CIVIS Foundation Report 15, Fall-Winter 1993 (Part One)

 

 

THE AUSTRALIAN BOOMERANG (continued)

 

NOW IT'S OFFICIAL: PETER SINGER'S LECTURE TOURS SPONSORED BY ROCKEFELLER'S DRUG LOBBY

 

Boomerang: "A curved or angular club used by the Australian natives as a missile weapon that comes flying back again; hence, something that reacts to the damage of its user. "

 

THE SENTENCE

 

The Italian Court was apparently not aware of this surprising fact, nor did it seem to have any idea of the role the Rockefeller Foundation plays world-wide, when on July 5 it imposed a fine on us for calling Professor Peter Singer of Monash University in Melbourne "a big phoney", and also fined the editor of the journal of Rome's LAV, Europe's largest AV league, who had published our article. And yet our opinion was whole-heartedly endorsed by a large number of animalist and health-oriented organisations, foremost in Singer's own country, (who were best aware of the damage he did in the AV cause and therefore in the health sector), but also in New Zealand, USA, Canada, and leagues and ordinary animal rightists all over Europe. They included the first publishers of Singer's own book in Germany and Italy, who had taken some time to realize what hidden game Singer was playing. We printed their letters of support in our last two issues, and more are still coming in.

 

For Peter Singer, his apparent "success" in the Court of Perugia is already proving a Pyrrhic victory, from which he is no more likely to recover than the King of Epirus ever did. Before the trial, only very rare people were aware of Singer's Rockefeller Connection, but now many are and their number is bound to grow.

 

When the panel of three judges asked him through the interpreter what was the purpose of the Rockefeller Foundation, which had hosted him, Singer replied in essence, without blushing, that it was "A humanitarian institution that does a lot of good everywhere," or words to that effect.

 

We don't know if the Greeks had a word for that kind of untruth, but there's one in the various other languages we are familiar with.

 

WHO IS PETER SINGER

 

Ever since the publication of his Animal Liberation in 1975, a book ostensibly written to tout vegetarianism and the respect for animals, Peter Singer is being advertised internationally with astonishing zeal in the establishment (Rockefeller) press as the world's foremost animal friend and protector; to the point of spurning leather shoes and belts, and even honey, as he considers any exploitation of animals immoral and "unethical" (except in the case of vivisection, of course - CIVIS note).

 

But just the opposite could be said of the Rockefeller Foundation, which unexpectedly supports him.

 

As all those who know history and remember it know, meaning an infinitesimal small number of people, the Rockefeller Foundation was set up when our century was young as the lobby for JDR's more than two-hundred pharmaceutical enterprises and has never swayed from its original purpose ever since, fostering the unhampered proliferation of allopathic (chemical and violent) drugs derived from the massive employ of laboratory animals, under the fantastic pretext of advancing medical knowledge and human health.

 

We started solving the riddle of the apparent Singer- Rockefeller contradiction by following a lecture Peter Singer held in Rome a few years ago. We had been wondering why, although the general press had by tradition solidly ignored vegetarianism and animal rights, as if those issues didn't exist, this same press was now making a sudden, unanimous exception in the sole case of Peter Singer, propagating his lecture tours about the new philosphical theory dubbed "bioethics" as if he were a visiting rock star.

 

Our second surprise was that in spite of the ballyhoo in the press, just about a score people had shown up for his conference in Italy's capital, and half of them were members of Italy's AV league who had only come to challenge his ambiguous statements about vivisection in his book. The other half were mostly cronies of Paola Cavalieri, his Italian rep.

 

The conference conclusively verified our suspicion of long standing that the Singer persona as "the world's foremost animal protector" had been fabricated purposely, over a period of years and employing considerable means, by the Rockefeller Foundation's think-tank, in order to have for foundering vivisectionists always this lifebelt ready: "But even Peter Singer defends the necessity of vivisection!"

 

THE TRICKS OF THE ROCKEFELLER PRESS

 

Time magazine, which on 20 November 1989 covered two full pages with a profile of Peter Singer and that we perused for the first time only after the trial, further consolidated our conviction. Described by Time as "a quiet 43-year-old who looks like the thinking man's Groucho Marx" and who "speaks in a voice that rarely fluctuates, either in octave or emotion", it is not to wonder that Singer lacks charisma and his lectures about his utilitarian theories on vivisection fail to attract authentic AVs, who recognize them as both scientifically invalid and morally bankrupt.

 

But leave it to the Time copywriters to make a lackluster figure appear glamorous and intriguing when need calls, titling the article on Singer with a headline that screamed in huge lettering: DEVIL OR SAINT? And it was repeated in many publications around the world, in similarly worded articles of the same tenor, proving there is such a thing as a world-encompassing Rockefeller press, primarily in medical news.

