests. This
policy was instituted in Australia, America, parts of Africa (especially
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Rhodesia and South Africa), New Zealand and parts of Asia. The British
Empire also took slaves from South India to Sri Lanka, Fiji, the West Indies
and other British colonies.
The South Indian slaves taken to Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon, were
forced to live in concentration camps and work for less than a subsistence
wage on European-owned tea estates. These included estates owned by
Liptons, Bushells and other large British based tea companies. The estates
were usually administered and managed by Sri Lankans of mixed European
and Singhalese or Tamil descent (Burghers). Tamils, who speak a different
language to the Singhalese majority population, were placed by the British
in influential positions within the colonial administration of Ceylon. These
Tamils were initially educated in English at Indian universities, but later
both Singhalese and Tamils were trained at the University of Ceylon in
Colombo. Scholarships and opportunities for private education at British
Universities were also provided by the British Empire, and thousands of
foreign graduates were produced by the old British Universities in the 1950s
and 60s. These foreign graduates were regarded, however, as second class
citizens by the British academic hierarchy, and many returned to their
homelands in the 1960s and 70s.
Over the past three decades, however, many of these anglophile
professionals from Sri Lanka and other Commonwealth countries have been
employed in the public service (including the health system) in Australia,
Canada, New Zealand and other previously white British colonies. Some
of these have been involved in the development and implementation of the
extensive psychiatric secret police system in Australia.
Recent newspaper reports have revealed worrying military and para-military
activities by the British in the Australian region. These have included
activities in Timor, New Guinea, Australia and New Zealand.
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Shortly before the Allies invasion of Timor, an extraordinary meeting

occurred in New Zealand. It was extraordinary because it was supposed to
be an Asia-Pacific Economic Community (APEC) conference, and most of
the Asian nations boycotted the meeting. It was also extraordinary because
the British Foreign Minister Robin Cook was there and was given a
prominent platform on which to call for war. Britain is not a member of
APEC, and the Asian leaders were wise to suspect foul play by the Allies.
The term Allies is here used to describe the old World War Two Allies,
who became allied again against freedom in Asia, Timor and New Guinea.
The late 1990s have been accompanied by a flourishing of private prisons
and private mercenary military activity in this part of the world. In
Melbourne the British private security company Group of Four have
been involved in the imprisonment of more and more young Victorian
people in private prisons. Group of Four security guards have recently also
been seen in a public psychiatric hospital, where they were asked by public
hospital psychiatric nurses to discipline involuntarily detained public
patients. This occurred at the Alfred Hospital in Prahran, one of the many
hospitals included in the Inner and Eastern Health Care Network.
The Health Care Network System was instituted by the Liberal Party
Kennett Government, and involved a direct attempt by the larger hospitals to
take over the funds of the smaller ones. These larger hospitals included the
Alfred Hospital, which is now co-administered with the Royal Eye and Ear
Hospital, Box Hill Hospital, Maroondah Hospital and Peter MacCallum
Cancer Institute. In the Age newspaper, on 18.12.99, a story by Mary-anne
Toy suggests that some of the truth of the politics behind the Health Care
Networks is now being revealed. Toy writes:
Tens of thousands of dollars donated by the public to the Peter
MacCallum Cancer Institute may have been siphoned off by a health
authority to plug budget deficits in other public hospitals.
Peter MacCallum is now part of the Inner and Eastern Healthcare
Network and the network board has the authority to redirect money
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donated to the cancer hospital anywhere in the network unless it has

been expressly reserved for a particular project.
In other words, people who donate money for what they intend to be help for
the ill can find their donations used for completely different reasons. More
seriously, some of the hospitals included in the Inner and Eastern Health
Care Network are involved in cruel and degrading treatment of people held
against their wills in psychiatric wards. These people are being
systematically given crippling injections and electroshock treatment, often
against their will. It is disturbing that funds given for the purposes of
supporting medical research into cancer and the treatment of cancer-affected
people should be diverted into treatments that many in society would
disapprove of if they knew about it. It is also disturbing that mercenary
police forces are given free reign in Australia in the form of Group of
Four run prisons and other private prisons. It is even more so because the
treatments of people in these prisons and the contracts between private
prison contractors and Governments are being kept from the Australian
people and the world.
In New Guinea the activities of British mercenaries came to light with the
revelations of Bill Skates Governments arrangements with the Sandline
company to provide mercenaries to put down the rebellion in the island of
Bouganville. This arrangement was to cost millions of dollars, and the deal
was again kept from the world in a corrupt secret arrangement that amounts
to treason by the New Guinean Government. It is of note that the New
Guinea Government, centred in Port Moresby, is heavily dependent on the
Commonwealth of Australia for its authority and finance. It is also important
to understand that independence movements are active all over the world,
and that it is global suicide to employ mercenary forces to subdue such
movements, since they will aggravate global warfare.
Bouganville is a small copper-rich island to the east of New Britain and
Papua New Guinea. It lies between New Britain and the Solomon Islands,
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which were also part of the British Empire. These islands and New Guinea
itself are home to a Melanesian race of people, who have lived in this area of
the world for millenia. They share a racial and cultural heritage with
Australian aboriginal people and Torres Strait Islanders. These people are
the rightful owners of the copper deposits in Bouganville, as well as the
other natural resources of the island. However, such rights are being
trampled on by the Australian and British mining companies which have
long exploited the indigenous people as cheap labour while stealing the
resources of their country. Similar situations occur all over the world,
including Australia.
New Guinea has suffered a similar fate, and the people of this large forested
island have also been subject to the divide and rule policy. New Guinea was
literally divided into East and West halves by Dutch and British masters. The
West New Guineans were given the choice of rule by Dutch masters or death
and the East New Guineans were given a similar choice by British colonists.
Freedom and Independence were not offered by the colonial rulers until after
the Second World War, when native New Guineans, Solomon Islanders,
Australian aboriginals and other Australians, New Zealanders and Torres
Strait Islanders were forced to give their lives for the British Empire and
Allied Forces. Millions of colonised people died in this war, which began
as one between the colonising European nations. Japan and the United States
of America entered the war later, and each made a grab for the nearest
territory, following the lead of the older slaving nations. The Japanese, as all
children in Australia are taught, invaded China, South East Asia and
Indonesia, bombed Darwin in Northern Australia and were thought to be
poised to invade Australia.
In reality it is most unlikely that Japanese would have attempted to invade
Australia in any way other than the way they did so after the end of the
Second World War: as tourists and landowners. The Japanese generally love
Japan, just as most Australians love Australia. Japanese generally like living
in Japan, and prefer to visit Australia rather than attack it. The current attack
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from Japan, and other nations, comes not so much from individuals but from
institutions, and these institutions are mainly engaged in economic warfare,
espionage and stealth warfare against Australia, rather than conventional
warfare and invasions.
Japan and Germany were rebuilt after the Second World War by American
and British finance, and also by Jewish finance, centred in Switzerland and
other tax-havens. The Global Economy that was constructed after the
Second World War was centred in Geneva in Switzerland, which had
adopted a neutral position in the Second World War. During the European
War of the 1930s, Italy and Spain sided with Germany and France and
England united against the Nazis. Russia fought its own war against
Germany, whilst most of Europe was conquered by the Germans without
significant resistance. This included Austria, Norway, Sweden, Belgium,
Switzerland, Denmark and Holland. This may be because the Governments
in these nations agreed with the basic Nazi philosophy, which was that of
genocidal eugenics. Maybe the people in these countries were too frightened
to resist the ferocity and brutality of the Nazis. Maybe they did not know
what was happening and were kept in the dark by media blackouts and Nazi
propaganda. War is a very confusing thing.
Nazi philosophy assumed that people with white skin were superior to
those with black skin, and the many different hues of humanity were
divided into blacks and whites. This was a central precept of eugenic
theory. The experts in the theory further classified people along
anthropological lines into different races based on Blumenbachs division
of humanity into black, brown, red, yellow and white races.
Eugenic theory was practiced differently in different countries that passed
eugenic laws earlier this century, but the theory inevitably brought atrocities
to every nation that embraced this racist medico-political theory. This is
because eugenics is divided into positive eugenics and negative
eugenics. Positive eugenics involves the encouragement of people with
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good genes to have more children. In Nazi eugenic theory, these people
had white skin and preferably blonde hair and blue eyes. These were
favoured as aesthetically superior to dark features. It is ironic that images of
Jesus of Nazareth, a man of Semitic origin, was portrayed at this time in
Nazi sympathising countries as having blonde hair and blue eyes.
Negative eugenics was (and is) centred on preventing those accused of
having defective genes and defective blood-lines from breeding. It is sad
to reflect that the Christian Churches did little to prevent the Nazi atrocities
of negative eugenics and played a significant role in condoning and aiding
the abuse. Children in the care of the Catholic and Protestant Churches in
Europe were, at this time voluntarily given up by Church authorities for
negative eugenic treatment. This involved diagnosing these children as
mentally ill or degenerate and sentencing them either to sterilisation or
death. Sterilised children were then sold into slavery. Children who were
considered unfit to live were killed in a variety of ways by people who
called themselves doctors and nurses. Chemicals were tested on them
for toxicity, and drugs and infections were forced into them. The effects of
starvation combined with hard labour on people who were being tortured in
a variety of ways were studied scientifically by men who called themselves
professors, physiologists, and medical researchers.
The Nazi Party also developed a notorious secret police system of gestapo,
and a social system based on social and familial betrayal. Children were
encouraged to inform on their parents in Nazi schools and neighbours were
encouraged to spy on each other and report dissident behaviour to the
authorities. An intricate system of espionage was accompanied by forced
confessions, framing of innocent people with crimes, summary executions,
arbitrary arrest, political incarcerations and other features of repressive
political systems.
The detailed systems of interrogation and framing by the Nazis was
developed by eugenists, many of whom were psychiatrists. Germany already
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had an international reputation for psychiatry prior to the Second World War.
Professor Edward Shorter, in A History of Psychiatry (1997), writes:
Germany became the world leader in psychiatry during the
nineteenth century precisely because of this dispersal of academic
talent into many separate universities, each nurtured by the dynastic
ambition of its own little principality. Germany possessed some 20
separate universities in addition to two medical academies, each
struggling for glory and competing in a lively race for scientific
advancement against the others.
Shorter is Professor in History of Medicine at the University of Toronto
(Canada) and is a keen supporter of biological psychiatry, but even he has
to admit to the connection between eugenic evil, Nazism and psychiatry:
Part and parcel of European culture, the fateful notion of
degeneration was picked up by the eugenists, by social-hygienists
intent on combating mental retardation with sterilization, and by
antidemocratic political forces with a deep hatred of degenerate
groups such as homosexuals and Jews. Psychiatrys responsibility for
all this is only a partial one. Academic psychiatrists in the 1920s were
not generally associated with right-wing doctrines of racial hygiene,
though there were exceptions to this, such as the Swiss psychiatrist
Ernst Rudin who after 1907 worked at the university psychiatric clinic
in Munich, and the Freiburg professor Alfred Hoche who in 1920
coauthored a justification for euthanasia. Academic medicine in
Germany on the whole stood waist-deep in the Nazi sewer, and bears
heavy responsibility for the disaster that followed. After 1933,
degeneration became an official part of Nazi ideology. Hitlers
machinery of death singled out Jews, people with mental retardation,
and other supposedly biological degenerates for campaigns of
destruction. (p.99)
In the above passage, Edward Shorter gives a very inaccurate account of the
targets of Nazi mass-murder. The killing was not, in fact, limited to
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degenerate races, which, by the way, also included Negroes, Poles, Russians,
Gypsies and other races, in addition to Jews. The Nazis also targetted
political dissidents, regardless of race, particularly pacifists, socialists and
communists. In addition to the mentally retarded, many others of normal
and exceptionally high intellect were also sterilised or euthanased if they
were from the wrong cultural, social, religious or political background.
These were generally diagnosed as mentally ill with labels such as moral
degeneracy, schizophrenia and personality disorders. Shorter also fails
to mention that eugenic laws recommending the castration of mental
defectives were passed in several states of the United States of America
many years before the Nazi atrocities, or the widespread acceptance of
negative eugenics by British, South African and Australian doctors and
academics before and after the Nazi holocaust.
A unique psychiatric secret police system has been developed in Australia
over the past ten years, under the guise of The National Mental Health
Strategy. This system has several stated objectives, and has had very
different practical results. It is ostensibly designed to streamline the mental
health services, get institutionalised people into the community, and treat
the worsening mental illness problem in Australia. The mental illness
problem is said to include depression, anxiety, panic, schizophrenia,
attention deficit, hyperactivity, drug addiction, alcoholism and
many others. However, these are names, not cures. There is no known cure
for most of the diagnoses promoted by the Mental Health Strategy, and the
treatment is almost exclusively on treatment with often addictive drugs.
Routinely, people who do not want to be drugged are forcibly injected with
tranquillisers simply because they refuse to agree that they are mentally ill
(termed lack of insight) and thus refuse to take drugs voluntarily. The
entire psychiatric system in Australia is one where people are given drugs as
the sole focus, and punished for refusing to take them. It is drug enforcement
of a different type.
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Integrated with the psychiatric system in Australia are mobile treatment

teams, which visit people at home and ensure compliance with drug taking.
These people are trained in eliciting evidence of mental illness and are not
above fabricating such if they are unable to detect it. They also have the
authority to break into peoples houses and take them away for treatment in
public hospitals with the assistance of State police. No warrant is necessary
for such intrusions and the paperwork authorising such actions may be
signed by doctors who have never met the person to be taken in for
treatment.
In Victoria, these actions are carried out by people who call themselves
health workers and may be qualified as doctors, nurses, psychologists or
social workers. They are systematically programmed into negative eugenics
before they are allowed to work in these mobile attack and treatment teams,
termed CAT teams. CAT team is an acronym for Crisis Assessment and
Treatment Team, but inevitably it is the team that creates the crisis. People
generally do not react well to being spied on in their own homes and injected
with drugs against their will. This sort of abuse can be stopped by curtailing
secret police activities in Australia and the British Commonwealth, and by
ignoring corrupt hierarchies based on principles of slavery.
The abolition of secret police activities in Australia will result in greater
freedom and peace of mind for the Australian people, since such activities
breed paranoia both in the secret police and the population they suspect of
being drug addicts, terrorists, mentally ill, criminals and
degenerates. Such prejudices have no place in a free, just, democratic
society. I believe most Australians aspire to such a home, as do people
around the world.
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30. SCHIZOPHRENIA AND DOPAMINE-BLOCKERS

Schizophrenia was invented in 1911 by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen
Bleuler (1857-1939), who crafted diagnostic criteria for this mental illness
of young people from the condition termed dementia praecox by the
German psychiatry professor Emil Kraepelin (1855-1926) in the 1890s.
Michael Stone, in Healing the Mind, writes:
Succeeding Forel as the director of the famed Burgholzli clinic in
1898, Bleuler worked intensively with psychotic patients, visiting and
talking with them five or six times a week, such that his familiarity
with them was comparable to that of psychoanalysts with their
patients (who were also seen about five times a week in this era). His
great monograph on the group of schizophrenias appeared in 1911;
here he proposed a new definition of the condition Kraepelin and
others had been calling dementia praecox. Bleuler identified the
primary signs of this condition, which have become known as the
four As: autism, loosening of associations, ambivalence, and affect
inappropriateness. The latter trait was the key element for Bleuler:
The patient who smiled while talking of the death of his mother, or
who cried while talking of inheriting a fortune, was showing a split
(Greek: schizo) between thought and affect: hence his term
schizophrenia. Ambivalence and autism were also words Bleuler
coined. (p.146)
It is difficult to see how autism (inability or refusal to speak) and these
other abnormalities could be detected in people who do not speak the
same language as the diagnoser. How does one tell if a persons mental
associations are loosened when they have a completely different belief
system, mode of speech and conceptual framework; when they think and
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speak in another language? It is easy to judge smiling or crying

inappropriately as suggestive of madness evidenced by inappropriate
affect if the reasons for such emotions are not understood due to linguistic,
social and cultural differences and barriers. It is equally unclear as to how
injections or tablets of dopamine-blockers can improve such symptoms.
There have been many changes in the accepted criteria for diagnosis of
schizophrenia in the modern world, however, and considerable differences
exist in different parts of the world. This is mentioned in the World Health
Organizations Handbook for the Schizophrenic Disorders (1995), which
was written by Heidi Sumich, Gavin Andrews and Caroline Hunt of the
Clinical Research Unit for Anxiety Disorders of the University of New
South Wales at St Vincents Hospital, Sydney and underwritten by the
New South Wales Institute of Psychiatry:
There is no single specific symptom that is required for a diagnosis of
schizophrenia. In other words, the symptoms experienced by one person
may not be exactly the same as the symptoms experienced by another
person. However, as a group, people with schizophrenia display an
identifiable set of symptoms. If someone exhibits one or more of these
symptoms for a specified length of time, he or she may then be regarded
as having a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
The American Psychiatric Associations (APA) Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) is the
alternative major diagnostic classificatory system to ICD-10 [the World
Health Organizations International Classification of Diseases]. In
DSM-IV, the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia differ slightly [!] from
ICD-10 in relation to the duration of time for which symptoms are
required to have been present prior to diagnosis. DSM-IV requires a
minimum duration of six months, including a prodromal or residual
phase, while ICD-10 requires the persistence of symptoms for only one
month.
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The handbook continues to explain how these symptoms of

schizophrenia are to be elicited, claiming that the most important symptoms
and signs include hallucinations, delusions, thought disturbances,
disordered thinking and negative symptoms (these are very different to
Bleulers criteria). Detailed methods for acquiring evidence of these
abnormalities are given in the Handbook for the Schizophrenic Disorders,
which was distributed to health workers in Australia by the Belgian drug
company Janssen-Cilag, which manufactures several drugs for the treatment
(but not the cure, which is said to be impossible) of schizophrenia,
including the crippling dopamine-blocker haloperidol, which is marketed as
injections, syrup and tablets of Haldol. This drug has been used around the
world for the punishment of social and political dissidents over the past 40
years. The manual contains a series of questions and interpretations for
doctors and other health workers designed to increase both diagnosis of
mental abnormality and treatment with Haldol and related drugs, and for
the most dubious of reasons. Injections and coerced ingestion of Haldol have
resulted in literally millions of people being crippled with tardive dyskinesia
and other forms of chronic brain damage since the 1960s. Others have died
from overdoses (deliberate or unintentional) of Haldol.
The Handbook for the Schizophrenic Disorders contains a dangerously overinclusive set of diagnostic criteria enshrined as the W.H.O.s Brief
Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS). In it, hallucinations are described as
seeing, hearing, smelling, or tasting things that other people do not see,
hear, smell, sense or taste [which could be due to greater sensitivity] and
are to be elicited by the following questions:
Do you ever seem to hear your name being called?
Have you heard any sounds or people talking to you or about you
when there has been nobody around?
Do you ever have visions or see things that others do not see? What
about smell odors that others do not smell?
It is easy to see why schizophrenia was not diagnosed in Biblical times.
All the prophets and visionaries, including Jesus Christ, would have been
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committed for involuntary psychiatric treatment. People who believe that

they are Jesus Christ rate a special mention in the manual, for these people
are suffering from the typical delusions of schizophrenia:
Delusions [are] false beliefs that are firmly held despite objective
and contradictory evidence, and despite the fact that other members of
the culture do not share the same beliefs; for example, the person may
believe that he or she is Jesus Christ, or that he or she is being
followed, poisoned, or experimented upon.
What about the people under surveillance in the numerous police states
around the world, and what about the people who are being poisoned and
experimented on by the psychiatric industry itself? These people can expect
a diagnosis of delusions after being asked the following questions, which
are apparently indicative of unusual thought content if answered in the
affirmative:
Have you been receiving any special messages from people or from
the way things are arranged around you? Have you seen any
references to yourself on TV or in the newspapers?
Can anyone read your mind?
Do you have a special relationship with God?
Is anything like electricity, X-rays, or radio waves affecting you?
Are thoughts put into your head that are not your own?
Have you felt that you were under the control of another person or
force?
Bizarre behaviour, another sign of schizophrenia is to be detected by
asking:
Have you done anything that has attracted the attention of others?
Have you done anything that could have gotten you into trouble with
the police? [the word gotten betrays an American origin for the
BPRS]
Have you done anything that seemed unusual or disturbing to
others?
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In the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (attributed in the manual to the World
Health Organization) is a description of self neglect which is archconservative, verging on fascist. A rating of 2 for self neglect is to be
recorded for hygiene/appearance slightly below usual community
standards, e.g., shirt out of pants, buttons unbuttoned, shoe laces untied, but
no social or medical consequences. A rating of 3 (out of 7, which is
extremely severe) is merited by hygeine/appearance occasionally below
usual community standards, e.g., irregular bathing, clothing is stained, hair
uncombed, occasionally skips an important meal with no social or medical
consequences. To be mentally well the manual insists that we should be
eating three meals a day, which many Australians cannot afford, and many
others choose not to consume. This strange obsession with regular meals is
repeated in grade 4 self-neglect which is to be recorded by the health
worker if a person fails to bathe or change clothes or is thought to have,
clothing very soiled, hair unkempt, OR irregular eating and drinking with
minimal medical concerns and consequences.
It is difficult to see how genetic defects and chemical imbalances can be
blamed for failing to tuck ones shirt in ones pants, and eat three meals a
day. In addition, the handbook contains a single-paged table on which the
level of severity (from a mild 2 to a very severe 7) of 24 symptoms and
signs elicited by the leading questions can be formally recorded by the
health worker. The forms are suitable for analysis by a computer, and
provide a checklist of abnormalities to detect. These include: somatic
concern, anxiety, depression, suicidality, guilt, hostility, elated mood,
grandiosity, suspiciousness, hallucinations, unusual thought content, bizarre
behavior, self neglect, disorientation, conceptual disorganization, blunted
affect, emotional withdrawal, motor retardation, tension, uncooperativeness,
excitement, distractibility, motor hyperactivity, mannerisms and posturing.
Suspiciousness is to be elicited by the following questions:

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Do you ever feel uncomfortable in public? Does it seem as though

others are watching you? Are you concerned about anyones
intentions toward you? In anyone going out of their way to give you a
hard time, or trying to hurt you? Do you feel in any danger?
For those who study psychiatry professionally, meaning they first gain
medical degrees from recognised universities, further training in techniques
of interrogation are obligatory, always seeking evidence of mental illness.
The recommended undergraduate textbook in Psychiatry for medical
students in Melbourne is Foundations of Clinical Psychiatry written in
collaboration between psychiatry professors at the University of Melbourne
and Monash University, and published in 1994 by Melbourne University
Press. In the chapter titled the psychiatric interview and evaluation of the
mental state Professor Nicholas Keks explains how persecutory delusions
can be inferred and that they are not necessarily untrue to qualify as
delusions (reflected also in the psychiatric truism that a delusion is still
a delusion even if it transpires, by coincidence, to be correct !):
Delusions with religious or subcultural content can prove difficult to
assess. Usually consultations with a member of the patients social group
is necessary. It should also be kept in mind that what appear to be
persecutory delusions may be true. It is not whether the delusion is
absolutely false that is relevant, but rather that the belief is adhered to by
the patient very firmly despite manifestly insufficient or inappropriate
evidence. For instance, a man was convinced that his wife was having an
affair, and indeed she was in a secret relationship. However, the
husbands conviction arose from the interpretation he placed on entirely
unrelated events such as the numbers printed on the letter he received
from the tax office.
In eliciting delusions, it is useful to first ask a question which should
elicit a positive response from anyone, and then to probe further for
abnormal thought content. For instance: Do you ever feel self-conscious
or shy in a new place or with strangers? The answer should be yes if
the question was understood. Then the patient can be asked whether they
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worry if people laugh behind their back, and so on, progressing to ask
about organised persecution. (pp.73-74)
It is assumed that belief in organised persecution is indicative of serious
mental illness: namely schizophrenia. What of hundreds of years of
organised slavery and other colonial atrocities? Did these end with the
official abolition of slavery by the French in 1794? Or by the British in
1834? Or by the United States of America in 1863? Or by the Belgians in
1904? Did organised persecution of Australian aborigines end with the
banning of blackbirding (kidnapping of Aboriginal and Islander slaves) in
1874? Was the 1940s persecution and mass-murder of people diagnosed as
schizophrenic in Nazi Germany disorganised? What about the diagnosis
of sluggish schizophrenia in Soviet political dissidents during the 1960s
and 1970s?
Rather than looking for the social, political and historical origins of
schizophrenia, the Mental Health Research Institute (MHRI) in Melbourne
is, in addition to conducting an extensive genetic study of schizophrenia,
actively engaged in trying to establish biological abnormalities in
diagnosed schizophrenics. The focus of the work of the Molecular
Schizophrenia Division is on the neurotransmitters dopamine and
serotonin. The institutes 1997 Annual report explains:
Dopamine is a chemical within the brain which is thought to be
important in the pathology of schizophrenia. The major evidence for this
is that drugs which behave like dopamine in the brain can cause a
psychosis reminiscent of schizophrenia in non-schizophrenic individuals.
In addition, the antipsychotic drugs that are used to treat schizophrenia
reduce the activity of dopamine in the human brain. Together, these
observations suggest that over-activity of the dopamine neuronal
pathways are important in the pathology of the illness. (p.18)
In other words, because dopamine-blocking drugs which have been forced
into people to treat schizophrenia (and mania) for several decades affect
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this particular neurotransmitter, dopamine must be at the root of the

postulated biochemical imbalance in this illness. It is a deft reversal of
logic, and if statistically significant differences were discovered it would
be very difficult to ascribe dopamine receptor abnormalities to the illness
rather than the treatment. As it turns out, after examining many brains from
dead schizophrenics, the researchers were unable to pronounce any
difference between theirs and those of normal people:
Within the Molecular Schizophrenia Division there are a number of
strategies being employed to determine whether dopamine is involved
in the pathology of schizophrenia. Tabasum Hussain and Susie
Kitsoulis have measured the density of dopamine receptors in samples
of brain tissue obtained from subjects who have had schizophrenia
[with their permission?] and compared these measures from
individuals who have not had schizophrenia. There was no difference
in dopamine receptor quantities in either the caudate putamen or
frontal cortex of subjects with schizophrenia. In addition, Robyn
Bradbury has shown that there is no difference in dopamine receptor
numbers in the hippocampus of people with schizophrenia. Our data
have shown that dopamine receptor quantities do not appear to be
altered in the brains of subjects with schizophrenia.
Not daunted by yet another failure to demonstrate actual abnormality in the
brains of people diagnosed as schizophrenic, the MHRI is also
investigating serotonin neurobiology and schizophrenia, again because
drugs which are used on people labelled schizophrenic affect this
neurotransmitter, which is also the focus of a marketing campaign for new
antidepressants. Here the institute claims to have had some success, but also
plans to make some ridiculous inferences from studies on rats:
Developments are being made on what cause the changes in the
serotonin transporter in subjects with schizophrenia. Lee Naylor has
discovered that by injecting rats with a drug called 5,7-dihydroxy
tryptamine, she can cause changes in their serotonin transporter which
are similar to those we have seen in subjects with schizophrenia. If her
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early findings are confirmed, then this may provide a model by which
the changes in the serotonin transporter in the human brain can be
studied using rat brains. (p.19)
In a situation repeated in all the large research institutions in Australia, most
of the repetitive, often meaningless, sometimes dangerous work which
includes handling potentially infectious tissue samples is done by young
women, often of ethnic background. The Board of Directors, however is
consistently middle aged, all-white and heavily male dominated, with
usually one or two token female board members.
The Chairman and Company Director of the Mental Health Research
Institute, which received grants totalling $5,484,523 in 1997, is Professor
Ben Lochtenberg, qualified with a Bachelor of Engineering (BE), and
medically unqualified. He is also Chairman of ICI Australia (Imperial
Chemical Industries), Director of Capral Aluminium and a Board Member of
the Inner and Eastern Health Care Network. He is a member of the
University of Melbourne Council and the former Chairman of the
Ministerial Review of Medical Staffing in Victorias Public Hospital
System according to the 1997 Annual Report. All 14 members of the Board
of Management in 1997 were white, and 12 were male. They included one
professor of psychiatry (David Copolov, the Institute Director), one
professor of medicine (Robert Porter, who is also Board Member of the
Southern Health Care Network and Member of Council, Victorian Institute
of Forensic Medicine), a professor of surgery (Gordon Clunie, a Scottish
surgeon, now retired), three lawyers, an accountant (who is treasurer of the
institute) and an economist. The female members were Dame Margaret
Guilfoyle, who is described as Deputy Chairman of the Infertility
Treatment Authority, Chairman of the Judicial Remuneration Authority and
Board Member of the Childrens Television Foundation and Dulcie Boling,
who is described in the 1997 Annual Report as Director of Seven Network,
Mercantile Mutual Holdings Ltd, Multi Media Asia Pacific Ltd and Country
Road Ltd. Dame Guilfoyle also is the former Chairman of the Human
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Rights Commission Inquiry into Rights of People with Mental Illness. One
might wonder, from the Annual Report of the MHRI, how closely the Board
Members of the institute identify with the problems of the oppressed and
dispossessed in Australia. Unless we are to imagine that in our free
country no one is oppressed or dispossessed.
In addition to their studies on schizophrenics brains and those who died
with Alzheimers disease, the MHRI is also involved in the Clozaril Patient
Monitoring System (CPMS), which, according to the institutes report, is an
independent monitoring system established by the Mental Health Research
Institute. It is funded by Novartis Australia. Novartis (which also markets
Ritalin for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder) is the only company
that sells Clozaril (clozapine) in Australia. The reason it needs to be closely
monitored is that clozapine is a very toxic drug, as the report admits, whilst
maintaining that it is a good drug for refractory schizophrenia:
Clozapine is an atypical antipsychotic agent of the dibenzodiazepine
class of compounds. It is chemically and pharmacologically distinct from
standard antipsychotic drugs and has been shown to improve both the
positive and negative psychotic symptoms in many patients with
schizophrenia who are unresponsive to, or intolerant of present day
therapy, while producing minimal extrapyramidal side effects.
Unfortunately, clozapine can cause a life threatening decrease in the
number of white blood cells (usually the neutrophils) in some people. At
present there is no way to determine who may be at risk from this effect,
but it is known that anyone who has experienced this problem cannot be
exposed to the drug again.
The toxicity if the drug is such that:
Everyone using clozapine must have a weekly blood test for the first
18 weeks of treatment, and then blood tests must be performed no less
than every 28 days thereafter.
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Agranulocytosis is not the only problem clozapine can cause. The 1999
MIMS lists: agranulocytosis, granulocytopenia, other haematological
disturbances, fatigue, drowsiness, sedation, dizziness, headache, weight
gain, hypotension, tachycardia, transient pyrexia (fever), extrapyramidal
symptoms (such as Parkinsonism), seizures, neuroleptic malignant syndrome
(another potentially fatal adverse effect), dream intensification,
hypersalivation, hyperthermia and others.
The 1996 American Publication Inside the Brain, by Pulitzer prize-winner
Ronald Kotulak, purchased from the Monash University Bookshop, makes
no mention of these problems. Kotulak, an enthusiastic promoter of any and
all the drugs mentioned in the book, gives clozapine his full support:
Unlike the standard antipsychotic drugs and tranquilisers, which
often render patients dulled and sedated, the new medications leave
them clearheaded.
One such drug is clozapine (Clozaril), which dampens explosive
aggression and clears psychotic thoughts. At places like the Mendota
Mental Health Institute in Madison, Wisconsin, clozapine has swung
open the doors of the back wards, allowing patients once doomed to a
lifetime under tight security to move into the community, going to
school and work.
Doctors who have seen the drugs effect are enthusiastic. Its like
these people were living under a spell and clozapine is breaking the
spell, said Dr.Gary J. Maier, of the University of Wisconsin, and
director of psychiatric services at Mendota, which houses the states
most violent patients. When that happens the long-standing immature
personality that had been struggling to be healthy but couldnt
because it kept going crazy is freed. They start to grow up.
Harvards Dr. John Ratey, who treats Massachusetts most violent
criminals at Medfield State Hospital, also is sending some of his
patients home after putting them on clozapine. He called it the most
exciting new drug Ive ever seen and likened its effect to a guided
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missile that goes right to the site of aggression in the brain without
making patients stupid, apathetic, sleepy, or non-sexual. (p.88)
By inference, the usual drugs used for psychotic disorders do cause
these problems. Ronald Kotulak, a science reporter, was not commissioned
by the editor of the Chicago Tribune to criticise the new drugs but to praise
them, and to find out Why do some children turn out bad? This question is
the motive given in the introduction, anyway, and the answer Kotulak
provides is simplistic and misleading: brain chemistry accompanied by
being brought up in bad neighborhoods. When he describes these bad
neighborhoods as being characterised by poverty, single mothers, and lower
education and income levels it becomes clear that black neighbourhoods
fit his description of bad neighbourhoods. It is also evident that several
pharmaceutical companies stood to benefit from his book, particularly
Novartis, the manufacturers of Clozaril, and the makers of the new
antidepressants, including Eli Lilly, manufacturers of Prozac, which is
promoted several times in the book.
A key factor in the chemical imbalance theories propagated by Kotulak
and the marketing strategies for new antidepressants is blaming the
neurotransmitter serotonin for a ludicrous range of mental illnesses and
mental abnormalities. Conveniently, the new SSRI (Selective Serotonin
Reuptake Inhibitor) drugs are known to primarily affect serotonin
metabolism. With scant regard for scientific evidence, Kotulak writes:
Low serotonin is common to many mental problems in which one
or more of our drives bursts out of its chemical corral.
Medical researchers found that most of these disorders may be
treatable with drugs that change serotonin levels. First developed to
halt the uncontrollable aggression of schizophrenia and depression,
these drugs are now being used or tested for a wide variety of
problems, including alcoholism, eating disorders, premenstrual
syndrome, migraines, anger attacks, manic-depressive disorder,
obsessive-compulsive disorders, anxiety, sleep disorders, memory
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impairment, drug abuse, sexual perversions, irritability, Parkinsons

disease, Alzheimers, depersonalization disorder, borderline
personality, autism and brain injuries. (p.88)
This gives some indication of the widespread experimentation that has
occurred since SSRI drugs were developed. They were developed, however,
as antidepressants, not antipsychotics or anti-parkinsonian drugs. The
list above, rather than demonstrating a low serotonin aetiology, merely
shows that when a new psychiatric drug is developed the medical profession
tends to experiment widely with it, trying it out on patients with a range of
different problems. This has occurred with the whole spectrum of psychiatric
drugs, including minor tranquillisers, major tranquillisers, lithium,
antidepressants and amphetamines. In fact, if one looks at the history of
medical chemical discoveries, such as the discovery of new hormones, one
of the routine targets for experiments have been psychiatric patients. Thus,
the discovery of insulin in 1921 was followed the next year by trying out
insulin-comas as a treatment for the insane. Cocaine, heroin and
amphetamines were widely used by the medical profession at the beginning
of the 20th century prior to them being designated (illegal) dangerous drugs.
Indeed cocaine, heroin and amphetamines are dangerous drugs, but so are
dopamine-blockers
(antipsychotics),
benzodiazepine
(minor)
tranquillisers and alcohol. Nicotine is also a dangerous drug, and so is
Prozac. All these drugs have caused deaths directly and indirectly.
All these drugs (except nicotine and alcohol) were introduced to the worlds
human population by the medical profession, and all have been deliberately
injected into experimental animals to test their toxicity. These animals have
included mice, rats, cats, dogs, sheep, goats, monkeys and chimpanzees.
With complete insensitivity towards the suffering of our closest primate
relatives, chimpanzees have been force-fed alcohol (to cause cirrhosis) and
fitted with masks that forced them to inhale cigarette smoke; they have been
deliberately infected with human pathogens and psychologically traumatised
so that scientists can tell us more about human illness. It is assumed that
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by finding out more about illness we will simultaneously understand how to

cure and prevent it and that this end justifies the unpleasant means (of
creating illness in animals). This is a complex issue, and many hold that the
suffering and sacrifice of animals is vital for medical progress and the
development of scientific knowledge.
Most of the animals killed by the scientific establishment in Australia (and
the world) today are not being sacrificed for a good reason. They are being
tortured and killed because they are victims of a lucrative multi-billiondollar industry. This industry breeds animals just so that they can be
experimented on using modern genetic technology and knowledge rats
mice, rabbits and other animals that are genetically vulnerable to cancer and
infections are being bred so they can be studied after exposing them to
various stressors and then killing them. The publication of research findings,
inevitably non-conclusive and requiring further (animal) experimentation is
itself a multi-billion-dollar industry as is the medical reasearch training
industry. They are not trained to bite the hand that feeds them.
31. A PSYCHOANALYSIS OF PSYCHIATRY

In recent years, many psychiatry departments in Australia have changed their
name to departments of psychological medicine, however, over the past
100 years, the philosophical, political and theoretical divide between
psychology and psychiatry (a medical specialty) has been deep, and in
many ways irreconcilable. It remains the case that genuine psychology
(scientific knowledge of the mind) and healing psychiatry (medical
treatment of psychological problems) cannot be achieved without a complete
transformation of both disciplines. It will require more than changes of
name. It will need a change from a system of labels, statistics, punitive
treatments, patriarchal attitudes and hierarchies to one where the complexity
of different cultures and individual perspectives is understood and valued. It
is hoped that the new systems of psychiatry and psychology are more open,
egalitarian and democratic than those of the present, which tend to be
secretive, ruled by old boy clubs, prejudices and negative preconceptions
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about psych patients (now officially called clients and consumers of the
Mental Health Services). In Australia the domination of psychiatrists over
psychologists is obvious, especially in the hospital system. It is a sad
reflection of the state of the psychology profession that from being a
breeding ground for pertinent criticism of the medical model and
commonsense (and logical) alternatives to labels and drugs, in Australia,
graduate clinical psychologists are often as certain of the validity of
psychiatric labels as they are about the miraculous nature of modern
psychiatric drugs.
Psychology, meaning knowledge about the mind, has become increasingly
splintered over the years into different schools of thought, each with
different approaches, assumptions, theories and research methods. They also
have different beliefs about the brain, ranging from schools of thought which
argue that all behaviour is caused by chemicals in the brain to ones that
argue that the brain has little to do with thinking or the destiny of
individuals, which is preordained by karmic forces and past lives. Other
schools of psychology argue that all (or most) adult psychological distress is
related to early childhood traumas, or that psychological problems are
usually caused by genetic defects and susceptibilities, or the aftermath of
viral infections. Some schools of psychology are preoccupied with statistical
analyses of behaviour, others consider these a waste of time and focus on
developing personality tests and intelligence tests. Some of the more
outrageous psychology schools ascribe what others interpret as
psychopathology to alien abductions and channeling by extraterrestrials
and metaterrestrials. Many recent schools of psychology are heavily
involved in animal experimentation, including the torture of mice, rats, cats,
dogs (a favourite) and monkeys, from which often unreasonable inferences
are made about human thought and behaviour. Some just focus on giving
good advice, concentrating on empowering individuals to make realistic,
sensible choices and decisions, and to find solutions to problems through
their own creative thought and personal motivation. Some schools of
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psychology are predictably more scientific than others, some are more
philosophically sound and therapeutically effective than others.
Psychology is a broad field of study, which developed from the arts and
philosophy, rather than from science and medicine, a point which has led
to intense rivalry between adherents of psychology and those of psychiatry
over the years, with psychiatry, as a branch of medicine, claiming a
mantle of scientific superiority over unscientific psychology. In truth,
however, neither is founded on firm scientific ground, though both have
tried hard to appear scientific, often by quoting statistics and engaging in
scientific-sounding double-blind trials and clinical trials.
Although Sigmund Freud and other early psychiatrists were medical doctors
trained in neurology, they focused on disturbances of thinking as well as
dynamic processes affecting the development of the mind generally, often
using anecdotal and personal experiences as a basis for their theories. Freud
is said to have coined the term unconscious and he argued that much of an
adults behaviour is governed by largely unrecognised unconscious motives,
which it required many years of analysis by an expert psychiatrist (such as
himself) to gain insight into. The dependence and other undesirable results
of such prolonged talk therapies were themselves given names in the new
jargon that grew in the new scientific discipline of psychoanalysis and
the practitioners of this style of psychiatry were (and are) called
psychoanalysts.
Literally speaking, psychoanalysis refers to analysis of the mind, and in
this sense it is an essential prerequisite for understanding the mind and
improving mental health in individuals and society as a whole. In practice,
however, the therapeutic value of psychoanalysis is dependent on the
theoretical assumptions of the psychoanalyst: how the psychoanalyst thinks
other people think. This includes assumptions about others motivations and
the dynamic processes that shape the minds development throughout life.
Behaviour, the observable result of others mental activity can be interpreted
in different ways depending on the assumptions, beliefs, hypotheses and
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theories of the analyst, and can also be misperceived because of prejudices

of the analyst.
It is also inevitable (and probably desirable), that psychoanalytical theorists
would include in their models some elements of self-analysis, and whilst this
sometimes denigrated as subjective and thus not scientific,
mathematical (statistical) analysis of normal behaviour (based on human
and animal experimentation) as the only objective scientific method of
study has obvious limitations and dangers, many of which have become
increasingly apparent in recent years.
The most influential medical doctor this century to present a model of
human mental processes was probably Freud, a Jewish Austrian physician
with rather suspect attitudes to women and children, who developed his
theories through a combination of clinical experience (with asylum inmates
and affluent private patients) and self-analysis. This was commented on by
Professor Stanfield Sargent in the 1944 introductory textbook Great
Psychologists (published by Barnes and Noble: New York), when the early
division (and splintering) of European psychological theory into different
(and often conflicting) schools of thought is described (with more than an
element of idol-building and myth-making):
In a young and growing science internal disputes often occur.
Psychology is no exception. Psychologists have differed about what
psychology should or should not include, about what it should
emphasize, about what research methods are best. When several
psychologists strongly support a certain viewpoint they are called a
school.
Structuralism traces back to two men, WILHELM WUNDT and
EDWARD BRADFORD TITCHENER. Wundt is regarded as the
father of experimental psychology since he established in 1879 at
Leipzig, Germany, the first psychological laboratory. To study with
Wundt came young and eager psychologists from many countries.
One of these was Titchener, an Englishman, who later came to
America to head the psychology department at Cornell University for
many years.
Following Wundts basic ideas, Titchener established the school
known as structuralism. Psychology is concerned with studying
images, thoughts, and feelings, the three elements forming the
structure of consciousness. The proper research method is
introspection, performed by trained observers. Learning, intelligence,
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motivation, personality, or abnormal and social behavior Titchener

ruled out of psychology [!]. He and his students did notable research
studies
Functionalism is a less systematic and unified school. It grew out
of the protests of many psychologists against analyzing consciousness
into ideas, images and feelings. The Danish psychologist HARALD
HOFFDING, and the American WILLIAM JAMES both emphasised
the dynamic, changing nature of mental activity and questioned
whether it could be analyzed into structural elements. Shortly after
1900 JOHN DEWEY and JAMES ROWLAND ANGELL at the
University of Chicago began to stress the ways in which an organism
adjusts to environment. Their aim in studying mental functions was to
discover how thinking, emotion, and other processes fulfilled the
organisms needs. The views of the functionalists helped to align
psychology with biology and to bring about a genetic approach to
psychological problems. (p.5)
The author of the book, Professor S. Stansfeld Sargent (PhD) of Columbia
University, fails to mention the word eugenics as the outcome of the
genetic approach to psychological problems, although this was common
knowledge at the time, nor does he admit to the atrocities that were being
perpetrated by biological psychiatrists in Nazi Germany over the years
immediately preceding the writing of this book. Although Wilhelm Wundt is
described as establishing the first psychological laboratory, the ethics of
what was done in this laboratory and to whom, is not explored in this
book, which idolises the fathers of psychology listed in the preface as
Binet, Freud, Galton, Helmholtz, Hollingworth, James, Thorndike, Watson
and Woodworth followed by Adler, Cannon, Cattell, Ebbinghaus, Gesell,
Goddard, Janet, Jung, Koffka, Kohler, Kraepelin, Lashley, Lewin, Pavlov,
Rorschach, Terman, Titchener, and Yerkes who are said to be associated
primarily with more specialized work.
Of these names a few have grown in fame (and notoriety) over the past fifty
years, including Freud, Jung, Galton, Kraepelin, Rorschach and Pavlov.
Freud and Kraepelin, especially, have many devoted disciples within the
medical profession. Much of the animal research industry and behavioural
sciences research is based on Pavlovs work on classical conditioning of
dogs (and humans). The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung is best remembered for
his self-analytical work on dreams, symbolism and philosophy, although he
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was an active clinical psychiatrist (and physician). Michael Stone writes, in

Healing the Mind (1998), of the relationship between Adler, Freud and Jung:
Viennese-born Alfred Adler (1870-1937) was among the small
group who met at Freuds house in Vienna on Wednesday evenings to
discuss important issues and developments in psychoanalysis. Adler
believed that the crucial dynamic motivating human action was the
wish for power. He articulated this notion in his 1907 book on Organ
Inferiority (the source of his coinage: the inferiority complex).
The first international meeting of analysts was organized by Jung
in 1908. Freud read his paper on the Rat Man, a case of obsessional
neurosis. At this time C.G.Jung was Freuds fair-haired boy. Freud
regarded him as brilliant and, of equal importance, hoped that this
Christian physician, the son of a Swiss pastor, would help make
psychoanalysis thus far practiced almost entirely by Jewish
professionals in Austro-Hungary acceptable in the wider, gentile
circles beyond the Viennese inner circle. (p.141)
Jung himself, wrote of Freud, in Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961):
Psychiatry teachers were not interested in what the patient had to
say, but rather in how to make a diagnosis or how to describe
symptoms and to compile statistics. From the clinical point of view
which then prevailed, the human personality of the patient, his
individuality, did not matter at all. Rather, the doctor was confronted
with Patient X, with a long list of cut and dried diagnoses and
detailing of symptoms. Patients were labelled, rubber-stamped with a
diagnosis, and, for the most part, that settled the matter. The
psychology of the mental patient played no role whatsoever.
At this point Freud became vitally important to me, especially
because of his fundamental researches into the psychology of hysteria
and of dreams. For me his ideas pointed the way to a closer
investigation and understanding of individual cases. Freud introduced
psychology into psychiatry, although he himself was a neurologist.
(p.135)
The scientific disciplines of Neurology, Psychiatry and Psychology
can be best understood from the Greek roots of these composites of neuro,
psyche, logos and iatros. Neuro refers to the brain and nerves, and
the logic based scientific study of the nervous system has long been
described as neurology. The idea of medical doctors trained in the
treatment of the mind but not the brain is a relatively recent phenomenon,
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and has led to the absurd situation where a mindless neurology and a
brainless psychiatry have become the only choices available for the
medical graduate who wishes to undertake further study in the
neurosciences. Psyche is variously translated as mind or soul, but it
certainly does not mean behaviour, as some modern psychologists and
psychiatrists suppose. Logos, translated literally means word, however in
the context of neurology and psychology can be used to refer to the total
scientific knowledge of the topic next to which the suffix is used. Thus
neurology refers to collective human knowledge about the brain and nervous
system, whilst psychology refers to collective human knowledge (including
that of past times) about the mind, thinking and thought (and even to
scientific study of soul, if the term is used unusually broadly). Psychiatry,
combining psyche with iatros (treatment) refers to treatment of the mind
(and soul) and it is difficult to see how the mind can be rationally and
scientifically treated by the medical profession without a rational scientific
understanding of both psychology and neurology.
Following his introduction to Freud, Jung continues, in Memories, Dreams,
Reflections with a description of his own psychoanalytical technique at
work:
I still recollect very well a case which greatly interested me at the
time. A young woman had been admitted to the hospital suffering
from melancholia. The examination was conducted with the usual
care: anamnesis, tests, physical check-ups, and so on. The diagnosis
was schizophrenia, or dementia praecox, in the phrase of those
days. The prognosis: poor.
This woman happened to be in my section. At first I did not dare
question the diagnosis. I was still a young man then, a beginner, and
would not have had the temerity to suggest another one. And yet the
case struck me as strange. I had the feeling that it was not a matter of
schizophrenia but of ordinary depression, and resolved to apply my
own method. At the time I was much occupied with diagnostic
association studies, so I undertook an association experiment with the
patient. In addition, I discussed her dreams with her. In this way I
succeeded in uncovering her past, which the anamnesis had not
clarified. I obtained this information directly from the unconscious,
and this information revealed a dark and tragic story.
The story, briefly, is that the woman, who was very pretty was rejected by
the son of a wealthy industrialist whom, according to Jung she thought
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her chances of catchingwere fairly good. After marrying someone else,

her depression had developed suddenly after being told that the wealthy
industrialists son had quite a shock when she got married, followed by a
tragedy when her young daughter died of typhoid fever, and she thought that
the infection had been contracted by the child sucking on a sponge tainted
by impure river water.
In his description of the story and his miraculous cure of her mental illness
by telling her she was a murderer, Jung seems to accept, and indeed
reinforce, the assumption that the child developed typhoid by sucking on this
sponge, even though the womans little son drank a glass of the river water
without becoming ill:
She was bathing her children, first her four-year-old girl and then
her two-year-old son. She lived in a country where the water supply
was not perfectly hygeinic; there was pure spring water for drinking,
and tainted water from the river for bathing and washing. While she
was bathing the little girl, she saw the child sucking at the sponge, but
did not stop her. She even gave her little son a glass of the impure
water to drink. Naturally, she did this unconsciously, or only half
consciously, for her mind was already under the shadow of the
incipient depression.
A short time later, after the incubation period had passed, the girl
came down with typhoid fever and died. The girl had been her
favourite. The boy was not infected. At that moment the depression
reached its acute stage, and the woman was sent to the institution.
From the association test I had seen that she was a murderess, and
I had learned many details of her secret. It was at once apparent that
this was a sufficient reason for her depression. Essentially it was a
psychogenic disturbance and not a case of schizophrenia.
It is clear from Jungs writings that, whilst recognising this womans distress
as due to psychological traumas that she suffered in the past, he failed to
realise that her predictable feelings of guilt that she had caused the death of
her own daughter through negligence could have been treated in a much
more humane way than by accusing her of being a murderer. He also
accepted validity of the label of schizophrenia and an attendant poor
prognosis, although he believed the pessimistic prognosis had been
misapplied in this case. He also admits to being intimidated (and thus
silenced) by the established hierarchy in the medical profession, such that he
did not dare disagree with the diagnosis made by his superiors. In terms of
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ethical, biological and scientific logic, Jung appears to have failed to realise
and evidently failed to explain to his patient that the belief she held that her
daughter contracted typhoid by sucking on a sponge with river water in it
was not a scientific certainty by any means, and the accidental death of her
daughter hardly made her a murderess, which by usual definition refers to
the intentional killer of another person. The fact that she did not have
schizophrenia would seem obvious, but a deeper exploration of why she had
been diagnosed as such would have perhaps made more interesting reading
than this rather self-indulgent account makes. Jung explains why he
considered his psychoanalytical psychotherapy technique a success:
I told her everything I had discovered through the association test.
It can easily be imagined how difficult it was for me to do this. To
accuse a person point-blank of murder is no small matter. And it was
tragic for the patient to have to listen to it and accept it. But the result
was that in two weeks it proved possible to discharge her, and she was
never again institutionalised. (p.137)
She may have committed suicide after being discharged.
Another great psychologist, according to Professor Sargent, the German
psychiatry professor Emil Kraepelin is still venerated as the father of
biological psychiatry in Australia, and acclaimed for his work in formulating
the basic classification of mental abnormalities and deficiencies that
underpins modern medical psychiatric diagnosis and treatment. His
considerable influence on modern psychiatry is described in later chapters
and in a more detailed discussion of the political and religious influences
pertinent to the schizophrenia label my previous book, The Politics of
Schizophrenia (Senewiratne, 2000). Continuing with Professor Sargents list
of great psychologists, Rorschach is remembered for devising the
ambiguous and unreliable Rorschach test, where inkblots are presented to
the subject to be analysed and their responses interpreted by the analyst.
Pavlov has become a household name (along with Freud) for conditioning
(programming) dogs into salivating in response to a bell, but whose
experimental legacy included cruel human experimentation also.
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Professor Sargent continues his passage on Schools in Psychology with a

description of behaviorism, yet another school of thought regarding
thinking:
Behaviorism was founded about 1914 by JOHN B. WATSON,
then an animal psychologist at John Hopkins University. He too was
impatient with the narrowness of structuralism, but he did not feel that
the functionalists went far enough in their criticisms. Watson objected
particularly to introspection, which he considered unscientific.
Psychologys real concern, he said, is to study behavior, not
consciousness. Expose an animal or a human being to a stimulus and
see how he responds; record this behavior objectively and you have
real scientific evidence. Watson and his fellow behaviorists
experimented on learning, motivation, emotion, and individual
development.
The school of behaviourism has been very influential in Australia and the
USA, to such an extent that many psychology texts define psychology as
the study of behaviour, rather than the study of thinking or the mind.
According to Professor Sargent, Psychoanalysis is just another school of
thought out of many competing models, and one that is scientifically
suspect:
Psychoanalysis stood apart from the other schools. Founded by a
physician, SIGMUND FREUD, it grew out of his effort to cure
persons suffering from mental and nervous disorders. Psychoanalysis
presents amazingly fruitful and provocative theories of motivation, of
personality development, and of abnormal behavior. Unlike other
founders of schools, Freud made no effort to verify his theories by
scientific experiment. Freuds major interpretations and those of his
dissident disciples are presented in the chapter called Conflicts and the
Unconscious. (S.Sargent in Great Psychologists, p6)
In Chapter 12, titled mental disease, Professor Sargent lists his preference
for psychiatric icons of all time. Several names are listed in capital letters
under the chapter heading: Hippocrates, Weyer, Pinel, Dix, Kraepelin,
Bleuler, Griesinger, Beers, Campbell, White, Jackson, Meyer, Rosanoff and
Lennox. The chapter begins with what, taken literally, could be a selffulfilling threat:
About one person of every twenty in the United States will at
some time during his life be treated in a mental hospital. The care and
cure of such persons is a tremendous problem.
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Then is presented a very misleading reference to the current humane versus

the prior inhumane methods involved in the treatment of those deemed
mentally ill or mad:
Apparently mental disease has always existed, but only in the last
fifty years has it been handled scientifically. We have progressed a
long way from the days of cells and chains for the insane. We still
have far to go to reach an ideal solution.
The supposition that the mentally distressed, confused, upset or disturbed
were routinely treated by all countries, nations, governments and families
with cells and chains is obviously not correct. In fact it is very few of the
population at any one time who have been treated in this way, and this sort
of treatment has been ordered by only a few people (mainly men) who have
had the authority to give such orders and have them implemented. Professor
Sargent also fails to mention that the routine treatments given to psychiatric
patients who had been diagnosed as suffering mental disease (or mental
illness) were much more cruel and punitive than mere cells and chains.
The imprisoned, chained lunatics (by many names) have been whipped,
immersed in cold water or hot water, sensorily deprived, injected with
known poisons and infections, made comatose, given electrical shocks to
their head, genitals and hands, surgically or chemically castrated, had their
teeth removed, starved and tortured in many other ways, always with the
claim that these things were being done for the sake of the afflicted
individual and the greater society. Inevitably a scientific sounding theory has
been used to justify what would otherwise be clearly recognised as unethical
and illegal abuse of the population by a professional elite.
Convincing the increasingly skeptical population of the world that they have
a superior understanding of madness and sanity, mental illness and health to
other experts and non-experts has been a longstanding concern of the
psychiatric profession, and a professional insecurity can be seen in efforts
of psychiatrists and psychologists to claim a position as legitimate
scientists. The problem of scientific credibility is addressed by Professor
Sargent in the following way:
We have called psychology a science. Is this correct? Astronomy,
chemistry, and physics are readily recognized as sciences; they
involve careful laboratory work, exact measurement, rigid laws, and
sure-fire predictability. Psychology is concerned with something less
definite and tangible; exactitude is hard to obtain and exceptionless
laws almost never occur.
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However, it is not the definiteness of its material which

determines whether a subject is a science. (If it were, biology might be
excluded since it studies the great unknown - life.) KARL PEARSON,
an English mathematician and scientist, insisted nearly fifty years ago
that the criterion of science is not subject matter but the methods of
investigation used. If scientific method is used systematically, we may
properly speak of a science, whether the object of study is minerals,
bacteria, human thoughts and feelings, or social institutions.
Scientific method is no mystery. It is a definite procedure used in
trying to answer a question or solve a problem. The problem may be a
practical one like What causes malaria?, What causes mental
disease?, How does alcohol affect behavior? Or the problem may
be inspired by mere curiosity: Why do objects fall to the earth?,
How does heredity work?, Can animals learn?
It is interesting that Professor Sargent should mention these particular
problems and questions and it is worth looking at the ways in which
these scientific, biological and social phenomena have been researched in
the years since this book was written, and what conclusions have been
reached by the scientific community about them. It is also worth looking
at the medical research that was occurring in institutions associated with
Columbia University where S. Stanfield Sargent was employed as
Associate Professor of Psychology during the Second World War.
The first question, What causes malaria?, can be answered easily on the
most obvious level: infection with Plasmodium malaria parasites, which are
carried by mosquitoes, and transmitted into the blood through the skin by
mosquito bites, usually from Anopheles or Culex mosquitoes. This is,
however, only a partial explanation of what causes malaria. Firstly, not
everyone who has malaria parasites injected into their skin will develop
malaria (depending on immune system health), and secondly, not everyone
who has contracted malaria has done so by being bitten by mosquitoes.
Some have been given infections by deliberate transfusion of infected blood
to test new antimalarial drugs. And at doses that made serious illness certain.
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32. PRIVATE HOSPITALS AND MILITARY

