The Review Column: Robert Kennedy (1968)

The Review Column from the July 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

Robert Kennedy
One of the more remarkable things about the assassination of Robert Kennedy was the emotional identification with the dead man on this side of the Atlantic.

This was more than a matter of sorrow at the Kennedys’ tragic history; it was more than awe at the family’s glamour. Robert Kennedy was mourned as one who stood for the poor and underprivileged, for racial integration and a more humane society. He was venerated as a rich man who cared deeply for the common people.

Was this true or false?

Kennedy was first and foremost a politician—one who drove ruthlessly for the top. It is no new thing, for a man on the march to power to speak up for the underdog; the British Labour government, to give only one example, is full of such people.

This is the true perspective on the famous Kennedy crusade. The simple fact is that they have always played for votes; when Martin Luther King was arrested at a crucial moment in the 1960 election, the late President Kennedy did not judge the matter on grounds of Negro interests but on how many coloured votes he could swing by taking King’s side, and whether they would be enough to make it worth while.

Similarly, Robert Kennedy provoked much hatred— perhaps also that of his alleged assassin—by championing Israeli interests in the Middle East. This was a direct bid for the Jewish vote, both in the Californian primary election and in the vital state of New York which Kennedy represented in the Senate. 

The dead man’s record in office is no more sympathetic. In September 1961 he warned that America was prepared to use nuclear weapons. When the Berlin wall went up he favoured a military confrontation with the Russians. As he himself admitted, he was once a hawk over Vietnam.

On these, and many other, issues Robert Kennedy was not on the side of the common man; he was standing strongly for the interests of American capitalism, even if the lives of millions were at stake.

The assassination was a horrible and frightening affair but so is the capitalist system Kennedy stood for. His was just a single life; capitalism has killed millions.


Germs at Porton Down
The recent protests at the Ministry of Defence germ and gas warfare laboratory at Porton Down have had one rather surprising result. As if to show us that there is nothing harmful going on there, the plant will hold a number of open days, when we shall all be able to see as much of what the scientists are up to as the government thinks fit

Perhaps we shall be encouraged to make a day of it— take the family for an outing on a cheap excursion from one of the nationalised transport undertakings, picnic under the shadows of menacingly blank windows, take home a souvenir test tube of anthrax or botulism.

Very few people will be taken in by the open days. When they are shown the vaccines against disease which Porton Down produces, they will probably reflect that such results are inevitable. The laboratory was set up for one primary purpose—research into methods of waging war by administering gas and disease.

At the moment the likelihood is that gas and germ warfare has too may practical difficulties. So, at one time, did the nuclear bomb. We may be sure that Porton Down is working on the problem.

One obvious characteristic of biological warfare is that is would kill people without damaging property. To the capitalist class, who always find the destruction of modern war such a problem, this is a great advantage. It is enough of an incentive to keep the retorts at Porton Down bubbling until they come up with a weapon which can be used—and which will probably defy belief for its horror.

And this—this waste of human knowledge and skill and inventiveness, this preoccupation with the techniques of mass killing—is what modern capitalism has come to.

What a way to celebrate

Even those who have lost their illusions about the TUC must have been surprised at the way that professedly working class body celebrated its centenary last month.

In London, they held a great banquet, which could hardly be called a salute to the memory of the men who suffered so much to establish the right of combination. Even more, the banquet was devoured at the Guildhall which, as much as any building can, stands for the durable fortunes of the British capitalist class.

In the chair was the Lord Mayor of London, who did not come to his office by way of martyrdom but who is elected by a few other very rich men, mainly financiers and merchants.

Along the top table were the Prime Minister and Barbara Castle, both of whom are busily carrying on the anti-working class policies which the Labour government has followed since it took office and which the TUC has never seriously resisted.

Also there were the top representatives of the employers, officials of the Confederation of British Industry like John Davies. With the exception of George Woodcock, this lot were all got up in evening dress and the whole gathering glowed with ribbons and sparkled with jewels and medals.

Of course such an event would not have been complete without the Queen and she also was present; in fact the trade unionists and business men had only a narrow escape from having her husband there as well.

The Queen made a speech—a sort of primary school exercise on the history of the unions, loaded with whitewash about the callous persecution of the early unionists, hinting that it was all a misunderstanding and that the employers were on our side all along.

Anyone who could witness this without actually being sick might have wondered what the Tolpuddle Martyrs and their contemporaries would have made of it all. But the TUC has come a long way in a hundred years, even if it is in a direction never dreamed of by the pioneers.