 

Time tried to make uninformed readers believe that Singer was possibly contested in Germany because of his Jewish origin, and in Australia because he joined protests from Animal Liberation against cruelties in Silver's Circus. But in actual fact Singer always spent more energies disapproving the activists of the Animal Liberation Front who actually freed animals from the laboratories and defending from "unjust" criticism his British ally, Judith Hampson, co-responsible for the latest vivisection-perpetuating laws in the U.K. and the entire E.C. That means that the people who according to Time whistled and booed him down in Germany, were more likely to have been, as in Italy, AVs who challenged his ambiguous stand on vivisection rather than anti-Semites. This is certainly the case in his own country, where Singer can count on the sympathy and respect of the whole research community; but not on that of Australia's AVs.

 

"ANIMAL LIBERATION"

 

Already when Singer's Animal Liberation first came out, we were surprised by the space the establishment press was dedicating to the book. It said little that had not been said almost a century earlier by a prolific English writer, Henry S. Salt, in a book entitled Animals' Rights. But although Salt was an established author and very well-connected individual, that particular book of his was totally ignored and promptly sank into oblivion, until the Society for Animal Rights in Philadelphia resurrected it in 1980, encouraged by the attention Singer's Animal Liberation had meanwhile obtained. But Salt's resurrected book was again ignored by the establishment press, as adamantly as when it had first appeared, and we know the reason: because Salt left no door open to vivisection, to the contrary of Peter Singer.

 

There is another untruth Singer told the three Italian judges at the trial, apart of his description of the Rockefeller Foundation as a "humanitarian" institution. He declared his Animal Liberation "is considered the Bible of the anti-vivisectionists". Evidently, Singer too moves in different circles from ours. OUR crowd, however approving Singer's vegetarian stand, regards Animal Liberation as "the Vivisectors' Bible".

 

Above and beyond our own, subjective opinion of Singer, there are plenty of other, objective reasons for considering him less than Simon-pure. But since then, more and worse has come to light.

 

BOOSTING VIVISECTION

 

Singer and his American side-kick, Tom Regan, co-edited recently in Italy, under the label of a small Catholic publishing house, a book they had originally co-authored in 1976, just one year after Animal Liberation first came out, for an American establishment publisher (Prentice Hall, a division of Simon & Schuster): Animal Rights and Human Obligations.

 

But the recent Italian version of this ostensibly humanitarian book contained a surprising addition to the first American edition: it included, without a word of comment or rebuttal, the infamous essay Dr Robert White of Cleveland had concocted for the New York Times Sunday Magazine a few years ago, "A Defense of Vivisection". In it the monkey head-transplanter glamorized his ghastly exercises and insulted his intelligent dissenters as misanthropic, witless morons. (J. B. Shaw? Albert Schweitzer? Mohandas Ghandi? Goethe? Leonardo? And thousands of modem MDs all over the globe, including the brilliant Dr Hadwen of Gloucester and the great innovator Lawson Tait, who developed most of the surgical techniques still in use today? "Witless morons" the lot of them?)

 

The Reader's Digest 26 million international edition (Morris Bealle has revealed that the New York Times and the Reader's Digest are among the media taken over by the Rockefeller Drug Trust) had then dutifully spread worldwide this obscene vivisectionist package, with nobody being granted space by any of the establishment press organs to rebut White's pseudo-scientific claptrap. And now in Italy, the two ostensible animal champions, "moral philosophers" Singer and Regan, gave Dr White's essay the chrisma of their accolade by including it, uncontested, in their allegedly humanitarian book, Animal Rights and Human Obligations.

 

How phoney can one get?

 

Next are samples of what the Italians get currently to read in the Singer/Regan book, from page 165 to 171 of the Italian edition, thanks to the unexplained and uncontested inclusion of Dr White's essay:

 

 

A DEFENSE OF VIVISECTION by Robert J. White

 

"The humanity which would prevent human suffering is a deeper and truer humanity than the humanity which would save pain or death in the animal. - Charles W. Eliot,Jormer Harvard University president.

 

"The intelligent citizenry of this country must be educated not only regarding the already multiple advantages of medical research but, what is more important, the absolute necessity of continued proliferation of biological research. (CIVIS note: read vivisection)

 

"As a concerned scientist and as a practicing neurosurgeon, I am simply unable to plumb the depths of a philosophy that places such a premium on animal life even at the expense of human existence and improvement. It would appear that this preoccupation with the alleged pain and suffering of the animals used in medical research may well represent true psychiatric aberrations....

 

"It has been suggested that many of the physiological and biochemical studies conducted on animals could be programmed for computer analysis and eventually eliminate the need for the living experimental preparations. If anything, computer availability has contributed to the increasing demand for animals for research.