CONNECTIONS
In the 1940s, at the same time that Professor Sargent wrote Great
Psychologists, and the nations of Europe were engaged in a bloody struggle
for territory and supremacy, an undisclosed number of men and women were
deliberately infected with malaria in Australia by the Commonwealth army
in conjunction with the British and Australian (Commonwealth)
governments, and American and British pharmaceutical (drug) companies.
The drug trials, on interred Italians and Jewish refugees, as well as wounded
Australian soldiers (who were obtained from convalescent hospitals), were
reported in the Australian newspapers over 50 years after they occurred, and
were hardly commented on by the scientific press or politicians in the
country in which these terrible abuses occurred. The experiments, on people
described in the Age articles as human guinea pigs, were done in North
Queensland (and later, in Melbourne) during the Second World War and for
several months after the official cessation of hostilities, driven by the
military and financial motive of testing new antimalarial drugs developed in
Germany for toxicity by the Allies on captive populations. It is difficult
not to see this as a hostile act against Australia and the Australian people, as
well as the Italian and Jewish people who were subjected to torture, which
was then denied.
Even with the revelation of details of these cruel and unnecessary acts by the
Australian and British Governments of the day (who ultimately hold
responsibility for their armed forces), the deliberate infection and poisoning
of these people was not described as torture or biological warfare by the Age
newspaper, although the reporters did describe the incident as abuse. The
Murdoch-owned newspapers in Victoria (The Australian and The Herald
Sun) did not take the issue up, and The Age did not persist with the
historical story or make the necessary connections with contemporary
medical science and research activity in Australia (and Melbourne, in
particular) to understand why Guy Nolch may have written in the editorial of
Australasian Science that little has changed in 50 years when commenting
on biological warfare suggesting that the fault lies not with the scientists
but the masters who control them.
The drug Paludrine was being tested for ICI chemicals, a large British-based
company which continues to market the drug today, and the director of ICI
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Australia, Professor Ben Lochtenberg, has been, for several years, the
director of the Mental Health Institute in Parkville, Melbourne. ICI, which
is an acronym for Imperial Chemical Industries was founded in 1926,
during a period of time between the two World Wars, that has been
referred to as The Depression. Around the same time as the revelations
about the infection and treatment trials, ICI pharmaceuticals was
transformed into Zeneca pharmaceuticals, which in 1999 became
amalgamated with the Sweden-based Astra pharmaceuticals, forming a new
giant drug company called Astra-Zeneca. The huge non-pharmaceutical
operations of ICI continued as ICI chemicals, unaffected by the merger,
according to the Information Service provided on a 1800 number by AstraZeneca. The phone message of the old Astra-Zeneca number in Melbourne
announced, on 1.9.99, that the Melbourne office of Astra-Zeneca has closed,
and the head office relocated to Sydney.
The malaria infections, which occurred in remote North Queensland, under
the auspices of the Red Cross, Royal Australian and British Military,
involved deliberately exposing physically and psychologically stressed
individuals to extraordinarily high doses of malaria through specially bred
mosquitoes and transfusions of blood infected with malaria. The infected
people were then subject to physical trauma such as exposure to cold and
then given massive doses of the chemicals to be tested, observing for toxic
effects. After the war ended, according to the newspaper reports, pressure
from the American drug company Winthrop (producers of Panadol) and ICI
resulted in the trials being shifted to the Heidelberg Military Hospital in
Melbourne, which had orchestrated the Australian trials. Panadol and
Panadeine (paracetamol with codeine), previously Winthrop brands, are now
marketed in Australia by the Consumer branch of SmithKline Beecham.
Heidelberg Military Hospital, which was built in 1941, became the
Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital in 1947, and became incorporated with the
adjacent Austin Hospital in 1995 to form the massive Austin and
Repatriation Hospital located in the North-Eastern Melbourne suburb of
Heidelberg. The Austin hospital, now the biggest hospital in Melbourne
according to the Public Relations Department of the hospital, was one of
Melbournes first hospitals, and was built in 1882. It is, like Melbournes
first hospital, the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Parkville, which was built in
1848, affiliated with the University of Melbourne, which was founded in the
1860s, at the time of the gold-rush. Both these hospitals are major teaching
hospitals (for medical students) and public hospitals which treat Melbourne
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people who cannot afford, or do not want private medical care. They also
both provide public psychiatric services, including locked facilities for
people to be injected in against their wills. In February, 2000, the public
relations officer at the Royal Melbourne Hospital explained to me that the
hospital has recently opened a unit with 25 acute beds and 8 for people
(usually girls) with eating disorders (mainly anorexia). Previously, the
Royal Melbourne Hospital was associated with the notorious Royal Park
Psychiatric Hospital, which has recently been closed and partially
demolished to make room for a visiting athletes at the Commonwealth
Games. They will be housed on a site where thousands of young Australians
have been imprisoned and tortured over the years with electric shocks and
huge doses of chemical toxins. Many have died, either during their
treatment or shortly after it. Their deaths have inevitably been reported as
suicide.
On 1.9.99, the Age newspaper in Melbourne announced in an article
headlined titled Coalition pledges $1b for health that, the coalitions
announcement came as the Opposition launched its health strategy,
promising to spend an extra $270 million building and upgrading hospitals
including $155 million to ensure the Austin and Repatriation Medical Centre
remained in public hands. The Austin and Repatriation Medical Centre has
never really been in public hands. Public hospitals in Australia are, like the
medical profession generally, controlled by elites who tend to support the
pharmaceutical industry as well as the military industry. The Heidelberg
Military hospital, which became the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital,
was initially a British-Australian Military Hospital, which coordinated
medical military activity during the Second World War (in the 1940s). This
is the hospital that coordinated the malaria experiments on interred Italian
and Jewish people during the WWII, and treated veterans for shell-shock
(later termed post-traumatic stress disorder) after this war and all the wars
Australia has been involved in since then. These include the wars in Korea,
Vietnam, New Guinea, and Malaya.
The 1943 University of Queensland publication The Nervous Soldier by
Professor John Bostock (of the University of Queensland and Brisbane
General Hospital) and Dr Evan Jones (of the University of Sydney) gives an
indication of treatment methods employed in Australia during the Second
World War, as well as the favoured diagnoses of the time. The book
recommends traits which will suggest need for psychological
investigations in soldiers, because, according to the manual, the military
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machine must have efficiency at all times. These traits include:

resentfulness to discipline or inability to be disciplined, unusual stupidity
or awkwardness in drills or exercises, inability to transmit orders
correctly, personal uncleanliness, criminal tendencies, abnormal sex
practices and tendencies including masturbation, filthy language and
defacement of property, distinct feminine types, bed wetters, subjects
of continual ridicule or teasing, queer or peculiar behaviour, chronic
homesickness and all recruits who show persistent fearfulness, irritability,
seclusiveness, sulkiness, depression, shyness, timidity, anti-social attitude,
over boisterousness, suspicion, dullness, sleeplessness [or] sleep walking.
(p.80)
The authors rule out those with mental deficiency, epilepsy,
schizophrenia or manic depression from employment in the armed forces,
and gives the following description of schizophrenia:
Whilst the fully developed schizophrenic personality is so
obvious that it cannot escape recognition, milder forms may be
recognised by certain character traits. They are sensitive, reserved,
bad mixers, unpractical, abstracted and dreamy, and generally have
difficulty in facing ordinary problems. Their mind is made up with
difficulty. They may lack the power of concentration. These traits
make them unsuitable material for soldiers. It is noteworthy that
during the last war 20 per cent of mental invalids belonged to this
class.
Not surprisingly, the main problems diagnosed in soldiers were related to
anxiety (ranging from normal nervousness to grave anxiety states). The
recommended treatments for more severe states of anxiety were
convulsion (chemical shock) therapy and narcotherapy. Milder cases
were treated by suggestion, hypnosis, hypno-analysis and narco-analysis.
Electrical shocks are also briefly discussed (as Faradism), and insulin
coma, whilst considered an effective treatment by the authors, was not
considered appropriate for military use. Alcohol was also used as an
anxiolytic and such use was recommended as follows:
The role of alcohol for the soldier cannot be lightly dismissed.
Drinking is a method of evading reality. Those who deprecate the use
of alcohol should imagine themselves attacking a machine gun at
dawn with death or mutilation a probability. In such cases some
evasion of reality is perfectly justifiable. The report by the War Office
on shell shock states that whilst alcohol must be rationed front-line
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medical and executive officers favoured the use of rum if properly

controlled: it was especially valuable in the early morning hours.
Service conditions create periods of abstinence, boredom and
danger. At their conclusion there is an irresistible urge for conviviality,
which exposes the soldier to alcohol at a time when his tolerance is
low. It is not surprising that cases of acute alcoholism are inevitable.
Whilst such lapses are to be deprecated from the angle of discipline,
the Medical Officer is concerned purely as a doctor whose job is to
make a presumably good soldier fit to resume his duty. (p.69)
In The Nervous Soldier, alcohol and cigarette abuse are identified as being
caused by military training, although it is not admitted as clearly as that.
Under the subtitle, the preliminary military training, in a chapter titled
The Stresses of Military Life, Bostock and Jones wrote, in 1943:
When Bill Smith receives his first uniform he must face an entire
alteration in his living conditions. His contacts are different. He is
shorn of many personality props and of the friends and relatives of a
life time. They are replaced by new faces and strange voices. Soon he
learns that he is fettered and frustrated by disciplinary restrictions. His
soul belongs to the army. For both married and unmarried there is a
modification of the sex routine. For some the change is towards
continence; others are snared in the net of promiscuity with its
attendant worries. The conditions of military life are calculated to stir
into activity repressed homo-sexual tendencies resulting in the
development of anxiety states or of paraphrenic psychoses. Even the
alcohol and tobacco habits partake of the change. There is a move
from teetotalism towards drinking, often to excess. Tobacco becomes
almost a necessity. (p.15)
The authors do not seem to realise how permanently destructive the training
of young men in this way is bound to be for society generally, whilst
admitting that it destroys fundamental respect for life:
and in addition there is another aspect manifesting itself. The
aggressive instincts are unfolding. The soldier trained from infancy to
regard human life as sacred must become efficient in taking life when
necessary. Unless he can learn to kill his enemies, military training is
futile. (p.16)
The prime motivator for a successful soldier, according to The Nervous
Soldier is patriotism. Ironically, the opening chapter suggests that fighting
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(and killing) in support of the British war effort (despite the British
imperial history of slavery and oppression), is actually a fight for freedom
from Nazi slavery and Japanese imperialism:
We are actors today in one of the great moments of history. We
are called to help free a large proportion of civilization from the
enslaving serfdom of German Nazism and Japanese imperialism. We
realise, as never before, the value of personal and national liberty.
This liberty, which has been brutally snatched from the Czechs,
Danes, Norwegians, Poles, Dutch and Greeks, has assumed a new
significance for us in the face of danger. Hitherto we took it overmuch
for granted. Democracy alone provides the way of life and the form of
government under which it can live and flourish. So Democracy must
prevail or freedom will vanish from the earth. This is an incentive, this
is a motive that should have the power to light the torch of unflagging
enthusiasm in us. And today we of the Anzac zone have another
motive perhaps the most primitive of all that of defending our
homes from destruction and our women and children from slaughter.
The fact that democracy is incompatible with monarchies and authoritarian
hierarchies evidently escaped the psychology professors who wrote this
manual, and the treatments they gave to nervous soldiers were not based
on the democratic will of the Australian people. They were based on the
psychiatric dogmas prevalent in British and Australian universities and
hospitals at the time, and an agenda based on producing efficient killing
machines who obeyed orders unquestioningly, accepted punishment without
complaint (discipline) and were willing to sacrifice their lives for the elites
who gave both the orders and the punishments (whilst believing they were
fighting and risking injury or death for freedom and democracy).
The mainstay of treatment for severe anxiety was, incongruously, chemical
shock therapy, involving the intravenous injection of drugs which caused
convulsions. These drugs included cardiazol and phrenazol, which also
caused acute terror and death, at times:
Shock therapy has received such widespread recognition during
the last few years that there is little need to describe the method in
detail. As it is particularly useful in the early stages its employment in
anxiety and hysterical conditions associated with war will often be
indicated. The treatment should be carried out by a trained team, and
under such conditions that complications such as fractures, should
they occur, can be adequately dealt with. This will include access to
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an X-ray unit. It is obvious therefore, that the method is not applicable

under field conditions.
The book continues to give details of dose, and injection technique for
inducing convulsions using cardiazol, warning that, if a convulsion fails to
occur the results are often most unpleasant, if not harmful. The trauma of
such treatment is easy to imagine:
The patient is in a dorso-recumbent position with a pillow under
the head and another under the upper thoracic region. During
convulsions the upper extremities should be held adducted to the trunk
and the shoulders are pressed down to avoid violent flexion of the
dorsal spine. Hold patient rigidly by shoulders to the bed, see that the
limbs are straight. A fracture of any limb may occur, but is less likely
if these precautions are carried out. (p.58)
Narco Therapy, essentially the same as the notorious deep sleep therapy,
was reserved for resistant cases. With an inexcusable ignorance about the
difference between a good nights sleep and a drugged coma, the authors
gave a revealing case history:
There is a growing belief in the utility of narco therapy for early
cases. Everyone is aware of the benefits of a good nights sleep
particularly after a heavy and worrying day. Public belief in the
efficacy of sleep is profound. Oh, doctor, says the patient, if I
could sleep for days, I would be cured. Today we are able to achieve
this miracle often with remarkable results. As an instance the
following case may be quoted.
AB was profoundly depressed and said he had venereal disease.
Suggestion and persuasion with exhaustive blood tests were useless.
Shock therapy was then tried without success. Finally he was put to
sleep for three weeks. When he awoke to reality the previous morbid
ideas had disappeared. Within a few days he was anxious to return to
work. [He may have just stopped complaining about his fear, for
obvious reasons]
As will be seen by the above, certain cases which do not respond
to cardiazol may respond to narco-therapy. Quite frequently
sleepnessness and restlessness or excitement render it either impolitic
or impossible to give shock therapy. Whenever this occurs, there is
scope for the use of narco-therapy.
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As for physio-therapy the psychiatrists who wrote The Nervous Soldier

were not talking about aerobic exercise. The section on Physio-Therapy
begins with an extraordinary description of the value of electrical shocks:
Electricity plays a small but definite part in the treatment of
nervous disorders. Faradism may be used with dramatic results. The
inert muscle at its touch leaps into spasm associated with discomfort if
not pain. Faradism has therefore a distinctly persuasive quality since it
gives ocular proof that paralysis is not complete. Furthermore as a
method of treatment, it has the merit of being uncomfortable and
therefore carries with it the suggestion, Get well quickly and be
finished.
In hysteria faradism will be used most frequently for mutism and
paralysis. In the former the electrodes may touch the naso pharynx
[the back of the throat] or be applied to the neck. (p.61)
In actuality, the suggestion is: get back to the firing line or well torture
you with painful electric shocks and chemically-induced convulsions. The
focus on efficiency means that doctors are expected to return soldiers to
active duty as soon as possible and while spending minimal time with
them (hence the enthusiasm for quick treatments like electrical and
chemical shocks). In a section titled enlisting the help of a cobber the book
explains:
A medical officer can only be with any one patient for a few
moments. He needs therefore an extension of himself to carry on the
good workOften a word with a mans cobber will infuse new hope
and if he has no cobber, see his platoon officer, and find him one.
A few years before George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, Bostock and
Jones wrote:
Most men are better for a big brother. When needed the Medical
Officer must take practical steps to find him. (p.71)
Wars make a lot of money for some industries, notably the weaponsmanufacturing industry, mining industry, chemical industry, espionage
industry, drug industry and medical treatment industry (including the
psychiatric diagnosis and treatment industry). In recent wars, the
increasingly influential humanitarian aid industry has also become a
noticeable profiteer. All these industries are now set up along corporate
lines, and compete with each other for credibility, sales and size. Many of
the humanitarian aid and charity organizations have completely
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betrayed the noble ideals expressed in their titles and do the very opposite of
what they are claimed by their public relations departments to do.
Although on paper these may be non-profit organizations, it should be
remembered that in Australia and America non-profit organizations
including religions and charities do not have to pay tax. Australia has
therefore become a tax haven for corrupt religious organizations and
charities, the money raised from the public being spent on projects which are
dubious, to say the least. Many of these charities ostensibly raise funds for
medical research which turns out to be largely spent on promotion of
disease and treatment services, drug trials and human (and animal)
experimentation, often orchestrated by universities and independent
research institutions located in and connected with public hospitals.
In Australia, as well as in Britain and America, the training people receive in
universities regarding philosophy (including ethics), economics, marketing,
politics, sociology, medicine and psychology are not directed towards ideals
of truth, honesty, justice, kindness, generosity and peacefulness. The reasons
for this can be elucidated historically, politically, and economically. They
can also be looked at psychologically and scientifically. However they are
approached, they should be looked at logically if we are to recover from the
militarisation and corporate takeover of Australian education. With the
corporatisation of the tertiary education system in Australia, the focus has
been on training young people to get a job, beat other people (compete
ruthlessly), make more money and be compliant consumers. The tertiary
education institutions in Australia also teach, and have developed within a
support-of-the-military paradigm, especially in the areas of science and
medicine.
This corporate takeover of medical education has been accompanied by
changes in medical and psychiatric terminology. The change of status of
psychiatric victims from prisoners to lunatics to patients to
consumers and clients has been an official one overseen by senior
members of the psychiatric profession in Australia, along with other changes
of name, such as mental hygeine to mental health, and human-rights
to anti-psychiatry. Others, such as eugenics and biological warfare
have disappeared from the vocabulary of doctors in Australia, to be replaced
by psychiatric genetics(when applied to local practices) or ethnic
cleansing (when applied to the Allies military opponents).
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The elaborate system of psychological training that soldiers are

programmed with to stop thinking about it and keep fighting without
questioning orders, has profound effects on their behaviour during action
(fighting and supporting the war effort), as well as afterwards, when they
find it impossible de-program themselves and return to civilian life. This
is where the repatriation and veterans hospitals have developed and
extraordinary system of blame the victim psychiatry. The veterans were
said to suffer from mental illness or nervous disorders and discharged
from the armed forces, sometimes on a pension from the Commonwealth
Department of Veterans Affairs. Alcoholism, aggression, violence, drug
addiction, gambling, nightmares, depression and chronic anxiety are all
common problems amongst returned soldiers and are the real fruits of war.
Such men have been both honoured and ignored. The well-behaved
soldiers, who accepted their injuries and dwindling government services
quietly were publicly lauded, once a year, at Anzac day marches, lest we
forget, while those who were angry, upset, confused or horrified by their
war-time experiences were impolitely pensioned off with whatever
nervous disorder diagnoses were in use at the time. These included shellshock after the First World War and post-traumatic stress disorder after the
Vietnam War.
The old Heidelberg Military Hospital, which treated thousands of returned
soldiers (and experimented on others, according to the Age report on human
guinea-pigs) is now part of the Austin and Repatriation Medical Centre in
Heidelberg, and proposals have been made, in recent years, to privatise the
hospital (sell the hospital to individuals and corporations), as has been done
with several ex-military hospitals around Australia in recent years.
One such hospital is the Repatriation Hospital at Greenslopes in Brisbane,
which was sold to Ramsay Health Care, who claim, in their glossy 1997
prospectus that:
Ramsay Health Care was established in 1964 and has grown to
become one of the largest and most successful private hospital
operators in Australia. The origins of Ramsay Health Care were in the
field of psychiatric healthcare where it achieved a reputation for
innovation in many areas of psychiatry and for providing high quality
care. The same culture and principles apply in all its healthcare
operations, which now encompass a diverse range of medical/surgical
hospitals in addition to psychiatric hospitals.
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The prospectus also announces that the company, which owns and operates
11 hospitals located in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South
Australia and Western Australia, with a total of 1,351 beds had signed
contracts in May 1996 with TF Woolham & Son Pty Ltd to construct a new
30 bed psychiatric ward at Greenslopes Private Hospital for the sum of
$1,515,011 and Transfield Constructions Pty Ltd (for $11,035,597) to build
four more hospital wards at the Hollywood campus in Western Australia.
In May, 1996, the prospectus reports, Kilcullen & Clark was engaged to
design and construct a psychiatric unit on the Hollywood campus for the
sum of $2,489,749.
In Victoria, the main centre of Paul Ramsays huge private psychiatric
empire is the Albert Road Clinic in Inner Melbourne. The prospectus
explains:
Albert Road Clinic was opened in July 1995 and in part was a
conglomeration of three existing psychiatric hospitals owned by
Ramsay Health Care. These hospitals were closed upon the opening of
Albert Road clinic. Albert Road Clinic is an 80 licensed bed facility
which is recognised throughout Melbourne as a major specialist
referral centre. The clinic specialises in the treatment of eating
disorders, adolescent disorders and elderly assessment and through its
mood disorders programme, has formal links with the University of
Melbourne.
Simultaneously, in a contract that has been kept secret by the Victorian State
Government, a 135 bed forensic psychiatry hospital has been constructed
at Yarra Bend, adjacent to the Fairfield Hospital and current home of the
Macfarlane Burnet Virology Institute, which is to be relocated adjacent to
the Alfred Hospital in Prahran (in inner eastern Melbourne). The Macfarlane
Burnet Centre, which advises the National and State Governements on HIV,
AIDS and AIDS prevention, is run by their Chief Executive Officer and
Executive Director the American Professor John Mills, who heads the
Childrens Virology Department, according to their 1998 Annual Report,
as well as being CEO of the company. Possibly presenting a major conflict
of interest, Professor Mills is also described as the Director of AMRAD
pharmaceuticals, which has recently constructed a massive new complex
also in prime land by the Yarra River.
AMRAD corporation, Macfarlane Burnet Centre, the Alfred Hospital and
Forensic Psychiatry Hospital, as well as the Austin Repatriation Hospital all
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have formal and informal links with the University of Melbourne,

Melbournes oldest university, and one of only two in the State of Victoria
authorised to produce medical graduates and train them in various areas, the
other being Monash University, founded in the 1960s. This includes the
training of medical specialists including psychiatrists and specialists on
public health, including international public health. This training is a
prolonged process involving in six years of undergraduate study, a years
internship in the public hospital system, and a variable number of years in
the public (teaching) hospital system during which they are examined by
senior specialists and, if they satisfy various criteria, allowed to call
themselves specialists also (and claim both authority and increased fees).
The same system, with some variations, is in operation throughout the
world, including Britain, where it originated, the USA, Canada, New
Zealand, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia.
Predictably, given the history of Australia, the medical and scientific
institutions in Australia maintain close philosophical and political links with
the old English Universities Oxford and Cambridge in addition to an
increasing influence from Harvard, Yale and other universities in the USA. It
is usual practice, and often considered obligatory, that as part of their
higher education, medical graduates spend at least one year in Britain or
the USA before receiving their specialist qualification. It is also the case that
many doctors with medical qualifications obtained in the United Kingdom
and New Zealand are practising in Australia, without any particular
qualification in the unique health problems and psychology of the Australian
people or a knowledge of their history or culture. Extraordinarily, many of
these doctors, some of whom also qualified in other Commonwealth
countries, such as New Zealand, Sri Lanka, India and Canada, are working
in the area of clinical and academic psychiatry, where a sensitive approach
and detailed knowledge of the diverse cultures and languages of Australia is
surely essential.
There are several political reasons why the psychiatric system in Australia is
disproportionately populated by doctors who are not Australian by birth, or
culturally. Many are not Australian citizens and do not regard Australia as
home. This is important because when treating peoples minds, ones
loyalties, including national loyalties (and concepts of patriotism) are
important especially when making diagnoses of political beliefs.
Revolutionary thought and action is proscribed by psychiatric diagnostic
criteria, including revolutionary thought in the areas of politics, philosophy,
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religion and science. Challenges to the authority of the state and the system
(wherever it is located) are also proscibed by psychiatric criteria for the
diagnosis of delusions, psychosis, schizophrenia and mania. Thus those who
attempt to radically change the existing system or demonstrate hostility or
aggression towards it can be diagnosed, though a complex web of jargon and
concepts (such as paranoia, thought disorder, affective disorder) as
incurably mad. This system of diagnosis can be, and has been, abused in
every part of the world in which it has been implemented, not least of all
because it is obviously politically expedient to discredit opponents as
mentally ill.
It is so obvious that this system can be abused that most States which
employ psychiatric diagnoses also have laws proscribing the misapplication
of labels of madness for political, religious and philosophical beliefs. This is
the case in every State in Australia however gross abuses in the application
of these labels occurs, and many people have been crippled and died, while
they could have been (and may have been) great artists, philosophers, poets,
or politicians. The reason so many potentially wonderful careers are
destroyed by psychiatric diagnosis and treatment is that the criteria defining
abnormality enshrined in psychiatric texts are fundamentally anti-creative.
Dopamine-blockers inhibit creative thought, and the diagnosis of original
(idiosyncratic) ideas as psychotic (out of touch with reality as defined by
the medical profession) also inhibits creative thinking. This includes socalled lateral thinking (referred to as flight of ideas, a classical symptom
of mania and hypomania) and belief in things that others do not believe
(delusions).
The label of mania can also be applied to people who become progessively
more outspoken, adventurous, spontaneous or generous. Giving away
expensive presents and giving away ones possessions are regarded as
typical manic activities, as is, incredibly, striking up conversations with
strangers on a train, and increase in goal-directed activities (DSM IV,
1995). While states of insane mania may exist, the criteria for diagnosis of
hypomania and mania are biased against particular types of activity and
particular beliefs. These are proscribed, not because they are unhealthy, but
because of the political and religious background within which psychiatric
diagnostic criteria were developed. In terms of politics, acceptable views,
according to the apolitical criteria of the DSM and ICD classifications are
essentially capitalist, obedient of the laws of land (whether good or bad
laws) and compliant with medical directives and orders.
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Of course, the psychiatric profession in Australia, New Zealand, Europe and

North America do not admit to having been affected by Cold War paranoia
(or propaganda) or to retain biases from the eras of colonialism, imperialism
and Christian crusades (and inquisitions). The struggle for emancipation and
human rights is not mentioned in psychiatric texts, and the history of
psychiatric atrocities is selectively ommitted when the story of medical
advances is told in the many popular medical history books which tell of the
miracles of penicillin, immunization, micro-surgery and modern genetics.
This is the version of medical history taught in medical schools around the
world, including the University of Queensland, where I myself learned the
Official History of Western Medicine. Actually there was hardly any
history included in the medical curriculum, true or false we learned names
of important scientists but not where and when they lived (or what their
assumptions and biases were essential knowledge if one hopes to
reasonably evaluate their theories and conclusions). Inevitably, every
medical student that graduated as a doctor (including myself) believed the
core tenets of the Official History of Western Medicine by the time we had
finished our 6 years at university. We had been carefully and methodically
programmed to accept our place in the system that trained us, and to accept
that any fundamental changes to this system would occur very slowly and
that anyone who thought otherwise was unrealistic out of touch with
reality.
For foreign graduates to be registered as medical doctors in Australia, they
must fulfil conditions stipulated by the Commonwealth Governmentsponsored Overseas Doctors Training Program, which makes it far easier
for some doctors to work in Australia than others. This depends, largely, on
where they trained graduates from British, Canadian and New Zealand
universities find it much easier to gain registration to work as doctors in
Australia than those who trained in the third world, China or Russia. This
is said to be related to the doctors proficiency in English, the argument
being that doctors who cannot communicate adequately in the English
language should not be allowed to work as doctors in English-speaking
Australia. The same argument, however, makes it doubly inappropriate that
doctors who do not speak and fluent English should be employed in the area
of public hospital psychiatry where ability to communicate with patients
and understand their culture and language is all-important.
The reason usually given for foreign graduates working, at least temporarily,
as psychiatric registrars and residents, when they first come to Australia, is
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that there is a shortage of local graduates to work in the public hospital

psychiatric system. This may be true, but if so, there are good reasons why
local graduates do not want to work in the capacities demanded of them by
the psychiatric system signing orders that take away their neighbours
rights and freedoms, and prescribing that drugs and injections be given to
people against their will. Most in Australia do not regard such activities as
fgiving people a fair go, but most do not know what goes on inside
psychiatric hospitals. Many have noticed, however, that people often come
out worse (after treatment) than when they went in.
There is large-scale public cynicism regarding the medical profession and
suspicion regarding the cosy relationship between doctors and the
pharmaceutical industry. I have heard accusations that doctors often have
shares in drug companies, which I do not believe to be the case. Most
doctors overprescribe drugs not because of pecuniary interest, but because
they are trained to do so. They are trained to diagnose illness, order
investigations, refer to specialist colleagues and prescribe drugs. This is an
important part of medical training, which is necessary for the good scientific
use of medications, however, without a holistic approach and a knowledge
of non-drug approaches, the medical profession is seriously blinkered
seeing people as labels and statistics which can be only treated with
chemicals and scalpels.
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33. BEHAVIOUR CONTROL AND SOCIAL CONTROL

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)
states that no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or
degrading treatment or punishment (article 5). The same collection of
International Laws states that everyone has the right to freedom of
thought, conscience and religion (article 18) and that everyone has the
right to freedom of opinion and expression (article 19). These rights
are fundamental to any democratic society, however much they are
ignored or perversely misapplied.
The Australian population is ostensibly protected from the perverse
misapplication and misinterpretation of laws by a legal concept termed
natural law or natural justice. This is an interesting and largely
unexplored area of law at the crossroads of science, philosophy, theology
and law. Natural law is rarely quoted in Australian courtrooms, but it is an
important principle evoked in the hearings of the Mental Health Review
Board in Victoria and equivalent bodies in other states. These are semiformal hearings with the power to authorise the release or continued
incarceration of people held against their will by the public hospital system,
when the usually drugged patient is interrogated by a lawyer and
psychiatrist, with a largely symbolic community visitor present to provide
a semblance of impartiality. The proceedings are unrecorded other than the
notes of the lawyer for the Board, and the patients reasons for requesting
release are contested by the psychiatrist who has a massive advantage in
convincing the Board representatives that the ongoing treatment of the
patient is necessary and desirable for the good of society, as well as that of
the patient. At times, the psychiatrist who seeks continued detention of the
(usually young) person is not even there in person: they are allowed to
present their evidence over the phone!
The Annual Report of the Victorian Mental Health Review Board and
Psychosurgery Review Board for the year ending 30 June 1998 states
that the Board heard 4827 cases in 1997-98, an increase of 11.6% from
the previous year, when 4326 cases were determined. In 1990-91, 2657
cases were heard, and a constant rise in the number of cases has
occurred each year since then. Of these 4827 cases 33% were
involuntarily detained inpatients (held against their will in hospitals)
and 63.4% were people objecting to community treatment orders
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(CTOs) which had been made against them by psychiatrists. Of these

appeals, only 5.7% of patients were discharged.
An argument that could be put forward to justify this low release figure is
that few of the people denied their freedom were not in need of forced
treatment and denial of the right of free movements that other citizens are
entitled to and take for granted. In other words, most of the people
incarcerated and forcibly injected with major tranquillisers (antipsychotics)
need this treatment for their own wellbeing and that of society, and thus no
human rights abuses are occurring through the actions of the Mental Health
Review Board.
Examination of the criteria by which mental illness is judged, the personal
experience of the author, the Report of the Seeking Justice Project and
several cases cited in the Annual Report of the Mental Health Review Board
(1998) show that, in fact, systematic abuses of young peoples right to
freedom of thought, speech and action are occurring as a direct result of
inappropriate determinations by the Mental Health Review Board, which
largely supports the treatments meted out to psychiatric patients in Victoria,
regardless of how cruel these treatments are, often based solely on lack of
insight in patients regarding their mental illness and the need for
treatment(drug treatment).
The Board routinely turns a blind eye to irregularities in paperwork and
medical records, excessive doses of drugs forced into patients, assault by
nursing staff, long periods of solitary confinement and punitive or coerced
electroshock treatment, all of which are occurring in Australian hospitals
today, and which regulatory bodies such as the Mental Health Review Board
have a legal and ethical responsibility to identify and prevent.
According to the report, in 1998, only 3 of the 24 psychiatrists on the Mental
Health Review Board are women, but 10 of the 23 legal members and 14
of 19 community members were women. All five professors (the highest
rank in the academic hierarchy) were men. These included three professors
of psychiatry, Professor Richard Ball, Professor Graeme Mellsop and
Associate Professor Sidney Bloch. Professor Bloch co-edited Foundations
of Clinical Psychiatry, the standard textbook for medical students at Monash
University and the University of Melbourne (at which he is one of several
psychiatry professors). He also gave the 1996 Beattie Smith Lecture at the
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University of Melbourne, a revised version of which was published in 1997

in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry.
In it he warned, hypocritically:
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it,
claimed Santayana. What can we learn from the Soviet and Nazi
horrors? We can recognise in both contributory elements derived from
concepts moulded by the psychiatric profession itself. In the USSR
the monopoly of Snezhnevskyism facilitated the States embrace of
psychiatry to stifle dissent. In Nazi Germany, the eugenic movement,
led in part by distinguished academic psychiatrists, was the foundation
on which Hitler could erect his murderous edifice. Thus we see that
psychiatry is not necessarily an innocent victim when forces beyond
its borders seek its connivance to pursue pernicious goals.
Snezhnevskyism is a reference to Soviet psychiatric policies based on the
doctrines of Professor Andrei Snezhnevsky, described as an architect of the
diagnostic schema which facilitated the Soviet misuse of psychiatry for
political purposes. Snezhnevsky, according to Professor Bloch, crafted the
reasons that a dissident could be labeled as schizophrenic because of the
political beliefs and behaviour, doing this over a period of thirty years during
which he created new categories such as sluggish schizophrenia which
could be diagnosed in people who appeared quite normal to the untrained
eye.
Professor Bloch explains:
In essence, he devised concepts which profoundly shifted the way
the condition was used clinically. This was no mere academic
exercise. Several crucial repercussions eventuated: (i) schizophrenia
was always genetically determined; (ii) although its features might
only manifest intermittently, the biological foundation of the illness
always remained; (iii) recovery was not possible; (iv) the main
question was the speed with which a patient would deteriorate; and (v)
rather sinisterly, because the illness might present with mild
symptoms and only progress later, schizophrenia was much more
common than previously thought. (p.174)
The Annual Report of the Mental Health Review Board (1998) states that
65% of patients seen at hearings had been diagnosed with schizophrenia,
with another 9% as having schizoaffective disorder and 11% with bipolar
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affective disorder (BAD). A disturbing perspective is presented of one of

these cases, which is amongst 21 of the 4827 cases selected for presentation
in the annual report, of a young man diagnosed as schizophrenic for what are
common new age ideas:
The patient had been diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia
with fixed delusional symptoms. He was preoccupied by his space and
research project which involved making further contact with aliens
from another planet and believed he and his girlfriend were the living
embodiments of people who had been burnt to death as witches in the
17th century. He told the Board he had communicated with aliens from
another planet via dreams and astral travel. He did not believe he was
mentally ill but was being persecuted for his religious beliefs. (p.33)
The Board, which had considered whether the patients beliefs could be
characterised as religious decided that it did not matter whether or not they
were religious, since even if [the patients] beliefs were religious, the
Board finds that aspects of [the patients] religious practice, namely his
interaction with aliens, falls properly into the category of hallucinations,
rather than mystical experience with the supernatural. The appeal for
release was rejected and the Mental Health Review Board decided that even
were his beliefs to be characterised as religious, the Board can and does
take them into account, along with these other factors, to determine [the
patient] to be mentally ill.
The Mental Health Review Board hearings are usually held in a room at the
same hospital where the patient is held, and may have been held for several
weeks or months, and some people have been kept on involuntary status for
several years with plans to continue certification indefinitely, against which
practice no real protections currently exist. It is important to note that these
are not dangerous, violent people who have murdered people or even broken
the law. They are usually young people who have been diagnosed as
schizophrenic because of their beliefs and behaviour and refuse to accept the
label and the crippling drugs that have been forced into them (usually by
injection if they refuse to swallow them), usually in huge doses and in
locked wards of psychiatric hospitals.
Despite claims of independence and impartiality, the Mental Health Review
Board is closely associated with the Public Hospital Psychiatry Departments
(in which hearings are held) which, in conjunction with the Victorian
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Department of Human Services and Commonwealth Department of Health,

implement the National Mental Health Strategy, which was launched in 1994
during the last year of Paul Keatings Labour Government. This Federal
(Commonwealth) Labour Government, in which Dr. Carmen Lawrence (who
has a psychology degree) was the Minister for Health, made many changes
in the Mental Health System that gave senior psychiatrists more power and
money and this trend has continued under John Howards Liberal
Government.
The National Mental Health Strategy was introduced in 1994 as a joint
Federal, State and Territory Government project. According to the Director
of the Research and Outcomes Evaluation Section of the Mental Health
Branch of the Commonwealth Department of Human Services and Health, in
a letter dated 6 March 1996, the Commonwealth Government has provided
$269 million for the reform of mental health services, of which $189 million
has been allocated to state and territory governments to achieve these aims.
The majority of this money has gone into restructuring of the existing mental
health system, including the formation of the Mental Health Council,
integration of community psychiatry services and the construction of
several new psychiatric institutions, including a new 135 bed forensic
psychiatry hospital in Yarra Bend Park, adjacent to the Fairfield Infectious
Diseases Hospital. The lack of public consultation and sinister degree of
secrecy concerning this major construction project is predictable when the
history of forensic psychiatry in Melbourne is known.
Forensic psychiatry literally means law-related psychiatry, but has
evolved from the branch of the public psychiatric system that diagnosed and
treated people labeled criminally insane in asylums for the criminally
insane, as well as psychiatric treatment (meaning drugs and/or
electroconvulsive treatment) to prisoners within the prisons system. It has,
for a number of years, been impossible to obtain records of how many
people are given electroconvulsive treatment (ECT, or electroshock
treatment) in public hospitals in Australia, but it is known to be several
hundred every week. In recent years it has been promoted in Australia, not as
a last resort, but as important first line therapy for particular psychiatric
conditions, particularly depression, but the treatment is also given for
mania and schizophrenia as well as schizo-affective disorder and
when injected drugs have failed to produce improvement in behaviour.
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The prisons system in Australia is closely linked to the public psychiatric

system, and both are integrated with police operations. There are several
possible points of referral to the psychiatric system from the police. The
Protocol Between Victoria Police and the Victorian Department of Health
and Community Psychiatric Services Division of 1995 provided a list of
indicators for referral to mental health services. The police members are
instructed to contact mental health services if one or more of the following
are thought to apply: Where a person is known to have a mental illness and
Has a history of violence or is a current threat to the safety of others
Is a serious threat to property
Shows significant self neglect
Has a high level of distress
Or is a person who:
Has a history or presents a current threat of deliberate self harm
Is behaving in a bizarre or unusual way
Is displaying gross mismanagement of personal affairs as a consequence
of an acutely disturbed mental state.
If the person is held in police custody or imprisoned by the courts, they may
still be subject to psychiatric drug treatment. As Professor Paul Mullen
writes in Foundations of Clinical Psychiatry:
Psychiatrists also became involved in the care of those in prisons
who though not so disordered as to have been found insane were
sufficiently disturbed as to require treatment. The role of psychiatrists
now includes a wide range of advisory and therapeutic functions at
almost every level of the criminal justice system. (p.322)
The word care is used very loosely. The prisons in Australia are not
intended for the care of people, they are intended for punishment. The
punishments are termed custodial sentences and are the result of
judgements of guilt. Incarceration is unpleasant and widely recognised to
be unpleasant, not least of all because of the environment in which
offenders are held. One has reason, then, to doubt a stated intent to care
for rather than contribute to this punishment. Painful, crippling injections,
electric shocks to the head and permanent labels of mental disorder are
indeed cruel punishments. Professor Mullen uses the term mental disorder
repeatedly in the text, but makes a mess of defining the term:
Mental health legislation varies between definitions which leave
the issue to the medical profession and those which state clear criteria
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with the intention of placing a brake on medical discretion. The latter

attempt to wrest decision-making from the medical and vest it in the
legal profession rarely succeeds for it simply translates the decision
about who is mentally ill into a decision about who is and is not
deluded, hallucinated or whatever. In a number of jurisdictions
antisocial personality disorder is specifically excluded from the forms
of disorder justifying committal. (p.335)
Antisocial personality disorder is described, in a previous chapter of
Foundations of Clinical Psychiatry, as follows:
People with this disorder manifest pervasive irresponsible and
antisocial behaviour in adult life. In their childhood, lying, truancy
and vandalism are common. In adulthood they cannot hold steady
employment, fail to maintain monogamous relationships and behave
irresponsibly. They frequently break the law, are involved in
aggressive outbursts and show little regard for the property of others.
They rarely experience remorse. They are reckless and seem unable to
plan or parent effectively. They often abuse both legal and illicit drugs
in association with complaints of tension, boredom and anger. The
disorder is more common in males and is seen in considerable
numbers in criminal populations. In their background there may be
evidence of Attention Deficit Disorder and Conduct Disorder
occurring in childhood. There is an increased incidence of substance
abuse and Somatisation Disorder. Relatives also show a high
prevalence of Antisocial Personality Disorder and substance abuse.
(p.192)
Associate Professor Jayashri Kulkarni who authored the above and the
chapter on personality disorders in Foundations of Clinical Psychiatry
from which it is quoted is one of the few female psychiatry professors in
Australia, and is, with Professors Graham Burrows and Robert Adler, a
ministerial nominee on the psychosurgery Review Board of Victoria.
The Psychosurgery Review Board is co-administered with Mental Health
Review Board. Graham Burrows is the head of the Mental Health
Foundation and the Department of Psychiatry at the Austin and Repatriation
Hospital at Heidelberg, Melbourne, and Robert Adler is, in addition to being
a professor of child psychiatry, is the psychiatrist on the Medical
Practitioners Board of Victoria.
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Professor Adler co-authored the chapter on Child and Adolescent

Psychiatry in Foundations of Clinical Psychiatry. In it the American
Psychiatric Associations recent labels for delinquent (or, more accurately,
disobedient) children, oppositional defiant disorder and conduct
disorder, are described in a single passage, providing an unpleasant
stereotype for the impressionable minds of medical students:
This disorder is characterised by negativistic and defiant
behaviour which is excessive for the childs developmental stage and
has been present for over six months. There is debate as to whether it
is simply the early manifestation of Conduct disorder. Certainly many
children who present with more serious antisocial behaviour
associated with the latter have a past history of hyperactivity and
negativism. Stealing, lying, running away from home, truancy and
physical aggression are common among conduct-disordered children,
who often show little remorse or concern for the feelings of others.
Conduct disorder is described as socialised or unsocialised depending
on whether the children commit their offences alone or in company. A
proportion of cases proceed to more serious offending in later
adolescence and Antisocial personality disorder in adulthood. (p.281)
It is not surprising that the authors have difficulty differentiating
Oppositional defiant disorder and Conduct disorder. There is hardly any
difference between the two: they are both stigmatising labels for naughty
children and adolescents. These are disciplinary diagnoses, social labels
with deeper political significance and implications. Together with Attention
Deficit Disorder (ADD) and AD/HD (Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity
Disorder), these are the most likely diagnoses that troubled (or troublesome)
children receive if they are introduced into the psychiatric system.
The American Psychiatric Associations Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM IV) defines Oppositional Defiant
Disorder as follows:
The essential feature of Oppositional Defiant Disorder is a
recurrent pattern of negativistic, defiant, disobedient, and hostile
behavior toward authority figures that persists for at least six months
(Criterion A) and is characterized by the frequent occurrence of at
least four of the following behaviors: losing temper (Criterion A1),
arguing with adults (Criterion A2), actively defying or refusing to
comply with the requests or rules of adults (Criterion A3), deliberately
doing things that will annoy other people (Criterion A4), blaming
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others for his or her own mistakes or misbehavior (Criterion 5), being
touchy or easily annoyed by others (Criterion A6), being angry and
resentful (criterion A7), or being spiteful or vindictive (Criterion A8).
(p.91)
It is assumed that children should obey adults, especially authority figures
(including psychiatrists), without question. These same children are
stigmatised as being spiteful, intentionally annoying, unreasonably resentful,
irritable and angry. Their understandable reluctance to accept the label of
defective person which is forced on them is explained away as if this is
part of the abnormality:
Usually individuals with this disorder do not regard themselves
as oppositional or defiant, but justify their behavior as a response to
unreasonable demands or circumstances (p.92)
Conduct Disorder is described in the DSM IV as a mental disorder distinct
from Oppositional Defiant Disorder, although the authoritarian attitudes
involved in creating the label are evidently very similar:
The essential feature of Conduct Disorder is a repetitive and
persistent pattern of behavior in which the basic rights of others or
major age-appropriate societal norms or rules are violated (Criterion
A). These behaviors fall into four main groupings: aggressive conduct
that causes or threatens physical harm to other people or animals
(Criteria A1-A7), nonaggressive conduct that causes property loss or
damage (Criteria A8-A9), deceitfulness or theft (Criteria A10-A12),
and serious violations of rules (Criteria A13-A15). Three (or more)
characteristic behaviors must have been present during the past 12
months, with at least one behavior present in the past 6 months. (p.85)
Inconsistently, but for obvious reasons, given the authors of the DSM, the
adults who order bombs to be dropped on other countries (or their own
country), send young people to kill other young people and order the
execution of prisoners on death row are excluded from a diagnosis of
conduct disorder. The scientists who infect innocent young animals with
Ebola virus and other killer-viruses are also spared a diagnosis of conduct
disorder: the label is intended with other targets in mind.
The DSM explains, without declaring the social, racial and cultural
prejudices (let alone the age-ist ones) underlying the practical application of
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this label, the collection of behaviours which are to be expected in

children unfortunate enough to be called conduct disordered:
Children or adolescents with this disorder often initiate aggressive
behavior and react aggressively to others. They may display bullying,
threatening, or intimidating behavior (Criterion A1); initiate frequent
physical fights (Criterion A2); use a weapon that can cause serious
physical harm (e.g., bat, brick, broken bottle, knife, or gun) (Criterion
A3); be physically cruel to people (Criterion A4) or animals (Criterion
A5); steal while confronting a victim (e.g., mugging, purse snatching,
extortion, or armed robbery) (Criterion A6); or force someone into
sexual activity (Criterion A7). Physical violence may take the form of
rape, assault, or in rare cases, homicide. (p.86)
In a single masterpiece of stigmatisation, children who break rules or are
cruel to animals are placed in the same category as rapists and murderers.
These bad children grow into bad adults according to the DSM IV, which
claims that most of the adults who have Antisocial Personality Disorder
previously display symptoms of conduct disorder when they are children:
For this diagnosis to be given, the individual must be at least 18
years (Criterion B) and must have had a history of some symptoms of
Conduct Disorder before age 15 years (Criterion C). Conduct disorder
involves a repetitive and persistent pattern of behavior in which the
basic rights of others or major age-appropriate societal norms or rules
are violated. The specific behaviors characteristic of Conduct Disorder
fall into one of four categories: aggression to people and animals,
destruction of property, deceitfulness or theft, or serious violations of
rules. (p.646)
To make sense of conduct disorder one must first decide what the basic
rights of others are. The United Nations Universal Declaration on Human
Rights could be used as a guide. Article 3 states that everyone has the right
to life, liberty and security of person. This is surely an indisputable and
fundamental human right. A child who takes the life of another person may
be diagnosed as having conduct disorder, according to the DSM IV, with
good reason, but this is merely a description of the crime, not an explanation
of the cause of the crime. Oppositional Defiant Disorder is not an
explanation either: it just means that the child concerned refuses to obey the
orders he or she is given. This may occur for any number of reasons. Neither
children nor adults enjoy being given orders, as a rule. People usually prefer
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being asked to being commanded. Rules may be trivial, unreasonable or

harmful. Rules are, moreover, a social phenomenon, not a medical one.
One of the rules that children and adolescents are expected to obey, to avoid
a diagnosis of conduct disorder (or antisocial personality disorder in
adults) concerns violence. This includes physical violence and emotional
violence (outbursts of anger or verbal aggression). Even passive
aggression can be viewed as evidence of mental disorder. Violence and
cruelty to animals can also be diagnosed. Yet children as a whole are
subjected to a constant (and escalating) barrage of violent images and ideas,
aggressive modes of speech and behaviour from television and video
programs, as well as from adults in real life. They are presented with selfmutilating role models like Marilyn Manson who scream or growl lyrics
about killing people, hating people and destroying life. They are fed sound
bites and have their concentration interrupted every few minutes with
commercial breaks and are then labelled with attention deficit disorder
if they fail to concentrate in class. They are brought up watching television
shows glorifying a promiscuous lifestyle and are then diagnosed as
mentally ill or mentally disordered if they adopt one themselves. They
are given addictive drugs (including amphetamines) from their early
childhood and then labelled substance abusers if they ingest or inject the
same drugs (or other drugs) later in life.
Violence also comes in many forms which are not covered by the DSM,
which also fails to mention needles as possible dangerous weapons. It is also
known that amphetamines, which are routinely prescribed to children as
young as four years old in Australia and the USA for AD/HD are notorious
for causing violent behaviour in both adults and children. Amphetamines
were invented about 100 years ago and were first used to attempt to control
the behaviour of hyperactive children as long ago as the 1940s. It was a
largely unsuccessful experiment, not least of all because amphetamines were
found to be highly addictive, and to cause psychosis and aggression. Methyl
phenidate (Ritalin, from Novartis) is the most prescribed modern stimulant
for children diagnosed with ADD or AD/HD. It is also an amphetamine-like
drug, although it is less addictive than dexamphetamine, which is also
prescribed for ADD and AD/HD.
In the 1970s and 1980s, true hyperactivity, as it was then called, was
considered to be a rare condition, affecting about one in two hundred
children (0.5% of children). These children were said to show a
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paradoxical response to stimulant drugs (specifically amphetamines), but

the prescription of these drugs was restricted to psychiatrists (who were also
allowed to prescribe them for narcolepsy) and paediatricians. Children and
adolescents (or adults) who obtained amphetamines by other means were
deemed to be committing a crime so serious that they could be sent to jail
for it. Suddenly, in the early 1990s, however, whilst maintaining the
illegality of black market amphetamines, a huge campaign was mounted
to increase the legal market for amphetamines. The target population was
children.
The first step, as with the marketing of any new diagnosis, was to claim that
ADD is often undiagnosed and is actually much commoner than previously
supposed. ADD (AD/HD) was now said to affect up to 5% of children, a 10fold increase on what was claimed a few years earlier. No cause for an
increase in the disorder was identified, however, and no explanation put
forward for the sudden increase in prescription of amphetamines.
Furthermore, the well-recognised addictiveness of these drugs was denied by
senior paediatricians and psychiatrists.
In a seminar for general practitioners masquerading as medical education,
Professor Ernest Luk, professor of child psychiatry at Monash University
admitted that drug prescription for AD/HD had increased by 2000% between
1988 and 1994, and a further 700% from 1993 to 1995. The talk was given
in 1997, and included the promotion of a range of drugs, including
stimulants, clonidine (an old anti-hypertensive drug now relaunched),
tricyclic antidepressants and SSRI antidepressants. Even low dose
neuroleptics (dopamine-blockers) are suggested.
Professor Luk provided notes to accompany his seminar, which promoted a
genetic factor for AD/HD, but listed other aetiological factors as brain
damage, toxic substances, dietary factors and psychological factors.
Television and sensory overload are not mentioned as psychological factors,
which are listed as adverse upbringing experience and child rearing
practice. Only lead and foetal alcohol syndrome are considered as
possible toxic substances which can contribute to the problem.
Amphetamine addiction is not mentioned, and the recognised fact that a
disproportionate number of children who have been diagnosed as suffering
from AD/HD develop problems with substance abuse is blamed on the
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condition itself, and not the practice of prescribing addictive drugs to young
children.
Dr John Court, a senior paediatrician at the Royal Childrens Hospital and
Board member of the Medical Practitioners Board of Victoria repeats this
claim in The Puberty Game published by Harper Collins in 1997. He is
explicit about how safe amphetamines are:
Dexamphetamine has been used for children with ADD for over
fifty years, and there is no evidence that it has led to dependence or
addiction. Both Ritalin and Dexamphetamine have been highly
researched, and long-term harmful effects have not been found. These
medications are now so widely used, particularly in the USA, that
there is considerable experience over many years in their use and
confidence in their safety. (p.156)
He then goes on to describe a series of side effects which should cause
serious concern about long-term damage as well as immediate risk:
There are some side effects that may occur with the medication
but usually settle down quickly and seldom last more than a few
weeks at most. These include some loss of appetite. With careful
introduction of the tablets in correct dose, children usually notice very
little change, and the effect wears off in time for the evening meal.
Dexamphetamine may lead to some difficulty in getting to sleep, but
only if the tablet is taken rather late in the day. Sometimes, in my
experience, children get an occasional headache or abdominal pain in
the first few days, though these dont persist.
Sometimes pre-teens and teenagers can get rather depressed when
they start the medication. In younger children this is seldom a
problem, though they can be rather emotional at first. Older teenagers
may become quite depressed, perhaps because the tablets make them
focus on their past failures and faults. Depression is perhaps the most
significant side effect of stimulant medication at this age.
It has been reported that the stimulants may slow down growth.
This should not be a problem if the medication is used properly, but
we always monitor growth with any medication given to children. It
has been shown that even if growth has been slowed, children catch
up later, and adult height is not effected [sic]. (p.156)
It is surely a big problem if drugs which cause depression are given to
children when the incidence of childhood depression and suicide has been
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steadily rising in both the USA and Australia. It is interesting that Dr Court
recognises that taking tablets (to improve behaviour) makes children focus
on their past failures. This is not, obviously, a pharmacological effect of the
drug: it is due to the diagnosis and the fact that they are being compelled to
take a tablet because of past failures and faults. John Court even admits
that:
Its hard to resist the comment Have you had your tablet today, Peter?
whenever an ADD child misbehaves.
The paediatricians strategy to ensure compliance in drug taking is an
effective technique if one wants children to develop a misguided enthusiasm
for taking pills:
I sometimes call the stimulants concentration pills that only the
best kids are allowed to have. (p.155)
Another keen promoter of the AD/HD diagnosis and the use of stimulant
drugs in children is Dr Christopher Green, author of Toddler Taming and
other books about bringing up children. In 1998 he authored an article in
Modern Medicine titled Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder clearing
the confusion. Perhaps better sub-titled refuting the criticism, the article
seeks to reassure doctors and parents about the safety of stimulant drugs,
while legitimising what is clearly a vague, subjective and stigmatising label.
He states the cause of the condition with authority but a noticeable lack of
evidence:
Until relatively recent times, professionals blamed the parents
attachment or relationships for causing ADHD behaviours. Others
said that ADHD was due to additives in food. Now we know that
neither of these is the cause, although the standard of parenting and
some food substances may influence already existing ADHD. Two
things are certain: firstly, ADHD is strongly hereditary and, secondly,
it is a biological condition.
Dr Green fails to recognise the propensity of the medical profession to see
what it looks for when he claims that heredity of the condition is obvious as
so many sufferers have a parent or close relative who has a similar
problem. Given the broad range of behaviours which can be viewed as
symptomatic of AD/HD, it is not surprising that once one member of a
family has been diagnosed, others with similar behaviour can be found.
Green admits that the presentation varies considerably. He writes:
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Most parents present a restless, intrusive, unthinking child. Others

tell of no obvious behaviour problems, just a child who finds it hard to
remember, to stick at a task and to maintain work output at school.
Some also have problems of dyslexia, language disorder or
clumsiness. Others are impossibly oppositional and a few have
extreme behaviour that has placed them in trouble with the law.
Green has difficulty explaining how it is that all these different behaviours
are caused by the same disorder or how it is that stimulant medication is
miraculously able to control the problem. He tries hard to validate his
position that this disorder (which is diagnosed on the basis of unwanted
behaviour) is a biological condition. By this he means that it is caused by
dysfunction of the brain (a similar label, minimal brain dysfunction, was
used for many years). He claims that this has now been proved. He writes:
For years it was presumed, but not proven, that ADHD is caused
by a minor difference in brain function. Now this can be shown by
imaging techniques such as PET, SPECT, and volumetric and
functional MRI. In ADHD, scans using these techniques show a slight
difference in function and anatomy in the behaviour-inhibiting areas
of the brain (the frontal lobes and their close connections). The
mechanism of this underfunction seems to be caused by an imbalance
of the neurotransmitters noradrenaline and dopamine. The effect of
stimulant medications, which are used to treat ADHD, is to increase
the production of these natural chemicals. (p.119)
As in the dopamine theory of schizophrenia and the serotonin theory of
depression (which followed the noradrenaline theory of depression), the
neurotransmitter theory of ADHD is inexcusably reductionist, and merely
follows the use of drugs which are known to affect these chemicals. One
wonders how Professor Luk can justify the use of low dose neuroleptics
(which block dopamine receptors) for the same condition that Green claims
is caused by lack of the same chemicals. In truth, neither an excess nor a
deficiency in any of these chemicals has been detected in untreated ADHD
sufferers (or schizophrenics or depressives) and the chemical imbalance
theory is merely one of inference secondary to known pharmacophysiology.
John Court, in The Puberty Game, repeats the chemical imbalance theory,
while presenting a regressively mechanistic, reductionist model of mental
function:
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The rationale for giving medication to children with ADD is this:

the brain acts like a computer in many ways, but its function depends
on chemical substances called neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters
help transmit messages between nerve cells, which are called
neurones. Neurones are the basic units of the nervous system,
including the brain. These neurotransmitters ensure that messages are
sent through the nervous system in an orderly and efficient way.
We believe that in ADD some of these neurotransmitters are not
functioning properly. It seems likely that the brain is not making them
efficiently, or in sufficient quantity. What we do know is that it is
possible to increase the efficiency of these neurotransmitters through
stimulating them by medication. This seems quite logical, and there is
ample experience to show that this stimulant treatment is one that
works in most cases, and is safe. (p.153)
The Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre in Melbourne lists some of
the common symptoms in amphetamine withdrawal in their 1996 booklet
titled, Getting Through Amphetamine Withdrawal. Days 1 to 3 (described
as the crash) are typified by exhaustion, increased sleep and depression. On
days 2 to 10 the symptoms include, strong urges (cravings) to use
amphetamines, mood swings (alternating between feeling irritable, restless,
and anxious to feeling tired, lacking energy and generally run down), poor
sleep, poor concentration, general aches and pains, headaches, increased
appetite and strange thoughts (such as feeling that people are out to get you
misunderstanding things around you, such as seeing things that arent there).
The withdrawal symptoms, according to the Turning Point doctors, start to
settle down in 7 to 28 days, during which time common symptoms include,
mood swings (alternating between feeling anxious, irritable or agitated, to
feeling flat and run down), poor sleep and cravings. It is easy to see how
the withdrawal symptoms of stimulant drugs can be attributed to the
conditions they are claimed to be treating: they sound remarkably similar to
the symptoms of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
The concept that initiating young children and their parents (and siblings)
into taking tablets to improve concentration and behaviour could lead to
subsequent dependence on drugs generally is not difficult to understand. The
psychological ramifications (for the whole family) of singling out individual
children to blame for arguments and discordance in the family (or
classroom) is cruel and socially destructive. I have not read a single article
blaming boring school curricula for lack of attention from children, although
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inconsistent discipline from parents is blamed as a contributing factor at

times. Furthermore, the medical profession continue to turn a blind eye to
the part they play in creating drug addiction, despite growing concerns from
the public as well as from dissidents within the profession. Christopher
Green refutes such concerns in Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
clearing the confusion:
Stimulant medication was first used for ADHD in 1937. The drug
Ritalin has been used since 1958. These preparations have now been
extremely well researched and proven; currently there are over 150
published papers showing that stimulants are effective and safe in
ADHD. Yet there are still people in this country who state that
stimulants are new, controversial, addictive, dangerous and unproven.
These ideas are out of date in 1998. (p.126)
It is not true that stimulant medication was first used for ADHD in 1937.
In 1937, ADHD did not exist. It is true, however, that some children were
experimented on with amphetamines, and that these children were labelled
as hyperactive. The construction of the new disorder which is now
accepted so glibly as a distinct biological condition by Dr Green and
others, was formally announced in the 1994 Fourth Edition of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders by the American
Psychiatric Association (APA). The disorder is described as follows:
The essential feature of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder
is a persistent pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity that is more
frequent and severe than is typically observed in individuals at a
comparable level of development (Criterion A).
Hyperactivity is described thus:
Hyperactivity may be manifested by fidgetiness or squirming in
ones seat (Criterion A2a), by not remaining seated when expected to
do so (Criterion A2b), by excessive running or climbing in situations
where it is inappropriate (Criterion A2c), by having difficulty playing
or engaging quietly in leisure activities (Criterion A2d), by appearing
to be often on the go or as if driven by a motor (Criterion A2e), or
by talking excessively (Criterion A2f). (p.79)
It appears that the psychiatrists who decided on these criteria were brought
up in the school that insists that children should be seen but not heard.
Further evidence of hyperactivity is evidenced in children who often get
up from the table during meals or while doing homework. Far from
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recognising any deleterious effects of television on concentration, according

to the DSM IV, getting up often while watching television is further
evidence of abnormality.
Incredibly, the psychiatric profession, and medical profession generally,
have failed to grasp the influence of television on childrens behaviour.
Rather than attributing increasing violence at younger ages to increasingly
violent television programs, video games, computer games and films, vague
chemical imbalance theories and statistics purporting to demonstrate
genetic factors are put forward, not as possible and partial explanations
but as proven fact. Science fiction movies about extraterrestrial invasions
are all the rage, but if an adolescent (or even a child) seriously believes in
UFOs, he or she can be diagnosed as having schizophrenia according to
modern psychiatric criteria.
The diagnoses of child psychiatry provide a justification to use the full
spectrum of adult psycho-active drugs on children. In essence the related
disorders of AD/HD, Oppositional Defiant Disorder and Conduct Disorder
are pseudoscientific gradings of delinquency. A child with AD/HD is bad,
but not as bad as a child with Oppositional Defiant Disorder. These children
are not as bad as those with Conduct Disorder. The latter is the favoured
label for children whose behaviour is deemed bad enough to go to prison for.
Not surprisingly, many adults who are labelled as having antisocial
personality disorder have previously been designated defective as children
with one of the labels, and been early victims of psychiatric stigmatisation.
Antisocial personality disorder, which is the new label for people who
used to be described as sociopaths, is not a nice thing to be diagnosed
with. The term implies that the person has no conscience, and does not feel
remorse for causing the suffering of other people or animals. There is no
doubt that such people exist, however the label is selectively applied for
those caught up in the prisons and psychiatric systems, and not those who
make the sort of rules that allow the poisoning of European rivers with
cyanide, the distribution of landmines or the incarceration of children. Men
who send young men off to war and inject them with chemicals for corporate
profits, or create depression and suicide for personal profit are also spared a
diagnosis of Antisocial personality disorder, together with men who
design taxes that further impoverish the poor and dispossessed in countries
with an offensive disparity between the conditions in which rich and poor
members of society live.
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The DSM IV defines Antisocial Personality Disorder as follows:

The essential feature of Antisocial Personalty Disorder is a
pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others
that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into
adulthood.
This pattern has also been referred to as psychopathy, sociopathy,
or dyssocial personality disorder. Because deceit and manipulation are
central features of Antisocial Personality Disorder, it may be
especially helpful to integrate information acquired from systematic
clinical assessment with information collected from collateral sources
[hearsay and rumour].
For this diagnosis to be given, the individual must be at least age
18 years (Criterion B) and must have had a history of some symptoms
of Conduct Disorder before age 15 years (Criterion C).
The long term unemployed are targetted with this horrible label, which
does not take into consideration the frustrations, loss of self-esteem and
boredom which can result from being denied rewarding and meaningful
activity:
Individuals with Antisocial Personality Disorder also tend to be
consistently and extremely irresponsible (Criterion A6). Irresponsible
work behavior may be indicated by significant periods of
unemployment despite available job opportunities, or by abandonment
of several jobs without a realistic plan for getting another job. There
may also be a pattern of repeated absences from work that are not
explained by illness either in themselves or in their family. (p.646)
The hypocrisy of the description of Antisocial Personality Disorder
becomes more obvious when one remembers that infamous reproach to the
Australian people from ex-Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, now head of
CARE Australia: Life was not meant to be easy. Such statements are
apparantly a feature of Antisocial Personality Disorder, according to the
American Psychiatric Associations DSM IV:
Individuals with Antisocial Personality Disorder show little
remorse for the consequences of their acts (Criterion A7). They may
be indifferent to, or provide a superficial rationalization for, having
hurt, mistreated, or stolen from someone (e.g., lifes unfair, losers
deserve to lose, or he had it coming anyway). These individuals
may blame the victims for being foolish, helpless, or deserving their
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fate; they may minimize the harmful consequences of their actions; or

they may simply indicate complete indifference. (p.646)
At the time of writing the Governor of Texas, presidential hopeful George
Bush junior, was confronted with a distraught 61 year-old great
grandmother, who begged him to spare her life. She had been sexually and
physically abused since childhood, and had suffered greatly during her
childhood, adolescence and adult life. She had killed her fifth husband, in
circumstances which were not elaborated on in the television program which
showed part of her plaintive appeal for clemency, and Bushs response. He
was unmoved. She was later killed by lethal injection. She was the 120 th
person to be executed in Texas in recent years. George Bush, the son of the
CIA boss and ex-president of the same name, gave his personal assent to the
killings despite numerous appeals against this State-sanctioned murder.
Almost all the people thus killed have been young black males. Four of
those killed have been women. Bush personally approved the death of two
of these four women since he became Governor of Texas. He campaigns
under the slogan the compassionate conservative. But then, his grasp of
the English language (his only language) is doubtful. Does this man have
Antisocial Personality Disorder? What about his father, who presided over
the CIA while they smuggled coccaine from Central America into his own
country, in exchange for guns which were used to kill freedom fighters in
other nations?
The DSM IV deftly redirects the attention to the victims and not the
perpetrators of poverty. Under Specific Culture, Age and Gender Features
the textbook claims:
Antisocial Personality Disorder appears to be associated with low
socioeconomic status and urban settings. Concerns have been raised
that the diagnosis may at times be misapplied to individuals in settings
in which seemingly antisocial behavior may be part of a protective
survival strategy. In assessing antisocial traits, it is helpful for the
clinician to consider the social and economic context in which the
behaviors occur. (p.647)
The textbook follows with a suggestion that the label is not applied often
enough to women:
Antisocial Personality Disorder is much more common in males
than in females. There has been some concern that Antisocial
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Personality Disorder may be underdiagnosed in females, particularly

because of the emphasis on aggressive items in the definition of
Conduct Disorder. (p.647)
The Australian textbook Foundations of Clinical Psychiatry expresses
different concerns about antisocial personality disorder:
The diagnostic criteria consist of little more than a catalogue of
obnoxious and disruptive behaviours which, it has been suggested, far
from defining a clinical disorder merely attempts to medicalise evil.
Many clinicians wish to banish those with APD (antisocial personality
disorder) from the realm of medicine and consign them as social
deviants to the police and justice systems. (p.339)
A case example is presented of a person typifying the label in what is
claimed as an attempt to establish that in addition to disturbance in
behaviour such people also have a disorder of mental function:
A man in his mid-twenties was first encountered after slashing his
wrists and abdomen while in prison where he was awaiting trial on
charges of burglary. He came from a disorganised home in which he
had been physically and sexually abused. At school he had been a
behaviour problem and had been referred to the educational
psychologists for what we would now term Conduct Disorder with
features of Attention Deficit Disorder. He left school at fifteen with no
qualifications despite having above average intellectual ability. He
was involved in petty theft both at school and in boys homes where he
spent part of his adolescence. In his teens he abused alcohol and
solvents. He had appeared before the courts on numerous occasions
for theft, assault, indecent assault and car conversion. He had been
admitted to psychiatric hospitals on two occasions, after an overdose
and after slashing his arms and legs with a razor. Both episodes
followed the breakdown of relationships with girlfriends.
He presented as an articulate man with considerable charm which
contrasted with his grim appearance, not improved by tattoos over his
face and hands. He acknowledged recurrent periods of depression,
usually lasting only hours and never more than days. During these
episodes of despondency he would experience self-destructive urges
combined with violent fantasies. He had a pervasive suspiciousness of
others with a tendency to refer any chance remark or overheard laugh
to himself. This led to confrontations where he would accuse and
occasionally strike others. Sexual relationships soon disintegrated
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because of his excessive jealousy. On one occasion when in prison he

had entered a disturbed state with bizarre persecutory beliefs and
pseudo-hallucinations, but this had rapidly resolved on transfer to the
hospital wing. His behaviour was impulsive, unpredictable and often
destructive of his own interests as of the common good. Police, prison
authorities and most ordinary people he came into contact with
considered him mad because of his unpredictable, self-destructive
and impulsive behaviour. Psychiatrists had on several occasions
declared him to be sane and to have a personality disorder. The
extensive abnormalities in his state of mind as well as his behaviour
carried no weight with the doctors bacause they were not the types of
disturbance found in the schizophrenias or other psychotic disorders.
(p.339)
Professor Paul Mullen, who presents the case history, omits some valuable
information about this man that could help understand his behaviour. It is
easy to see unpredictability in people one does not understand. What
happened to this mans family? Did he have any siblings, and if so, where
are they and what is his relationship like with them? Was he a stolen child?
What colour was his skin? What religious beliefs, if any, did he have? Was
he addicted to drugs, like much of the prison population? What drug
treatment had he been given in the past? Had he ever been given ECT? What
kinds of punishments was he subjected to in the boys homes and prisons
where he had obviously spent much of his youth? What had he stolen in the
alleged burglary?
Mullen presents this case in this way to illustrate some points of psychiatric
dogma. One is that people with personality disorders are not insane. To
put it simply, they are bad, not mad. This means that they can be
incarcerated in jails rather than psychiatric hospitals, although they can still
be treated with psychiatric drugs. Another point the professor is trying to
illustrate, is that people who develop this adult personality disorder
demonstrate symptoms of Conduct Disorder earlier in life. Despite the fact
that the case example may be fictional or fictionalised, the story of this
young man does illustrate an all too common journey for unwanted children
in Australia. Disobedience, disorder label, psychiatric treatment, loss of self
esteem, drug addiction, depression, alcohol abuse, aggression and violence,
police punishment, custodial punishment, worsening of drug addiction, selfharm, combined prison incarceration and punitive psychiatric treatment. Not
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surprisingly, this journey often ends in early death, often attributed to

suicide.
Paul Mullen is a senior professor of forensic psychiatry at Monash
University and Director of Forensic Psychiatry Services in Victoria. He
authored the chapter on Forensic Psychiatry in this textbook. He describes
his specialty as follows:
Forensic psychiatry is that area of psychiatry which overlaps with
the legal system. Central to it is assessment and treatment of the
mentally disordered offender, and provision of expert testimony to
both criminal and civil courts. In addition, forensic psychiatrists may
become involved in legal issues concerning competence, consent and
confidentiality, and malpractice. In recent years forensic psychiatrists
have had to care for a wide range of mentally disordered people
considered either of such high risk of dangerous behaviour, or so
problematic as to be unmanageable in normal psychiatric facilities.
(p.321)
Forensic psychiatrists themselves predict risk of dangerous behaviour and
their opinions on the matter are taken seriously by police and the courts,
despite their abysmal failure to make these predictions with accuracy, or
their inexcusable failure to abandon racial and cultural prejudices. It is no
longer politically correct to accuse particular races of violent tendencies,
dishonesty or criminality, so modern psychiatric textbooks make much of
refuting racialist theories of violence, preferring class-ist ones instead. The
racist prejudices underlying the new theories are poorly disguised however,
and the proportion of blacks in custody (in Australia, New Zealand and the
USA) speaks for itself.
Professor Mullen writes, under clinical prediction of dangerousness that
social background is an associated factor for high rates of violent
behaviour:
Those who appear before the courts and populate our penal
institutions are drawn disproportionately from lower socio-economic
classes. Poverty, though relevant, is less important than a sense of
exclusion from the rewards and regard of society. Those disabled by
mental illness are often drawn into the impoverished and drifting
populations of the excluded and rejected, and with this comes an
increased risk of offending, arrest and re-offence. Those who are
economically and socially deprived as well as being members of
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minority groups are at particular risk of offending and arrest, e.g.

black Americans, Maori New Zealanders and Aboriginal Australians.
Race is not the issue; it is the social and economic conditions under
which these racial minorities live. The unemployed, the unmarried or
unattached and the socially isolated are all at higher risk. (p.332)
One of the roles of forensic psychiatrists, according to Professor Mullen is
the investigation of malpractice. This rarely affects his own profession, but
in July 1991 there occurred an exception to the rule. He was called upon by
the Director General of Health in New Zealand to investigate the treatment
and death of Dolly Jane Pohe at the Psychiatric Unit of Rotorua Hospital,
and the practice of rapid neuroleptisation at the hospital. Responsible for
this abusive practice was the psychiatrist Gil Newburn, who was
simultaneously conducting drug-trials-for-profit for several pharmaceutical
companies (including the new antidepressant Aurorix, for Roche). Dr
Newburn had a treatment for manic patients that routinely rendered them
comatose with massive intravenous and intramuscular injections of
diazepam, chlorpromazine and haloperidol. Dolly Jane Pohe was one of his
victims. Although her race is not stated in the report, Pohe is a Maori name.
The committee of inquiry into this death consisted of Paul Mullen, who was
then Professor of Psychological Medicine at the University of Otago, and
David Bates, a barrister. Despite his advice to students that a psychiatric
report can present them as people with backgrounds, personalities, strengths
and weaknesses, Professor Mullen presented a report that is cold and
impersonal, but also negligently omissive. It was, in fact, a cover-up.
Dolly Jane Pohe, whose age, race and family background are not mentioned
in the report died on Sunday, 7th April, 1990, after being admitted as an
involuntary patient by Dr Newburn on Wednesday, 4 th April, three days
earlier. During this time she received 10 injections: 4 of haloperidol, 4 of
diazepam (Valium), one of chlorpromazine (Largactil) and one of
clonazepam (Rivotril). All these drugs are tranquillisers. In addition to this
she was given a huge amount of oral neuroleptics (dopamine-blockers)
including chlorpromazine and haloperidol. This included 400 milligrams of
oral chlorpromazine as soon as she was admitted (which was followed by
intramuscular injections of 30mg haloperidol and 10mg diazepam an hour
later) and 15 mg oral haloperidol later that afternoon.
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The next day she was given 15 mg haloperidol at 8.00 a.m., with further
doses of the same drug at 1.00 p.m., 3.30 p.m., 6.00 p.m. and 9.00 p.m. At
4.15 p.m. she was punished with intramuscular injections of haloperidol
(30mg) together with diazepam (10mg). Her crime was escaping from
torture and going down to the pub:
At 15:30 the security room door appears to have been open and
Ms Pohe slipped through and left the ward. The police were notified.
She was returned to the ward by the police at 16:15 having been found
in a nearby pub, the Palace Tavern. She was given haloperidol and
diazepam intramuscularly on return to the security room as she was
noted by Dr.Finucane to be more irritable and disturbed. She appears
to have settled after the medication until about 18:00 hours when she
was noted to be restless and banging on the door. She was threatening
to the nursing staff [from behind a locked door] and they recorded
anxieties about her potential for physical aggression. Ms Pohe seems
to have settled from 19:30 and remained quiet and probably sleeping
until 07:00 the next morning.
The next day the torture continued:
On waking, Ms Pohe appears to have become more restless and
disturbed [as one might if one woke in such an environment]. She is
described as aggressive, abusive, violent, unco-operative and
physically aggressive towards staff. At the request of nursing staff
Dr.Newburn saw Ms.Pohe in the seclusion room. The trainee intern
accompanied Dr.Newburn and described how impressed he was, both
with Dr.Newburns ability to calm Ms Pohe sufficiently to talk with
her and his ability to inject the haloperidol intravenously despite her
initial reluctance. Dr.Newburn considered her state to be deteriorating
rather than improving and an intravenous injection of haloperidol 35
mgs and diazepam 80 mgs was administered at 09:00 hours. A further
30 mgs of valium was injected by Dr.Newburn at 10:00 hours.
One thing that is obvious about Dolly Jane Pohe is that she did not want to
be locked in a room, and repeatedly banged on the doors, presumably to be
let out. This was callously noted as evidence of aggression, violent
behaviour and restlessness, further evidence of mania. It is unclear as to
what specific evidence Dr Newburn found of a deteriorating state other
than that she refused to co-operate with the incarceration and was angered
by it, and by how she was being treated. It is relevant that she was calm
enough to converse with the doctor before he injected her with the drugs.
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Maybe she hoped he would let her go home, or at least leave the security
room. This was not to be the case.
The next day, finding that she was still imprisoned, Dolly Pohe was
obviously despairing, but also suffering from poisoning by the drugs she had
been given:
On the Saturday morning she was noted to be restless and
irritable, banging on the door and angry. It was possible to bath her
and she had some breakfast. At about 09:00 she calmed down and
appeared to be asleep until 10:20. She was then noted to be in some
distress, wailing sounds were noted. She then slept until mid-day.
At 12:00 hours Nurse Young became aware that Ms Pohe was
heavily sedated and was apparently having difficulty swallowing. She
decided not to administer any further medication and phoned
Dr.Finucane to inform him of Ms Pohes state and her decision.
Dr.Finucane supported her decision.
At 13:00 hours Nurse Young noted Ms Pohes pulse was irregular.
She phoned Dr.Finucane to apprise him of the situation. He instructed
her to call the on duty house surgeon to request an ECG.
Dr Finucane examined Dolly Pohe at 4.00 p.m., but reassured the nursing
staff that although he found her to be drowsy and unco-operative he was
able to examine her cardiovascular system and her pulse was now regular.
He thought, however, that the 400 mg of chlorpromazine she had been given
in the morning combined with clonazepam may have resulted in a cardiac
arrythmia (irregularity) and wrote in the chart, try to use just haloperidol for
rest of day.
If the evening nurse had the same reluctance to further drug a heavily
drugged prisoner as Nurse Young, Dolly Jane Pohe may have survived. Mr
Lee, the male nurse who took over the care of Ms Pohe after Nurse Young
did not share her concerns. He noted that whenever Ms Pohe did rouse she
showed signs of becoming disturbed again and he felt it was important to
maintain the continuity of the sedation effect. She was given 20 milligrams
of haloperidol at 14:45, 19:00 and 22:00, according to the report. She was
given another 20 mg of haloperidol at 1.00 a.m. after banging at the door
again, this time because she wanted to go to the toilet. When nursing staff
entered the seclusion room at 5.15 a.m. she was dead.
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The report, presented to the Director General of Health (New Zealand) made
two recommendations, after a single sentence of summary. The summary
reads:
In our opinion there is no prima facie evidence against any
person in respect of which a prosecution should be recommended, or
in respect of which a complaint should be made under the Medical
Practitioners Act.
The recommendations are as follows:
(1) We do not recommend criminal prosecution of any person nor
complaint against any person under the Medical Practitioners Act or Nurses
Act
(2) We express our regret that there exists no suitable mechanism by means
of which civil remedies might be pursued against health care professionals
in appropriate cases of which the death of Ms Pohe might possibly be
considered an example. We recommend investigation of this deficiency in
our civil law with a view to legislative action being taken.
The psychiatrist who made these recommendations, Professor Paul Mullen,
is now one of the senior psychiatrists in charge of the forensic psychiatry
system in Melbourne. He is also a Professor of Psychological Medicine
(psychiatry) at Monash University, which is affiliated with both the Mental
Health Research Institute and the Macfarlane Burnet Centre. It is also
affiliated with Monash Medical Centre and the Alfred Hospital, both of
which inject people with crippling drugs against their will. Both hospitals
also give coercive electoconvulsive treatment. This is what medical students
and junior doctors learn to do in Melbourne, since both of these hospitals are
teaching hospitals.
The Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital, next to which the new Forensic
Psychiatry Hospital is currently being built is the home of the Macfarlane
Burnet Institute, the largest AIDS research institution in Australia. The
Macfarlane Burnet Centre (MBC) is soon to be located next to the Alfred
hospital in a multi-million dollar development. The executive director of the
Macfarlane Burnet Institute is the American Harvard University graduate
Professor John Mills, who is also the director of the AMRAD corporation.
AMRAD is a new Australian biotechnology company, a branch of which is
AMRAD Pharmaceuticals, which is involved in joint projects (as corporate
partners) with the Macfarlane Burnet Institute, according to the Institutes
Annual Report. Other (non-executive) directors of the Institute, which is
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soon to be relocated to new premises at the Alfred Hospital in Prahran,

include Sir Roderick Carnegie, who is described in the 1998 MBC Annual
Report as Chairman of Hudson Conway and Director of John Fairfax
Holdings limited. Hudson Conway is part owner of the Crown Casino in
Melbourne and Fairfax Holdings owns the Age newspaper and several
popular magazines.
The 1996/97 Annual Report of the Macfarlane Burnet Centre for Medical
Research Limited lists their biggest corporate sponsors as HIH Winterthur
(insurance), Rio Tinto (mining) and Smith Kline Beecham Pharmaceuticals.
HIH Winterthur donated $112,700, Rio Tinto donated $90,000 and Smith
Kline Beecham donated $40,000. Page 17 of the Annual Financial Report
(1998) of the Macfarlane Burnet Centre states (in bold italics) under
renumeration of directors that non-executive directors do not receive any
income. It also contains a small table that one director (presumably the
executive director, Professor Mills) was paid $273,515 (30 June 1997) and
$453,745 (31 December 1998). Chairman of the Board of the Macfarlane
Burnet Centre is Mr.Graeme Hannan, also Chairman of the Hannan finance
group, and the Deputy Chairman is Mr Raymond Williams, also chief
executive officer (CEO) of HIH Winterthur International Holdings Limited
and director of the following organizations: Insurance Council of Australia,
Australian Motor Insurers Limited, and Garvan Institute for Medical
Research (in Sydney).
The insurance industry and mining industry both have a vested interest in the
public health programs promoted by the Macfarlane Burnet Centre for the
prevention of AIDS and hepatitis, programs which are exported to Africa,
Asia and the Pacific Region by the Centre under the auspices of the World
Health Organization. These programs have an almost exclusive focus on
surveillance, injections, drugs and condom distribution as part of what is
euphemistically called a harm reduction strategy. The promotional
literature of the National Mental Health Strategy and Drug Strategy suggest
that harm minimization and harm reduction programs accept that drug
use is now an unavoidable feature of society and rather than attempt to stop
people from injecting themselves with heroin, amphetamines and other
chemicals, public health designers are focusing on teaching young people
safe injecting habits such as not sharing needles between users and safe
disposal of contaminated needles and syringes.
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The other major focus of the Macfarlane Burnet Centre, under the guise of
epidemiological research, is investigation of the sexual habits of particular
populations of young people in Australia and elsewhere, particularly the
Aboriginal population, with the simultaneous promotion of what is, again
euphemistically, termed safe sex, meaning the use of condoms and
lubricants, rather than sexual fidelity. This is the same lobby group that have
actively promoted safe injecting houses, also called shooting galleries,
where, it is planned, young people will be provided with the means and
environment to inject themselves with pharmaceutically regulated heroin,
using clean disposable needles in a controlled environment where they can
be resuscitated if the overdose. The strategy of virus infection control is
centred on, in their own terminology, surveillance.
The Macfarlane Burnet Centre Annual Report of 1997-98 describes their
involvement in an ongoing project titled Victorian Aboriginal Health
Service Study of Young Peoples Health and Well-Being. It is described as
follows:
The objective of the Young Peoples Health Study is to establish a
longitudinal study of a cohort of young Aboriginal people in order to
describe their health problems, explore the interrelated causes of these
problems, and describe factors associated with adolescent resilience
and vulnerability. This year the project team have finalised the
questionnaire which was programmed for computer use. A team of
peer interviewers was trained and a data collection manual prepared.
The team of young peer interviewers contacted young people on the
random sample list and invited them to take part in the study. 180
young Koori people living in metropolitan Melbourne have now
completed the lengthy questionnaire on portable computers. Those
over 16 years have also been counselled and had tests for blood borne
viruses and sexually transmitted diseases [hepatitis B and AIDS]. Data
collection is now finished and the data entered into the computer. The
next stage of the study will be analysis and writing up the results. The
results will be disseminated to the Aboriginal community and the local
Aboriginal community organisations. There will also be presentations
at seminars and conferences and the results will be published in
journals. (p.82)
The Macfarlane Burnet Centre were also involved in a project titled
Community Health Needs Assessment: Yarrambah Aboriginal
Community. This one week project, funded by Qld Health and Harvard
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University involved assisting the Yarrambah Community to design an

evaluation process for a community-based needs assessment. One wonders
whether this Aboriginal Community know who sits on the Board of the
Macfarlane Burnet Centre, or that Rio Tinto Mining are contributing to their
activities, along with the insurance industry. One wonders also what
conclusions the computer will reach with all the information gathered
about young aboriginal people in urban and rural Australia, and what other
purposes this sensitive information could be used for.
The Macfarlane Burnet Centre is a keen proponent of AZT (Azidothymidine,
also called Zidovudine, and manufactured by Glaxo-Wellcome) for the
treatment of HIV infection and AIDS, and needle and condom distribution
for the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases including AIDS. They
have been involved in establishing a needle and syringe exchange program
in the Indian State of Manipur, which is the first of its kind, and is
described in the previous years annual report as follows:
The SHALOM (Society for HIV/AIDS Lifeline Operation in
Manipur) Project is a collaboration between MBC and the Emmanuel
Hospitals Association (EHA). The project was established early in
1995 as an indigenous response to the alarming incidence of HIV
infection among young drug users in the semi-rural community of
Churachandpur in Manipur state, in far Northeast India. This
community-based project aims to reduce the transmission of HIV and
the impact of AIDS in the community. Home based care and drug
detoxification together with counselling and community education
continue as major components of the program.
A needle and syringe exchange program has been established, the
first of its kind in India, thus providing leadership in the introduction
of new but acceptable strategies to reduce the transmission of HIV in
south Asia. MBC has provided technical support, assisting in the
review of project activities and in planning and design of the third
phase. Further support has been extended through training and support
for investigations including a study of impact of the epidemic on
women by the community and seroprevalence of HIV among injecting
drug users.
In the next annual report, the same strategy is described as a harm reduction
approach without giving the detail that this involves the distribution of
needles and syringes.
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It could be argued that the Prime Ministers and American Governments

professed zero tolerance policy on drugs is totally incompatible with the
simultaneous provision of needles and plastic syringes (in the form of needle
exchange and distribution programs), without the added hypocrisy of
injecting rooms or injecting houses, as has been promoted in recent
years by the drug enforcement industry.
There is a fundamental difference between swallowing a drug and selfinjecting it. This is a point exploited by the methadone lobby, long after the
methadone program had demonstrably failed to prevent an increasing
number of Australians, Americans and Europeans from becoming addicted
to opiates. Other parts of the world are not equally troubled by opiate
addiction, although it is said to be a growing problem in large cities
throughout the world. The reason that methadone failed to decrease
addiction levels in the world is obvious. It is itself an opiate, and can cause
even worse and more prolonged withdrawal if suddenly stopped, than
heroin. A fear of the pain and suffering of withdrawal, and a weakening of
resistance to refuse the drug as the symptoms worsen are recognised
amongst the many factors that contribute to this terrible problem.
Methadone (physeptone) is a synthetic opiate available in tablet and syrup
form, and sold in Australia by the same company that produce AZT, the
giant pharmaceutical company Glaxo-Wellcome, the head offices of which
are based in the US and England. Wellcome Pharmaceuticals is related to the
Wellcome Trust, probably Britains largest medical research trust fund,
although it is claimed that the two organizations are politically independent,
and that financial, political and scientific decisions of the Wellcome Trust
are not influenced by agendas for the profit of Wellcome Pharmaceuticals,
now merged with the huge American drug company Glaxo to form GlaxoWellcome. Wellcome Pharmaceuticals is the only drug company in this
part of the world to manufacture and sell azidothymidine (AZT), now being
promoted by the Macfarlane Burnet Centre as a successful treatment for
AIDS, despite much evidence to the contrary. The Centres literature also
claims that HIV antibodies in the blood signify an infection that is inevitably
fatal, with or without drug treatment, a claim that is scientifically unjustified
and potentially disastrous.
AMRAD corporation, as well as the Macfarlane Burnet Centre and Forensic
Psychiatry Centre are closely involved with the University of Melbourne and
Monash University, and Professor John Mills, who has a bachelor of science
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(BSc) from Chicago and a medical degree (MD) from Harvard is a professor
of Microbiology at both Universities (a situation not uncommon in
Melbourne).
Monash University and the University of Melbourne are the only institutions
that are allowed to produce medical graduates in Victoria, and only medical
practitioners are allowed to prescribe psychoactive drugs via the national
Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS). Many potentially dangerous drugs
are, however available over the counter at pharmacies in Australia, and
others on pharmacy shelves and supermarket shelves. One such drug is the
opiate codeine, which, like morphine, pethidine and heroin causes
habituation and physical dependence with extended ingestion.
The physiological mechanism behind this phenomenon of psychological and
physical addiction to opiate drugs is well understood, and it is of note that
the British Empire was using opium for its addictive and socially destructive
properties when used as an intoxicant in the 1840, during the Opium Wars
with China. Following this notorious war, when British warships threatened
to attack Chinese ports if the country refused to allow more of the deadly
chemical import, Britain was ceded the territory of Hong Kong and
extensive trading rights as well as a guarantee of increased opium exports
into China. This opium was processed from poppies grown in other British
colonies, particularly India and Burma. In these countries farmers were
forced to dig up their rice fields and plant fields of poppies instead. Since
rice was, and is, a staple diet in these areas, this resulted in subsequent massstarvation over the subsequent century, for many millions whose land and
culture have been destroyed or degraded by these and similar acts of tyranny.
Opiates act on the brain by binding with opiate receptors on neurones. These
neurones are thought to be mainly in the central core of the brain, in the
hypothalamus, midbrain and brainstem. The emotional circuit termed the
limbic system is closely connected to these areas as is the movement
generation centre termed the basal ganglia. The hypothalamus, and other
parts of the brain produce the bodys own supply of natural opiates, termed
endogenous opiates or endorphins. These act as natural painkillers, relieving
both physical and psychological pain. They are released in increased
quantities at times of need due to the integrated activity of the nervous
system and mind. This physiological and biochemical mechanism is one of
an undiscovered number of natural abilities that human beings have to
withstand pain and other traumatic experiences and recover from them.
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The ingestion (or injection) of opiates has two obvious and predictable
effects on the brains physiology. Firstly, less opiates are produced by the
areas of the brain that normally secrete them. A similar effect is observed in
people who take thyroid extracts or cortisone, when endogenous production
(by the body) of these hormones decreases. The second predictable effect is
that the brain starts developing more receptors for opiates, partly due to
damage of other artificially stimulated receptors.
Artificial chemicals, whilst mimicking the effects of natural stimulation of
neurone cell membrane receptors (at synapses or on the body of the cell) in
some ways, behave in fundamentally different ways in the long term.
Natural neurotransmitters and neurohormones are constantly recycled by the
brain and are also being constantly synthesised from amino acids, which
reach the brain through the blood stream. This is a complex and intricate
chemical orchestra conducted by the brain, but profoundly influenced and in
a real sense controlled by the mind. Both the mind, and the sensitive
processes that regulate the biochemistry of the brain can be adversely
affected by exogenous (from outside) stimulation of receptors designed for
transient stimulation by naturally synthesised and catabolised chemical
messengers. These include the endorphins as well as neurohormones and
neurotransmitters.
Some of the named neurotransmitters have been increasingly mentioned in
popular literature and the mass-media in recent years, mainly because of
the aggressive marketing of a range of drugs that exert their most obvious
effects by increasing and decreasing the activity of neurotransmitters. These
drugs include the old and new antidepressants, amphetamines (and related
stimulants) and major tranquillisers (antipsychotics or dopamine-blockers).
The older tricyclic antidepressants (such as Tryptanol and Prothiaden) tend
to stimulate noradrenaline and serotonin activity, according to
pharmacological literature, whilst the newer SSRI antidepressants are
claimed by the manufacturers to specifically target serotonin reuptake
mechanisms in synapses in the brain, hence the name Selective Serotonin
Reuptake Inhibitors.
Prozac was the first SSRI drug to be marketed by a pharmaceutical
company, although the chemical precursor of the drug (also the precursor to
the euphoria drug ecstasy) was discovered several decades ago. Following
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the unprecedented sales of Prozac by Eli Lilly, the US based drug company
that manufactures and sells the drug, several other drug companies have
brought out their own SSRIs to get their share of the depression market, as
their own marketing plans describe the troubled people of the world.
SmithKline Beecham, the huge UK-based drug company are one such
company, and, in the mid-1990s began an aggressive marketing campaign in
Australia and New Zealand for their SSRI antidepressant Aropax, with a
particular push for the prescription of the drug by psychiatrists and general
practitioners for panic disorder. This was done with the assistance of the
Mental Health Foundation, headed by Professor Graham Burrows, who
endorsed a series of patient education leaflets promoting the diagnoses of
depression, anxiety, panic disorder, and obsessive compulsive
disorder(OCD) and the new drugs to treat these conditions (including the
ones produced by the sponsor SmithKline Beecham notably Aropax).
The following information was provided by SmithKline Beecham to their
sales representatives for Aropax (paroxetine) in New Zealand as part of an
intensive marketing campaign for the drug in the 1990s:
Depression is a condition of the central nervous system-ie the
brain. The basic unit of the nervous system is a neurone, which looks
like a rod with a swelling at each end. In the body these neurones
form long chains, or nerves. In the brain, they form massive, tangled
complexes. Chemical impulses pass from neurone to neurone like a
bucket-brigade, leaping the tiny gaps between each cell. These gaps
are called synapses.
The most important chemical imbalance that causes depression
seems to be related to a substance called serotonin, which is produced
by neurones and released into the synapse. Serotonin is necessary as a
medium for the brain to transmit positive emotions. Without enough
serotonin, it is physically impossible to feel happy or content.
Serotonin levels are usually kept at the right levels by the neurones
themselves, which re-absorb any excess, and release more in case of
shortage. In some depressed people, however, the neurones seem to
hoard serotonin, letting out only a trickle while aggressively
reabsorbing. As a result, the persons ability to feel happy dries up,
and they enter clinical depression.
This unreferenced and simplistic piece of nonsense fails to mention some
important facts about serotonin and distorts others in an inexcusable act of
medical and scientific fraud in an effort to promote a drug that specifically
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targets serotoninergic neurones in the brain. The promotional literature fails

to mention that serotonin is manufactured in the gut and nervous system
(including the brain) from the dietary amino acid tryptophan, and performs
many functions in the body other than being a happy chemical, which is
what the promotional literature from SmithKline Beecham suggests. This
advertising blurb also fails to mention that serotonin is concentrated in the
brain in the pineal organ, where it is converted to the neurohormone
melatonin, a scientific fact discovered in the 1960s and conclusively proved
in numerous studies. The fact that serotonin is concentrated in the pineal
where it is converted to melatonin during the night-time hours of darkness is
generally not found in literature about Prozac, Aropax and the other SSRI
drugs, including information provided by the drug companies to doctors or
in the many books and medical articles published about (and promoting) the
new psychiatric drugs.
SmithKline Beecham, who are, with the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories
(CSL) and the American giant Mercke, the biggest marketers of virus
vaccines in Australia, have played a prominent role in the Commonwealth of
Australias National Mental Health Strategy, and funded or co-funded a
range of public health and disease awareness campaigns and strategies
in Australia over the past 10 years. These have included collaborating with
the Mental Health Foundation and other drug foundations to produce,
promote and distribute literature promoting the diagnosis of panic disorder
for which the new SSRI drugs were being promoted despite conclusive
evidence that the drugs can aggravate anxiety immediately after they are
started precipitating psychosis and suicide in vulnerable individuals.
Australian ABC reporter Ray Moynihan, in his 1998 book Too Much
Medicine? described an elaborate launch of Aropax and panic disorder in
Sydney, in 1996:
One of the top chefs in the country is catering at one of the best
venues in the nation. A large gathering of doctors are about to tuck
into a $100-a-head meal. The live satellite link with hundreds of their
colleagues across Australia is soon to start: another lavish promotional
event dressed up as a scientific gathering, courtesy of the
This 1996 Sydney harbourside dinner was how the drug giant
SmithKline Beecham chose to educate doctors about the
governments approval of its new antidepressant, Aropax, for the
treatment of a psychiatric condition called panic disorder. The night
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was just one component in a highly sophisticated marketing campaign

to promote Aropax and this little-known disorder. The strategy
included Panic, the book; Panic, the video; and Panic, the T-shirt.
(p.115)
Moynihan continues to expose just a small amount of the ensuing cost to the
Australian community:
The use of new antidepressants, including Aropax and the better
known Prozac, has grown astronomically in Australia since the early
1990s, from 5,000 prescriptions a year in 1990 to over 2.5 million in
1996. Aropax is now one of the top-selling antidepressants. And as
the number of people using these expensive new drugs has
dramatically escalated, so too has the cost to the taxpayer. The new
antidepressants now cost the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme funded
through Medicare over $120 million in 1995-96. (p.115)
The 1992 SmithKline Beecham marketing plan, sent to the ACACP and
HRIC by a human rights worker in New Zealand in 1998, demonstrates a
callous disregard for the human beings being targeted to both prescribe and
consume this drug. The following extracts show the general tone of the
document:
Task/Assignment
We are to produce a strategy and creative execution to launch Aropax to GPs.
For the creative, we need a foundation concept and image, reflected in concept
boards for:
A detail aid
An invitation to the launch seminar
An educational mailing pack
Branding advertisements
Thought should also be given to

Leave behinds
Neurone card, showing how the neurone can hoard serotonin
Branded give aways
The client wants to research and test the campaigns submitted. Our concept boards
should be designed with this in mind.
Objective
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Marketing Objectives
1. Establish SSRIs as the future of antidepressant therapy by educating GPs.
2. Differentiate Aropax on the basis of its key attributes and strong branding.
3. As a result, establish Aropax as the SSRI of choice.
Direct marketing Objectives
1. Teach doctors about SSRIs.
2. Show why Aropax is the closest thing to an ideal agent.
3. Generate qualified leads for later sales calls.
Advertising Objectives
1. Build strong brand awareness of Aropax as the SSRI of choice. As we may
have a standing start race against a similar competitor, all branding must be
strong and emotional.
2. Build on the educational messages of the direct marketing.
Perhaps it is nave to imagine that the pharmaceutical industry would

consider the health of humanity as its primary objective. It is a clear conflict
of interest when the same industry is allowed opportunities to promote
diseases (especially invisible diseases) for which the drugs they produce
will be prescribed. It is also against the law. The wilful creation of disease,
termed biological warfare, is a crime against humanity, and is prohibited by
International Laws.
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34. THE DISUNITED NATIONS AND WARFARE

The geographical positioning of Canberra between Melbourne and Sydney
as the new capital city of the federated Australia was influenced by an overt
recognition of antagonism (euphemistically called rivalry) between the two
largest cities in Australia and the two most populous States, Victoria and
New South Wales.
Interstate competition and rivalry are not confined to Victoria and New
South Wales. Parochial attitudes are common in Queensland and the other
states, since Australia has never been a truly unified nation in terms of the
people who live here and even those who feel they belong here and are
citizens of the country. Although they may identify themselves as
Australian when overseas, many Australians identify themselves (and
others) as Queenslanders, Victorians, Western Australians etc. This
division of the population into camps with different state loyalties affects
some members of the community more so than others. In the arena of State
Politics, antagonism between State Premiers, usually based on arguments
about the relative allocation to State Governments of federally collected
taxes, is typical.
The political history of Australia is important to understand to gain an
accurate perspective of the present psychiatric system and prisons system in
Australia, because the three have been closely related since the development
of methods to control the immigrant and convict populations in the early
days of British Imperial Rule in what was, only 100 years ago, named
Australia (Southern Land).
Antagonism between people identifying themselves as being of one State or
another has persisted over the past 100 years and a constant feature of local
politics has been bickering between State Governments and between the
State and Federal Governments, but the problems created by fighting
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between institutions and organizations whose responsibilities are the

protection, defence, health and well-being of all Australians, do not end at
State level. The confusion and xenophobic hostility demonstrated by several
prominent State leaders over the past 30 years has influenced and been
influenced by the philosophies and political culture/attitudes of experts on
public health, including the mental health of the public. As well as rivalry
between States, each of which has different Mental Health Laws (such as
how, why and for how long people can be locked up and forcibly treated),
aggressive competition occurs between providers of health care and drug
treatments. These providers include some of the largest corporations in the
world, giant drug companies based overseas.
The basic structure of the mental health system in Australia and elsewhere in
the Commonwealth was established by the British Government following
colonisation, which was actively resisted by the native residents of Australia
as it was by native populations throughout the world. The period of
European colonisation of the world began long before the 1700s when what
is now called Australia was claimed by Captain James Cook for the British
Crown. Only 100 years ago the separate states that had been set up as semiindependent states and penal colonies (large prisons) were federated into the
Commonwealth of Australia, in which the system of separate states with
separate state governments persisted, with an additional Federal
(Commonwealth) Government with power to over-ride State laws and
policies (under certain conditions), based in Canberra. Constitutionally,
however, Australia remained a monarchy ruled by the British Royal Family
and their political representatives, and the Governor General of Australia
was given the power to dismiss the elected government, under certain
conditions, as occurred in 1975, when Gough Whitlams Labour government
was sacked by John Kerr.
Following this notorious incident, which disproved any notion of political
independence and democracy in Australia, Malcolm Fraser was appointed as
caretaker prime-minister. This political farce, which has been much written
and speculated about over the past 25 years occurred not long after the end
of the Vietnam War and the Javanese invasion of East Timor, which was
previously a cruelly administered, and badly neglected Portuguese colony.
The Portuguese retained commercial interests in the mineral-rich area and
also a philosophical and political presence in the form of the Catholic
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Church, facts that have importance in the current debate about Timorese
independence and freedom.
The Australian Governments previous betrayal of the Timorese people
should be kept in mind when deciding on the ethics of sending armed young
men and women to keep the peace according to American and
Commonwealth directives and strategies, since for many years, our
Governments, in defiance of the UN and the wishes (and health) of the East
Timorese people, have been the only ones in the world to officially accept
what was clearly a politically and economically motivated invasion of Timor
by Indonesia. This was clearly the invasion of a small island nation by a
larger neighbour, an act which ostensibly triggered one of several Gulf Wars
when Iraq did a similar thing to neighbouring Kuwait.
Double standards in international politics is ugly to see and abhorrent in
practice, but it has been a consistent feature of justified military actions
claimed in the name of peace-keeping, in which Australian military
personnel have played a role that can only be described as mercenary
executors of American and British national security demands, labouring
under the misapprehension that these demands are the same as Australias
and Australians national security needs. Geographically, politically,
historically and ethically, such a position is untenable, for several reasons,
and the history of economics, psychiatry, medical science and scientific
research in Australia clearly demonstrates why this is so.
The World Health Organization was formed after the Second World War as a
United Nations associated organization with a responsibility to improve the
health of the global human population. The organization initially focused
especially on infectious diseases in what they called the third world, being
a poorly-defined collection of nations most of which are in Africa and South
America. South-East Asian and South Asian nations were also mostly
described as third world, whereas Russia and China formed the less
spoken of second world. The first world in this three tiered classification
of the 180 or so independent nations on Earth, were the same nations that
developed the classification and their historical, economic and political
allies. Thus Britain, the United States of America, Canada, France,
Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries were elite members of the First
World, while Germany and Japan, who lost the war, were also allowed
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into the first world club, provided they accept the economic and
development reforms decided by the United Nations policy makers, which
included the notorious World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The worldwide misery created by the global debt and development
loans of the IMF and World Bank is almost incalculable. Under these
programs millions of people, particularly in Asia and Africa, have been
dispossessed of their land and forced into slavery or starvation. Their land
has been developed along the lines of escalating exploitation of the
mineral wealth of these parts of the world, regardless of growing pollution
and toxicity in the air, water and soil. This toxicity affects the countries in
which the minerals are mined and processed, as well as the oceans they are
transported across and the countries in which they are refined and
consumed or otherwise used. Too often, the raw minerals that are mined by
the slave-labour of a particular country are sold back to the enslavers at
enormous profit in the form of weapons and other technology to control the
increasingly restless populations of impoverished and angry slaves.
The development of modern slavery through the system of national debt is
simple in principle, but cruelly unfair. Under the system, nations were
allowed to borrow credit (loans) from first world banks via the World Bank
and pay back the loans, with interest, over the ensuing decades. Part of the
condition of these loans is that the countries, many of which had strong
nationalist political movements, accept the development plans devised by
the United Nations. These plans included programs affecting education,
health and banking, as well as defence and population control.
The ideals espoused by the United Nations many organizations have been
consistently noble, such as eradicating infectious disease, malnutrition and
pollution, and the promotion of peace and global tolerance, respect and
friendship. The outcomes of policies prescribed by the United Nations have
been less than disappointing in all these areas, and today, people in
increasing number are dying of infections, malnutrition, poisoning and the
direct or consequent effects of warfare and slavery.
The architects of policies that have created the modern medical, educational
and economic systems in Australia have included native Australians as well
as immigrants to the country and foreign citizens and nationals. This is also
the case in military policies and decisions, in a situation unique in the
modern world.
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The August 1999 Bulletin magazine features a cover story titled Defence:
our new policy revealed by national affairs editor John Lyons. The article
begins:
The chief of the Defence Department, Paul Barratt, has just been
sacked. An official report has condemned the $5bn purchase of six
Collins-class submarines as a disaster, saying they are unfit for war.
Morale has hit rock bottom for Australias armed forces personnel.
And a major review of Australias defence outlook, prepared in 1997,
was outdated before it was even published.
Despite the fact that events had overtaken the assumptions
contained in them six months earlier, the governments two reviews
premised on continuing economic expansion in the region were used
as justification for not cutting Australias $11 bn-a-year defence
budget. Our regional neighbours so the logic went would continue
to expand their military capabilities.
Now, an investigation by The Bulletin has uncovered classified
Defence Department documents which show that Australia has been
developing a dramatically different defence policy in secret. Since
the end of the Vietnam War, Australia has placed priority on defending
the sea-air gap across northern Australia. Our desire for forward
operations, such as Korea or Vietnam, had dissipated with defeat in
Vietnam.
But what is occurring now is an historic change in the countrys
defence policy. Australias defence force is becoming more integrated
into the American military machine and has begun purchasing
equipment with less relevance to its own defence needs.
The reality is clear: Australia is now moving towards a forward
defence policy, by stealth.
The Fairfax-owned Age newspaper on 29.7.99 featured a front page story by
Paul Daley, the papers defence correspondent in Canberra titled Australia
troops set for Timor. The article begins:
The United Nations is expected to ask Australian troops to form
the core of an international military operation for East Timor in the
likely event the province votes for independence from Indonesia.
Defence sources told the The Age that under strategies discussed
by Federal Cabinets national security subcommittee, Australian and
New Zealand troops are expected to form a nucleus of expertise for
any East Timor force at the UNs request.
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Under the strategy, other Pacific and Asian countries such as

Fiji, Malaysia and possibly Thailand would be asked to contribute
the bulk of the ground troops for the force, which would be referred to
as an international monitoring group or a transition assistance
force.
The article also stated that the Foreign Minister, Mr Alexander Downer,
said in Singapore that Australia would consider sending more police to East
Timor to deal with any increase in violence after the self-determination
ballot.
Violence comes in many forms. It can be psychological or physical. Speech
can be violent, and verbal abuse has real casualties. In fact both the receiver
of the abuse and the perpetrator of it suffer through verbal abuse and the
psychological damage that accompanies it. This may partly account for the
low morale of the Australian armed personnel who are yet again to be
ordered to use these arms against people in other countries that they do not
even speak the same language of and cannot possibly understand the
complex problems of. The Australians and New Zealanders that the
Commonwealth governments of these nations are so readily prepared to
contribute to an international peace-keeping force were, according to the
Age article, to be protected from harm by a mainly Malaysian and Fijian
human shield of ground-troops, whom they would obviously command,
but only according to directives from the Commonwealth and American
Military experts that also advise the State and Federal Governments about
matters relating to defence, and coach the political leaders of the country
about what to say to the public about defence. Needless to say, the Prime
Minister, Foreign Minister and other senior cabinet ministers do what they
are told during military crises such as have occurred in the Persian Gulf
and Yugoslavia this year, and can be expected to continue unthinking
obedience to NATO and US military policy, regardless of how much these
policies kill and maim Australians and their neighbours.
On Friday, 2nd April, an article was published in The Age newspaper by
Henry Kissinger, about the NATO bombing of Kosovo, titled Clinton is
mistaken. The article contains no reference to the extraordinary coincidence
that the offensive against Kosovo was launched at the same time that the US
President Bill Clinton was under threat of dismissal or criminal prosecution
for publicly lying under oath to Congress (the US Government) and
American people. It was the act of lying under oath that was the serious
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crime, much more so than the sordid sexual matters that Clinton was lying
about.
Somehow the remarkable timing of the American militarys publicly
reported offensives against Iraq, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan at times
of political and personal desperation by the official chief of the US armed
forces, have been all but ignored by the mass-media in Australia, but not by
the Australian people.
Cynicism towards American politics and Australian politics is a common
attitude in Australia, as is a general apathy towards politics of both a
domestic and international nature. There is little recognition of the enormous
influence that domestic and international politics has on the health of each
and every Australian. Yet the evidence is all around us that the official
Australian Health Policy, and the radical changes in Australian politics
reported in sporadic and soon-forgotten media reports are rapidly following
the lines of the United States system, but with significant differences.
The similarity is that capital rules and capitalism rules, with a veneration of
the principles free market and economic rationalism, both euphemisms
for modern slave theory. A key deception of this excuse for economic and
political expansion by already dominant economies is the concept of the
trickle-down effect. This is a justification for the worsening gap between
haves and have-nots in countries and communities around the world, and a
suggestion that if the rich are allowed to become richer still, some will
trickle down to poorer members of society increasing the overall wealth
of society. This discriminatory economic theory has turned out to be a bad
joke played on the millions of people who have been induced to climb the
illusory economic ladder only to find themselves deeper and deeper into
debt, more stressed, and more depressed.
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35. DIAGNOSING THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

The signs have been evident for many years that the global economy is sick.
These signs include a widening gap between rich and poor individuals and
nations as well as rising dependence by the people of the earth on drugs to
help them cope with living. Most animals do not need help to cope with
living, although some, diagnosed as suffering from depression by human
beings, are being given the same drugs that humans take to medicate their
unhappiness. Despite these drugs, or because of them, the number of people
who are killing themselves has been increasing every decade during the past
50 years. These are surely some signs of a sick economy.
In 1999 the Age newspaper contained a half page story on page 4 titled
Australias stark reality: size does matter written by the reporter Malcolm
Maiden. The article claimed that the company that once called itself the Big
Australian signalled its final, full surrender to the forces of globalisation.
The Big Australian referred to is the mining company BHP (Broken Hill
Propriety Limited), whose advertising campaigns of the past have identified
the company as the Big Australian and the Quiet Australian. The
newspaper report described some of the actions of the new American boss of
the company, which many Australians continue to identify as a great
Australian company along with Arnotts biscuits, Holden motor cars and
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other traditionally Australian companies which have been taken over by

larger foreign controlled companies in the new globalised economy.
It would appear on deeper political and economic analysis, that the State and
Federal (Commonwealth) Governments of Australia surrendered to the
forces of globalization many years ago, and for over a decade have been
loud advocates of what was termed globalization and economic
rationalism. Both are synonymous with the economy being ruled by the
markets and those with the most capital: capitalism, in other words. The
Australian Governments have been strong proponents of the philosophy that
large corporations and affluent individuals should be allowed to continue to
profit freely with minimal government interference suggesting that by so
doing, a trickle-down effect will lead to an overall rise in standard of
living, with the poor also eventually benefiting from increasing affluence of
the rich. This too is a Capitalist philosophy, closely connected with the
notorious social and political philosophy called social darwinism.
The discriminatory social policies that have resulted from misapplication of
the evolutionary theories of the English scientist Sir Charles Darwin, include
a range of social and economic theories based on promoting survival of the
fittest including promotion of the dominant races and enslavement or
extermination of inferior (also called degenerate races). Dominant races
(and races that implemented eugenics to try and become dominant) include
Aryan races (not all of whom are white) and white races, however the
races considered to be inferior (intellectually and morally) have
consistently been uncivilised natives of colonised countries in the
continents of Africa (especially), Australia, South America and Asia. The
Asian exception in post-world war two history has been Japan, reflected
by the fact that (rich, fair-skinned) Japanese were considered to be
honorary whites in white-supremacist systems such as that in apartheid
South Africa.
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Social darwinism infers from the concept that it is natural for the strong
to survive and the weak to die, that it is natural for the rich to prosper and
the poor to be exploited and enslaved. It supposes that in the struggle for
survival, the fit (rich) are destined to rule over the poor. This applies to
individuals, as well as groups of people and even nations according to social
darwinist theory. Nazi theory is a development of social darwinism, centred
on the implementation of eugenics, a catastrophic medico-political attempt
to improve the genes and genetics of the human race initially by selective
sterilization of those considered unfit to breed, and later by the mass murder
of races and classes of people considered dangerous, defective or
degenerate.
Social darwinism is intricately enmeshed with capitalist theory and slave
theory, and a close historical examination of the three theories demonstrates
common features and prejudices in their underlying philosophy.
The first is that some people, families, and some classes of people are
superior to others, and therefore deserving of more political power, more
money and property and more respect from the public, as well as better
opportunities for happiness, survival and success. These people are also
encouraged to have more children and to educate them in such a way as to
maintain the existing class and political structure. The inferiors in these
hierarchies were considered to be deserving of rule, as well as exploitation
by the superior races, classes and cultures.
The second is the class structure itself. Charles Darwin, as the grandson of
the imperial social theorist Sir Erasmus Darwin, was born into an elite
English academic family, and supposed, as his letters to his cousin Francis
Galton reveal, that the Darwin family were exceptionally well-endowed with
geniuses (including himself), amongst what he considered to be the most
intelligent type of person on earth, the Englishman of good breeding (and
from a good family). Hitler, and other advocates of racial superiority
theories formulated, or had formulated for them, different hierarchies, with
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some differences in the order in which races and individuals have been
categorised in terms of superiority and inferiority, however the basic
obsession with categorisation according to class, colour, race and presumed
genetics is common to all.
The class structures of Germany, Scandinavia, the United States of America,
England and Australia are significantly different, and the types of policy
which have been formulated to control troublesome sections of the society
have differed between these major centres of eugenics practice and exporters
of eugenic ideas.
The word eugenics was effectively written out of contemporary English
language after the end of the Second World War. This is because the
discredited philosophy of breeding better people according to Darwinian
principles, after being embraced by several European nations before the
1940s, was responsible for mass-murder, genocide, torture and other abuses
when practically applied to rid Germany and German-occupied Europe of
degenerate races and degenerate individuals. The nations whose
scientific, medical and political establishments initially embraced eugenics
included the United States, Great Britain, South Africa, Canada and
Australia. The misguided abuse of genetic science resulted in thousands of
forced sterilisations (often by simple castration) of young men and boys in
the United States in the early years of the twentieth century, often for
feeble-mindedness or degeneracy. Feeble-mindedness and
degeneracy were manifest in such behaviour, according to eugenists, as
masturbation, petty crime, immorality and delinquency.
The term eugenics and the first Society (organization) for Eugenics were
created in the 1860s by Charles Darwins first cousin Sir Francis Galton and
Darwins son, with the ostensible aim of improving humans by selective
parenthood, and to give a better chance to the more suitable races or strains
of blood (De Paoli, 1997). The philosophy was exported from London,
where it originated, to Germany where both eugenics and euthanasia
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(mercy killing) were instituted as State Social Policies in the 1920s and
1930s when, starting with the mentally ill and physically deformed, those
deemed to be immoral, or degenerate were killed following torture in
the form of cruel medical experimentation. This was a horrible practice that
became obvious to the world following the Second World War, when the
methods used by German and Japanese authorities to achieve racial
cleansing was revealed (in part) by the mass-media, which had become
increasingly powerful following the development of television in the 1920s.
The abuses which resulted from eugenics were usually blamed, however, on
Hitler and the Nazis, clouding the issue of why and where the Nazis got
their ideas. It also clouded the important fact that many other nations,
including those which constituted the Allies, also implemented eugenic
policies before and during the Second World War. Television, as usual, told
only part of the story, and was used, from the outset, for the purposes of proBritish and pro-American propaganda. It did not suit the agenda of the
television programmers at the time to reveal to the world how widely
eugenic philosophy was accepted and implemented.
The first television broadcast, an experimental internal broadcast before an
audience at the Royal Institution in London was done in the late 1920s by
John Logie Baird, a 38 year-old Scottish engineer who had worked at a
Clyde Valley electric power company, before leaving to concentrate on his
research, according to Penguins Chronicle of the World. The same year as
the founding of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 1927, ICI
chemicals was also founded in England. ICI is an acronym for Imperial
Chemical Industries, and these were the last days of undisguised
imperialism by the British Empire. ICI continued, after the war, to grow
into a massive chemical and pharmaceutical company, which profited from
experimentation on captive subjects during and after the Second World War,
including the recently revealed experiments on interred Italians and Jewish
refugees in Australia, who, along with injured Australian soldiers, were
deliberately infected with massive doses of malaria. These malaria infections
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were transmitted by transfusions of infected blood, and by exposing them to

specially bred mosquitoes.
The experiments on the disabled Australian soldiers and interred civilians
were claimed at the time to be necessary for the war effort and to protect
Australian troops who were dying of malaria in New Guinea, but this was
not, in fact, true. The cruel tests were done in the interests of the
pharmaceutical industry in the USA and England, specifically for those of
the American company Winthrop (manufacturers of Panadol) and ICI
chemicals, which were testing out a German-discovered drug, later marketed
as Paludrine. After the war ended, the trials continued for several months in
Melbourne, at the wishes of these foreign drug companies, demonstrating
the lie that lay at the heart of claims that they were necessary for the health
of Australian troops. The drug trials and the deliberate infections which
preceded them were orchestrated by the military hospital at Heidelberg,
Melbourne, and conducted in remote North Queensland, far from the eyes of
the rest of Australia and the world. What is worse, rather than compensating
the victims of this cruel human experimentation, the government of
Australia and the Australian military denied that such events actually
occurred until 50 years later, and even then denied culpability for their
actions. The orders that resulted in what can easily be described as torture
came from the British Empire, without whose agreement (and complicity)
the experiments would not have been allowed.
At the time of Erasmus Darwin, Charles grandfather, London was the centre
of the British Empire and the global economy, and the academics in
Englands two major Universities, Oxford and Cambridge, considered (and
declared) themselves to be the cream of the worlds intellect. They were the
educators of the British Royal Family and the designers of the British
educational system which was exported to the world. They were also the
designers and masterminds of English Imperialist theories, including the
divide and rule policies used in the many countries colonised by British
Forces, and many other socially destructive policies that continue to this day,
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sometimes due to conscious efforts to attack other countries, societies and

populations and sometimes as a result of entrenched attitudes and
procedures.
Imperialism is a term used to describe the expansionist political and
military philosophy of European monarchic empires, including England,
Norway, Sweden, Holland (Nederlands), Greece and Monaco, to mention
some of the democratic states that retain self-styled kings, queens and
royal families today. This concept supposes some families to be naturally
superior based on heredity, blood, genes and blood lines. These families
were designated as divinely appointed natural rulers to whom all lesser
mortals were expected to show respect, and further, diffidence. A
subservient attitude when a commoner was in social contact with the
aristocracy was demanded of the commoner and enforced by the
supporters and protectors of the royal families, kings and queens included,
but also including their children, relatives and descendents. In the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, when slavery was still legal, many other European
nations also had imperial royal families, including France, Belgium,
Germany, Austria and Spain. In fact, the aristocratic families that ruled
these different European nations were often related biologically to each
other. Thus the Kaiser (emperor) William (Wilhelm) II of Germany was the
grandson of Queen Victoria of England, and the present-day husband of
Queen Elizabeth of England, Prince Philip, is of the Greek royal family.
When, eventually, slavery of Africans was deemed illegal in the British
Empire and the slaves were released in 1833, rather than paying
compensation to those who were enslaved, the massive sum of 20 million
pounds was paid, instead, to the slavers, an action arranged by Nathan
Rothschild, of the Anglo-Jewish Rothschild banking family. This family has
remained immensely wealthy and influential until present times, as have
many other families, companies and nations that profiteered from the use of
slave labour over the past 500 years.
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Although the theory of evolution by natural selection is generally credited to

his grandson Charles, Erasmus Darwin also developed a theory of evolution
by the inheritance of characteristics and preferential survival of better
adapted species, publishing his theories in 1794 in a book titled Zoonomia.
His grandson developed these theories further following his journeys aboard
the HMS Beagle in the 1800s, but published them only when confronted by
a paper detailing similar theories by the young scientist Russell Wallace,
who forwarded a paper describing evolution by natural selection to Darwin
whilst on a journey as ships naturalist himself.
When Erasmus Darwin published Zoonomia, slavery was one of the
mainstays of the British Imperial economy, and this was to remain the case
for many decades to follow. Slaves were taken by the British from Africa to
the Americas, but also from the Indian Subcontinent to other parts of the
British Empire, where they were forced to work in menial jobs for British
companies and wealthy individuals. In Australia, convict labour was
another form of slavery instituted against the poor as well as political
dissidents (particularly Irish ones). Coolie labour, imported from China
and India, was another aborted effort at slavery by the British in Australia,
which most Australians are still unaware of.
In 1794, the same year Erasmus Darwin published his book, slavery was
officially abolished in all French territories, but not in British ones.
The Chronicle of the World, which is, it must be noted, a British version of
history, explains the French actions and motives as follows:
As the three black delegates from Santo Domingo watched from
their seats in the Assembly, the Convention votedto abolish slavery
throughout the territories of the republic and to confer French
citizenship on every former slave. Then the Domingans were led to
the Tribunal where the president embraced them as the Convention
rose in a standing ovationIn 1792, a year after the outbreak of the
slave revolt, two civil commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel
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were sent to administer the island. In August 1793 they freed all of the
500,000 slaves. This humanitarian act had its political side. As long as
the revolt continued it was impossible for France, at war with Spain
and Britain, to defend its colony. Loyal freedmen were naturally better
patriots than rebellious slaves. (p.783)
According to Chronicle of the World, the French hoped that their action
would stimulate Britains slaves to rise in their turn, thus helping to
undermine Britains war effort. This was not, in all probability, told to the
slaves, who were undoubtedly pleased at being freed, not realising that their
freedom was part of a military strategy. Here is seen one of the symptoms of
a globally sick economy: military and political strategy disguised as
humanitarian action. It also becomes evident from this historical episode,
that war between European states has been a dominant feature of global
politics for several centuries. It is worth noting that the British attempted a
similar strategy during the American War of Independence, when Negro
slaves were offered their freedom if they fought for the British against the
Americans. Hundreds of slaves were subsequently betrayed by the British,
and sold again into slavery after the British lost the war.
The development of Social Darwinism in the 1950s can be illustrated by the
1958 article Forecasting the Future, published in Frontiers of Science. The
author is another Sir Charles Darwin, grandson of the famous zoologist, and
great-great grandson of Erasmus Darwin. Sir Charles, who was a pioneer in
nuclear studies and acted as Director of the National Physics Laboratory in
England from 1938 to 1949 has a preoccupying fear. His concern is about
overpopulation. He introduces a very strange, but revealing, article with the
caption:
Every day there are eighty thousand more people on the earth. In
another fifty years the world population will be four billion a hungry
four billion. And in one hundred years? (p.100)
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He explains the methodology of modern scientific forecasting on which he

bases his pessimistic prediction:
The present director of the British Meteorological Office, Sir
Graham Sutton, wrote an article which describes the situation
admirably. In making his forecast the meteorologist is doing the same
sort of thing that a player does when he bids his hand at the game of
bridge. If he were required to predict what tricks he would take with
absolute certainty, he would not get very far; for example, if he had
the ace and king of a suit he would only be absolutely certain of two
tricks if that suit were trumps.
In fact, he does not declare that he will get two tricks, but he
makes the estimate that he will probably get, say, eight or nine tricks.
He reckons that this is the probability; he knows that one or two of his
strongest cards may possibly fail to win the tricks he expects, but then
he knows that this will most likely be compensated by tricks from
some of his other cards he was not so confidently counting on. He
estimates probabilities, and if he is an experienced player he is usually
not far from right in a general way, even though some of his details
may be wrong. (p.101)
Professor Charles Darwins paper Forecasting the Future was presented at
a physics seminar at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in
1956, where he had worked as a visiting professor in 1922. During the
Second World War he worked in the British Nuclear weapons industry,
directing the British National Physics Laboratory. He clearly viewed himself
as an experienced player.
Darwin gives some figures for world population that he could not possibly
be certain about, since at the times concerned large parts of the world were
undiscovered (by Europeans), and the populations of these areas have
been consistently underestimated (an example of which is seen in the Terra
Nullius declaration of Australia by the British):
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At the beginning of the Christian era the population of the world

was about 350 million. It fluctuated up and down a bit, and by A.D.
1650 it was still only 470 million. But by 1750 it had risen to 700
million, and now it is 2500 million. That is to say that for 1700 years
it was fairly constant, and then in 200 years it has suddenly
quadrupled itself.
The increase of world population is still going on at a rate of
doubling itself in a century, but it is a most menacing thing to think
about. (p.104)
More menacing than thoughts of overpopulation, is the impersonal,
abstracted way in which Darwin discusses solutions to the problem of
overpopulation:
Can anything be done about it? Frankly, though perhaps for a
short term something might be done, in the long run I doubt it. My
reason is this. Natures control of animal populations is a simple,
brutal one. In order to survive, every animal produces too many for
the next generation, and the excess is killed off in one way or another.
It is a method of control of tremendous efficiency, and during most of
his history it has also applied to man. To replace a mechanism of this
tremendous efficiency it is no use thinking of anything small; the
alternative we must offer, if we want to beat nature, must also be
tremendous.
The difficulty is even greater than it appears at first sight, because
there would be an instability about any alternative scheme deliberately
adopted. Thus, suppose some really good solution was found and was
adopted by half the world [Europe, for example?]. For a generation or
two this half would prosper. Its numbers would stay constant and the
people would not be hungry, but all the time the numbers in the other
half of the world would be increasing, so that in the end they would
swamp the first half [first world?]. That is the terrible menace of the
matter; there is a strong survival value in being one of those who
refuse to limit population. (p.109)
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Darwin leaves it to his audience to work on a solution to the menacing

problem of overpopulation, warning that war is not nearly murderous
enough:
The first thing we may think of which might reduce the numbers
is war, but most war is not nearly murderous enough to have any
effect. Thus we should count as a really bad war one in which five
million people would be killed, but this would only set back the
population increase for less than three months, and that hardly seems
to matter. I doubt that even an atomic war would have any serious
influence on the estimate, unless it led to such appalling destruction of
both the contestants that the economy of the whole world was ruined
and that barbarism and starvation would ensue. (p.109)
Professor Darwin likes the word tremendous, and it such a solution that
the grandson of the author of Descent of Man, exhorts his audience at
Caltech to work on:
It is very much to be hoped that a great deal of thought will be
given to this matter on the chance that someone may hit on a solution,
but I must repeat that natures method of limiting population is so
brutally tremendous that it can never be replaced by any such triviality
as the extension of methods of birth control. It calls for something
much more tremendous if there is to be any prospect of success.
(p.109)
Could AIDS be such a tremendously brutal solution?
Darwin, in his talk to Caltech, refers to a celebrated book on the threat of
overpopulation, written by Thomas Malthus in 1798. In his Essay on the
Principle of Population, originally published anonymously, the Anglican
priest and economist argued that poor laws tend to increase dependent
populations, and should be replaced by workhouses for those in distress
and government incentives for agriculture. He claimed that population is
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always destined to increase disproportionately compared to food production