Guinea Pigs and Mind Games (1995)

From the January 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

The last year has seen a steady stream of reports from the United States about the biological and nuclear weapons testing programmes of the US government and its agencies. As many have suspected, the US has been using military and civilian human “guinea pigs" for several decades in bio-warfare and radiation experiments. Some disclosures have come via requests from concerned individuals under the US Freedom of Information Act while the Department of Energy has released a number of documents which reveal America’s true nuclear heritage.

The liberal Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary offered “full disclosure” early last year of the decades of abuse of an unwitting population by the government, military and scientific establishment. Reports in the US media have so far focused on the release of information concerning the horrific injection of humans with plutonium without informed consent. Rather less has been reported about the facts which first came out, “that throughout the forties and fifties the military dropped radioactive dust over vast areas of the Western States . . .  in an on-going test of the biological effects of radiation poisoning” (EMF, ELF and Cold War Nuclear Guinea Pigs by Jim Martin in Flatland 11).

President Clinton, recognising the potential danger of such disclosures to the authority of the US state, has distanced himself from O’Leary, characterising her stance as “very emotional”. Indeed, in recent months O’Leary has announced that the scope of the inquiry will be limited due to what she terms “national security" considerations. Even so, sufficient information has come forward about the fascistic methods of bio-warfare testing used on the US working class to cause widespread concern, if not in some quarters outright panic. The revelations thus far are only the tip of an extremely dangerous iceberg, and given the nature of some of them, we can only wonder at those horrors that have been deliberately kept secret.

But enough has been disclosed to reveal the true nature of the American ruling class's contempt for its subjects. Here is a cross-section of recent disclosures in the US of experiments in bio-warfare and radiation testing over the last fifty years, (additional sources: Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Flatland magazine and Lobster):

• 1942-6 Dr Joseph G. Hamilton of the University of California hospital at San Francisco proposed a radioactive aerosol as a military weapon. Experiments were conducted giving “lethal dose” exposures to terminal patients. At least one of the “terminal” patients had been misdiagnosed: he only had an ulcer.
• 1945 in Miami, Florida, radioactive needles were placed in an Army private's nostrils. At the Vanderbilt University Medical Center 751 late-term pregnant women were given radioactive water 30 times background radiation levels at a free clinic.
• 1948-52 Twelve “battlefield radiation” tests were carried out over Tennessee and Utah. The US Air Force dropped radioactive cluster bombs dispersing as much as 15,000 curies in open-air fall-out tests.
• 1951 In Virginia, aspergillus fumagatus, a potentially lethal bacterium, was released upon mainly black workers at the Norfolk Naval Supply Center.
• 1951 In a nation-wide test 235 newborn babies were injected with radioactive iodide. In Memphis six out of every seven babies selected were black.
• 1957 Mainly non-English speaking Eskimos in Alaska were given an apple and orange each for their participation in Army tests to inject them with radioactive iodide.
• 1963 At least 34 underground nuclear tests in the US released significant levels of radiation into the atmosphere.
• 1953-65 The CIA initiated a full-scale mind-control programme under the code-name MK-ULTRA. Experiments included lobotomics, electroshock, sensory deprivation and drugs According to the book Acid Dreams: The CIA, LSD and the Sixties Rebellion by Martin Lee and Bruce Shlain, “nearly fifteen hundred military personnel have served as human guinea pigs in LSD experiments conducted by the US Army Medical Corps". In one experiment, black inmates at the Lexington Narcotics Hospital were given LSD for 75 days in gradually increased doses. The US government has paid out millions of dollars in recent years to settle lawsuits brought against them over MK-ULTRA.
• 1966 In a case since well-documented in the British press, retarded children in a school in Massachusetts were given doses of radiation in their breakfast cereal
• 1970 A recent Freedom of Information Act request produced a NASA report entitled Implantable Biotelemetry Systems, describing the development of radio receivers which could be implanted in the brain. Many US citizens claim to have undergone surgery for such implantation and lawsuits are currently pending.
• 1973 Prisoners in Oregon and Washington agreed to have their testicles dipped in radioactive water for the princely sum of S5..00 per week.

It has been estimated that it has cost $200 billion in the US alone to clean up after the nuclear research of the Cold War. The human cost is incalculable. Furthermore, it is likely that the experiments conducted in the US have been replicated to certain degrees in other countries with nuclear programmes like Britain, Russia and South Africa. And bio-warfare experimentation continues to be a growth area not only in the "acceptable” and "democratic” citadels of capitalism like the US but in the up-and-coming gangster states also, from Iraq to North Korea.