 

"An equally unrealistic approach has been based on the cell culture work....

 

"There is no way I can resolve the impasse that exists between the theology of the anti-vivisection movement and the immutable stance of practicality maintained by biological research. (CIVIS note: read vivisection)  I believe that the inclusion of lower animals in our ethical system is philosophically meaningless and operationally impossible and that, consequently, anti-vivisection theory and practice have no moral or ethical basis.

 

"Even Dr Albert Schweitzer recognized in his own unique philosophical scheme of things that scientific experiments with animals were necessary for the alleviation of human ills."

 

We don't know where Dr White, who logically moves in social and scientific circles that are very different from ours, got his lights on Dr Schweitzer, but we know where we got ours, and it is clearly stated in SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENT, page 327: "The last of his (Schweitzer's) famous 'Messages to the World' from his bush hospital in Lambarene, delivered a few weeks before his death in 1965, concerned vivisection. Addressed both in French and German to the World Congress for Abolition, which was being held in Zurich, it was also read on the Swiss TV and said: 'We must fight against the spirit of unconscious cruelty with which we treat the animals. Animals suffer as much as we do. True humanity does not allow us to impose sufferings on them. We have come too late to this realization. It is our duty to make the whole world recognize it.'"

 

"WE ONLY WANT RUESCH'S HEAD"

 

A short time before the last court session, an interesting light was shed on the reason for Singer's lawsuit, when his Italian hatchet woman confidentially informed the LAV editor that if the journal would officially disavow Ruesch's article and apologize to Singer for printing it, the libel action against the LAV would be dropped, as after all it was only Ruesch's head they wanted, not the LAV's. The editor answered, wittily, "Fuck off!", preferring to be co-defendant with Ruesch rather than an ally of Singer's

 

THE REPORTER

 

Gianni Maria Pace, the reporter who had slipped up on revealing that Singer had been "invited" by the Rockefeller Foundation, admitted privately he didn't know what the Foundation's purpose was. He just knew the name was prestigious and hoped it would confer some lustre to Singer's uninspiring image. An important detail about this reporter, which probably means nothing to most people, is that he has written many articles glorifying animal experimentation. Strangely, in the several interviews with Singer in leading papers, the subject of vivisection doesn't seem to have ever come up.

 

THE LAWYERS

 

Hans Ruesch, working in Switzerland, had had neither the leisure nor the wish to go shopping for a lawyer in Italy to defend him in faraway, mountain-top Perugia, nor could he afford a beautiful Paola Cavaliere to do all the spade work for him, so the Perugia court had to improvise for him legal help, as Italian law requires - a young local attorney who happened to be loitering inside the court building when Ruesch bust in at the last moment coming from Switzerland, and who was not familiar with the case.

 

Singer's lawyer, provided and briefed more than a year beforehand by his long-time hatchet woman, rep, and collaborator, Paola Cavalieri, was Ranieri Brogi from Milan, one of the very top penal lawyers of Italy, who had among his mammoth clients no less than the Industrialists Association, meaning all the automakers and the pharmaceutical industries, which just in those days were involved in the greatest financial and political scandal in the history of the nation, with billions of lire being thrown about like marbles every day, involving all the heads of State and even the Vatican.

 

How a modest and ethical professor from Australia managed to enlist such a lawyer, whose fees were just in those days up in the billions of tire, and who was paying for the professor's frequent flights from Australia and tours of conferences all over Europe which attract no paying crowds, and usually no audiences to speak of at all, will perhaps remain forever one of the mysteries of the animal rights phenomenon. Or will it?

 

ASTOUNDING CONTRADICTIONS

 

There is an astounding contrast in the way the establishment media present Singer to the public eye, and his attitude towards the "scientific" community.

 

Britain's Independent of 15 May 1990 falsely complimented him with this headline: "ANIMAL LIBERATION FOUNDER SEEKS END TO LIVE RESEARCH", and Australia's ADVERTISER of 19 April 1990 with the following chestnut: "AUST WINS PRAISE OVER ANIMAL RIGHTS".

 

But in UNIKEN of 25 October 1991, in a university paper from Down Under, we read that a visit from Peter Singer "...allowed a useful interaction between a significant number of UNSW staff who use animals in their work and the 'guru' of the animal liberation movement. The scientists were obviously gratified to hear Professor Singer say that the use of pound dogs in research could, with appropriate controls, be "an example of the most defensible kind of experimentation because the animal presumably feels nothing additional to what it would feel when put down with a high dose of anaesthetic, something that happens to thousands of abandoned dogs and cats every week in Australia."

 

 

To Part Two