CIVIS Foundation Report 4, Winter 1988/89

 

 

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE HOME SECRETARY

 

Douglas Hurd, as the Home Secretary in the British Cabinet, holds responsibility of all vivisection in the UK. He has declared: "We have nothing to be ashamed of about anything we did in vivisection in the last 111 years."  This startling pronouncement has now prompted a British member of CIVIS, Dennis Stuart, who works in West Germany, to address the following.

 

Dear Mr Hurd

 

I have followed with mounting incredulity in recent days your statements and actions with regard to terrorism and known or supposed supporters thereof.

 

My incredulity stems from the great disparity which evidently exists between the high moral stand you are adopting towards the aims and uncivilised methods of the IRA and other para-military groups in Northern Ireland and the benign approval you bestow upon no less uncivilised behaviour in other spheres.

 

It is a matter of great concern to many people in the UK and elsewhere that the British Home Secretary expresses (justified) horror at atrocities carried out by terrorists in the Northern Ireland context and yet remains coldly indifferent to, and even sturdily champions, the barbarous and demonstrably counter-productive tortures perpetrated on animals by "researchers" such as Prof. Colin Blakemore in pseudo-scientific laboratories throughout Great Britain. Any doubts you may have as to the validity of equating such practices with terrorism will be dispelled if you briefly imagine what terror you would experience if subjected to the same treatment as so many of Prof. Blakemore's victims - removal of your eyes and the sewing together of your eye-lids. Presumably you, as the Secretary of State holding responsibility for the countless animal and human victims of animal research, have taken care to acquaint yourself with the massive scientific evidence of the damage caused to human health through falsely applying its results in the fields of human medicine. If not, I urge you to do so.

 

An equal inconsistency in your thinking is evidenced in your recent decision to take away the right to silence in court cases and thus adjudge such silence to be an admission of guilt and of having something to hide; for it is precisely this same principle of silence which you and your fellow Home Office Ministers regularly resort to when facing parliamentary questions on vivisection, parrying these with vague abstractions or flat refusals to reply and thereby failing to honour what was claimed to be the guiding principle behind the Animals (Scientific Procedures) Act when this was presented to Parliament, namely the "increased accountability of the Home Secretary to the House." It should hardly occasion you surprise to learn that many members of the public are drawing the same conclusion from your strategy of silence on the animal experimentation issue as you draw from the silence of arrested persons in Northern Ireland, i.e. that you too, have something to hide!

 

The question inevitably arises as to the reason behind the double standards that are evidently being applied - abhorrence at terrorism in Northern Ireland but beaming approval of it in the animal laboratory, denial of the right to silence in the courts but indulgence in it within the British Parliament. One explanation that suggests itself to many minds is that whereas the IRA are political foes of the party to which you belong, the main beneficiaries from the perpetuation of animal experimentation are the pharmaceutical manufacturers who make a major contribution to Conservative Party funds.

 

Yours truly, Dennis B. Stuart

 

 

Dear Mr Stuart: We are sure that Mr Hurd is not going to give you a truthful answer, and probably he is not going to give you any answer at all; and that's not only because you are a citizen of negligible importance in his scheme of things, but mainly because, despite his high sounding position, Mr Hurd is in reality bound by far more strings than you ever will be, and it would be as unthinkable for him to disobey those who lifted him up to where he is as it would be impossible for any of us to stop the return of the sun in the morning. But we must first allow him the time to do what he won't do. Where-after CIVIS will let you have, in its next Report, the answer that Mr Hurd might have given you if he were a free, intelligent, and fearless man. HR

 

 

 

MEDICAL DOCTORS FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD DEMAND THE ABOLITION OF VIVISECTION

 

All the participants to the Congress announced in our previous FOUNDATION REPORT appeared and read out their papers, except Dr. Paul Olisa Adaka Ojeih, M.D. from Nigeria, and Dr. Vernon Coleman, M.D., London, who was detained but handed to CIVIS representative, Joy Palmer, his prepared, expectedly brilliant speech to be read out. At the end of the Congress the following Resolution was announced and handed to the Swiss news service:

 

THE ILDAV ANNOUNCES THE FOLLOWING RESOLUTION: WE EXPRESS OUR SYMPATHY AND SOLIDARITY TO ALL THE SICK PEOPLE IN THE WORLD WHO ARE MADE EVEN SICKER BY MEDICATIONS THAT WERE CONSIDERED SAFE AND EFFECTIVE ON THE BASIS OF NOTORIOUSLY MISLEADING ANIMAL TESTS, AND WE RESOLVE TO INTENSIFY OUR EFFORTS DESIGNED TO OBTAIN RECOGNITION FOR A MORE RELIABLE MEDICINE THROUGH THE ABOLITION OF ANIMAL EXPERIMENTATION. SIGNED FOR ILDAV: Dr. W. HARTINGER, PRESIDENT, and HANS RUESCH, HONORARY PRESIDENT.

 

Doctors wishing to join ILDAV are cordially invited to request the Statutes from the Gen. Secretary, Dr. Milly Schaer-Manzoli, CH-6517 ARBEDO, SWITZERLAND. In the USA and Canada, from Mrs. Bina Robinson, CIVIS, Box 26,Swain, New York, 14884. In Great Britain and Ireland, from Mrs. Joy Palmer, ClVIS, POB 302, London N8 9HD. No entry fees nor any financial contributions are requested for joining, just a declaration of solidarity on printed letterhead is sufficient.

 

Address by the Honorary President of ILDAV: Hans Ruesch, at the International Medical Congress held in Genera's Centre Intemational de Confrences on October 8th, 1988.

 

"REBELS WITH A CAUSE"

 

Ladies and Gentlemen!  Welcome to our Congress, and thank you for having come. As you may know, ILDAV stands for International League of Doctors for the Abolition of Vivisection, and thus, like all lLDAV meetings, this medical congress differs radically from the usual medical congresses that take place all over our Western world today, in which bewildered members of the profession compare notes about one new malady or another that has mysteriously cropped up lately, like AIDS, or else has just as mysteriously resisted al1l attempts by orthodox methods to defeat it, like cancer, arthritis, or diabetes.

 

Our ILDAV was founded with the intention of correcting a great, fatal wrong committed by a medical science that advertises itself as scientific, humane and progressive, but is in reality a hangover from the Dark Age of Ignorance. We refer to the delusion of pretending that animal experiments, also called vivisection, can teach us how to cure human ills. Our objections go far beyond the obvious moral considerations. Vivisection is a scientific error, a medical blunder of the first order, and it is our duty to make this known to all the world.

 

But history teaches that every important new idea is at first derided, then opposed, finally taken for granted. We are at the second stage now, being bitterly opposed, attacked even, because of the huge financial interests our criticism jeopardizes. Most seriously of all, even tough covertly, we are opposed by our respective governments, which are committed to defend the huge industrial interests which put the rulers where they are in the first place. And we are opposed, or at best ignored, by the mass media who in all industrialized countries have to truckle to their advertisers in order to exist; and well over 80% of all advertising revenues notoriously derive from the petrochemical combine. And last but not least we are opposed by the big, heavily infiltrated animal welfare and self-styled anti-vivisection societies. As a consequence, we also have large segments of public opinion against us. Especially here in Switzerland, which far from being the great free democracy it pretends to be, is much rather a skillfully disguised Oligarchy, which prevents the media from divulging any information that could seriously imperil its power, its financial interests.

 

But there can be no claim of being a free democracy where the public is not fully informed, where media and ruling power and the hoard of education systematically present only one side of the question, and there is no possibility of any counter information except in a private, limited circle such as is ours today.

 

The program of our event shows you that Swiss entries are conspicuously missing from the roster of today's speakers, although our ILDAV was founded in Switzerland and is Swiss based. This is the result of the cultural and professional and, if necessary, even legal intimidation exerted by our chemo- medical cartel.