Meanwhile in Britain it has just been revealed in an answer to Shadow Defence Secretary David Clark by the Director of the MOD’s Porton Down militaiy research establishment that LSD experiments were carried out on British troops in the 1960s. Clark says he is deeply concerned about this — and well he might be, for it was Labour in power for much of the time when the experiments were being carried out. According to a report in the Sunday Times (6 November) retired military personnel are still suffering severe side-effects from horrific experiments, including where they were strapped to a table before being administered with high doses of hallucinogenic drugs. It is claimed that large numbers were involved in brutal tests at Porton Down — 7,000 alone from 1944 to 1959 and many more thereafter. The Sunday Times states that “some were told that they would be assisting with research into a cure for the common cold; instead they say they were given nerve gas”.

What could illustrate the barbarism of the capitalist system better, even during so-called times of peace? Here for all to see is the competitive drive towards armed conflict ensuring that nation states treat the working class alternatively as cannon fodder and as guinea pigs for their inhumane and murderous experiments. As socialists have always contended, capitalism is not worth dying for, it is clear that less and less is it a system worthy of working-class support either - civilian or military. •

Dave Perrin

Councils of the "Peaceful." (1922)

Editorial from the June 1922 issue of the Socialist Standard

Some time ago there was great jubilation (for the worker's benefit!) in the papers over America's advocacy of reducing or abolishing armies and navies. A conference was held in Washington and all powers agreed to reduce armaments—so long as each was left better armed than any of the others! Throughout the business America was hailed as an advocate of peace.

During the discussions, however, America was significantly silent on the question of aerial armament. A little while after we learned that American chemists had devised a method of using deadly germs whereby aerial machines could drop small quantities (germ bombs) on to cities and destroy thousands of the inhabitants more efficaciously than by the cruder method of ordinary explosive bombs.

From the Daily News (10/5/1922) we learn that America has progressed still further in her peaceful pursuits. American inventors have now devised an almost noiseless and invisible aeroplane.

  “The significance of such experiments was revealed the other day, when a huge ‘ bomber,' carrying a load equivalent to enough missiles to lay streets in ruins, climbed—thanks to the special preparation of its engines—until it was at a height impossible during the raiding of the war.”
   "Here is seen the full menace, the winged monster, which, with devices able to silence the roar of its high-flying motors, has added to its terrors laboratory secrets which—applied to a machine already high in the air against a vast elusive background—confer on it the power of a virtual invisibility.”

In face of such things as this workers are still being deluded into supporting campaigns for the reduction of armaments and the abolishing of war. Those who control such campaigns have the object in view of reducing the expenses of running the Capitalist system. The success of such campaigns would increase unemployment but would not materially assist in preventing future wars.

The pretty little game of political chess that is going on at Geneva, and the recent stir over the action of one of the competitors in the Russian oil scramble, should make it obvious to anyone that war is never likely to be a remote contingency so long as capitalism lasts.

Comparatively small wars have been going on ever since “peace ” was established! But another one of the gigantic kind has already been foreshadowed by no less a person than Lloyd George—the man who was so emphatic about the last big struggle, signifying the end of all wars. More humorous still it is the Allies that are falling out now—falling out. over the spoils of “victory.”

Commenting on the general situation the Daily News (10/5/22) says :—

   "Nobody will deny that the danger of war, of war on a vast scale, within the life's span of those who have survived the tremendous slaughter of recent years, is real and formidable.”

Once more let us press the question: What concern of the working class is any war except the class war? All wars outside of the class war are waged in the interests of the Capitalists. Although the workers do the fighting the only reward they obtain is that obtained by the survivors of the too recent carnage in Europe—homes that require heroism to live in.

A New Campaign: Join the CCD (1962)

From the July 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

No, this is not a misprint. It stands for The Campaign for Chemical Disarmament which, doubtless, will soon start up when frustrated members of CND and others looking for good causes to follow have digested the facts recently given in an article in The Guardian under the title "U.S. Arsenal revised. Chemicals for defence”.

From the article is appears that the U.S. Army's projected expenditure for 1963 on research and development shows a drop of 20 per cent, on nuclear weapons and an increase of 67 per cent, on chemical and biological warfare. This, by the way, is a “faint ray of hope” for humanity, according to the former Chief Officer of the U.S. Army, General Creasy, who is reported to have said in 1959 that these weapons could lead to a “less total form of war". Apart from other possible results of chemical warfare, such as the interruption of nerve signals in the body causing convulsions and death, there are such effects as temporary paralysis, deafness, blindness and mental aberration. So much for less total forms of war!