ability. By such definition, the world has always been overpopulated.
The newspaper headlines on 6.1.2000 announced that another stockmarket
crash had occurred, this time blamed on imminent rises in interest rates in
the United States of America. The article in The Australian, by economics
correspondent Ian Henderson, begins:
The prospect of a sharp interest rate rise in the US within a month
wiped $15 billion off Australian share prices yesterday and
battered other markets worldwide.
The article continues:
Share prices around the world were jolted by fears of the looming
rise, which is being fuelled by evidence of strong economic growth, a
tightening labour market and a view that share markets are probably
overvalued in the US.
Why should strong economic growth cause a lack of confidence in the
stockmarket? What constitutes strong economic growth? What is the
labour market and why is it tightening? Could warfare and slavery have
anything to do with the collapse of the stockmarket? Is this an indicator that
the global economy is becoming more unwell or is it a sign of improving
health of the people who create and maintain the economy?
The stockmarket is maintained by speculation about the future. This includes
speculation about which companies and industries are likely to bring profits
to shareholders, and which are likely to out-compete the opposition. The
opposition, in a competition-oriented capitalist economy, include other
companies and industries on the one hand, and other countries and groups of
countries on the other. This competition is often ruthless and may involve
strategies developed by military-style thinking, including brainwashing,
propaganda, subterfuge and surprise attacks. Take-overs of smaller
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companies and industries by larger ones are common, and have resulted in
giant corporations wielding more economic influence than entire nations.
The connection between the stockmarket and military machine involve
more than common strategies, however. Companies that profit directly from
warfare are included amongst the companies on the global stockmarkets, and
these are known to grow in times of war. These companies include
businesses involved in more than the manufacture of conventional weapons
such as guns, missiles, tanks, grenades, aircraft, ships, submarines, land
mines and bombs. The industries which provide the raw materials for
conventional weapons, including the mining industry also profit from war
and preparation for war, regardless of whether this is called the war effort,
as it was called in the 1940s or defence as the same industry has been
called since then. In more recent times, computers, surveillance equipment
and biotechnology have also been part of the military machine, and used for
military purposes, as has the chemical industry and pharmaceutical industry.
These latter industries have played a prominent role in a change in modern
warfare from predominantly conventional warfare to predominantly
unconventional warfare, involving chemical warfare, drug warfare,
psychological warfare and biological warfare.
Reading between the lines of military jargon, some disturbing conclusions
may be reached by reading the cover story of the August 1999 Bulletin
magazine. The article, by John Lyons, is advertised on the front cover as
Defence: our new policy revealed and is titled Operation Backflip.
Lyons claims that following a reluctance to engage in such activities
following defeat in Vietnam, Australia is again engaged in what are
euphemistically termed forward operations, in the nature of Vietnam and
Korea. He reveals that this change in Australian military policy is being
done by stealth, and making the Australian military activities more closely in
line with that of the United States of America.
Lyons writes:
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After the defeat in Vietnam, US and Australian policymakers and

the public lost the appetite for prolonged overseas engagements. The
Nixon doctrine of 1969 preached that unless a leading power
intervened in a Third World conflict, the US should not commit
forces.
Committing forces is not the same as supporting conflicts, and it is common
knowledge that the US have supported armed conflict around the world over
the past century, especially in the past fifty years when the pentagon and US
military (and successive governments) have been fighting a war against
communism and socialism. This is not surprising, since the US is a major
exporter of arms, and it is thus deemed to be in the interests of the American
Economy, and thus the US National Interest to increase sales of North
American arms, even though they are causing misery and terror throughout
the world, including in the US itself.
It is more palatable for politicians in the USA and UK to have soldiers from
other nations doing the actual fighting and dying in the conflicts these armsproducers support. This is an age-old military strategy which was used by
the British throughout the colonial era, which was continued in the Second
World War and after it concluded. Lyons writes:
Defence planners want Australia to become more involved in
coalition operations such as supporting the US in a Gulf War-like
crisis since the US does not like to engage in military operations by
itself. Increased inter-operability with the US coincides with
Australias desire to improve its technology, part of what the
Americans call the Revolution in Military Affairs, combining the
emergence of new technology with advanced strike capability (p.25)
The national affairs editor of The Bulletin explains that this change in
Australian defence policy brings clear economic benefit to the US (but not
to Australia):
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In order to become more of an all-rounder as a military force,

the conclusion drawn by defence planners means it will be necessary
for Australia to buy more military equipment and technology from the
US.
Under the hidden policy, virtually any purchase can be justified.
This is reflected in the acquisitions Australia is considering, including
Apache armed reconnaissance helicopters with Longbow radar and
Hell-fire missiles, which are designed essentially for attacking tanks
or underground bunkers of the type found in Iraq or Northern Korea
a long way from the air sea gap.
The late twentieth century has been a time of global warfare, although this
has often been disguised by euphemisms, particularly in countries like
Australia which attempt to present to the world an image of a nation that is
intrinsically peaceful. This is far from true. Australia has sent troops to fight
in wars all around the world over the past century and even today Australian
troops are involved in military activity far from the nations shores.
Over the past one hundred years young Australian people have been sent to
fight in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and the pacific region. They have
sometimes been called peacekeepers, sometimes allied forces, but rarely
mercenaries. Sometimes they have been forced to go to war after being
conscripted, as occurred in the Korean War and Second World War. In more
recent times forced conscription has not occurred, and Australian military
personnel have been paid well for fighting or peacekeeping in foreign
lands. In fact, it is doubtful that these soldiers would leave their homes in
Australia were it not for the fact that they are paid well to do so. In this case,
mercenaries would surely be a more appropriate term to use to describe
these people.
Such views are not likely to be popular in Australia, since the troops
currently in Timor are being heralded as heroes who are keeping the peace
and preventing genocide by Indonesians who committed mass-murder of the
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indigenous Timorese population for two decades before the recent events in
the island. It should be recognised, however, that the Indonesian (Javanese)
invasion of the previously Portuguese half of Timor occurred with the
complicity of the Commonwealth Government in Canberra, and despite
international opposition to this act of political and military aggression. It
should also be noted that West Timor remains occupied by Javanese troops
and is still accepted by the Australian Government (and others) to be a
legitimate part of Indonesia.
Historically, though, Indonesia is synonymous with the Dutch East Indies,
the political and military centre of which was Batavia (Java). Thus
Indonesia is really a result of neocolonialism, with Java-controlled troops
occupying the surrounding islands: Sumatra, Sulawesi, Borneo and Timor
included. During the past century, the Dutch-instituted exploitation of these
islands has continued, with western governments supporting what was
widely recognised as a corrupt Javanese political hierarchy. This hierarchy
was ruled until recently by the Suharto family, who became, in essence, an
aristocracy in the region. President Suharto, who ruled Indonesia for
several decades, placed his own children and family members in positions
that enabled the family to exploit the natural resources of the area,
particularly the forests and minerals in the surrounding islands. They also
suppressed the growing calls for independence in brutal ways, including
genocide in Timor and other parts of Indonesia. The Australian government
supported the Suharto regime for many decades, including providing
military equipment and training as well as financial support, incongruously
described as international aid.
International aid comes in many forms and it is a massive multibilliondollar industry. It is also a euphemism, since the aid is inevitably
accompanied by a hidden agenda. In the case of Australian aid to
Indonesia, the hidden agenda was poorly disguised. Australian industrialists
and politicians intended profiteering from the Indonesian islands along
with the corrupt Javanese regime it propped up, armed and collaborated with
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in other ways. When the Labour Party and Gough Whitlams Government
supported the annexation of East Timor in the early 1970s, the motive was
clear: petroleum deposits in the Timor sea. It was supposed, at the time, that
Australia would be better able to negotiate with the Indonesians for a
share of Timorese oil than with an independent Timor, particularly a
communist, socialist or nationalist independent Timor. For over two decades
Australia turned a blind eye to mounting evidence of atrocities committed
against the indigenous Timorese population by the Indonesian military,
including the genocide of a third of the population of East Timor: some
200,000 men, women and children. So why the sudden concern that justifies
sending troops to East Timor to stop the atrocities and keep the peace at
the cost of over $500,000,000? Military, political and economic strategy, or
genuine concern about human rights abuses?
John Lyons wrote, in The Bulletin, in August 1999:
If Australia is forced to engage overseas in the next 12 months,
East Timor is the most likely flashpoint. Previously, the Korean
peninsula was Australias biggest regional security concern. While
neither necessarily involves combat troops, they could see an
Australian peacekeeping role with a dangerous edge.
East Timor holds both a humanitarian and strategic significance.
The Timor Gap and Arafura Sea provide one of the best deep-water
tunnels for submarines moving between the Pacific and Indian
Oceans.
In this analysis, the battle for oil deposits in the bed of the Timor sea are not
mentioned, but this is another of the strategic (economic) considerations
fuelling desire by Australian politicians to control the sea between Timor
and Australia. Despite Australias less than enviable human rights record,
and recently revealed abuses by and corruption in our police forces, it is
claimed by Lyons that:
If Timor votes for independence, a new country will need to be
built with independent political systems, police force and education.
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Much will depend on Australian funding, backed by Australian

peacekeepers.
It also opens up Timor to capitalist insustry, and the hold of Australian
mining companies in the area. Australia itself has an appalling human rights
record: with many abuses involving the police and related psychiatric
industry. Only a fraction of the aboriginal population survived the initial
onslaught by British colonists, and today most live in desperately
impoverished circumstances, in aboriginal settlements where they have a
life expectancy about twenty years shorter than the rest of the Australian
population. Abuses by State police against aboriginal people (especially
those in custody) and psychiatric patients (many of whom have been shot in
recent years) have received limited media attention in Australia, but more so
in the foreign press. It is worth noting that during what was indisputably a
genocidal campaign against the indigenous population of the continent, the
officials who presided over this carnage were called protectors of the
natives. It is also worth noting that in the 1840s, when aboriginal people
were still being hunted for sport, enslaved and massacred, the British
Government, which claimed to be protecting the natives, were engaged in
a cruel war against the Chinese, now known as the opium wars. During
these wars opium was forced into China from India and Burma (where it was
grown on British-owned and controlled plantations), with the intent of
addicting and subjugating the Chinese population to the addictive drug. The
justification given to the British population for these wars was ensuring
free trade.
It could be said that free trade values the freedom of industries more than
the freedom of people. Unfortunately this means that industries that result in
disease and death of humans are protected in the modern world more than
people are. It is also the case that free trade zones are poorly disguised
concentration camps of economic, and sometimes physical, slaves.
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So-called free-trade zones have been established by action of first world

countries throughout the third world, with the objective of exploiting
cheap labour in poor nations. An example of modern economic slavery in
Indonesia and the political repression that accompanied it during the rule of
the Suharto regime is given in The Global Trap by Hans-Peter Martin and
Harald Schumann (1997):
The Asian miracle does, of course, have its darker side. The boom
goes hand in hand with corruption, political repression, massive
environmental destruction, and often extreme exploitation of a labour
force with no rights (most of it made up of women). Take Nike, for
example. Its expensive trainers, costing up to 150 dollars a pair in
Europe and the USA, are stitched and punched by some 120,000
workers in the contract companies that supply Nike in Indonesia, for a
wage of less than three dollars a day. Even in Indonesian conditions
that is a starvation wage, but it complies with the legal minimum
applicable to more than half the countrys 80-million labour force. To
make sure that it keeps this advantage, the military regime headed for
the last thirty years by the dictator Suharto nips every workers protest
in the bud. For example, when Tongris Situmorang a twenty-twoyear-old working for Nike in Serang mobilized his workmates for a
strike in autumn 1995, local army men simply shut him up for seven
days in one of the factorys storerooms and kept an eye on him around
the clock. Still, he was later released and all he lost was his job.
Others, such as the two women trade unionists Sugiarti and Marsinah,
who are celebrated throughout the country, paid with their lives for
their courageous action. Their dead bodies, mutilated by torture, were
found on the rubbish tip of the factories where they had tried to
organize a strike. (p.146)
In China, according to the same book, Chinas socialist market economy
has been accompanied by terrible atrocities:
More than a million women workers have to stitch, punch or
pack on the work-benches for fifteen hours a day, or more in
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exceptional circumstances. People are forced to work like machines,

says a local newspaper. Often they must pay a deposit worth several
months wages when they first start work at the factory, and it is not
returned to them if they leave the company without the managements
approval. At night they are crammed together in narrow and often
locked dormitories which become death-traps in the event of fire.
Even the central government in Beijing has admitted that labour
legislation is being ignored; the first six months of 1993 alone
witnessed 11,000 fatal work accidents and 28,000 fires. Yet those who
rule in the name of the Chinese working class prevent any resistance,
above all in the special economic zones for foreign investors: those
who complain or attempt to form unions are likely to be sentenced to
three years in a labour camp and there are currently hundreds of trade
unionists in prison.
When faced with East Asias (by Western Standards)
unacceptable campaigns to capture world-market shares, most
governments in the West exercise astonishing restraint. (p.147)
The restraint that Western governments display towards these abuses may
seem astonishing to the authors of this book, but they are hardly out of
character given the long history of Western Governments supporting slavery
under the pretext of protecting free trade. This book was written prior to
the collapse of the Asian Tiger economies in 1997, which was blamed, in
the Australian media, on various factors that had little to do with mass
opposition in these countries to the conditions in these forced labour camps.
The Economist claimed, for example, on 10 January, 1998, that the crisis in
Asia shows no sign of abating despite the vast sums of money that the
International Monetary Fund is applying to the problem. This included a
rescue plan worth $43 billion for Indonesia, which followed a package of
$57 billion for South Korea in 1997. The magazine claimed that the
economic crisis in Asia was due to failure of Asias domestic regulators to
strike a balance between the risk of lenders and depositors:
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The failure of Asias domestic regulators to strike such a balance

is the chief cause of the regions problems. For years, lenders and
depositors felt too safe for their own good. Yet the Funds response to
the crisis is to make another set of lenders, foreigners this time, feel
safe. Some argue that the true cost of that costless Mexican bail-out is
todays crisis in Asia because foreign lenders learned in 1995 that
they would be rescued if their loans turned bad, and therefore lent
more than they should in Asia. (p.12)
The Economist fails to mention an author for this short article, which
describes the costless Mexican bail-out as follows:
Recall the Mexican bail-out of 1995. Nobody feared a global
meltdown in that case, though there were worries (justified, it turned
out) about Latin American contagion. Guided by other considerations,
America and the IMF nonetheless arranged support amounting to $40
billion. It worked. Confidence was restored. Growth in exports
allowed the emergency loans to be serviced at market rates and repaid.
American investors in Mexico didnt lose their shirts and, in the end,
American taxpayers didnt pay a cent. (p.11)
The global meltdown scenario is explained as a possible apocalypse
involving a systemic breakdown caused by nations defaulting on loan
repayments:
Invoking the risk of systemic breakdown is the most obvious
way to justify the IMFs intervention. Without an emergency injection
of dollars, it is argued, companies in South Korea and the rest would
default on their debts. This would cause distress everywhere,
especially in Japan, where stagnation could turn into outright
depression. From there the crisis could spread to the United States,
Europe and the rest of the world, as banks fail, credit disappears,
stockmarkets crash and economies collapse. This is the nightmare that
has driven governments, notably Americas, to support and indeed
insist upon the Funds course of action.
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It is interesting to note how much of the economic jargon used by The

Economist is seconded from medical terminology, including injection of
dollars, depression, systemic collapse and contagion. It is, by the way,
likely that most of the worlds population could imagine worse nightmares
and apocalyptic scenarios than a collapse of the International Banking
system, including the grossly unfair claims of third world debt to first
world bankers and creditors. In fact, with a longer view of history, one
could reasonably ask as to who owes who in the world of
macroeconomics. It is also evident that despite claims that these bankers
are bailing out poor nations in crisis, the real motive is protection of the
economies of rich countries (particularly the USA) rather than poor ones.
A capitalist perspective of the Third World debt problem was presented in
an economics textbook by John Jackson of the University of Western
Australia and Campbell McConnell of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
The textbook, titled Economics was in its third edition in 1988. In the
chapter titled Growth and the underdeveloped nations they wrote, under
the subtitle The debt problem:
In addition to the long-term deterioration of the underdeveloped
nations terms of trade, the global economic environment of the past
decade has been very adverse for the non-oil countries of the Third
World. A convergence of forces has greatly intensified their need for
economic assistance. First, the dramatic run-up of oil prices by OPEC
in 1973-74 and again in 1979-80 (raising the price of a barrel of oil
from about $2.50 to $32) greatly increased the energy bill of the oilimporting underdeveloped countries. Similarly, the inflation
experienced by the industrially advanced countries has increased the
cost of non-oil imports to the Third World. Finally, the general
stagnation of the advanced countries has slowed the growth of their
demand for the underdeveloped nations raw material exports. The
overall result has been that the exports of the poor non-oil nations
have been insufficient to pay for their imports. The financing of this
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shortfall has been largely through borrowing, that is, increasing the
international indebtedness of the non-oil Third World nations. The
long-term external debt of these nations has grown dramatically from
$97 thousand million in 1973 to over $1000 thousand million by the
end of 1986. Many debt-ridden Third World nations want their debts
cancelled or rescheduled so that current export earnings and foreign
aid can be used for development purposes rather than debt servicing
and repayment. (p.616)
The textbook goes on to say that, in response to a crisis that threatened the
international banking system, debts of many poor nations were rescheduled
in the 1980s, giving them more time to pay back their debts. In reality,
though, the post-WWII terms of international trade, including the activities
of the World Bank and IMF ensure that regardless of how much time these
nations are given to service their debts, they will continue sinking
deeper and deeper into debt. Yet this debt does not really exist. The
Third World owes nothing to the First World, and if anything the reverse
is the case. The rich (colonising) nations surely owe billions of dollars in
compensation to the now poor nations that they have exploited for the past
several centuries.
Since a reductionist and discriminatory medical paradigm has been part of
the sickness of the global economy, it is appropriate that a holistic medical
analogy may be used to lead to a natural cure for the worlds economic ills,
as well as man-made illnesses.
The worlds economic problems can be diagnosed by looking at each of the
human physiological systems, and extrapolating the systemic functioning of
the human body to the global economy. These include the nervous system,
the circulatory system, the respiratory system, the digestive system, the
reproductive system and the excretory system. The biochemistry of the
world can be approached scientifically to provide a solution to chemical
pollution and toxicity. The imbalance in distribution of wealth can be
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rectified by a more healthy circulation of money and material possessions.

The population of the world will breathe easier if people are provided with
clean air to take into their lungs. The natural detoxification of the world will
occur if the forests are regenerated, and the rivers and lakes contain pure
water, rather than industrial pollutants. A depression will not occur if
people look at their individual activities and focus on living a useful life in
the service and support of other living creatures, rather than worry about
unemployment. The world will not be overpopulated if there is a fair
distribution of land and wealth, regeneration of plant life and cessation of
unnecessary greed and waste. One can take this analogy further.
The circulation of blood in the body can be compared to the circulation of
money in the world. For health this circulation needs to be vigorous and
evenly distributed, with those areas that need more because of more activity,
receiving more on the basis of requirement (need). Too much blood in one
area leads to blockage and haemorrhage, and deficiency in others leads to
infarction and death of tissues. Likewise, a poorly distributed fiscal policy
leads to excess amongst some individuals and deficiency in others, within
countries, and warfare and widespread misery when the poor distribution
affects the global economy as a whole. Excess money can lead to real
illness, and such diseases of excess (obesity and addiction, for example) are
common causes of disease and death in western countries. Diseases of
deficiency (such as nutritional deficiency, starvation and immune deficiency)
are common in the poor nations. It is of note that blood is, itself, part of the
world economy, and the sale of blood and blood products a multi-billiondollar industry. Ironically, the Red Cross, which controls most of the
circulation of blood products in Australia with a virtual (or actual)
monopoly, was involved in the previously mentioned transfusions of
malaria-infected blood to interred Italians, Jewish refugees and disabled
soldkers in the Paludrine trials in Queensland in the 1940s.
The circulatory system of vertebrates is not controlled by a single part of the
body, and regulatory mechanisms exist around the body to ensure that only
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the correct amount of blood reaches different parts of the body, that the
pressure and temperature of the blood are maintained at a healthy level, and
that the heart, which pumps the blood around the body continues to have a
constant and ongoing rhythm. The blood is produced in a protected area, the
bone marrow, and the iron that is necessary to carry oxygen around the body
is recycled by action of the spleen and liver. If there is not enough blood in
circulation, disease, in the form of anaemia develops. For health of the
tissues, and the body as a whole, blood must be distributed by blood vessels
to each and every cell in the body.
The circulatory system, briefly and simplistically described above, can be
compared with the circulation of money, the generation of cash (by different
nations, as in bones which contain the bone marrow), the International
Monetary Fund and World Bank (the heart, which is suffering from
potentially terminal illness, at present), individual national banks and ATMs
(blood vessels), and tissues of different organs (towns and geographical
regions). Every individual has need of money, and deprivation of individual
cells (people) leads to disease in the whole.
The body is much more than blood, however. People need much more than
money for a healthy, happy life. They need food, air, light, and shelter, just
to survive. They also need clothing and warmth, emotional and
environmental stimulation, meaningful activity and good education for a
comfortable and healthy existence. The physiological analogy of the
cardiovascular system can also be applied to other systems, with a focus on
healing and regeneration.
The respiratory system of vertebrates is centred on the activity of the lungs,
but health cannot be achieved without clean air to breathe. This basic
necessity for life is currently being threatened by pollution and the
promotion of cigarettes throughout the world. The growth of the tobacco
industry over the past three hundred years has been accompanied, in fact, by
a dramatic rise in actual respiratory illness, particularly in industrialised
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countries, but also in other parts of the world at the hands of industrialised
nations. These illnesses include lung cancer, asthma and emphysema,
chronic bronchitis and respiratory infections. All these conditions are caused
or aggravated by cigarette smoking, and smoking adversely affects both the
smokers themselves, and other people who breathe in the smoke that they
exhale.
The tobacco industry is one of those destructive industries that became
wealthy with the sweat of slave labour. African slaves were taken to work on
tobacco plantations in the Caribbean, South America and elsewhere
throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by Dutch, Spanish and
English slavers, with the complicity of the governments and monarchies of
these colonising countries. Tobacco plantations were also created in the
Dutch East Indies, which later became Indonesia. In these islands
indigenous and migrant workers were employed, after the abolition of
slavery, to continue the monocrop agriculture that supports one of the
biggest killers of the modern world: the tobacco cigarette industry.
The fact that cigarette smoking is a major cause of respiratory disease was
denied for many years by tobacco companies decades after the medical
evidence demonstrating this fact was overwhelming. During the first and
second world wars cigarettes were promoted as of benefit to psychological
stress although in truth, withdrawal from the drug actually causes this
problem, since nicotine causes physical addiction. When it became
impossible for cigarette companies to promote their product in this way in
western countries due to public and medical awareness of the risks of
smoking, the same companies sold heavy nicotine cigarettes throughout the
third world instead, whilst finding ways around the laws against public
advertising of cigarettes in European nations (such as sponsorship of
televised sporting events). When opportunities arose, in the 1980s and
1990s, to sell American and European cigarettes in previously communist
countries, every effort was made to addict the populations of Russia,
Eastern Bloc countries and China to high-nicotine cigarettes despite their
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known dangers. It is encouraging, however, that recently compensation has

been paid, although belatedly, to the victims of the cigarette trade.
Cigarette addiction worldwide can be alleviated by a global ban on public
cigarette advertising, and the same applies to alcohol, which also causes
untold health damage throughout the world. This is not the same as
prohibition. It is well established that prohibition fails as a policy to stop
drug abuse, and can make the problem worse. A ban on cigarette advertising
in public places and the mass-media is a cost effective solution, which does
not interfere with the individuals right to smoke. While this right may exist,
the right to knowingly poison the lungs of the innocent does not exist. The
savings to the global health budget from such a ban would be massive,
particularly in countries such as Australia, where heart disease and cancer
are major causes of disease and death.
The respiratory health of the global population will also benefit from a
cessation of industrial pollution, but this is not as easy to achieve as a
cessation of cigarette smoke pollution. A significant reduction in global
pollution could be achieved, however, by greater corporate and
governmental support for non-petroleum energy sources, and with foresight
this is a wise thing for governments and industry to do, since petroleum
deposits are limited. Air itself can provide significant amounts of energy, in
the form of wind power, and sunlight is another clean source of energy,
which is sustainable in the long term. As for global environmental vandalism
of the nature of the recent cyanide spills in Europe, and the pollution of
Australian waterways by the mining and agricultural industries, the
responsibility for repair of previous damage falls on the companies guilty of
the vandalism and careless pollution which now affects every country on the
planet. Compensation for poisoned, oppressed, enslaved, tortured, terrorised,
dispossessed and displaced people of the world is surely the only just
outcome, and one that should become part of the currently dubious United
Nations agenda, as well as that of national governments around the globe.
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Freedom can be equated with the breath of life. It is a fundamental

requirement for a just society. This freedom includes freedom of speech,
freedom of thought, freedom of association, freedom of movement and
freedom of procreation. Yet these are all basic rights which have been, and
are currently, denied to large proportions of the worlds population. This is to
the detriment of the global economy, and more importantly, to the cause of
humanity, justice, peace and tranquillity.
Food is necessary for the digestive health of the global population. Contrary
to claims of overpopulation, it is well recognised that starvation and
malnourishment do not occur because there is not enough food to go around,
but because of warfare and wastage. The advice of Mohandas Gandhi 50
years ago, that the world provides enough for every persons need but not
every persons greed remains true today. Huge amounts of wheat and other
staple foods are regularly destroyed to maintain high prices of resources that
could be used to feed the poor. Rather than encouraging people in poor
nations to grow their own food using environmentally sensible multiple crop
agriculture, for several centuries large areas of the worlds fertile regions
have been, and continue to be, used for environmentally destructive
monocrop agriculture. This monocrop agriculture involves the deforestation
of mixed vegetation and replacement with single crops such as tobacco,
coffee, tea, wheat and sugar. The prices of these commodities has
consistently fallen, while the technology required to maintain these crops
has become more expensive. These crops are also of little benefit to the
essential dietary needs of the nations in which plantations were established
during the era of slavery. These plantations are being maintained for the
convenience and economy of rich countries rather than poor ones. Efforts to
become self-sufficient in terms of food grown in individual nations are
regularly thwarted by the policies of the World Bank and International
Monetary Fund, which support the interests of established industries and
large companies based in affluent nations. Yet even the description of these
nations as affluent makes little sense if the claims of debt to international
bankers are to be accepted. By these terms the United States of America is
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one of the poorest nations on earth, since this first world nation, like
Australia, also considered affluent, apparently also owes many billions of
dollars to the IMF and World Bank. For what? For policies forced on the
nations of the world that are increasingly creating a global wasteland?
Looking at the digestive system of the global economy on a broader level,
the total amount of ingested substances by humans can be looked at as a
whole. Recent years have seen humans being described by economic
rationalists as consumers rather than people, and it is evident that in
countries such as Australia, people are generally consuming too much and
consuming the wrong things if they intend their health to improve. These
include pharmaceutical drugs as well as animal products, particularly meat.
On 10.1.2000, The Australian contains a page three article titled Bad habits
push up $3bn pill bill. In it, John Kerin writes:
Hectic lifestyles, poor diet and too little exercise are driving up
Australias $3 billion-a-year prescription drug bill. An examination of
prescription drug-taking patterns over the past 12 months shows the
big growth has been for the treatment of cardiovascular ailments, high
blood pressure and high cholesterol. Almost 140 million scripts were
issued in 1998-99. Some 18 million were issued for blood pressurerelated complaints in 1998-99 and a further 8 million for drugs needed
to lower cholesterol.
Kerin adds that, the use of expensive stomach ulcer and gastric reflux drugs
and anti-depressants is also on the rise, with a decrease in scripts for antibiotics.
The reasons given by Dr David Brand, national president of the Australian
Medical Association (AMA) for this debacle are confused and confusing.
While admitting that diet and exercise are important in both high blood
pressure and lowering cholesterol and that the average Australian has been
gaining a gram of fat a day over the past 15 years, he also claims that the
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growth in use of prescription drugs could also be explained by tremendous

improvements in drugs. In reality, though, the increase is more likely to be
due to extraordinarily aggressive campaigns by pharmaceutical companies to
sell these expensive drugs and the failure of doctors to resist their marketing
strategies. Dr Brand himself admits that, a few years ago you had a bloody
hard time convincing patients to take some blood pressure preparations or
anti-depressants. This statement is a disturbing indicator of the medical
professions role in pushing drugs, especially when he also admits that the
resistance of the population to taking these drugs was because, they ended
up feeling more awful from the side effects than they did from the original
complaint.
In fact, high blood pressure and high cholesterol in themselves do not
usually make people feel awful: the reason they are treated is for the
prevention of heart disease, stroke and other consequences of atherosclerosis
(hardening of arteries). Furthermore, drug treatment by itself, without
behavioral change, has been repeatedly shown to be ineffective in reducing
this risk. Taking cholesterol lowering drugs without reducing meat and
saturated animal fat intake does not reduce overall risk of illness and death,
and the same applies for taking blood pressure lowering drugs without
reduction of mental stress, obesity and other lifestyle factors.
The health problems which are responsible for most of the pharmaceutical
expenditure of Australia and other first world countries are conditions
caused by excess, rather than deficiency. This point is missed by Kerin, and
by Brand. They also fail to mention the major additional risk factor for heart
disease and atherosclerosis: cigarette smoking.
Brand also makes the rather contentious claim that, rather than, again,
aggressive marketing campaigns for new antidepressants, and broadened
criteria for diagnosis of the condition, higher rates of prescribing for
depression were linked to improvements in its diagnosis. Actually, this
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improvement in diagnosis just means that doctors and the public are more
likely to call sadness, frustration, anxiety, worry and distress depression.
The diagnosis of depression has been marketed ruthlessly in the mass media,
including medical educational literature provided by the pharmaceutical
industry, health-promotional campaigns, such as those which formed the
1990s mental health strategy. In these campaigns, spearheaded in Australia
by the Mental Health Foundation, propaganda from the drug companies
Smith Kline Beecham, Roche, Pfizer and Eli Lilly (list not exhaustive)
exhort patients to self-diagnose themselves as suffering from a medical
illness termed depression. This illness is said to be caused by chemical
imbalances, which are sometimes specified as the neurotransmitters
serotonin and noradrenaline (called norepinephrine in the USA). This theory,
which conveniently acts to theoretically justify the prescription and
ingestion of chemicals (antidepressants) to correct the chemical imbalance
is the mainstay of modern biological psychiatry as a theory of depression
and is the main explanation pushed by these drug companies through Mental
Health Foundation literature, which is sponsored by these drug companies.
All these massive pharmaceutical companies sell new antidepressants. Eli
Lilly produces Prozac, Smith Kline Beecham markets Aropax, Pfizer
produces Zoloft and Roche offers Aurorix, all to treat depression. The
first three of these are SSRI antidepressants, the marketing of which has
constituted one of the biggest scientific frauds of the twentieth century.
The fraud regarding these drugs involves information given to doctors and
the public about the neurotransmitter serotonin, and the pineal organ in the
brain where the chemical is concentrated and converted to the neurohormone
melatonin during hours of night-time darkness. Serotonin was discovered in
the early 1940s and melatonin was discovered in 1958. The biochemical
pathway involved in the synthesis of serotonin from the amino acid
tryptophan was discovered in the early 1960s along with the pathway for
synthesis of melatonin from serotonin. It was discovered at this time that
serotonin and melatonin are concentrated in the pineal and that light shone
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into the eyes during the night (when melatonin is usually synthesised)
suppresses melatonin production. It was also discovered in the 1960s and
1970s that melatonin and the pineal affect the secretion of other brain
hormones, particularly those secreted by the pituitary gland located at the
base of the brain. Melatonin and serotonin were found to have effects on
mood, blood temperature, sleep and other important aspects of physiology.
Melatonin and the pineal were also found to have effects on sexual
maturation (probably via pituitary gonadotrophin hormones) as well as the
immune system. It was also discovered, over thirty years ago, that the pineal
is connected to the eyes and visual system via the suprachiasmatic nucleus
and sympathetic nervous system, and that the neurotransmitter noradrenaline
is involved in the conversion of serotonin to melatonin (Reiter, 1984).
The scam involving the pineal, melatonin and serotonin has involved a
systematic removal of scientific information about known pineal physiology
from medical and scientific textbooks, as well as disinformation about
serotonin and other neurotransmitters. This coincides with the marketing of
melatonin as a sleeping tablet and natural cure for jet lag and seasonal
affective disorder together with drugs which affect serotonin metabolism,
notably the SSRI antidepressants.
This removal of information about the pineal, which occurred in the late
1980s, affected a range of textbooks published by major corporate
publication companies based in the US and UK, including MacGraw Hill,
Churchill Livingstone and Appleton & Lange. A particularly outrageous
example is the respected specialist textbook Essentials of Neural Science
and Behavior published by Appleton and Lange, a subsidiary of Prentice
Hall International. The international edition of this book, which is on sale
in the bookshops of major universities in Australia, completely omits the
pineal organ in their 1995 edition, and the same phenomenon can be
observed in several other highly respected medical textbooks. Although most
parts of the brain are discussed in detail in these books, the pineal organ is
conspicuously absent.
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Corresponding with this removal of physiological information about the

pineal, serotonin has been associated with an extraordinary range of
psychiatric abnormalities. The Universal Press publication Inside the
Brain by Pulitzer prize-winning author Ronald Kotulak makes the following
claim in their book, published in 1996:
Low serotonin is common to many problems in which one or
more of our drives bursts out of its chemical corral. Medical
researchers found that most of these disorders may be treatable with
drugs that change serotonin levels. First developed to halt the
uncontrollable aggression of schizophrenia and depression, these
drugs are now being used or tested for a wide variety of problems,
including alcoholism, eating disorders, premenstrual syndrome,
migraines, anger attacks, manic-depressive disorder, obsessivedepressive disorders, anxiety, sleep disorders, memory impairment,
drug abuse, sexual perversions, irritability, Parkinsons disease,
Alzheimers, depersonalization disorder, borderline personality,
autism and brain injuries. (p.88)
The pineal is not mentioned in this book, nor melatonin, let alone the
concentration of serotonin in the pineal and the conversion of serotonin to
melatonin. A similar phenomenon can be observed in the Time magazine
article of September 1997 titled The mood molecule by Michael
Lemonick.
In this article serotonin is discussed in depth, however the pineal and
melatonin are not mentioned, and the discussion is centred on drugs which
affect serotonin, and, to a lesser degree, other neurotransmitters. The story,
as told by Lemonick does raise some concerns about the long-term safety of
these drugs, following the heart-damaging side-effects of Redux, a
serotonin-affecting drug which was marketed as a weight reduction drug in
the 1970s and 1980s by Wyeth-Ayerst and a company founded by one of the
developers of the drug, a Dr Richard Wurtman, who had worked as a
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consultant for Lilly (Eli Lilly) in the 1970s, at which time this company
(which later produced Prozac) was experimenting with serotonin-affecting
drugs as obesity treatments. Wurtman, who was trained as a neurologist and
also worked for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), founded a
company called Interneuron Pharmaceuticals to market Redux. Redux is
dexphenfluramine, derived from the amphetamine phenfluramine, which
was, even before the marketing of the drug as a human weight-loss drug,
known to cause brain damage in monkeys. Lemonick writes:
From the start, it was clear that Redux has serious potential side
effects. One is primary pulmonary hypertension, a rare form of high
blood pressure that strikes the blood vessels of the lungs. Another,
considered even more serious by some of Reduxs critics, was the
possibility of brain damage. When fed to monkeys, dexphenfluramine
can destroy neurons. Says John Harvey of the Allegheny University of
Health Sciences in Philadephia, who edits the Journal of
Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics: Any of us who were
pharmacologists knew this was a dirty drug. None of us was
surprised.
Some critics claim that Interneuron steamrolled Redux through the
FDA and that the agency acted irresponsibly in approving it, charges
that the company vigorously deny.
The reason that Redux was eventually withdrawn from sale, was not because
of pulmonary hypertension or brain damage. After twenty years of use, it
became evident that the drug also causes irreversible damage to heart valves.
This unexpected side-effect should make doctors and the public more wary
of ingesting drugs that affect natural chemicals which have a broad range of
physiological effects such as serotonin, melatonin, dopamine and
noradrenaline. This concern is highlighted by the fact that, as in the case of
Redux, toxic effects may only become fully evident many years later.
The American producer of Prozac, Eli Lilly, was the first to develop and
market globally a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI): a new
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class of expensive antidepressants derived from the stimulant MDMA. The

designer drug commonly known as Ecstasy shares its origin in MDMA,
but cannot be patented, hence its illegality. These are the realities of modern
drug laws: they are based on economic, not public health considerations.
Several dangerous man-made drugs are illegal, but far more dangerous drugs
are legal. The illegal drugs include heroin (derived from opium poppies),
and other opiate narcotics. They are not illegal, however, if prescribed as
pain-killers by doctors, in which case they are greatly overused. The
exception to this is the opiate codeine, which is available over the counter in
Australia in the form of Panadeine, Dymadon and Tylenol tablets (forte
preparations). These are also overused in Australia along with the non-forte
preparations which contain paracetamol alone (without codeine), but can
cause fatal liver and kidney damage, particularly in overdose.
Drug overdose is one of the growing causes of death in the modern world.
These include both intentional and unintentional overdose. Of these,
unintentional overdose, less usually reported as drug overdose than
suicide by intentional poisoning with drugs, is responsible for more of these
deaths. Unintentional overdoses include those due to the self-ingestion of
drugs, including paracetamol, aspirin, tranquillisers, sleeping tablets, anti
depressants and alcohol. The category also includes drugs given in excess
amounts by doctors and hospitals to people who are considered in medical
need of these drugs by some doctor or another. Often different doctors
contribute to a cocktail of drugs that individuals in the modern world
consume. Individuals who look to these doctors for medical advice, but
receive secondhand advertising for and from the pharmaceutical industry
instead.
Turning to the brain of the economy, it becomes evident that wherever it is,
it is not working well. If it was, the economy would not be as sick as it is.
The brain controls and regulates the other systems of the body, including the
rest of the nervous system. The brain is inextricably connected to the mind,
and the minds that have devised the current economic system were obsessed
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by war, nationalism and beating the opposition. This aggressive attitude

and associated militaristic, mutual paranoia paradigm has had a direct effect
on the economic, political, military and medical decisions which have been
made by governments in the past fifty years, despite claims of globalism.
The paradigm of the United Nations organisation, which grew out of the
League of Nations is still one of perpetual war and conflict, with a hidden
agenda in favour of the nations that formed the United Nations and remain
permanent members of the UN security council in the first place. These
were the victors of the Second World War: the United States and Britain.
Institutions such as the World Health Organization (WHO) are part of the
UN and World Bank systems, and again represent the interests of dominant
nations rather than smaller or less industrialised ones. In the lingo of the UN,
non-industrialised nations are termed Third World or Underdeveloped,
with development equated with corporate-ruled industrialisation. This is
one of the biggest problems that face the United Nations, World Health
Organization and populace of the world. Global pollution and unrestrained
disease creation amongst humans, plants and animals are the inevitable byproducts of a tradition of aggressive competition between individuals,
corporations and nations entrapped within a militaristic mind-set.
To solve these pressing problems will require a fundamental change in
paradigm from one of nationalistic aggression and competition to
international cooperation and support. The destructive division between
first, second and third worlds must be discarded from international
politics and health programs as a harmful anachronism. Global health can
only be achieved when the divisive politics of the past are ended. A
realisation must be made that conflict between nations is not necessary or
inevitable and that the vast majority of the worlds population would rather
live in peace and harmony.
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36. BORN DURING THE COLD WAR

Like most of the people in the world today, I was born during the Cold War.
While I studied medicine at the University of Queensland in the late 1970s, I
was aware that the Cold War was going on, but didnt realise how much
this would influence my medical training, which in turn largely determined
my belief system, as far as science, psychology and medicine were
concerned. I believed most of what I was taught at university. I accepted that
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the world was overpopulated, and that forced sterilization was sometimes
warranted. I thought that there was a strong case for voluntary euthanasia. I
thought that schizophrenics needed to be injected with drugs if they would
not take them of their own accord. (I never actually diagnosed anyone as
schizophrenic, manic or personality disordered myself, but would accept the
judgements of other doctors, especially specialists, including psychiatrists).
Until 1995 I remained largely ignorant of medical politics, the role of the
pharmaceutical industry in medical research, textbook publication and
continued education for doctors, other than what I was told myself by
representatives of the pharmaceutical industry (drug reps). The many past
crimes perpetrated by members of the medical profession, and examples of
medical abuses such as eugenics applications, which resulted directly from
medical policies, were not mentioned in the 6 years I studied at the
University of Queensland, or the 3 years that followed at the Royal Brisbane
and Royal Childrens Hospital in Queensland. The role of the medical
profession in supporting warfare was not explained to me at medical school,
but it became evident to me in the years that followed. It has been a gradual
realisation, accompanied by several surprises about how closely my own
training was influenced by military medicine.
During 1987, when I worked as a senior resident doctor and junior registrar
at the Royal Childrens Hospital, in Brisbane, Queensland, I served as a
senior resident for Professor John Pearn (who became Head of the
Department) and Dr Barry Appleton (paediatric neurologist). It surprised me
to read recently then, in the drug-company sponsored Current
Therapeutics journal, that Barry Appleton is also a senior officer in the
Australian Military, specifically, in the Royal Australian Air Force.
John Pearn, who authored the article about Military Medicine, regarded
himself, when I worked in the Royal Childrens Hospital (at which he was
professor of paediatrics), as a paediatric geneticist. Professor Pearn is
now the Chief of the Australian Commonwealth Military Medicine
Department of the Department of Defence, in addition to continuing to work
as a professor of paediatrics at the Royal Childrens Hospital. His official
military and political title is Surgeon General, but he still doubles as a
Professor of Paediatrics. These are some of the strange contradictions of
Australian military and medical politics.
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The use of psychological and biological weapons as agents of genocide is a

central focus of this book, along with the related use of chemicals and drugs
as weapons against targetted populations, again with the objective of
genocide. The most obvious reason for this focus is my own training as a
physician I am better qualified to research and analyse biological,
psychological and chemical warfare than other forms of conventional and
unconventional warfare. These are also forms of warfare that have been
barely written about, not least of all because they are routinely denied by
those developing and using them. The crime of genocide has also been
routinely denied by regimes that have subsequently been shown to have
committed the act, and official plans of genocide are rarely, if ever, overtly
admitted as such. Official documentation of current genocidal strategies
using biological and chemical weapons are unlikely to exist, but this does
not mean that the 1972 ban on biological and chemical warfare is being
adhered to by those who were undeniably developing these forms of warfare
in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.
The United Nations laws against genocide were formulated as a direct
response to revelations of Nazi atrocities during the Second World War, a
war during which psychological, biological and chemical warfare were
intensively researched by all the major protagonists. Immediately after the
Second World War official biological and chemical warfare laboratories
were set up in several countries, including the Soviet Union, Britain and the
United States of America; these were officially abandoned in 1973 with the
International Convention on Biological and Chemical Weapons. This
convention has been heralded as an example of successful conversion of the
military industry for peace. The Gaia Peace Atlas (1988), edited by Frank
Barnaby, former director of the Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute, claims:
That military industries can be converted to civilian purposes is
shown by the outcome of the 1972 Biological Weapon Convention.
This banned the production and development of biological weapons.
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American biological weapons establishments and personnel were then

converted to civilian medical establishments. (p.218)
Biological warfare has recently become a matter of public concern, and has
always been a matter of public importance. An acknowledged form of nonconventional (or unconventional) warfare, biological warfare is centred on
the use of infective and biologically toxic agents, including bacteria, viruses,
funghi, and chemical toxins to cause acute and chronic illness. Historically,
germ warfare as used to both kill and maim targetted populations. These
have sometimes been declared enemies, but more often they have been the
victims of covert warfare, especially during the proliferation of germ warfare
in the 20th Century. During the Second World War, as has been admitted
many decades later, both the Allies and the Axis powers developed and
tested various infective agents for use in biological warfare. On this matter
there is a noticeable difference between the claims of the opponents in the
Second World War and Cold War.
Australia, where this work was researched, where I studied medicine from
1978 to 1983, and where I have worked as a doctor for the past 18 years,
was a member of the Allies in the Second World War, and has aligned itself
politically, militarily and scientifically with the Capitalist West since the first
political foundation of this nation. This is a very recent event the nation of
Australia is only 100 years old. In stark contrast, the land of Australia is very
ancient, and the first people who arrived here did so in the unimagineably
distant past. These were the people the White Nation that called itself
Australia (Southern Land) now refers to as Aborigines. This term is, of
course, not a specific one. During the era of colonization the dark-skinned
natives of all the discovered continents were called Aborigines. Roughly
the same populations were also described, in historical records and texts as
natives, savages and blacks. Often these terms were used
interchangeably and had been since the earliest days of cargo slavery by the
architects of the Age of Discovery, as the Western history textbooks refer
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to the period of history from 1490 to 1600, when the monarchies of Western
Europe discovered millions of people to enslave and exploit.
Imperialism, the building of empires, was a fundamental objective of the
voyages of discovery by Magellan, Bartholomew Dias, Vasco Da Gama,
Columbus and the other great navigators of the late 15 th and early 16th
Centuries. Their voyages were financed by the wealthy, and rapidly
expanding kingdoms of Portugal and Spain directly. The monarchies of
these nations directly financed the voyages, and immediately claimed all
discovered territories for themselves. The Catholic Church sanctioned
these possessions and immediately sent missionaries to convert the natives.
This was done at the same time that soldiers, armed with guns and cannons
established colonies at various strategic locations around the globe. Each
site was chosen with care. Strategic importance was paramount, in terms of
strategy in the war between the various colonising (European) nations, and
the war against the people resisting enslavement, for colonization always
brought enslavement.
The role of, initially, the Catholic Church, and later the Protestant Churches
in aiding, abetting and sanctioning the expansion of various European
empires, despite the fact that it was a vehicle for slavery and exploitation,
must be acknowledged if one is to understand the history of genocide in the
modern world. In 1494 Pope Alexander VI gave divine sanction for the
division of all new lands between the monarchies of Spain and Portugal.
King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, who had financed Christopher
Columbus were given the hemisphere (half-globe) West of the Azores
islands in the Atlantic Ocean (North, South and Central America), and the
King of Portugal, John II, was granted any discoveries in the Eastern
Hemisphere (Africa and Asia), since he had financed Bartholomew Dias,
who had first sailed around the southern tip of Africa, discovering a sea
route to the Indian Ocean and thus to the valuable spice islands the East
Indies.
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When the monarchies of Holland, England and France developed sufficient

naval power to challenge the Spanish and Portuguese fleets, they took little
notice of the papal decree of Alexander, and claimed the support of their
rival Protestant Churches in their rival territorial claims. Inevitably the
desired divine sanction was given without requiring demands or
executions of the clergy, although under Henry VIII, who arranged for the
(his) British Parliament to appoint him head of the English Church in
1534. Ironically, Thomas Cromwell, Henrys First Minister, who had
convinced Parliament of the merits of this dubious act, was one of Henrys
many friends, enemies and wives the despot had executed when their utility
was no longer evident to him. Another friend that Henry VIII had executed
was the writer and philosopher Thomas More, who had written the satirical
classic Utopia in 1516 and was regarded as one of Britains leading
intellectuals. Thomas More had spoken publicly against Henry being made
head of the English Church, resulting in his execution in 1535 after 15
months imprisonment in the Tower of London. John Fisher, the bishop of
Rochester was executed on Henrys orders, also in 1535, for the same
reason.
Henry VIII ascended the British throne at the age of 18 and ruled the British
Empire until his death in the year 1547 at the age of 56. During this time he
squandered much wealth in wars against his French and Spanish rivals. To
replendish the Royal coffers he seized, with the assistance of his First
Minister, Thomas Cromwell, the lands and property of the Catholic Church
in Britain. This occurred after his break with the papacy due to the refusal of
the pontiff, Pope Clement VII to annul his marriage to Catherine of
Aragon, the Spanish princess he had married in 1508. Catherine, who was
previously Henrys sister-in-law (she was the widow of Henrys older
brother Arthur), was the daughter of King Ferdinand of Spain, who had been
granted the Western Hemisphere with his wife Queen Isabella by the
Spanish-born Pope Alexanders papal decree of 1494.
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Henry VIIIs main foe during the many years he waged war against the
French was King Francis, who died, aged 53, on the 31 st of March in 1547,
only two months after Henry. Francis had waged war, for many years,
against the Habsburg emperor Charles V, for control of the European
mainland and the newly discovered territories in the Americas. Charles, the
son of Philip the Fair and Joanna the Mad, was the grandson of
Ferdinand II of Aragon, the husband of Queen Isabella of Castile. Ferdinand
and Isabella had united their kingdoms in 1479, ten years after their
marriage, resulting in a shared empire centred in Spain. At the time, the main
threat to Spanish territorial ambitions came from the neighbouring monarchy
of Portugal, which, after a four-year war (1475-1479) was granted, by the
Spanish monarchy, a monopoly of trade and navigation along the entire West
African coast. When the explorer Bartholomew Dias, sponsored by John II
of Portugal, rounded the Cape of Good Hope (which he initially named the
Cape of Storms) in 1488, the territorial claims of the Portuguese expanded
dramatically, to include the entire Eastern Hemisphere.
One of King Henry VIIIs enduring legacies is the Royal College of
Physicians, which he established at the urging of the physician Thomas
Linacre. The Royal College of Physicians has remained, to this day, a
powerful force in medical politics, controlling the system of medical
qualifications throughout the British Empire (and later the British
Commonwealth). Henry VIII also presided over the formation of the United
Company of Barbers and Surgeons in 1540, appointing Thomas Vicary, the
Sergeant Surgeon of Henrys army, as Master of the new union. The
United Company subsequently became the Royal College of Surgeons (in
1800). In Medicine: the art of healing (1992), the politics surrounding the
formation of the United Company of Barbers and Surgeons is described:
In London, prior to 1540, there were two distinct groups of
surgeons who were in fierce competition over the right to supervise
those who wished to practice that craft. The more elite of the two was
the unincorporated Guild of Surgeons, with perhaps twoscore
members who had learned their skills while serving in military
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campaigns. The other was the much larger group of the Barbers
Guild, who had distinguished themselves from their fraters who had
only practiced barbering. With 185 members, this was the largest of
the livery companies in London.
The amalgamation into the new United Company of Barbers and
Surgeons was advantageous to both organizations. The status of the
barbers was elevated by their association with the elite surgeons and
by their separation from the pure shavers and hairdressers. For the
surgeons, the advantage lay in the increase in total numbers and the
much larger treasury of the men with whom they had been linked.
(p.40)
The system of government and civic infrastructure Australia were set up by
British colonial authorities in the early 20 th Century. The official head of
government in Australia was the British monarch, referred to in government
laws as The Crown. When Australia was formed as a Federal State in
1901, the Governor General, Australias official Head of Government, was
appointed by the English monarch. The Governor General maintained
executive powers over the elected government in Australia, according to the
Australian Constitution (which was actually British-designed, and thus
maintains British control over the Australian people, and the land they
occupy). At present the Queen of England, Elizabeth II, is the official
monarch of Australia, and thus the owner of Crown lands in Australia,
according to the Australian constitution. On 20th November 1926, the present
Queens grandfather, George V, declared that the British Empire would
henceforth be known as the British Commonwealth of Nations, of which
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Newfoundland should
have equal status with Britain as members (Burne, 1991, p.1088). King
George assumed the title George V, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain,
Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas, King, Defender of the
Faith, Emperor of India. The faith that George and his armies defended
(and attacked with) was the Anglican religion, as defined and ordained by
the Church of England (Anglican Church). This religion had been founded
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by the notorious King Henry VIII, who arranged for himself to be appoined
head of the new English Church when broke from the Catholic Church
because the Roman Pope refused to annul his marriage to Catherine of
Aragon, so he could marry again. Henry VIII had been granted the title
Defender of the Faith by an earlier pope because of his military support
against the Vaticans enemies. The title Emperor of India shows clearly
that George V regarded himself as the owner of this ancient land, and of his
various dominions. It was thus not really a common-wealth it was a
system of Imperialism under a new name and a new organizational structure.
The white colonies and dominions (Australia, New Zealand, Canada,
South Africa and Newfoundland) could aspire to being equal members in
the British Commonwealth, but those in the colonies and protectorates
mainly populated by people of colour were to continue as inferior
members.
In 1936 George V died leaving the throne for his son Edward VIII, who
reigned for less than a year, abdicating the throne to marry the twicedivorced Mrs Wallis Simpson, and American. The fact that Mrs Simpson
was divorced and an American national made it impossible, according to the
kings legal advisers, for the Edward VIII to marry her, so he abdicated in
favour of his younger brother George VI, the father of the current Queen of
England, Elizabeth II.
During the Second World War (1939-1945) the political concept of a
Commonwealth was exploited to full effect by the British Imperial armed
forces. Commonwealth partners from around the British Empire were
recruited to fight for the kings forces and Allies, against the unholy
alliance between the Germans, Italians, Spanish and Japanese, as the
American President Franklin D. Roosevelt described the Axis alliance in
his presidential address to the nation in December, 1940. It was during this
radio broadcast that Roosevelt urged Americans that the United States of
America must urgently become the great arsenal of democracy:
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As planes and ships and guns and shells are produced, your
Government, with its defense experts, can then determine how best to
use them to defend this hemisphere. The decision as to how much
shall be sent abroad and how much shall remain at home must be
made on the basis of our over-all military necessities.
We must be the great arsenal of democracy. For us this is an
emergency as serious as war itself. We must apply ourselves to our
task with the same resolution, the same sense of urgency, the same
spirit of patriotism and sacrifice, as we would show were we at war.
(Roosevelt, 1940, quoted in As It Happened: A History of the United
States, Sellers, et al, 1975, p.695)
In his broadcast to the nation Roosevelt said that we are planning our own
defense with the utmost urgency; and in its vast scale we must integrate the
war needs of Britain and the other free nations resisting aggression. The
other free nations in President Roosevelts terms, included South Africa,
Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which were members of the
Commonwealth of equal status with Britain according to George Vs
proclamation of 1926. Officers from these (white) nations had been placed
in positions of authority over the various coloured soldiers in His
Majestys Army, since the British Government, under the eugenist Winston
Churchill, had been integrating its own war needs. In His Majestys
armed forces it was possible for a dark-skinned man to become a lowranking officer, but only as frequently as Galtons theories would have
predicted this. The command positions were all occupied by white men, all
of whom had a good education, meaning that they went to elite schools
and universities. These men were rarely killed in the kinds of war the British
waged while the hordes of Indians, Africans and Australians who rushed to
defend the Commonwealth occupied the front line. They were the
occasionally honoured, and frequently killed, privates, who formed a
buffer zone between the enemys bullets and the officers who gave the
orders. The officers had been trained to order their men to keep fighting.
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The Second World War was fought on several fronts. These have relevance
to the scientific and medical information to follow, so I will provide a brief
overview of the politics of WWII as I perceive them. I did not learn anything
about the Second World War at school or university, and have only a limited
knowledge of its details, however most people have gathered that the Second
World War included a war between certain European governments for
control of Europe and Africa, and a war between the Japanese Imperial
goverment and the government of the United States of America. Predictably,
given the victors of the Second World War, Germany and Japan are usually
seen as being the aggressors in the Second World War, while Britain and the
USA are seen as the defenders of freedom and democracy. While it is true
that the Germans and Japanese had Imperial designs, the British and
Americans did also. British efforts to dominate the world, and create a
global empire, long predated even the foundation of Germany. At the
outbreak of the Second World War the British government claimed supreme
authority over a fifth of the worlds land surface: including dominions and
possessions on every continent. The jewel in the crown of the Empire
was India, the population of which was very much greater than that of the
British Isles. India, which had been wrested from Moslem moghul rulers by
the British in the 1700s, had long been a source of enormous wealth for the
Royal British Royal Family and their allies. Many of the crown jewels
were given to the British by the elite Indians, who were allowed to
maintain their priviledged position in His (British) Majestys Indian Empire,
provided they pay their taxes and allow their people to be exploited and
enslaved. The rule of British Raj continued in India through the long reign
of Queen Victoria, during which time Indian indentured labourers (slaves
from Tamil-speaking Southern India) were sent to various British dominions,
including Queensland (Australia), Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and British territories
and protectorates in the Caribbean Sea, Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean.
In all these areas the British established plantations which were
administered by whites and where most of the work was done by blacks
(of either African or Indian racial heritage).
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I was born in London in 1960. My father had graduated in medicine at

Cambridge University in the 1950s, and, while I attended primary school in
Kent he obtained his MD (specialist degree) after writing a thesis on the
effects of diuretic drugs on potassium excretion by the kidneys. After a crash
course in tropical medicine my father obtained a research grant from the
Nuffield Foundation to establish a research laboratory at the Kandy Hospital,
a public hospital in the hill town of Kandy, in Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon.
My parents were both born in Sri Lanka, and they regarded the change as
going home. For my older sister and I it was leaving our home and
adapting to a new one. At the age of 8 I did not find the change traumatic, as
far as I can recall, but my sister, who is a year older than me, remained
homesick for England for many years. In Kandy, which became my home
for the next 7 years, I attended a private boys school owned by the Anglican
Church Trinity College, Kandy. My father worked at the Kandy Hospital
and immersed himself in medical research, doing studies on anaemia,
urinary tract infections, fluorosis (toxicity due to high levels of fluoride in
water from rural wells), and other subjects. My mother, who has a degree in
Zoology from the University of Ceylon, helped my father in his medical
research and in writing up the research. Thus I was exposed to medical
research in the Third World at a young age, and witnessed, first hand, how
Indian tea-estate labourers were being treated in Sri Lanka. They were
treated atrociously.
When the British conquered the hill kingdom of Kandy in the early 1800s
they succeeded, where the Portuguese and Dutch had failed, to gain political
control of the whole of Ceylon. They never developed cultural control,
although for many years they tried. This was done by setting up systems of
government and education along the lines of other colonies. Ceylon was
then regarded as the pearl of the Indian Ocean a rich, fertile island in the
centre of the trade routes between Europe, Africa and the far East. For many
centuries the kings of Ceylon had exported spices and precious stones to
Arab and Chinese traders, and later with Portuguese and Dutch ones. The
Portuguese were the first to try and take control of the island. This was in the
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1600s, and the Portuguese, with their guns and cannons were able to take
control of the coastal kingdoms in the south of Ceylon. The Portuguese,
French and British had already established armed fortresses along the coast
of eastern and western coasts of India, during the 1600s and 1700s. The
Dutch, however, had control of the East Indies now called Indonesia,
and then also known as the Spice Islands or Moluccas. The Dutch took
control of the ancient cities of Java, creating a Dutch-speaking capital of the
Dutch East Indies, which they named Batavia (now Jakarta). The Spanish
controlled most of the South and Central American mainland, with the
exception of Brazil, which was a Portuguese colony. The Spanish also
controlled, during the age of cargo slavery, the south-east Pacific islands still
called the Philippines. In 1898, the United States of America took control
of the Philippines, along with Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam in a treaty with
the Spanish, which was signed in France (the Paris Treaty of 10.12.1898).
When the British and Dutch developed their own navies, in the 1600s and
1700s, they predictably challenged the Portuguese and Spanish claims.
Pointing to the considerable atrocities being committed by the Iberian
soldiers, the Protestant English and Dutch explained to the natives that they
hoped to exploit, that the Spanish and Portuguese were cruel Catholics who
had misunderstood the true word of God. This, claimed the Protestant
missionaries from England and the Nederlands, was to be found in the King
James Version of the Bible which was duly translated into hundreds of
languages. The British and Dutch colonists did not approach established
civilizations with guns in the first instance; they used, instead, flattery and
bribery, and, failing that, threats. Although their ships were armed with
cannons and carried soldiers with guns and swords, the British and Dutch
governments and monarchies kept their hands clean by having the dirty work
of betrayal, bribery and slavery to be organized and implemented by
trading companies. The British East India Company and the Dutch East
India Company, two such companies that were given authority to kill,
exploit and enslave in the name of their respective monarchs, are of special
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relevance to events in Africa during the Second World War that may point to
the cause of the current epidemic of AIDS in South Africa.
The League of Nations, the predecessor of the United Nations, was
formed in 1919, at the conclusion of the First World War, with the stated aim
of preventing further wars between rival European states. This political
organization between 27 nations including Britain and several of its
dominions, France, and other victorious European nations was instigated by
the US President Woodrow Wilson, who had presented his famous 14 point
peace plan in 1914. In 1919, his plan was adapted by the Allies at the
Versailles Peace conference in Paris, at which the formal suurender of the
Germans and the formation of the League of Nations, was negotiated.
According to the Versailles Treaty, Germany was stripped of its colonial
possessions, and much of its territory, and was to pay 20 billion gold
marks in reparations. Germany was to be demilitarised and surrender
territory lived in by 7 million people. The separate states of Austria,
Czechoslovakia, and Hungary were formed from the fragments of the once
huge Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg Empire, which had, in its heyday as the
Holy Roman Empire, controlled much of Europe and Iberia, and much of
the Americas. The Scandinavian states, Poland, Belgium, and France gained
territory from Germany in Europe in the Versailles Treaty, as did Romania,
Italy, Greece and the newly formed state of Yugoslavia. The following year
the allocation of Germanys colonies was decided by the victorious
Allies. This is where the real wealth of the German Empire lay.
According to the League of Nations mandate of 10 August 1920, the German
territories in East Africa (Tanganika and Uganda) was mandated to the
British, along with German South-West Africa mandated to the whitesupremacist Union of South Africa. These areas were known to be extremely
rich in diamond deposits, especially the coast of Namibia in South West
Africa. They also contained rich deposits of gold, uranium and other
precious minerals. The mandate thus gave British mining companies access
to extraordinary mineral riches in Southern and Eastern Africa. The 1920
League of Nations Mandate also added territory to British and French
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possessions in West Africa. The small East African states of Burundi and
Rwanda, centres of the 1984 African AIDS epidemic were added, by the
League of Nations, to the Belgian possessions in central Africa. Since the
1890s, King Leopold II of Belgium had claimed all of the Congo as his
personal property, instituting a system of cruel tyranny and slavery by white
Belgian authorities over a black population divided between privileged
Tutsis and subjugated Hutus. The atrocities being committed by the Belgians
in the Congo were publicised by the British, in particular, in the early 1900s,
resulting in the Belgian government taking over administration of the
territory from King Leopold, in 1908.
The Congo, now the independent African nation of Zaire, is where the AIDS
epidemic in Africa is said to have begun, and was the worst hit of the
African countries in the 1980s. Zaire, like Southern Africa, is rich in
minerals, and also contains the last large remnants of the tropical rainforest
that once covered so much of Africa. It is also the last remaining home of
our closest primate relatives, chimpanzees, which are, like many rainforest
animals, threatened with extinction at the hands of mankind.
Other than Australia, the central focus of this book is on Africa, a continent I
have only visited on a single occasion, in 1990. At this time I briefly visited
Zimbabwe, Kenya and Tanzania. Knowing little about the history of Africa, I
was amazed when we visited the Great Zimbabwe Ruins that Cecil
Rhodes refused to believe could have been built by any people other than
whites despite overwheming evidence to the contrary. These are the
remains of a Southern African civilization dating back centuries before
Bartholomew Diaz sailed around the Cape of Good Hope, encouraging his
sponsor, the king of Portugal to claim, for himself and his family, the whole
of Africa. The Spanish, however, disputed the Portuguese claim, and the
warring monarchs sought the decision of the religious leader of their people
and the remnants of the Roman Empire the Roman Pope, head of the
Catholic Church. The Pope decreed in the 1490s that the Portuguese King
John II could have the Eastern Hemisphere (east of the Azores Islands in
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the Atlantic Ocean, and thus Africa and Asia) while Queen Isabella and King
Ferdinand of Spain could have the Western Hemisphere (the newlydiscovered Americas, hence the term New World various European history
books).
The kingdom of Kongo (Congo) was approached by the Portuguese, in the
1500s, as a possible ally against the Moslem Empire of the Ottoman Turks,
against who the Crusades had raged for many centuries. The Moslem Moors,
allied with the Ottomans, had ruled the southern Iberian peninsula (Spain
and Portugal) until the 1300s, and the Catholic empires of Southern Europe
were eager for revenge against their traditional enemies the Moslems. The
Congo kingdom, which was ruled by the slave-trading and owning King,
became the primary source of African (negro) slaves for the Portuguese.
In Southern Africa, where the Germans fought against the British and
Belgians for control of the diamond-rich coast of South-West Africa, and
where Galton made his name, the AIDS epidemic is out of control. Over one
thousand people in South Africa alone are said to be infected with HIV every
day. These are all predicted to die within the next 15 years by Australias
premier AIDS advisory and research centre, the Macfarlane Burnet Centre in
Melbourne.
Frank Macfarlane Burnet, after whom the Macfarlane Burnet Centre,
Australias premier virology institute is named, was a eugenist. In fact, he
was still promoting eugenics in the 1970s when it was not a popular subject
for public discussion. He admits this in his 1978 book Endurance of Life,
when he also writes about the eugenic value of selective infanticide. The
Macfarland Burnet Centre presently claims, in its promotional literature that
Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet was very concerned about overpopulation.
They fail to mention that inherent in the much-voiced fear of
overpopulation has always been the ugly combination of racism and
xenophobia. They also fail to mention that Sir Frank was also a member of
the notorious Order of the Rising Sun, the Right wing group that planned
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to create a master race along eugenic lines by genociding people using

biological warfare, and some of whose members were arrested in 1972 with
30 kilograms of typhoid bacteria cultures (Barnaby, 1997, p.37). Macfarlane
Burnet was decorated by a Second Class of the Order of the Rising Sun in
1961, three years after winning the Galen Medal of the Worshipful Society
of Apothecaries of London (1958) and a year after winning the Nobel Prize
in Medicine/Physiology (1960) having been a Fellow of the Royal Society
since 1942.
Closely related to the history of genocide is the dreadful use of chemical and
biological weapons and warfare. The deliberate creation of disease in
targetted populations has a long history, dating back to at least the Middle
Ages, when bodies of people who had died from the bubonic plague were
thrown over the walls of beseiged cities to infect the surrounding enemy
(with the additional objective of avoiding disease from the dead bodies).
The dispossession of indigenous people around the world was justified by
Europeans with imperialist designs in similar ways in the Americas, in
Africa and in Australia, and in all three alcohol was used as a means of
attacking native populations. Describing indigenous populations as
uncivilised savages in need of protection from morally and intellectually
superior (white) masters was a widely-used justification for enslavement of
these black, red and brown people it was claimed as necessary for the
development of backward races, or at least better than their previous state
of barbarity. Alongside this development and a central means of its
implementation was the stealing and brainwashing of children in various
Church-run educational institutions. It was seen as a divinely-sanctioned
obligation to save the souls of pagan or heathen races, by force if necessary.
This resulted in what has been subsequently defined by International Law as
cultural genocide.
This book has been more concerned with physical genocide than cultural
genocide, although the two are clearly related. Physical genocide results in
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cultural genocide and destroying the culture of a targetted population results

in the premature illness and death of members of the culture concerned.
Generally, and in the case of Aboriginal people in Australia, physical
genocide and cultural genocide have been employed as parallel strategies.
In this book I have explored the possibility that an active eugenics
conspiracy has existed behind the scenes for at least the past 130 years, and
that genocide has been occurring in Australia and Africa, in particular, for
over 200 years. I have assembled some pieces of a complex puzzle, one
often confused by euphemisms and medical jargon, and there is much more
work in this area to be done. Whether or not AIDS is the result of a eugenics
program, I have no doubt that disease creation is a massive problem in the
modern world and that medical graduates such as myself have a
responsibility to look critically at our own knowledge and mistakes. I hope
others will join me in the search for the true history of medical science, so
that we can use biological knowledge for health. For all people.
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84.Murdoch Institute. (1996) 1996 Annual Report. Murdoch Institute:
Melbourne
85.Murray, P., Wells, J. (1980) From Sand, Swamp and Heath: A History of
Caulfield. City of Caulfield: Melbourne
86.Nathan, P., Burrows, G and Norman, T. (1997) Melatonin: is it a marker
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of depressive illness? in Aust. J of Med. Science Vol. 18, May 1997