 

For our nation is ruled by an elegantly gloved but ruthless iron fist, by a huge industrial complex which in the course of just a few years past has caused a whole series of ecological and genocidal disasters: once it killed all the fish in the Rhine, every day it is killing the trees in our forests, it has killed or blinded and paralyzed innumerable people all over the globe - in Italy, Egypt, India, Japan, all in the name of philantropy, mind you, but for considerable profit. And now we cry: Enough! We refuse to be accomplices, to be partners in crime, even just by keeping silent. And to be allowed to continue along the same destructive but lucrative lines, the industrial complex needs an alibi, it needs scapegoats: helpless animals, for phoney, misleading "Safety Tests" that have been devised expressly as a smokescreen with which to provide its poisons with a clean bill of health. The yearly price for this clean bill of health for poisonous products is the death by torture of more than 3 million laboratory animals just in our little country, a world record, the highest percentage on the globe for any nation in proportion to its population.

 

Other excuses for vivisection are the acquisition of prestigious and lucrative academic titles, presented as diplomas-of knowledge and culture, but in reality certificates of caIousness and ignorance.

 

Or else a desire for grants - money - under the pretext of curing maladies, although it is a welI-known fact that you can't pass a human malady on to an animal, much less can you study a human malady on another species. And yet right now the laboratory profiteers clamor for more and more money, in the vain hope of infecting the last chimpanzees with AIDS - a disease they themselves have fabricated in the animal laboratories, but which, in the true fashion of sorcerers' apprentices, they are no longer able to control.

 

Switzerland, with the highest per capita consumption of laboratory animals, and the USA with the highest overall consumption of them in the world, should be among the healthiest nations if vivisection were any good, but they are among the very sickest, as their massive use of medicines and therapies proves. Americans rank seventeenth in life expectancy, Switzerland ranked first in Europe last year - not in life expectancy but in the incidence of AIDS!

 

Ladies and gentlemen, consider this: Suppose a horse breeder were beginning to lose his animals to a mysterious malady, and the veterinarian he called in would tell him: "If you give me enough money, I'll pass your horses' malady on to human beings, and by studying your horses' malady on people I'll discover how to cure your horses." What would the breeder say? He would say this man is either a big crook or a mental case. But that's exactly what the research community is doing - spending billions of your tax money in animal laboratories, and in the process increasing the rate of cancer and diabetes and heart disease and the rest of the human maladies instead of curing them. They haven't even learned how to cure the common cold! The only novelties are the new maladies they have been able to create - from Herpes to SMON to AIDS. And yet the media continue obediently to rave about the "miracles" of Modern Medicine, and the misled majority continues to prostrate itself in awe or admiration before this new Religion and its white-robed priests.

 

Gandhi put it clearly: An error remains an error no matter how widely it is believed, and a truth remains true even if the whole world ignores it. Truth does not get elected by majority decision. Fortunately, more and more medical people have not only come to recognize the tragic error that is vivisection for medical science, but have also had the courage to proclaim it, unimpressed by hostility and pressure. This in turn has encouraged us to found ILDAV. This league is barely one year old, and so its members are still a minority within the huge battle force of industrialized medicine. But again it was Gandhi who said: In every great cause it is not the number of fighters that counts, but it is the quality they are made of that becomes the deciding factor. All great men have always stood alone. So our ILDAV members are pioneers. Rather than a minority we should call them an elite. Every elite is a minority. Consider them the leaven in the dough of dense public conscience, which must be raised to intellectual sanity.

 

In barely a year's time, we have already rallied more than 180 dedicated members. That's not bad, in such a short time, with hardly any means at our disposal and no publicity but the word of mouth.

 

Our very special gratitude goes to our three Japanese doctors here today, who have flown in expressly, and at their own expense, to communicate us their solidarity. But we must grow further, much further. Also our visitors here today can help. If you have a trusted family physician, beg him to join our ILDAV, reminding him of Richard Wagner's words, who already many years ago said: "I would never go to a doctor who believes in vivisection, because I know that he is not only a man without heart, but also an incompetent in his profession." Don't entrust your health, and don't confide your children, to a man who believes in vivisection.

 

And now I am asking you to listen to our medical experts, all men who not only have a heart, but also have an intellect. I thank you.