Elsewhere in the article is mentioned the Hague Protocol signed by certain nations after the First World War and ratified by Great Britain (although not the United States) by which it was agreed not to use poisonous gases and chemicals in warfare. Yet a few weeks ago consternation was caused by the finding of hundreds of cylinders of mustard gas on a beach in Wales, manufactured by Britain during the Second World War and subsequently dumped. So much for the agreements between nations which the CND and similar organisations would have us believe will preserve us against the use of terrible weapons. The fact that gas was not used during the 1939/45 war only means that it was recognised as a rather inefficient method of murdering opponents, depending as it does on weather conditions. The same attitude, it may be added, did not apply to the napalm bomb or the flame thrower.

And so far we have only been discussing chemical weapons. So-called biological warfare is still very secret, although a year or two ago it leaked out that scientists were working on germs which could wipe out cities with far less trouble than hydrogen bombs and, what is more, leave property unharmed!

History has shown that summit meetings, treaties and promises come to nothing when the operations of capitalism force governments to protect their spheres of interest, if necessary, by war. Weapons will be manufactured secretly and held in reserve for the right moment. Equally we know that governments have not shrunk from using such weapons however terrible, when the interests of capitalism demand it.

Nobody can say that they will not do so again.

S. Goodman

Plague Wars (1999)

Book Review from the September 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Plague Makers: The Secret World of Biological Warfare. Wendy Barnaby. Vision paperbacks, London 1999, pp 214. £9.99.

This interesting book looks at the history of biological weapons; their development this century; who produces them and why; and the attempts to prevent them from being used.

The Persians, Greeks and Romans poisoned wells by throwing corpses into them and, in 1763, a British captain tried to kill North American Indians by giving them blankets from a smallpox hospital. The crudeness of delivery systems in the past led to a belief that biological weapons were not reliable, but the development of modern techniques has led to this assumption being questioned.

Wendy Barnaby points out that biological weapons can be made much more cheaply than nuclear or chemical weapons and that attacks may be impossible to determine from naturally occurring outbreaks of disease.

The destruction that can be wreaked by biological weapons is frightening: "One gram of anthrax could, if distributed effectively, kill more than 100 millions people." And it is not only governments that develop biological weapons; their cheapness makes them available to terrorist groups. It has been estimated that ". . . a major biological arsenal could be built in a room 15-by-15 feet, with £5,000 worth of equipment".

The Aum Shinrikyo sect, responsible for the nerve gas attack in Tokyo's underground in 1995, had 160 barrels of media for growing clostridium botulinum and members of the right-wing supremacist group, Order of the Rising Sun, had more than 30 kilograms of typhoid bacteria in their possession when they were arrested. They planned to poison the water supplies of major cities to create a master race.

The duplicity of governments is demonstrated by the manufacture of biological weapons despite endorsing the 1925 Geneva Protocol which condemned them. Britain produced five million cattle cakes containing anthrax in "Operation Vegetarian" during the Second World War although they were never used despite Churchill's readiness to wage war with them in 1945, prevented only by the cessation of hostilities. The island of Gruinard was contaminated with anthrax in 1942 and remained closed to the public until decontaminated in 1990. Nevertheless, the UN General Assembly was assured in 1969 that Britain had never produced biological weapons. The American programme was even bigger, employing nearly 4,000 people after the war.

Thousands of American prisoners were killed in experiments by the Japanese, but the perpetrators were given immunity from prosecution provided they shared their knowledge. Barnaby shows how utterly ruthless capitalist politicians are in pursuit of power. The apartheid regime in South Africa had a programme to try to develop vaccines that only worked on black people, and a number of political assassinations were carried out with biological and chemical weapons including poisoning Steve Biko with thallium and poisoning three Russian advisers to the ANC by contaminating their food with anthrax.

Between 1949 and 1969, the Pentagon carried out 239 tests, spraying Serratia marcesens and Bacillus globigii over populated areas. Despite claiming that the bacteria were harmless the army decided not to continue trials in case they affected the health of servicemen. On 26 July 1963, Bacillus globigii was released in London's underground to see how it would spread.

The 1925 Geneva Protocol and the 1975 Biological Weapons Convention has had little effect on the manufacture of biological weapons. We cannot know to what extent they are manufactured because of the secrecy with which governments operate. Barnaby states: "a more informed public would want to reinforce the revulsion ordinary people fell about the use of biological weapons" and "a public more alive to the threat posed by biological weapons would back up governments trying to strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention". But governments will always operate in secret because the cut-throat competitive nature of capitalism permits of no alternative. Attempts to reform capitalism and make war more humane are doomed to failure because the availability of naturally-occurring bacteria makes it impossible to police the activities of governments or terrorist groups. Only socialism can eliminate war by removing the profit system which is the driving force for competition and conflict. Unfortunately, in this interesting and well-researching book such a solution is not even considered.

Carl Pinel