87. Nolch, G. Editorial in Australasian Science, September 1999
88.Nossal, G. (1978) Natures Defences. Australian Broadcasting
Commission (ABC): Sydney, Australia
89. Pilger, J. (1989) A Secret Country. Cape: London
90. Popenoe, P., Johnson, R. (1920) Applied Eugenics. Macmillan: USA
91.Reiter, R. (ed) The Pineal Gland ; Raven Press : New York (1984)
92.Rintoul, S. (1993) The Wailing: A National Black Oral History.
Heinemann (Reed): Australia
93. Roach, M. (1998) Why Men Kill, Discover, Vol 19, 12: 100-108.
94. Rogers, H. (1968) The Early History of the Mornington Peninsula.
Hallcraft: Melbourne
95. Roitt, I., Brostoff, J., Male, D. (Editors) Immunology. Mosby: UK, USA,
Mexico, Spain, Italy, Korea, Singapore, Japan, Australia (1996)
96. Sanford, J. (1980) Arbovirus Infections, chapter in Harrisons Principles
of Internal Medicine (Isselbacher, et al, editors). McGraw Hill: USA
97. Sargent, S. (1944) Great Psychologists. Doubleday: USA
98. Sargant, W. (1957) Battle for the Mind. Pan: UK
99. Saleeby, C. (1921) The Eugenic Prospect: National and Racial. T.
Fisher Unwin: London
100. Senewiratne, B., Thambipillai, S. (1974) Pattern of Poisoning in a
Developing Agricultural Country, , British Journal of Preventative and
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101. Senewiratne, B., Hettiarachchi, J., Senewiratne, K. (1974) Some
Problems in the Management of Anaemia in Tea-estate Workers in Sri
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102. Senewiratne, R (1997) Psychiatric Tales and Words About Life. (selfpublished)
103. Senewiratne, R (1999) Eugenics and Genocide in and from Australia.
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104. Senewiratne, R (2000) The Politics of Schizophrenia: Dodging the
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on Human Populations, chapter in Frontiers of Science (Hutchings, E.,

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110. Sumich H, Andrews G. (1995)The Management of Mental Disorders,
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APPENDIX: POLITICAL DIAGRAMS

1. The politics of schizophrenia
2. Political connections of the Mental Health Research Institute
3. Psychiatry disease promotion in Australia
4. Analysis of propaganda from Australian Correctional Management
5. Rockefeller corporation biowarfare connections
6. Biological & chemical warfare industry in Melbourne, Australia
7. The recycling of blood
8. The politics of AIDS
9. Summary of MBC International Health Unit programs
10.Summary of MBC International Health Unit programs cont.
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30. SCHIZOPHRENIA AND DOPAMINE-BLOCKERS

Schizophrenia was invented in 1911 by the Swiss psychiatrist Eugen
Bleuler (1857-1939), who crafted diagnostic criteria for this mental illness
of young people from the condition termed dementia praecox by the
German psychiatry professor Emil Kraepelin (1855-1926) in the 1890s.
Michael Stone, in Healing the Mind, writes:
Succeeding Forel as the director of the famed Burgholzli clinic in
1898, Bleuler worked intensively with psychotic patients, visiting and
talking with them five or six times a week, such that his familiarity
with them was comparable to that of psychoanalysts with their
patients (who were also seen about five times a week in this era). His
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great monograph on the group of schizophrenias appeared in 1911;

here he proposed a new definition of the condition Kraepelin and
others had been calling dementia praecox. Bleuler identified the
primary signs of this condition, which have become known as the
four As: autism, loosening of associations, ambivalence, and affect
inappropriateness. The latter trait was the key element for Bleuler:
The patient who smiled while talking of the death of his mother, or
who cried while talking of inheriting a fortune, was showing a split
(Greek: schizo) between thought and affect: hence his term
schizophrenia. Ambivalence and autism were also words Bleuler
coined. (p.146)
It is difficult to see how autism (inability or refusal to speak) and these
other abnormalities could be detected in people who do not speak the
same language as the diagnoser. How does one tell if a persons mental
associations are loosened when they have a completely different belief
system, mode of speech and conceptual framework; when they think and
speak in another language? It is easy to judge smiling or crying
inappropriately as suggestive of madness evidenced by inappropriate
affect if the reasons for such emotions are not understood due to linguistic,
social and cultural differences and barriers. It is equally unclear as to how
injections or tablets of dopamine-blockers can improve such symptoms.
There have been many changes in the accepted criteria for diagnosis of
schizophrenia in the modern world, however, and considerable differences
exist in different parts of the world. This is mentioned in the World Health
Organizations Handbook for the Schizophrenic Disorders (1995), which
was written by Heidi Sumich, Gavin Andrews and Caroline Hunt of the
Clinical Research Unit for Anxiety Disorders of the University of New
South Wales at St Vincents Hospital, Sydney and underwritten by the
New South Wales Institute of Psychiatry:
There is no single specific symptom that is required for a diagnosis of
schizophrenia. In other words, the symptoms experienced by one person
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may not be exactly the same as the symptoms experienced by another

person. However, as a group, people with schizophrenia display an
identifiable set of symptoms. If someone exhibits one or more of these
symptoms for a specified length of time, he or she may then be regarded
as having a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
The American Psychiatric Associations (APA) Diagnostic and
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV) is the
alternative major diagnostic classificatory system to ICD-10 [the World
Health Organizations International Classification of Diseases]. In
DSM-IV, the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia differ slightly [!] from
ICD-10 in relation to the duration of time for which symptoms are
required to have been present prior to diagnosis. DSM-IV requires a
minimum duration of six months, including a prodromal or residual
phase, while ICD-10 requires the persistence of symptoms for only one
month.
The handbook continues to explain how these symptoms of
schizophrenia are to be elicited, claiming that the most important symptoms
and signs include hallucinations, delusions, thought disturbances,
disordered thinking and negative symptoms (these are very different to
Bleulers criteria). Detailed methods for acquiring evidence of these
abnormalities are given in the Handbook for the Schizophrenic Disorders,
which was distributed to health workers in Australia by the Belgian drug
company Janssen-Cilag, which manufactures several drugs for the treatment
(but not the cure, which is said to be impossible) of schizophrenia,
including the crippling dopamine-blocker haloperidol, which is marketed as
injections, syrup and tablets of Haldol. This drug has been used around the
world for the punishment of social and political dissidents over the past 40
years. The manual contains a series of questions and interpretations for
doctors and other health workers designed to increase both diagnosis of
mental abnormality and treatment with Haldol and related drugs, and for
the most dubious of reasons. Injections and coerced ingestion of Haldol have
resulted in literally millions of people being crippled with tardive dyskinesia
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and other forms of chronic brain damage since the 1960s. Others have died
from overdoses (deliberate or unintentional) of Haldol.
The Handbook for the Schizophrenic Disorders contains a dangerously overinclusive set of diagnostic criteria enshrined as the W.H.O.s Brief
Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS). In it, hallucinations are described as
seeing, hearing, smelling, or tasting things that other people do not see,
hear, smell, sense or taste [which could be due to greater sensitivity] and
are to be elicited by the following questions:
Do you ever seem to hear your name being called?
Have you heard any sounds or people talking to you or about you
when there has been nobody around?
Do you ever have visions or see things that others do not see? What
about smell odors that others do not smell?
It is easy to see why schizophrenia was not diagnosed in Biblical times.
All the prophets and visionaries, including Jesus Christ, would have been
committed for involuntary psychiatric treatment. People who believe that
they are Jesus Christ rate a special mention in the manual, for these people
are suffering from the typical delusions of schizophrenia:
Delusions [are] false beliefs that are firmly held despite objective
and contradictory evidence, and despite the fact that other members of
the culture do not share the same beliefs; for example, the person may
believe that he or she is Jesus Christ, or that he or she is being
followed, poisoned, or experimented upon.
What about the people under surveillance in the numerous police states
around the world, and what about the people who are being poisoned and
experimented on by the psychiatric industry itself? These people can expect
a diagnosis of delusions after being asked the following questions, which
are apparently indicative of unusual thought content if answered in the
affirmative:
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Have you been receiving any special messages from people or from
the way things are arranged around you? Have you seen any
references to yourself on TV or in the newspapers?
Can anyone read your mind?
Do you have a special relationship with God?
Is anything like electricity, X-rays, or radio waves affecting you?
Are thoughts put into your head that are not your own?
Have you felt that you were under the control of another person or
force?
Bizarre behaviour, another sign of schizophrenia is to be detected by
asking:
Have you done anything that has attracted the attention of others?
Have you done anything that could have gotten you into trouble with
the police? [the word gotten betrays an American origin for the
BPRS]
Have you done anything that seemed unusual or disturbing to
others?
In the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (attributed in the manual to the World
Health Organization) is a description of self neglect which is archconservative, verging on fascist. A rating of 2 for self neglect is to be
recorded for hygiene/appearance slightly below usual community
standards, e.g., shirt out of pants, buttons unbuttoned, shoe laces untied, but
no social or medical consequences. A rating of 3 (out of 7, which is
extremely severe) is merited by hygeine/appearance occasionally below
usual community standards, e.g., irregular bathing, clothing is stained, hair
uncombed, occasionally skips an important meal with no social or medical
consequences. To be mentally well the manual insists that we should be
eating three meals a day, which many Australians cannot afford, and many
others choose not to consume. This strange obsession with regular meals is
repeated in grade 4 self-neglect which is to be recorded by the health
worker if a person fails to bathe or change clothes or is thought to have,
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clothing very soiled, hair unkempt, OR irregular eating and drinking with
minimal medical concerns and consequences.
It is difficult to see how genetic defects and chemical imbalances can be
blamed for failing to tuck ones shirt in ones pants, and eat three meals a
day. In addition, the handbook contains a single-paged table on which the
level of severity (from a mild 2 to a very severe 7) of 24 symptoms and
signs elicited by the leading questions can be formally recorded by the
health worker. The forms are suitable for analysis by a computer, and
provide a checklist of abnormalities to detect. These include: somatic
concern, anxiety, depression, suicidality, guilt, hostility, elated mood,
grandiosity, suspiciousness, hallucinations, unusual thought content, bizarre
behavior, self neglect, disorientation, conceptual disorganization, blunted
affect, emotional withdrawal, motor retardation, tension, uncooperativeness,
excitement, distractibility, motor hyperactivity, mannerisms and posturing.
Suspiciousness is to be elicited by the following questions:

Do you ever feel uncomfortable in public? Does it seem as though
others are watching you? Are you concerned about anyones
intentions toward you? In anyone going out of their way to give you a
hard time, or trying to hurt you? Do you feel in any danger?
For those who study psychiatry professionally, meaning they first gain
medical degrees from recognised universities, further training in techniques
of interrogation are obligatory, always seeking evidence of mental illness.
The recommended undergraduate textbook in Psychiatry for medical
students in Melbourne is Foundations of Clinical Psychiatry written in
collaboration between psychiatry professors at the University of Melbourne
and Monash University, and published in 1994 by Melbourne University
Press. In the chapter titled the psychiatric interview and evaluation of the
mental state Professor Nicholas Keks explains how persecutory delusions
can be inferred and that they are not necessarily untrue to qualify as
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delusions (reflected also in the psychiatric truism that a delusion is still

a delusion even if it transpires, by coincidence, to be correct !):
Delusions with religious or subcultural content can prove difficult to
assess. Usually consultations with a member of the patients social group
is necessary. It should also be kept in mind that what appear to be
persecutory delusions may be true. It is not whether the delusion is
absolutely false that is relevant, but rather that the belief is adhered to by
the patient very firmly despite manifestly insufficient or inappropriate
evidence. For instance, a man was convinced that his wife was having an
affair, and indeed she was in a secret relationship. However, the
husbands conviction arose from the interpretation he placed on entirely
unrelated events such as the numbers printed on the letter he received
from the tax office.
In eliciting delusions, it is useful to first ask a question which should
elicit a positive response from anyone, and then to probe further for
abnormal thought content. For instance: Do you ever feel self-conscious
or shy in a new place or with strangers? The answer should be yes if
the question was understood. Then the patient can be asked whether they
worry if people laugh behind their back, and so on, progressing to ask
about organised persecution. (pp.73-74)
It is assumed that belief in organised persecution is indicative of serious
mental illness: namely schizophrenia. What of hundreds of years of
organised slavery and other colonial atrocities? Did these end with the
official abolition of slavery by the French in 1794? Or by the British in
1834? Or by the United States of America in 1863? Or by the Belgians in
1904? Did organised persecution of Australian aborigines end with the
banning of blackbirding (kidnapping of Aboriginal and Islander slaves) in
1874? Was the 1940s persecution and mass-murder of people diagnosed as
schizophrenic in Nazi Germany disorganised? What about the diagnosis
of sluggish schizophrenia in Soviet political dissidents during the 1960s
and 1970s?
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Rather than looking for the social, political and historical origins of
schizophrenia, the Mental Health Research Institute (MHRI) in Melbourne
is, in addition to conducting an extensive genetic study of schizophrenia,
actively engaged in trying to establish biological abnormalities in
diagnosed schizophrenics. The focus of the work of the Molecular
Schizophrenia Division is on the neurotransmitters dopamine and
serotonin. The institutes 1997 Annual report explains:
Dopamine is a chemical within the brain which is thought to be
important in the pathology of schizophrenia. The major evidence for this
is that drugs which behave like dopamine in the brain can cause a
psychosis reminiscent of schizophrenia in non-schizophrenic individuals.
In addition, the antipsychotic drugs that are used to treat schizophrenia
reduce the activity of dopamine in the human brain. Together, these
observations suggest that over-activity of the dopamine neuronal
pathways are important in the pathology of the illness. (p.18)
In other words, because dopamine-blocking drugs which have been forced
into people to treat schizophrenia (and mania) for several decades affect
this particular neurotransmitter, dopamine must be at the root of the
postulated biochemical imbalance in this illness. It is a deft reversal of
logic, and if statistically significant differences were discovered it would
be very difficult to ascribe dopamine receptor abnormalities to the illness
rather than the treatment. As it turns out, after examining many brains from
dead schizophrenics, the researchers were unable to pronounce any
difference between theirs and those of normal people:
Within the Molecular Schizophrenia Division there are a number of
strategies being employed to determine whether dopamine is involved
in the pathology of schizophrenia. Tabasum Hussain and Susie
Kitsoulis have measured the density of dopamine receptors in samples
of brain tissue obtained from subjects who have had schizophrenia
[with their permission?] and compared these measures from
individuals who have not had schizophrenia. There was no difference
in dopamine receptor quantities in either the caudate putamen or
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frontal cortex of subjects with schizophrenia. In addition, Robyn

Bradbury has shown that there is no difference in dopamine receptor
numbers in the hippocampus of people with schizophrenia. Our data
have shown that dopamine receptor quantities do not appear to be
altered in the brains of subjects with schizophrenia.
Not daunted by yet another failure to demonstrate actual abnormality in the
brains of people diagnosed as schizophrenic, the MHRI is also
investigating serotonin neurobiology and schizophrenia, again because
drugs which are used on people labelled schizophrenic affect this
neurotransmitter, which is also the focus of a marketing campaign for new
antidepressants. Here the institute claims to have had some success, but also
plans to make some ridiculous inferences from studies on rats:
Developments are being made on what cause the changes in the
serotonin transporter in subjects with schizophrenia. Lee Naylor has
discovered that by injecting rats with a drug called 5,7-dihydroxy
tryptamine, she can cause changes in their serotonin transporter which
are similar to those we have seen in subjects with schizophrenia. If her
early findings are confirmed, then this may provide a model by which
the changes in the serotonin transporter in the human brain can be
studied using rat brains. (p.19)
In a situation repeated in all the large research institutions in Australia, most
of the repetitive, often meaningless, sometimes dangerous work which
includes handling potentially infectious tissue samples is done by young
women, often of ethnic background. The Board of Directors, however is
consistently middle aged, all-white and heavily male dominated, with
usually one or two token female board members.
The Chairman and Company Director of the Mental Health Research
Institute, which received grants totalling $5,484,523 in 1997, is Professor
Ben Lochtenberg, qualified with a Bachelor of Engineering (BE), and
medically unqualified. He is also Chairman of ICI Australia (Imperial
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Chemical Industries), Director of Capral Aluminium and a Board Member of

the Inner and Eastern Health Care Network. He is a member of the
University of Melbourne Council and the former Chairman of the
Ministerial Review of Medical Staffing in Victorias Public Hospital
System according to the 1997 Annual Report. All 14 members of the Board
of Management in 1997 were white, and 12 were male. They included one
professor of psychiatry (David Copolov, the Institute Director), one
professor of medicine (Robert Porter, who is also Board Member of the
Southern Health Care Network and Member of Council, Victorian Institute
of Forensic Medicine), a professor of surgery (Gordon Clunie, a Scottish
surgeon, now retired), three lawyers, an accountant (who is treasurer of the
institute) and an economist. The female members were Dame Margaret
Guilfoyle, who is described as Deputy Chairman of the Infertility
Treatment Authority, Chairman of the Judicial Remuneration Authority and
Board Member of the Childrens Television Foundation and Dulcie Boling,
who is described in the 1997 Annual Report as Director of Seven Network,
Mercantile Mutual Holdings Ltd, Multi Media Asia Pacific Ltd and Country
Road Ltd. Dame Guilfoyle also is the former Chairman of the Human
Rights Commission Inquiry into Rights of People with Mental Illness. One
might wonder, from the Annual Report of the MHRI, how closely the Board
Members of the institute identify with the problems of the oppressed and
dispossessed in Australia. Unless we are to imagine that in our free
country no one is oppressed or dispossessed.
In addition to their studies on schizophrenics brains and those who died
with Alzheimers disease, the MHRI is also involved in the Clozaril Patient
Monitoring System (CPMS), which, according to the institutes report, is an
independent monitoring system established by the Mental Health Research
Institute. It is funded by Novartis Australia. Novartis (which also markets
Ritalin for attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder) is the only company
that sells Clozaril (clozapine) in Australia. The reason it needs to be closely
monitored is that clozapine is a very toxic drug, as the report admits, whilst
maintaining that it is a good drug for refractory schizophrenia:
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Clozapine is an atypical antipsychotic agent of the dibenzodiazepine

class of compounds. It is chemically and pharmacologically distinct from
standard antipsychotic drugs and has been shown to improve both the
positive and negative psychotic symptoms in many patients with
schizophrenia who are unresponsive to, or intolerant of present day
therapy, while producing minimal extrapyramidal side effects.
Unfortunately, clozapine can cause a life threatening decrease in the
number of white blood cells (usually the neutrophils) in some people. At
present there is no way to determine who may be at risk from this effect,
but it is known that anyone who has experienced this problem cannot be
exposed to the drug again.
The toxicity if the drug is such that:
Everyone using clozapine must have a weekly blood test for the first
18 weeks of treatment, and then blood tests must be performed no less
than every 28 days thereafter.
Agranulocytosis is not the only problem clozapine can cause. The 1999
MIMS lists: agranulocytosis, granulocytopenia, other haematological
disturbances, fatigue, drowsiness, sedation, dizziness, headache, weight
gain, hypotension, tachycardia, transient pyrexia (fever), extrapyramidal
symptoms (such as Parkinsonism), seizures, neuroleptic malignant syndrome
(another potentially fatal adverse effect), dream intensification,
hypersalivation, hyperthermia and others.
The 1996 American Publication Inside the Brain, by Pulitzer prize-winner
Ronald Kotulak, purchased from the Monash University Bookshop, makes
no mention of these problems. Kotulak, an enthusiastic promoter of any and
all the drugs mentioned in the book, gives clozapine his full support:
Unlike the standard antipsychotic drugs and tranquilisers, which
often render patients dulled and sedated, the new medications leave
them clearheaded.
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One such drug is clozapine (Clozaril), which dampens explosive

aggression and clears psychotic thoughts. At places like the Mendota
Mental Health Institute in Madison, Wisconsin, clozapine has swung
open the doors of the back wards, allowing patients once doomed to a
lifetime under tight security to move into the community, going to
school and work.
Doctors who have seen the drugs effect are enthusiastic. Its like
these people were living under a spell and clozapine is breaking the
spell, said Dr.Gary J. Maier, of the University of Wisconsin, and
director of psychiatric services at Mendota, which houses the states
most violent patients. When that happens the long-standing immature
personality that had been struggling to be healthy but couldnt
because it kept going crazy is freed. They start to grow up.
Harvards Dr. John Ratey, who treats Massachusetts most violent
criminals at Medfield State Hospital, also is sending some of his
patients home after putting them on clozapine. He called it the most
exciting new drug Ive ever seen and likened its effect to a guided
missile that goes right to the site of aggression in the brain without
making patients stupid, apathetic, sleepy, or non-sexual. (p.88)
By inference, the usual drugs used for psychotic disorders do cause
these problems. Ronald Kotulak, a science reporter, was not commissioned
by the editor of the Chicago Tribune to criticise the new drugs but to praise
them, and to find out Why do some children turn out bad? This question is
the motive given in the introduction, anyway, and the answer Kotulak
provides is simplistic and misleading: brain chemistry accompanied by
being brought up in bad neighborhoods. When he describes these bad
neighborhoods as being characterised by poverty, single mothers, and lower
education and income levels it becomes clear that black neighbourhoods
fit his description of bad neighbourhoods. It is also evident that several
pharmaceutical companies stood to benefit from his book, particularly
Novartis, the manufacturers of Clozaril, and the makers of the new
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antidepressants, including Eli Lilly, manufacturers of Prozac, which is

promoted several times in the book.
A key factor in the chemical imbalance theories propagated by Kotulak
and the marketing strategies for new antidepressants is blaming the
neurotransmitter serotonin for a ludicrous range of mental illnesses and
mental abnormalities. Conveniently, the new SSRI (Selective Serotonin
Reuptake Inhibitor) drugs are known to primarily affect serotonin
metabolism. With scant regard for scientific evidence, Kotulak writes:
Low serotonin is common to many mental problems in which one
or more of our drives bursts out of its chemical corral.
Medical researchers found that most of these disorders may be
treatable with drugs that change serotonin levels. First developed to
halt the uncontrollable aggression of schizophrenia and depression,
these drugs are now being used or tested for a wide variety of
problems, including alcoholism, eating disorders, premenstrual
syndrome, migraines, anger attacks, manic-depressive disorder,
obsessive-compulsive disorders, anxiety, sleep disorders, memory
impairment, drug abuse, sexual perversions, irritability, Parkinsons
disease, Alzheimers, depersonalization disorder, borderline
personality, autism and brain injuries. (p.88)
This gives some indication of the widespread experimentation that has
occurred since SSRI drugs were developed. They were developed, however,
as antidepressants, not antipsychotics or anti-parkinsonian drugs. The
list above, rather than demonstrating a low serotonin aetiology, merely
shows that when a new psychiatric drug is developed the medical profession
tends to experiment widely with it, trying it out on patients with a range of
different problems. This has occurred with the whole spectrum of psychiatric
drugs, including minor tranquillisers, major tranquillisers, lithium,
antidepressants and amphetamines. In fact, if one looks at the history of
medical chemical discoveries, such as the discovery of new hormones, one
of the routine targets for experiments have been psychiatric patients. Thus,
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the discovery of insulin in 1921 was followed the next year by trying out
insulin-comas as a treatment for the insane. Cocaine, heroin and
amphetamines were widely used by the medical profession at the beginning
of the 20th century prior to them being designated (illegal) dangerous drugs.
Indeed cocaine, heroin and amphetamines are dangerous drugs, but so are
dopamine-blockers
(antipsychotics),
benzodiazepine
(minor)
tranquillisers and alcohol. Nicotine is also a dangerous drug, and so is
Prozac. All these drugs have caused deaths directly and indirectly.
All these drugs (except nicotine and alcohol) were introduced to the worlds
human population by the medical profession, and all have been deliberately
injected into experimental animals to test their toxicity. These animals have
included mice, rats, cats, dogs, sheep, goats, monkeys and chimpanzees.
With complete insensitivity towards the suffering of our closest primate
relatives, chimpanzees have been force-fed alcohol (to cause cirrhosis) and
fitted with masks that forced them to inhale cigarette smoke; they have been
deliberately infected with human pathogens and psychologically traumatised
so that scientists can tell us more about human illness. It is assumed that
by finding out more about illness we will simultaneously understand how to
cure and prevent it and that this end justifies the unpleasant means (of
creating illness in animals). This is a complex issue, and many hold that the
suffering and sacrifice of animals is vital for medical progress and the
development of scientific knowledge.
Most of the animals killed by the scientific establishment in Australia (and
the world) today are not being sacrificed for a good reason. They are being
tortured and killed because they are victims of a lucrative multi-billiondollar industry. This industry breeds animals just so that they can be
experimented on using modern genetic technology and knowledge rats
mice, rabbits and other animals that are genetically vulnerable to cancer and
infections are being bred so they can be studied after exposing them to
various stressors and then killing them. The publication of research findings,
inevitably non-conclusive and requiring further (animal) experimentation is
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itself a multi-billion-dollar industry as is the medical reasearch training

industry. They are not trained to bite the hand that feeds them.
31. A PSYCHOANALYSIS OF PSYCHIATRY

In recent years, many psychiatry departments in Australia have changed their
name to departments of psychological medicine, however, over the past
100 years, the philosophical, political and theoretical divide between
psychology and psychiatry (a medical specialty) has been deep, and in
many ways irreconcilable. It remains the case that genuine psychology
(scientific knowledge of the mind) and healing psychiatry (medical
treatment of psychological problems) cannot be achieved without a complete
transformation of both disciplines. It will require more than changes of
name. It will need a change from a system of labels, statistics, punitive
treatments, patriarchal attitudes and hierarchies to one where the complexity
of different cultures and individual perspectives is understood and valued. It
is hoped that the new systems of psychiatry and psychology are more open,
egalitarian and democratic than those of the present, which tend to be
secretive, ruled by old boy clubs, prejudices and negative preconceptions
about psych patients (now officially called clients and consumers of the
Mental Health Services). In Australia the domination of psychiatrists over
psychologists is obvious, especially in the hospital system. It is a sad
reflection of the state of the psychology profession that from being a
breeding ground for pertinent criticism of the medical model and
commonsense (and logical) alternatives to labels and drugs, in Australia,
graduate clinical psychologists are often as certain of the validity of
psychiatric labels as they are about the miraculous nature of modern
psychiatric drugs.
Psychology, meaning knowledge about the mind, has become increasingly
splintered over the years into different schools of thought, each with
different approaches, assumptions, theories and research methods. They also
have different beliefs about the brain, ranging from schools of thought which
argue that all behaviour is caused by chemicals in the brain to ones that
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argue that the brain has little to do with thinking or the destiny of
individuals, which is preordained by karmic forces and past lives. Other
schools of psychology argue that all (or most) adult psychological distress is
related to early childhood traumas, or that psychological problems are
usually caused by genetic defects and susceptibilities, or the aftermath of
viral infections. Some schools of psychology are preoccupied with statistical
analyses of behaviour, others consider these a waste of time and focus on
developing personality tests and intelligence tests. Some of the more
outrageous psychology schools ascribe what others interpret as
psychopathology to alien abductions and channeling by extraterrestrials
and metaterrestrials. Many recent schools of psychology are heavily
involved in animal experimentation, including the torture of mice, rats, cats,
dogs (a favourite) and monkeys, from which often unreasonable inferences
are made about human thought and behaviour. Some just focus on giving
good advice, concentrating on empowering individuals to make realistic,
sensible choices and decisions, and to find solutions to problems through
their own creative thought and personal motivation. Some schools of
psychology are predictably more scientific than others, some are more
philosophically sound and therapeutically effective than others.
Psychology is a broad field of study, which developed from the arts and
philosophy, rather than from science and medicine, a point which has led
to intense rivalry between adherents of psychology and those of psychiatry
over the years, with psychiatry, as a branch of medicine, claiming a
mantle of scientific superiority over unscientific psychology. In truth,
however, neither is founded on firm scientific ground, though both have
tried hard to appear scientific, often by quoting statistics and engaging in
scientific-sounding double-blind trials and clinical trials.
Although Sigmund Freud and other early psychiatrists were medical doctors
trained in neurology, they focused on disturbances of thinking as well as
dynamic processes affecting the development of the mind generally, often
using anecdotal and personal experiences as a basis for their theories. Freud
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is said to have coined the term unconscious and he argued that much of an
adults behaviour is governed by largely unrecognised unconscious motives,
which it required many years of analysis by an expert psychiatrist (such as
himself) to gain insight into. The dependence and other undesirable results
of such prolonged talk therapies were themselves given names in the new
jargon that grew in the new scientific discipline of psychoanalysis and
the practitioners of this style of psychiatry were (and are) called
psychoanalysts.
Literally speaking, psychoanalysis refers to analysis of the mind, and in
this sense it is an essential prerequisite for understanding the mind and
improving mental health in individuals and society as a whole. In practice,
however, the therapeutic value of psychoanalysis is dependent on the
theoretical assumptions of the psychoanalyst: how the psychoanalyst thinks
other people think. This includes assumptions about others motivations and
the dynamic processes that shape the minds development throughout life.
Behaviour, the observable result of others mental activity can be interpreted
in different ways depending on the assumptions, beliefs, hypotheses and
theories of the analyst, and can also be misperceived because of prejudices
of the analyst.
It is also inevitable (and probably desirable), that psychoanalytical theorists
would include in their models some elements of self-analysis, and whilst this
sometimes denigrated as subjective and thus not scientific,
mathematical (statistical) analysis of normal behaviour (based on human
and animal experimentation) as the only objective scientific method of
study has obvious limitations and dangers, many of which have become
increasingly apparent in recent years.
The most influential medical doctor this century to present a model of
human mental processes was probably Freud, a Jewish Austrian physician
with rather suspect attitudes to women and children, who developed his
theories through a combination of clinical experience (with asylum inmates
and affluent private patients) and self-analysis. This was commented on by
Professor Stanfield Sargent in the 1944 introductory textbook Great
Psychologists (published by Barnes and Noble: New York), when the early
division (and splintering) of European psychological theory into different
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(and often conflicting) schools of thought is described (with more than an

element of idol-building and myth-making):
In a young and growing science internal disputes often occur.
Psychology is no exception. Psychologists have differed about what
psychology should or should not include, about what it should
emphasize, about what research methods are best. When several
psychologists strongly support a certain viewpoint they are called a
school.
Structuralism traces back to two men, WILHELM WUNDT and
EDWARD BRADFORD TITCHENER. Wundt is regarded as the
father of experimental psychology since he established in 1879 at
Leipzig, Germany, the first psychological laboratory. To study with
Wundt came young and eager psychologists from many countries.
One of these was Titchener, an Englishman, who later came to
America to head the psychology department at Cornell University for
many years.
Following Wundts basic ideas, Titchener established the school
known as structuralism. Psychology is concerned with studying
images, thoughts, and feelings, the three elements forming the
structure of consciousness. The proper research method is
introspection, performed by trained observers. Learning, intelligence,
motivation, personality, or abnormal and social behavior Titchener
ruled out of psychology [!]. He and his students did notable research
studies
Functionalism is a less systematic and unified school. It grew out
of the protests of many psychologists against analyzing consciousness
into ideas, images and feelings. The Danish psychologist HARALD
HOFFDING, and the American WILLIAM JAMES both emphasised
the dynamic, changing nature of mental activity and questioned
whether it could be analyzed into structural elements. Shortly after
1900 JOHN DEWEY and JAMES ROWLAND ANGELL at the
University of Chicago began to stress the ways in which an organism
adjusts to environment. Their aim in studying mental functions was to
discover how thinking, emotion, and other processes fulfilled the
organisms needs. The views of the functionalists helped to align
psychology with biology and to bring about a genetic approach to
psychological problems. (p.5)
The author of the book, Professor S. Stansfeld Sargent (PhD) of Columbia
University, fails to mention the word eugenics as the outcome of the
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genetic approach to psychological problems, although this was common

knowledge at the time, nor does he admit to the atrocities that were being
perpetrated by biological psychiatrists in Nazi Germany over the years
immediately preceding the writing of this book. Although Wilhelm Wundt is
described as establishing the first psychological laboratory, the ethics of
what was done in this laboratory and to whom, is not explored in this
book, which idolises the fathers of psychology listed in the preface as
Binet, Freud, Galton, Helmholtz, Hollingworth, James, Thorndike, Watson
and Woodworth followed by Adler, Cannon, Cattell, Ebbinghaus, Gesell,
Goddard, Janet, Jung, Koffka, Kohler, Kraepelin, Lashley, Lewin, Pavlov,
Rorschach, Terman, Titchener, and Yerkes who are said to be associated
primarily with more specialized work.
Of these names a few have grown in fame (and notoriety) over the past fifty
years, including Freud, Jung, Galton, Kraepelin, Rorschach and Pavlov.
Freud and Kraepelin, especially, have many devoted disciples within the
medical profession. Much of the animal research industry and behavioural
sciences research is based on Pavlovs work on classical conditioning of
dogs (and humans). The Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung is best remembered for
his self-analytical work on dreams, symbolism and philosophy, although he
was an active clinical psychiatrist (and physician). Michael Stone writes, in
Healing the Mind (1998), of the relationship between Adler, Freud and Jung:
Viennese-born Alfred Adler (1870-1937) was among the small
group who met at Freuds house in Vienna on Wednesday evenings to
discuss important issues and developments in psychoanalysis. Adler
believed that the crucial dynamic motivating human action was the
wish for power. He articulated this notion in his 1907 book on Organ
Inferiority (the source of his coinage: the inferiority complex).
The first international meeting of analysts was organized by Jung
in 1908. Freud read his paper on the Rat Man, a case of obsessional
neurosis. At this time C.G.Jung was Freuds fair-haired boy. Freud
regarded him as brilliant and, of equal importance, hoped that this
Christian physician, the son of a Swiss pastor, would help make
psychoanalysis thus far practiced almost entirely by Jewish
professionals in Austro-Hungary acceptable in the wider, gentile
circles beyond the Viennese inner circle. (p.141)
Jung himself, wrote of Freud, in Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961):
Psychiatry teachers were not interested in what the patient had to
say, but rather in how to make a diagnosis or how to describe
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symptoms and to compile statistics. From the clinical point of view

which then prevailed, the human personality of the patient, his
individuality, did not matter at all. Rather, the doctor was confronted
with Patient X, with a long list of cut and dried diagnoses and
detailing of symptoms. Patients were labelled, rubber-stamped with a
diagnosis, and, for the most part, that settled the matter. The
psychology of the mental patient played no role whatsoever.
At this point Freud became vitally important to me, especially
because of his fundamental researches into the psychology of hysteria
and of dreams. For me his ideas pointed the way to a closer
investigation and understanding of individual cases. Freud introduced
psychology into psychiatry, although he himself was a neurologist.
(p.135)
The scientific disciplines of Neurology, Psychiatry and Psychology
can be best understood from the Greek roots of these composites of neuro,
psyche, logos and iatros. Neuro refers to the brain and nerves, and
the logic based scientific study of the nervous system has long been
described as neurology. The idea of medical doctors trained in the
treatment of the mind but not the brain is a relatively recent phenomenon,
and has led to the absurd situation where a mindless neurology and a
brainless psychiatry have become the only choices available for the
medical graduate who wishes to undertake further study in the
neurosciences. Psyche is variously translated as mind or soul, but it
certainly does not mean behaviour, as some modern psychologists and
psychiatrists suppose. Logos, translated literally means word, however in
the context of neurology and psychology can be used to refer to the total
scientific knowledge of the topic next to which the suffix is used. Thus
neurology refers to collective human knowledge about the brain and nervous
system, whilst psychology refers to collective human knowledge (including
that of past times) about the mind, thinking and thought (and even to
scientific study of soul, if the term is used unusually broadly). Psychiatry,
combining psyche with iatros (treatment) refers to treatment of the mind
(and soul) and it is difficult to see how the mind can be rationally and
scientifically treated by the medical profession without a rational scientific
understanding of both psychology and neurology.
Following his introduction to Freud, Jung continues, in Memories, Dreams,
Reflections with a description of his own psychoanalytical technique at
work:
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I still recollect very well a case which greatly interested me at the

time. A young woman had been admitted to the hospital suffering
from melancholia. The examination was conducted with the usual
care: anamnesis, tests, physical check-ups, and so on. The diagnosis
was schizophrenia, or dementia praecox, in the phrase of those
days. The prognosis: poor.
This woman happened to be in my section. At first I did not dare
question the diagnosis. I was still a young man then, a beginner, and
would not have had the temerity to suggest another one. And yet the
case struck me as strange. I had the feeling that it was not a matter of
schizophrenia but of ordinary depression, and resolved to apply my
own method. At the time I was much occupied with diagnostic
association studies, so I undertook an association experiment with the
patient. In addition, I discussed her dreams with her. In this way I
succeeded in uncovering her past, which the anamnesis had not
clarified. I obtained this information directly from the unconscious,
and this information revealed a dark and tragic story.
The story, briefly, is that the woman, who was very pretty was rejected by
the son of a wealthy industrialist whom, according to Jung she thought
her chances of catchingwere fairly good. After marrying someone else,
her depression had developed suddenly after being told that the wealthy
industrialists son had quite a shock when she got married, followed by a
tragedy when her young daughter died of typhoid fever, and she thought that
the infection had been contracted by the child sucking on a sponge tainted
by impure river water.
In his description of the story and his miraculous cure of her mental illness
by telling her she was a murderer, Jung seems to accept, and indeed
reinforce, the assumption that the child developed typhoid by sucking on this
sponge, even though the womans little son drank a glass of the river water
without becoming ill:
She was bathing her children, first her four-year-old girl and then
her two-year-old son. She lived in a country where the water supply
was not perfectly hygeinic; there was pure spring water for drinking,
and tainted water from the river for bathing and washing. While she
was bathing the little girl, she saw the child sucking at the sponge, but
did not stop her. She even gave her little son a glass of the impure
water to drink. Naturally, she did this unconsciously, or only half
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consciously, for her mind was already under the shadow of the
incipient depression.
A short time later, after the incubation period had passed, the girl
came down with typhoid fever and died. The girl had been her
favourite. The boy was not infected. At that moment the depression
reached its acute stage, and the woman was sent to the institution.
From the association test I had seen that she was a murderess, and
I had learned many details of her secret. It was at once apparent that
this was a sufficient reason for her depression. Essentially it was a
psychogenic disturbance and not a case of schizophrenia.
It is clear from Jungs writings that, whilst recognising this womans distress
as due to psychological traumas that she suffered in the past, he failed to
realise that her predictable feelings of guilt that she had caused the death of
her own daughter through negligence could have been treated in a much
more humane way than by accusing her of being a murderer. He also
accepted validity of the label of schizophrenia and an attendant poor
prognosis, although he believed the pessimistic prognosis had been
misapplied in this case. He also admits to being intimidated (and thus
silenced) by the established hierarchy in the medical profession, such that he
did not dare disagree with the diagnosis made by his superiors. In terms of
ethical, biological and scientific logic, Jung appears to have failed to realise
and evidently failed to explain to his patient that the belief she held that her
daughter contracted typhoid by sucking on a sponge with river water in it
was not a scientific certainty by any means, and the accidental death of her
daughter hardly made her a murderess, which by usual definition refers to
the intentional killer of another person. The fact that she did not have
schizophrenia would seem obvious, but a deeper exploration of why she had
been diagnosed as such would have perhaps made more interesting reading
than this rather self-indulgent account makes. Jung explains why he
considered his psychoanalytical psychotherapy technique a success:
I told her everything I had discovered through the association test.
It can easily be imagined how difficult it was for me to do this. To
accuse a person point-blank of murder is no small matter. And it was
tragic for the patient to have to listen to it and accept it. But the result
was that in two weeks it proved possible to discharge her, and she was
never again institutionalised. (p.137)
She may have committed suicide after being discharged.
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Another great psychologist, according to Professor Sargent, the German

psychiatry professor Emil Kraepelin is still venerated as the father of
biological psychiatry in Australia, and acclaimed for his work in formulating
the basic classification of mental abnormalities and deficiencies that
underpins modern medical psychiatric diagnosis and treatment. His
considerable influence on modern psychiatry is described in later chapters
and in a more detailed discussion of the political and religious influences
pertinent to the schizophrenia label my previous book, The Politics of
Schizophrenia (Senewiratne, 2000). Continuing with Professor Sargents list
of great psychologists, Rorschach is remembered for devising the
ambiguous and unreliable Rorschach test, where inkblots are presented to
the subject to be analysed and their responses interpreted by the analyst.
Pavlov has become a household name (along with Freud) for conditioning
(programming) dogs into salivating in response to a bell, but whose
experimental legacy included cruel human experimentation also.
Professor Sargent continues his passage on Schools in Psychology with a
description of behaviorism, yet another school of thought regarding
thinking:
Behaviorism was founded about 1914 by JOHN B. WATSON,
then an animal psychologist at John Hopkins University. He too was
impatient with the narrowness of structuralism, but he did not feel that
the functionalists went far enough in their criticisms. Watson objected
particularly to introspection, which he considered unscientific.
Psychologys real concern, he said, is to study behavior, not
consciousness. Expose an animal or a human being to a stimulus and
see how he responds; record this behavior objectively and you have
real scientific evidence. Watson and his fellow behaviorists
experimented on learning, motivation, emotion, and individual
development.
The school of behaviourism has been very influential in Australia and the
USA, to such an extent that many psychology texts define psychology as
the study of behaviour, rather than the study of thinking or the mind.
According to Professor Sargent, Psychoanalysis is just another school of
thought out of many competing models, and one that is scientifically
suspect:
Psychoanalysis stood apart from the other schools. Founded by a
physician, SIGMUND FREUD, it grew out of his effort to cure
persons suffering from mental and nervous disorders. Psychoanalysis
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presents amazingly fruitful and provocative theories of motivation, of

personality development, and of abnormal behavior. Unlike other
founders of schools, Freud made no effort to verify his theories by
scientific experiment. Freuds major interpretations and those of his
dissident disciples are presented in the chapter called Conflicts and the
Unconscious. (S.Sargent in Great Psychologists, p6)
In Chapter 12, titled mental disease, Professor Sargent lists his preference
for psychiatric icons of all time. Several names are listed in capital letters
under the chapter heading: Hippocrates, Weyer, Pinel, Dix, Kraepelin,
Bleuler, Griesinger, Beers, Campbell, White, Jackson, Meyer, Rosanoff and
Lennox. The chapter begins with what, taken literally, could be a selffulfilling threat:
About one person of every twenty in the United States will at
some time during his life be treated in a mental hospital. The care and
cure of such persons is a tremendous problem.
Then is presented a very misleading reference to the current humane versus
the prior inhumane methods involved in the treatment of those deemed
mentally ill or mad:
Apparently mental disease has always existed, but only in the last
fifty years has it been handled scientifically. We have progressed a
long way from the days of cells and chains for the insane. We still
have far to go to reach an ideal solution.
The supposition that the mentally distressed, confused, upset or disturbed
were routinely treated by all countries, nations, governments and families
with cells and chains is obviously not correct. In fact it is very few of the
population at any one time who have been treated in this way, and this sort
of treatment has been ordered by only a few people (mainly men) who have
had the authority to give such orders and have them implemented. Professor
Sargent also fails to mention that the routine treatments given to psychiatric
patients who had been diagnosed as suffering mental disease (or mental
illness) were much more cruel and punitive than mere cells and chains.
The imprisoned, chained lunatics (by many names) have been whipped,
immersed in cold water or hot water, sensorily deprived, injected with
known poisons and infections, made comatose, given electrical shocks to
their head, genitals and hands, surgically or chemically castrated, had their
teeth removed, starved and tortured in many other ways, always with the
claim that these things were being done for the sake of the afflicted
individual and the greater society. Inevitably a scientific sounding theory has
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been used to justify what would otherwise be clearly recognised as unethical

and illegal abuse of the population by a professional elite.
Convincing the increasingly skeptical population of the world that they have
a superior understanding of madness and sanity, mental illness and health to
other experts and non-experts has been a longstanding concern of the
psychiatric profession, and a professional insecurity can be seen in efforts
of psychiatrists and psychologists to claim a position as legitimate
scientists. The problem of scientific credibility is addressed by Professor
Sargent in the following way:
We have called psychology a science. Is this correct? Astronomy,
chemistry, and physics are readily recognized as sciences; they
involve careful laboratory work, exact measurement, rigid laws, and
sure-fire predictability. Psychology is concerned with something less
definite and tangible; exactitude is hard to obtain and exceptionless
laws almost never occur.
However, it is not the definiteness of its material which
determines whether a subject is a science. (If it were, biology might be
excluded since it studies the great unknown - life.) KARL PEARSON,
an English mathematician and scientist, insisted nearly fifty years ago
that the criterion of science is not subject matter but the methods of
investigation used. If scientific method is used systematically, we may
properly speak of a science, whether the object of study is minerals,
bacteria, human thoughts and feelings, or social institutions.
Scientific method is no mystery. It is a definite procedure used in
trying to answer a question or solve a problem. The problem may be a
practical one like What causes malaria?, What causes mental
disease?, How does alcohol affect behavior? Or the problem may
be inspired by mere curiosity: Why do objects fall to the earth?,
How does heredity work?, Can animals learn?
It is interesting that Professor Sargent should mention these particular
problems and questions and it is worth looking at the ways in which
these scientific, biological and social phenomena have been researched in
the years since this book was written, and what conclusions have been
reached by the scientific community about them. It is also worth looking
at the medical research that was occurring in institutions associated with
Columbia University where S. Stanfield Sargent was employed as
Associate Professor of Psychology during the Second World War.
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The first question, What causes malaria?, can be answered easily on the
most obvious level: infection with Plasmodium malaria parasites, which are
carried by mosquitoes, and transmitted into the blood through the skin by
mosquito bites, usually from Anopheles or Culex mosquitoes. This is,
however, only a partial explanation of what causes malaria. Firstly, not
everyone who has malaria parasites injected into their skin will develop
malaria (depending on immune system health), and secondly, not everyone
who has contracted malaria has done so by being bitten by mosquitoes.
Some have been given infections by deliberate transfusion of infected blood
to test new antimalarial drugs. And at doses that made serious illness certain.
32. PRIVATE HOSPITALS AND MILITARY

CONNECTIONS
In the 1940s, at the same time that Professor Sargent wrote Great
Psychologists, and the nations of Europe were engaged in a bloody struggle
for territory and supremacy, an undisclosed number of men and women were
deliberately infected with malaria in Australia by the Commonwealth army
in conjunction with the British and Australian (Commonwealth)
governments, and American and British pharmaceutical (drug) companies.
The drug trials, on interred Italians and Jewish refugees, as well as wounded
Australian soldiers (who were obtained from convalescent hospitals), were
reported in the Australian newspapers over 50 years after they occurred, and
were hardly commented on by the scientific press or politicians in the
country in which these terrible abuses occurred. The experiments, on people
described in the Age articles as human guinea pigs, were done in North
Queensland (and later, in Melbourne) during the Second World War and for
several months after the official cessation of hostilities, driven by the
military and financial motive of testing new antimalarial drugs developed in
Germany for toxicity by the Allies on captive populations. It is difficult
not to see this as a hostile act against Australia and the Australian people, as
well as the Italian and Jewish people who were subjected to torture, which
was then denied.
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Even with the revelation of details of these cruel and unnecessary acts by the
Australian and British Governments of the day (who ultimately hold
responsibility for their armed forces), the deliberate infection and poisoning
of these people was not described as torture or biological warfare by the Age
newspaper, although the reporters did describe the incident as abuse. The
Murdoch-owned newspapers in Victoria (The Australian and The Herald
Sun) did not take the issue up, and The Age did not persist with the
historical story or make the necessary connections with contemporary
medical science and research activity in Australia (and Melbourne, in
particular) to understand why Guy Nolch may have written in the editorial of
Australasian Science that little has changed in 50 years when commenting
on biological warfare suggesting that the fault lies not with the scientists
but the masters who control them.
The drug Paludrine was being tested for ICI chemicals, a large British-based
company which continues to market the drug today, and the director of ICI
Australia, Professor Ben Lochtenberg, has been, for several years, the
director of the Mental Health Institute in Parkville, Melbourne. ICI, which
is an acronym for Imperial Chemical Industries was founded in 1926,
during a period of time between the two World Wars, that has been
referred to as The Depression. Around the same time as the revelations
about the infection and treatment trials, ICI pharmaceuticals was
transformed into Zeneca pharmaceuticals, which in 1999 became
amalgamated with the Sweden-based Astra pharmaceuticals, forming a new
giant drug company called Astra-Zeneca. The huge non-pharmaceutical
operations of ICI continued as ICI chemicals, unaffected by the merger,
according to the Information Service provided on a 1800 number by AstraZeneca. The phone message of the old Astra-Zeneca number in Melbourne
announced, on 1.9.99, that the Melbourne office of Astra-Zeneca has closed,
and the head office relocated to Sydney.
The malaria infections, which occurred in remote North Queensland, under
the auspices of the Red Cross, Royal Australian and British Military,
involved deliberately exposing physically and psychologically stressed
individuals to extraordinarily high doses of malaria through specially bred
mosquitoes and transfusions of blood infected with malaria. The infected
people were then subject to physical trauma such as exposure to cold and
then given massive doses of the chemicals to be tested, observing for toxic
effects. After the war ended, according to the newspaper reports, pressure
from the American drug company Winthrop (producers of Panadol) and ICI
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resulted in the trials being shifted to the Heidelberg Military Hospital in

Melbourne, which had orchestrated the Australian trials. Panadol and
Panadeine (paracetamol with codeine), previously Winthrop brands, are now
marketed in Australia by the Consumer branch of SmithKline Beecham.
Heidelberg Military Hospital, which was built in 1941, became the
Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital in 1947, and became incorporated with the
adjacent Austin Hospital in 1995 to form the massive Austin and
Repatriation Hospital located in the North-Eastern Melbourne suburb of
Heidelberg. The Austin hospital, now the biggest hospital in Melbourne
according to the Public Relations Department of the hospital, was one of
Melbournes first hospitals, and was built in 1882. It is, like Melbournes
first hospital, the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Parkville, which was built in
1848, affiliated with the University of Melbourne, which was founded in the
1860s, at the time of the gold-rush. Both these hospitals are major teaching
hospitals (for medical students) and public hospitals which treat Melbourne
people who cannot afford, or do not want private medical care. They also
both provide public psychiatric services, including locked facilities for
people to be injected in against their wills. In February, 2000, the public
relations officer at the Royal Melbourne Hospital explained to me that the
hospital has recently opened a unit with 25 acute beds and 8 for people
(usually girls) with eating disorders (mainly anorexia). Previously, the
Royal Melbourne Hospital was associated with the notorious Royal Park
Psychiatric Hospital, which has recently been closed and partially
demolished to make room for a visiting athletes at the Commonwealth
Games. They will be housed on a site where thousands of young Australians
have been imprisoned and tortured over the years with electric shocks and
huge doses of chemical toxins. Many have died, either during their
treatment or shortly after it. Their deaths have inevitably been reported as
suicide.
On 1.9.99, the Age newspaper in Melbourne announced in an article
headlined titled Coalition pledges $1b for health that, the coalitions
announcement came as the Opposition launched its health strategy,
promising to spend an extra $270 million building and upgrading hospitals
including $155 million to ensure the Austin and Repatriation Medical Centre
remained in public hands. The Austin and Repatriation Medical Centre has
never really been in public hands. Public hospitals in Australia are, like the
medical profession generally, controlled by elites who tend to support the
pharmaceutical industry as well as the military industry. The Heidelberg
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Military hospital, which became the Heidelberg Repatriation Hospital,

was initially a British-Australian Military Hospital, which coordinated
medical military activity during the Second World War (in the 1940s). This
is the hospital that coordinated the malaria experiments on interred Italian
and Jewish people during the WWII, and treated veterans for shell-shock
(later termed post-traumatic stress disorder) after this war and all the wars
Australia has been involved in since then. These include the wars in Korea,
Vietnam, New Guinea, and Malaya.
The 1943 University of Queensland publication The Nervous Soldier by
Professor John Bostock (of the University of Queensland and Brisbane
General Hospital) and Dr Evan Jones (of the University of Sydney) gives an
indication of treatment methods employed in Australia during the Second
World War, as well as the favoured diagnoses of the time. The book
recommends traits which will suggest need for psychological
investigations in soldiers, because, according to the manual, the military
machine must have efficiency at all times. These traits include:
resentfulness to discipline or inability to be disciplined, unusual stupidity
or awkwardness in drills or exercises, inability to transmit orders
correctly, personal uncleanliness, criminal tendencies, abnormal sex
practices and tendencies including masturbation, filthy language and
defacement of property, distinct feminine types, bed wetters, subjects
of continual ridicule or teasing, queer or peculiar behaviour, chronic
homesickness and all recruits who show persistent fearfulness, irritability,
seclusiveness, sulkiness, depression, shyness, timidity, anti-social attitude,
over boisterousness, suspicion, dullness, sleeplessness [or] sleep walking.
(p.80)
The authors rule out those with mental deficiency, epilepsy,
schizophrenia or manic depression from employment in the armed forces,
and gives the following description of schizophrenia:
Whilst the fully developed schizophrenic personality is so
obvious that it cannot escape recognition, milder forms may be
recognised by certain character traits. They are sensitive, reserved,
bad mixers, unpractical, abstracted and dreamy, and generally have
difficulty in facing ordinary problems. Their mind is made up with
difficulty. They may lack the power of concentration. These traits
make them unsuitable material for soldiers. It is noteworthy that
during the last war 20 per cent of mental invalids belonged to this
class.
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Not surprisingly, the main problems diagnosed in soldiers were related to

anxiety (ranging from normal nervousness to grave anxiety states). The
recommended treatments for more severe states of anxiety were
convulsion (chemical shock) therapy and narcotherapy. Milder cases
were treated by suggestion, hypnosis, hypno-analysis and narco-analysis.
Electrical shocks are also briefly discussed (as Faradism), and insulin
coma, whilst considered an effective treatment by the authors, was not
considered appropriate for military use. Alcohol was also used as an
anxiolytic and such use was recommended as follows:
The role of alcohol for the soldier cannot be lightly dismissed.
Drinking is a method of evading reality. Those who deprecate the use
of alcohol should imagine themselves attacking a machine gun at
dawn with death or mutilation a probability. In such cases some
evasion of reality is perfectly justifiable. The report by the War Office
on shell shock states that whilst alcohol must be rationed front-line
medical and executive officers favoured the use of rum if properly
controlled: it was especially valuable in the early morning hours.
Service conditions create periods of abstinence, boredom and
danger. At their conclusion there is an irresistible urge for conviviality,
which exposes the soldier to alcohol at a time when his tolerance is
low. It is not surprising that cases of acute alcoholism are inevitable.
Whilst such lapses are to be deprecated from the angle of discipline,
the Medical Officer is concerned purely as a doctor whose job is to
make a presumably good soldier fit to resume his duty. (p.69)
In The Nervous Soldier, alcohol and cigarette abuse are identified as being
caused by military training, although it is not admitted as clearly as that.
Under the subtitle, the preliminary military training, in a chapter titled
The Stresses of Military Life, Bostock and Jones wrote, in 1943:
When Bill Smith receives his first uniform he must face an entire
alteration in his living conditions. His contacts are different. He is
shorn of many personality props and of the friends and relatives of a
life time. They are replaced by new faces and strange voices. Soon he
learns that he is fettered and frustrated by disciplinary restrictions. His
soul belongs to the army. For both married and unmarried there is a
modification of the sex routine. For some the change is towards
continence; others are snared in the net of promiscuity with its
attendant worries. The conditions of military life are calculated to stir
into activity repressed homo-sexual tendencies resulting in the
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development of anxiety states or of paraphrenic psychoses. Even the

alcohol and tobacco habits partake of the change. There is a move
from teetotalism towards drinking, often to excess. Tobacco becomes
almost a necessity. (p.15)
The authors do not seem to realise how permanently destructive the training
of young men in this way is bound to be for society generally, whilst
admitting that it destroys fundamental respect for life:
and in addition there is another aspect manifesting itself. The
aggressive instincts are unfolding. The soldier trained from infancy to
regard human life as sacred must become efficient in taking life when
necessary. Unless he can learn to kill his enemies, military training is
futile. (p.16)
The prime motivator for a successful soldier, according to The Nervous
Soldier is patriotism. Ironically, the opening chapter suggests that fighting
(and killing) in support of the British war effort (despite the British
imperial history of slavery and oppression), is actually a fight for freedom
from Nazi slavery and Japanese imperialism:
We are actors today in one of the great moments of history. We
are called to help free a large proportion of civilization from the
enslaving serfdom of German Nazism and Japanese imperialism. We
realise, as never before, the value of personal and national liberty.
This liberty, which has been brutally snatched from the Czechs,
Danes, Norwegians, Poles, Dutch and Greeks, has assumed a new
significance for us in the face of danger. Hitherto we took it overmuch
for granted. Democracy alone provides the way of life and the form of
government under which it can live and flourish. So Democracy must
prevail or freedom will vanish from the earth. This is an incentive, this
is a motive that should have the power to light the torch of unflagging
enthusiasm in us. And today we of the Anzac zone have another
motive perhaps the most primitive of all that of defending our
homes from destruction and our women and children from slaughter.
The fact that democracy is incompatible with monarchies and authoritarian
hierarchies evidently escaped the psychology professors who wrote this
manual, and the treatments they gave to nervous soldiers were not based
on the democratic will of the Australian people. They were based on the
psychiatric dogmas prevalent in British and Australian universities and
hospitals at the time, and an agenda based on producing efficient killing
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machines who obeyed orders unquestioningly, accepted punishment without

complaint (discipline) and were willing to sacrifice their lives for the elites
who gave both the orders and the punishments (whilst believing they were
fighting and risking injury or death for freedom and democracy).
The mainstay of treatment for severe anxiety was, incongruously, chemical
shock therapy, involving the intravenous injection of drugs which caused
convulsions. These drugs included cardiazol and phrenazol, which also
caused acute terror and death, at times:
Shock therapy has received such widespread recognition during
the last few years that there is little need to describe the method in
detail. As it is particularly useful in the early stages its employment in
anxiety and hysterical conditions associated with war will often be
indicated. The treatment should be carried out by a trained team, and
under such conditions that complications such as fractures, should
they occur, can be adequately dealt with. This will include access to
an X-ray unit. It is obvious therefore, that the method is not applicable
under field conditions.
The book continues to give details of dose, and injection technique for
inducing convulsions using cardiazol, warning that, if a convulsion fails to
occur the results are often most unpleasant, if not harmful. The trauma of
such treatment is easy to imagine:
The patient is in a dorso-recumbent position with a pillow under
the head and another under the upper thoracic region. During
convulsions the upper extremities should be held adducted to the trunk
and the shoulders are pressed down to avoid violent flexion of the
dorsal spine. Hold patient rigidly by shoulders to the bed, see that the
limbs are straight. A fracture of any limb may occur, but is less likely
if these precautions are carried out. (p.58)
Narco Therapy, essentially the same as the notorious deep sleep therapy,
was reserved for resistant cases. With an inexcusable ignorance about the
difference between a good nights sleep and a drugged coma, the authors
gave a revealing case history:
There is a growing belief in the utility of narco therapy for early
cases. Everyone is aware of the benefits of a good nights sleep
particularly after a heavy and worrying day. Public belief in the
efficacy of sleep is profound. Oh, doctor, says the patient, if I
could sleep for days, I would be cured. Today we are able to achieve
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this miracle often with remarkable results. As an instance the

following case may be quoted.
AB was profoundly depressed and said he had venereal disease.
Suggestion and persuasion with exhaustive blood tests were useless.
Shock therapy was then tried without success. Finally he was put to
sleep for three weeks. When he awoke to reality the previous morbid
ideas had disappeared. Within a few days he was anxious to return to
work. [He may have just stopped complaining about his fear, for
obvious reasons]
As will be seen by the above, certain cases which do not respond
to cardiazol may respond to narco-therapy. Quite frequently
sleepnessness and restlessness or excitement render it either impolitic
or impossible to give shock therapy. Whenever this occurs, there is
scope for the use of narco-therapy.
As for physio-therapy the psychiatrists who wrote The Nervous Soldier
were not talking about aerobic exercise. The section on Physio-Therapy
begins with an extraordinary description of the value of electrical shocks:
Electricity plays a small but definite part in the treatment of
nervous disorders. Faradism may be used with dramatic results. The
inert muscle at its touch leaps into spasm associated with discomfort if
not pain. Faradism has therefore a distinctly persuasive quality since it
gives ocular proof that paralysis is not complete. Furthermore as a
method of treatment, it has the merit of being uncomfortable and
therefore carries with it the suggestion, Get well quickly and be
finished.
In hysteria faradism will be used most frequently for mutism and
paralysis. In the former the electrodes may touch the naso pharynx
[the back of the throat] or be applied to the neck. (p.61)
In actuality, the suggestion is: get back to the firing line or well torture
you with painful electric shocks and chemically-induced convulsions. The
focus on efficiency means that doctors are expected to return soldiers to
active duty as soon as possible and while spending minimal time with
them (hence the enthusiasm for quick treatments like electrical and
chemical shocks). In a section titled enlisting the help of a cobber the book
explains:
A medical officer can only be with any one patient for a few
moments. He needs therefore an extension of himself to carry on the
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good workOften a word with a mans cobber will infuse new hope
and if he has no cobber, see his platoon officer, and find him one.
A few years before George Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four, Bostock and
Jones wrote:
Most men are better for a big brother. When needed the Medical
Officer must take practical steps to find him. (p.71)
Wars make a lot of money for some industries, notably the weaponsmanufacturing industry, mining industry, chemical industry, espionage
industry, drug industry and medical treatment industry (including the
psychiatric diagnosis and treatment industry). In recent wars, the
increasingly influential humanitarian aid industry has also become a
noticeable profiteer. All these industries are now set up along corporate
lines, and compete with each other for credibility, sales and size. Many of
the humanitarian aid and charity organizations have completely
betrayed the noble ideals expressed in their titles and do the very opposite of
what they are claimed by their public relations departments to do.
Although on paper these may be non-profit organizations, it should be
remembered that in Australia and America non-profit organizations
including religions and charities do not have to pay tax. Australia has
therefore become a tax haven for corrupt religious organizations and
charities, the money raised from the public being spent on projects which are
dubious, to say the least. Many of these charities ostensibly raise funds for
medical research which turns out to be largely spent on promotion of
disease and treatment services, drug trials and human (and animal)
experimentation, often orchestrated by universities and independent
research institutions located in and connected with public hospitals.
In Australia, as well as in Britain and America, the training people receive in
universities regarding philosophy (including ethics), economics, marketing,
politics, sociology, medicine and psychology are not directed towards ideals
of truth, honesty, justice, kindness, generosity and peacefulness. The reasons
for this can be elucidated historically, politically, and economically. They
can also be looked at psychologically and scientifically. However they are
approached, they should be looked at logically if we are to recover from the
militarisation and corporate takeover of Australian education. With the
corporatisation of the tertiary education system in Australia, the focus has
been on training young people to get a job, beat other people (compete
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ruthlessly), make more money and be compliant consumers. The tertiary

education institutions in Australia also teach, and have developed within a
support-of-the-military paradigm, especially in the areas of science and
medicine.
This corporate takeover of medical education has been accompanied by
changes in medical and psychiatric terminology. The change of status of
psychiatric victims from prisoners to lunatics to patients to
consumers and clients has been an official one overseen by senior
members of the psychiatric profession in Australia, along with other changes
of name, such as mental hygeine to mental health, and human-rights
to anti-psychiatry. Others, such as eugenics and biological warfare
have disappeared from the vocabulary of doctors in Australia, to be replaced
by psychiatric genetics(when applied to local practices) or ethnic
cleansing (when applied to the Allies military opponents).
The elaborate system of psychological training that soldiers are
programmed with to stop thinking about it and keep fighting without
questioning orders, has profound effects on their behaviour during action
(fighting and supporting the war effort), as well as afterwards, when they
find it impossible de-program themselves and return to civilian life. This
is where the repatriation and veterans hospitals have developed and
extraordinary system of blame the victim psychiatry. The veterans were
said to suffer from mental illness or nervous disorders and discharged
from the armed forces, sometimes on a pension from the Commonwealth
Department of Veterans Affairs. Alcoholism, aggression, violence, drug
addiction, gambling, nightmares, depression and chronic anxiety are all
common problems amongst returned soldiers and are the real fruits of war.
Such men have been both honoured and ignored. The well-behaved
soldiers, who accepted their injuries and dwindling government services
quietly were publicly lauded, once a year, at Anzac day marches, lest we
forget, while those who were angry, upset, confused or horrified by their
war-time experiences were impolitely pensioned off with whatever
nervous disorder diagnoses were in use at the time. These included shellshock after the First World War and post-traumatic stress disorder after the
Vietnam War.
The old Heidelberg Military Hospital, which treated thousands of returned
soldiers (and experimented on others, according to the Age report on human
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guinea-pigs) is now part of the Austin and Repatriation Medical Centre in

