CIVIS Foundation Report 13, Spring-Summer 1992 (Part One)

 

 

CIVIS - Killer of the Dream?

 

For the many newcomers into the CIVIS fold let us explain again that CIVIS is the Latin acronym for International Center of Scientific Information on Vivisection. "Vivisection" is the historical term for every kind of cruel or stressful animal experimentation, "whether or not cutting is done", to quote the American Encyclopaedia, and as everyone who has read SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENT knows.

 

Those same readers also know that animal tests are not only useless but counterproductive in medical research.

 

However, while we kept increasing our membership, we were also grieved to discover that some of our erstwhile followers unexpectedly dissented from our policy, which is the very policy that made CIVIS "different" from the run-of-the-mill "animal rights" organisations.

 

What IS our policy? To name names, to call the shots as they come, to rake in the muck and expose it to the germ killing sunlight.

 

But suddenly we discover that some people object to all that. And we don't mean the born dissenters, envious losers, nor the fence-sitters that abound in all walks of life. Much less do we mean the salaried infiltrators disguised as animal rightists. On the contrary. We mean a few of the pure in heart, the genuine, once passionate AVs and declared abolitionists who used to follow confidently in the swath cut by CIVIS, and one day, surprisingly, almost out of the blue, seem to resent our revelations almost as if they were a personal affront. Until a casual conversation unveiled what to our simple mind had seemed a mystery.

 

"MOST PEOPLE HATE HEARING THE TRUTH IF THE TRUTH KILLS THEIR DREAMS. AND CIVIS IS A KILLER OF DREAMS."

 

This hit us as hard as a homing boomerang - and boomerang is the right word, because in the Introduction to 1000 DOCTORS we had already stated as much, saying that most humans, being herd animals, feel safe only in numbers, and are afraid of straying from the herd. They want to share the hopes and thoughts of the majority. And the majority resent being disturbed in the midst of their fondest dream.

 

A brief historical reminder is called for at this point. We can safely say that during the first half of this century the number of doctors who realized that vivisection was a wrong method of medical research and were not afraid to say so, far outnumbered the others in the whole world, with the possible exception of the USA and Canada, where Rockefeller's Drug Trust had already taken over public education ever since the beginning of the century. Then, in the late Fifties, the Thalidomide tragedy struck, providing the first irrefutable, scientific proof soon to be followed by an endless series of similar proofs - that the AV doctors had been right all along. But at that juncture, the profiteers, led in Europe by Britain's chemical industry, recognized the danger and intervened, duplicating in surreptitious ways, through political intrigue, what Rockefeller had done more blatantly half a century earlier in the USA, when he had instituted the General Education Board of America with an initial "gift" of 300 million dollars (in the day of the five-cent cigar).

 

But Rockefeller's lavish gift to the American people was one with iron strings attached: only those medical Faculties that predicated the massive consumption of chemical drugs as the secret to health could be recipients of the Rockefeller largesse, while doctors who healed by natural means were decried as quacks or driven out of the country or into jail. Thus Modem Medicine achieved its only undisputable miracle: turning a population of hardy immigrants and sober pilgrims into a large nation of woebegone medico dependents or drug addicts, for the ever rising profits of Rockefeller's 200 pharmaceutical enterprises - as America's investigative reporter Morris Bealle has so brilliantly recounted in his THE DRUG STORY and THE HOUSE OF ROCKEFELLER, two books never mentioned by the Establishment press nor obtainable in any American bookstore. And the mass media had, then as now, no choice, if they wanted to survive, but to bow to the money boys rather than side with those who had merely unprofitable health to dispense.

 

In England, the chemical industry had one obstacle to overcome that Rockefeller had never had to contend with: a very restrictive law, the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876, that would have severely impeded any expansion of vivisection, which was a still rare practice the year that law was passed. To overcome the handicap of the law, the British chemical industry, dominant in Europe, had to secure first of all the silent complicity of the Home Office, as the Brits quaintly call their Government, and then that of the AV and animal protection societies.

 

Our FOUNDATION REPORTS Nr 3 and 4 related how with the death in 1932 of Dr Hadwen of Gloucester, President of BUAV, the then largest AV league in the world, "scientific AV" started its decline - a decline which was completed only in 1970, when Dr Hadwen's last close associate, Mrs Kidd, died, and BUAV became yet another vassal of the industrial interests, with the task to keep vivisection alive and thriving.

 

How? Not by DOING anything but by NOT DOING what should be done.  Playing the false advocates, taking good care to conceal from the thousands of sympathizers whom they kept attracting into their fold, and of course withholding from the media too, the growing evidence that was being collected against animal experimentation: that it has not only proven useless but also unscientific and gravely counterproductive.