Heidelberg, and proposals have been made, in recent years, to privatise the
hospital (sell the hospital to individuals and corporations), as has been done
with several ex-military hospitals around Australia in recent years.
One such hospital is the Repatriation Hospital at Greenslopes in Brisbane,
which was sold to Ramsay Health Care, who claim, in their glossy 1997
prospectus that:
Ramsay Health Care was established in 1964 and has grown to
become one of the largest and most successful private hospital
operators in Australia. The origins of Ramsay Health Care were in the
field of psychiatric healthcare where it achieved a reputation for
innovation in many areas of psychiatry and for providing high quality
care. The same culture and principles apply in all its healthcare
operations, which now encompass a diverse range of medical/surgical
hospitals in addition to psychiatric hospitals.
The prospectus also announces that the company, which owns and operates
11 hospitals located in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South
Australia and Western Australia, with a total of 1,351 beds had signed
contracts in May 1996 with TF Woolham & Son Pty Ltd to construct a new
30 bed psychiatric ward at Greenslopes Private Hospital for the sum of
$1,515,011 and Transfield Constructions Pty Ltd (for $11,035,597) to build
four more hospital wards at the Hollywood campus in Western Australia.
In May, 1996, the prospectus reports, Kilcullen & Clark was engaged to
design and construct a psychiatric unit on the Hollywood campus for the
sum of $2,489,749.
In Victoria, the main centre of Paul Ramsays huge private psychiatric
empire is the Albert Road Clinic in Inner Melbourne. The prospectus
explains:
Albert Road Clinic was opened in July 1995 and in part was a
conglomeration of three existing psychiatric hospitals owned by
Ramsay Health Care. These hospitals were closed upon the opening of
Albert Road clinic. Albert Road Clinic is an 80 licensed bed facility
which is recognised throughout Melbourne as a major specialist
referral centre. The clinic specialises in the treatment of eating
disorders, adolescent disorders and elderly assessment and through its
mood disorders programme, has formal links with the University of
Melbourne.
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Simultaneously, in a contract that has been kept secret by the Victorian State
Government, a 135 bed forensic psychiatry hospital has been constructed
at Yarra Bend, adjacent to the Fairfield Hospital and current home of the
Macfarlane Burnet Virology Institute, which is to be relocated adjacent to
the Alfred Hospital in Prahran (in inner eastern Melbourne). The Macfarlane
Burnet Centre, which advises the National and State Governements on HIV,
AIDS and AIDS prevention, is run by their Chief Executive Officer and
Executive Director the American Professor John Mills, who heads the
Childrens Virology Department, according to their 1998 Annual Report,
as well as being CEO of the company. Possibly presenting a major conflict
of interest, Professor Mills is also described as the Director of AMRAD
pharmaceuticals, which has recently constructed a massive new complex
also in prime land by the Yarra River.
AMRAD corporation, Macfarlane Burnet Centre, the Alfred Hospital and
Forensic Psychiatry Hospital, as well as the Austin Repatriation Hospital all
have formal and informal links with the University of Melbourne,
Melbournes oldest university, and one of only two in the State of Victoria
authorised to produce medical graduates and train them in various areas, the
other being Monash University, founded in the 1960s. This includes the
training of medical specialists including psychiatrists and specialists on
public health, including international public health. This training is a
prolonged process involving in six years of undergraduate study, a years
internship in the public hospital system, and a variable number of years in
the public (teaching) hospital system during which they are examined by
senior specialists and, if they satisfy various criteria, allowed to call
themselves specialists also (and claim both authority and increased fees).
The same system, with some variations, is in operation throughout the
world, including Britain, where it originated, the USA, Canada, New
Zealand, Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia.
Predictably, given the history of Australia, the medical and scientific
institutions in Australia maintain close philosophical and political links with
the old English Universities Oxford and Cambridge in addition to an
increasing influence from Harvard, Yale and other universities in the USA. It
is usual practice, and often considered obligatory, that as part of their
higher education, medical graduates spend at least one year in Britain or
the USA before receiving their specialist qualification. It is also the case that
many doctors with medical qualifications obtained in the United Kingdom
and New Zealand are practising in Australia, without any particular
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qualification in the unique health problems and psychology of the Australian

people or a knowledge of their history or culture. Extraordinarily, many of
these doctors, some of whom also qualified in other Commonwealth
countries, such as New Zealand, Sri Lanka, India and Canada, are working
in the area of clinical and academic psychiatry, where a sensitive approach
and detailed knowledge of the diverse cultures and languages of Australia is
surely essential.
There are several political reasons why the psychiatric system in Australia is
disproportionately populated by doctors who are not Australian by birth, or
culturally. Many are not Australian citizens and do not regard Australia as
home. This is important because when treating peoples minds, ones
loyalties, including national loyalties (and concepts of patriotism) are
important especially when making diagnoses of political beliefs.
Revolutionary thought and action is proscribed by psychiatric diagnostic
criteria, including revolutionary thought in the areas of politics, philosophy,
religion and science. Challenges to the authority of the state and the system
(wherever it is located) are also proscibed by psychiatric criteria for the
diagnosis of delusions, psychosis, schizophrenia and mania. Thus those who
attempt to radically change the existing system or demonstrate hostility or
aggression towards it can be diagnosed, though a complex web of jargon and
concepts (such as paranoia, thought disorder, affective disorder) as
incurably mad. This system of diagnosis can be, and has been, abused in
every part of the world in which it has been implemented, not least of all
because it is obviously politically expedient to discredit opponents as
mentally ill.
It is so obvious that this system can be abused that most States which
employ psychiatric diagnoses also have laws proscribing the misapplication
of labels of madness for political, religious and philosophical beliefs. This is
the case in every State in Australia however gross abuses in the application
of these labels occurs, and many people have been crippled and died, while
they could have been (and may have been) great artists, philosophers, poets,
or politicians. The reason so many potentially wonderful careers are
destroyed by psychiatric diagnosis and treatment is that the criteria defining
abnormality enshrined in psychiatric texts are fundamentally anti-creative.
Dopamine-blockers inhibit creative thought, and the diagnosis of original
(idiosyncratic) ideas as psychotic (out of touch with reality as defined by
the medical profession) also inhibits creative thinking. This includes socalled lateral thinking (referred to as flight of ideas, a classical symptom
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of mania and hypomania) and belief in things that others do not believe
(delusions).
The label of mania can also be applied to people who become progessively
more outspoken, adventurous, spontaneous or generous. Giving away
expensive presents and giving away ones possessions are regarded as
typical manic activities, as is, incredibly, striking up conversations with
strangers on a train, and increase in goal-directed activities (DSM IV,
1995). While states of insane mania may exist, the criteria for diagnosis of
hypomania and mania are biased against particular types of activity and
particular beliefs. These are proscribed, not because they are unhealthy, but
because of the political and religious background within which psychiatric
diagnostic criteria were developed. In terms of politics, acceptable views,
according to the apolitical criteria of the DSM and ICD classifications are
essentially capitalist, obedient of the laws of land (whether good or bad
laws) and compliant with medical directives and orders.
Of course, the psychiatric profession in Australia, New Zealand, Europe and
North America do not admit to having been affected by Cold War paranoia
(or propaganda) or to retain biases from the eras of colonialism, imperialism
and Christian crusades (and inquisitions). The struggle for emancipation and
human rights is not mentioned in psychiatric texts, and the history of
psychiatric atrocities is selectively ommitted when the story of medical
advances is told in the many popular medical history books which tell of the
miracles of penicillin, immunization, micro-surgery and modern genetics.
This is the version of medical history taught in medical schools around the
world, including the University of Queensland, where I myself learned the
Official History of Western Medicine. Actually there was hardly any
history included in the medical curriculum, true or false we learned names
of important scientists but not where and when they lived (or what their
assumptions and biases were essential knowledge if one hopes to
reasonably evaluate their theories and conclusions). Inevitably, every
medical student that graduated as a doctor (including myself) believed the
core tenets of the Official History of Western Medicine by the time we had
finished our 6 years at university. We had been carefully and methodically
programmed to accept our place in the system that trained us, and to accept
that any fundamental changes to this system would occur very slowly and
that anyone who thought otherwise was unrealistic out of touch with
reality.
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For foreign graduates to be registered as medical doctors in Australia, they

must fulfil conditions stipulated by the Commonwealth Governmentsponsored Overseas Doctors Training Program, which makes it far easier
for some doctors to work in Australia than others. This depends, largely, on
where they trained graduates from British, Canadian and New Zealand
universities find it much easier to gain registration to work as doctors in
Australia than those who trained in the third world, China or Russia. This
is said to be related to the doctors proficiency in English, the argument
being that doctors who cannot communicate adequately in the English
language should not be allowed to work as doctors in English-speaking
Australia. The same argument, however, makes it doubly inappropriate that
doctors who do not speak and fluent English should be employed in the area
of public hospital psychiatry where ability to communicate with patients
and understand their culture and language is all-important.
The reason usually given for foreign graduates working, at least temporarily,
as psychiatric registrars and residents, when they first come to Australia, is
that there is a shortage of local graduates to work in the public hospital
psychiatric system. This may be true, but if so, there are good reasons why
local graduates do not want to work in the capacities demanded of them by
the psychiatric system signing orders that take away their neighbours
rights and freedoms, and prescribing that drugs and injections be given to
people against their will. Most in Australia do not regard such activities as
fgiving people a fair go, but most do not know what goes on inside
psychiatric hospitals. Many have noticed, however, that people often come
out worse (after treatment) than when they went in.
There is large-scale public cynicism regarding the medical profession and
suspicion regarding the cosy relationship between doctors and the
pharmaceutical industry. I have heard accusations that doctors often have
shares in drug companies, which I do not believe to be the case. Most
doctors overprescribe drugs not because of pecuniary interest, but because
they are trained to do so. They are trained to diagnose illness, order
investigations, refer to specialist colleagues and prescribe drugs. This is an
important part of medical training, which is necessary for the good scientific
use of medications, however, without a holistic approach and a knowledge
of non-drug approaches, the medical profession is seriously blinkered
seeing people as labels and statistics which can be only treated with
chemicals and scalpels.
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33. BEHAVIOUR CONTROL AND SOCIAL CONTROL

The United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948)
states that no one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or
degrading treatment or punishment (article 5). The same collection of
International Laws states that everyone has the right to freedom of
thought, conscience and religion (article 18) and that everyone has the
right to freedom of opinion and expression (article 19). These rights
are fundamental to any democratic society, however much they are
ignored or perversely misapplied.
The Australian population is ostensibly protected from the perverse
misapplication and misinterpretation of laws by a legal concept termed
natural law or natural justice. This is an interesting and largely
unexplored area of law at the crossroads of science, philosophy, theology
and law. Natural law is rarely quoted in Australian courtrooms, but it is an
important principle evoked in the hearings of the Mental Health Review
Board in Victoria and equivalent bodies in other states. These are semiformal hearings with the power to authorise the release or continued
incarceration of people held against their will by the public hospital system,
when the usually drugged patient is interrogated by a lawyer and
psychiatrist, with a largely symbolic community visitor present to provide
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a semblance of impartiality. The proceedings are unrecorded other than the

notes of the lawyer for the Board, and the patients reasons for requesting
release are contested by the psychiatrist who has a massive advantage in
convincing the Board representatives that the ongoing treatment of the
patient is necessary and desirable for the good of society, as well as that of
the patient. At times, the psychiatrist who seeks continued detention of the
(usually young) person is not even there in person: they are allowed to
present their evidence over the phone!
The Annual Report of the Victorian Mental Health Review Board and
Psychosurgery Review Board for the year ending 30 June 1998 states
that the Board heard 4827 cases in 1997-98, an increase of 11.6% from
the previous year, when 4326 cases were determined. In 1990-91, 2657
cases were heard, and a constant rise in the number of cases has
occurred each year since then. Of these 4827 cases 33% were
involuntarily detained inpatients (held against their will in hospitals)
and 63.4% were people objecting to community treatment orders
(CTOs) which had been made against them by psychiatrists. Of these
appeals, only 5.7% of patients were discharged.
An argument that could be put forward to justify this low release figure is
that few of the people denied their freedom were not in need of forced
treatment and denial of the right of free movements that other citizens are
entitled to and take for granted. In other words, most of the people
incarcerated and forcibly injected with major tranquillisers (antipsychotics)
need this treatment for their own wellbeing and that of society, and thus no
human rights abuses are occurring through the actions of the Mental Health
Review Board.
Examination of the criteria by which mental illness is judged, the personal
experience of the author, the Report of the Seeking Justice Project and
several cases cited in the Annual Report of the Mental Health Review Board
(1998) show that, in fact, systematic abuses of young peoples right to
freedom of thought, speech and action are occurring as a direct result of
inappropriate determinations by the Mental Health Review Board, which
largely supports the treatments meted out to psychiatric patients in Victoria,
regardless of how cruel these treatments are, often based solely on lack of
insight in patients regarding their mental illness and the need for
treatment(drug treatment).
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The Board routinely turns a blind eye to irregularities in paperwork and

medical records, excessive doses of drugs forced into patients, assault by
nursing staff, long periods of solitary confinement and punitive or coerced
electroshock treatment, all of which are occurring in Australian hospitals
today, and which regulatory bodies such as the Mental Health Review Board
have a legal and ethical responsibility to identify and prevent.
According to the report, in 1998, only 3 of the 24 psychiatrists on the Mental
Health Review Board are women, but 10 of the 23 legal members and 14
of 19 community members were women. All five professors (the highest
rank in the academic hierarchy) were men. These included three professors
of psychiatry, Professor Richard Ball, Professor Graeme Mellsop and
Associate Professor Sidney Bloch. Professor Bloch co-edited Foundations
of Clinical Psychiatry, the standard textbook for medical students at Monash
University and the University of Melbourne (at which he is one of several
psychiatry professors). He also gave the 1996 Beattie Smith Lecture at the
University of Melbourne, a revised version of which was published in 1997
in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry.
In it he warned, hypocritically:
Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it,
claimed Santayana. What can we learn from the Soviet and Nazi
horrors? We can recognise in both contributory elements derived from
concepts moulded by the psychiatric profession itself. In the USSR
the monopoly of Snezhnevskyism facilitated the States embrace of
psychiatry to stifle dissent. In Nazi Germany, the eugenic movement,
led in part by distinguished academic psychiatrists, was the foundation
on which Hitler could erect his murderous edifice. Thus we see that
psychiatry is not necessarily an innocent victim when forces beyond
its borders seek its connivance to pursue pernicious goals.
Snezhnevskyism is a reference to Soviet psychiatric policies based on the
doctrines of Professor Andrei Snezhnevsky, described as an architect of the
diagnostic schema which facilitated the Soviet misuse of psychiatry for
political purposes. Snezhnevsky, according to Professor Bloch, crafted the
reasons that a dissident could be labeled as schizophrenic because of the
political beliefs and behaviour, doing this over a period of thirty years during
which he created new categories such as sluggish schizophrenia which
could be diagnosed in people who appeared quite normal to the untrained
eye.
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Professor Bloch explains:

In essence, he devised concepts which profoundly shifted the way
the condition was used clinically. This was no mere academic
exercise. Several crucial repercussions eventuated: (i) schizophrenia
was always genetically determined; (ii) although its features might
only manifest intermittently, the biological foundation of the illness
always remained; (iii) recovery was not possible; (iv) the main
question was the speed with which a patient would deteriorate; and (v)
rather sinisterly, because the illness might present with mild
symptoms and only progress later, schizophrenia was much more
common than previously thought. (p.174)
The Annual Report of the Mental Health Review Board (1998) states that
65% of patients seen at hearings had been diagnosed with schizophrenia,
with another 9% as having schizoaffective disorder and 11% with bipolar
affective disorder (BAD). A disturbing perspective is presented of one of
these cases, which is amongst 21 of the 4827 cases selected for presentation
in the annual report, of a young man diagnosed as schizophrenic for what are
common new age ideas:
The patient had been diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia
with fixed delusional symptoms. He was preoccupied by his space and
research project which involved making further contact with aliens
from another planet and believed he and his girlfriend were the living
embodiments of people who had been burnt to death as witches in the
17th century. He told the Board he had communicated with aliens from
another planet via dreams and astral travel. He did not believe he was
mentally ill but was being persecuted for his religious beliefs. (p.33)
The Board, which had considered whether the patients beliefs could be
characterised as religious decided that it did not matter whether or not they
were religious, since even if [the patients] beliefs were religious, the
Board finds that aspects of [the patients] religious practice, namely his
interaction with aliens, falls properly into the category of hallucinations,
rather than mystical experience with the supernatural. The appeal for
release was rejected and the Mental Health Review Board decided that even
were his beliefs to be characterised as religious, the Board can and does
take them into account, along with these other factors, to determine [the
patient] to be mentally ill.
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The Mental Health Review Board hearings are usually held in a room at the
same hospital where the patient is held, and may have been held for several
weeks or months, and some people have been kept on involuntary status for
several years with plans to continue certification indefinitely, against which
practice no real protections currently exist. It is important to note that these
are not dangerous, violent people who have murdered people or even broken
the law. They are usually young people who have been diagnosed as
schizophrenic because of their beliefs and behaviour and refuse to accept the
label and the crippling drugs that have been forced into them (usually by
injection if they refuse to swallow them), usually in huge doses and in
locked wards of psychiatric hospitals.
Despite claims of independence and impartiality, the Mental Health Review
Board is closely associated with the Public Hospital Psychiatry Departments
(in which hearings are held) which, in conjunction with the Victorian
Department of Human Services and Commonwealth Department of Health,
implement the National Mental Health Strategy, which was launched in 1994
during the last year of Paul Keatings Labour Government. This Federal
(Commonwealth) Labour Government, in which Dr. Carmen Lawrence (who
has a psychology degree) was the Minister for Health, made many changes
in the Mental Health System that gave senior psychiatrists more power and
money and this trend has continued under John Howards Liberal
Government.
The National Mental Health Strategy was introduced in 1994 as a joint
Federal, State and Territory Government project. According to the Director
of the Research and Outcomes Evaluation Section of the Mental Health
Branch of the Commonwealth Department of Human Services and Health, in
a letter dated 6 March 1996, the Commonwealth Government has provided
$269 million for the reform of mental health services, of which $189 million
has been allocated to state and territory governments to achieve these aims.
The majority of this money has gone into restructuring of the existing mental
health system, including the formation of the Mental Health Council,
integration of community psychiatry services and the construction of
several new psychiatric institutions, including a new 135 bed forensic
psychiatry hospital in Yarra Bend Park, adjacent to the Fairfield Infectious
Diseases Hospital. The lack of public consultation and sinister degree of
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secrecy concerning this major construction project is predictable when the

history of forensic psychiatry in Melbourne is known.
Forensic psychiatry literally means law-related psychiatry, but has
evolved from the branch of the public psychiatric system that diagnosed and
treated people labeled criminally insane in asylums for the criminally
insane, as well as psychiatric treatment (meaning drugs and/or
electroconvulsive treatment) to prisoners within the prisons system. It has,
for a number of years, been impossible to obtain records of how many
people are given electroconvulsive treatment (ECT, or electroshock
treatment) in public hospitals in Australia, but it is known to be several
hundred every week. In recent years it has been promoted in Australia, not as
a last resort, but as important first line therapy for particular psychiatric
conditions, particularly depression, but the treatment is also given for
mania and schizophrenia as well as schizo-affective disorder and
when injected drugs have failed to produce improvement in behaviour.
The prisons system in Australia is closely linked to the public psychiatric
system, and both are integrated with police operations. There are several
possible points of referral to the psychiatric system from the police. The
Protocol Between Victoria Police and the Victorian Department of Health
and Community Psychiatric Services Division of 1995 provided a list of
indicators for referral to mental health services. The police members are
instructed to contact mental health services if one or more of the following
are thought to apply: Where a person is known to have a mental illness and
Has a history of violence or is a current threat to the safety of others
Is a serious threat to property
Shows significant self neglect
Has a high level of distress
Or is a person who:
Has a history or presents a current threat of deliberate self harm
Is behaving in a bizarre or unusual way
Is displaying gross mismanagement of personal affairs as a consequence
of an acutely disturbed mental state.
If the person is held in police custody or imprisoned by the courts, they may
still be subject to psychiatric drug treatment. As Professor Paul Mullen
writes in Foundations of Clinical Psychiatry:
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Psychiatrists also became involved in the care of those in prisons

who though not so disordered as to have been found insane were
sufficiently disturbed as to require treatment. The role of psychiatrists
now includes a wide range of advisory and therapeutic functions at
almost every level of the criminal justice system. (p.322)
The word care is used very loosely. The prisons in Australia are not
intended for the care of people, they are intended for punishment. The
punishments are termed custodial sentences and are the result of
judgements of guilt. Incarceration is unpleasant and widely recognised to
be unpleasant, not least of all because of the environment in which
offenders are held. One has reason, then, to doubt a stated intent to care
for rather than contribute to this punishment. Painful, crippling injections,
electric shocks to the head and permanent labels of mental disorder are
indeed cruel punishments. Professor Mullen uses the term mental disorder
repeatedly in the text, but makes a mess of defining the term:
Mental health legislation varies between definitions which leave
the issue to the medical profession and those which state clear criteria
with the intention of placing a brake on medical discretion. The latter
attempt to wrest decision-making from the medical and vest it in the
legal profession rarely succeeds for it simply translates the decision
about who is mentally ill into a decision about who is and is not
deluded, hallucinated or whatever. In a number of jurisdictions
antisocial personality disorder is specifically excluded from the forms
of disorder justifying committal. (p.335)
Antisocial personality disorder is described, in a previous chapter of
Foundations of Clinical Psychiatry, as follows:
People with this disorder manifest pervasive irresponsible and
antisocial behaviour in adult life. In their childhood, lying, truancy
and vandalism are common. In adulthood they cannot hold steady
employment, fail to maintain monogamous relationships and behave
irresponsibly. They frequently break the law, are involved in
aggressive outbursts and show little regard for the property of others.
They rarely experience remorse. They are reckless and seem unable to
plan or parent effectively. They often abuse both legal and illicit drugs
in association with complaints of tension, boredom and anger. The
disorder is more common in males and is seen in considerable
numbers in criminal populations. In their background there may be
evidence of Attention Deficit Disorder and Conduct Disorder
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occurring in childhood. There is an increased incidence of substance

abuse and Somatisation Disorder. Relatives also show a high
prevalence of Antisocial Personality Disorder and substance abuse.
(p.192)
Associate Professor Jayashri Kulkarni who authored the above and the
chapter on personality disorders in Foundations of Clinical Psychiatry
from which it is quoted is one of the few female psychiatry professors in
Australia, and is, with Professors Graham Burrows and Robert Adler, a
ministerial nominee on the psychosurgery Review Board of Victoria.
The Psychosurgery Review Board is co-administered with Mental Health
Review Board. Graham Burrows is the head of the Mental Health
Foundation and the Department of Psychiatry at the Austin and Repatriation
Hospital at Heidelberg, Melbourne, and Robert Adler is, in addition to being
a professor of child psychiatry, is the psychiatrist on the Medical
Practitioners Board of Victoria.
Professor Adler co-authored the chapter on Child and Adolescent
Psychiatry in Foundations of Clinical Psychiatry. In it the American
Psychiatric Associations recent labels for delinquent (or, more accurately,
disobedient) children, oppositional defiant disorder and conduct
disorder, are described in a single passage, providing an unpleasant
stereotype for the impressionable minds of medical students:
This disorder is characterised by negativistic and defiant
behaviour which is excessive for the childs developmental stage and
has been present for over six months. There is debate as to whether it
is simply the early manifestation of Conduct disorder. Certainly many
children who present with more serious antisocial behaviour
associated with the latter have a past history of hyperactivity and
negativism. Stealing, lying, running away from home, truancy and
physical aggression are common among conduct-disordered children,
who often show little remorse or concern for the feelings of others.
Conduct disorder is described as socialised or unsocialised depending
on whether the children commit their offences alone or in company. A
proportion of cases proceed to more serious offending in later
adolescence and Antisocial personality disorder in adulthood. (p.281)
It is not surprising that the authors have difficulty differentiating
Oppositional defiant disorder and Conduct disorder. There is hardly any
difference between the two: they are both stigmatising labels for naughty
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children and adolescents. These are disciplinary diagnoses, social labels

with deeper political significance and implications. Together with Attention
Deficit Disorder (ADD) and AD/HD (Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity
Disorder), these are the most likely diagnoses that troubled (or troublesome)
children receive if they are introduced into the psychiatric system.
The American Psychiatric Associations Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM IV) defines Oppositional Defiant
Disorder as follows:
The essential feature of Oppositional Defiant Disorder is a
recurrent pattern of negativistic, defiant, disobedient, and hostile
behavior toward authority figures that persists for at least six months
(Criterion A) and is characterized by the frequent occurrence of at
least four of the following behaviors: losing temper (Criterion A1),
arguing with adults (Criterion A2), actively defying or refusing to
comply with the requests or rules of adults (Criterion A3), deliberately
doing things that will annoy other people (Criterion A4), blaming
others for his or her own mistakes or misbehavior (Criterion 5), being
touchy or easily annoyed by others (Criterion A6), being angry and
resentful (criterion A7), or being spiteful or vindictive (Criterion A8).
(p.91)
It is assumed that children should obey adults, especially authority figures
(including psychiatrists), without question. These same children are
stigmatised as being spiteful, intentionally annoying, unreasonably resentful,
irritable and angry. Their understandable reluctance to accept the label of
defective person which is forced on them is explained away as if this is
part of the abnormality:
Usually individuals with this disorder do not regard themselves
as oppositional or defiant, but justify their behavior as a response to
unreasonable demands or circumstances (p.92)
Conduct Disorder is described in the DSM IV as a mental disorder distinct
from Oppositional Defiant Disorder, although the authoritarian attitudes
involved in creating the label are evidently very similar:
The essential feature of Conduct Disorder is a repetitive and
persistent pattern of behavior in which the basic rights of others or
major age-appropriate societal norms or rules are violated (Criterion
A). These behaviors fall into four main groupings: aggressive conduct
that causes or threatens physical harm to other people or animals
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(Criteria A1-A7), nonaggressive conduct that causes property loss or

damage (Criteria A8-A9), deceitfulness or theft (Criteria A10-A12),
and serious violations of rules (Criteria A13-A15). Three (or more)
characteristic behaviors must have been present during the past 12
months, with at least one behavior present in the past 6 months. (p.85)
Inconsistently, but for obvious reasons, given the authors of the DSM, the
adults who order bombs to be dropped on other countries (or their own
country), send young people to kill other young people and order the
execution of prisoners on death row are excluded from a diagnosis of
conduct disorder. The scientists who infect innocent young animals with
Ebola virus and other killer-viruses are also spared a diagnosis of conduct
disorder: the label is intended with other targets in mind.
The DSM explains, without declaring the social, racial and cultural
prejudices (let alone the age-ist ones) underlying the practical application of
this label, the collection of behaviours which are to be expected in
children unfortunate enough to be called conduct disordered:
Children or adolescents with this disorder often initiate aggressive
behavior and react aggressively to others. They may display bullying,
threatening, or intimidating behavior (Criterion A1); initiate frequent
physical fights (Criterion A2); use a weapon that can cause serious
physical harm (e.g., bat, brick, broken bottle, knife, or gun) (Criterion
A3); be physically cruel to people (Criterion A4) or animals (Criterion
A5); steal while confronting a victim (e.g., mugging, purse snatching,
extortion, or armed robbery) (Criterion A6); or force someone into
sexual activity (Criterion A7). Physical violence may take the form of
rape, assault, or in rare cases, homicide. (p.86)
In a single masterpiece of stigmatisation, children who break rules or are
cruel to animals are placed in the same category as rapists and murderers.
These bad children grow into bad adults according to the DSM IV, which
claims that most of the adults who have Antisocial Personality Disorder
previously display symptoms of conduct disorder when they are children:
For this diagnosis to be given, the individual must be at least 18
years (Criterion B) and must have had a history of some symptoms of
Conduct Disorder before age 15 years (Criterion C). Conduct disorder
involves a repetitive and persistent pattern of behavior in which the
basic rights of others or major age-appropriate societal norms or rules
are violated. The specific behaviors characteristic of Conduct Disorder
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fall into one of four categories: aggression to people and animals,

destruction of property, deceitfulness or theft, or serious violations of
rules. (p.646)
To make sense of conduct disorder one must first decide what the basic
rights of others are. The United Nations Universal Declaration on Human
Rights could be used as a guide. Article 3 states that everyone has the right
to life, liberty and security of person. This is surely an indisputable and
fundamental human right. A child who takes the life of another person may
be diagnosed as having conduct disorder, according to the DSM IV, with
good reason, but this is merely a description of the crime, not an explanation
of the cause of the crime. Oppositional Defiant Disorder is not an
explanation either: it just means that the child concerned refuses to obey the
orders he or she is given. This may occur for any number of reasons. Neither
children nor adults enjoy being given orders, as a rule. People usually prefer
being asked to being commanded. Rules may be trivial, unreasonable or
harmful. Rules are, moreover, a social phenomenon, not a medical one.
One of the rules that children and adolescents are expected to obey, to avoid
a diagnosis of conduct disorder (or antisocial personality disorder in
adults) concerns violence. This includes physical violence and emotional
violence (outbursts of anger or verbal aggression). Even passive
aggression can be viewed as evidence of mental disorder. Violence and
cruelty to animals can also be diagnosed. Yet children as a whole are
subjected to a constant (and escalating) barrage of violent images and ideas,
aggressive modes of speech and behaviour from television and video
programs, as well as from adults in real life. They are presented with selfmutilating role models like Marilyn Manson who scream or growl lyrics
about killing people, hating people and destroying life. They are fed sound
bites and have their concentration interrupted every few minutes with
commercial breaks and are then labelled with attention deficit disorder
if they fail to concentrate in class. They are brought up watching television
shows glorifying a promiscuous lifestyle and are then diagnosed as
mentally ill or mentally disordered if they adopt one themselves. They
are given addictive drugs (including amphetamines) from their early
childhood and then labelled substance abusers if they ingest or inject the
same drugs (or other drugs) later in life.
Violence also comes in many forms which are not covered by the DSM,
which also fails to mention needles as possible dangerous weapons. It is also
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known that amphetamines, which are routinely prescribed to children as

young as four years old in Australia and the USA for AD/HD are notorious
for causing violent behaviour in both adults and children. Amphetamines
were invented about 100 years ago and were first used to attempt to control
the behaviour of hyperactive children as long ago as the 1940s. It was a
largely unsuccessful experiment, not least of all because amphetamines were
found to be highly addictive, and to cause psychosis and aggression. Methyl
phenidate (Ritalin, from Novartis) is the most prescribed modern stimulant
for children diagnosed with ADD or AD/HD. It is also an amphetamine-like
drug, although it is less addictive than dexamphetamine, which is also
prescribed for ADD and AD/HD.
In the 1970s and 1980s, true hyperactivity, as it was then called, was
considered to be a rare condition, affecting about one in two hundred
children (0.5% of children). These children were said to show a
paradoxical response to stimulant drugs (specifically amphetamines), but
the prescription of these drugs was restricted to psychiatrists (who were also
allowed to prescribe them for narcolepsy) and paediatricians. Children and
adolescents (or adults) who obtained amphetamines by other means were
deemed to be committing a crime so serious that they could be sent to jail
for it. Suddenly, in the early 1990s, however, whilst maintaining the
illegality of black market amphetamines, a huge campaign was mounted
to increase the legal market for amphetamines. The target population was
children.
The first step, as with the marketing of any new diagnosis, was to claim that
ADD is often undiagnosed and is actually much commoner than previously
supposed. ADD (AD/HD) was now said to affect up to 5% of children, a 10fold increase on what was claimed a few years earlier. No cause for an
increase in the disorder was identified, however, and no explanation put
forward for the sudden increase in prescription of amphetamines.
Furthermore, the well-recognised addictiveness of these drugs was denied by
senior paediatricians and psychiatrists.
In a seminar for general practitioners masquerading as medical education,
Professor Ernest Luk, professor of child psychiatry at Monash University
admitted that drug prescription for AD/HD had increased by 2000% between
1988 and 1994, and a further 700% from 1993 to 1995. The talk was given
in 1997, and included the promotion of a range of drugs, including
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stimulants, clonidine (an old anti-hypertensive drug now relaunched),

tricyclic antidepressants and SSRI antidepressants. Even low dose
neuroleptics (dopamine-blockers) are suggested.
Professor Luk provided notes to accompany his seminar, which promoted a
genetic factor for AD/HD, but listed other aetiological factors as brain
damage, toxic substances, dietary factors and psychological factors.
Television and sensory overload are not mentioned as psychological factors,
which are listed as adverse upbringing experience and child rearing
practice. Only lead and foetal alcohol syndrome are considered as
possible toxic substances which can contribute to the problem.
Amphetamine addiction is not mentioned, and the recognised fact that a
disproportionate number of children who have been diagnosed as suffering
from AD/HD develop problems with substance abuse is blamed on the
condition itself, and not the practice of prescribing addictive drugs to young
children.
Dr John Court, a senior paediatrician at the Royal Childrens Hospital and
Board member of the Medical Practitioners Board of Victoria repeats this
claim in The Puberty Game published by Harper Collins in 1997. He is
explicit about how safe amphetamines are:
Dexamphetamine has been used for children with ADD for over
fifty years, and there is no evidence that it has led to dependence or
addiction. Both Ritalin and Dexamphetamine have been highly
researched, and long-term harmful effects have not been found. These
medications are now so widely used, particularly in the USA, that
there is considerable experience over many years in their use and
confidence in their safety. (p.156)
He then goes on to describe a series of side effects which should cause
serious concern about long-term damage as well as immediate risk:
There are some side effects that may occur with the medication
but usually settle down quickly and seldom last more than a few
weeks at most. These include some loss of appetite. With careful
introduction of the tablets in correct dose, children usually notice very
little change, and the effect wears off in time for the evening meal.
Dexamphetamine may lead to some difficulty in getting to sleep, but
only if the tablet is taken rather late in the day. Sometimes, in my
experience, children get an occasional headache or abdominal pain in
the first few days, though these dont persist.
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Sometimes pre-teens and teenagers can get rather depressed when

they start the medication. In younger children this is seldom a
problem, though they can be rather emotional at first. Older teenagers
may become quite depressed, perhaps because the tablets make them
focus on their past failures and faults. Depression is perhaps the most
significant side effect of stimulant medication at this age.
It has been reported that the stimulants may slow down growth.
This should not be a problem if the medication is used properly, but
we always monitor growth with any medication given to children. It
has been shown that even if growth has been slowed, children catch
up later, and adult height is not effected [sic]. (p.156)
It is surely a big problem if drugs which cause depression are given to
children when the incidence of childhood depression and suicide has been
steadily rising in both the USA and Australia. It is interesting that Dr Court
recognises that taking tablets (to improve behaviour) makes children focus
on their past failures. This is not, obviously, a pharmacological effect of the
drug: it is due to the diagnosis and the fact that they are being compelled to
take a tablet because of past failures and faults. John Court even admits
that:
Its hard to resist the comment Have you had your tablet today, Peter?
whenever an ADD child misbehaves.
The paediatricians strategy to ensure compliance in drug taking is an
effective technique if one wants children to develop a misguided enthusiasm
for taking pills:
I sometimes call the stimulants concentration pills that only the
best kids are allowed to have. (p.155)
Another keen promoter of the AD/HD diagnosis and the use of stimulant
drugs in children is Dr Christopher Green, author of Toddler Taming and
other books about bringing up children. In 1998 he authored an article in
Modern Medicine titled Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder clearing
the confusion. Perhaps better sub-titled refuting the criticism, the article
seeks to reassure doctors and parents about the safety of stimulant drugs,
while legitimising what is clearly a vague, subjective and stigmatising label.
He states the cause of the condition with authority but a noticeable lack of
evidence:
Until relatively recent times, professionals blamed the parents
attachment or relationships for causing ADHD behaviours. Others
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said that ADHD was due to additives in food. Now we know that
neither of these is the cause, although the standard of parenting and
some food substances may influence already existing ADHD. Two
things are certain: firstly, ADHD is strongly hereditary and, secondly,
it is a biological condition.
Dr Green fails to recognise the propensity of the medical profession to see
what it looks for when he claims that heredity of the condition is obvious as
so many sufferers have a parent or close relative who has a similar
problem. Given the broad range of behaviours which can be viewed as
symptomatic of AD/HD, it is not surprising that once one member of a
family has been diagnosed, others with similar behaviour can be found.
Green admits that the presentation varies considerably. He writes:
Most parents present a restless, intrusive, unthinking child. Others
tell of no obvious behaviour problems, just a child who finds it hard to
remember, to stick at a task and to maintain work output at school.
Some also have problems of dyslexia, language disorder or
clumsiness. Others are impossibly oppositional and a few have
extreme behaviour that has placed them in trouble with the law.
Green has difficulty explaining how it is that all these different behaviours
are caused by the same disorder or how it is that stimulant medication is
miraculously able to control the problem. He tries hard to validate his
position that this disorder (which is diagnosed on the basis of unwanted
behaviour) is a biological condition. By this he means that it is caused by
dysfunction of the brain (a similar label, minimal brain dysfunction, was
used for many years). He claims that this has now been proved. He writes:
For years it was presumed, but not proven, that ADHD is caused
by a minor difference in brain function. Now this can be shown by
imaging techniques such as PET, SPECT, and volumetric and
functional MRI. In ADHD, scans using these techniques show a slight
difference in function and anatomy in the behaviour-inhibiting areas
of the brain (the frontal lobes and their close connections). The
mechanism of this underfunction seems to be caused by an imbalance
of the neurotransmitters noradrenaline and dopamine. The effect of
stimulant medications, which are used to treat ADHD, is to increase
the production of these natural chemicals. (p.119)
As in the dopamine theory of schizophrenia and the serotonin theory of
depression (which followed the noradrenaline theory of depression), the
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neurotransmitter theory of ADHD is inexcusably reductionist, and merely

follows the use of drugs which are known to affect these chemicals. One
wonders how Professor Luk can justify the use of low dose neuroleptics
(which block dopamine receptors) for the same condition that Green claims
is caused by lack of the same chemicals. In truth, neither an excess nor a
deficiency in any of these chemicals has been detected in untreated ADHD
sufferers (or schizophrenics or depressives) and the chemical imbalance
theory is merely one of inference secondary to known pharmacophysiology.
John Court, in The Puberty Game, repeats the chemical imbalance theory,
while presenting a regressively mechanistic, reductionist model of mental
function:
The rationale for giving medication to children with ADD is this:
the brain acts like a computer in many ways, but its function depends
on chemical substances called neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters
help transmit messages between nerve cells, which are called
neurones. Neurones are the basic units of the nervous system,
including the brain. These neurotransmitters ensure that messages are
sent through the nervous system in an orderly and efficient way.
We believe that in ADD some of these neurotransmitters are not
functioning properly. It seems likely that the brain is not making them
efficiently, or in sufficient quantity. What we do know is that it is
possible to increase the efficiency of these neurotransmitters through
stimulating them by medication. This seems quite logical, and there is
ample experience to show that this stimulant treatment is one that
works in most cases, and is safe. (p.153)
The Turning Point Alcohol and Drug Centre in Melbourne lists some of
the common symptoms in amphetamine withdrawal in their 1996 booklet
titled, Getting Through Amphetamine Withdrawal. Days 1 to 3 (described
as the crash) are typified by exhaustion, increased sleep and depression. On
days 2 to 10 the symptoms include, strong urges (cravings) to use
amphetamines, mood swings (alternating between feeling irritable, restless,
and anxious to feeling tired, lacking energy and generally run down), poor
sleep, poor concentration, general aches and pains, headaches, increased
appetite and strange thoughts (such as feeling that people are out to get you
misunderstanding things around you, such as seeing things that arent there).
The withdrawal symptoms, according to the Turning Point doctors, start to
settle down in 7 to 28 days, during which time common symptoms include,
mood swings (alternating between feeling anxious, irritable or agitated, to
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feeling flat and run down), poor sleep and cravings. It is easy to see how
the withdrawal symptoms of stimulant drugs can be attributed to the
conditions they are claimed to be treating: they sound remarkably similar to
the symptoms of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder.
The concept that initiating young children and their parents (and siblings)
into taking tablets to improve concentration and behaviour could lead to
subsequent dependence on drugs generally is not difficult to understand. The
psychological ramifications (for the whole family) of singling out individual
children to blame for arguments and discordance in the family (or
classroom) is cruel and socially destructive. I have not read a single article
blaming boring school curricula for lack of attention from children, although
inconsistent discipline from parents is blamed as a contributing factor at
times. Furthermore, the medical profession continue to turn a blind eye to
the part they play in creating drug addiction, despite growing concerns from
the public as well as from dissidents within the profession. Christopher
Green refutes such concerns in Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder
clearing the confusion:
Stimulant medication was first used for ADHD in 1937. The drug
Ritalin has been used since 1958. These preparations have now been
extremely well researched and proven; currently there are over 150
published papers showing that stimulants are effective and safe in
ADHD. Yet there are still people in this country who state that
stimulants are new, controversial, addictive, dangerous and unproven.
These ideas are out of date in 1998. (p.126)
It is not true that stimulant medication was first used for ADHD in 1937.
In 1937, ADHD did not exist. It is true, however, that some children were
experimented on with amphetamines, and that these children were labelled
as hyperactive. The construction of the new disorder which is now
accepted so glibly as a distinct biological condition by Dr Green and
others, was formally announced in the 1994 Fourth Edition of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders by the American
Psychiatric Association (APA). The disorder is described as follows:
The essential feature of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder
is a persistent pattern of inattention and/or hyperactivity that is more
frequent and severe than is typically observed in individuals at a
comparable level of development (Criterion A).
Hyperactivity is described thus:
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Hyperactivity may be manifested by fidgetiness or squirming in

ones seat (Criterion A2a), by not remaining seated when expected to
do so (Criterion A2b), by excessive running or climbing in situations
where it is inappropriate (Criterion A2c), by having difficulty playing
or engaging quietly in leisure activities (Criterion A2d), by appearing
to be often on the go or as if driven by a motor (Criterion A2e), or
by talking excessively (Criterion A2f). (p.79)
It appears that the psychiatrists who decided on these criteria were brought
up in the school that insists that children should be seen but not heard.
Further evidence of hyperactivity is evidenced in children who often get
up from the table during meals or while doing homework. Far from
recognising any deleterious effects of television on concentration, according
to the DSM IV, getting up often while watching television is further
evidence of abnormality.
Incredibly, the psychiatric profession, and medical profession generally,
have failed to grasp the influence of television on childrens behaviour.
Rather than attributing increasing violence at younger ages to increasingly
violent television programs, video games, computer games and films, vague
chemical imbalance theories and statistics purporting to demonstrate
genetic factors are put forward, not as possible and partial explanations
but as proven fact. Science fiction movies about extraterrestrial invasions
are all the rage, but if an adolescent (or even a child) seriously believes in
UFOs, he or she can be diagnosed as having schizophrenia according to
modern psychiatric criteria.
The diagnoses of child psychiatry provide a justification to use the full
spectrum of adult psycho-active drugs on children. In essence the related
disorders of AD/HD, Oppositional Defiant Disorder and Conduct Disorder
are pseudoscientific gradings of delinquency. A child with AD/HD is bad,
but not as bad as a child with Oppositional Defiant Disorder. These children
are not as bad as those with Conduct Disorder. The latter is the favoured
label for children whose behaviour is deemed bad enough to go to prison for.
Not surprisingly, many adults who are labelled as having antisocial
personality disorder have previously been designated defective as children
with one of the labels, and been early victims of psychiatric stigmatisation.
Antisocial personality disorder, which is the new label for people who
used to be described as sociopaths, is not a nice thing to be diagnosed
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with. The term implies that the person has no conscience, and does not feel
remorse for causing the suffering of other people or animals. There is no
doubt that such people exist, however the label is selectively applied for
those caught up in the prisons and psychiatric systems, and not those who
make the sort of rules that allow the poisoning of European rivers with
cyanide, the distribution of landmines or the incarceration of children. Men
who send young men off to war and inject them with chemicals for corporate
profits, or create depression and suicide for personal profit are also spared a
diagnosis of Antisocial personality disorder, together with men who
design taxes that further impoverish the poor and dispossessed in countries
with an offensive disparity between the conditions in which rich and poor
members of society live.
The DSM IV defines Antisocial Personality Disorder as follows:
The essential feature of Antisocial Personalty Disorder is a
pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others
that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into
adulthood.
This pattern has also been referred to as psychopathy, sociopathy,
or dyssocial personality disorder. Because deceit and manipulation are
central features of Antisocial Personality Disorder, it may be
especially helpful to integrate information acquired from systematic
clinical assessment with information collected from collateral sources
[hearsay and rumour].
For this diagnosis to be given, the individual must be at least age
18 years (Criterion B) and must have had a history of some symptoms
of Conduct Disorder before age 15 years (Criterion C).
The long term unemployed are targetted with this horrible label, which
does not take into consideration the frustrations, loss of self-esteem and
boredom which can result from being denied rewarding and meaningful
activity:
Individuals with Antisocial Personality Disorder also tend to be
consistently and extremely irresponsible (Criterion A6). Irresponsible
work behavior may be indicated by significant periods of
unemployment despite available job opportunities, or by abandonment
of several jobs without a realistic plan for getting another job. There
may also be a pattern of repeated absences from work that are not
explained by illness either in themselves or in their family. (p.646)
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The hypocrisy of the description of Antisocial Personality Disorder

becomes more obvious when one remembers that infamous reproach to the
Australian people from ex-Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, now head of
CARE Australia: Life was not meant to be easy. Such statements are
apparantly a feature of Antisocial Personality Disorder, according to the
American Psychiatric Associations DSM IV:
Individuals with Antisocial Personality Disorder show little
remorse for the consequences of their acts (Criterion A7). They may
be indifferent to, or provide a superficial rationalization for, having
hurt, mistreated, or stolen from someone (e.g., lifes unfair, losers
deserve to lose, or he had it coming anyway). These individuals
may blame the victims for being foolish, helpless, or deserving their
fate; they may minimize the harmful consequences of their actions; or
they may simply indicate complete indifference. (p.646)
At the time of writing the Governor of Texas, presidential hopeful George
Bush junior, was confronted with a distraught 61 year-old great
grandmother, who begged him to spare her life. She had been sexually and
physically abused since childhood, and had suffered greatly during her
childhood, adolescence and adult life. She had killed her fifth husband, in
circumstances which were not elaborated on in the television program which
showed part of her plaintive appeal for clemency, and Bushs response. He
was unmoved. She was later killed by lethal injection. She was the 120 th
person to be executed in Texas in recent years. George Bush, the son of the
CIA boss and ex-president of the same name, gave his personal assent to the
killings despite numerous appeals against this State-sanctioned murder.
Almost all the people thus killed have been young black males. Four of
those killed have been women. Bush personally approved the death of two
of these four women since he became Governor of Texas. He campaigns
under the slogan the compassionate conservative. But then, his grasp of
the English language (his only language) is doubtful. Does this man have
Antisocial Personality Disorder? What about his father, who presided over
the CIA while they smuggled coccaine from Central America into his own
country, in exchange for guns which were used to kill freedom fighters in
other nations?
The DSM IV deftly redirects the attention to the victims and not the
perpetrators of poverty. Under Specific Culture, Age and Gender Features
the textbook claims:
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Antisocial Personality Disorder appears to be associated with low

socioeconomic status and urban settings. Concerns have been raised
that the diagnosis may at times be misapplied to individuals in settings
in which seemingly antisocial behavior may be part of a protective
survival strategy. In assessing antisocial traits, it is helpful for the
clinician to consider the social and economic context in which the
behaviors occur. (p.647)
The textbook follows with a suggestion that the label is not applied often
enough to women:
Antisocial Personality Disorder is much more common in males
than in females. There has been some concern that Antisocial
Personality Disorder may be underdiagnosed in females, particularly
because of the emphasis on aggressive items in the definition of
Conduct Disorder. (p.647)
The Australian textbook Foundations of Clinical Psychiatry expresses
different concerns about antisocial personality disorder:
The diagnostic criteria consist of little more than a catalogue of
obnoxious and disruptive behaviours which, it has been suggested, far
from defining a clinical disorder merely attempts to medicalise evil.
Many clinicians wish to banish those with APD (antisocial personality
disorder) from the realm of medicine and consign them as social
deviants to the police and justice systems. (p.339)
A case example is presented of a person typifying the label in what is
claimed as an attempt to establish that in addition to disturbance in
behaviour such people also have a disorder of mental function:
A man in his mid-twenties was first encountered after slashing his
wrists and abdomen while in prison where he was awaiting trial on
charges of burglary. He came from a disorganised home in which he
had been physically and sexually abused. At school he had been a
behaviour problem and had been referred to the educational
psychologists for what we would now term Conduct Disorder with
features of Attention Deficit Disorder. He left school at fifteen with no
qualifications despite having above average intellectual ability. He
was involved in petty theft both at school and in boys homes where he
spent part of his adolescence. In his teens he abused alcohol and
solvents. He had appeared before the courts on numerous occasions
for theft, assault, indecent assault and car conversion. He had been
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admitted to psychiatric hospitals on two occasions, after an overdose

and after slashing his arms and legs with a razor. Both episodes
followed the breakdown of relationships with girlfriends.
He presented as an articulate man with considerable charm which
contrasted with his grim appearance, not improved by tattoos over his
face and hands. He acknowledged recurrent periods of depression,
usually lasting only hours and never more than days. During these
episodes of despondency he would experience self-destructive urges
combined with violent fantasies. He had a pervasive suspiciousness of
others with a tendency to refer any chance remark or overheard laugh
to himself. This led to confrontations where he would accuse and
occasionally strike others. Sexual relationships soon disintegrated
because of his excessive jealousy. On one occasion when in prison he
had entered a disturbed state with bizarre persecutory beliefs and
pseudo-hallucinations, but this had rapidly resolved on transfer to the
hospital wing. His behaviour was impulsive, unpredictable and often
destructive of his own interests as of the common good. Police, prison
authorities and most ordinary people he came into contact with
considered him mad because of his unpredictable, self-destructive
and impulsive behaviour. Psychiatrists had on several occasions
declared him to be sane and to have a personality disorder. The
extensive abnormalities in his state of mind as well as his behaviour
carried no weight with the doctors bacause they were not the types of
disturbance found in the schizophrenias or other psychotic disorders.
(p.339)
Professor Paul Mullen, who presents the case history, omits some valuable
information about this man that could help understand his behaviour. It is
easy to see unpredictability in people one does not understand. What
happened to this mans family? Did he have any siblings, and if so, where
are they and what is his relationship like with them? Was he a stolen child?
What colour was his skin? What religious beliefs, if any, did he have? Was
he addicted to drugs, like much of the prison population? What drug
treatment had he been given in the past? Had he ever been given ECT? What
kinds of punishments was he subjected to in the boys homes and prisons
where he had obviously spent much of his youth? What had he stolen in the
alleged burglary?
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Mullen presents this case in this way to illustrate some points of psychiatric
dogma. One is that people with personality disorders are not insane. To
put it simply, they are bad, not mad. This means that they can be
incarcerated in jails rather than psychiatric hospitals, although they can still
be treated with psychiatric drugs. Another point the professor is trying to
illustrate, is that people who develop this adult personality disorder
demonstrate symptoms of Conduct Disorder earlier in life. Despite the fact
that the case example may be fictional or fictionalised, the story of this
young man does illustrate an all too common journey for unwanted children
in Australia. Disobedience, disorder label, psychiatric treatment, loss of self
esteem, drug addiction, depression, alcohol abuse, aggression and violence,
police punishment, custodial punishment, worsening of drug addiction, selfharm, combined prison incarceration and punitive psychiatric treatment. Not
surprisingly, this journey often ends in early death, often attributed to
suicide.
Paul Mullen is a senior professor of forensic psychiatry at Monash
University and Director of Forensic Psychiatry Services in Victoria. He
authored the chapter on Forensic Psychiatry in this textbook. He describes
his specialty as follows:
Forensic psychiatry is that area of psychiatry which overlaps with
the legal system. Central to it is assessment and treatment of the
mentally disordered offender, and provision of expert testimony to
both criminal and civil courts. In addition, forensic psychiatrists may
become involved in legal issues concerning competence, consent and
confidentiality, and malpractice. In recent years forensic psychiatrists
have had to care for a wide range of mentally disordered people
considered either of such high risk of dangerous behaviour, or so
problematic as to be unmanageable in normal psychiatric facilities.
(p.321)
Forensic psychiatrists themselves predict risk of dangerous behaviour and
their opinions on the matter are taken seriously by police and the courts,
despite their abysmal failure to make these predictions with accuracy, or
their inexcusable failure to abandon racial and cultural prejudices. It is no
longer politically correct to accuse particular races of violent tendencies,
dishonesty or criminality, so modern psychiatric textbooks make much of
refuting racialist theories of violence, preferring class-ist ones instead. The
racist prejudices underlying the new theories are poorly disguised however,
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and the proportion of blacks in custody (in Australia, New Zealand and the
USA) speaks for itself.
Professor Mullen writes, under clinical prediction of dangerousness that
social background is an associated factor for high rates of violent
behaviour:
Those who appear before the courts and populate our penal
institutions are drawn disproportionately from lower socio-economic
classes. Poverty, though relevant, is less important than a sense of
exclusion from the rewards and regard of society. Those disabled by
mental illness are often drawn into the impoverished and drifting
populations of the excluded and rejected, and with this comes an
increased risk of offending, arrest and re-offence. Those who are
economically and socially deprived as well as being members of
minority groups are at particular risk of offending and arrest, e.g.
black Americans, Maori New Zealanders and Aboriginal Australians.
Race is not the issue; it is the social and economic conditions under
which these racial minorities live. The unemployed, the unmarried or
unattached and the socially isolated are all at higher risk. (p.332)
One of the roles of forensic psychiatrists, according to Professor Mullen is
the investigation of malpractice. This rarely affects his own profession, but
in July 1991 there occurred an exception to the rule. He was called upon by
the Director General of Health in New Zealand to investigate the treatment
and death of Dolly Jane Pohe at the Psychiatric Unit of Rotorua Hospital,
and the practice of rapid neuroleptisation at the hospital. Responsible for
this abusive practice was the psychiatrist Gil Newburn, who was
simultaneously conducting drug-trials-for-profit for several pharmaceutical
companies (including the new antidepressant Aurorix, for Roche). Dr
Newburn had a treatment for manic patients that routinely rendered them
comatose with massive intravenous and intramuscular injections of
diazepam, chlorpromazine and haloperidol. Dolly Jane Pohe was one of his
victims. Although her race is not stated in the report, Pohe is a Maori name.
The committee of inquiry into this death consisted of Paul Mullen, who was
then Professor of Psychological Medicine at the University of Otago, and
David Bates, a barrister. Despite his advice to students that a psychiatric
report can present them as people with backgrounds, personalities, strengths
and weaknesses, Professor Mullen presented a report that is cold and
impersonal, but also negligently omissive. It was, in fact, a cover-up.
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Dolly Jane Pohe, whose age, race and family background are not mentioned
in the report died on Sunday, 7th April, 1990, after being admitted as an
involuntary patient by Dr Newburn on Wednesday, 4 th April, three days
earlier. During this time she received 10 injections: 4 of haloperidol, 4 of
diazepam (Valium), one of chlorpromazine (Largactil) and one of
clonazepam (Rivotril). All these drugs are tranquillisers. In addition to this
she was given a huge amount of oral neuroleptics (dopamine-blockers)
including chlorpromazine and haloperidol. This included 400 milligrams of
oral chlorpromazine as soon as she was admitted (which was followed by
intramuscular injections of 30mg haloperidol and 10mg diazepam an hour
later) and 15 mg oral haloperidol later that afternoon.
The next day she was given 15 mg haloperidol at 8.00 a.m., with further
doses of the same drug at 1.00 p.m., 3.30 p.m., 6.00 p.m. and 9.00 p.m. At
4.15 p.m. she was punished with intramuscular injections of haloperidol
(30mg) together with diazepam (10mg). Her crime was escaping from
torture and going down to the pub:
At 15:30 the security room door appears to have been open and
Ms Pohe slipped through and left the ward. The police were notified.
She was returned to the ward by the police at 16:15 having been found
in a nearby pub, the Palace Tavern. She was given haloperidol and
diazepam intramuscularly on return to the security room as she was
noted by Dr.Finucane to be more irritable and disturbed. She appears
to have settled after the medication until about 18:00 hours when she
was noted to be restless and banging on the door. She was threatening
to the nursing staff [from behind a locked door] and they recorded
anxieties about her potential for physical aggression. Ms Pohe seems
to have settled from 19:30 and remained quiet and probably sleeping
until 07:00 the next morning.
The next day the torture continued:
On waking, Ms Pohe appears to have become more restless and
disturbed [as one might if one woke in such an environment]. She is
described as aggressive, abusive, violent, unco-operative and
physically aggressive towards staff. At the request of nursing staff
Dr.Newburn saw Ms.Pohe in the seclusion room. The trainee intern
accompanied Dr.Newburn and described how impressed he was, both
with Dr.Newburns ability to calm Ms Pohe sufficiently to talk with
her and his ability to inject the haloperidol intravenously despite her
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initial reluctance. Dr.Newburn considered her state to be deteriorating

rather than improving and an intravenous injection of haloperidol 35
mgs and diazepam 80 mgs was administered at 09:00 hours. A further
30 mgs of valium was injected by Dr.Newburn at 10:00 hours.
One thing that is obvious about Dolly Jane Pohe is that she did not want to
be locked in a room, and repeatedly banged on the doors, presumably to be
let out. This was callously noted as evidence of aggression, violent
behaviour and restlessness, further evidence of mania. It is unclear as to
what specific evidence Dr Newburn found of a deteriorating state other
than that she refused to co-operate with the incarceration and was angered
by it, and by how she was being treated. It is relevant that she was calm
enough to converse with the doctor before he injected her with the drugs.
Maybe she hoped he would let her go home, or at least leave the security
room. This was not to be the case.
The next day, finding that she was still imprisoned, Dolly Pohe was
obviously despairing, but also suffering from poisoning by the drugs she had
been given:
On the Saturday morning she was noted to be restless and
irritable, banging on the door and angry. It was possible to bath her
and she had some breakfast. At about 09:00 she calmed down and
appeared to be asleep until 10:20. She was then noted to be in some
distress, wailing sounds were noted. She then slept until mid-day.
At 12:00 hours Nurse Young became aware that Ms Pohe was
heavily sedated and was apparently having difficulty swallowing. She
decided not to administer any further medication and phoned
Dr.Finucane to inform him of Ms Pohes state and her decision.
Dr.Finucane supported her decision.
At 13:00 hours Nurse Young noted Ms Pohes pulse was irregular.
She phoned Dr.Finucane to apprise him of the situation. He instructed
her to call the on duty house surgeon to request an ECG.
Dr Finucane examined Dolly Pohe at 4.00 p.m., but reassured the nursing
staff that although he found her to be drowsy and unco-operative he was
able to examine her cardiovascular system and her pulse was now regular.
He thought, however, that the 400 mg of chlorpromazine she had been given
in the morning combined with clonazepam may have resulted in a cardiac
arrythmia (irregularity) and wrote in the chart, try to use just haloperidol for
rest of day.
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If the evening nurse had the same reluctance to further drug a heavily
drugged prisoner as Nurse Young, Dolly Jane Pohe may have survived. Mr
Lee, the male nurse who took over the care of Ms Pohe after Nurse Young
did not share her concerns. He noted that whenever Ms Pohe did rouse she
showed signs of becoming disturbed again and he felt it was important to
maintain the continuity of the sedation effect. She was given 20 milligrams
of haloperidol at 14:45, 19:00 and 22:00, according to the report. She was
given another 20 mg of haloperidol at 1.00 a.m. after banging at the door
again, this time because she wanted to go to the toilet. When nursing staff
entered the seclusion room at 5.15 a.m. she was dead.
The report, presented to the Director General of Health (New Zealand) made
two recommendations, after a single sentence of summary. The summary
reads:
In our opinion there is no prima facie evidence against any
person in respect of which a prosecution should be recommended, or
in respect of which a complaint should be made under the Medical
Practitioners Act.
The recommendations are as follows:
(1) We do not recommend criminal prosecution of any person nor
complaint against any person under the Medical Practitioners Act or Nurses
Act
(2) We express our regret that there exists no suitable mechanism by means
of which civil remedies might be pursued against health care professionals
in appropriate cases of which the death of Ms Pohe might possibly be
considered an example. We recommend investigation of this deficiency in
our civil law with a view to legislative action being taken.
The psychiatrist who made these recommendations, Professor Paul Mullen,
is now one of the senior psychiatrists in charge of the forensic psychiatry
system in Melbourne. He is also a Professor of Psychological Medicine
(psychiatry) at Monash University, which is affiliated with both the Mental
Health Research Institute and the Macfarlane Burnet Centre. It is also
affiliated with Monash Medical Centre and the Alfred Hospital, both of
which inject people with crippling drugs against their will. Both hospitals
also give coercive electoconvulsive treatment. This is what medical students
and junior doctors learn to do in Melbourne, since both of these hospitals are
teaching hospitals.
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The Fairfield Infectious Diseases Hospital, next to which the new Forensic
Psychiatry Hospital is currently being built is the home of the Macfarlane
Burnet Institute, the largest AIDS research institution in Australia. The
Macfarlane Burnet Centre (MBC) is soon to be located next to the Alfred
hospital in a multi-million dollar development. The executive director of the
Macfarlane Burnet Institute is the American Harvard University graduate
Professor John Mills, who is also the director of the AMRAD corporation.
AMRAD is a new Australian biotechnology company, a branch of which is
AMRAD Pharmaceuticals, which is involved in joint projects (as corporate
partners) with the Macfarlane Burnet Institute, according to the Institutes
Annual Report. Other (non-executive) directors of the Institute, which is
soon to be relocated to new premises at the Alfred Hospital in Prahran,
include Sir Roderick Carnegie, who is described in the 1998 MBC Annual
Report as Chairman of Hudson Conway and Director of John Fairfax
Holdings limited. Hudson Conway is part owner of the Crown Casino in
Melbourne and Fairfax Holdings owns the Age newspaper and several
popular magazines.
The 1996/97 Annual Report of the Macfarlane Burnet Centre for Medical
Research Limited lists their biggest corporate sponsors as HIH Winterthur
(insurance), Rio Tinto (mining) and Smith Kline Beecham Pharmaceuticals.
HIH Winterthur donated $112,700, Rio Tinto donated $90,000 and Smith
Kline Beecham donated $40,000. Page 17 of the Annual Financial Report
(1998) of the Macfarlane Burnet Centre states (in bold italics) under
renumeration of directors that non-executive directors do not receive any
income. It also contains a small table that one director (presumably the
executive director, Professor Mills) was paid $273,515 (30 June 1997) and
$453,745 (31 December 1998). Chairman of the Board of the Macfarlane
Burnet Centre is Mr.Graeme Hannan, also Chairman of the Hannan finance
group, and the Deputy Chairman is Mr Raymond Williams, also chief
executive officer (CEO) of HIH Winterthur International Holdings Limited
and director of the following organizations: Insurance Council of Australia,
Australian Motor Insurers Limited, and Garvan Institute for Medical
Research (in Sydney).
The insurance industry and mining industry both have a vested interest in the
public health programs promoted by the Macfarlane Burnet Centre for the
prevention of AIDS and hepatitis, programs which are exported to Africa,
Asia and the Pacific Region by the Centre under the auspices of the World
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Health Organization. These programs have an almost exclusive focus on

surveillance, injections, drugs and condom distribution as part of what is
euphemistically called a harm reduction strategy. The promotional
literature of the National Mental Health Strategy and Drug Strategy suggest
that harm minimization and harm reduction programs accept that drug
use is now an unavoidable feature of society and rather than attempt to stop
people from injecting themselves with heroin, amphetamines and other
chemicals, public health designers are focusing on teaching young people
safe injecting habits such as not sharing needles between users and safe
disposal of contaminated needles and syringes.
The other major focus of the Macfarlane Burnet Centre, under the guise of
epidemiological research, is investigation of the sexual habits of particular
populations of young people in Australia and elsewhere, particularly the
Aboriginal population, with the simultaneous promotion of what is, again
euphemistically, termed safe sex, meaning the use of condoms and
lubricants, rather than sexual fidelity. This is the same lobby group that have
actively promoted safe injecting houses, also called shooting galleries,
where, it is planned, young people will be provided with the means and
environment to inject themselves with pharmaceutically regulated heroin,
using clean disposable needles in a controlled environment where they can
be resuscitated if the overdose. The strategy of virus infection control is
centred on, in their own terminology, surveillance.
The Macfarlane Burnet Centre Annual Report of 1997-98 describes their
involvement in an ongoing project titled Victorian Aboriginal Health
Service Study of Young Peoples Health and Well-Being. It is described as
follows:
The objective of the Young Peoples Health Study is to establish a
longitudinal study of a cohort of young Aboriginal people in order to
describe their health problems, explore the interrelated causes of these
problems, and describe factors associated with adolescent resilience
and vulnerability. This year the project team have finalised the
questionnaire which was programmed for computer use. A team of
peer interviewers was trained and a data collection manual prepared.
The team of young peer interviewers contacted young people on the
random sample list and invited them to take part in the study. 180
young Koori people living in metropolitan Melbourne have now
completed the lengthy questionnaire on portable computers. Those
over 16 years have also been counselled and had tests for blood borne
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viruses and sexually transmitted diseases [hepatitis B and AIDS]. Data

collection is now finished and the data entered into the computer. The
next stage of the study will be analysis and writing up the results. The
results will be disseminated to the Aboriginal community and the local
Aboriginal community organisations. There will also be presentations
at seminars and conferences and the results will be published in
journals. (p.82)
The Macfarlane Burnet Centre were also involved in a project titled
Community Health Needs Assessment: Yarrambah Aboriginal
Community. This one week project, funded by Qld Health and Harvard
University involved assisting the Yarrambah Community to design an
evaluation process for a community-based needs assessment. One wonders
whether this Aboriginal Community know who sits on the Board of the
Macfarlane Burnet Centre, or that Rio Tinto Mining are contributing to their
activities, along with the insurance industry. One wonders also what
conclusions the computer will reach with all the information gathered
about young aboriginal people in urban and rural Australia, and what other
purposes this sensitive information could be used for.
The Macfarlane Burnet Centre is a keen proponent of AZT (Azidothymidine,
also called Zidovudine, and manufactured by Glaxo-Wellcome) for the
treatment of HIV infection and AIDS, and needle and condom distribution
for the prevention of sexually transmitted diseases including AIDS. They
have been involved in establishing a needle and syringe exchange program
in the Indian State of Manipur, which is the first of its kind, and is
described in the previous years annual report as follows:
The SHALOM (Society for HIV/AIDS Lifeline Operation in
Manipur) Project is a collaboration between MBC and the Emmanuel
Hospitals Association (EHA). The project was established early in
1995 as an indigenous response to the alarming incidence of HIV
infection among young drug users in the semi-rural community of
Churachandpur in Manipur state, in far Northeast India. This
community-based project aims to reduce the transmission of HIV and
the impact of AIDS in the community. Home based care and drug
detoxification together with counselling and community education
continue as major components of the program.
A needle and syringe exchange program has been established, the
first of its kind in India, thus providing leadership in the introduction
of new but acceptable strategies to reduce the transmission of HIV in
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south Asia. MBC has provided technical support, assisting in the

review of project activities and in planning and design of the third
phase. Further support has been extended through training and support
for investigations including a study of impact of the epidemic on
women by the community and seroprevalence of HIV among injecting
drug users.
In the next annual report, the same strategy is described as a harm reduction
approach without giving the detail that this involves the distribution of
needles and syringes.
It could be argued that the Prime Ministers and American Governments
professed zero tolerance policy on drugs is totally incompatible with the
simultaneous provision of needles and plastic syringes (in the form of needle
exchange and distribution programs), without the added hypocrisy of
injecting rooms or injecting houses, as has been promoted in recent
years by the drug enforcement industry.
There is a fundamental difference between swallowing a drug and selfinjecting it. This is a point exploited by the methadone lobby, long after the
methadone program had demonstrably failed to prevent an increasing
number of Australians, Americans and Europeans from becoming addicted
to opiates. Other parts of the world are not equally troubled by opiate
addiction, although it is said to be a growing problem in large cities
throughout the world. The reason that methadone failed to decrease
addiction levels in the world is obvious. It is itself an opiate, and can cause
even worse and more prolonged withdrawal if suddenly stopped, than
heroin. A fear of the pain and suffering of withdrawal, and a weakening of
resistance to refuse the drug as the symptoms worsen are recognised
amongst the many factors that contribute to this terrible problem.
Methadone (physeptone) is a synthetic opiate available in tablet and syrup
form, and sold in Australia by the same company that produce AZT, the
giant pharmaceutical company Glaxo-Wellcome, the head offices of which
are based in the US and England. Wellcome Pharmaceuticals is related to the
Wellcome Trust, probably Britains largest medical research trust fund,
although it is claimed that the two organizations are politically independent,
and that financial, political and scientific decisions of the Wellcome Trust
are not influenced by agendas for the profit of Wellcome Pharmaceuticals,
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Wellcome. Wellcome Pharmaceuticals is the only drug company in this

part of the world to manufacture and sell azidothymidine (AZT), now being
promoted by the Macfarlane Burnet Centre as a successful treatment for
AIDS, despite much evidence to the contrary. The Centres literature also
claims that HIV antibodies in the blood signify an infection that is inevitably
fatal, with or without drug treatment, a claim that is scientifically unjustified
and potentially disastrous.
AMRAD corporation, as well as the Macfarlane Burnet Centre and Forensic
Psychiatry Centre are closely involved with the University of Melbourne and
Monash University, and Professor John Mills, who has a bachelor of science
(BSc) from Chicago and a medical degree (MD) from Harvard is a professor
of Microbiology at both Universities (a situation not uncommon in
Melbourne).
Monash University and the University of Melbourne are the only institutions
that are allowed to produce medical graduates in Victoria, and only medical
practitioners are allowed to prescribe psychoactive drugs via the national
Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS). Many potentially dangerous drugs
are, however available over the counter at pharmacies in Australia, and
others on pharmacy shelves and supermarket shelves. One such drug is the
opiate codeine, which, like morphine, pethidine and heroin causes
habituation and physical dependence with extended ingestion.
The physiological mechanism behind this phenomenon of psychological and
physical addiction to opiate drugs is well understood, and it is of note that
the British Empire was using opium for its addictive and socially destructive
properties when used as an intoxicant in the 1840, during the Opium Wars
with China. Following this notorious war, when British warships threatened
to attack Chinese ports if the country refused to allow more of the deadly
chemical import, Britain was ceded the territory of Hong Kong and
extensive trading rights as well as a guarantee of increased opium exports
into China. This opium was processed from poppies grown in other British
colonies, particularly India and Burma. In these countries farmers were
forced to dig up their rice fields and plant fields of poppies instead. Since
rice was, and is, a staple diet in these areas, this resulted in subsequent massstarvation over the subsequent century, for many millions whose land and
culture have been destroyed or degraded by these and similar acts of tyranny.
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Opiates act on the brain by binding with opiate receptors on neurones. These
neurones are thought to be mainly in the central core of the brain, in the
hypothalamus, midbrain and brainstem. The emotional circuit termed the
limbic system is closely connected to these areas as is the movement
generation centre termed the basal ganglia. The hypothalamus, and other
parts of the brain produce the bodys own supply of natural opiates, termed
endogenous opiates or endorphins. These act as natural painkillers, relieving
both physical and psychological pain. They are released in increased
quantities at times of need due to the integrated activity of the nervous
system and mind. This physiological and biochemical mechanism is one of
an undiscovered number of natural abilities that human beings have to
withstand pain and other traumatic experiences and recover from them.
The ingestion (or injection) of opiates has two obvious and predictable
effects on the brains physiology. Firstly, less opiates are produced by the
areas of the brain that normally secrete them. A similar effect is observed in
people who take thyroid extracts or cortisone, when endogenous production
(by the body) of these hormones decreases. The second predictable effect is
that the brain starts developing more receptors for opiates, partly due to
damage of other artificially stimulated receptors.
Artificial chemicals, whilst mimicking the effects of natural stimulation of
neurone cell membrane receptors (at synapses or on the body of the cell) in
some ways, behave in fundamentally different ways in the long term.
Natural neurotransmitters and neurohormones are constantly recycled by the
brain and are also being constantly synthesised from amino acids, which
reach the brain through the blood stream. This is a complex and intricate
chemical orchestra conducted by the brain, but profoundly influenced and in
a real sense controlled by the mind. Both the mind, and the sensitive
processes that regulate the biochemistry of the brain can be adversely
affected by exogenous (from outside) stimulation of receptors designed for
transient stimulation by naturally synthesised and catabolised chemical
messengers. These include the endorphins as well as neurohormones and
neurotransmitters.
Some of the named neurotransmitters have been increasingly mentioned in
popular literature and the mass-media in recent years, mainly because of
the aggressive marketing of a range of drugs that exert their most obvious
effects by increasing and decreasing the activity of neurotransmitters. These
drugs include the old and new antidepressants, amphetamines (and related
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stimulants) and major tranquillisers (antipsychotics or dopamine-blockers).

The older tricyclic antidepressants (such as Tryptanol and Prothiaden) tend
to stimulate noradrenaline and serotonin activity, according to
pharmacological literature, whilst the newer SSRI antidepressants are
claimed by the manufacturers to specifically target serotonin reuptake
mechanisms in synapses in the brain, hence the name Selective Serotonin
Reuptake Inhibitors.
Prozac was the first SSRI drug to be marketed by a pharmaceutical
company, although the chemical precursor of the drug (also the precursor to
the euphoria drug ecstasy) was discovered several decades ago. Following
the unprecedented sales of Prozac by Eli Lilly, the US based drug company
that manufactures and sells the drug, several other drug companies have
brought out their own SSRIs to get their share of the depression market, as
their own marketing plans describe the troubled people of the world.
SmithKline Beecham, the huge UK-based drug company are one such
company, and, in the mid-1990s began an aggressive marketing campaign in
Australia and New Zealand for their SSRI antidepressant Aropax, with a
particular push for the prescription of the drug by psychiatrists and general
practitioners for panic disorder. This was done with the assistance of the
Mental Health Foundation, headed by Professor Graham Burrows, who
endorsed a series of patient education leaflets promoting the diagnoses of
depression, anxiety, panic disorder, and obsessive compulsive
disorder(OCD) and the new drugs to treat these conditions (including the
ones produced by the sponsor SmithKline Beecham notably Aropax).
The following information was provided by SmithKline Beecham to their
sales representatives for Aropax (paroxetine) in New Zealand as part of an
intensive marketing campaign for the drug in the 1990s:
Depression is a condition of the central nervous system-ie the
brain. The basic unit of the nervous system is a neurone, which looks
like a rod with a swelling at each end. In the body these neurones
form long chains, or nerves. In the brain, they form massive, tangled
complexes. Chemical impulses pass from neurone to neurone like a
bucket-brigade, leaping the tiny gaps between each cell. These gaps
are called synapses.
The most important chemical imbalance that causes depression
seems to be related to a substance called serotonin, which is produced
by neurones and released into the synapse. Serotonin is necessary as a
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medium for the brain to transmit positive emotions. Without enough

serotonin, it is physically impossible to feel happy or content.
Serotonin levels are usually kept at the right levels by the neurones
themselves, which re-absorb any excess, and release more in case of
shortage. In some depressed people, however, the neurones seem to
hoard serotonin, letting out only a trickle while aggressively
reabsorbing. As a result, the persons ability to feel happy dries up,
and they enter clinical depression.
This unreferenced and simplistic piece of nonsense fails to mention some
important facts about serotonin and distorts others in an inexcusable act of
medical and scientific fraud in an effort to promote a drug that specifically
targets serotoninergic neurones in the brain. The promotional literature fails
to mention that serotonin is manufactured in the gut and nervous system
(including the brain) from the dietary amino acid tryptophan, and performs
many functions in the body other than being a happy chemical, which is
what the promotional literature from SmithKline Beecham suggests. This
advertising blurb also fails to mention that serotonin is concentrated in the
brain in the pineal organ, where it is converted to the neurohormone
melatonin, a scientific fact discovered in the 1960s and conclusively proved
in numerous studies. The fact that serotonin is concentrated in the pineal
where it is converted to melatonin during the night-time hours of darkness is
generally not found in literature about Prozac, Aropax and the other SSRI
drugs, including information provided by the drug companies to doctors or
in the many books and medical articles published about (and promoting) the
new psychiatric drugs.
SmithKline Beecham, who are, with the Commonwealth Serum Laboratories
(CSL) and the American giant Mercke, the biggest marketers of virus
vaccines in Australia, have played a prominent role in the Commonwealth of
Australias National Mental Health Strategy, and funded or co-funded a
range of public health and disease awareness campaigns and strategies
in Australia over the past 10 years. These have included collaborating with
the Mental Health Foundation and other drug foundations to produce,
promote and distribute literature promoting the diagnosis of panic disorder
for which the new SSRI drugs were being promoted despite conclusive
evidence that the drugs can aggravate anxiety immediately after they are
started precipitating psychosis and suicide in vulnerable individuals.
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Australian ABC reporter Ray Moynihan, in his 1998 book Too Much
Medicine? described an elaborate launch of Aropax and panic disorder in
Sydney, in 1996:
One of the top chefs in the country is catering at one of the best
venues in the nation. A large gathering of doctors are about to tuck
into a $100-a-head meal. The live satellite link with hundreds of their
colleagues across Australia is soon to start: another lavish promotional
event dressed up as a scientific gathering, courtesy of the
This 1996 Sydney harbourside dinner was how the drug giant
SmithKline Beecham chose to educate doctors about the
governments approval of its new antidepressant, Aropax, for the
treatment of a psychiatric condition called panic disorder. The night
was just one component in a highly sophisticated marketing campaign
to promote Aropax and this little-known disorder. The strategy
included Panic, the book; Panic, the video; and Panic, the T-shirt.
(p.115)
Moynihan continues to expose just a small amount of the ensuing cost to the
Australian community:
The use of new antidepressants, including Aropax and the better
known Prozac, has grown astronomically in Australia since the early
1990s, from 5,000 prescriptions a year in 1990 to over 2.5 million in
1996. Aropax is now one of the top-selling antidepressants. And as
the number of people using these expensive new drugs has
dramatically escalated, so too has the cost to the taxpayer. The new
antidepressants now cost the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme funded
through Medicare over $120 million in 1995-96. (p.115)
The 1992 SmithKline Beecham marketing plan, sent to the ACACP and
HRIC by a human rights worker in New Zealand in 1998, demonstrates a
callous disregard for the human beings being targeted to both prescribe and
consume this drug. The following extracts show the general tone of the
document:
Task/Assignment
We are to produce a strategy and creative execution to launch Aropax to GPs.
For the creative, we need a foundation concept and image, reflected in concept
boards for:
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A detail aid
An invitation to the launch seminar
An educational mailing pack
Branding advertisements
Thought should also be given to

Leave behinds
Neurone card, showing how the neurone can hoard serotonin
Branded give aways
The client wants to research and test the campaigns submitted. Our concept boards
should be designed with this in mind.
Objective
Marketing Objectives
4. Establish SSRIs as the future of antidepressant therapy by educating GPs.
5. Differentiate Aropax on the basis of its key attributes and strong branding.
6. As a result, establish Aropax as the SSRI of choice.
Direct marketing Objectives
4. Teach doctors about SSRIs.
5. Show why Aropax is the closest thing to an ideal agent.
6. Generate qualified leads for later sales calls.
Advertising Objectives
3. Build strong brand awareness of Aropax as the SSRI of choice. As we may
have a standing start race against a similar competitor, all branding must be
strong and emotional.
4. Build on the educational messages of the direct marketing.
Perhaps it is nave to imagine that the pharmaceutical industry would

consider the health of humanity as its primary objective. It is a clear conflict
of interest when the same industry is allowed opportunities to promote
diseases (especially invisible diseases) for which the drugs they produce
will be prescribed. It is also against the law. The wilful creation of disease,
termed biological warfare, is a crime against humanity, and is prohibited by
International Laws.
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34. THE DISUNITED NATIONS AND WARFARE

The geographical positioning of Canberra between Melbourne and Sydney
as the new capital city of the federated Australia was influenced by an overt
recognition of antagonism (euphemistically called rivalry) between the two
largest cities in Australia and the two most populous States, Victoria and
New South Wales.
Interstate competition and rivalry are not confined to Victoria and New
South Wales. Parochial attitudes are common in Queensland and the other
states, since Australia has never been a truly unified nation in terms of the
people who live here and even those who feel they belong here and are
citizens of the country. Although they may identify themselves as
Australian when overseas, many Australians identify themselves (and
others) as Queenslanders, Victorians, Western Australians etc. This
division of the population into camps with different state loyalties affects
some members of the community more so than others. In the arena of State
Politics, antagonism between State Premiers, usually based on arguments
about the relative allocation to State Governments of federally collected
taxes, is typical.
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The political history of Australia is important to understand to gain an

accurate perspective of the present psychiatric system and prisons system in
Australia, because the three have been closely related since the development
of methods to control the immigrant and convict populations in the early
days of British Imperial Rule in what was, only 100 years ago, named
Australia (Southern Land).
Antagonism between people identifying themselves as being of one State or
another has persisted over the past 100 years and a constant feature of local
politics has been bickering between State Governments and between the
State and Federal Governments, but the problems created by fighting
between institutions and organizations whose responsibilities are the
protection, defence, health and well-being of all Australians, do not end at
State level. The confusion and xenophobic hostility demonstrated by several
prominent State leaders over the past 30 years has influenced and been
influenced by the philosophies and political culture/attitudes of experts on
public health, including the mental health of the public. As well as rivalry
between States, each of which has different Mental Health Laws (such as
how, why and for how long people can be locked up and forcibly treated),
aggressive competition occurs between providers of health care and drug
treatments. These providers include some of the largest corporations in the
world, giant drug companies based overseas.
The basic structure of the mental health system in Australia and elsewhere in
the Commonwealth was established by the British Government following
colonisation, which was actively resisted by the native residents of Australia
as it was by native populations throughout the world. The period of
European colonisation of the world began long before the 1700s when what
is now called Australia was claimed by Captain James Cook for the British
Crown. Only 100 years ago the separate states that had been set up as semiindependent states and penal colonies (large prisons) were federated into the
Commonwealth of Australia, in which the system of separate states with
separate state governments persisted, with an additional Federal
(Commonwealth) Government with power to over-ride State laws and
policies (under certain conditions), based in Canberra. Constitutionally,
however, Australia remained a monarchy ruled by the British Royal Family
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and their political representatives, and the Governor General of Australia

was given the power to dismiss the elected government, under certain
conditions, as occurred in 1975, when Gough Whitlams Labour government
was sacked by John Kerr.
Following this notorious incident, which disproved any notion of political
independence and democracy in Australia, Malcolm Fraser was appointed as
caretaker prime-minister. This political farce, which has been much written
and speculated about over the past 25 years occurred not long after the end
of the Vietnam War and the Javanese invasion of East Timor, which was
previously a cruelly administered, and badly neglected Portuguese colony.
The Portuguese retained commercial interests in the mineral-rich area and
also a philosophical and political presence in the form of the Catholic
Church, facts that have importance in the current debate about Timorese
independence and freedom.
The Australian Governments previous betrayal of the Timorese people
should be kept in mind when deciding on the ethics of sending armed young
men and women to keep the peace according to American and
Commonwealth directives and strategies, since for many years, our
Governments, in defiance of the UN and the wishes (and health) of the East
Timorese people, have been the only ones in the world to officially accept
what was clearly a politically and economically motivated invasion of Timor
by Indonesia. This was clearly the invasion of a small island nation by a
larger neighbour, an act which ostensibly triggered one of several Gulf Wars
when Iraq did a similar thing to neighbouring Kuwait.
Double standards in international politics is ugly to see and abhorrent in
practice, but it has been a consistent feature of justified military actions
claimed in the name of peace-keeping, in which Australian military
personnel have played a role that can only be described as mercenary
executors of American and British national security demands, labouring
under the misapprehension that these demands are the same as Australias
and Australians national security needs. Geographically, politically,
historically and ethically, such a position is untenable, for several reasons,
and the history of economics, psychiatry, medical science and scientific
research in Australia clearly demonstrates why this is so.
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The World Health Organization was formed after the Second World War as a
United Nations associated organization with a responsibility to improve the
health of the global human population. The organization initially focused
especially on infectious diseases in what they called the third world, being
a poorly-defined collection of nations most of which are in Africa and South
America. South-East Asian and South Asian nations were also mostly
described as third world, whereas Russia and China formed the less
spoken of second world. The first world in this three tiered classification
of the 180 or so independent nations on Earth, were the same nations that
developed the classification and their historical, economic and political
allies. Thus Britain, the United States of America, Canada, France,
Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries were elite members of the First
World, while Germany and Japan, who lost the war, were also allowed
into the first world club, provided they accept the economic and
development reforms decided by the United Nations policy makers, which
included the notorious World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF).
The worldwide misery created by the global debt and development
loans of the IMF and World Bank is almost incalculable. Under these
programs millions of people, particularly in Asia and Africa, have been
dispossessed of their land and forced into slavery or starvation. Their land
has been developed along the lines of escalating exploitation of the
mineral wealth of these parts of the world, regardless of growing pollution
and toxicity in the air, water and soil. This toxicity affects the countries in
which the minerals are mined and processed, as well as the oceans they are
transported across and the countries in which they are refined and
consumed or otherwise used. Too often, the raw minerals that are mined by
the slave-labour of a particular country are sold back to the enslavers at
enormous profit in the form of weapons and other technology to control the
increasingly restless populations of impoverished and angry slaves.
The development of modern slavery through the system of national debt is
simple in principle, but cruelly unfair. Under the system, nations were
allowed to borrow credit (loans) from first world banks via the World Bank
and pay back the loans, with interest, over the ensuing decades. Part of the
condition of these loans is that the countries, many of which had strong
nationalist political movements, accept the development plans devised by
the United Nations. These plans included programs affecting education,
health and banking, as well as defence and population control.
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The ideals espoused by the United Nations many organizations have been
consistently noble, such as eradicating infectious disease, malnutrition and
pollution, and the promotion of peace and global tolerance, respect and
friendship. The outcomes of policies prescribed by the United Nations have
been less than disappointing in all these areas, and today, people in
increasing number are dying of infections, malnutrition, poisoning and the
direct or consequent effects of warfare and slavery.
The architects of policies that have created the modern medical, educational
and economic systems in Australia have included native Australians as well
as immigrants to the country and foreign citizens and nationals. This is also
the case in military policies and decisions, in a situation unique in the
modern world.
The August 1999 Bulletin magazine features a cover story titled Defence:
our new policy revealed by national affairs editor John Lyons. The article
begins:
The chief of the Defence Department, Paul Barratt, has just been
sacked. An official report has condemned the $5bn purchase of six
Collins-class submarines as a disaster, saying they are unfit for war.
Morale has hit rock bottom for Australias armed forces personnel.
And a major review of Australias defence outlook, prepared in 1997,
was outdated before it was even published.
Despite the fact that events had overtaken the assumptions
contained in them six months earlier, the governments two reviews
premised on continuing economic expansion in the region were used
as justification for not cutting Australias $11 bn-a-year defence
budget. Our regional neighbours so the logic went would continue
to expand their military capabilities.
Now, an investigation by The Bulletin has uncovered classified
Defence Department documents which show that Australia has been
developing a dramatically different defence policy in secret. Since
the end of the Vietnam War, Australia has placed priority on defending
the sea-air gap across northern Australia. Our desire for forward
operations, such as Korea or Vietnam, had dissipated with defeat in
Vietnam.
But what is occurring now is an historic change in the countrys
defence policy. Australias defence force is becoming more integrated
into the American military machine and has begun purchasing
equipment with less relevance to its own defence needs.
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The reality is clear: Australia is now moving towards a forward

defence policy, by stealth.
The Fairfax-owned Age newspaper on 29.7.99 featured a front page story by
Paul Daley, the papers defence correspondent in Canberra titled Australia
troops set for Timor. The article begins:
The United Nations is expected to ask Australian troops to form
the core of an international military operation for East Timor in the
likely event the province votes for independence from Indonesia.
Defence sources told the The Age that under strategies discussed
by Federal Cabinets national security subcommittee, Australian and
New Zealand troops are expected to form a nucleus of expertise for
any East Timor force at the UNs request.
Under the strategy, other Pacific and Asian countries such as
Fiji, Malaysia and possibly Thailand would be asked to contribute
the bulk of the ground troops for the force, which would be referred to
as an international monitoring group or a transition assistance
force.
The article also stated that the Foreign Minister, Mr Alexander Downer,
said in Singapore that Australia would consider sending more police to East
Timor to deal with any increase in violence after the self-determination
ballot.
Violence comes in many forms. It can be psychological or physical. Speech
can be violent, and verbal abuse has real casualties. In fact both the receiver
of the abuse and the perpetrator of it suffer through verbal abuse and the
psychological damage that accompanies it. This may partly account for the
low morale of the Australian armed personnel who are yet again to be
ordered to use these arms against people in other countries that they do not
even speak the same language of and cannot possibly understand the
complex problems of. The Australians and New Zealanders that the
Commonwealth governments of these nations are so readily prepared to
contribute to an international peace-keeping force were, according to the
Age article, to be protected from harm by a mainly Malaysian and Fijian
human shield of ground-troops, whom they would obviously command,
but only according to directives from the Commonwealth and American
Military experts that also advise the State and Federal Governments about
matters relating to defence, and coach the political leaders of the country
about what to say to the public about defence. Needless to say, the Prime
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Minister, Foreign Minister and other senior cabinet ministers do what they
are told during military crises such as have occurred in the Persian Gulf
and Yugoslavia this year, and can be expected to continue unthinking
obedience to NATO and US military policy, regardless of how much these
policies kill and maim Australians and their neighbours.
On Friday, 2nd April, an article was published in The Age newspaper by
Henry Kissinger, about the NATO bombing of Kosovo, titled Clinton is
mistaken. The article contains no reference to the extraordinary coincidence
that the offensive against Kosovo was launched at the same time that the US
President Bill Clinton was under threat of dismissal or criminal prosecution
for publicly lying under oath to Congress (the US Government) and
American people. It was the act of lying under oath that was the serious
crime, much more so than the sordid sexual matters that Clinton was lying
about.
Somehow the remarkable timing of the American militarys publicly
reported offensives against Iraq, Sudan, Yugoslavia and Afghanistan at times
of political and personal desperation by the official chief of the US armed
forces, have been all but ignored by the mass-media in Australia, but not by
the Australian people.
Cynicism towards American politics and Australian politics is a common
attitude in Australia, as is a general apathy towards politics of both a
domestic and international nature. There is little recognition of the enormous
influence that domestic and international politics has on the health of each
and every Australian. Yet the evidence is all around us that the official
Australian Health Policy, and the radical changes in Australian politics
reported in sporadic and soon-forgotten media reports are rapidly following
the lines of the United States system, but with significant differences.
The similarity is that capital rules and capitalism rules, with a veneration of
the principles free market and economic rationalism, both euphemisms
for modern slave theory. A key deception of this excuse for economic and
political expansion by already dominant economies is the concept of the
trickle-down effect. This is a justification for the worsening gap between
haves and have-nots in countries and communities around the world, and a
suggestion that if the rich are allowed to become richer still, some will
trickle down to poorer members of society increasing the overall wealth
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of society. This discriminatory economic theory has turned out to be a bad

joke played on the millions of people who have been induced to climb the
illusory economic ladder only to find themselves deeper and deeper into
debt, more stressed, and more depressed.
35. DIAGNOSING THE GLOBAL ECONOMY

The signs have been evident for many years that the global economy is sick.
These signs include a widening gap between rich and poor individuals and
nations as well as rising dependence by the people of the earth on drugs to
help them cope with living. Most animals do not need help to cope with
living, although some, diagnosed as suffering from depression by human
beings, are being given the same drugs that humans take to medicate their
unhappiness. Despite these drugs, or because of them, the number of people
who are killing themselves has been increasing every decade during the past
50 years. These are surely some signs of a sick economy.
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In 1999 the Age newspaper contained a half page story on page 4 titled
Australias stark reality: size does matter written by the reporter Malcolm
Maiden. The article claimed that the company that once called itself the Big
Australian signalled its final, full surrender to the forces of globalisation.
The Big Australian referred to is the mining company BHP (Broken Hill
Propriety Limited), whose advertising campaigns of the past have identified
the company as the Big Australian and the Quiet Australian. The
newspaper report described some of the actions of the new American boss of
the company, which many Australians continue to identify as a great
Australian company along with Arnotts biscuits, Holden motor cars and
other traditionally Australian companies which have been taken over by
larger foreign controlled companies in the new globalised economy.
It would appear on deeper political and economic analysis, that the State and
Federal (Commonwealth) Governments of Australia surrendered to the
forces of globalization many years ago, and for over a decade have been
loud advocates of what was termed globalization and economic
rationalism. Both are synonymous with the economy being ruled by the
markets and those with the most capital: capitalism, in other words. The
Australian Governments have been strong proponents of the philosophy that
large corporations and affluent individuals should be allowed to continue to
profit freely with minimal government interference suggesting that by so
doing, a trickle-down effect will lead to an overall rise in standard of
living, with the poor also eventually benefiting from increasing affluence of
the rich. This too is a Capitalist philosophy, closely connected with the
notorious social and political philosophy called social darwinism.
The discriminatory social policies that have resulted from misapplication of
the evolutionary theories of the English scientist Sir Charles Darwin, include
a range of social and economic theories based on promoting survival of the
fittest including promotion of the dominant races and enslavement or
extermination of inferior (also called degenerate races). Dominant races
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(and races that implemented eugenics to try and become dominant) include
Aryan races (not all of whom are white) and white races, however the
races considered to be inferior (intellectually and morally) have
consistently been uncivilised natives of colonised countries in the
continents of Africa (especially), Australia, South America and Asia. The
Asian exception in post-world war two history has been Japan, reflected
by the fact that (rich, fair-skinned) Japanese were considered to be
honorary whites in white-supremacist systems such as that in apartheid
South Africa.
Social darwinism infers from the concept that it is natural for the strong
to survive and the weak to die, that it is natural for the rich to prosper and
the poor to be exploited and enslaved. It supposes that in the struggle for
survival, the fit (rich) are destined to rule over the poor. This applies to
individuals, as well as groups of people and even nations according to social
darwinist theory. Nazi theory is a development of social darwinism, centred
on the implementation of eugenics, a catastrophic medico-political attempt
to improve the genes and genetics of the human race initially by selective
sterilization of those considered unfit to breed, and later by the mass murder
of races and classes of people considered dangerous, defective or
degenerate.
Social darwinism is intricately enmeshed with capitalist theory and slave
theory, and a close historical examination of the three theories demonstrates
common features and prejudices in their underlying philosophy.
The first is that some people, families, and some classes of people are
superior to others, and therefore deserving of more political power, more
money and property and more respect from the public, as well as better
opportunities for happiness, survival and success. These people are also
encouraged to have more children and to educate them in such a way as to
maintain the existing class and political structure. The inferiors in these
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hierarchies were considered to be deserving of rule, as well as exploitation

by the superior races, classes and cultures.
The second is the class structure itself. Charles Darwin, as the grandson of
the imperial social theorist Sir Erasmus Darwin, was born into an elite
English academic family, and supposed, as his letters to his cousin Francis
Galton reveal, that the Darwin family were exceptionally well-endowed with
geniuses (including himself), amongst what he considered to be the most
intelligent type of person on earth, the Englishman of good breeding (and
from a good family). Hitler, and other advocates of racial superiority
theories formulated, or had formulated for them, different hierarchies, with
some differences in the order in which races and individuals have been
categorised in terms of superiority and inferiority, however the basic
obsession with categorisation according to class, colour, race and presumed
genetics is common to all.
The class structures of Germany, Scandinavia, the United States of America,
England and Australia are significantly different, and the types of policy
which have been formulated to control troublesome sections of the society
have differed between these major centres of eugenics practice and exporters
of eugenic ideas.
The word eugenics was effectively written out of contemporary English
language after the end of the Second World War. This is because the
discredited philosophy of breeding better people according to Darwinian
principles, after being embraced by several European nations before the
1940s, was responsible for mass-murder, genocide, torture and other abuses
when practically applied to rid Germany and German-occupied Europe of
degenerate races and degenerate individuals. The nations whose
scientific, medical and political establishments initially embraced eugenics
included the United States, Great Britain, South Africa, Canada and
Australia. The misguided abuse of genetic science resulted in thousands of
forced sterilisations (often by simple castration) of young men and boys in
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the United States in the early years of the twentieth century, often for
feeble-mindedness or degeneracy. Feeble-mindedness and
degeneracy were manifest in such behaviour, according to eugenists, as
masturbation, petty crime, immorality and delinquency.
The term eugenics and the first Society (organization) for Eugenics were
created in the 1860s by Charles Darwins first cousin Sir Francis Galton and
Darwins son, with the ostensible aim of improving humans by selective
parenthood, and to give a better chance to the more suitable races or strains
of blood (De Paoli, 1997). The philosophy was exported from London,
where it originated, to Germany where both eugenics and euthanasia
(mercy killing) were instituted as State Social Policies in the 1920s and
1930s when, starting with the mentally ill and physically deformed, those
deemed to be immoral, or degenerate were killed following torture in
the form of cruel medical experimentation. This was a horrible practice that
became obvious to the world following the Second World War, when the
methods used by German and Japanese authorities to achieve racial
cleansing was revealed (in part) by the mass-media, which had become
increasingly powerful following the development of television in the 1920s.
The abuses which resulted from eugenics were usually blamed, however, on
Hitler and the Nazis, clouding the issue of why and where the Nazis got
their ideas. It also clouded the important fact that many other nations,
including those which constituted the Allies, also implemented eugenic
policies before and during the Second World War. Television, as usual, told
only part of the story, and was used, from the outset, for the purposes of proBritish and pro-American propaganda. It did not suit the agenda of the
television programmers at the time to reveal to the world how widely
eugenic philosophy was accepted and implemented.
The first television broadcast, an experimental internal broadcast before an
audience at the Royal Institution in London was done in the late 1920s by
John Logie Baird, a 38 year-old Scottish engineer who had worked at a
Clyde Valley electric power company, before leaving to concentrate on his
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research, according to Penguins Chronicle of the World. The same year as

the founding of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 1927, ICI
chemicals was also founded in England. ICI is an acronym for Imperial
Chemical Industries, and these were the last days of undisguised
imperialism by the British Empire. ICI continued, after the war, to grow
into a massive chemical and pharmaceutical company, which profited from
experimentation on captive subjects during and after the Second World War,
including the recently revealed experiments on interred Italians and Jewish
refugees in Australia, who, along with injured Australian soldiers, were
deliberately infected with massive doses of malaria. These malaria infections
were transmitted by transfusions of infected blood, and by exposing them to
specially bred mosquitoes.
The experiments on the disabled Australian soldiers and interred civilians
were claimed at the time to be necessary for the war effort and to protect
Australian troops who were dying of malaria in New Guinea, but this was
not, in fact, true. The cruel tests were done in the interests of the
pharmaceutical industry in the USA and England, specifically for those of
the American company Winthrop (manufacturers of Panadol) and ICI
chemicals, which were testing out a German-discovered drug, later marketed
as Paludrine. After the war ended, the trials continued for several months in
Melbourne, at the wishes of these foreign drug companies, demonstrating
the lie that lay at the heart of claims that they were necessary for the health
of Australian troops. The drug trials and the deliberate infections which
preceded them were orchestrated by the military hospital at Heidelberg,
Melbourne, and conducted in remote North Queensland, far from the eyes of
the rest of Australia and the world. What is worse, rather than compensating
the victims of this cruel human experimentation, the government of
Australia and the Australian military denied that such events actually
occurred until 50 years later, and even then denied culpability for their
actions. The orders that resulted in what can easily be described as torture
came from the British Empire, without whose agreement (and complicity)
the experiments would not have been allowed.
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At the time of Erasmus Darwin, Charles grandfather, London was the centre
of the British Empire and the global economy, and the academics in
Englands two major Universities, Oxford and Cambridge, considered (and
declared) themselves to be the cream of the worlds intellect. They were the
educators of the British Royal Family and the designers of the British
educational system which was exported to the world. They were also the
designers and masterminds of English Imperialist theories, including the
divide and rule policies used in the many countries colonised by British
Forces, and many other socially destructive policies that continue to this day,
sometimes due to conscious efforts to attack other countries, societies and
populations and sometimes as a result of entrenched attitudes and
procedures.
Imperialism is a term used to describe the expansionist political and
military philosophy of European monarchic empires, including England,
Norway, Sweden, Holland (Nederlands), Greece and Monaco, to mention
some of the democratic states that retain self-styled kings, queens and
royal families today. This concept supposes some families to be naturally
superior based on heredity, blood, genes and blood lines. These families
were designated as divinely appointed natural rulers to whom all lesser
mortals were expected to show respect, and further, diffidence. A
subservient attitude when a commoner was in social contact with the
aristocracy was demanded of the commoner and enforced by the
supporters and protectors of the royal families, kings and queens included,
but also including their children, relatives and descendents. In the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, when slavery was still legal, many other European
nations also had imperial royal families, including France, Belgium,
Germany, Austria and Spain. In fact, the aristocratic families that ruled
these different European nations were often related biologically to each
other. Thus the Kaiser (emperor) William (Wilhelm) II of Germany was the
grandson of Queen Victoria of England, and the present-day husband of
Queen Elizabeth of England, Prince Philip, is of the Greek royal family.
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When, eventually, slavery of Africans was deemed illegal in the British

Empire and the slaves were released in 1833, rather than paying
compensation to those who were enslaved, the massive sum of 20 million
pounds was paid, instead, to the slavers, an action arranged by Nathan
Rothschild, of the Anglo-Jewish Rothschild banking family. This family has
remained immensely wealthy and influential until present times, as have
many other families, companies and nations that profiteered from the use of
slave labour over the past 500 years.
Although the theory of evolution by natural selection is generally credited to
his grandson Charles, Erasmus Darwin also developed a theory of evolution
by the inheritance of characteristics and preferential survival of better
adapted species, publishing his theories in 1794 in a book titled Zoonomia.
His grandson developed these theories further following his journeys aboard
the HMS Beagle in the 1800s, but published them only when confronted by
a paper detailing similar theories by the young scientist Russell Wallace,
who forwarded a paper describing evolution by natural selection to Darwin
whilst on a journey as ships naturalist himself.
When Erasmus Darwin published Zoonomia, slavery was one of the
mainstays of the British Imperial economy, and this was to remain the case
for many decades to follow. Slaves were taken by the British from Africa to
the Americas, but also from the Indian Subcontinent to other parts of the
British Empire, where they were forced to work in menial jobs for British
companies and wealthy individuals. In Australia, convict labour was
another form of slavery instituted against the poor as well as political
dissidents (particularly Irish ones). Coolie labour, imported from China
and India, was another aborted effort at slavery by the British in Australia,
which most Australians are still unaware of.
In 1794, the same year Erasmus Darwin published his book, slavery was
officially abolished in all French territories, but not in British ones.
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The Chronicle of the World, which is, it must be noted, a British version of
history, explains the French actions and motives as follows:
As the three black delegates from Santo Domingo watched from
their seats in the Assembly, the Convention votedto abolish slavery
throughout the territories of the republic and to confer French
citizenship on every former slave. Then the Domingans were led to
the Tribunal where the president embraced them as the Convention
rose in a standing ovationIn 1792, a year after the outbreak of the
slave revolt, two civil commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel
were sent to administer the island. In August 1793 they freed all of the
500,000 slaves. This humanitarian act had its political side. As long as
the revolt continued it was impossible for France, at war with Spain
and Britain, to defend its colony. Loyal freedmen were naturally better
patriots than rebellious slaves. (p.783)
According to Chronicle of the World, the French hoped that their action
would stimulate Britains slaves to rise in their turn, thus helping to
undermine Britains war effort. This was not, in all probability, told to the
slaves, who were undoubtedly pleased at being freed, not realising that their
freedom was part of a military strategy. Here is seen one of the symptoms of
a globally sick economy: military and political strategy disguised as
humanitarian action. It also becomes evident from this historical episode,
that war between European states has been a dominant feature of global
politics for several centuries. It is worth noting that the British attempted a
similar strategy during the American War of Independence, when Negro
slaves were offered their freedom if they fought for the British against the
Americans. Hundreds of slaves were subsequently betrayed by the British,
and sold again into slavery after the British lost the war.
The development of Social Darwinism in the 1950s can be illustrated by the
1958 article Forecasting the Future, published in Frontiers of Science. The
author is another Sir Charles Darwin, grandson of the famous zoologist, and
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great-great grandson of Erasmus Darwin. Sir Charles, who was a pioneer in

nuclear studies and acted as Director of the National Physics Laboratory in
England from 1938 to 1949 has a preoccupying fear. His concern is about
overpopulation. He introduces a very strange, but revealing, article with the
caption:
Every day there are eighty thousand more people on the earth. In
another fifty years the world population will be four billion a hungry
four billion. And in one hundred years? (p.100)
He explains the methodology of modern scientific forecasting on which he
bases his pessimistic prediction:
The present director of the British Meteorological Office, Sir
Graham Sutton, wrote an article which describes the situation
admirably. In making his forecast the meteorologist is doing the same
sort of thing that a player does when he bids his hand at the game of
bridge. If he were required to predict what tricks he would take with
absolute certainty, he would not get very far; for example, if he had
the ace and king of a suit he would only be absolutely certain of two
tricks if that suit were trumps.
In fact, he does not declare that he will get two tricks, but he
makes the estimate that he will probably get, say, eight or nine tricks.
He reckons that this is the probability; he knows that one or two of his
strongest cards may possibly fail to win the tricks he expects, but then
he knows that this will most likely be compensated by tricks from
some of his other cards he was not so confidently counting on. He
estimates probabilities, and if he is an experienced player he is usually
not far from right in a general way, even though some of his details
may be wrong. (p.101)
Professor Charles Darwins paper Forecasting the Future was presented at
a physics seminar at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in
1956, where he had worked as a visiting professor in 1922. During the
Second World War he worked in the British Nuclear weapons industry,
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directing the British National Physics Laboratory. He clearly viewed himself

as an experienced player.
Darwin gives some figures for world population that he could not possibly
be certain about, since at the times concerned large parts of the world were
undiscovered (by Europeans), and the populations of these areas have
been consistently underestimated (an example of which is seen in the Terra
Nullius declaration of Australia by the British):
At the beginning of the Christian era the population of the world
was about 350 million. It fluctuated up and down a bit, and by A.D.
1650 it was still only 470 million. But by 1750 it had risen to 700
million, and now it is 2500 million. That is to say that for 1700 years
it was fairly constant, and then in 200 years it has suddenly
quadrupled itself.
The increase of world population is still going on at a rate of
doubling itself in a century, but it is a most menacing thing to think
about. (p.104)
More menacing than thoughts of overpopulation, is the impersonal,
abstracted way in which Darwin discusses solutions to the problem of
overpopulation:
Can anything be done about it? Frankly, though perhaps for a
short term something might be done, in the long run I doubt it. My
reason is this. Natures control of animal populations is a simple,
brutal one. In order to survive, every animal produces too many for
the next generation, and the excess is killed off in one way or another.
It is a method of control of tremendous efficiency, and during most of
his history it has also applied to man. To replace a mechanism of this
tremendous efficiency it is no use thinking of anything small; the
alternative we must offer, if we want to beat nature, must also be
tremendous.
The difficulty is even greater than it appears at first sight, because
there would be an instability about any alternative scheme deliberately
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adopted. Thus, suppose some really good solution was found and was
adopted by half the world [Europe, for example?]. For a generation or
two this half would prosper. Its numbers would stay constant and the
people would not be hungry, but all the time the numbers in the other
half of the world would be increasing, so that in the end they would
swamp the first half [first world?]. That is the terrible menace of the
matter; there is a strong survival value in being one of those who
refuse to limit population. (p.109)
Darwin leaves it to his audience to work on a solution to the menacing
problem of overpopulation, warning that war is not nearly murderous
enough:
The first thing we may think of which might reduce the numbers
is war, but most war is not nearly murderous enough to have any
effect. Thus we should count as a really bad war one in which five
million people would be killed, but this would only set back the
population increase for less than three months, and that hardly seems
to matter. I doubt that even an atomic war would have any serious
influence on the estimate, unless it led to such appalling destruction of
both the contestants that the economy of the whole world was ruined
and that barbarism and starvation would ensue. (p.109)
Professor Darwin likes the word tremendous, and it such a solution that
the grandson of the author of Descent of Man, exhorts his audience at
Caltech to work on:
It is very much to be hoped that a great deal of thought will be
given to this matter on the chance that someone may hit on a solution,
but I must repeat that natures method of limiting population is so
brutally tremendous that it can never be replaced by any such triviality
as the extension of methods of birth control. It calls for something
much more tremendous if there is to be any prospect of success.
(p.109)
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Could AIDS be such a tremendously brutal solution?