 

A decade ago, Britain's new, scandalous, so-called "Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act" was being examined by Parliament, occasionally mentioned in the press, and lamely denounced in the journals of England's wildly overestimated, totally infiltrated AV leagues. That Act had been prepared at the behest of the chemical industry with the collaboration of the professional "animal welfare" Establishment including Dr Michael Balls of FRAME, Dr Judith Hampson of RSPCA, and Clive Hollands of the Scottish AV society. Even as the bill was about to be passed, the editorialists of Britain's AV leagues hadn't gone beyond tearfully whimpering that "There's not a single cruelty the new Act does away with" and encouraging their members to march in protest, masqueraded as rabbits and carrying placards, along deserted city streets on weekends.

 

But during all the first five years of this period, not a word from the British leagues about the massive scientific documentation extant in England ever since at least April 1979, when SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENT had been launched by London's Futura Publications and the just budding Animal Aid league, but had been received with icy silence by the press; the same press that had most favorably treated all of the author's precedent books. And with equal silence by Britain's established AV and animal welfare organisations.

 

With one notable exception: BUAV. This largest and oldest AV league in the world had done far more to protect Britain's vivisection community than the press had done with its deliberate silence: in BUAV's journal, Animal Welfare, editor John Pitt had viciously excoriated SLAUGHTER, questioning its sources, ridiculing its abolitionist stand, even finding a way to advertise as useful one of the most infamous torture instruments ever invented by sick minds - the Horsley-Clarke device - whose scientific nullity, denounced by the leading brain specialists, the book had revealed.

 

Not only the massive evidence contained in SLAUGHTER was available to the British leagues at a time the disgraceful new bill was still in discussion. There was also NAKED EMPRESS at the disposal of anyone willing to contest the new bill in the making, a book even more important than SLAUGHTER for that particular purpose, first published by CIVIS in 1982. A CIVIS representative, who had worked for BUAV but had left the society in disgust because it stubbornly refused to take notice of the CIVIS literature, was desperately but in vain endeavoring to propagandize NAKED EMPRESS in Britain in those crucial years.

 

But there was also at least one other major work at the disposal of anyone seriously willing to thwart the passage of the fraudulent new Act of 1986 while Mr Hurd and partners were still foisting it upon Parliament and people as an improvement on the old one.

 

The major work we mean is VIVISECTION OR SCIENCE - A CHOICE TO MAKE, by Italy's Prof. Pietro Croce, MD, who after years of international research activity in animal laboratories had gradually come to realize the great damage being done to medicine by that wrong methodology, and had had the courage to proclaim it.

 

The English version of that invaluable book was not yet available in the early '80s, but we had already undertaken to translate salient parts from it into English for publication in our CIVIS Bulletin Nr 1 (1982), with which the British leagues were thoroughly familiar. And exactly that should be the task of such rich AV organisations as the British ones, who rake in millions every year from legacies willed to them by duped members on the understanding that nothing should be left untried to stop vivisection: with the considerable financial means at their disposal, they could and should have got at least Prof. Croce's book translated, published, distributed and loudly advertised in the early '80s if they had had any intention of fighting vivisection. They obviously did not, though being aware since 1979 that with the foundation of RSPCA-manned Eurogroup for Animal Welfare in Brussels, the groundwork for the evil new Community laws, designed to anchor and expand vivisection internationally, was being laid. To fighting vivisection, they had preferred fighting SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENT.

 

But while the British leagues kept up their traditional shadowboxing, and ill-advised AVs ridiculed the movement in the eyes of the public by hopping about dressed as rabbits, in Italy a far more realistic scenario was being enacted.

 

Renowned medical scientists like Prof. Pietro Croce of Milan's research hospital L. Sacco, Prof. Gianni Tamino of Padua University, a Congressman he, and several other authoritative medical people were time and again advocating in Parliament the Abolition of all animal experimentation on medical grounds. Those parliamentary discussions had been increasing ever since on 24 November of 1984 the House, after examining the CIVIS information and viewing a CIVIS video (some of whose images appeared two years later in Javier Burgos great "Hidden Crimes" film) voted for a three-year moratorium on ALL animal experiments: a decision which made front-page news in the nation's leading newspaper, Corriere della Ser, but was studiously ignored by all the foreign AV organisations, and even by Italy's Health authorities.

 

The fact that this historical vote achieved no practical result, that due to interference from Industry, disguised as a Good Fairy dubbed Ministry of Health, nothing at all changed in Italy's labs in spite of this vote, is relevant on two counts. And both confirm what CIVIS had been asserting all along.

 

First, that where the industrial interests predominate, the word Democracy is a sham, because the industrial (read financial) privileges nullify all the others. And secondly, it showed that the big animal protection and humane organisations everywhere in the world chose to ignore this first political success achieved by the CIVIS documentation, and that could be achieved elsewhere, too, if the big leagues had not syphoned into their fold all the animal sympathizers in order to keep misdirecting or paralyzing their activities.