Darwin, in his talk to Caltech, refers to a celebrated book on the threat of
overpopulation, written by Thomas Malthus in 1798. In his Essay on the
Principle of Population, originally published anonymously, the Anglican
priest and economist argued that poor laws tend to increase dependent
populations, and should be replaced by workhouses for those in distress
and government incentives for agriculture. He claimed that population is
always destined to increase disproportionately compared to food production
ability. By such definition, the world has always been overpopulated.
The newspaper headlines on 6.1.2000 announced that another stockmarket
crash had occurred, this time blamed on imminent rises in interest rates in
the United States of America. The article in The Australian, by economics
correspondent Ian Henderson, begins:
The prospect of a sharp interest rate rise in the US within a month
wiped $15 billion off Australian share prices yesterday and
battered other markets worldwide.
The article continues:
Share prices around the world were jolted by fears of the looming
rise, which is being fuelled by evidence of strong economic growth, a
tightening labour market and a view that share markets are probably
overvalued in the US.
Why should strong economic growth cause a lack of confidence in the
stockmarket? What constitutes strong economic growth? What is the
labour market and why is it tightening? Could warfare and slavery have
anything to do with the collapse of the stockmarket? Is this an indicator that
the global economy is becoming more unwell or is it a sign of improving
health of the people who create and maintain the economy?
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The stockmarket is maintained by speculation about the future. This includes

speculation about which companies and industries are likely to bring profits
to shareholders, and which are likely to out-compete the opposition. The
opposition, in a competition-oriented capitalist economy, include other
companies and industries on the one hand, and other countries and groups of
countries on the other. This competition is often ruthless and may involve
strategies developed by military-style thinking, including brainwashing,
propaganda, subterfuge and surprise attacks. Take-overs of smaller
companies and industries by larger ones are common, and have resulted in
giant corporations wielding more economic influence than entire nations.
The connection between the stockmarket and military machine involve
more than common strategies, however. Companies that profit directly from
warfare are included amongst the companies on the global stockmarkets, and
these are known to grow in times of war. These companies include
businesses involved in more than the manufacture of conventional weapons
such as guns, missiles, tanks, grenades, aircraft, ships, submarines, land
mines and bombs. The industries which provide the raw materials for
conventional weapons, including the mining industry also profit from war
and preparation for war, regardless of whether this is called the war effort,
as it was called in the 1940s or defence as the same industry has been
called since then. In more recent times, computers, surveillance equipment
and biotechnology have also been part of the military machine, and used for
military purposes, as has the chemical industry and pharmaceutical industry.
These latter industries have played a prominent role in a change in modern
warfare from predominantly conventional warfare to predominantly
unconventional warfare, involving chemical warfare, drug warfare,
psychological warfare and biological warfare.
Reading between the lines of military jargon, some disturbing conclusions
may be reached by reading the cover story of the August 1999 Bulletin
magazine. The article, by John Lyons, is advertised on the front cover as
Defence: our new policy revealed and is titled Operation Backflip.
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Lyons claims that following a reluctance to engage in such activities

following defeat in Vietnam, Australia is again engaged in what are
euphemistically termed forward operations, in the nature of Vietnam and
Korea. He reveals that this change in Australian military policy is being
done by stealth, and making the Australian military activities more closely in
line with that of the United States of America.
Lyons writes:
After the defeat in Vietnam, US and Australian policymakers and
the public lost the appetite for prolonged overseas engagements. The
Nixon doctrine of 1969 preached that unless a leading power
intervened in a Third World conflict, the US should not commit
forces.
Committing forces is not the same as supporting conflicts, and it is common
knowledge that the US have supported armed conflict around the world over
the past century, especially in the past fifty years when the pentagon and US
military (and successive governments) have been fighting a war against
communism and socialism. This is not surprising, since the US is a major
exporter of arms, and it is thus deemed to be in the interests of the American
Economy, and thus the US National Interest to increase sales of North
American arms, even though they are causing misery and terror throughout
the world, including in the US itself.
It is more palatable for politicians in the USA and UK to have soldiers from
other nations doing the actual fighting and dying in the conflicts these armsproducers support. This is an age-old military strategy which was used by
the British throughout the colonial era, which was continued in the Second
World War and after it concluded. Lyons writes:
Defence planners want Australia to become more involved in
coalition operations such as supporting the US in a Gulf War-like
crisis since the US does not like to engage in military operations by
itself. Increased inter-operability with the US coincides with
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Australias desire to improve its technology, part of what the

Americans call the Revolution in Military Affairs, combining the
emergence of new technology with advanced strike capability (p.25)
The national affairs editor of The Bulletin explains that this change in
Australian defence policy brings clear economic benefit to the US (but not
to Australia):
In order to become more of an all-rounder as a military force,
the conclusion drawn by defence planners means it will be necessary
for Australia to buy more military equipment and technology from the
US.
Under the hidden policy, virtually any purchase can be justified.
This is reflected in the acquisitions Australia is considering, including
Apache armed reconnaissance helicopters with Longbow radar and
Hell-fire missiles, which are designed essentially for attacking tanks
or underground bunkers of the type found in Iraq or Northern Korea
a long way from the air sea gap.
The late twentieth century has been a time of global warfare, although this
has often been disguised by euphemisms, particularly in countries like
Australia which attempt to present to the world an image of a nation that is
intrinsically peaceful. This is far from true. Australia has sent troops to fight
in wars all around the world over the past century and even today Australian
troops are involved in military activity far from the nations shores.
Over the past one hundred years young Australian people have been sent to
fight in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and the pacific region. They have
sometimes been called peacekeepers, sometimes allied forces, but rarely
mercenaries. Sometimes they have been forced to go to war after being
conscripted, as occurred in the Korean War and Second World War. In more
recent times forced conscription has not occurred, and Australian military
personnel have been paid well for fighting or peacekeeping in foreign
lands. In fact, it is doubtful that these soldiers would leave their homes in
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Australia were it not for the fact that they are paid well to do so. In this case,
mercenaries would surely be a more appropriate term to use to describe
these people.
Such views are not likely to be popular in Australia, since the troops
currently in Timor are being heralded as heroes who are keeping the peace
and preventing genocide by Indonesians who committed mass-murder of the
indigenous Timorese population for two decades before the recent events in
the island. It should be recognised, however, that the Indonesian (Javanese)
invasion of the previously Portuguese half of Timor occurred with the
complicity of the Commonwealth Government in Canberra, and despite
international opposition to this act of political and military aggression. It
should also be noted that West Timor remains occupied by Javanese troops
and is still accepted by the Australian Government (and others) to be a
legitimate part of Indonesia.
Historically, though, Indonesia is synonymous with the Dutch East Indies,
the political and military centre of which was Batavia (Java). Thus
Indonesia is really a result of neocolonialism, with Java-controlled troops
occupying the surrounding islands: Sumatra, Sulawesi, Borneo and Timor
included. During the past century, the Dutch-instituted exploitation of these
islands has continued, with western governments supporting what was
widely recognised as a corrupt Javanese political hierarchy. This hierarchy
was ruled until recently by the Suharto family, who became, in essence, an
aristocracy in the region. President Suharto, who ruled Indonesia for
several decades, placed his own children and family members in positions
that enabled the family to exploit the natural resources of the area,
particularly the forests and minerals in the surrounding islands. They also
suppressed the growing calls for independence in brutal ways, including
genocide in Timor and other parts of Indonesia. The Australian government
supported the Suharto regime for many decades, including providing
military equipment and training as well as financial support, incongruously
described as international aid.
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International aid comes in many forms and it is a massive multibilliondollar industry. It is also a euphemism, since the aid is inevitably
accompanied by a hidden agenda. In the case of Australian aid to
Indonesia, the hidden agenda was poorly disguised. Australian industrialists
and politicians intended profiteering from the Indonesian islands along
with the corrupt Javanese regime it propped up, armed and collaborated with
in other ways. When the Labour Party and Gough Whitlams Government
supported the annexation of East Timor in the early 1970s, the motive was
clear: petroleum deposits in the Timor sea. It was supposed, at the time, that
Australia would be better able to negotiate with the Indonesians for a
share of Timorese oil than with an independent Timor, particularly a
communist, socialist or nationalist independent Timor. For over two decades
Australia turned a blind eye to mounting evidence of atrocities committed
against the indigenous Timorese population by the Indonesian military,
including the genocide of a third of the population of East Timor: some
200,000 men, women and children. So why the sudden concern that justifies
sending troops to East Timor to stop the atrocities and keep the peace at
the cost of over $500,000,000? Military, political and economic strategy, or
genuine concern about human rights abuses?
John Lyons wrote, in The Bulletin, in August 1999:
If Australia is forced to engage overseas in the next 12 months,
East Timor is the most likely flashpoint. Previously, the Korean
peninsula was Australias biggest regional security concern. While
neither necessarily involves combat troops, they could see an
Australian peacekeeping role with a dangerous edge.
East Timor holds both a humanitarian and strategic significance.
The Timor Gap and Arafura Sea provide one of the best deep-water
tunnels for submarines moving between the Pacific and Indian
Oceans.
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In this analysis, the battle for oil deposits in the bed of the Timor sea are not
mentioned, but this is another of the strategic (economic) considerations
fuelling desire by Australian politicians to control the sea between Timor
and Australia. Despite Australias less than enviable human rights record,
and recently revealed abuses by and corruption in our police forces, it is
claimed by Lyons that:
If Timor votes for independence, a new country will need to be
built with independent political systems, police force and education.
Much will depend on Australian funding, backed by Australian
peacekeepers.
It also opens up Timor to capitalist insustry, and the hold of Australian
mining companies in the area. Australia itself has an appalling human rights
record: with many abuses involving the police and related psychiatric
industry. Only a fraction of the aboriginal population survived the initial
onslaught by British colonists, and today most live in desperately
impoverished circumstances, in aboriginal settlements where they have a
life expectancy about twenty years shorter than the rest of the Australian
population. Abuses by State police against aboriginal people (especially
those in custody) and psychiatric patients (many of whom have been shot in
recent years) have received limited media attention in Australia, but more so
in the foreign press. It is worth noting that during what was indisputably a
genocidal campaign against the indigenous population of the continent, the
officials who presided over this carnage were called protectors of the
natives. It is also worth noting that in the 1840s, when aboriginal people
were still being hunted for sport, enslaved and massacred, the British
Government, which claimed to be protecting the natives, were engaged in
a cruel war against the Chinese, now known as the opium wars. During
these wars opium was forced into China from India and Burma (where it was
grown on British-owned and controlled plantations), with the intent of
addicting and subjugating the Chinese population to the addictive drug. The
justification given to the British population for these wars was ensuring
free trade.
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It could be said that free trade values the freedom of industries more than
the freedom of people. Unfortunately this means that industries that result in
disease and death of humans are protected in the modern world more than
people are. It is also the case that free trade zones are poorly disguised
concentration camps of economic, and sometimes physical, slaves.
So-called free-trade zones have been established by action of first world
countries throughout the third world, with the objective of exploiting
cheap labour in poor nations. An example of modern economic slavery in
Indonesia and the political repression that accompanied it during the rule of
the Suharto regime is given in The Global Trap by Hans-Peter Martin and
Harald Schumann (1997):
The Asian miracle does, of course, have its darker side. The boom
goes hand in hand with corruption, political repression, massive
environmental destruction, and often extreme exploitation of a labour
force with no rights (most of it made up of women). Take Nike, for
example. Its expensive trainers, costing up to 150 dollars a pair in
Europe and the USA, are stitched and punched by some 120,000
workers in the contract companies that supply Nike in Indonesia, for a
wage of less than three dollars a day. Even in Indonesian conditions
that is a starvation wage, but it complies with the legal minimum
applicable to more than half the countrys 80-million labour force. To
make sure that it keeps this advantage, the military regime headed for
the last thirty years by the dictator Suharto nips every workers protest
in the bud. For example, when Tongris Situmorang a twenty-twoyear-old working for Nike in Serang mobilized his workmates for a
strike in autumn 1995, local army men simply shut him up for seven
days in one of the factorys storerooms and kept an eye on him around
the clock. Still, he was later released and all he lost was his job.
Others, such as the two women trade unionists Sugiarti and Marsinah,
who are celebrated throughout the country, paid with their lives for
their courageous action. Their dead bodies, mutilated by torture, were
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found on the rubbish tip of the factories where they had tried to
organize a strike. (p.146)
In China, according to the same book, Chinas socialist market economy
has been accompanied by terrible atrocities:
More than a million women workers have to stitch, punch or
pack on the work-benches for fifteen hours a day, or more in
exceptional circumstances. People are forced to work like machines,
says a local newspaper. Often they must pay a deposit worth several
months wages when they first start work at the factory, and it is not
returned to them if they leave the company without the managements
approval. At night they are crammed together in narrow and often
locked dormitories which become death-traps in the event of fire.
Even the central government in Beijing has admitted that labour
legislation is being ignored; the first six months of 1993 alone
witnessed 11,000 fatal work accidents and 28,000 fires. Yet those who
rule in the name of the Chinese working class prevent any resistance,
above all in the special economic zones for foreign investors: those
who complain or attempt to form unions are likely to be sentenced to
three years in a labour camp and there are currently hundreds of trade
unionists in prison.
When faced with East Asias (by Western Standards)
unacceptable campaigns to capture world-market shares, most
governments in the West exercise astonishing restraint. (p.147)
The restraint that Western governments display towards these abuses may
seem astonishing to the authors of this book, but they are hardly out of
character given the long history of Western Governments supporting slavery
under the pretext of protecting free trade. This book was written prior to
the collapse of the Asian Tiger economies in 1997, which was blamed, in
the Australian media, on various factors that had little to do with mass
opposition in these countries to the conditions in these forced labour camps.
The Economist claimed, for example, on 10 January, 1998, that the crisis in
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Asia shows no sign of abating despite the vast sums of money that the
International Monetary Fund is applying to the problem. This included a
rescue plan worth $43 billion for Indonesia, which followed a package of
$57 billion for South Korea in 1997. The magazine claimed that the
economic crisis in Asia was due to failure of Asias domestic regulators to
strike a balance between the risk of lenders and depositors:
The failure of Asias domestic regulators to strike such a balance
is the chief cause of the regions problems. For years, lenders and
depositors felt too safe for their own good. Yet the Funds response to
the crisis is to make another set of lenders, foreigners this time, feel
safe. Some argue that the true cost of that costless Mexican bail-out is
todays crisis in Asia because foreign lenders learned in 1995 that
they would be rescued if their loans turned bad, and therefore lent
more than they should in Asia. (p.12)
The Economist fails to mention an author for this short article, which
describes the costless Mexican bail-out as follows:
Recall the Mexican bail-out of 1995. Nobody feared a global
meltdown in that case, though there were worries (justified, it turned
out) about Latin American contagion. Guided by other considerations,
America and the IMF nonetheless arranged support amounting to $40
billion. It worked. Confidence was restored. Growth in exports
allowed the emergency loans to be serviced at market rates and repaid.
American investors in Mexico didnt lose their shirts and, in the end,
American taxpayers didnt pay a cent. (p.11)
The global meltdown scenario is explained as a possible apocalypse
involving a systemic breakdown caused by nations defaulting on loan
repayments:
Invoking the risk of systemic breakdown is the most obvious
way to justify the IMFs intervention. Without an emergency injection
of dollars, it is argued, companies in South Korea and the rest would
default on their debts. This would cause distress everywhere,
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especially in Japan, where stagnation could turn into outright

depression. From there the crisis could spread to the United States,
Europe and the rest of the world, as banks fail, credit disappears,
stockmarkets crash and economies collapse. This is the nightmare that
has driven governments, notably Americas, to support and indeed
insist upon the Funds course of action.
It is interesting to note how much of the economic jargon used by The
Economist is seconded from medical terminology, including injection of
dollars, depression, systemic collapse and contagion. It is, by the way,
likely that most of the worlds population could imagine worse nightmares
and apocalyptic scenarios than a collapse of the International Banking
system, including the grossly unfair claims of third world debt to first
world bankers and creditors. In fact, with a longer view of history, one
could reasonably ask as to who owes who in the world of
macroeconomics. It is also evident that despite claims that these bankers
are bailing out poor nations in crisis, the real motive is protection of the
economies of rich countries (particularly the USA) rather than poor ones.
A capitalist perspective of the Third World debt problem was presented in
an economics textbook by John Jackson of the University of Western
Australia and Campbell McConnell of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
The textbook, titled Economics was in its third edition in 1988. In the
chapter titled Growth and the underdeveloped nations they wrote, under
the subtitle The debt problem:
In addition to the long-term deterioration of the underdeveloped
nations terms of trade, the global economic environment of the past
decade has been very adverse for the non-oil countries of the Third
World. A convergence of forces has greatly intensified their need for
economic assistance. First, the dramatic run-up of oil prices by OPEC
in 1973-74 and again in 1979-80 (raising the price of a barrel of oil
from about $2.50 to $32) greatly increased the energy bill of the oilimporting underdeveloped countries. Similarly, the inflation
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experienced by the industrially advanced countries has increased the

cost of non-oil imports to the Third World. Finally, the general
stagnation of the advanced countries has slowed the growth of their
demand for the underdeveloped nations raw material exports. The
overall result has been that the exports of the poor non-oil nations
have been insufficient to pay for their imports. The financing of this
shortfall has been largely through borrowing, that is, increasing the
international indebtedness of the non-oil Third World nations. The
long-term external debt of these nations has grown dramatically from
$97 thousand million in 1973 to over $1000 thousand million by the
end of 1986. Many debt-ridden Third World nations want their debts
cancelled or rescheduled so that current export earnings and foreign
aid can be used for development purposes rather than debt servicing
and repayment. (p.616)
The textbook goes on to say that, in response to a crisis that threatened the
international banking system, debts of many poor nations were rescheduled
in the 1980s, giving them more time to pay back their debts. In reality,
though, the post-WWII terms of international trade, including the activities
of the World Bank and IMF ensure that regardless of how much time these
nations are given to service their debts, they will continue sinking
deeper and deeper into debt. Yet this debt does not really exist. The
Third World owes nothing to the First World, and if anything the reverse
is the case. The rich (colonising) nations surely owe billions of dollars in
compensation to the now poor nations that they have exploited for the past
several centuries.
Since a reductionist and discriminatory medical paradigm has been part of
the sickness of the global economy, it is appropriate that a holistic medical
analogy may be used to lead to a natural cure for the worlds economic ills,
as well as man-made illnesses.
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The worlds economic problems can be diagnosed by looking at each of the

human physiological systems, and extrapolating the systemic functioning of
the human body to the global economy. These include the nervous system,
the circulatory system, the respiratory system, the digestive system, the
reproductive system and the excretory system. The biochemistry of the
world can be approached scientifically to provide a solution to chemical
pollution and toxicity. The imbalance in distribution of wealth can be
rectified by a more healthy circulation of money and material possessions.
The population of the world will breathe easier if people are provided with
clean air to take into their lungs. The natural detoxification of the world will
occur if the forests are regenerated, and the rivers and lakes contain pure
water, rather than industrial pollutants. A depression will not occur if
people look at their individual activities and focus on living a useful life in
the service and support of other living creatures, rather than worry about
unemployment. The world will not be overpopulated if there is a fair
distribution of land and wealth, regeneration of plant life and cessation of
unnecessary greed and waste. One can take this analogy further.
The circulation of blood in the body can be compared to the circulation of
money in the world. For health this circulation needs to be vigorous and
evenly distributed, with those areas that need more because of more activity,
receiving more on the basis of requirement (need). Too much blood in one
area leads to blockage and haemorrhage, and deficiency in others leads to
infarction and death of tissues. Likewise, a poorly distributed fiscal policy
leads to excess amongst some individuals and deficiency in others, within
countries, and warfare and widespread misery when the poor distribution
affects the global economy as a whole. Excess money can lead to real
illness, and such diseases of excess (obesity and addiction, for example) are
common causes of disease and death in western countries. Diseases of
deficiency (such as nutritional deficiency, starvation and immune deficiency)
are common in the poor nations. It is of note that blood is, itself, part of the
world economy, and the sale of blood and blood products a multi-billiondollar industry. Ironically, the Red Cross, which controls most of the
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circulation of blood products in Australia with a virtual (or actual)

monopoly, was involved in the previously mentioned transfusions of
malaria-infected blood to interred Italians, Jewish refugees and disabled
soldkers in the Paludrine trials in Queensland in the 1940s.
The circulatory system of vertebrates is not controlled by a single part of the
body, and regulatory mechanisms exist around the body to ensure that only
the correct amount of blood reaches different parts of the body, that the
pressure and temperature of the blood are maintained at a healthy level, and
that the heart, which pumps the blood around the body continues to have a
constant and ongoing rhythm. The blood is produced in a protected area, the
bone marrow, and the iron that is necessary to carry oxygen around the body
is recycled by action of the spleen and liver. If there is not enough blood in
circulation, disease, in the form of anaemia develops. For health of the
tissues, and the body as a whole, blood must be distributed by blood vessels
to each and every cell in the body.
The circulatory system, briefly and simplistically described above, can be
compared with the circulation of money, the generation of cash (by different
nations, as in bones which contain the bone marrow), the International
Monetary Fund and World Bank (the heart, which is suffering from
potentially terminal illness, at present), individual national banks and ATMs
(blood vessels), and tissues of different organs (towns and geographical
regions). Every individual has need of money, and deprivation of individual
cells (people) leads to disease in the whole.
The body is much more than blood, however. People need much more than
money for a healthy, happy life. They need food, air, light, and shelter, just
to survive. They also need clothing and warmth, emotional and
environmental stimulation, meaningful activity and good education for a
comfortable and healthy existence. The physiological analogy of the
cardiovascular system can also be applied to other systems, with a focus on
healing and regeneration.
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The respiratory system of vertebrates is centred on the activity of the lungs,

but health cannot be achieved without clean air to breathe. This basic
necessity for life is currently being threatened by pollution and the
promotion of cigarettes throughout the world. The growth of the tobacco
industry over the past three hundred years has been accompanied, in fact, by
a dramatic rise in actual respiratory illness, particularly in industrialised
countries, but also in other parts of the world at the hands of industrialised
nations. These illnesses include lung cancer, asthma and emphysema,
chronic bronchitis and respiratory infections. All these conditions are caused
or aggravated by cigarette smoking, and smoking adversely affects both the
smokers themselves, and other people who breathe in the smoke that they
exhale.
The tobacco industry is one of those destructive industries that became
wealthy with the sweat of slave labour. African slaves were taken to work on
tobacco plantations in the Caribbean, South America and elsewhere
throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by Dutch, Spanish and
English slavers, with the complicity of the governments and monarchies of
these colonising countries. Tobacco plantations were also created in the
Dutch East Indies, which later became Indonesia. In these islands
indigenous and migrant workers were employed, after the abolition of
slavery, to continue the monocrop agriculture that supports one of the
biggest killers of the modern world: the tobacco cigarette industry.
The fact that cigarette smoking is a major cause of respiratory disease was
denied for many years by tobacco companies decades after the medical
evidence demonstrating this fact was overwhelming. During the first and
second world wars cigarettes were promoted as of benefit to psychological
stress although in truth, withdrawal from the drug actually causes this
problem, since nicotine causes physical addiction. When it became
impossible for cigarette companies to promote their product in this way in
western countries due to public and medical awareness of the risks of
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smoking, the same companies sold heavy nicotine cigarettes throughout the
third world instead, whilst finding ways around the laws against public
advertising of cigarettes in European nations (such as sponsorship of
televised sporting events). When opportunities arose, in the 1980s and
1990s, to sell American and European cigarettes in previously communist
countries, every effort was made to addict the populations of Russia,
Eastern Bloc countries and China to high-nicotine cigarettes despite their
known dangers. It is encouraging, however, that recently compensation has
been paid, although belatedly, to the victims of the cigarette trade.
Cigarette addiction worldwide can be alleviated by a global ban on public
cigarette advertising, and the same applies to alcohol, which also causes
untold health damage throughout the world. This is not the same as
prohibition. It is well established that prohibition fails as a policy to stop
drug abuse, and can make the problem worse. A ban on cigarette advertising
in public places and the mass-media is a cost effective solution, which does
not interfere with the individuals right to smoke. While this right may exist,
the right to knowingly poison the lungs of the innocent does not exist. The
savings to the global health budget from such a ban would be massive,
particularly in countries such as Australia, where heart disease and cancer
are major causes of disease and death.
The respiratory health of the global population will also benefit from a
cessation of industrial pollution, but this is not as easy to achieve as a
cessation of cigarette smoke pollution. A significant reduction in global
pollution could be achieved, however, by greater corporate and
governmental support for non-petroleum energy sources, and with foresight
this is a wise thing for governments and industry to do, since petroleum
deposits are limited. Air itself can provide significant amounts of energy, in
the form of wind power, and sunlight is another clean source of energy,
which is sustainable in the long term. As for global environmental vandalism
of the nature of the recent cyanide spills in Europe, and the pollution of
Australian waterways by the mining and agricultural industries, the
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responsibility for repair of previous damage falls on the companies guilty of

the vandalism and careless pollution which now affects every country on the
planet. Compensation for poisoned, oppressed, enslaved, tortured, terrorised,
dispossessed and displaced people of the world is surely the only just
outcome, and one that should become part of the currently dubious United
Nations agenda, as well as that of national governments around the globe.
Freedom can be equated with the breath of life. It is a fundamental
requirement for a just society. This freedom includes freedom of speech,
freedom of thought, freedom of association, freedom of movement and
freedom of procreation. Yet these are all basic rights which have been, and
are currently, denied to large proportions of the worlds population. This is to
the detriment of the global economy, and more importantly, to the cause of
humanity, justice, peace and tranquillity.
Food is necessary for the digestive health of the global population. Contrary
to claims of overpopulation, it is well recognised that starvation and
malnourishment do not occur because there is not enough food to go around,
but because of warfare and wastage. The advice of Mohandas Gandhi 50
years ago, that the world provides enough for every persons need but not
every persons greed remains true today. Huge amounts of wheat and other
staple foods are regularly destroyed to maintain high prices of resources that
could be used to feed the poor. Rather than encouraging people in poor
nations to grow their own food using environmentally sensible multiple crop
agriculture, for several centuries large areas of the worlds fertile regions
have been, and continue to be, used for environmentally destructive
monocrop agriculture. This monocrop agriculture involves the deforestation
of mixed vegetation and replacement with single crops such as tobacco,
coffee, tea, wheat and sugar. The prices of these commodities has
consistently fallen, while the technology required to maintain these crops
has become more expensive. These crops are also of little benefit to the
essential dietary needs of the nations in which plantations were established
during the era of slavery. These plantations are being maintained for the
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convenience and economy of rich countries rather than poor ones. Efforts to
become self-sufficient in terms of food grown in individual nations are
regularly thwarted by the policies of the World Bank and International
Monetary Fund, which support the interests of established industries and
large companies based in affluent nations. Yet even the description of these
nations as affluent makes little sense if the claims of debt to international
bankers are to be accepted. By these terms the United States of America is
one of the poorest nations on earth, since this first world nation, like
Australia, also considered affluent, apparently also owes many billions of
dollars to the IMF and World Bank. For what? For policies forced on the
nations of the world that are increasingly creating a global wasteland?
Looking at the digestive system of the global economy on a broader level,
the total amount of ingested substances by humans can be looked at as a
whole. Recent years have seen humans being described by economic
rationalists as consumers rather than people, and it is evident that in
countries such as Australia, people are generally consuming too much and
consuming the wrong things if they intend their health to improve. These
include pharmaceutical drugs as well as animal products, particularly meat.
On 10.1.2000, The Australian contains a page three article titled Bad habits
push up $3bn pill bill. In it, John Kerin writes:
Hectic lifestyles, poor diet and too little exercise are driving up
Australias $3 billion-a-year prescription drug bill. An examination of
prescription drug-taking patterns over the past 12 months shows the
big growth has been for the treatment of cardiovascular ailments, high
blood pressure and high cholesterol. Almost 140 million scripts were
issued in 1998-99. Some 18 million were issued for blood pressurerelated complaints in 1998-99 and a further 8 million for drugs needed
to lower cholesterol.
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Kerin adds that, the use of expensive stomach ulcer and gastric reflux drugs
and anti-depressants is also on the rise, with a decrease in scripts for antibiotics.
The reasons given by Dr David Brand, national president of the Australian
Medical Association (AMA) for this debacle are confused and confusing.
While admitting that diet and exercise are important in both high blood
pressure and lowering cholesterol and that the average Australian has been
gaining a gram of fat a day over the past 15 years, he also claims that the
growth in use of prescription drugs could also be explained by tremendous
improvements in drugs. In reality, though, the increase is more likely to be
due to extraordinarily aggressive campaigns by pharmaceutical companies to
sell these expensive drugs and the failure of doctors to resist their marketing
strategies. Dr Brand himself admits that, a few years ago you had a bloody
hard time convincing patients to take some blood pressure preparations or
anti-depressants. This statement is a disturbing indicator of the medical
professions role in pushing drugs, especially when he also admits that the
resistance of the population to taking these drugs was because, they ended
up feeling more awful from the side effects than they did from the original
complaint.
In fact, high blood pressure and high cholesterol in themselves do not
usually make people feel awful: the reason they are treated is for the
prevention of heart disease, stroke and other consequences of atherosclerosis
(hardening of arteries). Furthermore, drug treatment by itself, without
behavioral change, has been repeatedly shown to be ineffective in reducing
this risk. Taking cholesterol lowering drugs without reducing meat and
saturated animal fat intake does not reduce overall risk of illness and death,
and the same applies for taking blood pressure lowering drugs without
reduction of mental stress, obesity and other lifestyle factors.
The health problems which are responsible for most of the pharmaceutical
expenditure of Australia and other first world countries are conditions
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caused by excess, rather than deficiency. This point is missed by Kerin, and
by Brand. They also fail to mention the major additional risk factor for heart
disease and atherosclerosis: cigarette smoking.
Brand also makes the rather contentious claim that, rather than, again,
aggressive marketing campaigns for new antidepressants, and broadened
criteria for diagnosis of the condition, higher rates of prescribing for
depression were linked to improvements in its diagnosis. Actually, this
improvement in diagnosis just means that doctors and the public are more
likely to call sadness, frustration, anxiety, worry and distress depression.
The diagnosis of depression has been marketed ruthlessly in the mass media,
including medical educational literature provided by the pharmaceutical
industry, health-promotional campaigns, such as those which formed the
1990s mental health strategy. In these campaigns, spearheaded in Australia
by the Mental Health Foundation, propaganda from the drug companies
Smith Kline Beecham, Roche, Pfizer and Eli Lilly (list not exhaustive)
exhort patients to self-diagnose themselves as suffering from a medical
illness termed depression. This illness is said to be caused by chemical
imbalances, which are sometimes specified as the neurotransmitters
serotonin and noradrenaline (called norepinephrine in the USA). This theory,
which conveniently acts to theoretically justify the prescription and
ingestion of chemicals (antidepressants) to correct the chemical imbalance
is the mainstay of modern biological psychiatry as a theory of depression
and is the main explanation pushed by these drug companies through Mental
Health Foundation literature, which is sponsored by these drug companies.
All these massive pharmaceutical companies sell new antidepressants. Eli
Lilly produces Prozac, Smith Kline Beecham markets Aropax, Pfizer
produces Zoloft and Roche offers Aurorix, all to treat depression. The
first three of these are SSRI antidepressants, the marketing of which has
constituted one of the biggest scientific frauds of the twentieth century.
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The fraud regarding these drugs involves information given to doctors and
the public about the neurotransmitter serotonin, and the pineal organ in the
brain where the chemical is concentrated and converted to the neurohormone
melatonin during hours of night-time darkness. Serotonin was discovered in
the early 1940s and melatonin was discovered in 1958. The biochemical
pathway involved in the synthesis of serotonin from the amino acid
tryptophan was discovered in the early 1960s along with the pathway for
synthesis of melatonin from serotonin. It was discovered at this time that
serotonin and melatonin are concentrated in the pineal and that light shone
into the eyes during the night (when melatonin is usually synthesised)
suppresses melatonin production. It was also discovered in the 1960s and
1970s that melatonin and the pineal affect the secretion of other brain
hormones, particularly those secreted by the pituitary gland located at the
base of the brain. Melatonin and serotonin were found to have effects on
mood, blood temperature, sleep and other important aspects of physiology.
Melatonin and the pineal were also found to have effects on sexual
maturation (probably via pituitary gonadotrophin hormones) as well as the
immune system. It was also discovered, over thirty years ago, that the pineal
is connected to the eyes and visual system via the suprachiasmatic nucleus
and sympathetic nervous system, and that the neurotransmitter noradrenaline
is involved in the conversion of serotonin to melatonin (Reiter, 1984).
The scam involving the pineal, melatonin and serotonin has involved a
systematic removal of scientific information about known pineal physiology
from medical and scientific textbooks, as well as disinformation about
serotonin and other neurotransmitters. This coincides with the marketing of
melatonin as a sleeping tablet and natural cure for jet lag and seasonal
affective disorder together with drugs which affect serotonin metabolism,
notably the SSRI antidepressants.
This removal of information about the pineal, which occurred in the late
1980s, affected a range of textbooks published by major corporate
publication companies based in the US and UK, including MacGraw Hill,
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Churchill Livingstone and Appleton & Lange. A particularly outrageous

example is the respected specialist textbook Essentials of Neural Science
and Behavior published by Appleton and Lange, a subsidiary of Prentice
Hall International. The international edition of this book, which is on sale
in the bookshops of major universities in Australia, completely omits the
pineal organ in their 1995 edition, and the same phenomenon can be
observed in several other highly respected medical textbooks. Although most
parts of the brain are discussed in detail in these books, the pineal organ is
conspicuously absent.
Corresponding with this removal of physiological information about the
pineal, serotonin has been associated with an extraordinary range of
psychiatric abnormalities. The Universal Press publication Inside the
Brain by Pulitzer prize-winning author Ronald Kotulak makes the following
claim in their book, published in 1996:
Low serotonin is common to many problems in which one or
more of our drives bursts out of its chemical corral. Medical
researchers found that most of these disorders may be treatable with
drugs that change serotonin levels. First developed to halt the
uncontrollable aggression of schizophrenia and depression, these
drugs are now being used or tested for a wide variety of problems,
including alcoholism, eating disorders, premenstrual syndrome,
migraines, anger attacks, manic-depressive disorder, obsessivedepressive disorders, anxiety, sleep disorders, memory impairment,
drug abuse, sexual perversions, irritability, Parkinsons disease,
Alzheimers, depersonalization disorder, borderline personality,
autism and brain injuries. (p.88)
The pineal is not mentioned in this book, nor melatonin, let alone the
concentration of serotonin in the pineal and the conversion of serotonin to
melatonin. A similar phenomenon can be observed in the Time magazine
article of September 1997 titled The mood molecule by Michael
Lemonick.
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In this article serotonin is discussed in depth, however the pineal and

melatonin are not mentioned, and the discussion is centred on drugs which
affect serotonin, and, to a lesser degree, other neurotransmitters. The story,
as told by Lemonick does raise some concerns about the long-term safety of
these drugs, following the heart-damaging side-effects of Redux, a
serotonin-affecting drug which was marketed as a weight reduction drug in
the 1970s and 1980s by Wyeth-Ayerst and a company founded by one of the
developers of the drug, a Dr Richard Wurtman, who had worked as a
consultant for Lilly (Eli Lilly) in the 1970s, at which time this company
(which later produced Prozac) was experimenting with serotonin-affecting
drugs as obesity treatments. Wurtman, who was trained as a neurologist and
also worked for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), founded a
company called Interneuron Pharmaceuticals to market Redux. Redux is
dexphenfluramine, derived from the amphetamine phenfluramine, which
was, even before the marketing of the drug as a human weight-loss drug,
known to cause brain damage in monkeys. Lemonick writes:
From the start, it was clear that Redux has serious potential side
effects. One is primary pulmonary hypertension, a rare form of high
blood pressure that strikes the blood vessels of the lungs. Another,
considered even more serious by some of Reduxs critics, was the
possibility of brain damage. When fed to monkeys, dexphenfluramine
can destroy neurons. Says John Harvey of the Allegheny University of
Health Sciences in Philadephia, who edits the Journal of
Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics: Any of us who were
pharmacologists knew this was a dirty drug. None of us was
surprised.
Some critics claim that Interneuron steamrolled Redux through the
FDA and that the agency acted irresponsibly in approving it, charges
that the company vigorously deny.
The reason that Redux was eventually withdrawn from sale, was not because
of pulmonary hypertension or brain damage. After twenty years of use, it
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became evident that the drug also causes irreversible damage to heart valves.
This unexpected side-effect should make doctors and the public more wary
of ingesting drugs that affect natural chemicals which have a broad range of
physiological effects such as serotonin, melatonin, dopamine and
noradrenaline. This concern is highlighted by the fact that, as in the case of
Redux, toxic effects may only become fully evident many years later.
The American producer of Prozac, Eli Lilly, was the first to develop and
market globally a Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor (SSRI): a new
class of expensive antidepressants derived from the stimulant MDMA. The
designer drug commonly known as Ecstasy shares its origin in MDMA,
but cannot be patented, hence its illegality. These are the realities of modern
drug laws: they are based on economic, not public health considerations.
Several dangerous man-made drugs are illegal, but far more dangerous drugs
are legal. The illegal drugs include heroin (derived from opium poppies),
and other opiate narcotics. They are not illegal, however, if prescribed as
pain-killers by doctors, in which case they are greatly overused. The
exception to this is the opiate codeine, which is available over the counter in
Australia in the form of Panadeine, Dymadon and Tylenol tablets (forte
preparations). These are also overused in Australia along with the non-forte
preparations which contain paracetamol alone (without codeine), but can
cause fatal liver and kidney damage, particularly in overdose.
Drug overdose is one of the growing causes of death in the modern world.
These include both intentional and unintentional overdose. Of these,
unintentional overdose, less usually reported as drug overdose than
suicide by intentional poisoning with drugs, is responsible for more of these
deaths. Unintentional overdoses include those due to the self-ingestion of
drugs, including paracetamol, aspirin, tranquillisers, sleeping tablets, anti
depressants and alcohol. The category also includes drugs given in excess
amounts by doctors and hospitals to people who are considered in medical
need of these drugs by some doctor or another. Often different doctors
contribute to a cocktail of drugs that individuals in the modern world
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consume. Individuals who look to these doctors for medical advice, but
receive secondhand advertising for and from the pharmaceutical industry
instead.
Turning to the brain of the economy, it becomes evident that wherever it is,
it is not working well. If it was, the economy would not be as sick as it is.
The brain controls and regulates the other systems of the body, including the
rest of the nervous system. The brain is inextricably connected to the mind,
and the minds that have devised the current economic system were obsessed
by war, nationalism and beating the opposition. This aggressive attitude
and associated militaristic, mutual paranoia paradigm has had a direct effect
on the economic, political, military and medical decisions which have been
made by governments in the past fifty years, despite claims of globalism.
The paradigm of the United Nations organisation, which grew out of the
League of Nations is still one of perpetual war and conflict, with a hidden
agenda in favour of the nations that formed the United Nations and remain
permanent members of the UN security council in the first place. These
were the victors of the Second World War: the United States and Britain.
Institutions such as the World Health Organization (WHO) are part of the
UN and World Bank systems, and again represent the interests of dominant
nations rather than smaller or less industrialised ones. In the lingo of the UN,
non-industrialised nations are termed Third World or Underdeveloped,
with development equated with corporate-ruled industrialisation. This is
one of the biggest problems that face the United Nations, World Health
Organization and populace of the world. Global pollution and unrestrained
disease creation amongst humans, plants and animals are the inevitable byproducts of a tradition of aggressive competition between individuals,
corporations and nations entrapped within a militaristic mind-set.
To solve these pressing problems will require a fundamental change in
paradigm from one of nationalistic aggression and competition to
international cooperation and support. The destructive division between
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first, second and third worlds must be discarded from international

politics and health programs as a harmful anachronism. Global health can
only be achieved when the divisive politics of the past are ended. A
realisation must be made that conflict between nations is not necessary or
inevitable and that the vast majority of the worlds population would rather
live in peace and harmony.
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36. BORN DURING THE COLD WAR

Like most of the people in the world today, I was born during the Cold War.
While I studied medicine at the University of Queensland in the late 1970s, I
was aware that the Cold War was going on, but didnt realise how much
this would influence my medical training, which in turn largely determined
my belief system, as far as science, psychology and medicine were
concerned. I believed most of what I was taught at university. I accepted that
the world was overpopulated, and that forced sterilization was sometimes
warranted. I thought that there was a strong case for voluntary euthanasia. I
thought that schizophrenics needed to be injected with drugs if they would
not take them of their own accord. (I never actually diagnosed anyone as
schizophrenic, manic or personality disordered myself, but would accept the
judgements of other doctors, especially specialists, including psychiatrists).
Until 1995 I remained largely ignorant of medical politics, the role of the
pharmaceutical industry in medical research, textbook publication and
continued education for doctors, other than what I was told myself by
representatives of the pharmaceutical industry (drug reps). The many past
crimes perpetrated by members of the medical profession, and examples of
medical abuses such as eugenics applications, which resulted directly from
medical policies, were not mentioned in the 6 years I studied at the
University of Queensland, or the 3 years that followed at the Royal Brisbane
and Royal Childrens Hospital in Queensland. The role of the medical
profession in supporting warfare was not explained to me at medical school,
but it became evident to me in the years that followed. It has been a gradual
realisation, accompanied by several surprises about how closely my own
training was influenced by military medicine.
During 1987, when I worked as a senior resident doctor and junior registrar
at the Royal Childrens Hospital, in Brisbane, Queensland, I served as a
senior resident for Professor John Pearn (who became Head of the
Department) and Dr Barry Appleton (paediatric neurologist). It surprised me
to read recently then, in the drug-company sponsored Current
Therapeutics journal, that Barry Appleton is also a senior officer in the
Australian Military, specifically, in the Royal Australian Air Force.
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John Pearn, who authored the article about Military Medicine, regarded
himself, when I worked in the Royal Childrens Hospital (at which he was
professor of paediatrics), as a paediatric geneticist. Professor Pearn is
now the Chief of the Australian Commonwealth Military Medicine
Department of the Department of Defence, in addition to continuing to work
as a professor of paediatrics at the Royal Childrens Hospital. His official
military and political title is Surgeon General, but he still doubles as a
Professor of Paediatrics. These are some of the strange contradictions of
Australian military and medical politics.
The use of psychological and biological weapons as agents of genocide is a
central focus of this book, along with the related use of chemicals and drugs
as weapons against targetted populations, again with the objective of
genocide. The most obvious reason for this focus is my own training as a
physician I am better qualified to research and analyse biological,
psychological and chemical warfare than other forms of conventional and
unconventional warfare. These are also forms of warfare that have been
barely written about, not least of all because they are routinely denied by
those developing and using them. The crime of genocide has also been
routinely denied by regimes that have subsequently been shown to have
committed the act, and official plans of genocide are rarely, if ever, overtly
admitted as such. Official documentation of current genocidal strategies
using biological and chemical weapons are unlikely to exist, but this does
not mean that the 1972 ban on biological and chemical warfare is being
adhered to by those who were undeniably developing these forms of warfare
in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s.
The United Nations laws against genocide were formulated as a direct
response to revelations of Nazi atrocities during the Second World War, a
war during which psychological, biological and chemical warfare were
intensively researched by all the major protagonists. Immediately after the
Second World War official biological and chemical warfare laboratories
were set up in several countries, including the Soviet Union, Britain and the
United States of America; these were officially abandoned in 1973 with the
International Convention on Biological and Chemical Weapons. This
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convention has been heralded as an example of successful conversion of the

military industry for peace. The Gaia Peace Atlas (1988), edited by Frank
Barnaby, former director of the Stockholm International Peace Research
Institute, claims:
That military industries can be converted to civilian purposes is
shown by the outcome of the 1972 Biological Weapon Convention.
This banned the production and development of biological weapons.
American biological weapons establishments and personnel were then
converted to civilian medical establishments. (p.218)
Biological warfare has recently become a matter of public concern, and has
always been a matter of public importance. An acknowledged form of nonconventional (or unconventional) warfare, biological warfare is centred on
the use of infective and biologically toxic agents, including bacteria, viruses,
funghi, and chemical toxins to cause acute and chronic illness. Historically,
germ warfare as used to both kill and maim targetted populations. These
have sometimes been declared enemies, but more often they have been the
victims of covert warfare, especially during the proliferation of germ warfare
in the 20th Century. During the Second World War, as has been admitted
many decades later, both the Allies and the Axis powers developed and
tested various infective agents for use in biological warfare. On this matter
there is a noticeable difference between the claims of the opponents in the
Second World War and Cold War.
Australia, where this work was researched, where I studied medicine from
1978 to 1983, and where I have worked as a doctor for the past 18 years,
was a member of the Allies in the Second World War, and has aligned itself
politically, militarily and scientifically with the Capitalist West since the first
political foundation of this nation. This is a very recent event the nation of
Australia is only 100 years old. In stark contrast, the land of Australia is very
ancient, and the first people who arrived here did so in the unimagineably
distant past. These were the people the White Nation that called itself
Australia (Southern Land) now refers to as Aborigines. This term is, of
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course, not a specific one. During the era of colonization the dark-skinned
natives of all the discovered continents were called Aborigines. Roughly
the same populations were also described, in historical records and texts as
natives, savages and blacks. Often these terms were used
interchangeably and had been since the earliest days of cargo slavery by the
architects of the Age of Discovery, as the Western history textbooks refer
to the period of history from 1490 to 1600, when the monarchies of Western
Europe discovered millions of people to enslave and exploit.
Imperialism, the building of empires, was a fundamental objective of the
voyages of discovery by Magellan, Bartholomew Dias, Vasco Da Gama,
Columbus and the other great navigators of the late 15 th and early 16th
Centuries. Their voyages were financed by the wealthy, and rapidly
expanding kingdoms of Portugal and Spain directly. The monarchies of
these nations directly financed the voyages, and immediately claimed all
discovered territories for themselves. The Catholic Church sanctioned
these possessions and immediately sent missionaries to convert the natives.
This was done at the same time that soldiers, armed with guns and cannons
established colonies at various strategic locations around the globe. Each
site was chosen with care. Strategic importance was paramount, in terms of
strategy in the war between the various colonising (European) nations, and
the war against the people resisting enslavement, for colonization always
brought enslavement.
The role of, initially, the Catholic Church, and later the Protestant Churches
in aiding, abetting and sanctioning the expansion of various European
empires, despite the fact that it was a vehicle for slavery and exploitation,
must be acknowledged if one is to understand the history of genocide in the
modern world. In 1494 Pope Alexander VI gave divine sanction for the
division of all new lands between the monarchies of Spain and Portugal.
King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, who had financed Christopher
Columbus were given the hemisphere (half-globe) West of the Azores
islands in the Atlantic Ocean (North, South and Central America), and the
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King of Portugal, John II, was granted any discoveries in the Eastern
Hemisphere (Africa and Asia), since he had financed Bartholomew Dias,
who had first sailed around the southern tip of Africa, discovering a sea
route to the Indian Ocean and thus to the valuable spice islands the East
Indies.
When the monarchies of Holland, England and France developed sufficient
naval power to challenge the Spanish and Portuguese fleets, they took little
notice of the papal decree of Alexander, and claimed the support of their
rival Protestant Churches in their rival territorial claims. Inevitably the
desired divine sanction was given without requiring demands or
executions of the clergy, although under Henry VIII, who arranged for the
(his) British Parliament to appoint him head of the English Church in
1534. Ironically, Thomas Cromwell, Henrys First Minister, who had
convinced Parliament of the merits of this dubious act, was one of Henrys
many friends, enemies and wives the despot had executed when their utility
was no longer evident to him. Another friend that Henry VIII had executed
was the writer and philosopher Thomas More, who had written the satirical
classic Utopia in 1516 and was regarded as one of Britains leading
intellectuals. Thomas More had spoken publicly against Henry being made
head of the English Church, resulting in his execution in 1535 after 15
months imprisonment in the Tower of London. John Fisher, the bishop of
Rochester was executed on Henrys orders, also in 1535, for the same
reason.
Henry VIII ascended the British throne at the age of 18 and ruled the British
Empire until his death in the year 1547 at the age of 56. During this time he
squandered much wealth in wars against his French and Spanish rivals. To
replendish the Royal coffers he seized, with the assistance of his First
Minister, Thomas Cromwell, the lands and property of the Catholic Church
in Britain. This occurred after his break with the papacy due to the refusal of
the pontiff, Pope Clement VII to annul his marriage to Catherine of
Aragon, the Spanish princess he had married in 1508. Catherine, who was
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previously Henrys sister-in-law (she was the widow of Henrys older

brother Arthur), was the daughter of King Ferdinand of Spain, who had been
granted the Western Hemisphere with his wife Queen Isabella by the
Spanish-born Pope Alexanders papal decree of 1494.
Henry VIIIs main foe during the many years he waged war against the
French was King Francis, who died, aged 53, on the 31 st of March in 1547,
only two months after Henry. Francis had waged war, for many years,
against the Habsburg emperor Charles V, for control of the European
mainland and the newly discovered territories in the Americas. Charles, the
son of Philip the Fair and Joanna the Mad, was the grandson of
Ferdinand II of Aragon, the husband of Queen Isabella of Castile. Ferdinand
and Isabella had united their kingdoms in 1479, ten years after their
marriage, resulting in a shared empire centred in Spain. At the time, the main
threat to Spanish territorial ambitions came from the neighbouring monarchy
of Portugal, which, after a four-year war (1475-1479) was granted, by the
Spanish monarchy, a monopoly of trade and navigation along the entire West
African coast. When the explorer Bartholomew Dias, sponsored by John II
of Portugal, rounded the Cape of Good Hope (which he initially named the
Cape of Storms) in 1488, the territorial claims of the Portuguese expanded
dramatically, to include the entire Eastern Hemisphere.
One of King Henry VIIIs enduring legacies is the Royal College of
Physicians, which he established at the urging of the physician Thomas
Linacre. The Royal College of Physicians has remained, to this day, a
powerful force in medical politics, controlling the system of medical
qualifications throughout the British Empire (and later the British
Commonwealth). Henry VIII also presided over the formation of the United
Company of Barbers and Surgeons in 1540, appointing Thomas Vicary, the
Sergeant Surgeon of Henrys army, as Master of the new union. The
United Company subsequently became the Royal College of Surgeons (in
1800). In Medicine: the art of healing (1992), the politics surrounding the
formation of the United Company of Barbers and Surgeons is described:
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In London, prior to 1540, there were two distinct groups of

surgeons who were in fierce competition over the right to supervise
those who wished to practice that craft. The more elite of the two was
the unincorporated Guild of Surgeons, with perhaps twoscore
members who had learned their skills while serving in military
campaigns. The other was the much larger group of the Barbers
Guild, who had distinguished themselves from their fraters who had
only practiced barbering. With 185 members, this was the largest of
the livery companies in London.
The amalgamation into the new United Company of Barbers and
Surgeons was advantageous to both organizations. The status of the
barbers was elevated by their association with the elite surgeons and
by their separation from the pure shavers and hairdressers. For the
surgeons, the advantage lay in the increase in total numbers and the
much larger treasury of the men with whom they had been linked.
(p.40)
The system of government and civic infrastructure Australia were set up by
British colonial authorities in the early 20 th Century. The official head of
government in Australia was the British monarch, referred to in government
laws as The Crown. When Australia was formed as a Federal State in
1901, the Governor General, Australias official Head of Government, was
appointed by the English monarch. The Governor General maintained
executive powers over the elected government in Australia, according to the
Australian Constitution (which was actually British-designed, and thus
maintains British control over the Australian people, and the land they
occupy). At present the Queen of England, Elizabeth II, is the official
monarch of Australia, and thus the owner of Crown lands in Australia,
according to the Australian constitution. On 20th November 1926, the present
Queens grandfather, George V, declared that the British Empire would
henceforth be known as the British Commonwealth of Nations, of which
Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Newfoundland should
have equal status with Britain as members (Burne, 1991, p.1088). King
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George assumed the title George V, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain,
Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas, King, Defender of the
Faith, Emperor of India. The faith that George and his armies defended
(and attacked with) was the Anglican religion, as defined and ordained by
the Church of England (Anglican Church). This religion had been founded
by the notorious King Henry VIII, who arranged for himself to be appoined
head of the new English Church when broke from the Catholic Church
because the Roman Pope refused to annul his marriage to Catherine of
Aragon, so he could marry again. Henry VIII had been granted the title
Defender of the Faith by an earlier pope because of his military support
against the Vaticans enemies. The title Emperor of India shows clearly
that George V regarded himself as the owner of this ancient land, and of his
various dominions. It was thus not really a common-wealth it was a
system of Imperialism under a new name and a new organizational structure.
The white colonies and dominions (Australia, New Zealand, Canada,
South Africa and Newfoundland) could aspire to being equal members in
the British Commonwealth, but those in the colonies and protectorates
mainly populated by people of colour were to continue as inferior
members.
In 1936 George V died leaving the throne for his son Edward VIII, who
reigned for less than a year, abdicating the throne to marry the twicedivorced Mrs Wallis Simpson, and American. The fact that Mrs Simpson
was divorced and an American national made it impossible, according to the
kings legal advisers, for the Edward VIII to marry her, so he abdicated in
favour of his younger brother George VI, the father of the current Queen of
England, Elizabeth II.
During the Second World War (1939-1945) the political concept of a
Commonwealth was exploited to full effect by the British Imperial armed
forces. Commonwealth partners from around the British Empire were
recruited to fight for the kings forces and Allies, against the unholy
alliance between the Germans, Italians, Spanish and Japanese, as the
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American President Franklin D. Roosevelt described the Axis alliance in

his presidential address to the nation in December, 1940. It was during this
radio broadcast that Roosevelt urged Americans that the United States of
America must urgently become the great arsenal of democracy:
As planes and ships and guns and shells are produced, your
Government, with its defense experts, can then determine how best to
use them to defend this hemisphere. The decision as to how much
shall be sent abroad and how much shall remain at home must be
made on the basis of our over-all military necessities.
We must be the great arsenal of democracy. For us this is an
emergency as serious as war itself. We must apply ourselves to our
task with the same resolution, the same sense of urgency, the same
spirit of patriotism and sacrifice, as we would show were we at war.
(Roosevelt, 1940, quoted in As It Happened: A History of the United
States, Sellers, et al, 1975, p.695)
In his broadcast to the nation Roosevelt said that we are planning our own
defense with the utmost urgency; and in its vast scale we must integrate the
war needs of Britain and the other free nations resisting aggression. The
other free nations in President Roosevelts terms, included South Africa,
Canada, Australia and New Zealand, which were members of the
Commonwealth of equal status with Britain according to George Vs
proclamation of 1926. Officers from these (white) nations had been placed
in positions of authority over the various coloured soldiers in His
Majestys Army, since the British Government, under the eugenist Winston
Churchill, had been integrating its own war needs. In His Majestys
armed forces it was possible for a dark-skinned man to become a lowranking officer, but only as frequently as Galtons theories would have
predicted this. The command positions were all occupied by white men, all
of whom had a good education, meaning that they went to elite schools
and universities. These men were rarely killed in the kinds of war the British
waged while the hordes of Indians, Africans and Australians who rushed to
defend the Commonwealth occupied the front line. They were the
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occasionally honoured, and frequently killed, privates, who formed a

buffer zone between the enemys bullets and the officers who gave the
orders. The officers had been trained to order their men to keep fighting.
The Second World War was fought on several fronts. These have relevance
to the scientific and medical information to follow, so I will provide a brief
overview of the politics of WWII as I perceive them. I did not learn anything
about the Second World War at school or university, and have only a limited
knowledge of its details, however most people have gathered that the Second
World War included a war between certain European governments for
control of Europe and Africa, and a war between the Japanese Imperial
goverment and the government of the United States of America. Predictably,
given the victors of the Second World War, Germany and Japan are usually
seen as being the aggressors in the Second World War, while Britain and the
USA are seen as the defenders of freedom and democracy. While it is true
that the Germans and Japanese had Imperial designs, the British and
Americans did also. British efforts to dominate the world, and create a
global empire, long predated even the foundation of Germany. At the
outbreak of the Second World War the British government claimed supreme
authority over a fifth of the worlds land surface: including dominions and
possessions on every continent. The jewel in the crown of the Empire
was India, the population of which was very much greater than that of the
British Isles. India, which had been wrested from Moslem moghul rulers by
the British in the 1700s, had long been a source of enormous wealth for the
Royal British Royal Family and their allies. Many of the crown jewels
were given to the British by the elite Indians, who were allowed to
maintain their priviledged position in His (British) Majestys Indian Empire,
provided they pay their taxes and allow their people to be exploited and
enslaved. The rule of British Raj continued in India through the long reign
of Queen Victoria, during which time Indian indentured labourers (slaves
from Tamil-speaking Southern India) were sent to various British dominions,
including Queensland (Australia), Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and British territories
and protectorates in the Caribbean Sea, Indian Ocean and Pacific Ocean.
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In all these areas the British established plantations which were

administered by whites and where most of the work was done by blacks
(of either African or Indian racial heritage).
I was born in London in 1960. My father had graduated in medicine at
Cambridge University in the 1950s, and, while I attended primary school in
Kent he obtained his MD (specialist degree) after writing a thesis on the
effects of diuretic drugs on potassium excretion by the kidneys. After a crash
course in tropical medicine my father obtained a research grant from the
Nuffield Foundation to establish a research laboratory at the Kandy Hospital,
a public hospital in the hill town of Kandy, in Sri Lanka, then called Ceylon.
My parents were both born in Sri Lanka, and they regarded the change as
going home. For my older sister and I it was leaving our home and
adapting to a new one. At the age of 8 I did not find the change traumatic, as
far as I can recall, but my sister, who is a year older than me, remained
homesick for England for many years. In Kandy, which became my home
for the next 7 years, I attended a private boys school owned by the Anglican
Church Trinity College, Kandy. My father worked at the Kandy Hospital
and immersed himself in medical research, doing studies on anaemia,
urinary tract infections, fluorosis (toxicity due to high levels of fluoride in
water from rural wells), and other subjects. My mother, who has a degree in
Zoology from the University of Ceylon, helped my father in his medical
research and in writing up the research. Thus I was exposed to medical
research in the Third World at a young age, and witnessed, first hand, how
Indian tea-estate labourers were being treated in Sri Lanka. They were
treated atrociously.
When the British conquered the hill kingdom of Kandy in the early 1800s
they succeeded, where the Portuguese and Dutch had failed, to gain political
control of the whole of Ceylon. They never developed cultural control,
although for many years they tried. This was done by setting up systems of
government and education along the lines of other colonies. Ceylon was
then regarded as the pearl of the Indian Ocean a rich, fertile island in the
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centre of the trade routes between Europe, Africa and the far East. For many
centuries the kings of Ceylon had exported spices and precious stones to
Arab and Chinese traders, and later with Portuguese and Dutch ones. The
Portuguese were the first to try and take control of the island. This was in the
1600s, and the Portuguese, with their guns and cannons were able to take
control of the coastal kingdoms in the south of Ceylon. The Portuguese,
French and British had already established armed fortresses along the coast
of eastern and western coasts of India, during the 1600s and 1700s. The
Dutch, however, had control of the East Indies now called Indonesia,
and then also known as the Spice Islands or Moluccas. The Dutch took
control of the ancient cities of Java, creating a Dutch-speaking capital of the
Dutch East Indies, which they named Batavia (now Jakarta). The Spanish
controlled most of the South and Central American mainland, with the
exception of Brazil, which was a Portuguese colony. The Spanish also
controlled, during the age of cargo slavery, the south-east Pacific islands still
called the Philippines. In 1898, the United States of America took control
of the Philippines, along with Cuba, Puerto Rico and Guam in a treaty with
the Spanish, which was signed in France (the Paris Treaty of 10.12.1898).
When the British and Dutch developed their own navies, in the 1600s and
1700s, they predictably challenged the Portuguese and Spanish claims.
Pointing to the considerable atrocities being committed by the Iberian
soldiers, the Protestant English and Dutch explained to the natives that they
hoped to exploit, that the Spanish and Portuguese were cruel Catholics who
had misunderstood the true word of God. This, claimed the Protestant
missionaries from England and the Nederlands, was to be found in the King
James Version of the Bible which was duly translated into hundreds of
languages. The British and Dutch colonists did not approach established
civilizations with guns in the first instance; they used, instead, flattery and
bribery, and, failing that, threats. Although their ships were armed with
cannons and carried soldiers with guns and swords, the British and Dutch
governments and monarchies kept their hands clean by having the dirty work
of betrayal, bribery and slavery to be organized and implemented by
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trading companies. The British East India Company and the Dutch East
India Company, two such companies that were given authority to kill,
exploit and enslave in the name of their respective monarchs, are of special
relevance to events in Africa during the Second World War that may point to
the cause of the current epidemic of AIDS in South Africa.
The League of Nations, the predecessor of the United Nations, was
formed in 1919, at the conclusion of the First World War, with the stated aim
of preventing further wars between rival European states. This political
organization between 27 nations including Britain and several of its
dominions, France, and other victorious European nations was instigated by
the US President Woodrow Wilson, who had presented his famous 14 point
peace plan in 1914. In 1919, his plan was adapted by the Allies at the
Versailles Peace conference in Paris, at which the formal suurender of the
Germans and the formation of the League of Nations, was negotiated.
According to the Versailles Treaty, Germany was stripped of its colonial
possessions, and much of its territory, and was to pay 20 billion gold
marks in reparations. Germany was to be demilitarised and surrender
territory lived in by 7 million people. The separate states of Austria,
Czechoslovakia, and Hungary were formed from the fragments of the once
huge Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg Empire, which had, in its heyday as the
Holy Roman Empire, controlled much of Europe and Iberia, and much of
the Americas. The Scandinavian states, Poland, Belgium, and France gained
territory from Germany in Europe in the Versailles Treaty, as did Romania,
Italy, Greece and the newly formed state of Yugoslavia. The following year
the allocation of Germanys colonies was decided by the victorious
Allies. This is where the real wealth of the German Empire lay.
According to the League of Nations mandate of 10 August 1920, the German
territories in East Africa (Tanganika and Uganda) was mandated to the
British, along with German South-West Africa mandated to the whitesupremacist Union of South Africa. These areas were known to be extremely
rich in diamond deposits, especially the coast of Namibia in South West
Africa. They also contained rich deposits of gold, uranium and other
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precious minerals. The mandate thus gave British mining companies access
to extraordinary mineral riches in Southern and Eastern Africa. The 1920
League of Nations Mandate also added territory to British and French
possessions in West Africa. The small East African states of Burundi and
Rwanda, centres of the 1984 African AIDS epidemic were added, by the
League of Nations, to the Belgian possessions in central Africa. Since the
1890s, King Leopold II of Belgium had claimed all of the Congo as his
personal property, instituting a system of cruel tyranny and slavery by white
Belgian authorities over a black population divided between privileged
Tutsis and subjugated Hutus. The atrocities being committed by the Belgians
in the Congo were publicised by the British, in particular, in the early 1900s,
resulting in the Belgian government taking over administration of the
territory from King Leopold, in 1908.
The Congo, now the independent African nation of Zaire, is where the AIDS
epidemic in Africa is said to have begun, and was the worst hit of the
African countries in the 1980s. Zaire, like Southern Africa, is rich in
minerals, and also contains the last large remnants of the tropical rainforest
that once covered so much of Africa. It is also the last remaining home of
our closest primate relatives, chimpanzees, which are, like many rainforest
animals, threatened with extinction at the hands of mankind.
Other than Australia, the central focus of this book is on Africa, a continent I
have only visited on a single occasion, in 1990. At this time I briefly visited
Zimbabwe, Kenya and Tanzania. Knowing little about the history of Africa, I
was amazed when we visited the Great Zimbabwe Ruins that Cecil
Rhodes refused to believe could have been built by any people other than
whites despite overwheming evidence to the contrary. These are the
remains of a Southern African civilization dating back centuries before
Bartholomew Diaz sailed around the Cape of Good Hope, encouraging his
sponsor, the king of Portugal to claim, for himself and his family, the whole
of Africa. The Spanish, however, disputed the Portuguese claim, and the
warring monarchs sought the decision of the religious leader of their people
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and the remnants of the Roman Empire the Roman Pope, head of the
Catholic Church. The Pope decreed in the 1490s that the Portuguese King
John II could have the Eastern Hemisphere (east of the Azores Islands in
the Atlantic Ocean, and thus Africa and Asia) while Queen Isabella and King
Ferdinand of Spain could have the Western Hemisphere (the newlydiscovered Americas, hence the term New World various European history
books).
The kingdom of Kongo (Congo) was approached by the Portuguese, in the
1500s, as a possible ally against the Moslem Empire of the Ottoman Turks,
against who the Crusades had raged for many centuries. The Moslem Moors,
allied with the Ottomans, had ruled the southern Iberian peninsula (Spain
and Portugal) until the 1300s, and the Catholic empires of Southern Europe
were eager for revenge against their traditional enemies the Moslems. The
Congo kingdom, which was ruled by the slave-trading and owning King,
became the primary source of African (negro) slaves for the Portuguese.
In Southern Africa, where the Germans fought against the British and
Belgians for control of the diamond-rich coast of South-West Africa, and
where Galton made his name, the AIDS epidemic is out of control. Over one
thousand people in South Africa alone are said to be infected with HIV every
day. These are all predicted to die within the next 15 years by Australias
premier AIDS advisory and research centre, the Macfarlane Burnet Centre in
Melbourne.
Frank Macfarlane Burnet, after whom the Macfarlane Burnet Centre,
Australias premier virology institute is named, was a eugenist. In fact, he
was still promoting eugenics in the 1970s when it was not a popular subject
for public discussion. He admits this in his 1978 book Endurance of Life,
when he also writes about the eugenic value of selective infanticide. The
Macfarland Burnet Centre presently claims, in its promotional literature that
Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet was very concerned about overpopulation.
They fail to mention that inherent in the much-voiced fear of
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overpopulation has always been the ugly combination of racism and

xenophobia. They also fail to mention that Sir Frank was also a member of
the notorious Order of the Rising Sun, the Right wing group that planned
to create a master race along eugenic lines by genociding people using
biological warfare, and some of whose members were arrested in 1972 with
30 kilograms of typhoid bacteria cultures (Barnaby, 1997, p.37). Macfarlane
Burnet was decorated by a Second Class of the Order of the Rising Sun in
1961, three years after winning the Galen Medal of the Worshipful Society
of Apothecaries of London (1958) and a year after winning the Nobel Prize
in Medicine/Physiology (1960) having been a Fellow of the Royal Society
since 1942.
Closely related to the history of genocide is the dreadful use of chemical and
biological weapons and warfare. The deliberate creation of disease in
targetted populations has a long history, dating back to at least the Middle
Ages, when bodies of people who had died from the bubonic plague were
thrown over the walls of beseiged cities to infect the surrounding enemy
(with the additional objective of avoiding disease from the dead bodies).
The dispossession of indigenous people around the world was justified by
Europeans with imperialist designs in similar ways in the Americas, in
Africa and in Australia, and in all three alcohol was used as a means of
attacking native populations. Describing indigenous populations as
uncivilised savages in need of protection from morally and intellectually
superior (white) masters was a widely-used justification for enslavement of
these black, red and brown people it was claimed as necessary for the
development of backward races, or at least better than their previous state
of barbarity. Alongside this development and a central means of its
implementation was the stealing and brainwashing of children in various
Church-run educational institutions. It was seen as a divinely-sanctioned
obligation to save the souls of pagan or heathen races, by force if necessary.
This resulted in what has been subsequently defined by International Law as
cultural genocide.
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This book has been more concerned with physical genocide than cultural
genocide, although the two are clearly related. Physical genocide results in
cultural genocide and destroying the culture of a targetted population results
in the premature illness and death of members of the culture concerned.
Generally, and in the case of Aboriginal people in Australia, physical
genocide and cultural genocide have been employed as parallel strategies.
In this book I have explored the possibility that an active eugenics
conspiracy has existed behind the scenes for at least the past 130 years, and
that genocide has been occurring in Australia and Africa, in particular, for
over 200 years. I have assembled some pieces of a complex puzzle, one
often confused by euphemisms and medical jargon, and there is much more
work in this area to be done. Whether or not AIDS is the result of a eugenics
program, I have no doubt that disease creation is a massive problem in the
modern world and that medical graduates such as myself have a
responsibility to look critically at our own knowledge and mistakes. I hope
others will join me in the search for the true history of medical science, so
that we can use biological knowledge for health. For all people.
REFERENCES
73.Allen, T., Thomas, A. (1992) Poverty and Development in the 1990s.
Oxford University Press (in association with Open University): UK
74.American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of
Mental Disorders ; APA: New York (1994)
75.Arieff, I. (2001) The world in 2050: older, poorer and very crowded, The
Age, 2.3.2001
76.Aronson, T. (1968) The Coburgs of Belgium. Cassell: London, UK
77.Ayana, R. AIDS: The True Story. Nexus: Australia (1988)
78.Baglin, D., Moore, D. (1970) The Dark Australians. Australia and New
Zealand Book Company: Sydney and Melbourne
79.Barnaby, F. (1976) preface to Medical Protection against Chemical
Warfare Agents. SIPRI: Sweden
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80.Barnaby, F. (Editor) (1988) The Gaia Peace Atlas. Pan: London, Sydney
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APPENDIX: POLITICAL DIAGRAMS

11.The politics of schizophrenia
12.Political connections of the Mental Health Research Institute
13.Psychiatry disease promotion in Australia
14.Analysis of propaganda from Australian Correctional Management
15.Rockefeller corporation biowarfare connections
16.Biological & chemical warfare industry in Melbourne, Australia
17.The recycling of blood
18.The politics of AIDS
19.Summary of MBC International Health Unit programs
20.Summary of MBC International Health Unit programs cont.
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