 

And now we have reached the heart of this Editorial, dubbed, if you remember, CIVIS - Killer of the Dream?  The answer is Yes.

 

A generation has passed since the events of the 70s, and we notice that most of them have been forgotten or never registered and that today's AVs are just as uninformed about the past events, about the infiltrations, the lost battles, the shattered illusions, the empty promises, as if all that had never taken place or never been revealed. Inevitably, Santayana's words come to mind: "Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it."

 

And in fact the few who have good memory can see how all the past errors, that will be recognized as such only by the time they can't be undone, are being repeated today by the vast majority. Putting their trust in the wrong people, accepting empty promises as gilt-edged bonds. Yes, preferring the dream to reality. And hoping never to be awakened.

 

Most members of this new generation have never heard of CIVIS and its disclosures. But now they learn for the first time from other sources, from the literature of the few existing leagues, of the crimes and stupidity of vivisection. So they rush, filled with the horror and hopes of all neophytes, into the streets to demonstrate, as BUAV and NAVS and AA tell them to do.

 

And then there comes this CIVIS organisation from the mountains who tells them: "Don't listen to those people. In our opinion, today's Langleys and Sharpes and Singers and Balls and McIvors and Barnes and Roberts and Bardots contribute as much to the perpetuation of vivisection as did the Earps and Ryders and Patersons and Hampsons and Dowdings of yesterday. Today's BUAV and NAVS and AA crowd are in our opinion just not very genuine people. From them you should expect no salvation. If you are seriously interested in seeing vivisection abolished, and not just to dream about it, then don't listen to those people, but investigate the matter by yourself.

 

People who decide to investigate the matter, who take the trouble to read the CIVIS Bulletins Nr 1 (1983) and Nr 2 (1987) and all the CIVIS FOUNDATION REPORTS from the first one (1988) onward, and to watch Javier Burgos' "HIDDEN CRIMES" film that the big leagues have been accurately hiding from them, to the point of producing some bland, misleading films of their own with which to cover it up, will discover of course that things are just exactly as CIVIS says, i.e. the exact opposite of what the one-eyed leaders of the blind have been telling them all along.

 

And are they happy about it? Of course not. Because what CIVIS does is called muckraking. And nobody likes muck much.

 

Are they happy to hear what CIVIS has to say about Britain's Dr Robert Sharpe? Of course not.  He is the author of The Cruel Deception that brings valid scientific proof of the serious damage done by vivisection to human kind, just as it was stated and revealed time again in SLAUGHTER. So what's wrong with repeating that twelve years later? Wrong is a subtle thing: that Or Sharpe, himself a former vivisector, nowadays allegedly reformed, tactfully refrained from divulging all the scientific facts he knew at the time they would have mattered. He waited for the new, fraudulent British bill to become law, and the new EC Convention to be adopted, which now guarantee the perpetuation of vivisection in the U.K. and all the EC countries for decades to come, before voicing his dissent by publishing this book that the AV leagues pretend to hail as the message of the new messiah.

 

Alas, this new messiah came just too late to Britain's and the rest of Europe's AV stage. And we further have to say that in 1982, introduced to the European Parliament in Strasbourg as an AV by Dr Judith Hampson who was then helping to forge the fraudulent new British bill, we witnessed Dr Sharpe aiding the vivisectors, not by what he said in his long address to Europe's Parliamentarians but by what he withheld from them, in the best British leagues manner, and he is thus co-responsible for the continued expansion of vivisection through the European Community, which has now finally endorsed the Convention that the true AV had been bitterly opposing.

 

Are they happy to hear what CIVIS has to say about Dr Vernon Coleman, latest president and big black fly in the ointment of a once irreprehensible International League of Doctors for the Abolition of Vivisection? Of course they are not happy to hear that a Dr Coleman, who claims a weekly readership of 20 million, had been writing popular medical books and columns in tabloids for 20 years without ever saying a word against vivisection during the years while the fraudulent new British bill was still in discussion in Parliament - and only when it was sure that it could not be stopped, did he speak his first word of condemnation of it. Same case as Dr Sharpe.

 

And now in this issue it is Prof. Peter Singer's turn. Wot? Even Singer? Yes, especially Singer. Who would ever enjoy hearing all that? Nobody would, we least of all.

 

But CIVIS is not in business to collect orchids. Our only aim is to accelerate the inevitable demise of the obtuse crime of vivisection, which cruelly kills not only animals but people as well. And if for so doing we lose a few pusillanimous pussyfooters and former lukewarm sympathizers along the road, all we can say is that we are sorry to lose them. But they should never have joined CIVIS in the first place.

 

 

To Part Two